Shades of Allegiance

by Sandy Williams

  She laughed. The sound escaped her and unwound that tension strangling her chest. “You’ve dated a few delicate women in your lifetime.”

  “Not delicate. Just not you.” He tried to scowl. It didn’t work. There weren’t storm clouds behind his eyes.

  “There aren’t a thousand things wrong,” she said. “Just two or three. And I’ve got them.”

  His stern glower didn’t work either, especially not when his gaze locked onto her mouth. A current of hot energy shot through her core. She wasn’t used to this, the way one look could set her off-balance. She loved the dizziness, the way he kept her from remaining steady where she stood. He was a warship rattling beneath her feet, and she lived for pushing him off course.

  Now there were storms in his eyes, the strong, powerful kind that could resurface continents. His thumb traced the curve of her jaw. “You don’t have to wear a disguise with me.”

  “Good.” The last of her worries vanished. She tugged hard on his belt.

  Fire obliterated the last remnants of fear in Ash’s eyes.

  He kissed her, letting her unfasten his belt. His hands dropped to the curve of her ass. A squeeze and she complied, hopping up to wrap her long legs around his waist.

  Seeker’s God, he loved how receptive she was, how quickly her body reacted to his, her lips parting, her tongue meeting his. Her arousal permeated the air.

  Teeth scraped across his lower lip. Her fingers dug into the muscles of his shoulders. She tilted her head back, giving him access to her throat but also shifting her center of gravity backward. He kissed her neck and let the momentum pull him forward until she hit the transport’s console. He rested her there so he could yank off her shirt.

  She pulled off his.

  Her bra disappeared next. Then his pants. Hers. Skin to skin, he pressed into her. The console beneath her flashed, its screen enlarging the image of Caruth. He made an attempt to turn it off, but Ash’s hand encircled him.

  “God, Ash.” The words almost sounded like a plea. Maybe they were because he needed to be inside her. She was his mission, his universe. He would destroy galaxies to keep her in his arms.

  The screen flashed again. He didn’t have the coordination or willpower to seek out the Off button. He kissed her lips, her cheek. He sucked her ear between his teeth, then pressed his mouth to that sensitive spot beneath her jaw, all while she worked him to the edge of his control. Almost past it.

  He kissed down her neck, then to her shoulder, then he palmed a breast and flicked his tongue over her nipple.

  She made a sound of desperation, a sound that almost undid him.

  He gripped her wrist, making her go still until he hooked one of her legs over his shoulder, opening her to him.

  She guided him inside. He drove in deep and stayed there, just for a moment, just long enough for her eyes to meet his, for the lust in them to turn to connection, for her to know she was his and he was hers.

  She gripped the back of his neck and pulled him down.

  He kissed her. Her hands clutched at his shoulders. Her fingernails dug in, but he didn’t feel the pierce of his skin. He felt only her heat wrapped around him and a hot, rising pleasure as he pumped into her.

  Ash’s head tilted back on a moan. He put a hand to the side of her throat, and she gasped out a breath, left herself vulnerable to him. He nipped at the delicate skin, and her body jerked. He loved her reactions, her little mews, the way she met him thrust for thrust.

  “Rip,” she whispered.

  He gave her some kind of unintelligible response and placed both her feet on the edge of the console. The screen beneath her flickered and flashed as he drove into her harder and faster, the pleasure rising, building, crescendoing from a precipice he needed to jump off.

  She reached the top first. Her cry pushed him over the edge. He came inside her, thrusting until he was spent, then he wrapped her in his arms and held her while the aftershocks vibrated through both their bodies.

  He pulled her off the console, then collapsed with her on the floor against the wall, keeping her close, letting their heartbeats slow, their breaths even out.

  Lights flashed and flickered across the console.

  “I think we might be off course,” Ash said.

  He laughed and tightened his arm around her. “Let me know when you’re ready for another detour.”

