by R Coots
Jossa shifted her arm so Delfi had better access to the seam and tried to think of where to start. With her first waking? The second? The things the other concubines had told her? ::That will take too long,:: she said finally. Carefully, making sure she got as many details as she could remember, she bundled the whole into a metaphorical package and pushed it down the mind bond.
Delfi wavered, sinking back on her heels as she absorbed the information. A blink, then another, and she shook her head. ::He is . . .::
Jossa nodded. ::He is many things. But stupid isn’t one of them.::
Delfi bent over her work again, makeshift lock pick wiggling furiously. ::True. But he’s also made a grave miscalculation.::
“What?” In her surprise, Jossa forgot to keep the words in her head.
The shackle around her wrist popped open. Del dug into the other one as Jossa shook her hand out. ::Do you have any idea what his plan is? Where we’re going?::
“I was a little preoccupied. What with you being awake and the language mix-up and all that.” Jossa winced. She didn’t want to remind her sister of that right now. Although they would have to deal with it at some point. Had they lost the gift of Foreseeing too? She locked that question away in a deep corner of her brain before Del could pick up on it. As horrible as the Foreseeings could be, she prayed to the Ancestors that they were still somewhere in Delfi. They were too useful to lose.
::Hey.:: A hard finger poked Jossa in the breastbone. ::Wake up, sister mine. We don’t have time for daydreaming over muscles.::
::Excuse me?:: Jossa shot up straight and grabbed for Delfi’s shoulders. ::I dropped out of orbit when he came for me. Not a day ago! You think I’m—:: She looked at her hands. Both hands. Free.
Delfi doubled over laughing.
Jossa shook her head. “You are an evil child, you know that?”
Delfi gulped down a couple more chuckles and nodded. Then she wrapped her arms around Jossa and squeezed tight. For the second time in ten minutes, all was right with the world. Then Delfi sat back and moved so she could dangle her legs off the edge of the bunk.
Jossa did the same, eyes on the door. ::What’s your plan?::
Delfi leaned against her sister’s side, toying with the lock pick. ::You will not like it.::
::I usually don’t. Although if you plan to have us run out there, one carrying the other and yelling “Help, she’s hurt,” I will brain you myself.::
::But that one works so well! Especially if one of us is really bleeding.:: Delfi grinned up at Jossa.
Jossa arched an eyebrow.
Del pouted, but it was just for show. Anticipation and glee thrilled down the mind bond. ::He thinks we are only good for sex, though he has seen us fight.:: She reached a mental hand along the bond. ::We need to know what he’s planning.::
It took Jossa a moment to understand. A heartbeat to see what her sister meant. Her heart stopped altogether. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t. I—”
Delfi covered Jossa’s mouth with one slim hand and wrapped her other arm around Jossa’s torso. ::Then don’t. You’ve already done so much. I will do this thing. I have enough Hearing to get past his shields. Especially if I’m touching him. You be ready to fry his mind if he resists.:: Her lips quirked and she looked back at Jossa. ::One way or another, we’ll make it happen.::
Fear punched Jossa in the gut. Fear entirely of her own making. She lurched to her feet. “No.”
Delfi turned and reached up to take Jossa’s face in her hands. ::We are sisters, aren’t we?::
Jossa opened her mouth and then shut it, trying to think of how to explain this to Del. ::He doesn’t know you. He won’t trust me.
::His shields are strong. He isn’t stupid. You try to glean from his mind, or I try to read him. He catches either of us sneaking into his head and we won’t get a second chance. I nearly killed him with my emotions twice already.:: The look on his face when he’d told her how many Fleet soldiers she’d destroyed. The rage that poured off him after she’d lost herself to grief and forgot her duty in the bathing chamber. Jossa slipped her hand into Del’s and squeezed. ::He expects sex. He wants entertainment. But he might talk if we ask.:: She looked at the door to the rest of the ship and took a deep breath. ::And if we come armed.::
>Chapter Twenty-Five
Syrus
May your Ancestors see you.
May your Ancestors know you.
May you carry them with you always.
