The Dragon Corps

by Natalie Grey

  The Ariane was quiet. Midnight shift, Nyx at the helm, safe passage to the Alveni Syndicate brokered through Lesedi. After a bruising workout—both Mars and Camorra were seriously upping their game these days—and a skin-meltingly hot shower, Talon was finally relaxing enough to slide off to sleep.

  Even under the exhaustion of the sparring session, he could feel his mind running.

  Talon’s mind never completely stopped.

  Someone had come after Lesedi. Neither she nor he were fools, both of them knew that an information broker could expect assassination attempts—hell, she’d had protective measures in her office for a reason. But they both know, as well, that she was right when she said this mission was the cause of it all.

  And who knew she was working on this mission?

  Talon’s eyes opened in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling.

  His crew.

  His mind thrust the thought away. It wasn’t beyond reason that the Warlord’s intelligence apparatus had noticed Talon, and noticed who he spoke to on Akintola Station. It wouldn’t have been impossible to tail his landing party.

  His crew.

  No. Above all, a Dragon crew was loyal. Entire crews had gone to their deaths without complaint or hesitation, to protect one another and fulfill their missions.

  And there had to be more to it. After all, where had the orders come from every time, when they were told to abort their missions on Ymir? Talon forced himself down the line of thought. He hadn’t left the same team members at the helm for each mission, and even if a team member could have faked a dispatch, those orders had been discussed with the main office, and verified.

  They weren’t false orders. They hadn’t been sent from his ship. He relaxed fractionally.

  His face took on a wry look and he sighed, rubbing at his forehead. It was a sad state of affairs when he was glad that the source of false intel was Central Intelligence.

  But who? Who, there, could call off missions every time without an investigation being launched? How many plants did the Warlord have, and how high were they? Who even could order a mission abort? They’d have to submit their reasoning, which meant they would need to be able to cover their tracks well enough to explain why, several targets in, a mission had been—

  He felt the realization hit him like a punch to the gut.

  No. Oh, no. He rolled up to sit, his chest heaving as his mind recoiled.

  Follow the thought, Rift.

  No. No, no, no. No, this wasn’t possible.

  Follow the thought.

  If they were able to abort missions, and justify that, if they were deep in enough to whatever team handled the intel coming out of Ymir…

  Follow the thought.

  Those had never been missions fought against the Warlord. Talon closed his eyes and felt the room spin. No. But there was no denying it. The look in his target’s eyes as she offered herself up to die in the last mission.

  That hadn’t been one of the Warlord’s pet enforcers. That had been a commander who knew her fighters’ best chance of survival was her quick death.

  No!

  Talon shoved himself out of bed and slammed his hand against the bulkhead. Pain exploded up his arm and gave a yell—wordless, full of rage. He doubled over, wanting to empty the contents of his stomach on the metal floor, but he went down to his knees with his fists pounding against the ground, instead. It was the wrong target, but the violence felt good—

  Until he remembered it had always been the wrong target. Until his memory, honed and trained, called up every resistance fighter he had killed. He could remember every face. The horror, the desperation.

  The way none of them ever had a chance.

  He was a Dragon, for God’s sake. He had been trained to take out the best.

  And he had slaughtered resistance fighters.

  The door hissed open behind him and he was turning from instinct alone.

  Nyx. Her brows were drawn together, brown eyes searching the room for the cause of his distress. “Boss?” The word was uncertain.

  They were resistance fighters, Talon wanted to say. We’ve been the ones keeping the Warlord’s slaves in check.

  But he said nothing, looking at the familiar face. He knew Nyx as well as he knew himself. Nyx, and Tersi, and Jester, and Sphinx, and—

  But who had known about Lesedi?

  His crew.

  “Boss?”

  “Get the crew up,” Talon said. Don’t do this. You’re running hot. You need to be cold, you need to plan. “I want to talk to them.”

