Shades of Allegiance

by Sandy Williams

  Damn it, Hauch.

  Ten hours. That’s how long it had been since she’d shaken the soldier off her trail. She’d expected it to take a day, maybe two, before he took up a more aggressive search.

  She should have known better. Hauch was a professional pain in her ass.

  “If you’ve ordered a hit,” she said. “Cancel it.”

  Light winked off Chace’s comm-cuff when he wiggled his wrist in the air.

  Right. The dampeners. He couldn’t call off his people. God, she despised this planet.

  She finished her vorix. Stood. “Where was last contact?”

  “Who is he?”

  “Tell me where, Chace.”

  Amused, he leaned an elbow on the bar. “Tell me who.”

  A deep and potent fury seeped through her veins. She had to fight it. Keep control. If she let too much emotion show, Chace would learn the soldier meant something to her. He’d use that information. Exploit it. No, Hauch could be nothing more than a replaceable asset.

  “He’s my recon. I can’t debrief a corpse.”

  The corner of Chace’s mouth lifted in a grin. “Last known location was the Bottoms.”

  That was closer than she’d expected. Either she’d been sloppy or Hauch had more than a little experience tracking targets on destitute planets.

  “You’re coming with me.”

  “Am I?” he asked smoothly.

  “If you want your people to live, yes.”

  Chace laughed. “It’s good to have you back, Ash.”

  I’m not back.

  2

  Somewhere under the sludge, two parallel grooves cut a path down the street. They contained the levitation and propulsion coils that sent dart-rail cars through the precinct and across the continent. The dart-rail was the cheapest way to travel on Glory, but it was also the most unreliable, especially in Brightwater. The friction from trash and the ever-present muck slowed the cars down, and here in the Bottoms, they didn’t work at all.

  Chace trudged beside her, his gait unhurried. He thought Hauch was already dead. He didn’t know the soldier though. Hauch was almost as hard to kill as she was.

  The sound of distant gunfire broke through the constant slurp of the sludge sucking at their feet. Ash drew her Covar and cut down a narrow alley. It sloped uphill, and her feet finally came down on dry, cracked concrete instead of mud. Nearing a corner, she slowed, then pushed off her hood and put her back to the wall. A heartbeat later, she peered around the corner.

  Hauch had gotten himself into one hell of an ambush. He was crouched behind a retaining wall at the base of a tiered courtyard just a few meters from two unmoving bodies. Around him, multistoried residential units stabbed at the cloud-covered sky. That’s where Chace’s men had holed up. They fired from behind the building’s broken windows and from one wooden balcony. That balcony stretched alongside the western unit’s facade, and if the man up there made his way across it, he’d be in position to take Hauch down.

  “Call off your dregs,” Ash said.

  Chace checked the charge on his Secca Nine. “I sent two men to kill him. There’s at least five gunmen out there.”

  She peeked around the corner again. Hauch concentrated his fire on the balcony, forcing the dreg stationed there to remain behind a battered cooling unit. Chace was right though. The dregs were shooting at each other almost as much as they shot at Hauch.

  “Any guess who they belong to?” she asked.

  “Devok.” He practically spat the name.

  Tension whooshed out of her chest. Devok. She could handle him. He was colder and more ruthless than Chace, but he was more reckless too.

  “You guys have a falling out?” she asked, scanning the courtyard again, noting the dregs’ positions, the potential exits, the distance between her and Hauch.

  “Who do you think betrayed you?” Chace said.

  “I’m still not convinced it wasn’t you.”

  Did his Secca Nine twitch her way? He’d definitely gone rigid.

  His eyes turned as cold as the southern pole and as lethal and sharp as the razorback sharks that darted between its ice.

  “I kept you dead for five years. I protected Mira for you.”

  “For a profit,” she said.

