Chapter Twenty-Seven

Horror knocked the breath right out of Edie’s chest. She stared at the grim-faced monarch.

“Edie.” V’kyrri said.

Displaced rage, scattered by Eilod’s demand for aid, coalesced and landed square on him. She jabbed a finger at him. “Don’t you dare try to sweet talk me. Not when you knew you were dying. And especially not when you knew that everyone I give a damn about gets ripped away.”

“Hear the soldiers out,” he urged, eyes irrationally alight and a smile on his lips. He rose to face her, his shirt open and the lines of his chest taunting her.

Her mouth watered, recalling the taste of his skin. Damn it.

“If these are the soldiers sent to investigate Immin’s ship, it means something that they’re asking for you and not their commanding officers,” he said.

Stiffening her spine, she forced her gaze away. “Fine. I’ll help. On this one thing.” She strode back the way she and he had come.

“Wait for your attaché,” he said, peeling away Raj’s sensors and buttoning up his shirt when she glanced over her shoulder. He met her eye. “General.”

Turning away, she fumbled the SEM frames from her face, hands shaking. She’d never, throughout the occupation and war, bent her head to the empire. Yet here she was. Marching to their signal because it matched hers. And maybe because she couldn’t resist a certain Claugh captain.

Her people needed her.

Except as a means of manipulating her people, the Claugh didn’t need her. Neither did V’kyrri. Not anymore.

She’d kept her promise. She’d reunited him with his people. It was time to cut the cords. Before Trente’s admonition came true and the Claugh ate her alive.

Her skin tingled. Awareness prickled her nerves.

V’kyrri put a hand beneath her hair and massaged the stony muscles. “Ever lead a squad?”

Edie sagged, shook her head. “I’m not qualified to lead a group of kids on a camping trip, much less act as any kind of general.”

“That’s where I come in.” He drew her against his body. “I’ve got your back.”

Relief flushed her. She straightened when she longed to go on leaning and pasted a smile to her face. She put her glasses in place. A twinge of headache suggested she was coloring well outside the addiction lines. Again. On both the SEM and V’kyrri.

Maybe she’d better get a grip on this general-ing business and stand on her own two feet. Even if she wobbled.

V’kyrri needed his people and his family.

She needed—what she couldn’t have. Withdrawal would be hell.

“I’ve got this,” she said.

“No officer shall enter any potentially hostile situation without backup.”

“Officers of the Claugh nib Dovyyth probably shouldn’t quote regs to resistance fighters.” She walked out from beneath the comfort of his touch.

He chuckled.

When they emerged into the holding pen, V’kyrri mapped the lay of the people contained by the pen and tucked it into her head.

Jonas and the rest of the cell clustered to the left of the gate. The quartet of soldiers asking for her stood at the gate, brows lowered, gazes focused dead ahead.

From the far-right hand corner, Tiimetes threw a vicious glare her way.

The sergeant at the gate snapped to attention and made to salute.

“Don’t,” she signed with a swipe of closed fingers across her body. “No tipping anyone off. I’m unofficial, right?”

Comprehension widened the man’s brown eyes. He canted his body to shield what he said, “We investigated the assassin’s ship.”

A private stepped forward, a handheld in her grip.

“Given the information we recovered,” the sergeant went on, “we wanted to give it to someone who all the Nol Jakze can trust. Will you accept the files?”

Jonas and the knot of resistance fighters shifted, a subtle motion of spines straightening, and traded glances.

Edie registered how they’d been privy to the conversation. The fact that these soldiers now trusted old revolutionaries rather than their own commanders made prickles tighten on the skin between her shoulder blades.

“Summary?” she asked. “What’s on there that you can’t trust to your higher-ups?”

“Proof, ma’am,” he said. “Everything you said and worse.”

Edie wilted. She accepted the handheld.

“No.” V’kyrri whispered into her head when she hesitated with it.

“Your queen needs this,” she thought at him.

“She’s your queen, too. And yes. She does, but the last thing you want is for people to see you pass Nol Jakzian military secrets to a Claugh captain.”

Excellent point. One that drove home how little experience she had playing hero. Or general. She tucked the unit into a shielded pocket of her tool belt.

She couldn’t lead these people. Couldn’t even begin to know how. They deserved better. Jonas, maybe.

Still. She’d be happy to rub Tiimetes’ nose in the mess he’d made. She met Jonas’s eye, then the sergeant’s. “If we don’t arrest the governor, the Claugh will.”

“Yes, ma’am. It will be necessary to surrender custody anyway, as the captain can tell you,” the sergeant said, looking at V’kyrri. “Ranking Claugh officials have jurisdiction.”

