Kaiden

by Vivienne Savage

  She took aim and squeezed off a single dart. The young man stumbled, crashed to his knees, and hit the ground, but the damage was done. An alarm went off, blaring across the complex.

  Nisrine used his own restraints to bind him, and then glanced upward. Kaiden was out of sight and she prayed his efforts paid off sooner than later. Until then, it was up to her to defend him.

  After reactivating her personal stealth field, she moved into the shadows of the tower and prepared. The first round of opposition came from the western guard shack, two frantic men who looked as though they’d been shaken awake from a mid-watch snooze. Both went down within seconds of each other, a harmless dart in each neck.

  She waited, expecting another security team to arrive any minute, but the area remained silent. Trepidation crawled up her spine—an icy, warning tingle.

  Five bullets punched Nisrine’s right side. Her suit prevented penetration, but it didn’t dull the impact enough to save her from getting the breath knocked from her lungs. A split-second was all it had taken, a hail of bullets from an automatic weapon. Shit. She ducked and rolled, unable to see her attacker but recognizing the telltale whirring noise of a miniature chaingun. The moment she leapt to her feet, another struck her from behind. Her tranq gun skittered across the pavement beyond her reach.

  Every inch of her hurt, and if not for her armored suit, she’d be peppered with holes. With her psychic energy gathered around her, she formed it into a kinetic barrier and kept on her guard.

  Another tug of foresight cued her to the incoming attack from behind. With a flash of precognition to aid her, Nisrine darted to the side. Wind rushed past her, and an ejected magazine clattered to the ground.

  Narrowing her eyes, Nisrine unleashed her power in the general direction of her unseen assailant. The kinetic punch warped the air all around her in a forward surging cone. The blast connected with the invisible gunman and sent him tumbling through the air. Two heartbeats later, her assailant shimmered into focus, the gray of a tight-fitting suit spreading over a slim and athletic body. Nisrine deprived her opponent of their main weapon then thrust again with telekinesis. The gun sailed over the fence and into the distance.

  At the same moment, her attacker landed in a crouch—not a person, but a pink and hairless biped adorned in military-grade armor similar to Nisrine’s. The close-fitting suit had been constructed from the best bullet-resistant material, a popular choice for operatives outfitted with stealth apparatuses.

  Scars circled the woman’s bald scalp in a halo of newly healed tissue. The eyes, soulless and black, stared back at Nisrine without emotion. She felt no life there, only the echo of torment and pain, agony in a familiar shell she’d seen many times before on the Jemison. This creature had been a fellow operative once.

  “Saskia Dupree?”

  The world tilted and spun beneath her. Nausea rose with her realization, a sick and twisted sense of understanding. Saskia had been the one to abduct Kaiden seven years ago and turn him over to undergo years of torture.

  And she’d also pulled the trigger on Armando Lopez, killing Nisrine’s boyfriend two years ago. She still remembered that day, its hours alternating moments of hatred, grief, and sorrow. She remembered the ruthless dive into Saskia’s mind, the first time she had ever intentionally used her gifts to inflict pain.

  “You’re supposed to be in prison.”

  Saskia said nothing. Her features remained void of any personality. She vanished again, but this time, Nisrine struggled to link a slippery hook into the woman’s psyche.

  Bile rose in her throat and she staggered back, overwhelmed by the concentration of negative energy.

  At the time of Kaiden’s rescue, when the commodore and Xander asked her to examine him for life, she’d always known he was there. His mind hadn’t been destroyed. He’d been a thinking, living man trapped beneath layers of emotional bondage.

  The same was not true for Saskia. Nisrine reached out for life and felt nothing—no soul, no emotions. An emptiness greeted her like the vast open space of a dying star system.

  As Saskia sped toward Nisrine, she recovered from the shock in time to throw an incomplete kinetic shield around her body. Her attacker’s flying kick sliced through the barrier. It must have been augmented by cybernetics, because it packed enough force to push Nisrine backward across the pavement despite the psionic wall between them, cracking a rib in the process and introducing her to a world of pain. With a telekinetic shove, she hurled the woman past her and toward the electrified gate.

