As far as Ariel knew, no one ever died of poison among the Thallians until Eilif drugged her husband herself. Still, Ariel wished the woman’s compulsion to taste Ariel’s food wouldn’t keep reminding them both of what they’d escaped.
Still, if Raena could change and step out into the light where the galaxy could see her, then survival—recovery—was possible for them all.
*
It wasn’t just any arcade. Trust Haoun, who’d learned to pilot the Veracity on flight simulators, to know Lautan had a massive entertainment palace.
Entertainment machines from around the galaxy stuffed the building. Some rudimentary machines pitted operator reflexes against weights or gravity. Others required players to climb inside or atop them. Raena had learned to play handheld games at Haoun’s elbow on the Veracity, but she couldn’t beat the precision of his fine motor skills. Here, she was attracted to games that required big physical movements, but her body was too small to make most of these games work.
She stopped in front of the jet scooter race, but didn’t mount the machine. Foot pedals controlled acceleration and the handlebars held weapons controls, but she couldn’t figure out how to stretch to reach both at the same time.
Haoun loomed over her, bending low so she could hear him over the racket in the arcade. “It’s built for a bigger thing than you.”
“Show me how it’s played?” Raena asked.
“I’m not any good at it,” he argued. “I can steer, but I can’t shoot at the same time. You need mammal reflexes for this one.”
Raena smiled at that, not offended.
“Maybe we could play it together,” he offered.
She looked up at his face, but the lizard seemed as expressionless as ever.
“Give you a boost up?”
Now she knew he was teasing her. “Sure, big guy. Help me up.”
Haoun’s oversized hands were gentle as they fit around her waist. Raena straddled the machine and Haoun stepped up behind her. He pointed out the safety restraints and the firing mechanisms, then hunched over her so he could reach the handlebars to steer.
Raena leaned up against him. “Get comfortable,” she suggested. “I’m not shy.”
He laughed, knowing that was true, and fidgeted closer.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Let’s begin.”
He coasted them forward smoothly. They took their place at the starting gate with the other players. The jet scooter’s motor made a steady thrum between Raena’s knees. Haoun’s chest grew warmer against her back.
Raena smiled to herself. She used to be able to disassociate what was happening to her flesh from the objective she pursued. That ability helped her to endure the fights she got into as Ariel’s bodyguard, but also to survive her Imperial training and Thallian’s beatings. What her body did and felt was separate from who she was and what she wanted.
The boundaries seemed to be melting. She felt extremely conscious of Haoun’s long thighs outside hers. She felt his muscles bunch and twitch as he kicked the scooter faster and faster. And there was the smell of him, alien and strange and fascinating and complex. With effort, she focused on the game—but her attention kept drifting.
She’d never been this close to anyone nonhuman before. Oh, she’d fought them, tortured them occasionally aboard the Arbiter, but never had such prolonged physical contact. Even when she’d been transported aboard the slave ship, the Viridians had left her alone to preserve her value. Well, they left her alone, as long as she would eat.
One of the other scooters pulled ahead in the game. Haoun growled deep in his chest. Raena felt the vibration against her back. Her blood responded to it.
“Can I fire on the other players?” she shouted.
“Only if we collect the talisman.” He nodded toward a green thing glowing far ahead.
“We’d better get there first,” she said.
Haoun barked out a laugh and kicked the bike down one more notch. It shot forward, rocking Raena back more firmly against the big lizard.
She got the sense he enjoyed the contact as much as she did.
*
The boy born Jimi Thallian scanned backward through the recording of the Messiah documentary so he could watch the firefight with the androids again. The aggressor, he was certain, was Raena Zacari, the woman who had rescued him. He’d seen her in person only once, briefly, when she helped him get the hopper flight-ready so he could run away from home. Even then, Jim had taken a teenage boy’s pleasure in the way her catsuit strained and stretched over her small, slim body, and especially in the fluid way she moved, as if her slightest gesture was part of a dance. It didn’t hurt that she was also utterly terrifying.
