You smiled.
She smiled.
And you thought about…
Because you couldn’t help yourself. Because that’s what Tom would do, and you, after all, are Tom. Like it or not. For better, or worse.
Now you’re standing here in the night on the Smuggler’s End, a massive floating estate that resembles a high-tech version of some ancient pirate ship with a central tower that climbs up against the moon and the night, you’re standing here and smoking while you’re trying to solve all your problems and not think about Illuria.
You try to think of how to solve your—not Tom’s—problems.
Problem number one: Find out where Scarpia intends to rendezvous with the stolen corvette.
Problem number two: Contact your handler and let him know that the kill teams have to come in now. Right now. They have to stop Scarpia before that rendezvous. Before the corvette jumps into the Republic’s core system. Because something tells you that when that happens, all the planetary proximity jump protocols aboard that ship will be disabled. A screaming five-hundred-ton corvette will go in low and fast on the House of Reason.
And yeah… the death of the Republic a few minutes later.
***
There is absolutely no way.
You say that a lot. And it keeps being incorrect. But you don’t see a way to get a message to anyone in the Carnivale.
And the day of the operation is getting close.
MCR officers, real live rebels, actually show up with their bankers at Scarpia’s floating estate. And lawyers. Contracts are agreed on, and of course you’re there, Tom, watching it all go down because Scarpia trusts you. Now more than ever.
Frogg’s stock is falling after the botched job on Ootani Station.
You’re the bright and shining new Tyrus Rechs. You never fail. You’re Pericles. Or Agamemnon. Or Kurth of Dentaar.
The man of the hour as far as Scarpia is concerned.
So you’re all there. Including Illuria, who’s going on a shopping trip a couple of weeks before the jump to the rendezvous.
That night, to celebrate the contracts being signed and the transfer of half the credits up front, Scarpia throws a party for the MCR on a desert island.
Everyone is there.
The MCR buffoons all look so proud of themselves, and sick at the same time. Not that these guys ever do any real fighting for freedom. Still, they look sick because they’re committed. Committed to taking the conflict to a whole new level. And aware that the wrath of the Republic, the Legion being the most common chosen method of that wrath, will come down hard on everyone it can find.
Few will survive.
But of course this too is for the greater good, the MCR cuckoos proclaim through toast upon toast.
And still there is no way for you to signal X. Because that needs to happen. Or… corvette into the House of Reason. And with that speed and payload, there’s just no way of telling how large the fallout will be.
It will destroy the city. Of that you’re sure.
Could it destroy the planet?
You tell yourself you’re growing paranoid. Of course not. If it could, someone would have done it.
But you don’t know. For sure.
You don’t.
You need to tell X.
Pigasaurs are roasted over hot coals. Golden liquor flows, adding its own burn to revelers’ throats as the smoke of the charred and salted meat rises into the evening. Dancers and drums are brought in from some foreign place to entertain. The beat is tribal and urgent. This party is life and all that is opposite of the impending mission of death.
The MCR officers guzzle and laugh, living as large as they can because they know there’s not much more of it left to them… life, that is. They know they’re finally poking the beast in a way that will no longer be tolerated. Something more than skirmishing with relatively unprotected planets. More than the Chiasm and Kublar.
Scarpia pours you a drink. “Look at them, Tommy. Fools.” He’s close to you, and drunk too. And the look in his eyes is pure neurotic coldness. No love. No empathy. No customer service from the galaxy’s most affable and elusive arms dealer. Scarpia stares at his customers with disgust and contempt, and it’s a good thing you are back, away from the firepit, among mephitic shadows that seem to dance across your faces in time to the drummer drumming for the lovely girls who undulate for the MCR officers.
“They’ve allied themselves with the zhee. The aliens will die for their cause on impact, and these rebels will die by the Legion in the fallout. What a joke.” Scarpia spits this out with low disgust. “We’ll be on our way to paradise, earning billions at a fixed rate, when they go to light speed.”
And you’re praying, hoping, willing him to tell you the rendezvous point right now, because the hour is late and now it’s so desperate you might just hijack the ship’s comm and try to get a message through, never mind the consequences.
So many dead. Those are the consequences.
But he doesn’t tell you. And it seems, almost for a second, as his drunken eyes wander back to lucidity, he seems to know that maybe that’s what you were waiting for.
The rendezvous coordinates.
Or maybe it’s just a trick of the firelight and shadows. And the drink.
Maybe it’s just your fear.
He smiles at you. Warm and genuine. Sorta.
“Fixed rate, Tommy boy. For the rest of our lives.”
And then Scarpia wanders back to the fire and refills everybody’s drink from a decanter of liquor so expensive a family on any of the best core worlds could live for a year off of the proceeds.
The MCR officers cheer and shout. Much of that liquor doesn’t make it down their throats. Spilled onto the pure white sand of the island.
It’ll all go down before the month ends.
You know that now. It’s all goes down that swiftly, and you have no idea where, or how to let X know to stop it.
The House of Reason and everything around it.
You head down to the beach, then back to the ship. “Tell Mr. Scarpia I wasn’t feeling well,” you tell the boatswain.