  27

  They landed in the late afternoon, gave the customs attendant direct orders not to notify anyone of their arrival, then they hired a shuttle to take them north of the city to the head of a hiking trail. It was just before nightfall when Ash veered off the marked path and took them to the edge of a dry creek bed. Its black rocks were smooth from the seasonal rains, which would return in another few weeks. The forest would turn into a tree-filled swamp for two months after that before it dried out again. Then the cycle would repeat. The short, extreme seasons made Caruth ideal for military training.

  There weren’t any obvious signs that someone had passed through the creek bed previously, but when he paid attention, he noted a partial shoe tread in the dirt and more than one shoulder-high broken twig. Whoever had passed through there before had taken care to cover their tracks.

  He expected Ash to take them underground. When she didn’t, and they were approximately two kilometers from the base, he grew worried. “The perimeter is monitored by satellite.”

  “Heat signature, yes.” She stepped up onto a rocky ledge. “But this path just happens to be on a sliver that isn’t covered between the hours of 2100 and 2300.”

  “How do you know that?” he asked, irritation slipping into his voice. Ash shouldn’t have had access to the satellite data. “And how many times did you sneak on and off base?”

  “Once,” she said with a laugh. “Only once. I promise.”

  He hopped onto the ledge, then grabbed her around the waist. “I’m not sure I believe you.”

  She turned in his arms. “I had to survive all the hell you put us through. I couldn’t do that without the very few hours of sleep you allowed us.”

  He gave a noncommittal grunt, then he kissed her.

  And she kissed him back.

  Seeker’s God, he loved this woman. She had this way of teasing her tongue along his lip that made his mind zero in only on her. An entire unit of soldiers could have come barreling through the forest, and he wouldn’t have noticed. He needed her in his life and not just this brief moment in time. He needed her for the rest of it.

  Her fingers tickled the back of his neck as she pressed her hips against his. Their time in transit hadn’t been enough. He wanted her again. He wanted to be irresponsible and continue their past pattern of intense, badly timed sex.

  She made a sound that nearly shred the last of his self-control, but just when he’d decided that sex right now was the best idea ever, she broke the kiss.

  “Shit,” she said.

  He clenched his teeth together and kept very still. Ash’s green eyes were locked on his, her face was flushed, and her chest rose and fell with her breaths.

  “I need to move,” she said.

  “You need to move?”

  She grinned and backed away another step. “You started that.”

  “That was a quick apology for putting you through hell. You made it more than that.”

  She laughed and grabbed his hand. “Come on, Rip.”

  He followed her with a smile that turned forced. One of those images Tahn had plucked from his thoughts—a dead, unmoving Ash—rammed its way into his mind. He tried to block it out, but he couldn’t shake it. He couldn’t stop seeing her hurt and injured and almost dead on Ysbar Station. He saw her unconscious on Tahn’s ship. He saw her in the damn psyche-mask again, locked inside the training facility’s medical ward.

  “I never told you how I was injured,” Ash said ahead of him.

  He did his best to focus on her now. It helped that he knew the night she was talking about. It was right before Drop Day, the last chance for anomalie
s to exit the program before undergoing the loyalty training and receiving their first booster injections. She’d returned to base early and injured, and Rykus had caught her, literally caught her, when her knees had given out in the shower while she attempted to erase evidence of a fight she shouldn’t have been involved in.

  There were a lot of words said that night and a lot more unsaid. He would have discharged her from the program if I-Comm hadn’t wanted her to graduate so badly. If he’d turned her in, the Intelligence Committee would have transferred her to another instructor, and for reasons he hadn’t realized at the time, that had been unacceptable.

  He ducked beneath a branch. “I figured you picked a fight with one too many assholes.”

  She snorted. “No. You made it very clear we’d be expelled if we fought outside the base. I had to be on my best behavior.”

  Something loosened in his chest, and he let out a laugh. “Best behavior.”

  She looked over her shoulder and smiled. Leaf-filtered moonlight cascaded over her, and his not-yet-relaxed body reacted with a visceral twinge of desire. She was strong and beautiful, and when she dropped her pretenses and they were alone like this, she was fun. She had a sense of humor buried beneath her performances and flirtations.

