Shades of Allegiance

by Sandy Williams

  “Trevast,” Ash said after Chace exited. “Why were you communicating with him, and why did you order him to kill me?”

  Those cold blue eyes studied her.

  “It wasn’t personal,” Tahn said after a moment. “Standing orders. He was to eliminate anyone who knew about our existence.”

  “I didn’t know about you. Not then.”

  “It was a matter of time, and you were a liability. Things would have been much simpler if he’d followed protocol, but he never liked to fall in line.”

  “He was your informant.”

  “Not a very good one,” Tahn said with a shrug. “Had he not been important to me, I would have had him replaced. He was too selective with the information he passed on. Guilty conscience or some such nonsense.”

  “What are the factions?”

  Tahn’s eyes widened just perceptibly. “Told you a lot, did he?”

  “Jevan put a bullet in his head. His last words were to fight the factions.”

  Tahn’s mouth turned down.

  Rykus didn’t like this. He didn’t like Ash being so far away. Ignoring the snipers overhead and the dread creeping over his spine, he closed the distance between them and took her hand.

  Her gaze shot to his like she hadn’t noticed him move. That wasn’t like her, and her stillness, the tightness in her eyes, in her jaw, her shoulders, made him want to draw his Covar.

  Then she squeezed his hand. He squeezed back, his heart finding a little more room to beat. She was still okay.

  No, not entirely okay. She was hurt.

  He met Tahn’s eyes. “I need to get her to medical care.”

  Ash shook her head and pulled her hand from his. “Tell me about the factions. Tell me how many telepaths have infiltrated the Coalition’s military and government. Tell me what the endgame is.”

  Tahn cocked his head. “Why would I do that?”

  Careful, Ash, Rykus thought. One of Tahn’s men stood behind her with his arms crossed, his fingers tapping on the gun he held like he was counting the seconds that passed. Something in his stance, in the way he held himself and watched them, made Rykus think he was tuned in to comm chatter even though he saw no sign of an earpiece.

  “Because they were my family,” she said. “Trevast was my brother. It doesn’t matter what he did for you, he was one of mine. I will kill everyone responsible for the deaths of my team.”

  “Including me?”

  “Including you.”

  The man behind Ash uncrossed his arms. It would take less than a second for him to lift his gun and put a hole in the back of Ash’s head.

  “Trevast mentioned your immortality complex.” Tahn took a step forward. “You are misguided if you think you can touch me. Your shields are nonexistent.”

  Ash stumbled backward.

  “Ash!” Rykus caught her arm, kept her upright. Her face scrunched up in pain.

  Right before he decided to go for his gun and blow Tahn’s head off, Ash went silent and still.

  Rykus froze. His heart thudded louder than a battle in his ears. He said her name again, but her eyes were locked on Tahn. Her hands balled into fists, and it was like nothing else existed in the universe except for the man in front of her.

  If Tahn had control—

  Ash launched herself at the crime lord. Her fist clipped his chin.

  Tahn fell backward. Before he hit the ground, Rykus tackled Ash. He expected the impact of the snipers’ bullets, expected Ash to struggle against his grip, expected this to be the end.

  He didn’t expect the chuckle that came from Tahn.

  “I see why Trevast liked you,” he said, rubbing his jaw. “No. Don’t shoot them yet.”

  “Stay out of my head,” Ash snarled.

  Damn it, he had to get her out of there. He pulled her back to her feet and let his thumb slide along her inner wrist, trying to soothe her.

  “A transport is waiting outside.” Tahn stood and wiped a droplet of blood from his lower lip. “My ship has superb medical facilities. We will talk there.”

  “We talk here,” Ash said.

  Tahn smiled. “I know this might come as a shock, but I am not here to have a conversation with you. I’m here to speak with the commander.”

  Ash stiffened in his arms. Slowly Rykus shifted his attention from her to Tahn.

  “What?” he asked.

  Tahn smoothed a wrinkle from his shirt and tugged his sleeves straight. “It’s a pleasure to meet you in person after all these years. Had I known you’d become the hero of Gaeles Minor and an instructor of Caruth, I would have arranged a meeting a decade ago.”

