Morningstar

by Robyn Bachar

  “Aye, Captain. I’ll let them know.” Bryn squeezed Malcolm’s shoulder and gave him a reassuring smile. “Stay out of trouble, and get some rest.”

  He smiled weakly in return. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  Poor thing. What would he do if he couldn’t be an indexer?

  “I’ll make sure he’s taken care of,” Andee assured her.

  “Thanks, Andee.” Malcolm beamed. Then he coughed and cleared his throat. “Sorry. I meant, thank you, my lady.”

  A Cy’ren lady looking after a male human slave. That was certainly a twist.

  Bryn retreated from the room and hurried back to their quarters, where she found Jace and Sabine moaning and mid-thrust—rather like how she’d left them. It was a miracle they hadn’t collapsed from exhaustion. Sabine writhed beneath him as he rode her, fast, hard and with impressive stamina. Bryn paused to admire them, watching the smooth glide of the muscles of Jace’s back moving beneath his granite skin. He had a few battle scars, and Bryn’s breath caught as she realized she now knew the story behind each one. Hopefully this mission wouldn’t add any more.

  “Come to bed,” Sabine said, her voice low and breathy.

  “Can’t.” Bryn leaned against the bedroom wall, well out of reach. “And you two need to wrap things up. Malcolm identified the location of the testing facility. Captain wants us off-world in an hour.”

  “All of us?” Jace asked.

  “All of us. Sorry, a’gra, you’ll have to wear the suit again.”

  Sabine sighed in annoyance, probably both at the idea of wearing the sterile suit and because Jace had stopped thrusting. She ground her hips against him, and he growled. Rolling her eyes, Bryn quickly joined them on the bed long enough to grab Jace’s hair, bare his throat and bite him. He came instantly, followed by Sabine, and Bryn smirked with triumph.

  Bryn released Jace and affectionately spanked him. “Let’s go, Second Son. We’re on the clock.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  From orbit, Becklav looked like every other tiny agricultural colony Jace had seen during his travels. It was made up of a handful of boxy prefab structures clustered around a town square with one small landing pad on the outskirts, all surrounded by green fields of crops. There were many like it in the Syndicate systems, and though this was Alliance space, he saw no measurable difference. He expected Becklav would be…shinier, somehow, like the Alliance navy—gleaming with the advantage of privilege that only the wealthy managed in Syndicate space. Supposedly all Alliance worlds were safe and comfortable, though considering the scars Captain Hawke bore, Jace assumed the reality wasn’t as idyllic as the stories.

  At the moment, the only thing remarkable about Becklav was the lack of power. Not even the emergency lighting was on—the colony was completely dark.

  “I’m not detecting any significant heat from the colony. The vehicle engines read cold,” Rizzoli reported.

  “But the vehicles are still there?” the captain asked. “The equipment hasn’t been removed? Or destroyed?”

  “Looks like everything’s still there. Just no one home,” he confirmed.

  Jace frowned. “Something’s off. The Eppes wouldn’t go through all that trouble to hide their activity and then abandon their equipment for anyone to find.”

  “Agreed. I don’t like this. Get your team, take the shuttle down and do a sweep. Full armor, and bring your rifles,” Captain Hawke ordered.

  “Yes sir.”

  When the team was assembled, Jace’s gaze flicked over Bryn as they boarded the shuttle, and he struggled to ignore the tangled emotions that she inspired. Bryn was an officer and a shadow sword, and as such belonged on a mission like this, no matter how strongly his urge to protect his mate insisted that she return to his quarters and stay there with Sabine. Bryn had donned the captain’s armor, because, as Captain Hawke put it, the set was only gathering dust in her quarters since the captain wasn’t allowed to participate in away missions.

  It was around 2200 hours local time when they landed, and pitch black. Becklav had no moons to brighten the night sky, though it didn’t matter to the Cy’ren. They could see in the dark, but it would slow down the human members of the team. In theory the heads-up displays in their helmets should aid their vision, but in practice the helmets themselves slowed them down. The armor protected them from the environment, but the separation dulled their senses. Jace couldn’t feel the breeze or the night chill, but the HUD informed him that it was above freezing with a light wind from the northwest.

