by Natalie Grey
Nyx, who was trying to kill Tera’s father. Tera had to remember that. She thrust the thoughts of friendship away and considered.
“Wait.”
“What?” Nyx shot her a quick look.
“Your informant. Was this the one who gave you the original information about Aleksandr?”
Nyx shook her head. “No. That information, we found on our own.”
Tera felt her brow furrow. Whoever had planted it was subtler than she had guessed. She had assumed from the start that this was the work of an informant, but who would have known to plant the information and wait for someone like Talon to stumble over it? She cursed silently. She’d never thought even he might not know his source.
Something to consider later. It just meant she had to live through what was coming, that was all. She steadied herself as she walked through the door to the makeshift war room. The woman, the one in the pilot’s jumpsuit—Aryn, was it?—had perched on a stool in the corner, careful not to get in anyone’s way. She smiled at Tera.
“Hello.” She did not ask about the handcuffs.
“Where’s Talon?”
“With Cade, sending a message. They said for everyone to meet them here.” The woman hesitated, looking to Nyx, and then her blue-grey eyes went back to Tera. “Talon said you were here to bring the Warlord down.”
“Yes, I….” Tera tried to find a good word for the layers of lies she had been crafting. “I defected when I learned the truth.”
“Oh. So that’s why….” She gestured at the handcuffs.
“Yes.” Tera was, as usual, not entirely sure where to go from here in the conversation.
“And how did you, ah … know him?” Aryn gamely filled the silence.
I’m his daughter. No, too much. “I was one of his assassins.”
Only when Aryn’s face went stony did Tera remember. This is Aryn, a former inhabitant of Ymir.
“I—not on Ymir.”
“Mm.” The sound was barely strong enough to be heard. Aryn looked away.
This was dangerous. She had the ear of the former Dragon, and that man clearly had Talon’s. Aryn must be convinced.
“I know what you must think,” Tera said quietly. “But I swear to you, I only knew him as Aleksandr Soras. He saved my life on Osiris and adopted me. I helped him take down people who were beyond the reach of the law, people he couldn’t get to any other way. I only killed people who deserved it.”
“The Dragons thought that, too.” Aryn’s gaze was surprisingly direct.
Tera paused, at a loss. Her gaze met Nyx’s.
“He sent us on missions to take out the resistance leaders on Ymir.” The Dragon’s mouth twisted. “Told us the targets were the Warlord’s men and sent us in.” At Tera’s horror, she seemed almost amused. “Didn’t you ever wonder why the boss is so angry?”
She hadn’t, in point of fact, but it fit now. She’d seen the way he looked after the soldiers he commanded. To know that they had been ill-used—
It was all lies, she reminded herself. Lies.
“I knew the ones I killed,” she said finally. For the first time, it sounded like a weak defense. “I saw the things they did with my own eyes. They were slave traders, arms traffickers.”
“Did he ever send you after someone named Ellian Pallas?” Aryn’s voice was bitter.
“No. Ellian got some weapons for me once.” She remembered the man’s cold face. “You know him?”
“He was my husband,” Aryn said shortly. “The Warlord’s armorer.” She looked down at her hands. “Not my best decision.”
“You didn’t know,” Nyx said soothingly.
“You were—” Tera looked over. Lies and truth were merging, overlapping until she was dizzy with it. Ellian had been Aleksandr’s armorer as well as the Warlord’s. Whoever wanted to take Aleksandr down had known just where to spread the lies to make them believable.
“He took me out of the mines,” Aryn explained. Her voice was still wary as she looked at Tera. “It seemed like a good deal at the time.”
“I should think a Dragon’s a better deal,” Tera said before she could stop herself, and Aryn gave a surprised laugh.
“A much better deal.” She had thawed somewhat. “I didn’t mean to be rude, you know. Of course you came to help when you found out who he was. No one knew for so long….”
“We’ll take him down,” Nyx promised her, looking up briefly from the map. “For Ymir.”
“You’ve done enough for Ymir. We’re free.” Aryn smiled back at the woman. “Though I wouldn’t mind seeing him brought to trial.”
“You don’t have a vengeful bone in your body, do you? You should spend some time with the boss.”
Tera looked between them, trying to understand the way her stomach was twisting. So Aryn had lived on Ymir. Tera shouldn’t feel guilty for that. Only the Warlord should feel guilty for that—and the Warlord was not, absolutely not Aleksandr Soras. She had to keep remembering that, no matter how the others spoke. She had seen people who lied before. She could keep her mind clear.
Only these weren’t lies, not precisely. Everyone here believed them.
Talon’s entrance, thankfully, saved her from having to think. He looked around the room and nodded at all of them.
“No word. She’s gone underground. Tersi can’t find a trace of her.”
“It’ll take anyone else ten times as long even to get there,” Nyx said reassuringly. “I assume he’s still looking.”
“Of course. We should offer her protection if we can.” Talon leaned over the map. “I can’t imagine why she didn’t ask.”
“Probably because she assumed you wouldn’t be stupid enough to go back to Akintola,” Cade offered.
“It isn’t stupid.”
