by Susan Grant
Triad Captain Hadley Keyren noted the first hint of panic in her lead pilot’s voice. There was no time to ponder his terror, or even hers. The time for second-guessing was after a battle. That was, if you had an after.
Her battleship was surrounded. Enemy ships were everywhere: a rogue battlelord and his loyalist buddies. How had they so thoroughly caught her off guard? Were they that good, or was she that green?
Her vote landed somewhere in between. Her promotion was only weeks old, and everyone knew how Drakken battlelords fought.
With black, godless souls and no mercy.
Sweat tingled on Hadley’s temples. She fought the same tendrils of panic she’d heard in the pilot’s voice. Half the bridge crew was glancing at her where she stood. They waited for the order that would save them, waited for the order that would turn this losing battle around.
Goddess, guide me through this.
But the gods who she’d prayed to all her life were curiously silent now. She was on her freepin’ own, as her Drakken friend Rakkelle would say.
If only Rakkelle were here. She’d know what to do.
A flash of light. “Incoming!” the weapons officer shouted. Hadley caught the edge of the command console and braced herself. That one almost jarred her molars loose.
“Impact—aft left control pod!” the engineer called out.
“Seal off the pod!” Hadley ordered.
“Done.”
Hadley smelled something burning. Her ship or her pride? Both were equally at risk at going up in smoke.
“Lost two more fighters, Captain.”
Blast it. They were decimating her defenses, killing her crew. The war might be over, but this one was just beginning.
She stalked to the front of the bridge. There was no way they were going to fight their way out of this one. They were either going to be a casualty, or…
“Ram it.” She made fists. “Pilot, spin her around, on my mark—”
“Ram it?” Stunned would describe the man’s expression and tone. Well, it beat panic.
“Turn this baby around, Lieutenant. We’re going to hit that monster’s ship with our damaged pod to keep our good side functional. Do it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The bridge crew was silent as the pilot obeyed her order. Alarms wailed distantly through the damaged ship.
“Aim for just forward of their star drive.” She was crazy. She knew what the crew was thinking. We’re going to die anyway—might as well die trying. Hadley had grown up on a farm on Talo, an outlying provincial world where the sun and the seasons formed the framework of life, not machines. She used to drive fruit to market in a centuries-old truck. Once, road pirates tried to steal the load. Her brother rammed them. Hadley never forgot. He had showed her how. It was just never applied to a starship.
Before this moment.
They were moving full speed when they hit. The impact threw her sideways. She pulled up to her knees. Metal screeched on metal. The vibration rattled her bones. Sparks lit up the starboard view ports. “Jump speed—now,” she ordered. They needed to accelerate away or they were dead. “Jump, jump!”
Grimly in the midst of chaos, she took stock of statistics. Her fighters were still out there. They’d jump without their mother ship. They’d make it to the other side even if the command ship didn’t. Maybe this wasn’t a victory, but it was a draw; her crew and ship were a total loss, the battle-cruiser was heavily damaged if not an outright hull loss, and her fighters would have survived.
The ship shuddered as it struggled to accelerate. She thought it was going to come apart. The speed crawled higher, but it wasn’t yet at the necessary velocity to jump to hyperspace and safety. The battle-cruiser’s fighters pursued them like a swarm of angry bees.
“Go,” she whispered to her ship, her hand in a fist, her stomach twisting, wasted, her uniform jacket damp with sweat.
Then…then finally…the stars stretched out into streamers, and they were gone. Breaths later, they dropped out of hyperspace in a non-hostile region.
It was utterly silent.
The lights came up on the bridge, and her instructor walked toward her. She couldn’t read his expression. “I’ll pack my things,” she told him. Now that she’d failed, she’d be assigned somewhere else.
“Captain Keyren.”
“Yes, sir.” She stood tall. Might as well look good while receiving the news that takes away your dreams, she reasoned.
“Congratulations,” he said, taking her hand. “You passed. That was a hell of a risk, but I saw no other way out.”
“I passed…”
“Yes.”