  “I’m here for the same reason she is,” Rykus said. Tahn’s two remaining men moved closer. Above, he heard one of the snipers shift.

  “In a way,” Tahn agreed. He stepped back and motioned toward the peeled open wall. “Please. The matter we need to discuss is important.”

  Smoke and fire still decorated the bent metal and rubble. Exiting that way would have been suicidal except a bright orange foam suddenly sprayed over the gap. It hardened when it touched the surface, extinguishing flames and creating a makeshift bridge over the debris.

  Their situation was already bad. Going to Tahn’s ship, which would be filled with Tahn’s people, would make it worse.

  “Commander,” the crime lord said. “I’m sure you know Ash is hurt more than she lets on. My people will take care of her.”

  Hell. They didn’t have a choice. Tahn wanted to talk to him, not to Ash. If he wanted Rykus on his ship, he’d get him on his ship. If Ash didn’t go with him…

  Well, he doubted they’d leave her alive.

  “We stay together,” Rykus said. “And you stay out of her head.”

  Ash shook her head. “No. We’re not going to his ship.”

  “Yes, you will,” Tahn said, clasping his hands behind his back once again. “You will because I have all the answers you’re searching for.”

  23

  Ash couldn’t think. She could barely breathe. The telepaths were everywhere, knocking against her consciousness like the flying crickets of Ghent. She wanted to take a flamethrower to them, wanted to watch them puff into ashes and fall.

  Their transport eased inside the warship’s docking bay.

  Rykus placed his hand on her jumping leg. She forced it to go still. Forced her fists to loosen on her lap.

  Her gaze darted toward the cockpit. That’s where Tahn was, sitting beside his pilot and one of his men. The rest of them—the three snipers and four others—sat toward the front, chatting between themselves like this was any ordinary day. They’d attempted to help her when they first came on board. Ash had said something. She couldn’t remember what, but the result had been Rykus stepping between them. He’d told her to sit, taken the med-kit from the telepaths, and attended to her wounds himself.

  He was a calm, collected presence, while she was completely out of control. She felt the chaos of her composure and couldn’t do a thing about it. They were in a small, confined space with ten telepaths, and they were docking with a huge ship that held…

  Hell. She couldn’t count them all.

  Her leg started jumping again.

  “I need you to calm down,” Rykus said, his voice a low murmur.

  She shook her head.

  “Ash.” His thumb slid over her knee. “He wants something from us. Let’s not give him a—”

  “From you,” she said. “What the fuck does he want from you?”

  “I don’t know, but we have time to figure it out. Tahn isn’t impulsive.”

  “You’ve only read the dry reports the Coalition puts together. He might need you to answer a question. Once you do—”

  “He wouldn’t have brought you if he intended to kill you. If he just had a question for me, he would have asked it on Glory and assassinated both of us there. He wants my cooperation.”

  “He—” She squeezed her teeth together. God, she was never like this, never so scattered and volatile, but e
very time she almost pulled herself together, she remembered Hauch. She remembered Mira.

  “I know,” she said, her throat raw. “I know and I can’t. I…” She closed her eyes. “I need you to order it.”

  The transport slipped into the docking clamps with a thud.

  “What?”

  “Order it. Command it. Just… make me calm.”

  He stared at her. It was unfair what she was asking him. She knew that, knew how much he despised the loyalty training, but if he did nothing, she was going to kill every single telepath who looked at her wrong.

  Rykus’s jaw clenched. “You can calm yourself down.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I’m not commanding you.”

  “This is your job,” she grated out. “You’re supposed to keep me from snapping!”

  “You’re not going to snap.”

  She dug her fingers into her elbows. “Rykus—”

  “No.” He stood suddenly.

  Tahn’s men stopped chatting.

  Ash locked her attention on them. She watched their hands, making sure none moved toward their weapons. If they did… Well, they hadn’t confiscated Rykus’s weapon. It was right there at eye level. She could draw it and kill at least half the telepaths before they took her out.

