CHAPTER 14
Raena took the last of Coni’s moon cakes out of the cooler and carried them back to the Haru girl’s cabin. “It’s me,” Raena said outside the door. “Can I talk to you?”
“It’s open.”
“I brought a peace offering.”
“You didn’t need to do that.”
Coni didn’t get up from her desk. Raena handed the plate of cakes to her and sat on the floor. Coni took a cake and handed the tray down to Raena. They chewed in silence, then Raena said, “You’ve been a good friend to me. I don’t know how much time you put into my defense on Kai, but I know who found the evidence Corvas needed. Thank you.”
Coni waved that away, but accepted a second moon cake. “You are family, Raena.”
“I feel that way, too. I overstepped today. I am sorry.”
“No, I’ve been thinking about what you said. You’re right. I was crazy to think I could fight. I was so scared today, watching you. I couldn’t protect Mykah because I was afraid you would hurt me like that. I’ve been in denial. I thought the fighting would be quick. It would be bloodless, like a game. None of us would be hurt.”
“I get hurt all the time,” Raena said. “Eilif got killed.”
The blue girl nodded. “We’re not playing, are we?”
“No, we’re not,” Raena answered. “I would rather scare you away from combat now, here on the ship, than make you participate and regret it later. We will be safer if we can concentrate on what we’re doing and not worry about you.”
Coni asked plaintively, “Do you have to take Mykah?”
For once, the emotion in her voice was clear. Raena was pretty sure that Mykah wanted to come, but she told Coni what she wanted to hear. “I can go alone.”
“Thank you,” Coni said quickly, as if Raena might change her mind. “I . . . He’s my life. I don’t know what I would do if . . .”
Raena smiled. “You talk him out of coming. I’ll abide by his wishes.”
* * *
Mykah sprawled on the banquette with his arm under the bone-mender. He’d pulled off his shirt to deal with the machine’s heat. Close to hand, he had a glass of ice water and the remote. He paused the news when Coni came in. “You all right?” he asked, holding out his good hand.
Coni wove her fingers between his and came to scent him with her head. “I’ll be all right,” she promised. “I talked to Raena just now.”
“Did you let her live?” he teased.
She chuckled. “Yes. Raena excused me from going into battle with her.” Coni gazed at him with her lavender eyes. “She said you don’t have to go, either.”
“I know I don’t have to,” Mykah said. “What made her decide she didn’t want me to come?”
Coni looked away from him, at the image frozen on the screen. It was one of Mykah’s shots of the rioting on Kai, looking down from the lamppost in front of the Hall of Justice. A Planetary Security agent was in the process of stunning a little Eske.
Coni dragged her gaze away to answer his question. “I don’t want you to go.”
Mykah pulled her closer, then kissed her so she’d know he really meant it. With the lightest touch, she traced the lightning scar that branched across his stomach and onto his chest. He knew she was thinking of how badly he’d gotten hurt the last time he’d followed Raena into a firefight.
He took a deep breath. The pressure to get this right was enormous. “I am going with her,” he said quietly. “Raena can fight us past the gray soldiers. She can take apart the Outriders, if she needs to. But I don’t know if she can negotiate with the Templar Master. I don’t know if I can either, but I’m afraid to trust the future of humanity to a former assassin.”
Coni sat back from him sharply, but he kept hold of her hand and didn’t let her get away.
“You know that’s what she is,” he said. “We can dress it up and call her a warrior, but Raena is a trained killer. I don’t want her to charge in there and kill the reborn Templars because she’s the only representative humanity’s got.”
“You don’t trust her?” Coni asked.
“I trust her to protect us. I trust her with my life. But the gray soldiers have been taunting her all across the galaxy. I don’t trust her temper if they push her too far.”
“I don’t want you to die,” Coni said in Imperial Standard. It was the language Mykah had been born into, the one his parents had spoken to him. Coni used it when she wanted to stress something.
