by Natalie Grey
Now he was going hard in the other direction. Lesedi had purposefully spooked all four targets and the one being tracked by the Io, a man known as JD, was going to ground at a very exclusive space station known as Calabria. Only the mob and their invited guests were welcome, and JD, a trained Dragon with extensive experience as a spy, as well as knowledge of Alliance protocols, would certainly be welcome.
The crew of the Io was not likely to get the same reception. Their ship would probably be blasted into rubble on approach.
Thus, they needed the shuttle. One could not simply steal the security codes to get into Calabria. No. The security codes needed to be sent with the correct encryption, from the correct ship—if any single piece did not fit, the ship would be destroyed on approach.
Get me a ship, Lesedi had said, and I can do the rest.
There had been debate, of course. They had discussed sending Tera to make contact with a lower-level employee, and having her get onto the space station alone, on one of their official ships. While working for her father, she had talked—or snuck—her way into places far more exclusive and less savory than this. She had information and skills to rival a Dragon’s. If she pretended to be looking for employment, as they guessed he was, she could almost certainly get the same reception.
Mala could tell Tera had been tempted, but she had been resolute: she was part of a team now. She would go in using the skills of the whole team, or not at all.
Besides which, she pointed out that she no longer had her father’s resources to get her out if something went wrong inside the station. In the end, they had decided to go in this way: stealing a shuttle with the correct authorization protocols and using that to dock.
“50 kilometers from the drop point,” Aryn reported over the comms. She had brought them in almost a quarter of the planet away from the estate and was flying low to avoid detection on the scanners.
The mob was powerful on this planet, but it didn’t control everything—and getting past the satellites and larger-scale security measures had been a matter of codes obtained by Lesedi.
Cade let Mala precede him into the shuttle bay, where Tera was already waiting. Mala, who had grown used to Tera’s ready smile and cheerful amorality, was surprised to see the other woman looking nearly emotionless.
Tera on a mission was entirely different from Tera day-to-day, apparently.
She and Cade were both dressed in close-fitting armor that moved easily and fit under their jackets. Their boots were made for combat, but not identifiable at a glance, and they were lightly armed. This was supposed to be a quick, in-and-out mission, but if they got held up, they hoped to be able to blend in on the estate.
“I still think I should come with you,” Mala said.
Both of the others looked at her with forbidding expressions. While planning the mission, Mala had argued stridently to be included.
The answer had always been no. Mala’s argument had been that as someone who understood electronics and engines, she might well be able to make the shuttle-stealing easier and head off any potential problems.
Tera and Cade’s point had been that if something happened to her, Nyx would kill them.
“You’ll watch us,” Tera said. She tapped the video recorder at her hairline. “We’ll have you to give us tech support. And it’s not like I have no experience with this sort of stuff. I used to hack the mechs in my training runs all the time.”
“I would kill to have that for training,” Cade muttered.
“Me, too. Unfortunately, the Alliance felt the same way and that was one of my father’s properties they confiscated.” She rolled her eyes. “All right. We have to be close. Aryn?”
“One kilometer.”
Tera gestured Mala back, and Mala went to the airlocked booth to begin opening the shuttle bay doors. She caught one last glance as Cade and Tera ran to the edge and, on Aryn’s signal, jumped.
She sighed. She never got to do any of the fun stuff. It had been terrifying when she was involved in the mission against Ghost, of course, but she’d started to forget just how terrifying.
She bet she could do what they were doing. Jumping out of a ship would be fun, right? She switched on Tera’s video feed—
And nearly threw up in the booth when she saw the ground rushing up in Tera’s view.
Maybe it was best that she’d stayed behind. Mala twiddled her thumbs and looked over at the shuttle. Yes. It was much better that she provide remote technical support.
Tera hit the ground and rolled through the underbrush. When she got to her feet, it was with a sigh of relief and a happy smile. She loved her crew, she really did. Every one of them were wonderful people.
But it had been far too long since she’d been on a mission, and she’d been starting to feel herself going soft.
She and Cade sprinted through the trees. She was reveling in the feel of the sunshine and the fresh air in her lungs, and she guessed that he was, as well. There was only so long you could stay cooped up on a ship before you started wanting to jump out a window.
The shuttle hangar was coming up and Tera did another scan of the area with her implanted system. While she wouldn’t see a map of any potential hazards, she would get pings that would give her a general direction, telling her from their speed how close she was.
In this case, she got a ping from directly ahead, which she had already been anticipating, and nothing else.
The woman who owned this estate, Sofia Cappadona, apparently did not bother with high security when she was not in residence—or, at least, not high enough security to outwit Lesedi and a talented pilot.
Perhaps Cappadona thought the access codes couldn’t be hacked. Perhaps she thought all of her enemies would come in along the road. Perhaps she thought that because she was mid-level amongst her peers, no one would focus on her estates.
Whatever the case, she was wrong.
“Five meters to first checkpoint,” Mala reported in their earpieces. “And … jump.”