  “Anything?” Jace asked Ramsay, the tech.

  “Nothing. No heat signatures, no movement, no active power sources. This place is dead.”

  “Right. Let’s get the power back on and access their databank. Soth, take point.”

  Commander Soth stepped forward. “Yes sir. Move out.”

  Soth led them forward, and the team moved down an empty road. The silence was eerie—even with the oppressive quiet caused by his helmet, there should have been outside noise. Running equipment, vehicle engines, communications traffic, indigenous birds or insects, any sounds of habitation. Jace studied the buildings for signs of life as they passed, but there was nothing.

  “The buildings appear to be sealed,” Bryn commented.

  “They could have sealed them after they evacuated the colonists,” Jace said. “Maybe they intended to return for the equipment.”

  “Or they considered it an acceptable loss,” Soth replied. “This is the main utility building. We’ll have to manually override the lock.”

  Ramsay stepped forward. “I’m on it.”

  The tech pulled the access panel off in search of the override mechanism.

  “Keep your eyes open. The Eppes might have left surprises for us,” Jace warned. Slavers often left dangerous devices behind in their abandoned bases to discourage other groups from moving in. The team chorused acknowledgments as Ramsay pulled a lever and the door lurched open. Soth entered first, switching on the searchlights mounted on his helmet and rifle to aid visibility.

  “The generator control room is on sub-level two,” Ramsay said.

  A sigh hissed across the comm. “We’re going to have to manually open every door on the way there, aren’t we?” Soth asked.

  “Yes sir,” Ramsay replied.

  Jace bit back his own sigh. “Better get moving then.”

  The eerie silence frayed his nerves, and his anxiety increased with each door the group stopped at. Where were the colonists? Why had the Eppes evacuated the personnel but left everything else behind? A few cannon blasts from orbit would have leveled a colony this small.

  A sudden rifle blast startled him—Bryn had fired, and her target dropped at the end of the hallway they had just traversed.

  “Hold your fire,” Soth ordered. The shadow sword approached the target, a human male dressed in plain coveralls. “He’s unarmed. Civilian.”

  Jace’s jaw clenched. This was Bryn’s first field mission since her return to duty, and she’d fired on a non-combatant. Clearly he’d been wrong to trust that she could handle it.

  “No heat signature,” Bryn replied, her voice calm and even over the comm.

  “What?”

  “This is a human colony. His body heat should show on the infrared, but he’s room temperature. A human can’t survive at that temperature. Few humanoids can.” Bryn joined Soth, her rifle unerringly trained on the fallen body. “I’d say he was a synthetic, but he has signs of decomp.”

  Soth cursed low in Cy’reni. “She’s right. The body has signs of advanced decomp, at least a few days’ worth.”

  “What does that mean?” Ramsay asked.

  “Means he was already dead,” Soth said.

  The tech tsked over the comm. “That doesn’t make sense. How could he be dead and moving?”

  Soth nudged the body with his boot.
The corpse twitched and lunged for Soth’s leg, and Bryn shot it in the head. It didn’t move again.

  “Thanks,” Soth said.

  “Stay frosty. There might be more of these. Watch for movement,” Jace ordered, receiving a chorus of aye, sirs in reply. His pulse raced, and he forced himself to take several deep breaths before motioning for them to proceed.

  The team moved through the dark, silent building. Manually opening each door slowed them down, and Jace watched the shadows with increasing anxiety. What sort of bioweapon could animate the dead? Was it airborne? Had it killed the colonists? There were hundreds of people registered as citizens of Becklav. Were they all affected? Or had they been evacuated after a disaster in the labs, and the body Bryn had dropped was one that had been left behind? His instincts warned him to abort the mission, to retreat to the shuttle until they could do a thorough scan of the area. But if the air was contaminated, it wasn’t showing up on the sensors built into his armor. No, the fastest, most certain way to find answers would be from the colony’s data core. They had to continue.

