While she looked over her cellmates, she entertained herself by assigning crimes to them: shoplifting, grifting, brawling. She had the big simian girl down for belligerency, if that was a crime here. Poor thing had a seriously pouty expression.
Raena walked over to the three Chameleon girls sprawled on the lone sleeping bench. “Shift,” she told them nicely.
They appraised her with narrowed eyes.
Raena smiled. “Ladies, they took my boots because I sent a bounty hunter to the hospital this morning with them.” Not entirely cause and effect, but both parts of the sentence were true. “I don’t want to stand around barefoot. Shift.”
They turned pointedly away.
Raena snatched hold of the closest girl, flung her to the floor, and held her down with one dirty bare foot across her neck.
The other two launched themselves off the bench together.
Careful not to injure the girl beneath her foot, Raena struck out hard enough that the skull of one girl cracked into the skull of the other. They collapsed to the less than sanitary floor in a tangle of limbs.
Raena let the third girl up, but the fight had gone out of her now that her sisters were down. The confrontation ended so quickly that the jailers didn’t notice. Raena smiled again.
She climbed up onto the bench and folded her legs under her. When she looked up, the one she’d labeled belligerent stood over her.
“Want a seat?” Raena asked. “There’s plenty of room.”
The simian girl sat down. “What happened to you?”
“They made me lay in a puddle in the spaceport.” Raena rubbed her hand over her head, but her hair was still too damp to stand up. “How about you?”
“They locked me up for not paying my hotel bill. I thought my boyfriend had gotten it. Instead, he got my sister and left me behind.”
Raena shook her head in sympathy. “How long have you been waiting to get out?”
“Three days. The consulate was supposed to have contacted my parents to bail me out.”
“Three days?” Raena echoed.
“Yeah. We may be in here for a while.”
“Good thing we’ve got a place to sit.”
*
Haoun sat under an umbrella on the beach, gazing out at the steely waves. The temperature was more pleasant now that the storm had passed. He wished Raena was with him, then laughed. She probably wished it, too, wherever they were holding her.
He remembered the first time she came out of her cabin on the Veracity, six months ago. She’d worn a short, bright blue dress that revealed her thighs. The human girls he’d dated before had been curvier, softer, and certainly taller. He’d been put off by her size and configuration.
For a while, Raena seemed to avoid him, preferring to spend her time with Jain Thallian and Mykah. Once Haoun learned more about her, about how long she had been imprisoned alone, her aloofness seemed more like shyness. It wasn’t that Raena disliked nonhumans; she’d had so little interaction with them that she was afraid of misreading them, of offending them. Most of all, of frightening them.
Only after he’d seen her working to befriend Coni did Haoun realize that Raena was as hungry for companionship as he was himself. While she struggled to unravel Sloane’s attack on her with the Messiah drug, Haoun went out of his way to keep her company.
She made him feel protective. He’d thought at first that was because of her size. Now that he really thought about it, he realized it was because she tried so hard to protect all of them. She had been willing to die to protect Mellix, simply because he was Mykah’s friend. She asked to have herself imprisoned on the Veracity because she worried the Messiah drug might make her a danger to the crew. And she’d gone into the meeting with Outrider in an attempt to protect the galaxy from the Messiah drug. Raena might not recognize it, but to Haoun, she seemed like a hero.
Haoun hoped she was okay now, wherever she was being held. He hoped the other prisoners wouldn’t pick on her, that she wouldn’t be drawn into anything she couldn’t fight her way out of. She’d been imprisoned so often that she probably had strategies aplenty to survive one more day. Still, it seemed intolerable that she should ever spend another hour in captivity. The galaxy owed her some freedom.
Haoun promised to go and see her in the morning, Mykah’s paranoia be damned.
*
Their late lunch was a fairly somber affair. Since the Veracity’s crew didn’t know if they were in trouble, no one wanted to use their credit and identify themselves. They pooled their cash before they placed the order.
