Annika nodded. She’d guessed that.
“There was supposed to be a signal, and we were supposed to drop you off. We only woke you because…”
Annika took a deep, slow breath. They were supposed to be asleep for the journey, passed out in their plastic honeymoon suite. That explained a lot. “Because?”
Another swallow, and the skin around her eyes tightened.
“Because you were going to sell us to someone else? No, you would have kept us asleep for that, too. You were going to reason with us, see if you could get us to buy our way out?”
“If that deal’s still on,” Noal said, “Meridian will pay.”
Annika didn’t look at him. She’d almost forgotten he was there. The Flavio didn’t look at him, either.
“No, that’s not it,” Annika said, still advancing. “You wanted us awake because…”
“Someone wanted to meet you.” She turned for the door again, her magboots coming off the wall.
Annika sprang, leading with her stiletto. She banged into the Flavio, slamming her against the bulkhead. The Flavio cried out as her ankles bent unnaturally. Annika engaged her own boots and pressed down on top of her, knife to her throat.
“Who?” Annika said, voice still calm, but the Flavio had gone limp. Annika grabbed her face, thinking the pain had made her pass out, but her eyes were glazed over, the control panel on her suit flashing red as it detected no vitals.
Annika straightened. “Shit.”
Noal gaped at her. “You killed her before she could say!”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Then what the dark happened?” Noal asked, his face horrified.
“Suicide maybe, or some countermeasure of her house, something that reacts to her vitals.” She looked around the room. “Or we’re being monitored from offsite.” She disengaged her boots and floated to the control panel again. “Whatever it is, we need to get off this ship before whoever wants to meet us gets here.”
“Who do you think it is?”
She’d discounted her family because they’d have known she could escape from this feeble attempt, but if the Flavio was supposed to keep her asleep, the bet for Nocturna was back on. They would have kept her asleep until it was more useful to have her as a corpse, then they would have arranged whatever tableau suited them, something pinning the deaths on Meridian. When Nocturna decided to frame someone, they always did an excellent job.
Annika hovered over the comm, wondering if she dared contact her family. It would be nice to hear from Ama’s own lips that she planned to sacrifice the Nocturna heir for the chance to destroy Meridian. It was her life’s work, after all.
Instead, Annika set up a repeating signal, a distress call seeded with Meridian codes, a clue for Judit, but they couldn’t sit around waiting for her. A few quick scans reported that the planet below was inhospitable, but there was a station close by, though this ship was too big to dock there. Annika keyed in a message, again using Meridian codes, telling Judit where they’d gone. They were old codes, well changed by now, but it would give Judit a lead, and if someone else found this ship first, maybe it would slow them down long enough for Judit to catch them.
“Come on, Noal. There’s a shuttle below. We need to get out of here.”
“What about the other guards?”
She’d already done a scan. The two of them were the only moving things on the ship, but as he stared at her, she didn’t know how to put it into words. “They won’t be a problem.”
He stared at the Flavio as he nodded slowly. His family really had sheltered him. Maybe they’d always known the marriage plan would fall apart. They would have come up with some ham-fisted way to either derail it or overreact to something Nocturna had done. They’d probably never considered the fact that he would actually lead their house one day, so they’d raised him as nothing more than a sacrificial lamb. Ama would have been appalled.
Chapter Five
Going through the transmitter gates always made Judit feel squashed. In reality, the ship wasn’t “going” anywhere. A ship entered the gate, and space folded around them, transmitting them to another gate within the first gate’s range. If they wanted to go farther, they had to transmit again from the new gate. Still, it took only seconds. Even with antimatter drives, such distances would have otherwise taken hundreds of years, thousands if one had to actually travel from one side of the galaxy to the other.
Judit was just thankful she’d never had to go near the outer rims. She stuck to the well-maintained gates. She’d heard there were some in the outer reaches that were so poorly kept, it was a wonder they went anywhere, and then not exactly where the crew wanted to go.
Roberts bent over his console, always the first to recover from the mild confusion that came with gate travel. Judit knew he was looking through his data, so she suppressed the urge to prod him. She couldn’t hurry him along even if her family might be right behind her once they’d figured out what she’d done. She didn’t think they’d launch the attack on Nocturna. Even if her grandmother wasn’t the greatest believer in the hierophant prophecies, if the fleet was decimated, everyone in Meridian would think it was because the chosen one hadn’t been aboard. That might be enough incentive for Meridian to drag Judit back home, chain her up on some other captain’s bridge, and hope that was enough to satisfy prophecy for the attack.
Her patience ran out. “Anything?”
Roberts pressed a hand to his ear as if that would make his comm work harder. “I’m picking up an old Meridian code.”
“Head that way.”
Beatrice gave her a sideways glance. “An old code could be a trap, Jude.”
Judit nodded. Or it could be Annika. And right now, they had to head for the nearest clue. “Keep listening,” she said to Roberts. “Let me look at that area of space.”
It was sent to her screen, a bright blue planet with absolutely nothing interesting about it. She searched the surrounding area, but saw nothing, not yet. If it was a ship, they weren’t close enough for a good look. She zoomed as close as the viewer would allow, looking for darker spots against the stars.