  Focus, man.

  “I was heading back to the hotel,” she said, continuing on the path. “I’d just left the Melting Star when I heard a fight in the alley. I wouldn’t have stopped if I hadn’t noticed it was one man against six. I was going to just get their attention and hope the person they were attacking ran. Then I recognized who it was.”

  It was an anomaly, most likely. Probably one of his. It took six months to get Ash to work with the other recruits as a team. Once she stopped clinging to her independence and started to trust them, she always had their backs. She wouldn’t turn them in for anything even if it meant her taking on extra runs and maintenance duties.

  “It was Arek,” Ash said.

  The next branch nearly hit him in the face.

  “Arek?”

  “That was exactly my reaction,” she said.

  Arek was the last person in the KU he would have guessed. The man was the only instructor who was also an anomaly, and he was… reclusive. He would show up when Rykus and the other instructors went out for drinks, but he wasn’t big on conversation.

  “Since he was an anomaly, an instructor, and a scary SOB,” Ash said, “I figured he could handle himself. I was going to run, but two more men came out of the bar. I think he might have wanted to get his ass kicked because he wasn’t really fighting until I got involved, and then he was a machine. Most of the guys wised up and ran, but one wasn’t quick enough. Arek was pummeling him. I wasn’t sure he was going to stop, so I moved in to pull him off. I was too focused on him and not on one of the injured men crawling back to his feet. I ended up with a broken bottle in my side. I wasn’t on boosters yet, and that sucker bled. By the time we trekked back to base and I made it to the shower, I was well beyond woozy.”

  “You could have told me,” he said.

  “You wanted to boot me from the program. Besides, I swore I’d keep my mouth shut.” She paused, looked over her shoulder. “Maybe don’t mention this conversation to Arek.”

  “This leads to his quarters, doesn’t it?”

  She grinned. “Now you know why I only used this path once.”

  He just shook his head and followed.

  Twenty minutes later, they reached an almost invisible split in the earth. Brush and dirt covered the narrow entrance, which looked to be part of a drainage system that predated the base. Ash tapped on her comm-cuff, lighting up the damp, metal walls.

  Damp and cramped.

  “You sure I’m not going to get stuck in there?” he asked.

  “Arek fit. You can fit.”

  He had to turn sideways, and even then, his gear scraped the culvert’s sides. It was a slow process, crouching through the tunnel with a slippery layer of sludge beneath their feet. It didn’t smell good either. By the time the culvert angled upward and dried out, he wasn’t sure if the odor had disappeared or if he’d just become used to it.

  It felt like they traveled a good ten kilometers underground, but it was probably closer to one when Ash finally stopped at what looked like a dead end.

  “Made it,” she whispered. “Guess I should knock.”

  “He’s not someone you want to spook.”

  She made a sound of agreement, then tapped three times on the flat, metal surface. When the silence stretched long enough, she pushed her shoulder into the wall. It scraped against the ground, creating new scratches on an old wooden floor. It was either a locker or another heavy cabinet. She moved it far enough for them both to slip free, then turned around.

  “Should we w—”

  A hand wrenched her from the tunnel.

  “Wait!” Rykus shoved his way out the small opening. Arek already had Ash on the ground, already had his fist hammering down toward her face.

  She hooked her leg around his and rolled.

  “Arek,” Rykus yelled.

  Ash couldn’t evade his second punch, but Arek stopped himself millimeters from her nose.

  “You,” he said, staring down at Ash.

  “And Rykus,” she pointed out. “Maybe don’t kill me just yet?”

  Arek straightened, pulling Ash upright too with a fistful of her shirt.

  “Sorry,” Rykus said. “I didn’t know we were invading your quarters until half an hour ago. We have a problem, and we needed access to the base without alerting Rohn. You can let her go.”

  Arek still had a tight grip on her shirt. Fortunately, Ash wasn’t struggling at the moment, but she wasn’t the type of person to act docile for long.

