“An altercation?”
“A Taiyok assassin.”
“Bloody hells, Nika. Who did you piss off?”
“It’s safer for you if you don’t know the details.” She wandered around the cluttered office, which he didn’t keep nearly as neat and ordered as his work floor outside, mostly to avoid having to meet his gaze. “I’m exposed, and I need to distance myself from NOIR. There are places I need to go to get answers to important questions, but I can’t risk continuing to use the official transit system. Not when some very powerful people are looking for me.”
A slight pause stretched out before he responded, during which time she was unable to draw any conclusions from his expression because she still didn’t meet his gaze.
“So you need a ship. Any special requirements?”
“A small, agile personal craft is all I’m looking for. Fast would be a bonus, but not at the expense of other necessities. Minimal defensive capabilities, but I don’t need a warship.” The conversation with Dashiel, Perrin and Joaquim bloomed into the front of her mind, but she hurriedly quashed it and the pain it brought with it. “I’ll pay you what I can, but that isn’t very much.” One favor request gutted out.
He nodded and went around his desk to check something on his inventory pane. After a few seconds of poking around in his system, he came over and placed his hands on her hips, halting her pacing with a touch.
“It shouldn’t be too much trouble to get you what you need.” He drew closer for a kiss, but she instinctively flinched, turning her head to the side before she could stop herself.
They froze in that awful position for an interminable second. Then he took a slow step back. “What’s wrong?”
She opened her mouth to answer him, but a dozen responses died in her throat.
“Nika?” Abruptly his chin dropped to his chest with a quiet, wry chuckle. “You met someone, didn’t you?”
And there was the disappointment. Seriously, why had she pulled away from him? She damn sure didn’t owe Dashiel any allegiance. Yet somehow, her brief time knowing him had killed the spark, casual and frivolous though it had been, that she felt for Grant. And it kind of sucked. “I wish I hadn’t.”
His brow furrowed in confusion, understandably so.
She grimaced. “Look, I just…I have to concentrate on my mission right now. I can’t afford to get distracted, or even to slow down at all.”
He shrugged with forced mildness, but a new reservation and coolness clouded his features. “It’s all right. I always knew what this was—and what it wasn’t.”
She didn’t love him, but she nevertheless felt a pang of loss as his body language told the story of his withdrawal from her. “You’re a good man, Grant.”
He huffed a laugh, now the picture of friendly but detached professionalism. “I really am. Come on, let’s head over to the hangar out back. Let me show you a beauty I think will work for you.”
Nika blinked. She was gaping, in all likelihood. Her head tilted, but the new angle didn’t reveal any obvious flaws.
“Well? What do you think?”
“Grant, I can’t take this ship.”
“Why not?”
“It’s…” beautiful “…it had to cost you ten times what I can pay you simply to build it, and I expect you can get another ten times cost for it on the market.”
“True, and true. But I was never planning on selling it. Now, I want you to take it. The speed is pretty good, but the agility is through the roof. You can outmaneuver military fighters in this ship—which I personally hope you’re not planning on doing. It has state-of-the-art shielding installed as well as half-decent weaponry. The luxuries inside should be to your liking. Nothing too over the top, but you’ll be comfortable.”
The specs he rattled off were having trouble penetrating her brain, because said brain was still trying to get past the absurd notion that he was actually offering her the ship. This ship. The one in the hangar. The one she stood in front of fawning over like a Chizeru over a fleece blanket.
The brushed nickel hull claimed and reflected the lighting in the hangar in equal measure. An icy cerulean glow crept out in distinctive lines along the rims of the dual engines. The wide, low profile and tapered nose gave it a furtive, devious appearance—not that the ship was sentient, but if it were.
“What…why weren’t you going to sell it?”
Grant shoved his hands into his pockets and began wandering around the front of the hangar. “I picked up a vintage craft at auction a couple of years ago—little more than a hull and a rusting engine. Restoring it has sort of been a side project of mine. I had this idea in my head how at some point I’d take six months off and cruise around the Dominion.
“I never would have done it—I’m too much of a workaholic—but I enjoyed knowing I could. It shouldn’t sit here wasting away in the hangar, though. You need it, and I suppose it needs you.”
“I…” she struggled past the lump that had now materialized in her throat “…I don’t know what to say. I’ll pay you forever for it. Start a tab.”
“Just don’t get caught, okay? This baby can help you with not getting caught, if you’ll let it.”
51
* * *
Nika slow-walked the perimeter of the ship, scanning for anything she ought to check.
She’d installed a dozen routines on starship piloting and maintenance, but most of them still needed a good workout before she was apt to be comfortable flying—and living on—a ship. Her mind supplied the names of the various external components and the factors that contributed to their performance, but the terms felt foreign. Sterile combinations of letters lacking any tangible connection to the physical equipment she was trying to study.
Grant was an excellent ship builder and a master craftsman, and he’d devoted extra care to crafting this ship, so she shouldn’t be surprised when she came up empty on the ‘inspection.’ The exterior of the ship was in perfect shape; she doubted she’d find it any less to spec on the inside.
