CHAPTER 17
As a condition of interrogating the Templars, the Thallians insisted that the Veracity’s crew leave their weapons outside the city. Mykah let himself into Raena’s cabin and opened the panel above her bunk. Inside hung the pair of chipped stone knives. He slipped one into the top of his boot, the way she did.
Kavanaugh and Gisela met him at the hatch. Jim had contrived a case for Vezali’s translator that made it look rare and special. It was cutting-edge tech from twenty years in the future: guaranteed the Thallians had never seen anything like it. Kavanaugh would carry the translator, while Jim stayed with the ship and got its engines primed for takeoff.
Gisela was armed with Vezali’s little zip gun. She had also broken down a Stinger and split the pieces between the three of them. Its power pack was tucked into the box with the translator. Other than that, they didn’t want to push the Thallians’ restrictions. Getting thrown into detention wouldn’t help anyone.
The three of them presented themselves at the city gate. One of Aaron’s lieutenants passed them through the energy scanner and let them inside the city. The Thallian clones were very interested in the translator, but of course none of the Veracity’s crew admitted to speaking anything but Imperial Standard, so they had no way to test it.
A six-man honor guard escorted Mykah and the others into a bunker built down into the surface of the ground. Mykah noted the weird smells Jim had mentioned.
“We believe this is a queen,” one of the Thallian clones said. He halted in front of one of the darkened stalls.
Mykah peered into the shadows inside. “Is it restrained?”
“Yes.”
“Open the door.”
“Captain, these things are deadly.”
“The creature from whom we took the translator was wearing it,” Mykah said, sparing a fond thought for Vezali. “We believe it needs to make bodily contact with the subject to work.”
“It’s your funeral.” The Thallian reached forward and placed his hand on the lock screen.
Mykah pulled the translator over his head and stepped into the shadowy stall. He wasn’t at all sure this would work. The Templars spoke in colors and the translator worked in sound, but somehow the apparatus had been able to translate for Raena and the Templar Master on Drusingyi.
“I’m called Mykah,” he thought to the bulk in front of him. “Can you understand me?”
The creature crawled around to face him. Primary colors, shot through with vivid green, swirled across its face.
“Yes,” it said. “Welcome, Mykah Chen. We have been awaiting you.” He could hear the Templar’s words inside his head, like a thunderstorm. He clenched his eyes shut and wondered if there was a way to turn the translator down.
Aloud, Mykah asked, “Do you know why we’re here?”
“Yes.” The Templar’s voice was genderless and low, a musical hum that made the air quiver.
The Thallians gathered close to the door of the stall, startled to hear the Templar speaking aloud.
“How many of you are there here?”
“Four.”
“Are you a breeding queen?”
“Yes.”
The Thallians suddenly rustled behind him, all of them snapping to attention at once, their hands to their earpieces. Mykah had a sinking feeling.
“Captain Chen,” the lieutenant said, “the Arbiter is entering the system.”
“Excellent,” Mykah said aloud, forcing enthusiasm to cover his dread. “I look forward to reporting to your brother at the first opportunity.”
To the Templar queen, he thought, “We need to get out of here now.”
It rushed toward him, snatching him up in its forelegs. He shouted in surprise. Gisela took the distraction to shoot the two Thallians closest to her. Kavanaugh snatched up one of their guns as everyone dodged in separate directions, looking for cover. Gisela ducked inside the Templar Queen’s cell, reloading her zip gun.
Mykah stared at her. The girl seemed scarily calm, even though he could see two bodies sprawled outside the cell. Somehow, he hadn’t believed she was a killer like Raena.
He bent to saw at the ropes pinioning the Queen with Raena’s stone knife. It was surprisingly sharp.
* * *
Three clones stood outside Raena’s cell. They had not turned on the hallway lights, or the lights in her cell. They stood in the twilight, watching her pretend to sleep. They were young men, Jonan’s younger brothers. She wondered if they had ever been off the planet before, if they’d seen a girl. Spoken to one. Touched one.
Raena smiled at them, but didn’t get up. “Did you want something?” She pitched the tone of her voice to make them shiver.
“Why are you here?” one of the clones asked.
“I’ve seen the error of my ways. I want to return to serving your brother.”
“But why did you come here?” he repeated. “Why didn’t you go directly back to the Arbiter?”
“Jonan directed Captain Chen to bring me here.”
Another clone hissed at her.
