by Jay Allan
“No, I suppose not too many. Not anymore, at least.”
“It’s just been too long. Two centuries is a long time, and there’s no one alive who remembers the last imperial atrocities. Chrono—no one alive today even knew anyone who lived during that time! Sure, everybody pays lip service to the old fears handed down from their great-grandparents, but they aren’t really afraid anymore, are they?”
Astra sat back and shook her head.
Alyssa wore a troubled expression.
“What is it, Lys?”
“I’m just wondering . . . nobody’s afraid of the empire anymore, except the marshal, of course. But people are usually wrong about such things. Do you think . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Do I think what, Lys?”
“Maybe we should be worried about the empire. Not in a generation, or a hundred years, as the marshal does, but right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, maybe they’re involved in all this. Perhaps the danger is far closer than we imagine.”
Astra didn’t answer. She’d been thinking the same thing, but she hadn’t wanted to say it, to admit the possibility. She felt a shiver move through her body. If the empire was working against them already, the Far Stars just got more dangerous. A lot more dangerous.
The two sat long in silence, each of their minds treading down dark roads.
CHAPTER 4
“ALL RIGHT, LUCAS, GET US THE HELL OUT OF HERE.”
“Way ahead of you, Skip.” The Claw’s pilot was working his board like a virtuoso, increasing power at just the right speed, and charting the best route through the thick Castillan atmosphere.
Blackhawk knew Lucas was on it, so he dropped hard into his command chair, reaching around and clipping his harness in place. The tight strap hurt as it pressed against his midsection. He’d caught a round in the side during the final escape from the Grand Palais. He’d been a warrior for thirty-five years, and he’d known immediately it was nothing serious, just a flesh wound. But that didn’t change the fact that it still hurt like hell. The snugness of the strap tugged at it, ripping open the hasty dressing he’d applied.
Just another scar to add to the collection.
Shira bounded up the ladder and ran across the bridge toward Ace’s station. She sat down hard and leaned over the scope.
“How is he?” Blackhawk asked. Ace had been hit too, twice, and one of the wounds was serious. Doc was down in the Claw’s tiny sick bay, still working on him.
“He’s in rough shape, Ark.” Shira was usually as cool as they come, but Blackhawk could tell from her voice she was worried. “He’s lost a lot of blood. If we were on Celtiboria, he’d be fine. But as good as he is at patching us back together, Doc’s not a real surgeon, and the Claw’s infirmary isn’t a hospital.”
Blackhawk just nodded. He turned away for a few seconds, closing his eyes. He wanted to be down there, standing behind Doc, waiting at Ace’s side. But his place was here, making sure they all got out. It wasn’t going to help Ace if the Claw got blasted out of the sky by the Castillan defense forces.
“I’ve got bogies on the scope, Captain.” Her voice was calm once more. Blackhawk allowed himself a quick smile.
Nothing fazes her.
“Lucas?” Blackhawk shot his eyes over toward the pilot’s station.
“I’m pushing as hard as I dare, Skip. This atmosphere is too damned thick.” Castilla’s air was heavier than Celtiboria’s, with an atmospheric pressure 30 percent higher. It made lifting off quickly a hazardous proposition at best. The Claw was a solid vessel, but she was still subject to the laws of physics. Friction causes heat. If the hull temperature got hot enough, even the iridium-alloy armor would melt.
We’ve been in tough scrapes before, and if it hasn’t melted yet . . .
“Well, push it harder. I’d rather bet on the Claw’s hull holding out than fight the entire Castillan Defense Force.” He leaped out of his chair abruptly, grabbing onto one of the support columns as he moved toward Ace’s station. “Get down to the turrets, Shira. Just in case. I’ll man the scope.”
“Yes, sir.” She jumped up and moved quickly toward the ladder, her step never once faltering. A planetary takeoff was a rough affair, but she raced across the wildly pitching floor with the grace of a dancer and hopped onto the ladder.
