by Natalie Grey
“I see.” Three seconds on the jump core. Two…
“Please wait for us to dock with—”
Talon reached out and slammed his hand down on the jump button.
Nyx always described jumps as the world turning inside out, and Tersi argued and said they felt more like the moment at the top of a rollercoaster when you could feel both the weightlessness and the sickening drop. For Talon, however, they felt as if he had slipped into a world running half a second behind his own. He was locked in the liquid stream of time and yet jerked roughly out of it, all at once.
It gave him a headache, every time. He rubbed at his temples as they came out of the jump and groaned.
“Where the hell are we?”
“Middle of nowhere.” Nyx looked over. “We restocked the pain meds at Akintola. D’you want—”
“It’s fine.” Talon leaned back in his chair. “So the Warlord wants her back. Not entirely unexpected.”
“She’s a Soras?” Nyx went straight to the point.
“She told me he rescued her on Osiris and raised her.”
“Then she’s bad news.”
“She’s an assassin.” Talon looked over at her, arms folded over his chest. “She was already bad news. Come on. I told Jester I’d tell everyone what’s going on.”
“Good plan.” Nyx unhooked and stretched.
“How’s the rib?” Talon asked as they walked.
“It’ll be fine. I should have stopped for a medical visit on Akintola, but….”
“But you hate doctors, and then we blasted our way out of there?”
“Something like that.” One shoulder lifted, and she gave him the shadow of a smile. “And I didn’t want to put us on his radar—or let him know Lesedi was still alive.”
“We’ll get you care,” Talon promised.
“You know that can’t be our top priority.” She nudged him with her arm and he saw genuine affection in her eyes. “Come on, where’s the cold-hearted bastard we know and love?”
“I’m getting soft in my old age.” Talon grinned ruefully as they came into the mess. He looked out over the crew assembled, and leaned back against the doorframe. “We have an…interesting situation. The assassin we brought on board purports to have been raised by the Warlord, and an encounter we just had with a mercenary ship—Nyx, any trace on that? No?—might have confirmed it. Unless it was meant to be corroborating evidence on that setup.”
“I wouldn’t arm weapons to fire on a Dragon ship unless I was prepared to fight,” Nyx offered. “And they wanted to talk to you, not just anyone.”
“True.” Talon rubbed at his head.
“So, why defect now?” Sphinx asked. Her thick, golden-brown hair was drawn back in a bun at the back of her head, and she leaned on one of the tables, golden eyes alert.
“A good question, and one to which, I’m afraid, she doesn’t seem to have much of an answer.” Talon looked out at them all. “She said, and I quote, that it was wrong of the Warlord to send the other assassin after me because—and again, remember I’m quoting—I’m nice.”
There was a pause, and then the entirety of the crew burst out laughing. Nyx was holding her side, Jester clapped Loki on the shoulder, and Sphinx spat tea on the table.
“Well, if she really was raised by the Warlord, maybe you do seem nice to her.” It was Loki’s voice, soft but strong. Everyone turned to look at him in surprise, and Talon saw that his face was grave. “We know how the Warlord fought. He had children executed. If she has a sense of honor, she might well side with the Dragons against the Warlord.”
“Which would mean he would want to get her back,” Jester concurred. “We saw her fight. Hell, where was she hiding? I didn’t see her until she was right up on that other one.”
Talon only nodded to acknowledge the question. They had no answer to that. Dragons, though they fell on the “enhanced” side of the line that separated enhanced from cyborg, were heavily upgraded. For this woman to have surprised them meant she could move both quickly and silently. It was disconcerting.
“What was she like?” Nyx asked Talon, going back to the main point before he could sink into memory.
Talon searched for the word. “Demure.”
A chorus of snorts said what the Dragons thought of that.
“And I thought the same,” Talon agreed. “But there’s something about her….” Something about the way she moved, soft as water but with bone-crunching force in her hands and feet. Something about the way she looked at him, assessing him even while he assessed her. Perhaps, and only perhaps, the fact that her talk of honor seemed troublingly familiar, like an echo of words he had whispered to himself in the night when he was alone.
“Sir?” It was Nyx.
“She….” Talon looked down at the floor and forced a smile. “Let’s just say, if she’d wanted to be a Dragon, I would have considered her.”
Silence. They couldn’t deny her fighting force—indeed, her very short demonstration had been more impressive to them than a drawn-out fight would have been—but none of them were willing to trust her.
“In any case, her lineage—or, I suppose, upbringing—is the thing that’s most important, I think. If the Warlord is trying to get her back … we’ve got leverage. So you all put your minds to work on that. Search for anything and everything you can. If he or anyone close to him adopted children, I want to know about it. If there are records of people in his employ, find them. I want to know where she was trained. I want to know how she was trained.” What he wanted to ask, really, was what sort of person would raise a child to be an assassin.
But he already knew the answer to that question.
“Where are you going, sir?” Loki, with his watchful eyes.
“I’m going back to finish our conversation. If she really wants to help, she’ll tell me where the bastard is hiding. And I’m going to get more out of her about her defection.” He nodded to them and left, steps slowing as soon as he was out of their sight.
