Dragon's Promise

by Natalie Grey

  And yet…

  “We’ll inspect the warehouse.” The words came out of her mouth muted and unsure, and she bit her lip.

  “Boss?” Tersi was frowning at her. “You don’t sound too sure about that.”

  “Well, we can’t dither about waiting to be a hundred percent sure,” she said firmly. Waiting for perfect information was a sure way to do nothing and get killed, they had been taught that over and over in training. She needed to do something now, and the warehouse was here. And she might be able to talk Talon out of being tempted by that information, but unfortunately she wasn’t sure how to talk herself out of it. “Grose wants to catch this guy as much as we do at this point. We have no reason to think he’s feeding us false information.”

  “True, but it could easily be useless,” Tersi said firmly. “If he thought Ghost was still there, he’d have gone in himself to get a glimpse.” When she looked over, he held his hands up in mock surrender. “Or maybe he’s telling himself that he thinks Ghost is still there. Whatever the case, he has the resources to send someone as a plant and he hasn’t done it. There’s gotta be a reason, even if he doesn’t know it himself.”

  “If he had a better assessment of risk, he might be at the top of his profession,” Nyx said firmly. “He’s afraid of this person. He wants to take them down, but he’s afraid. Mala told me he was scared as hell when our ship came in. He’s paranoid.”

  “Not a bad quality, in his line of work.” Tersi shook his head. “If you want to go in, we’re behind you. But you don’t sound sure.”

  “I’m not going to be sure of anything. We’re here, we might as well check.” Nyx rotated the tabletop to give the other side of the room a right-side-up look at the map, and everyone braced for the complaining shriek of metal the old contraption always gave. But it spun easily.

  “Hey, that’s nice.” Esu squatted down to look.

  “Maybe we should go in for maintenance more often,” Jester agreed. “The ship’s running like a dream right now. That stuck door on our bunks is even working again.”

  “That’s all our guest,” Tersi said.

  Everyone looked over at him and Nyx felt her brow furrow. “What?”

  “Mala. She said she’s been going stir-crazy and when I asked what she liked to do to pass the time, she told me about some big old engine she keeps in her guest bedroom.”

  “She’s still doing mechanical work?” Nyx smiled slightly. Kiran had harbored grand plans of being a shipboard mechanic, and he’d been annoyed when Mala pestered him to teach her everything he knew, as she always did. He’d been even more annoyed when she took to it like a fish to water, while he couldn’t seem to make the simplest thing go right.

  “Yeah. You didn’t know?” Tersi gave her a little frown. You could spend a little more time with her, that look said.

  Nyx gave him a look of her own. I’ll thank you to shut up.

  He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I joked about something with the shuttle, and she fixed that, and she must have just run with it. She said she’d fixed the thermometer on the oven, too.”

  “Huh.” Nyx tried to keep her expression flat. Somehow, the idea of Mala fixing up the Ariane seemed almost domestic—as comfortable and easy as Nyx cleaning her weapons and checking over her gear. A Dragon ship ran easily when everyone had their own little quirks and talents, and it had been Sphinx who tended to fix things up.

  She shook her head and returned to the problem at hand. Make the best choice.

  How did she do that?

  And if she didn’t do it right, her crew would be in danger. Nyx resisted the urge to sink her head into her hands. How did Talon ever make choices when he was in charge? How did he not go crazy with the what-ifs and the maybes and the options? He wasn’t distracted by Mala, that was how. Nyx gave a firm headshake at herself. Her feelings were running amok. She couldn’t trust them right now.

  “All right, everyone look at the layout. Squad questions?”

  Everyone shook their heads.

  “Suit up, then. We leave in fifteen minutes.”

  19

  Mala paced around the ship as the team left and finally settled in the cockpit, swiveling in the co-pilot’s chair as Tersi tracked the shuttle on his view screen. It dropped out of sight around the horizon of the moon and the Ariane trailed behind, orbiting high enough out not to catch the attention of any of the sentry satellites. The ship moved slowly when it was running quiet, and Mala had the sense of a great jungle cat stalking its prey; the little she could see from the dials on the pilot’s readout, the ship was one of the finest in the Alliance fleet, nearly as maneuverable as a Destroyer.

  “Why are warehouses always on moons?” she asked finally. She was going to go crazy if she kept thinking about what the Dragons were up to. She’d had no trouble picturing them running through gunfire and kicking down doors before this, but the idea of Nyx creeping into an unknown situation was making her a bit jumpy.

  “Lower escape velocity.” Tersi looked over at her. “It’ll be okay, you know. It’s not a great mission, but it’ll be okay.”

  “What do you mean, not a great mission?”

  “To be honest….” He grimaced. “I’m not sure I’m following the commander’s reasoning on this one. It seems like too much risk for information we can probably get elsewhere.”

  “How much risk?”

  “I shouldn’t have put it that way.” He shook his head. “I didn’t mean to worry you. I’m not very good at talking to civilians. You might have noticed.”

  “Been in the military for a while, huh?”

  “Since I was twenty-four. Both my grandfathers were, and my grandmother on my mother’s side—and my dad was, and my mother was a navigator. So everyone kind of … talked military, I guess.”