“But that’s because you have me,” Tera concurred. She raised an eyebrow at Talon’s surprise. “She didn’t know you have me. Mr. Williams is right.”
Talon looked vaguely grumpy at that. “We’ll find her if we can. Now. Objective. We need to turn off surveillance in one of the government offices long enough for us to get in there and track that message. We need to figure out where the hell that bastard’s hiding.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Aryn murmured. “Where would he go that wasn’t Ymir or the central planets?”
“Not Ragnarok,” Talon answered precisely. “But we really don’t know much beyond that. Now, Lesedi seems to have been working on pretty much the same thing. Using her possible locations should be quicker than doing a full trace….” He sighed heavily. “If she was right.”
“If anyone’s right, it’s Lesedi.” Nyx raised her eyebrows.
“But how would she know?” Tera interjected. She didn’t know which way to steer this—which way would be slower, and thus better. During the operation, they’d be working on a margin of seconds, and if she could just cause enough indecision to eat up some time, they might well have to get out before Talon could complete a full trace.
On the other hand, a trace was surer. If she bargained wrong….
“Lesedi is good,” Talon told her.
“Even I didn’t know where he was hiding,” Tera pointed out, clinging to her story about Ragnarok. “A trace is surer.”
“But much slower,” Nyx pointed out, playing into Tera’s game without knowing it.
Dammit, she should not feel guilty about this.
“We’ll decide when we get there,” Talon said, cutting off the discussion with a chop of his hand. “Hell, there’s a chance Tersi will have gotten something with this intel by the time we reach Akintola. In the meantime, we figure out where to go when we get there.”
“This way.” Tera seized on the topic gratefully. Things were going from bad to worse with this mission, and if she didn’t focus on something, she was going to start frowning. She laid the counters out. “No red on your uniforms, obviously.”
“I’m familiar with Akintola,” Talon said drily.
“Right. Okay, who’s going with us?”
“Loki and Tersi.”
“Well, remember this to tell Tersi, then: out the door and to the left, cut this corner narrow against the grain of traffic and you’ll miss the body camera here in the wall.” She tapped at one part of the diagram. “Now, there are only two types of people who go to the financial district: really good criminals, and people who actually work there. Sometimes both. The point is, from here on out, you get through by not acting like a good criminal. Walk right down the center of these corridors here, go as close to the center of the doorway as you can, and go straight across the plaza here. The cameras will catch you, but the scanners only catch the outsides where people are trying to sneak. Holmsten & Jacobs is in this tower here and they employ Kellen mercenaries, so the best thing to do is put a blue bar on the left arm of your uniform here.” She drew a line up the middle third of the inside of her forearm. “From here, it’s quick to get past the edge of the district to get back into the government offices—if you’re stopped, say you’re going to check patent requisitions, it makes everyone’s eyes glaze over—and the two buildings we want are here and here.”
“Good.” Talon nodded, having apparently given up his objections to the financial district. “Sphinx and Gabriel will stay with the Ariane. Everyone else, suit up—we’re taking the Io.”
13
“You know this plan is terrible.” Cade’s voice sounded in Talon’s earpiece. The decontamination wash was taking longer than usual, and Cade seemed to be certain that all of it was a trap. Talon refrained from sighing.
It didn’t help.
“What’s wrong?” Tera did not look up from where she was programming one of the hacking devices, but Talon could feel the awareness in her. It never wavered, never flagged. He found himself wondering, when he was alone, just what would make that composure break. The end of the world, maybe. Or his lips at her throat—
Down, boy. He hoped his breathing rate had not increased; failing that, he could only hope she didn’t figure out why it had.
She was still staring at him. He needed to come up with something to say. Something that wasn’t, for instance, a detailed accounting of his dreams last night. Or how he’d woken up with his heart racing and found himself in the armory at two in the morning, trying to wear away his thoughts on the punching bag. Or how that hadn’t worked. He cleared his throat.
“You’re not nervous, are you?” Her voice was warm.
He tilted his head. Nervous worked as a lie. It explained everything.
“You don’t need to be.” She looked over at him. “You’re good.”
“’Good’ isn’t enough to—”
“You’re very good,” she said simply. Her eyes met his, and there was nothing there beyond a simple statement of fact. Or maybe there was. He saw a flash—the same confusion in her eyes that he felt roiling in his chest?
It was gone too quickly for him to say. Her eyes went flat again, and she pressed her lips together the way she did when she didn’t want to give anything away.
“I’m not nervous.” He didn’t get nervous before combat. Until Tera, he would have said he didn’t get nervous for any reason. He touched his earpiece, checking that he was still on the private channel to the cockpit of the Io. “Everything’s fine here.”
“If you say so.” Cade didn’t sound convinced.
“Mr. Williams is worried?” Tera looked over at him, having picked up Cade’s tone, if not his words. “That makes more sense than you being worried.”
“Cade was a good soldier,” Talon said instantly.
“I don’t doubt it. He doesn’t like anything about this.” She considered, seemingly unaware of Loki and Tersi watching her from the other side of the decontamination chamber. “He doesn’t want Aryn involved.”