  Whatever she thought of how she’d found him, Nyx gathered the crew in the war room quickly and without explanation. They were alert, ready to go at once if necessary—their training was too good for them to be yawning and complaining about being up, and Nyx would never have stood for that, anyway.

  No. Now was not the time for him to be thinking about how much he liked his crew. It was the time for him to be watching them.

  Very, very carefully.

  “You all should know, by this point, what this mission is.” Talon let his gaze drift over the group. Sphinx’s flyaway blonde hair was creeping out of its braid, Jester was rubbing absently at a scar on his wrist, as he always did when he was deep in thought, and Tersi was leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed over his chest, a frown on his face.

  No one spoke.

  “We’re taking the fight to the Warlord,” Talon told them bluntly. “I don’t care if we march in there with mercenaries, just like he did, or we arm the resistance, or one of us has to get in there and stab him with his own goddamned dinner fork. I made a promise that the next time I went back to Ymir, I was going to kill him, and the next time I left, they’d be free. I do not intend to go back on that promise.”

  Camorra was watching him, her head tipped to the side, a frown on her delicate features. She and Mars stood together, close as twins, light and dark, honey and amber and granite and night, her stronger and more deadly than she looked, he quieter and more delicate in his approach than anyone would suspect if they had never seen him fight.

  “You’re Dragons,” Talon told them. “You can leave whenever you wish. You know that.”

  For the first time, he saw a reaction: Jim, his brown eyes wide with surprise. The man exchanged a look with Aegis, and what passed between them, Talon could not say.

  “So I’m offering you that chance.” His voice sounded less lost than he felt. “You know this will likely kill some of us—if not all. Lesedi was nearly killed, and you know she’s not one to take foolish risks.”

  They were all frozen, none of them betraying what might be there.

  What might be there.

  He was being paranoid.

  “Boss.” Tersi exchanged a look with Nyx. “None of us are going anywhere.”

  Talon didn’t smile. “Don’t speak for them.” He looked around at the rest of them. “Think about it. You want out, you tell me and I’ll make sure you get to Seneca. Anyone who stays….” He knew his eyes were cold. “You stand with me. You stay, because you remember the oaths you took.”

  He had come here for their reactions, but right now, he didn’t want to see something he couldn’t forget. He turned and left without another word, without looking at their faces, and he took the bridge and closed the door behind him.

  Aleksander Soras had stayed late at the office, poring over documents. He had seen Tera board the shuttle and—satisfied that it was her, that she was not going to be obstinate about this—had returned to his office to continue working.

  Her speech had been profoundly unsettling. He regretted asking for her opinion.

  He regretted, for the first time, training her to be what she was. He had no illusions about her. She was a fighter, through and through. She would have found a battlefield, whether in the Alliance Navy or in one of the less savory parts of allied space. She would have been good, too. No one pushed themselves like she did.

  But he had certainly helped. He was t
he one who made sure she knew languages, who gave her logic puzzles, who built the courses she excelled at, even as a child.

  Now….

  He was staring off into the distance when the door opened. Julian stood there, looking as well put together as if this were 9AM.

  “Yes?” His voice was unexpectedly hoarse. Soras cleared it and nodded for Julian to speak.

  “Talon Rift—”

  Soras grimaced.

  “—has apparently begun to act very oddly. He made a strange speech to his crew about remembering the oaths they took, telling them that if they did not want to participate in his present mission, he would return them to Seneca.”

  Soras spun a pen in his long fingers, eyes narrowed.

  “He knows,” Julian said softly. He met Soras’s sudden look with equanimity. “Not … that. He knows there’s someone on his crew. He must.” He gave a small sigh. “Also, he confirmed that the information broker is still alive.”

  Soras let out his breath slowly and tried not to sweep the lamp off his desk. Right now, he wanted to hear something break.

  He held himself still until Julian, normally patient, shifted slightly and cleared his throat.

  “What do I tell the contact?”