“And take one of the Twins with you,” he called out to her. “Tarq.” The Twins were alike in so many ways it wasn’t hard to think of them as anything but two copies of the same person. But despite their similarities in appearance, voice, temperament, and personality, Tarq was inexplicably a better shot than his brother.
“Got it, Captain.” She vanished below the floor.
Blackhawk staggered the rest of the way across the bridge, grabbing hold of Ace’s chair and pulling himself around. He sat and bent over the scope immediately. “We’ve got twenty-plus enemy craft launching, Lucas. And that’s only from this hemisphere.”
“I’m punching it hard, Skip, but I’m a big fan of having a hull between us and the atmosphere.”
You and me both. But I’m not a fan of catching a missile in the nonmelted hull.
Blackhawk could feel the ship bucking as the thrusters pushed it faster into the Castillan sky. He knew Lucas was taking it right to the limit. The Claw would be fine once she cleared the atmosphere. The big question was if she would clear it. The Castillans didn’t have anything that could catch her in space, at least not in a straight-out chase. Blackhawk sighed, watching the enemy ships moving slowly on the scope. At least the thick air was a factor that limited them both equally. That gave the Claw a chance to escape.
I hope.
“Plot us the best course to avoid enemy contacts. Let’s see if we can get out of here without a battle. It’d be nice to have someplace we could come back to for a change.” He didn’t have any real desire to return to Castilla, but the list of places where the Claw and its crew had worn out their welcome was getting long.
“Already working on it, Skip. Give me thirty seconds.”
Blackhawk dialed up Shira’s turret. “You in place yet?”
“Yeah, Cap. Just strapping in and powering up the guns.” He could hear her scrambling into position and slamming the hatch behind her. The turrets were tight spaces, and nobody really fit in them, at least not well. He had no idea how Tarq managed to squeeze his massive frame in there, but somehow he did, and never once complained.
Ace, on the other hand, complained every. Single. Time.
I wish I had him complaining right now.
Blackhawk flipped the comm unit, bringing the second turret on the line. He knew Tarq would still be working his way through the narrow hatch. He could hear the giant’s uncomfortable grunts through the comm. “Listen to me, both of you: I want you ready, but don’t fire unless I give the order. No matter what. Understood?”
They both answered yes.
“We’re going to try to get out of here without committing an act of war.” He paused for a few seconds, pondering how the Castillans would view kidnapping one of their oligarchs. “Another one, I mean.”
The ship shook again, almost knocking Doc off his feet. He was standing over Ace, staring down at his hands, both of which were deep inside the unconscious man’s chest, working feverishly. The first shot was a flesh wound, but the second one was bad. Really bad. It had clipped the heart, tearing several holes in the muscle and causing a massive amount of bleeding.
The Claw’s sick bay had a decent supply of artificial blood, an expensive luxury that few adventurers’ vessels could afford. That had kept Ace alive so far, but Doc still had to repair the damage to save his patient. And regardless of the nickname the crew had given him, Rolf Sandor wasn’t a surgeon. At least not one with proper credentials. Medicine had been a hobby for him before he’d hooked up with Blackhawk, just another area of interest for the brilliant scholar, one of many. He’d studied the field, and he had a tremendous storehouse of knowledge. But he’d neve
r practiced medicine, not before the day he’d saved a wounded Blackhawk and found a new home. But an amateur doctor was all Ace Graythorn had, and Sandor wasn’t about to give up on his patient. At least the Claw had a medical AI. That was a help.
Think, think . . . don’t just cut. He’d fused two holes in Ace’s heart, but the pool of blood substitute still filling the chest cavity proved there was another leak. He felt around with his fingers, trying to find the remaining wound. There was another bullet in there, and at least one more perforation.
His own heart was pounding in his ears, and he knew he didn’t have much time. If he didn’t finish up and plug the last hole, and soon, Ace was going to die.
The ship shook again, harder this time, and he reached out with a blood-covered hand and grabbed the edge of the table to stabilize himself. “Fuck,” he muttered, as he staggered toward the decon unit to resterilize his hand. Come on, Ark, he thought. Keep this thing steadier than that, or I’m going to lose him.