  “Rohn,” Arek said.

  “He is an enemy and a threat to the Coalition. I can’t explain more than that now.”

  Arek didn’t respond. He just stood there holding Ash’s shirt. For a really long time.

  A wave of uneasiness went through him. Arek was an anomaly. Rohn had been an instructor of Caruth for almost three years now. What if Rohn had been messing with his head?

  “Ash?” Rykus questioned.

  She licked her lips. “I think he’s okay.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m not an expert. I…” She swallowed. “Have you, by chance, been telepathically fucked with? Sir.”

  Ash’s description of Arek as a machine fit him well. He had no expression on his face. No little tell that indicated her question surprised or confused him.

  Rykus’s fingers itched to reach for the nonlethal Syra60 holstered at his back. It would drop a normal man for two to three minutes. With Arek, they might get a good twenty seconds.

  “Explain.” Arek released Ash’s shirt with a little shove.

  “That’s what happened to me,” Ash said. “Jevan Valt screwed with my mind, subverted the loyalty training, and programmed me with orders to kill Rykus and Dr. Monick. That’s why they put me back in the psyche-mask two months ago.”

  Arek looked at him.

  Rykus nodded. “It’s true. Minister Prime Tersa knows. The war chancellor knows. And a few other select people. They can confirm after we take Rohn into custody.”

  He waited for a response. He wouldn’t call Arek a friend—the man was too private to build relationships with people—but they’d never had a conflict other than the normal rivalry that existed between the instructors. They each tried to be the best at their jobs, making sure only the most skilled and stable anomalies made it to Drop Day. Rykus had won that competition every year by having the highest tap-out rate, and he’d never had an anomaly snap after graduating, although for a short period of time, he’d thought he’d lost Ash.

  “Rohn is in the institute,” Arek said.

  Damn it. “How many has he loyalty trained?”

  “More than half.”

  “They might need to be watched,” Rykus said. “There’s a good chance he can communicate with them telep
athically.”

  Arek walked to the cabinet they’d pushed aside, opened it, and took out a Kinetic A88 rifle.

  “You’re really not questioning this much,” Ash said. “It’s suspicious.”

  “Rohn is an asshole.” Arek swung the rifle over his shoulder, then headed for the stairs.

  Rykus waited until the man left the basement. “You sure he’s okay?”

  “No, but unless you feel like taking him down, we have to trust him.”

  They followed Arek up the stairs and found him standing by a folding table that had been pushed up against a wall. Laid out in a nice, neat line was a sidearm, two Foil8 expanding ammunition magazines, a sheathed knife, a compact trauma kit, and a flash grenade. He picked the items up one by one and slotted them into his combat belt.

  “You’re, um, prepared,” Ash said.

  Prepared or paranoid, Rykus thought. Neither one was exactly out of character for the instructor.

  “What’s the plan?” Arek asked.

  Rykus looked at Ash, watching that little crease between her brows. She eventually smoothed it out, and her expression changed to one of resolve.

  “Where are they keeping Valt?” she asked.

  He turned, took two steps to the kitchen table, the only solid-looking piece of furniture visible in his quarters, and tapped on its embedded screen.

  Rykus moved to stand beside him, then he looked down at the aerial view of the anomaly training grounds. The area covered six hundred and fifty square kilometers that curled around the Tamori Mountains. The anomalies spent the majority of their time in the southern part of the territory. The city of Arcadis had grown right up to the east border, and the dry creek bed he and Ash had followed cut into the base’s southwest corner. The large swath of land between the city and mountains held the main drill fields, which were studded with buildings that were used for teaching martial arts, engineering, hack-sig, and a thousand other subjects the Coalition wanted its most deadly soldiers to learn.

  Rykus’s gaze locked on the white-roofed building that was closest to the east border. That was the institute, the place where anomalies were taken to get their first injection and boosters and, afterward, to receive the loyalty training that turned them into the most devoted soldiers any government could ever want.