Traitor (Rebel Stars Book 2) (23 page)

Change was at hand. It was what Ced had wanted for years. He should have been happy. Problem was, if that change wasn't coming from within the Locker? He knew it wouldn't last.

With no recording of the conversation between Kansas and her anonymous benefactor, he didn't have much to go on. He didn't want to go to someone else for help, either. Not without more evidence. Not when Kansas was so close to fixing so much. For a few days, he moved in an anxious daze. A limbo of doubt. He'd wake in the middle of the night, sheets drenched with sweat. He watched the office for unfamiliar faces, anyone who might be leaning on Kansas, but all he saw were Dragons.

One night, as he slept, he gasped so hard he choked. He sat up, sweating and coughing. "Mom?"

Shadows swept the walls. He didn't want to turn on the light—he wanted to stay in that moment, to sink into it like warm water—but he knew he had to.

There was nothing there. He was alone. Just like he'd always been.

That morning, he found Kansas in the hall and grabbed her arm. "We need to talk."

Her gaze moved across his face. "You look like shit."

"Your office, Kansas."

The corner of her mouth twitched. She headed to her office, closing the door behind him. "What do you want?"

"I need to know what we're doing."

"Sitting across from each other looking incredibly serious. Or did you mean something else?"

"What's your plan for the Blackwings?"

She shrugged. "Reforming the recruitment system was a shiv to their ribs. There's two ways this plays out: either they sit tight and bleed out, or they come for us. Try to undo what's been done."

"And once that's settled," he said. "Then what?"

"Then we've won."

"No debts to repay? No promises to fulfill? You've had a lot of help to get here."

Her face stayed blank. "That's all been paid off. You know me. Do you really think I'd let myself owe anything to anyone?"

"I think you'll do whatever it takes to sit on the throne," he smiled. "What's my role in this?"

"What do you want it to be?"

"I want to be partners. Like before. I'm not asking to share your crown, but I would like to be your right hand. I want to know everything that's going on here."

Kansas tilted her head. "Why did it take you this long to ask?"

"Do we have a deal?"

"You saved me once," she said. "Do you remember? The woman in the street with the knife? I thought there was no way out. But you showed me the way."

"One last thing." His heart did its best to knock down his ribs. "What about us?"

"Us? You and me?"

"You and me."

A crooked smile stole over her face. "Haven't you figured it out yet? You can't get anything unless you're willing to reach for it." She tapped her device. The door locked with a click. She stood. "Now lie down on the floor."

* * *

His shoulders felt lighter. The air smelled cleaner. He wasn't free of his doubts—he'd heard what he'd heard—but he was no longer on the outside looking in. He was by her side. Whatever came next, he could help her navigate out of it. Like he'd always done.

That same day, she came to him with word on the Blackwings. They were making a move on the Dragons' turf. Nothing violent, nothing overt, just letting their dealers wander a half block past their territory.

"They're trying to provoke a fight," Ced said.

"No shit," Kansas laughed. "But they've backed us into a corner. We can't show weakness. Any hint that we fear them, and our allies will start planning where to stick the knife."

"So you take away the game. Get the poles to put a block on the trade."

"And infuriate every crew on the station?"

"Put it on the poles. Get them to say it's about preventing violence in this time of trouble. Do that, and it puts it on the Blackwings. They'll alienate everyone on their side."

"We'll give it a shot," she said. "But if the poles don't bite, I won't back down."

"I know."

They bit. Two days later, the corners were a ghost town. Kansas' device started pinging nonstop. She had to make a lot of promises to a lot of crews, but the Dragons' war chest had grown fat after years of feeding off the jukes. The Blackwings pitched a fit, cementing Ced's conviction it had been the right move.

That evening, with Kansas tied up in talks with other crews, Ced headed to the cafeteria for his first meal of the day. He took an empty seat in the midst of several other tables, getting a handle on the crew's mood. Their voices were upbeat. Confident. A lot of talk about what they were going to spend their new-found money on.

