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WATER STREAMED OVER ROWENA’S head as she stood in the shower. Implants didn’t replace the need for sleep. They simply balanced out the brain chemistry while nanites expedited cell repair enough to make it feel like a few minutes standing still was the same as eight hours of rest.
Maybe it had been more than a few minutes.
The water was growing cold by the time Rowena shook off the fuzzy-headed feeling of the REM boost and dried off with a thin towel. Her stomach rumbled in complaint. All that food at Sonya’s party and all she’d managed to steal was a handful of fruit.
“Crack my hull.” Opening the chill box, she looked at the square packages Tyrling had sent. Pink. Orange. Green. The food was color coded, but no one had bothered to give her the cypher.
This is why she needed a crew.
How was a person supposed to survive when they worked more hours than there were in a day and still had to find time to feed themselves? She needed an XO, a ship’s cook, and a couple of NCOs on hand to back her up.
Picking an orange box, she opened it and read the label: BREAKFAST SANDWICH. Frozen solid and with no hint as to what it contained.
Slamming it on the counter to activate the heating element, she waited. The frozen sandwich stayed resolutely cold. A quick scan showed no integrated heating elements.
How was it supposed to cook? Was it supposed to sit out overnight?
Certain she was missing a key step, she shoved the sandwich back in the chiller. There were ration bars in the closet. Fighting grounder food into edibility was a waste of time.
Her phone rang as she pulled on a pair of multi-pocketed pants and a black shirt that would let her blend in throughout Kydell.
“Lee.” Whoever was on the other end was Jhandarmi and there was no point lying about her name. She tucked Hollis’s black knife into her belt and the Starguard emergency card into her pocket under a heavy shield. There. Technically she was keeping her end of her agreement with Hollis.
“Tyrling.” The director growled out his name. “You in Kydell?”
“Yes. Did you get the report from Silar yet?”
“Got it. I need boots on the ground. Get a head count on Lethe troops, make sure there’s extra security around our offices. You know the kind I mean.”
A shield. “Yes, sir.” Marshall had put one up originally and there was no reason for it not to be intact, but she’d go check it again.
“We’ve got another agent arriving today. I’ll have him contact you. Keep your phone nearby. And, Lee, stay out of trouble.”
“I’ve been a model officer, sir. No complaints since my arrival.”
“Except for the dead security guard.”
“I warned him, sir. I’m an engineer, but I can’t fix stupid men who think they can beat me in a fight.”
Tyrling laughed. “You can’t at that. Get going. I need reports yesterday.”
“Then I’ll see if I can invent time travel in my free moments, sir.” She hung up with a grim smile. “Are there only twelve people on this planet?” she asked the wall. “Is there really no one else who could do this?”
Probably not.
Just like no one else could fix the water filtration on the Tuul to ensure Yunjin had a good training berth. Or barter repairs on the hull of the Ingala for the engine parts the Persephone needed. Or see if the botanist on the Cattleya wanted to trade orchid seeds for a set of Kaitlin rods for her side project.
“Hull-cracked grounder imperialist.” Rowena laced her heavy black boots up and stuffed a couple of ration bars in her pockets for later.
There was probably a good reason for not going to find Sonya Lethe and slamming her head against the wall until she saw sense.
Marshall would say it wasn’t politically delicate enough. Although the whole planet would be better if someone sat Lethe down, looked her in the eye, and explained that on the whole, society did better without tyrants. A little bit of public service, a few less ostentatious parties, and Sonya could have all the public adoration she wanted without killing anyone.
Locking the apartment, Rowena headed out of the small residential district to the business center where the Kydellians kept all the foreign embassies and police in a couple of older buildings marked by dusty flood lines.
The streets were quiet, even for an early hour of the morning. Businesses should have been opening, the smell of pastries should have filled the streets, and there should be a surge in noise from the docks as the first ships of the morning came in on the tide.
There was nothing.
Store fronts were shuttered.
Restaurants were dark, their ovens cold.
From the docks was the mournful bell, calling the absent rowdies to work.
They’d fled the city. Left it abandoned to the people who called themselves the true citizens. And what were those people going to do when no one else came to unload the cargo?
Her phone’s ringing filled the street. “Hello?”
“Tyrling,” the director said. “You at the offices yet?”
“Just heading there now. Things are quiet here. Why?”
“One of the silent alarms went off.”
She risked a quick ping of the shield over the offices. “The security is in place and it won’t let anyone in unless they have a Jhandarmi badge.”
“Could be a mouse or something. A bird flying through a window.” The director sounded uneasy.
Rowena turned the corner so she saw the long road that ran from the hilltop capitol buildings to the main dock. The Jhandarmi offices were to the left, tucked into the same structure as the offices for work permits and social services. Someone was stepping out.
“Is your other agent here?” Rowena asked.
“Could be,” Tyrling said. “He caught the earliest tram in this morning.”
The man walking out of the offices waved at her.
“Maybe he forgot his badge.” She waved back and started walking to meet him.
The world exploded.
Rowena tumbled backward and looked up in shock as smoke billowed up from the ruined building.
All their work. All their efforts. She’d kept the rowdies away, stopped Lethe’s plan, and the Jhandarmi offices were still in ruins.
In her mind, a confusion of calculations beat against each other.
It didn’t make sense. There was a shield in place. There were guards.
The only easy way past was to teleport the explosives in, and no one from fleet had been here but her.
