No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three (39 page)

She marched him over to the lock, nodded down to it. She didn’t need to apply much pressure to his wrist to make unlocking the cell seem like a good idea.

As soon as the forcefield started to shimmer, Raena knocked his head into the wall. Holding him up, she searched his pockets. The back of his collar hid a knife sheath. She stole the blade and let him drop over the threshold of the cell.

He was correct. Two guards stood at the end of the hall. They carried handguns, both sheathed. One had a bandolier of sleep grenades.

She weighed the knife in her hand, then flung it. The clone on the left slumped.

She leaned into a run as the second guard drew his gun. If he’d had a Stinger, she might have worried. They powered up fast. The quick start cost power in the bolt, but the gun reacted quickly enough to draw and fire while hunting. This gun was some kind of clunky Imperial firearm, designed for continuous fire. A brute weapon, not anything that required skill.

She made it halfway down the hall before he fired his first shot. It went past her, wide enough that she didn’t even feel the heat.

He kept his finger on the trigger, sweeping toward her. Raena flung herself into a roll.

Something behind her sparked, caught fire. The fire suppression system kicked in, filling the hallway with mist.

The guard let up on the trigger, unsure if he’d hit her. He’d just realized he should have sounded the alarm. As soon as he glanced toward it, Raena flung herself forward. She barreled into him, mashing him against the wall as she pulled the pin of one of the sleep grenades. The gas whooshed up into his face.

With her free hand, she snatched the breather from his belt, switched it on, held it over her face, and danced back to watch the show.

He fumbled weakly at the grenades, trying to figure out which was leaking, unable to see them on his chest. He hadn’t thought to drop the gun, so he only had one free hand. Before long it didn’t matter. She pulled the hissing grenade from the bandolier and pitched it back down the hall toward her cell.

Raena searched the guards quickly. She stole their gun belts, the bandolier of grenades, and retrieved the knife from the dead man’s eye. She wiped it off on his uniform. Then she jammed the blade between the doors of the elevator and ran it down the slot, searching for the emergency release.

She could hear the elevator car coming down. Reinforcements were on their way.

*   *   *

The Templar Queen set Mykah carefully back on the floor. “Thank you,” he told her. He triggered his comm bracelet.

“On my way,” Jim said.

“The
Arbiter
has entered the system.”

“I know.” Fear constricted the boy’s voice. “Are you safe?”

“For the moment.”

“I have a quick detour to make. It’s going to cost you your handheld.”

“Do it,” Mykah said.

“See you soon.”

Mykah came out of the Templar Queen’s stall to find Gisela arming herself with the fallen Thallians’ guns. Kavanaugh was examining the lock on the second stall.

“Can you shoot it open?” Mykah asked.

“It’ll be faster to slice it off.” Kavanaugh picked up one of the cyanogen cutting torches.

Mykah turned back to the queen. “Do you have food or other provisions you need from here?”

“The food is contaminated,” she said. She brushed gently past him and went to stand in front of one of the stalls. “This one of us is badly wounded. He will not survive the trip.”

Mykah put his hand on her carapace. “We can’t leave him here for the Thallians.”

“You will have to kill him,” she said. “Do you know how?”

“No.” Mykah wanted to tell her that he’d never killed anything. He wanted to ask one of the others to do it, but Gisela was just a kid—even though she’d just gunned down half a dozen Thallians—and Kavanaugh was busy cutting open the other stalls.

The Templar Queen twisted her head toward Mykah. Her face was a swirl of shades of brown and black.

“Tell me what I need to do,” Mykah said.

*   *   *

Jim armed the incendiary bomb as he got the
Veracity
into the air. He’d never done this before, but he’d had to run through the bombing simulators with his brothers. He knew the sequence. He prayed his aim was up to the job. This strike needed to be surgical.

The
Veracity
hovered above the Thallians’ library. It tore at him to damage the city. He reminded himself that, by his time, everything was already gone. Either he destroyed the library now or the galaxy would do it when they murdered the planet. One way or another, all its knowledge was ash—and there was no time to go retrieve the Templar’s message and Mykah’s handheld from the study carrels. He couldn’t allow those things to fall into his family’s hands.