“I passed captain school…”
“Now all you have to do is wait for your ship to come out of dry dock.”
Cloud Shadow. Her own ship. Her first command. She was going to be a captain. Oh, my goddess. “Thank you, sir. Thank you.” She turned to the shaken crew and saluted them. “And thank you.”
They were still too shocked to say anything as she walked out of the simulator. Beaming, she pushed into the busy corridors of the Ring, the headquarters of the former Coalition military and now the Triad Alliance. The frosty planet Sakka, home to the palace of the goddess-queen, glowed large and luminous outside the view ports.
“Well, sweet thang, you look like you’ve been through hells.”
She braced herself at the sound of Tango’s voice. Sleeves rolled up, the Earthling’s uniform was just shy of being too tight, but snug enough to show every muscle on his body, and then some. He caught up to her, laying his arm over her shoulders.
She lifted his arm and dropped it. He reacted with his “aw, baby” look that she’d long since learned to ignore. The Earthling Major Ruben Barrientes, aka Tango, was tall, blond and insufferably cocky. “I have been through hells, as a matter of fact,” she told him. “Hells and back.”
“I’ll bet. I heard you pulled the quad profile. Don’t feel bad. No one gets out of that one.”
“I did.”
“It’s what separates the men from the boys,” he continued, oblivious to her comment. Then his steps faltered. “Holy shit, Hadley. You did? You passed?”
She grinned.
“How?”
“Rammed it.”
“You rammed the ship…”
“Yes.”
“A freepin’ Drakken battle-cruiser? Are you crazy?”
“Guess I am.” If this is what crazy meant, she had to say she quite liked it.
“You owe me a drink in the bar later—and I don’t mean one of those fruity girly drinks, either. You’ve got no excuse. Your boyfriend’s still in the hospital.” He winked at her, then continued on down the corridor.
Once upon a time when they were both newly assigned to the Unity, Tango had both horrified and fascinated her. His flirtation had her emotions roiling. Handsome and so very foreign—Texan, to be precise—he almost managed to get her into bed. But there was a complication. A tall, dark and dangerous complication: Former Imperial Wraith Bolivarr, who she didn’t realize at first was the love of her life.
Why would she? Bolivarr was Drakken. She was Coalition. He wore tattoos of a wraith, a highly trained covert operative. Wraiths were masters of deception and of survival. Their own military feared them along with everyone else. She on the other hand was a country girl from the rural planet Talo. Her past was an open book, whereas his was a mystery. Bolivarr knew nothing of his life prior to being found beaten unconscious, naked, and left for dead in a back alley on a down-and-out mining world with nothing but wraith tattoos and a virulent hatred of the warlord’s regime giving hints to his past. He was rescued by Drakken pirates who ended up being assigned to the Unity, where he and Hadley had met in the final days of her assignment.
Bolivarr suffered from thought-suppression. It blocked secrets he wasn’t supposed to remember. The people who had done it to him were probably dead. It made her sick to think of beautiful Bolivarr used as a tool for the warlord, much like the coalit
ion’s now-banned REEF assassins. The difference was that REEFs had hardware installed; they were bioengineered. The Drakken didn’t have technology that advanced. Meds and sometimes surgery were used to alter the brain. The technique was cruder, the results often unpredictable. And, as in Bolivarr’s case, the reality was always cruel.
Bolivarr willingly suffered for the chance to recover his memories. The treatments were rigorous frustrating, and often painful. There was always the risk they’d cause more damage than what had already been done. He’d do it for the chance at a normal life, to be able to, once and for all, know who he was. He didn’t know how long healing would take. “If the meds don’t work, I might need surgery. And then perhaps therapy, depending.”
“I’ll wait for you,” she’d whispered. “I will.”
They continued to see each other between his hospital stays and her shipboard duties. Sometimes they had days on end to be in each other’s company, sharing her quarters or his, acting as if they were already married, which she hoped one day might happen. Other times, like now, they were apart for weeks, with Bolivarr stuck in the hospital after suffering seizures, and her attending captain’s school. While she worked at earning her captain’s stripes, Bolivarr endured experimental treatments of every kind in hopes of uncovering his past. So far, they’d uncovered nothing but nightmares.