She laughed. “Does it trouble you that I am intimate enough with your brother to use his given name?”
“Just how intimate were you?” the clone wanted to know. His voice was lower pitched than his brother’s.
Raena met his eyes. “Very.”
As if that was the permission they wanted, they let themselves into her cell. They stood over her in a pack, gloating to have her in their power. One of them let her in on their joke: “You’ll be glad to know that the Arbiter has entered the system.”
So they knew they had to make use of her quickly, before Jonan took her away.
Raena shoved herself upward. She remembered what Jim told her about the boys being trained to work as a team. She hadn’t seen that amongst the younger ones on her first trip to Drusingyi, but these were adult, more practiced. Raena kicked the first in the crotch hard enough to lift him from the floor. The other two charged her.
The fight had to be over with fast, she realized. The attackers hadn’t turned the lights up, but unless they’d turned off the cameras, she had to assume someone was monitoring the show. Reinforcements, when they came, would be better armed.
The leader flung himself atop her, trying to pin her to the bunk. He grabbed both of her hands in one of his, wrenched them over his head. She went limp, as if she’d lost the will to fight. All she needed was for his attention to wander. When he reached for the zipper of her jumpsuit, Raena twisted one hand free. He jerked his head away, so she missed her target, but her nails sunk deep into his eye socket instead. Now he knew she was serious.
He scrambled backward, fear overpowering his hormones, Raena launched herself off the bunk. She slammed into him, hands around his wrists so he couldn’t slow his fall as he toppled. His head whacked the floor good enough that he went limp.
The third one grabbed her foot to haul her backward. He’d underestimated how sharp her boot heels were and how motivated Raena was to use them. They only wanted to rape her. They wanted her awake and aware enough to know what was happening to her. She had no such restrictions. She slashed open the lad’s femoral artery. He collapsed, cursing, trying to stanch the blood.
She rolled back to her feet and spun toward the first clone. His face had gone a sour green color, but he’d managed to get himself to his knees.
“All I want is out,” Raena said. “Let me go and you can still save your brother’s life.”
“There are guards in the hall,” he panted as he struggled to his feet.
“Will they give me as much trouble as you three have?” She advanced on him again, slowly, to give him time to think. He hadn’t called for assistance, even though it was close at hand. He hadn’t wanted the others to see how badly she’d beaten them.
He dragged himself to his full height, got his hands up into the semblance of a defensive position.
Raena skipped toward him. When she brought her knee up fast, he dropped his hands. She answered him with a punch in the throat. Now he couldn’t change his mind and call for aid.
She slipped behind him and forced his left arm up between his shoulder blades. If he didn’t twist just the right way, he’d dislocate his own shoulder.
She marched him over to the lock, nodded down to it. She didn’t need to apply much pressure to his wrist to make unlocking the cell seem like a good idea.
As soon as the forcefield started to shimmer, Raena knocked his head into the wall. Holding him up, she searched his pockets. The back of his collar hid a knife sheath. She stole the blade and let him drop over the threshold of the cell.
He was correct. Two guards stood at the end of the hall. They carried handguns, both sheathed. One had a bandolier of sleep grenades.
She weighed the knife in her hand, then flung it. The clone on the left slumped.
She leaned into a run as the second guard drew his gun. If he’d had a Stinger, she might have worried. They powered up fast. The quick start cost power in the bolt, but the gun reacted quickly enough to draw and fire while hunting. This gun was some kind of clunky Imperial firearm, designed for continuous fire. A brute weapon, not anything that required skill.
She made it halfway down the hall before he fired his first shot. It went past her, wide enough that she didn’t even feel the heat.
He kept his finger on the trigger, sweeping toward her. Raena flung herself into a roll.
Something behind her sparked, caught fire. The fire suppression system kicked in, filling the hallway with mist.
The guard let up on the trigger, unsure if he’d hit her. He’d just realized he should have sounded the alarm. As soon as he glanced toward it, Raena flung herself forward. She barreled into him, mashing him against the wall as she pulled the pin of one of the sleep grenades. The gas whooshed up into his face.
With her free hand, she snatched the breather from his belt, switched it on, held it over her face, and danced back to watch the show.
He fumbled weakly at the grenades, trying to figure out which was leaking, unable to see them on his chest. He hadn’t thought to drop the gun, so he only had one free hand. Before long it didn’t matter. She pulled the hissing grenade from the bandolier and pitched it back down the hall toward her cell.
