The sword was real, a family heirloom. It felt heavy and metallic in his grasp, warm to the touch. Notthe cool, perfectly-distributed weight of a pilot’s slice.
Humans knew little about the Sun-kissed, even after surviving a war against them, and yet one fact stood out: to kill them, you take the head.
Auden tilted his head to one side, basking in his own beauty. Of course he was beautiful. His face was manufactured: everything from the pale grey eyes to the sculpted face. He was created to be admired; to make humans weak at the knees for desire of him. “Kill me then, sweetness,” he breathed. “Let’s see how much better it makes you feel.”
Olivier swung the sword, severing his husband’s head from his neck. His duty, he reminded himself as the ugly thud vibrated through his arms, and his heart. Duty above everything. It had to be him who struck the blow. How could he trust it to anyone else?
His hand closed around a glass of whiskey, relishing the way that it felt against his palm before he poured the contents down his throat.
That didn’t help, either.
Athos’ eyes snapped open. He hadn’t dreamed of that in years – oh, there had been dreams, terrible torturing dreams that regularly ripped his heart out of his chest, but not that, not the moment when he performed the execution.
The failed execution.
Cutting off their heads doesn’t work after all. I should warn someone about that.
“Where am I?” he muttered. “Grimaud?” It came out as a slur of unrelated consonants, and he realised too late that this wasn’t his bunk on the Pistachio. Damn it, had he totalled another ship?
He found a flat white medipack fastened to his bare chest, and sat up in a hurry, groaning as his head churned and the bright lights of the medibay hurt his eyes.
“You’re alive, then.” It was a chirpy voice. Athos glared at it until the blur resolved into a familiar person.
“Pigtails,” he said flatly.
“You know that’s not my name,” the redhead said, not offended. She passed him a cup of ice chips. “Dana would have hung around but she said she was likely to smother you in your sleep if she did, so she’s gone back to work.”
“Grimaud?”
“Much the same only she said ‘break his limbs’ instead of ‘smother him’ and she’s overseeing the repairs of the Pistachio.”
Athos nodded slowly. He didn’t hurt as much as he might have expected, but he still felt shaky. “Am I grounded?”
“Inappropriate stims usage in the field, three days out of combat,” said a different voice, breaking into their conversation. “You’re to report back to Treville at Chaillot Station as soon as you’re fit to travel so she can shout at you in person.” A fifty-something medic in a hover chair whirred over towards them, peering at Athos through her thick glasses with professional interest. “You’re getting off lightly, kid.”
Athos had a long history with Wheels, the Musketeers’ longest-serving medic, and he was well aware that things could have gone much worse.
“Always a pleasure, sweetness,” he drawled at her.
Wheels gave him a dirty look. “Don’t even think about trying to flirt with me, Mr Posh Accent. I haven’t slept for forty-eight hours, and I have no sympathy for self-destructive pilots. Were you trying to kill yourself? Suicide by Front Line?”
Athos was taken aback. “No,” he said, and meant it. There were times he had come close to that, but no – Aramis and Porthos would never forgive themselves, if he let it get that bad. They had enough of a hold on his heart that he curbed his more self-destructive impulses.
Perhaps he was due for recalibration about what exactly counted as more self-destructive.
“Good to know.” Wheels made a check mark on the clamshell that rested on the arm of her hoverchair. “You will remain here for three more hours under my observation, and then you can get the hell out. Planchet says Cap will let you bunk with her while you’re on enforced downtime.”
Athos blinked, not used to the idea that their baby-faced D’Artagnan was a Captain now. “Am I allowed to know what happened to my pants?”
Dana was dog tired, worn to the bone, and while she wanted to check in on Athos in the medibay, she didn’t have any energy left for the angry rant she had been building inside her head. Sleep first, shouting later.
She let herself into her small quarters and toppled headfirst on to the bunk. She lay there still and silent for at least ten minutes, trying to work up the energy to take her boots off.
If she sat up, she could get at that wine. She would need to hide it when Athos was well enough to bunk with her. But she was going to drink some of it first, and to hell with hypocrisy.
