Cypher (The Dragon's Bidding Book 2) (2 page)

More than just the site
of the Dragon Throne, senators, elected by their constituents, met here to
hammer out legislation and present petitions, but the ultimate power remained
with the Emperor and the two Triumvirs—military and civilian. The Scyrans’
hybrid Imperial Republic served them well, as long as the Emperor remained fair
and just, but two decades of Ashcraft’s rule had showed how horribly things
could go off the rails with a despot in control.

Wolf leaned close to
whisper, not using his comm. “We should have brought the cats.”

“Too many people.
They’d have been trampled in that mess we came through.” Behind the tinted
visor, she couldn’t see his face to judge his mood, but he held his shoulders
tight, his back rigid.

“I’d like to be able to
tap into Jumper’s empathic senses about now, or perhaps Faydra’s telepathic
ability.”

“What’s wrong?”

Before he could answer,
their guards stopped at a double door, pulled it open, and ushered them into a
room, its desk and over-stuffed couches suggesting a waiting area for an inner
office. A second pair of white-armored guards flanked the exit in the opposite
wall.

“Can you download a map
of the building and tell where we are?” Wolf asked.

Fitz linked into
building security and pulled up the floorplan, viewing it on her inhead
display. Now she understood her partner’s unease. “We’re not near the Assembly
Hall; this is the far side of the complex.”

“That’s what I feared,
and our two escorts haven’t left. They’re standing behind us, blocking any
retreat.” He pitched his voice low, staying off the comm to prevent the
Praetorians picking up their conversation.

Fitz fought the urge to
turn and confront the pair behind her, but instead scanned the other two. A
sense of wrongness rippled down her spine. “I recognize the taller one. He’s an
augie. The Praetorian Guard won’t recruit from SpecOps.”

The internecine rivalry
between the Imperial Guard and Special Operations had been long-standing and
vitriolic. Fitz eased her hand closer to the slug thrower on her hip. “I’m
betting all four of them could be augies.” Her combat systems lit up, feeding
her scenarios and probabilities, and targeting reticles flashed on her inhead
display.

“And we walked right
into their trap.” Wolf’s ploy to keep their conversation secret had failed; the
augies’ enhanced hearing would have picked up their whispers as easily as if
they’d been shouting.

Fitz rolled her
shoulders. “You grab Ari and stash her under that desk, then take the two at
the back.” Her weapon blurred from its holster at the same time as all four of
their attackers launched into hyperkinetic speed.

Cyan bolts of energy
crisscrossed the room. Behind her, Wolf’s slug thrower thundered. Glass
shattered. Ashcraft and his two guards blocked a clear shot at her attackers,
forcing her to jink to the right, but the augies ignored her, concentrating
their fire on the old Emperor. The marines hadn’t pulled their pistols clear of
their holsters before they were cut down. A wild shot burned past the now-collapsing
trio, catching Fitz in the side. Her battlesuit absorbed the energy, dispersing
it, but a flash of heat made it through the armor to scald her skin.

The closer of the two
augies charged her. She stitched a line of slugs up his chest, hoping to find a
seam, a weakness, anything. Each hit must have felt like a hammer blow, but he
didn’t acknowledge them. As he plowed into her, Fitz grabbed his shoulders and
fell back, letting momentum and her boot in his midsection carry him up and
over. She rolled to her feet, bringing her pistol around, but her opponent
wouldn’t be getting up. A red puddle formed beneath him; one of the slugs had
found a way through his armor.

A bolt of energy struck
her back, then a second and a third, overwhelming her battlesuit’s ability to
ablate the heat. Composites boiled, peeling back. Her armorcloth undersuit
fused to her skin. She could smell her flesh burning. Responding to her brain’s
spike of endorphins, her onboard pharmacopeia dumped painkillers into her
bloodstream, along with a double hit of the elixir that supplied the symbiont
with the glucose and protein it needed to repair her wounds.