  “Nothing. They can wait.” His words were ugly. “If they won’t talk him out of the damned thing—” His fingers clenched, and he stood and went to the window.

  A quiet square, a moment of peace from the constant chaos civilians caused.

  “How do you deal with a Dragon?” he asked rhetorically. Julian did not answer, and he looked around, waiting for the man to answer. When he did not answer—was it Tera’s name he did not want to say?—Soras smiled thinly. “Who is a Dragon’s equal, but another Dragon? Send me the dossiers of the commanders who are still nearby. We need to move quickly.”

  “How far do you think he would get, really?” Julian spoke at last, and there was almost a laugh in his voice. “I say talk him into it, talk him into going now. He doesn’t stand a chance against—”

  “No.” His voice was harsh. Tera’s voice was echoing in his head: With the Dragons leading the charge now, he’s on borrowed time. They won’t back down.

  Julian swallowed, and nodded his head. “I’ll bring you the dossiers.” He was gone a moment later.

  Soras closed his eyes, but the words were in his head and there was no running from them.

  And the Warlord knows—he must, the same way they did, just a feeling, just a hunch—that his time is up. They won’t stop fighting until he’s dead, because every fighter he snuffs out, another will rise up. All across allied space.

  And Aleksander Soras, the Warlord of Ymir, very much feared that she was right.

  The dock was bustling with military personnel. Crates of food, water purification tablets, and fuel were shuttled across the meticulously maintained concrete, while other carts, carrying what could only be munitions, were stopped at checkpoints and waved onward.

  His badge gave him clearance, though the officers gave him a curious look.

  “Where’s your red?” one of them asked.

  “What?” Liam’s brow furrowed.

  “Red. A Dragon always wears red. Where’s yours?”

  “I’m not a—” He broke off. “I don’t have a team yet. I think that’s when you get the red.” He looked up and down the dock. “Do you know where Team 11 is?”

  “Three docks that way.” One of the officers pointed to a sleek grey ship with red on its starboard wingtip. Conway was painted on its side in neat letters.

  “Thank you.” Liam made his way toward the ship with his heart pounding.

  As he approached, he picked out Wraith, in close-headed conversation with someone he could only guess was Mallory. The closer he got, the more he could see how heated the conversation was. Mallory gestured emphatically, her fingers rigid—as if she wanted to clench them into fists, or rip at her hair. Wraith hissed something back.

  Both of them noticed him when he was still a good distance away, and their heads swung as if in unison. He stopped in his tracks, but neither of them moved. Wraith murmured something to her commander, who looked Liam over with a slightly different expression.

  They waited for him to come to them.

  “Yes?” Mallory asked, without preamble.

  “My name’s Liam Morel,” he said, by way of explanation. “You sent Lieutenant Commander Lukin to interview me.”

  She only lifted one eyebrow.

  “If there’s still a place on the team,” Liam said quietly, “I’d like to be considered for it. I know I turned it down, but—”

  “Talon turn you down?” Something flickered in her face when she said Talon’s name.

  “No, I didn’t—I haven’t spoken to him, or any of his team. I’m here because I realized what’s important.”

  Silence.

  “I wanted to be a Dragon so I could serve justice,” Liam said. “Fighting for what’s right, is what I want to do. I saw Nyx fight, but I know that every member of your team is like she is: the best of the best, ready to put themselves on the line to do the right thing no matter what. It was … childish … to pick a favorite team when I know none of you.” He ducked his head. “I hope you will still consider my application.”

  There was a silence.

  “And you think it’s as easy as that, kid?” There was such a deep bitterness in Mallory’s voice that Liam’s head jerked up to stare at her, wide-eyed. “You think it’s just as easy as picking the right thing to do, and doing it?”

  He knew the answer she wanted from him, but he also knew his answer.

  “Yes,” he said simply.

  She snorted. “You’re an idiot, but I’d rather have you here than—well, it’s not important.”

