No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three (28 page)

“We’ve been watching the trial.”

About the same time as her crewmates, Raena realized that the kids wore “Free Raena Zacari” T-shirts.

“Have they dropped the charges?” one of the girls wanted to know.

Raena shook her head. “Out on bail.” Her voice sounded alien to her own ears.

Others in the waiting room began to recognize her. The crowd around them grew denser. People wanted to congratulate her for killing the Thallians or ask where she’d trained. One guy wanted to hire her, either as a bodyguard or as a companion, Raena wasn’t clear. Not all the attention was approving, but Raena had trouble tracking it. The kids closest to her all babbled at once, something about role model and standing up to anti-humanists and what an honor. Raena wondered if they were breathing up all her air. Haoun kept a grip on Raena’s shoulder, holding her upright.

Then Corvas appeared, wading through the crowd. Even though the slim lizard was much smaller than Haoun, he knew how to command space. He cleared a margin around her. The kids stared at him, starstruck. Security cameras buzzed around, getting a good view of Raena being supported and protected by Haoun, Coni, and Corvas. She wondered if that would make it into the broadcast of her trial.

A human doctor showed up, flanked by a couple of hospital security guards. They cleared a path for Raena into the treatment area.

Raena whispered to Corvas, “What just happened?”

His eyes rotated to regard her. “Exactly what Ariel hoped would happen.”

*   *   *

The doctor asked Raena to sit on an examining table. Luckily, Haoun was there to boost her up. Her skin looked even more sunburned now, the reddish tone brightening under her usual color.

“You need the soot suctioned from your lungs,” the doctor said. “It’s filling the alveoli and making it hard for you to get enough oxygen. The suctioning process is uncomfortable. You need to hold absolutely still or there’s a chance that we could puncture your lungs. Sedation is not optional.”

Raena reached out and Coni took her hand. The blue girl said, “Haoun needs to be treated, too, but Corvas will stay with you.”

“Where are you going?” Raena rasped.

“Something has happened on the
Veracity
. Mykah wants me to meet him there.”

Raena’s vision went black around the edges. She felt her body going away.

*   *   *

“Everyone out,” the doctor ordered.

“I’ll stay,” Corvas said calmly. “You know who she is.”

The doctor nodded.

“I’m losing count of the number of attempts on Raena’s life on Kai,” Corvas said. “I know you will do your best for her, Doctor, but for your safety, she needs a guard. I will be it.”

“All right. Everyone else . . .”

Coni took Haoun’s arm and tried to nudge him away.

“I’m staying, too,” he growled. “She didn’t leave me last night. I’m not leaving her now.”

“I don’t care who stays or goes,” the doctor snapped, “but I need to help her now.”

Coni led the other two back out of the doctor’s way. “The
Veracity
was attacked in the night,” she said quietly. “Ariel wants me to pull up the video. I need to go.”

“Go,” Corvas said. “We’ll watch over Raena.”

*   *   *

Coni wasn’t sure what she expected as she walked across Kai City, but the strange and frightening silence that filled the morning wasn’t it. Most shops remained shuttered. Most tourists seemed to have kept close to their hotels. She was almost the only person loping through town.

She watched for the soldiers in gray, but they didn’t seem to be lurking around. She tried to remember if they’d ever attacked Raena in the daylight.

Coni had never particularly worried about her own safety before. On the scale of people in the galaxy, she was average size. Her teeth and claws were sharp enough to make most creatures think twice about getting too close. She’d taken some self-defense classes in school, but now she wished she’d sparred with Raena aboard the
Veracity
. More fight training might have made her feel more confident this morning.

That spun her thoughts off into another direction. She didn’t know what to expect aboard the
Veracity
. Mykah had locked Ariel’s daughter and the two Thallians aboard last night. Coni hoped that Raena’s mistrust of Jim Zacari was unfounded. She kind of liked the boy.

*   *   *

Unlike the rest of Kai City, the spaceport bustled this morning. The party on Kai seemed to be over. Ship after ship powered up around Coni, taking off in search of a good time elsewhere.

When she reached their docking bay, Coni found the
Veracity
locked. She commed Mykah, who didn’t pick up. As she left him a message, he opened the ship from the inside. He glanced over her shoulders before stepping back out of her way.

