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

by Rhoads, Loren

  With her free hand, she snatched the breather from his belt, switched it on, held it over her face, and danced back to watch the show.

  He fumbled weakly at the grenades, trying to figure out which was leaking, unable to see them on his chest. He hadn’t thought to drop the gun, so he only had one free hand. Before long it didn’t matter. She pulled the hissing grenade from the bandolier and pitched it back down the hall toward her cell.

  Raena searched the guards quickly. She stole their gun belts, the bandolier of grenades, and retrieved the knife from the dead man’s eye. She wiped it off on his uniform. Then she jammed the blade between the doors of the elevator and ran it down the slot, searching for the emergency release.

  She could hear the elevator car coming down. Reinforcements were on their way.

  *

  The Templar Queen set Mykah carefully back on the floor. “Thank you,” he told her. He triggered his comm bracelet.

  “On my way,” Jim said.

  “The Arbiter has entered the system.”

  “I know.” Fear constricted the boy’s voice. “Are you safe?”

  “For the moment.”

  “I have a quick detour to make. It’s going to cost you your handheld.”

  “Do it,” Mykah said.

  “See you soon.”

  Mykah came out of the Templar Queen’s stall to find Gisela arming herself with the fallen Thallians’ guns. Kavanaugh was examining the lock on the second stall.

  “Can you shoot it open?” Mykah asked.

  “It’ll be faster to slice it off.” Kavanaugh picked up one of the cyanogen cutting torches.

  Mykah turned back to the queen. “Do you have food or other provisions you need from here?”

  “The food is contaminated,” she said. She brushed gently past him and went to stand in front of one of the stalls. “This one of us is badly wounded. He will not survive the trip.”

  Mykah put his hand on her carapace. “We can’t leave him here for the Thallians.”

  “You will have to kill him,” she said. “Do you know how?”

  “No.” Mykah wanted to tell her that he’d never killed anything. He wanted to ask one of the others to do it, but Gisela was just a kid—even though she’d just gunned down half a dozen Thallians—and Kavanaugh was busy cutting open the other stalls.

  The Templar Queen twisted her head toward Mykah. Her face was a swirl of shades of brown and black.

  “Tell me what I need to do,” Mykah said.

  *

  Jim armed the incendiary bomb as he got the Veracity into the air. He’d never done this before, but he’d had to run through the bombing simulators with his brothers. He knew the sequence. He prayed his aim was up to the job. This strike needed to be surgical.

  The Veracity hovered above the Thallians’ library. It tore at him to damage the city. He reminded himself that, by his time, everything was already gone. Either he destroyed the library now or the galaxy would do it when they murdered the planet. One way or another, all its knowledge was ash—and there was no time to go retrieve the Templar’s message and Mykah’s handheld from the study carrels. He couldn’t allow those things to fall into his family’s hands.

  He released the bomb and pulled the Veracity away toward the bunker where the Templars had been imprisoned.

  *

  Raena launched herself across the elevator shaft. Her fingers caught the cage around the access ladder. She scrambled through the entry gap, one eye on the elevator car plunging down at her. It stopped at the floor she’d just left.

  The bandolier of sleep grenades got hung up on the cage as she climbed. She stopped to untangle it. In her hurry, she fumbled it. It dropped out of reach.

  No time to worry about it now, she told herself. She made herself climb. It wouldn’t take them long to secure the detention floor and figure out where she’d gone. As far as she knew, there was only one way in or out.

  If the Arbiter had entered the system, it would take a while for Jonan’s shuttle to bring him to the planet’s surface. The Veracity was going to have to get up and off the planet quickly and quietly. She had to get the hell out of this building fast if she wanted to go with them.

  An enormous explosion sounded over her head. Around her, the elevator shaft flexed. Raena clung to ladder rungs, waiting for debris to rain down. When it didn’t, she pushed herself to climb.

  The target had not been the building she was in, but it must have been next door or very nearby. Sounded like an incendiary bomb. It didn’t make sense for the Arbiter to bomb Jonan’s home world—and they should have been too far away. The bomb must have been dropped by the Veracity—and only Jim would know how to load the bomb or drop it.

