by M. D. Cooper
She growled menacingly “Is it true? Are you with the SSF? Were you planted on our ship?”
Ironically, those were questions he could answer truthfully and give little away but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. Surrendering one truth led to another, then another. Tayna would offer him rewards for his honesty, and the process of breaking him would begin.
Defiance was the best option.
Tayna let out an angry breath and pushed him back, putting a strain on his exhausted arms, and nearly making his legs buckle.
“Too bad. You rather I hurt you? Maybe that’s your idea of foreplay.” The thing on his chest activated and began to feed filaments into his body. Filaments that attached to nerve endings and clusters.
Grayson clenched his jaw and desperately tried not to scream too loud.
“That was level one. You want to go for two?” Tayna asked. “Were you sent by the SSF? Who did you contact?”
“I can’t tell you, but do you think I could have a sandwich?” Grayson whispered. “It’s been hours since I last ate.”
“Guess that’s a yes then.”
* * * * *
Gabriel and Micha waited outside. When Tayna exited the cargo bay, Gabriel crossed his arms. “Well?”
Tayna shook her head. “He hasn’t cracked yet but he will. If I have to cut his fingers off and hack off his dick, he’ll talk. It’s only a matter of time.”
“Time we might not have if he had a direct line to the SSF.” Gabriel sighed and shook his head. “We were lucky they couldn’t see through our stealth tech. But that was in the heat of battle. If they know where we’re bound, they’ll be watching the jump points. We’ll be visible before we transition.”
“And if they deploy sensor nets near the jump points they’ll see us before that,” Micha added.
“They won’t,” Tayna said. “We killed the comm hookup before he had a chance to give anything away.”
“Maybe. Stars, how stupid were we to let him on board? His formality, his manner of speech, he’s an officer. Or he was. I never should’ve trusted him,” Gabriel said.
Tayna shrugged. “You couldn’t have known. He fixed the ship like any engineer would have. Not a lot of officers are that good with their hands.”
Micha laughed. “You would know.”
Tayna scowled and gave him a shove. “Shut the fuck up, Micha.”
“It’s what you get for sleeping with the hired help,” Gabriel said with a scowl. “He’s not from Scipio. He isn’t one of us. That much we knew the moment he stepped on board. We needed him to do a mission, that was all. Once the mission was over…”
Tayna nodded. “Space junk, I know. I’m sorry, Captain. You know how excited I get when we have meat on board.”
“At least you know his body,” Micha said with a laugh. “I still think you should try direct extraction.”
Tayna shook her head vehemently. “No, for the last time, no. If he really was an officer, then he’ll have fail safes. They don’t just let brains like his wander around vanilla. I’m lucky the suppression band is working—and that he doesn’t have an AI. If that was the case we’d be better off just killing him.”
“Then you’d better get back to it,” Gabriel said as he turned toward the lift. “Promise him whatever you want but we have to know what he told them. We need to know if they know about the girl. We’re a day from the jump point. Find out by then or we kick him out the airlock.”
VALLEYS OF JERICHO
STELLAR DATE: 09.24.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Equatorial Valleys, Jericho
REGION: Gedri System, Silstrand Alliance
Rogers groaned as he came to.
He opened his eyes and immediately closed them as the pounding headache throbbing behind them became apparent. It felt like his head had been minced and his eyes throbbed and threatened to pop from the pressure behind them.
No wonder. He was still upside down in his pilot chair and its a-grav emitters were off. Made sense that his head hurt so stinking much. Rogers struggled to release his harness but his fingers weren’t listening to what he wanted them to do just yet, the tingling and throbbing making it impossible for him to work the clasp.
As he slapped his hands on his thighs to wake them up, he glanced through the bridge’s once-clear dome, now half-covered with soot and carbon from their descent through Jericho’s thin atmosphere.
What he saw was green. Lots of green. Tall grass, mixed with bamboo and trunks of trees, were visible between the black streaks on the dome.