Raena searched the guards quickly. She stole their gun belts, the bandolier of grenades, and retrieved the knife from the dead man’s eye. She wiped it off on his uniform. Then she jammed the blade between the doors of the elevator and ran it down the slot, searching for the emergency release.
She could hear the elevator car coming down. Reinforcements were on their way.
* * *
The Templar Queen set Mykah carefully back on the floor. “Thank you,” he told her. He triggered his comm bracelet.
“On my way,” Jim said.
“The Arbiter has entered the system.”
“I know.” Fear constricted the boy’s voice. “Are you safe?”
“For the moment.”
“I have a quick detour to make. It’s going to cost you your handheld.”
“Do it,” Mykah said.
“See you soon.”
Mykah came out of the Templar Queen’s stall to find Gisela arming herself with the fallen Thallians’ guns. Kavanaugh was examining the lock on the second stall.
“Can you shoot it open?” Mykah asked.
“It’ll be faster to slice it off.” Kavanaugh picked up one of the cyanogen cutting torches.
Mykah turned back to the queen. “Do you have food or other provisions you need from here?”
“The food is contaminated,” she said. She brushed gently past him and went to stand in front of one of the stalls. “This one of us is badly wounded. He will not survive the trip.”
Mykah put his hand on her carapace. “We can’t leave him here for the Thallians.”
“You will have to kill him,” she said. “Do you know how?”
“No.” Mykah wanted to tell her that he’d never killed anything. He wanted to ask one of the others to do it, but Gisela was just a kid—even though she’d just gunned down half a dozen Thallians—and Kavanaugh was busy cutting open the other stalls.
The Templar Queen twisted her head toward Mykah. Her face was a swirl of shades of brown and black.
“Tell me what I need to do,” Mykah said.
* * *
Jim armed the incendiary bomb as he got the Veracity into the air. He’d never done this before, but he’d had to run through the bombing simulators with his brothers. He knew the sequence. He prayed his aim was up to the job. This strike needed to be surgical.
The Veracity hovered above the Thallians’ library. It tore at him to damage the city. He reminded himself that, by his time, everything was already gone. Either he destroyed the library now or the galaxy would do it when they murdered the planet. One way or another, all its knowledge was ash—and there was no time to go retrieve the Templar’s message and Mykah’s handheld from the study carrels. He couldn’t allow those things to fall into his family’s hands.
He released the bomb and pulled the Veracity away toward the bunker where the Templars had been imprisoned.
* * *
Raena launched herself across the elevator shaft. Her fingers caught the cage around the access ladder. She scrambled through the entry gap, one eye on the elevator car plunging down at her. It stopped at the floor she’d just left.
The bandolier of sleep grenades got hung up on the cage as she climbed. She stopped to untangle it. In her hurry, she fumbled it. It dropped out of reach.
No time to worry about it now, she told herself. She made herself climb. It wouldn’t take them long to secure the detention floor and figure out where she’d gone. As far as she knew, there was only one way in or out.
If the Arbiter had entered the system, it would take a while for Jonan’s shuttle to bring him to the planet’s surface. The Veracity was going to have to get up and off the planet quickly and quietly. She had to get the hell out of this building fast if she wanted to go with them.
An enormous explosion sounded over her head. Around her, the elevator shaft flexed. Raena clung to ladder rungs, waiting for debris to rain down. When it didn’t, she pushed herself to climb.
The target had not been the building she was in, but it must have been next door or very nearby. Sounded like an incendiary bomb. It didn’t make sense for the Arbiter to bomb Jonan’s home world—and they should have been too far away. The bomb must have been dropped by the Veracity—and only Jim would know how to load the bomb or drop it.
She doubled her pace up the ladder. Was Jim simply sending her a message that it was time to go? If the Veracity was airborne enough to drop incendiaries and not get caught in the heatwave, she wasn’t going to catch up to it. It was out of here.
Maybe they were telling her goodbye.
* * *
Jim dropped a concussion bomb that was small enough to level a building—the cloning lab, he was pretty sure. He set the Veracity down in the wreckage.
Small arms fire pinged off the ship’s hull. Jim popped open the controls for the ship’s guns. He fired blindly, trying to chase his attackers back under cover. The handguns didn’t pose any danger to the Veracity, but they would slow the others down from escaping.
Once things had settled momentarily, Mykah raced with the Templars for the Veracity. Kavanaugh and Gisela ran interference for them.
