Lost Alliance (Dragonfire Station Books 1-3): A Galactic Empire series

by Zen DiPietro

  “So it’s the fault of his government that he’s forced to do what he does.” Hawk was right, to a degree. She just wasn’t sure what degree.

  “Not exactly. But people just want to survive, you know? Don’t they have the right to try?”

  Of course they did. For every one of her personally held ideals, there were a billion people in the universe. People with family and love and hope for a future. Her ideals might feel more immediate or more important to her because they were hers, but a person’s life was worth far more than any one of her beliefs.

  She slid down the wall to sit next to him. “Okay. I understand that. But how do we justify giving money to an arms dealer?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not up to me to figure that out. I just know that my guy on Atalus is not evil. Yes, he profits off the war. He started out as a teacher, and would still rather be doing that, so long as he could do it on his own planet, which he can’t. He doesn’t fight the war. He’s just living in the world he was born into.”

  “But he has the money to get out. Why doesn’t he?”

  Hawk shrugged again. “That’s his business. Maybe he has family that won’t or can’t leave. Maybe he can’t bear to abandon his world. Maybe he just doesn’t know how to live any other life. It’s not our business. You’re putting your own values on him, and that doesn’t work.”

  “Fine. I get it.” She sighed. “Besides, it’s not like we have other options.”

  He slapped her knee lightly. “There you go. That’s it exactly. When the universe hands you nothing but garbage, you make a big garbage sandwich and take a bite. Anyone looks at it and cringes away can screw off. They have no right to judge.”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  So they were headed to Atalus, then. To get their ship repaired amidst a civil war, by an arms dealer. Yay.

  Other than being meltingly hot, their stay on Atalus didn’t prove to be too terrible. Hawk’s associate Tee, as he preferred to be called, housed them in his compound, far from any fighting or civilization. Buried in the middle of a burning-hot desert.

  Shade, fans run via small generators, and large amounts of water helped, but the days passed in a blur of wavy heat lines that made the ground look psychedelic. Two days in, Fallon wondered if she was hallucinating just a bit. What she wouldn’t do for hardwired electricity and climate control.

  She had something to look forward to, though, and she focused on that like a lifeline. Hawk had arranged to have someone load the Outlaw onto their ship and haul it out to them. Fallon would tuck the Outlaw inside the Nefarious, giving her both ships. Which made her almost giddy. She kind of wanted to rub her hands together and make mwa-ha-ha sounds when she thought about it.

  Repairs went slowly, though, which served to tamp down her enthusiasm. Tee’s team could only work so many hours in such hot conditions each day. There were also some parts that he had to track down and negotiate for. Atalus no longer had its own ships. The vessels and the facilities that made them had all been bombed out, which left Tee searching among scrap to find what they needed for the Nefarious, or waiting for a freighter to arrive. Once again, Fallon wished she had her own mech to certify the repairs. She’d have felt a lot better if she had Kellis to approve the ship before she attempted an in-atmosphere takeoff. Since there was no getting around the situation, she tried not to think about it.

  At least in that respect, the heat was a good thing, as her intense discomfort made it hard to think about anything at all, besides escaping the planet. She had literally nothing to do but while away sweltering minutes that dissolved into hours. She didn’t know how people lived like this. She wasn’t the only one melting with boredom, either. She wished they could stay on board the Nefarious, but that idea had been nixed almost immediately. Though the ship would maintain a temperature that would protect their tech and gear, life support would not be operating during repairs. Which left the four members of Avian Unit sprawled out on cool stone floors, breathing what felt like fire.

  Slightly after the point where she felt she’d dissolved into an unrecognizable pile of goo, the Nefarious was given the green light. Avian Unit wasted no time in thanking their host and getting the hell out of there.

  She led her team onto the ship. The first cool lungful of reprocessed air came like a revelation, and she greedily tried to suck up all of it she could.

