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IF HOLLIS HAD KNOWN AT SIXTEEN that acing a tactics exam would catch him a lifetime of paperwork and organizing in the fleet, he would have skipped the test and taken up dishwashing duty. Ancestors bless Perrin Carver, he was a good man but he had the organizational skills of a concussed walrus. The sheer amount of files sitting on the desk waiting to be sorted made Hollis’s eye twitch.
His oversized, transparent black desk with three screens were drowning in stacks of color-coded datfiles. More of them were marked red for Priority than he cared to count. The space behind his chair had been filled with lockers of things Perrin felt were important but that the commander didn’t want cluttering his own office. Weapons. Restraints. Spare parts for various computers.
But oddly no blankets. Perrin had taken those away after he caught Hollis napping on the long black couch that took up the second wall.
The other two walls were tinted windows that let him look into the Guardian’s bullpen. Right now, the labyrinth of underground tunnels the Starguard used as office space was quiet.
Hollis triggered the Guardian Veil program on his implant to count life signs. Two junior techs were down in the gym, there was a squad meeting in the secondary bullpen, and that was it for the underground. Upstairs, the OIA offices were lively, filled with crew filing reports and collecting passes to the air show.
But there wasn’t a single peon he could dump the paperwork on.
He checked the time on his implant and wondered if it was too late to chase Lee down and pick a fight. It would get him away from the desk work and it would be fair payment for siccing the cadets on him. Plus, he’d have the pleasure of getting a reaction out of cold-as-dark Rowena Lee.
The Silar cadets were keeping a running tally of her sneers and eye rolls. If any of them got a tight-lipped smile from her, they’d consider it a momentous victory.
Lee had given him a smile on the sparring mat. Granted, it was the only warning at all that she was going to break free and try to snap his spine. But, all things considered, this was progress. A year ago, there wouldn’t have been a warning.
“Guardian Silar!” one of the junior guardians screamed from the front desk as a door slammed at the top of the stairs. “Guardian!”
Hollis rolled his eyes skyward and wondered if anyone would notice if he accidentally force-teleported a junior officer to vacuum.
Guardian Tejan opened the door to Hollis’s office, heart-shaped face suffused with panic. “Sir, we have a problem up front.”
Hollis sighed as the smell of fried chicken and lime soap wafted in. The Tejans were Silar allies. Making her vanish would cause trouble. “What kind of problem?”
“Vaneer is arguing with a woman up at the front desk. She’s requesting a day-pass from him but her crew doesn’t have her listed. She’s asking to speak to you.” Tejan’s face was wrinkled with more worry than the situation sounded like it merited.
“Is she a pretty woman? A cadet? Someone I shouldn’t talk to?”
“She threatened to leave Vaneer smeared across the tile and give his eyeballs to his captain if he didn’t find you immediately.”
“Hmmm. Off-hand I can only think of two women in fleet likely to make that threat and follow up on it. It’s not Marshall, is it?”
“No, sir. She’s, um, a Lee I think? Maybe a Gonbar. Short, black hair, round face.”
From up at the front desk, Guardian Vaneer pinged Hollis’s implant with a panic code.
“I’ll go check.” Walking through the office would waste precious seconds, so he teleported, stepping directly from his office to the front desk.
The offices had once been the main hub of all interstellar trade in the Malik system, a spaceport capable of refitting gravity-capable warships while unloading new settlers and running a major trading port. At the height, the spaceport had seen thousands of people and hundreds of space craft crossing the marbled floors every day.
Overhead, the summer sun came through the stained glass dome that had once been the central terminal for the Tarrin spaceport.
A small circle of blue-white light marked the edge of the Guardian’s reception area. Two junior guardians stood barricaded behind a half-circle stone desk as if it could lend them the authority they needed to win this battle.
Rowena Lee was glaring down his junior guardian. She’d showered and pulled her night-black hair into a tight bun at the back of her head. All the softness she allowed during training was replaced by the olive green Lee uniform with a sculpted collar that hid and protected her neck.
Under the sharp angles of the yeoman’s rank she wore on her shoulder, she wore the same faded ship’s patch for the Danielle Marie that he’d singed during one of their battles. They’d first crossed paths when that patch was new. Back when they’d both been lean, hungry teenagers.