In order to drink, she had to get up.
Her door chimed once, twice, three times, and even before she could react to it, she heard an urgent thumping against the door. Damn it all to hell and back. Dana rose slowly, staggering with exhaustion, and thumbed open the door.
Athos stood on the other side, wearing medibay-printed pyjamas and an agonised expression.
“What?” Dana snapped.
“Pigtails told me about the Anjou wine,” Athos blurted out.
Heat surged through her body. Her anger and fear about what the fuck he had been doing to himself resolved into a single, furious punch.
Athos went down like he’d been felled by a cinquefoil pole, and Dana didn’t even feel guilty about it. She stood over him, letting her fury pour all over him – yelling about how much his friends loved him, and how he was a stupid, selfish addict who was going to break all their hearts when he got himself killed out of sheer drug-induced idiocy.
When Dana paused to take in a shaky breath, he tried to speak. She cut him off with another round of ranting, then sat on his chest, and hit him a couple more times around the arms.
Finally, she ran out of words and anger.
“D’Artagnan,” Athos started to say. Dana raised her hand to smack him again. He caught her hand and flipped her on to the ground, leaning over her with her wrists pinned hard above her head. “Dana, this is all very touching,” he snarled into her face. “But if you would stop emoting at me for half a minute, I didn’t come here because I was thirsty.”
Dana glared up at him, breathing hard. “Then what?”
Athos sighed, still not relinquishing her wrists. “Aramis and Porthos and I have not been inside the same medibay since this damned war began. We’ve barely seen each other since Chaillot Station. We never sent you any fucking wine.”
46
Dovecote Red
Nothing about the flasks offered a clue – they held the stamp of the Cotillard Vineyard in Anjou, and a postal seal to show they were authorised for interstellar export. There was no sign that they had been tampered with since leaving the vineyard.
Athos took over Chantal’s testing chamber with a surprising demonstration of charm and tact, long enough to learn that the contents of the “Anjou wine” contained enough poison to wipe out a whole platoon of Musketeers, let alone a single Arms-Sergeant Captain.
Back in Dana’s cabin, Athos sat on the bunk poring over the holo-card that had accompanied the poisonous gift. “I remember this picture, it’s from a year ago. Chevreuse took it in the medibay after the three of us were involved in a training accident, when I lost the Merci Beaucoup. She posted it on Fleetnet with the caption ‘Inseparable in Idiocy’ – Treville had a copy on her dartboard for at least a month. Anyone could have got hold of this.”
“How many ships have you lost, Athos?”
“I’m hoping my luck changes with the Pistachio. No ship that ugly is ever going to be blasted out of the sky.” He blinked, and looked up at Dana. “He is all right, isn’t he?”
Dana was touched. Athos pretended he wasn’t soft about his spaceships, but she knew true love when she saw it. “The Pistachio is fine, nothing we can’t patch up. Grimaud is also fine, by the way, though I doubt she’ll be speaking to you by the time you ship out again.”
“T
hat’s just how I like it,” said Athos, his attention drawn back to the holo-card. “You couldn’t tell this was old? It’s from before I grew out my beard.”
“Since you started shaving it close again it looks exactly the same.” Dana fiddled with one of the flasks, and Athos moved quickly, his hand covering her own.
“Keep your fingers to yourself. We don’t know what other surprises your murderous friend has in store for you.”
Dana’s hand stuttered on the flask. “Point made.”
“I’ll take them with me when I ship out,” he said. “This is a matter for Amiral Treville.”
“There’s more,” said Dana, and quickly told him about Conrad, and the transmission Aramis had shared with her, via Chevreuse. Athos went very still when she confessed that it was Prince Alek who had staged Conrad’s rescue.
“This is bad,” he said in a low voice, once she was finished. He tapped his comm stud. “Grimaud, when will he be ready to return to base?”
“I hate you, I hate your face, I hate your ship,” his engie said calmly. “Six hours, if it’s an emergency, but only if you can prove you’ve had actual sleep, and I take the helm.”
