No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three

by Rhoads, Loren

  Raena perched on the arm of his chair. “I learned a long time ago that courage isn’t going into a fight when you’re certain you’ll win. I have to go to Drusingyi, because I have to try to save what’s left of my people. None of the rest of you are obligated to come die at my side. So I respect and honor your courage. I’m grateful to have you as a friend.”

  “Good. Promise you won’t try to erode my fragile bravery by telling me what you expect we’re getting into?”

  “I promise.” Raena slipped down into his lap and hugged him as tightly as she could. “I’ll post a sparring schedule once we’re underway. I’ve got three days to whip you three into a fighting team.”

  Haoun started to protest, but Raena laid a finger across his mouth.

  “Mandatory,” she said. “I saw how you bobbled that stun staff.”

  He laughed.

  “But I’ll make it up to you afterward,” Raena promised. She hopped out of his lap. “I’ll leave you to the preflight check.”

  “Send Gisela up, will you?” he asked. “I’m going to train her to copilot.”

  “Is she coming along with us?”

  “She is your biggest fan,” Haoun said. “She wouldn’t let us leave her behind.”

  “She goes on the sparring schedule too, then.”

  *

  Raena found Gisela lying on the banquette in the lounge. “Which one of Ariel’s daughters are you?”

  Gisela opened eyes that were a strange blue so dark that it almost looked black. “My uncle sold me after my parents died. I was working as a maid in a brothel on Tacauque when the Shaad Foundation bought me.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Almost eight.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Still living at home?”

  Gisela looked at Raena skeptically. “Is this an interview?”

  “In a way. I’m trying to figure out how you fit in here.”

  “You’re not the captain,” Gisela pointed out.

  Raena’s smile was tight. “I’m the evil mastermind. That means I outrank Captain Chen.”

  “My apologies, then.” The girl pushed herself into sitting up. “Ariel trained me to be a bodyguard to Madame Shaad.”

  Raena tossed a Stinger at her. “Field strip that.”

  The girl took the Stinger apart in seconds, stacking the pieces neatly, then reassembled it in half the time. Clearly, her mother’s daughter.

  “You a good shot?”

  “Not as good as Ariel. Better than everyone else.”

  “I don’t know if we’re going to need sharpshooting on this trip. I don’t know what we’re going to need. What I’ve got are games players and hackers, but maybe what I need are diplomats. Real diplomats who know how to make peace. And I’ve never known anyone like that. All I’ve ever known were soldiers following the orders of crazy people.”

  Gisela didn’t dispute any of that. Instead, she said, “Eilif was the gentlest person I ever met. She mended a bird’s wing after the poor creature flew into a window at the villa. She could make anyone feel better. She could tame the most broken child … She had a gift. And that thing killed her because it didn’t need her. She bled to death on the floor of the Veracity because I was knocked out and couldn’t help her.”

  “Concussion?” Raena guessed.

  “Yeah,” Gisela said. She didn’t nod. “It’s getting better.”

  “We’re not a hospital ship,” Raena said. “You’re going to have to take care of yourself. If your head gets knocked around again, even if we just have a rough landing, you could be looking at permanent damage.”

  “I’m used to taking care of myself,” Gisela promised.

  “Good. I’m not used to taking care of anyone else.” After she said it, Raena realized that was a lie. She had taken care of Ariel for years. She relented and said, “Haoun wants you in the cockpit. He says he’s going to train you to copilot.”

  The girl’s smile lit her strange-colored eyes. “Thank you, Raena. You won’t regret letting me come along.”

  Raena wondered about that, but she let it pass.

  *

  The training began as soon as the Veracity was back into space. Raena supervised as Mykah and Coni grappled. She noted that they held back, gentle with each other, so she separated the two of them. Her surprise attack on Mykah was full-speed and all-out. He had mass and reach on Raena, but she let him know she wasn’t playing this time.

  Coni watched, puzzled, waiting for Mykah to complain or ask for help. When she heard Raena break his arm—the groan that escaped him left no doubt—Coni leapt back into the fray.

  Raena slapped her hard enough that Coni’s head rang. The little woman landed a few more blows on Mykah before Coni succeeded in peeling Raena off of him. She threw Raena back with surprising strength, but the little woman landed on her toes and launched herself back at Coni.

  “Are you crazy?” Coni protested. “Stop. Wait. What are you doing?”

  Raena backhanded her. As Coni blinked tears away, Raena threw herself into a backflip and went after Mykah, who lay panting on the deck. She kicked him hard enough to roll him over. He doubled up, trying to protect his organs.

  Coni sprang after Raena. She pulled the woman off of Mykah, pitched her hard at the deck at an angle so she couldn’t pop back up, then pinned her down with one foot.

  Her claws were unsheathed and her hand had drawn back, when Mykah grabbed her arm. “Stop, Coni!”

  Shaking, Coni stepped back and let him hold her.

  Mykah reached his uninjured hand down to Raena. She let him tug her to her feet.

  “I’m going to be ill,” Coni warned.

  Mykah petted her back. “It’s just the aftermath of the fight,” he said. “Stand up and take a deep breath. It will pass.”

