The breathers gave him pause.
Was it just a precaution, or did they plan to do something to the atmosphere?
He and his team had their helmets on for full reflective mode invisibility, and they would be fine if something went wrong, but Nyha and her girls, and the other hostages still waiting at the docking bay, would be dead in minutes.
He took a moment to focus on the Halatians. His first proper look at them.
Nyha's rich blue hair was down, and it flowed over her back to just below her shoulder blades. She looked younger than he'd expected; delicate and with a haunting beauty that he associated with magical tales and legends. All golden skin and dark, serious eyes.
She also looked deeply angry.
The girls were calmer than he'd thought they'd be, and also, achingly young. They were a tight unit, holding on to each other as they walked, but in a way that spoke of shared strength, not abject fear.
“In there.”
The front two guards, a man and a woman, stopped outside the entrance to a room, and the man pointed inside.
Nyha and the girls edged past them and went inside, and the man pointed a finger at the two guards behind them.
“Keep watch. Don't touch them or talk to them. Understand?”
Mak frowned at the warning, particularly as it seemed focused on the younger of the two men.
Neither of them acknowledged the order.
“I won't be so forgiving the second time around, Hamand, so don't mess up.” The burly man jabbed his finger directly at the guard, a snarl in his voice, then turned to the other one. “Baint, I'll hold you just as responsible if he does anything stupid.”
The pair gave a reluctant nod.
The woman with the man giving orders muttered something to him under her breath as they walked off, and the younger guard made a face at their backs as they turned a corner and disappeared.
Interesting.
And worrying.
Mak didn't want to leave Nyha and her girls with the guards when even their own people suspected them of being dangerous, but hopefully the warning would hold them for now, and the two clearly senior members of the team weren't going back the way they'd come, but were headed deeper into the building.
He had to follow them.
Mak ghosted past the doorway, looking in as he went by, and saw it was a reasonable-sized room and the girls were huddled in the far corner, with Nyha between them and the guards.
Her cheek looked bruised, and he shot a sharp look at the guard the older, bigger man had called Hamand. Had he hit her?
He memorized the man's face, then forced himself to speed up a little to keep up with the two guards he was following, fighting back a hot surge of anger and trying to replace it with the cold edge of patience.
There would be a reckoning. It was just a matter of when.
The two hostage takers were talking to each other in low voices that echoed in the empty stone structure.
They were Arkhoran, no doubt about it.
Which was not good.
Kalastoni already resented Arkhor for the centuries they'd held on to Cepi. Now some Arkhorans were putting everyone on Kalastoni at risk, and using the Halatians as hostages was just another twisted touch.
Mak would stop them, and he would enjoy every minute of it. These people were trying to drag Arkhor down, make them the pariahs of the Verdant String, and he would not allow it.
“Mak, are you there?” The whisper in his ear made him stop. Her voice eased some of the tension he was feeling.
“Yes.” He was far enough behind the two senior guards and they were talking loudly enough, he thought it safe to reply. “I'm following two of the hostage-takers who took you to that room. What can you tell me about them?”
There was a moment of startled silence. “You saw us? Where were you?”
“Do worry about that. Do you have any information for me?” He could hear the girls talking in the background, guessed she had her back turned to the door and was pretending to be part of the conversation.
“The man is Cors, and I think he's the operations officer. He was definitely the one who vetted the members of the group, because he was in trouble for letting Hamand slip through. I think they're an offshoot of The Calling, or they're a group who used The Calling as a front. Hamand seems to be a genuine believer, and that's a problem for Veld, the leader. He hasn't got time for ideology.”
The Calling. Mak shook his head. This just got stranger and stranger. The Calling wasn't an Arkhoran cult. It was supposedly a Kalastoni movement, but there were a few people from all over the Verdant String who'd joined up.
“The woman is called Garde. She's the second-in-command. I don't know any more about either of them.”
“It's more than I had before.” Mak shortened his step as Garde and Cors slowed down up ahead. “I'm going to put you on silent for a while. Hang on.”
He edged closer. There were plenty of shadows, but even if there hadn't been, it would have been hard for them to spot him.
He stepped carefully into a roughly circular room, one he'd been in before when he'd infiltrated the ruins for fun a while back. He leaned against the wall in a nice deep shadow created by the strange dimensions of the room.
Cors and Garde stood in the center, on either side of a circular carved disk that was flush with the floor. They sunk to their haunches and put their hands on it.
“In three, two, one.” Garde counted down, and then moved her hands clockwise, while Cors mirrored her on the other side.
The disk turned, and they stepped back as it seemed to sink into the floor, in a way that didn't make sense.
Its diameter when they'd turned it was more or less the length of Mak's arm, shoulder to wrist, but as it fell away it seemed to take more of the floor with it, as if the ground were liquid, not solid.
“Freaks me out, every time,” Cors said, and Mak found himself agreeing with him.
“Come on.” Garde dropped into the hole, and after a moment's hesitation, Cors did the same.
