by Natalie Grey
“Yeah. Lesedi sent—well, come here, look.” Nyx scooted over to the corner of the bed and leaned to tap at her keyboard as Loki leaned back out of the way. “They shut down the power plant after he left. I’m sure he was there. Lesedi is, too. He went out—almost certainly—on this ship.”
She brought it up with a few more taps of the keys. It was a cargo hauler, absolutely massive, with a reinforced and sectioned hold to carry the power cells created on the station.
“I wonder how Ghost got into that business,” she said, tilting her head to the side as she looked at the ship on the screen. “Something stable to balance out the smuggling profits? Or was it something bigger, like she wanted to run something big enough that they’d need their own power plants. Certainly came back to her well when she lost the main part of everything. She has infrastructure now.”
Loki gave her a surprisingly inscrutable look for a 17 year old. “What does Wraith think?”
“Hmm? No idea, this just came in. I sent them coordinates to lay in but we haven’t talked yet. I just got off the phone with Lesedi.”
“And talked with me?”
“Yeah.” Nyx looked at him. “We had to clear the air, right? I’d put it off for a few days.”
“I just mean….” Loki scratched at his head. “Shouldn’t you be talking with Wraith about all this? You could have talked to me any time. It doesn’t sound like you were worried about me not being reliable in combat, right? So it could have waited.”
Nyx stared at him, eyes faintly narrowed as she tried to parse what he was getting at.
“You just … we were worried we weren’t going to get there in time,” Loki said brutally. “And we almost didn’t. We really almost didn’t.”
Nyx’s smile died. “Yes. I’m aware.”
“It wasn’t an easy choice to go back. It wasn’t an easy choice to leave in the first place, but you did it—you took their advice, you listened to what they had to say, you did it. You fought through and saw … well, I heard what happened on the bridge.”
“So … what, Loki?”
“So why the hell are you taking your time talking to me?” Loki demanded. “Where are your priorities?”
Nyx drew back, stung. “You’re on my team, I need to know things are okay before we go into battle again.”
“But things aren’t okay, and it’s not because I was an asshole, it’s because you won’t lean on us! It’s because you aren’t part of our team!”
She froze, staring at him. “Run that by me again? And tread carefully. You’re on thin ice.”
“Yeah, because you don’t want to hear this! Because you want to pretend everything’s just fine with you when you’ve been through hell with this mission! They’re killing civilians left and right to fuck with you. You’ve had to face people you love dying, more than once. And you won’t lean on anyone. You’re so worried about whether I feel okay about my career plan. Nyx, I’m 17, I don’t need to have my life planned out—”
“Thought you were 23.” Nyx tried a joke. Her pulse was pounding and her palms felt clammy, and all she could think about was how much she wanted to talk about literally anything other than this.
Loki gave her a furious look. “You’re not on Team 9 anymore. You get that, fine. But you aren’t on Team 11, either. You won’t lean on anyone.”
“The last thing any of you need to see is me….” Nyx pushed herself up. “Get out.”
“Talk to Wraith.”
“I’ll do what I need to do!”
“But you won’t!” He was standing, too, but he wasn’t budging.
“Get out, Loki.”
“Wraith tried to come here after Victus. I saw her.” He was standing his ground. “You sent her away. She and Centurion are here for you to lean on. There’s a difference between falling apart and being human. If you try to pretend everything’s fine and normal when we know you’re having trouble, we all know something worse is coming down the pipeline. You’re going to fall apart at this rate. If Talon had come to you and Tersi to deal with what had happened, you’d never think less of him for it. But instead you came to me. You tried to fix my shit. You went to Tersi, and I’ll bet you still didn’t talk about what’s going on with you.”
Nyx swallowed and tried to find the words to tell him to leave.
“Talk to Wraith,” Loki said finally. “Talk to Centurion. You’ve been through the ringer.”
“I can’t do this right now.”
“You have to. Nyx, if you can’t rely on us … we can’t rely on you.” He waited for her to say something, and when she didn’t, he shook his head and left silently. At the door he paused, and she thought he might say something, but he only left, the door sliding shut behind him and his footsteps receding down the corridor.
Alone in the room, Nyx slid down the wall to sit on the floor and pressed her fingers against her eyes until she no longer felt the urge to cry.
Then she went back to her desk and kept working, formulating a plan for the attack on Tristan’s ship.
25
“I’m telling you, if you want him broken, this is the best way—if you want him to come out of hiding while his ship is still crippled—”
“No.” Estabrook’s voice was uncompromising. “You made it clear where your priorities are. If it’s Talon or Nyx, you’re going to hurt Nyx. I went along with it because you promised me he’d die and you didn’t manage to do that, did you?”
Tristan rolled his eyes and settled back in his seat. The cargo hauler was never silent, always humming with the activity of keeping the power cells contained.
If the ship lost power, there were manual overrides to jettison the power cells in the direction of the nearest star or stretch of empty space. Without the shielding on the containers, they would break down quickly. There were stories of captains who had ignored that fact and neglected their maintenance, and those stories made even hardened assassins shudder.