  Coni looked at him, shaking her head. “I thought she was going to kill you.”

  “That’s what she wanted you to think.” He turned to Raena. “Did you see what you wanted?”

  She nodded. Blood bloomed on her chest, where Coni’s claws had torn her shirt. Raena pressed on the wounds, to slow the bleeding.

  “I’m sorry, Coni. I wanted to see what you were capable of. Now I want you to think about whether you can unleash that fury before Mykah gets hurt. Because if you can’t, if you restrain yourself, it may be too late.”

  Coni sank to the floor, still panting. “I wanted to kill you.”

  “I know. But we don’t have time to be polite about this. I need to know that you can defend yourself, that you will defend all of us. I need to know that you can get angry enough to kill, if you have to—and that you won’t freeze up afterward. Because if we get to Drusingyi and there are Outriders there—if there are gray soldiers there—I want to know that you won’t go down without a fight.”

  Raena sat down in front of Coni and reached out to take her hands, before noticing that her own were bloody. “This is going to be hard,” Raena promised. “It’s going to be awful. If you don’t want to come down to the planet, I won’t think any less of you and I don’t want you to think any less of yourself. You need to decide that if you do come, you will be all in. Otherwise, you or Mykah are going to get killed. If I have to fight alone, I’d rather go alone to do it.”

  *

  Haoun came into the gym hesitantly, unsure what he would find. He’d seen Raena stitching up her chest before she hauled the Thallians’ old bone regenerator out to mend Mykah’s arm. Coni had retreated to her cabin. Haoun knew Coni and Mykah had been sparring with Raena. Clearly, something drastic had happened.

  “I won’t bite,” Raena promised him.

  “I’m not sure a human bone-mender will fix me,” he answered.

  “Your lesson is different than Mykah or Coni’s,” Raena said. “I want to see how fast you can move and for how long. We’re going to run.”

  She made him run on the treadmill. And run. And run. Haoun had probably never run so long in his life. He foun
d himself dragging slower and slower. Raena jogged alongside him without getting winded or slackening her pace.

  “Jump off,” she told him. When he did, she said, “Freeze.”

  He locked his muscles up so hard that he nearly tipped himself over.

  “Good. Very good. If we need to run and then hide, I don’t want them to hear you gasping. You’re doing great.”

  He laughed. “What if they hear my heart pounding out of my body?”

  “I can’t hear it,” she said. “Can you ignore it?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay. Now I want you to attack me.”

  He’d known it would come to this. He looked down at his claws. He couldn’t retract them like Coni could hers. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t want you to hurt me, either.”

  “I know.”

  “I—I don’t think I can do this. I’m sorry, Raena. I want to protect you. I want …”

  She leaned up against him and looked up into his face. “It’s all right. I didn’t want to set a limit for you. How do you feel about shooting?”

  “I’m okay at shooter games. Better at spraying around cover than at sharpshooting.”

  “Good. I’ll train you on the ship’s external guns.”

  He realized, “You’re going to leave me behind.”

  “It’s safer for us both,” she said. “You are a natural pilot. We need you to get us onto Drusingyi—and we’re not getting away unless you survive to fly us out again.”

  “Why are you going gentle on me after you were so hard on Coni and Mykah?”

  “I told you their lessons were different. I wanted to see if Mykah would follow me even when he was in danger. If he would trust I had a plan, even if he got hurt. I’d never gone off-leash on him before. I wanted to see if he’d panic, if fear or pain would defeat him. He made me very proud.”

  “Did you mean to break Coni?”

  “She isn’t broken. She’s upset and angry and it may take her time to forgive me. But she stopped to watch when she should have stepped up. It may be just the way her people are, or it may be individual to her, but I’ve faced those guys in gray four times. They don’t freeze. If I ever waited to see what they were going to do next, I would be dead. There isn’t time to think in a fight. I can train her to overcome that tendency, but she has to decide if she wants to. If she doesn’t, that’s fine. I’m not going to beat it into her the way it was beaten into me. Unfortunately, we don’t have much time, so I pushed her—both of them—hard.”

  “You should go tell her that,” Haoun said. “She’s going to tear herself up over this. She’ll feel like she let you both down. She didn’t protect Mykah and she disappointed you.”

  “I’m not disappointed,” Raena said. “I will definitely tell her that.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Raena took the last of Coni’s moon cakes out of the cooler and carried them back to the Haru girl’s cabin. “It’s me,” Raena said outside the door. “Can I talk to you?”

  “It’s open.”

  “I brought a peace offering.”

  “You didn’t need to do that.”

  Coni didn’t get up from her desk. Raena handed the plate of cakes to her and sat on the floor. Coni took a cake and handed the tray down to Raena. They chewed in silence, then Raena said, “You’ve been a good friend to me. I don’t know how much time you put into my defense on Kai, but I know who found the evidence Corvas needed. Thank you.”

  Coni waved that away, but accepted a second moon cake. “You are family, Raena.”

  “I feel that way, too. I overstepped today. I am sorry.”

