allies and enemies 02 - rogues (18 page)

“The intelligence from Maynard yielded so much more than we’d hoped. Immensely so.” Wren extended his arm, guiding her down a corridor that led deeper into the ship. She paused long enough to glare at him, before moving on.

Maynard? Since when were they so chummy?

“This better be worth it.”

Wren thumbed open a screen on his tablet. He held up a graphic that was part telemetry read and part stellar chart. She gave it a cursory glance then fixed him with a dead stare. It finally sank into him.

“There is a traceable energy signature that’s keyed to a particular type of propulsion Maynard’s research facility had been working on. The ramifications, if true, would most certainly solve problems around the unstable nature of subspace propulsion and use of the known mapped Hawk aps in this area.”

“Wren. Less tell. More show.” She folded her arms.

“It’s here.”

Snowden resisted the urge to put her fist in his face. “
What’s
here?”

“The stryker. The one from the long array scans.”

“Here? How?” Snowden regarded the battered walls and ravaged corridor. “Show me.”

37

The stryker resembled the unlikely offspring of an ancient atmospheric ship like an F-16 and a wasp. Snowden appraised the dull silver skin and sloped lines. It was a killing machine, by any other name. The hull bore no markings. The canopy was open. A trio of engineers crawled over the body like ants attacking the corpse of a beetle. With just as much efficiency as their insect counterparts, they were taking the metal beast apart piece by piece.

“My analysis indicates this is an experimental vessel. Impressive compartmentalization for creating an artificial singularity. It’s not reliant on mapped Hawking apertures…what the Eugenes call flex points.” Wren jerked his chin up, sounding oddly prideful, as if he had something to do with making the thing.

“You mean it makes its
own
Hawk aps?” Snowden continued her orbit of the bustle of activity. Already she was wording the trans to Vesta that was going to turn this exposure to a win.

“As an over simplification, yes.”

“The pirates do that? Make this thing?” Snowden asked, dubious. The grungy bay did not seem the likely place for such a ground-breaking invention. It had more the air of a seedy chop-shop.

“Not these…
criminals
.” Wren spat the word. He actually seemed insulted by her question. “They did not know what they had here.”

“You’re losing me, Miles.” Snowden fought an uncontrollable urge to step away from him. “
What
did they have here?”

“Why, a weapon, of course,” he said with a bird-like tilt to his head.

“A weapon?”

“Major, this stryker destroyed a Eugenes Deacon class vessel. Specifically the one that belonged to our prisoner…Maynard.” A bitterness hooked his mouth. For a crazy moment, she had a sense of anger churning deep within the ordinarily mild-mannered Wren.

She looked away, uncomfortable. But the soldier in her was still impressed with this discovery. Deacon class vessels were massive ships, planet-killers. Capturing tech like this could mean a game-changer for the UEC.

“Explain,” she prodded.

His damned tablet appeared. He found a new screen. More tables. Graphs. “The drive on this stryker creates a destabilization to the drives on a Eugenes vessel. This in turn triggers a catastrophic failure to the field, ripping it apart on a subatomic level.”

“Can we use it? Replicate it?”

“If given time, perhaps…” He parted his hands in a twitching shrug, another very un-Wren-like gesture.

She got the uneasy sense there was an undercurrent here; she was missing something important. “Why would Eugenes kill their own ship?”

“An act of sabotage by the pilot. She was the project leader on the weapon’s development. The pirates that claimed this stryker had also taken her hostage. During our team’s insertion, she escaped along with two others.” Wren’s tone flattened. “The ship they took is a type of personal yacht, equipped with an IS drive. That leaves only habitable locations that are IS drive reachable with the resources they had at hand. This narrows the possibilities extensively, were we to pursue them. If you are to agree, that is?”

“How’re you getting all this?” Snowden studied him. He had too many answers, too quickly. She didn’t like the idea of being led, but liked even worse being left with nothing to show for it when Vesta found out about the loss of cover.

Miles scowled. “I’ve questioned a surviving Binait female that has offered information in exchange for amnesty.”