“Administer another two units.”
The Claw’s medical AI was a fairly rudimentary unit, but Sandor was glad to have it. The system was scanning Ace’s vitals in real time, and it reported instantly when there were any changes.
“Administering. The supply of artificial blood is nearly depleted. Four additional units remain.” The AI had an androgynous human-sounding voice. Doc mentally flipped a coin and decided it was female.
“Keep two additional units on standby.” He was running out of time. Focus. You can do this.
Doc tried to concentrate on Ace, but he couldn’t suppress a passing thought about the odd path his life had taken, from brilliant university professor to exiled loser of a political struggle to rogue mercenary. The part that surprised him the most was how much he preferred his life on the Claw to his days in academia. For all the danger and hardship—or maybe because of it—Rolf Sandor couldn’t imagine going back to his classroom and his lab.
He probed around, moving his finger slowly, probing for any damage. He felt the frustration rising as he continued without success. The AI was projecting a 3-D image of Ace’s chest. Doc knew where the bullet was, but he couldn’t find the damaged area of the heart wall. It was somewhere under the pool of blood filling Ace’s chest cavity.
Finally, his fingertip felt something. The bullet. He reached out with his other hand, grabbing the extractor. He moved the long, slender tool slowly, carefully, toward the projectile, grabbing it and slowly pulling.
An instant later he dropped the small chunk of metal onto a tray. Good, he thought. “Administer two more units.”
Now I just have to stop the bleeding and get him patched up before I run out of blood substitute.
Katarina sat on the edge of her cot, staring silently at the wall, replaying the last moments of their escape from the Grand Palais. She was troubled, and a strange expression had taken hold of her face.
They had barely gotten away. Another minute and they would all have been killed or captured. But Lucas had managed to bring the Claw down over the large roof deck just in time, somehow wedging the ship into the tight confines next to the hotel’s massive tower. He popped the lower hatch and dropped a bunch of lines to the ground, and they had frantically scrambled aboard.
Her agile mind focused hard on every aspect of the operation: the final fight with the guards, the race to climb up before enemy reinforcements arrived, the effort of getting a wounded Blackhawk and unconscious Aragona aboard.
Then Ace went down in hail of enemy fire.
He’d been the last one, the rearguard, standing under the shadow of the Claw, guns in both hands. His assault rifles spewed death and held the enemy back while his friends climbed to safety.
Katarina had been staring right at him when he was hit. The first shot took him in the shoulder. He staggered back, but he stayed on his feet and kept on firing without so much as a pause. It was no more than a few seconds, a fleeting instant, before he was hit again. The shot took him full on in the chest, and he dropped instantly, his guns falling to the ground next to him. He lay motionless on the rooftop.
Blackhawk saw it too, and he lunged across the deck, now slick with his own blood. He was reaching for one of the lines, determined to go back down and rescue Ace, ignoring his own wound. But Tarnan grabbed him hard, his massive arms holding the captain like a vise while Tarq slid down the cable toward Ace’s still form.
Katarina felt an urge to follow, but she stayed frozen in place, unsure if it was discipline or panic holding her back. She was as cold-blooded and fearless in battle as Blackhawk, but something about seeing Ace sprawled out on the concrete below hit her hard, stripping her of her normal decisiveness.
She stood stone still and watched as Tarq dropped to the roof, certain the big man would never make it back up with Ace through the heavy enemy fire. She was about to rush to one of the cables when a blinding flash ripped through the air, and the shattered remnants of the hotel wall erupted into flame and debris.
Another flash followed, and she stared down where the enemy guards had been a few seconds before. The macabre scene was lit by half a dozen fires. There was nothing visible through the clouds of billowing smoke except wreckage and charred bodies.
She understood right away. It had been Shira. Through all the confusion and chaos of the final escape, Shira Tarkus had kept her wits. She’d run to the needle gun controls and blasted the enemy guards to bits, clearing the way for Tarq to rescue Ace.
