To the Victor

by R Coots

  “No.” Quinn walked up and laid a hand on the wobble in the gravitational waves that marked the next Barbican. “Not if this is our only way out of the system.”

  “Well, you’re going to keep an eye on him,” Syrus said. “Sweeps, rabbit hunts, you name it. Keep him occupied until I get back. And if I don’t make it back—”

  “Will you stop that?” Iira snapped. The soft whack of skin on skin cracked through the suddenly quiet room. Syrus turned to look. The redheaded sai had her sister wrapped up in her arms, guarding the other woman’s head as she hissed at Iira like a pissed-off cat. Iira raised her hand again, probably to dole out a little more discipline.

  Syrus reached over and caught her wrist before she had a chance to strike. “Hold on,” he told her, eyeing the ball of arms and legs and bloody clothing that might or might not have been two people at one point. The redhead started hissing at him instead.

  “Quinn,” Syrus said over his shoulder. “I still owe Kizen a thank-gift, right?”

  “Yes milord,”

  The germ of an idea sprouted and took root. Syrus turned to look at his second. “There’s a blond in my quarters. Back full of scars. Blue eyes. Don’t let her talk you into beating her. Take her over to the Ataorl Banso. Make sure he keeps pounding the shit out of this system like he said he would.

  Quinn’s lips twitched, but he bowed. “And you, milord?”

  “I’m going to sneak into that outpost and bring back the keys for the Barbican. And these two—” He jerked a thumb at the girls on the floor. “Are my ticket in.”

  > Chapter Twenty-Two

  Syrus

  They’re untrustworthy as Hell, but who else are you going to send on the suicide missions? So long as teams keep comin’ back, alive or in pieces, we’ll keep sending ’em out. No good for anything else.

  -recording, private quarters, Admiral Utten, 1567.602 F.K.

  Syrus could drop a space station though the holes in this plan. His old clearances were probably enough to get him aboard the base guarding the Barbican, but they could also get him killed right in the hangar. He’d have to survive long enough to get new ones, fast. So much depended on being able to move around the base instead of getting stuck in a holding cell or floating dead in vacuum.

  Add in the fact that he was bringing the two women along for the ride and this was a shitstorm just waiting to happen.

  He stomped on his conscience when it tried to speak up and turned his brain back to the puzzle of getting them to cooperate. Hopefully he could keep them off balance. Keep them from realizing how badly they could fuck this thing up for him. If not, well, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d opened an outer hatch on someone. But it could be his last.

  Somewhere behind Syrus, something hit the deck of the hangar with a ringing clang. He looked up, pulled out of his thoughts. A tech bent, cursing under her breath, and picked up the piece of equipment that had fallen off her cart. Once it was back in place, she trotted off across the hangar towards the mechanic shops, pushing the cart ahead of her. Syrus clipped the knife hilt back on his belt and took a deep breath to center himself. He was on edge. That was all. Oona and her team were doing a last check of the ship he’d be using, one of many captured from a landing field down planet and brought up to be retrofitted with Fleet systems. He’d commandeered it mainly because Engineering hadn’t started tearing it apart yet.

  The scuff of a boot on metal announced Quinn’s presence. Syrus waited.

  “Milord, if I may?”

  Syrus swallowed the smile that would have wrecked the serious mood and glanced over at Quinn. “You don’t understand why I’m bringing the women.”

  “No milord.” Quinn tipped his head slightly, the rim of his helmet shadowing his eyes.

  Syrus turned on one heel so he could look the man in the face. “Think about it. They’re sai. There are two of them. Which, granted,” he lifted a shoulder, “isn’t really a guarantee of them being bonded. Whoever answers my hail on that base might know that, he might not. But no Imperial is going to turn away two sai. From their point of view, they might as well cut off their arms and legs and feed them to a bajbar.”

  Quinn frowned slightly. “You wish to fly in there and hand them the women?”

  Syrus eyed Quinn. The little pinched line between his eyebrows said he wasn’t happy. The line had been there since Syrus had declared he was bringing the strays along. It was the longest any expression had lived on Quinn’s face in the entire time Syrus had known him.

