No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three (36 page)

CHAPTER 16

“
C
aptain,” Kavanaugh called from the cockpit. “We have a message coming in on Imperial Priority One.”

Mykah met Raena’s eyes as he put his coffee cup down on the galley table. “Any last-minute advice?”

“Stand up straight as you can. Meet his eyes momentarily, then look over his shoulder.” She smiled, showing teeth. It wasn’t comforting. “Don’t look nervous.”

As Mykah stood up, he tugged his dress jacket down into place. Raena had one more sip of her tea and strode back to her cell.

Mykah went up to the cockpit and nodded at Kavanaugh.

The man whose image filled the screen was familiar from all the research Mykah had done. Jonan Thallian wore a pointed beard to emphasize his cheekbones. Both his hair and beard were blue-black, which made the sheen of his silvery gray eyes that much more striking. Before it could reach his expression, Mykah locked down the stab of recognition he felt.

Thallian snapped, “Explain your message, Captain Chen.”

“We were investigating an arms retailer on Lautan for Coalition contamination, when we were attacked by our prisoner. She killed four of my men before my aide took her down. Once we had her onboard the
Veracity
, the genetic trace named her as Raena Zacari.”

“Raena Zacari is dead,” Thallian said.

“Yes, my lord. So the official record says. However, after we dosed her with RespirAll, she told us an unbelievable story about being imprisoned in a cave on the Templar tombworld.”

Gisela walked up to Mykah and reported, “She’s awake again, sir.”

Mykah nodded crisply and met Thallian’s eyes. “My lord, do you have any suggestions for keeping her under control?”

“Let me see her.”

Mykah nodded to Kavanaugh, who toggled on the camera in Raena’s cell. She was upside down in a handstand, doing press-ups.

Thallian’s sigh made the hair stand up on the back of Mykah’s neck. Mykah hoped like hell that Raena couldn’t hear it. “My lord?”

“Doze gas,” Thallian said. “I will send you the dosage.” Thallian consulted something offscreen, then said, “Your message indicates you are still amongst the Border Worlds, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You will detour to Drusingyi. I will tell my family to expect you.”

“What do I tell the Emperor, my lord?”

“Tell him nothing, until I confirm her identity,” Thallian barked. “I am three days out from Drusingyi myself. Wait for me there. I’d like to commend you personally, Captain.”

“Very good, sir. Thank you.”

Kavanaugh shut down the comm system and shuddered. Mykah shuddered himself. “Can we get to Drusingyi and away in three days?” he asked.

“It’ll be cutting it close.”

“I don’t want her to have to face him,” Mykah said. “We need to put our plan put together so Jim can get in there and we can head back to the time machine before Thallian arrives.”

He looked down at Jim in the copilot’s chair. The boy stared rigidly at the controls. Mykah placed a hand on his shoulder. “You all right?”

The boy didn’t jump. “How can she toy with him like this?”

Mykah remembered something Raena told him the first time she went to Drusingyi. “She is his greatest weakness.”

Jim nodded. “That is true.”

“There must be something you can say to inspire her before she faces the rest of them.” Mykah realized that was a lot of pressure to put on the kid, but no one knew the Thallians better than the scion who loathed them.

*   *   *

Jim found Raena in her gym. She’d gone there to work off the adrenaline of her glancing interaction with Thallian. She hadn’t expected it would upset her so. “Did you want something?” she asked the boy.

“Can you tell me anything good about my father?”

Raena looked at the boy. Like Jain, Jim seemed to have realized that though she had known his father for a much shorter span of years, her knowledge of him ran much deeper.

Raena laughed at the first good point that occurred to her. “Jonan was gentle after he beat me. Since he didn’t want me to go to the infirmary to have my injuries treated . . .”

Jim interrupted, “Why not?”