She’d been a few centimeters shorter, but she was the same unflinching fighter he’d first met at the Academy, hovering in Mal Baular’s shadow looking for throats to slit. The Lees were still considered a minor crew back then, tech experts who made decent weapons.
Somehow, in the bowels of their monstrous warships, they’d forged her as a gift to the Baulars. To be Mal’s wife and protector.
Rowena was the Warmonger’s perfect weapon. Cold. Ruthless. Brutal.
Beautiful.
If she were a ship, he would have stolen her in the war. If she were a knife, she’d be at his side every hour of the day.
But instead she was his... something else. Not quite enemy. Not quite ally.
A rogue planet with no orbit, or a flaring sun, it was hard to say.
The ruling council thought they’d broken her, but he saw slips of the old Rowena still. A flash in her eyes during training that said she was thinking about killing him. A sneer on her lips that said she wanted to see him die the way his brother had.
He kept a tight shield up and walked calmly toward the front desk, waiting to see how far Rowena had slipped from civilization this time.
“Sir!” Vaneer looked like he was going to pee himself in relief. “I’ve told this woman twice that her captain hasn’t authorized her leave.” The junior guardian had the good sense to hide behind the long desk and keep his back to the long wall of windows.
“And I told your officer twice that this isn’t a matter of leave.” Rowena turned, arms crossed, eyes cold as the black between stars. “I’m going to the Tarrin morgue and need a shield pass.”
“Depositing or picking up?” Hollis joked, trying to defuse the situation.
Lee looked unimpressed, lips moving a fraction of a millimeter into a condescending sneer. Her shield gave her ship and rank, and marked her as being on official business, which was all the junior guardian really needed to know.
Vaneer missed all that and smirked. “She threatened me, sir. Said she’d leave me all over the floor.” He chuckled like that was a hilarious idea.
Hollis glared at Lee. “Really? You were going to leave me with sex-crazed cadets and a crime scene? That’s a little unfair.”
“I can bury him alive or drop him in the black with a teleport,” she said blandly. “No mess. No paperwork.” For Rowena that was practically pacifistic.
“You couldn’t!” Vaneer protested.
:Don’t kill him.: Hollis ordered Rowena over a tight, localized beam.
Rowena’s jaw tightened a fraction, the only sign she’d heard him.
Grinning so he didn’t yell, he walked over to Vaneer. “You see this woman? This is Rowena Lee. Put her face on your implant with a warning signal. Lee might be ranked a Yeoman right now, but she was a commander in the war, she’s a decorated fighter pilot, an engineer, and one of the five most dangerous people walking around Enclave. She could kill you. More worrisome, she would kill you and she wouldn’t apologize. If your crew complained, she might kill them too. The guardians would catch her, eventually, but we’d lose people in the fight. You don’t have the firepower for this battle. The reason you’re alive is because she’s a nice person, not because she’s weak.”
Rowena took a breath and some of her softness returned, a gentling in the tightness around her eyes that said she was willing to let this insult go. “Don’t lie to him, Silar. He’s alive because I don’t have time to play children’s games.”
Vaneer’s eyes went wide with panic. Good. Maybe the kid would learn some survival skills.
Hollis smiled. “Thank you for your patience, Yeoman. Would you please step into my office so I can help you? Vaneer is only authorized to hand out passes for the airshow, and I understand you’re not going.”
He watched her closely, trying to see something. A flicker of the eye that might be regret or distress that she was not going. A glance at the passes. Any sign that there was an emotion there.
There was nothing.
If there wasn’t fury and rage, there was a blank mask, a boundary he wasn’t allowed to cross.
He followed her into the guardian’s bullpen and waited for an explanation.
She walked into his office before she spoke. “I need a pass to Tarrin and I need something that makes me look like a Tarrin professional.”
“A professional what?” Hollis sat on the edge of his desk, pushing back a stack of datfiles.
“The Jhandarmi want me to identify a weapon that was used in an apparent homicide. The family is coming to collect the body today, so I need to look like someone you would trust with the deceased and the investigation.”
“What happened to the pass Sciarra gave you when you started working with the Jhandarmi? That shouldn’t expire until the new year.”
There was a slightest narrowing of her eyes, a hint of anger. “Captain Lee did a quarters check and said I wasn’t allowed to have it.”