A shadow passed in front of the planet, and she rewound the feed, looking again.
“The signal’s coming in and out,” Roberts said.
Judit nodded. “Probably the planet’s interference. Something’s in high orbit.”
All three of the bridge crew bent over their scanners. At tactical, Evie brushed her short black hair out of her green eyes and peered at her screen. “I see a dot.”
At the helm, Beatrice muttered an affirmative. When they got close enough to move into orbit, Judit saw a small craft with an engine nearly as big as the rest of it, definitely built for speed. Its orbit looked to be in slow decay; that might mean no one was manning the helm. The ship wasn’t in danger of falling to the planet anytime soon, but it would eventually when a few small thrusts would have maintained its orbit.
“Any chatter?” Judit asked.
Roberts shook his head.
“They must know we’re here,” Beatrice said.
Judit nodded. “Go ahead and ping them.”
“No response,” Roberts said after a moment.
“They’ve got some pretty nice plate armor,” Evie said. “It’s blocking scans.”
“Shuttle airlock is wide open,” Beatrice said. “Maybe they abandoned ship.”
“Let’s take our own shuttle over. Bea, Evie.”
Beatrice called for two other crew members to take their stations on the bridge then caught up to Judit. “Do you need me to remind you that as a member of the Blood—”
“No.”
“You shouldn’t be going.”
“I know.”
“But that’s not going to stop you?”
“You’re going to have to wrestle me to the ground and sit on me, Bea.”
“Is that an order, Jude?”
Judit gave her a sideways smile. “If you try it, I plan to put up plenty of resistance.”
Beatrice sighed and leaned close. “Running in to rescue your lady love? I don’t know whether to swoon or do my darkest to stop you.”
“Swooning is safer, but…I need your help, Bea.”
Beatrice nodded, all traces of joking vanishing from her face. “We’ll find her, Jude, but when we do, well, hasn’t everything changed? I mean, Meridian was going to attack Nocturna.”
Yes, peace through marriage seemed off the table. Or was it? The only thing that had changed between Annika, Noal, and Judit was the identity of the chosen one. If she and Annika…
Her breath caught at the thought, and her stomach turned a slow circle as the galaxy laid possibilities before her. She could go home with Annika and Noal and tell her family they didn’t need the armada; the original peace could still work. If they’d ever accept it, if either house would accept a peace that didn’t end with the other house annihilated.
Once aboard the shuttle, it was a short ride to the unknown ship. It still had atmosphere, though the gravity was shot. No signs of life, though Evie picked up traces of pistol fire. Judit tried not to let herself think of what that might mean.
They donned pressure suits even though the atmosphere was up and running. Judit didn’t want to take any chances. Evie took point with a pistol drawn, Judit behind her with Beatrice bringing up the rear, carrying their equipment case.
It was a small ship, only four decks plus a hangar, and it didn’t take long to spot the bodies, all of them efficiently dealt with except those who’d suffocated. Judit hurried through the ship, searching for clues of Annika or Noal, expecting to find their bodies floating around every corner, but they weren’t there.
“Dig into the computer,” Judit said when they reached the bridge. She studied one body stuck to the wall of the bridge that looked to be a member of House Flavio, but someone had already riffled the bodies, maybe looking for clues.
“I’ve got something,” Beatrice said from the command console. “Someone’s put in the Meridian distress code from here, but as I said, it’s an old one.”
Might be Noal. Sometimes he didn’t bother with the updates, knowing Judit would memorize all the new codes. “Anything else?”
“Looks like another Meridian code buried in here, a message.” She squinted at the display. “Also an old code. Says, ‘Judit, we went to the station.’”
“Direct,” Evie said, smirking.
Judit took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Noal and Annika were alive and had abandoned ship, but who’d helped them? Where had all the bodies come from? She clicked her teeth. “Roberts, find any nearby space stations.”
“You got it, Boss.”
She shut down the line and turned to Beatrice. “Copy everything from that computer. We need to get on the trail of that shuttle.”
“It’s going to take a while…”
“Then leave it. We’ll come back after we get Annika and Noal, but shut off the signal and delete the message.”
As they pushed back through the halls toward their shuttle, Beatrice said, “This could still be a trap for you, Jude.”
“This is a lot of trouble to go through to kill me.” But whoever kidnapped Noal and Annika had found all the trouble they could want, if the bodies were any indication. Whoever had killed this crew had probably taken Annika and Noal. They’d either managed to leave a message before they went, or their kidnappers had, and what could that mean?
“Who killed all these people?” Evie asked as they made their way through the dead. “Does the chosen one or the Nocturna heir have some abilities no one knows about?”
The thought of Noal committing such violence almost made her laugh, but someone from Nocturna? She tried to shake the thought away. Annika was Nocturna, but could she have killed all these people so…neatly?
Once aboard the Damat, Judit paused. She’d been in such a hurry to get after Annika and Noal, she hadn’t thought about asking her crew to disobey direct Meridian orders, but now she ordered Evie back to the bridge and kept Beatrice behind. “I should take the shuttle from here, Bea. This is my quest, not yours, not the crew’s. Go back to Meridian, tell them I ordered you off course and then ordered you back. They’ll forgive you.”