  Well, he could go fuck himself. The women might break this plan all to bits, but they could also be what made it work. Trying to explain the particulars of Foreseers and sousi to a Fleet man was like trying to tell a cat how a space elevator operated. Not worth it.

  Admit it, his brain told him. You’re not bringing them because you think you can get them to work for you. You’re bringing them because the minute you take off and leave them here, Oona is going to chuck them out an airlock.

  He growled at the voice.

  It’s called guilt, his conscience said. And you have it in spades.

  He snarled. Out loud this time. Quinn’s face tightened. Syrus opened his mouth, then shut it. And there was always an airlock. Better he do it himself than someone else.

  Someone who would probably torture them first.

  Syrus shook his head. Quinn was still waiting for an answer.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” There was more, of course, but not even Quinn needed to know the fine details of how he planned to pull this off. “Depends on how long it takes me to get the keys. I’m not occupying the fucking base all by my lonesome. In and out is all. If getting the job done means I have to make them think I’ve given them the women, that’s what I’ll do.” He curled a lip. “Not like they’ll live long enough to use them.”

  “When can we expect you back, milord?"

  “Day or two out. If Oona’s vacfighters don’t blow my ass all over the solar system. A couple days on the base. Another two or three back. Might have to circle the system if they try to follow.” He hitched his carry bag higher on his shoulder

  Quinn raised an eyebrow. "As you wish, milord." He picked up another carry bag, this one tattered and burned, blazoned with the sign of this planet’s government. “Oona had one of the outFleet pick this out of stores. Will it suffice?”

  Syrus took it, rifled through the contents, and shrugged. “Should. So long as they don’t look Fleet. She cleared the ship yet?”

  Quinn gestured. Oona and one of the mech-techs were coming down the ramp of the ship. The captain dusted off her hands as she came forward. She didn’t look impressed.

  Syrus raised an eyebrow at her.

  “It will fly, milord,” she said, coming to rest in front of him. “Badly, but it will fly.”

  “All relative to what you expect,” he told her. “That right there was some officer’s baby, before we got here.”

  Oona frowned harder, but a commotion on the other side of the hangar interrupted what she was about to say. Iira, leading the two strays by a set of tethers shackled around their wrists. Someone had found clothes for the redheaded one. A shirt and pants, not one of the dresses his women wore. The girl swam in them. She was also guiding her sister across the deck, moving her around crates and clusters of people like she had charge of a child, not a woman six inches taller than her and weaving like a drunk.

  “If I may, milord?” Oona’s voice was the closest thing to disrespectful he’d ever heard from her.

  He looked at her. “You may, Captain.”

  Her mouth twisted. “They’ve served their purpose. We’re forewarned of the Imperial Net.”

  She shut up when he scowled at her. The closed-down ball of emotions under her skin shifted slightly before righting.

  “We need to have the ‘Who’s Warlord here?’ discussion again? You know you never win. If you’re so worried about it though, talk to your husband. He’s not complaining.” He turned to look at the mech-tech standing off to
the side. “Get them on board.” He nodded at the women still making their way across the deck. “In one piece. Tether them in the galley—” He stopped and thought better of it. “Alive.”

  The woman sputtered. He ignored her, turning on his heel and stalking up the ramp of the ship. “And make sure they get the walls in my rooms fixed before I get back,” he called over his shoulder. “Want the locks working again. Tired of crazies tearing things apart.”

  >><<

  One hour and a very convincing firefight later, Syrus latched the control yoke into place against the console. He shouldn’t leave the bridge. It wasn’t smart.

  But he could hear the women moving around down in the galley. Whatever Iira had dosed Jossa with to calm her down must be wearing off. Syrus shook his head and checked the nav system one last time, just to be sure. He had a little while before they managed to break free of their shackles and sabotaged the engine.

