No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three (23 page)

*   *   *

Haoun didn’t actually hate Kai as much as Mykah did. His own job here had been fairly cushy. He’d shuttled tourists out into the desert to explore the Templar ghost towns. Mostly Haoun waited in the temperature-controlled buses, playing video games, while the tourists exhausted themselves in the heat. If the tourist parties featured any human females, he invited them for revivifying drinks afterward. He’d met a lot of people, collected a satisfying amount of tips, and dated some very nice warm girls.

He hadn’t realized he was bored until Mykah offered him a job piloting the
Veracity
.

Haoun looked down at Raena, who was once again chained to the defendant’s chair. Today she wore a skin-tight outfit that shimmered in the bright courtroom lights. The reflective catsuit wouldn’t leave any of her body to the imagination, except that you couldn’t look straight at her with the glare it gave off. He wondered how it registered to the cameras.

He also wondered if anyone else understood the social critique she offered without saying a word.

The three judges took their places in the courtroom.

The Shtrell court reporter said, “The prisoner here before us has been charged by the Business Council of Kai with kidnapping a young human male who has not yet been identified. Raena Zacari has requested that the charge go to trial.”

The court recorder replayed the video of Jain Thallian jumping off his jet bike and running toward the lock on the ship now recognized as the
Veracity
. Haoun had to admit, he was impressed with the job Coni and Mykah had done altering the metadata on the recording to make it appear that this was a different docking bay than the
Raptor
had landed in. He didn’t know how they’d managed to change the record under Kai’s nose. It was scary that they had that kind of power. He hoped that would continue to use it for good.

*   *   *

When the video of Jain’s capture finished, Raena looked up at Corvas. He smoothed an invisible wrinkle out of his blue and aquamarine caftan and said, “I call the next witness.”

Preceded by an oversized blue-furred Haru bailiff, a slim boy came out of the waiting room. He wore an expensive sleeveless green brocade pullover with a high silk collar. It looked to Raena as if it hid body armor. Muscles striped his bare arms. His posture was perfectly straight, shoulders back, chin up, and yet he didn’t look haughty as much as frightened. He held himself too taut, as if he might crumble.

He had the bluish black hair, the silver eyes, the long straight nose and pointed chin, but this was not Jain Thallian. Raena had respected Jain, even felt comradeship for him, damaged as he was. She’d known Jain was just as proud as she was of what they’d survived at his father’s hands. She guessed this must be Jimi, Jain’s younger brother, the sole surviving Thallian clone.

The boy’s eyes flicked to Raena’s face. She gave him a nod that didn’t begin to encompass her gratitude. Raena hadn’t known Jimi well enough to feel any affection for him, but she understood exactly what it cost him to appear in public.

“State your name for the court,” Corvas said.

“I traveled to Kai under the name Jim Zacari,” Jimi said, “but my given name is Jain Thallian. My father was Jonan Thallian, the man who carried out the Templar genocide.”

The audience in the courtroom exploded. Jimi flinched away from the furor. The Haru bailiff came to stand protectively over him, arms crossed on his too-broad chest. The boy shrank from him as well, uncertain if the blue-furred guard was for his protection or not.

The judges howled for silence, but the crowd struggled toward the half wall that separated them from the courtroom set. The cameras turned toward the mob, recording their anger in all its spectrum of details.

Shackled as she was, Raena remained seated in the defendant’s box. She scanned the area around her, but saw nothing that could be used as a weapon. If anyone came over the railing within her reach, she would have to kill them barehanded, before they could touch Jimi. Undoubtedly, that would play well around the galaxy: the ultimate proof that humans were violent and dangerous. Raena wondered if she had been set up.

A forcefield shimmered into place just inside the half wall, isolating the courtroom from the audience. The forcefield flickered several times until the old circuitry stabilized.

“It’s been a while since we needed that,” the gray judge said.

“Glad it still works,” the insect answered. “I thought we were going to have a full-scale riot.”

“We may yet.” The rock judge nodded toward the audience, who still shouted and gesticulated behind the wall of silence. To the bailiff, he said, “Will you pass along an order to clear the galleries and close the court? We’ll proceed without all that foolishness.”