“Because then there would have been an official record of how he abused me. He might have been reprimanded, even demoted. So he taught himself to care for me. He bound my wounds and changed my bandages and made excuses for me when I had to relax under a bone-mender for days at a time. He fed and cared for me when I couldn’t get out of bed. I think it entertained him to have a toy he could break and repair in secret.”

Jim shook his head at the thought. “My mother took care of us.”

“Where do you think she learned how to do it?”

Rather than answer, Jim changed the subject. “Did you know he had been forbidden to mate?”

“Forbidden by whom?”

“Family doctrine. It dated back to the family’s earliest colonization of Drusingyi. Only the alpha clone was allowed to take a wife.”

“I wasn’t ever Thallian’s wife,” Raena argued.

Jim raised an eyebrow.

“Concubine, maybe.”

It was his turn to laugh. “No one was supposed to have an ongoing relationship with a woman. That was easy for most of them, because they never left the planet. Others dated when they traveled, but I think those were mostly business transactions. What my father had with you could have gotten him exiled or killed on Drusingyi, if Uncle Aten discovered it. It meant Father’s first loyalty wasn’t to the family. That’s why Uncle Revan and Uncle Merin remained bachelors all their lives.”

She nodded, wondering if Jim knew about the unrequited passion between Revan and his mother.

Jim continued, “My father killed Aten’s wife and sons after Uncle Aten was crippled. Once my father became the alpha, he considered everyone who did not belong to him a threat. So he executed them all, even though we’d already lost so much. Revan protested, but there was precedent for it. Merin supported my father.”

Raena hadn’t realized Jonan’s murderous streak had applied to his nephews as well. She felt a pang of sympathy for his son. How had he survived more than a decade with his father?

She relented and answered Jim’s question. “Jonan liked to look at the stars. He taught me to name them. He loved anything that gave him the illusion of flight: zero g, jet packs, free fall, wings. His favorite color, unsurprisingly, was crimson. He loved the flavor of blackberries and the scent of lilies.”

Jim nodded, trying to digest all of that. “Did you ever know him when he was sane?”

“Never. He left home to fight for the Empire because his ambition was bigger than to rule one family on one planet. He was willing to do anything to other people because no one else was ever real to him. He lived alone in a universe peopled with ghosts.”

“You were real to him,” Jim pointed out.

“Only after I ran from him. Then he knew what he’d lost.”

The boy considered that. “You think he was cruel to us because we weren’t real to him?”

She turned that question around. “Do you know what happened to Jain?”

“Mother said they made him stand on a parapet with a noose around his neck. Jain hung himself.”

“That’s true,” Raena said. “Jain revealed my position to the family. When your brothers attacked me, I killed them all as Jain watched. Jain hung himself afterward. Your father did not face me himself until he’d sent everyone else against me. Everyone but your mother, whom he’d already forgotten. Even after your brothers were dead, he didn’t grieve for them. He collected their bodies together to serve as guests for our wedding feast. Alive or dead, his family was all the same to him.”

Jim sighed shakily, but did not start to cry. Raena wondered if he had liked any of his brothers, if anyone had ever been kind to him, beyond Revan and Eilif.

His next question was unexpected. “Do you think that Father was crazy because something went wrong in the cloning process? My family meant to create a hyena, but they got a shark instead?”

“I think that’s very possible—but I don’t want to give Jonan an excuse. I watched him learn to love torture. It saddened me, but didn’t surprise me, to discover he’d carried out the genocide. He may have been born broken, but he chose to do evil.”

*   *   *

Once they reached Drusingyi, the Thallians sent ships to meet the
Veracity
and escort it through their satellite defenses in the asteroid belt. Kavanaugh flew carefully, noting landmarks in case they needed to blast out of there in a hurry. Luckily, it seemed that most of the defenses faced out toward the galaxy instead of in toward the planet. Still, if the
Veracity
made a big enough ruckus when they left, he was sure things could be quickly reconfigured. While the rest of the crew were busy on the planet, Kavanaugh would make it his job to figure out how to escape the satellite net.