It was not a good death.
So Tristan liked the sound of the shield generators. It was a good sign for his continued ability to live.
What he did not like was Estabrook’s recalcitrance.
Tristan wasn’t even sure how Estabrook had made it off Victus Terminal in the first place. He’d run from Nyx, leaving Tristan behind, and had been gone within minutes. He must have been. No one remembered seeing him and no one knew whether or not any ships had left.
Now, despite having several ships designed for Aleksandr Soras with top-of-the-line technology, ships that could greatly help Tristan in his bid to take out the Conway, Estabrook refused to help at all.
“If you want him to suffer,” Tristan said now, “killing her is one of the best ways to do it. Send him a message that you’ve got her in the crosshairs and—”
“And he’ll find a way to fuck it up,” Estabrook snapped. “They always do. No one was supposed to be able to get to him before the ships took him out, he wasn’t supposed to be able to fight any of them off. I put redundancies in place that should have killed him three times over. He has the luck of the devil—the last thing I want to do is piss off someone equally dangerous and take them on, too.”
Tristan fought the urge to growl his frustration. He could go after Nyx on his own as soon as one of his own warships reached him. In the meantime, he was well-hidden. She would never guess he was on a cargo ship, and even if she could, he’d changed course several times since their departure—she wouldn’t know where he was headed.
She would never find his ship even if she thought to look for it. No one could track his ship if he didn’t want them to.
Satisfied with his safety, he was nonetheless chafing at the bit to get to her. He wanted the odds fully stacked against her—otherwise, he couldn’t see how he’d ever get her to surrender. He needed her to be so outnumbered that coming with him would be the only way to save her crew.
Hell, some of them might even make good agents for Ghost. Who knew?
He even had a holding cell set as
ide for her, a room half-filled with power cells, with a small space shielded and marginally inhabitable. She’d already be radiation-sick by the time he got her to Ghost, but Ghost wouldn’t mind that. The whole point of this exercise was pain.
And if she started to get out of line, Tristan could just release the shields in that compartment. She’d be dead within a minute.
He still wanted more backup. She was slippery and she was unpredictable. Who could say what she would pull out of her hat when he faced her next time?
He wanted another Dragon to help him, and Estabrook wasn’t being any use.
“Name your price,” Tristan said finally.
Estabrook raised an eyebrow.
“Take out Talon first. You want to do that? Fine.” Tristan nearly spat the words. “Then help us. Name your price, and you will have what you want. I don’t think you realize how much my employer wants this woman dead.”
Estabrook considered this. He did not give a number, though, which worried Tristan. He was sure he could get Ghost to agree to any number, any amount of goods, but if Estabrook wanted a favor to call in, Ghost might balk at that.
She didn’t like being indebted to people.
“Why do you work for her?” Estabrook asked finally. “She’s close to dead now, she must be. Why aren’t all you rats fleeing the sinking ship?”
Tristan sat frozen. What if Ghost saw this? She would. She’d be watching him. What could he say that wouldn’t make her angry?
“She’s not close to dead,” he said.
“Her smuggling operation is gone. She’s not a big player anymore. And the Alliance says they killed her. Of course, they say a lot of things.”
“You don’t understand any of this,” Tristan said finally. He thought of Ghost’s mechanical body, the way she sometimes creaked when she moved, the way he’d seen her crush one of her generals’ throats. She was … more. Different.
If he walked away, he knew there would be nowhere he could hide. He knew only some of what she was capable of, from what he’d seen and what they’d tested on him, but even that was enough to terrify him.
“I will never betray her.” His voice trembled. “Never.”
Estabrook looked halfway between impressed and amused. “Very well, then. As it happens, I have an idea—a way to take them both out at once.”
“Rather than have what Ghost could give you?” Tristan frowned. Why would Estabrook choose to work together now, after Tristan had offered him riches beyond measure?
“Yes,” Estabrook said. “I can see the fear in your eyes. I’m not going to get mixed up in that. But we can useful to one another. Listen carefully, this is how we’ll do it….”
26
JD took a brief glance in the mirror and smoothed down a stray lock of hair before nodding at his reflection and heading for the door. Stray locks of hair, spinach caught in teeth, and wrinkled suits were things that were, for other people, only embarrassing.
For him, they were a matter of life and death. He was forgettable, that was his main talent—his face seemed to slide out of people’s memories the instant they stopped looking at him, and he’d noticed from an early age that even when he was in plain sight, people tended not to notice him.
Anything distinctive or noteworthy about his appearance would destroy that illusion.
He went to the door of his en-suite bathroom and blinked in surprise when it wouldn’t open. Routine maintenance, said the screen on the door.
He shrugged and made his way out into the halls of Calabria Station, where the security guard stationed by his door shot him a quick, appraising look.
“Good morning, Mr. Collette.”
“Morning.” It took effort to keep his voice pleasant. The guards here were trained to look at people and the ones the mob had assigned to him were trained to notice him.
Which they did. Wherever he went on the station, they popped up as well. They never intervened in anything he did, but he could always feel them watching, like a prickle on the back of his neck.