“See you in six hours.” Athos cut her off without further conversation. “See? Grimaud’s fine.”
“Don’t tell her you’re bringing poison on board, it would be far too much of a temptation,” said Dana. “Are you really going to take this to Treville?”
“Oh, yes. All this –” Athos waved a hand at the flasks with a troubled look upon his face. “This is personal, not political. Cardinal Richelieu has lived too long and survived too much political bullshit to indulge in personal revenge, and if she ordered your assassination it wouldn’t be something this amateur. Who else wants you dead? Should we consider that pilot with the eye-scar and the fierce hair?”
“You don’t get to mock anyone’s hair, given yours when we met,” said Dana, reaching over to rub her palm over the blond stubble of his scalp. “And no, I don’t think – Ro and I have an understanding. If she wanted to kill me, I honestly think she’d prefer to be there for it.”
“How romantic,” Athos said sarcastically. “Well, then. I can think of one suspect.”
“So can I.”
They didn’t say it – any of the names by which they knew Milord. They could not speak of the alien spy without feeling him there in the room with them.
“I can believe it,” Dana said finally. “He was furious before Conrad escaped. After – everything in Paris, I can well believe that he is taking it personally, about me.”
Athos nodded, and sat in silence for a moment. “Now I have to have a very detailed and very uncomfortable conversation with Amiral Treville. It’s long past time that we put this Sun-kissed creature in the ground.”
Dana felt a painful tug at her stomach. “Do you have to go straight away?”
Athos smiled, and tapped her lightly on the nose. “The war won’t last forever, D’Artagnan. We’ll all be back, drinking and brawling in Paris before you know it.”
Dana said nothing. It felt a terribly long way away.
“Six hours,” Athos reminded her. “I can crash here, yes? Let’s see if this sleep thing is as worhtwhile as everyone claims.”
“Fine,” Dana groaned, looking at the narrow bunk and wondering how on earth they would both fit. “But take your damn boots off.”
Forty-eight hours after Athos and Grimaud left to make their appointment with Treville, the Hoyden rolled into the main dock of the Frenzy Kenzie.
Dana stared at it for a full minute, gathering her courage to check on whether Porthos was alive and well inside her dart – but in fact, the Hoyden didn’t look like it had taken any damage at all.
Bonnie was the first one out, and she waved off the intern that Bass sent over for a damage report. When she caught sight of Dana across the wide expanse of space, she crooked her finger.
Huh.
Dana headed to the Hoyden, wondering what in space was going on, only to stumble over her feet when a tall and elegant figure in a violet flight suit stepped out, instead of Porthos.
Rosnay Cho gave her an enigmatic smile, and held out her wrist. “Captain,” she said lightly.
Dana leaned in, her wrist brushing against Ro’s. Her comm hummed as the new orders rattled in.
“What happened to your Moth?” she asked, because there was something about Ro that made her blurt out the first thing that came into her mind, every single time.
“Crashed and burned in the last sortie against the Sun-kissed,” said Ro, and laughed out loud at the horror that crossed Dana’s face. “Honey, I didn’t know you cared.”
“That was a beautiful ship,” Dana muttered.
“I’m sure the Cardinal will present me with a new one for services rendered.”
Dana glared at her. “So what are these orders?”
“Oh, I’m relieving you of duty for 48 hours,” said Ro in an offhand sort of way. “You don’t have to show me the way to the captain’s chair – I’m sure I remember it.”
Dana blinked. “You’re what? I’m – what?”
Rosnay Cho was already walking away, a knapsack tossed casually over one shoulder. “Read your orders, D’Artagnan,” she called out behind her. “You’ll find them enlightening.”
Porthos explained everything on the way to Chaillot Station. She made Bonnie pilot the Buttercup, so that Dana – still without an engie of her own given Planchet’s continuing duties on the Frenzy Kenzie – could share the Hoyden’s flight deck and they could talk without the use of comms.