  When they arrived at the control room, the tech fiddled with the main power control panel. “There’s no evidence of damage. Should be no problem to activate the power.”

  “Any sign of what deactivated it?” Jace asked.

  “No. Once we get it on again, we can check the records to see if it was shut off here or remotely.”

  Jace nodded. “Proceed.”

  Though the lights brought some comfort, the rooms and hallways remained empty. Abandoned. Subterranean tunnels connected the colony’s main structures, and the team used one to access the research facility. Hacking the door locks was faster and easier than forcing each one open manually, and they made good time to the data archive.

  “Status?” Jace asked as Ramsay powered up a screen at a data entry terminal.

  “Everything looks intact. Encrypted, but intact. I’m surprised they didn’t wipe it all like they did at Nepheros.”

  “Maybe they meant to return for it.” Jace pinged the ship’s comm. to update the captain. “Talon II, this is Harrow. Keep your eyes peeled for Eppes ships. Looks like they may have left their equipment behind because they meant to retrieve it later.”

  “Acknowledged, Harrow,” Captain Hawke replied. “Go ahead and pull the core from the databanks. We’ll decrypt it on the ship.”

  “Aye sir. Harrow out.” Jace motioned for Ramsay to proceed, and the tech began disconnecting the core from the bank.

  Bryn eased closer to Jace, her weapon trained on the door. “I don’t like this. It’s too quiet,” she said.

  “You’d prefer something more dramatic for your return to active duty?” Jace asked. A noise that sounded suspiciously like a snort huffed over the comm. in reply. “You could always shoot Soth when we get back to the landing pad.”

  “Hey, she already broke my nose, she doesn’t need to shoot me too,” Soth grumbled.

  The core was large and heavy—it likely held years of Eppes bioweapon research—and required a hover sled to move. Ramsay was in charge of the sled, and the rest of the team covered him as they crowded into a lift to return to the surface.

  Awkward silence filled the lift car, but all hell broke loose when the lift doors opened on the main floor of the research lab. A sea of swaying, decaying figures turned in unison toward the sudden movement, and Soth cursed and opened fire. The breath froze in Jace’s lungs as the snarling mob rushed toward them—none of whom showed on infrared—but then his training kicked in and he opened fire.

  Some of their attackers dropped, and while others jerked from direct hits, they kept on coming. After a few moments of heavy fire the team felled all of the targets. Jace stared at the bodies as the team inched forward. Humans missing chunks of flesh, some with broken or lost limbs—a few still moved on the floor despite having taken enough rifle blasts to bring down a scout ship. As much as Jace cursed the confines of his armored helm, at that moment he was grateful for it, because the stench of that many decomposing bodies would truly be awful.

  “How is this possible?” Bryn murmured over the comm.

  “Virus, most likely,” Ramsay guessed. “Could be medical nano-bots, but they’re fucking expensive to manufacture and program. Everybody keep your helmets on.”

  “I hear that,” Soth said. “Ready to move when you are.”

  “We’re going to double-time it back to the shuttle,” Jace said. “Fire in short bursts. Sam claims to have improved the rifles to overheat less, but that doesn’t mean we should push them. Go.”

  They exited the building to find that the quiet, empty night was now filled with a horde of shambling colonists. Judging by the numbers, none of Becklav’s inhabitants had been evacuated, and instead had been abandoned to a fate worse than death.

  The team moved fast and fluid, keeping the worst of the crowd at bay, but they began to lose ground, greatly outnumbered. Bryn brought up the team’s rear, and Jace’s heart stopped when he glanced back and didn’t see her.

  “Viera, report,” Jace ordered. No answer. Silence stretched over the comm. as the mob that dogged them split. The leaders continued to chase Jace’s team, but the rest had stopped—focused on new prey.

  Bryn.

  “Soth! Cover me.” Without waiting for a reply, Jace roared a battle cry, drew his sword and charged, hacking and slashing. A sea of limbs grasped at Jace, trying to pull him down, but he pressed on. Finally he glimpsed Bryn’s borrowed armor, and he grabbed her.