Mykah pulled her back down, so he could feel her fur against his bare skin. “I’ll do my best not to die,” he promised. He used Haru, Coni’s language, so she would understand that he was serious, too.
* * *
Back in her cabin, Raena checked messages, curious to hear how things worked out for Ariel and Corvas with the Business Council. She found several messages from Ariel. One of them was labeled Urgent: Where is Gisela?
Raena marched into the cockpit, where the girl hunched over the controls. She asked Haoun, “Could you give us a moment?”
He looked from one to the other of them and got up without comment.
Once he’d entered the passageway, Raena asked the girl, “You didn’t tell your mother you were coming with us?”
“She would have said no,” Gisela answered.
“She would have said no because you have a concussion.”
“She would have said no because of you,” Gisela argued. “She knows if there’s danger, you won’t back down.”
“I don’t know what Ariel has told you about me—”
Gisela cut her off. “She hasn’t had to tell me much. Eilif told me how you rescued her, how you killed all the Thallians singlehandedly. Haoun showed me the recording of you protecting Mellix outside Capitol City. Kavanaugh told me about watching you disassemble the Outriders. Mykah told me how you saved him from the Walosi on Lautan. I’ve watched the video of you fighting the death squad on Kai. You step up. You face the dangers. You don’t start fights, but you stop them.”
“I’m not a hero, Gisela. Heroes are good people who do the right things for the right reasons. That’s never been me.”
“Who cares what your reasons are, if your actions are heroic? You save people. You protect them. And this thing on Kai, this trial—you showed the galaxy that it’s possible to be graceful and calm in the face of enormous bigotry. Like it or not, you’re a symbol.”
“I never intended that,” Raena said. “Pedestals tend to have tiny cross sections and very long drops.”
Gisela had no answer to that, for which Raena was grateful. The whole conversation made her vastly uncomfortable. “Call your mother,” Raena ordered. “Argue your case to her. If she tells me you can stay, fine. Otherwise, we’re putting you out and she can come pick you up.”
* * *
It wasn’t long before Gisela commed back to Raena’s cabin. Ariel wanted to talk. Raena smiled at her sister’s image on the screen. “What’s your decision, Ari?”
“Gisela can stay, if she stays out of your way. If she’s going to irritate you, put her out.”
Raena studied her oldest friend. For all Ariel’s temper, her heart was tender and fierce. Gisela might not have been hers by birth, but Ariel would believe to the end of her days that the girl was family. Raena wondered if Ariel had ever trusted her with anything as precious.
“Now I’m a damn babysitter,” Raena groused.
“Sorry about that. I should have left her on Callixtos, but she is the best shot among my kids and she’s been a good bodyguard for my mother. I thought she’d provide the best protection for Eilif and Jim. Going to Kai was meant to be an adventure for her.”
“This trip is gonna be an adventure, too,” Raena threatened. “Where was she supposed to be when we left Kai?”
“At the hospital, following that nice Dr. Fishawk’s orders.”
“He was good looking,” Raena agreed. “So he didn’t release her to go charging into battle?”
“No.”
“Then I will do what I can to keep her out of one. But you know I really can’t promise anything.”
“I know, Raena.” Ariel took a long drag off of her spice stick. “She’s about the age I was when I ran away to join the Coalition. I thought I was so grown-up at the time. Was I really that young?”
Raena laughed. Instead of answering, she asked, “How are things working out on Kai?”
“I had a very nice chat with your friend Mellix. Is his fur really that beautiful color?”
“Yes.”
“Lovely. He’s sending an assistant to Kai to conduct some interviews in person. In the meantime, you have been publicly cleared of all charges brought by the Business Council of Kai. Even the weapons charges were expunged, considering that you knew there were Thallians prowling around on the planet. It’s officially agreed that no one should ever have faced them unarmed. Kai gave you a surprisingly generous apology for dragging you into their troubles, in hopes that you will consult with their new Head of Security. We didn’t make them any promises. The bail money has been returned. Corvas’s fees have been paid by the Business Council, in addition to lost income and transportation costs and a myriad of other fees that we were able to extract from them. Nothing too outrageous, but I wanted to make sure it hurt. Oh, and you received the bounty for Revan Thallian.”