There’s only one way to get a message through now.
Only one person.
23
It’s Illuria who seduces you. Isn’t it that way, Tom? Isn’t it always that way? Haven’t we seen this coming from far off? You go back to the ship because she didn’t get to go to the party. It’s business, dear, Scarpia had told her.
And she seemed genuinely hurt. Then.
Scarpia hadn’t wanted some drunken MCR officer with nothing but fatalism and glory on his mind to take a shot, make a grab at her, and queer the whole deal. Toss away all that fixed-rate paradise.
“Bad form,” was a thing Scarpia would’ve said in the party’s foul aftermath.
So she’d stayed out of sight. Pheromones are dangerous. No use messing everything up over a girl.
So you go back, because she’s going shopping the day after next on some pleasure world, while you, Scarpia, and Frogg take Scarpia’s ship to begin the process of fitting the corvette with an untold payload, and then delivering it, formally, to the MCR. Care of the zhee.
Then everyone disappears to that fixed-rate paradise Scarpia has promised you all.
And if Illuria is going shopping for fine and lacy things suitable for Scarpia to display her in, then of course the operating and rendezvous timetable coincide with the end of her trip. Kill two birds with one stone. It’s very Scarpia thinking.
All you have to do is find out where—once you seduce your messenger. Then get a message through.
So you return to the ship. Not because Illuria knows… but because she might deliver the message for you. But first… she has to want to.
Has to want to save the beings in that suicide corvette’s path, and throw away all the fixed-rate fantasies of old pirates.
And also there is this… When Scarpia said she couldn’t come to the party, why, yes, she had made that ge
nuinely sad face. She loves parties. And music. And dancing. And food. And new friends.
But she gave you that look no one else caught.
The look that said… now. Tonight. Or never, Tom.
You’re sure of it. It wasn’t the pheromones. It was her. Wanting you.
And as you cross the waves out to the estate, Tom, or you, or whoever you’ve become on this night with everything on the line, you’re desperately hoping Frogg didn’t see her look too.
Because he’s been watching you lately.
He’s always watching.
And yes. There’s always that knife.
***
The launch docks bob at the waterline of the massive, floating estate. Most of the crew is either at station, or helping out with the party ashore. There are some on board, however. And anything out of the ordinary will be noticed and reported. If it is seen.
But you’ve gotten good at being unseen. Who has seen through Tom?
And of course… this is as dangerous as it gets. This is where Scarpia has you thrown from the ship when you’re far out at sea. In imported shark–infested waters with no place to swim and no Carnivale men in black to come and pull you out.
No kill teams to stop the impending loss of Republic life, or flip the board to start eliminating the lives of the Republic’s enemies, either.
Or maybe…
No. That’s why you have to do this. So they’ll know.
And that’s got to happen because someone—two someones from your other life; yours, not Tom’s—why, they’re on Utopion. Sub-luxury housing, courtesy Nether Ops. Very nice, just not Senate Council nice. They’re waiting for you to come home from the wars.
Maybe it will be Frogg with the knife.
What?
Instead of the rented sharks out in deep waters.
Oh. No. Frogg’s stock has fallen.
But this is how someone like Frogg gets back in tight with Scarpia, Tom.
Yes. It is. I’ll be careful.
So it’s vital that no one sees anything that shouldn’t be seen right now, aboard the mostly quiet Smuggler’s End. The perfect scenario is that somehow she’s swimming in the pool. You imagine that. The water shimmering in blue and her in nothing beneath the water. You imagine that because she knows you’re coming back for her. Has known it. Has really arranged it.
Because isn’t she in charge, Tom?
Someone’s got to be in charge in all of this, and it may as well be her. She’s the only one who isn’t a cutthroat and a killer. She only enjoys their company. And that’s been the autobiography of your life these last six months.
In the company of cutthroats and killers.
Someone has to be in charge because you don’t need to hear that it’s all not going according to plan. You don’t want to hear that the fate of the House of Reason, and the city on Utopion built around it, and perhaps the Republic itself, is actually dependent on your seducing a concubine. Because if the universe abhors a vacuum then we certainly can’t imagine what it abhors about the fate of all those people.
It’s hard not think of her body as you thread the through the ship, passing large maintenance rooms and dark storage bays kept in clean and neat order where all the toys wait.
And then another thought occurs.
Everyone is headed back here tonight.
Why not blow up the ship with Scarpia, Frogg, and all the MCR generals on board? Kinda solves the problem, doesn’t it, Tom, or whoever you are?
Except it really doesn’t, because no one knows what happens next. No one knows back at the Carnivale that the MCR has pitched so many of its resources—really to the point where this is their one shot—to buy enough dark market payloads, the stuff that makes MAROs look like fire-poppers, and stuff a stolen corvette full of it. Big enough to carry the load, still fast enough to get through if the jump takes you to the edge of the planet. Destroy the House of Reason and thereby destroy the surrounding city for the next atomic half-life hundred years.