Snowden grunted.
Jesus, we’re running a goddamn resort for alien defectors.
Although, it would be easy enough to space them once they outlived their usefulness. Saved on ammo.

She pretended to consider before nodding. “Agreed.”

They watched the bustle of activity that engulfed the stryker. “This project leader we’re going after got a name?”

“Erelah Veradin.”

PART V

38

“If’n you gonna sit, you need t’order.”

The comment fought against the din of tavern. Sela turned from her watch of the door. The server was dressed in a grimy set of coveralls. A lit vine stick dangled from one corner of the man’s mouth. The smoke mingled with the smell of unwashed bodies and greasy food in the packed tavern. He could have been thirty or a hundred and thirty; it was difficult to tell beneath the thick layer of tattoos and scars.

A fusillade of shouts and the crash of breaking glass erupted from the back of the crowded room, followed by desperate drunken laughter. The server didn’t flinch. The yellowed eyes that regarded her were dulled of interest for anything beyond his immediate proximity.

“Water,” she said.

He chewed the vine stick. “Got scrip?”

“Clean water.” She slapped a token onto the pitted surface of the bar, irritated to see some of the hard-won currency depart so quickly. “That doesn’t glow in the dark. Enough for two.”

The server took the coin and sauntered off, in no great hurry to fulfill the order.

The air here was bad. Contaminants filled the water. It was a toxic and lasting gift of the long-gone shipbuilding yards that once ran day and night. Brojos had been one of the biggest builders for Fleet and Origin. Now it was dying, like the rest of the Reaches. This place was a limb, severed from the rest of the body. It could only decay.

Any length of time spent outdoors required filter masks, absurdly expensive. As a result, indoor spaces like this were crowded to bursting.

She’d spent the morning trying to negotiate a suitable price for the assault boots and econ suit. At first, no one in the grimy market center of Brojos would deal with her, distrustful of a newcomer. Their broken patois of Commonspeak compounded her frustration. Ultimately, she found a salvage dealer willing to broker a deal, resulting in the modest collection of chits resting in the thigh pocket of her shipsuit and the two refurbished filter masks crammed into her day kit.

The dock fees for Obscrum were too steep. It was Jon’s stroke of inspiration to hide the Cassandra in the rusted-out skeletal remains of a Phaedon class carrier languishing on the settlement’s ragged edges. Without a dock to charge the ship’s batteries or provide potable water, they would have to be inventive with resources. Regardless, it was secure and a means to avoid other parties.

Were there more of Poisoncry’s men here, like Fisk, ready to recruit her to serve their Guild masters? Her first few days here, Sela had expected the Guild-sworn to show up around every corner. Looking back on their encounter, she still could not place what it was exactly about him that unnerved her.

Sela scanned the other patrons. Some gazed listlessly into drinks. Others stared off into space, shoulders hunched in the universally accepted stance of the dispossessed. There were a few curious glances in her direction. She scowled. They kept their own council for now.

Jon wove his way through the crowd to her. The duffle strung over his shoulder seemed heavier. A good sign. He slid onto the bench beside her. The server sloshed two battered metal tumblers on the bar. He gave an absent nod.

“Elegant place you’ve found. I’d have cleaned up.” Jon cocked an eyebrow as the server moved away.

She studied him. “Where is your coat?”

“Why? Is there a dress code here?” He glanced down at his thin shirt and then around the room.

“Where is your coat?” she repeated, ignoring another one of his ill-timed jests.

“Surprisingly, there’s no brisk market for outmoded pulse weapons with faulty charge inducers.” He gave a lopsided smirk. “Guy liked my coat. I traded it.”

“You need proper attire.” The weather here was unpredictable at best, but always toward the colder end of the spectrum. Dirty, ash-laden snow had already begun to spit down outside. As a breeder, she could endure harsher environs, but he would require warmer clothing.

Aside from that, she had simply liked how the jacket looked on him.

He leaned in, voice lowered in mocking conspiracy. “Guess what? I’ll live.” He patted the heavy duffle. “Besides, we need to eat.”

