Athena's Ashes

by Jamie Grey

  Wall had agreed to meet them in his new compound and had sent the coordinates to Viktis through a secure comm channel. When the spaceport on Lenue was destroyed in Navang’s attack, Wall had relocated his drug production facility to Hera III, a tiny planet on the edge of Coalition space.

  The government had tried terraforming it, to bring in settlers from Earth, but the planet was as stubborn as its indigenous species—a willowy group of aliens who called themselves the F’Obon. They towered over the humans at seven feet, with long thin necks and perfectly round heads. Their leathery skin protected them from the harsh winds that blew across the dusty terrain.

  The humans who stayed behind when the Coalition left formed a settlement in a protected valley, where they harvested the spindly cactus-like plants to use in medical dispensaries. New Queensland had roughly fifty-thousand residents, squished into apartments and adobe houses, who spent their days either searching for or processing the plants for shipment off-world.

  It was the perfect place for Wall to retreat to.

  “What the hell is taking so long?” Finn growled, crossing his arms.

  Viktis lounged against the crumbling rock wall that marked the edge of the dusty plain and the beginning of civilization. He shrugged. “The settlers on this world run on their own time. No sense in getting impatient.”

  Renna scanned the dirt-streaked dockworkers who were taking a break nearby. “Speak for yourself.” Her skin pricked with unease, and she shifted her weight from foot to foot, hand on the handle of her blaster. “I sent the order half an hour ago. I don’t like this.” At least Keva and the Athena had already left to take Aldani and Myka to the safe house. They’d be safe, no matter what happened here.

  “Just a busy day.” Viktis yawned. “It’ll show up soon.”

  Before she could complain again, the hum of an approaching speeder filled the air and Viktis raised his eyebrow in an I-told-you-so smirk.

  Finn’s hand twitched near his holster, and Viktis pushed himself off the wall. He stayed relaxed, but the set of his shoulders told her he was still on guard.

  The speeder pulled to a stop in front of them, and the driver’s door opened with a hiss. The driver grinned at them, his left front tooth missing. “Speeder as ordered. Bring it back by the end of the day or you’ll be charged double.”

  “And you’ll be taking off an hour from our bill, since you’re late, right?” Renna asked.

  “Not my fault. Traffic jam on the other side of town.” He slid from the car and headed toward the seedy bar at the end of the street. “Have a nice day.”

  “Traffic jam, my ass,” she muttered, heading for the driver’s seat.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Viktis asked. “I’m the pilot here.”

  Renna smirked. “You haven’t piloted a ship in five years. Besides, I already have the map of the city in my head. You know, crazy implant and all.”

  Viktis’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t need an implant to help me find my way around. You know, my impeccable sense of direction and all.”

  Both Finn and Renna burst out laughing. “You keep telling yourself that,” she said, climbing into the speeder.

  Viktis huffed. “Fine. But I’m not sitting in back.”

  They sped through the shit-hole of a town, passing slums and tenements on the way to the more wealthy part of the city. A thin layer of yellow sediment coated the buildings and streets, giving it an odd, dusty glow. Even the skin of the humans living there was tinged yellow.

  Renna parked the speeder. When they got out, they approached Wall’s compound, a rambling set of buildings hidden behind a high steel wall. She eyed the barbed wire with a frown. The security measures seemed a bit excessive.

  “You sure he’s waiting for us?” she asked, pressing the buzzer on the gate. There was no answer.

  Viktis stared through the bars of the gate into the silent compound. “When I spoke with him on the holo earlier, he said he’d have a man on point to let us in. Try again.”

  Renna leaned on the buzzer for a good thirty seconds before letting go. The shrill scream of the bell echoed through the courtyard, but there was no sign of movement. The skin between her shoulder blades prickled, and she unsnapped her holster. On either side of her, Finn and Viktis pulled out their blasters.

  “I’m going to hack into the system,” she said, crouching in front of the lock. “Watch my back.”

  The two men nodded, and Renna went to work on the gate. With a quick glance she could tell it was Rege Rail model—but this one was different.

