Dragon's Echo

by Natalie Grey

  A hand grabbed at her and she nearly cartwheeled. The grip was strong, and only a Dragon was that strong. She had just one chance to see Loki’s furious expression before his fist caught her in the face and she went sprawling.

  “Loki—”

  “He was lying!” Loki screamed at her. “He was lying the whole damned time, he was never going to let—”

  “Loki, for God’s sake, shut up!” Nyx ducked another punch and drove her shoulder up into his solar plexus. “Do not do this here, and let me explain, goddammit!”

  “Explain?” She had grabbed his wrists and he hauled at them furiously, too angry just to kick her and have done with it. “He’s gone, Nyx. You two and your fucking honor and wanting to save civilians.”

  “Loki—”

  “Well, I don’t give a fuck about them!” His beautiful face was screwed up. “I would kill anyone on this station to save any one of you and I thought you were the same.”

  “Loki.”

  “You killed him.”

  “I said let me explain.” Nyx pulled him close. “That is an order.” Her voice dropped to a hiss. “And stop yelling about how you’d kill civilians, you stupid asshole.”

  “I. Would.”

  She hit him as hard as she could. Around them, thankfully, the civilians had scattered away. The dock had been mostly empty already, cleared out when her gunshot went off in the cargo bay, but a few people had stayed. Now they were all crouched behind their food stands and whatever equipment they could find.

  “You listen to me.” Nyx got down on one knee, staring Loki in the eyes. “I am willing to give you a lot of leeway because you’re new. But this is why we don’t let people your age into the Dragons. I knew he was lying, Loki. I’m not stupid and neither is Talon.”

  Loki pushed himself up on his elbows. His nose was streaming blood and he was suddenly wary.

  “Did you see Talon wearing a helmet?” Nyx asked. “No? So Mr. Keep-your-visor down wasn’t wearing a helmet. What does that tell you?”

  Loki looked dumbstruck. “That he … that there was something we couldn’t see. A way of surviving without one.”

  Nyx nodded.

  “She’s right, you know,” Talon’s voice said on the team channel.

  Nyx jumped and swore. “Jesus fucking—you could have told me sooner that I was right about that, you bastard.”

  “Couldn’t do it until I knew they weren’t listening anymore, now could I?” He sounded amused. “Just glad you figured it out. I was kicking myself for not telling you. …Also glad you didn’t actually think you were killing us when you did that.”

  Nyx began to laugh. She crouched down and laughed as tears streamed out of her eyes.

  She had known. She had gone into combat with him for years. He would never skip wearing a helmet with the rest of his armor … unless he had something better.

  But until she heard his voice, part of her had still feared that she was wrong, that she had misjudged terribly—that he was dead.

  “And you’ll have guessed this already,” he said, “but the Ariane seems to be free and clear. There never was a bomb there. Conway, what’s the word on you?”

  “Free and clear as well,” Foxtail’s voice came back. “They’re doing a station sweep, but I don’t think there was any bomb there, either.”

  Nyx sighed and tipped her head back. She helped Loki up—he wasn’t looking at her, embarrassed about having made a scene, and she wasn’t feeling charitable enough yet to smile at him—and headed for the Conway’s docks.

  “Any idea where Estabrook went?” she asked.

  “None. I’d hazard a guess we won’t find him anywhere on this station, though. Him or the other one. Guessing that’s one of Ghost’s friends?”

  “Seems to be. On the plus side, I guess we can—”

  The explosion flared outside the landing bay windows and alarms burst on with a wail. The ship next to the Conway’s docking bay swung out of control as its air vented. Bodies were flung out into the black, one striking the glass, and civilians screamed.

  Nyx ran to the glass, pressing herself against it, fighting the urge to punch her away through it, get out into the black, to get to—

  There was nothing to do. The people out there wouldn’t make it until pickup. They’d be dead before she ever got to them and she’d only vent the docking bay while she was at it. It was a useless, instinctive urge.

