allies and enemies 02 - rogues (10 page)

“How would
you
know?”

The pressure against his head lessened. The giant shifted off his back. A deck plate groaned near his ear and Ott’s boot stepped into his line of sight.

“She’s inked. Look for yourself. Back of her neck.”

Ott lifted her from her cower and dashed her to the floor on her stomach, her face inches from his. Her eyes met Asher’s. Silently he willed her to stay quiet as Ott pulled at the neck of her baggy shipsuit.

“Eh.” Ott snorted, disappointed. Then, with an odd gentleness, dumped the girl back to her spot near the wall.

An angry cheated silence radiated from the giant as he stepped back out of view. Asher had time to brace himself before more kicks were delivered to his spine and ribs.

“Engine hack,” Ott muttered. His heavy footfalls announced his return to the pilot’s den. The hatch shut. Dimness returned to the space. He heard the girl move. She pulled at his clothes. He rolled onto his back.

“Velo hack?” She peered down at him, incredulous. “That’s my Kindred’s mark. It’s not a property—”

“Ott can’t read much, especially Eugenes. Not many of those bastards can.” He ran a tongue along the inside of his mouth and spat bright red onto the deck. “Should I call him back, tell him my mistake?”

She shook her head vigorously, then: “You lie so much.”

“It’s how you stay alive here…
Tilley
.” He over-pronounced her name, prodding her own obvious lie out into the crappy light of the runner. “You should learn to be better at it.”

PART III

18

Tristic had chosen this shell out of desperation. With each passing day, she paid the price of that choice. A vessel such as this was never meant to contain her. It was asking a cup to hold an ocean.

What choice had I?

The
Questic
had been crumbling around her and her personal craft was unreachable. Escape was impossible. In the chaos, a bulkhead had given way, crushing her body like an insect. As she lay bleeding, she knew her end would come just as the vessel, so much of her life’s work, died around her.

The Veradin girl had done this: Erelah. In destroying the carrier, she had also destroyed herself. An unimaginable thing.

Maynard was a vile animal, but her loyal creature still. He had found her and, while the officers and techs scurried away, he pulled her from the twisted metal and brought her to the escape vessel. From its battered deck, Tristic watched her life’s work eaten by the singularity. The jdrive’s proximity ripped apart the delicate field of the
Questic’s
velos. Ironically, it was a fault she knew of, but had elected to dismiss.

Her own twisted body was dying. All the augments, the patient medical pandering, were for nothing—thwarted by a child’s brash act. Desperate for a host, Tristic had no other choice but Maynard.

She recalled his cheated anguish as she invaded his body. The lies she had spun for him were made grotesque by his unflagging loyalty. At the end, he gave over, a loving sacrifice to her intensity.

In a sense, she mourned him. He had been her perfect counterpart. She was the hunter and he, the carrion beast that lurked in her wake, consuming the remains.

How many subjects had they gone through like that in her search for a new perfect Human host? She’d lost count. She vowed his sacrifice was not in vain. It would be his gift to her, as when the savage ancestors of the Eugenes offered up beasts and children to appease their half-imagined gods.

Tristic was left alone, trembling in this new form. Maynard’s body was a temporary shelter, a delay to her own death. Eugenes physiology lacked the exploitable frailties of a Human host. They were easily used up. That’s why she had needed Erelah—the perfectly imperfect girl.

A lesser being would have succumbed, surrendered to the inevitability.

Instead Tristic had chosen the coldsleep of one of the suspension chambers. When she woke, her rescuers were not Regime or Fleet. They were Humans. A ship full of them in their arrogant primate glory.

Tristic had barely contained the fit of hysterical laughter.

It was an eternity before their words were reigned into sense by one of their machines as it cranked out translations of inelegant Commonspeak. A boring time after that with halted exchanges. They attempted to interrogate her. She was their prisoner, apparently. How laughable. Their naive nature was almost charming.

She knew little of this place. There were only two rooms: her cell and the white room, each as bland as the next. The gravity seemed to have the stickiness she’d come to associate with artificial constructs. Definitely a ship or a station.

