Kicking Ashe (12 page)

“Something else that shouldn’t be,” Ashe put in to save his dignity and his temper.

“Should we collect…it?” Calendria asked, her gaze a mix of fascinated and horrified.

“No.” Shan turned, indicating the camp’s portal with a stern look.

Ashe passed inside, her thoughts spinning in a bunch of different directions. The big, bad guy had wanted the transmogrification machine, so seeing it in pieces was good, though also unsettling since last time she’d seen it the bad guy’s minion had been following it. Did it mean there might be a minion incoming? If it was part of the plot against Shan, it didn’t appear to have gone well, so the minion might be in for a surprise.

I am reluctant to make assumptions—

Ashe didn’t feel much reluctance from him, but didn’t call him on it even though he was the one who always said she should never assume. Sometimes one just had to assume something if one wanted to move forward.

—but I think this is just time debris and an irrelevant distraction.

She tended to agree, though that didn’t mean the minion was out of the equation. She thought about the state of the debris. Maybe he’d tried and didn’t make it? Or missed his mark?

Because it is irrelevant does not mean that someone with ill intent couldn’t use it to forward his agenda.
It’s what she’d do, though not with ill intent, of course. There was a family mantra about expecting the unexpected with some corollaries about not letting a crisis go against you and working with what you had. Did other families have tons of mantras? It was easier to wonder this than figure out how this particular unexpected could be twisted for use against Shan or how they neutralized the threat before it could be used against him.

Let’s focus on what we do know.

Okay.
She thought for a minute, realized why she’d avoided doing this.
I got nothing.

Our bad guy picked on Shan for a reason.

The bad guy, as near as they could tell, had mined several people from alternate realities and tried to use them to destabilize time. It had taken some huge, brass ones for their bad guy to take on Time, though she was not clear what brass ones were. Just that they had to be huge cause he almost won. Not that they knew for sure he’d lost.

It is possible this Shan is one of those people.

The peep into the other reality with Shan did seem to indicate this, though they were seriously winging it into the stratosphere with the hypothesis. And even if Shan had been mined from another reality, they didn’t know how to get him back. Right now she didn’t even know how to get them home.

If he was shifted by the bad guy, Time may be trying to restore him to his proper place.

It was true that the bad guy had had to do some seriously fancy crap to distract Time and almost wipe it out, so even Time might find it challenging to clean it all up. It still made her head hurt to think about it, hurt in a way Lurch couldn’t fix. The complex mix of time theory, time pins, lynch pins, anti-nanite technology, and alternate realties had resulted in the time tsunami.
You know, we might be an accident, too. Irrelevant.
She felt Lurch pondering this.
And with the bad guy with the brass ones possibly out of the equation, we’re left with what?

Shan is high strata.

So, it’s a simple power struggle? That still leaves us surplus to requirements.

If Time sent us here, it is neither simple nor are we surplus to anything.

Just because it felt good didn’t make him right.

We have seen evidence that Shan might have been shifted from his own time.

In her previous meeting with Shan, there’d been clear signs of time shifting, but without access to the Base archives, they had no way to prove this Shan wasn’t in his right time, which turned the situation into a minefield for them. If they made the wrong move, they might destabilize time again. If they didn’t make the right move, they might destabilize time again. Even right moves could make time unstable.

It’s already unstable, though it seems to be localized.

The meteorites and the time shift during the kiss did seem to support his thesis. But she was without time senses and gear to navigate the instability—not to mention she had no clue where they were or when—

The impossible just takes longer.

Or the impossible might just be impossible.
It was a little used family mantra, added by an ancestor no one liked to talk about because it meant something might actually be impossible.

Let’s look at how one might use this situation against Shan.

He didn’t have to feel so happy about it. They were here to help him, not hose him.

There are many ways to cause Shan problems in this situation, the first being your presence.