He hated it.
He couldn’t afford to back down now, however. He was being hunted and he needed protection—badly. He had known when Aleksandr Soras first called for backup that something had gone wrong.
It hadn’t really been a surprise, of course. The plan to kill Talon Rift had been risky at best, and a massive miscalculation at worst—with “worst” happening to be exactly the way things shook out.
While some of JD’s associates had gone running to Soras, sure they could protect him against the rest of the Corps, JD had stayed in place. He could see the writing on the wall. He knew it was over. Soras had only survived as long as he had by keeping his identity a secret—with that in the open, he was living on borrowed time, and JD did not intend to share his fate.
His plans of sheltering in place, however, had been ruined when Talon Rift managed to find his identity. How, JD didn’t know, but he wasn’t wasting time on that. He had run to the mob—the only people he knew who had a shot in hell of protecting him.
Since Ghost died, anyway.
Now he had to strike a bargain with them, and he could not expect it to be a painless process. He had a lot to offer the mob, but he could hardly expect them not to take advantage of the fact that without their help, he was as good as dead.
A shuttle was coming in to dock as he made his way along the outside of Calabria’s lobby. Built as a statement of the mob’s extreme wealth, Calabria was an incredible feat of engineering. Its main lobby, where the inhabitants could relax and congregate, was filled with living plants and lined with three-story-high windows out into the black.
It was the exact opposite of everything JD was as a person, and it unnerved him every time he was here.
He gave an annoyed look back over his shoulder as he walked, seeing two familiar guards trailing him around the edges of the lobby. When he got in the elevator—glass all around, it was like living in a zoo around here—they waited behind, not playing their hand obviously by getting in the elevator with him.
He could see them radioing to their associates on other floors, however. It wasn’t subtle.
He got off on the next floor above the lobby and stopped at the bathroom across from the elevators. This one wouldn’t open, either. Routine Maintenance again. Apparently, that was on Tuesdays at 9AM. He would have to remember that.
He shook his head and made his way quickly down marble hallways to the office of Fanti Casanova.
There was a mental image that went along with the name Casanova, and Fanti fit it surprisingly well. He was cosmopolitan, speaking so many languages with ease that JD could not begin to guess the limits of his abilities in that arena. Casual comments made it clear that Fanti, though he could not be much past his mid-twenties, had seen most planets in Allied space and had done mob business most of the places he traveled.
And this was the man assigned to strike a deal with JD.
JD had the sneaking suspicion that Fanti was better at this type of negotiation than he was, too.
There was nothing for it, however. He rapped on the door and opened it when Fanti called, “Come in.”
JD took in the spread of documents and data streams on Fanti’s desk. It looked like hardwood, but it was a massive computer screen, and the young man was shifting documents around with light, sure touches.
“Is now a bad time?” JD asked him.
“Not at all.” Fanti looked up at him with a disarmingly sweet smile. He looked his age for that one moment, and JD marked how well Fanti could appear to be innocent and unworldly. “I’m simply concluding a small piece of business. One of our higher-level employees was not maintaining correct security protocols and a shuttle was stolen from her property.”
“They have you handling that?” JD raised an eyebrow as he took a seat, unbuttoning his suit jacket.
“Oh, of course. I’ve been responsible for maintaining her employment contract.” Fanti dragged two more documents into place, typed in a command JD coul
dn’t see, and double-tapped the screen. “This was a breach of it.”
His face was still pleasant, but something cold had opened behind his eyes, as if someone far older than the young man had taken over his body. The smile hadn’t even wavered as he signed the woman’s death warrant.
Boyish charm and not the faintest hesitation to kill. JD could only admire that, though he had to fight the urge to swallow nervously. This was what awaited him if he failed the mob.
He had no doubt that Fanti’s timing had been entirely deliberate.
There was the sound of footsteps in the hallway and both men looked up in time to see one of the maintenance workers go by. She didn’t see them, hidden as they were behind Fanti’s door, but the material was made to allow light through in one direction, and they could see her clearly.
She walked quickly, her black hair drawn back in a neat braid, surprisingly tall. JD didn’t remember seeing her before, but the grime around her nails and the calluses on her fingers attested to the fact that her toolbox was not just for show. She was dressed nicely—everyone on Calabria was—which made it clear that she was not armed.
Fanti gave her a quick, assessing glance, and looked back at JD. “So, how can I help you? And can I get you anything? Tea, coffee?”
It was time to get to work. JD gave a smile and reminded himself just how much he had to offer these people.
“Tea, please.” If nothing else, it would allow him an opportunity to go to the bathroom and clear his head if Fanti started trying to confuse him. JD watched as the other man ordered tea with a tap of his fingers, and then met the man’s smiling eyes and tried to remember just how dangerous this all was. “I’m proposing a partnership based around my work in the Dragons….”
“I have to say…” Lesedi’s voice was drily appreciative through the earpiece. “I do enjoy this place.”
Mala tried not to smile too obviously as she made her way down the hallway toward the bathrooms. She was not wearing a visible earpiece, and the last thing she wanted was for any of the people here to notice her.