ALSO BY LOREN RHOADS
In the Wake of the Templars
The Dangerous Type
Kill By Numbers
Copyright © 2015 by Loren Rhoads
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Night Shade Books, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
Night Shade books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fundraising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Night Shade Books, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].
Night Shade Books™ is a trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. ®, a Delaware corporation.
Visit our website at www.nightshadebooks.com.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover illustration and design by Cody Tilson
Print ISBN: 978-1-59780-830-9
Ebook ISBN 978-1-59780-849-1
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to Jeremy Lassen, my hero.
CHAPTER 1
The air on Lautan hung breathlessly still, so thick with moisture that all edges looked softened. All colors were smudged. Unhappy in the humidity, Raena Zacari wasn’t paying attention where the crew of the Veracity led her. Among her high-spirited crewmates, there was much shoving, teasing, consultation of the handhelds, and starting off in new directions. She was too old for that nonsense. She just wanted a drink.
Much more interesting to Raena were the people roaming around the old district of Lautan’s tourist city. The scattered visitors crossed the spectrum between somewhat avian to insectile to reptilian, but Raena saw far fewer furred people than she’d gotten used to. Other than Mykah Chen, the Veracity’s captain, and Raena herself, she didn’t see another human face.
She wasn’t sure if that could be blamed on the planet’s climate. The ambient temperature made her feel sticky. She wondered if the city—whatever it was called—had an ocean and whether it was swimmable. That might justify dragging around in conditions like these.
“Finally.” Vezali’s translator used a high-pitched, girlish voice. The Dagat’s tentacles had gone greener than usual, as her body turned a sunset pink. “I’m starving.”
Raena looked up to see a highly stylized logo that read “New Bar” in Galactic Standard. How new could it be, she wondered, to be worth the epic hike through the humidity it had taken them to reach it?
Inside the darkened bar, the air was comfortably cool. Oversized screens, flickering with sporting events or weddings or tragedies, provided the only light.
“Xyshin?” Coni asked her. The blue-furred Haru girl wore a sleeveless sundress patterned with large orange carnivorous flowers. They clashed with her coloring.
“Sure,” Raena agreed abstractedly, transfixed by the images flashing all around her. It was disorienting to see through all these windows into the galaxy at once.
“Come sit down,” Haoun suggested. The big lizard led her through the tables to a corner, where she could get her back against the wall. Once she only had to deal with the screen in front of her, Raena felt better. She frowned, trying to puzzle out what was happening in the video. It seemed to be some form of wrestling match.
Mykah excused himself to chat with a waitress. She switched the channel on the screen that faced them to the news.
Vezali arrived with a large bowl full of swimming ribbons. Raena turned away as her friend reached a tentacle in to catch one. Raena was pretty sure she didn’t want to watch Vezali slurp down anything while it was still wriggling.
For the most part, her shipmates turned a blind eye to each other’s gastronomic quirks. Although the Veracity provided plenty of physical space for the five of them, they still lived more or less on top of each other. The only sure way to put up with each other’s eccentricities was to ignore them.
Coni arrived with an oversized bottle of xyshin and a carafe of fizzing water on a tray full of glasses. Xyshin was one of the few types of liquor that the crew agreed on. Raena liked its syrupy sweet flavor, because the sweetness forced her to stop drinking long before she became very impaired.
Raena was entertained that the crew chose to stick together, now that they finally had space to spread apart. All five of them wedged in around the table as the music for Mellix’s show came on. “Is this what we’re here to see?” Raena wondered aloud.
Mykah grinned. Today he’d braided the hair on the sides of his head so that his skull looked taller and narrower. He was still clean-shaven, a look he’d experimented with and seemed prepared to stick to for the moment. That left only his hair to play with.
Raena accepted the glass of xyshin Coni handed to her and settled back.
The screen filled with low-light footage of Outrider facing them in the dusty warehouse on Verwoest. Raena had had no idea that Mellix had been close enough to record that. She’d had her hands full at the time.
The video showed the firefight with the three Outrider androids. Mykah got shot in the first exchange. He dragged himself behind some crates and put down covering fire for Raena, who launched herself at the androids with a pair of stone knives. The blades worked surprisingly well for dismantling the weird mechanicals.
“Such a badass,” Haoun whispered. Raena ignored him, unsure whether he meant to mock her.
In the video, Tarik Kavanaugh, the old war buddy who’d backed her up during the fight, held the androids off enough that Raena had time to disassemble one after another.
The video ended with Raena rolling the last Outrider head up in black Viridian slave cloth. The camera’s focus had been on the thing in her hands, tentacles writhing out of the stump of its neck. There could be no doubt it was Templar tech.
Once Raena had the head wrapped up tightly, it went quiescent. Then the camera pulled back to look at her.
Her image filled the screen. There she stood, spiky black hair like a corona around her face, black eyes alight with energy left over from the fight.
Raena felt sick. She’d trusted Mellix to keep her out of the story. Now she kicked herself for being so gullible. She’d known he was an investigative journalist when the Veracity took him in.
