allies and enemies 02 - rogues (36 page)

But the closest thing he felt when it came to Erelah.

In that moment, he got it. Finally.

“This isn’t a scam,” Asher said quietly. “I don’t want scrip. Or you. And I certainly don’t want your piece-of-crap ship. I’ve got my own piece-of-crap ship.”

He stepped closer, hands still held high, until the barrel of the weapon rested against his chest, in that same spot where Erelah’s hand had pressed and she’d wedged inexplicably into his very soul.

He recognized the threat he saw in Tyron’s gaze from his own reflection. He’d known it every waking moment of his search for Veradin. Desperation to keep safe what is yours. A willingness to stand between that harm and the thing that keeps you whole and sane. All this time, in those weeks he had been driven, not really stopping to examine that urge, the push that churned him ahead and spurred him on regardless of each dead end or false step. It burned there, a keening hollow ache, perhaps worsened knowing it was so close to being mended.

“I want Erelah to live. That’s all I care about.”

The gun in her hands drifted down, slightly. Something in that amber gaze softened. “Jon?”

“Just listen to what he has to say, Ty.” Veradin placed his hands on her shoulders. He leaned against her, voice softer still. “He can prove it.”

Jon glanced at him. “Show her the message.”

85

“This changes nothing.” Sela tossed the handheld onto the table the moment Erelah’s message finished. Jon sat up, startled by the noise from his semi-daze. The pounding in his aching brain sprang back to life. “It is possible this was coerced.”

“That doesn’t even make sense. No one knows we’re here. And why?” Elbows planted on the counter, Jon propped his head upright. He shut his eyes. At least the nausea was gone…for now.

What the Sceelah had they given him, anyway?

There was no reply. Sela had left the room.

With a monumental act of will, he pushed up from the bench. He sensed he was missing a chunk of time. Corsair was gone. Last time he’d seen him, he was an impatient shadow pacing along the corridor while he and Ty argued.

He found her in the bunkroom, shoving things into his battered duffel. “What’re you doing?”

“Packing.” She knelt, pulling a modest stack of neatly folded clothes from beneath the bed. His clothes, most specifically.

“What. Why.” His brain felt as if a layer of mold had grown over it, slowing everything.

She exhaled. Her shoulders stiff. “You’re still impaired. I’m saving you the energy required to argue. Ultimately, you will try to convince me to go with Corsair to Erelah’s presumed location. I’ll feel required to go with you given our relationship status.”

He scoffed. “Fates, you’re such a romantic. If I weren’t about to puke, I’d kiss you.”

“And you are reckless.” She paused, arms filled with more gear.

He sat on the edge of the bed and leaned in her way. “You love it. Admit it.”

He knew how far he could push her. There was always a hidden pool of anger there, just beneath her surface. She dug through another storage box, but he glimpsed the subtle upward curl of a smirk. “We would have departed Hadelia tonight in any regard.”

He winced, guilty. His intention had been to dissuade her from leaving. Jon flopped back onto the bed, his arm thrown across his face to blot out the glare of the lights. His legs extended across the only open pathway in the tiny room, forcing her to step over him.

“Does your head hurt?” There was mocking, gloating sympathy in her tone. He could easily envision her using it on a whiney booter.

Her noisy rummaging had stopped. He moved his arm away.

“Had worse. I’ll live.” Her smugness urged the lie from him. In truth, this was the hangover to end all hangovers.

She had changed into the broken-in shipsuit that was worn through at one knee. It wrenched his pride to see her in castoff clothes, although she’d never complain. But it was better than her wandering around the Cass topless with Corsair onboard. Modesty was a weird thing for her. She had no problem menacing someone while half-dressed, but put her in anything clingy and she was suddenly “naked.”

With an unconvinced smirk, Sela climbed onto the bed. She reached across him, the confined space forcing her to straddle his torso as she claimed the pulse gun from the storage rack.

There was a self-satisfied glint in her eyes. “Serves you right…going off on your own.”

“I’m sure it was no less dangerous than your secret mission. Whatever that was.”

She sat back on her heels. Any amusement instantly evaporated. “Irrelevant, in light of current matters.”

