The Dragon Corps

by Natalie Grey

  And just why the Dragons existed.

  He had been glad to have her there with him. He was surprised, now, to remember that they had not even discussed their testimony as they traveled back to give it. He’d had no doubt that she would tell the truth, and she hadn’t come to him about it.

  She didn’t look at him now. She was lost in memory.

  “I was glad I didn’t have to make the call,” she said finally. “I was glad I wasn’t where you were, and I was glad I wasn’t where Cade was. I was so ashamed of that. I went into that senate hearing thinking, ‘don’t ask me what I would have done.’”

  “Would you have made a different call?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She still would not look at him. She looked down at her hands, instead, at the callused fingertips and the faint scars that had accumulated over the years from injuries and surgeries. “What matters is I wasn’t prepared to make one. That’s what I can’t forgive myself for. It’s why I’m afraid of what to do if they offer me a command.”

  Talon leaned his elbows on his knees, and his chin on his hands. “I’ve never seen you waver. In battle, you make calls when you have to.”

  “It only takes once.” She looked haunted. “You didn’t hesitate on the Blood Moon.”

  “There’s a difference,” Talon said, into the quiet, “between doubting, and hesitating.” He considered. “Not ‘doubting.’ Knowing you might regret something.”

  “And you just….”

  “Stop thinking, and do it.”

  She nodded after a moment. “Can I ask … what changed this time? Just one too many missions, or what?”

  “It’s not that, it’s….” He closed his eyes, and saw Jacinta’s face.

  She was haunting him.

  “They weren’t afraid to die this time. That’s new. That’s dangerous.” His hands clenched. “And he doesn’t deserve it. Of all the people in the fucking universe, the Warlord of Ymir? That’s who she was dying for? I thought I knew what I needed to know about him, but it’s clear I don’t. Something isn’t adding up.”

  “So you’re going to talk to Soras.” She was withdrawn.

  “Go on, tell me it’s a bad idea. Everyone thinks so.”

  Unexpectedly, her face split in a grin. “If we were a font of good ideas, we wouldn’t have joined the Dragons. You don’t get to be a Dragon with an especially well-developed sense of self-preservation.”

  Talon gave a bark of laughter.

  “It’s not doing it that I disapprove of, or even telling Lesedi—you shocked Mars, though, showing her those briefs. Kiddo asked me if you normally showed her classified things.”

  “And you said?”

  “That when it came to Lesedi, classified meant about five minutes more work before she knew it.” Nyx’s smile was lazy now. “And that she’s one of the good ones. I don’t think he believed me.”

  “He’ll learn.” Talon had only been about halfway through the first mission he’d commanded before he realized he needed more information than Intelligence could give him. “And, back to the point: you don’t object to me doing this, or telling her … but…?”

  “But maybe you shouldn’t broadcast it.” She met his gaze. “You go into Intelligence and say that, it’s going to be all ‘round the department in weeks, all ‘round the Dragons and all of their information brokers, most likely. And you don’t know where the Warlord has ears. You know as well as I do that when that carrier went down, it wasn’t an accident. He’s got resources we can’t begin to guess at. Everyone knows he killed Hoa.”

  Hoa was James Hoa, Aleksander Soras’s predecessor. He’d been a good man and a good spy, and after the Navy had nearly taken back Ymir, he’d been found murdered in brutal enough fashion that most of the rest of Intelligence leadership had resigned.

  The agents, however, insisted that the most horrifying thing about his murder had been that anyone had been able to get the drop on him. Whoever it was, they insisted, must have been superhuman, and stalking him for a very long time. It was impossible that anyone else could have taken him out.

  “Figuring out his resources will be step one, then.” Talon pressed his palms together. “Look … I know maybe it doesn’t make sense, but—”

  “You don’t have to justify yourself to me.”

  “I’m going to anyway—I need someone to tell me if I’m being dumb as hell. And I know it doesn’t make sense, but Soras took over Intelligence when no one else would. That means he isn’t scared by what happened, or at least he knows it’s worth doing anyway. I think he’s sitting on some intel. He doesn’t want to send us to a certain death.”

  “And that’s where you’re taking us now,” she said quietly.

  “No. Maybe.” Talon considered. “Would you follow me if I was?”

  “If you think we’ll win, yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.” She smiled. “Not saying I wouldn’t prefer a less lethal mission, but if that’s how it has to go down, then that’s how it has to go down.”

  “That’s what Tersi said, too.”

  “That’s the team you built, boss.” She pushed herself up. “You should try to sleep. If you’ve made your decision, stop worrying about it.”

  In the doorway, though, she paused.

  “Boss? You still in there?”

  “I was hoping you’d talk me out of it.” The admission surprised him. He hadn’t known it until then.

  She paused. “Because? Don’t want to die? No one’s going to think less of you for not running the op.”

  “Because it’s the wrong decision.” That was what had been eating at him. “And fuck if I can figure out how. I can’t figure out what else to do, but all of this is wrong. The way I’m going about it….” He shook his head. “I just can’t think of a better way. And something needs to happen.”