She’d been the last line of defense in Kydell and she’d failed.
“Lee!” Tyrling screamed from the phone she’d dropped. “Lee!”
Rowena reached for it and a heavy boot fell down, narrowly missing her fingers as it crushed the phone.
“Officer?” A man with dark blond hair covered in plaster dust held up a Jhandarmi badge. He’d been the one coming out of the offices.
She looked down at the broken phone. “Yes?”
“Agent Erach.” He took a shaky breath. “Erach Dolus. Tyrling said you could help me if I needed it.” He looked over his shoulder at the destruction. “I need it.”
It would have been better to stay, try to sort through the debris and find the cause of the explosion. But she could come back after Erach was safe. “Straight to the hospital or to Tyrling?”
“To these coordinates, please.” He pulled a scrap of paper out of his pocket. ”It’s my safe zone for emergencies like this.”
The location was somewhere on the eastern edge of the continent. A sparsely populated area, but well within her teleport limits and a good place to hide a base. “Tyrling knows of this?”
“Yes, you can call him—” His eyes grew wide with delayed realization. He looked down at the shattered phone. “We can contact him when we arrive. I have medical equipment there. Everything I need.”
Lethe troops rounded the corner, shouting.
“Please,” Erach said. “This is going to be a political nightmare if the Kydellians find out I’m here. I haven’t had a chance to get my work registration signed. No one was in the office.”
“Okay.” Rowena held her hand. “Hold on. Close your eyes if you like. Some people find this disorienting.”
It took nothing to teleport them from the smoke-filled city to the wide plains where the sun beat down on them and the air was filled with the screams of angry insects.
“Lovely location,” Rowena said, dropping contact Erach’s hand. Summer-dried grasses and the distant green smear of a tropical forest. “When’s it rain here?”
“Rainy season should be starting soon,” Erach said. “You won’t be here for it.”
“I wasn’t planning on being here for it.” She turned back to him and felt a twinge in her arm.
The Jhandarmi officer grinned angrily. “You thought you were better than us?”
“What?” She pinged her implant and found nothing.
No signal. No answering response.
Even her secondary implant was low. “What is going on?”
“You’re going to meet some friends of mine.” Erach was grinning ferociously, hazel eyes filled with glee. “You’re going to give us the answers we need. You’re going to cooperate, or I will personally make sure that the war your lot thinks was so terrible is just a distant childhood fantasy.” Erach pulled an older-style metal gun from beneath the folds of his jacket. “I will make your life a living nightmare.”
Rowena’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “With that?”
Erach frowned down at his weapon. “Yes. It’s a gun.”
“But it’s not meant for torture. Do you know the kick-back on that thing? At this range, one shot is going to cut me in half.” She took step toward him as her training came to the fore. “There’s no way to miss a major artery. If you want torture, you need something small.” Another step. “You want to focus on pain, not damage.”
He didn’t move fast enough to dodge her punch. A fist to his jaw and an elbow to his neck.
She grabbed the gun as he fell.
A shot rang out beside her, the ordinance splashing into the hardpacked dirt beside her. “You have friends? How?” She stomped on Erach’s side, taking minimal satisfaction in the sound of ribs breaking, and ran away from the guns.
It was a guess at best. They could have been herding her. Could be setting an ambush. But staying still was a worse option.
The stolen gun was heavy in her hands. Pre-isolation style with metal bullets. It was a crude, wasteful sort of weapon, but it would kill someone.
Without her implant, her lungs started to burn. Her legs insisted she didn’t want to run this fast over uneven ground.
It went against all her training to keep moving rather than stand and fight.
The ground exploded to her right from another shot behind her. She dodged left.
Zig-zagging, weaving. It was like being in a fighter, except there wasn’t comforting weight of her uniform, no guns, no communications.
Last time things had been this desperate was when Hollis had cracked her hull and she’d been forced to put up a heavy shield or breath vacuum.
Ancestors, that had been a day. If Mal hadn’t been there keeping her calm, she would have run short of oxygen long before she made it to safety.
Breath. Keep breathing, Ro. Steady. Count it out.
She focused on breathing. Her feet kept going, moving along the unpredictable lines of the fighter’s flight path until she reached the dubious safety of the trees. Even without her nanites she could cover a kilometer in under ten minutes. Time and distance would give her an advantage.
Glancing behind, she tried to gauge the distance to where Erach lay. A couple of klicks at most. It looked further than it was, but there was a slope that stretched to the horizon. The open plain was the top of a plateau.
An animal shout filled the air, a long, low howl from the dawn of time that silenced the insects and made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.
Hellhounds.
They’d brought the hunting hounds after her.
Standing to fight wasn’t a question. Her implant wasn’t recharging fast enough and she couldn’t defend against the dogs while moving.
Rowena looked up at the canopy.
The edge of the forest was filled with light, pretty and inviting, but horrible for defense. The deeper forest would have more options for camouflage.
Think of it as a training exercise. A practice drill. Can your cadets do this?
Of course they can.
So can you.
In a few hours, there’d be other concerns. Water was important in this heat.
Food.
Shelter, if it rained or it grew cold tonight.
Communications, if her implant didn’t recharge.
She should have asked Erach how he’d nulled her implant before she put his rib bone through his lung.
The baying hounds grew closer as she sprinted past the edgewood for the darker parts of the forest. Ancestors, if you can forgive me, send some help.
Ducking under a low branch, she plunged into the undergrowth and ran for her life.