Raena smiled at her. “Now I just need to survive to enjoy it all.”
“Yes,” Ariel said. “Only that.”
“We were on vacation when this started,” Raena remembered. “That seems so long ago now.”
“Well, I’m not recommending any more pleasure planets to you.”
“No blame from me,” Raena promised. “I enjoyed Kai when we were there the first time. Shame they got greedy and invited me back the way they did.”
Ariel didn’t argue with that. “When do you expect to be done with this adventure?”
“Don’t know,” Raena said. “I really will call you, as soon as I can, afterward.”
“Take care then. Tell Gisela to watch her head.”
Raena powered down her screen and went to check on Mykah. He still lay in the lounge under the bone-mender. Coni’s head rested on his good shoulder.
“How’s it feel?” Raena asked.
“Not as hot as it did.”
“That’s a good sign.” She looked over the telltales. “Make a fist for me.”
He did.
“No pain?”
“I’m good,” he said.
“Good.” She initiated the shutdown sequence on the machine. “I’m sorry about that, Mykah.”
“No, you made your point. But if you’re trying to scare me off of coming with you, you’re going to have to do a better job than that.”
Raena looked at Coni first, but the blue girl had her eyes closed. “I told Coni I can go alone, if I need to.”
“You don’t need to,” Mykah promised.
* * *
The rest of the trip to Drusingyi passed smoothly. Haoun was pleased with Gisela’s progress as a pilot. Raena suspected he had ulterior motives for spending so much time with the human girl, but he spent all his spare time with Raena, making up for the days in jail. She even got her bubble bath, as promised. Best of all, though, Haoun consented to play piloting games with her, so Raena could update her skills.
True to her word, Coni forgave her. She seemed resigned to—if not thrilled about—Mykah going into battle. Raena wasn’t sure what argument he’d used to persuade his girlfriend, but she didn’t question it.
Together she and Mykah went over the weapons on the Veracity. They chose their tools, made sure everything was powered up and ready to go, then packed for the trip. Raena got him fitted for a diving suit from the Thallians’ stores. And they sparred faster and harder than they had before. He would never be her equal, but he was becoming more of a challenge. For that, she was grateful.
All in all, time passed. Not as quickly as Raena would have liked, but plenty of little things filled her days. Her chief concern was that Kavanaugh and Vezali had not checked in from Callixtos. They didn’t respond to Haoun’s attempts to contact them. Raena didn’t need to say anything to the others. They knew the silence couldn’t be good.
On the final day before they reached the Thallians’ system, Raena called everyone into the lounge. They sat on the banquette facing her. Only now that she had them collected up did the differences in her age from theirs strike her. They were all so young. Only Gisela had ever been in a gunfight. None of them had seen real combat.
How had it come to this? Raena had never been a commander. She’d always been a lone gun. The weight of all these lives, dependent on her to figure this out and get it right, was terrifying.
Raena put a schematic of the Thallian city up on the screen. The cloning lab was highlighted. “That’s where we’re headed. Once the Veracity gets down to the city, we’ll have to circle it to see where we can dock. The Thallians’ hangar was here—” she pointed “—but Eilif leveled it as we left. I don’t know where the Templars have been docking, but they must have a plan for getting out of the city. None of the experts seem to think they can swim.”
She met each of their eyes and began to lay out her plan.
“I want us to come off the ship hot. That means, Haoun, as soon as we’re docked, you start firing the Veracity’s guns at anything that moves. Coni, I want you up in the turret. Gisela, you’re at the airlock to cover us. I’m out first, then Mykah.”