The documentary moved on, exploring the history of the Messiah drug and its recent reappearance. Raena couldn’t concentrate to follow the story. Her thoughts were hijacked by the knowledge that she’d been revealed to the galaxy. In fact, now that she looked around the New Bar, most of its screens had been switched to the same station. Everyone watched Mellix’s show.
Raena’s first inclination was to run. But where could she hide that would be beyond the reach of the galactic media?
Mykah turned to her, aglow with pride. As soon as he saw her face, his good mood evaporated. “I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “I wanted to cut sooner, but Mellix insisted on giving you credit for taking down the Outriders. He said it was important to humanize the fight.”
Raena saw the sense of that, vaguely. She wished they’d chosen Tarik Kavanaugh to be the human face of the fight against the Messiah drug. Kavanaugh would have been honored by the attention. Instead, Raena regretted stepping up to mount the attack. She should have trusted it to Mykah and Kavanaugh, although it might have gotten them killed. She should have turned the whole thing over to the authorities. Would have, in fact, i
f she’d thought there was any way in hell she could have gotten them to believe her. She should have left the Messiah drug to trickle out into the galaxy, do its damage, and destroy humanity. She should have washed her hands and kept her anonymity. Now, she didn’t know how or when or why, she was doomed.
“Let me out,” she told Haoun.
He got up to give her room to get off the bench and around the table.
“Where are you going?” Coni asked. She stood in front of Raena and laid a warm paw on her bare arm.
“I don’t know.” Her body wanted desperately to run, anywhere, immediately.
“There’s no one left to look for you,” Coni promised. “They’re all dead. You’re safe now.”
Raena appreciated the blue-furred girl’s assurances, but adrenaline sang in her blood. “I’ve got to get out of here,” she insisted. “I won’t leave the city. I just need to get outside. Into the light.”
“I’ll come with you,” Haoun said. “The rest of you should celebrate. Congratulations, Mykah. This is excellent work.”
*
Coni took Mykah’s hand in hers and squeezed. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “I knew she’d be upset. But I thought it would be better for her to see how brief the closeup was, so she would know it wasn’t much to worry about. We didn’t even identify her by name.”
Coni rubbed her head on his shoulder, scenting him. He pulled her back down to the bench and picked up his glass of xyshin.
Coni changed the subject. “What’s up with Haoun and Raena?”
“Is something up?” Vezali asked, surprised.
“He seems to be finding lots of excuses to be in her company,” Mykah observed. “He used to date ‘warm girls’ on Kai.”
Coni and Vezali stared at him. Mykah laughed. “His words, not mine.”
“You think he’s dating Raena?” Vezali asked.
Mykah turned to his girlfriend. “You’re the expert on all things Raena. What do you think?”
“I’m not sure,” Coni said slowly. “There’s a distinct possibility. I just wondered if I was the only one to notice anything.”
“If it’s true, that’s going to change the dynamic on the Veracity,” Mykah warned.
“Hope she doesn’t hurt him,” Vezali remarked.
“Hope he doesn’t hurt her,” Mykah countered. “Haoun’s kind of a playboy. Love ’em and leave ’em,” he clarified, in case Vezali’s translator didn’t know what to make of the phrase. “Haoun doesn’t want to tie himself down because he’s still in love with his kids, back home.”
*
Raena paused in the shadowy doorway to check the street outside the New Bar. Nothing looked out of place. People still strolled calmly through the humidity, chatting and shopping and carrying drinks.
She took a deep breath, stepped out, and adjusted her pace to the flow of traffic. She struggled to keep herself from resting her hand on the grip of the Stinger holstered on her thigh.
Haoun kept close by. He stood high enough that he could see over almost everyone’s heads. If she’d trained him, he might have been an asset. She tried to keep herself from viewing him as a distraction now.
“Wanna talk?” he asked.
Mostly, she wanted to keep moving, but the streets were narrow and winding and the air was so opaque that keeping watch on all of it overwhelmed her. “Do you think we can find the water?” she asked.
“It’s this way.”
He led her there like he’d been on Lautan before. The buildings opened up to reveal a charcoal gray ocean stretching off to the horizon. Round green stones the size of her palm covered a wide, mostly empty beach. Raena took another deep breath. This was what she wanted: to be able to see things coming.
Unfortunately, the beach stones radiated the day’s warmth back up at her. Haoun pointed out a small copse of frilly trees. It looked shady beneath them. When they got there, the tree bark smelled pleasantly spicy, like nutmeg. Raena put her back against a tree and tried to relax.
“So?” Haoun prompted.
“When I left the Arbiter,” she said, “I was on the run for a little over two Earth years. During that time, I got captured eleven times. I fought off more bounty hunters than I can count. All I wanted was to be invisible, beneath notice, but the bounty was too high. Hunting me was just too tempting.”
She trailed off, staring out at the steely ocean. “I know Coni’s right. I know there’s no one after me any more. But running … that’s all I knew for so long. I’m safer when no one knows I exist.”
