No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three (33 page)

Raena paused long enough to let them absorb all that. “Gisela, if the guards are robots like Outrider, they will be really well shielded. Aim for their guns.”

She stepped away from the screen and let it go back to sleep. “If we can’t dock, Mykah and I will swim over.”

Mykah raised his hand.

“I know,” Raena said. “You don’t swim. I can pull you, but that means you’ll have to cover me.”

“Do you want us to hang around?” Haoun asked.

“No. The leviathans will be drawn to the sound of
Veracity
’s engines. Go back up to the surface and wait ’til we call you.”

“What if you don’t call?” Gisela asked.

“We’ll be dead.”

Coni took Mykah’s hand, but nobody refuted that.

*   *   *

Raena joined Gisela and Haoun in the cockpit. The last time the
Veracity
came through the asteroid belt inside the Thallians’ home system, Coni had teased the codes for safe passage through the minefield out of the
Raptor
’s memory. This time, all the satellites rotated erratically, tumbling blindly through space.

Ahead of them, Drusingyi was a dead gray mass shrouded by turbulent clouds. Raena scanned it for any signs of life. The
Veracity
’s scanners hadn’t made Vezali’s upgrade list yet, but the crew didn’t normally have much use for them. Using the
Veracity
’s outdated technology, Raena couldn’t find anything on the planet that passed for life. Whatever lived there, it was hidden under the ocean.

Haoun brought them through the atmosphere at a steep trajectory. The plan was to land long enough to let the hull cool before they dove into the ocean.

“What’s that?” he asked.

Raena looked up to see what he was pointing at. A black smudge discolored the snow at the edge of a glacier. Raena focused in as much as she could.

“It was the
Sundog
,” she said. “Looks like Kavanaugh got attacked before they could get away.”

Haoun slowed enough that they could circle.

Raena ran through the channels, searching for Vezali or Kavanaugh’s comms.

“Nice to see you,” Kavanaugh said.

Haoun let out a sigh of relief.

“Where are you?” Raena asked.

“Snow cave. Near where you found the
Arbiter
survivors.”

“Got you locked,” Haoun said. “We’ll be right there.”

*   *   *

Kavanaugh waved his arms as Haoun brought the
Veracity
down. The old veteran’s face was covered by a scrap of cloth, which he pulled down to reveal the ice crystals in his gingery beard. He waved like a man so relieved to see rescue that he had trouble staying on his feet.

Haoun cut the engines and let the
Veracity
drop the last twenty meters, rather than make the mistake he did the last time: melting the snow, which then refroze around the landing gear and locked them in place, until Mykah and Coni cut them lose. The
Veracity
landed with a good bump. Raena hoped Gisela’s hard head didn’t knock up against anything. The girl had been warned of the dangers.

A frigid wind rushed suddenly through the
Veracity
. Coni must have opened the hatch to let Kavanaugh onboard.

Raena realized she should have set a test for him. What if he was a replica, like the Revan had been?

She unhooked herself from the crash webbing and raced back to the hatch.

By the time she got there, the Kavanaugh had Coni’s throat in the crook of his arm, his gun against her head. Coni’s lavender eyes had gone round with shock.

Raena skidded to a halt at the sight of them.

Kavanaugh re-aimed his gun and shot her.

*   *   *

Raena came to with Jimi Thallian leaning over her, shining a flashlight into her eye. Raena knocked his hands away from her face. Jimi jumped backward like a startled cat.

“They stunned you,” he explained quickly. “Gisela said she had a concussion from when she fell. I wanted to make sure you didn’t.”

Raena sat up. Adrenaline sang through her, casting off the last of the stun’s effects. “I’m fine,” she snarled. “Don’t touch me again.”

“Sorry.” Jimi switched off the flashlight.

“Where are the others?”

“Everyone is okay. We’re down in the city now. The Templar Master wants to speak to you, when you’re up to it.”

“I’m up to it now.”