In one of the first bright spots she’d encountered since the doomed visit to Mirai Tower, she was actually rather excited about taking the ship out for an extended spin. Among a thousand troubling thoughts dogging her consciousness, she’d realized that she agreed with her former self on something. Over centuries of ubiquitous use of the d-gates to cross distances short and vast, they had willingly bound themselves to the ground, and she wanted to travel amidst the stars.
She’d looked up the public files on the Shorai initiative former-her and Dashiel had talked about in his memory. Billed as the most ambitious space exploratory initiative since the Dominion’s founding, it had launched to great fanfare nine years ago. Led by an External Relations Advisor, Mason Fassar, the Shorai set out in search of new discoveries—aliens, cosmic wonders and, of course, kyoseil.
The plan was for the ship to deposit small d-gates along the way at points of interest so that specialty teams could follow behind to investigate any finds. Over time, the growing interstellar travel network that resulted would expand the Dominion’s reach far beyond its borders.
Once a year or so, the External Relations Division issued a press release announcing some new find by the Shorai, usually one of purely scientific interest, in the distant reaches of space. Details were scarce, however, and Nika couldn’t help but wonder what stories lay behind the headlines. What might Advisor Fassar be finding out there in the deep expanses of the void?
The question called to a quiet yearning in her psyche, much as it had for her former self.
If only she could afford to indulge the romantic whimsy of exploration for exploration’s sake, of discovery for discovery’s sake. She was taking to the stars, but the scolding voice in her head reminded her this was not a pleasure cruise, which was why she needed to stop daydreaming and refocus on the task at hand.
Time to make an effort at an interior inspection—then time to go. She was supposed to be running, after all, and she’d remained here t
oo long already.
With a sigh she began ascending the extended ramp.
“Care for some company?”
Nika whirled around at the sound of the voice. She carried her Glaser with her everywhere now, and she had it raised before the question had finished.
Dashiel stood ten meters away, a bag in each hand. He wore what likely passed for casual attire in his world, linen pants and a lightweight cable knit sweater. There were even a few hairs out of place, ruffled by the breeze to fall across his brow in—who cared how his hair fell?
“Don’t move. Don’t twitch.”
He obeyed, though his throat did flex with a swallow. “I’d deeply appreciate it if you didn’t shoot me again. It hurt quite a lot.”
“Good. What are you doing here?”
“Coming with you, of course.”
She stared at him in utter incredulity. “Are you fucking kidding? I’m not letting you a centimeter closer to me. How the hells did you find me?”
His gaze dropped to the ground. “I put an internal tracker in one of your drinks when you were at my place. Don’t be angry. I only did it because I was terrified I would lose you, literally. I was afraid you’d stumble into something nasty and get yourself erased again, and this time I’d lose you forever. I only wanted to be able to find you if you got into trouble.”
“Liar. You never ‘only’ anything. Is your Justice pal on his way here right now?” She backed two steps up the ramp. Was he responsible for the assassin? When the Taiyok failed, was he being sent in to finish the job? “I’m leaving before the cavalry arrives. Fuck you.”
“Wait!” He rushed forward, but skidded to a halt when she lowered her finger over the Glaser’s trigger mechanism. “No one else is coming, I promise. Please hear me out.”
She paused at the hatch as indecision locked her into inaction. His ‘promise’ wasn’t worth the negative credits left in her account. If she delayed and he was lying, everything would have been for naught and she’d find herself in either a shootout or a Justice detention cell—or a shootout then a Justice detention cell. But the desperation in his voice begged for her indulgence, and some deep, reclusive part of her she didn’t fully understand wanted so badly to be wrong about him….
“Nika, I was always coming with you. I just needed a little time to work through what that meant for me. Then Mirai Tower happened, and the time for reflection I’d hoped to have got cut short, but I still needed time—time to put my plan in motion.”
“Yes, about what happened at Mirai Tower.”
“If I had sided with you in front of the others, neither of us would have made it out of there under our own power. We both would have been arrested on the spot. If we’d tried to escape together, I would have slowed you down too much and we’d have ended up arrested anyway. But what I could do was buy you time to escape, and buy myself time to make sure your escape meant something.
“I told you it would all be a performance, and it was. I convinced Adlai I was ignorant of your plans and created enough doubt in Gemina to make her cautious, giving me the room I needed to execute on my plan.”
“Which was?”
He angled his head down at the smaller of the two bags. “Transfer operational control of Ridani Enterprises to my second, Vance Greshe, and withdraw the entirety of my personal wealth into untraceable credits. It’s not quite as substantial as it once was, but it will suffice. See, I thought I’d fund your rebellion. Well, mostly fund you and I, but there should be plenty left over for a good cause.”
Her gun arm faltered, and her aim slipped away from his chest. “You…what?”
“I’m all in—with you, with your rebellion and your personal mission, with all the wrongs you’re seeking to right. I hate that I wasn’t able to clue you in earlier, but at Mirai Tower our communications were being monitored. And after…I figured you’d delete any ping I sent to you without reading it.
“The only thing I knew to do was show up in person and hope you’d give me a chance to explain before shooting me again. Speaking of, any chance you can put the gun down now?”