Mak walked carefully forward, testing each step, until he reached the edge of the hole.
He couldn't see anything inside it, it was pitch black.
He tapped his comm set to switch to the team's frequency. “Checking in,” he said. “I've followed the two senior lieutenants of this op to a strange-as-shit hole in the ground. I'm going to follow them. It's in that circular room we've all been in before, to the right of the entrance. The hostages are in a room down the same passageway. Also, no way in hell they just found this, so it's an inside job. Erenn, tell Sinjin to hold every single member of the Cepi team who is handed over and start questioning them about this. Wish me luck.”
He ended the transmission before anyone could respond, because he didn't have time to stand around talking.
Taking a deep breath, he checked his pack, and then he jumped.
7
Nyha stood, stretching out after being hunched over for too long waiting for Mak to talk to her again.
Fear and worry twined together in her chest, because she was sure he would contact her if he could. He was in danger out there, and she didn't want to consider what would happen if he was caught or killed.
When he'd gone silent, she'd felt the loss of his deep, rumbling voice keenly.
Probably too keenly.
He was a lifeline, the only one she had, but she needed to work on a way out of this without him, too. She couldn't depend on being saved.
She'd thought the same fifteen years ago, onboard the Dru, the long, rusted smuggler ship that had scooped Nyha and her family up as they were fleeing the wreckage of Halatia, and then tried to blackmail the planets of the Verdant String for their safe delivery.
When the weeks had turned to months, when the food had run out and first her father and then her mother had been murdered because the smugglers couldn't feed them all—the smugglers knew the children would be a better bargaining chip than the adults—she'd sat with the other ch
ildren and plotted an escape.
They hadn't needed it in the end, and she knew now, looking back with the benefit of age and hindsight, they would not have succeeded if they'd tried.
It had taken the actions of Captain Drake on the Verdant String planet of Parn to break the deadlock.
The smugglers had not been a cohesive group, and they'd taken their human cargo to every planet of the Verdant String.
The suddenness of the catastrophic tectonic plate movements on Halatia—and there were plenty of conspiracy theories about that—meant there hadn't been any Verdant String help available.
The smugglers had reacted quickly, though, scooping up the small Halatian vessels as they escaped the volcanic activity, the earthquakes, and the mayhem.
And then the world had ground to a standstill as Verdant String politicians and leaders argued about whether to give in to blackmail, and whether they had room for those Halatians who'd made it out.
All the while, people died; either murdered, or starved, or from the deadly Fain virus that swept through the ships.
Captain Drake of Parn had defied orders after a journalist had snuck onboard a smuggler ship and transmitted the true horror of the situation. He'd put together an elite team of soldiers and taken the largest ship that circled Parn, freeing the Halatians, killing or arresting all the smugglers.
His actions had a ripple effect, spurring the other Verdant String planets on to do the same.
And when it was over, when they saw how few Halatians were left, the finger pointing began.
That was then, though. This was now.
Now Veld and his crew were using that guilt, that deep-seated sense of shame at taking too long to act, to manipulate the Verdant String.
And she wasn't twelve years old anymore.
She was a respected scientist, and the custodian of four girls who had been born in pain and fear on the Dru, and whose lives she had been part of ever since.
There would be no bargaining for the lives of her girls, no matter what she'd said to Vice-admiral Sinjin half an hour ago.
She'd stuck to the script Veld had given her in the canteen, reading it woodenly and without any inflection. She refused to be emotive, to beg for help, to do anything but follow the instructions she'd been given.
She turned to look at the guards at the door, but they were facing away, talking quietly to each other. The girls were still talking, too, their chatter, their innocence, giving her more resolve than ever.
“Mak, I hope you're all right,” she said quietly.
“Well, this is a surprise.”
The sound of his voice made her freeze, made something very close to relief leap in her throat.
“Why is it a surprise?” She lowered herself back in her chair.
“I'm . . . somewhere I thought comms would have difficulty reaching.”
“Are you safe?” She wondered where he could be on this tiny rock that he thought comms wouldn't be able to reach, and couldn't think of anywhere.
“I'm safe enough, just worried about how I'll get back. How are things up there?”
Up there? Was he underground?
“Fine. They're leaving us alone.” She leaned forward, and surreptitiously looked under her arm at the doorway.
Hamand and Baint were exactly as they'd been before, talking to each other, their backs to the room.
“Did that one called Hamand hit you?”
She hesitated. There was nothing in his voice to suggest he was affected by that, but somehow she thought he was. “Yes. He's the one who's a Calling believer. Veld was furious when he hit me, and Cors took him off to discipline him, although he seems fine, so I'm not sure what was done to him.”
“The Calling believes in striking people?”
“Apparently The Calling believe when they're on Cepi, no one can disobey them. Instead of immediately complying with what he told me to do, I turned to reassure the girls.”
“And you say Veld was angry that he had managed to get a place on the team?” Mak asked. “As if there was a distinction within the ranks between those who had bought into the beliefs of the cult, and those who were using it?”