As soon as she crossed the threshold, Coni smelled blood. Death. “What’s happened?”

“Someone got onto the ship last night.” Mykah’s voice quavered with fury.

“I thought you locked it,” Coni said, before she thought better of it. She realized it sounded like an accusation.

“I did. It looks like Jim opened it from the inside. We need you to access the
Veracity
’s recordings to see if you can figure out why.”

“Who is dead?” Coni heard a flutter in her own voice. Mykah turned back to take her in his arms, holding her close.

It was comforting, but she couldn’t see his face when he said simply, “Eilif.”

A little noise escaped her.

“It’s bad in the cockpit,” he said. “Can you work in our cabin?”

“Is Jim all right? Gisela?”

“I’ll tell you everything,” Mykah promised. “Let’s get to work first. I want to know what happened, too.”

As she followed him down the passageway, she caught a glimpse of Ariel on her hands and knees in the cockpit, mopping the floor. Shuddering, Coni closed her eyes and tried to wipe the image away.

“Is Planetary Security on their way?” Coni’s voice still had the shrill flutter to it. The sound made her hackles rise.

“We didn’t call them.” Mykah opened their cabin door. Coni let him usher her in. She collapsed onto the desk chair. Everything looked normal inside. “Ariel says that they have completely failed to protect us at every opportunity so far. If they find out that we were sheltering another Thallian, beyond the one they already knew about, they will spin Eilif’s death into more charges against us—or against Raena, since she was out of jail last night. Ariel wants us to find out who killed Eilif, so Raena can avenge her.”

Coni’s hands trembled as she reached out to wake the screen. She realized he hadn’t told her about Jim or Gisela, but she was afraid to ask again.

*   *   *

Last night’s recording from the cockpit’s camera showed Gisela, Eilif, and Jim gathered together to stare down at the view screen. It was impossible to see what they were looking at, but the argument was easy to hear.

“You know he’s dead, Jimi,” Eilif said. “You’ve seen the video.”

“We’ve seen all kinds of videos,” Jim argued. “I know everyone believes Raena killed him. What if it was one more cover-up? What if Kai couldn’t admit that they had him? That he was injured, but they patched him up and let him go?”

“At least set a test for him. Ask him something only Revan would know.”

Coni sat back from the screen and stared at Mykah. “Revan?” she echoed.

“Can you pull up last night’s recording from the exterior cameras?” Mykah asked.

“Do you want the
Veracity
’s cameras or the security cams in the docking bay?”

Mykah hugged her, amused to have been given a choice. “Let’s see what they saw in the cockpit first.”

Coni typed in the right commands and triggered the playback. On their screen, the docking bay filled with a squadron of soldiers in gray, their heads covered in mirrored helmets. They all looked similar in size and shape. “Human, do you think?” Coni asked.

Mykah shrugged. “We can rule out a whole lot of people they’re not.”

In the video, one of the soldiers stepped forward and stripped off his glove. He popped open the cover on the
Veracity
’s palm lock and laid his hand on the screen. The
Veracity
chirped as if it recognized him, but the door remained locked, waiting for Mykah’s passcode.

The soldier stepped back out of the hatch alcove. He reached up under his helmet, unfastened its strap, and pulled it off. Then he gazed at the
Veracity
, silver eyes stormy with displeasure. It certainly looked like Revan Thallian.

“Are there more of them?” Mykah asked. “More Thallians than we knew about?”

“Gods, I hope not,” Coni said. She toggled back to the cockpit’s camera.

Jim walked out of frame. Eilif leaned over to Gisela and suggested quietly, “Hide.”

Coni pressed pause on everything. “I’m not sure I can watch this.”

“I need to see,” Mykah said. “Why don’t you ask Ariel to come, too?”

Coni was only too happy to get up from the desk chair. Fear swirled around in her blood. She took a couple of steps toward the cockpit, before deciding she didn’t really want to see what Ariel was scrubbing up.

“We’re watching the video,” Coni called down to her, “from the external cameras. Do you want to come see it?”

“I do,” Gisela said quietly from inside her cabin. “I can’t remember what happened.”

Coni was so relieved the girl was still alive that she felt lightheaded.

When Gisela came to her cabin door, her face looked even paler than normal, her dark eyes even darker. Coni offered a hand to steady her. Gisela took it gratefully. “Are you all right?”