  Well, those would actually be minor problems, considering the alternatives. The techs may have said that the ship was spaceworthy. And it might be. They’d told him the deck plates weren’t rigged, the core wasn’t set to blow, and as far as they could tell, the nav system was clear of worms that might fly him into the local star.

  That didn’t mean they’d found everything. He hadn’t given them much time once he’d picked the ship he planned to use. Even if he trusted that they’d gone over every line of code in the nav banks, it didn’t mean this heap of metal wouldn’t drop him down a gravity well. He’d commandeered a military vessel. There were fail-safes built into these things to keep them from wandering off, even if the person who took one had clearance to fly it.

  No. No. Clear. Stupid nav beacons and their overrides. Ah. No wonder this ship had been sitting on that planet instead of on the base in orbit. Whatever poor fuck took his last breath back there had been smuggling some sort of plant matter out to a satellite around the fourth planet in the system. Or maybe it was fungus. Hell, there might even be eggs rotting in some cubbyhole under the deck plates. There’d been chickens down there. Who knew?

  Syrus hoped there wasn’t any of that shit on board right now. Probably not, what with the going over the techs had given it. He’d check later. For now, he erased the smuggler’s port of call from the system, then got to work telling the autopilot to skate them around the third moon on the second planet. Hide from the smuggler’s sensors, but still make it look like they were taking the usual route back to the Barbican. Hopefully the people guarding the back door would be too buried in panicky civilians to take much of a look at where he came from and how he’d gotten this ship.

  Of course, if he’d missed something and the ship decided to slide out from under him, he’d just wasted his time. Syrus double checked his course and shook his head. Fiddling wouldn’t make it perfect. He’d just have to take what he could get. That there was a second Barb system was a mixed blessing in and of itself. Just the sort of fucked up thing most Imperials thought their Ancestors handed out like carnival treats. Sweet and full of promise on the outside, acid sour on the inside. Then, when you got too many of those “blessings,” they had to replace your teeth.

  Somebody wanted to funnel people through the Barbs and make them work to get anywhere else. Preferably, with scans of their maruste before they were let through.

  He tapped a few keys on the autopilot and looked at the course. Still there.

  In the meantime, he had two shackled women to check on. He needed to get some answers. See what he was dealing with before they had to put up a front for any Navlad officers. It’d be a pity to go to so much trouble to keep them alive just to find out that the risk of them flipping the switch from sex toys to killer women was bigger than getting shot by the Navlad Military.

  Scooping his bags from under the pilot’s chair, he toggled the intercom and headed aft.

  >><<

  Syrus stopped when he made it to the galley. It was empty. What the fuck?

  The space was narrow, more a widening in the hall that ran through the ship than a room at all. Not meant for a large crew. Sink and counter on the starboard side, with a metal basin set over the hotbox for cooking. Storage and table to port. The table was bolted down, not floating like the Fleet version. More storage under the bench that wrapped around three sides of the table. Everything a solid military gray. Not an inch of extra space to hide in.

  He’d stuck them at the table. Tethered them there with mag cuffs. How the hell had they managed to get free so fast? It took him ages to get out of those things, and even he had a hard time resisting the pull of the tethers long enough to get the job done.

  A muffled whimper told him where at least one of them was. The flare of anger and confusion told him how to find the other one. Squatting on his heels, he ducked his head so he could see under the table. “The hell you doing under there?” he asked. And how the fuck had they managed it? Sheer force of will?

  Jossa was on the bench, curled on her side. The other one, Delfi, had pulled her tethers to their limit and was wrapped around the head of her sousi, cradling the weeping woman’s face against her breast. It looked uncomfortable as hell, what with the flares of Jossa’s crown jabbing her in the ribs, but she was managing.

  Delfi turned her head in his direction and hissed. He couldn’t see her expression behind the snaking mass of hair billowing out from under her crown. But he could guess what it looked like. Little bitch. He bared his teeth at her and stood up, grabbing the bag Iira had given him before takeoff. The girl under the table hissed again when he dropped it on the surface over her head.