The second augie leaped
over the tangle of bodies and backhanded her into the wall. A side table
splintered behind her, the edge driving into her burned back. Her vision
dimmed. She slid to the floor as her opponent pounded her. Augies weren’t above
using weapons, but most preferred to do their wet work in close and personal
with fists and feet and knives.

Fitz rolled into a ball
to protect her head, but a savage kick made it through her defenses and
spider-web cracked her face shield. She’d managed to hang on to the slug
thrower and tried to bring it up, but the augie ground her hand beneath his
foot, wrenched the weapon from her grip, and flung it across the room.

He dragged her up by
her combat harness and pinned her against the wall with a hand around her
throat. If he landed a blow on her, she’d be out of the fight and unable to
protect Ari. Fitz fished behind her back, seized the handle of her vibroblade
and pulled it free, igniting it.

An illegal modification
of a shipyard worker’s cutting tool, the v-blade could slice through six
centimeters of hull plating, so Praetorian armor presented no problem. Fitz
jammed the v-blade into his belly and ripped upward, opening armor and muscle
like a baked crustacean dinner.

Across the room, the
remaining two augies doubled up on Wolf. Fitz knew from experience that with
his outdated augmentations he could hold his own against one augie, but two
out-classed him. A florid-faced augie had his arm around Wolf’s throat, choking
him while his partner pounded him.

Shouts sounded in the
hallway, and fists hammered on the door. Reinforcements. But for which side?

Ari charged into the
fray, wielding a vase like a club. Fitz grabbed her jacket and pulled her back,
then shoved her none too gently away. “Stay out of this.”

She pulled the Acton
from her shoulder holster, thumbed the power setting down to stun as she
vaulted onto the closest augie’s back, then jammed the barrel under his chin
and stroked the firing stud. He folded up like wet cardboard, dragging her down
with him.

At least she’d have one
alive to question when this mess finished—assuming the stun beam hadn’t
scrambled his brain.

As she struggled up,
the remaining augie hurled Wolf at her and together they collapsed into a
tangle of limbs. Fitz tensed at the flash of light on a blade as the augie
blurred into motion, but he didn’t come after them. He paused only long enough
to slit his stunned colleague’s throat, then kicked open the door and bulled
through the knot of Praetorian Guards trying to force their way inside.

“Stop him,” yelled
Fitz. “Lock down the building. I want him alive.”

Not one of the
guardsmen moved to follow the fugitive, and Fitz noticed their weapons were
pointed in her direction. A tall man with captain’s bars on his collar faced
her, eyes cold and jaw stubborn. His gaze swept the room, taking in the three
bodies in Praetorian armor. She could well imagine his thoughts.

“I don’t take orders
from no damn wirehead,” he said.

Fitz bit back her anger
until she had time to draw a calming breath. His name tag read Weiland, and a
query of her newly acquired personnel files showed a Captain Shabuoth Weiland
had recently been posted as the commander of the palace’s detachment of
Praetorian Guards.

Great. They were
probably going to be butting heads on a daily basis.

“Well, Captain, you’d
better get used to it, because as soon as Ransahov becomes Emperor, I’m going
to be her Chief of Security. As I see it, that makes me your boss. So if you
want to continue wearing that pretty white armor, you will obey my orders. And
you can start by getting a med-team down here with a couple of stasis boxes.
There might still be someone alive in this mess, and I want some answers.
Starting with how four strangers—four
augie
strangers—waltzed in here
and set up an ambush, and none of your people noticed.”

She started to turn
away, but stopped. “And one more thing, Captain. If I ever hear you call me a
wirehead again, you’ll be lucky to get a job cleaning toilets in a mag-lev
station.”

Fitz pulled off her
helmet and raked her fingers through sweaty hair as she joined Wolf. He leaned
against the wall, trying to catch his breath.

“I see imperial
politics haven’t changed,” he said. “Still a blood sport.” He removed his own
helmet, then pulled a small med-case from his pocket and fumbled it open.

“Here, let me do that.”
She took the case from him and extracted two ampules of the elixir and injected
him.

