No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three (15 page)

Twilight drew on faster now. No lights glowed anywhere below her, but off in the distance behind her, she could see Kai City reflected against the clouds. It was a hundred kilometers or more distant, too far to hope for help.

One of the skiffs rose from the escape pod it had been investigating.

Raena stopped lying stiff and flat, facing into the wind. She forced her body downward, spread-eagled to catch as much wind as possible. It slowed her somewhat, so that when the updraft rose from the base of the mesa, she steered herself over the mesa top. Then she clenched her teeth, grabbed the cradle of rope, and sawed the survival tool through it.

The wind tore the parachute away. It grew smaller as it flapped off.

And a helmet, she thought. Wish I had gloves and a helmet.

Raena tucked into the fall, but the pack on her back made landing awkward. She lost a layer of skin on one leg. At least she managed not to break anything.

Before she could uncurl herself, a turbo skiff whizzed beyond her, chasing the parachute.

She hadn’t much time. Growling at herself to move, Raena got to her feet. She limped over to the nearest crevasse and slipped over its edge, feeling for toeholds as she went.

The sky grew darker by the moment. Dark was good. She could work in the darkness.

Raena struggled to keep her mind focused on the climb, wedging her fingers into the rock, keeping her body relaxed, evening out her breathing.

She hadn’t gone far before her mind wandered again. The rock face was still hot from the daytime. It didn’t burn her, but it hinted at how warm the desert would get, come morning.

Not only did she lack shoes, but she’d left her gargoyle goggles on Lautan. She remembered how bright the light had been last time she’d been on Kai. Crossing the desert in daylight was likely to burn her eyes right out of her head.

Focus, she ordered herself. She’d lost track of how far down the canyon face she’d come. It jolted her when she put her foot down on a boulder just above the canyon floor.

Searchlights caressed the top of the mesa overhead. One or more of the skiffs had come to look for her.

Raena hopped down off the boulder to the canyon’s floor. Then she darted into the darkness.

A channel ran straight down the middle of the serpentine canyon, clearly engineered rather than natural. Raena wondered if there used to be irrigation ditches on the surface of Kai. Maybe she could still find water. That would become important in a day or two, when she finished the water in her pack.

Without warning, the crevasse spat her out into a courtyard barely visible in the twilight. The ornate facades of a handful of buildings faced the courtyard. Bihn told her there were Templar ghost towns on Kai. It seemed that she had discovered one.

Raena ducked into the middle doorway. The building was pitch black inside. She forced herself farther in, wondering if Kai had critters who would seek shelter inside the abandoned houses. She had an emergency lantern in her survival pack, but if her pursuers saw it flashing around in the darkness, they’d know exactly where to look for her.

She stopped to listen. The old house held its breath. Raena couldn’t hear anything beyond the rush of blood in her ears, just like being in her tomb. Remembered terror shivered over her.

Raena forced herself to sit on the stone floor, to breathe in the darkness. She was safe for now. She had a little water and some food. They didn’t know where she’d gone.

She pulled one of the nutritional bars from her pack and unwrapped it, careful to put the wrapping back in the pack so it couldn’t betray her later. She nibbled the bar, trying to eat it slowly rather than gobble it down as her body wanted to do. It tasted of sweetness, but felt like some kind of small nuts or seeds. Not a bad flavor, if unfamiliar. She hoped eating it would still the tremor in her hands.

If her pursuers had infrared, they would find her. If there were enough of them and they searched long enough, they would find her. While she was curious what they wanted from her, she wasn’t interested in dying to find out.

If what Bihn told her was true and Kai City held the only civilization on the planet, then it offered her only hope of getting back into space.

Raena knew where the tourist spaceport was, but at the moment, barely armed and still barefoot, she had little to trade for passage off-world. Not enough for anyone to risk anything, if they knew Planetary Security wanted her.

She could lurk around the spaceport until she found a human ship to commandeer. One thing she’d learned as Ariel’s bodyguard, though, was that you didn’t steal from rich people. Working people might let a slight go, because they couldn’t afford to fight you and what else were they going to do, but the rich wouldn’t let it drop. They would hunt you down—or pay someone else to do it.