  “Well, you know what they say.” She raised an eyebrow. “Mistakes have a way of making themselves real clear. Just keep an eye out. We’ll adjust when the time comes.”

  The door closed softly behind her and Talon looked after her, eyes focused in the middle distance. That was why he couldn’t settle: it wasn’t the right plan. His every instinct was screaming at him to walk away.

  The problem was, as Nyx had mentioned, Dragons didn’t have a particularly good sense of self-preservation.

  7

  Liam woke in the darkness to a hand over his mouth and breath by his ear. He froze, taking the deepest breath he could in the process. Getting shoved into icy water and held down was the sort of experience that left you on edge for the rest of your life, apparently.

  His eyes flicked sideways and he saw the faint glint of the lights on sleek hair.

  “Get up,” Victoria said quietly. “Come with me.”

  Curious, Liam sat up in the darkness and padded after her, pulling his shirt on as he went. In the hallway, squinting against the light, he saw her look him up and down curiously.

  “No shoes?” she asked him.

  “Oh.” After life on a farm, it usually didn’t occur to him to put them on. “Do I need any?”

  “Probably not, I was just surprised.” She lifted one shoulder. “You forget to wear shoes on a ship, you might lose a foot right quick. I guess I figured a farm would be the same way.”

  “When you’re running equipment, yes. When you’re feeding chickens, not so much. Where are we going?”

  “To train. Can you fight on an empty stomach?” She had stopped at a small kitchenette in the hallway and held a cabinet open for him.

  Liam blinked at her. If this was an empty stomach, he couldn’t think of the last time he’d been full. He was used to rationing food carefully, eating exactly his portion of what was kept back before they sold their crops and their meat—and sometimes less, if he knew his grandfather needed more food.

  Since he’d arrived on Seneca, he’d had more food than he knew what to do with. At first he tried to eat all of it. He’d never been given extra “just in case” before
. After a while, feeling heavy and lethargic, he’d simply tried to eat the most perishable items and carry the rest with him. He now had 17 apples in his backpack that he didn’t know what to do with, and was beginning to think he should stop saving them—but the idea of throwing away food still made his stomach flip-flop nervously.

  He considered trying to say this to Victoria, and wasn’t sure she would understand any of it.

  “I don’t need any food,” was all he said.

  She only nodded, but he got the sense she approved. She set off down the corridor and he followed, feeling somewhat like a puppy trotting at her heels.

  “Why are we training now?”

  “The Dragon Commanders are showing up tomorrow.” She gave him a smile over her shoulder.

  “What? I thought we had two weeks of training!”

  “Apparently not.” She detoured down a side hallway and looked up in irritation at a flickering light. The training grounds for the Dragons were on the outskirts of the main city, and while the building kept the wind out and the heat in, it was beginning to show its age. “Can’t say I’m surprised,” Victoria added. “This whole thing seems to be about catching us off guard.”

  That did seem to track with his experience. Liam nodded and looked around himself as he walked. The corridors all seemed to him to be identical: long and low, with plasticky floors and light panels along the tops of the walls that hurt his eyes.

  “How many of us will make it, do you know?”

  She shook her head. “And there’s no way to know which will make it, either. Each commander wants something different, and you’ll never know what that is in advance. Sometimes even they don’t know. That’s why there are people here from so many different backgrounds. Everyone here could be a Dragon … if there’s a commander who needs what they have.”

  Liam wanted to ask if there was any point in training, then, but a moment later, he saw the folly of that statement. The more he knew, the more chances he had to impress.

  Victoria pushed open a door and gave him a smile, nodding for him to go past her. If she guessed his thought process, she didn’t say anything about it.

  He was still in the doorway when she hit him.

  She was going to kill him. She had brought him here to kill him and thin the competition. That was Liam’s only thought as he reeled, pain exploding through the back of his head. She had timed her strike well, and she had clearly trained with the best: she summoned a great deal of force for her build.

  And Lord only knew what enhancements she had.

  Well, fuck it. If she was going to try this, he was going to make her hurt. With a roar, Liam gathered his footing and burst back up, elbow lashing toward her head. She ducked, damnably fast, and he grabbed one of her arms and yanked her up. A head butt sent her reeling backwards and Liam didn’t even think, not consciously—he pulled hard on one of the weapons racks and it, and its contents, came tumbling down toward her.

  Forced onto the defensive, she retreated, and he hurdled the mass of tumbled shelving and weapons to follow her. His tackle sent them both sprawling onto the ground and he was ready to land his hardest punch full on her face when he froze.

  The muzzle of her gun was pressed into his sternum.

  And then, to his surprise, she smiled. She dropped the gun and managed to tumble him sideways with a quick twist of her hips. A second later, she pulled him up and pressed the gun into his hand.

  “You’re faster than I expected—and you work with your environment. That’s good! But you haven’t really fought with weapons before, have you? A sidearm? A knife?”

  “I’m, ah … I’m competent with a knife.” But barely. Liam’s head was spinning with the sudden change of pace.

