Chapter Fifteen
Orion Arm, on the planet Agora . . .
On one wall of Emma Scarlet’s office hung a framed, black and white portrait of Murray Rothbard, the intellectual grandfather of the Voluntarist Network, an American with round spectacles and a bowtie cinched at the neck. Hundreds of years after his death, Rothbard’s writings found their way onto the tablet of a lunar helium-3 tycoon—a lanky, idealistic forty-something named Robby McFerrin, who dreamed of a different world among the stars. A world where every man and woman ruled their own life, where there was no moneyed oligarchy pulling the strings of government like a marionette, no politicians bloodletting the people while pretending to be their champions.
A portrait of the fifty-something McFerrin, also in black and white but taken by a much finer camera, hung on the opposite wall. McFerrin stood in a suit fitted to his narrow frame, arms crossed, staring at the camera with a distant smile, a peninsula of thinning hair remaining on the crest of his head. The two long-dead men stared at each other as if across a chessboard. If Emma believed in an afterlife, she would think that’s exactly what they’d be doing: playing chess and pontificating endlessly about their shared dream.
Emma turned and looked down on the rooftop garden of the Cornerstone Jurisdiction building, where the final stages of negotiations proceeded between the VN’s Discretionary Defense Force, led by Georgio Heimer, and the Confed, led by Heydar Samara. Of course, nothing had changed. Dozens of Confed diplomats and aides mingled with DDF representatives in the open areas, a few clustered in the foliage-hidden walkways off to the sides of the rooftop. Meanwhile, a herd of protesters lined the sidewalk and street corner around the entrance to the Cornerstone building, projecting their voices with speaker drones. Their signs were too small to read from so far up, but Emma remembered what the bulk of them said:
“Don’t Make Deals with the Devil”
“Keep Agora Peaceful”
“Say NO to the Confed!”
Ninety-some floors above the protestors, the dealmaking went on unabated while its negotiators ate aged gouda and Havarti on pita bread. All the intrigue and political brokering put her on edge. Soon, Confed military ships would have free movement through their systems. Their manufacturing centers would be producing armaments and military equipment. Their planets, especially Agora, would become valuable targets for any of the Confed’s enemies. Unsettling, to say the least.
But there was no good option. Remain independent and the VN would be vulnerable to an easy invasion from a foreign power. But ally with the Confed and risk becoming perpetually tied to them, enemies with their enemies for the rest of Emma’s life. Remain defenseless and pure, or safe but entangled in a compromising alliance.
What would Murray do? What would Robby do?
The holo-node at the back of her desk jingled its repetitive “incoming call” tune. She pushed aside her leather chair and leaned over the desk to see who was calling. Georgio Heimer’s office. Emma tapped the touchscreen button to answer.
“It’s Emma,” she said before the holo image appeared. On rare occasion, the audio connected a few seconds before the visuals.
A shaky depiction of Georgio appeared in the air above her desk. He was holding the holochat mobile device at arms’ length as he walked through a marbled hallway, passing by projected images of the Agoran cityscape behind him. His shit-eating grin boded worse in Emma’s mind than would have an outright frown.
“We’ve got ink on the page,” Georgio said with affected celebration.
“As in, a final agreement?” she asked.
“We’ve got a final,” he confirmed. “The press announcement will be in about twenty minutes.”
Emma felt an odd twist of emotions. Relief, of course, but also a tightening in the pit of her stomach.
“Now, Emma,” Georgio said with a rise in volume—what he did when he wanted to sound more authoritative. “There’s gonna be a lot of talk about it on the news, on the net. Everybody’s gonna have an opinion, but I don’t want you to listen to any of that, okay? We’re doing what we have to do here, and it’s the right thing for the VN.”
Emma’s eyes fluttered in annoyance. “You don’t need to patronize me, Georgio. I’ve agreed to go this far. I won’t get weak-kneed now.”
“Good,” Georgio said with finality. “You’re our secret weapon, you know that? In my mind, you represent everything we’re trying to defend.”
“Almost sounds like you’re trying to flatter me,” Emma said, reading between the lines. “What’s the occasion?”
