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

by Rhoads, Loren

  Mykah kept pulling her forward, increasing the length of his stride. And she ran beside him, calling on the dregs of her strength. The Veracity was the only home she had ever loved. She ran for it.

  Jim dashed ahead of them. In the ship’s hatchway, he reached back to drag Raena inside. Mykah leapt in after her, pounded his fist down on the lock.

  Raena sprawled on the deck, certain that her heart would tear itself apart. Jagged breath cut the inside of her throat.

  She lay there, gasping, as the others made the ship ready to leave. She felt the engines powering up.

  “Raena, strap down,” Mykah ordered over the comm.

  She shook her head, unable to push herself up off the deck.

  Something soft brushed her cheek. It was insistent. She opened her eyes to see a Templar leaning over her, stroking an antenna across her face.

  The Templar picked her up in its many legs, gently cradling her against its chitinous underside. At this point, she didn’t care if it planned to eat her. She closed her eyes and let herself swoon, but the deep unconsciousness she craved remained out of reach.

  The Templar moved to brace itself. It was too big to fit into any of the crash webbing aboard the Veracity, but it could wedge itself into the main passageway.

  The ship shot upward at a steep angle. That probably meant Kavanaugh was flying. He had been doing it for decades now, maybe longer than Haoun had been alive. As he forced the old ship through a series of punishing evasive maneuvers, adrenaline surged into Raena’s blood despite herself.

  “What’s going on?” she shouted forward, but either they were concentrating or they didn’t hear her.

  “Fighters from the Arbiter are pursuing us,” a voice said. It sounded like a stringed instrument, its voice so low that Raena felt it in her chest.

  “Are you speaking to me, Templar?” she asked softly.

  “Yes. We have the translation apparatus now.”

  The running wasn’t over yet. She had to get up, get into the turret, and man the guns. She had to protect the others.

  “Can you help me get aft?”

  “Yes.”

  The Templar pulled itself through the Veracity, carrying Raena along with it. When they reached the turret guns, Raena said, “Let me go now. I will try to convince them to leave us alone.”

  She crawled up into the bubble, switching on the comm inside. “Route some power to the guns.”

  “We’re going to jump as soon as I can get clear of the asteroids,” Kavanaugh said.

  “If you lose me, so be it. I’ll give you a chance to run.”

  *

  Jim crept up into the turret with her. He didn’t say anything, just powered up the other gun and climbed in.

  He was, unsurprisingly, a good shot. Raena felt better for his company, since the black eye left her completely reliant on the computer targeting. She laid down covering fire and let Jim pick off the fighters coming alongside them. The two of them made a good team.

  She wondered if he had any regrets killing these strangers. She couldn’t see the boy’s face, but she imagined he was smiling.

  Finally the Veracity got out beyond the asteroid belt. Kavanaugh gave the ship her head, letting her run flat out as he calculated the jump back to the Templars’ tombworld.

  Mykah came to the base of the turret guns. “Come down,” he said. “We’re clear.”

  Raena let Jim go down first. Once he’d gotten out of her way, she called down to Mykah, “Will you catch me? My leg’s frozen up. I can’t manage the climb.”

  “I’ve got you,” he assured.

  *

  Raena shut herself in her cabin and did not come out to eat. Kavanaugh let her get away with that for one day, then he overrode the lock on her door and let himself in.

  She sat in the darkness. One eye had swollen shut. The other glittered in the red power light of her screen.

  She’d showered. Some of her fingers were taped together. She’d gotten her cuts and burns bandaged. She sat wound up in the coverlet, but hadn’t bothered to dress. Even in the dimness, he could see the black shadow of an enormous bruise on her thigh. It must go down to the femur.

  “Is it broken?” he asked.

  “Just bruised.”

  Kavanaugh set the tray on her desk, then handed her the cup of tea, double sweet and full of rice milk, the way Mykah said she liked it. Kavanaugh sat beside her on the bed, with his back against the bulkhead.

