Cypher (The Dragon's Bidding Book 2)

by Christina Westcott

  “Hell, it makes a lot of sense. That explains how he knew to use Wolf’s access codes, why he could lay all those false trails and find his way out of the building so easily.” If she thought it would be a nightmare to hunt down a man wearing her partner’s body, how much worse if that usurper had access—even at only a deep, gut level—to all of Wolf’s knowledge, skills, and deviousness?

  Ski stormed into the room, kicking the door when it didn’t retract fast enough. She stalked to the processor, pawing through the entries with a balled up fist.

  “Yig’s balls, doesn’t this bitch have any alcohol in it?” By the end of the sentence she was shouting. “Rum, whiskey, hell, I’ll take coolant tank hooch.” She settled for a cup of tea.

  “Liquor doesn’t have any effect on us,” Fitz pointed out.

  “I almost think life was easier as an alcoholic.”

  “What?”

  “What do you think I was doing when Wolf found me? Pickling my liver on some gerbat-infested mining colony, treating equally drunk miners. You’ve noticed he has a habit of finding lost souls, like some damn kid dragging home abandoned puppies.”

  “Kittens,” Jumper corrected.

  “Them, too. He’s like an enormous gas giant, dragging people into his orbit and settling them in nice, neat lives around him. Like me. And Fen Donkenny.”

  “And Bartonelli?” Fitz asked.

  The doctor sighed, reminded of her patient. “Now, she was an odd one. She came looking for him. I heard she tried to sign on with the Dragons, but was turned away because she didn’t have the experience. She found a unit that would take her, put in a couple of years, and came right back the next time we had an open enlistment. You’d almost think she’d appointed herself his personal guardian angel.”

  “She’s infatuated with him?” That would explain the animosity she sometimes felt from the merc.

  Ski shrugged. “Who knows? I do know it’ll tear him up when he learns what he did to her.”

  “It wasn’t him,” Fitz said. Jumper’s thoughts echoed her words.

  “No, but he’ll feel responsible for it. You know he will. He believes it’s his job to protect all his friends.”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed.” Fitz remembered the night he stepped in front of her, taking the shot meant to kill her.

  He’d trusted her with the life of his friend, and she’d failed to protect Bartonelli. “Will she be okay?”

  “If you’re asking me if she’ll live? I think so, but will she be the same as before? That I’m not so sure of. Spinal injuries are tricky, and he tore her up pretty bad. There’s only so much the nanites can do.”

  Fitz wrapped her arms around her stomach to hold back the wave of nausea climbing her throat.

  Ski continued. “She placed a life-codicil in her contract with the Dragons; most mercs have them. States that if she’s injured so badly she can’t function, she’d rather be released.”

  Something in the dead tone of the doctor’s voice told Fitz she wasn’t talking about a discharge from the unit.

  “Euthanasia?”

  Ski nodded, and tossed her empty cup in the recycler. “Yeah. I’d better head back and check on her.”

  “Wait, she knows about…about us. Have you talked to her about the symbiont?”

  “Becoming a Lazzinair? Yeah, we talked once. Said if she couldn’t die, she’d never make it to Heaven, or Nirvana, or wherever NeoBuddhists think they’re going to end up after they’ve reincarnated enough times. Course she was drunk at the time.”

  “We’re tough, but not indestructible. She’d still get her chance at Nirvana; it’ll just take a while.”

  Ski’s jaw worked as she considered that. “Yeah, but with that codicil in her file, I’d need her commanding officer to override it.”

  “Wolf’s not exactly available right at the moment.”

  “I suppose I could comm back to Rainbow and get Donkenny to sign off on it, but that would take a while.”

  “No need. Before Wolf went under, he assigned the sergeant to me. As I see it, that makes me her commanding officer.”

  A smile spread across the doctor’s freckled face. “Yes, yes it does.”

  “Then do it. We’ll worry about the fallout later. If you need any written authorization, send it to me. I’ll sign off on it.”

  “Sign off on what?” Braylin Pike asked as he stepped through the door. “Are we talking about Thylia? Is she going to be okay?”