  She doubled her pace up the ladder. Was Jim simply sending her a message that it was time to go? If the Veracity was airborne enough to drop incendiaries and not get caught in the heatwave, she wasn’t going to catch up to it. It was out of here.

  Maybe they were telling her goodbye.

  *

  Jim dropped a concussion bomb that was small enough to level a building—the cloning lab, he was pretty sure. He set the Veracity down in the wreckage.

  Small arms fire pinged off the ship’s hull. Jim popped open the controls for the ship’s guns. He fired blindly, trying to chase his attackers back under cover. The handguns didn’t pose any danger to the Veracity, but they would slow the others down from escaping.

  Once things had settled momentarily, Mykah raced with the Templars for the Veracity. Kavanaugh and Gisela ran interference for them.

  As soon as Kavanaugh hurried into the cockpit, Jim relinquished the controls. He rushed past Mykah, who was herding the Templars into the hold.

  “Where are you going?” Mykah asked.

  “To get Raena. She’s out of her cell.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There was a security alert.”

  “I’m going with you,” Gisela said.

  “No.” Jim’s tone was commanding enough to rock her back. “I can pass. They’ll be too panicked by all the damage to look too closely at me, but they’ll kill you on sight. They’ll know you’re not family.”

  Gisela unbuckled the stolen gun belt slung around her hips and held it out.

  “Thanks.” Jim took all the weapons she offered. “Tell Mr. Kavanaugh to bomb the ship depot as soon as he’s in the air. I marked it on the schematic. The bomb is already loaded. That’ll keep them from following you.”

  “See you at the rendezvous site,” Mykah told him. “Good luck.”

  “You, too.”

  The boy jumped out the hatch and started to run. Gisela fired over his head, clearing him a path, as Kavanaugh got them back into the air.

  *

  Raena’s legs trembled with strain as she crawled out of the elevator shaft at last. All these weeks of imprisonment had been hell on her conditioning.

  The maintenance hallway in which she found herself was featureless, no indication which way she should run. She chose right and ran flat out. No need to conserve energy now. Either she could find the Veracity and get to it, or she’d have to get to the ship depot and steal something—any of the Thallians’ War-era craft were well within her outdated skill set, she realized with a grin—and get herself off the planet. Better to die alone in space than to be taken back aboard the Arbiter.

  Something else exploded, a series of booms, one setting off the next. So much for the ship depot. Apparently, Jim had decided to leave his family no way off the planet.

  The lights in the corridor flickered out. Raena skidded to a halt and pressed herself flat against a wall, waiting for the fuel silo to go.

  Nothing more exploded as she caught her breath. The emergency lighting kicked in. In the dimness, Raena ran some more. She took the next left. Ahead of her stood a door with a lock screen. That was a problem. Raena ran at it anyway. She was covered with enough Thallian blood that she hoped she could pass. She licked her hand, rubbed it against the blood flaking f
rom her jumpsuit, and slapped her palm down on the lock.

  The computer considered, then slid the door open for her.

  She found herself in a city on fire. Smoke smeared the night sky. The air smelled toxic and her recently suctioned lungs were sensitive. She pulled the stolen breather back on, hoping its filter would get her safely out of the city.

  An enormous explosion slammed her back against the building. Her head hit hard enough that she saw stars. The Thallians had lost the battle with the fire on their fuel silo.

  All right. She couldn’t get off the planet. She still had to get out of the city before Jonan came. She loped toward the hangar that held the jet bikes.

  *

  Raena drained the stolen handguns on her way through the city. She didn’t wait for the Thallians to fire on her; she merely took them out wherever she saw them. As far as she was concerned, only four of the clones had to survive into the future—and three of those were off the planet. As long as she didn’t kill Aten by mistake, she’d done no irreparable damage.