Beatrice shook her head. “I know Meridian might think we can easily wipe out Nocturna, but there’d be heavy casualties, people we know. If we can prevent that…”
“Not everyone on board will feel that way.”
Beatrice shook her head. “They’ll do their duty. Don’t worry about the crew.”
Judit smiled and walked with her toward the lift, her heart lighter.
* * *
The little shuttle was close quarters, and Annika sighed for the second time as Noal tried to shift away from her. The slender seats forced their shoulders or thighs to knock together constantly, but he kept his head tilted so far away he’d already banged it on the wall.
“There’s nowhere to go, Noal,” she said. “And I’m not going to hurt you.”
He swallowed and didn’t look at her.
“We can talk about it if you want,” she said.
“No thanks.”
“It was our lives or theirs. When you thanked me for helping you, I thought you understood that.”
He swallowed. “It was easy to say in the moment.”
By the dark, he sounded as if he wasn’t Blood at all. “Who raised you? Or do you suppose Meridians never kill anyone?”
“They didn’t raise me to do it; that’s all I know.”
“They didn’t do you any favors. Maybe they never expected you to survive.”
He stared at her. “I don’t know you at all, do I?”
And the dark of it was, that was mostly true. “You know…a lot about me. I didn’t want you to see this part.” And that was true, too.
He studied her before he sighed. “I suppose Judit would have killed them, too, but I don’t like to think about it.”
She nodded ahead to where the ship’s single screen showed the specs of the space station ahead. “We don’t know anyone there, and we don’t know who might be looking for us. We don’t know which house lays claim to this section of space or how tightly they control it. We could find ourselves surrounded by enemies. But even if that’s not true,” she said before he could interrupt, “they won’t be friends. At best, they’ll be neutral, and they won’t want to give up anything for free. Some might want to hold us for ransom.” She patted his arm, and he didn’t pull away. “We have to assume we’re in danger. It’s the only way to be safe.”
“Keep my eyes open, that sort of thing?”
“Exactly.”
He looked at her sharply. “Should we disguise ourselves?”
It was a good idea. Even with his dyed hair, his looks were very Meridian, instantly recognizable, and though there were some houses with shades like her own blond color, she should probably do something about it. “Let’s see what we have.”
They found some ration packs, and Noal used a vegetable drink to turn Annika’s hair light green. They couldn’t do anything about their eyes without lenses. They found a cloth Noal could use as a scarf, and he tied it around his forehead, pulling it low over his eyes. She pulled her hair in a messy bun, wishing she had a hat and hoping she didn’t smell too much like vegetables to put anyone in mind of hurried disguises.
The station wanted an ID before they could dock, and she fed them what the shuttle had, telling them she’d come from a freighter that’d had an accident, giving them coordinates far from the original ship. She knew they’d mark it; some would go looking for salvage, and when they found none, they’d come looking for her, but that was fine. She didn’t plan to be found. If Judit didn’t find them, Annika planned to abandon the shuttle and try to steal or buy her way onto something faster with the promise of creds to come.
After they docked, they gutted the ship of anything saleable, not knowing how long they’d be aboard the station. They’d taken a few creds off their kidnappers as well as weapo
ns and a handheld scanner, but that wouldn’t get them far, especially with the station-wide repeating message that no weapons were allowed on board. Scanners wouldn’t find her stiletto, but the shock sticks and pistols had to remain behind.
Annika tried to put on a relaxed air as they sauntered through the airlock and down a slender tube into the docking ring of the station, joining a few others who meandered toward where the dock opened into the station proper.
She faltered at the door, Noal doing the same, assaulted by flashing lights and a din of noise, the speech of a great many people crammed into a small space combined with the ding and whoop of betting machines and hawkers. It was like an enormous bazaar, with signs in many house dialects as well as the common tongue. With a riot of clothing and hairstyles and just as many places to change an outward appearance, it was difficult to focus on one person, and all of them seemed to be talking at once. Someone bumped into Annika, and she tugged Noal to a spot out of the way of the moving crowd, between a stall selling what looked like bondage gear and one selling some kind of brightly colored dessert.
Noal looked as shell-shocked as she felt. “What is all this?” he cried above the noise.
Even when Ama had let Annika out to practice her skills in the real world, they’d never gone anywhere like this. Most spaces frequented by Nocturna Blood were calm and tranquil. Even their most raucous parties had never been this chaotic. “I don’t…” All her careful plans fell apart. She didn’t even know where to start in this mess. “I guess we need to find someone to sell things to.”
“Any idea where to start?”
Across the crowded space, Annika noticed someone watching them, a shrewd look on his face. She knew what he saw: two newcomers, easily dazzled and easily taken advantage of. Blond, mid-twenties, he was handsome in a rugged, unkempt sort of way. His suit had once been of good quality but had seen better days. The color-changing cravat probably distracted most people from the shininess of his gray cuffs or the threadbare hem of his trousers.
With a smile, he began to work his way toward them, and Annika kept up her expression of wonder, though the arrival of a con man made her relax. A target always put her in the right frame of mind.
House of Fate Page 6