“Your captain approved of your training with the Jhandarmi and working outside Enclave.”
“He approved that, but not of me leaving Enclave without express permission each trip,” Lee said, voice dangerously calm. “Captain’s prerogative.”
Hollis rolled his eyes. It wasn’t his place to question how other crews ran, it really wasn’t, but there were times he wished he had a clear shot at Hoshi Lee and an excuse to pull the trigger. It was criminally stupid to tie Rowena down to one ship. “All right. I’ll get a new one ready for you. And I’ll walk you down to wardrobe since I don’t think anyone else here has the code.”
She could probably break in if she was feeling motivated, but that wasn’t something he wanted to encourage. People asked questions when he let other people break locks for convenience.
Hollis led Rowena down the hall with unmarked Eden-green doors at odd intervals. “You know, if you’d let Carver officially swear you in, they’d give you a code of your own so no one had to escort you down here.”
If it were possible, the temperature around Lee dropped, but he was fairly certain the chill off her was hovering at zero Kelvin as it was. Telling her she wasn’t a bother would probably make it worse. He didn’t need a favor from her and he wasn’t trying to curry one. So he tried to think of something else to discuss. “Have you see the new holovid going around Enclave?”
“Which one?” she asked with a hint of annoyance.
“The one the younger Daunfars smuggled in from Tarrin? One of their senior officers brought the Starguard a copy to have it checked against fleet standards.”
Rowena’s eyebrows went up in confusion. “We have holovid standards? I thought anything not filmed in an empty cargo bay was considered a masterpiece.”
“Fleet moral standards,” Hollis said loftily as he unlocked the room where the guard kept their grounder clothes.
None of them had ships with ample closet space and the since no one had gotten particularly attached to any of the styles, the lot of it had wound up moldering in a closet. It had taken the new recruits two weeks to clean, sort, and hang everything. The end result was a space nearly as large as the training gym with rows of clothing sorted by size and color. It smelled of dust and a lingering floral perfume someone had tried several weeks ago.
“What passes for fleet moral standards these days?”
“Whatever Perrin says, I guess.” He turned on the light and smiled as Rowena grimaced. “Smallest sizes on the left, largest on the right.”
Her lips twitched in what might have been a silent curse, but she squared her shoulders and marched to the left.
Hollis followed. “The vid was about grounders who used fleet tech to reanimate bodies. Bring them back from the dead, sort of. But then the dead attacked the living and the city burned down.”
Rowena pulled a pair of heavy pants with four pockets off the rack. She paused for a moment, her black eyes staring off unseeing as she accessed her implant. There was a hint of green in her eyes, then purple.
He hid a smile. So far Rowena was the only person he knew of whose eyes glowed two distinct colors when pulling up data. He suspected she was accessing two different data bases, one public and one private, but he’d never been able to prove it. Asking wasn’t likely to get him anywhere, but she always did have the best gossip.
She shook her head. “We don’t have any tech capable of doing that.”
“No, but it’s meant to be a fun, scary movie.” He held out a hand and pushed the pants back toward the rack. “That’s a uniform for a dock worker.”
Her lips twitched in the hint of a grimace. “Dock workers can be well-educated consultants for the Jhandarmi, can’t they?”
“Try these.” He offered her a pair of graceful black slacks with a matching jacket.
Rowena held it up. “I think the neckline’s a little low.”
One glance said that the jacket alone would reveal more skin that was practical, or than Rowena was likely to ever let anyone see and live. Still...
“Still...”
“This is business, Silar! I’m not you. I’m not trying to seduce anyone.”
“I’m just saying you could if you needed to. Here,” he pulled a dark gold blouse from the rack. “This should look fine with it.”
Rowena regarded it skeptically. “It looks... shiny.”
“Metallics are very popular in Tarrin right now. You’ll look like someone with a comfortable amount of wealth, a basic understanding of classic Tarrin fashion, and it’ll give you freedom of movement.”
She rolled her eyes, but took the clothes and stepped behind the curtain someone had thrown up. “I am going to a morgue.”
“Where the dead could rise up and attack you,” he teased, listening to the sound of fabric over skin.
“Silar, if I get there and this dead person wakes up, I swear you are going to meet your ancestors a lot sooner than you planned.” She stepped out, black hair falling in soft waves to her waist, a scowl etched on her face.