Cade and Tera hurdled over recessed panels in the ground. They couldn’t see them, but their research on the facility’s security measures had suggested that they would be here, and Mala had promised to warn the two of them if she saw them on scans. The long line of buried sensors would report the pressure of a footstep and would go off in the main compound.
Tera was willing to bet they wouldn’t respond quickly. They probably got small animals tripping the switch so often that they hardly checked. It wasn’t worth taking the chance, however.
They could see the wall through the trees now.
“No guards patrolling,” Mala told them. “Last line of sensors is two feet out from the wall.”
Tera shook her head with a grim smile. That one was clever, at least—any attempt to get over the wall would likely result in pressure on those sensors. What human could climb a wall that high, made of smooth concrete, after jumping from over two feet away at the start?
Not many, but then—Tera wasn’t entirely human anymore. She tripped the tiny internal switches that would let the top-grade implants kick in and her speed increased noticeably. A body could not take this for long, but could handle it for a while. She pushed herself harder, zeroing in on her target, making a mental target of where to jump. Three more steps, two, one—
She jumped and threw her grappling hook as her feet found purchase on the wall. The hook, sharper than any razor, dug into the concrete and held for Tera to claw her way up the wall.
Beside her, Cade pulled himself up hand over hand on his own rope. When she looked over to check his progress, his face was completely calm.
He was one of those, then: one of the people for whom action and combat provided a paradoxical oasis of calm. She had wondered.
They paused at the top of the wall. The hangar was a scant few meters away across unkempt ground. Sofia Cappadona probably never saw this part of the estate, and so no one cared for it at all.
Getting over the top of the wall without touching it was
a tricky exercise in bracing, scrabbling, and jumping, along with tiny hooks embedded in their boots that would allow them to push off. It wasn’t something one would even attempt unless it was necessary, but the top of the wall almost certainly had pressure sensors. They managed it, but it was hardly elegant, and both of them wound up in heaps at the bottom of the wall.
“I remembered being more graceful than this,” Cade said, his voice muffled by the mud.
Tera snickered. She took his hand when he offered it and let him haul her to her feet. “Every time, I think I’m going to do better than that and I never do. Deadly assassin, shhh, very quiet, sneaking everywhere—splat.”
Cade’s shoulders shook with silent laughter.
They made their way to the only external door and Cade waited while Tera scanned the hangar. It seemed quiet and still.
“Mala? Any last warnings?”
“Nope. Just lift the back left panel and it’s the bit with the blinking blue light. Try to obscure what you’re doing, too. I’m in their video circuits and have begun a loop, but in case I’ve missed a redundant circuit, we don’t want them to figure our plan out too easily. I’d say you’re clear.”
Tera and Cade nodded to one another. She wedged her fingers into the gap between the door and the frame, let one of her implants break the skin and slide out, and held it in place as the code patch began an override of the electronic lock.
The door clicked open and they made their way inside, quick and silent.
No talking now. Tera took one shuttle, and Cade took the other. They carefully detached the piece of machinery with the blinking blue light—“yep, that’s the one,” Mala confirmed quietly in their ears—and then met in the middle to exchange them. After switching the two pieces, they met at Cade’s shuttle and began to boot sequence.
“With any luck,” Cade murmured as he settled into the pilot’s chair, “no one is going to be paying much attention.” He gave her a look and hit the button to begin opening the hangar doors.
He did not wait for them to open entirely, but lifted off and tipped the shuttle sideways to slip through the opening, banking smoothly and giving a satisfied sigh. “This handles well. We’re never going to get Aryn to give this thing up, you know.”
“That’s fine.” Tera craned to watch the compound. As far as she could tell, no one there had noticed yet that the hangar was open and a shuttle was missing. “She’s been working hard, she could use a new toy.”
Cade laughed. “We should have stolen some weapons, too. And a nice server of data for Lesedi.” They had cleared the trees and could faintly see the Io in the distance, its shuttle bay still open for them to fly inside.
“We’ll get her something on the station,” Tera decided. “A nice, shiny present for everyone.”
“Good call. God, I’d forgotten how fun this was.” He bounced one fist on the arm rest. “Now I’m all full of adrenaline. Want to spar when we get back?”
“Sure. Give Mala some time to—”
“Their alarms just went off,” Mala reported. She sounded amused. “I can see you on the scanners, by the way.”
“Excellent.” Cade sounded pleased. “Let Phase 2 begin.”
The shuttle would be reported missing, of course. Any codes associated with it would be deactivated on the affiliated security systems. Were they to try to dock at the station with a stolen shuttle, the alarms would go off and they would be turned into dust.
But the parts they had switched were the identifiers. They’d taken Shuttle A, and that would be the one marked as stolen—while, in fact, their shuttle believed itself to be Shuttle B. Tera smiled and patted the control panel in front of her.
“Let Phase 2 begin,” she agreed. “Let’s go break into Calabria.”
11
“This man,” Talon said, “is a fucking shadow.” He dropped the papers onto the desk and shook his head at Tersi. “I swear to God, he probably goes out of his way to hide what kind of cereal he eats for breakfast.”
