Dragon's Echo

by Natalie Grey

  “They’ve shut the shuttle off,” one of the guards snapped. “We don’t know who got onto the station and—”

  “Shut it,” the other guard hissed, looking at Lesedi. “Ma’am, we really need to close off this corridor.”

  Lesedi drew herself up. “You really need to secure that shuttle. Do you have any idea what might be on board? It’s overriding our systems and you’re just sitting here, fighting with the door while they might be priming a nuke? I’m calling Reitano.”

  The guards gave each other a terrified look.

  “Ma’am, we have to get you to safety.” One started trying to usher her down the hall.

  The wrong way down the hall. Lesedi lifted her chin and swept off the other way, with both of them trailing her anxiously.

  “Ma’am, the blast doors in the other direction are closer—”

  “Yes,” Cade interrupted, stepping out of an alcove, “but you see, we were this way.” He brought a nightstick down on one guard’s head with a thump as Tera slid up behind the other one to jab a tiny needle into his neck. Both of them slumped to the ground.

  “Good,” Lesedi said. “Mala?”

  “One second,” Mala’s voice came back. There was a click. “Coming! Aryn, can you get the shuttle doors open?”

  “Now,” Tera added. Alarms had started somewhere in the station.

  The doors to the shuttle slid open and Aryn looked over her shoulder from the pilot’s seat. “Come on!”

  They piled in and the shuttle undocked with record speed.

  “Tell me you disabled their defense systems,” Aryn muttered.

  “Yes. Not only that, I’ve locked their fighter tubes.” Mala grinned. “The ends won’t open.”

  “The ends—” Cade gave her a worried look. “Which ends?”

  “The … the end ends.”

  “So the fighters are going to go shooting down the tubes and … crunch?”

  Mala clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Couldn’t happen to nicer people,” Lesedi advised her, patting her arm. She grinned and settled down onto one of the padded benches. “And I’ll have you know I just got us an entire trove of priceless information. If we ever want to go after the mob … we’re set for life.” She held up a data chip with a smile.

  Tera sat as well, buckling herself in with a grin. “Any juicy details?”

  “Oh, like you wouldn’t believe,” Lesedi said.

  Aryn was smiling as she accelerated away from the station. The terminal beeped and she checked it, looking over her shoulder at Tera. “Talon checked in. Estabrook is down. Should I tell him we got JD?”

  “Yeah.” Tera smiled. She said nothing, but her eyes darted to Mala.

  Mala took a deep breath and folded her hands in her lap. “I’m sure everything’s fine,” she said quietly.

  Cade looked over at her with a reassuring smile. “It absolutely is,” he assured her. “You’ve seen Nyx in action. It’s gonna take a lot more than a gangster with a grudge to take her down.”

  32

  “Overrides!” Nyx called. She didn’t wait to see who listened, only lifted her sidearm and fired.

  Tristan was many things—cunning, cruel, used to outflanking his opponents. But he wasn’t a combatant, and he hadn’t known to start moving as soon as he saw Nyx in the doorway. Her shot took him in the left shoulder, sending him over backwards with a cry of pain.

  It wasn’t a lethal shot, but then, it wasn’t meant to be. Nyx got to him the next moment, hauling him forward to slam him facedown over one of the control panels. When it beeped and lit up, she pushed him onto the floor instead. Her gauntleted hands tangled in his hair and tightened, giving his head a hard shake.

  “You’re going to tell me everything,” she said.

  In the background, alarms were going off in a chorus of beeps and whistles, coming in and out of sync. Dragons were yelling, people were running down the corridors and somewhere, distantly, machinery was clanking.

  Tristan turned his head. He had gone pale with the pain—Nyx, having been shot before, knew the rush of heat and blunt, spreading pain he was feeling—but he was smiling.

  “Are you going to go down with the ship this time, Captain Alvarez?” He coughed and pain flared in his eyes. “I know your history. I know you were on the Blood Moon. Will you do the same thing Rift did and abandon the innocent to their deaths—save your own miserable life?”