"…like she told
me
?" To his right, an out-of-uniform security teamer laughed, leaning his elbows on the table. "She said to lock them up. So I locked them up. You gonna argue?"

"I'd sooner stick my face behind a live engine," another man muttered. "Any idea who they were with?"

"Official word is…" The voice grew too faint to hear. Ced stood, moving to bus his tray. "…heard one of them say the Hive."

This drew surprised looks from the guard's coworkers. Ced confirmed the man's ID, dumped his tray, and headed to his room to dig through the security logs.

She'd disguised it well. Buried it in a heap of street reports and made no official entry. But there was a hole in her schedule—it said she'd been in talks in her office when he knew for a fact she'd been upstairs in the penthouse—and this was followed by a security team taking a car to their building a few blocks away.

The one where they kept detainees.

He closed his device, headed outside, and walked to the detention center. There, he told the staff he'd been sent to follow up with the crew from the Hive. A man peeled from behind the counter and brought him to the windowless rear of the building.

"Careful in there," the man said. "One of them's a local. Former marine."

Ced thanked him and stepped inside a bright passage. Four cells lined it on each side, sealed with transparent plastic walls. Only three of the cells were occupied. He spotted the marine instantly—shaved head, goatee, muscles that looked like they produced their own anabolics. The second man had a far more reasonable build, but where the marine looked serene, this man looked pissed. The third cell held a dark-haired woman in her late twenties. Her face looked delicate. Her eyes looked anything but.

"My name's Ced," he announced. They were being monitored; any lie would draw attention. "I'm here to follow up."

"Glad to hear it," the angry-looking man said, his voice carrying clearly through the clear plastic separating him from Ced. "That admiral of yours doesn't seem to take threats to your continued existence too seriously. By which I mean 'at all.'"

"What kind of threats?"

The woman moved to the edge of her cell, eyeing him with naked suspicion. "Who are you?"

"I'm the one person who knows Admiral Carruth better than anyone," he said. "You think she didn't take you seriously? Then I'm the one you have to convince."

"How much do you know?"

"Start from the top."

The angry-looking man snorted. "Nothing, in other words? You sound like a real big wheel around here, all right."

Ced turned to walk away.

"Stop," the woman said. "Webber, if you don't shut up, the first thing I'm going to do once we're out of here is shove both my feet down your throat. Got me?" He said nothing. The woman turned to Ced. "Pull up a chair. There's a lot to tell."

He listened, arms folded over his chest, as she laid out a convoluted, decades-long history of a rock called Quarantine, a parallel program on the Locker, and the much more recent activities of FinnTech Industries and Valiant Enterprises. Ced had heard some noise about FinnTech doing business with the aliens—hard to ignore that, considering the Swimmers hadn't been seen in a thousand years. But he'd been so wrapped up in other business—first, his waiting-out-the-clock numbness serving Garnes; then, Kansas' shocking revolution—that he'd never truly absorbed the news' impact.

He stopped the woman, Rada, several times, either to clarify points or interrogate her on things that didn't fit. Soon, the only things he didn't understand were the parts they hadn't yet untangled for themselves.

Rada finished, silent for the first time in minutes. Ced lowered his eyes and tapped a search into his device. Iggi Daniels' face was meaningless to him, but he recognized her voice on the spot.

The same voice he'd heard giving orders to Kansas.

Seeing his expression, Rada drew her face six inches back from the plastic wall. "What is it?"

"You're wrong about one thing." Ced's voice felt like it was coming from another body. "The inoculation isn't some Swimmer plot to exterminate us. Valiant Enterprises is using it to track children so they can't be hidden from the crews."

"Why is that such a big deal?"

"The crews have always taken on orphans and kids whose parents didn't have the means to provide for them. A few years before I was born, the crews adopted the care debt—meaning that, once the kid hit eighteen, he either had to stick with the crew and pay them back a lot, or leave and pay them a fortune. So people started hiding their kids away. Keeping them away from the crews—until the crews found a foolproof way to track them down and drag them back into the system."