Raena paused long enough to let them absorb all that. “Gisela, if the guards are robots like Outrider, they will be really well shielded. Aim for their guns.”
She stepped away from the screen and let it go back to sleep. “If we can’t dock, Mykah and I will swim over.”
Mykah raised his hand.
“I know,” Raena said. “You don’t swim. I can pull you, but that means you’ll have to cover me.”
“Do you want us to hang around?” Haoun asked.
“No. The leviathans will be drawn to the sound of Veracity’s engines. Go back up to the surface and wait ’til we call you.”
“What if you don’t call?” Gisela asked.
“We’ll be dead.”
Coni took Mykah’s hand, but nobody refuted that.
* * *
Raena joined Gisela and Haoun in the cockpit. The last time the Veracity came through the asteroid belt inside the Thallians’ home system, Coni had teased the codes for safe passage through the minefield out of the Raptor’s memory. This time, all the satellites rotated erratically, tumbling blindly through space.
Ahead of them, Drusingyi was a dead gray mass shrouded by turbulent clouds. Raena scanned it for any signs of life. The Veracity’s scanners hadn’t made Vezali’s upgrade list yet, but the crew didn’t normally have much use for them. Using the Veracity’s outdated technology, Raena couldn’t find anything on the planet that passed for life. Whatever lived there, it was hidden under the ocean.
Haoun brought them through the atmosphere at a steep trajectory. The plan was to land long enough to let the hull cool before they dove into the ocean.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Raena looked up to see what he was pointing at. A black smudge discolored the snow at the edge of a glacier. Raena focused in as much as she could.
“It was the Sundog,” she said. “Looks like Kavanaugh got attacked before they could get away.”
Haoun slowed enough that they could circle.
Raena ran through the channels, searching for Vezali or Kavanaugh’s comms.
“Nice to see you,” Kavanaugh said.
Haoun let out a sigh of relief.
“Where are you?” Raena asked.
“Snow cave. Near where you found the Arbiter survivors.”
“Got you locked,” Haoun said. “We’ll be right there.”
* * *
Kavanaugh waved his arms as Haoun brought the Veracity down. The old veteran’s face was covered by a scrap of cloth, which he pulled down to reveal the ice crystals in his gingery beard. He waved like a man so relieved to see rescue that he had trouble staying on his feet.
Haoun cut the engines and let the Veracity drop the last twenty meters, rather than make the mistake he did the last time: melting the snow, which then refroze around the landing gear and locked them in place, until Mykah and Coni cut them lose. The Veracity landed with a good bump. Raena hoped Gisela’s hard head didn’t knock up against anything. The girl had been warned of the dangers.
A frigid wind rushed suddenly through the Veracity. Coni must have opened the hatch to let Kavanaugh onboard.
Raena realized she should have set a test for him. What if he was a replica, like the Revan had been?
She unhooked herself from the crash webbing and raced back to the hatch.
By the time she got there, the Kavanaugh had Coni’s throat in the crook of his arm, his gun against her head. Coni’s lavender eyes had gone round with shock.
Raena skidded to a halt at the sight of them.
Kavanaugh re-aimed his gun and shot her.
* * *
Raena came to with Jimi Thallian leaning over her, shining a flashlight into her eye. Raena knocked his hands away from her face. Jimi jumped backward like a startled cat.
“They stunned you,” he explained quickly. “Gisela said she had a concussion from when she fell. I wanted to make sure you didn’t.”
Raena sat up. Adrenaline sang through her, casting off the last of the stun’s effects. “I’m fine,” she snarled. “Don’t touch me again.”
“Sorry.” Jimi switched off the flashlight.
“Where are the others?”
“Everyone is okay. We’re down in the city now. The Templar Master wants to speak to you, when you’re up to it.”
“I’m up to it now.”
“They’ll probably come for us soon. First, though: the others wouldn’t tell me. Is my mother safe?”