Haoun picked the restaurant. Every dish had insects of one form or another in it, whether fat juicy larvae or crunchy beetles. It wouldn’t have been Mykah’s preference, but he felt hungry enough now to eat anything. The grasshopper stir-fry had a nutty flavor that actually wasn’t too bad.
Coni picked the bugs out of her food and set them aside. Haoun scraped them into his own dish. “What’s this about the Thallians?” he asked quietly.
“You know Raena’s Imperial boss was a clone,” Mykah said. “The guy who captained the Raptor was one of his brothers—also a clone. The kid we transported was as well. So one of the son-clones has a message for Raena. He hacked into his home planet’s security cameras and saw someone moving around in the cloning lab under the sea.”
“First,” Haoun said, “I didn’t know Raena left any of the Thallians alive, other than Eilif.”
“Second?” Mykah asked.
“Why are we trusting a clone of Thallian’s not to lead us straight into a trap?”
“Raena would know if we could trust him,” Mykah said confidently.
Vezali headed off an argument by asking, “How did the message come through?”
“Via Arial Shaad, that old friend of Raena’s who helped us get her new identity legalized.”
“Have you told Ariel that Raena was arrested?” Vezali asked.
“Not yet. I messaged all of you, then went off to settle with the dockmaster. When I got back, Security was locking us out. Since then, we’ve been more concerned about the ship.” Mykah reported what they’d discovered about the Veracity’s docking fees.
“How did everything fall apart?” Haoun demanded. “Yesterday morning, this was just a vacation.”
“Raena would say it was because she appeared in Mellix’s documentary,” Vezali pointed out.
“I don’t see how they could be connected,” Mykah argued.
“Actually,” Coni said, “it’s connected to the Walosis attacking Mykah yesterday. Once Raena caught the notice of Lautan’s Planetary Security, that connected to Kai’s warrant for her. Apparently, the fight made the planetary news last night, so every bounty hunter on Lautan knew she was here.”
Mykah would have apologized for starting the trouble, but he hadn’t started it. Instead, he suggested, “Why doesn’t everyone come back to our hotel room for the night? We’ll bail Raena out in the morning.”
“Why wait?” Haoun wanted to know.
“Because the bounty hunters can’t get her in jail,” Mykah said. “She’s safe for now.”
He turned to Vezali. “Did you have any luck finding us some guns?”
“The pawnshop’s sidearms weren’t too pricy, but they’d marked the power packs up to an outrageous degree.” Vezali opened the bag at her side with two tentacles, then reached in with three more and pulled out several guns at once. “You’ll have to choose your targets carefully.”
“Hopefully, we won’t need weapons at all,” Mykah said. “Give me the bill and we’ll cover it out of the ship’s fund.”
“Thank you. Otherwise, this spree zeroed out my gambling winnings from last night.” Vezali offered a Stinger in one tentacle to Mykah. “It’s a couple of generations younger than the one you’ve been using, but I thought you’d be more familiar with its range and limitations than something newer.”
She gave Coni a pistol large enough for the Haru girl’s hands. “This should fit into your shoulder bag.”
>
Haoun got a long-barreled Shtrell weapon. “No trigger guard,” Vezali pointed out, “so your claws won’t catch.”
As they looked their secondhand weapons over, Vezali said, “I need to modify them so they can all run on the same kind of power pack. I’ll do it tonight in the hotel room, so don’t start any fights until I get things adapted.”
“What did you get for yourself?” Mykah asked.
She laughed. “It’s basically a zip gun. It fires darts, instead of energy. It’s light enough that I can strap it to a tentacle and not feel fettered.”
“What’s its range?” Mykah wondered.
“Let’s just say it will take down anything that the rest of you miss.”
*
The hotel room at the Avah was so cold it practically felt refrigerated inside. Coni walked straight over to the window to let some warm air in while Haoun fiddled with the atmospheric controls.