  “You should see the other guy,” she joked quietly.

  “Jim said you were fighting the alpha clone.”

  She nodded.

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No.” She sipped her tea. “I had a realization in the middle of the fight. I was going to kill Aten because he looked like Jonan. Because Jonan was evil. Because I couldn’t kill Jonan again.”

  “When I was a kid, it was easy to tell the bad guys,” Kavanaugh said. “The Empire was evil. The Coalition said they would protect us. The Templars said they would accept us into the galaxy. And the Thallians stripped away those promises because they killed the Templars and turned the galaxy against us. It must have been difficult to let any of the Thallians live.”

  “I told myself I’d changed, but twice now, I’ve gone to Drusingyi and killed nearly everyone I came across, man and boy.” Raena asked despairingly, “How am I different from the monsters?”

  “You’ve been trained to be a monster,” Kavanaugh told her, just as quietly. “You’ve loved and been loved by monsters. But the galaxy is just the galaxy. Most of us are only people. We will forgive you for being a monster, as long as you only show us part of who you are. Humanity needs someone to protect it. We need you to fight for us, even if you feel like a monster.”

  She shook her head. “I knew if I killed Aten, I was destroying the future. Jonan wouldn’t become the alpha clone. He wouldn’t hunt me down after you got me got out of the tomb. I wouldn’t steal the Veracity. Jim probably wouldn’t even have been cloned. Everything that’s happened to me in the last six months would cease to exist.” She sipped her tea. “I held the future in my hands. I wanted so very badly to break it.”

  “But you didn’t,” Kavanaugh pointed out. “Jim is still with us. We rescued a Templar Queen and two young females. We can save the Templars after all. We can make things right in the galaxy.”

  Raena set the teacup aside and turned to kiss him. Kavanaugh submitted to her. Even injured, she was still strong enough to hurt him, and he didn’t want to be hurt. He wanted the same thing he had always wanted: to fix her. To rescue her. So he let her use him, to prove something to herself.

  He had to close his eyes, so he couldn’t see how badly she’d been beaten.

  In all the years he’d imagined saving her, it had never been exactly like this. She was gentler than he expected, more invested in the sensation of it than the consummation. He tried to relax into it, let her take what she needed, but it was difficult to separate himself from all the years of fantasies and dreams.

  In the end, she was entirely quiet. Afterward, he only held her and asked nothing more. He knew that this would only happen once. Both of them had exorcised their demons. When he saw Ariel again and asked her to marry him, Raena would give them both her blessing. He hoped she would find some peace with Haoun, if only for a while.

  Raena curled her head against Kavanaugh’s shoulder, closed her good eye, and went to sleep. His heart broke for her just a little bit more. He kissed her forehead, on the side that wasn’t swollen and bruised.

  CHAPTER 18

  When Kavanaugh woke, Raena was sitting up at her desk, eating the meal Mykah sent in for her earlier. She had gotten herself dressed. Her color seemed normal now. Her blackened eye had faded toward green and come open a slit.

  “Feeling better?” he asked.

  “You’re the best doctor I’ve ever had.” The return of her sense of humor let him know that the crisis had passed.

  “Maybe the most hands-on,” he teased.

>   “Mykah commed back about ten minutes ago,” she said. “We’re coming up on the Templar tombworld.”

  “Should I hustle?” Kavanaugh asked.

  “You’ve got time,” she told him.

  “Come out with me,” he suggested. “The Templars would like to get to know their savior.”

  “I didn’t save them,” Raena pointed out. “You and Mykah and Gisela did. Jim did.”

  “You bought us the time,” he answered. “They were prisoners, too, facing vivisection so the Thallians could create the plague. They understand that you sacrificed yourself so we could rescue them.”

  She put her fork down and twisted to face him. “I’m not a hero, Tarik. I don’t want anyone to treat me like one.”

  “Understood. But Mykah and the kids will worry about you, if you don’t come out.” He grinned at her. “You don’t want everyone else busting in here the way I did.”

