No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three (2 page)

*   *   *

Raena paused in the shadowy doorway to check the street outside the New Bar. Nothing looked out of place. People still strolled calmly through the humidity, chatting and shopping and carrying drinks.

She took a deep breath, stepped out, and adjusted her pace to the flow of traffic. She struggled to keep herself from resting her hand on the grip of the Stinger holstered on her thigh.

Haoun kept close by. He stood high enough that he could see over almost everyone’s heads. If she’d trained him, he might have been an asset. She tried to keep herself from viewing him as a distraction now.

“Wanna talk?” he asked.

Mostly, she wanted to keep moving, but the streets were narrow and winding and the air was so opaque that keeping watch on all of it overwhelmed her. “Do you think we can find the water?” she asked.

“It’s this way.”

He led her there like he’d been on Lautan before. The buildings opened up to reveal a charcoal gray ocean stretching off to the horizon. Round green stones the size of her palm covered a wide, mostly empty beach. Raena took another deep breath. This was what she wanted: to be able to see things coming.

Unfortunately, the beach stones radiated the day’s warmth back up at her. Haoun pointed out a small copse of frilly trees. It looked shady beneath them. When they got there, the tree bark smelled pleasantly spicy, like nutmeg. Raena put her back against a tree and tried to relax.

“So?” Haoun prompted.

“When I left the
Arbiter
,” she said, “I was on the run for a little over two Earth years. During that time, I got captured eleven times. I fought off more bounty hunters than I can count. All I wanted was to be invisible, beneath notice, but the bounty was too high. Hunting me was just too tempting.”

She trailed off, staring out at the steely ocean. “I know Coni’s right. I know there’s no one after me any more. But running . . . that’s all I knew for so long. I’m safer when no one knows I exist.”

“You need a distraction,” Haoun pronounced. “You need something that will allow you to burn off some energy.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“There’s an arcade—”

The laughter that burst out of her vaporized some of the worry in her chest.

*   *   *

Vezali retrieved a glass with one tentacle. The xyshin didn’t have much flavor, but its temperature felt very pleasant in this bar. Although they’d controlled the ambient temperature and brought it down a dozen degrees, the place still felt uncomfortably warm. Vezali’s plans for the afternoon included a long soak in a bath.

Vezali settled back onto the bench with Mykah and Coni to watch the rest of the newscast.

The Messiah drug story was Mellix’s first work since he broke the news of the flaw in the tesseract drive a galactic month ago. That story put an end to casual space travel. Bit by bit, ships across the galaxy were being refurbished with older technologies, but many of the larger shipping companies and interstellar cruise lines—unable to afford to replace the engines on their entire fleets—had chosen to go out of business. They were angry because tesseract travel remained safe the majority of times, except on the occasions when a ship entered tesseract space and didn’t come out. Unfortunately, insurance to pay the families of long-distance haulers was too exorbitant to absorb—and casual travelers no longer wanted to take the risk.

It made places like Lautan, where the
Veracity
had landed this morning, so desperate for visitors that they dropped prices on everything from accommodations to alcohol. That made the pleasure planet affordable to working class people like the
Veracity
’s crew. And they deserved a vacation after their work revealing the resurgence of the Messiah drug to the galaxy. Raena Zacari deserved time off most of all.

Vezali fished another eel out of the bowl and slurped it down. These were a treat, even if they were farmed rather than wild-caught.

On the screen, chestnut-furred Mellix mapped out the known spread of the Messiah drug. When the crew of the
Veracity
had discovered it was loose in the galaxy again, they knew they were looking for two crates, each filled with as many as fifty pouches of the drug. Forty of those pouches had already been accounted for and destroyed, but the rest had disappeared. The tracers attached to each individual pouch had gone silent.

Vezali still struggled to understand how exactly the Messiah drug worked. It was a Templar drug, but with the Templar extinct, only humans could use it. During the Human-Templar War, human addicts had destabilized some of the border governments by attacking heads of state in their dreams. For the Dagat, Vezali’s people, dreams and memory were the same thing. They couldn’t use the Messiah drug and believed they were immune to its attacks.