  “Okay, put the gun in your side pocket—no, safety on, good Lord, it’s unloaded but you should always have good habits—and we’ll try again. At some point during the fight, you need to see if you can get the gun out and on my skin before I can get it away from you, okay?”

  Liam stared at her.

  “You said you were worried you didn’t know enough.” She shrugged. “I wanted to see what you could do. And you’ve got the raw talent in spades. So let’s get training, kid. The commanders’ll be here in a few hours."

  “—and so soon after a mission is the best time. He won’t see it coming.” Talon resisted the urge to slump back in his chair. For one thing, one did not slump while trying to make an impressive presentation. For another, his dress uniform was pricking at his neck if he dropped his chin so much as an inch.

  They’d probably designed it that way on purpose, the bastards.

  Aleksander Soras considered this. Talon’s best guess, given his prior service in the Navy, was that he was somewhere near fifty, and he wore his dress uniform with the ease of someone who’d been in command behind desks for years. He’d kept himself trim, however, and he moved well. Talon would be willing to bet that he’d kept up with his weapons certifications as well. It was clear that, though he was in Intelligence now, he was still Navy through and through.

  Talon liked that. Being overseen by Intelligence kept the Dragons out of much of the usual meddling by the brass … but it also meant that the people sticking their noses in on occasion had never even considered training for combat. It meant he ended up explaining things that shouldn’t need explaining. That had dropped off since Soras had taken over.

  “I’m in,” Soras said, after a moment.

  “Eh?” Talon felt the weird sensation of putting his whole weight into pushing on a door and having it open suddenly.

  “I’m in.” Soras was smiling at him. “You seem surprised, Major.”

  “I am.” No point in denying it.

  “You make good points.” Soras drummed his fingers on the desk. He looked out the wide window that faced one of the city squares, with its profusion of greenery and the swirl of people—ordinary civilians, the type of person Soras and Talon spent their lives protecting, and yet never really understood.

  Talon had the sense that Soras wanted to say more, so he waited while the man got up and went to look out more closely, hands linked behind his back in an at-ease position.

  Talon smiled slightly. You could, indeed, take a man out of the Navy, but you never took the Navy out of a man.

  “It’s bad for my pride, of course.” Soras didn’t look back, His tone was rueful, a bit self-deprecating. “I kept thinking the analysts could do this—well, hoping. I run Intelligence now, not a military unit. I hoped I could bring them up to speed. But clearly, I was not able to—”

  “The task itself is difficult.” Talon had not guessed that he would be reassuring his boss on this visit. “It is possible to do everything right, and still fail. Those are the types of missions Dragons choose. We know that.”

  Soras turned to look at him, face surprisingly cold. “Your reassurance, while I’m sure well-intentioned, does not change the facts: Ymir is still … occupied. Our best intentions are worth nothing, wouldn’t you say? Results are what matter.” He came to sit down once more. “Which is why I say you make good points. Clearly, what we have tried to do so far has been ineffective.” He made a fist, flexed his fingers. Brown eyes looked into Talon’s. “So what do you need from me? I take it that instead of taking the intel we provide, you will be giving us specific queries.”

  Talon hoped his face didn’t show how lost he was. He had spent his time on a very long, detailed, and—he hoped—persuasive presentation as to exactly why Intelligence and the Navy should send people to what would undoubtedly be a mission with high casualties.

  Or total casualties.

  He had, in fact, expected this to take multiple meetings. He hadn’t prepared a list of queries yet.

  “Major?” Soras looked almost amused.

  “Ah….” Talon rubbed at his face. “Layouts of the districts, dossiers on anyone identified to be working with the Warlord, including what they do and where they live and work. Anything you can find about the guard training an
d equipment, as well as the locations of any guard structures, and information on the types of surveillance they have. A best-guess layout of the palace, including any security measures we know or guess he has in place….” He caught sight of Soras’s face. “Is any of that problematic?”

  “No. No.” Soras shook his head. “It’s very … thorough.”

  “There’s no way to know where we’ll find an opening. The more information we have, the better.” He’d have his team poring over everything they got, Tersi trying to hack any system the Warlord had, and Lesedi working with the more specific questions Talon could give her after seeing what Intelligence could produce.

  “Mmm.” Soras looked suddenly awkward. He took a breath and opened his mouth to speak, and seemed to think better of it.

  Talon waited.

  “Major,” Soras said finally, “I am behind you on this. What I am about to say does not mean I necessarily think this is a bad idea. If you decide to move forward, you will have my full support—any resources I can provide, any access I can give, you will have at your disposal. I hope you will also keep me updated on any other Dragon teams that might join you. However….”

  “You think it’s a bad idea.” Back to square one.

  Talon did not need Soras’s permission. Dragon commanders chose their own targets, and were largely answerable to no one. Neither the military nor Intelligence could command a Dragon crew to perform any particular mission, nor could they forbid it.

  It was why they were so careful about their selection, both of Dragons, and in those they chose to give their own teams.

  Right now, Talon didn’t particularly need Soras to help him. He had Lesedi, he had his team, and Soras’s words had reminded him that he had the rest of the Dragons as well.