  “I wasn’t done,” Liam said.

  She stopped in her tracks, and Wraith gave a little sound of interest. They both looked at him.

  “I think the situations where you can’t figure out the right thing to do … those are rarer than we like to think.” Liam swallowed. “I think if you clear your head, you realize that things aren’t so complicated that your gut can’t tell you what’s right.” She was staring at him, and Loki knew what he’d seen between her and Wraith was something that was eating at her. “You know what to do,” he told her. “This time? I saw your face when you two were talking. The position you’re defending, the thing you think you have to do? You don’t. You know it’s wrong.”

  “That will be quite enough, recruit.” Her voice was tart. “Dragons are informal, but not quite that informal.”

  Liam swallowed and looked down.

  There was a long pause.

  “Go pick a bunk,” Mallory said finally. “Wraith will show you.”

  And she was gone, as silently as Nyx, while Loki looked after her, wide-eyed.

  “Come on,” Wraith said, without missing a beat. Halfway up the gangway, she added, under her breath, so low that no one could have picked it out over the dock noise and the engines, “And thank you. You have no idea what you got involved in, but she needed to hear that. Even if she….”

  “Even if she?”

  “Never mind. This mission … isn’t for you.” And she pressed her lips together and refused to say any more than that.

  Mallory sat in the captain’s quarters of the Conway and shook.

  She didn’t want to do this, but the orders came from the top. She had wanted to tell the pale ghost of a man who called her from Soras’s office that she would take this order from his mouth and nowhere else, but….

  But that wasn’t going to make it better.

  There was pretty language to it, and a lot of justifications: lives to be saved or lives to be lost. The ‘greater good’ was mentioned more than once. ‘A Dragon knows better than most that what is right is not always what is easy.’

  She didn’t have to take the job, she knew that. But if she didn’t, they would give it to someone else, and if it was going to happen one way or another….
>
  Sometimes the best you could do for an old friend was stab them in the front.

  She looked down at the orders, hoping against hope that they had somehow changed.

  They hadn’t.

  Kill Talon Rift.

  20

  “They nearly got the weapons.” The Warlord’s voice was quiet from behind the mask. Too quiet—and too pleasant by far. “I hired you because of your reputation. If you aren’t able to keep your colleagues in line, however, perhaps I should find someone else.”

  No! Ellian closed his mouth on the single, frantic word. He could not show that much weakness, it would be like blood in the water.

  With a man like the Warlord, who could so casually utter a threat, fear would be fatal, and not just for Ellian. For Aryn, whose beauty would be a mess of blood and screams before she died, simply to make a point. For Ellian’s sister, Rachel, and for her son, Samuel—both protected as well as he could, though it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t make any difference at all.

  The Warlord had had the head of Alliance Intelligence assassinated. Nothing Ellian could do would get in his way.

  He forced himself to breathe.

  “You’ll notice it wasn’t a weapons trafficker who tried to work the deal,” he said bluntly. “None of them would have dared. The woman who did has a reputation. She was suicidal in who she chose to support, everyone knew it—and now she’s dead, and the deal is ruined.”

  “Do you have any idea how complex that was?” the Warlord asked him, voice still too soft. “How many pieces had to be found, how many agents had to be neutralized?” His hand slammed onto his desk suddenly and the image on the call shook. His voice was a roar. “Do you even understand how she put the deal together?”

  “From bits and piece, from units that would have been melted down. Useless weapons, old weapons.”

  “There should not,” the Warlord said, and his voice was shaking, “have been any weapons. They should have found all doors closed to them.”

  Ellian wanted to rage at the man. What was he supposed to say? Was he supposed to have such a reputation that no merchant, whether a true arms dealer or not, would be afraid to sell guns? He never would, there would always be the trade going to the outer planets, and there were enough unsavory uses for these things that no one—no one—would start asking every client if a weapon here or there was meant for Ymir.