  One of the Thallian clones waited for her at the vehicle depot. He looked remarkably like Jonan—the same obsessively muscled body, the same sharpened teeth. More than just brothers, these two could have been twins. They must have been clones from the same batch.

  Raena stopped running, breathing hard, her body on fire with adrenaline. Exhaustion lingered not far off. “You must be Aten.”

  “You’ve heard of me.”

  She nodded. “I didn’t hear about many of Jonan’s brothers by name, but I know about you and Revan.” What was the alpha clone doing here alone? Were other clones hiding nearby, ready to shoot her down? Or had Aten sent the others to fight the fires and save the city? If any of the Thallian brothers had been sane, their behavior would have been easier to predict.

  “I’ve heard about you, too,” he warned. “The Empire didn’t exaggerate when they called you dangerous. Why didn’t they kill you like they said they would?”

  She caught herself about to tell him the truth. Aten survived the War. She would kill him twenty-some years in the future. She could do nothing that would change how he reacted to her name then. “They did kill her,” Raena lied. “Raena Zacari was buried alive in a Templar tomb as a way to control your brother.”

  “What was her relationship with my brother?”

  “She served as his aide.”

  “Is that all?”

  “She did anything he required her to.”

  He snarled, “Did she fuck him?”

  Raena looked at him, uncertain how to answer. She knew Jonan supplanted Aten as the alpha clone. She just didn’t know when. If she admitted her relationship with Jonan, would she destroy his chance to advance in the family? It was tempting to get some payback, however petty it might be.

  Was this where the future disintegrated for her? If she said too much, would Aten have Jonan killed? Plague or no, she still stood a chance of being rescued from her tomb by Kavanaugh and Sloane. She might still go to Kai and see Ariel again. But if Jonan didn’t become the alpha clone, his men would not hunt her on Kai. She wouldn’t steal the Veracity. She wouldn’t run away with Mykah and Coni and the others. She’d never go back to Drusingyi to rescue Jimi and she’d never stop the Messiah drug and she’d never take up with Haoun on Lautan. If she killed Aten Thallian now, she would break the future. The last year of her life would be rewritten.

  It was a sacrifice she didn’t want to make.

  Luckily, Aten backtracked in the conversation. “Who are you?”

  “My name is also Raena Zacari,” she said, letting him hear the truth in her voice.

  “Who cloned you?”

  Raena didn’t know how to answer that.

  “I saw the genetic analysis,” he said. “I saw markers from Jonan’s DNA.”

  She remembered bleeding out on Drusingyi, after Jonan had shot her. She remembered the family’s medical robot preparing to operate on her. Had they transfused her with Thallian’s blood while she was out? Was his blood replicating inside her still? Raena shuddered at the thought.

  “I need to get out of here,” she told him.

  “Not until I get some answers.” Aten settled himself in her path, ready for a fight. “Whom do you serve?”

  “That’s a complicated question.” During the War, there had been three sides: the Empire, the Templars—and the Coalition, trying to rescue what they could from the collision between the other two. “I serve humanity.”

  Aten’s next question surprised her. “What mission has the Emperor given my brother?”

  Raena allowed herself a little smile. “Are you testing me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your brothers are commanded to create a plague genetically keyed to the Templar. Jonan is meant to use the Arbiter to sue for peace as a cover for spreading this plague.”

  “And you’re here to stop the plague?”

  “Yes.”

  “What makes you think we can deny the will of the Empire?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then why are you doing this to us?”

  When she didn’t answer, he pounced at her, gloved hand raised to strike. Raena watched his eyes, not his hand. As the blow fell, she flung herself to the opposite side, grabbed his left arm and pulled him off balance, danced away. This was the fight she had trained for all her life: when a Thallian was still young and fit enough to test her, but she was old and wily and strong enough to match him.

  Aten attacked, trying to shove her against the wall of the vehicle depot. She blocked him and stood her ground. He was startled when her fist slipped past his guard and landed hard enough on his jaw that he bit his tongue with his sharpened teeth. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

  Raena darted around him enough that he never knew which direction her next attack would come from. He grimaced, surprised to find her his equal. Blood streaked his teeth.