-Benediction of the Activator-Priests
Syrus locked the last couple code changes into the masker and switched to the third set of parameters as he listened for movement in the hall leading to the bridge. The women would show up once they’d made a thorough sweep of the ship. They couldn’t not confront him. He’d rather they’d had the decency to stay locked up in the crew bunk, but from what he’d heard over the shipwide comms, that idea never made it to orbit.
He didn’t have to wait long. He was just making the first changes when the faint ring of feet on hollow stairs announced their arrival. He snorted to himself. People made the mistake of thinking they walked quieter in bare feet than in boots, but they forgot that hollow metal made noise when stepped on. He saved the program and switched over to the completed one. Hopefully the right woman would attack first. Hitting someone with this thing twice in a row was risky.
And except for when you’re having a temper tantrum, you don’t really want to kill them, do you?
He snorted and leaned back in his chair, propping his feet up on the copilot’s seat as he imagined stuffing the voice in a cage and locking it. It should be so easy.
The women stopped outside the door to the bridge. Syrus waited, listening, but if they were coming up with a plan, they were doing it along the mind bond that made them sousi. Smart.
He could feel them, though—their emotions a quiet turmoil of anticipation, fear, anger, and glee. The redhead must be shielding somehow, to keep them so muted. He couldn’t tell what came from which woman, but he had a fairly good guess.
After another minute or two, the wait got boring. Whatever they had planned, it apparently included letting him die of old age. “Thought you two weren’t interested in giving me a show,” he said finally. “You breathe any louder, I’m going to think you’re about to come.” He switched out another glyph and looked at the door. “If that’s what you’re up to, might as well get in here so I can watch.”
Surprise and embarrassment flared. Fabric rustled as one of them moved. Slowly, first a foot, then a shoulder, then the rest of her eased through the door. Jossa watched him with hooded eyes, mouth set in an unhappy line as Delfi slid around the opposite side of the doorframe. Both women held spanners, their fingers wrapped around metal bars almost as thick as their wrists.
“Thought Oona’s people checked the boat for possible weapons.”
“They missed a storage locker,” Jossa said. Now that she was close enough, he felt the steady thrum of determination emanating from her. Its rhythm was uneven, pulling to the side. Towards Delfi.
Syrus dropped his feet off the copilot’s chair and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, dangling the masker in loose fingers. The women tensed. He raised an eyebrow. “You gonna use that on me? Or the controls?”
Delfi said something sour in He’la. Syrus guessed it meant “What do you think?” He laughed. Jossa flinched, fear spiking through the air like an electrostatic charge. The end of her spanner wavered, but she didn’t drop it. Delfi raised her weapon a little higher.
“Look,” Syrus said. “You wanted to know the plan, right? Where we’re headed? That sort of shit?” He straightened and waggled the masker at them. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have sat out there in the hall debating who gets to hit first.”
The women exchanged a look. And probably a good number of subvocal words. Syrus wondered if the feeling of a hundred tentacle suckers pulling free of his arms signaled chagrin.
Neither woman spoke, so he kept going. “
Here’s the deal. You make things easier, in a way. We get where we’re going, I say I’ve got a couple sai I rescued before the Fleet got to them—”
Delfi snorted. Jossa made a disbelieving noise. Syrus jerked his chin at Delfi. “I say I figure this one’s a Foreseer. Unless she plans to keep her mouth shut”—he eyed Delfi, who glowered at him—“there’s no way around telling them.”
The two women traded another look. Syrus decided to ignore it. He thumbed the toggle on the device and started working on the third set of parameters again, taking out the original glyph and replacing it with the one for Foreseer, then hiding it under the death-only condition.
The women stood there, watching him. He kept one eye on them as he worked, wondering when they’d get the nerve to attack. Place of birth, switched. Family, fixed. Erase the indenture link for sure. He pulled information from one of the other samples stored in the masker’s memory and dropped it into place instead.
“Why?” Jossa broke the silence at last, her voice huskier than usual. “Why leave the Fleet at all? Won’t that—” She took one hand off her weapon to make a rude gesture. “Other warlord take over? Why give it up? I thought you liked ruining planets.”