As soon as Kavanaugh hurried into the cockpit, Jim relinquished the controls. He rushed past Mykah, who was herding the Templars into the hold.
“Where are you going?” Mykah asked.
“To get Raena. She’s out of her cell.”
“How do you know?”
“There was a security alert.”
“I’m going with you,” Gisela said.
“No.” Jim’s tone was commanding enough to rock her back. “I can pass. They’ll be too panicked by all the damage to look too closely at me, but they’ll kill you on sight. They’ll know you’re not family.”
Gisela unbuckled the stolen gun belt slung around her hips and held it out.
“Thanks.” Jim took all the weapons she offered. “Tell Mr. Kavanaugh to bomb the ship depot as soon as he’s in the air. I marked it on the schematic. The bomb is already loaded. That’ll keep them from following you.”
“See you at the rendezvous site,” Mykah told him. “Good luck.”
“You, too.”
The boy jumped out the hatch and started to run. Gisela fired over his head, clearing him a path, as Kavanaugh got them back into the air.
* * *
Raena’s legs trembled with strain as she crawled out of the elevator shaft at last. All these weeks of imprisonment had been hell on her conditioning.
The maintenance hallway in which she found herself was featureless, no indication which way she should run. She chose right and ran flat out. No need to conserve energy now. Either she could find the Veracity and get to it, or she’d have to get to the ship depot and steal something—any of the Thallians’ War-era craft were well within her outdated skill set, she realized with a grin—and get herself off the planet. Better to die alone in space than to be taken back aboard the Arbiter.
Something else exploded, a series of booms, one setting off the next. So much for the ship depot. Apparently, Jim had decided to leave his family no way off the planet.
The lights in the corridor flickered out. Raena skidded to a halt and pressed herself flat against a wall, waiting for the fuel silo to go.
Nothing more exploded as she caught her breath. The emergency lighting kicked in. In the dimness, Raena ran some more. She took the next left. Ahead of her stood a door with a lock screen. That was a problem. Raena ran at it anyway. She was covered with enough Thallian blood that she hoped she could pass. She licked her hand, rubbed it against the blood flaking from her jumpsuit, and slapped her palm down on the lock.
The computer considered, then slid the door open for her.
She found herself in a city on fire. Smoke smeared the night sky. The air smelled toxic and her recently suctioned lungs were sensitive. She pulled the stolen breather back on, hoping its filter would get her safely out of the city.
An enormous explosion slammed her back against the building. Her head hit hard enough that she saw stars. The Thallians had lost the battle with the fire on their fuel silo.
All right. She couldn’t get off the planet. She still had to get out of the city before Jonan came. She loped toward the hangar that held the jet bikes.
* * *
Raena drained the stolen handguns on her way through the city. She didn’t wait for the Thallians to fire on her; she merely took them out wherever she saw them. As far as she was concerned, only four of the clones had to survive into the future—and three of those were off the planet. As long as she didn’t kill Aten by mistake, she’d done no irreparable damage.
One of the Thallian clones waited for her at the vehicle depot. He looked remarkably like Jonan—the same obsessively muscled body, the same sharpened teeth. More than just brothers, these two could have been twins. They must have been clones from the same batch.
Raena stopped running, breathing hard, her body on fire with adrenaline. Exhaustion lingered not far off. “You must be Aten.”
“You’ve heard of me.”
She nodded. “I didn’t hear about many of Jonan’s brothers by name, but I know about you and Revan.” What was the alpha clone doing here alone? Were other clones hiding nearby, ready to shoot her down? Or had Aten sent the others to fight the fires and save the city? If any of the Thallian brothers had been sane, their behavior would have been easier to predict.
“I’ve heard about you, too,” he warned. “The Empire didn’t exaggerate when they called you dangerous. Why didn’t they kill you like they said they would?”
She caught herself about to tell him the truth. Aten survived the War. She would kill him twenty-some years in the future. She could do nothing that would change how he reacted to her name then. “They did kill her,” Raena lied. “Raena Zacari was buried alive in a Templar tomb as a way to control your brother.”
“What was her relationship with my brother?”
“She served as his aide.”
“Is that all?”
“She did anything he required her to.”
He snarled, “Did she fuck him?”
Raena looked at him, uncertain how to answer. She knew Jonan supplanted Aten as the alpha clone. She just didn’t know when. If she admitted her relationship with Jonan, would she destroy his chance to advance in the family? It was tempting to get some payback, however petty it might be.