“They’ll probably come for us soon. First, though: the others wouldn’t tell me. Is my mother safe?”

Raena made no attempt to soften the news. “Eilif is dead. The Revan android shot her the night they captured you.”

The boy closed his eyes against the realization that he’d allowed his mother’s killer onto the ship. “I knew it,” he said. “They wouldn’t tell me, but I knew.”

Raena watched him. Jimi looked a startling amount like Jain had when she’d broken him. Like his brother, Jimi faced the loss of the last of everything. The struggle reflected on his face: rage and despair and grief and fear. He was only a boy, twelve or thirteen at most, a sheltered prince whose father had been an abusive tyrant. She couldn’t imagine what it had been like, growing up with his wolf pack of brothers, but she had to respect Jimi for surviving more than a decade of life with Thallian when three years had been enough for her.

Jimi didn’t cry, though. A resolved mask snapped down over his emotions. He stared at Raena, prepared for the fight to come.

That
she could work with.

“Do you know what the Templar Master wants?” she asked.

“No,” Jimi said. “He has some kind of mission for us, you and me.”

The door slid open. Two Outriders stood there, flanked by a ring of soldiers in gray. Now that the soldiers weren’t wearing their mirrored helmets, she could see they weren’t all humanoid after all. Maybe, if Raena watched the news, she would recognize the celebrity each of them was supposed to represent.

“Please give us a fight,” one of the Outriders invited.

“No,” Raena said. “Your boss needs me, so disassembling you wouldn’t be much fun.”

The pair of them stood back out of the way so she and Jimi could come into the hallway.

The rest of the
Veracity
crew was gathered from the adjoining rooms. Mykah sidled up to her. “What do we do?”

“Wait,” Raena said. “I need to know what this has been about.”

*   *   *

Raena wasn’t sure what to expect when the gray soldiers marched the
Veracity
’s crew into the cavernous cloning lab. The room was much busier than when she’d visited it before. Then there had been only a handful of Jonan’s clones maturing in the vats, chubby young boys almost ready to breathe on their own. There had also been eight clones of Raena, practically full-term infants. Raena had slaughtered them all without remorse.

Now that the Templar Master had taken over, every vat seemed full: maybe a hundred in all. Raena didn’t know how the Templars reproduced back before the War. She’d assumed there had been a queen somewhere, busily laying eggs, but she couldn’t remember ever seeing an immature Templar. Like so many other things related to nonhumans, she had only concerned herself with how to kill them, not with how they lived.

She marveled that the Templar Master would bring her here. If he knew who Raena really was and whom she’d served, she would have expected him to keep her far from any opportunity to finish what Jonan had started. Had he fallen for Coni’s new biography—or was this a test?

As she and the crew of the
Veracity
passed vat after vat of maturing Templars, the Templar Master rose up at the far end of the room. He was taller than the recordings of any other Templars she’d seen before, a towering figure with far too many legs. The flat surface of his face swirled with more colors than Raena could name.

At his side stood Vezali. She flowed forward to greet her crewmates, caressing Mykah’s shoulder with one tentacle, offering another to Kavanaugh, training Raena’s hair back away from her face with a third.

“Nice to see you all again,” she said.

“Have they treated you all right?” Raena asked.

“Yes. They’ve treated me like an honored guest.”

“Welcome, Raena Zacari,” the Templar Master said through the translator around Vezali’s middle. His voice had a rich genderless tone like a cello. He must be transmitting his thoughts to the translator somehow. He continued, “You have proved yourself to be the warrior that we need.”

“To do what?” Raena asked.

“Prevent the spread of what the galaxy calls the Templar plague.”

Raena frowned, trying to make sense of that. “Those who conceived of the plague, those who manufactured it, and the one who spread it are all dead.”

“Because the plague is no longer a threat, I have returned to the galaxy.”

“What do you want me to do?” she asked skeptically.

“You will go back in time. You will stave off the genocide spawned by humanity. You will save my people.”