Watching her twist and roll, fire and dodge, and ultimately dismantle the Outrider androids with a pair of stone knives made him uncomfortably aroused.
Jim stifled that by thinking: I understand exactly what my father saw in her. The chill that followed the thought stopped his breath.
During the War, Raena Zacari had served Jim’s father aboard his Imperial destroyer, a nominally diplomatic ship called the Arbiter. When Raena deserted from Imperial service, Jonan Thallian lost the last bulwark that kept him sane. In short order, he acquiesced to the Emperor’s directive to spread the plague that wiped out the Templars. That genocide led to the destruction of the Empire.
The moment the galaxy turned against humanity, Jonan Thallian fled home like a rabid wolf. He dragged his family and the crew of the Arbiter down into his homeworld’s ocean, where they waited out the execution of the planet above.
Five years after the War finally ended, after the surface of their homeworld was poisoned and dead, Jimi was born. The only survivor of his crop of clones, he’d grown up ostracized from his cloned brothers, both older and younger. Despite their identical appearance, not one of the others recognized their father’s crimes as atrocities.
When Jim finally sought help to escape his homeworld, he betrayed his family and led Raena to them. He remembered sitting in the hopper, ready to run at last, and telling her to kill them all.
And she’d done it. He didn’t know how; the news stories weren’t as specific as he would have liked. There had been a fire in the castle where his family lived. The domes of the undersea city cracked. Everything he’d ever known had been washed away, exactly as he’d wished.
Raena never came forward to claim the vengeance she’d rained down on his family. Still, Jim knew she was responsible. He would have liked to thank her personally, but Raena had warned him that if he ever so much as thought about coming after her, she would kill him in his sleep.
No wonder his father had adored her.
The comm chirped at him. Even though it had no camera, the boy switched off the news and came to attention beside his bed. “Yes, sir?”
The shipyard master asked, “Jim, are you up already?”
“Yes, sir.”
“There’s no hurry, son, but there’s another racer coming in. Could you pull its tesseract drive before lunch?”
“Glad to, sir.” He’d already dressed, made his bed, and stowed his few belongings. Now he scraped his black hair back into a ponytail, then slid his feet into his brand-new work boots.
As he turned to lock up, Jim looked around his little room. True, it was not much bigger than the bed, but it was his alone. For the first time in his life, Jim had his own place, with a door he could lock. He had a job that he loved: fitting outdated drives back into ships that had foolishly upgraded to tesseract drives. He even got paid for the work, collecting a paycheck for the first time in his life.
Jim never saw the surface of his homeworld before the galaxy poisoned it. He’d never seen the surface of any planet, until Raena Zacari helped him leave home. He’d never held a job, or used money, or seen an alien, or talked to a girl his own age.
So many things that he owed to Raena Zacari. The only thing he could do to thank her was to adopt her last name as his own.
*
&
nbsp; As they sped through the finishers’ gate, Raena’s face felt flushed from the wind of their passage as much as from the proximity of Haoun at her back. Disappointed that the game was over and they’d have to part, Raena blushed still more.
Haoun’s clever hands unclipped her from the restraints. He squeezed her back against him in a hug. Raena laughed in pure pleasure.
“Did you enjoy that as much as I did?” his translator said against the top of her head. His voice, whispering against her hair, sounded guttural and rough, but the translator made him sound overeducated and posh.
“Oh, yes.” Raena twisted to look up into his yellow eyes. “Maybe more than I should have.”
He hugged her again. She wished she could read his expressions and know if he was smiling, but the slit of his mouth didn’t change.
“Where should we go to celebrate?”
Raena wished he hadn’t left it up to her. If she said the wrong thing, it would screw up everything. The balance on the Veracity would be irrevocably changed, no matter what.
Luckily, he could read her better than she could read him. He rescued her by saying, “Your bunk’s too small for me.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Raena said. “There’s no privacy on the ship, anyway. Let’s splurge.”