Katarina was silent now, her mind confused and uncertain as she stared at the wall of her cabin. Discipline was second nature to her, almost a religion. She’d been trained in the ways of the Sebastiani Assassins’ Guild since childhood. Its tenets and commandments had governed her life as long as she could remember—they made her the person she was. She had earned the gold belt, over a hundred confirmed kills. She’d taken out heads of state and leaders of criminal organizations, and she’d survived mission after mission. She had excelled because of her discipline. But it had failed her during the escape, and she had hesitated when she should have acted.
She knew what it was, at least in part, and it was something she hadn’t wanted to face. Sebastiani assassins worked alone. Solitude was part of the life, hand in hand with discipline. Emotions, loyalties, even vendettas—they all interfered with the cold, rational judgment expected of graduates of the Sebastiani school. She had lived her life devoted to these principles, but now she found herself facing growing doubts. She knew she had been on Wolf’s Claw for too long. She had clearly lost her edge. She’d found friends, a family . . .
And that was a luxury an assassin couldn’t afford.
She’d fooled herself with mind games, petty frauds she perpetrated to drive away her doubts. She paid for her passage, insisting she wasn’t really one of the crew. But her lies were empty, and only she had been fooled.
She knew she had to leave, to return to the loneliness that made her one of the most gifted practitioners of her trade. And yet, the idea ripped at her heart. She didn’t want to abandon those she now realized had become her friends, to leave them to face danger without her blade and skills at their side. And she knew, whatever she did, she couldn’t force herself to depart now.
Not until she knew Ace was going to survive.
She’d viewed the Claw’s informal first officer as a clownish buffoon when she first arrived on board, but two years of living in close quarters and fighting side by side had shown her a different side. The boisterous loudmouth was as much an alias for Jason Graythorn as her own noblewoman persona was for her. The real man hidden beneath the bluster was far different from what he appeared to be. And she began to realize he was far more important to her than she’d imagined.
She stood up and opened the hatch, walking out into the short corridor. She moved toward the small alcove that housed the Claw’s sick bay and stopped, standing at the far end of the room, watching quietly as Doc worked frantically to save Ace’s life. She didn’t say anything. Even her breath was si
lent. She just stood with her eyes fixed on Doc and waited to see if Ace Graythorn would survive. As she stood there, she suddenly realized something.
I don’t know what I will do if he doesn’t.
“Just keep us out of range, Lucas. Those Castillan tubs can’t keep up with the Claw.”
Of course, Blackhawk knew it wasn’t that simple. There had been patrol ships on duty in the space around Castilla as well as on the ground, and they too had responded when the alarm went out. There were hostiles heading toward Wolf’s Claw along four different vectors. But he couldn’t give the order to jump, not yet. Entering hyperspace would scrag most of the systems on the ship, including sick bay. And that would kill Ace.
“I’m on it, Ark. But you know they’re going to run us down eventually. There’s no vector that will get us past them all, at least not without spending some time in weapons range.”
He did know all that, but he thought that as long as he didn’t voice it, maybe a solution could be found. One bit of good news: at least the ship was fully functional this time. That wasn’t something they’d been able to take for granted over the years, and Blackhawk knew Lucas would take full advantage of it.
Blackhawk looked down at the comm controls on the armrest of his chair. He was tempted to check in with Doc again, but he resisted the urge. The Claw’s resident scholar and part-time doctor was doing everything he could to save Ace. Blackhawk had no doubt of that. There was no point in interrupting him with comm chatter.
“Fifteen minutes, Skip.” Lucas was staring at a tangled web of plotting calculations on his screen. “Seventeen tops. Then we’ll have to jump or fight.”
Blackhawk sighed. Seventeen minutes wasn’t a long time, and the decision looming ahead of him was one he dreaded. The Claw could take on one or two of the Castillan patrol ships, and maybe even more, with a strong prospect of victory. But there were a lot more than one or two out there, and engaging the first group would slow their escape, allowing more enemy units to converge. Staying in the system was gambling with the lives of everyone on the Claw. But jumping now was a death sentence for Ace.