“Just some broken ribs.
I’ve had worse. What about you?”

The post-battle
adrenaline left her trembling, and her stomach felt knotted around glass
shards. “I feel…” She rolled her shoulders and flexed her back. “A little sore,
but I just took several pulse bolts to the back. I should be on my way to the
med-bay, but I feel fine.”

His smile widened. “The
first time you walk away from a fight that you really shouldn’t have survived
can be quite an experience. Not that you ever get used to it or take it for
granted, but the memory of that first time sticks with you. It marks you as
some…
thing
different.”

Fitz tucked the
med-case back into his pocket. “As much as you depend on that stuff to keep you
functioning, you might want to consider having an onboard pharmacopeia
implanted. And while you’re in the tank, why not have all your augmentations
brought up to date? I read the specs on the newest updates when they repaired
the damage I sustained on Baldark, and they’re pretty slick.”

“You mean become
augmented?”

“Technically you
already are an augie; just a pathetic one. Don’t you want to be faster and
stronger than I am?”

“Perhaps I like you
being the stronger, more assertive one. Particularly in bed.”

Fitz snorted. “I might
not always be around to save your butt. Just think about having the updates
done, would you?” She grinned, amused at turning the tables on his incessant
need to protect her.

“I’ll think about it,
but Ari plans to keep me busy making nice with the leaders of those three
worlds Ashcraft grabbed. She has some elaborate plan for war reparations to try
to make them like us again. She’ll learn—nobody likes the Empire, except our
money when we’re trading and our warships when they’re threatened by the
Landers Federation.” He pushed a strand of sweaty hair off his face. “And I
want to get back to Rainbow and check out the damage Ishtok Base sustained from
that imperial attack.”

Fitz understood his
need to get back and see what remained of his previous life. Wolf had lost his
mercenary base, his home, and a few of his friends when the Empire attacked the
Midworld Alliance.

“The Founder’s Day
celebrations start soon, and the Fleet always stands down for that, so I doubt
she’ll have you out showing the imperial colors until after the holidays.
That’s a week—ten entire days—you can take off. A few of them in the tank to
get the augmentations done, then we can spend the rest of the holidays alone,
just the two of us.”

“Does that mean I get
to miss out on all the balls and speeches and fancy dinners where I have to
wear a bloody uncomfortable dress uniform and shake hands with a pack of idiots
I’d rather punch in the face?”

Fitz snickered. “We’ll
see. Will you do it, please?”

“We’ll see,” he
parroted back to her.

Ari approached, handing
over the weapons they’d dropped in the struggle. “I don’t think anyone’ll be
needing that stasis box,” she said. “From the looks of Ashcraft, those augies
were serious about silencing him.”

Fitz checked the
ammunition counter before holstering the slug thrower. “Yeah, they went after
him first; must have been worried we’d get some names, contacts and numbered
bank accounts out of him, but I don’t know. His mind was pretty far gone.”

“Do you think your old
buddy Tritico is behind this?” Ari asked Wolf.

“Assassination is Jan’s
favorite strategy for dealing with inconvenient information leaks.”

Fitz lowered her voice
to keep the guardsmen from overhearing her remarks. “Then why not just have a
sniper take him out? Why come after us, too? Tritico has to know his chances of
killing any of us is practically non-existent.”

“That doesn’t mean he
wouldn’t try, he… Bloody hell.” Wolf straightened. “What if he only wanted to
delay
us?”

Ari’s eyes widened. “So
he could get to the Assembly Hall first and declare his claim to the throne.”

In the two and a half
centuries of the Late Scyran Empire, there had rarely been two simultaneous
claimants to power, but on each occasion the senate had split its allegiance
between them, resulting in a long and bloody civil war.

“Captain, we need an
escort to the Assembly Hall. Now,” Fitz called to the Praetorian’s commander.

When Weiland didn’t
jump to comply, Ari turned on him. “You heard her, Captain. I suggest you obey.
She’s only slightly less intolerant of insubordination than I am.”