*
Ariel pulled her goggles into place, nodded at Kavanaugh, and stepped onto the firing range. She breathed out, long and slow, and dropped each target in turn as it popped up around her.
She wondered why Kavanaugh wasn’t hitting anything, then realized she hadn’t given him a chance. She eased off and let Tarik step up.
Working through the range with someone else always made her think of Raena. Raena was content to hang back, let Ariel do the bulk of the shooting. Raena liked to look long-range and see what was coming up, but she preferred to fight up close. She said she liked to hear the sound of something’s breath when she killed it. Ariel had taken that as juvenile dramatics, until it proved to be true.
No matter how much they practiced, Raena had never gotten to be the sharpshooter Ariel was, but she could lay someone out with a single punch. Ariel didn’t like to let people get that close. They’d worked well as a pair.
Kavanaugh fell somewhere in the middle. He’d grown up on a medical ship during the Human-Templar War, so he knew a little medicine, could shoot like veteran, and was an asset in a hand-to-hand fight. His head had been no match for Raena’s fist, though.
Ariel watched Tarik advance through the range, steady and unhurried. It might take him a shot or two to knock down a target, but he didn’t skip any.
They finished out the target series by taking turns.
Ariel grinned as she pulled off her goggles. “What do you think of the new Stinger?”
Tarik turned the pistol over, pulled the charge pack out of its butt, weighed it in his glove. “It’s lighter. Ought to make it real popular.”
“You don’t like it?” she wondered.
“Made me worry the charge was draining too fast. Did you see me keep checking the levels? That might cause problems in a fight.”
“You’ll get used to it,” she predicted.
“You don’t need to give me one of these,” he argued. “My old gun is good enough.”
“Not gonna force one on you.” Ariel knew how old soldiers were with their sidearms. “I thought I might send a handful of these to Raena. I saw you two taking out those androids on the news. Looked like she was armed with an antique.”
“She is.” Tarik stripped off his gauntlets and chest shield, setting them back in the cubbyholes in the range’s lobby. “She and the kid use guns the Thallians left behind on the Veracity. All their equipment dates to before the end of the War.”
Ariel clicked her tongue. “Can’t have my sister running around the galaxy with twenty-year-old guns.”
Tarik laughed. “You don’t get them free any more.”
“It’s not like stealing them from my dad’s shop, sure,” she agreed, “but part of the deal when I sold his business was that I still get a steep discount on the new models. Besides, Raena’s worth it. It’s not like she’ll stay out of trouble. I can’t do anything else to keep her safe.”
“Suppose that’s true,” he agreed.
Ariel pulled off her shield and put it away beside Tarik’s. “You want to stay for dinner?”
“Your mom gonna try to set us up again?” he teased.
“Probably.”
He grinned. “Maybe you’ll listen to her, this time.”
Ariel felt her smile freeze for a second, saw that Kavanaugh caught it. She waved her hand between them, blinking back tears. “I know it’s stupid. I know Gavin was …” Her voice quavered, but she pushed herself to go on. “It was never going to work. He was such an idiot. But I’m not over him yet.”
Tarik opened his arms enough to offer a hug in a way that she could ignore it.
Ariel hated herself for crying over Gavin Sloane. Seeing his body on the news haunted her. She put her head down on Tarik’s shoulder and clutched him close. He rubbed her back and said, “I miss him, too.”
Ariel wondered briefly—bitterly—if Raena ever cried over the man who’d killed himself for her.
*
Haoun led Raena up the steep hill in the center of town. Buildings sprouted from it haphazardly. There weren’t actual streets between them as much as tracks of varying widths. The neighborhood drowsed quietly at this time of the late afternoon. Up here on the hill, the faintest breeze licked sweat from Raena’s forehead.
“Have you got a destination in mind?” she asked.
“Not really. The cheapest places tend to be at the bottoms of hills. You deserve better than that.”
“How you talk,” she teased. “The places at the bottom of the hill are for people eager to get out of this humidity.”