“Well, if it’s so
irrelevant
, you can tell me then.” He reached for her, but she stepped off the bed, purposefully avoiding his gaze.

“Why did you not return to the Cassandra as you said you would?” Sela drew the A6 and busied herself with checking the charge compressor.

“You first.” He pushed up on his elbows. The motion created a new wave of nausea.

The hungover part of him didn’t want this nascent argument. But he could tell that whatever she’d done or discovered on her clandestine mission had bothered her. Things that bothered Sela had a way of coming back to bite him in the ass and often at completely inappropriate times.

Like the time she locked you out of the ship…for six hours.

Satisfied with her inspection, she holstered the A6. “When this is over.”

“Is this because I asked you—”

“We’ll talk when all this is over, Jon.” Her amber gaze held his. There was fresh damage there, just under the surface. During his admittedly stupid stunt at the tavern, he’d missed something important. He knew from experience that she would let it eat her soul before she said a thing, especially if it meant compromising a “mission” or disappointing him.

She will put you first every time, Jon.

He felt a stronger surge of guilt at this.
I don’t deserve her.
“We’ll get Erelah. Help her. Things will be right. It will be all right. You’ll see.”

“I wasn’t aware things weren’t.” Sela pivoted out the door. This time moving in the direction of the command loft.

The rungs of the ladder sounded beneath her boots. “I suggest you bathe before we leave. You smell like a wasterec. Might as well use the water reserves.”

Jon climbed to his feet. He lifted an arm and sniffed experimentally. He cringed. In fact, a shower sounded like bliss.

“What’re you doing?” He leaned against the corner bulkhead. She was a dark shape moving in the interior of the loft. They’d agreed to take Corsair’s vessel. Any belongings left in the Cass, the ship itself, would be forfeit to scavs.

There was a deadly glee in her voice. “Leaving a gift for Koenii.”

86

Corsair’s vessel was a Cassandra.

The fact that it was in far better repair spurred a jealous twinge and worsened the odd pang of leaving
their
Cass behind.

Sela wondered how long before Koenii found her. Or the surprise she had left for him.

The sense of satisfaction was almost worth seeing her destroyed. Realistically she knew the Cass was on her last legs.
The primary nodes were held together with patience and good intentions. The ancient cesium manifold was well past any safe limit for compression. It was a matter of time before a catastrophic failure.

But it had been home—hers and Jon’s.

Foolish. It’s just a ship.

There were more pressing matters.

“How did you locate us?” She watched Corsair prod through the screens of the navsys with an efficiency that seemed unmatched by his hulking appearance. “Hadelia is a large planet. Searching should have taken a considerable amount of time.”

“It did. Too much.” He paused, gave her a proud grin. “Got lucky when I heard about this crazy Volunteer and a crester castoff taking jobs. I knew it was my girl…Ty.”

He seemed to enjoy his adoption of her name. No one but Jon called her Ty. Most certainly not this miscreant.

Sela lunged, grabbing a handful of his jacket and leaning down into his thick face in one quick move.

He frowned, no doubt surprised by her speed. Good.

“You will call me
Tyron
. If that’s too hard to remember, you call me ‘sir.’ Got it?” She jabbed his collar for emphasis.

“Fair enough.” The frown stretched into that annoying grin again. It failed to match the predatory wariness in his maroon gaze. A Binait mongrel as well. How appropriate. Then, all respect absent: “
Sir.
”

She released his jacket. He leaned back into the bench. She returned to her spot.

It would be infinitely satisfying to remove that insolent smirk from his face, but Jon’s orders had been rather specific.
Watch him. Don’t kill him.

He probably thought himself handsome, but Sela found nothing attractive about him. He was just a big mound of muscle, possessing none of Jon’s refinements. Granted, he spoke High Eugenes, barely.

Was this the behavior that had won Erelah’s trust? Perhaps the girl had suffered some sort of head trauma…

The Erelah in the wav was far frailer than even the waif-like creature Jon had pulled from the stryker in the Cassandra’s bay two years ago. The air of composure was still there. She did not gibber nonsense about the Sight or monsters. In fact, she spoke in that same refined High Eugenes that made Sela’s hands instinctively curl into fists.

