Dragon's Echo

by Natalie Grey

  Most ships didn’t carry more than two full spreads.

  Most ships couldn’t maneuver like the Ariane or avoid Alliance decoy buoys, either.

  This was not good.

  Footsteps sounded behind them and Stabby was there to fit helmets over both of their heads. It wasn’t a full suit, but it would extend to lock around their upper torso and give them a few minutes’ worth of breathing time if necessary.

  And they didn’t have the time to get their suits on, anyway. If they stopped moving for a second, they were dead.

  “Firing now.” Talon launched the missiles.

  Jester nodded. He turned the ship straight up and accelerated hard. Behind them, there was the sound of shattering as something unsecured flew off a table in the shifting gravity.

  “Prime an EMP,” he told Talon.

  Talon didn’t disregard Jester’s advice when it came to ship battles. Jester could hold a 3D map in his head like no one Talon had met, and if he had a plan, Talon was going to go with it. He nodded and unlocked the EMP missile, moving it into position inside the wings to fire.

  “Ready on your mark.”

  “Wait for it,” Jester said. “Wait for it. Shit. We’re taking a hit.”

  “Can we afford to—”

  “It’s take a hit or miss our shot, and if we miss our shot, they’ll launch more missiles. This is our chance.” Jester waved a hand at Talon’s console. “Feed our missiles Tera’s targeting algorithm. All of the missiles. Now, do it!”

  Talon brought the algorithm up and missed the key, he was typing so fast. He jabbed it again, blowing his breath out and praying.

  “EMP, now!” Jester’s shout came just in time for Talon to hit the button before one of the enemy missiles hit the Ariane’s hull straight on.

  The ship tumbled and the alarms screamed. Blast doors slammed shut all across the ship.

  “Hull breach in the shuttle bay,” Stabby reported. He’d stayed with them in the cockpit.

  “Come on, baby.” Jester was turning the ship, banking and banking. “Come on, come on.”

  Their missiles slammed into the enemy ones, one after another. A few shuddered too near the Ariane’s hull, but the three Dragons in the cockpit kept their eyes focused on the enemy ship. They couldn’t see the missile, but—

  It hit and power flooded over the enemy ship’s hull. Its engines flickered, and a moment later, the last of the Ariane’s missiles hit it along the top of the hull. The hull shuddered, flexed, and broke apart. The engines flared and died.

  Jester gave a whoop and Talon grinned fiercely.

  “Done, and done. Fuck, that was close. Who the hell—”

  The proximity alerts went off again and all three of them jerked around to stare at the map.

  Three ships.

  “Those weren’t there a moment ago,” Jester said. His voice was tight. “They’ve got stealth systems we can’t see through.”

  “Stealth. Now.”

  Jester nodded. He engaged the stealth systems and brought the ship to a standstill before turning it down to drop below the enemy fleet. They banked sideways a moment later before straightening out again.

  Go to stealth and get on a different heading. It was their standard practice when surprised by enemy ships.

  “Okay, we head for a port,” Talon said. “We’ll send a message encrypted as soon as we—are they turning?”

  They were. Unerringly, the enemy frigates turned to follow the Ariane’s present course.

  The bottom dropped out of Talon’s stomach. He looked over to see Stabby and Jester staring at him, waiting for orders. Jester swallowed before he could stop himself. There was real fear in his eyes.

  “I can’t take three,” he said quietly.

  “Full acceleration,” Talon said. “Stay out of missile range.”

  He waited as the Ariane began to accelerate … and let his head drop when the other ships began to accelerate to keep pace.

  They couldn’t take three. Not with any certain odds—and anyone who’d found the Ariane would be going for other Dragon ships as well.

  “Send a distress signal.” He could not believe those words were coming out of his mouth.

  “To the Conway?” Jester asked him.

  Talon opened his mouth to say yes, and then shook his head. “To anyone. They … have somewhere they need to be. Send it broadwave. And just do what you can to keep us out of missile range until someone can get to us.”