  “You’re right about that.” She gave him a smile in return before concentrating on her cold food.

  He got up to dress.

  *

  Raena limped out as far as the lounge. Mykah helped her get strapped into the crash webbing. His eyes wouldn’t meet hers.

  “It’s okay,” she promised. “I’m healing.”

  Jim strapped himself in beside her. Once he was settled, Raena gave him the photo of Eilif that she’d found in Revan’s coat. “This was in her cabin,” Raena said, “when I took it apart to build the cell. Revan treasured it. I like it because she looks so happy. I thought you would want it.”

  “Thank you.”

  Mykah strapped himself in on the other side of her. Once he was settled, he reached out to take her hand. “We’re ready,” he called up to the cockpit.

  “Okay,” Gisela said. “We’re broadcasting the new message from the queen. Here’s hoping it will get us through their security net.”

  *

  Whatever the Queen said to them, the Templars guarding the tombs let the Veracity land on the tombworld. One of the queen’s female attendants was a time engineer. She crawled out of the Veracity to examine the time machine, to make certain it really would allow the Veracity to go home.

  While she was busy, Raena went to speak with the queen.

  The Templar Queen bent forward to caress Raena’s bruised face with her antennae. Raena stood straight and still, enduring it. The Templar had no eyes that she could see, only the hypnotic swirl of colors that was its face.

  Over Vezali’s translator, the Queen said, “Mykah Chen told us that you distracted the Thallians’ security while the crew of Veracity rescued us.”

  “We are a team,” Raena said.

  “And we will be forever grateful to you. But one thing confuses us.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The one who calls himself the Templar Master? How did he survive the plague that killed everyone else?”

  “He said his people shut him in one of the Templar tombs to wait until the Thallians were gone.”

  “This is what confuses us. Jimi Thallian survives.”

  “Jimi Thallian is a hero.”

  The queen did not deny it. “Jimi Thallian says this plague was keyed to the Templar.”

  “Yes.”

  “He says that the plague died out when the Templar died out.”

  “Jim would understand that better than I do,” Raena admitted.

  “But the Templar Master did not die out. And it is not our way to imprison our own people,” the queen said. Raena waited for the translator to catch up with the maelstrom of colors flashing and flaring across her face. “We think this Templar is a coward who fled from the past and, when he found himself alone, plotted revenge.”

  Raena nodded. “He could have sent us to rescue Templars from the past, but he didn’t. He sent us to unleash a plague to destroy humanity.”

  “We have seen the message that he wanted you to transmit. If he was not a criminal before, he is a criminal now,” the queen said. “The answer to insanity is not more madness. The answer to genocide is not more genocide.”

  “What do your people do to their criminals?” Raena asked.

  “Kill them.”

  She had expected that. “How?”

  “No,” the queen said. “The answer is when.”

  *

  Once the Templars’ time machine was ready, Kavanaugh backed the Veracity into the mountain. This time he set down before the ship lost power. Everything went black momentarily, before chugging to life once more.

  When Kavanaugh pulled them out of the mountain into the gritty wind, the Veracity’s scanners showed no other life on the planet. The ships full of androids orbited overhead. The Queen hailed them before they could communicate with their master.

  Raena watched the energy signatures coming off the ships, waiting to see if their guns heated up. They didn’t.

  “What does that mean?” Mykah asked.

  “She must know what to say to them,” Raena said. “Call Coni. See if the Templar Master will let you talk to her.”

  *

  The Templar Queen and the Master kept in constant communication as the Veracity returned to Drusingyi. Raena didn’t know what they were saying to each other—Vezali’s translator couldn’t keep up—but she suspected at least one of them spoke of love.

  Mykah did connect with Coni—and was able to confirm that she wasn’t an android. She said the grays had started a countdown when the Veracity went into the time machine, but almost no time had passed before it came back out. For the time being, the hostages were being treated like guests.

