Dragon's Echo

by Natalie Grey

  She hefted the toolbox as quietly as she could. She wanted to be completely unmemorable, but her height was working against her. She didn’t need to add clanking tools and a complaint to the manager into the bargain.

  She turned down the hallway to the bathrooms and paused, pretending to check a computerized panel as the people in the hallway cleared out.

  “Start the loop,” she murmured, moving her lips as little as possible.

  For two minutes, she faked working on the panel. She would look in her tool kit, take a tool out, use it for a bit, put it back, check functionality.

  It couldn’t be a short enough loop that anyone would notice.

  “Bring yourself back to the starting position,” Lesedi said. “Left arm out a bit, hold it … good. Loop is going, there’s a requisition order for that panel if anyone checks in their database, and you can do whatever you want from here.”

  “Like get a drink in the lobby?” Mala murmured. She grinned as she searched along the hallway with a panel-finder. When it lit up over a stretch of what looked like empty wall, she gave a small smile. “Gotcha.”

  The panel was mounted with a hinge on one side and spring-release points on the other. Mala carefully laid a device Tera had given her over each of the spring release points and hissed in disappointment when it blinked red. They were coded to pass along a message to the central maintenance offices when opened, and the message was triggered off pressure, not a circuit she could override.

  She traced the pressure sensors across the wall and down, and at last found something she could work with. Another small tool, looking like a screwdriver but much, much more useful, overloaded the circuit, forcing a reset, and Mala went quickly back to open the panel before everything came back online.

  Here, at last, were the controls that would manage the bathroom doors. She unscrewed the breaker panel front with practiced ease and attached small devices to each of the cables, then replaced it and made her way back to the panel she had worked on in the video.

  “Done. Lesedi, is anyone in that bathroom?”

  There was a pause before Lesedi’s voice came back. “Let me check. No. No, there’s not.”

  “Lesedi, what are you up to?” Tera asked over the channel.

  “I’m an information broker on a proprietary station owned by the mob. You get one guess. You two should move now, though.”

  “Moving,” Cade’s voice said.

  It wasn’t long before Mala heard them coming up the hallway. She got her tools back into the box and stood up with a smile to look over her shoulder.

  “Finally. You two find a patrol or….”

  The footsteps she’d heard had been combat boots, yes, but they hadn’t belonged to Cade or Tera. Instead, they went with three heavily-armed guards who were staring at Mala with uniformly unfriendly looks.

  “You’re not on our employment records,” the lead guard said. “So why don’t you tell me who the hell you are, how you got onto this station, and what you’re doing here.”

  27

  “All right, we’ve traced the registration on the ships.” Talon tossed a packet of papers onto the wooden table in the war room. “The three that attacked us came from shipyards that do not show up in any of the official alliance databases, but if you search directly via a ship that was produced there, you can find them. Nominally, they were Intelligence shipyards. However, I’d bet a considerable amount of money that only Aleksandr Soras knew about them.”

  “Sounds about right,” Aegis rumbled. “And we think Estabrook is headed back there for more ships?”

  “Actually, no.” Talon shook his head. “Which is good, because they’re on the other side of Seneca from here. No, what we found is a way of tracing those ships. They interact with each other and with communications buoys to go through a system that—again—only Soras could access, so he could see where all his ships were in real-time. Fortunately for us….” He gave a smile. “We have an ally that has all of his systems.”

  “If he has any sense, he’ll have turned that off.” Jester was frowning.

  “He hasn’t, which makes me think he either doesn’t know how to, or doesn’t realize it exists. Or, I suppose, he didn’t think it was important because no one would have access to those systems anymore.”

  Aleksandr Soras had kept Tera even more secret than his identity as the Warlord. Very few people had ever known she existed, and almost all of them were dead.

  “For what it’s worth, my money is on him not knowing about the system at all,” Tersi said. “It’s very subtle. Soras was pretty paranoid and everything I’ve seen of his systems suggests that he liked to keep tabs on people without them knowing.”

  A few team members nodded, and a few shook their heads, but the meaning all seemed to be the same: Soras had gotten what was coming to him.

  You could only hide from Dragons for so long.

  “Our guess is that he knows where we were headed,” Talon said. “He’s expecting us to stop off at Crius and then resume as soon as our hull is repaired. He could run and hide, but so far, he’s shown himself to be fairly determined to take us out now. So I think we can expect another few ships to be waiting for us somewhere. The question is….” He spread a map out. “Where that will be.”

  The team all leaned forward to weigh in.

  “The shipping lane runs right from Crius to Valentine as the crow flies,” Stabby pointed out.

  “That is one dead crow,” Jim said. “But he has a point, everyone knows you like to do things as fast as possible, that means taking the most direct route.”

  “He’s also known to be sneaky,” Esu cut in. “And if I wanted to be sneaky, I’d detour this way.” He traced a path around a couple of systems. They had the signifiers for extensive radio interference and solar instability. “It would be hard to track someone who came through here. If there were any secret communications buoy networks, they likely wouldn’t be in such an out-of-the-way system, and now that we’ve had our stealth systems overridden once, Estabrook might think we’re going out of our way to go to remote places.”