  “Did you get to see them often?”

  “Actually, some of the military ships have places for children. A lot of them are deployed in systems that are well-sentried. If there had been an attack, we would all have been sent planet-side. We used to get in such trouble because we’d run off and hide, and they’d read us this big lecture on what would happen if there was an attack and we didn’t get to the escape shuttle fast enough—of course, we all thought being on a ship during an attack would be the most exciting thing ever, so those lectures didn’t exactly have the intended effect.”

  Mala laughed. “Sounds like every kid I knew.”

  “Pretty much. Look, no need to sit up here and fret. Why don’t you go get something to eat?”

  “All I do is eat.”

  “And fix the ship. You get extra rations for that.” He grinned. “Go on. You’ll only jump at everything if you’re here, you know. Also … it’s classified and I’d lose my clearance if they look at the video logs.”

  “Right.” Mala grinned and left him, her footsteps taking her past the command hub and down toward the kitchen. Stabby, the other Dragon left aboard, gave her a friendly wave and went back to his research, frowning at what appeared to be a schematic of an ore chisel.

  Mala was just pulling down a packet of freeze-dried vegetables—the descriptions she heard from the Dragons were so disgusting that she was getting curious—when the thought came to her. The ship was unguarded, and the only two Dragons aboard were occupied. Turning off the stove and stowing the vegetables back in place, Mala stole one glance down the hallway to the command hub and, seeing Orin still buried in his research, made her way lightly down the stairs and across the ship.

  The brig was on the lowest level, and it was fairly cold. She was shivering by the time she arrived at the cell where the prisoner was kept, not a room with metal bars as she had expected, but a room with solid walls and a wash of yellow paint that probably went from cheery to infuriating after more than a couple of hours. A quick glance in the window showed her former host chained near the back wall.

  She yanked her head away from the window before he could look up and see her, and considered her options. Her heart was pounding, and she s
hould know far better than to talk to him. But if Tersi was right, if there wasn’t much chance of getting useful information today, Mala knew that Nyx was likely to come back here, and keep talking. And at some point, this man would ask a question about how the Dragons had managed to get Mala on their side, and everything would come crashing down.

  What she needed, more than anything, was to get him not to say anything. She crossed her arms and leaned back against the wall, thinking furiously. As far as he was concerned, Mala had betrayed him. That meant that even if the mysterious Ghost was the current target of his ire, Mala would eventually gain his attention. She needed a plan to confirm what he suspected and throw him off from saying the things that would expose her … and of course, a plan that would get him on her side.

  A little voice in her head told her this was not possible, but she couldn’t afford for this to go any other way. She mapped out the conversation in her head and nodded to herself. She just had to act a part, and she knew a thing or two about that.

  When she pushed the door open, she was smiling apologetically.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long to get down here.”

  “You.” His face darkened.

  “Look, I know it’s not comfortable down here, but this is so much better than the alternative, right?”

  “Being sent out the airlock?” he asked her bitterly. His suit was rumpled and stubble was beginning to come in on his cheeks.

  “What? No! No, don’t you see? You were right about Ghost.”

  “What?” He looked over at her sharply.

  “As soon as you contacted me, I began to put things together.” Mala sat on one of the benches out of reach, hoping her choice of seating wasn’t too obvious.

  “Like how you could pin this whole mess on me?” he asked her acidly.

  “No! No. Listen, they want to believe everything, all right? They want to believe you. But right now, what they need is to get Ghost, and you’re the best one to lead them there.”

  “Not you? You, with your own set of Dragons?” He was still furious. “You should be an actress. I never even suspected that you were involved with them. I could see you holding secrets from them.”

  Which was precisely the sort of thing he could not be allowed to say to Nyx. Mala shook her head and held her hands out.

  “Look. I’m a small fry, all right? Always have been, might always be. And that’s mostly okay, right? I’ve got enough money.”

  “Fool. Unless you’re at the top, you’re getting used.”

  “I know. In this case, that’s true.”

  “It’s always true.”

  “Maybe.” Mala smiled. “But whatever the case, I don’t like being used any more than you do. Something always felt off about this, and I just tried to convince myself that it was okay. Before I knew who you were, I could see your work in the system, with the outputs varying and the expected price going up and down—I knew you were there, but more than that, I knew they were losing control. And that made me realize just how much control they had. They’ve got that committee dancing on a string, and they’re trying to play everyone who’s working for them for fools. I don’t like that.”

  “So you threw me under the bus?” He narrowed his eyes.

  Mala refrained from sighing. He really was difficult to throw off the scent. “No. As far as I’m concerned, neither of us has done anything wrong. That’s Ghost. You know I can talk them into saying that you were scared for your life—and that you were gathering evidence to make a charge, be a whistleblower.”

  He raised his head. For the first time, she saw interest in his eyes.

  “We just need to find Ghost,” she told him persuasively.

  “You think that’s easy?” He laughed. “I’ve checked out everyone I can think of. I took those committee reports and I investigated every damned person they were looking at. I ran those people through the wash. I even looked at them a few months ago! I looked at every single thing and I couldn’t tell you who’s taking those bribes.”

