She noted that the Chameleon girls had taken control of the bench again.
“I haven’t seen the consul either,” Raena complained as the manacles locked into place.
“There isn’t any human consul on Lautan,” the squad commander said.
Someone nudged her with the butt of a gun. As they marched her out of the cellblock, Raena kept her head up, face forward, but her eyes scanned relentlessly. Too many jail guards lounged around for her to try anything, even to test the slack in the restraints, which—like everything else on Lautan—had been made for a larger creature than her. Without knowing where she was headed or what charge she had to face, it was stupid to consider any escape that might get her killed.
Oh, but she wanted to run. Adrenaline flooded her blood. Raena struggled to remember that, wherever they were taking her, it was not back to Thallian.
*
Ariel jolted awake, her heart hammering in her chest. She listened, but her room remained entirely silent. The lockdown telltales flashed from the monitor, but none of the alarms had been tripped. Everyone was still safe.
She crawled across her oversized bed to check messages. No word from Raena, not even an acknowledgement from the Veracity. The message had been opened, but no one had bothered to respond.
That meant trouble.
The sweat that slicked Ariel’s body turned icy. Raena would understand what Ariel was going through here. Even if she decided that Ariel was a big girl who could take care of herself, Raena would want to protect Eilif. If Raena hadn’t answered, it was because she couldn’t.
Ariel threw off her covers and went to shower.
Raena had to be okay. Ariel wouldn’t trust anyone else to spy on the Thallian world and survive.
*
The Planetary Security detail hustled Raena down a hallway and straight into the back of a patrol wagon. The truck had lights inset into its ceiling behind a heavy-duty screen. Built-in benches lined its walls. Raena didn’t see any sort of crash webbing, so this was a simple planetary vehicle. Hopefully, she’d get her chance to run on the other end, before they rushed her onto a ship.
The security corps didn’t remove the restraints that pinned her wrists, which made it uncomfortable to sit on the bench against the truck’s cab. Raena braced her bare feet against the agents’ boots to keep from being bounced around.
The agents regarded her through their smoked faceplates, but didn’t move their feet out of her reach. They also didn’t holster their sidearms. Someone must have studied the recording of her defense of Mykah on the beach. They weren’t taking any chances that she’d attempt to escape.
She remained confident in the identity that Coni built for her, but she wished she knew where they were going. She couldn’t think of anything illegal she’d done recently that deserved this level of security. Since her escape from the tomb, Raena had been to Brunzell with Sloane, where she never stepped outside after the night he’d taken her to dinner. From there, they’d gone to Kai to meet Ariel. She’d joined Mykah and Coni disrupting the jetpack race, but since those two hadn’t been arrested alongside her, she doubted that was what this was about. She’d never been linked to the bombing of Mellix’s apartment on Capitol City. He’d gotten her cleared of the fire on Verwoest. What could this possibly be about?
Something exploded softly in front of the truck. The whole vehicle shuddered as its engine made a weird stutter. The patrol wagon drifted to the left and continued around at a speed that felt ill advised.
The commander shouted, “Jhen, what are you doing up there?” He got no response.
As the truck toppled over, Raena scrambled to brace her bare feet against something more solid than the Security agents. A pistol barely missed striking her in the head. It lay there, just centimeters from her face, taunting her.
The soldiers hadn’t been fastened down either. The writhing mass of them ended up in a pile against the lowest wall of the truck.
The vehicle slid, grinding and bouncing, over the roadway. It finally crashed to a halt. The lights went out.
Raena sat up. The restraints on her arms were loose enough that she could easily slip her legs through and get her arms around in front of her. There was plenty of groaning and cursing in the darkened truck as the agents picked themselves up. Even disoriented and injured, they remained between Raena and the still-locked door. She decided to bide her time. She curled up as small as she could, trying to look harmless.
One of the Security agents folded open the lower door. As the agents duckwalked out of the truck, someone outside shot them down in the street.
Raena hoped that the Veracity’s crew hadn’t mounted a rescue attempt. If they were identified fighting Planetary Security, that would put an end to their ability to travel freely around the galaxy right quick.
Whoever was outside, though, was too efficient for her crew. The street filled with fallen Security agents, but Raena hadn’t even glimpsed the attackers yet. She also didn’t see any bolts. Whatever the attackers were using, they weren’t energy weapons. Who would risk killing Security forces?
The Security agent left to guard her yelled into his comm, “No, I need backup now! The prisoner is still restrained. Don’t worry about her. Everyone else is down. I need help!”
She could help. Raena waited until he’d turned the comm off and took his stance with his rifle before she went into action. She swept his legs out from under him and somersaulted backward, getting her arms in front of her body finally. As he flopped on his back, struggling to aim the rifle at her—she was too close, he would have done better to drop it—Raena sprang to her feet. She kicked him hard in the chest and snatched up his rifle.
While he was trying to gasp in a breath, Raena braced her back against the truck’s wall, balanced the rifle on her hip. Whenever the attackers came through the door, she was ready.
They didn’t make her wait long.
As they flung the topmost door back upward, the streetlights finally revealed them. They wore the same featureless gray uniforms as the soldiers who had attacked Mellix’s apartment on Capital City.