Syrus looked up. Was that what she thought he was doing? Escaping? Just how out of it had she been in that conference room?
Jossa flinched. Syrus realized he’d slipped his internal shields. For a second he thought about leaving them down, to keep her off balance. Then he yanked them back up. She was too strong, and he had no idea if the redhead had secondary sai that could bite him in the ass. Jossa eased back onto her heels as he settled the shields again and Syrus hid a smirk. The redhead still watched him like a snake about to strike, but Jossa thought she knew him. Thought she knew why he did things.
Syrus bared his teeth at them and leaned forward, masker clenched in one hand. The plastic casing creaked. He loosened his grip before it cracked. “I like flattening solar systems just fine. Once I’m done with this trip, I’m going to go right back to it.”
His conscience wiggled free of the cage he’d built for it and gave him the evil eye. He ignored it. Easier to do that than try and stuff it back in its hole. At least right now.
Delfi hitched her makeshift weapon a little higher and growled at him. Syrus nearly laughed. If it hadn’t been for the pop-fizz of frustration bursting in his skull, he would have. She almost sounded . . . cute. But she was serious, and so was the situation.
Fuck it, he thought. They’d come up here to attack him and make their escape from the Fleet a reality. Telling them where the ship was going wouldn’t hurt much. It might keep them from screaming their true identities to the stars on arrival.
“There’s a hidden Barbican in this system,” he told them. “Part of Hadra’s Net. We’re headed for the base guarding it.”
The women stared at him, faces blank. He didn’t even get the satisfaction of surprise. Nothing. So much for his big reveal.
Jossa must have caught his disappointment, because she smiled. Just a little. Delfi snorted. He raised an eyebrow, but kept going. “The military started building the Net before you went under. They must not have gotten to this section by the time you went in the caskets. Would have thought you’d at least heard rumors.”
“Oh,” Jossa said, glancing at Delfi, who shrugged. “The Barrier Wall. We weren’t sure it was actually going through. We thought it might be. But we’d been away from the Palace for nearly ten years when the hunters caught up with us.” She stopped and curled her shoulders in. Next to her, Delfi shifted her weight to lean towards her sousi. Jossa leaned a bit in return. Her hold on the spanner loosened again. “We should have asked why the place was being emptied,” she said in a small voice. “But there were so many being closed off and quarantined, we didn’t think anything of it.”
Delfi said something, frustration coloring every word. Syrus waited, but Jossa didn’t translate. He eyed her until she looked away from her sister and saw him. Her mouth twisted. “We should have known when Denz wouldn’t tell us exactly how he’d found the place. Hiding us under guard of the military . . .”
Yes. They should have. But desperate times and all that shit. Shit he knew far too well. Rubbing it in now wouldn’t do him any favors. “You know what the contingency plans were in case of a breach?”
“Khe,” Delfi said, with venom. Was that fear coming off her? Jossa blinked and stared at the redhead. Syrus waited. They had that look on their faces again. The sousi look that meant they were talking to each other. Whatever Delfi told Jossa, it wasn’t good. Jossa’s surprise rippled out, along with indignation. He hid a wince as the emotions struck his face.
“Is it even possible?” Jossa whispered, looking back at him. “I thought you said the Empire was crumbling. How does it have the resources to mass a battlegroup? Or give up a Barbican and its systems?”
“The Empire is crumbling. The military . . .” He shrugged, made the last couple changes on the masker, and locked the code in place. “Opinions differ. So do priorities.”
She looked at him. “They’ll stall first. They have to. It has to have been tried before.”
He nodded. “More than a few times. It’s more likely to work now that it’s the Imperial Military and not just whatever the Border Rardog can scrape together.”
That made him think of what was coming. He tightened up his shields a bit. No telling if the sai on the base ahead of them could feel anything at this range. If they could, his only defense was to make his mental footprint as innocent as possible.
“Larahach,” Delfi said in a hard voice. “Lujkohksii yzoh ykspuch esho, ohzo keha’ohksii ekka uethga ykspuch esho.” And then she swung the spanner at his head.