He ordered his implant to save that memory for later. When was reaching his second century he wanted to be able to recall this moment like the fine art it was. But not share it. “Hair up, I’d think. You don’t want viscera on you.”
Her hair curled up on its own, manipulated by telekyen.
It was very tempting to pull a strand loose just to see her reaction. But he quashed that. Their interactions over the past year had grown friendlier, but she looked close to her breaking point. “It looks good. Your boots work, but I think we have some office shoes on the far wall.” He looked across the room, implant pulling data from the telekyen tags, until he found what he wanted. “Here. Black, with a slight heel. You can run in them and they’ll give a little height.”
Rowena’s eyes widened at the perceived insult. “Are you saying I’m too short to examine a corpse?”
“They’re weighted so you can kick in someone’s head easily, and the heels give you a better reach.” He grinned.
Her mouth opened with an objection then snapped shut, teeth snapping together as her jaw clenched. :You’re ridiculous.:
“True. But they’ll fit. So...”
Rowena took the shoes and put them on. “How do I look?”
Hair pinned up, the suit with the gold, sleeveless blouse on... She looked devastating. Dangerous. A dark goddess incarnate come to destroy the last remnants of humanity.
If she were anyone else, even another Lee, he would have tried for more than a look. But, Rowena?
“Silar? Did you die?”
“No, no... I’m trying to find a suitable response.” He crossed his arms and shook his head.
“It’s not that bad,” she huffed, turning to look at herself from all angles. “It’s not very practical, but I look like a grounder.”
He measured her reach and took two steps back. “You look gorgeous.”
Rowena snapped him an angry glare filled with confusion.
Hollis held up his hands to placate her. “Please remember that the grounders don’t know you, they don’t know your reputation, and one of them might try to approach you and flirt.”
She shrugged. “So? People have flirted with me before.”
“How many had broken arms after?”
“That’s unfair!”
“All I’m saying is, please don’t add to the morgue’s collection of corpses while you’re gone.” He had to tease her, had to make it playful, because if Rowena realized how beautiful she was she’d run and hide again. The fleet needed her to crawl out of her shell. Needed her to be the confident, competent officer she’d been during the war. She was the strongest Warmonger still alive, and, although she didn’t see it, many people in the fleet still looked to her for guidance. If Rowena could make peace with the fleet, the civil war that had broken them and brought them to die on this planet would finally end.
“Don’t break any treaties. Don’t break any arms. Got it.” She looked up at him. “I’ve done the training, you know. I might step into the occasional bar brawl, but I can control my temper.”
He narrowed his eyes, all thoughts of coaxing her back into fleet politics forgotten. “Occasional bar brawl? In the last month the guardians had to break up seventeen ‘little brawls’ you were in. You tried to take out my knee cap in one of them.”
“You were off duty.”
“Seventeen, Lee. Seventeen!”
“I didn’t start them. Not unless you think breathing in public is enough to start a fight.” She crossed her arms, the metallic shirt rippling interestingly.
In that outfit, breathing could start a fight.
“Besides,” Rowena said, “that’s here with the fleet, not out there with the grounders. I know when I step outside Enclave I represent the Lee crew and the fleet.”
Hollis looked her over once more. Forget flirting, someone was going to fall in love if she went out like that. “I think you need to change. Maybe the dock worker uniform.”
“This one is fine!”
“That, on you, is enough to bring a dead man back to life.”
Rowena rolled her eyes. There was a slight twitch in her lips, the barest hint of a ghost of smile.
Mentally, he awarded himself a point.
“I’m gorgeous, Silar, but I think the dead man is likely to stay dead.”
“And... the living who try to ask you out?”
“I’m on duty and, although I’m flattered, I’m not available.” She held her hand up like she was taking an officer’s oath. “I promise not to kill any grounders...” She put her hand down. “Unless they attack me first.”
“Actual attacking though,” Hollis said seriously. “Not just grabbing your shoulder to get your attention or invading your personal space.”
The corner of her lips twisted up in a satisfied smirk. “We both know that I know exactly what to do with someone in my personal space.”
Hollis smiled back. “Yes, but the grounders don’t have shields. Cushion them as they fall, please.”