  Since she had first seen Tristan after the explosion, Nyx had known he had a hook on her. He had managed to slide his way into her mind and grab at every fear she had: of someone she loved being hurt as revenge for her work; of everything she did being undone, useless, lost in the endless swirl of evil she saw every day.

  And yet somehow, when he taunted her with the Blood Moon….

  All of that released. A weight lifted from her mind and she took what felt like her first deep breath in weeks.

  “You’re all the same,” she told him. “All of you. You’re the answer to ‘why do bad things happen to good people?’ It’s evil, that’s the answer. That’s why we fight. You always put someone else in the crosshairs to try to save your own life in the bargain.”

  “And you kill them to take us out.” He was laughing now. “Spare my life, and I’ll spare the colony. I’m the only one who can turn the ship around.”

  “I highly doubt that,” Nyx said calmly. “You didn’t know we were here. You didn’t know we had beat you to the battle. You didn’t know we had been tracking you before you changed course.” She shook his head again. “I’ll spare you if you tell me what you know of Ghost.”

  She saw the shock in his eyes. “You’d spare my life for that?”

  “You misunderstand me.” Nyx leaned close. “Elia Gemmel.”

  “What?”

  “Horace Jens. Theo Czarkowski. Clara Nolte. Killian Howard. They’re the people you’ve killed—that I know of—to get to me. Just to make a point. They’re dead, Tristan, you can’t bring them back. And I have to wonder how many more there are. After that? You don’t get to live.”

  “You promised to spare me!”

  Nyx leaned close. “I’ll kill you myself. It’ll be quick. If you don’t tell me what you know of Ghost? I’ll leave you for her to find. You’ve failed her. What d’you think she’ll do to you?”

  He shuddered, his whole body tensing.

  “I don’t know where she is.” It was utter defeat. His eyes closed for a moment. He was beginning to fade now. “No one does. Well … the doctor. And a few of her people. But they send their signals from encrypted terminals and each one branches—there’s no way to know. She can see everywhere, you don’t understand. You have to kill me quickly. Even here, she can get me.”

  “Can she?” Nyx raised her eyebrows. In point of fact, she doubted that. Tristan spoke like someone whose fear of Ghost had begun to take over his entire life, destroying him from the inside out like a cancer.

  “Ma’am?” Gambit’s voice was completely calm, and something about that pricked Nyx’s attention. She had the sudden sense that when Gambit sounded very calm and professional, something was likely very wrong. “The radiation levels in the ship are rising.”

  “You know what orders to give.” She didn’t want Tristan to hear that she was evacuating the rest of the crew.

  “…Yes, ma’am.” At least Gambit didn’t fight her on it. “All crew return to the Conway.”

  “We haven’t got the targeting changed or the shielding re-enabled,” Wraith said.

  “I’ll handle it,” Nyx said, over the channel. Time was ticking away, and she didn’t have time to fight this. She’d turn the jets manually if that was what it took.

  She had made the choice not to think about what that meant. This wasn’t their fight, and she wasn’t going to risk them for it.

  There was a pause. “You all heard the captain’s orders,” Wraith said finally.

  Nyx swallowed. She turned her attention back to Tristan. She hoped Gambit was listening to t
his. It was going to be a hell of a loss if no one heard the secrets Tristan told.

  “Tell me,” she said. “I don’t have time for this shit. Tell me, or I will give you to the team to work on and tell them to leave you for Ghost when they’re done. Tell me, or you’ll live far, far longer than you want to. We both know I can deliver on that.”

  Tristan glared at her. His eyes were losing focus, and the only thing he seemed to have left in his mind was pure hatred.

  “I told you I don’t know!”

  “You’re getting orders and you know a damned sight more than just ‘where she is.’ What is she doing? How is she rebuilding?” How did she survive? Nyx had the sense that that question in particular might betray just how little she knew, and so she did not voice it.