Webber, the smaller of the two men, was looking annoyed again. "Why couldn't they just hire adults like normal people?"

"Out here, people die every day," said MacAdams, the marine. "Always been like that. In the early days, the crews stepped up. Said
they
were your family. Promised you that, if you bought it in the line of duty, your children would always be taken care of." He rubbed his bald scalp. "It was the glue that held this place together. Then the crews found a way to turn a liability into a profit."

"And you think it took the help of Valiant Enterprises," Rada said to Ced. "But what would they want with the Locker?"

"Best guess?" Ced said. "None of the big companies had the balls to take on the Locker directly. They ran the numbers and saw it would be suicide. So Valiant found a way to gain control. They saved the crews from having to go back to the old ways. And now, they're ready to—"

He cut himself off, resisting the urge to look up at the corners of the hallway between the cells.

"Could be you're right about Valiant," Rada said. "That doesn't address the Swimmers. They didn't give H/K this tech out of the goodness of their multiple hearts."

"You told all this to Kansas?"

"Yep," Webber said. "She was so impressed she gave us an all-expenses-paid trip to prison."

"I'll talk to her." Ced turned toward the door.

"Hey." Behind him, Rada put her palm on the transparent wall. "That's it?"

He gazed at her. "What would you do if you got out of here?"

"If you're right, Valiant has enabled a de facto child slavery ring. We'll try everything we can to help."

"'Try' isn't good enough."

Her gaze was as steady as Kansas'. "We've put our lives on the line for this more times than I can count. If we get out of here, we'll see this through to the end."

Ced nodded and walked out. If one of the guards informed Kansas of his visit, the video would prove he knew everything. He had a play, though—he wouldn't try to hide it from Kansas.

He just had to do one thing first.

Gangsters tended to be creatures of the night, and the white rooms were open all hours. He headed to one and passed through their sanitation protocol. They brought him a clean device. Once he could trust his voice not to shake, he messaged Venner, the Orcs' admiral, and set up a meet. Venner wanted to do it on his home turf, but Ced insisted on the white room.

"Bring as many people as you need to feel safe," Ced said. "I'll be alone."

"Are you
trying
to insult me? How about you at least tell me what this is about?"

"Not until you're here."

On the device screen, the man swore, gazed at Ced, then swore again. "When?"

"Right now. I guarantee you'll want to hear this."

He hung up. It was an hour before Venner arrived and passed through the protocol. He'd brought three men and a woman with him. They were dressed in the plain white clothes provided by the cleanroom staff, but Ced recognized most of them from earlier encounters.

Venner thunked down across the table. "Talk."

"I need your help getting a ship out of the Locker."

The rival admiral was in his late thirties, with a receding hairline cut close to the scalp, a crescent moon branded on his forehead, and a series of thin metallic plates tattooed or grafted onto his left forearm. It was intended to make him look tough. On most days, it worked. That night, though, he wore a brittle, irritated expression, like a guy who'd passed out in his Crash Day costume and been woken too early the next morning.

"Let me guess," Venner said. "It's the one your teenage admiral has ordered glued to the runway."

Ced nodded. "They came to help us. They must be allowed to leave."

"Why are you coming to me with this?"

"I can't trust anyone from my crew not to report me. If you want to try, we're in a white room. You won't have a single record. It'll be your word against mine—and you've had a grudge against the Dragons for years."

The man snorted, casting an amused glance at his bodyguards. "Cunning. Let me know if you're ever in the market for a new job. In the meantime, care to explain why Kansas is so keen to keep the ship grounded?"

Ced mashed his lips together, gesturing in a broad sweep. "This place, do you give any shits about it? Or is it just a way to make your pockets clink?"

"I can trace my lineage back to when the
Outcast
first touched down on this rock. Do I smile every time I hear the daily financials? Unashamedly. But don't mistake me—I would lose it all in defense of this place."

"Outsiders have been tampering with the Locker for years. And it just got a whole lot worse."

Venner drew back like he'd just discovered the back half of a beetle in his sandwich. "That's how she did it?"