“For the duration of the outbreak, Her Majesty is on world to coordinate medical relief efforts. Her Majesty recognizes and encourages the right of the people to police their own,” V’kyrri said aloud.

Edie translated, then added, “Will you assist?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Edie moved to the middle of the yard, V’kyrri and the clump of soldiers at her left shoulder, Jonas and the other resistance fighters closed in on her right.

Tiimetes met her gaze, his features impassive. Detainees clustered into position to see what she had to say.

“Never hire an assassin who’ll dig up everything about you to sell to the highest bidder,” Edie said. She tapped her tool belt. “I don’t understand what you hoped to gain by killing everyone on world.”

Onlookers shifted, fingers and hands fluttering as they murmured amongst themselves.

“You’ve always lacked vision,” he replied. “And the will to do what was necessary to achieve freedom.”

She gaped. “The occupation benefited you directly. Tii, your own soldiers searched Immin’s ship. They found proof that you not only authorized the murder of our people, you actively aided and abetted it.”

The people clustered around him eased away.

“How dare you…” he wheezed, his muscles tightening.

“You planned to use the Chekydran to drive out the Claugh and then what?” she demanded. “You’d be beholden to TFC where you wouldn’t even get a vote in the council?”

“I’d have freed us. The thing you wanted and failed to do,” he shouted. “That’s what they promised. Equal recognition under TFC law. We’d have been wholly independent, while I—”

“You what? Pretended to be king? Of a dead planet? You’ve murdered millions.”

He shrugged it off and waved a hand to indicate the holding pen. “They idolize you of all people.”

Faces around the yard hardened. Shoulders rode high and tight.

“They idolize the resistance,” she countered. “Not me. You were included.”

“It wasn’t enough,” he snapped. “All the stories are about you. No one knew my name until I became governor. And now, it doesn’t matter, does it? The Chekydran are here. People are dying. And this time, Firestorm, there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.”

A man in a limp, damp business suit rushed Tiimetes. Tii sidestepped and planted the heel of his hand in the man’s lower back, sending him sprawling. Another onlooker planted a fist in Tii’s jaw.

The crowd surged.

Pure instinct. Edie darted between Tii and the mob. V’kyrri and the soldiers joined her.

“Stand aside.”

“Let us—”

“He deserves to die.”

“The same has been said of me,” Edie said, making her words big enough to be seen by everyone. “That I killed innocents, and I deserve to die. It’s been said of several of us. We don’t have a death penalty on Nol Jakze for a reason. Who among us is qualified to judge this man?”

Hands and expressions trembled.

Finally, a woman in mud-smeared trousers asked, “Did you? Kill my father and brother on the train to Jorzance City?”

“No,” she said. “I swear on my parents’ graves. I’ve blown up my share of trains, I admit. But they were troop carriers.”

“Once the Claugh started forcing our civilians to ride the trains with them, she refused to blow up any more,” Jonas said.

“You are such children,” Tiimetes slurred. He uttered an eerie, high-pitched burble of laughter that rode up her SEM’s audio display, and then he crumpled to the concrete behind her.

Edie turned.

Blood leaked from Tiimetes’s nose. Her stomach lurched. The hit to his jaw. Or the fall. Right? Not plague. Not so soon.

Terror clenched her in a cold fist. “V’kyrri.”

“Medical emergency,” V’kyrri said into a ship’s badge she hadn’t registered. “The governor is down. Repeat, planetary governor is down. Active bleed.”

****

Edie sat at the makeshift conference table in a tent behind the Sen Ekir, her head in her hands.

“We’re out of options for Governor Calamae,” silver-haired Dr. Idylle said, his hand heavy on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

Did she have to lift her head for him to see her nod? No. But she did have questions. Lots and lots of questions she didn’t want answers to.

“How long?” she forced herself to ask as she sat upright.

The fine lines at the corners of Dr. Idylle’s eyes and mouth deepened. “Days and only a few of those.”

“He had to have been infected before the bombs,” Jayleia said. “One man in detention had a fever. He’s in the isolation ward. Everyone else has been vaccinated and released. The soldiers you asked for and their lieutenant are through decon and getting some down time.”

“There’s a teenager in my ship,” Edie said.

Jay nodded. “No problem.”

“What evidence do we have that the governor might have been exposed prior to planetary infection?” the blonde, silver-eyed hologram of Captain Ari Idylle asked.

Edie tapped the handheld the soldiers had given her. “If there’s direct evidence, it’ll be in here. At the very least, it proves he’s a traitor.”