“You need a distraction,” Haoun pronounced. “You need something that will allow you to burn off some energy.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“There’s an arcade—”
The laughter that burst out of her vaporized some of the worry in her chest.
*
Vezali retrieved a glass with one tentacle. The xyshin didn’t have much flavor, but its temperature felt very pleasant in this bar. Although they’d controlled the ambient temperature and brought it down a dozen degrees, the place still felt uncomfortably warm. Vezali’s plans for the afternoon included a long soak in a bath.
Vezali settled back onto the bench with Mykah and Coni to watch the rest of the newscast.
The Messiah drug story was Mellix’s first work since he broke the news of the flaw in the tesseract drive a galactic month ago. That story put an end to casual space travel. Bit by bit, ships across the galaxy were being refurbished with older technologies, but many of the larger shipping companies and interstellar cruise lines—unable to afford to replace the engines on their entire fleets—had chosen to go out of business. They were angry because tesseract travel remained safe the majority of times, except on the occasions when a ship entered tesseract space and didn’t come out. Unfortunately, insurance to pay the families of long-distance haulers was too exorbitant to absorb—and casual travelers no longer wanted to take the risk.
It made places like Lautan, where the Veracity had landed this morning, so desperate for visitors that they dropped prices on everything from accommodations to alcohol. That made the pleasure planet affordable to working class people like the Veracity’s crew. And they deserved a vacation after their work revealing the resurgence of the Messiah drug to the galaxy. Raena Zacari deserved time off most of all.
Vezali fished another eel out of the bowl and slurped it down. These were a treat, even if they were farmed rather than wild-caught.
On the screen, chestnut-furred Mellix mapped out the known spread of the Messiah drug. When the crew of the Veracity had discovered it was loose in the galaxy again, they knew they were looking for two crates, each filled with as many as fifty pouches of the drug. Forty of those pouches had already been accounted for and destroyed, but the rest had disappeared. The tracers attached to each individual pouch had gone silent.
Vezali still struggled to understand how exactly the Messiah drug worked. It was a Templar drug, but with the Templar extinct, only humans could use it. During the Human-Templar War, human addicts had destabilized some of the border governments by attacking heads of state in their dreams. For the Dagat, Vezali’s people, dreams and memory were the same thing. They couldn’t use the Messiah drug and believed they were immune to its attacks.
However, Raena had been the victim of a Messiah user named Gavin Sloane. One of his attacks on Raena had added a memory to Vezali’s mind. That meant the Dagat was aware that time had been changed: only once, but that was enough. The experience felt like a violation. Vezali kept probing the altered memory, wondering how to make it go away.
In the newscast, Mellix left it to Mykah to sum up how to recognize a Messiah user’s attack and whom to contact for help.
Vezali wouldn’t have recognized Mykah, if the screen hadn’t helpfully labeled him as the captain of the Veracity. He had tied his hair back, shaved his face clean, and dressed up for his big moment. Still, humans with their changeless coloration were difficult to tell apart.
When the broadcast ended, Coni filled everyone’s glass with more xyshin so they could have a toast.
“I’m sorry Raena didn’t see the whole thing,” Mykah said.
“Maybe she will watch the rest of it with you later,” Coni soothed, “when she’s less upset.”
*
At the end of the newscast, Ariel Shaad and Eilif Thallian sat back on the sofa as one, each lost in her own thoughts.
Ariel put her feet up on the coffee table. She had known Gavin Sloane died from abusing the Messiah drug. Raena had shown her images of his shriveled corpse, so she could grieve. At the time, Ariel had been angry, had hated Sloane for chasing something impossible when he could have had the love Ariel wanted to give him. Now, seeing he’d released the drug back into the galaxy rather than destroying it before it could do any more damage, she hated him all over again.
She lit a spice stick and stared at the smoke, wondering what was wrong with her that she’d ever loved that man.
Eventually, Eilif said, “Raena had her scar removed.”
Ariel laughed, glad to be pulled out of her thoughts. “Raena said the scar tied her to the person she used to be. Watching her dismember those androids, though … The old Raena is clearly still in there.”
“She looks more like me now,” Eilif mused.
Like Eilif used to look, Ariel realized, when she’d been young. Eilif was a clone of someone who looked a lot like Raena. Somewhere in the cloning process, something had gone wrong with her. She aged faster than normal. Although she was barely twenty, her hair had already gone entirely white. Conversely, Raena’s long imprisonment in a Templar tomb had frozen her appearance at around twenty. In actual age, she was closer to forty-five. She could have been Eilif’s mother.
Ariel said, “I’m surprised Raena allowed her image to go out on an intragalactic broadcast. She never wanted anyone to see her before.”
Eilif poured some more tea for Ariel, then filled her own cup and sipped from it before Ariel had a chance to raise hers. The behavior was a relic from Eilif’s life with the Thallians, where she’d served as their chief food taster.
No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three Page 1