He couldn’t see sky from his vantage, just more and more green.
There was only one conclusion, they were in one of the planet’s deep valleys—the few places where the atmosphere was still thick enough for verdant life.
He finally managed to release the clasp on his harness. Unfortunately, his numb hands failed to hold onto the seat and he dropped the meter to the floor, landing hard on his shoulder.
With a shake of his head he struggled to his knees. “Winter? Nadine!” Man, his voice sounded horrible too.
The bridge was in disarray. Smoke drifted low across the deck while the holodisplays flashed erratically. Overhead, conduits hung down where panels had been wrenched free. What the hell had happened to them in the dark layer?
“Nadine!” Rogers cried out once more as he rose up and climbed across one of the fallen panels between him and the comms console. Where the hell was she?
A moan came from the rear of the bridge, a rumbly bass: Winter. Well, at least one other crew member was still with him.
“That was some damn party. We didn’t even get a goodie bag,” the albino said as he rose on shaky legs.
Great, a delirious Winter was worse than the usual variety. “Move your ass, Winter, and get that door open.”
A softer, more delicate groan caught Rogers attention. He glanced down and gasped. There, beneath a pile of debris, lay Nadine. She was pinned under a pair of heavy panels which were wedged under a piece of deck plate that had risen up—twisted strangely by some event he couldn’t recall. Her face was a rictus of pain, the expression entirely unnatural on her normally serene face.
“Nadine, I’m going to get you out of there. Hold on.” Rogers tried to keep the worry out of his voice as he grabbed one of the panels that lay atop her, but Nadine shook her head quickly.
“No.” The single word came in a gasp. “I tried to move it. Hurts too much. Punctured…something.”
“Okay, relax. Lay still. I’ll figure it out, okay?” Rogers gave her his best charming smile, but inside, panic raged. Nadine looked pale, Rogers’ head was killing him, and they were trapped on the bridge in what was probably a hostile environment. What was there to be calm about?
From his angle, all he could see was her head. If something had punctured her body, pulling it out could be bad news. But if she was bleeding internally, leaving her in place wasn’t helping either.
He needed to hear her breathing. “Winter, can you stop banging around back there for a second?”
“Why?” Winter called back.
In the moment of silence, Rogers could hear the wet gurgle from Nadine as she drew breath. Shit.
“Get that door open fast! We need to get her to the medbay.”
“What do you think I was doing?”
Rogers tried connecting to the ship over the Link—something he should have done immediately. Would have if his head hadn’t been soup.
No response. The ship’s wireless network was offline.
“You stay put,” he said to Nadine. “I’m going to help Winter with the door, then we’ll come back for you.”
Nadine nodded silently and he gave her a reassuring smile before climbing over more debris to get to the door. When he arrived, Rogers saw that half of Winter’s face was swollen, traces of blood dried on his skin. “You look like crap.”
“Try looking in the mirror,” Winter said as he sliced through some wires. “No power anywhere. Damn door is locked
shut and I’m not sure I can get it open.”
“Nadine’s hurt bad. I think we might be losing her. We need to get to the medbay.”
Winter didn’t stop working but his eyebrows rose. “Yes, repeating that really helps. Anything else you want to tell me that’s going wrong right now?”
Rogers considered it. “We’re in one of Jericho’s deep valleys, close to the equator from what I could tell when we came in. I can’t get any network signals, so unless a satellite passes over head and we pick it up in time, we’re stuck down here.”
“Shut up, Rogers, before I punch you in the mouth.”
Rogers kept going. “I’ve heard that a lot of smugglers operate out of these valleys, if they saw us come in—”
Winter spun on him. “I’ve moved on from wanting to punch you to wanting to cut you. Go sit with Nadine until I get this damn thing open, would you?”