He should have told them all of it. He should have told them the flash of genuine incomprehension in her eyes when he spoke the name Warlord.
But she had to have known the truth.
Didn’t she?
6
The Dragons clustered into the cockpit of the Ariane in silence as Jester guided the ship around the smaller moon and toward orbit around Ragnarok. As she looked over, Tera saw Talon watching her. He raised his eyebrows in a silent question, and she leaned forward to see the coordinates on the console.
She nodded at him when she saw that they were right on target. She wasn’t surprised that they had come in within shuttle range—indeed, she had expected no less. Scarcely had the word Ragnarok been out of her mouth before Talon had the ship racing for the outer colonies. He knew all of Aleksandr’s hiding places—if he knew Aleksandr was not here, he gave no sign of it.
But then, Tera had chosen her false information well. The planet turned lazily below them, a haven for the richest and most famous that human space had to offer. The massive storms that scoured its surface battered themselves against the terraforming bubbles, and were no match for the technology there; Tera remembered Aleksandr showing her how the building could repair itself, new alloys resistant to the cold, window panes replaced and generators restored even in the fiercest ice storms. Such weather was no obstacle to the truly rich.
No, the bitter cold of Ragnarok was a weapon only against thieves and assassins. Anywhere else in human-occupied space, one could wait and pick one’s time, try to find a way around guards or alarms. On Ragnarok, the cold would kill you well before you found a weakness in the security systems. Tera listened when other assassins spoke—she knew there had never been a successful assassination on Ragnarok. Her cohort did not even take jobs here.
And yet, as Tera knew, even here, Aleksandr did not feel safe from Talon.
Tera risked another glance over at the Dragon. She had been watching him covertly for days. As a captive, she had few enough chan
ces to look him over—and pretending to be an ally meant that she should not be too obvious in sizing him up. She had to make do with the minutiae she caught out of the corner of her eye. He was well muscled, and moved with an ease that she saw only in warriors; he was comfortable not only in his body but also in his ability to respond to chaos. She had seen him with the faint tinge of exhaustion that signaled a heavy work out, and with the careful stillness of those who had spent years training their reflexes.
Why did she watch him? She had seen him in combat—she knew, even from those few moments, what he was capable of. But she could not seem to stop watching him, as if there was some puzzle in this man she could not even explain to herself.
When he looked up, she turned her head away quickly. She was bound tightly, her wrists secured to a metal belt and her ankles with a scant few inches of room between the shackles. She could never have taken out the crew that clustered here, but they still watched her closely, and she still went out of her way to project as much helplessness as she reasonably could. Accordingly, she had not indulged in her instinctive desire to look over them one by one, noting weaknesses and blind spots.
She was patient. She could wait.
“There are no ships on the landing pad,” Jester said. He’d called up one of the nearby satellites as soon as they came in range, and the empty circle showed clearly on one of the screens. The man kept his voice neutral, but none of them could miss the accusation.
“Ships are stored underground,” Tera said, her absent-minded tone carefully calculated as she looked over the pictures; people trusted what you said when you seemed not to be paying attention. Some ships were stored in basement hangars, after all; the Dragons did not need to know that Aleksandr always kept a ship ready for escape, wherever he was.
“So. Where will we attack?” Talon had crossed his arms as he looked over at her.
“If you’re hoping to storm the walls and go in with guns blazing, you’re going to be disappointed.” Tera felt a smile touch her lips. Talon had a rare intellect and more subtlety than most—he was a leader in the Dragons, after all—but there was still a touch of the soldier to him. No matter how talented he was at the lies and half-lies of this world, she knew that part of him longed to kick down doors and go in shooting, secure in the knowledge of who and what lay ahead of him. It was a weakness, Tera reminded herself.
It was also strangely endearing. And was that a touch of a blush she saw in his cheeks before he quelled the reaction?
“Brute force has its moments.” He could not hide the hint of a smile. “We could just drop a nuke and be gone.”
Her own smile faltered, but Talon was watching her, and she must let him knew she was on his side.
“Then you’d never know if you caught him,” she said lightly. She wished she could look away without sparking his suspicions. This had been her nightmare since she left: a quick, elegant solution that no lock-picking or ready words could avert. It was what Aleksandr feared, was it not? That they would come so quickly for him that he would not even have the chance to plead his case, explain that they had been misled. For two nights, Tera had lain awake in terror that she had miscalculated, that Aleksandr would have taken shelter here. The facts, the stark evidence of the empty landing pad, did nothing to assuage her fears; her mind ran wild with reasons that the pad might lie empty while he was still there. She tried to keep her eyes steady on Talon’s.
“Indeed,” he said softly.
She was entering dangerous territory.
“You’ll want to go in through the gardens,” Tera said, dragging the conversation back to facts. Emotion surged, and she thrust down the memory of running along the dirt paths, laughing in delight at the butterflies and the koi, Aleksandr strolling indulgently behind her. “There’s a weak point along the southwestern edge to allow for venting.”
There hadn’t ever been an assassination on Ragnarok because only one assassin had ever spent enough time there to learn its secrets. And while she had sometimes fantasized about taking down the worst of those who lived here, seeing the realization of death in their eyes before she struck, she had never anticipated using her knowledge like this.