Erelah told of the unraveling of her very genetics. It was the result of the tampering done by Tristic to prepare her as a host. A splicer had a means to remedy this, but required a blood relative. Sela had listened with increasing incredulity to the explanation Erelah had given of her missing two years. It was vague enough for Sela to suspect that the girl did not truly understand how this “chrono displacement” had occurred.

Moving slowly, hands outstretched in a mocking movement as if to say he feared another attack from her, Corsair reached for the navsys and began tabbing through the screens. If her constant glare bothered him, he didn’t let it show. During her time as Commander, if Sela had a man in her unit like this one, she wouldn’t have needed to lift a finger to fix it. The others would have straightened him out soon enough.

Narasmina was deep within the Reaches, as best as Sela could tell that the Reaches had a beginning, middle or end. The jealously guarded flexer near Hadelia was problematic.

A glance at the telem showed her the fat-bellied cargo tugs and darting shapes of a dozen other vessels, all near in age to the Cassandra or older. They were cued up for the Poisoncry flexer, obediently waiting their turn to pay the creds to be released. Nothing happened here without their say so.

Soon one of the Guild’s security skiffs would demand their tithe or blast sizeable holes in their hull. Perhaps even Fisk was watching from somewhere in Hadelia’s vast network of orbiting platforms. At any moment, he’d alert everyone to their presence, order their arrest.

Yet, Corsair seemed unconcerned.

She was careful to keep her body at an angle to him and swung the interface screen to her side. “The flexer will put us in at Narasmina. Are you sure? The picket will expect the tithe—”

“That’s not how this works.” He pulled the screen back. “Erelah trusted
me
with this. I’ll do the charting.”

“Which will be extremely difficult with broken fingers.” Sela swung the frame away.

“This is my ship. My rules,” he countered.

“I doubt you legally own this vessel.”

“Your kind are all the same aren’t you? Giant stick up your—”

“There a problem?” Jon hunched over the railing.

He seemed less pale, but hurting. She could tell by the stiffness of his moves. The moment they’d breached atmo, Jon had disappeared into the waste rec where he had undoubtedly been heaving his guts out like a booter during null grav training. Whatever the barkeep had given him had yet to work its way out of his system. A smug, small-minded part of her felt vindicated, as if he had somehow earned his lesson about going off to taverns on his own.

“He refuses to relinquish the navigational criteria for the conduit travel,” Sela blurted before Corsair could say a word. The brigand had somehow influenced Jon, or at least earned a short-sighted trust from him. In his compromised state, Jon was far less wary of the man than was prudent.

“Who
talks
like that?” Corsair rolled his eyes.

“
I
talk like that,” Sela snapped.

“Enough.” Jon held his hands out, gesturing for calm. He winced as if his head stung. “Let’s start over.”

Sela drew in breath to speak. Jon held a hand up to her. He regarded Corsair. “What’s this about? I thought we had an agreement.”

Corsair flashed her a smug grin. “Still do. But here’s the lay of it. Erelah made a change to this ship. Used the jdrive. Won’t need the flexers.”

Jon peered at the screen over their shoulders. “My sister trusted
you
with the device from the
Jocosta
.”

“Trusts me with more than that.”

Revolted, Sela scoffed.
How long would Jon allow this farce to continue?

Corsair regarded Jon. “What’s it gonna be, cap’n?”

“What about the Poisoncry picket? They can still track a departure,” Sela urged. She thought of Fisk hunched like a funnel spider stalking its prey.

Corsair’s chuckle was a low rumble.

“What.”

“I wouldn’t worry about them.”

“Friends of yours?” Jon asked.

“Poisoncry? They hate me…or any Ironvale Guild.”

“That’s so hard to imagine.” Sela glared.

Jon expelled an impatient breath. “I take it you have a way around that, then?”

“It won’t matter. Not with the jdrive tech. We don’t need the flexer. Just need to stay clear of velo drive fields of other vessels.”

Jon watched him for a measuring moment. Sela shook her head slightly. This whole operation was too risky.
We don’t know this man. We have no reason to trust him. What are you doing?