Wings of Retribution (64 page)

Ragnar glanced down at the enclosure, wishing he could get a closer look without raising suspicions.  He could see Paul below, standing apart from the rest.  Athenais was with him.  They were talking about something, looking at the stone wall below him.  Ragnar tried to see what they were gazing at, but the lip of masonry prevented it.

Frustrated, Ragnar considered what to do next.  Athenais had taken his place as a shifter.  That’s why she had left him on the ship.  Now he had to stay out of sight, do nothing that would endanger the others.  What he
wanted
to do was slip through the halls slitting throats until he had transformed the entire island a stinking mass of corpses.  If Paul was alive, that meant that his father was—

No.  He refused to think it.  Juno would
not
kill one of the oldest and most powerful L’kota
ishala
just to bring Ragnar back.  It was unthinkable.  She was just trying to scare him.

It irritated him that the best he could do was reconnaissance.  It was no use trying to free the others from their cell—the entire enclosure was an expensive setup, the kind that always thwarted
Beetle
when they were working on a banking planet heist.  The clear panels were airtight, blastproof, and completely EMP resistant.  The only way to open the enclosure without spending two hours outside with a high-intensity laser was with a special passcode and genetic material. 

And, while Ragnar was well-skilled in espionage, he had a sinking feeling that the insane matron of this planet was just paranoid enough to see him coming. 

Fighting a feeling of helplessness, Ragnar went to the other side and watched the massive black cloudbank on the horizon.  A storm system.  Bigger than anything he had witnessed on a land planet.  If he was going to do anything, he could probably use the cover of a storm.

But what could he do? 

More than anything, he needed to find the island’s central com equipment.  If Athenais was here, then the rest of the crew should be close.  He had to get a message out to Squirrel.  She’d pick it up.  She
slept
with her headphones on.  He could broadcast his personal code and she’d recognize it for what it was even if she was half asleep and drugged.

But why was Athenais the only one here?  Had she somehow gotten separated from her ship?  She’d been
naked
.  Ragnar couldn’t think of many rescue strategies that required the infiltrator to get naked.

Well, he could think of a few.  But on the docks?  Without even a weapon? 

Maybe Athenais had been her normal, overbearing, ballsy self and had decided that a quiet, single-man strike team was the best way to rescue him and had instead gotten herself caught.  After all, who did she have to take with her?  Smallfoot was dead and Goat and Dune were just as likely to shoot themselves in the foot as shoot someone else.  Squirrel was a pacifist, and Dallas was…well…Dallas.  Aside from sitting in the captain’s chair and destroying Athenais’s Biamachi rug when she thought nobody was looking, she was pretty useless.

Ragnar was usually the one Athenais took with her on these missions.  Maybe Athenais had been counting on
him
to help her.

Ragnar winced.  Looking back, maybe it hadn’t been the best idea to shock those two.  He had just automatically assumed Athenais would have help with her.

So on to Plan F.  Plans A through E had turned out to be utter failures, so right now, his best bet was finding the
Beetle.
  Fairy would love to show off with some fancy flying.  If he got onboard, maybe he could get her to blast open the enclosure with a photon beam.  He’d have to get a message to the shifters to get out of the way, but Squirrel should be able to handle that.  Ragnar was just about to begin climbing to the top story when a hand on his shoulder stopped him.  Turning, Ragnar stiffened when he saw that it was a Stranger.

“So what does the Utopia know?  How much did you tell them?”

“Nothing,” Paul said.  “Species Ops never had the chance to fully interrogate us.”

“Good,” Athenais grunted.  “They can’t know we’re coming.  As soon as we get out of here, we need to—”  She stopped when Paul reached out and touched her arm.

“Athenais, I need to tell you what I know.  Now.  Before it’s too late.”  He glanced up through the glass ceiling, his eyes focused on the decaying body above.

It’s already too late,
Athenais thought.  Her innards were already mourning, her hopes long since abandoned, but she did her best to give him a confident façade.  “They think I’m Ragnar.  They’re not going to kill you.”

“Listen to me,” Paul insisted, his grip on her arm beginning to hurt.  “They killed my father.  They knew who he was, what he was, and they killed him anyway.  I don’t care what they said about trying to breed more shifters, there’s something else going on here.  They would
never
have killed him if that’s what they wanted.  He was much, much too valuable.”

Smart cookie, that Paul.  Athenais glanced up.  “He did nothing to provoke them?”

“Nothing.”  Paul let go of her arm.  “They chose him deliberately.”

“And you think you’re next.”

“It’s possible.  Something isn’t right.”

Athenais sighed.  “You’re as paranoid as Ragnar.  Fine.  Tell me.”  For all the good it would do.

“Anyone who goes after the Potion is playing with fire.  There are some very bad people in control of Millennium, and the technology they’ve got protecting that place is the best the Utopia can afford.”

