No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three (11 page)

The bounty hunters stood outside in the street, no doubt in full view of any security cameras. One was a grizzled human man with long, wild hair. The second male was something large and humanoid with mechanical arms. The last was a twitchy white-furred creature with a black face. All of them trained weapons on her.

“You all right?” the man asked.

“Not shot,” Raena said.

“That’s good. Let’s get out of here before these gray ghosts get re-inforced. Those boys are nothing but trouble.”

Raena kept coming toward the bounty hunters, trying to work out the angles. The three of them were staggered, far enough apart that there was no taking out two of them before the third brought her down. If she’d had time to get out of the manacles or if she’d had a working rifle or if she had boots or if the nighttime air wasn’t like breathing through a wet blanket . . .

The man slung his rifle and came to loop a cable through her restraints. “We’ll get those off you once we’re underway. All right?”

Raena nodded. The other two took positions to flank her.

“Just a hop, a skip, and a jump,” he promised.

Since he seemed in a chatty mood, Raena asked, “Who put the bounty on me?”

“Kai’s Business Council. I love these mercantile gigs.”

Raena couldn’t puzzle that out. What could Kai be charging her with? Her end of the fight against the Thallians had clearly been self-defense. Kai couldn’t be charging her with that, could they?

The bounty hunters’ car waited in the next street over. Raena climbed in docilely, to be sandwiched knee to knee with the man and his giant friend. The monkey creature drove. The car took them through town and right up onto their ship. She never had another chance to run.

*   *   *

Kavanaugh found Eilif sitting by herself in the farthest corner of the garden. She jumped guiltily when he stopped in front of her.

“How are you?” he asked gently.

She bit her lip as she glanced up at him, then immediately dropped her gaze. “It’s all too much,” she whispered. “I know they want to help, but there are so many of them. And they’re loud. And . . .” She started to cry.

“And it’s scary to defend yourself,” Kavanaugh guessed. “He hurt you every time you protested.”

She shivered like a frightened mouse.

Kavanaugh went down on one knee to make himself smaller. “I’ve seen Raena’s scars,” he said. “I don’t know if you knew that we were friends when she was running from him. I saw what he’d done to her when she was young.”

“He trained her to fight,” Eilif said, “so he could beat her when she fought him. He trained our sons to fight, then he broke their bodies. He . . .” She faltered, unable to name the things that Thallian did to her.

“It’s all right,” Kavanaugh promised. “Ariel didn’t ask if you wanted to learn to fight, but you don’t need to. There are other ways to escape.” He didn’t list them, because surely she understood. “Just know,” he said, “that all of the Shaads, Ariel included, will put themselves between danger and you.”

“How is she so brave?” Eilif asked hopelessly.

Kavanaugh had his own theories on that, but he said, “Some people fight for the love of it. Some because they have to. Ariel has come a long way, but she’s still an arms dealer at heart. She still wants to die with a gun in her hand. Raena is a warrior. She wants to die on her feet, fighting a worthy enemy.” He put his hand on the small, broken woman’s. “How do you want to die, Eilif?”

She stared at Kavanaugh, but her tears had stopped. He could practically see the thoughts spinning through her head.

“I don’t want to be afraid,” she said at last.

“What would give you courage?”

“Knowing that he can’t hurt me any more.”

“He’s dead,” Kavanaugh reminded. “You watched him burn.”

“Yes.”

That wasn’t enough, he saw. He tried another argument. “All the clones were different, weren’t they? Some were cruel and some were cunning and some were . . .”

“Clever,” she said. “Gentle. Wise.”

“Even though they were genetically similar, none of them grew up to be exactly like your husband. Even if the robot is cloning more Thallians somehow, none of them will be him.”

She nodded, thinking hard. “Even with Jonan to train them, none of the boys was as vicious as he was.”

“How long did it take, from beginning the cloning process until they were born? How long until they were grown? Until they would be dangerous?”

“It would take years,” she said.

He could see that he had given her some comfort finally.

She surprised him by asking, “How do you want to die, Mr. Kavanaugh?”

“In my bed, in my sleep, after a long and satisfying life.”

She smiled at him. For a moment, he saw Raena echoed in her face. His blood chilled. Then her green eyes caught the sunlight behind him and the illusion dissolved.