  Conditioned air clung to her like a second skin, coating her in a layer of comfort even though the rest of her still felt gelatinous. She collapsed into the pilot’s chair once she got to the bridge, willing her innards to solidify enough that she could fly this rig.

  Finally, the cool relief sank all the way through her and she felt human again. She opened her eyes and found none of the others had followed her all the way to the bridge. They must have gone to their berths. Which would have been smarter, actually. But she’d been focused on the pilot’s chair for a week, and had no patience for further delay.

  A shower really was in order though. Even though it was only a sonic unit. Ah, well.

  It felt good to be clean again, without the salt and sweat hanging heavy on her skin. Add a fresh jumpsuit and she felt almost normal. She just needed some food. Something cold.

  When she made it back to the bridge, Raptor awaited. He smiled when he saw her. He also wore a fresh uniform.

  “Ready?” she asked him.

  “Way beyond ready.”

  “I sent Hawk and Peregrine to rest. We’ll be on six-hour shifts until we arrive at our destination. Should take us about two weeks.”

  “Nice.” Raptor studied the panel in front of him, checking out the flight path as she laid it in.

  “Yep. Glad we bought this baby.” She patted the panel affectionately.

  “And when we get to Zerellus?” he asked.

  “I’m hoping by then you’ve come up with something on the implant technology. Then it’s all up to Brak to make sense of the memory soup in my brain.”

  He grimaced. “No pressure, right?”

  She thought of Brak and smiled. “She’s up to the challenge.”

  Avian Unit quickly fell into a comfortable routine of meals, duty shifts, and recreation. It felt good to be back on a schedule. Productive.

  Rec consisted of card games, Go, and workouts in an ad hoc gym they set up in the cargo bay alongside the Outlaw. Far from ideal, but Fallon’s body thanked her. She got achy when she didn’t work out regularly, as if her muscles became angry at her inattention.

  Each night, she drifted to sleep, determined to map out more memories behind the doors in her mind. Her sleep on Atalus had been so restless and fitful that she’d come up with nothing, but on the Nefarious, her mind cooperated. To a point. She saw things, but often didn’t know what to make of them.

  She didn’t understand the significance of the tired mechanic who had given her an apple. She couldn’t see herself in the memory, so she had no idea at what point in her life it had happened. The same for a struggle in a back alley where a pair of local toughs had tried to steal from her. Without context, the memories meant little. But she kept spelunking through the corridors of her sleeping mind, finding a pleasant meal with her parents and brother behind a big yellow door and a soft blanket patterned with cherry blossoms behind a blue one.

  Of these minor memories, seeing her brother interested her most. He looked a great deal like her, and had an easy laugh she could now pick out of a crowd. He’d been warm, affectionate, and teasing. All the things she’d have hoped for in a brother. Now, she only hoped she’d get the chance to meet him in real life. Back on Earth, he still didn’t know she’d visited their parents. Probably wasn’t even sure she was alive. But she was alive, and thinking of him. Somehow that made her feel good.

  The scrapyard parts that had gotten the Nefarious back in shape had been far from ideal. She’d need to have some of them replaced almost immediately. But if they could just make it to Zerellus, that would be no problem. It was a delightful planet—similar to Earth but with
a different and much younger culture, and plum with all of the amenities a person could want.

  After months of tight quarters, scows, and one boiling planet, Fallon had every intention of indulging in a few pleasant pursuits. She knew that Hawk and Peregrine were planning the same thing, in their own particular ways. Fallon most looked forward to steamy showers and some decadent, gooey desserts—preferably ones that contained chocolate. Oh, and a real workout in a fully equipped gym.

  She made arrangements for the four of them to share a suite in a fancy Zerellian hotel. She elected to remain within the transportation hub to keep the team ready for a quick departure, but there were plenty of hospitality options right there. She counted down the days until they arrived.

  When Zerellus came into view, Fallon felt mildly surprised that they’d managed to arrive without experiencing pirate attacks or brain aneurysms or massive malfunctions. She’d almost started to expect things to go wrong.

