“I’m a soldier, Jon. And I’m good at what I do. That is how the Regime made me.” She tried flexing a smile at him. “Have you such little faith in my abilities?”
“You’re not a soldier anymore. Or an assassin.”
“Then what am I?”
“You’re too important for me to lose. There are those of us who would find losing you a great tragedy. There are those of us who could not bear it.” He tapped a finger against her chest. She recognized her own words from their tense meeting on the officer’s hab level of the Storm King before the SSDs came to arrest him, before they’d become fugitives or anything else. She looked up into his eyes, so perfect, angry and sad.
“You’ll always do the honorable thing, the right thing. You would do that, no matter if it killed you or how it broke you. Let me do that for you now.” Surprisingly, the words felt too big for her throat and she ducked her head.
“It’s not your job to protect me. Or serve me. And I certainly don’t want you to die for me. Erelah would not want it either.” He tilted her chin up until their gazes met again. This was what he did when something was important. As if by his proximity, he could will his thoughts into her. It was his intensity that made it precious. It was the earnestness of it that made him so…him. The fact that he still tried, all the while knowing what she was and ignoring the fact that she’d never be quite what he thought she could. He stood tireless in the face of a battle that could never be won.
She loved him for that. She wanted to be this person for him, however impossible. It was nearly a physical sensation, crushing in its rawness. He would never really see, would he?
Sela leaned against him, let him embrace her. “Then I won’t die.”
Seven
“Asher, please. Do not ask me to do this. I know what it means for you.” Kelta’s voice cracked. The woman could be harder than anyone he knew. To hear the hurt there, even under the corruption of the static from the Cassandra’s substandard vox link, was nearly enough to make Asher pause. “If Ironvale learns of this…if they capture you, they’ll kill you. I swore to your mother to protect you. I made—”
“You made a vow to my house, to the Corsair name.” His voice grew thick, and he cleared his throat, suddenly annoyed with himself. “I’ve never once ordered you to do a thing. I’m ordering you now. Do you understand?”
The silence stretched out. For a long time, only the dull, uncertain hiss of the speakers filled the empty command loft. He thought she’d severed the connection. For that, he could not fault her.
Then, her response dropped like blade. “I will do it.”
“Good.”
“There is nothing good about this.” Strength resurged in her voice. “Think of what this would do to Erelah. What it would mean for your child.”
“I am. That is why I’m trusting you.” He reached out to end the connection.
“I would pay the priestess at the temple of the Fates to pray for you, but I know what you would say.”
“Save your money.”
There was a scoffing noise from her end. And at that moment he could envision her, sitting on the terrace drenched in the warm orange of the Narasmina sunset, overlooking the busy street of the lower markets in the salty air. A place he would never see again. It hit him then, the sudden longing for a place he’d spent his whole youth trying to escape.
“Kelta…” He paused. “I meant to do right.”
“I know.” Her voice was filled with the distance between them. “Goodbye, Asher.”
He leaned back into the grav bench, allowed his shoulders to slump, and waited for the unexpected tightness to leave his throat.
She could have thrown it back in his face: who was he to hold someone to an oath when he had broken so many? Yet she hadn’t. There was steel to her, something he’d always respected and never voiced. That was why it hurt.
For his entire life, Kelta pra-Corsair had been his constant, regardless of her status as a bound servant to his mother’s house. Her loyalty to him was without question, no matter how deeply he sinned. The woman had been witness to just about every misstep. She’d met it all with her customary grace and wisdom. In his secret heart, he knew he did not deserve her loyalty. Yet she remained, constant as the stars. What he asked now was a means to protect her, as much as it was to ensure safety for Erelah and the baby.
Narasmina would not be safe. It’d stopped being a safe haven the moment he had returned there with Erelah. He’d been foolish to think otherwise, but at the time, it was a dare he was willing to make. The rapture of having Erelah to himself had bled the reason from him. It now felt like a lifetime ago. During those long nights with her, and in that little pocket of forgetting, he’d believed his own lie that things would never go bad or that the evils of the Reaches wouldn’t find them and expect their due. Even without the bounty placed on Erelah by the Humans, trouble would have caught up to him on Narasmina. Someone would have come looking: Zenti, Ironvale Seekers, any one of the enemies he’d made over the past few years.