  The last trace of the relaxed, carefree accomplice disappeared. The survivor—the unrepentant cutthroat—surfaced. That was one of Chace’s assets, the ability to act harmless until he was crossed. Dregs who knew him well knew to watch their backs. Ash had watched hers. She’d kept eyes on him five years ago. It was unlikely he’d betrayed her, but he’d been in the best position to subvert the scheme. And it was oh-so-very coincidental that Scius had discovered she was alive within days of the Coalition cutting off her finances.

  One hundred percent unapologetic, she met his gaze. He could try to take her out now. He could shove her into the line of fire. Or he could do nothing. She’d thrown the cards, let him know he hadn’t earned her trust. Ash knew him and she knew Glory. When things turned tight, every dreg scrambled to protect their own asses.

  “If you thought I did it,” Chace said slowly, “I’d be dead.”

  “You know where Mira is.”

  “You could find her without me.”

  Eventually, yes, but he would save her time and effort.

  “Signal your dregs to stand down. Then cover me.” She turned toward the fight, deliberately presenting Chace with her back as an easy target. A shallow puddle rippled with his blurred reflection. If he lifted his Secca Nine…

  “I’ll pass your tests, Ash,” Chace said. “I always have.”

  We’ll see.

  She holstered her Covar, pulled her hood up, then sprinted across the courtyard.

  Gunfire rang through the air, but none of it sprayed the ground near her. Before the dregs realized someone else was joining the fight, she dove behind the retaining wall.

  Hauch swung his gun toward her.

  She knocked the barrel toward the sky. “Hello, Hauch.”

  “Ash.” The soldier’s sweat-beaded face was a bright, angry shade of red.

  “You looked like you could use some help.”

  “So you put yourself into a compromised position right alongside me? Nice famgin work.”

  He rolled back toward the fight and strafed the balcony.

  “I know one of the dregs,” she said. “I need the gunfire to stop so he can hear me.”

  “I’m not the one doing most of the shooting.”

  “Just give it a pause.”

  Hauch mumbled something in his native language but stopped shooting. The cracks and bangs from the dregs’ weapons slowed. They’d seen her dash across the courtyard. Both sides would be wondering who the hell she was.

  “Devok!” Ash shouted. “Order your dregs to holster their weapons.”

  Devok’s loud laugh came from one of the broken windows in the res-unit to the right. “We’ve got high ground, and who the fuck are you?”

  “Kip Vizen asked that same question right before we stampeded his thrinks.”

  Hauch’s head swiveled toward her, and then he rolled his eyes toward the polluted air above.

  Well, his opinion would have been different if he’d smelled the trail of shit their little red paws made through the estate.

  “That dreg is dead.” Devok’s voice boomed down.

  She drew her Covar and shouted back, “Not the last time I checked.”

  “Stand up.”

  “You going to shoot me?”

  “If he does, he’s dead,” Chace yelled.

  Damn, he’d moved fast. He’d climbed on top of a metal awning to the right and leaned his shoulder against the res-unit’s wall. His Secca Nine pointed toward a broken window. If that’s where Devok was holed up, Chace might have him targeted.

  “Ah, the prince of piss pots arrives,” Devok taunted. “Decided to get your hands dirty?”

  “It’s her,” Chace said. “She’s the only reason I haven’t pulled the trigger.”
/>
  “You haven’t pulled that trigger ’cause you don’t want to get on the wrong kill list.”

  “Is there a right kill list?” Hauch muttered beside Ash.

  “Some are a mark of honor,” Ash said. Then she called out, “I’m going to stand, Devok. Tell your dregs not to shoot.”

  “They’ll hold their fire.” Devok sounded bored.

  “Your friends are nice,” Hauch said, running a hand over his short-cropped hair. Dust and chips of cement rained to the ground.

  “If this goes bad, use me as a distraction and haul ass to the spaceport.” She raised her hands into the air first, then when she didn’t get her fingertips blown off, she straightened.

  Five seconds passed. No one fired a weapon. They just might survive this.

  “You ready to come say hello, Devok?”

  “I’m coming down,” he called back.

  Slowly Ash lowered her arms.

  “You can get up now,” she said to Hauch.