  “Schematics,” she ordered her implant. Her pulse jumped with excitement as the holo image of the lock appeared in her vision, the plans pulling apart to show her the various components.

  When this implant thing worked like it was supposed to, it was amazing.

  As her gaze switched between the real lock and the virtual one, her frown deepened. Wall had altered his lock in some way. This was going to take longer than she planned.

  Renna pulled her tools out of the small case she carried on her belt and inserted a probe into one of the chip slots. There was a soft beep as her program ran through the system.

  While she waited, she peered through the gate into the dirty courtyard. A long, low building sat directly in front, guarded by a thick wooden door. Two larger buildings flanked the main building, long and low. Warehouses, she’d guess.

  A gust of wind blew down the street, bringing with it the arid scent of dust and smoke. Her hacking tool beeped again, and Renna glanced down. A few tweaks in the code and the gate clicked as it unlocked.

  “We’re in,” she said, pocketing her tools and grabbing her blaster.

  Finn readied his gun as he pushed open the gate. He took several tentative steps into the courtyard, sweeping the space for anything unusual. Viktis and Renna followed close behind.

  “What the hell is going on?” Viktis muttered. “Where is everyone?”

  “Wish I knew.” The prickling of her skin was getting worse by the second, and she forced herself to take a calming breath as she pointed to a thick metal door in the interior wall of the courtyard. “I think Wall’s lab is through here.”

  It opened immediately, the heavy lock already disengaged. She glanced at Viktis, whose eyebrows had furrowed until they were almost touching.

  He shook his head and shifted his blaster in his hand. “That door should have been locked. On your guard.”

  Renna nodded and stared down the long, narrow corridor made from rugged stone. Her skin erupted into full-fledged goose bumps as the trio crept down the corridor. There were still no signs of life or movement from anywhere.

  “Show heat signatures,” she ordered. Why did she keep speaking out loud? Her implant responded to thoughts as well as words now. Old habits die hard evidently.

  “Anything?” Finn asked.

  She shook her head as they moved farther down the corridor. At the far end she spotted another heavy door, this one slightly ajar. Finn pushed it open and Renna slipped past him into what looked like a kitchen.

  Or, at least, it had been before someone had ransacked it. The cupboard doors had been ripped from their hinges and broken terracotta plates were smashed on the floor in piles of orange dust. Dry goods and food were scattered everywhere, leaving a trail of white powder and shattered eggs. She took a step farther into the room and grimaced as her feet squelched in some sort of slick cooking oil.

  Renna clutched her gun tightly. Beside her, Viktis’s amber skin had turned pale, and the bone plates in his head quivered with anger.

  What had happened here?

  “Through there?” She pointed at the door across the room. Her hand shook as she pushed it open onto another long room.

  “Gods,” Viktis whispered.

  Electronics and machinery were smashed and scattered across the floor like someone had taken a sledge hammer to the entire contents of the room. Holovids and communicators were barely recognizable pieces dusting the floor. Electrical chip
s and shards of glass crunched under Renna’s boots as she approached the center of the space.

  Her unease was at full force now, like an icy hand pressed against her spine. Where was everyone?

  “His lab’s got to be through there,” Viktis said, gesturing at the final door.

  “There could be anything waiting for us behind there,” Finn said softly. “Whoever did this could still be here.”

  “I hope they are,” Viktis growled.

  Renna ordered her implant to scan for heat signatures. “There’s nothing alive behind that door,” she said with the shake of her head.

  Finn’s hand tightened on his blaster. “Still doesn’t mean there can’t be danger. Are you both ready?”

  Renna and Viktis nodded.

  “Let’s do this,” Viktis said. He kicked the door open, and Renna and Finn burst into the room, guns sweeping the space. She froze at the utter destruction that had turned Wall’s neat lab into an apocalyptic scene. The space was cavernous, built of steel and cement. Fluorescent lights glowed overhead, casting stark shadows over the rows of smoking machinery Wall had used to produce the black market drug, clay. The drug that had destroyed Renna’s childhood

  Its burnt-sugar scent mingled with the copper stench of blood. It clogged Renna’s throat and made her stomach convulse. And then she saw them.