“We’ll have twenty-three seconds to get in any gap we make before the machines begin fixing the breach.” Tera cocked her hand to hold out three fingers and folded the first down. “I’ll need to turn off the alarms and sound an ice storm alert within 11 seconds, though.” The second finger curled down. “And in the event of a breach, there is no way to call off the guards, so we’ll need to hide until their sweep is done, and we need to get to where we’re hiding without showing on the cameras, because access to the security feed is farther in.” She curled down the third finger.
“Should we go in closer to that?”
“No. You’d have to rappel down from the roof, and you and your drop ship would set off proximity alarms.”
“Why wouldn’t we set off the alarms near the gardens?” Nyx asked reasonably.
“Ice builds up on some of the sensors, and that’s one of them. It gets swept off every day, but it’s covered again within fourteen hours.” She knew her face was twisting with annoyance. “I told them about that, but they never fixed it.”
“And no chance they would have fixed it now?” Talon’s voice was interested.
Dammit, that was the sort of thing Aleksandr would do if he’d fled here to get away from the Dragons. Tera tried to shrug carelessly. “I’ll know when I see it.”
“That’s a hell of a gamble.”
“You’re attacking a safe house on Ragnarok, not breaking up a school party.” Tera gave him a look.
“That, we are.” He grinned. “Very well, then. How do I disable the security cameras? And what’s the path from the entry point to the hiding place?”
She opened her mouth to answer, and then realized why he had asked.
“You think you can do this without me?” Her eyes narrowed at him.
“With enough knowledge.”
“I got my knowledge from years of living there. I can tell you some of it—most of it, even. But I cannot talk you through it all beforehand. The logic on the alarm system is too complex; the touches aren’t just in the right order, they have to be pressed with very specific timing.”
“And you think I can’t master that timing.” She’d pricked his pride.
“No,” Tera said flatly. But he would ask why, wouldn’t he? And she could not tell him the real reason—she could not admit that she would mimic the touch of the robotic arm from an automated sweep because her touch implants could follow the timing to the microsecond. Those kind of implants were forbidden, as were so many of the enhancements she carried—and God alone knew what Talon would do if he knew about them. She sighed. “You could,” she amended. “But we don’t have the time for you to practice. I don’t know what type of satellites he has in orbit. We’ll need to strike in the next two days, and it took me years to learn the machine patterns.”
His eyes met hers, and she wanted to curse at that strange look of his, that seemed to convey everything and nothing at once. What did it mean? What did he know?
“You have to bring me,” Tera said simply.
The Dragons did not speak. They did not even move. Nonetheless, she could hear their warning like a breeze running through trees, rustling the leaves. Their disapproval flowed to Talon and he shook his head.
“We can’t trust you with this.”
But he was wrong. Tera knew in her mind, no matter what her heart feared, that Aleksandr was not here. This was just a house, just a dangerous house, and she had no qualms about destroying it if that was what it took for her to gain their loyalty. She would save them from its dangers without hesitating. She would use this to gain the trust she needed.
That was why they were here, after all. That was why she had suggested Ragnarok.
“You can trust me,” she said simply. “I wouldn’t trust me, either—but you can. And even if you won’t….” She lifted one sh
oulder, holding his eyes. “You need me.”
His eyes searched her face, and she watched the Dragons tense, waiting for his answer.
“Why do we need you, when you can talk us through this from the ship?”
“I can’t even give commands quickly enough, let alone have you respond in time.” Her jaw was set. She was just about to say that he would be risking the life of his soldiers when she caught the gleam of humor in his eyes.
“Very well. You’ll come with us.”
Two or three of the Dragons looked at him sharply, and Tera thrust down the urge to smile smugly.
It was good that she didn’t, because the next moment, Talon said simply, “Of course, you’ll be unarmed.”
“What?”
“As deadly as you are without weapons, I think we can agree you’re more deadly with them.” His lips quirked. “You’ll just have to trust us to protect you.”
He had her backed into a corner and they both knew it, and when she should have raged at his arrogance, she could only feel the urge to laugh. Talon was a worthy opponent—had she really thought he would be as easy to talk around as Apollo? She bent her head in assent, still smiling, but not before she caught his answering grin.
There was nothing wrong with enjoying a battle of wits, was there?
7
Whoever had decided to turn Ragnarok into one of the most luxurious destinations in the galaxy had, Talon decided, been some sort of mad genius. Ahead of him, he could see the domes of the Warlord’s pleasure gardens shining with splashes of green and the vivid reds and yellows of blooming flowers.
Around him, however, the wind carried the effective temperature of the planet to below -40C, and his lungs were struggling to accept even the air that came through his suit’s filter. Never had the luxury of a mansion seemed quite so appealing.
Had Tera, a feral little girl from the slums of Osiris, truly lived here? It was almost inconceivable. But something in the way she looked at the dome told him it must be true. She had settled into a tiny hollow in the snow as they waited for the wind to shift—an essential component of breaking in, he was told—and her eyes followed the lines of the building with both assessment and familiarity. Her face was expressionless except for her mouth, which seemed to hold a certain softness.