  “I think I’ll wait to see how much you mouth off first.” He brushed more dust from his hair.

  Ash snorted, then watched Chace slide off the awning.

  She slipped her Covar into its holster, a move designed to say Look, I’m harmless.

  A door in the nearest res-unit opened, and a short man with black, tangled hair and a shaggy beard stepped into the street. He took slow, measured steps, his eyes squinting as he studied her.

  “Well, look at you,” Devok said. “You’re back.”

  “Not back. Visiting.”

  “You’re supposed to be dead. Chace dumped your body. We all saw it.”

  “You all saw it,” Chace said as he approached. “But you didn’t all check for a pulse.”

  Devok’s gaze shifted to Chace, then back to her. “You schemed with this bastard? Trusted him over me?”

  “I trusted no one,” she said.

  “Lot of good that did you. Lot of good it did anyone. I should put you back in the grave.”

  “You sorry it didn’t work the first time?” Chace said.

  “I did my job. She didn’t see it through.” Angry eyes turned on her. “You killed half my dregs.”

  “Half your dregs shouldn’t have been involved,” she said smoothly. “And I’m loving this little reunion, but I’d like to get off the street.”

  She held out her hand to Hauch, fingers together, thumb held out. He gave her a disgusted look, then stood without help. He’d caught her warning signal, though, and kept his hand near his gun.

  “Yeah,” Chace said. “We should go.”

  “He’ll get you killed.” Devok’s voice turned into a gravelly murmur.

  Chace kept his gun pointed toward the ground. Barely. “Worried about her all of a sudden?”

  Devok let out a bark of a laugh. “This is about you, not her. Your petty ploys are starting to make sense.”

  Ash raised her eyebrow at that.

  Chace didn’t respond. Very deliberately, he turned his back on Devok and started back up the street.

  It was a test. She knew it the instant Devok’s gaze shifted from Chace’s back to her face. He assessed. He studied. He drew his weapon. She had exactly one second to choose who would live.

  She fired first, a head shot that dropped Devok to the ground. Then Hauch fired. Then Chace. Then the dregs in the res-units who’d just lost their leader. More than a dozen bullets split the air in less than a dozen seconds. Then the sound of silence slipped back over the street.

  Chace met her gaze. “Guess you trust me a little.”

  “Walk,” she ordered.

  As the sun lost altitude behind the horizon, Chace led the way out of the decaying city and into what had once been a sparse strip of forest. It was overgrown now, thick with thorned vines and nearly impassable brush. Chace cut a trail through its thinnest section, and when they emerged on the other side, the sharp, metal shelters of Salvage reflected the last of the sun’s dying rays.

  Old trams and outdated sub-atmo flyers were the mansions of Salvage. The rest of the shelters were hammered-together pieces of metal dragged from the breaking yards. Those yards kept Glory on capsule itineraries. The Coalition’s member planets sent their defunct satellites, science stations, and obsolete spaceships to poison the waters in this far corner of the KU. With a famished, beaten-down population, Glory drank in the contamination.

  Hauch made a noise.

  Ash glanced at him, eyebrows raised.

  “You grew up here,” he said.

  “It fits me, doesn’t it?”

  “Cold and sharp-edged. It does.”

  Accurate description. The closely spaced shelters might as well have been sharpened daggers. Fall or trip, and you’d get cut. Cuts led to infections, infections led to death or to the bosses, who controlled both legal and illegal drugs. Here, that was Scius. If you were lucky, he would send you to the local contingent of Seekers or to Mira. But if you were unlucky—if you were on his shit list—he’d watch you sicken and die. He had a fascination with it, that last breath and beat of a heart, the stillness that followed.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Hauch said, alert as he maneuvered through the ramshackle city of metal.

  “What? You never get homesick?” She kept her tone light. She knew what Hauch was really saying, that it was irresponsible to come to a world like Glory where her life was at risk. She was the Coalition’s telepath detector, its link to a threat that could unravel the interplanetary government and turn allies into enemies.