  21

  “Nyx!”

  Nyx rubbed at her eyes and sat up as the Wraith opened the door and came into the room. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m so sorry, I know you prefer if we don’t—”

  The worry on Wraith’s face. The tone of her voice. The message terminal. Everything snapped into focus and Nyx surged to her feet, focusing in on Wraith’s face. “What is it?”

  “It’s….” Wraith looked over at the message terminal and let her breath, shoulders slumping. “It’s the Ariane.”

  A chill ran down her arms and Nyx felt her breath coming in tiny jerks. “What happened to them?”

  “Nothing yet. I—maybe. We got a distress call. It went broadwave.”

  Nyx stood frozen for a moment, and then she ran for the cockpit. She had no memory of shoving Wraith aside, but she must have. She ran with the light-headed feeling of not knowing quite where she was in space, her feet hitting the ground before she thought they should, stumbling slightly on the steps.

  Choop and Loki, headed to the cockpit with the rest of the crew behind them, flattened themselves out of the way as she came down the stairs at high speed and swung around the railing, and in the cockpit, Centurion turned to look at her with fear tight in his face.

  For a moment, Nyx could not speak for fury, and she could see that Centurion knew exactly why.

  Talon could call in any of the other teams if he needs help, Centurion had told her yesterday, and Nyx had agreed….

  Because she didn’t think it would ever have to happen. Now Talon had needed to call for help—and he hadn’t come to her first. It went broadwave, Wraith had said. He’d sent for anyone in range.

  He hadn’t thought she’d come.

  She had no memory of getting down the corridor to the cockpit, but she was there and the crew was clustered around her. There was a disturbance behind her and Loki was at her side. His hand caught hers and squeezed it once and she looked over at him, willing herself not to cry.

  Dragons didn’t send distress calls. She could count on one hand the number of incidents she’d heard about in her time with the Corps. Hell, the Ariane had faced down an entire destroyer formation without sending one before.

  Loki was thinking the same thing. He looked over at her and found a small smile from somewhere. “That time, there was no time to call for help,” he told her.

  That gave her the space to breathe. Talon would never have called for help unless he thought there was a chance someone would get to them in time—and he was a proud, stubborn bastard who was stupid enough that he might not have called for help anyway. It was good that they’d gotten this message.

  She nodded at Maple, who was still in the pilot’s seat. “What’s going on?”

  Maple tapped a few keys and the message came up on the screen: the coordinates and heading of the Ariane and specifications on the three ships tailing it. The Ariane was reported as damaged, but there was no mention of what that meant.

  “They should be able to lose….” Nyx should her head. “Anyone. The Ariane’s fast.” She bounced slightly on the balls of her feet to try to get the adrenaline out of her system. “Who would this be? It could be the rogue Dragons, it could be Ghost. Who else am I missing?”

  “I don’t think it makes sense to speculate,” Centurion said quietly. “Talon’s made enough enemies in his career that it could be anyone, and we know of two people who might have it out for him right now, but not enough about either to make differing plans of attack.”

  There was a
silence, and everyone looked at Nyx. She knew she should look up. She should meet their eyes. All she could see were the words on the screen, though. Who had typed them? Jester? Talon? Aegis? She could hear the words in each one of their voices.

  What if this was the last thing she ever heard from any of them?

  She tore her eyes away to look at the heading of the Conway. They’d get in under the wire, before the cargo ship left the power station—but not by much. If they turned to help the Ariane now, they would miss Tristan.

  Tell Maple to keep flying. She knew the “right” answer. She knew what she should say. They were waiting for her to say it, weren’t they? She looked up at them, taking all the courage she had to look them in the eyes. Maybe their resolve would give her strength.

  Instead, she saw the look she had worn years earlier on the Blood Moon—the look that said they would never want to make this decision. They were terrified that she would ask them what to do. Even for them, this wasn’t clear-cut.