Raena was in the galley, eating the huge meal Mykah had prepared especially for her and Jim. Kavanaugh heard Raena laughing, a wonderful sound, full of life. He didn’t see how she could survive being a prisoner of Thallian’s family, but now that her death was imminent, she seemed to have shed her fear.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me who she really was?” Gisela asked quietly from the copilot’s chair.

“Because she isn’t that person any more,” Kavanaugh answered.

The girl thought about that answer, before asking, “Did you know her before the War?”

“No. When I met her, she was already running from Thallian. She wasn’t too much older than you are now.”

“And her back . . . ?”

“Yeah, Thallian had already scarred her.”

“How can she sound so happy?” Emotion choked Gisela’s voice, so similar to Ariel that it was hard for Kavanaugh to remember that the two of them weren’t actually blood. “Doesn’t Raena know what’s going to happen to her?”

“She has a better idea than any of us do,” Kavanaugh explained. “She’s taking all the pleasure she can in the time she has left.”

He glanced over at Gisela. Tears sparkled in her deep blue eyes and she looked more like a child than ever. What the hell was she doing here? Anger rushed over him: that there could be such innocence in the galaxy while Thallian was busy plotting genocide in humanity’s name. Kavanaugh hoped the crew could protect Gisela from the madman, whether or not they accomplished anything else.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” he said, “but Raena needs you to be strong right now. She can’t worry about us while she’s facing them. I want to say goodbye to her, but if you can’t do it, go hide in your cabin until she’s gone.”

Gisela nodded and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “I can do it. Give me a minute.”

“Good.” Kavanaugh gave her some time to calm herself, then pressed the intercom and said, “We should be landing in an hour. Raena, would you come up before then?”

*   *   *

“I guess I’m wanted.” Raena took one last mouthful of the honey wine Mykah had opened for her. It tasted like summer, like the flowers in the sunny garden at Ariel’s villa. “Thank you for that meal, Mykah. It was perfect.”

He swooped down to grab her up in a hug. Raena clasped her hands behind his neck and pulled herself closer, eyes shut to make the moment last.

“I hugged you for luck the last time you went down to face the Thallians,” he reminded.

“And that turned out pretty well,” she remembered. “Don’t worry about me.”

He squeezed her, then leaned over to set her feet on the floor. “I know you can take care of yourself.”

“I’ll do my best,” she promised.

Jim stood at attention beside the table. Raena offered him her hand. The boy looked surprised, but he took it.

“Good luck,” she said.

“You, too.”

She gave his fingers an extra squeeze, then turned to go forward.

Kavanaugh stood when she entered the cockpit. He opened his arms, so she pressed herself into them and kissed his cheek.

He grinned at her. “Give ’em hell.”

“That’s my plan.”

Gisela climbed awkwardly out of her copilot’s chair. Her lower lip trembled.

“Don’t cry,” Raena said. “You’ll ruin my hero moment.”

Gisela laughed and blinked hard.

Raena gave the girl a quick hug. “Make your mother proud.”

Gisela nodded, unable to speak.

Raena went back to her cell and changed into Jain’s jumpsuit. Like a prayer, she buckled on her silver-heeled boots. Then she lay down on the bunk. She had recalculated Thallian’s dosage of the Doze gas so that it would knock her out, but not for too long. She didn’t want to spend any more time unconscious in the Thallians’ detention than was absolutely necessary.

*   *   *

Kavanaugh set the
Veracity
down gently on the pad the Thallians had lit up for him. The last hours of night engulfed this part of the Thallian homeworld, which struck him as fitting. Dawn was barely an hour away.

Mykah met Kavanaugh outside Raena’s cell. They peeked at her through the window in the door. She was out cold, mouth open and eyes rolled back. Mykah hit the remote in his pocket to release the restraints she’d used as crash protection on the way down. Her limbs sprawled bonelessly.

“Did you vent the cell already?” Kavanaugh asked.