When she turned away from the window, Coni bumped into Mykah. The room would be cramped for the four of them. Haoun stretched out along the inside wall. Vezali sat on the floor to begin altering the new weapons. Mykah sprawled on the bed and turned on the news.
A handful of human kids had been arrested on Kolar, complete with a packet of the Messiah drug. They were so new to using the drug that they hadn’t aged very much at all.
“They must have been betrayed,” Haoun observed.
“It’s hard to believe that Planetary Security could act so quickly otherwise,” Mykah agreed.
The news segment finished with a clip from Mellix’s documentary to thank him for alerting the galaxy to the renewed menace of Messiah. The segment they chose to show, of course, was Raena wrapping the Outrider android’s head in the Viridian cloth.
“Raena’s not going to be happy about that,” Vezali noted.
Coni excused herself and went down to research some more in the business office. She needed to check if Kai wanted her and Mykah for pranking the jetpack race.
Once she got everything cabled together, Coni called up the coverage of the jetpack race. Mostly it focused on the crowd favorites, racers that gamblers were likely to follow. She found a featurette about Raena soaring on her makeshift wings between the skyscrapers, turning somersaults and going into swan dives for the pure thrill of flying. Coni had been there to see it happen live, but she watched the footage again with a smile. Raena looked like the embodiment of fun.
Although Mykah and Coni also appeared in that video, none of the three of them were named. Several athletic gear companies were looking to identify Raena, in order to offer her spokesmodel contracts. That in itself was remarkable, because humans rarely featured in such visible roles in advertising. Coni and Mykah, though, were dismissed as tourists on Kai who’d gotten caught in the middle of the race without knowing better.
The commentator mentioned that prizes had gone missing from some of the buildings along the scavenger hunt, but not enough had been stolen to change the foregone conclusion of the race. He shrugged it off as a clerical error.
Fortunately, there were no warrants for any of them for their adventure that night. While Coni felt relieved, she knew Mykah would be disappointed.
Coni glanced around the business office, but she was still the only person using it. She turned the puzzle of Raena’s arrest over in her mind. Kai wanted Raena for kidnapping Jain Thallian and stealing the Thallians’ Imperial-era diplomatic transport: both things Raena was actually guilty of. She had captured Jain, although not to ransom him. Instead, she held him prisoner on the Raptor and took him home to his family. She hadn’t even asked for a ransom before returning the boy. Was there an opposite of kidnapping?
In terms of stealing the Raptor itself, Raena had commandeered the ship, true. However, the Thallians and their soldiers had no further use for it after she fought them off. Either they were dead or imprisoned on Kai for instigating violence on the weapons-free world. Was it theft if you simply appropriated something left lying around? Apparently so, if you didn’t pay the docking fees before you left with it.
Maybe, Coni thought, if she poked around a bit, she could find something that would help in Raena’s defense without connecting her to the assassination of the Thallians.
As it turned out, the Kai Security records were fairly easy to open. Coni accessed the video recordings of the day they’d left Kai. It took some looking around, but she finally located video of the Raptor landing at Kai’s spaceport.
When they came off the ship, the Raptor’s crew looked like soldiers, rather than tourists. All human males of approximately middle age, they wore matching black uniforms completely inappropriate for the desert heat of Kai. Their pockets sagged. Although Kai was designated a weapons-free world, Coni suspected the soldiers hadn’t simply packed sandwiches.
The last two people to step off the Raptor were the Thallian clones. Jain she recognized. While Coni had never actually spoken to him, she’d watched Raena bonding with the boy as the Veracity took him home.
At first, Coni had pitied the child locked in his small cell all day. Then she confirmed what Raena already suspected: Jain was responsible for the torture and murder of at least one of the men who had rescued Raena from her tomb. Jain looked like a child, but he was not innocent by a long stretch.
The final person in the security video was the ship’s captain, Revan Thallian. He had been Jonan Thallian’s older brother. Coni didn’t know Revan’s part in the creation or dissemination of the Templar plague, but she did know Revan hid his younger brother after the Human-Templar War ended and the human tribunals began, then did his brother’s bidding in the galaxy afterward.