  “X91 is here!” she yelled into the communication channel.

  The electrified fence had no impact on Saskia, and she hadn’t flown nearly as hard as Nisrine hoped for. Would they have outfitted her with a mild psionic destabilizer? The creature bounced off the semi-rigid links and rebounded with a flying leap no mere human could have accomplished, but Nisrine saw it coming and timed a flawless spinning hook kick that snapped her foot against the mutant’s face. Her opponent tumbled aside and somehow flowed to her feet again like a boneless abomination.

  Nisrine whipped an injector from her supplies and jabbed it into her thigh. She’d deal with the consequences of fighting with a fractured rib later. Before, she’d always prided herself on never needing stimulants during a battle, sometimes teasing Joaquin for his reliance—but she needed to be in optimal form to keep Scarot’s little pet off Kaiden. Nothing else mattered.

  Falling back on her machine pistol, Nisrine squeezed out a dozen rounds that popped and rebounded off Saskia’s projectile-deflecting suit. No good. The shields were fully functional, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t chip away at them. Then the bitch was on her again in close quarters, forcing Nisrine to sway and duck, weaving in and out to avoid getting her head taken off by those powerful hands.

  They traded swings and kicks that didn’t land, the women moving back and forth over the concrete but unable to break through each other’s guards. Their cybernetic overhaul had turned her into a beast, and her punches were so powerful, Nisrine suspected blocking them with bare arms would have resulted in shattered bones.

  Using her psionic powers became a must, dampening each blow and tossing Saskia aside, though her opponent only came at her again with endless stamina, never crying out in pain or appearing to tire, no matter how many times Nisrine lifted her from the ground and slammed her away to shoot her again.

  The machine pistol was top of the line and wouldn’t run out of rounds any time soon, but her fatiguing human body and wary mind couldn’t keep it up forever, even with a dose of stimulants circulating through her blood.

  Hurry, Kai.

  Saskia closed in again, this relentless and unstoppable thing that would have been absolutely terrifying if Nisrine could spare a single moment to be scared. She didn’t have time for fear, because there was a man counting on her, needing her to watch his back, and she’d be damned if she let him down.

  It didn’t matter how much her body hurt as long as Kaiden came out of it okay.

  “Come on, you ugly bitch. It seems the outside now matches your inside. Think it was karma?”

  Saskia didn’t react. So much for hoping there was even a shred of humanity left. Nisrine knew the enemy’s fighting style, but it was as robotic and lifeless as her soulless, dead eyes.

  And that had to be her weakness. The thing had no doubt been programmed to dissect both of their combat styles for weaknesses. But she couldn’t expect what Nisrine wouldn’t ordinarily do. To defeat a machine, Nisrine had to be unpredictable.

  After sucking in a deep breath, she braced herself and let Saskia come to her. Rather than block with telekinesis, she rolled with the punch—letting it skim past her cheek instead of hitting her dead on in the face—and grasped Saskia by the back of the neck to use her running momentum against her. The end result was a body slam worthy of Viljoen’s grappling lessons with the royal marines. Anticipating Saskia’s immediate flip to her feet, Nisrine spun into a low foot sweep while drawing her phase sw
ord.

  She slashed through the air and struck, cleaving through the power cell of her opponent’s shield generator. It had been exactly where she’d hoped it would be. Thrusting the mutant again with telekinesis, she reached for her firearm...

  And at that precise second, a hoverbike flown by Ranulf crashed into Saskia. The bulky second mate leapt from the vehicle before the instant of impact and rolled to safety across the grass. Grinning, he rose from the ground and dusted grit from his armor. “I was right. You are having all the fun.”

  Nisrine took the moment to catch her breath, too relieved to question his timely arrival. “Thanks.”

  “That should take care of… whatever that thing was. Now where’s the lad? Is he done?”

  “No. I’m guessing it isn’t as easy as he thought it would be. He’s been up there… speaking with the satellites for a couple minutes. How did you get here so fast?”

  “Eh, we were en route to provide backup when the guard reported an intruder over comms. Didn’t take much longer to get here.”