  “Remote places where no help could get to us,” Jim argued. “That was what saved our ass last time. We’d hardly walk into the same trap again.”

  “He should never have given those ships to them,” Aegis said, shaking his head. “If they’d been manned by a more capable set of crews, we would be dead. Estabrook’s just going through everything he can of Soras’s organization, throwing things at us as he finds them. The man’s running scared.”

  “I’d agree with that,” Talon said. “All of it. He likes throwing other people at us, though. He doesn’t want to take the risk himself. How he ever made it through the psych evaluations for Dragon Selection is beyond me.”

  “Soras,” Tersi said meaningfully.

  Talon groaned. “I keep forgetting just how much he had access to. God, if you want to take over a planet, the head of Intelligence is definitely the job to have. Makes you wonder if he was planning anything more—a takeover of the whole Alliance, for instance.”

  “He’d have gotten there eventually, but it would have killed him.” Esu shrugged. “What I don’t get is that he had to know someday he’d be found out. He can’t have been stupid enough to believe he’d get away with it forever, right?”

  “He might have, for all we know.” Talon shook his head. “People who are that spectacularly sociopathic don’t always have a great idea of how consequences work. He might have thought he could brazen his way out of it—or blackmail people.”

  He sighed as he looked down at the paper.

  “Before we talk about finding him, can we talk about how we’re going to make sure we get him?” Aegis asked pointedly. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but we got our asses handed to us last time.”

  “I appreciate you going easy on me. And I take it you’re referring to the other ships’ capabilities, not Jester’s piloting.”

  “That was better than it had any right to be,” Ae
gis agreed, with a nod at Jester. “But he knows he messed up when he gave those ships to people who didn’t know how to use ‘em. He won’t do that again. Next time, a good pilot won’t be enough to save us. Without stealth….” He let the words hang.

  “Luckily enough, Tersi was able to get some information out of the computers before they self-destructed.” Talon rolled his eyes. The whole ship had been a death trap for its own crew, and he did not approve of that. “We should be able to utilize the same stealth protocols it was using, and I had thought about making a fake cargo convoy and hiding out in the middle of those ships. If we can get funding for that—”

  “We have a problem,” Stabby reported from the cockpit. “I’m sending the details down to the war room.”

  Talon’s pulse quickened. “All right. Go.”

  It was a message, very short, and signed simply with “R.”

  Two sets of coordinates.

  “Stabby—”

  “On it.” There was the sound of tapping keys, and then the computers in the war room lit up with a map.

  Talon sucked in his breath in a hiss.

  “That bastard,” he said quietly. “Call the Conway, tell Nyx it’s urgent.”

  “All right.” Nyx leaned back against the wall and squinted at the map on the table. “This is where he seems to be heading, which is … the middle of nowhere. So what the hell is he up to? I’m about 90% on the plan of just chasing him down, since he doesn’t seem to know we’re following him, and attacking. However, there exists the possibility that he does know we’re following him and he’s setting up a nasty surprise of some sort.”

  Foxtail leaned on the table, frowning down at the map. “I didn’t find anything in this sector.”

  “I know. And that report was thorough.”

  “If it’s not a landmark, it’s a rendezvous,” Centurion said simply.

  Nyx looked around at him, jaw dropping open. “That. Yes. Okay, then who’s he meeting up with?”

  “Ghost?” Maple suggested.

  “Unlikely if he hasn’t got Nyx,” Wraith objected.

  “Ah, right. Balls. It would’ve been nice to take them both out at once.”

  Maple, Nyx was learning, did not like extended operations. She preferred to identify her enemy, kill them thoroughly, and move on to the next mission.

  “He’s either delivering the power cells or meeting up with someone who can help him get to us,” Nyx said. “Right?”

  “Or both,” Centurion said, with a shrug. “Although that’s overkill for almost everything.”

  “That many power cells could be dangerous, though.” Wraith tapped at the schematics of the ship. “They can be jettisoned, and I’m not sure if they can do a specific one at a time. I’d guess yes. Cut power, jettison the cube. If it hits us and any of it gets inside the ship, we’re in bad shape.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Gambit looked incredulous.

  “Those cells go right into power plants,” Wraith said. “They’re all shielded inside the ship and if the shields fail, the ship fries unless they jettison everything. A ship like that is carrying enough power to run a couple of small planets for … a year?”

  “Sweet fancy Moses,” Choop muttered. Nyx nodded. That summed up her feelings on the matter pretty well.

  “All right, then can we force the system to short out without him knowing about it?”

  “Cold.” Wraith grinned. “I like it.”

  “The other option would be boarding, but I suggest we choose one or the other.”

  There was a round of chuckles.

  “Ma’am?” It was Halo, calling from the cockpit. “Two messages just came in, one from someone called R, and another one marked urgent, from the Ariane.”

  Nyx felt a stab of alarm. “Bring them up. Ariane first.”

  It was actually Talon on the line, his face worried. “Did you get the message, too?”

  “Yours came in at the same time. Halo, can you bring it up, too?” She scanned the two sets of coordinates. “Where are these?”

  “Plug them in.” He looked weary. “You’ll see.”