  By the law of averages, she felt like the universe owed her some good luck any time now.

  “I feel a little odd about docking the Nefarious,” Fallon admitted to Hawk. “Are you sure it’ll be in good hands?”

  He gave her a quit-being-stupid squint as he stood and hefted a duffel bag onto his shoulder. “Of course it will. Now quit your fussing and get your ass through the airlock. If you miss the elevator, I’m not waiting on you.”

  “Do you have a date already lined up, or something?” she teased.

  “More or less.” He negotiated himself and the bag through the doorway and was gone.

  She’d double-checked all of her security protocols, just for good measure. Hawk was right, no doubt. Her baby would be fine.

  She patted the pilot’s seat as she left, making her way to her berth to grab her gear. Once she got through the airlock and onto the docking station, she found that she had a half-hour wait for an orbital elevator. She gave Hawk a dirty look for needlessly rushing her. But the bustling station wasn’t unpleasant, and the time passed quickly enough.

  None of them said much on the ride down. Her partners were probably thinking ahead to the things they were looking forward to, just as she was.

  Upon arriving at their suite, they performed a thorough security sweep. Then Fallon closed herself in her bedroom and fell onto the huge, overstuffed bed covered in fluffy white bedding and big puffy pillows. She stretched out, trying to touch all four corners as she breathed the cool, quiet air. The unrelenting whiteness wasn’t usually her thing, but it seemed like the perfect antidote to months of space travel’s murky blackness.

  After several heartbeats, she leaped up and ran for the shower. She stripped off her clothes as she went, leaving them in a trail behind her. When she wore only her silver bracelet, which she never took off, she stepped into the water.

  Her possibly record-breaking shower left her feeling clean and refreshed. Finally, she toweled off and wrapped herself in a fleecy pale-yellow robe. She strode into the parlor, running her fingers through her hair, then stopped dead. Raptor sat on the white couch, a dark blot on a pristine field.

  “The Ghost strikes again.” She was surprised to feel no annoyance.

  “We need to talk,” he said. The look on his face suggested that she wouldn’t like what he had to say.

  Fallon leaned back into the couch cushions and propped her feet on the sleek, clear table.

  “How old was the message? Do you think Whelkin is legit?”

  One side of Raptor’s mouth twisted up. “At this point, I won’t vouch for anyone who isn’t Avian Unit. But everything does add up. Your father said he trusts him, and if he’s on our side, it would make sense for him to be hiding from Blackout.” His half smile smoothed out. “As for the message, it had been there for a while. Once we got back to PAC space, I did a sweep of all my channels. He sent the message eight weeks ago.”

  “And what would make him think you’d ever monitor that channel? Doesn’t it seem convenient that he’d reach out to you? Assuming it’s him and he’s legit, might someone else have intercepted the message?”

  Raptor shrugged. “First two questions, I don’t know. But I saw no evidence that anyone else had seen it, and I wiped it out of existence.”

  Fallon wasn’t eager to trust anyone involved with Blackout, or with the PAC in general. Unless she had a real reason to. By all accounts, she’d liked Whelkin a great deal, and had kept in touch with him over the years. But liking him didn’t mean he wouldn’t put a lethal stinger shot through her brain.

  She had to consider the possibility that he was on their side, though. “If he is for real, he must be in the same situation we’re in. Which means he’ll be staying underground, if he’s even still alive. We might not be able to find him.” She didn’t like Whelkin’s odds, on his own.

  Raptor picked at a thread on the couch’s arm. “If we decide it’s the right move, I can leave a message on the same channel. If he’s still breathing, I guarantee he’ll be monitoring it.” He pulled the thread loose and worried it between his fingers. “If he’s for real, we could use him. We need all the allies we can get.”

  “Why would Blackout turn on him, too?” Whelkin was a trainer and a recruiter. A mentor. He had nothing to do with Avian Unit’s ops, or the implant in Fallon’s head. As far as she knew, anyway.