Syrus lunged to his feet, catching the metal bar in his free hand. Jossa came alive and stepped in, aiming her weapon at his face. He dropped the masker, ducked under the strike, and drove his fist up under Jossa’s ribcage. The air left her lungs in a muted squeak. She folded around his fist. He shoved, and she dropped back into the copilot’s chair. The spanner dropped to the floor with a clang.
Delfi’s heel took him in the knee. Syrus grunted and caught his balance, then yanked on her spanner. She’d already let go. Instead she came at him, hands reaching for his shoulders, her leg swinging up for another kick. Dumb move. Panicked move.
Syrus let her get hold of his shirt, crouched slightly from his already hunched-over position, and scooped the masker off the pilot’s seat where it’d landed. Then he stood. Delfi staggered, her balance thrown, her feet slipping as she tried to gather herself. Syrus grabbed her by the shirt front, hit the power button on the device, and rammed the business end into her stomach.
Electricity popped. The girl went rigid, eyes bulging. Surprise tore up his arm and ripped at his neck before flaying the skin from his face and chest.
Syrus snarled and shoved the masker harder into her abdomen. Bitch! Think she could hurt him, did she? Think she and her precious sousi would take him out and fly off, free and clear? She had no idea who she was fucking with!
Something hit him from the side. No finesse. No technique. Desperation and fear overwhelmed the surprise. His right side went numb, then flared in agony. Syrus fell back a step, then another as Jossa caught her balance and swung her fist at his face. Syrus backhanded her with the hand that held the masker. She twisted with the force of the blow, fetching up against the pilot’s chair. Syrus let go of Delfi, turned so he could catch Jossa by the shoulder with his free hand, and dropped down next to Delfi. Jossa dropped with him. He heard her cry of pain as her knees hit the deck, but all he felt was rage. Rage and desperation. He wasn’t sure if it came from Jossa or himself.
“Shut the fuck up,” he roared in her ear. He yanked. She lost her balance. The thin fabric of her dress tore. She landed in an ungainly heap on her sousi. Syrus grabbed her hair and pulled her back. She fought him, trying to cling to her sister. Trying to shield her.
Bitch. Fucking sousi and their fucking stupidity! Throw
themselves out an airlock if they thought it would save their bonded.
Somehow he got Jossa off the redhead without giving in to the urge to snap her neck. He didn’t know how, what with the feeling gone in his arms and the monster in his head about to tear free of its prison.
“Shut up,” he roared at her again. “Look. At. Me.” Jossa jammed the business end of a knife hilt into his armpit. A hilt that had come from his belt. Syrus stopped short. The monster paused its tirade. So she hadn’t been flailing around to no purpose after all.
Jossa stared up at him, eyes wide, chest heaving. Syrus raised an eyebrow and dredged up some mockery to dance along his skin and tickle her extra sense. She growled and jabbed him harder with the hilt, but she didn’t activate it. He chuckled. “You go ahead with that,” he told her. “I’ll live long enough to hit your girl with this again.” He waggled the masker in his other hand. “I zap her again so soon, her heart goes into v-fib. You know what happens after that?”
Jossa bit her lip and looked at her sousi, stretched out and unconscious on the floor. Syrus loosened his hold on her hair just enough to allow her the movement. “She dies,” Jossa whispered.
He smiled. “She does.”
Jossa looked back at him. “But you’ll still be dead.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Lived through worse. Question is, will you?”
She swayed and he let her go. She wasn’t going to attack him. She was too afraid of life without her sousi.
The perennial weakness of a bonded sai, his conscience reminded him in a caustic voice.
He ignored it. Instead he reached out and took Jossa’s chin in his hand, pulling her face around so she’d pay attention to him instead of staring at Delfi. Fear etched a pattern of sorrow and hopelessness over his skin. “So,” he said, “you going to work with me on this? Or do I have to keep threatening you two all the way to the base?”
She licked her lips and opened her mouth, then shut it.
He leaned down to look her more fully in the face. “I’m exactly what you think I am. Savage. You got lucky just now. Wanna take the risk I lose my temper and don’t get it back? I can get in there without you. Just easier to have you.”