Even if they succeeded in rescuing Erelah, and Tyron did kill Maxim, there would be consequences. Maxim was Poisoncry’s creature—a well-known fact even to a disavowed Ironvale guildsworn like himself. The moment Poisoncry learned that their hold on this little corner of the Reaches was threatened, they would be merciless in their pursuit of anyone connected to Maxim’s murder. Even if Tove succeeded in her coup, there was nothing about a shattered guild that promised safe refuge from Poisoncry for Erelah.
Kelta had lived through the turmoil of the dishonoring of his mother’s house and the murder of his father. Asher’s simple order to leave would be an easy task by comparison.
Ironvale was the last resort. The last hope. Kelta still had connections there.
It was something he knew as an inevitability. He’d bought this a long time ago, long before Erelah Veradin was even an errant possibility. Perhaps his whole life had been a Path to this moment.
Time to pay out would be soon.
But he had to…no, he needed to see Erelah just one last time before that happened. The urge to have her there with him settled on him in a deep, oceanic wave of need that grew so vast, he could no longer judge its horizon. There was no singular word to describe it.
He had a lot of past in his past. Love had made him a champion-level idiot to think it wouldn’t come calling for him one day. But now he was willing to pay for what he’d earned, and just as willing to give his life to be sure that Erelah survived any fallout.
Just let me see her again.
Even coarse bitches like the Fates would see the poetry in that. Wouldn’t they?
Eight
Maxim Agrippa was a complete idiot. But a useful one. For now.
Fisk suppressed a sigh and maintained his deadpan expression as he watched Splitdawn’s sorrowful excuse for an Imperator sprawl into the thickly cushioned pallet. At his lazy gesture, two painfully young female attendants approached. They moved with the drugged ambivalence of the conditioned as they filled goblets and laid a tray of food on the nearby table. Maxim lunged up, snagging the wrist of the closest girl. She gave no sign of protest as he pulled her down onto the pallet beside him.
Canting his head slightly, Fisk regarded the servant’s flat, expressionless gaze. His implanted optics showed him that her heart rate remained the same; her temperature patterns fluctuated slightly. His inspection was cursory; the outcome expected. Poisoncry conditioning was lasting and permanent. He expected nothing less and appreciated the quality of the workmanship, even if Maxim did not.
This payment was a mere pittance if it meant keeping the overgrown man-child content and distracted. Weapons, money, slaves—these were mere trinkets. True value rested in information. To Poisoncry, information was the most powerful commodity.
“Imperator,” Fisk waved away the proffered plate of barely cooked meat. “I think that you do not take Tove’s threats against you seriously. Even now she conspires.”
“What el
se is new?” Maxim toyed with the braids that bound the serving girl’s hair like he was petting a small dog. He shrugged, dismissive. “That is what my sister does. She craves my death.”
“You must meet with her in three days’ time. In person. Without an avatar. Your law demands it,” Fisk said with infinite patience. “It would be an opportunity for her to act on this…craving.”
Maxim shoved the girl away, suddenly disgruntled. He sat up. “And I expect Poisoncry to keep their end of our agreement and offer their continued protection.” His dark eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Unless that has changed?”
The man’s heart rate spiked. The skin along his cheeks and forehead changed in color. Maxim was frightened.
Fear was good. A useful variable. Fisk flexed a smile and ducked his chin. “An unforeseen anomaly has changed predicted outcomes.”
Seeing the renegade Volunteer Sela Tyron and her Human partner at the meeting with Maxim’s avatar had been a surprise for Fisk. A rarity. He’d last known them to be escaping from Hadelia; after that, they were as ghosts. The superstitious would have called this sighting luck. Fisk did not. He believed in calculations, written in the cold hard science of numbers and fact. His prayers were in permutations, deviation analyses and the predictability of patterns.