  Her earpiece crackled. “And this will keep happening,” Tristan’s voice said, soft and deadly, “until you pay the price that’s owed.”

  15

  “She’s right, you know.” The sound of Talon’s voice sent a jolt of pure rage through him. He should have known better than to think revenge could be this easy. Estabrook guided the ship through the security protocols that would allow it to drift away, emitting a cloaking signal that would confused Victus’s signals.

  He hadn’t docked—no, he had paid to place his small craft in one of the loading bays. It was simple enough, now, to leave from the part of the station the Ariane and Conway could not see.

  He was kicking himself, though. He should have known better. Why had he ever allied himself with a civilian? They didn’t know what Dragons were capable of.

  He’d done it because he had no one else. The thought was sobering.

  He had learned his lesson, though. No more looking for allies. He would plan as if he were alone. He knew about some resources of Soras’s that the Alliance had not found yet. If he was going up against two armed ships and two crews of Dragons, he would simply have to find a way to overwhelm them.

  And he was pretty sure he had one.

  16

  Beyond the constant hum of the ship and the ticking of the hull, Nyx’s cabin was silent. She lay on her back on her bed, a glass of whiskey balanced on her sternum, her eyes on the ceiling.

  In her head, she could not stop replaying the sight of the other ship exploding. She had been so close to seeing Tristan’s plan. She had known the bomb wouldn’t be on the Ariane, that was too easy. There was too much of a chance that she and Talon would pull that one out, that they’d outwit their captors somehow.

  As they had done.

  She had expected that Tristan would make her pay if she escaped him, and stupid her, she’d thought it would be with her new team. Instead, he’d put yet another layer of deception into his plan and innocent people had suffered.

  Innocent people always suffered because of people like Tristan. Every new Dragon was coached on that. Evil people would use human shields or false repentance—any factor of human kindness they could exploit. They would stack the deck so that any attempt to take them down would result in innocent lives lost.

  But if they lived, they only took more and more—and many more people suffered and died for that. Dragons were trained to take those people out when they had the chance. It was what Talon had done on the Blood Moon all those years ago….

  And it was what Nyx should have done three days earlier on Akintola Station.

  She should have killed him, and damn all the rest. Mase and Alina were patient, they could track their quarry even if they went to ground. Lesedi could find almost anyone, and Tera had proven she could do the same.

  What had she been thinking?

  There was a restless sound and Tersi shifted his feet where they were propped on the bed. The Ariane and the Conway were docked together, some distance from Victus, and he had come aboard at her invitation.

  It hadn’t been the sort of conversation she’d hoped to have with him. Instead of their usual jokes and unwinding, they had only silence. He had also been staring up at the ceiling, but now he picked his head up to look at her.

  “You have to talk to him, you know.”

  It was so far from her own train of thought that she could only blink at him for a moment until she realized what he was talking about—Loki, who was currently hiding out miserably in his bunk.

  And it was such a small issue compared to the explosion, and th
at, combined with the sheer depth of Loki’s stupidity made her speak sharply.

  “I don’t. I’m not going to. He can sit there and stew over it. He should feel bad.”

  Tersi just looked at her.

  Nyx took the glass off her chest and sat up, glaring at him as she downed the whiskey in one gulp. “I’m not talking to him. He knows what he did.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “He can’t be that stupid.”

  “He can be that young. Nyx, have a fucking heart.”

  “What the hell?” She frowned at him. “Since when are you—”

  “He joined up a couple of months ago,” Tersi said. “He’s seventeen. The man who raised him died and he came off a damned farm on Crius into one of the most competitive military programs in the world. He made it, he turned down Team 11 and then realized how selfish he was being—point the first in favor of him being smarter than his years. When he got onto Team 9, he went into combat with zero fear and he had all our backs. Now, young people aren’t so great with mortality, but still.”

  Nyx rolled the glass between her palms, frowning.