Georgio cracked a grin and walked a few paces without responding. Emma could hear his staffers talking in the background.
“Confed made a stipulation.” He went a few more paces in silence, perhaps listening to something around him. “They want you and a few security execs to go to Earth for some information-sharing. You, Mitchell Stott, a few others, they want you and your chief engineers to inspect their orbital shipyards and defense apparatus, give your input on efficiency and security.”
Emma tilted her head back and narrowly refrained from groaning. “Why me? I mean, the engineers, I get. But I’m on the management side. What can I add?”
“Heydar requested you by name,” Georgio explained. “Said he trusts your judgement. Besides, we could use this to give the alliance some visibility.”
“Oh, so it’s a publicity gimmick then,” Emma said.
“The DDF sees it that way,” Georgio said plainly. “But not Heydar. I believe he thinks rather highly of you.”
She regretted that conversation at the bar on God’s Eye now. She figured she had come off as dense, but apparently Heydar hadn’t interpreted it that way.
“Couldn’t you have gotten me out of it?” Emma asked. “I’ve got a fleet to build at double our normal production speed. I can’t just pack up and go sightseeing while—”
Georgio held up his hand. “I know, I know. It’s frustrating. But we didn’t have time to negotiate line by line. That would’ve taken weeks. We needed to ink a deal and this was one thing they asked for. They conceded some things to us, so we had to give a little to them.”
Emma stared off, thinking. Still trying to reason her way out of this.
“It’ll be a quick trip,” Georgio said. “In and out in a few days.”
She let out a ragged sigh. “When do we leave?”
Chapter Sixteen
Orion Arm, on the planet Earth . . .
Davin’s torso, stiffened from however many layers of casting and bandages, kept him upright as he leaned gingerly against the wall beside his bed. The painkillers helped. Basema, today in a pink shirt bearing the laughing face of some cartoon elephant, sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed, holding a few dolls with frighteningly big eyes and skin the same shade as hers. Davin had rediscovered how quickly a child’s timidity would evaporate once they’d found a new playmate. And since Davin’s wrists had been freed of cuffs and his ankle locked with a shock anklet, he made the perfect, captivated playmate.
Basema uttered a string of syllables in her language that Davin couldn’t come close to divining. Davin held up the one boy doll Basema had brought in, obviously for him. It had dark, styled hair and a thin singer’s mike snaking from his ear to his lips. It looked like a teen, Arab pop star.
“Oh Anaya,” Davin said in what he imagined the boy doll’s voice would be. “You know I want to be with you, but we cannot defy your father’s wishes. He will never let us be together.”
It felt a little odd putting on the accent for the doll, but Basema didn’t seem to mind. She moved her own doll closer and maneuvered the big-eyed creature’s arm to reach toward the boy doll’s hand. In the high-pitched girl doll’s voice, she spoke another sentence or two in her language.
Davin put down his doll. “Basema, I know you speak Universal. Your father spoke to you in Universal just yesterday.”
She turned her glaring brown eyes up at him. Clearly, he’d wronged her in the worst way possib
le.
“Idon’t like . . . Universal,” she snarled through her accent, pausing before the last word as if it were an expletive. “Universal is for school.”
Davin shrugged. “Fair enough, but this love story is gonna have to proceed a little differently than these two think.”
Flames danced in Basema’s eyes. “They . . . are . . . inlove!” It might’ve been frustration putting pauses between her words, or it might’ve been the extra time it took to translate in her head.
“Yeah, I get that,” Davin said. “But they’re going to need a translator or something. And it’s not just the language barrier. They’re clearly very different. I mean, your girl is normal—pretty, nice personality from what I can tell, a little shy. But my guy is like a pop star or something. Clearly a celebrity. Probably got fans around him all the time. I’m not saying itcan’t work, just that it’s—” The moment the thought of Sierra entered his mind, his lips stopped moving. It occurred to him where this idea of the celebrity and the pauper had come from—his own life. He wondered if his assessment of the dolls was true for his own situation. A stupid fantasy even to wonder, but one that he couldn’t shake.