He released the bomb and pulled the
Veracity
away toward the bunker where the Templars had been imprisoned.

*   *   *

Raena launched herself across the elevator shaft. Her fingers caught the cage around the access ladder. She scrambled through the entry gap, one eye on the elevator car plunging down at her. It stopped at the floor she’d just left.

The bandolier of sleep grenades got hung up on the cage as she climbed. She stopped to untangle it. In her hurry, she fumbled it. It dropped out of reach.

No time to worry about it now, she told herself. She made herself climb. It wouldn’t take them long to secure the detention floor and figure out where she’d gone. As far as she knew, there was only one way in or out.

If the
Arbiter
had entered the system, it would take a while for Jonan’s shuttle to bring him to the planet’s surface. The
Veracity
was going to have to get up and off the planet quickly and quietly. She had to get the hell out of this building fast if she wanted to go with them.

An enormous explosion sounded over her head. Around her, the elevator shaft flexed. Raena clung to ladder rungs, waiting for debris to rain down. When it didn’t, she pushed herself to climb.

The target had not been the building she was in, but it must have been next door or very nearby. Sounded like an incendiary bomb. It didn’t make sense for the
Arbiter
to bomb Jonan’s home world—and they should have been too far away. The bomb must have been dropped by the
Veracity
—and only Jim would know how to load the bomb or drop it.

She doubled her pace up the ladder. Was Jim simply sending her a message that it was time to go? If the
Veracity
was airborne enough to drop incendiaries and not get caught in the heatwave, she wasn’t going to catch up to it. It was out of here.

Maybe they were telling her goodbye.

*   *   *

Jim dropped a concussion bomb that was small enough to level a building—the cloning lab, he was pretty sure. He set the
Veracity
down in the wreckage.

Small arms fire pinged off the ship’s hull. Jim popped open the controls for the ship’s guns. He fired blindly, trying to chase his attackers back under cover. The handguns didn’t pose any danger to the
Veracity
, but they would slow the others down from escaping.

Once things had settled momentarily, Mykah raced with the Templars for the
Veracity
. Kavanaugh and Gisela ran interference for them.

As soon as Kavanaugh hurried into the cockpit, Jim relinquished the controls. He rushed past Mykah, who was herding the Templars into the hold.

“Where are you going?” Mykah asked.

“To get Raena. She’s out of her cell.”

“How do you know?”

“There was a security alert.”

“I’m going with you,” Gisela said.

“No.” Jim’s tone was commanding enough to rock her back. “I can pass. They’ll be too panicked by all the damage to look too closely at me, but they’ll kill you on sight. They’ll know you’re not family.”

Gisela unbuckled the stolen gun belt slung around her hips and held it out.

“Thanks.” Jim took all the weapons she offered. “Tell Mr. Kavanaugh to bomb the ship depot as soon as he’s in the air. I marked it on the schematic. The bomb is already loaded. That’ll keep them from following you.”

“See you at the rendezvous site,” Mykah told him. “Good luck.”

“You, too.”

The boy jumped out the hatch and started to run. Gisela fired over his head, clearing him a path, as Kavanaugh got them back into the air.

*   *   *

Raena’s legs trembled with strain as she crawled out of the elevator shaft at last. All these weeks of imprisonment had been hell on her conditioning.

The maintenance hallway in which she found herself was featureless, no indication which way she should run. She chose right and ran flat out. No need to conserve energy now. Either she could find the
Veracity
and get to it, or she’d have to get to the ship depot and steal something—any of the Thallians’ War-era craft were well within her outdated skill set, she realized with a grin—and get herself off the planet. Better to die alone in space than to be taken back aboard the
Arbiter
.

Something else exploded, a series of booms, one setting off the next. So much for the ship depot. Apparently, Jim had decided to leave his family no way off the planet.

The lights in the corridor flickered out. Raena skidded to a halt and pressed herself flat against a wall, waiting for the fuel silo to go.