  Before they took them both out.

  She forced her gaze to the floor. Forced herself to breathe. If she acted, Rykus was dead. She couldn’t act.

  She couldn’t.

  Suddenly the crickets around her disappeared.

  Her eyes shot up.

  Tahn stood just inside the cabin.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “No.” Slowly she stood.

  “You don’t sense anything?” he asked.

  “I—” She stopped. Did she feel something? If she focused on Tahn, he disappeared like a distant star in a black sky. But if she didn’t focus directly on him, there was something there, something like a faint glow in her peripheral vision.

  “Interesting,” Tahn said. His presence flared an instant, and one of his men opened the transport door. “Shall we?”

  “How do you do that?” Ash asked.

  Tahn’s mouth twitched into a smile. “We keep our hands to ourselves, so to speak. Please.”

  She stared out the door. There wasn’t a choice anymore. They were inside Tahn’s ship. He wanted her off the transport. If she didn’t do as he asked, he had a shipload of telepaths waiting, none of which were “keeping their hands to themselves” at the moment.

  She knew better than to walk into a new environment without good intel. Rykus knew it too, but he moved to the exit.

  This hadn’t been her plan. The plan had been to bring Tahn to Glory and to stay on Glory. She’d known he had ties to Scius, but she hadn’t expected him to walk into Scius’s compound the moment she killed the boss. She thought she’d have time to enlist help from old connections, patch her wounds, rescue Hauch.

  The soldier’s death-pale face flashed in her mind. Her stomach hurt as if she had a dagger lodged in it.

  Ash had failed. She’d let Hauch and Mira die, and she’d left their bodies behind just like she’d left hundreds of others five years ago when her scheme had gone to hell.

  Ash braced a hand on the wall beside the open door. She didn’t want to leave the transport. Every instinct screamed for her to get out of there. To get Rykus out of there. She couldn’t protect him from a ship full of telepaths. Not with two bullet holes in her shoulder and older injuries that hadn’t healed. The only reason she was upright was because she’d injected a booster.

  Rykus left the transport. She forced herself to follow, stepping onto the docking bay’s deck. It was like crawling into her own grave. If she looked up, a thousand Jevan Valts would be laughing down at her, tossing in handfuls of dirt.

  Two people waited a few meters away, a woman and a man. The woman stood with her feet set wide and arms crossed. She’d pulled her hair into a tight braid down the center of her head. Darkly lined eyes and a deep red lipstick accentuated her pale face, and she looked at Ash as if she were a slime bug not worthy of being smashed by her boot.

  The man beside her wasn’t as tense. His face was marred by frown lines, and his shirt was untucked, his gray pants impressively wrinkled. He scanned Ash from head to toe before his mouth twisted into a scowl.

  Both were telepaths.

  Ash’s fight-or-flight instinct rioted in her chest, causing her heart to beat faster and the blood in her veins to burn like electricity that needed to escape.

  The woman’s eyes narrowed, but it was the man who stepped forward and drew something from the belt looped around his waist.

  Ash hit his wrist, knocking the device from his hand to hers. She pointed it at the woman, who’d lost a second uncrossing her arms to draw her weapon.

  “Stop.” Tahn stepped into view, walked right up to Ash, and with thumb and forefinger, he plucked the device from her hand. “Careful, Doctor. This one’s skittish.”

  He returned the tool—a bio-scanner of some sort, not a weapon—to the man.

  “Cas,” Tahn said to the woman. “Let’s not kill our guests without permission.”

  “Our guests”—she practically spat the word—“shouldn’t make quick moves.”

  Ash took a smooth step toward her. “I can kill you slowly then.”

  One corner of Cas’s mouth curved into a smile. “Ramie Ashdyn. Lone survivor of the Chalos II massacre. Some say the cause of it. Tell me. Did you lift a finger to save Trevast’s life?”