However, Raena had been the victim of a Messiah user named Gavin Sloane. One of his attacks on Raena had added a memory to Vezali’s mind. That meant the Dagat was aware that time had been changed: only once, but that was enough. The experience felt like a violation. Vezali kept probing the altered memory, wondering how to make it go away.

In the newscast, Mellix left it to Mykah to sum up how to recognize a Messiah user’s attack and whom to contact for help.

Vezali wouldn’t have recognized Mykah, if the screen hadn’t helpfully labeled him as the captain of the
Veracity
. He had tied his hair back, shaved his face clean, and dressed up for his big moment. Still, humans with their changeless coloration were difficult to tell apart.

When the broadcast ended, Coni filled everyone’s glass with more xyshin so they could have a toast.

“I’m sorry Raena didn’t see the whole thing,” Mykah said.

“Maybe she will watch the rest of it with you later,” Coni soothed, “when she’s less upset.”

*   *   *

At the end of the newscast, Ariel Shaad and Eilif Thallian sat back on the sofa as one, each lost in her own thoughts.

Ariel put her feet up on the coffee table. She had known Gavin Sloane died from abusing the Messiah drug. Raena had shown her images of his shriveled corpse, so she could grieve. At the time, Ariel had been angry, had hated Sloane for chasing something impossible when he could have had the love Ariel wanted to give him. Now, seeing he’d released the drug back into the galaxy rather than destroying it before it could do any more damage, she hated him all over again.

She lit a spice stick and stared at the smoke, wondering what was wrong with her that she’d ever loved that man.

Eventually, Eilif said, “Raena had her scar removed.”

Ariel laughed, glad to be pulled out of her thoughts. “Raena said the scar tied her to the person she used to be. Watching her dismember those androids, though . . . The old Raena is clearly still in there.”

“She looks more like me now,” Eilif mused.

Like Eilif used to look, Ariel realized, when she’d been young. Eilif was a clone of someone who looked a lot like Raena. Somewhere in the cloning process, something had gone wrong with her. She aged faster than normal. Although she was barely twenty, her hair had already gone entirely white. Conversely, Raena’s long imprisonment in a Templar tomb had frozen her appearance at around twenty. In actual age, she was closer to forty-five. She could have been Eilif’s mother.

Ariel said, “I’m surprised Raena allowed her image to go out on an intragalactic broadcast. She never wanted anyone to see her before.”

Eilif poured some more tea for Ariel, then filled her own cup and sipped from it before Ariel had a chance to raise hers. The behavior was a relic from Eilif’s life with the Thallians, where she’d served as their chief food taster.

As far as Ariel knew, no one ever died of poison among the Thallians until Eilif drugged her husband herself. Still, Ariel wished the woman’s compulsion to taste Ariel’s food wouldn’t keep reminding them both of what they’d escaped.

Still, if Raena could change and step out into the light where the galaxy could see her, then survival—recovery—was possible for them all.

*   *   *

It wasn’t just any arcade. Trust Haoun, who’d learned to pilot the
Veracity
on flight simulators, to know Lautan had a massive entertainment palace.

Entertainment machines from around the galaxy stuffed the building. Some rudimentary machines pitted operator reflexes against weights or gravity. Others required players to climb inside or atop them. Raena had learned to play handheld games at Haoun’s elbow on the
Veracity
, but she couldn’t beat the precision of his fine motor skills. Here, she was attracted to games that required big physical movements, but her body was too small to make most of these games work.

She stopped in front of the jet scooter race, but didn’t mount the machine. Foot pedals controlled acceleration and the handlebars held weapons controls, but she couldn’t figure out how to stretch to reach both at the same time.

Haoun loomed over her, bending low so she could hear him over the racket in the arcade. “It’s built for a bigger thing than you.”

“Show me how it’s played?” Raena asked.

“I’m not any good at it,” he argued. “I can steer, but I can’t shoot at the same time. You need mammal reflexes for this one.”

Raena smiled at that, not offended.

“Maybe we could play it together,” he offered.

She looked up at his face, but the lizard seemed as expressionless as ever.

“Give you a boost up?”

Now she knew he was teasing her. “Sure, big guy. Help me up.”