Basema’s scowl only deepened in the silence. “Younot . . . playing . . . right.”
A board creaked outside the bedroom doorway. Siraj appeared, holding the same submachine gun as before. “Basema. Come on.” He let out a blur of foreign words.
Basema huffed and gathered her dolls, then scooted off Davin’s bed and out the door.
Siraj took a step inside the room. “As I promised.” Then he turned and left, revealing another figure in the hallway, a lean girl with loose clothes and a backwards baseball cap. Her chin trembled and her eyes glistened as Davin met her gaze.
The sight of Strange instantly tore his heart in half. She rushed in, the door shutting behind her, and went straight to Davin’s bed. Her arms coiled gently around his neck as she sank down beside him, crying into the cotton on his better side. Davin held her as tightly as his weak arms and tender ribcage would allow, and they melted together into a purge of emotion, finally freed from whatever prison had trapped it in. He couldn’t have let himself break down around strangers, not when he was so vulnerable already. But with Strange, he couldn’t hide anything. No pain. No tears.
They had lost their crew mates. Their friends. Two members of their screwy little family.
And it was Davin’s fault. He’d dragged them into this mess, screwed them out of a mountain of sharecoin, steered them to this hellhole planet . . . and for what? He’d lost the “what,” too. He’d earned his crew nothing but their own demise. Their horrifyingly permanent demise.
Strange drew away, a teary, sniffly mess, having passed through the worst of the storm of emotion. Davin blinked away a salty sting to see her clearer.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, feeling crushed by his powerlessness. “I fucked it all up.” His chin quivered. He couldn’t look her in the eye. The emotions of unchangeable loss tugged at him from all sides, pulling and pulling with no hope of escape.
Strange hung her head, sniffed hard, and squeezed off the rest of her feelings. She could do that: put a clamp on her own wound. Not like Davin, who felt paralyzed deep down. Strange swallowed, staring down thoughtfully, and after a few seconds, shook her head.
“Not your fault.” Her voice only a few decibels above an exhaled breath. “Not your fault.”
Davin looked Strange over, realizing her lack of bandages or injuries. “You alright?”
She nodded. “I hid upstairs in that apartment. They didn’t find me. Left in a rush after they got Sierra. It didn’t take more than probably five minutes for these guys to show up.” She jerked her head toward the door, indicating the Defenders of Glory. “I thought I’d lost all three of you.” Another burst of emotion threatened to break out, but she stopped it. She shook her head, looking like she wished she hadn’t brought up that thought. “What are we gonna do, Cap?”
Davin let out a long, slow breath, staring off, remembering the gunfight in the apartment. Lying on the floor helplessly, in terrible pain. Watching Sierra point the stun gun at his leg and fire. She did it to save him.
“I gotta go after her,” he said, almost regretting the words once they were out. Almost.
Strange squeezed her eyes shut and let out a heavy sigh. “Cap . . . we can’t go after her. Even if we knew where she went—and wedon’t—we’d just get our asses handed to us again by the Abramists once we caught up to them.”
“I know,” Davin said, connecting the dots in his head. A new pall fell on him. “Assuming I can get through their border, I don’t imagine I’d be able to get back out. It’s a suicide mission.” He finally met her eyes again. “That’s why you won’t be going.”
The crinkles in Strange’s brow loosened. Her eyes widened. She sat back a bit. “What?”
“I’ve lost enough of my crew,” Davin said. “And that’s on me. It’ll always be on me. But I won’t lose you. And I won’t be responsible for millions of people’s deaths. At least . . . I don’t wanna be.”
“Cap, you’re not responsible for what people in Carina do,” Strange objected. “Or Sagittarius, or the Confed, or the next room over. You’re not the master of anybody but yourself. Let the Carinians and Sagittarians do whatever they want. Let ‘em tear each other apart. That’s not your fault.”
“It is if they use Sierra as an excuse to do it,” Davin replied.
Strange huffed and looked away with a clenched jaw.
“You’ve got more than enough for fare back to Agora,” Davin said, heart hurting. “You can take Bron and Jai’s shares too. I’ll take theFossa.”