  “Goddammit.” Mala slumped back against the wall. “I’ll … I had only just gotten to thinking it was one of them when you contacted me. I’ll … I’ll do what I can. I’ll get you out of here soon. For now, for appearance’s sake, they have to treat you like a suspect.” She had to hope he believed that.

  But apparently he had something else in mind entirely. “Can I ask you something?” There was genuine curiosity in his voice now. The anger had fallen away.

  “What?” She looked over.

  “How does a smuggler fall for a Dragon? And how did you even meet? It can’t be how smugglers normally meet Dragons.” There was a quirk of humor at his mouth.

  “They know where to go to hear things we want hidden,” Mala said, with a shrug. “They go to the same places we go. You’ve seen them in their dress clothes—they can almost blend in. And when people are drunk … things slip.”

  “You don’t strike me as the type of person who lets things slip.” He considered. “Or who makes choices as dangerous as loving a Dragon.”

  “That’s not a choice,” Mala said, before she could stop herself. She took a quick glance at him and looked down at her hands. “You’ve seen her. She’s gorgeous, and the smartest woman I’ve ever met, and so damned funny. I couldn’t … I couldn’t ever talk myself out of loving her.”

  “No.” He sounded almost wistful. “It sounds like you can’t. What’s it like, loving someone like that?”

  Mala looked over into his eyes, seeing the yearning there. People with money always said they were worried no one really loved them, and Mala hadn’t had an ounce of sympathy until this moment—seeing how he looked at her, like she’d uncovered a secret he’d give his whole fortune for.

  Well, at least she could assure him that he wasn’t missing out on anything.

  “It’s terrifying,” she said flatly, and she stood up and left before she could say anything more that would trouble her sleep.

  20

  The cavern was filled with heavy containers stacked on rolling platforms, a decidedly low-tech way to handle one of the most important resources in the galaxy. All of the technology, it seemed, had gone into the crates themselves. Scans showed that the metal was a reinforced alloy that Nyx had only seen used in military equipment before, and painted absurdly with ShadowBlack. Apparently, the goal was to make sure that anyone who found the warehouse and then stole the crates would neither be able to get them open, nor find them.

  “This is shady as hell,” Esu said across the comms. The team was crouched in a series of tunnels that must have been used to help build this place, and had since been covered over and abandoned.

  Nyx only gave a terse nod. Their voices were low, but she did not want to catch the attention of the guards below. Even given the price of Gerren’s Ore, the amount of guns in the room was extravagant. It seemed more likely, given the pairs of guards patrolling each row of crates, that this place thought it was Ghost’s next target rather than that it was run by Ghost themself. That, or Ghost was paranoid and didn’t have any sense of scale in terms of protecting the warehouse; as things stood, any attack was likely to cause enough chaos that friendly fire would take down a good deal of the guards.

  Something was most definitely off about this whole thing. Her eyes followed the patrol routes and scanned for security cameras while she waited for the location data to come down from the Ariane. At last Tersi’s voice echoed through her helmet.

  “Bad news, boss.”

  Nyx tapped her receiver to indicate that he should go on.

  “Well, first of all, it looks like there’s a bloody battalion in there.”

  She tapped an affirmative.

  “Good lord. What do they think they’re going to do if there’s a real attack? Place that small, they’d shred each other in the crossfire.” She could practically see the man shaking his head. “Not important, though. Here’s the thing: unless Ghost is posing as one of the guards down there, it’s almost a surety that
they aren’t there.”

  She tapped a general query.

  “Well, our friend in the brig seemed to indicate that this was a recent visit, right? So it’s probably not the person running it, because that’s been the same guy for about five years now. And I’d guess, if Ghost has managed a successful smuggling ring this long, the visit was either to make sure there was no evidence lying around for the subcommittee members to see, or it was after their visit to check up on what they’d asked.

  “Now, there was a new set of guards dropped off a few days before the visit, but as far as I can tell, all of them check out as long-standing members of Kell Corp. Ghost is paying for the best, and a lot of them—and it’s not likely they’re posing as a guard.”

  Nyx let out a slow breath, trying not to wince with disappointment. She kept her voice low, knowing that between the remoteness of their vantage point in the ducts and her helmet, no one could hear her.

  “So Ghost isn’t here.”

  “No.”

  “Damn.” She shook her head. Normally, it would be child’s play to get one of the guards alone and interrogate them. But the guards seemed to go nowhere alone, and the sheer volume of them was going to make it difficult to isolate even one pair. Given the open structure of the warehouse, Nyx was fairly sure that their only choice was to get into the overseer’s office, and even that was a risky proposition. A man who dealt with Ghost could be expected to keep his mouth shut and choose a quick death over Ghost’s retribution, leaving the Dragons to fight their way through the thousand guards on their way out.

  Ignoring the twist of worry in her gut, Nyx reminded herself that slim chances and impossible odds were the exact situations for which the Dragons had been made. The overseer was the one who could tell them about Ghost, and therefore, the overseer was the one they needed to see. She gave the order quietly and saw the faint movements as Dragons disappeared from grating and slid back through the vents.