Was this where the future disintegrated for her? If she said too much, would Aten have Jonan killed? Plague or no, she still stood a chance of being rescued from her tomb by Kavanaugh and Sloane. She might still go to Kai and see Ariel again. But if Jonan didn’t become the alpha clone, his men would not hunt her on Kai. She wouldn’t steal the Veracity. She wouldn’t run away with Mykah and Coni and the others. She’d never go back to Drusingyi to rescue Jimi and she’d never stop the Messiah drug and she’d never take up with Haoun on Lautan. If she killed Aten Thallian now, she would break the future. The last year of her life would be rewritten.
It was a sacrifice she didn’t want to make.
Luckily, Aten backtracked in the conversation. “Who are you?”
“My name is also Raena Zacari,” she said, letting him hear the truth in her voice.
“Who cloned you?”
Raena didn’t know how to answer that.
“I saw the genetic analysis,” he said. “I saw markers from Jonan’s DNA.”
She remembered bleeding out on Drusingyi, after Jonan had shot her. She remembered the family’s medical robot preparing to operate on her. Had they transfused her with Thallian’s blood while she was out? Was his blood replicating inside her still? Raena shuddered at the thought.
“I need to get out of here,” she told him.
“Not until I get some answers.” Aten settled himself in her path, ready for a fight. “Whom do you serve?”
“That’s a complicated question.” During the War, there had been three sides: the Empire, the Templars—and the Coalition, trying to rescue what they could from the collision between the other two. “I serve humanity.”
Aten’s next question surprised her. “What mission has the Emperor given my brother?”
Raena allowed herself a little smile. “Are you testing me?”
“Yes.”
“Your brothers are commanded to create a plague genetically keyed to the Templar. Jonan is meant to use the Arbiter to sue for peace as a cover for spreading this plague.”
“And you’re here to stop the plague?”
“Yes.”
“What makes you think we can deny the will of the Empire?”
“I don’t.”
“Then why are you doing this to us?”
When she didn’t answer, he pounced at her, gloved hand raised to strike. Raena watched his eyes, not his hand. As the blow fell, she flung herself to the opposite side, grabbed his left arm and pulled him off balance, danced away. This was the fight she had trained for all her life: when a Thallian was still young and fit enough to test her, but she was old and wily and strong enough to match him.
Aten attacked, trying to shove her against the wall of the vehicle depot. She blocked him and stood her ground. He was startled when her fist slipped past his guard and landed hard enough on his jaw that he bit his tongue with his sharpened teeth. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
Raena darted around him enough that he never knew which direction her next attack would come from. He grimaced, surprised to find her his equal. Blood streaked his teeth.
She hit him again in the jaw and barely got away when he grabbed for her. She raised her fist to lick his blood from her knuckles.
He watched her, seemingly captivated. Then, without warning, he swept her feet out from beneath her. She landed on the stone floor.
He kicked her hard as he could in the thigh. Raena rolled with the blow, managed to get to her hands and knees before he kicked her again. And again. And again.
She forced her eyes open, locking the pain away somewhere else. She had to think.
Next time he kicked her, she sat up fast. Grabbed his calf and held on. Forced his foot up higher. Kicked his standing shin hard with her sharpened heel.
When he lost his balance, she pounced on him.
As she tightened her hands around his throat, Raena smiled into Aten’s eyes. She knew where to put her fingers to cut off his oxygen, to slow the blood to his brain, to give him the most pain without allowing him to lose consciousness.
She thought he would struggle more. She thought he would argue or try to tempt her. Instead, as it had when she killed his twin in the future, masochism got the better of him. Aten surrendered to the sensation of death tightening around his throat.
Clarity chilled her. She wanted to kill Aten as much as she’d ever wanted anything in her life. But why? As a way to hurt Jonan? To punish Aten for his part in developing the plague? She didn’t know this man. She had no way or right to judge him. Her crew had already set his city on fire, bombed his family’s only route of escape, and killed uncounted numbers of his uncles, brothers, and sons.
The Thallians had lost. She didn’t need to do this. She couldn’t do this. The future might still come . . .
Of their own accord, Raena’s hands unlocked on Aten’s throat.
Aten opened eyes gone bloodshot to peer at her. Raena sat back on his chest, staring at him, shocked at herself.