A chorus of bawdy laughter snagged her attention. A female bellowed in an octave that did not suggest mirth, but anger. The sea of bodies obscured most of the action, but a trio of heads and shoulders towered over the rest. Three males. They loomed over a young woman, barely out of adolescence. The girl shoved at one of them, attempting to make her way past—fruitless, considering their relative sizes. One of them made an apish show of letting her by, only as his cohort seized her by the hair. This elicited another round of laughter from the trio. They were like spike hounds playing with a captured rodent. Judging from the sudden lack of interest from the crowd, this activity was tolerated and possibly common.

A spike of anger drove through Sela.

“What are you doing?” Jon’s voice brought her back.

Her hand rested on the stock of the A6, a reflex. “If that were your sister—”

“But it’s not.” He flinched at the mention of Erelah, just enough. He eased her hand away from the side arm.

The server mopped at the table with a stained cloth. “No sense tanglin’ with the Heavy Grav boys. Koenii’s men always win.”

“What’s a Koenii?” Sela ventured. Jon’s boot tapped her leg.

She glared at him.
What harm would it be to gain intel on a potential threat?

The server regarded her, measuring, as if truly seeing her for the first time. Sela sank back, trying to appear only casually interested.

“Koenii runs everythin’ from the market to the Skids.” He nodded at the growing altercation with the young woman. The Heavy Gravs were now taking turns keeping her kit out of reach. “He use dem brainless scavs to do it.”

“They’re as big as Valen,” Jon commented.

Sela studied them, silently agreeing.

But my Valen would never have acted that way.

All were easily the height of a breeder with the muscles to complete the illusion. There was a uniformity to them that suggested infantry. She’d heard stories that Hadelia once housed a Regime kennel before the Treaty of Ashes. The breeders produced by that facility had to have gone somewhere. Were these Heavy Gravs their progeny?

She’d nearly laughed at the nickname. Heavy gravity. It was a common penalty the drillers exacted when a cluster did not perform perfectly. They’d crank up the a-grav in the training facility, order the operation performed over and over. A term for punishment that became synonymous with bad luck. How appropriate here.

As Sela watched, the girl gave up pursuit of her belongings and tried to slip by. One of the men seized her wrist. The girl bellowed in pain, swinging out in an erratic arc with her free fist. It struck her attacker with a meaty thwack to his thick jaw. His features collapsed into a frown. The amusement drained away.

The quarry wasn’t supposed to fight back.

Sela was striding through the crowd before Jon could stop her.

39

“Oh, for Miri’s sake.” Jon pushed through the crowd in Sela’s wake.

How am I surprised?

He recognized a strange mix of pride as well. The Sela Tyron that once stood across from his ops console on the
Storm King
five years ago would have let the incident slide past, watching dispassionately and perhaps even analyzing the girl’s choice in tactics.

Jon caught up with her. So far, none of the Heavy Gravs noticed them; their antics still focused on the young woman. This close, the tension of the watching crowd was electric and hungry. A ring of onlookers had formed, not willing to become embroiled but just as eager to see what free entertainment might unfold.

He seized Sela’s upper arm before she reached the point of no return. She pivoted, eyes narrowed.

“What’re you doing?” He tried to pull her back and she dug in.

“Evening the odds.”

“There is no way this ends well.” He looked past her to the three impossibly large men. One of them had noticed them and now leaned against his counterpart to make a comment. There were variances in their clothes and in the inkwork on their arms and necks, but otherwise, they seemed identical.

Interchangeable, like cogs. Parts for the machine,
was what Silva used to call them. Despite his dislike of the
Storm King
’s captain, Jon could see what he meant.

“Hey, bricker. You got business with ‘dis?” The question was thick with the strange patois of Hadelia.

Too late now
.

Sela maneuvered from his grip and stepped in front of Jon. “I do. Leave her alone.”

The Heavy Gravs exchanged scoffs of disbelief. “The vulta owe you scrip too? You wait your turn then, eh?”

“Ty, just forget this. Leave it.” The command came out in Regimental.

Her spine stiffened, perfunctory after all this time. It was the language of commands, edicts. “In a moment,” she responded in the same over her shoulder.