Raena made no attempt to soften the news. “Eilif is dead. The Revan android shot her the night they captured you.”
The boy closed his eyes against the realization that he’d allowed his mother’s killer onto the ship. “I knew it,” he said. “They wouldn’t tell me, but I knew.”
Raena watched him. Jimi looked a startling amount like Jain had when she’d broken him. Like his brother, Jimi faced the loss of the last of everything. The struggle reflected on his face: rage and despair and grief and fear. He was only a boy, twelve or thirteen at most, a sheltered prince whose father had been an abusive tyrant. She couldn’t imagine what it had been like, growing up with his wolf pack of brothers, but she had to respect Jimi for surviving more than a decade of life with Thallian when three years had been enough for her.
Jimi didn’t cry, though. A resolved mask snapped down over his emotions. He stared at Raena, prepared for the fight to come.
That she could work with.
“Do you know what the Templar Master wants?” she asked.
“No,” Jimi said. “He has some kind of mission for us, you and me.”
The door slid open. Two Outriders stood there, flanked by a ring of soldiers in gray. Now that the soldiers weren’t wearing their mirrored helmets, she could see they weren’t all humanoid after all. Maybe, if Raena watched the news, she would recognize the celebrity each of them was supposed to represent.
“Please give us a fight,” one of the Outriders invited.
“No,” Raena said. “Your boss needs me, so disassembling you wouldn’t be much fun.”
The pair of them stood back out of the way so she and Jimi could come into the hallway.
The rest of the Veracity crew was gathered from the adjoining rooms. Mykah sidled up to her. “What do we do?”
“Wait,” Raena said. “I need to know what this has been about.”
* * *
Raena wasn’t sure what to expect when the gray soldiers marched the Veracity’s crew into the cavernous cloning lab. The room was much busier than when she’d visited it before. Then there had been only a handful of Jonan’s clones maturing in the vats, chubby young boys almost ready to breathe on their own. There had also been eight clones of Raena, practically full-term infants. Raena had slaughtered them all without remorse.
Now that the Templar Master had taken over, every vat seemed full: maybe a hundred in all. Raena didn’t know how the Templars reproduced back before the War. She’d assumed there had been a queen somewhere, busily laying eggs, but she couldn’t remember ever seeing an immature Templar. Like so many other things related to nonhumans, she had only concerned herself with how to kill them, not with how they lived.
She marveled that the Templar Master would bring her here. If he knew who Raena really was and whom she’d served, she would have expected him to keep her far from any opportunity to finish what Jonan had started. Had he fallen for Coni’s new biography—or was this a test?
As she and the crew of the Veracity passed vat after vat of maturing Templars, the Templar Master rose up at the far end of the room. He was taller than the recordings of any other Templars she’d seen before, a towering figure with far too many legs. The flat surface of his face swirled with more colors than Raena could name.
At his side stood Vezali. She flowed forward to greet her crewmates, caressing Mykah’s shoulder with one tentacle, offering another to Kavanaugh, training Raena’s hair back away from her face with a third.
“Nice to see you all again,” she said.
“Have they treated you all right?” Raena asked.
“Yes. They’ve treated me like an honored guest.”
“Welcome, Raena Zacari,” the Templar Master said through the translator around Vezali’s middle. His voice had a rich genderless tone like a cello. He must be transmitting his thoughts to the translator somehow. He continued, “You have proved yourself to be the warrior that we need.”
“To do what?” Raena asked.
“Prevent the spread of what the galaxy calls the Templar plague.”
Raena frowned, trying to make sense of that. “Those who conceived of the plague, those who manufactured it, and the one who spread it are all dead.”
“Because the plague is no longer a threat, I have returned to the galaxy.”
“What do you want me to do?” she asked skeptically.
“You will go back in time. You will stave off the genocide spawned by humanity. You will save my people.”