She exhaled so harshly no air remained in her lungs to sustain her. She couldn’t find any holes to poke in his pitch, and he was so damn charming. All she had left to bolster her defiance was her own doubts and the persisting burn of betrayal.
He’d thoroughly wrecked the meager trust she’d begun to have in him, and now here he stood asking for it back. He’d hurt her, and now he was telling her he’d only been acting in her best interests. Telling her he was giving up his life of posh luxury, the business he’d spent his life building and his position of lofty influence, all for her. Not for the memory of a person who no longer existed, but for her.
She felt lightheaded, when what she really needed was for all that blood to return to the brain it had vacated.
Could he be lying? Playing a long game for Justice, or even for the Guides? If the goal was for her to lead them to NOIR, he was going to be sorely disappointed, because she didn’t intend to return home until this was over. If the goal was something else, she couldn’t conceive of what it might be. The Guides already knew the answers she sought; they gained nothing from stringing her along.
He lost patience with her silent ruminating. “What can I do to convince you? Do you want to deep-scan me for tracking devices? Immerse yourself in a simex of my last sixty hours? Feel how I felt when I watched you tumble out of that window and into free-fall?”
His voice cracked near the end, and with the last word his shoulders fell. “I know trust is in short supply for you. I’m simply asking—no, begging—for a tiny bit of it. Give it to me on loan until I can prove myself worthy of it.”
The last bit of resistance abandoned her. She sank down onto the ramp, letting the Glaser dangle over her knees and dropping her forehead to rest against them. Trust was in short supply for her, but though she’d worn a brave face for the world, dammit, she didn’t want to do this alone….
She heard him coming up the ramp, and she couldn’t bring herself to stop him.
He fell to his knees in front of her and ignored the gun between them to bring his hands to her face and gently lift her chin. “Nika, you have always been my world. The love of my many lives. I will never betray you, and I will always follow wherever you lead.”
The sting of tears blurred his features as he leaned in and kissed her forehead. “I’m so sorry I hurt you. I should have found some way to let you know what I was doing.”
He kissed both of her cheeks in turn. “The thing is, I’m no good at all this stealth and subterfuge. You’re going to have to teach me how to be a rebel.” Finally he kissed her lips, softly. “Will you teach me?”
She nodded shakily, then dropped the gun onto the ramp and pulled him closer to kiss him far more ferociously. His embrace felt like a home from a half-remembered dream.
He grasped her hands and splayed his palms flush against hers until their fingertips met…and she sensed him, sensed his mind, open and vulnerable. Offering itself to her.
She closed her eyes.
The aroma of freshly grilled kabobs brought a smile to my face as I stepped onto the sweeping balcony ringing the Mirai Tower d-gate room. Hors d’oeuvres!
Maris appeared at my side while I was loading up my plate, a glass of champagne in her outstretched hand.
I balanced the plate against my chest so I could take it from her. “You read my mind.”
“As I do.” Maris paused, and her gaze cut across the other guests scattered around the balcony. “You haven’t seen him yet, have you?”
“Seen who? I just got here.”
“The new Industry Advisor, of course.”
I tugged an olive off the kabob and popped it into my mouth. “Oh. Nope.”
A devious smirk crept across her lips. “You should remedy the error.”
“Why…?”
Maris let the smirk linger as she casually turned and sauntered off.
She certainly knew how to pique
my curiosity. I rolled my eyes then started scanning the balcony. Knew that person, knew that person, knew but despised that person…
…a well-dressed man stood near the balcony railing talking to one of the Commerce Advisors. Chestnut hair framed distinguished features in soft waves that lightened to amber when sunlight crossed them. He shifted slightly in my direction, revealing vivid hazel irises driving a cautious, studied gaze.
I did not know him, but this was about to change.
I tossed my still full plate on a table and strode over as the Commerce Advisor conveniently wandered off. The man’s gaze landed on me when I was still several meters away, and its intensity almost stopped me cold. Oh, my.
I closed the remaining distance and thrust out my hand. “Nika Kirumase, External Relations Advisor. And you are?”
One corner of his lips curled up as he accepted my offered hand. “Dashiel Ridani. I was just promoted to Industry Advisor this week.”
My hand remained encased in his firm, warm, thoroughly tingly and delightful grip, and I decided I was in no hurry to remove it. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Ridani. Welcome to the Advisor ranks. How are you finding the new job so far?”
His eyes danced as he brought my hand up and placed a soft kiss on my knuckles. “I find I am liking it more every minute.”
Are you now? I licked my lips. Deliberately. “Trust me, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
“Nika?”
She forced her eyes open and intertwined her fingers with his to break the connection. “Sorry. I suppose I’m a little tired.”
“I imagine it’s been a rough few days for you.”
“You really have no idea.” She tried to sound as casual as possible. “Out of curiosity, how did we first meet?”
His brow wrinkled in surprise at the question. “At a reception at Mirai Tower, when I was initially named an Advisor. Why?”
“No reason.” She offered him a quick smile, then hurriedly renewed their kiss before he could probe further. What was going on with these flashes? If they were his memories, why were they from her perspective?
Exin Ex Machina Page 29