  “She’s running on all the old infrastructure. She doesn’t have a plan. I told her she shouldn’t focus on you, but she wouldn’t listen. You and your girlfriend … she’ll kill you both.”

  “She already killed one of us.”

  “You and I both know … that’s not true.” He sighed. “She’ll find her. Doesn’t matter where you hid her. Her network can still find everyone they hid. You think she was the only one in the senate? Do you have any idea how much classified information she had access to?”

  “And they still support her? After Soras?”

  “You don’t understand.” People always said that at the end, but this time, Nyx felt a chill that told her he was telling the absolute truth. “You haven’t seen what she does to people.”

  “I saw some of it.” She wasn’t feeling very well. The radiation must be making it through her suit. She prayed to make it long enough to get the intel out of him.

  The alarms seemed to have stopped. She wondered vaguely what that was about.

  “She can see … everywhere.” He looked at her and there was a faint hope in his eyes now. “Can you kill her?”

  Of all the things, Nyx had expected, this was not it. She looked him in the eyes and nodded.

  It wouldn’t be her, of course, but someone would. What were friends for, after all?

  “You promised,” he said to her.

  He’d given her little enough, but there was something there. Something they could use, whoever ‘they’ were. She nodded and unclasped her hand from over his wound. Blood, staunched by the pressure of her glove, flooded out onto the floor and his eyes drifted closed.

  She had to move. She had to find a way to turn this ship. She had already spent too long on him.

  Nyx stood and looked around at the controls … where Foxtail and Loki were calmly assessing what looked like a readout of the ship’s internal systems.

  “I told you to leave. Wraith told you to leave.”

  “Wraith told us you’d given us orders,” Loki corrected her. He looked over at her. “Come on. You didn’t seriously think anyone was going to obey that one, did you?”

  Nyx blinked at him. There was a crack running all down the front of his armor, and his voice was wheezing a bit.

  “Morel, do you need to see a doctor?”

  “I mean … probably. Foxtail just had some really interesting things she found in the—”

  “Doctor. Now.” Nyx waved him along with her rifle. She looked around to where the rest of the team was standing. “I take it from this display of insubordination that we’ve re-shielded the cargo and stopped the ship from its crash course?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Wraith spun around in the captain’s chair, lounging easily. She pushed herself up and gestured for Nyx to take a seat. “I present you the spoils of war: your very own cargo ship, filled with millions of credits’ worth of power cells and a good deal of Ghost’s proprietary programs.”

  Nyx stared at her XO, trying not to smile. “I told you all to leave.”

  “There must have been a problem with my headset,” Wraith said innocently.

  “Mine, too,” Gambit agreed. “I could have sworn you said to call off the other ships Tristan sent for, send Wraith to fix the targeting, and Loki and Choop to fix the shielding. I’m so sorry, ma’am.”

  Nyx felt her shoulders shaking. “Well, I can’t just let this slide, you know. I came up through the Navy, there are rules.”

  “The Conway has a very nice brig,” Wraith said. “Appropriately grim, very uncomfortable bench.”

  “I was thinking, oh … a cake and some cigars. But if you’d really prefer the brig, I’m happy to order you all to spend a few hours there.”

  “No, no, you’re the captain, we should do things the way you want to do them.”

  “Cake, it is.” Nyx looked around. “Choop and Centurion, you pull first shift with Foxtail while she gets what she can out of the programs. Under no circumstances are you to plug anything from this ship into the Conway. Yes?”

  “I know data protection rules!” Foxtail looked insulted.

  “And eventually you’ll get impatient with slow processing speeds or think of something really cool you could test if only it was connected to the networks, and—yes, I see from your expression that I was correct about that. I’ve seen Tersi work, I know how programmers can get about fun toys. Follow the rules on this one. Ghost basically is a computer at this point.”

  “Oooooh.” Foxtail’s eyes lit up. “This is gonna be fun.”