Raena was small and it was dark inside the truck, but she had no sort of cover. Her only hope was to shoot enough of the gray attackers to block the doorway with their bodies.
She didn’t bother shooting to stun. Whoever these guys were, they hadn’t come to her rescue.
“Drop!” someone ordered. Raena flung herself down on her face. Only then did she realize that the voice had spoken Imperial Standard.
The grays split in half. Some pivoted to deal with the threat outside. The others started toward Raena.
She recognized an EMP grenade as it spun into the truck. Someone outside was trying to disable the grays’ combat helmets.
The grenade had been pitched to strike the upper wall. Everyone standing caught the blast wave in the head. They collapsed like unstrung marionettes.
That was unexpected. The EMP should have just messed up their displays. The gray soldiers didn’t even seem to be breathing.
“Come on out, Raena,” the voice outside called.
“I’m afraid to,” she answered. She looked down at her stolen rifle, but the EMP had disabled it, too. She dropped it and crept forward to grab one of the gray soldiers’ sidearms. It was a surprising weapon, sinuous and bulbous. She’d never seen anything like it, couldn’t imagine what it was supposed to do. It didn’t even seem to have a trigger.
“You want us to come in and get you?” His voice held a hint of threat.
“No, I’m coming,” Raena promised. “Tell me you want me alive.”
The person outside laughed. “If we wanted you dead, that truck would be full of corpses right now. The bounty’s only good if you’re alive.”
Ah. Bounty hunters. That was familiar territory. Raena put the unusual weapon gently back on the bottom wall of the truck. She stepped over the fallen bodies, alert for one of them to grab her. No one moved.
The bounty hunters stood outside in th
e street, no doubt in full view of any security cameras. One was a grizzled human man with long, wild hair. The second male was something large and humanoid with mechanical arms. The last was a twitchy white-furred creature with a black face. All of them trained weapons on her.
“You all right?” the man asked.
“Not shot,” Raena said.
“That’s good. Let’s get out of here before these gray ghosts get reinforced. Those boys are nothing but trouble.”
Raena kept coming toward the bounty hunters, trying to work out the angles. The three of them were staggered, far enough apart that there was no taking out two of them before the third brought her down. If she’d had time to get out of the manacles or if she’d had a working rifle or if she had boots or if the nighttime air wasn’t like breathing through a wet blanket …
The man slung his rifle and came to loop a cable through her restraints. “We’ll get those off you once we’re underway. All right?”
Raena nodded. The other two took positions to flank her.
“Just a hop, a skip, and a jump,” he promised.
Since he seemed in a chatty mood, Raena asked, “Who put the bounty on me?”
“Kai’s Business Council. I love these mercantile gigs.”
Raena couldn’t puzzle that out. What could Kai be charging her with? Her end of the fight against the Thallians had clearly been self-defense. Kai couldn’t be charging her with that, could they?
The bounty hunters’ car waited in the next street over. Raena climbed in docilely, to be sandwiched knee to knee with the man and his giant friend. The monkey creature drove. The car took them through town and right up onto their ship. She never had another chance to run.
*
Kavanaugh found Eilif sitting by herself in the farthest corner of the garden. She jumped guiltily when he stopped in front of her.
“How are you?” he asked gently.
She bit her lip as she glanced up at him, then immediately dropped her gaze. “It’s all too much,” she whispered. “I know they want to help, but there are so many of them. And they’re loud. And …” She started to cry.
“And it’s scary to defend yourself,” Kavanaugh guessed. “He hurt you every time you protested.”
She shivered like a frightened mouse.
Kavanaugh went down on one knee to make himself smaller. “I’ve seen Raena’s scars,” he said. “I don’t know if you knew that we were friends when she was running from him. I saw what he’d done to her when she was young.”
“He trained her to fight,” Eilif said, “so he could beat her when she fought him. He trained our sons to fight, then he broke their bodies. He …” She faltered, unable to name the things that Thallian did to her.
“It’s all right,” Kavanaugh promised. “Ariel didn’t ask if you wanted to learn to fight, but you don’t need to. There are other ways to escape.” He didn’t list them, because surely she understood. “Just know,” he said, “that all of the Shaads, Ariel included, will put themselves between danger and you.”
“How is she so brave?” Eilif asked hopelessly.
Kavanaugh had his own theories on that, but he said, “Some people fight for the love of it. Some because they have to. Ariel has come a long way, but she’s still an arms dealer at heart. She still wants to die with a gun in her hand. Raena is a warrior. She wants to die on her feet, fighting a worthy enemy.” He put his hand on the small, broken woman’s. “How do you want to die, Eilif?”
She stared at Kavanaugh, but her tears had stopped. He could practically see the thoughts spinning through her head.
“I don’t want to be afraid,” she said at last.
“What would give you courage?”
“Knowing that he can’t hurt me any more.”
“He’s dead,” Kavanaugh reminded. “You watched him burn.”
“Yes.”
That wasn’t enough, he saw. He tried another argument. “All the clones were different, weren’t they? Some were cruel and some were cunning and some were …”
“Clever,” she said. “Gentle. Wise.”