Corvas came over to talk to the Thallian boy. “You all right, son?”

“Yes, sir. That’s the reason I work and travel under an assumed name.”

“Very understandable.”

The judges looked past Raena to check on the audience, but the evacuation seemed to be underway at last.

“When can we resume?” the stick insect asked.

“Whenever the court is ready,” Corvas said.

“Let’s give them another moment,” the gray judge suggested.

Raena spent the time breathing deeply, gazing at the floor between her feet. She felt sick, amazed at herself, ready to die to protect a Thallian.

“All right,” the female judge said at last. “They’ve gone.”

“Jim,” Corvas said, “tell us your story.”

So the boy spun out a tale of how he and his uncle Revan and a handful of soldiers from the
Arbiter
had come to Kai to capture Raena Zacari. How they had trailed her to the souk in Kai City and how they attacked her party there.

“Did you know Raena Zacari before the attack?” Corvas asked.

“Yes,” the boy said. “I had been in contact with her over the grid.”

“Why?”

“I needed help to escape my family.”

“Why was that?”

A camera zoomed closer to get a tight shot of the boy’s face. He glanced at it, glanced back to Ariel seated calmly in the gallery, then focused on Raena. “Because my father was a murderer of epic scale,” the boy said. “My brothers and I were prisoners on Drusingyi, because of the crimes our elders committed before we were born. My father’s generation weren’t the glorious heroes they wanted to believe they were. What they’d done disgusted me.”

It had been one thing for Jimi to tell Raena how he felt on the cusp of his escape, right before she wiped his family out. Now, with the galaxy listening in, he revealed the depths of his loathing. It was obvious from the fury trembling in his voice that he did not lie when he proclaimed how much he hated his family.

“How did Raena help your escape?”

“She made sure that Uncle Revan couldn’t follow me.”

“By killing him?” one of the judges asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then what happened?”

“She followed me back to Captain Chen’s ship and we left Kai together.”

“Captain Chen’s ship is the
Veracity
?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And where did you go?”

“I took them through the satellite defenses to Drusingyi.”

The levels of dishonesty in Jimi’s account made Raena’s head swim. Reality bore so little resemblance to what he said on the witness stand that she was amazed the judges couldn’t taste falsehood in the air.

In reality, Jimi had never been to Kai before. He’d never been off of his homeworld, until Raena told him how to reconfigure a hopper and offered a distraction to cover his escape. Yes, Jimi had given her enough information that she could bring the
Veracity
to Drusingyi, but he’d done it inadvertently.

Or so she had believed. She gazed at the boy now, calculating. He lied to his family for years about his feelings for them. More than that, he’d lied to his father, an Imperial torturer who once lived to root out dishonesty. The boy must be craftier than she’d thought. Jimi was, after all, one of Thallian’s sons.

“What happened after you reached Drusingyi?” the rock judge asked.

“The
Veracity
picked up the distress call from the men from the
Arbiter
. A malfunction had destroyed the city’s air filtration system. The men were stranded on the planet’s surface, without any kind of supplies or survival equipment.”

“None of this is related to the trial here before us,” Corvas pointed out.

“True,” the twiggy judge agreed. “It’s fascinating nonetheless.”

The defender inclined his head. One of his eyes slid sidelong to look at Raena. Then he faced the judges again. “Since Jain Thallian clearly was not kidnapped, I ask that the charge of kidnapping be dropped against Raena Zacari.”

“We will withdraw to chambers to discuss,” the head judge said. “Court is dismissed for the rest of the morning. We will meet back here this afternoon.”

*   *   *

Again the lunch they brought Raena was impressive, a green salad flecked with nuts, seeds, and dried berries. The accommodations might be dusty and the showers rationed, but the food could not be beat.

The jail guards escorted her back into the courtroom afterward and chained her once more in the defendant’s box. Jimi had gone back to hiding in protective custody. The audience seats seemed even fuller than they had been in the morning, but with a noticeable increase in the number of Planetary Security agents stationed around them.