  A second mercenary arrived on the silver hoverbike and stopped beside Saskia’s crumpled body. Nisrine recognized the driver, one of the men who had accompanied Evie on Amun, but she had never learned his name. He didn’t speak much, one of those big and silent types.

  “Put a bullet in that thing’s head, Pieter,” Ranulf ordered.

  The merc gave a curt nod and dismounted. He pulled his weapon as he crossed over to Saskia’s prone form. Not wanting to watch, Nisrine turned away. Saskia may have killed the last man she’d cared for, but the monstrous act committed against her had robbed the moment of any satisfaction. It was joyless. Empty. A hollow victory that inspired as much anguish as her reasons for wanting the woman dead.

  Pieter screamed.

  Nisrine jerked around again to see the man had arched in the posture of an electrocution victim, one of Saskia’s hands around his ankle. When he collapsed, wisps of smoke rose from him and the scent of scorched human flesh filled the air.

  “Fuck!” Ranulf roared before unloading his assault rifle. Bullets peppered an empty space, Saskia already on the move again and vanishing from sight.

  “She’s a splicer with squid abilities. Eel now, too, by the looks of it,” Nisrine said.

  “Yeah, I figured.” The pale blue lens of the partial visor curving in front of his right eye glowed bright. “I don’t see her heat signature, either.” The man turned a few times, then his eyes narrowed. “But I hear her.”

  Ranulf whirled and released another short burst of rounds. Struck by several bullets and knocked out of her camouflage, Saskia gasped. She lost her running momentum, spinning out of control first, then flipping away to scale the tower. She crawled over the metal and swung onto the next tier with a primate’s agility.

  Kaiden.

  “She’s going for him!” Ranulf beat Nisrine to the ladder and scaled the metal rungs with surprising speed for a man of his bulk.

  From the ground, Nisrine attacked with psionic pulses, waves of telekinesis force aimed at Saskia to knock her from the metal bars. All it did was slow her ascent, forcing her to pause or change direction—until Nisrine caught her head-on with a well-timed shockwave. The mutant slipped on the bars and plummeted to the lower platform where Ranulf awaited her. After a moment of grappling on the ledge, Ranulf hurled them both over the edge.

  They hit the ground together. The twenty-foot drop snapped Ranulf’s leg and pooled blood beneath him, the jagged edge of a glossy white bone jutting up through his muscular thigh. As he groaned in pain, Saskia staggered to her feet.

  Spying an opening, Nisrine rushed in with her phase sword. The crackling blade slid through Saskia’s abdomen and out her back, but Saskia never cried out, even as Nisrine jerked the blade toward her chest, hoping to damned near tear her in half if it meant the creature would go down and stay down.

  Although she expected to smell blood and the awful, unforgettable scent of entrails, she glanced down to see an empty cavern. They’d hollowed Saskia. Little of the human she’d once been remained, her body a patchwork of cybernetics and genetic enhancement.

  As that cold realization washed over Nisrine, the creature’s cold touch closed around the back of her neck and the electrocution began. A strangled scream caught in her throat, choked off by Saskia’s tight grip, then pressure squeezed her chest like a vice and her vision blurred.

  Gareth slipped into a chair and mopped his brow with a towel. Without a full crew, the remaining members of the Jemison were forced to pull double duty, often training on the spot to perform auxiliary roles. He’d been in the kitchen over the grill to help feed the hardworking marines.

  “So far, so good, Commodore. Not a single UNE ship in sight within the next five astronomical units at least.”

  “Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

  Flight Lieutenant Norman chuckled. “Ships don’t normally patrol this system, even after all the trouble that went down with Loki 4 a couple years back.”

  Ethan acknowledged him with a nod from the co-pilot’s seat. Franks, the man who belonged in the chair, had waved a sorrowful goodbye from the hangar with everyone else who didn’t want to go down with the Jemison. “Even so, we can’t let our guard—”

  “Proximity alert,” Jem announced. “The HMS Shepard has uncloaked on our starboard side.”

  Gareth jerked upright in his seat. “What? I just scanned.”

  “Newer Lexar-class ship,” the XO said.