  Six of Wall’s men hung from the steel rafters by their ankles.

  Blood dripped from where their heads used to be, and the floor beneath their bodies was a crimson lake that had already started to coagulate.

  Acid burned her throat, and Renna swallowed it back as she turned away from the grisly scene. Viktis and Finn had already moved farther into the room, their guns at the ready.

  Renna pulled her shirt over her nose and followed them toward the other end of the room where a wall of flickering holo monitors loomed.

  As they cleared the last stack of destroyed crates, Finn flung out his arm. “Stay back.” His voice went hoarse, and dread curled tightly in Renna’s chest.

  Viktis pushed past her, only to stop dead.

  Oh, gods.

  There was nothing Renna could do but step forward as well. And then she wished she hadn’t.

  It was Wall. Or had been before whoever’d killed him had split him open from neck to navel. He lay prostrate, arms and legs extended in a grotesque mockery of how they’d found Myka back in Navang’s lab.

  His face had been sliced off, leaving only a bloody skull behind. His insides spilled onto the floor beside him in a pile of pink, slimy mush. A single holoscreen had been inserted into the cavity to take the place of his heart and lungs.

  The iron-rich scent of his blood mingled with the odor of decay already rising from his body. Renna pressed a hand to her lips, revulsion making her unable to look away. As she stared, the holoscreen in Wall’s chest cavity flickered on. Light glowed behind the streaks of Wall’s blood that dripped down the corner of the monitor, but it wasn’t enough to hide the horror of what played there.

  It was Renna.

  Lips parted, she watched herself hack into the MYTH computers and copy files to her optical drive. Oh, gods. Someone had recorded this the day Dallas had gotten her access to the MYTH files.

  “I had permission to be there,” she protested. “Major Dallas knew about this.”

  The scene continued with a list of files scrolling across the screen. Finn’s eyebrows drew together. “He knew you were accessing those?”

  “I was searching for Pallas’s information. Of course he didn’t know. He thought I was searching for clues to find the Athena.”

  On the screen, she furtively copied over more information, then bent down beneath the bank of computers before finally leaving the room.

  The scene fast-forwarded several hours according to the time stamp across the bottom of the screen. And then the images slowed again. A spark of something burst from below the computer bank, creating a small puff of black smoke.

  As they watched, the whole room exploded.

  Renna gasped and stepped back. “I was picking up the holodisk that I dropped,” she protested. “I didn’t plant that bomb!” Her mind spun with everything that had happened in the last few days. Wall’s horrible death, Samil’s trap on Tartarus, the explosion in the MYTH facility that took down the defenses.

  Dr. Samil had played them all.

  Her gaze focused on the body holding the holomonitor, and a cry tore from Renna’s lips. She turned away from the man’s desecrated corpse, from the image of herself doing the unthinkable, from the questions in Finn’s eyes, from Viktis’s sick expression.

  Finn grabbed her, pulling her face against his chest. “Shhh. It’s okay, Renna. It’s going to be okay.”

  She sobbed against his shoulder. “It’s never going to be okay.”

  Viktis gingerly removed the disk from the holodevice, then turned back to them. “Pull it together, Ren,” he said. “You need to get into Wall’s safe and see if your drugs are still here.”

  Finn stroked her back. “You can do this. And then we can get the hell out of here and kick Samil’s ass.”

  She took a shaky breath, still breathing through her mouth to avoid the scent of death, and tried to push away the horrors around her. She had a job to do. She’d seen things as bad as this before. They just hadn’t hit quite so close.

  Renna nodded into Finn’s shoulder. “All right. I can do it. I’ll be okay.” Without looking around, she headed directly for Wall’s safe.