‘Explain’ wasn’t entirely accurate, given that Porthos had no real idea what was going on, and why Rosnay Cho of all people had been rotated on to cover for Dana on the Frenzy Kenzie.
“Athos is cooking something up with Treville, and they want us part of it,” was all she had to share. “Spy stuff.”
Dana nodded miserably. It had been categorically proven that she was terrible at spy stuff, but if Athos thought she could be useful, she wasn’t going to let him down. “How’s he doing?”
Porthos gave her a cagey look, as if trying to work out how much she already knew. “Grimaud has threatened to quit if he doesn’t cool it with the pilot drugs and the stims,” she said.
“Grimaud threatens to quit every week,” Dana sighed.
“She means it this time. She showed him a job offer she received from Claudine Jussac of the Red Fleet, and he promised not to call her bluff.”
Dana was skeptical. Grimaud had been enabling Athos for a long time, like the rest of them. It was hard to imagine he would let her force him into a corner. “Is he actually going to cool it with the pilot drugs and the stims?”
“He’s hopped up on caffeine. I haven’t seen him drunk since he got back from his near miss,” Porthos said. “But he’s spent most of his time behind closed doors with Treville, so maybe he hasn’t had time.” She hesitated to continue, her fingertips tapping idly against the cables of her harness. “He’s taking this Milord business personally.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Dana demanded.
Porthos gave her a long, hard look. “He’s acting like it’s his fault the bastard tried to poison you.”
“Oh,” Dana groaned, because of course Athos would blame himself. “Typical.”
“There’s also a problem with the Prince Consort,” Porthos went on. “Prince Alek is supposed to be back safely on Lunar Palais – leading the home guard, or tattooing the nursery walls or whatever else an expectant father does while his pregnant wife is out winning a war against aliens. Instead, he’s bombing around the solar system, punching spies in the head and rescuing his tailor from sinister asteroid prisons.”
“Does Athos blame himself for that too?” Dana asked tiredly.
“Nope,” said Porthos, hiding a grin. “I’m pretty sure Treville is going to blame you.”
Dana expected to be taken to the Regence Royal’s flagship, or the armoured command base: the Saint-Gervais. Failing that, she
thought Treville might have an office somewhere on Chaillot Station. Instead, Porthos led her directly back to the nightclub they had spent the evening in before the proper battle began – Dovecote Red.
“This is official business, right?” Dana asked as they made their way through the grinding bodies, pulsing music and spotlights that turned everything blood-red. “You haven’t kidnapped me to show me a good time?”
“Such trust,” Porthos laughed, catching her by the hand and pulling her onwards through the club. At the far end of the bar, she gave a discreet password, and was led through to a mostly sound-proofed back room.
There, surrounded by barrels and bottles, two Musketeers sat at a game of cards, with a bottle of wine between them. Aramis and Athos.
“About time you showed up,” said Athos as he laid down his hand.
“It’s been forever,” said Aramis, giving Dana a friendly hug and hooking her arm around Porthos’ neck.
“No Treville?” Porthos said with a frown, pushing Aramis off and pouring herself a drink. “I expected her here by now.”
“Is this or isn’t this official business?” Dana asked, unsure whether to make herself comfortable. There was an odd tension in the air.
Athos looked up, his eyes locking on to hers. “Not all councils of war can be held in the open,” he said.
There was a knock at the door.
Dana’s friends froze, their hands going to their belts. Athos’ fingers hovered at his pilot’s slice, while Aramis and Porthos reached for stunners.
“So we’re not supposed to be here?” Dana hissed. She had been right to be suspicious.
“That isn’t Treville’s knock,” Aramis said in a whisper.
The door spun open. The bright red-gold lights of the club poured across the threshold, along with the thumping beat of the music. Six Red Hammers filed into the room, lining up against one wall. A woman in full battle dress and steel-grey hair stepped in after them. The door whirled shut behind her, keeping out the music and the blazing lights, though the thudding backbeat continued to vibrate through the floor.
Musketeer Space Page 43