“Can you blame him?” Talon looked over at her. “Tera….” He hesitated, but she knew the truth about her father; she could stand to hear what it had meant to others. “Aryn grew up knowing that she could be dragged out of her house and shot for anything—any crime she’d committed or they’d decided to say she committed. She knew she could be given to any of your father’s seconds-in-command as a gift. She watched it happen to people she knew. And she knew that if none of that happened, she’d work in the mines until she died.” He felt the familiar anger twisting in his chest. “She knew that someone like me might come into her house and kill her,” he said quietly, “and there would be nothing she could do to fight back.”
Tera’s eyes were as flat as they ever were, but her lips had parted. As he watched, she pressed them together and looked away. Her skin had a greyish tinge; her breath came in a jerk before it slowed again.
“Should I not have said that?”
“We all knew what the Warlord did.” She did not look back. “It’s…difficult…to believe that the Warlord was my father.”
“Do you believe it?” She didn’t seem to him like a woman who indulged in self-delusion. But he must have been wrong about her, because she met his eyes and her brow furrowed.
“Often, no, I can’t.” There was silence in the decontamination unit as her gaze raked over all of them, coming to rest back on Talon. “I’ll do what needs to be done,” she said defiantly. More quietly, pitching her voice for Talon’s ears alone even though she must know the chamber was too small for that, she added, “I know you aren’t going to bring me with you when you go.”
The breath went out of him in a whoosh. He had wanted to speak to her about this, going to the brig half a dozen times before going away in silence. He hadn’t needed to find words, it turned out now; she knew him in some way he could not understand. He watched her swallow.
“I would do the same,” she said finally and then she took a deep breath as the doors opened and walked out into Akintola Station, forging her way through the crowds in the path she had laid out for them.
This time, whether it was Tera’s lead or the blue stripes on their uniforms, fewer eyes followed them. She ducked casually under the line of sight of some cameras, and slowed her pace fractionally to miss the sweep of others.
They crossed the main plaza in the financial district, the stars glittering and the planet hanging dizzily above them, visible through the windows. It was a spectacular view, Talon thought. No wonder the bankers had snatched this part of the station up.
Then she led them into a warren of back alleyways, calling greetings to a few who looked likely to step into their path.
“I hope you don’t owe any of them money,” Talon murmured into his suit comm.
“Better.” Her voice said that she was smiling. “They owe me favors. Why d’you think I brought us this way?”
When she stopped at last, it was in the lower-ceilinged corridors that led to one of the six towers. She indicated with faint nods of her head which two doors they would use, and reached out to urge Tersi back when he would have stepped into line of sight of one of the cameras.
“This is it.”
“You two go.” Talon nodded to her and Loki.
“Don’t do it.” Cade’s voice sounded in his ear; the man had been listening in. “Don’t let her be alone with him. He’s too young.”
Talon did not respond to that until the two of them were away. “He’s a lot like you.”
“And I’m a gullible bastard.” Talon heard Aryn laugh in the background. “Fell for your shit a few weeks back, didn’t I?”
“Loki knows what’s riding on this.” And Talon had coached him extensively on how to communicate what Tera was doing.
“Mm-hmm.” But Cade fell silent after that.
Talon and Tersi waited quietly in well-practiced stillness as the seconds ticked by. Then:
“It’s done.” Tera’s voice. “You have 48 seconds before the door arms again.”
“Good.” Talon waited.
“Loki.” It was Tera again.
“What?”
“You need to tell Talon I’m not backstabbing everyone.” Her voice was bland.
“Oh. Ah—sir
—”
“Yes?” Talon resisted the urge to sink his head into his hands. Beside him, Tersi was staring straight ahead, clearly trying not to laugh.
“All clear.” Loki sounded faintly miserable.
“Thank you, Loki.” Talon started off down the hall. He could feel Tera’s amusement coming from the nearby offices. Amusement without a hint of indignation. He wanted to—
No, best not to think about that. Talon opened the door of the postmaster’s office and eased his way inside. Normally he would have chosen the Alliance Revenue Service offices, generally a place most people avoided. On Akintola, however, where it was a safe bet that any given person was committing fraud of some kind, those offices were more closely watched than nearly anywhere else.
“Why do they still call these post offices?” Tersi asked. He was hooking one of the devices into a side panel in the wall. He did not look up.
“I have no idea.” Talon waited for the light on his panel to blink green. “Why did they call them post offices to start with?”
“Because that was the mail. ‘The post.’ You’re good to go, by the way.”
“Yeah, but why did they call it ‘post?’”
“I don’t know.”
“You started it.” Try the trace, or Lesedi’s coordinates? Trace, or coordinates?
“Yeah, because I didn’t know.”
Talon felt his face crack into a grin. His fingers danced over the keys, bringing up the coordinates he had memorized. He did better when there was banter, and Tersi knew it. Today, he felt, was a day for faith in his team—and Lesedi was one of them.
The first coordinates returned nothing. So did the second. The third, however, in an old shipping lane in one of the more affluent sub-quadrants, returned a partial lock. Talon’s breath came short. There should be nothing there. The rights to that space were held by a corporation that neither used them, nor gave them out, and….
Good god, why had he not thought to check that?