Nothing more exploded as she caught her breath. The emergency lighting kicked in. In the dimness, Raena ran some more. She took the next left. Ahead of her stood a door with a lock screen. That was a problem. Raena ran at it anyway. She was covered with enough Thallian blood that she hoped she could pass. She licked her hand, rubbed it against the blood flaking from her jumpsuit, and slapped her palm down on the lock.

The computer considered, then slid the door open for her.

She found herself in a city on fire. Smoke smeared the night sky. The air smelled toxic and her recently suctioned lungs were sensitive. She pulled the stolen breather back on, hoping its filter would get her safely out of the city.

An enormous explosion slammed her back against the building. Her head hit hard enough that she saw stars. The Thallians had lost the battle with the fire on their fuel silo.

All right. She couldn’t get off the planet. She still had to get out of the city before Jonan came. She loped toward the hangar that held the jet bikes.

*   *   *

Raena drained the stolen handguns on her way through the city. She didn’t wait for the Thallians to fire on her; she merely took them out wherever she saw them. As far as she was concerned, only four of the clones had to survive into the future—and three of those were off the planet. As long as she didn’t kill Aten by mistake, she’d done no irreparable damage.

One of the Thallian clones waited for her at the vehicle depot. He looked remarkably like Jonan—the same obsessively muscled body, the same sharpened teeth. More than just brothers, these two could have been twins. They must have been clones from the same batch.

Raena stopped running, breathing hard, her body on fire with adrenaline. Exhaustion lingered not far off. “You must be Aten.”

“You’ve heard of me.”

She nodded. “I didn’t hear about many of Jonan’s brothers by name, but I know about you and Revan.” What was the alpha clone doing here alone? Were other clones hiding nearby, ready to shoot her down? Or had Aten sent the others to fight the fires and save the city? If any of the Thallian brothers had been sane, their behavior would have been easier to predict.

“I’ve heard about you, too,” he warned. “The Empire didn’t exaggerate when they called you dangerous. Why didn’t they kill you like they said they would?”

She caught herself about to tell him the truth. Aten survived the War. She would kill him twenty-some years in the future. She could do nothing that would change how he reacted to her name then. “They did kill her,” Raena lied. “Raena Zacari was buried alive in a Templar tomb as a way to control your brother.”

“What was her relationship with my brother?”

“She served as his aide.”

“Is that all?”

“She did anything he required her to.”

He snarled, “Did she fuck him?”

Raena looked at him, uncertain how to answer. She knew Jonan supplanted Aten as the alpha clone. She just didn’t know when. If she admitted her relationship with Jonan, would she destroy his chance to advance in the family? It was tempting to get some payback, however petty it might be.

Was this where the future disintegrated for her? If she said too much, would Aten have Jonan killed? Plague or no, she still stood a chance of being rescued from her tomb by Kavanaugh and Sloane. She might still go to Kai and see Ariel again. But if Jonan didn’t become the alpha clone, his men would not hunt her on Kai. She wouldn’t steal the
Veracity
. She wouldn’t run away with Mykah and Coni and the others. She’d never go back to Drusingyi to rescue Jimi and she’d never stop the Messiah drug and she’d never take up with Haoun on Lautan. If she killed Aten Thallian now, she would break the future. The last year of her life would be rewritten.

It was a sacrifice she didn’t want to make.

Luckily, Aten backtracked in the conversation. “Who are you?”

“My name is also Raena Zacari,” she said, letting him hear the truth in her voice.

“Who cloned you?”

Raena didn’t know how to answer that.

“I saw the genetic analysis,” he said. “I saw markers from Jonan’s DNA.”

She remembered bleeding out on Drusingyi, after Jonan had shot her. She remembered the family’s medical robot preparing to operate on her. Had they transfused her with Thallian’s blood while she was out? Was his blood replicating inside her still? Raena shuddered at the thought.

“I need to get out of here,” she told him.

“Not until I get some answers.” Aten settled himself in her path, ready for a fight. “Whom do you serve?”

“That’s a complicated question.” During the War, there had been three sides: the Empire, the Templars—and the Coalition, trying to rescue what they could from the collision between the other two. “I serve humanity.”