  She wanted to scream and time was ticking away. Every moment she delayed, they were further from the Ariane.

  And she couldn’t go back, she had to get to Tristan. She had to take out Ghost before any more innocent people died for this vendetta. A rogue senator with classified information and the best technology in the world? A woman who’d managed to transfer her consciousness to a cybernetic body? If they let her go….

  There was no telling what she would be capable of. Maryam Samuels was a computer now. She could get into the Alliance databases, get any piece of information, sneak through their systems … shut down everything.

  Nyx put her hands over her mouth and rocked. Don’t make me make this decision.

  Except she had to. She was the one who was here, and something had to happen. She could hear the absolute silence of everyone holding their breath.

  Talon had gathered the best in the Corps on Team 9. She knew that. The best pilot, hacker, sharpshooter…. They were canny, they were resourceful. And they were too far away for her to have any hope of helping.

  There was no point to going in to help, none at all.

  She looked at her heading, she looked at the distress signal.

  “Turn the ship.” She could not believe herself. She clenched her hands on the back of Maple’s chair. “Send a message that we’re coming. Tell them when we’ll be there. And I don’t know how fast this ship goes—”

  “It goes fast.” Centurion moved her aside and swung himself into the co-pilot’s seat. He looked up at her and she saw, of all things, approval in his eyes.

  Around her, the crew was nodding. Loki hadn’t looked over at her but he was shaking slightly.

  “Let’s go, then,” Nyx managed.

  She just had to stay sane until they got there.

  22

  Thankfully, Centurion’s assessment of the Conway was dead on: the ship was almost as fast as the Ariane, and they were within spitting distance of Team 9’s last known location within a few hours.

  Nyx, now in full armor, stood in the doorway of the Conway’s cockpit, her eyes fixed on the empty space outside the ship. At the controls, Choop and Gambit did the same. When the proximity alerts began to beep, all three of them jumped—and from the clangs behind Nyx, the rest of the team had come to watch and were jostling to see what they could.

  Gambit, in the copilot’s chair, looked at the screen and her lips tightened. “Wreckage ahead,” she said. Her voice was low. “Waiting on an assessment.”

  Nyx nodded jerkily, but her hands were clenched on the back of Choop’s chair so hard that the whole thing creaked. She wanted to close her eyes, but they stayed open, traitorously. She had to see the broken ship.

  She had to know who it was.

  Gambit’s console beeped again. “Technical read-outs coming in.” She scanned them, paging through the information, frowning, sending queries. At last, her face broke into a smile. “It’s not an Alliance ship. Nothing about it matches the Ariane.”

  There were a few cheers, but Nyx did not smile. “How sure are you?”

  “Sure,” Gambit told her. She squinted out into the black and must have picked out the speck of silver, because she found the image and pulled it up on the screen. Data was pinging back, building a shaped image of the tumbling pieces. “Look, it was broken nearly in half, still mostly intact—you can see it’s not the Ariane.”

  Nyx’s shoulders settled. Thank God. Her lips moved in a prayer she thought she had forgotten.

  Thank God.

  “There are no electrical signals,” Gambit said. “And the heat signature is climbing off the charts—whoever hit them, I’m guessing the Ariane, the missile was targeted to knock out life support. My guess is they couldn’t vent the heat anymore.”

  Nyx nodded. It was an ever-present problem in space. With all of a ship’s systems and the humans aboard a ship creating heat, and no atmosphere outside to conduct it away, the systems that managed the heat aboard a ship were absolutely vital.

  “How recently was it hit? Can you say?”

  “Guessing from the temperature, I’d say no more than a quarter of an hour, actually.” She looked over. “They’re almost certainly already dead.”

  “Good. We don’t have time to stop.” Her voice didn’t sound like hers. It was detached, absolutely cold.

  He looked over his shoulder at her, eyes unreadable behind his helmet, and gave her a small nod.