  Fitz had seen lost puppies look happier than her young aide.

  The doctor pushed past him, patting his arm. “She’s going to be fine, Lieutenant, just fine.” Once she was behind him, she grinned at Fitz and rolled her eyes as she departed.

  Fitz fought to keep from returning the smile. When had those two found the time to get on a first name basis? “What do you have for me? I’m sure you didn’t come all the way from Headquarters just to ask about the sergeant.”

  Pike stammered, and a flush rose from beneath his uniform’s high black collar to cover his face. Perhaps he had chased her down only to inquire about Bartonelli.

  “It’s about the Triumvir…uh, Youngblood…uh…”

  “Why don’t we just refer to him as the suspect?” Fitz pulled her hair back into an untidy pony tail and straightened her torn jacket, stained and spotted with blood from the fight. “I need to shower and change. You can brief me on the way back.”

  Jumper trotted ahead of them as the pair headed to the lift.

  “All indications are that he, uh, the suspect…”

  “Wait.” Fitz pulled him to a stop as she ran a surveillance scan. No listening devices registered, but passive scans wouldn’t show up, and those could originate from far outside the building. She tapped her temple. “We’re in public, use your comm—level three beta.”

  They had changed all the encryption codes to prevent any former DIS agents from deciphering their transmissions. Without access to the new ones, their broadcast would appear to an eavesdropper as senseless babble.

  The lieutenant’s sub-vocalizations came across as a flat computer-generated voice inside her head. “I think he escaped the building almost immediately, but before he did, he penetrated the security system and shut down a bunch of feeds, setting up half a dozen diversionary routes. By the time we got enough people in here to check them all, he’d already escaped.”

  The lift car arrived, the door opening on two med-techs leaning against the wall chatting. They tensed as the two black-clad agents stepped aboard, shifting as far from the newcomers as possible. The SpecOps uniform had always engendered a healthy respect, but in the decade since Fitz had last been posted in Striefbourne City, that apprehension had morphed into outright fear. She could thank DIS for that. How long before the civilian population—and a good portion of the military—stopped seeing her as the enemy?

  She relaxed, clasped her hands in front of her, and feigned an air of indifference while she listened to Pike continue his report.

  “We think he went out one of the maintenance sub-levels. A surveillance camera came back with a 95.2 percent positive identification as he exited the underground two blocks from here. We lost him for a while, but he resurfaced in Six Corners. That’s a semi-legitimate commercial district on the edge of the Warren.”

  Fitz stepped from the lift and made for the exit to the rooftop landing pad. “I’m well aware of what Six Corners is, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Of course you are, Colonel FitzWarren.” He seemed to be reminding himself of the derivation of her name.

  The glare of sunlight blasted her vision to its lowest level as she pushed through the door and onto the landing pad. While she’d been worrying about Bartonelli’s outcome, night had given way to daylight. The cold front had passed, leaving the morning air crisp and the sun balanced above the horizon. A sleek black aircar waited, the SpecOps’ crossed swords insignia emblazoned on its side. Fitz walked around to open the pilot’s side. Flying might help take the ragged buzz off her nerves. �
��I’ll take left seat.”

  Pike scrambled to the other side, continuing his report aloud as the doors sealed and the suppression field kicked in. “After that we lost him. The enforcers report that they can’t keep any cameras operating in the Warren. No matter how well they conceal them, the units always disappear.”

  Fitz looked at him incredulously, then reminded herself that he came from an upper middle class family and had not the slightest idea what life in her former home was like. “There’s not much else for kids to do in there but hunt down the equipment and steal it. How do you think I made enough creds to eat regularly? We’d strip out the components and sell them to those semi-legitimate tech dealers in Six Corners.”

  “We could send in some drones to look for signs of him,” Pike said.

  Fitz snorted. “They wouldn’t last as long as the cameras. The gang bosses don’t want anyone watching what they’ve got going down, so they put a nice bounty on the drones. One of those could net me more than scrounging for cameras all day long.”

  Pike gave her a speculative glance. “I hadn’t realized you were so, ah… resourceful as a kid.”