Rogers raised his hands. “I just wanted you to know what we’re up against. Hurry up and open the damn door.” Rogers backed away so Winter wouldn’t actually take a swing at him. It wouldn’t be the first time Winter hit him just because he didn’t like the message.
He returned to Nadine, whose eyes were closed tightly against the pain. He squatted and stroked her arm. “We’re opening the door now. We’ll have you in the medbay before you know it.”
“Status report,” Nadine whispered.
Rogers tried to find something to smile about. ‘We’re damn well screwed’ wasn’t the answer she needed to hear. “We’re not dead yet. We have air.”
“That good?” Nadine laughed and then winced. “The tracker, Kylie’s tracker…get it up and working. You have to get out of here and get to her, one way or another. Okay?”
Rogers shook his head. “Not okay. You don’t tell me what to do. You do it yourself after we patch you up.”
Nadine’s eyes narrowed. “Now isn’t the time for pep talks.”
“Now is the perfect time. You think I want to tell Kylie you died on my watch? Bullshit, Nadine. You hang in there, you ride the pain, and we fix you up. You come with us when we go to rescue Kylie from her crazy tech-hating family.”
“I don’t think she’d want to see me right now anyway. You find her. You save her,” Nadine said, her voice imploring.
Rogers scowled. “Why wouldn’t she want to see you? Even if things were weird between you two, she’d always want to see you. She loves you, Nadine.”
Nadine nodded with tears in her eyes. “I know.” Her voice cracked when she said it. “Oh by the stars, how I know…” Her hand reached for his and Rogers took it, squeezing her hand tight.
“Hang in there. You do that for me,” Rogers insisted. “Promise.”
“I promise.” Tears fell from Nadine’s eyes and Rogers stroked her hair. Her forehead was burning hot. He hadn’t seen her that vulnerable in a while, even after rescuing her from Jason she had been in full control. The only way Nadine would talk like this is if she thought she was dying, and Rogers wasn’t content to sit with that.
“Door’s open! Rogers!” Winter growled.
“I’m going to help him so he doesn’t get lost. I’ll be right back. You don’t go to sleep. And don’t go dancing or anything while I’m gone.”
Nadine cracked a pained smile. “Promise. I left my dancing shoes back in Montral.”
“Good thing we’re back on Jericho, then. We can swing by and pick them up on our way out of here.”
Rogers kissed her forehead then worked his way across the debris to the exit. Winter was already gone, and he rushed to the medbay as fast as his still-throbbing head would allow.
Winter was already there, rummaging around in the room, which hadn’t fared much better than the bridge. Bottles of pills, boxes of supplies, and hypospray cylinders littered the floor. Anything that wasn’t bolted down—and much that once was—had been tossed around the room.
Winter was piling what he could find into a bag; bandages, pain medicine, and the suture gun.
“That going to be enough?” Rogers asked.
“Go get cutting tools from the engine room,” Winter snapped. “Chances are we’re going to have to slice and dice to get her out.”
“Nadine?” Rogers asked.
“No, you idiot, the ship.”
Rogers nodded and ran out of the medbay, Winter calling after him. “Grab the whiskey, too! She’s gonna need it.”
* * * * *
Nadine moaned as Winter slid his hand under the metal panel bearing down on her. He lifted and she gasped in pain.
“My leg! You’re driving into…”
Rogers tried to slide the top panel out sideways, but that made whatever was stuck in her chest shift and she screamed.
“No good,” Winter said. “She’s under the deck plate with two loose panels wedged between it and her. We’ll have to do it the slow way.”
She saw him light the plasma torch and begin to cut away at the twisted deck plate under which she and the panels were wedged.
As the tip of the torch began to slice the metal, everything shifted, and she sucked in a deep breath. It felt like she was being ripped apart and she squeezed her eyes shut, desperately trying to block out the pain.
She forced herself to be calm. She had learned techniques to deal with pain, to take herself away to some other place. Somewhere that wasn’t the place where she was about to die.