Haoun’s oversized hands were gentle as they fit around her waist. Raena straddled the machine and Haoun stepped up behind her. He pointed out the safety restraints and the firing mechanisms, then hunched over her so he could reach the handlebars to steer.

Raena leaned up against him. “Get comfortable,” she suggested. “I’m not shy.”

He laughed, knowing that was true, and fidgeted closer.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Let’s begin.”

He coasted them forward smoothly. They took their place at the starting gate with the other players. The jet scooter’s motor made a steady thrum between Raena’s knees. Haoun’s chest grew warmer against her back.

Raena smiled to herself. She used to be able to disassociate what was happening to her flesh from the objective she pursued. That ability helped her to endure the fights she got into as Ariel’s bodyguard, but also to survive her Imperial training and Thallian’s beatings. What her body did and felt was separate from who she was and what she wanted.

The boundaries seemed to be melting. She felt extremely conscious of Haoun’s long thighs outside hers. She felt his muscles bunch and twitch as he kicked the scooter faster and faster. And there was the smell of him, alien and strange and fascinating and complex. With effort, she focused on the game—but her attention kept drifting.

She’d never been this close to anyone nonhuman before. Oh, she’d fought them, tortured them occasionally aboard the
Arbiter
, but never had such prolonged physical contact. Even when she’d been transported aboard the slave ship, the Viridians had left her alone to preserve her value. Well, they left her alone, as long as she would eat.

One of the other scooters pulled ahead in the game. Haoun growled deep in his chest. Raena felt the vibration against her back. Her blood responded to it.

“Can I fire on the other players?” she shouted.

“Only if we collect the talisman.” He nodded toward a green thing glowing far ahead.

“We’d better get there first,” she said.

Haoun barked out a laugh and kicked the bike down one more notch. It shot forward, rocking Raena back more firmly against the big lizard.

She got the sense he enjoyed the contact as much as she did.

*   *   *

The boy born Jimi Thallian scanned backward through the recording of the Messiah documentary so he could watch the firefight with the androids again. The aggressor, he was certain, was Raena Zacari, the woman who had rescued him. He’d seen her in person only once, briefly, when she helped him get the hopper flight-ready so he could run away from home. Even then, Jim had taken a teenage boy’s pleasure in the way her catsuit strained and stretched over her small, slim body, and especially in the fluid way she moved, as if her slightest gesture was part of a dance. It didn’t hurt that she was also utterly terrifying.

Watching her twist and roll, fire and dodge, and ultimately dismantle the Outrider androids with a pair of stone knives made him uncomfortably aroused.

Jim stifled that by thinking: I understand exactly what my father saw in her. The chill that followed the thought stopped his breath.

During the War, Raena Zacari had served Jim’s father aboard his Imperial destroyer, a nominally diplomatic ship called the
Arbiter
. When Raena deserted from Imperial service, Jonan Thallian lost the last bulwark that kept him sane. In short order, he acquiesced to the Emperor’s directive to spread the plague that wiped out the Templars. That genocide led to the destruction of the Empire.

The moment the galaxy turned against humanity, Jonan Thallian fled home like a rabid wolf. He dragged his family and the crew of the
Arbiter
down into his homeworld’s ocean, where they waited out the execution of the planet above.

Five years after the War finally ended, after the surface of their homeworld was poisoned and dead, Jimi was born. The only survivor of his crop of clones, he’d grown up ostracized from his cloned brothers, both older and younger. Despite their identical appearance, not one of the others recognized their father’s crimes as atrocities.

When Jim finally sought help to escape his homeworld, he betrayed his family and led Raena to them. He remembered sitting in the hopper, ready to run at last, and telling her to kill them all.

And she’d done it. He didn’t know how; the news stories weren’t as specific as he would have liked. There had been a fire in the castle where his family lived. The domes of the undersea city cracked. Everything he’d ever known had been washed away, exactly as he’d wished.

Raena never came forward to claim the vengeance she’d rained down on his family. Still, Jim knew she was responsible. He would have liked to thank her personally, but Raena had warned him that if he ever so much as thought about coming after her, she would kill him in his sleep.