  Fitz snugged down her seatbelt. “Why the hell do you think SpecOps recruited me?”

  She firewalled the throttle, and the aircar shot straight up, gees driving them down into their seats. Claws extended, Jumper clung to the center console as he flattened out like a furry pancake.

  Pike scrambled for his restraints while she tipped the car up on one wing to zip between two heavy haulers, then climbed through the traffic stream to break out into the clear airspace above, her transponder squawking to those nearby that they were Special Operations. Her aide kept one hand braced on the instrument panel, as if that would protect him if they collided with anything larger than an insect at this speed. Within minutes, she received her clearance to the imperial residence. The holographic dragons shrouding the palace flashed multicolored lights across the interior of the aircar as she rolled onto a final approach to the parking structure.

  Hoping to slip into the office unnoticed, they took a service lift down from the garage, but her Principal Staff Officer, Sergeant Devon Perez, waited there in ambush. She hadn’t stepped a foot out of the lift when he announced, “The Emperor wants to see you at your earliest convenience.”

  Although Jumper denied sensing it, Fitz had often thought Perez might be clairvoyant. He had the uncanny knack of locating her, no matter how hard she tried to evade him.

  “Can I at least take a shower first?” She stepped around him.

  “I don’t know; Her Imperialness sounded impatient.” Perez fell into step with her, moving with a decided limp. He’d been a marine until an injury cost him part of one leg. He’d been offered a cybernetic replacement but refused, choosing instead to command an office staff with the same iron discipline he’d used on his marines.

  “The Emperor is always impatient,” said Fitz. “Was it her?”

  “No, just her aide.”

  “Then I have time for a shower. When Ari herself calls and bites your head off, then I’ll hurry. Anything else?”

  “The report on Dr. DeWitt came in.”

  “Send it to my in-box.” With her life in free fall around her, the failure of a prototype weapon ranked as one of her lesser worries.

  “This could be important.”

  The edge in his voice made her halt and exchange a glance with Pike.

  “Send it to me,” her aide said. “If it’s anything I think you’ll need before your meeting with the Emperor, I’ll give you a quick briefing.”

  As her compiler, Pike could take a tangle of data, boil it down to its salient bits, break them apart, reassemble them, and see the patterns every other analyst missed. His connections were often tenuous, his conclusions far-fetched, but more often than not they were correct. The skill had won him his place as her aide.

  Fitz nodded her thanks and slipped through the back door into the minuscule apartment tucked behind her office. Little more than a couch, a processor, and a freshener, she’d spend far too many nights here of late. With Wolf gone, the home they shared felt empty and haunted by the ghosts of their laughter.

  Jumper scrambled up on the counter by the processor, an expectant gleam in his green eyes. At least he seemed to be feeling better, even if she couldn’t work up an appetite. She presented him with a double helping of liver in creamed gravy, slaking her own hunger with another hit of elixir. She stripped off her ruined uniform, removed the medals and collar pins, and tossed it into the recycler.

  When the water was as hot as she could stand, Fitz eased into the shower, letting the heat unwind the muscles in her back and neck. The bruises had finally faded, the cuts healed, but the bone-deep weariness remained, far down in her soul in a place even the symbiont couldn’t reach. She needed sleep, but without Wolf beside her that wasn’t going to happen. She leaned against the warm, wet tiles of the tiny shower stall. A few minutes of relaxation appeared to be all she would get.

  But here, too, there were ghosts. Only a few days ago, when Wolf brought the Fleet back in from their first maneuvers, he’d arrived at the royal residence to deliver his report to Ari, but stopped at Fitz’s office first, a bouquet of Blue Nova roses in his arms. They’d made love in this shower while the Emperor waited impatiently for his appearance. The sound of his chuckles and her soft moans seemed to echo from the hard, wet walls.

  Fitz slid down the slippery tiles into a tight ball of misery. The warm water running down her face disguised her tears. In the short time she’d known Wolf, she’d cried more than the rest of her life combined, because now she had something precious to lose. She’d thought she cared about her friends, Maks Kiernan particularly, but until the day that crazy mercenary walked into her life, she had no idea of the heights love could take her to, nor the depths of pain his loss could bring.