  “No, I’ve been thinking about what you said. You’re right. I was crazy to think I could fight. I was so scared today, watching you. I couldn’t protect Mykah because I was afraid you would hurt me like that. I’ve been in denial. I thought the fighting would be quick. It would be bloodless, like a game. None of us would be hurt.”

  “I get hurt all the time,” Raena said. “Eilif got killed.”

  The blue girl nodded. “We’re not playing, are we?”

  “No, we’re not,” Raena answered. “I would rather scare you away from combat now, here on the ship, than make you participate and regret it later. We will be safer if we can concentrate on what we’re doing and not worry about you.”

  Coni asked plaintively, “Do you have to take Mykah?”

  For once, the emotion in her voice was clear. Raena was pretty sure that Mykah wanted to come, but she told Coni what she wanted to hear. “I can go alone.”

  “Thank you,” Coni said quickly, as if Raena might change her mind. “I … He’s my life. I don’t know what I would do if …”

  Raena smiled. “You talk him out of coming. I’ll abide by his wishes.”

  *

  Mykah sprawled on the banquette with his arm under the bone-mender. He’d pulled off his shirt to deal with the machine’s heat. Close to hand, he had a glass of ice water and the remote. He paused the news when Coni came in. “You all right?” he asked, holding out his good hand.

  Coni wove her fingers between his and came to scent him with her head. “I’ll be all right,” she promised. “I talked to Raena just now.”

  “Did you let her live?” he teased.

  She chuckled. “Yes. Raena excused me from going into battle with her.” Coni gazed at him with her lavender eyes. “She said you don’t have to go, either.”

  “I know I don’t have to,” Mykah said. “What made her decide she didn’t want me to come?”

  Coni looked away from him, at the image frozen on the screen. It was one of Mykah’s shots of the rioting on Kai, looking down from the lamppost in front of the Hall of Justice. A Planetary Security agent was in the process of stunning a little Eske.

  Coni dragged her gaze away to answer his question. “I don’t want you to go.”

  Mykah pulled her closer, then kissed her so she’d know he really meant it. With the lightest touch, she traced the lightning scar that branched across his stomach and onto his chest. He knew she was thinking of how badly he’d gotten hurt the last time he’d followed Raena into a firefight.

  He took a deep breath. The pressure to get this right was enormous. “I am going with her,” he said quietly. “Raena can fight us past the gray soldiers. She can take apart the Outriders, if she needs to. But I don’t know if she can negotiate with the Templar Master. I don’t know if I can either, but I’m afraid to trust the future of humanity to a former assassin.”

  Coni sat back from him sharply, but he kept hold of her hand and didn’t let her get away.

  “You know that’s what she is,” he said. “We can dress it up and call her a warrior, but Raena is a trained killer. I don’t want her to charge in there and kill the reborn Templars because she’s the only representative humanity’s got.”

  “You don’t trust her?” Coni asked.

  “I trust her to protect us. I trust her with my life. But the gray soldiers have been taunting her all across the galaxy. I don’t trust her temper if they push her too far.”

  “I don’t want you to die,” Coni said in Imperial Standard. It was the language Mykah had been born into, the one his parents had spoken to him. Coni used it when she wanted to stress something.

  Mykah pulled her back down, so he could feel her fur against his bare skin. “I’ll do my best not to die,” he promised. He used Haru, Coni’s language, so she would understand that he was serious, too.

  *

  Back in her cabin, Raena checked messages, curious to hear how things worked out for Ariel and Corvas with the Business Council. She found several messages from Ariel. One of them was labeled Urgent: Where is Gisela?

  Raena marched into the cockpit, where the girl hunched over the controls. She asked Haoun, “Could you give us a moment?”

  He looked from one to the other of them and got up without comment.

  Once he’d entered the passageway, Raena asked the girl
, “You didn’t tell your mother you were coming with us?”

  “She would have said no,” Gisela answered.

  “She would have said no because you have a concussion.”

  “She would have said no because of you,” Gisela argued. “She knows if there’s danger, you won’t back down.”

  “I don’t know what Ariel has told you about me—”

  Gisela cut her off. “She hasn’t had to tell me much. Eilif told me how you rescued her, how you killed all the Thallians singlehandedly. Haoun showed me the recording of you protecting Mellix outside Capitol City. Kavanaugh told me about watching you disassemble the Outriders. Mykah told me how you saved him from the Walosi on Lautan. I’ve watched the video of you fighting the death squad on Kai. You step up. You face the dangers. You don’t start fights, but you stop them.”

  “I’m not a hero, Gisela. Heroes are good people who do the right things for the right reasons. That’s never been me.”

  “Who cares what your reasons are, if your actions are heroic? You save people. You protect them. And this thing on Kai, this trial—you showed the galaxy that it’s possible to be graceful and calm in the face of enormous bigotry. Like it or not, you’re a symbol.”

  “I never intended that,” Raena said. “Pedestals tend to have tiny cross sections and very long drops.”

  Gisela had no answer to that, for which Raena was grateful. The whole conversation made her vastly uncomfortable. “Call your mother,” Raena ordered. “Argue your case to her. If she tells me you can stay, fine. Otherwise, we’re putting you out and she can come pick you up.”

  *