He punched her in the head. Luckily, from this angle, the blow didn’t have much speed behind it. She let him overbalance her.
Something crashed down atop Aten and he collapsed over her. Past his shoulder, Raena saw the face of one of the boy clones. Something in his expression told her it was Jim.
He rolled Aten’s body off of her. “Did my uncle hurt you?”
“No more than your father ever did,” Raena said.
“Can you walk?”
Raena allowed him to help her to her feet. “Yes.” The deep bruise made her right thigh quiver, but the leg held her weight.
“They moved the Veracity to the rendezvous site,” Jim warned her. He led her to a jet bike and jumped on.
Raena clambered up behind him. She wondered if Haoun still existed in the future, if he would remember her. If he still liked human girls. If the Empire fell, or if it made peace with the Templars. If there was anything familiar worth going back to or if they had destroyed it all.
* * *
At some point, they passed out of the city. Raena didn’t notice. They rode until the jet bike ran out of fuel. Then they ran. The next thing that caught her attention was Mykah standing guard near a spire of rock. Dawn was breaking over the mountains.
Mykah hissed when he saw her. Raena wanted to tell him that the damage looked worse than it was, but really, she was worse than she looked, so she kept silent. He put his arm around her waist and took some of her weight off her injured leg.
She forced herself to jog across a wide grassy field. She had disjointed impressions: purple wildflowers spangling the grass; the air alive with birdsong. Yellow sunlight poured warmth over her skin. She’d had no idea how beautiful Drusingyi had been, before the galaxy murdered it. This must be breaking Jim’s heart.
Gisela stood in the doorway of the Veracity, covering their approach. She had the sniper rifle upraised, staring through the scope over Raena’s head. Raena didn’t look back to see if she was being followed. She no longer had the strength to care. The people in the past had ceased to be her problem.
Mykah glanced over her shoulder and put on a burst of speed. “We’ve got to go,” he urged.
“Go,” Raena said. “Go back to her.”
“Run!” he ordered.
She didn’t want to. She felt all her years now in the aches in her body, in the heaviness of her heart. She could just lie down here, in the glorious sunshine, and be one with the grasses and flowers. She was done. Let Mykah go home and face down the Templar Master, beg for the survival of humanity.
Mykah kept pulling her forward, increasing the length of his stride. And she ran beside him, calling on the dregs of her strength. The Veracity was the only home she had ever loved. She ran for it.
Jim dashed ahead of them. In the ship’s hatchway, he reached back to drag Raena inside. Mykah leapt in after her, pounded his fist down on the lock.
Raena sprawled on the deck, certain that her heart would tear itself apart. Jagged breath cut the inside of her throat.
She lay there, gasping, as the others made the ship ready to leave. She felt the engines powering up.
“Raena, strap down,” Mykah ordered over the comm.
She shook her head, unable to push herself up off the deck.
Something soft brushed her cheek. It was insistent. She opened her eyes to see a Templar leaning over her, stroking an antenna across her face.
The Templar picked her up in its many legs, gently cradling her against its chitinous underside. At this point, she didn’t care if it planned to eat her. She closed her eyes and let herself swoon, but the deep unconsciousness she craved remained out of reach.
The Templar moved to brace itself. It was too big to fit into any of the crash webbing aboard the Veracity, but it could wedge itself into the main passageway.
The ship shot upward at a steep angle. That probably meant Kavanaugh was flying. He had been doing it for decades now, maybe longer than Haoun had been alive. As he forced the old ship through a series of punishing evasive maneuvers, adrenaline surged into Raena’s blood despite herself.
“What’s going on?” she shouted forward, but either they were concentrating or they didn’t hear her.
“Fighters from the Arbiter are pursuing us,” a voice said. It sounded like a stringed instrument, its voice so low that Raena felt it in her chest.
“Are you speaking to me, Templar?” she asked softly.
“Yes. We have the translation apparatus now.”
The running wasn’t over yet. She had to get up, get into the turret, and man the guns. She had to protect the others.
“Can you help me get aft?”
“Yes.”
The Templar pulled itself through the Veracity, carrying Raena along with it. When they reached the turret guns, Raena said, “Let me go now. I will try to convince them to leave us alone.”
She crawled up into the bubble, switching on the comm inside. “Route some power to the guns.”
“We’re going to jump as soon as I can get clear of the asteroids,” Kavanaugh said.