  Her heart sank when she saw it was a state-of-the-art model, like all of Wall’s tech, but she squared her shoulders and crouched in front of it, concentrating as hard as she could on the keypad and electronics. Not the eerily silent warehouse of the dead around her.

  Two minutes later, the safe cracked open. With a stifled scream of both anger and disgust, she kicked the door shut so hard it sprang back open.

  Wall’s severed hand lay palm up on the bottom of the safe, an empty vial clutched between his cold, stiff fingers. Renna’s drug was gone.

  “I’m going to kill that bitch if it’s the last thing I do.” Her voice shook, but this time it was fury, not horror.

  Finn wrapped an arm around Renna and pulled her back toward the door. Viktis surveyed the warehouse one last time, letting his gaze drop to his former friend’s body. “When you do, I want to be there to watch.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Renna crawled into the speeder, not protesting when Finn took the driver’s seat. As they drove off, she stared out the window, unseeing. Her skin crawled, and all she wanted was a hot shower and a stiff drink.

  And some way to erase the images of the warehouse from her mind.

  Samil had done some horrific things, but this attack had changed everything. She’d made Renna look like a traitor and tortured an innocent man.

  Each scene in the warehouse had been specifically created to taunt Renna. The men hanging from the rafters mimicked a job gone wrong back on Baeno, where her team had been beheaded and hung when they’d been caught. Wall’s positioning had been the exact same as Myka’s. And the hand in the safe… She bit back a shudder. The Seralline Star Sapphire job on Treze.

  Samil wanted Renna to suffer. To let her know that she knew more about Renna’s past than anyone. Every nerve ending in her body twitched. What else did she know about Renna’s life? Who else was in danger?

  Finn pulled the speeder to a stop in front of the Eris’s hangar. He cut the power, but didn’t move to get out of the car. Instead, he shifted so he could look at her.

  Renna’s stomach lurched. She’d never seen that expression on his face before.

  “Renna, I need to ask this. What happened back at MYTH? What were you doing in that room?”

  “You still don’t trust me?” She couldn’t hide the disbelief in her voice. Hadn’t they just had this conversation? Hurt made her lungs ache, but she forced herself to look him in the eye.

  “I do trust you. That’s why I need to hear it from you.” He smiled.
“MYTH is going to throw everything it has at you if Samil leaks this. I want to be able to protect you.”

  Her tension eased a bit. “I don’t need your protection. I can take care of myself.”

  “We all know that, Ren, but we’re a team.” Finn squeezed her hand. “Let us help.”

  From the back seat, Viktis nodded in agreement. “Never thought I’d say it, but pretty boy is right.”

  Renna took a deep breath. “Fine. Dallas got me into the archive. I told him I needed to look for information that would help me track the Athena down. I accessed all the personnel files for everyone on board, but before that, I did a sweep of the system for information on Pallas. Exactly what we discussed before I left you guys.”

  “I remember,” Finn said. “But how did she get footage of you planting a bomb?”

  “I told you. I dropped my OSD, but somehow Samil edited the footage to make it look like I was planting something. The bitch has more resources than the devil.”

  “What game is she playing?” Viktis asked with a frown. “She doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who does anything without a reason.”

  Finn tapped his fingers on the steering controls. “I have no idea, but whatever it is I don’t like it.” He pushed open the speeder door. “Let’s get back to the ship and meet up with the Athena at the rendezvous point. We have a lot to discuss.”

  The trio boarded the Eris, and Commander Jayla met them at the CIC. She took one look at their faces and turned toward the comm room. “Inside. Now.”

  Lieutenant Blake followed, closing the door behind them. “What the hell happened? You look like someone murdered your best friend.”

  Renna let out a gasp, and Viktis’s hands curled into fists.

  Blake’s eyes widened as he took a step back. “What the hell did you find?”

  Finn raked a hand through his hair and sat down heavily. “Samil got there first. Wall’s dead. The drug is gone. She’s playing a game with us, but I can’t figure out what she’s after.” He glanced at Jayla. “We need to regroup with Aldani and see what else we can do. Renna needs that drug.”