  “On it, ma’am.”

  “Thank you,” Nyx said absently. She drummed her fingers on the table as she waited, forcing the motion to keep herself from tensing up. When a map replaced the images, she frowned. “Okay. Two colonies. One’s … not too far from here, I’d guess, and the other is—oh. Oh.”

  “Yes,” Talon said. “Precisely.”

  The two colonies were relatively undefended. After so long out in space, people had come to the conclusion that there probably weren’t any alien species to find, and with terraformed planets so rare out this way, the colonies didn’t make an attractive target for human pirates.

  And, being in opposite directions from one another, both far out, they pulled the Ariane and the Conway in different directions.

  There would be no coming to save each other this time.

  “Ma’am?” It was Halo. “I checked the pings from the communications buoys, and to. Make a long story short, once I unscrambled things again—the cargo ship changed course.”

  “Let me guess,” Nyx said. “It’s making for that colony.”

  “Yes. And it’s about four hours ahead of us. If I had to guess … it’s not going to be alone when we get there.”

  “I’d guess you’re right.” Nyx looked at the table. “All right. Halo, lay in coordinates for the colony. Wraith, Centurion, come up with a boarding plan for the cargo ship—you all, thrash out who’s going to be on guns and who’s going to be piloting when we go in, let’s assume there will be interference. Halo, route Talon’s call to my cabin. I’ll be back soon.”

  She was two steps out the door when Loki caught up with her. He stared at her wordlessly.

  “I’m on your team,” Nyx said, pitching her voice for him alone, “but I’m not going into this without saying goodbye.”

  28

  In the cabin, Nex hesitated before bringing up the call. She sat.

  “Can I say something before we—yeah. Can I?”

  “Sure.” Talon inclined his head.

  “I get why you babysat me.” Nyx managed a smile, even though it felt like her chest was cracking open. “I’ve been babysitting you, too. We went into so much shit on our own and I never thought twice about it, but now that you’re on a different ship … well, I think I wanted to run this mission with you all so much because I was afraid something would happen and I’d never forgive myself. So I get why you pulled that stupid stunt when we started out.”

  Talon laughed at the last part. “Yeah. I’d send you in at the head of a group and … I mean, you never do it lightly, but it wouldn’t occur to me to worry about it. I knew you knew how to handle yourself. Now….”

  His voice trailed off. Nyx nodded.

  “Yeah.” She shook her head. “And this one—well, you just know it’s meant to kill us.”

  Talon nodded. He sighed.

  “On the other hand,” Nyx said, “people try to kill us an awful lot. Some of them are pretty good at what they do, even.”

  Talon was startled into a laugh. “I suppose that’s true. They’re always trying, and no one’s managed it even once.”

  “Exactly.” Nyx leaned back in her chair. “Goddamn, though. You find yourself wondering—what if I’d picked literally anyone other than Ghost to go after?”

  “What if you hadn’t seen Mala that night, picked a different target, brought the low-level guy in and waited for more info before charging in after the head honcho? What if you’d had cereal for breakfast instead of toast? Let me tell you, you can spend all the time in the world going back over your missions with a fine-toothed comb and pulling them apart. Thing is, you usually do that at moments like this.”

  “And?”

  “And right now you have a lot better things to do.”

  “Wraith and Centurion are handling it.” Nyx sighed. “And I should be, instead. I just couldn’t….”

  “I know.
And when this is over, we’ll get a drink somewhere and Io crew can tell us how they broke onto Calabria—”

  “That’s where they were going?”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything. I thought you knew.”

  “They said the mob, I just … ohhhh.” Nyx groaned and flopped her head forward. “They’d best not let Mala off that ship or I am going to punt Cade through a wall.”

  “I will pay to watch you try.”

  She rubbed at her face. “You’re broke, you spent all your money on Victus.”

  “Low, Alvarez. Low.”

  She managed a smile. “Listen—you know I hate this shit, so I’m only saying it once, and if you ever repeat it, I’ll say you’re lying. It’s been hard to give you up. You and Tersi … I trusted you. I do trust you. I don’t trust a lot of people. Having you at my back meant the world to me.”

  “We know. You want my advice, though, give your crew a chance. Wraith’s good people. So’s Centurion.”

  “We thought that about Soras.” She wiped at her eyes. “And he destroyed everything we stood for. I don’t know how to trust the rest of them—especially on this ship, with what happened to Mallory. I feel like I’ll be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.”

  “Look, I don’t want to make light of everything that happened, but it’s damned impressive, actually, that someone managed to make you more untrusting. I wouldn’t have said it was possible.”

  She couldn’t smile at that.

  “Okay, bad joke. I’m trying.” He sighed. “This sucks. That’s all there is to it. They know the best way to get to us is to play us against one another. They want our heads to be on how the other one is doing. Lord fucking knows what they’d do if they knew about the Io.”

  Nyx felt a chill. Then her jaw set. “So we take them out before they can figure it out.”

  “That’s the ice-cold XO I know.” He grinned. “I know what you’re capable of. You played the odds and tossed me out a damned airlock with no helmet. You fight like that, they don’t stand a chance.”