  Nyx shook her head and left, chuckling. She was back on the Conway, stripping off her armor, when Doc slid up behind her and waved a wand quickly over Nyx’s body. The blue light coming from the wand illuminated so many spots that Nyx felt more mortified than angry at the unexpected doctors’ visit.

  Was her clothing really this dirty?

  “Not much radiation,” Doc announced. “Show me your teeth.”

  “I do not go to doctors.”

  “You don’t spread radiation on my ship and contaminate my other patients, is what you don’t do.” Doc was not at all cowed. “Show me your teeth. Good. Now your eyes. Let me see your nails. Ears. Good, you can go—take a shower and throw out that set of undergear, put the armor in a closed container to be washed.”

  Muttering, Nyx headed back to her cabin.

  The messages from Talon and Lesedi were waiting on her terminal and she smiled as she typed out a response, inviting them to a rendezvous on Akintola.

  She had a particular bakery in mind for the cake.

  33

  A faint noise came from the hallway outside and John Hugo looked up from his desk. He was one of the last ones in the building tonight, as he was on many nights. He was always meaning to get back home earlier, but….

  Aleksandr Soras had left quite a mess to clean up.

  He was lucky that he’d found such a good nanny, but it wasn’t fair to his daughter for him to be working this much. He was only working this late tonight because he’d made plans for them this weekend, plans he had sworn to everyone who would listen that he was not going to let be derailed by work.

  Which meant staying late now. It seemed like he couldn’t win. He gave a little sigh.

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted this job, or that he didn’t find the work worthwhile. If he didn’t, he’d be gone in a heartbeat.

  The problem was that all of the things he touched were absolutely necessary.

  Including the reports that were beginning to come in about Ghost. He had already been researching her organization after the attack on the docks, but the worry of the Dragon teams had given him incentive to look a little harder.

  What he found was far from encouraging. One agent in particular had uncovered a string of dead doctors, each specializing in neurosurgery or biocomputing. Some could be linked to Maryam Samuels and some could not, but the trail was clear if you looked. All of them had retired from celebrated careers, and all had disappeared entirely within months.

  One body had turned up—and really, that was more chilling than dozens of them. Because they were all dead, Hugo had no doubt of that.

  The trail ended, however, three years ago. The last doctor to disappear had been Ezra Trie
u, a man known—paradoxically enough—for his commitment to ethics, reasonable limits on experimentation, and general caution about the limits of science.

  It was possible that Trieu had failed, the same as all the other doctors, and Samuels had given up her quest to gain immortality.

  But Hugo didn’t think so. He was more and more sure that Trieu had succeeded, and that Samuels was still alive … if it could even be called that.

  One of his sources seemed to think the same. The entries from this agent stretched back for years, always small details, always assisting investigations that would otherwise have failed and left innocent people to die. Sometimes it was a suggestion of a person to talk to, when all other leads had failed. Sometimes it was a piece of code.

  In this case, it was more substantial: a collection of every known associate of Ghost’s, including aliases, family members, known specialties, and suspected sightings. None of them had shown up in other known criminal organizations, and there was no sign that any of them had died, either, in the expected jockeying for power with Ghost’s apparent death.

  Ghost, the source concluded, was still alive—and based on the work of the various doctors over the years, she was alive as an entirely cybernetic being with capabilities that were unknown, but certainly dangerous.

  Who this source was, Hugo didn’t know, but he was deeply curious.

  They simply went by “L.”

  He had been communicating with them for months now, since before Aleksandr Soras was apprehended. Having seen their trail of good information over the years, he had trusted the clues they sent him enough to investigate, and by the time the news broke about Soras, Hugo had already followed the trail and was able to provide corroborating evidence to the senate. It had helped the case wind up very quickly, and had doubtless been instrumental in Hugo becoming the current head of Alliance Intelligence.

  What was surprising to him was how much fun he’d had with those communications. Though the messages were almost entirely information and facts, a sense of humor laced the words, and more than once, Hugo had found himself smiling at the messages as he worked.