Kavanaugh smiled back at her. He wasn’t sure how old Eilif was, except that she had been born after the War ended. She could not be more than twenty, but worry lined her face and her hair had gone entirely white. Ariel believed that Eilif had been artificially matured, so she could serve as Thallian’s wife and the mother of his children. Worst of all, Eilif didn’t even know she was a clone. But even if her growth had been accelerated, they were not in imminent danger of a Thallian attack. It would still take time to get new Thallians up to speed.

*   *   *

The cabin the bounty hunters put Raena in was only slightly more spartan than her own cabin on the
Veracity
. Smaller, and likely the comm was disabled, but she wouldn’t be uncomfortable there.

The guy with the mechanical arms came in, followed by the grizzled human. He asked, “You want the restraints off?”

“Yes, please.”

“Here’s how we’re gonna do it: Chale is gonna hold you still for me while I do the cutting. You’re gonna relax and pretend you’re at the spa. Anything happens to me or Chale or you make a grab for the cutting torch, Skip is going to gas the lot of us and you’ll wake up in the crash web. Got it?”

“I don’t want trouble,” Raena said. “You don’t have wandering hands, do you?”

“Chale is the jealous type,” he promised. “So don’t get all wily on me.”

“Stellar.”

They settled on the bunk. Chale wrapped one mechanical arm across Raena’s shoulders and pulled her back against his chest. She didn’t give him any reason to tighten his hold.

The man sparked the torch and began to cut the left restraint.

“Why’d you speak Imperial Standard to me?” she asked.

“Because I knew your mother.” He didn’t look up from his cutting.

“Did you serve together?”

He laughed. “No, I was a hunter during the War. Ran with a crew that chased her. Money was too good to resist. I’m the only one who survived it.”

Raena didn’t remember him at all. Into the silence, she had to say something. “What was she like?”

“Your mother was crazy,” he said decisively. “We thought she had a death wish, that she would be easy pickings. It wasn’t a death wish so much as she didn’t care what happened to her, as long as she didn’t go back to him.”

“Thallian?”

“Yeah. Between the two of them, my crew never stood a chance.”

“I’m sorry,” Raena said. “I’ve heard those were bad times.”

He glanced up at her, then went back to work. “It’s amazing how much you look like her.”

“I’ve been told that.” Raena wondered if he would know who Ariel was, if he’d care that she might be able to match any bounty offered by Kai. She didn’t suppose you lasted twenty-five years as a bounty hunter if you sold your captives to the highest bidder.

“How long am I going to be your guest?” she asked.

“That depends. You hear about the problems with the tesseract drives?”

“Yeah.”

“We haven’t been able to afford to replace ours yet. Still paying off its installation, in fact. So as long as we don’t have any statistical hiccups, this’ll be a fast trip.”

Otherwise, Raena understood, they were going to vanish into tesseract space and never been seen again. She shivered.

Chale chuckled behind her. “C’mon, Bihn. No need to frighten her. She’s being a model prisoner, so far.”

Raena changed the subject. “Thank you for getting me away from those guys in gray.”

“You run into them before?”

“Yeah. They seem like soldiers, not hunters. Pretty risky, taking down the Lautan Planetary Security like that.”

“Yeah. PS was supposed to deliver you to us at the spaceport, but once we saw the ghosts creeping around, we thought we’d better come make sure we got you onboard safely.”

“Why do you call them ghosts?”

“No insignia,” he said. “Never see them without their helmets. Never see them, actually, unless they’re on a mission. Then it’s best to make sure they don’t see you.”

“Have you been seeing them a lot?”

“More and more. Where’d you see them?”

“Capital City.”

“I didn’t hear about that one. The news is keeping their existence really quiet.”

“Are they government?”

“Don’t think so. Private militia, which limits who they could belong to. Who’d you piss off?”

“Other than businesses on Kai? I’ve got no idea.”

He finally got the second restraint cuff off her arm and switched the cutting torch off. “Thank you for being sensible about all of this.”

Sensible, Raena wondered, or overly cautious? In the past, she would’ve made her move hours ago. Now she kept finding reasons not to risk her life. Was that a change for the better, if it garnered her thanks from bounty hunters?