“If you lose me, so be it. I’ll give you a chance to run.”
* * *
Jim crept up into the turret with her. He didn’t say anything, just powered up the other gun and climbed in.
He was, unsurprisingly, a good shot. Raena felt better for his company, since the black eye left her completely reliant on the computer targeting. She laid down covering fire and let Jim pick off the fighters coming alongside them. The two of them made a good team.
She wondered if he had any regrets killing these strangers. She couldn’t see the boy’s face, but she imagined he was smiling.
Finally the Veracity got out beyond the asteroid belt. Kavanaugh gave the ship her head, letting her run flat out as he calculated the jump back to the Templars’ tombworld.
Mykah came to the base of the turret guns. “Come down,” he said. “We’re clear.”
Raena let Jim go down first. Once he’d gotten out of her way, she called down to Mykah, “Will you catch me? My leg’s frozen up. I can’t manage the climb.”
“I’ve got you,” he assured.
* * *
Raena shut herself in her cabin and did not come out to eat. Kavanaugh let her get away with that for one day, then he overrode the lock on her door and let himself in.
She sat in the darkness. One eye had swollen shut. The other glittered in the red power light of her screen.
She’d showered. Some of her fingers were taped together. She’d gotten her cuts and burns bandaged. She sat wound up in the coverlet, but hadn’t bothered to dress. Even in the dimness, he could see the black shadow of an enormous bruise on her thigh. It must go down to the femur.
“Is it broken?” he asked.
“Just bruised.”
Kavanaugh set the tray on her desk, then handed her the cup of tea, double sweet and full of rice milk, the way Mykah said she liked it. Kavanaugh sat beside her on the bed, with his back against the bulkhead.
“You should see the other guy,” she joked quietly.
“Jim said you were fighting the alpha clone.”
She nodded.
“Did you kill him?”
“No.” She sipped her tea. “I had a realization in the middle of the fight. I was going to kill Aten because he looked like Jonan. Because Jonan was evil. Because I couldn’t kill Jonan again.”
“When I was a kid, it was easy to tell the bad guys,” Kavanaugh said. “The Empire was evil. The Coalition said they would protect us. The Templars said they would accept us into the galaxy. And the Thallians stripped away those promises because they killed the Templars and turned the galaxy against us. It must have been difficult to let any of the Thallians live.”
“I told myself I’d changed, but twice now, I’ve gone to Drusingyi and killed nearly everyone I came across, man and boy.” Raena asked despairingly, “How am I different from the monsters?”
“You’ve been trained to be a monster,” Kavanaugh told her, just as quietly. “You’ve loved and been loved by monsters. But the galaxy is just the galaxy. Most of us are only people. We will forgive you for being a monster, as long as you only show us part of who you are. Humanity needs someone to protect it. We need you to fight for us, even if you feel like a monster.”
She shook her head. “I knew if I killed Aten, I was destroying the future. Jonan wouldn’t become the alpha clone. He wouldn’t hunt me down after you got me got out of the tomb. I wouldn’t steal the Veracity. Jim probably wouldn’t even have been cloned. Everything that’s happened to me in the last six months would cease to exist.” She sipped her tea. “I held the future in my hands. I wanted so very badly to break it.”
“But you didn’t,” Kavanaugh pointed out. “Jim is still with us. We rescued a Templar Queen and two young females. We can save the Templars after all. We can make things right in the galaxy.”
Raena set the teacup aside and turned to kiss him. Kavanaugh submitted to her. Even injured, she was still strong enough to hurt him, and he didn’t want to be hurt. He wanted the same thing he had always wanted: to fix her. To rescue her. So he let her use him, to prove something to herself.
He had to close his eyes, so he couldn’t see how badly she’d been beaten.
In all the years he’d imagined saving her, it had never been exactly like this. She was gentler than he expected, more invested in the sensation of it than the consummation. He tried to relax into it, let her take what she needed, but it was difficult to separate himself from all the years of fantasies and dreams.
In the end, she was entirely quiet. Afterward, he only held her and asked nothing more. He knew that this would only happen once. Both of them had exorcised their demons. When he saw Ariel again and asked her to marry him, Raena would give them both her blessing. He hoped she would find some peace with Haoun, if only for a while.
Raena curled her head against Kavanaugh’s shoulder, closed her good eye, and went to sleep. His heart broke for her just a little bit more. He kissed her forehead, on the side that wasn’t swollen and bruised.