He laughed. The sound was a sharp bark that his translator didn’t try to explain. “All right. I won’t make you climb the entire hill. How’s this place look?”
He indicated a featureless black cube. Raena couldn’t figure out where its door was. “That one’s scary,” she told him honestly.
They rounded the cube to find a spire modeled on a Templar tower, an organic form that looked half-melted in the heat.
“Definitely not,” they agreed.
Nearby rose a step pyramid, each of its levels crowned with a garden that trailed languid vines down the building’s face.
“What about that one?” Raena asked.
“Let’s see what kind of rooms they have.” Haoun led her into the heavily air-conditioned lobby. One of its walls held a grid of lighted images: rooms with beds, rooms with tubs, rooms furnished with rocks or trees or tanks of various liquids. One room offered what looked like a nest of pillows and cushions that reminded her of Haoun’s bed on the Veracity. “How’s this?” Raena asked.
“Stellar.” He pressed the image, which vanished to be replaced by the price. He pressed the chit on the chain around his neck against the screen. A little slot opened to reveal the key.
Some things were just easier to manage in you had blunt fingertips rather than claws. Raena retrieved the key and turned to look for the elevator.
*
On the fourth moon of Staub, a bored Varan pharma tech glanced over the manifest coded to the large crate in front of him. It contained some kind of robot pharmacist and the chemical it ran on.
The tech circled the crate, activating its pressurized locks. Normal security on robots wasn’t as tight as this, but no matter. The sooner he finished, the sooner he could take his spice break.
Once the lid slid open, he saw the damned robot lay in individually wrapped pieces inside. The Varan grumbled to himself as he searched for the package knife. The damn knife was always wandering off.
Might as well take his break, he decided.
After his return, he located the head in the crate. He sliced the black wrapping away to reveal a pasty face with scraggly red hair and an oddly shaped no
se. Why did it need to be humanoid, he wondered, as he set the head none too gently on the floor. Next, he uncovered a hand, part of a leg, one foot, the torso.
The android’s eyes flicked open. Fat, wormlike tentacles extruded from the base of its neck, stretching toward the shoulders. The android assembled itself while the tech’s back was turned.
It rose to its feet, took a step forward, and pulled the package knife from the shocked tech’s hand.
CHAPTER 2
Raena and Haoun undressed in the late afternoon light that streamed through the hotel room’s windows. She was startled to discover that their anatomies weren’t compatible.
“It’s okay,” Haoun whispered. “Just show me what you like.”
Raena would have been so much more comfortable acting upon him, but without guidance, she didn’t have any idea where to start.
“I’ve never been with anyone who wasn’t human before,” she confessed.
“Not to worry. I like human girls. But I know you all have different favorites. Show me yours and let me honor them.”
Raena crawled into the sleeping nest. She appreciated that Haoun didn’t remark on her scars.
She lifted one of his hands, its extraordinarily long fingers tipped with black talons. “Touch me with your claws,” she suggested.
“How hard?” he asked.
“Let’s see.”
*
Dinner with the Shaad family was often like theater, Kavanaugh had decided. You never knew how many of Ariel’s adopted kids would be around, passing through on their ways to one humanitarian adventure or another. Some of them worked for the family foundation, identifying human kids who needed to be bought out of slavery or rescued from group homes or plucked from the street. Several worked in medical services. Others did fundraising or public relations. Kavanaugh couldn’t keep the kids straight. He wasn’t really sure how many there were altogether, but they tended to all talk at once, at a high volume. It wasn’t uncommon for food to fly from one end of the table to the other, so you had to watch your head.
Madame Shaad, Ariel’s mother, doted on her grandchildren. She had wanted nothing more in life than to spoil the next generation. The only thing that could have made her happier was if some of them had been blood relations. Ariel never settled down long enough to commit to carrying a child. Soon it wouldn’t matter any more. Madame Shaad was growing desperate enough that even Kavanaugh seemed like son-in-law material these days.
No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three Page 2