“Major?” the captain said.

Damen, newly released from medical, took the handheld, and plugged it into a port.

Edie, V’kyrri, and to her shock, the Chekydran-ki had helped Pietre set up the massive tent, bring in chairs, tables, solid fuel heaters, and then they’d installed com gear. It brought holograms of Admiral Seaghdh, Captain Idylle, and Zain Durante, Edie’s former boss, to the chairs at the conference table.

Despite the heaters, Edie shivered. “You think Tii’s ‘allies’ poisoned him at their last meet up.”

“Working hypothesis,” Captain Idylle said.

Edie shook her head. “Cold. And I say that as someone who knows a few too many ways President Durgot can be a treacherous Orhait’s ass.”

Admiral Seaghdh, the razorblade of a man wrapped in a uniform so dark green it looked black, met her eye, his own narrowed. Sizing her up. “How do you figure into this situation, Ms. Drake?”

“Name’s Edie. I don’t. I grew a conscience in the wrong place at the right time.”

“You saved enemy soldiers,” V’kyrri said, contradicting her. “Your conscience was a pre-existing condition.”

“There’s a price on your head,” Ari said. “Several, as I understand it.”

“Suggesting you do figure into this,” the admiral concluded.

“Durgot’s a paranoid psychotic, but until he started sending messages pleading for me to ‘come home’ after the Silver City thing, I had no idea he knew I existed. And now he’s trying to fix the ‘exist’ part,” Edie grumbled.

“When you failed to respond to his messages, Durgot released your identity,” Durante said. “The prices on your head rapidly followed.”

“I want to know how he could give up something only you were supposed to have,” Edie replied.

Her former boss studied her. That hazel gaze and the faint downturn of his mouth kept agents and mercenaries alike in line for the entire decade she’d been subject to it.

No one spoke.

Durante taught Edie to play this power game. She’d never won. Not against him. But then, she’d been betrayed before, and this time, she’d be damned before she went down without a fight.

Finally, he spread his fingers wide. “I do not betray my agents’ trust, Edie. It was not I.”

Sincerity delivered with perfect grammar even. He believed what he said. She believed what he said. Relief stung her eyes. She sighed, pulled her lenses down and pinched the bridge of her nose. She opened her eyes and slid the glasses back into place. “Doesn’t explain why Durgot wants me dead.”

“You have something on him,” Turrel said.

She threw her arms wide. “What? I am—was—an operative with very specific and limited scope. What could I possibly have on him? Director?”

“I’m sorry, Edie. I have no further data on that front.”

“Will you allow us access to t’Achriedes-myn’s systems?” Ari asked.

“You mean you aren’t past my lockouts already?” she sniped.

V’kyrri put a hand on her wrist. “We’re on the same side, Edie.”

Edie slumped. “How fond I am of being reminded I have nothing left to lose. Here.”

Damen took her access code.

“We’re not after your trade secrets,” Ari said. “Just digging for whatever has Durgot interested in tying up the loose end he thinks you represent.”

“You’re going to take what you want anyway.”

“In the interests of fighting Chekydran and, if I have to, TFC? You bet,” the woman said. Not a mote of guilt or remorse in her expression. “TFC plays hardball. You should be used to it by now.”

She was. “Tell me you can bomb the Chekydran out of existence from your orbital position.”

“The Hiin,” Ari corrected. “I wish I could. They’ve erected a defense screen.”

V’kyrri and Edie traded a glance.

“The crystal,” V’kyrri said.

Edie sucked a breath between clenched teeth. “I need in there before it’s impossible to get in there.”

“It may not be necessary,” V’kyrri began. “We—”

“It is.” Dr. Idylle and Jayleia said simultaneously.

Eilod leaned into the table. “New data?”

“The Ki flew over the installation,” Jay said. “While the crystal is in place, they cannot influence their Hiin.”

“Translate,” V’kyrri said.

“The Chekydran-ki sing their Hiin into metamorphosis,” Jayleia said. “We developed an endocrine bomb, a chemical that, in combination with parental song, triggers the Hiin to spin cocoons, where they stay until the queen releases them.”

“Ship’s engines in atmosphere interfered with the song in one case,” Dr. Idylle said. “It appears the Hiin noted the aberration and found a way to turn sound to their defense. Our hypothesis is that the crystal is augmenting the planetary hum as a means of blocking their parents’ song.”

Edie frowned. He wore inserts of some kind in either ear. They all did. Eilod and V’kyrri included. Edie touched her ear. The doctor dipped his chin.