  The galaxy did not seem to have been ruined. Jim pointed out that he’d known the city had been attacked during the War. He just hadn’t known when. He didn’t discount Raena’s theory that the Veracity’s attack had pushed the Thallians into making the plague, but his answer echoed what she’d said to him about Jonan: “They may have been broken, but they chose to do evil.”

  This time, when they returned to the Thallian homeworld, they took the Veracity into Drusingyi’s ocean. The android-crewed ships served as an honor guard, fighting off the leviathans who took interest in them. When they parked in the newly built hangar outside the cloning lab, the Templar Master came to meet them.

  Inside the Veracity’s hatch, the queen called, “Mykah Chen.”

  Mykah stepped up to her and put his hand on her carapace. She touched his face with her antenna.

  “Please take back your translation device. I do not want it to be damaged.”

  Mykah gently unwound it from her. While he was holding it, her voice sounded in his head. “Thank you for all your assistance.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Gisela keyed open the hatch and the Veracity’s crew went out first. They walked down the ramp and moved aside, so the Templars could follow. The Queen came last. Her face was aglow with shades of yellow and pale green.

  The Templar Master rushed toward her, trundling over his androids, knocking them aside like broken toys.

  Vezali glided over to join the rest of the crew. She took the translator from Mykah, said, “You’ll thank me for this,” and shut the device off.

  Raena grinned. “Good. We did not want to hear whatever they’re going to say to each other.”

  The Queen reared up on her hindmost legs. The Templar Master rose up to meet her, but she easily knocked him onto his back and began to take her pleasure from him.

  “Um,” Mykah said.

  “What did you think was going to happen?” Raena asked.

  “There are kids present.”

  She laughed. “It’s all natural, right? This is how the Templars return to the universe.”

  “Do we have to watch?” Kavanaugh asked, wincing.

  “You don’t,” Raena told them. “She wanted me to stay.”

  So Mykah and the others went off to find Coni and Haoun. All throughout the cloning dome, androids were frozen in strange postures. Something about their master’s distraction had disrupted their autonomy.
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br />   “We should deactivate them now, while they can’t fight back,” Jim suggested.

  “I’ll help,” Gisela said.

  Mykah left the others to it. The present was not going to feel saved to him until he held Coni in his arms.

  *

  Once the Queen finished with the Templar Master, each of her attendants had a go at him. Raena used the time to behead the androids in the hangar. She took special pleasure in taking the Raena decoy apart.

  She stacked the android heads in the airlock and let them get washed out into the ocean. She wasn’t sure if the water would corrode them, but at least some of the heads were eaten by the leviathans swimming outside the dome. That made her smile.

  Finally, the Templars finished breeding. Raena came to look at the Master, lying on his back, his legs moving lazily in the air. He paid no attention to her as she moved up behind his head. She placed her Stinger against his face and fired.

  The colors on his face flared angry orange and painful red. Raena carved across them and closed her eyes. Killing a Templar was just as awful as Mykah warned her it would be.

  When at last the job was done, the female Templars fell upon his body and began to feast.

  *

  Haoun met her when she walked alone out of the hangar. He didn’t say anything, simply gathered her close in his arms and held her. Raena had never been so relieved to be held before.

  When at last he let her go, he handed her a green and gold scarf folded in the shape of a bird. “Welcome home.”

  “Thank you, Haoun.” She unwrapped the scarf, then held it against his scales to admire the color. She wound it around her throat. “But I’m not home yet,” she said. “We need to take Kavanaugh and the kids back to Ariel. I expect we’ve got a wedding to attend. Once the Veracity is in space after that, I’ll feel I’ve come home.”

  “That may be a while yet,” Haoun warned. “Mykah has plans to announce the return of the Templars to the galaxy.”

  Raena heaved a mock sigh. “I suppose we’ll have to be media heroes again.”

  Haoun laughed at her and took her hand. “We’ve got some time to kill before that happens.”