Tyron’s reappearance in the company of Corsair had been an anomaly, a rare thing that circumvented the pattern of probability and prediction that composed Poisoncry’s control of the Reaches. Something had caused that anomaly. Anomalies were dangerous things and were, by their nature, untamable with prediction. Anomalies were what had happened on Hadelia.
Even now, parts of that world, the seat of Poisoncry’s power for centuries, had become a nest of unknowns. An uprising, starting as a spurious data point, had swollen into an unpredictable sea of chaos. Already Brojos, a putrid little settlement in the rusted-out remains of the anti-spinward shore, rebelled against the Guild’s rule. Obscrum was now under threat from the same. It was enough to create worry—a loathsome emotion that held no purpose in the face of the artful equations of the universe.
Maxim rolled his eyes and took a long draught from his cup. “You speak like a machine.”
“This disavowed Ironvale guildsworn, Corsair. A person in his position would not come to you in this manner if he did not have a powerful position to barter. Yet you did not hear him out,” Fisk said. “Was it correct that you fear Ironvale’s retaliation for dealing with him?”
“Enough!” Maxim cast the cup aside. It clattered into an unseen corner with a wet slosh. None of the servants in the room moved. Fisk drew in a deep stilling breath, his hands folded on his lap.
“I fear no Guild!” Maxim thumped a fist against the enameled and etched chest of his armor.
Ignoring Maxim’s predicted response, Fisk calmly sipped from his cup. The moment the wine hit the sensory collectors in his mouth, his implants showed him the molecular composition of the substance. He read it casually, waiting for Maxim’s tirade to evaporate. The wine’s aftertaste lasted four seconds longer than the outlying variable set he’d predicted. Bored with the analysis, Fisk opened a sub-s link with a thought and sent an encrypted command to the closest Poisoncry neural cluster to gather any and all useable data on Asher Corsair. Almost as an afterthought, he added a request to track the movements of any of his known associates.
Satisfied, Fisk turned his attention back to Maxim, who’d turned his aggression to a leg of some cooked animal. The fat dripped down his chin and glistened into his beard. Fisk fought a wave of revulsion and told his vision input to ignore that section of the viewed image.
“Consider this: Tove will be just as vulnerable as you at the Conclave. This would be your opportunity to solve this ongoing problem.”
“You say that as if I have not tried. She is well-guarded,” Maxim said. Begrudgingly he added, tossing the denuded bone aside, “Clever.”
“Perhaps, my grace, you can leave the details to me. I believe we have just the man for this particular assignment.”
Part Two
Nine
Not for the first time, Tristic marveled at the simplicity of Human eyes, especially the garishly blue ones that belonged to her host’s body. The Human systems of communication were so basic it bordered on the profane. Throughout her careful search for a new host, Tristic admitted she had failed to realize how much she had depended on certain aspects of her original Sceeloid physiology and how much she would miss them. As a consequence, she found herself disgusted by the necessary reliance on the limited senses of her new Human host, Miles Wren.
She could no longer behold the shifting patterns of temperature or the dancing layers of the UV spectrum—a tool she had come to rely on during her rise to the role of Defensor within the Regime. It had been indispensable to discern lies from truth in her Eugenes counterparts. What their tongues withheld or sought to adulterate with lies, their physiology betrayed in the language of body heat.
It had been this Sceeloid sense of vision that had helped her find Erelah Veradin, a Human hiding in plain sight, a pretender among predators. Long ago, the Eugenes had purged their ancestors, the Humans, from the Known Worlds in a frenzy of zealous terror and self-righteousness. Or at least, they thought they had.
How terrible to find your ancestors lacking. As a Sceeloid-Eugenes hybrid created by genetics splicers, Tristic could understand that sentiment.
Tristic had always been a planner. It was the ability to anticipate your opponent—not simply might or will—that allowed for victory. They were easily befuddled, these Humans, and always sought the easiest course of action. They were predictable in that way.