Nadine’s thoughts drifted back to her homeworld of Valkris in the Transcend. It was a garden world where ancient trees created green bowers over winding streets, and the homes were made of marble and other rare stone from across the alliance. It was a world where many of the elite in that sector of the Transcend would come to reconnect with themselves and with nature.
But it was also a place of darkness.
Her family had risen to power on Valkris, not to the pinnacle, but high enough to ensure their voice was heard when important decisions were made. But behind that façade, her family’s legacy was one of death.
For generations, her family had trained operatives and assassins who went on to work for the highest bidders in the Transcend. Their work amassed secrets, and those secrets were the family’s power.
But there was a trade-off. The Hand knew of her family’s actions, and rather than bring justice to bear, the agency’s Director used her family as a source of recruits. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement, and one that neither side wished to end.
When Nadine was called upon to serve, she had no choice but to enlist in The Hand. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t wanted to go at the time—she had been young, only twenty-two. She had known the family business would eventually call, but Nadine had hoped to have years to fulfill her dreams first.
And so her service had begun. Her required term of service had only been fifty years, but once she had left the Transcend for the Inner Stars, Nadine had fallen in love with the intrigue, with the game.
Now, two hundred years later, as she lay dying in a torn-up ship on a ruined planet in a crime-ridden star system, Nadine wondered what it had all been for. Had she really done anything worthwhile with her time?
Other than hurt people like she had hurt Kylie?
It had been decades since she had seen her family. She had always said that she’d go back after the next mission. Spend a few years with them after the next job. Many, like her father, were gone, dead in service of the Transcend, or in the family business.
Maybe there was an afterlife and she’d see them again soon.
Rogers placed a hand on her shoulder and it jarred Nadine back to reality. “Rogers?” she murmured.
“You were calling for your dad. You want us to stop?”
That probably wasn’t exactly what she had been doing but she didn’t have the strength—or desire—to explain. Nadine shook her head. “Painkiller…more please. I fear I’ve built a resistance to the sedative over the years.”
Rogers administered the drugs and Nadine felt her mind drift away as he placed a rag inside her mouth. �
��Bite down on that if it hurts too much. We have to get this metal out if we’re going to get biofoam into the wound so we can move you.”
Nadine nodded with a whimper, biting down hard as Winter pulled at the steel. Home was back in her mind. She was a small girl skipping along a pathway on her family’s estate. The lake was on her left, and she could see the waterfall come into view. Father stood, watching with pride while Mother sat on a bench, preening herself absently.
Her mother was a proper woman, always well-dressed, insisting on proper manners at all times. Mother was a woman who had struck terror in Nadine’s heart, even when she was just sitting nearby. Always observing, watching, storing up a list of things done wrong, of corrections to make.
The pain intruded, tearing her away from her memories and Nadine shrieked. Her eyes widened as metal tugged at her insides. Bit by bit, she felt it sliding out—it hurt as though it was taking half of her chest with it. Nadine struggled to rise, but Rogers kept a hand on her forehead. His flesh was so cold against her skin. Why was he so cold? Or was it her that was burning up?
“Easy, easy.”
Nadine’s short, rapid breaths echoed in her ears. She saw a flash of light and a spinning orb in the distance. She was going into shock. That was it, wasn’t it? Nadine struggled to hold on. Her fingernails gripped the ridges on the deck plate as her head tossed side to side.
Stay awake, stay awake, she yelled at herself. How or why didn’t matter, it only matter that she did.
“Oh shit, Winter. She’s bleeding out.”
“Well, get those shards out, or they’ll just cut her back open. Then we can patch her up.”
Nadine felt the pain slip away. Everything became calm as she watched Rogers run a blood-soaked hand through his hair. Was that her blood? It had to be. There was so much of it and he looked so worried.
“You can do it, Rogers.” She whispered encouragement as her teeth were chattering together. Why was she so cold all of a sudden?