No one could know I was incoming.
Though she did know she presented Shan with a huge problem. If he surrendered her to his government, he broke his word to her and his guys. He became the bad guy. If he went the good guy route, he still had lots of explaining to do to his xenophobic superiors. That could mess up more than his career.

But if one were waiting, watching for the right opportunity…

Then she’d be it in spades—though she did not know what a shovel had to do with anything. Duty seemed to be the main motivator for them all. From what she’d learned about his people, about the female cages, about their lack of access to women, whoever ran things would need to keep things in very tight control to make that work. Didn’t have to have absolute power to corrupt. Just had to want what wasn’t yours.
So a ship goes missing in mysterious circumstances. No way to know how or why Shan was sent to investigate.
He’s here and he’s uneasy about it, which means something wasn’t right about it.

So far I concur with your analysis.

And there’s lots of potential for stuff to go wrong.
This sector was already experiencing problems before the time debris started arriving and the ship disappeared. If she were a nasty ass bad guy wanting what wasn’t hers, she’d try to figure out a way to throw the nasty ass Zelk into the mix, cause bad guys tended to get minions to do their dirty work for them. Made plausible deniability more plausible. No matter what time she’d passed through, plausible deniability was the name of the betray game. Or more simply, the more things changed, the more they didn’t.

Ashe was a bit on the nasty ass side herself, so she had no trouble believing that someone Shan trusted could be in touch with the Zelk. She frowned. How weird was it to run into the only sentient reptilian species ever? It could be a factor of time righting itself, but wouldn’t Lurch have run into a non-humanoid species somewhere in his many years and travels? Could Time have been wrong all of his seasons since sentience or had he just not traveled widely enough? It was something to add to the many things she needed to think about when she had time—and yes, she was aware of the irony of the thought, though glad Lurch seemed to have missed it. Or ignored it.

Even with the Zelk on board, the betrayer had the problem of how to expose the camp without exposing themselves to retribution. And how would the Zelk find the camp? As far as she could tell, Shan had some truly fine cloaking capabilities. She assumed—even though she shouldn’t ever—that a Keltinarian ship could detect the cloaked camp. Her thoughts stalled a bit. What if the camp hadn’t been cloaked until the ship disappeared? It didn’t seem like tech a paranoid government would give to a civilian research team. Since they wouldn’t park a bunch of civilians in a region they thought the Zelk would attack, they wouldn’t need to give them the good stuff. With this side of the galaxy sort of collapsing, it wasn’t prime real estate. Cloaking was expensive—even in her time. Would that mean the camp’s location on this planet was easily available? Or—

If the cloak is Garradian based
, Lurch joined her thought process,
then it cloaks by filtering out the elements it wishes to hide, leaving the elements that are natural to the surroundings visible. It also controls temperature.

Temperature could be tracked.
That would be why Shan kept the camp so close to the ambient temperature. And the filters prevented mysterious holes in the planet surface. That left—

“I’m sure you added the fallings into your cloak’s filtering equations?”

Shan halted. His hands curled into fists.

So that would be a no. The rat in the pile could point the Zelk in the right direction and let them home in on the camp using the automaton parts. She wondered whose idea it had been to bring them all into the camp? “I guess you could filter it all out.” Ashe let the words drift on the heated air like they didn’t matter. Shan stared at her, one brow arching. She pitched her voice too low for anyone but him to hear. “Or not.”

“A trap? That’s very—”

“Devious?” Ashe shrugged. “It’s a gift.” Not to mention a long time family tradition. She considered her meeting with her not-so-great grandma. Make that a really long time. “Unless you don’t want to know.” It sucked when you felt betrayed by those you trusted. Lurch flinched. As he should.

Shan’s hesitation was so brief she almost missed it. He turned, so his back was to Calendria and maybe so he could pound her with his gaze some more.

“I want to know.” He turned and stalked away, something in the set of his shoulders telling her not to follow him.