A ping on his implant told him the things Rowena needed for her excursion were ready.
He snapped his fingers as he focused on what he wanted and teleported the pass card from the main office. It hung in mid-air for a second, then dropped into his hand.
“All right. Pass for the shield.” He handed it to Rowena as he led her back to the main hall and locked the wardrobe door behind them.
Rowena turned the card over. “This doesn’t have an expiration date.”
He shrugged. “Do you know when the Jhandarmi will close the case?”
“No.”
“Then it stays open. You can teleport in and out at need. And there’s a shield code for you. It allows the Starguard to know which side of the shield you’re on, and if someone needs to leave you an urgent message, it’ll be waiting for you when you cross the shield.”
“Anyone who needs to send me an urgent message can use my personal code,” Rowena said.
Hollis nodded. “Yes, if they have it. Most people don’t.”
“All my friends do.”
Which meant Titan Sciarra and maybe a few of the Lees.
He grinned anyway. “I don’t have it.”
“You don’t need it.” Her tone was venomously sweet. “We’re not friends.”
Hollis let that one go. Technically, he needed a way to contact her if there was an emergency because she was signing out under his authority. But Rowena would dodge that by saying she was under Jhandarmi authority, or her captain’s, or some other side rule that meant she wasn’t going to share anything she didn’t want to.
With a tight smile, he pointed at the pass. “This is one of the cards given to field agents. Break it, and a guardian will be on site in seconds.”
She eyed it thoughtfully. “Like the one I had when Titan went missing. You don’t hand those out to everyone?”
“Not since one enterprising young officer decided that being cold and lonely one night was an emergency. She went to her quarters, stripped her uniform off, and broke her key to see who would show up.”
Rowena’s eyes lit with amusement. “I bet you had fun.”
“Hardly. Sciarra was on duty and not too pleased to be pulled away from clocking out for the night to go home to his wife. Even if it had been me, I would have been on duty and given the officer the same lecture. We’ve been more careful about who gets the right to summon a guardian on a whim since then. I figure you’re responsible enough not to do anything shenanigany.”
“I’m absolutely positive that’s not a word.”
“Shenanigan. Shenanigans. Shenanigany. It declines.” He held out the obsidian knife he’d loaned her once before. “Here.”
Rowena held out her hand in surprise. “You sure?”
“In case something goes wrong. It never hurts to have a backup weapon. You could be trapped in the morgue with the undead!” He widened his eyes in fake shock and alarm.
She rolled her eyes in exasperation, then looked around.
“What?”
Black eyes met his. “Too many witnesses.”
He looked down the hall. Sure enough, three guardians were loitering there, waiting to see if a fight broke out. “They’re probably taking bets on who’s going to throw the first hit.”
“Probably.” She looked at the floor.
“We could really mess with their minds you know...”
It wouldn’t even take something as scandalous as a kiss. If he made Rowena laugh in front of witnesses, all of Enclave would be talking about it by noon.
“We’re not trying to kill each other, isn’t that paradigm-shifting enough?” Dark eyes looked up at him through long lashes.
Hollis shrugged. “Mmmm, we could do more.” He watched the guardians as they milled in a circle.
“Not everyone exists so you can get a reaction out of them, Silar.”
Hollis shifted his full attention back to Rowena. “But it’s so much fun to get a reaction.”
She lifted her chin a fraction as she squared her shoulders. That was a look of annoyance he knew well. Rowena was done fooling around.
“I should stop talking and let you get to the Jhandarmi,” Hollis said quickly. There was a limit to his good luck.
“That’s what I would prefer.”
“Well, have fun. Good luck identifying the mystery weapon. And don’t die. Everyone knows I get to be the one to kill you.”
Rowena chuckled softly, sending a pleasant little frisson through Hollis’s body and probably starting a wildfire of gossip in the process. “Not if I kill you first.” There was a flash of a smile before she teleported out.
Hollis dragged a hand along his chin. He’d just let Rowena Lee loose on the world and there were really only two ways this could go.
Either the world was going to end, and it was best if he hunkered down behind the thickest hull in the Silar armada.
Or the nature of the universe was going to dramatically realign, and the smart thing to do was grab a good snack and find a seat to watch the fireworks.
Whichever, Magnetic Storm Rowena was on the horizon.