  “He saw people die,” Tersi said honestly. His voice was a bit rough at the mention of Sphinx, but he didn’t lose his focus. “The one thing he could be sure of was that any member of his team would do anything to save him, if push came to shove.”

  “But it’s not about him.” Nyx sank her head into her hands.

  “Isn’t it?” Tersi put his glass down and leaned forwards. “Yes. I get it. It’s about the people we serve. It’s about honor. But we’re people, Nyx. Tell me you wouldn’t have given up if you thought the people you served with didn’t think gave a damn about you. Look me in the eye and tell me that.”

  She couldn’t. She looked down at her hands, instead. At the empty glass.

  “Right,” Tersi said. “We’re supposed to do it for everyone back home, all the people who are never even going to know all the things we do for them. But you and I know that at the end of the day, we do it for the people we fight beside. When Loki came here, that’s what he found. It was a family. It’s what makes us able to walk into danger like that—the fact that people have our backs.

  “You and I know that you would never have pressed that button so easily unless you believed they had a way out—but that’s not what it looked like to Loki. What it looked like was that you’d sacrifice him in a heartbeat … and not even look back.”

  “He should have known.” The words came out between gritted teeth. “He should have known I would never do that.”

  “He should have. But fear isn’t rational, and he’s very young. He’s very new to this. He’s very far from home. And like it or not, Alvarez … you’re his Captain, not just his friend. You need to go talk to him.”

  Nyx swallowed and nodded.

  “I just….” She sighed. “On the civilian ship. On the ship I’d see. He knew I’d guess it was the Conway instead of the Ariane, he waited for me to get there, and he made sure I’d see it. I should have known.” She wasn’t talking about Loki anymore. She just had to speak about it, and she couldn’t think too much about what she as saying, or she wouldn’t be able to get the words out.

  “There’s no way you should have known,” Tersi said at once. “None. If anyone else were in command, you’d see that.”

  There was a knock at the door. Nyx waited, but it didn’t slide open. “Who is it?”

  “Wraith.”

  “I’ll be there in a sec.” Nyx sighed.

  Tersi nodded to the door. “What do the two of them make of all this?”

  “Huh?” Nyx looked up and then shook her head, shrugging. “Oh. I don’t know.” She lifted her shoulders. “I’ll see what she wants and—”

  “I have to get back to the Ariane. I’ll be there. You probably need to decompress with your team.”

  She hugged him and walked with him to the door. “I miss you. We’ll have to talk sometime—not about this sort of shit.”

  “We will.” He gave her his trademark lopsided smile and slipped out the door, nodding to Wraith.

  She waited at the doorway. “Can I come in?”

  “Oh. Uh, sure.” Nyx stepped out of the door and gestured for the XO to make her way into the room. “Take the chair. I really need another one.”

  “A folding one, maybe.” Wraith looked around herself. “Otherwise, I don’t see where you’d put it.”

  “Talon had a … never mind.” Nyx forced a smile and grabbed her glass to go rinse it out in the sink. “What can I do for you?”

  Wraith gave her a curious look. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  “Huh?” Nyx looked over at her.

  “With what happened.” Wraith was sitting awkwardly in the chair, as if she weren’t quite sure she was welcome. “Look, if you were Mallory, we’d know how to deal with this—if you wanted to talk when something like this happened, or be left alone, or what. It wouldn’t be quite this awkward.” She gave a little laugh. “As it is, I gotta ask.”

  Nyx walked back into the room, frowning at the mention of, when something like this happened. She sat down on the bed, trying to think of what to say.

  Wraith watched her for a moment and then settled back in the chair. “We were out here a few years ago, actually. We went after this slaver off in the boonies, even further out than Crius.”

  “What’s further out than Crius?” Nyx frowned.

  “That’s the thing, no one knew.” Wraith gave her a haunted look. “Wherever he took the people he got … they never got found. We tried, we … we did some really not-nice things to the people in his org, but he kept that info on lockdown. That far out, it would have been like looking for a needle in a haystack. Our only guess is that he was trying to terraform a planet himself and he needed a workforce.”