That meant she would have to find the secondary spaceport, the one for deliveries and workers. Kai had more human employees than Lautan did, but she would still be individual enough to be noticeable. She’d have to be extra cautious until she hijacked a ship. She would also have to wait until she found one capable of being flown by a woman whose knowledge of piloting was twenty years out-of-date.

As much as she loathed the idea, planetary custody offered advantages. It meant she would be fed, kept out of the sun, and sheltered from the gray militia. Maybe the only thing that made sense was to turn herself in to Planetary Security and wait for the cavalry to come get her.

Once the night settled in for real, Raena could not have moved if she’d wanted to. No telling if the floor of the old house was solid or how far back it went. The stone where she sat felt so smooth that she wondered if it had been swept. Had someone else set up housekeeping here?

She would have been happier with her back against something, anything, but without turning on her light, she wasn’t about to crawl off in search of a good solid wall.

To pass the time, she thought over what she knew about the Templars. She wasn’t certain of very much. They were an old species, maybe the first to travel the stars. No one knew where they originated. By the time other people crept off their homeworlds, the Templars had already colonized planets strewn across the galaxy. They were ready to trade, but to trade with the Templars, new worlds had to give up their interplanetary weaponry. Those who could not abide by the Templars’ rules were annihilated.

Mostly the Templars traded their technology for food. The translation devices Vezali and Haoun wore were Templar tech. Even the comm system the
Veracity
used to connect to the galaxy in real time was based on Templar tech, stolen and adapted by the Empire. The machines that made most colonized planets’ air breathable and water drinkable had come from the Templars. The galaxy relied on Templar-made fabrics and construction materials and miscellaneous electronics.

The galactic peace might have endured forever, if humanity had not run up against Templar space. The Empire wanted to expand—and they didn’t want to give up their weapons to trade by the Templars’ rules.

Between the Empire and the Templars stood the border worlds. These managed to form a Coalition between their nonhuman governments and the human refugees fleeing the Empire. If any of them had had weapons of war, the border worlds might have joined the conflict on the Templars’ side. Unfortunately, the masters of the galaxy had destroyed all the weapons they’d confiscated before the War. The only way the Coalition governments could arm themselves was by hijacking Imperial convoys or by scavenging Imperial ships. They were late to the party.

The galaxy at large merely looked on in horror, unable to offer aid or even defend themselves.

The War had been going on for years by the time Raena ran from it. She’d never seen a living Templar, nor had most humans. If an Imperial craft came across a Templar ship, they destroyed it. The same happened if the Templars saw an Imperial ship first. The initial aggressor always won the exchange, at the price of total obliteration of the enemy.

Things seemed fairly evenly balanced when Raena was imprisoned on the Templar cemetery world. Wiping the Templars out must have struck the Emperor as the only gambit to level the playing field.

He hadn’t counted on humanity’s aversion to genocide. Everyone who had an opportunity to do so switched sides, choosing to live in the galaxy rather than assist the Empire’s plans to take it over.

Raena didn’t know what the Templars would have done if they’d succeeded in overpowering the Empire. Would they have wiped humanity out or seen its people enslaved? She was fairly certain the rest of the galaxy wouldn’t have censured them over it. Everyone was too reliant on Templar-derived tech—the tesseract drive as case in point—to be thrilled when they had to reinvent or reverse-engineer the things they relied upon every day.

Raena suspected that the failure of the tesseract drive was just a harbinger of things to come. Other tech would start winding down before much longer. If nothing else, without the understanding to manufacture translators that could add new languages, there would be no way to easily communicate with new peoples. Misunderstanding would escalate.

Without the Templars to enforce galactic peace, Raena expected that many governments were already experimenting with interplanetary weaponry. At first the weapons would be justified as self-defense, but eventually someone would claim offense. Then there would be war again.

There was nothing she could do about it here. The silence of the dead village worked on her. Normally sleep was difficult for Raena to find, but now, in the blackness, it stole over her and she couldn’t resist.

