Shades of Allegiance

by Sandy Williams

  They didn’t have time for this.

  “Chace,” she yelled. She gripped the panel’s lower edge and pulled.

  Chace joined them. They strained, fighting the panel and the time and the physical exhaustion that drained the strength from their bodies.

  “Mira,” Rykus ground out.

  “I can fit,” Mira said. She dropped to her knees, slipped between Rykus and Chace and maneuvered herself into the opening.

  “Ash. Go.”

  “You first,” she said.

  “You’re smaller. Get in the damn hole.”

  “Go, Ash,” Chace said, shoving her.

  Shit! Shit! Shit!

  Panic scraped her heart, more painful and sharp than the metal that scraped her skin.

  She pulled free on the other side, rolled to her back, and kicked the panel.

  She kicked it again and again, refusing to stop, refusing to look at the time remaining on her comm-cuff.

  Chace’s head and shoulders came through the opening and stuck. The metal edge sliced his arm.

  Ash slammed both feet into the panel. Either it budged or Chace’s blood acted as a lubricant. He made it past his widest point and pulled himself inside.

  Ash kicked the panel again.

  Rykus threw the ER kit into the hole and tried to follow it into the too-small opening.

  Ash kicked and kicked and kicked.

  The ten-second warning chimed.

  Ash looked at her fail-safe.

  She stopped breathing. He didn’t fit. He had to fit!

  When the shrill wail pierced the air, Ash wasn’t sure if it was the causeway’s scream or her own.

  9

  “You okay?” Someone gripped her arms. “Ash.”

  She forced air into her lungs and rational thought back into her head. Her fail-safe was on top of her, alive and whole, not dead or obliterated, and he was looking at her as if she was the one who’d almost splattered out.

  He’d been stuck, but somehow he’d made it through.

  “Y-yeah.” She swallowed. Her throat was made of sandpaper, and if she’d wanted to push Rykus off her, she wouldn’t have been able to. She’d funneled everything into surviving the causeway. She was a withered-up thing now, used and faded.

  Fuck. Even Rip’s face smeared to black.

  She blinked hard. Refocused.

  Something changed in Rykus’s eyes. The concern bled from his expression and was replaced with a look of determination. He gave a curt nod, like he was answering a question, then he pulled her to a seated position against the wall.

  Not a wall. A cabinet. She tried to focus on the room. A blur moved toward her.

  “Water.” Chace held out a bottle. Rykus took it, twisted off the top without activating the chill function, then held it to her lips.

  She clutched it with both hands and drank.

  “Slow,” he murmured. He kept a hand on her shoulder, either for reassurance or to hold her steady. She needed both more than she’d admit. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this weak, this out of control.

  No. She did remember. Almost two months ago, Rykus had re-imprinted himself into her head, erasing what Jevan Valt had done to her mind. The loyalty training was designed to break anomalies, and their fail-safes slid into the chaos to put them back together. Rykus was putting her back together again.

  She lowered the water bottle and breathed.

  Rykus’s hand shifted from her shoulder to her face, a soft, brief brush of his thumb along her jaw that they both wanted to be more. He pressed a nutri-bar into her hand, then stood.

  Ash took another sip of water. With each swallow, rational thought trickled back into her head.

  The scheme. If she remained sitting there, she’d fuck the whole thing up. They had to get to the control room and upload the virus before security could organize.

  She raised her hand to the counter at her back and used it to pull herself to her feet. They were in one of the station’s break rooms. The panel they’d entered through was gone, as was a strip of the wall to her left. The tram must have peeled the metal off, flattening it against the causeway or smashing it against the vehicle all the way to the west end. They were lucky it hadn’t turned into shrapnel and pulverized them.

  A table that must have been pushed up against the ruined wall lay overturned in the room’s center. A cooling unit and counters lined the other walls, leaving just a half meter open on either side of the door, a door that Rykus moved to with determined strides.

  “Chace,” he said.