Coni wondered how Kai could connect the Raptor to the Veracity without realizing that the Thallian murderers had roamed their capital city at will.
After the Thallians left the Raptor, it stood quietly for hours. Coni sped through the recording until Jain returned alone to the docking slip. He hastily parked his jet bike on the tarmac and rushed toward the Raptor’s hatch, fumbling his glove off as he went.
As if she’d fallen out of the sky, Raena landed atop the ship carrying a stun staff. Coni searched her memory. Raena said she’d followed the boy on a jet bike of her own. She ditched it in midair and let it crash into the next docking slip over. Coni remembered how Mykah had used the smoke as a beacon to lead him to the Raptor. Coni had thought her part in sneaking onto the ship had been exciting, but it paled in comparison to Raena’s original commandeering of it.
In the recording, Raena lay on the upper hull of the Raptor, then flipped gracefully over its edge, stun staff at the ready. From the way she held the staff, it appeared that she used the business end on Jain in the Raptor’s hatchway. Thanks to the angle of the camera, nothing questionable was actually visible. An argument could be made that Raena merely brandished the stun staff at him, without actually striking him with it.
After a brief time, Raena walked out of the Raptor alone. She looked around and aimed a Stinger at the camera. The video ended.
Coni set her handheld on the desk and rubbed her eyes.
That was it? That was Kai’s whole case? Raena landed atop the ship, she walked into the ship with a stun staff, and she walked off it with a pistol. There was no real evidence she had hurt—to say nothing of kidnapped—the boy. There wasn’t even any evidence she’d flown away in the Raptor. Without footage of her intentionally crashing the jet bike, the only illegal thing she’d done in the recording was to vandalize the camera.
Coni searched for other cameras around that section of the spaceport to see if she could find anything more damning.
How desperate was Kai that they would issue a bounty on such flimsy evidence? Were they simply hoping to extort money from Raena in order to have the charges dropped?
Yawning, Coni wondered if the crew of the Veracity had enough money between them to get everything paid off in the morning. The stress of the day was catching up with her. She hoped the hotel bed was big enough for her and Mykah.
&n
bsp; CHAPTER 5
Raena never imagined the crew would abandon her. Coni and Haoun had watched her get arrested. After the Messiah revelation, the ship had plenty of money. It should have been easy for them to come bail her out. When hours passed and no one came—and no charges were pressed—she began to feel anxious.
She would have thought twice about submitting so meekly in the spaceport, if she’d known she would have to sit in a holding cell for any length of time. She hoped she hadn’t inspired the kids to be so paranoid that they just ran away without her. The other creatures in the cell stayed out of her way as she paced.
Eventually a squad of ten Planetary Security agents came to retrieve her. Raena looked her escort over. That strength of numbers seemed entirely unnecessary for delivering her to a hearing. It looked surprisingly like a firing squad.
“What’s going on, Commander?” she asked.
“You’re being extradited.”
“I haven’t been charged yet,” she protested.
“Doesn’t matter to me.”
His agents took their places around the edges of the forcefield’s aperture, guns drawn. Raena looked them over, picking the one to take down first, planning angles of attack. The dispirited creatures in the cell huddled together, as far from her as they could get. Once the firing started, it would be a slaughter.
She couldn’t do it. These were innocents in the holding cell, pickpockets and grifters at worst. In the past, she wouldn’t have cared if they died during her escape attempt. In the past, she would have been running from Thallian. Now, she realized with a shock, she didn’t want their deaths on her conscience.
As soon as Raena stepped past the barrier, the smallest agent raised the manacles. “Please turn around,” she said.
Raena couldn’t see the person’s face behind the smoked faceplate, even to judge her species, but the agent sounded like little more than a kid. With a sigh, Raena complied and clasped her hands behind her back.
No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three Page 7