  A chime inside her head announced an incoming message. Devon Perez didn’t speak, but a single sentence printed across her inhead display.

  This time Ransahov called.

  Fitz reluctantly abandoned her warm sanctuary and toweled off. A tight black bodysuit of armorcloth went on first, then a new uniform. When she returned to her office, Braylin Pike perched on the corner of her desk, his face wearing the pinched frown that usually foreshadowed the delivery of particularly unsettling speculations.

  “The report on DeWitt?”

  He pursed his lips. “Yeah.”

  “Can this wait until after my meeting with Ransahov?”

  “It could…” His inflection on the last word tacked an unspoken but onto the sentence.

  Fitz sighed and punched up a cup of coffee. “But, it shouldn’t.” She dropped into the chair behind her desk. “Be quick about it.” At his nod, she asked, “What did he have to say about the failure of the grenade?”

  “Nothing. He was dead.” Pike drummed his fingers on his mouth as he paced.

  “Dead? How?”

  “Someone cut his throat. After breaking every bone in his body.”

  “Malick’s Hell. That sounds like the work of an augie.”

  “Yeah, it bore an uncanny resemblance to those political murders that were so common around here when DIS ran CyberOps.”

  She didn’t have to be a compiler to realize this headed in a direction she wasn’t going to like.

  “Looks like he planned to bolt,” Pike said. “They found several forged ident-cards and a ticket to Coronia Station. With the borders back open, from there he could disappear into the Midworlds, or even the Back of Beyond. He’d already transferred all his assets to a numbered bank account on Willcommin, but they pulled a few SpecOps strings and were able to retrieve the records. Seems he’s had sizable periodic deposits from a dummy corporation on Lemminkainen for the past four years, then two days ago it transferred in five hundred grand. Which, incidentally, disappeared from the account around the time DeWitt was getting beaten to death.”

  “This has all the ear marks of a DIS operation,” Fitz
said.

  The cat agreed. “Scratch up a pile of shit and you’re sure to find Tritico under anything that stinks that bad.”

  “So DeWitt’s been in Tritico’s pocket all along and he knew we were planning to hit that safe house down in the Kristavaar rainforest, but that’s a lot of money for giving Tritico a heads-up.”

  Pike stopped pacing, and dropped into the chair across the desk from her. “And he was running, like he didn’t want to hang around and get caught up in whatever was about to go down. So I checked his personnel file.” He leaned forward, his elbows braced on the top.

  “Were you aware DeWitt headed the project to design the ship’s avatar system?”

  Jumper’s ears folded back. “You mean he dreamed up crotchety old Lizzy?”

  Pike continued as if the cat hadn’t interrupted him. “He developed the protocols for layering a human mind print onto a computer.”

  Fitz suddenly couldn’t breathe. Wolf had been in there, Jumper said. Like software running in the background. “Bloody hell,” she said when she could finally draw air into her lungs. “He also designed the new MK VI computers used in Wolf’s augmentation update.”

  The lieutenant nodded, his head bobbing like some child’s toy. “With the augie project shut down, your partner may have only been a target of opportunity, but what if Tritico wanted to subvert him specifically?”

  A mind with no compunction, no morals, hijacking a body with all of Wolf’s considerable talents for mayhem? Ice settled in Fitz’s stomach. “Tritico tried to kill Ransahov once before and failed. Now he needs an assassin who can get through all the Imperial Security measures—get past me—and take her and the entire government down.”

  “Malick’s hell,” Pike said. “Is even he that good?”

  Jumper surged to his feet, fur standing up along his spine. “With those upgrades? You bet your fricking ass he is. You’ll never see him coming. He’ll rip through this clap-trap security like it was wet crapper paper. No offence, Boss Lady. Then he’ll blow away every one of those wimpy Praetorian Guardsmen in their pretty-ass white armor. The only thing you’ll see of him will be his smile just before he puts a slug between your eyes…” His ears flatten against his skull. “Oh shit, we are so screwed.”