  Chace held Mira’s arm, whispered something into her ear. He met Ash’s gaze briefly before drawing his weapon and taking position beside the door.

  Ash didn’t realize what was going on until Mira stepped into her line of sight.

  Oh, hell no.

  Ash stepped around Mira, but the woman grabbed her arm. “You’re a liability.”

  Ash pulled free just as Rykus opened the door. He and Chace swung into the corridor. No way in hell was she letting him do this without her.

  “They’ll be focused on protecting you instead of themselves,” Mira said.

  Ash ignored her and drew her Covar.

  “You’ll distract them. They won’t get to the control room in time. Ash!” Mira slipped in front of her again. “Let them do this.”

  “They can’t without my—” Her wrist suddenly felt bare.

  She looked down. Rykus had taken her cuff. She’d been so out of it she hadn’t noticed.

  He’d had the same hack-sig training as she did, but he wasn’t as good at it. If the code didn’t slide in smoothly, it would be too easy for station personnel to locate it. Ash needed to be there.

  She fisted Mira’s filthy shirt in her hand. “Stay with me.”

  Mira made another effort to hold Ash back but gave up when she yanked her into the corridor. Rykus and Chace were moving off to the right. Rykus kept his Covar trained ahead while Chace covered their backs. The latter saw Ash first and gave her a don’t-blame-me shrug.

  Rykus didn’t turn around, but something in the way he moved said he knew she was there, and he wasn’t pleased.

  Fuck his displeasure. He hadn’t commanded her to stay back like he had on Ysbar Station, but his I-have-to-protect-you attitude was pissing her off. She was an anomaly. She was trained to push past the pain and fatigue. She thrived off the adrenaline of battle and overcoming the odds.

  She drew parallel with him when he reached the first cross corridor. He didn’t glance her way; he clenched his jaw and, weapon ready, rounded the corner.

  Ash copied the maneuver, found a target.

  “Down!” she and Rykus ordered.

  A man dropped a comm board and backpedaled with his hands raised.

  Rykus took two aggressive steps forward. “On the ground!”

  The man lowered to one knee, then the other. At the far end of the corridor, security made its first appearance.

  Ash shot first, strode past Rykus, and shot again. Two guards fell before they could return fire. The other two got shots off, but they were inexperienced. Nervous. They missed their targets. Ash didn’t. Their bodies hit the floor.

  She kept her Covar trained down the hall as she moved toward a door that should lead to the control room. It didn’t open at her approach, so she tapped the sensor to its left. Lockdown flashed across the pad.

  Rykus moved to her side, half-shielding her with his body when she drew her blade. She gripped its sheath, then slammed the pommel into the sensor. It broke with a protest of sparks. A soft click and the door unlocked.

  Piss-poor security.

  Ash kicked the door open.

  Someone fired from inside, an uninterrupted barrage of bullets that slammed into the corridor’s opposite wall. A few rounds pinged off. One sliced through Ash’s left shoulder. She ignored it and waited. When the enemy ran out of bullets, she charged inside, killed the man struggling to reload his gun, then swept her gaze across the control room. Three—no
, four—remaining targets. Their hands were in the air, their eyes wide.

  “You want to live, get on the floor,” she said.

  Chairs moved. Most of the techs flattened themselves to the ground. One man hesitated. She put a bullet in his chest, then strode to the terminal in the room’s center. The front wall was divided into eight sections. All but one showed a portion of the causeway. The far-left corner showed only numbers. Specifically, they showed odds. These bastards were tasked with monitoring the status and safety of the causeway, and they had been betting on her group’s survival.

  Figured.

  She tapped the user pad, switching vid views until she found the one she wanted.

  “You’ve got two incoming on the right,” she called over her shoulder. Rykus, Chace, and Mira stepped inside the ops room. Rykus unlatched her comm-cuff, tossed it to her, then took up position beside Chace to watch the corridor.

  Ash made sure Mira was doing her part, tying up the techs on the floor. Of course she went to the two people Ash had shot first.