Strange frowned and shook her head. “Cap . . . you’re a shit pilot. You can’t deny it.”
Davin raked his fingers through his greasy hair, in desperate need of some shampoo.
“I’ll refresh myself. I’ll autopilot my way through it.”
“You’ll crash theFossa into the ocean is what you’ll do,” Strange said with a hearty dose of spite. “If you’re absolutely sure about this, and I can’t convince you to see reason . . .” She pinched the bridge of her nose with eyes squeezed shut. “Then I’m goin’ with you.”
“Strange, no,” Davin said. “Go back to Agora.”
She stared at him with eyes more firm and resolute than he’d seen on her in a long, long time. “Davin—” She never used his name. Never. The sheer sincerity in her eyes melted his resolve. “You’re not the only one who thinks of our crew as family. Now that Bron and Jai are . . . You’re all I’ve got left.”
Davin stared back in silence. She wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, he could tell. And he didn’t want to tell her no. He didn’t want to part with her.
So he nodded and extended his hand, resting it on top of hers. She nodded back, a tacit recognition that the fight was over between them, for now.
“There’s a couple things we gotta figure out first,” Strange said, then tapped a knuckle on Davin’s shock anklet. “Like getting out of here. And then there’s the fact that we have no idea where the Abramists even went. And the fact that they have a five day head start. And that they have us wildly outgunned, outmanned, outshipped, and out pretty much anything else you could think of.”
Davin shrugged. “Details.”
Strange’s eyelids fluttered. “Really, Cap. It’s a big galaxy out there. Where do we even start?”
He felt the slightest smirk on his lips. “I’ve got a plan.”
Chapter Seventeen
Siraj stood across Davin’s small bedroom from him and Strange, one arm crossed over his chest, the other bent at the elbow, fingers scratching at the dark bristles on his neck. His submachine gun hung behind his back. The room remained in thoughtful silence for a long time.
Finally, the dar-haired Defender took in a long breath and held it, eyes shifting between Davin and Strange.
“I’ll let you go,” he said. “And I’ll stock you with weapons, ammunit
ion, medical supplies, food, whatever you need . . .”
Davin and Strange exchanged a surprised but hesitant smile.
“On two conditions.”
There it was. Of course there would be conditions.
“We’re listening,” Davin said.
Siraj stopped scratching his neck beard and held up a finger. “First, you’ll take one of my soldiers with you. One of my best.”
Davin frowned, not understanding. “Why?”
“Because the moment you have Sierra Falco in your possession again,” he said with steely sternness, “you will bring her straight back to me.”
Davin recoiled. He and Strange exchanged another glance, this one humorless.
“What would you want with Sierra?” Davin asked.
“That’s none of your business,” Siraj replied. “But I will promise you that no harm will come to her from the Defenders. We’re not terrorists. We don’t harm innocents if we can help it.”
Of course the Defenders of Glory would want Carina’s prima filia. It was a no-brainer. If Siraj had her, he’d have the Carinian prime minister by the balls, able to make whatever demand he wanted. Carina was probably the only force in the galaxy that could control the Confed, and if Siraj could use that to his advantage, why wouldn’t he?
Davin slumped his shoulders, staring at the floor. He was injured, weaponless, and strapped with a shock anklet. He had no leverage. What he did have was time. Time to figure out how to rescue Sierra without delivering her to another captor who would use her just like her previous captors.
“Alright,” Davin said. “You’ve got a deal.”
Strange gave him a twisted, confused look. He ignored it.
“Now who’s the soldier you’ve got in mind to babysit us?”
Chapter Eighteen
Davin leaned on Strange as they stepped up a zigzagging ramp at a dying snail’s pace. In fact, Davin felt a little like a dying snail, even wearing his own clothes—the loosest and softest shirt Strange could find in his personal room. All this walking and auto-riding from the Defenders’ compound in Jerusalem to the South Levant Spaceport pulled at his stitches, made pain spike in his shoulder. It was like some rodent with sharp teeth had bit chunks out of him.
Horns of the Ram (Dominion Book 2) Page 9