“Pietre customized noise-cancelling com-sets used by in-atmosphere fighter pilots.” Dr. Idylle tapped one of the earpieces. “We no longer remove them. The headaches, irritability, sleep disturbances, and irrationality seem to have been cured. The effect appears limited to non-natives.”

“Non-hearing,” she corrected, the blood draining from her head.

He lifted an eyebrow. “Non-hearing? Can you elaborate?”

“Occasionally hearing children are born,” she said. “They don’t often survive on world. Tiimetes is one of the very few who did, in fact. Shortly after birth, hearing babies stop sleeping. They stop eating. Nothing our medical people did worked. The only cure was taking them off-world. No one ever knew why.”

He shook his head. “Hearing tests became codified procedure, and any child born with hearing is removed from Nol Jakze because the baby’s system would be overwhelmed by a sound no one else could perceive.”

“When I realized who our esteemed guest was,” Ari nodded at Edie, “I remembered the hysteria in the TFC media over the Claugh invasion of Nol Jakze.”

Dr. Idylle’s head came up. His blue eyes glittered with interest. “Right’s violations. If I recall, the Council filed formal protests with the empire over Nol Jakze.”

“Many of them,” Eilod said.

“Alexandria,” Dr. Idylle said, eyes wide, one hand outstretched to the flickering holograph of his daughter.

Ari tipped her head. “I believe I’m thinking what you’re thinking. The Claugh forces that occupied Nol Jakze had no way of knowing about the planetary hum. The Autken had no reason to set foot on world before we brought Damen in as an ancillary member of the Sen Ekir crew.”

“If we could establish a pattern as to how and when incoming troops were driven mad—”

“ ‘Driven’?” Edie erupted. “There’s no ‘driven’ to it. They just are.” She shot a glance around the table. “Present company excepted only when wearing hearing protection.”

Dr. Idylle’s light blue gaze slid her way, his brows scrunched.

V’kyrri smoothed a hand down her spine. Welcome warmth spread into her body.

Propping her elbows on the table, Edie framed her face as if her hands were blinders. If the Claugh who’d invaded hadn’t been mad before they’d arrived on Nol Jakze, then they, too, were victims. Right alongside Edie’s parents. So many assumptions from her past, so many self-evident truths, all being ripped apart.

She shoved away from the table.

V’kyrri rose with her, lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth.

She shook her head. “I’m not okay with rewriting who the victims were.”

“Nothing will make what happened here okay, Edie,” V’kyrri said, the lines on his face deepening.

“No. It won’t.” Edie tried to shift away the ache in her chest. It didn’t work. “Leave it. Time to focus on right now. Tiimetes has information. Someone needs to get it from him. Might as well be me. At least I know when he’s lying.”

V’kyrri’s eyes widened, and his fingers flexed before he forced them ramrod straight. She waited for him to say something. Anything. He’d closed off since they’d brought Tiimetes inside. She’d resorted to her SEM to navigate the nuances of this group of strangers. It left her nauseated and in pain. Not to mention lonely.

Ah, the joys of addiction.

“I’ll allow it.” Dr. Idylle said. “Provided you follow all sensible precaution.”

“Does he know?” Edie met the older man’s eye.

Dr. Idylle frowned.

“That he’s dying, Linnaeus,” Jayleia clarified.

“Yes. We could not ethically withhold that information.”

“Good,” Edie said.

The man paled, but he summoned Raj.

“Ms. Drake, one does not…” the admiral began, the harsh peaks and valleys of his audio signal reaching through her SEM to give her a splitting headache. He broke off.

Edie glanced at the table. The queen had a hand up. “Captain V’kyrri, be seated.”

“Eilod—”

“Dr. Idylle,” the monarch went on as if V’kyrri hadn’t protested and taken a step closer to Edie. “Is the governor in any condition to present a physical danger to Edie?”

“He is secured,” Dr. Idylle said. “Patients in later stages of the disease can become confused and attempt to rise.”

“Very well,” Eilod said, then met Edie’s eye. “May we rely upon a report?”

“You’re really going to pretend you won’t be listening?” Edie shot. “He hates speaking our native language, but if he does, and it bears repeating in polite company, you bet.”

Turrel snickered.

“Edie?” V’kyrri murmured.

She looked at him. Uncertainty hung on the shadows in the hollows of his cheeks and darkened his eyes. Edie’s fingers twitched with the impulse to smooth the tension from his jaw. If he’d only get into her head and talk to her—with her head aching from emptiness, she offered him a faint smile, the only reassurance she could summon.

His features relaxed. “Be careful.”