*   *   *

Haoun got down to the jailhouse early in the morning, to try to beat the heat of the day. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same brilliant idea. The thick air had already heated up when the line advanced enough that he could get into the building.

After he cleared the security checkpoint, he lined up again with the other visitors. An officious little Pityuka came by with a handheld, asking each visitor the name of the prisoner they wanted to see.

“Raena Zacari is no longer in custody,” she told Haoun.

“When was she released?”

“She was remanded to transporters for extradition to Kai during the night.”

“What?” He hadn’t meant the question to come out so loud. The poor little Pityuka quivered, ruffling her yellow feathers.

“I’m sorry,” Haoun said, although he wasn’t, really. “She just got arrested yesterday.”

“Yes, well, Kai seems eager to have her back.” The Pityuka consulted her handheld again. “Looks like her effects were unclaimed. You can retrieve those from Property.”

So he wandered off in search of that office. He would have liked to comm Mykah and arrange transportation to Kai, but the jailhouse was dampened so that his comm wouldn’t connect.

It took Haoun a while to locate the Property office. Of course, once he found it, he didn’t have any ID to connect himself to Raena. Haoun sighed. Mykah would have to come back with the crew manifest.

*   *   *

Mykah checked his handheld against the number on the docking slip. The
Veracity
really was gone.

Anger overrode his paranoia. He marched down to the dockmaster’s office.

“Where’s my ship?” he demanded.

“According to Planetary Security, it wasn’t yours,” the clerk said, after consulting the computer. “They said it was the
Raptor
, stolen on Kai six months ago. It’s in the process of being towed back to Kai, where it will be auctioned off to pay back fees. If you hurry, you can probably get there in time to buy it back.”

Mykah noticed the dock’s security team moving into place behind him. Raena was nowhere around to get him out of this fight. Besides, even she wouldn’t take on Planetary Security face to face. He sucked in a shaky breath. “Did you even look at the
Veracity
before you let them take it? Did anyone compare the ID numbers?”

The clerk did that for herself. “Hm.”

“Yeah,” Mykah said. “Hm. Somebody was in a hurry to steal my ship and you just let it go.”

“I wasn’t on duty when it was—”

Mykah cut her off. He kept his voice low, calmer than he felt. “I want the name of the clerk on duty at the time the ship was released. I want a copy of the records, complete with signatures. I want to know who took the bribe that bought my ship. Then I’m going to calculate lost revenue as well as travel expenses. I will bill Lautan for not preventing the theft of my ship from their spaceport.”

And he was tempted to call Mellix. This incident was so much smaller in scale than the journalist usually looked into, but maybe it indicated a larger issue, if Kai—or pleasure planets as a rule—were impounding and selling independent spaceships at will on any sort of trumped-up charges. Because of the tesseract flaw, big cruise liners were already not traveling to the pleasure planets. If the pleasure planets tried to make up the revenue on the back of independent travelers, they would put themselves straight out of business.

Maybe he didn’t even need Mellix’s name behind this exposé. He just needed to find out if the
Veracity
was the only ship to be stolen like this. Was it targeted—or was this a trend?

*   *   *

The bounty hunters were as good as their word. They left her alone.

Raena spent her time searching every crevice of the room. She wasn’t sure why they didn’t come in to stop her. Perhaps the room didn’t have a working surveillance system. She considered doing something lewd to see if they were paying attention, but decided it wasn’t worth the fallout.

Maybe they were all asleep. Or maybe Chale and the human had something better to do than watch a girl. It didn’t matter to Raena. After she discovered a jagged wedge of metal jammed in the top of the doorframe, she was ready to take the room apart.

Her stomach grumbled. She’d lost track of time, but she couldn’t remember eating anything since breakfast with Coni on Lautan. She missed Mykah’s cooking. That boy could turn the blandest vegetable protein into a feast.

The lights in her cabin went out. Raena wasn’t sure if she’d tripped something or if her captors simply decided it was time for her to sleep. The sounds of the engine did not change, so she got to work reconfiguring the ventilation system. She was almost more comfortable in the dark than in the daylight—and she didn’t want them to be able to gas her when they made planetfall on Kai.