Hadley hurried through the corridors to the medical wing. Her heart gave a happy little leap at the sight of Bolivarr, in bed, quietly intense as he sketched on a datapad. His eternal calm was probably part of his training to be a wraith. She tried not to dwell on what else he was trained to do. A lock of black hair hung over his forehead. She itched to brush it away, and to feel his warm embrace.
For once, he didn’t sense her presence. He was too focused on his drawing. The stylus scratched over the surface, then he paused to ponder his work. He appeared confused, even troubled. Her heart went out to him. To not know who you were, or what secrets your mind kept hidden, was awful.
He needed a hug. Hells, she needed one after the morning she’d had. She bounced inside and landed on the edge of the bed. No medical assistants in sight. They’d have shooed her off. He glanced up, and she caught him midlaugh, kissing him full on the mouth.
Goddess, the man could kiss. Luckily, no one stormed the room to investigate. His pulse must be off the charts, she thought, because hers sure was.
“You just kissed the Triad’s newest ship captain,” she murmured against his lips.
He moved her back to look at her. He was so handsome when he was happy that it stole her breath away. “Congratulations, Captain Keyren.”
“That’s Hadley to you.”
“Hadley my love, you mean. Let’s go out tonight to celebrate your achievement. Dinner, even drinks.” They weren’t big drinkers and as a rule stayed out of the bar. It was more than she could say about the rest of the Drakken he’d come aboard with. System-wide there was a ban on sweef in effect, the homemade rotgut liquor inexplicably loved by so many Drakken military. It was distilled from a type of evergreen tree—and tasted like it. The smell alone made Hadley’s eyes water. Worse, sweef was highly addictive and rotted teeth. She’d seen Tango consume a shot on a dare once. Fighter pilot bravado. Bolivarr had never touched the stuff. Um, that he remembered. Then Bolivarr’s face fell. “If I can convince them to let me out of here for a few hours.”
“I’d rather you get well. We’ll celebrate when you’re out of this hospital.”
“We’ll celebrate more than that.” His eyes turned dark as he lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to the underside of her wrist. “I want to kiss you everywhere,” he said. “And I mean everywhere.”
A med tech entered the room. They jumped apart. Hadley felt warm from her blushing face to her curling toes. They remained silent until the tech finished replacing some supplies and left. Then she melted into laughter.
She pointed to the datapad Bolivarr had turned upside down. “What are you working on?”
“An unfinished drawing of an unfinished thought. A half-remembered dream.” He turned the datapad so she could see it. Five circles formed an elongated pentagon. “This keeps showing up in my thoughts. I don’t know why.” He showed her some other sketches. “Runes. I think. I don’t know.” He groaned and dropped the pad. “I want to know, Hadley. I’m tired of waiting. Maybe this is the key. Maybe this will unlock everything.”
She ached with the frustration he must feel not being able to remember. “Every tiny piece remembered is one closer to finishing the puzzle.”
“I know.” Sadness flickered around his features despite his smile. Bolivarr was such a gentle spirit, shy and sweet with those tragic eyes. It was exactly that aura of innocence that had won over her heart. She wanted to erase the melancholy that was always a part of him. Even when he was laughing it was there in the background, as if he missed something terribly. Or someone.
He’d been a wraith, a loner by profession, but maybe there were loved ones in Bolivarr’s life. Or a lover. Even a wife. She tried to dismiss her worries as silly, futile jealousy, but what if there was someone who meant so much to him that even with total memory loss, he grieved their loss? What if? It scared her. After all, she may very well have lost her heart to someone whose heart already belonged to someone else.
Together they studied the drawings, most of them of the same five small circles, and some with borders filled in creating pentagons of various sizes. “It looks like an obelisk,” he said, his focus back on his drawings.