  Ash lunged for the woman, but pain slashed through her mind, and her knees hit the deck. She might have screamed. She couldn’t tell because a phantom blade cut off everything except the hurt. She needed that blade gone, needed to push it out so her synapses could reconnect, but Cas’s mental fingers were as intrusive as the electrodes of the psych-mask on Caruth. They pricked her scalp and she thrashed, trying to shake off the—

  The pain vanished. It went from debilitating to nonexistent so quickly Ash couldn’t adjust to the artificial gravity. Her arms buckled, and she fell to her side, nauseated and dizzy. It took several more seconds to bring the docking bay back into focus and to make sense of the sounds inside it.

  “She’s okay, Commander.” Tahn’s voice from her left. She looked that way, saw her fail-safe flattened beneath three men.

  A pair of boots moved into her vision. The doctor bent down. Before she could react, he pressed an injector against her neck.

  She swung at him, but it was a weak, uncoordinated motion.

  Her arms buckled beneath her. She tried to push up. No luck. A prickling numbness spread through her body. The edges of her vision darkened. She managed to grab the doctor’s leg, but her fingers wouldn’t tighten. They wouldn’t pull him toward her so she could beat the ever-living hell out of him.

  She fought the weight of her eyelids, but whatever concoction he injected her with must have been formulated for anomalies. Her vision blurred, and everything went black.

  The doctor and two other men escorted them through Tahn’s ship. They’d strapped Ash to a rolling cot. Rykus walked beside it, one hand on her arm. He tried to pay attention to the ship, to the route they took and the number of people they passed, but most of his attention remained on Ash. With her metabolism, she should wake any moment, and when she did, she’d be pissed.

  He hadn’t been close enough to stop her from antagonizing the telepaths before. He hadn’t been close enough to help when they’d hurt her. He intended to be close from now on. She was drowning in her fears. She needed his support.

  But she didn’t need him to command her.

  His free hand tightened into a fist. The insult of that request hadn’t faded. He’d almost exploded when she’d asked. He wanted to explode now. He wanted to yell and argue and fight.

  He just wanted her to wake up.

  “What did you inject her with?” he asked the doctor.

  “A sedative.” The man didn’t glance up from
his comm-cuff, not even when he turned toward the door sliding open to his right.

  Rykus followed him into the med-bay. “Her metabolism is among the highest out of every population in the KU, and the booster she injects increases that. If you gave her a common sedative, she’d be awake by now.”

  “Over there,” Doc said, pointing toward a space beside a panel with multiple screens and medical boxes.

  He didn’t roll the cot a millimeter farther. After nearly a minute, the doctor looked up and realized his order wasn’t being followed.

  “Yes, yes. A fascinating metabolism.” He looked back at his comm-cuff. “I wasn’t sure I had the right blood sample because…” He waved his hand at Ash’s blood-covered body. “Anyway, I modi—”

  “You had a sample of Ash’s blood?”

  “She grabbed this.” He held up the medical device Ash had held for all of three seconds. “I modified the sedative specifically to the sample.” He used a cloth to wipe it clean, then walked to the med-panels. One of the boxes opened, and he placed the device inside. “It’s much better than a generic concoction that clouds minds and leaves people groggy for hours. Fortunately, it appears the mix worked because…” Again, he waved his hand toward Ash. “I’ll be able to wake her clearheaded when I choose.”

  The doctor’s attention dropped back to his comm-cuff.

  “Do it now,” Rykus said, his voice deepening with authority.

  Doc’s chin lifted as if he was about to meet Rykus’s gaze, but his eyes remained on his screen like he’d miss something important if he looked away.

  Rykus released the cot’s railing and, ignoring the two armed men behind him, took a step toward the doctor.

  “Wake her.”

  “Uhhh.” Doc struggled to look up from his cuff again. He only managed to do it after one of the guards issued Rykus a warning.

  Doc fastened his cuff around his wrist. “Apologies. I haven’t studied a loyalty-trained anomaly before. She is perfectly fine though. Really, her regenerative ability is impressive. Do all Caruth’s anomalies begin to heal so quickly? Without any rest or treatment?”

  Rykus stared.