  She hit him again in the jaw and barely got away when he grabbed for her. She raised her fist to lick his blood from her knuckles.

  He watched her, seemingly captivated. Then, without warning, he swept her feet out from beneath her. She landed on the stone floor.

  He kicked her hard as he could in the thigh. Raena rolled with the blow, managed to get to her hands and knees before he kicked her again. And again. And again.

  She forced her eyes open, locking the pain away somewhere else. She had to think.

  Next time he kicked her, she sat up fast. Grabbed his calf and held on. Forced his foot up higher. Kicked his standing shin hard with her sharpened heel.

  When he lost his balance, she pounced on him.

  As she tightened her hands around his throat, Raena smiled into Aten’s eyes. She knew where to put her fingers to cut off his oxygen, to slow the blood to his brain, to give him the most pain without allowing him to lose consciousness.

  She thought he would struggle more. She thought he would argue or try to tempt her. Instead, as it had when she killed his twin in the future, masochism got the better of him. Aten surrendered to the sensation of death tightening around his throat.

  Clarity chilled her. She wanted to kill Aten as much as she’d ever wanted anything in her life. But why? As a way to hurt Jonan? To punish Aten for his part in developing the plague? She didn’t know this man. She had no way or right to judge him. Her crew had already set his city on fire, bombed his family’s only route of escape, and killed uncounted numbers of his uncles, brothers, and sons.

  The Thallians had lost. She didn’t need to do this. She couldn’t do this. The future might still come …

  Of their own accord, Raena’s hands unlocked on Aten’s throat.

  Aten opened eyes gone bloodshot to peer at her. Raena sat back on his chest, staring at him, shocked at herself.

  He punched her in the head. Luckily, from this angle, the blow didn’t have much speed behind it. She let him overbalance her.

  Something crashed down atop Aten and he collapsed over her. Past his shoulde
r, Raena saw the face of one of the boy clones. Something in his expression told her it was Jim.

  He rolled Aten’s body off of her. “Did my uncle hurt you?”

  “No more than your father ever did,” Raena said.

  “Can you walk?”

  Raena allowed him to help her to her feet. “Yes.” The deep bruise made her right thigh quiver, but the leg held her weight.

  “They moved the Veracity to the rendezvous site,” Jim warned her. He led her to a jet bike and jumped on.

  Raena clambered up behind him. She wondered if Haoun still existed in the future, if he would remember her. If he still liked human girls. If the Empire fell, or if it made peace with the Templars. If there was anything familiar worth going back to or if they had destroyed it all.

  *

  At some point, they passed out of the city. Raena didn’t notice. They rode until the jet bike ran out of fuel. Then they ran. The next thing that caught her attention was Mykah standing guard near a spire of rock. Dawn was breaking over the mountains.

  Mykah hissed when he saw her. Raena wanted to tell him that the damage looked worse than it was, but really, she was worse than she looked, so she kept silent. He put his arm around her waist and took some of her weight off her injured leg.

  She forced herself to jog across a wide grassy field. She had disjointed impressions: purple wildflowers spangling the grass; the air alive with birdsong. Yellow sunlight poured warmth over her skin. She’d had no idea how beautiful Drusingyi had been, before the galaxy murdered it. This must be breaking Jim’s heart.

  Gisela stood in the doorway of the Veracity, covering their approach. She had the sniper rifle upraised, staring through the scope over Raena’s head. Raena didn’t look back to see if she was being followed. She no longer had the strength to care. The people in the past had ceased to be her problem.

  Mykah glanced over her shoulder and put on a burst of speed. “We’ve got to go,” he urged.

  “Go,” Raena said. “Go back to her.”

  “Run!” he ordered.

  She didn’t want to. She felt all her years now in the aches in her body, in the heaviness of her heart. She could just lie down here, in the glorious sunshine, and be one with the grasses and flowers. She was done. Let Mykah go home and face down the Templar Master, beg for the survival of humanity.