  “I don’t know. But then I don’t know why they’ve turned on us, either. I think it’s worth the risk.”

  She agreed, although reluctantly and with many reservations. As much as she hated the idea of making them vulnerable, they needed more assets. She also hated the idea of leaving someone out in the cold. And her father had vouched for Whelkin.

  “We’d have to run it by Hawk and Per. I’d want a unanimous decision on this one.” If it turned out to be a double cross, she wouldn’t bear the fault alone.

  “Of course.”

  Silence stretched out between them. There were too many possibilities for Fallon to map out contingency plans. She’d have to wait for more information. She hated waiting.

  She frowned at him, still lounging on her white couch like he owned it. “You said there were two things. What’s the second?”

  He smiled. “I saved the best for last. I got a message from Brak.”

  She straightened, instantly interested. “Oh?”

  “She said she was on to it, and would have it soon.”

  “That’s it?” Fallon slouched back against the cushions.

  “Yeah. She used the algorithm and channel I gave her, but I warned her to be brief and as vague as possible.”

  Fallon had hoped the message meant that Brak had already cracked it. Progress was good, but what she really needed was results. If she could recover her memory, maybe she’d have exactly what she needed to infiltrate Blackout and end all this.

  Fallon had continued, each night, to shop amongst the doors in her mind and pick out random scenes and images from her life. Some of them were nothing more than a feeling, or a scene frozen in time. Often, she saw an object she didn’t recognize. Her mind held innumerable bits of minutiae, apparently.

  Seeing these things didn’t make any memories come blazing back to life. She remembered what she saw in the dreams, but they were images apart from her, nothing like remembering.

  “I was kind of expecting more,” Raptor mused.

  “More?” She blinked at him, trying to recall whether she’d missed part of the conversation. She’d disappeared into her own thoughts and lost track.

  “I tell you Brak just about has a method to recover your memories and you just sit there.”

  “Was I supposed to jump around and squeal?”

  “Sure. That would be entertaining.” He flicked away the white thread he’d been fiddling with and smiled.

  “Not happening. I’m sure there’s somewhere you could go if you want to be entertained, though. This place has just about everything.”

  He stretched expansively, making himself at home on her couch. “Yeah, I could get used to this.”

/>   “It would be a shame if you did. Our frequently deplorable conditions would seem all the worse for you, by comparison.”

  He sighed. “You have to ruin everything, don’t you?”

  She gave him a cheeky grin. “Not everything. But some things.”

  He surprised her by scooting closer so he could loop an arm around her shoulders. “We’ve been through a lot together. This could be our last mission, you know.”

  “Every mission is potentially our last. We didn’t exactly go into a career known for longevity.”

  “Some of us do make it into old age, though. Krazinski and Colb started out in ops.”

  “And how many other field agents can you name who made it to middle age?” She waited, but he didn’t answer. “It’s surprising that all four of us have made it this far.”

  “Just shows you how good we are.” He gave her a little jiggle with his arm.

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.” He let his arm drop so he could turn sideways to face her. “Sure, we’ve had a lot of close calls, but we’re still here.”

  “I don’t think I ever objected to dying in the line of duty.” She raised her eyebrows at him and he shook his head in confirmation. “But it scares me to think we might not get this one right. That we might not be able to fix Blackout.” She felt like a tiny piece of flotsam, trying to take on a supernova.

  Raptor patted her knee. “Now you’ve gone all glum. But when have we ever failed to get the job done?”

  “I’m not really the person to ask about that,” she reminded him.

  “Exactly. As far as you know, we’re paragons of success.”

  “Not true. Per and Hawk told me about some missions that went south.”

  “Because of anything we’d done wrong?” His eyebrows rose high on his forehead.

  “No. Bad intel. Or bad luck.”

  “Right. And even on those missions where things went sideways, we still all got out in one piece. We’re going to do that this time too.” He tapped her knee with his index finger. “We’ll fix Blackout.”