  “On your feet, Lieutenant.” Jace hauled Bryn up and pulled her arm around his shoulders, dragging her away from clawing arms that tried to pry her from him. Soth’s excellent aim barely kept the crowd from overtaking them.

  “Come on.” Soth waved them past as he continued firing, and hope filled Jace as he saw the shuttle ahead. Ramsay and the hover sled made it there first. The tech popped the hatch, and the team shoved the entire sled onboard with a screech of metallic protest as the sled scraped the starboard crew seats. It would be a tight fit. Jace hurried in behind them, and Soth followed a second later and shut the hatch. Ominous banging sounded on the other side, and the noise increased as the rest of the mob surrounded them.

  “Here, take her,” Jace ordered. Bryn was silent and limp in his arms, and he handed her to Ramsay. They had to launch before the colonists tore the shuttle apart.

  Soth took the spot next to him at the controls. “Initiating flight sequence. Engaging engines.”

  The engines flared to life with a comforting hum and the shuttle lifted. For a moment it hesitated, as though the weight of the mob was going to pull them down, but then the ship lurched skyward. Jace breathed a deep sigh of relief once they reached orbit.

  “Hawke’s Wing, this is the Talon II, report,” the comm. buzzed.

  “This is Harrow. Lieutenant Viera is unresponsive. We need a medical team to meet us in the shuttle bay.”

  “Negative, Commander. You’re being quarantined for forty-eight hours,” the captain replied.

  “Quarantined?” Jace repeated. His stomach plummeted back to the surface.

  “Becklav control began broadcasting a planetary distress call once you turned the power back on, warning that a virus has been released on the surface. If the virus was airborne then the shuttle is contaminated. We don’t have the equipment to sterilize it. There’s an Alliance ship inbound, but it’s six hours out. You’ll have to wait for them. How bad is Viera?”

  “Nonresponsive. Could be dead.” Soth shrugged.

  “She’s not dead,” Jace growled. “Take the controls.”

  He stumbled to the back of the shuttle where Ramsay had squeezed Bryn into a seat and strapped her in. He called her name, but there was no reply. Jace swallowed hard as his stomach twisted into knots.

  “Her comm. could be damaged,” Ramsay said. Jace reached for the release for Bryn’s helmet, and the tech c
aught his hand. “Don’t. If the virus is airborne she’ll be infected if you break the seal on her armor.”

  Jace cursed and nodded—he was right. “Bryn? Can you hear me?”

  No response. His pulse thumped loud in his ears, a rapid dance beat inside the confines of his helmet. They had promised Sabine that they would both return to her unharmed. How could he explain to her that he’d gotten Bryn killed on her first mission away? She would never forgive him. He would never forgive himself.

  “Damn it, Brynnaren. I am not telling Sabine you were mauled to death by diseased colonists. Come on, a’gra. Talk to me. That’s an order.”

  Jace gripped her shoulder and shook her, and finally Bryn twitched. A pained groan crackled over the comm.

  “Quit it. Shoulder’s dislocated,” she complained.

  Jace breathed deep, flooded with relief, and said a silent prayer of thanks. “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”

  “I’ll try not to. So…if we’re going to be stuck here for the next six hours, I don’t suppose anyone brought playing cards?”

  Jace grinned, shook his head and sat back on his heels. “Captain, this is Harrow. Lieutenant Viera is conscious but has a dislocated shoulder. Would you please inform Sabine about the quarantine situation?”

  “Will do. Sit tight, Jace. Alliance brass can be a bunch of jackasses, but their ships have decent food.”

  “Thank you, Captain. Hawke’s Wing out.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Alliance warship Constitution was the largest ship Bryn had ever seen, even larger than the Adamant. It was sleek, silver, elegant and damn imposing. The shuttle was brought into an empty bay—one sign of contamination, and they would all be blown out into space and pounded into pieces by the Constitution’s cannons. It wasn’t a comforting thought, but there was nothing they could do about it. At least the Alliance didn’t shoot them on sight. Syndicate ships wouldn’t have been so forgiving.