No one knows about that plan anywhere in the Republic. But the MCR and their zhee buddies do. And they won’t forget just because some of their officers and their arms dealers croak. In fact, they’ll be stronger, won’t they? Because then all they have to do is track down where Scarpia hid the thing amid the ruin of his financial empire, and the invoice is no longer due.
If the MCR was smart, you think, they’d blow this ship up with Scarpia inside it. But they’re not.
And that’s good, you tell yourself.
You enter the main deck. The “pleasure dome,” as Frogg has called it in the past. Nothing is there waiting for you except the lonely deck chairs and the shimmering waters of the pool, gently undulating in the night as though someone has only recently swum and then left. You hear the quiet lap of the water against the sides of the beautiful pool. The light shifting beneath the water is somehow comforting. A perfect oblivion to drown yourself in.
For what you did.
For what you’re about to do.
You weren’t really going to seduce a woman not your wife in order to save the Republic, were you?
Tom?
Were you?
And you certainly weren’t going to enjoy it.
Tom?
Tom has nothing to say. And that bothers you for so many reasons.
Illuria is nowhere to be seen. That’s for the best, because your marriage is safe. It’s just that all those people on Utopion are dead.
You light a cigarette and contemplate the technical difficulties of how to blow the Smuggler’s End, with yourself on board. Because that’s the last option. The only option.
You’re thinking about the end of you when you notice the delicate, perfect wet footprints that lead away from the pool’s edge.
Leading to the sauna.
As though she saw the launch leave the island and knew it was you coming for her. Finally.
She is in control.
You cast a furtive glance over your shoulder, Tom, at that island. No other launches. And even here, across the water, you can hear the drum and bass meltdown of the party to end all parties in full swing over there.
You have a little girl. A wife. You’re a naval officer.
And a spy.
Those people will die.
So Tom walks into the sauna area where it’s cool and dark and the echo of his footsteps on the tile is what walking into hell alone must sound like.
And you find her there. Waiting, as though this moment were seen coming from far off, from the very first moment when she said your name.
Tom.
***
“Are you worried?” you ask her. After. The two of you lying entwined on the rich fragrant planks of the heated sauna.
But regretful really seems to be the word you meant instead of “worried.”
Because that’s where you, not Tom, are at. Because even if you save the Republic and prevent that corvette from smashing into the House of Reason on Utopion… well, you will have to tell the mother of your daughter about this.
Will I? you ask yourself. Because it wasn’t you. It was Tom. Tom committed adultery. Not you.
Tom can’t commit adultery. Tom’s not married.
This is all you. You did this. Not Tom.
You.
Own it.
So you’ll tell her. Your wife. And she’ll know the breaking point of your fidelity. All those people. But she’ll wonder, if she takes you back in. She’ll always wonder. What if it was half as many? What if it was just one life? What if it was because you wanted an excuse?
You take a drag off of your cigarette and hate yourself. If only for the idiotic notion that you could ever save what you had. It’s really all gone now. Worse than what Utopion might be. Whatever you once were… it’s gone.
And then there are things you’ll never be able to tell her because details hurt. So you’ll live with the pleasure, and the pain. And because Illuria, lost and happy Illuria, strokes your chest and you feel her tears on
your skin. And she keeps whispering the name, that name that is not you, over and over as though it is a destination on a map she keep within her heart. Softly, in that velvety deep voice of hers.
You can’t ever imagine forgetting her.
It’s not as easy as it all looks, Tom. You.
“Illuria…” You speak softly. Softly because your voices echo in the deeps of the sauna complex.
This is as dangerous as it gets.
“Illuria…” you begin again.
She looks up at you with those dark doe eyes that you will never, ever forget. Not because of the pheromones you’re drowning in. Not because of the six months of fear and terror, and the running down an alley being chased by mindless killers, monster donkeys known as the zhee. And all that time waiting for the math to work out in Frogg’s head and for him to start cutting on you. And knowing you’ll have no way to defend yourself from something that’s more dangerous and vicious than it is human. And all the other late-night arms deals with killers and cutthroats who’d just as soon take your life as opposed to parting with their dirty, blood-covered credits. And pieces-of-junk freighters to forgotten end-of-nowheres so that you can, as X said, “Sink good and well, into the muck of the galactic underworld, my dear boy.”
Not because of all that and so much more.
But because she sees you for whoever it is you are right now. Not Tom. Not you. Not the Nether Ops patsy.
She sees you as you when you found her in the sauna and she beckoned you to her, promising some other kind of oblivion. Promising to go all the way there with you.
And you surrendered and roared into her… as all that darkness disappeared.
“Yes,” she says up at you in the quiet of the sauna. A pipe somewhere gently hisses.
“He’s a monster,” you say.
“Yes,” she replies. “I know.”
You sigh. You sigh because finally… after all this time out here beyond the perimeter, all alone, deep in a cover you’ve lost yourself in, finally you have an ally. One person you can tell the truth to.
“You’ve got to help me stop him,” you whisper.
“I know, Tom.”
Her voice is small, and frightened.
Kill Team (Galaxy's Edge Book 3) Page 18