  Nyx whistled.

  “Yeah. Anyway, we’d been trying to find them and Mallory had dismantled everything. She took down his shipyards, she brought in his trading partners, she shut down the syndicate that was acting as a cover from him. He was watching everything he’d built fall apart. It wasn’t a Warlord of Ymir type deal, he’d built this up slowly, over years. So we find where he’s hiding out and we go in for him. We figure finding him is the only way to find the rest of the slaves he took, right?”

  Nyx nodded.

  “Well, he wasn’t going to let us take him alive. He made us fight through all of the last of his guard, just threw them at us knowing they wouldn’t survive, and when we got all the way through, he told us that if he couldn’t have the civilians, we couldn’t have them, either. He blew himself up so we’d never find where he’d taken the slaves. We took him down, but he made sure we couldn’t save any of the people he hurt.”

  Wraith’s voice ached and Nyx let her hands clench.

  This was the worst part about their work. You could punish people, you could take them out of the game, but you could never undo what they had done.

  “Mallory blamed herself,” Wraith said.

  “That’s crazy.”

  “No crazier than you blaming yourself for what happened on Victus.”

  Nyx knew this speech and she didn’t want to hear it. She looked away and tried to think of a reasonably polite way to tell Wraith to leave.

  “Yeah, you don’t want to hear it,” Wraith said. “I get that. It’s easier to pretend you control the whole world and you just fucked up, rather than accept that there are people so evil and so psychotic that they don’t care who they kill.”

  Those words hit her right in the gut. Nyx hunched her shoulders, struggling to breathe. She looked over at Wraith and felt words welling up in her chest: I know it wasn’t my fault, but it sure as hell feels like it. If they’re doing it because of me, if I could trade my life in, shouldn’t I? Right now I can’t tell if not accepting his bargain was the right thing to do … or just me preserving my own life.

  She flexed her fingers and pressed her palms together, trying to undo the tension in her body
by force.

  I’m afraid I made an enemy too big for me to take down and I’ll get you killed like Talon got Sphinx and Meph killed.

  It was an ungenerous thought. She knew how those deaths weighed on him and she would be the first to tell him that it wasn’t his fault—it was Soras’s. Sphinx and Meph had always known their lives were on the line.

  But now, in control of a ship, she knew why Talon would never be able to let it go—and if push came to shove she wasn’t sure she could sacrifice her team against her own, private enemies. Because Tristan was coming after her, and she wasn’t surrounded by a team who had served with her for years. They were new. They didn’t deserve to die for this.

  Nyx looked at Wraith’s face and suddenly wondered if she should tell the other woman any of this. Wraith was her XO—she should see Nyx at her best, being decisive.

  Shouldn’t she?

  At the very least, Nyx shouldn’t confess that Wraith and the teammates she loved might die for no real purpose. Nyx forced herself to stand. She wiped her clammy hands on her pants and gave a mechanical sort of smile.

  “Thanks for coming to talk to me. It helped.”

  Wraith blinked up at her.

  “And it’s uh—it’s nice to know more about the missions you ran with Mallory.” Nyx went to the door and opened it. “So thanks for that, too. Gives me perspective on things, you know?”

  Wraith hesitated, but she knew a dismissal when she saw one. She nodded and left.

  In the cabin, Nyx leaned her forehead against the door. She had never needed someone to talk to more than she did now, and she had never felt more alone.

  17

  “You’ve reached Commander Alvarez of the Ariane. If this is an emergency, please route a message through Dragon Command at 67-8425-”

  Mala sighed and cut the call. She had left Nyx three messages over the past few days and she had a feeling that leaving another one would just make her seem like the crazy girlfriend.

  After all, she had known what she was getting into. Nyx had been the one who said that a Dragon’s life wasn’t conducive to attachment, and it had been Mala who swore they’d make it work.