Athenais nodded curtly.  “I’ve been there.  Get to the point.”

“Here’s my point: Neither Morgan nor I were ever planning on going to Millennium with you.  If they caught us, they could make us tell them exactly where the rest of us are on Penoi.  We were planning on letting you and Ragnar go.  I was going to protect my father on some nice deserted planet, somewhere he’d be safe.”

They weren’t even planning on coming
along
?
her mind sputtered.  She’d been used.  Again.
 
“And the access codes?” Athenais growled, her anger beginning to rise like a molten rush.  “
Were
there ever any?” 

Paul hesitated.

Athenais was so furious she could hardly speak.  “So that was just another line of bullshit, just like the rest of it.”

“We’re shifters,” Paul said apologetically.  “If we ever knew the codes, why would we have come to you?”

Athenais cursed, cursing herself for a rube.  “You’ve been lying to me.  All this time.  All of you.”

Paul flinched.  “Not Ragnar.  He thought we were telling the truth.”

“You lied to your own
brother?
”

“He would have told you the truth, and we needed your help.”

“He would have told me the truth because it’s a
suicide mission
!” Athenais screamed, waving her hands at the general shitstorm they were currently in.  “If we’d even
made
it to Millennium, there’s complexes on that planet that go all the way to the moon’s
core
!  A hundred miles deep!  Only a
moron
would go there without the right codes!  They’ve got enough firepower to implode a galactic core!  Damn it. 
Damn
!”

“We needed your help,” Paul repeated.  “The Governor turned us down.”

Athenais grabbed his collar and shoved him against the wall in an instant.  Around them, shifters closed in on her in warning, but she ignored them.  Her face an inch from the alien’s, she growled, “You never said anything about the Governor.”  She felt like crushing his eyeballs into his alien skull with her thumbs.  “What did you tell him?”  She knew she was too cold, too calm.  She hadn’t been this furious in years.

Paul must have seen her fury, because he recoiled into the wall.  “We thought he was Rabbit,” he babbled.

Suddenly, everything made so much more sense to her, like a goddamn jigsaw puzzle falling into place.  Athenais stared at him, mouth open in shock. 

“He fit the description,” Paul went on quickly.  “Wealthy, powerful, his hands in every pie on T-9…”  Now it was his face that was going pale.  “You mean he’s
not
Rabbit?”

“You thought Governor Black was
Rabbit?”

“We only had rumors and legends to go on.  We didn’t know…”

“
You
got my crew killed,” Athenais snarled, slamming him against the wall.  “It wasn’t Fairy.  It was
you
!”

Paul looked stricken.  “Your crew was killed?  I thought Stuart found Rabbit.”

“He did!  And as soon as we got back to port, Governor Black blew Beetle to pieces.  Fairy’s the only one who wasn’t onboard.”

He opened and closed his mouth several times, staring at her in horror.  Finally, the alien started to babble, “You have to see where we were coming from…”

“No, I don’t.”  Athenais released him angrily.  “If I had a gun right now, I’d shoot you myself.”

Paul looked away. 

“What about those colonists?  Are they really dying to make more Potion?”  She gave him a bitter look.  “Or another lie?”

“They’re dying,” Paul said hurriedly.  “They inject the unfinished Potion into a colonist, where it reproduces until there’s nothing left of the original subject except a mass of melted flesh and bones.  They wait for the reproduction trigger to deactivate, then they distill the Potion to inject into Utopis.  The ratio is usually two to one.  Two colonists for each finished dose.”

Athenais took a deep breath.  “Did you even have a plan to get us in there?  Or were you just going to let Ragnar and me figure it out for ourselves?”

“We figured out the best entry point,” Paul said.  “The bay where they deliver the colonists.  We thought Squirrel could hack the access codes and then—”

“Squirrel’s
dead
!”  Athenais made a disgusted gesture and stalked in a circle, just to keep from pounding his alien face into the wall.  Pettily, she kicked a stone across the yard and ripped a twig off a manicured tree.  Shaking the stick at him, she growled, “I can’t believe this.  You were risking our lives on the
off chance
we could put the pieces together before Millennium security shot us out of the sky?  How do you
sleep
at night?”

Paul’s eyes narrowed.  “Same way you can, human, after massacring my people.”

Athenais took a step toward him, so furious she could barely speak.  Beside her, one of the other shifters yanked the twig out of her grip and pointedly snapped it in half.  She ignored him completely, her full attention on Paul.  Softly, she said, “I never massacred your people, shifter.  I fought for you on Wythe.  I spent twelve years imprisoned on your planet because your people couldn’t believe I wanted to help them fight.  Then when they let me out, I never held a grudge.  I took out fifty-eight Utopian ships before I was captured.”