“Without the border, those five marks remind me of one of the patterns my grandmother and her friends used to weave into their quilts and paint on pottery. Something that ancient warriors wore on their armor, I think. The guards of the birthplace of the goddesses, or some such thing.” Her home planet Talo was a rural world with a tradition of folklore and fairy tales as rich as its farmland. “Life was a bit slow, you know. At night there was nothing else to do but make quilts and make up stories.”
“I for one am glad you had no night life. You might have found a man long ago and I never would have had the chance to be with you.”
“That’s too sad to think about.”
“I know.”
“So let’s not.”
In the next instant he was using the stylus furiously, filling in the sketch he’d made, drawing a border around them then scratching it out. Then he stopped, throwing down the stylus to rub his temples. “It’s something from my life before. I’m sure of it.”
“Something bad?”
He shook his head. “Something I’m supposed to know.”
“A wife and three children.” Her finger tapped each point of light in turn. “One, two, three…and mama and papa. See? And those are their names.”
“In runes?”
“Who knows? Maybe you had a family.”
He chuckled. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t know that.”
“We’ve been through this, Hadley. I was a wraith. Wraiths are married to their work.” He tucked her hair behind her ear, tenderly. “I told you not to worry about that stuff.”
Yet a familiar unease tugged at her, and that jealousy she couldn’t help. After the first seizure when he’d thought his memories were returning, he told her he wasn’t married. Despite what he insisted, there was no guarantee Bolivarr was single. True, there was no marriage tattoo, a Drakken custom, but his body art told only part of a story that his mind had no way of validating. “All I’m saying is that you can’t be sure.”
“I’m sure about you, love.” His hand slipped deeper into her hair, loosening it from her regulation, battle-bridge chignon as his soft mouth brushed over hers. “Sure that I can’t wait to make love with you again.”
She sighed, melting, awash in tingles. Smiling against her lips, he pulled her into a full-on kiss despite the threat of a medic walking in on them at any moment.
The kiss was so delicious that her ears rang. It took a few seconds to realize only on
e ear was ringing, and only because her PCD was chiming in it.
“Keyren,” she answered crisply as Bolivarr’s thumb traced distracting circles on the inside of her wrist.
“I hear congratulations are in order, Captain.”
The deep and familiar voice set her heart to kicking even harder. Zaafran, she mouthed to Bolivarr, who dropped her hand at the mention of the famous name. She shot straight up. “Prime-Admiral Zaafran. Thank you, sir.”
Zaafran was the highest-ranking naval officer in the Coalition—and now the Triad Alliance. He was a peer of Admiral Brit Bandar’s, the Coalition’s most beloved war hero and Hadley’s personal hero. She remembered the emergency drills, growing up on Talo. Then one day the drill was real. They were under attack. The entire squadron of Hordish ships was destroyed by a single warship under the command of Admiral Bandar when she was still only Star-Commander Bandar. The admiral saved Hadley’s planet. From then on, Hadley was determined to model her life after the admiral’s. She became the first female from folksy, clannish Planet Talo to win an appointment to the Royal Galactic Military Academy, and the youngest graduate to be selected as Admiral Bandar’s executive officer. The miracle of Hadley’s existence was having had the honor of serving in a capacity to make her hero’s life easier. Although it had always been her dream to someday rise up through the ranks and captain a ship of her own, she’d learned so much from watching in her day-to-day routine as Admiral Bandar’s assistant. That Zaafran, a contemporary of Bandar, would take the time to congratulate her, a mere newbie captain, left her in shock. She couldn’t imagine that her passing the check ride would be such news. Unless he, too, was surprised. Talo girl makes good.
Hadley beamed and almost missed the prime-admiral’s request. “I have some work for you, Captain,” he said. He sounded weary, stressed.
“Of course, sir.” She deflated slightly. Likely all he needed from her was to escort another group on a bridge tour of the Unity. No matter that she was awaiting reassignment; she was still in demand in her former role. That meant getting stuck escorting VIPs and the press, both virtual and real, around the huge ship, the first of its kind combining all three sides of the Triad.