  She nodded back. They were here. They were all here with her, and from everyone’s attitude on the flight here, they approved of her decision. Tersi had been right when he told her why Dragons kept fighting. They fought for justice, they fought for the powerless—but in some ways, they fought most of all for their teammates.

  A captain who would take a shot at an enemy instead of helping a friend wasn’t someone most Dragons would want to follow.

  “Taking us wide around the wreckage,” Choop said. “My guess is—”

  A storm of beeping erupted on both monitors, and Gambit leaned forward to look. “They’re fighting.”

  “They?” Nyx leaned over her shoulder.

  “Three ships. This one matches the specifications of one of the three they mentioned in the distress signal, so it’s got to be the Ariane and the other two of those ships.”

  “Accelerating.” Choop tapped at his screen. He saw Nyx’s sharp look and knew her question: Why the hell weren’t we going this fast the whole time? “There’s only so long we can hold this speed before the engines start to burn out, but we’ll come in fast enough that the enemy ships might not see us in time to adjust course.”

  Gambit brought up the targeting systems and began priming weapons. Her jaw clenched. “Which do I target first?”

  Nyx hesitated only a moment. “Let me have the guns.” She stood aside as Gambit got out of the chair, and then slid in. Their targets were coming up fast and she narrowed her eyes at the screen, fury rising in her chest.

  How dare they hurt the people she loved? How dare they?

  The crew of the Conway could see the battle unfolding on the screen now. The Ariane was darting between the two other ships, circling to the outside of the battle consistently so that one ship always had the other in its line of fire.

  “Clever,” someone muttered. There was a murmur of agreement.

  One of the enemy ships had been hit and was trailing smoke. As Nyx watched, it started to fall back, allowing the other to swing over the top of it, turrets aimed at the Ariane.

  Nyx launched their missiles. It was a visceral thing in a frigate, where you could feel every shudder through the whole ship. The missiles streaked away and she saw the enemy ship start to turn—

  Choop was right, it hadn’t seen them with enough time to maneuver. It fired countermeasures and banked, but it wasn’t quick enough. Whoever these people were, they hadn’t guessed that Talon would be able to summon help this quickly. The missiles hit it broadside and it tumbled as patches of the hull opened, venting into space.

  �
�Hang back.” It was Jim’s voice. “We have EMP set to go on the other.”

  “Roger,” Choop said easily. “Good to see you in one piece, Ariane.”

  “Good to see you.” It was Talon speaking now. “We’ve got one hell of a pilot, but things weren’t looking too good there for a moment. Just a sec while we wrap this up.”

  “Don’t take them out,” Nyx said suddenly. “EMP and then let them hang.”

  There was a pause.

  “…What?” Talon asked.

  “I want to know who these bastards are.” She stood up out of the chair and gestured to Gambit to sit again. “Choop, can you get us a dock?”

  He blew his breath out in a disbelieving chuckle before he realized she was serious. “I, uh—yes, ma’am.”

  “Good man.” Nyx clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll let you know what we find out?”

  “Only if you get to the bridge first,” Talon said serenely.

  “Oh, this is how we’re doing it?” She was starting to smile. All that tension had to go somewhere, and it was this, or cry.

  And she hated crying.

  She handed her headset to Gambit and waved a hand at the crew. “Airlock—now. We’re boarding that ship and we’re taking it, and we are on the clock, because Talon seems to think his crew can get to the bridge before we can. Eleven!”

  “Eleven!” They took off as a group and Nyx gave a feral smile as she brought up the rear.

  Whoever these people were, they had bargained dead wrong when they went after Talon.

  23

  “Choop.” Nyx looked back toward the cockpit. “What’s the word?”

  “They’re trying to get away,” Choop reported. “Come on, you slippery bastard. Come on, come on….”

  The team grinned.

  “Oh, this is not going to be pretty.”

  “How so?”