  “Fucking Lexar stealth technology,” Gareth muttered.

  “Shepard to the Jemison, this is Captain Theroux. Commodore Bishop, I am asking you to surrender. Transfer the queen into our care and allow us to escort you to the nearest military base for holding.”

  “I can’t do that, Captain,” Ethan replied.

  “I have orders to—”

  “I know all about your damned orders,” Ethan bit out, “and I appreciate that you aren’t initiating combat, but until we know who we can trust, we will not release the queen to anyone. There are traitors in High Command.”

  “Can you provide proof?”

  An icy fist closed around Gareth’s heart. Did he dare to hope they’d be reasonable?

  “No,” Ethan replied. “Not yet. But proof is coming.”

  “Then I must insist that you release the queen. Transfer her to our medical quarters, and we’ll—”

  “I can’t do that. She’s in danger.”

  The line went quiet and Gareth tensed, breath held as he and everyone else on the bridge waited.

  “You leave me no choice, Commodore. Theroux out.”

  “Evasive maneuvers, now!” Ethan ordered. “Initiate a ship-wide alert. All hands to their battle stations. Attack to disable only!”

  The ship shuddered. A second missile slammed against their shields before they veered to port.

  “How are our shields holding, Jem?”

  “Shields are at full capacity,” the A.I. responded.

  Ethan grunted. “Those were love taps meant to scare us into surrender. Let’s try to disable their weapons before they decide to get serious.”

  The two ships played cat and mouse, with the Jemison at the disadvantage. For every two disabling shots they fired, three came back at them in return. Their vessel had been designed for stealth and reconnaissance, and the Shepard was one of their best battlecruisers, another Lexar-made ship donated to the UNE for their loyal service in the Nova Force.

  Another hit slammed into their hull and the ship shuddered.

  “Hull breach on level seven. Sections twenty-four through twenty-six have been sealed. No casualties. Two personnel taken to medical.”

  “Shields are at three-fourths capacity,” Gareth called out, “and I’ve picked up the Glenn on the long-range sensors. She’ll be here in thirteen minutes.”

  Ethan glanced up. “Can we outrun them if we jump to lightspeed, Jem?”

  “Our probability of successfully fleeing both ships is thirty-five percent,” Jem tol
d them. “The HMS Shepard has been outfitted with the newest lightdrive engines.”

  “We’ll have to route all power from the ship’s cannons if we want to jump,” Gareth called. “They don’t have to do that. They’ll take us out while we’re vulnerable.”

  Ethan swore again. “Then they’ve given us no choice. We’ll have to engage them for real. Disable their engines and do what’s necessary.”

  “Sir, that will cause significant casualties.” Gareth swallowed back the lump in his throat.

  A prolonged silence preceded Ethan’s grim response. “I know.”

  The sick feeling in his stomach persisted, but they had no other recourse, because turning the queen over to their hands didn’t guarantee her safety. They’d take her to the nearest hospital, then someone—another assassin, or even a doctor paid the right amount of money—would end her glorious reign and that’d be the end.

  If she even survived that long. A tingle of intuition traveled Gareth’s spine, chilling him. There’d be sleeper agents on the other ships, too. Maybe in the other medical wings. No one could be trusted, because the damage went that deep.

  They had to hold out until Kaiden sent the message to the world.

  Jem brought the ship around and focused their fire on the newer vessel, plasma rockets aimed for the engines.

  A solemn hush fell over the cockpit, enduring for several minutes while they battled their fellow marines. The Jemison rocked and a navigation panel overloaded. The helmsman cried out, blown from his seat.

  “Scored a direct hit on their secondary cannon, Commodore,” Thandie said over the link. “We’re out of missiles, but they’re still armed with guns.”

  Ethan glanced at the monitor displaying the medical bay. “How’s the queen, Xander?”

  “Stable. Injuries across the ship have been reported, but most are superficial.”

  Jem patched Etherington in from the depths of the ship, his voice panicked amidst the chaos and noise. “Engine one is offline!”

  “How are the others?”

  “Not looking good. If we take another direct hit, we’ll lose them.”