  “You let me track you for three days,” he said. “Then you disappeared. What’s your objective?”

  “It’s the same as yours. Preserve and protect the Coalition.”

  “And you’re choosing to do that here?”

  “Always so judgmental.” She nudged him with her shoulder. “Sorry you were stuck with the babysitting duty. Next time try not to get blown up.”

  His return nudge nearly sent her into the edge of a lean-to. Of course this wasn’t his choice of assignments. He wanted to be on Javery with the rest of Trident Team.

  The thought of the planet made her itch to check her com-cuff. It wouldn’t give her an update on the Sariceans’ blockade though. That would come with the next capsule. It was scheduled for tomorrow, but capsules to Glory tended to be delayed or canceled altogether. It could be weeks before she heard anything about Javery.

  Weeks before she learned anything about Rip.

  Worry wrenched through her stomach, making her feel as starved as the children who watched them. She shouldn’t have left Rip. She might be banned from the planet, but she could have found a way to Javery’s surface. She could have avoided authorities and protected her fail—

  No.

  Breathe.

  Focus.

  Rip didn’t need protection. He was there as a liaison between the Coalition and Javery, and if the Sariceans tried anything, the triumvirate would call in the Fleet and Fighting Corps to help.

  “You okay?” Hauch asked.

  Shoving away her worries, she nodded toward the bloodstained bandage wrapped around Hauch’s bicep. “How’s the arm?”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Am I not allowed to be concerned about my favorite teammate?”

  “I should drag you straight to the spaceport,” he grumbled.

  “But we’re already here.”

  Chace had thrown back his hood beside a broken door to a half-buried freighter. Sawed-off wings of sub-atmo flyers stabbed into the ground on either side of it, creating slivers of black shadows.

  “Who are the dregs?” a voice said from the slash of dark to the right of the door.

  “They’re with me,” Chace answered.

  “Not what I asked.” Cloth rustled as the man shifted, undoubtedly bringing a weapon to bear on one of them.

  “I have business with Mira,” Ash said. “We’ll be in and out in minutes.”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Then perha
ps I can make an introduction.” Or she could make his guts mingle with the shadows.

  “You want access, you pay,” the man said. In her peripheral vision, shapes peeled away from other shelters. Tattered longcoats dragged across the ground. Some twisted around small feet. Others reached to the knobby knees of boys and girls made skinny by recent growth spurts. They stalked across the muddy ground, their jaws set, their eyes filled with hunger and malice.

  Hauch cursed.

  “Intimidated?” Ash said.

  “They’re kids.”

  “Cheap, disposable labor.” Her gaze swept across the nearest trio, two boys and a girl with a little more meat on their bones than the others.

  “Abban,” Chace said. The doorkeeper leaned forward, and a faint moonlight oozed across a nose broken at least as many times as his missing and chipped teeth. “You’re losing out on your second payment.”

  “Access costs more creds than you can shit out. Each of you pays or you get the fuck out of my yard.”

  Ash kept her eyes on the trio. The taller boy and the girl were in charge. She saw it in the way the other kids’ gazes darted to them then away. The third kid stayed slightly behind the duo, his gaze shifting between Ash and the boy and girl in a quiet, measured way.

  Ash focused on the tall kid in front. “Abban didn’t tell you who he’s hiding. He didn’t tell you what she’s worth.”

  Abban chuckled.

  “We’ve got an understanding,” the kid said with a sneer. “Goes beyond what you think you know.”

  “Sure. Of course he wouldn’t exploit you. As long as you and your gang are good with being used, might as well take things safe and easy.”

  The kid drew a knife.

  She raised an eyebrow. “You realize I have a gun, don’t you?”

  “I’m quick and I’ve got good aim.” The kid lifted the blade, threatening to throw it.

  Chace let out a snort, crossed his arms, then leaned against the half-buried freighter like a man waiting for a bot to perform.

  Same old Chace, letting her manipulate the situation.

  “Might want to approve killing me with your keeper first,” she said.