“Maybe it's been a hoax from the beginning.” Nyha said. “Maybe they were hoping to use the religious undertones to get access to Cepi, and when that didn't work, they delayed the destruction in the courts so they could do exactly what they're doing now, only with the real members of the group, not the cult members they attracted to make themselves look like a believable quasi-religion.”
“Hmm.” His hum vibrated through her comm. “Maybe.”
“One thing doesn't make sense, though.” She realized she was the only one in the room talking, and made a gesture with her hands for the girls to start chatting again. “How could they have arranged for us to be here?”
“That's something I'd like to know, too.” She heard a rustle, as if Mak was moving. “Is there someone amongst the staff who was involved in inviting you?”
“I was told today that it was Dr. Garett who suggested it. Professor Faro was angry because he didn't want any distractions in the last weeks of clearing the site, but Garett had already sent his idea to the administrative council, and the councillors had agreed to go ahead.”
“Dr. Garett.” Mak sounded like he was committing the name to memory.
The girls had gone quiet again, and Nyha frowned at them. “Talk,” she mouthed.
Vik subtly pointed a finger to her left, and an icy sensation grabbed Nyha by the back of the neck, and trickled down her spine.
“Behind me?” she mouthed.
Vik gave the most infinitesimal nod.
“Nyha? What's going on?” Mak asked. She forced herself to ignore him, lifting finger to set her comm to silent.
She drew in a deep, centering breath. She had to assume it was both guards, and now she was concentrating on the sounds behind her, she sensed they stood on either side of her.
She stood suddenly, shoving her chair back so that it tipped over to the right.
Then she spun, using her elbow to hit the guard to her left—Baint—on the jaw.
As he staggered back, she swept her foot behind his leg and he went down.
She was already moving as he fell, punching him in the groin as he hit the floor and then flipping him on his stomach when he tried to curl in on himself.
She unsnapped the restraints on his belt, and slapped them on him, using the other pair on his ankles.
Behind her, as she'd attacked, she'd heard the girls leap into action on Hamand.
He'd moved backward as the chair fell toward him, that was her last impression of him, but now she looked up, and saw the girls had him down and restrained as well.
Tilla was calmly moving around the room, picking up the two laz guns that had flown from the guards' hands as they'd gone down and putting them in her satchel.
“We need gags,” Ju said, and Fran pulled off the headband she wore to keep her springy curls back from her face, and handed it over.
Vik bent her arms back under her shirt, fiddled, and then pulled out the strapless bandeau she was wearing, dangling it from two fingers.
Ju grinned and they both went to work, tying the gags. Hamand tried to shout, but Ju smacked the back of his head, bouncing his forehead on the floor, and tied Fran's headband as tight as she could. Baint was still moaning quietly, and didn't put up any resistance.
Then they all stood back and looked at their handiwork.
“I knew, theoretically, we could overpower them, but they had the laz guns.” Fran sat down suddenly on a chair.
“They couldn't kill us with the laz guns, because that would mean they couldn't use us.” Vik shrugged.
“Yes, but especially this one,” Tilla toed Hamand, “didn't care that much about that plan. When he realized you were talking to someone on your comm set, he looked like he wanted to hurt you. So it was a big risk.”
Hamand made a sound and Tilla toed him again, a little harder.
&nb
sp; “We managed it because they underestimated us, got too close, and thought they had us scared and in their power.” Nyha looked down at the two guards with satisfaction. “We used the advantages we were given, and we did an awesome job.”
The girls grinned back at her.
“I thought . . .” Fran slowly stood. “I thought all those fighting classes you made us go to were your way of working through what happened to you. I always resented them.”
“You're right, they were my way of trying to control what happened to me. But they were also there to make sure, as much as possible, you would never be as helpless as I was.” Nyha smiled. “And they worked.”
“I'd say.” Vik grinned. “So what do we do now?”
Nyha lifted her shoulders to loosen them. Switched her comm set back to talk mode. “Mak, are you there?”
“Nyha, what the hell?”
“We've tied up the guards. Is there somewhere we should go that you can suggest?”
“You've overpowered your guards?” Mak sounded strained.
“Yes.”
“Then go back the way you came until the first exit to your left, head out of the building, and I'll get someone on my team to meet you.”
“You have a team?” She frowned. All this time, she'd thought he was on his own.
“Do it, Nyha. Now, before anyone comes to check on you.”
“All right.” His tone put her back up. She knew she sounded snippy, but she felt snippy.
She moved to the door, looked both ways, and then led the girls to their second escape attempt of the day.
8
Mak leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to get himself under control.
He didn't know what had led to Nyha and the girls fighting with their guards, but given the warnings Cors had issued, he could just imagine.
That they'd managed to come out the winners in that fight surprised him deeply, but he forced himself to put that aside. He switched back to the team frequency. “The Halatians are exiting the ruins where we went in. One or more of you, meet them there, get them to the base, and let Sinjin know when it's done.”
Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology Page 42