  He ignored her halfhearted swat at his leg and started unloading the gear. “Now,” he told them. “Got a whole bunch of electronic shit up here. Gonna use it on you whether you like it or not. Personally—” He dodged another strike and kicked back, gently. He didn’t connect. “Stop that, or I won’t tell you what I’ve got for you.”

  A barking stream of the Foreseers’ language answered him. Rage and frustration and confusion burned his legs. Jossa’s whimpers had escalated to muffled sobs. He let a small fist make contact with his kneecap before he crouched down again. “Listen. Those crowns are coming off. Difference in what happens after depends on how you answer my questions and whether you keep trying to knock my kneecaps off. Got that?”

  Delfi all but spat another string of garble at him. The girl was so wound up he couldn’t tell which emotion he’d made worse. There was grief under it all. He could feel it now that he was nearly touching her. The fury and frustration overlaying it were so blinding that he had a hard time telling one from the other.

  Then there was Jossa. She just lay there, hiccupping into Delfi’s shirt. Nothing at all like the woman who’d stolen his weapons and gone barreling into a pile of Fleet warriors.

  He stood, growling to himself, and snapped the tethers that held Jossa to the bench. Then he reached down and grabbed her by the collar. Delfi flailed at him from under the table, but she couldn’t do much damage from where she was and the tethers wouldn’t let her scramble out the other side.

  He could feel Jossa now that he was touching her. If he hadn’t been hit by it before, he would have dropped her. He nearly went down anyway, as the weight of guilt and self-hatred sliced its way up his arm and punched in under his ribcage. All his fault. Should have never. All his fault. Better to have died than go through life like this.

  He set her on the bench seat a little harder than he’d meant to. She gave a strangled cry that dissolved into a sob. He tried letting go of her and she toppled forward, face buried in her hands, nearly hitting her forehead on the edge of the table. Gritting his teeth, he took her by the shoulders and pushed her back upright long enough to relink the tethers to her shackles. She stayed put for the process, weaving in her seat like a drunk.

  “Jossa,” he growled at her once he had her attached to the wall again. Delfi tried to use his leg to help claw her way free of the table. He ignored her. “Dammit woman, look at me!”

  Noth
ing. Delfi managed to make it upright and started pulling at his arm, snarling like a demented kitten. Now he had fury, regret, self-hatred and frustration hitting him from both sides. The emotions churned under his skin, mixing with his own and bubbling through his body as the monster reached for control.

  Fucking women. So wrapped up in their own problems. Didn’t even realize that without him, they’d be worse than dead right now. Either stuck back on that planet as their life support killed them in inches, or on the Edde Belo as Kizen and the rest of the Fleet tore them apart. He’d brought them along, hoping they’d be useful—and now he’d been turned into a fucking babysitter!

  “Alright, enough!” His hands moved. One grabbed a body and threw it. The other struck out blindly.

  Delfi hit the end of her tethers and snapped back. The crown protected her skull from the impact when she struck the bulkhead. Jossa’s head whipped back, and she stared at him, his handprint turning half her face bright reddish brown.

  “Now. What the hell was that back on the ship?”

  For a moment he thought it hadn’t been enough. He had no idea, short of beating them senseless, what he’d have to do to get their attention elsewise. Then Jossa wavered, caught herself, and looked over at Delfi. “I broke her.” Her voice was hoarse and scratchy, like she’d been screaming for weeks instead of crying quietly in a corner.

  He blinked. Not really what he meant, but at least it was something. He’d take it for now.

  “Aren’t there rumors?” She looked back at him. Her eyes had glazed over again. Her voice cracked on every other word and she kept having to stop to gasp for breath. “There used to be rumors.” Her hands came up to clutch at his, fingernails digging into his skin. It was like someone had stabbed him with spikes of dry ice. He couldn’t feel his arms.

  Delfi croaked something derogatory, then cackled. Jossa looked down. Syrus followed her eyes. Delfi was leaning over, one pale hand wrapped around her sousi’s ankle. From the look of concentration on her face, she was trying to do something. If the rising level of anger was any clue, she was failing.