  Waste of time. Both were dead.

  Something clinked to Ash’s right. She looked that way, confirmed that the tech wasn’t doing anything stupid, then she turned to the terminal and slotted her comm-cuff into a port. It took seconds to override the required admin status, another moment to get the system to accept her cuff, then she had the virus open and unraveling. It would do its thing, corrupting safeguards and rewriting access parameters until she was the only one who could operate it. She just needed a good series log to link it to.

  There. The load sequence history. It updated every twenty-two minutes and would camouflage the code errors.

  A soft scuff behind her. She turned away from the terminal and saw Rykus leaving the doorway to approach her.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he said. His gaze was locked onto the screen that showed heavily armed dregs preparing to enter the building.

  “Only three.” She gestured to a screen with another view. “Scius left six others at the exit terminal. He’s not certain where we are.”

  A blue light flashed to life on the comm board, and an alert popped up on her cuff: Connection Acquired.

  “Dampeners are down,” Rykus said, a note of satisfaction in his voice. “I’ll contact the Corps.”

  “Contact who?” Chace stood in the doorway still, his attention split between the corridor and Rykus.

  “The Fighting Corps,” Rykus said.

  Chace’s Secca Nine pointed at her fail-safe’s chest. “Drop the cuff.”

  Rykus’s gaze rose, meeting Chace’s without one hint of worry.

  But worry exploded into Ash, a sharp, rapid assault that made her forget about the virus, the dampeners, the trouble gathering outside the station. She saw the threat to her fail-safe and nothing else.

  She lifted her Covar, almost squeezed the trigger, but Rykus shifted into the way.

  Purposefully shifted. He glanced over his shoulder. His steady gaze ordered her to calm down, to back off, then he casually returned his focus to Chace and asked, “Is there some reason you don’t want the Coalition’s help?”

  Ash lowered her weapon as she moved to Rykus’s side, but she kept it ready. Her blood pulsed with the need to take aim again. If Chace so much as twitched…

  Chace’s gun dipped when he looked at her. He should have been wearing a wary expression—she was oh so close to putting a bullet in his head. Instead, the look he gave her said something along the line of This guy’s joking, right?

  Joking about…? Right. The Fighting Corps. Hell, she needed rest. Her head was screwed on backward.

  “You can’t contact the Corps,” she told Rykus.

  “We need help,” he said. “They’ll send it.”

  Chace snorted.

  Ash shook her head. “This is Glory. Any Coalition representative who has been here more than a day is as corrupt as a dreg running his fiftieth scheme. They’ll sell us to the highest bidder.”

  “Soldiers will follow orders.”

  He was used to that, men and women carrying out his commands without question. He was Rip Rykus, hero of Gaeles Minor, scourge of the senate anomaly hearings, and a tough-as-hell soldier who crushed his enemies. He’d never been in a position where he had to deal with loyalty as fluid as a dark rift.

  “Drop the cuff,” Chace said again. Some self-preserving instinct kept him from raising his weapon.

  “Rhys,” Ash said, doing her best to neutralize her voice and the need-to-kill compulsion buzzing in her veins. “The Coalition sends its worst soldiers here, the ones who are one wrong word away from a discharge. We can’t trust them.”

  His jaw clenched hard.

  “We need to board the capsule before it leaves,” he said, using that scary-ass talent of his to keep his voice steady and cool.

  “I’ll make sure you get there,” Ash said.

  “Did you not hear the word we?”

  She gave him a little, insouciant shrug. “Selective hearing, remember?”

  He’d thrown those two words at her time and again on Caruth. They were usually followed by orders to haul rocks from one side of the training facility to the other. The reference to their past worked though. Her victory was in the breath he let out and the not-quite-concealed warmth in his eyes.

  She turned back to the terminal before she reacted to that look, but he didn’t let her escape his influence. He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “How much longer do you need?”

  His breath tickled her ear, and she had to fight the instinct to lean into him.