*   *   *

When Raena opened her eyes, a faint green light glowed in the back of the house. She watched it, but it came no closer. The silence stopped up her ears.

Her body had stiffened up. Climbing painfully to her feet, she crept cautiously toward the light. It burned with an even emerald glow that was easy on her eyes. When she reached the room where it shone, she marveled at the size of the place. There was nothing cozy or inviting about the empty stone room. It had clearly been fashioned out of the rock for the huge Templars.

A faint mist floated ankle-high above the floor. Raena told herself it was a trap. She should be planning how to cross the desert and get herself back to Kai City. How could she overpower her pursuers? How could she be certain she’d be able to fly a skiff, if she stole one? How was she going to muffle its engine so the sound of it didn’t alert the others to follow her?

Instead, she stepped into the room. As she crossed the threshold, the ankle-high mist gathered itself into a sleeping couch.

Twenty years after its masters were erased from the galaxy, the faithful house still remembered the Templars, still worked to offer them comfort.

Desperately lonely, Raena sat on the couch. The mist moved around her gently, conforming to her body, supporting her aching and abraded limbs. Ariel had told her that human chemistry shared startling similarities to the Templars. Apparently, they were alike enough to trigger the furniture’s nurturing response.

It was so pleasant just to rest. Raena leaned back into the misty couch and closed her eyes.

*   *   *

When Raena woke again, she heard a pattering sound, like water. She stood up. The wonderful couch that had supported her dissolved back into mist and evaporated.

Following the sound of rain, she discovered another room lit by a pale green glow. Gentle droplets filled the air inside. She tested the spray with her left hand, but it was only water. She stepped into the shower and let it wash the sweat and worry from her face and hair. Later, perhaps, she would regret getting her clothing wet, but now she took the dress from the breast pocket of Bihn’s shirt and rinsed it out, too.

The couch had healed her while she slept. All her aches had been eased. The scabs washed from her abraded leg to reveal new skin beneath. She felt better than she had in days.

Rather than drain into plumbing and vanish, the shower water collected into a stream that ran down into the mountain.

Raena pulled the emergency lantern from her knapsack and followed the stream. It led down a winding stairway into the mountain. Eventually, the water trickled into an underground river that flowed farther than her light could reach.

She settled down on the shore of the river. The stone had been worked into a series of rises, smooth and flat, that would provide safe footing and a place to draw out boats. Mooring posts still protruded from the rock. She shined her lantern overhead, examining the ceiling of the cavern. Normally, Templar stone was rough-surfaced, covered in jagged nubbins, but this stone had been polished until it was softly reflective. She hoped that meant the river had been used as a highway.

She set the light aside so she could see as she pulled everything out of her pack. When she’d checked the pack in the escape pod, she’d noticed the inflatable raft. At the time, she had been tempted to leave the raft behind to spare herself the weight, but decided it might provide shelter in the desert, if she could find nothing else.

The pack didn’t contain anything she could use as a paddle, but it didn’t matter. The river seemed to have a good current. She hoped it was flowing to the ocean and not a waterfall, but she would soon find out.

*   *   *

Once she got the raft into the water, Raena scrambled to climb aboard. The river rushed with gathering speed away from the lonely house. Its course seemed to have been cleared of obstacles, so that Raena never encountered rapids or whirlpools. She stretched out in the bottom of the raft so that her head would not strike the ceiling, if ever it dipped toward her. In her cozy nest, she ate another bar and drank more water from her pack. After what seemed like hours, she slept again.

She woke when light caressed her face. The cave grew brighter as she neared its mouth. It did not seem to be daylight quite yet, but dawn was coming.

The scent of the air changed, as the water grew brackish.

The river spat her out into the ocean. Raena could see Kai City up on the cliffs a couple of kilometers down the coast, but the current was bearing her away, out to sea. She quickly collected her trash from the bottom of the raft, stuffed it into her pack, and then dove over the raft’s edge. She swam parallel to the beach for a while, long enough to get out of the current.