But sometimes they were clever. Here on Roughbook, a decade ago, they had managed to kill a small colony of Sceeloid by harnessing a simple strand of protein, what they called a virus, to claim the Sceeloid base. However, when it came to deciphering the considerable Sceeloid technology left behind, these enterprising creatures had fallen short. For a race that had gained access to the stars nearly two centuries ago, they still thought in terms of a gravity-bound race (up, down, back, forth). The Sceeloid, for all their bloodthirsty conquering, had mastered space for a millennium before the Humans arrived. The co-opted Sceeloid base—Roughbook—was more than a set of tunnels burrowed into the walls of an asteroid. It was a hive, and at its center thrummed the still-thriving heart of a fusion-complex core. The Humans had succeeded in accessing only a tenth of its power with their primitive hacks. Entire levels of the compound had remained unexplored, unassessed by the Humans—not out of laziness, but ignorance. To traverse a compound built by Sceeloid, you must think like a Sceeloid.
That was how she found the secret chambers.
This was her second excursion into the chambers, a row of cells carved in the signature Sceeloid semi-circle, nestling the core’s main fuel distribution node. By now, she realized its true purpose: weapons caches. She’d marveled once more at the arrogance required by the Humans to simply hang up some banners and plastic doorways and call this conquered warren theirs. This place was dormant, not dead.
Tristic stood in the mellow lights of the room, set at an incandescence that was too feeble for her host. She took out the device—a flashlight, they called it. It was simple, but it possessed a setting for ultraviolet that allowed her host’s poorly evolved eyes to read the otherwise invisible native Sceeloid language.
What felt like an eternity later, she had the chamber layout memorized and moved to the next room. She glimpsed lines that fed incubation chambers where embryo Sceeloid drone workers slumbered in drugged stasis. The fluid glowed with a rheumy incandescence that suggested the same viral contagion had infected them. A pity. A squad of warrior Sceeloid may have been useful. She pressed on. There were at least four new chambers to explore in the time of Miles Wren’s designated sleep cycle. Ever since the incident at Tintown, the Humans were watchful of this Wren’s activities. They would no doubt seek Wren out if he failed to put in an appearance during morning report. And
their overzealous caution had kept her from joining any searches for Erelah off the station.
Prying open a new hatch, she discovered vat upon vat of liquid memory vessels still recording the movement of every power fluctuation within Roughbook’s corridors. She also found a row of stun-chargers, slim and compact little pieces of technology that easily fit in the palm of her host. She plucked one up. They were perfect for rendering enemies unconscious. An easy item to use in a contingency. One could never plan too far ahead.
Such a treasure trove. Greater than all the war spoils collected even by the Council of First. It was nearly heartbreaking to see these miracles sitting in such a state of disuse.
However, an easy thing to correct.
Aware of the dwindling time she had left, Tristic pressed on. It was in the last chamber that she found a true prize: the vast bank of processors that governed the core failsafe. Tristic felt the essence that was once Miles Wren writhe with anguish when it saw her newest prize and sensed her intent. How delicious his despair.
Ten
“Beer,” said Roughbook’s tech ops specialist, Tyler Chapman. “I’ve never wanted a beer so much in my entire life.”
This was greeted with a sympathetic grunt.
“It’s weird, you know? I’d never cared about it before back on Europa. Take it or leave it. You’d think I’d miss something better, like weed or knowing who’d won the last match between Army and Navy.”
He set down two discards from his hand and took up two more. “Of course, some of the guys got creative. They make stuff like those prison screws used to. No thanks.”
Tyler felt his mouth start to water. Sweet Jesus, a beer would be incredible. It wasn’t about the alcohol. It was the taste, the smell, the sensation of drinking a nice, ice cold double IPA. Didn’t even need to be the kind made from Earth-grown wheat, because that might as well be made out of freshly ground unicorn bones. It could be that fungus stuff that they made back on Mars colony with the fake hops thrown in. Part of him suspected it wasn’t about the beer so much as what actually having access to a beer meant. It meant home. It meant no more rations and not looking at the same metal hallways every day and having the same snoring fuckwad for a roommate.
Allies and Enemies: Exiles, Book 3 Page 4