  She stared down at the screen, well aware that he stared down at her. His height, his strength, his command of the room, all the things that made him him coiled through her like an ever-pulsing flare of light. Maybe she should capsule out with him.

  “Ash,” he said, his tone a gentle reprimand.

  A corner of her mouth pitched into a smile. “It’s done. Or it will be in a few minutes.”

  He glanced at the terminal, and if she hadn’t been familiar with his nuances, the almost unnoticeable changes in body language, she would have missed the flicker of incredulity in his gaze.

  That flare in her stomach pulsed hotter. She could still impress him, still obliterate his expectations. She loved doing that.

  When he looked back at her, his gaze lingered on her eyes before dropping to her mouth.

  “If you don’t want me to kiss you,” he said, his voice a low, quiet rumble, “we need to move.”

  “It’s not a matter of want.” She brushed against him as she turned toward the exit. She thought she might have heard the heavy thump of his heart beat, but she couldn’t keep her focus on him. Chace was watching her, not the corridor. Mira stood near him in midconversation, staring down at the comm-cuff in her hand until she realized Chace wasn’t listening. She looked up, then followed his line of sight to Ash.

  Ash made sure her expression concealed all hints of emotion. “You need something?”

  Chace matched her cool tone. “Just watching our backs.”

  “You’re supposed to be watching the corridor,” she said.

  But the corridor wasn’t where the attack came from.

  The clinks, the scuffs, the little thumps that had tweaked her attention solidified into a picture in an instant when movement registered high in her peripheral vision.

  She looked up in time to see the small gap in a ceiling square.

  The flash grenade dropped, and just like she had on board her team’s shuttle two months ago, she shouted a warning. And just like two months ago, she covered her face with an arm and dove for the ground. And just like two months ago, the blast knocked her unconscious.

  10

  Rykus despised being on the wrong end of flash grenades.

  The cacophony banged inside his skull, ricocheting from one side to the other until his equilibrium was shot to hell. Not that balance would help him when he was sprawled out on the floor.

  He rolled onto his right side and reach
ed for his Covar, but his perception was off. The three blurry images of the weapon were all out of reach.

  He hoped his screwed-up vision was tripling the number of people dropping from the ceiling. They were everywhere. The nearest enemy approached, yelling something Rykus’s shattered hearing couldn’t translate. The man wore military garb and was camouflaged with a layer of dust and dirt that might as well have said he’d crawled up the ventilation shaft.

  He pointed a rifle at Rykus’s chest. Rykus watched its barrel weave back and forth until the blur solidified into a single point. His clearing vision didn’t improve the situation though. The room might not be filled with triple the number of bad guys, but the probability of surviving this attack wasn’t great.

  He looked away from the rifle to find the one person in the room who didn’t give a damn about the odds. Ash was a good three meters away, lying facedown on the floor. Breathing but not moving.

  Two men strode toward her.

  “Hey!” Rykus yelled. The rifle jabbed into his chest as one of the men kicked Ash’s ribs. She curled up, protecting herself. The move was so un-Ash-like Rykus’s reality slowed and stuttered.

  It was like watching a vid replay at half speed. Ash let the man grab her, let him shove her to her back and put his weapon in her face despite having the perfect opportunity to execute a Creisian arms switch. She didn’t put up any fight at all, not even when the man grabbed her face.

  Rykus let his hold on his rage go, accepted the risk, and grabbed the rifle with both hands, knocking its trajectory up and over his shoulder.

  Every weapon opened fire.

  The booms and blasts lasted no more than five seconds before silence retook the room.

  Rykus should have been strafed with bullets, should have had holes in his chest, pouring out rivers of red. Ash, Chace, and Mira should have been staring lifelessly across the room with their heads split open and brain matter splattered across the floor, but not one of them had a fatal injury, and Chace was grinning at the newcomers who’d rushed through the door.

  They wore the hooded longcoats Glory’s gangs were enamored with. Despite the swaths of black material covering the lower portions of their faces, Chace greeted them as if he’d known they’d appear.