“I hit my head last night,” the girl said. “I don’t remember how. I was out almost all night.”

Ariel joined them in the passage. Around the edges, her clothes were damp and stained with pink. Her mouth clenched in a grim line. “You’re supposed to rest,” she told Gisela.

“I’ll rest better when I know what happened.”

Ariel didn’t argue with that.

They crowded into Coni and Mykah’s cabin. Coni stood near the door, so she could duck out if she needed to. Mykah unpaused the video.

In the recording, Gisela slipped inside one of the lockers in the cockpit. Eilif closed its door after her, then stood in front of it, blocking it with her body. Coni was startled to watch the transformation that came over Eilif, once she heard the gray soldiers board the
Veracity
. Her posture shifted. Her head sank so that her gaze focused on the floor. She reverted to being a slave, not the free woman she had become.

The Revan soldier came into the cockpit.

Eilif said quietly, “Raena Zacari found the message you left for me.”

“You followed it, of course,” Revan snarled.

“Of course,” Eilif answered.

“Pause it again,” Ariel said. Mykah complied.

“That’s not really Revan Thallian,” Ariel told them. “Raena found a photograph of Eilif in that military coat of Revan’s. It had no message, except as evidence that Revan secretly loved Eilif as much as she secretly loved him. Eilif was testing this guy. She just proved he was an impostor.”

“That doesn’t help us know who he is,” Mykah pointed out.

“It narrows it down. He looked enough like Revan that Eilif wasn’t sure and Jim was fooled.”

“The ship recognized him,” Coni observed.

“Then he’s been altered or manufactured in some way to pass for a Thallian,” Ariel said.

“Why would anyone do that?” Gisela asked.

“The question is,” Mykah corrected, “who would have the technology?”

“Let’s see some more,” Ariel said. Mykah set the video to play again.

Jim followed his uncle’s doppelganger into the cockpit. He glanced around for Gisela, then focused on his mother. Eilif didn’t look up from the floor.

Revan rounded on Jim. “Can you fly this ship?”

“Not alone, sir.”

“Then we’ll scuttle it.” Revan turned to his men, waiting in the passage out of view of the camera. He nodded sharply but didn’t issue any order aloud. Then he asked Jim, “Do you know where they’ve hidden their weapons?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Help my men confiscate them.” He turned on Eilif. “Gather anything you want from this ship.”

“Where are we going?” Eilif wondered quietly.

“Home.” He glanced up at the
Veracity
’s recorder and smiled. Sharpened teeth filled his smile.

“Pause it again,” Ariel said. “I’ve got to sit down.” Rather than get her bloodstained clothes on Mykah and Coni’s bedding, she sank to the floor. “It’s a trap for Raena.”

“We have to watch the rest of it,” Gisela argued. “I want to know how Eilif died.”

“You can tell me later,” Coni said. “I’m going to call Corvas and check on Raena.”

*   *   *

After Coni had retreated into the lounge, Ariel asked, “Is she okay?”

Mykah nodded. “Coni’s visual memory is very sharp. She remembers things from news programs she watched as a child that still trouble her. It’s better if she doesn’t see this.”

He looked to Gisela, leaning against the wall by the door. “Please sit down,” he invited.

Moving languidly as if not to rattle her brain around, Gisela settled on the floor. She leaned against Ariel’s shoulder. Mykah started the playback again.

Eilif waited until all the gray soldiers were occupied elsewhere. Silently, she eased open the locker where Gisela hid. “You have to get a message to Raena,” she whispered. “Tell her the
Veracity
is compromised. Don’t tell her where we’ve gone. It’s a trap.”

She spun around half a second before Revan strode back into the cockpit. He held a bulbous gun like the one Raena had stolen the night before. “I’m sorry, my dears,” he said. “We want the boy. We don’t need you.”

The second before he fired at them, Eilif flung herself in front of Gisela. The blast caught her squarely. She toppled back into Gisela, who struck her head on the locker door. Revan stood over them, gun ready, but neither of them moved. Eilif was already hemorrhaging onto the deck.

“It’s a sonic weapon,” Ariel said. “What a horrible way to die. You are lucky you didn’t catch any more of the blast.”