Ashe sighed, turned away. She ought to do something, if she could figure out what that was. She caught an odd look on Calendria’s face that vanished as soon as she saw Ashe looking at her. With a slight nod her direction, Calendria turned away, too, heading toward the collection tent, leaving Ashe alone with an uncomfortable question that shouldn’t have been a surprise, or taken her so long to think.

Was there someone already in the camp ready and willing to betray Shan? And if there were, how would they get clear before the bad stuff happened, without it looking like they were trying to get clear?

* * * *

Shan stared at the data screens, not sure what he hoped they would show him. The tent felt close, claustrophobic, the air stale, though it was a relief to be out of sight. It felt as if all eyes watched him, wondering what he’d do with the alien.

Someone is gunning for you.

Betrayal.

If anyone wanted to betray him, then Ashe was a gift. She did not need to be his enemy to bring him down. Trying to save her would do it. He did not even need to fail at saving her. The attempt would disgrace his family into at least one, possibly more than one, strata drop. That would not only free up the Council seat for another within their strata, but the partner chosen for him. It could cost them the property that they currently held and what he would have acquired in partnering.

Property and power.
Ample motivation for betrayal.

Ashe wasn’t a perfect weapon. He could easily remove the threat she posed by taking her into custody aboard his ship. He had the means. He’d tagged her when he touched her inside the camp. If he turned her over to the Authority, the threat she posed would vanish.

All he had to do was betray his sworn word, his honor.

He hadn’t said the words out loud, but he knew the promise he’d made. He’d put her under his protection in front of the whole camp. His men, his warriors would know he’d not kept his word. How could they trust him to keep his word to them if he did not keep it now?

Duty said he turn her over to proper authorities.

Duty versus honor.

Custom, training said there was no conflict. That only by putting duty first was there honor, that there was never dishonor in doing one’s duty. All were supposed to understand this. If this were truth, why did it feel wrong? Why would he consider risking his family’s future for a stranger, an alien?

He paced the interior perimeter of the tent, circling his thoughts as he circled the space, hoping for clarity. In his world, protection of women was a man’s ultimate duty. Ashe might be an alien, but she was also a woman, though the Authority would not consider her human, let alone worthy of protection. Of course, if she were part of the plan against him, then honor was satisfied, duty could be executed. He might regret her fate, but his conscience would be clear, wouldn’t it?

Like a still frame vid, he saw her as he’d first seen her. Replayed her first smile. The sudden sadness in her eyes when he disappointed her. Exotic, determined, wary, vulnerable—though he sensed she’d not be happy he thought her so. Then the vid changed to Ashe in custody. What would the Authority do with an exotic, beautiful female with no protections? No rights? In his mind, the light faded from her eyes, replaced by haunted despair. Her smile, the tender curve of her mouth, vanished as others, so many others came to see, to take—he shook his head to clear the image. Vivisection would a merciful release from what would happen during their “study” of her.

She did not deserve that. Betrayal did not, could not free him from sworn word. When he’d offered protection, he had not qualified it, had not placed limits or conditions on what she must do to be worthy of it. Honor was not conditional. It was not expedient. Honor was not duty. He felt this truth to his core, though it went against all he’d been taught. What he’d been taught was wrong, though he could see now how well it served the Authority to foster the belief that right would never conflict with the might of the Authority.

A conscience was an uncomfortable companion, but how much worse would a betrayed conscience be? His enemy sought to mortally wound him, but if he gave up his honor for protection, the wound would be self-inflicted. He did the work for his enemy, whether he survived or not.

If she were the trap, or part of a trap, it seemed crafted to catch him, no matter which direction he went. Who knew him well enough to do this? If he did his duty, if he were what his leaders expected him to be, he’d hand her over without a thought. This would bring honor to himself, to his family and his strata. He’d tighten his grip on his power and his land. So his enemy must know him well enough to know he could not do this. This enemy must know him better than he knew himself, because until this moment, he had not known this about himself. Did that make her the trap? Fate? Simple bad luck?