“Even though they were genetically similar, none of them grew up to be exactly like your husband. Even if the robot is cloning more Thallians somehow, none of them will be him.”
She nodded, thinking hard. “Even with Jonan to train them, none of the boys was as vicious as he was.”
“How long did it take, from beginning the cloning process until they were born? How long until they were grown? Until they would be dangerous?”
“It would take years,” she said.
He could see that he had given her some comfort finally.
She surprised him by asking, “How do you want to die, Mr. Kavanaugh?”
“In my bed, in my sleep, after a long and satisfying life.”
She smiled at him. For a moment, he saw Raena echoed in her face. His blood chilled. Then her green eyes caught the sunlight behind him and the illusion dissolved.
Kavanaugh smiled back at her. He wasn’t sure how old Eilif was, except that she had been born after the War ended. She could not be more than twenty, but worry lined her face and her hair had gone entirely white. Ariel believed that Eilif had been artificially matured, so she could serve as Thallian’s wife and the mother of his children. Worst of all, Eilif didn’t even know she was a clone. But even if her growth had been accelerated, they were not in imminent danger of a Thallian attack. It would still take time to get new Thallians up to speed.
*
The cabin the bounty hunters put Raena in was only slightly more spartan than her own cabin on the Veracity. Smaller, and likely the comm was disabled, but she wouldn’t be uncomfortable there.
The guy with the mechanical arms came in, followed by the grizzled human. He asked, “You want the restraints off?”
“Yes, please.”
“Here’s how we’re gonna do it: Chale is gonna hold you still for me while I do the cutting. You’re gonna relax and pretend you’re at the spa. Anything happens to me or Chale or you make a grab for the cutting torch, Skip is going to gas the lot of us and you’ll wake up in the crash web. Got it?”
“I don’t want trouble,” Raena said. “You don’t have wandering hands, do you?”
“Chale is the jealous type,” he promised. “So don’t get all wily on me.”
“Stellar.”
They settled on the bunk. Chale wrapped one mechanical arm across Raena’s shoulders and pulled her back against his chest. She didn’t give him any reason to tighten his hold.
The man sparked the torch and began to cut the left restraint.
“Why’d you speak Imperial Standard to me?” she asked.
“Because I knew your mother.” He didn’t look up from his cutting.
“Did you serve together?”
He laughed. “No, I was a hunter during the War. Ran with a crew that chased her. Money was too good to resist. I’m the only one who survived it.”
Raena didn’t remember him at all. Into the silence, she had to say something. “What was she like?”
“Your mother was crazy,” he said decisively. “We thought she had a death wish, that she would be easy pickings. It wasn’t a death wish so much as she didn’t care what happened to her, as long as she didn’t go back to him.”
“Thallian?”
“Yeah. Between the two of them, my crew never stood a chance.”
“I’m sorry,” Raena said. “I’ve heard those were bad times.”
He glanced up at her, then went back to work. “It’s amazing how much you look like her.”
“I’ve been told that.” Raena wondered if he would know who Ariel was, if he’d care that she might be able to match any bounty offered by Kai. She didn’t suppose you lasted twenty-five years as a bounty hunter if you sold your captives to the highest bidder.
“How long am I going to be your guest?” she asked.
“That depends. You hear about the problems with the tesseract drives?”
�
�Yeah.”
“We haven’t been able to afford to replace ours yet. Still paying off its installation, in fact. So as long as we don’t have any statistical hiccups, this’ll be a fast trip.”
Otherwise, Raena understood, they were going to vanish into tesseract space and never been seen again. She shivered.
Chale chuckled behind her. “C’mon, Bihn. No need to frighten her. She’s being a model prisoner, so far.”
Raena changed the subject. “Thank you for getting me away from those guys in gray.”
“You run into them before?”
“Yeah. They seem like soldiers, not hunters. Pretty risky, taking down the Lautan Planetary Security like that.”
“Yeah. PS was supposed to deliver you to us at the spaceport, but once we saw the ghosts creeping around, we thought we’d better come make sure we got you onboard safely.”
“Why do you call them ghosts?”
“No insignia,” he said. “Never see them without their helmets. Never see them, actually, unless they’re on a mission. Then it’s best to make sure they don’t see you.”
“Have you been seeing them a lot?”
“More and more. Where’d you see them?”
“Capital City.”
“I didn’t hear about that one. The news is keeping their existence really quiet.”
“Are they government?”
“Don’t think so. Private militia, which limits who they could belong to. Who’d you piss off?”
“Other than businesses on Kai? I’ve got no idea.”
He finally got the second restraint cuff off her arm and switched the cutting torch off. “Thank you for being sensible about all of this.”
Sensible, Raena wondered, or overly cautious? In the past, she would’ve made her move hours ago. Now she kept finding reasons not to risk her life. Was that a change for the better, if it garnered her thanks from bounty hunters?
*
Haoun got down to the jailhouse early in the morning, to try to beat the heat of the day. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same brilliant idea. The thick air had already heated up when the line advanced enough that he could get into the building.
No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three Page 8