Of course, Templars could travel in time. Gooseflesh shivered up over her. Surviving Sloane’s attacks with the Messiah drug had shown her how fragile the past could be. More than anything, she did not want to fool around with time. “Why?” She waved at the rows of clones maturing around them. “Why mess with the past when you have all these to claim the future?”
“These are flawed. The plague contaminated our dead. They cannot be cloned. Only I am pure, because my people locked me away in one of our tombs to wait out the devastation. All of these are cloned from me. Not one of them is a queen. We can no longer reproduce in any way, except by cloning. This makes the Templar too fragile to survive.”
Mykah asked, “Why not find an antidote to the plague and send it back to protect your people?”
“Templar cannot journey backward in time.”
That shocked Raena. What good was having the technology to travel in time if it only allowed you to move forward? She wondered if any Templars had been able to escape to the future to survive the plague. Maybe if the galaxy progressed far enough, they would find Templars already there, waiting for them. Or maybe the Templars that fled forward had already been infected with the plague and died.
Mykah stepped forward. The gray soldiers trained their guns on him, but he ignored them. “I will go.”
“You are nonessential,” the Templar Master said. “Jimi Thallian and Raena Zacari will go back in time. They will prevent the plague.”
“Why us?”
It didn’t answer her. She wasn’t sure if it understood the question.
The Templar Master’s head turned toward her, but without eyes, a mouth, anything that might hint at facial features, she could only stare at the hypnotic swirl of colors, everything from a rancid white to a bloody crimson shot through with poisonous yellow.
“The last functional temporal manipulation device is hidden on the Templar tombworld. Do you accept this mission, Raena Zacari?”
“What if we don’t succeed?” Raena asked.
“All your friends will die. All humans will die. Anyone who shelters humans will die.”
It was mad, she realized. The greatest power in the universe had gone insane during its imprisonment. Raena looked at the gray soldiers, who could pass anywhere and destroy anything. Outriders were probably already in place to do the most possible damage to any government that might protect humanity. She faced a creature who really had nothing left to lose and no reason not to destroy the galaxy in its death throes.
She closed her eyes. She could kill the Templar Master here, now—but the gray soldiers standing around would butcher the Veracity’s crew in immediate retaliation. And the Outriders ranged around the galaxy wouldn’t stand down just because their master was dead. If there were other gray soldiers elsewhere, they’d proven they loved mayhem too much to simply stop killing everything that crossed their paths. She saw no way to prevent the galactic slaughter from here.
Unwillingly, she said, “I need a ship to get to the Templar tombworld.”
“You will take Veracity. It will go back in time with you.”
“Neither Jimi nor I can pilot it,” Raena lied. She did not want to be alone with the Thallian boy. She didn’t trust him to help her do whatever must be done.
“I will go,” Gisela volunteered. “I’ve been training to pilot the Veracity.”
“I can fly her,” Kavanaugh said. “I will go.”
“It’s my ship,” Mykah reminded them. “You’re not going without me.”
Raena looked at Mykah, Tarik, and Gisela. Any person she took with her was more likely to survive than those she left behind. She’d given Ariel her word that she would try to protect Gisela. That meant accepting her as part of the crew.
She would have liked to take Haoun and Coni along too, but she suspected the Templar wanted some hostages. It killed her to be so cold, but she couldn’t save everyone.
The Templar Master cocked its head at Raena. “Raena Zacari, do you accept this crew?”
“Yes.”
The gray soldiers converged on them, pulling the human volunteers away and herding them toward the exit from the cloning lab.
“Wait!” Coni shouted. “Mykah . . .”
“I love you!” he yelled at her.
Raena turned to give Haoun a smile. He nodded at her. They hadn’t talked of love. What they had wasn’t love. She would come back for him nonetheless.
Vezali flowed through the cloning lab after them. The gray soldiers didn’t try to stop her. At the door of the cloning lab, she said, “Just in case,” and pressed her translator into Mykah’s hand.