“Maybe he’s a robot.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Talon nodded at Aegis. “You got anything?”
Aegis shook his head. He looked similarly disgusted with the lack of information on Estabrook.
Usually, there was a certain amount of knowledge to be found about any given Dragon. Many had been on multiple teams. Their commanders or teammates could talk about who they were close to, their sense of humor, any quirks in combat.
But Talon wasn’t joking when he said Estabrook might as well have been a shadow. Estabrook had only ever been a part of Team 22, and they didn’t seem to know him well at all. Grunt had sent a brief message in response to Talon’s query, listing what Estabrook had told him about his life. It wasn’t much, all told, and Grunt simply said that he now believed most of it to be lies in any case.
It was clear that the two had been close. Now that Talon was saying he would take care of it, Grunt had taken the rest of his team and gone off the grid.
Talon didn’t want to understand, but he did. When Kuznetsova had realized her XO was one of Soras’s agents, she had killed him, herself—but what would Talon have done, if it had been Nyx?
He couldn’t even think about it.
And thinking about Nyx made him feel guilty, anyway. He closed his eyes and let his head drop forward. Fuck.
As if on cue, Jester’s voice came through the comm unit in his room: “The Conway is on our scanners. Docking in about five minutes.”
“Thanks.” Talon exchanged looks with Tersi and Aegis. “All right, let’s get this over with.”
“It’d help to know exactly what ‘this’ is,” Aegis rumbled. “We all saw your fights when she was XO, but how’d they end?”
“We yelled ourselves out and one of us realized we were wrong,” Talon said grimly. “She never just walked away. So I have no idea what’s coming.”
Nyx, as it turned out, had so far been wrong that Estabrook could call the other rogue Dragons in to form a team. Tera and Cade had reported the their target, JD, was seeking shelter from the mob, and neither Alina nor Mase were tracking any sudden movements from their targets.
Tersi had managed to track Estabrook’s progress, however, toward his only known haven: Crius, the same planet that Loki was from. To get there, Estabrook would need to stop off at Victus Terminal, one of the last ports that led into Crius’s relatively empty stretch of space.
Talon had accordingly sent a message to Nyx, who had responded only that she would rendezvous with them to plan the mission.
That was it, that was all. She hadn’t yelled, she hadn’t given him a piece of her mind, she hadn’t said anything about what happened at Akintola.
It made Talon nervous.
“She’s going to yell at us,” Tersi said morosely.
“And we’re going to stand there and we’re going to take it,” Talon said.
“We were trying to help her,” Aegis said.
“Yeah, and we should’ve known better. When she saw me going stupid with Tera, she offered to fix it all for me, made sure I couldn’t hurt the team by being stupid, and then stood back and let me make my own choices. That’s what we should have given her. We should have actually had her back.”
The other two nodded glumly as Talon ushered them out of his cabin. They made their way to the airlock door with the rest of the team trailing after them. Everyone looked nervous.
They had seen how Nyx had left.
When the airlock clamp locked between the two ships, Talon actually jumped. He sighed and crossed his arms over his chest, fixing his eyes on the door. Would she even come to talk with him, or would she send Wraith and Centurion instead?
No. She would come. She wasn’t going to sulk. He fought the urge to bounce a little on his feet, use physical activity to let his nerves out.
The door hissed open and she was already staring at him. Before he could say a single word, she jerked her head—not toward the war room, but the other way down the hall, toward the gym.
“Let’s go. You and me.”
“…What?”
She was already walking, checking her hair, stripping off her outer layer. “We’re having this out,” she called over her shoulder, not looking back. “Right now.”
Talon stared after her, lips twitching, and his team held their breath, waiting. Then he followed her with a grin, taking off his own over shirt, and everyone started laughing as they crowded down the hallway after the two of them. From the number of footsteps Talon could hear, everyone on Team 11 was coming along to watch, too.
Nyx was already warming up when he got into the room. She met his eyes and he saw the humor there—and the lingering anger.
“I just want you to know,” Talon said as he kicked off his boots and stepped into the ring, “I know you’ve got good reason to be angry.”
She said nothing. She was rolling her head and shoulders, watching him.
“I did the wrong thing,” Talon told her.
One eyebrow quirked, but she still didn’t talk.
“You have every right to be furious with me.”
She was beginning to smile.
“And you probably want to beat my ass through the floor.”
She crossed her arms and stared him down.
“…But you’re gonna have to fucking work for it.” Talon threw the challenge down with a grin. “You get one free hit, Alvarez, and then you gotta work.”
“Nyx.”
“Captain Alvarez.”
He got a peal of laughter out of her and the tension melted out of his chest—right before she closed the gap between them faster than he would have thought possible and knocked him halfway through the crowd of watching Dragons.
There was a cheer and some laughter and everyone scattered toward the walls.
Talon picked himself up with a groan. “I regret saying you got one free hit.”
“If anyone should have known better, Major, it’s you.” She wasn’t just talking about the hit.
“Yep.” He wheezed a bit and stepped back into the room. “Let’s go.”
She nodded.
And waited.