“Raena Zacari,” the court recorder said, “the Planetary Business Council of Kai has agreed to drop the charge of kidnapping. Instead, it charges you with being a party to violence on a weapons-free world, violence that ended in the murder of four men. How do you answer these charges?”

“If I killed anyone on Kai, it was in self-defense.”

“Kai does not recognize self-defense as justification for violence,” the rock judge said. “How do you plead?”

Corvas pre-empted her response. “We insist on our right to trial. Please show us your evidence for the charge.”

A security cam, meant for catching shoplifters, provided grainy low-res video of seven men and Jain attacking a small party of tourists in the souk on Kai. One minute Ariel Shaad, Gavin Sloane, and Raena Zacari were sampling exotic fruits under a silver-shot canopy. The next, a soldier dressed in nondescript black livery had grasped Ariel’s arm and tried dragging her away. She fumbled for the gun no longer hanging at her thigh.

Gavin Sloane turned right into another assailant’s fist. Sloane staggered into a wall and slid to the dirt.

Raena Zacari spun into her own attacker’s grip on her arm and brought the heel of her free hand up hard under his chin. Still turning, she pulled him off balance and used his body to take the blow aimed at her by his accomplice. Then she dropped the man with the busted jaw and leapt onto the next man. In a movement as economical as poetry, she had broken his arm, several of his ribs, and vaulted over him as he dropped so she could come to Sloane’s aid.

Sloane’s attacker didn’t even know Raena was coming. Jumping onto his back, she twisted his head sharply enough to snap his spine, then turned to deal with the man dragging Ariel away. Less than a minute had passed, and already three attackers were down. One was dead.

Raena moved from one man to the next efficiently, dropping one with a scorpion kick, the next with a roundhouse punch. Her small stature made her tricky for the larger men to grab. The high-heeled boots she wore proved lethal. Most unnerving of all, she laughed through the whole attack, as if it was the most fun she’d had in years.

Then her gaze locked on Jain Thallian in the shadows.

A smoking canister dropped at her feet. Others rained down around her. Jain pulled his mask up from under his chin. Raena leaned into a sprint toward him, but Revan Thallian bulled after her. They came at Jain so fast he couldn’t do anything more than raise the shock net he carried.

Raena wound her fists in the sparking net and yanked hard. She hauled it out of Jain’s grasp and whirled, catching Revan upside the head with it. Then she tugged on the edge of the net and sent Revan to the dirt.

She turned a cartwheel after him and brought the toe of her boot down hard on Revan’s throat. He wilted, obviously dead. Raena snatched the mask off his face and held it over her own nose. For the first time in the fight, she seemed to be breathing hard.

Bending down, she scooped up a sleep canister with her spare hand. When her head came up, her insectile sunglasses fixed on Jain. Both of them ran out of frame.

The broadcast video usually cut at that moment, but this version continued long enough to show seven bodies in black uniforms strewn across the cramped market street, with barely a splash of visible blood.

The recording ended with a rain of sleep grenades. Pale blue smoke shrouded the scene.

Over the stunned silence in the courtroom, Corvas said, “I call Ariel Shaad to witness.”

*   *   *

Ariel strode out of the gallery to sit in the witness box. Mykah noticed she’d dressed up during the lunch break: ropes of gemstones shimmered on her chest and both wrists sported gem-studded bracelets. She’d traded her usual uniform of white blouses and gray trousers for a warm green dress that played up the flawless gold of her skin. Only the braid remained, but even it was more complicated than usual.

Now she looked less like a veteran and more like the upper-class clientele of Kai. When Corvas introduced her as the head of the Shaad Family Foundation, she looked the part. It was hard to picture her as the heir and one-time owner of the Shaad Arms Company.

Ariel told about her first visit to Kai, soon after the War ended. She and her mother had come to gamble, to be pampered, to relax. In a galaxy where humans—even those who fought with the Coalition—seemed more in danger all the time, they’d had a wonderful time and felt very safe on Kai.

Because of those fond memories, Ariel’s mother had come back to Kai several times since, bringing all her wealthy friends. Ariel never worried about the older ladies on Kai because she’d known that Planetary Security was so good.