Of course, Templars could travel in time. Gooseflesh shivered up over her. Surviving Sloane’s attacks with the Messiah drug had shown her how fragile the past could be. More than anything, she did not want to fool around with time. “Why?” She waved at the rows of clones maturing around them. “Why mess with the past when you have all these to claim the future?”

“These are flawed. The plague contaminated our dead. They cannot be cloned. Only I am pure, because my people locked me away in one of our tombs to wait out the devastation. All of these are cloned from me. Not one of them is a queen. We can no longer reproduce in any way, except by cloning. This makes the Templar too fragile to survive.”

Mykah asked, “Why not find an antidote to the plague and send it back to protect your people?”

“Templar cannot journey backward in time.”

That shocked Raena. What good was having the technology to travel in time if it only allowed you to move forward? She wondered if any Templars had been able to escape to the future to survive the plague. Maybe if the galaxy progressed far enough, they would find Templars already there, waiting for them. Or maybe the Templars that fled forward had already been infected with the plague and died.

Mykah stepped forward. The gray soldiers trained their guns on him, but he ignored them. “I will go.”

“You are nonessential,” the Templar Master said. “Jimi Thallian and Raena Zacari will go back in time. They will prevent the plague.”

“Why us?”

It didn’t answer her. She wasn’t sure if it understood the question.

The Templar Master’s head turned toward her, but without eyes, a mouth, anything that might hint at facial features, she could only stare at the hypnotic swirl of colors, everything from a rancid white to a bloody crimson shot through with poisonous yellow.

“The last functional temporal manipulation device is hidden on the Templar tombworld. Do you accept this mission, Raena Zacari?”

“What if we don’t succeed?” Raena asked.

“All your friends will die. All humans will die. Anyone who shelters humans will die.”

It was mad, she realized. The greatest power in the universe had gone insane during its imprisonment. Raena looked at the gray soldiers, who could pass anywhere and destroy anything. Outriders were probably already in place to do the most possible damage to any government that might protect humanity. She faced a creature who really had nothing left to lose and no reason not to destroy the galaxy in its death throes.

She closed her eyes. She could kill the Templar Master here, now—but the gray soldiers standing around would butcher the
Veracity
’s crew in immediate retaliation. And the Outriders ranged around the galaxy wouldn’t stand down just because their master was dead. If there were other gray soldiers elsewhere, they’d proven they loved mayhem too much to simply stop killing everything that crossed their paths. She saw no way to prevent the galactic slaughter from here.

Unwillingly, she said, “I need a ship to get to the Templar tombworld.”

“You will take
Veracity
. It will go back in time with you.”

“Neither Jimi nor I can pilot it,” Raena lied. She did not want to be alone with the Thallian boy. She didn’t trust him to help her do whatever must be done.

“I will go,” Gisela volunteered. “I’ve been training to pilot the
Veracity
.”

“I can fly her,” Kavanaugh said. “I will go.”

“It’s my ship,” Mykah reminded them. “You’re not going without me.”

Raena looked at Mykah, Tarik, and Gisela. Any person she took with her was more likely to survive than those she left behind. She’d given Ariel her word that she would try to protect Gisela. That meant accepting her as part of the crew.

She would have liked to take Haoun and Coni along too, but she suspected the Templar wanted some hostages. It killed her to be so cold, but she couldn’t save everyone.

The Templar Master cocked its head at Raena. “Raena Zacari, do you accept this crew?”

“Yes.”

The gray soldiers converged on them, pulling the human volunteers away and herding them toward the exit from the cloning lab.

“Wait!” Coni shouted. “Mykah . . .”

“I love you!” he yelled at her.

Raena turned to give Haoun a smile. He nodded at her. They hadn’t talked of love. What they had wasn’t love. She would come back for him nonetheless.

Vezali flowed through the cloning lab after them. The gray soldiers didn’t try to stop her. At the door of the cloning lab, she said, “Just in case,” and pressed her translator into Mykah’s hand.

CHAPTER 15