Tristic gleaned what she could: she was alone, no other survivors from the
Questic
had been recovered. Odd.

Until she deduced why: the singularity, the flex point. Somehow her escape vessel had slipped through this thin space in the wake of the explosion and emptied out into another region entirely—the Reaches. Like moths to a flame, her Human captors were lured by the energy signature of the exit side of the flex point that had taken out the
Questic
.

How did you do that?

What did it mean?

Are there others like you?

Tristic offered clues, played with them. All the while burning, burning. Already Maynard’s body curled at the edges like paper exposed to flame. Moving to a new host required exposure, proximity to one of them. The Humans kept their distance, wary. It was an infuriating temptation. She was a starved animal, surrounded by food, but prevented from consuming.

Tristic regarded the firm white hands with square knuckles she now commanded. Her spine was firm and straight. The lungs filled with powerful draughts of air. She had never entertained taking a male form. They were blunt tools, dismissed. Yet despite its imperfections, there was a delicious sense of precision to being in this form. A shame it would not last.

It was enough to induce panic.

But patience. There was time still.

Now Tristic waited in the white room, seated at the simple metal table. Hands folded on its cold surface. Back rigid, posture perfect. She kept the look on her host’s face purposefully neutral, something the real Maynard never could manage.

“Mr. Maynard,” the Human announced from the doorway, as if he needed welcome to enter his own prison.

Did all these creatures behave as meekly?

Tristic recognized the sound of her assumed name flopping off his inelegant tongue. Their means of translation involved devices nestled against their ears. Such quaint barbarians.

“Should we pick up where we left off?”

She regarded the speaker. Captain Miles Wren.

He was clad in a dark blue shipsuit with a series of color patches on the sleeves. Indicia at the neck and collar marked the rank that he claimed to possess. Incredibly, second in command of their installation,
Roughbook
, he called it. An odd choice and probably code.

He seemed too finely boned and pale to be infantry. The hands that clasped the flat object against his chest were almost elegant. His bearing spoke of someone that might have been raised in a synthetic gravity environment. His eyes were a ghastly bright blue and hair dark blond. All impure traits, she noted with a stab of revulsion at the sight of her next vessel.

Tristic resisted a sigh of boredom and plastered an eager look on her face. The key was to speak slowly and in Common so that their silly devices had time to offer an accurate translation. “By
pick up
, do you mean resume the prior topic of discussion?”

Wren grimaced. “Sorry. The translators have difficulty with idioms. But, yes, that’s what I meant.”

“Very well.”

He laid his ever-present tablet on the tabletop and efficiently opened a series of screens. On it were grid coordinates with two different languages: Commonspeak and English, Wren’s only language.

“Your vessel was found here at 00.99.99.939. Is there something significant about the location?”

“Nothing.”

“Hmm.” His eyes narrowed. “You’d indicated you were originally aboard a larger vessel that was under distress and used an EEV. The time stamp indicated it’d been close to three weeks, if we estimate things properly.”

Such tedium. This vessel burns and you waste my time.

She could easily pop the metal shackles that bound these wrists, squeeze that pallid throat, force her essence into his lanky form.

Her captors watched everything. There were armed guards outside the door. And to what end? To shuffle from useless husk to husk?

Tristic shifted in the seat.

Maybe Wren sensed he was losing her attention; he flipped screens. “The area was subjected to a gravity distortion. An immense one. No longer there, but the echo of it still is. It’s been checked against the radiation native to the region. A few days ago, we got a new ping on this area. There was another energy emission similar in size and concentration to the one we found around the time of your arrival.”

“I have already told you as much as I could. My duties did not include stellar mapping.” She lilted her voice to suggest an apologetic tone. How simple could this man be?

He did not look up from the device, seeming enthralled with it. “It’s another ship. A small one, with the construct closely matching what you refer to as a stryker model.”

Wren thumbed past another screen. There was a blurred image like a silver bird of myth. But unmistakable in its shape.

The stolen heart of her host leapt. The
Jocosta
.

The girl. Erelah. My girl. The perfect one. The one who brought my ruin.

Tristic had found the Human girl, hiding in plain sight as a project leader within the very ranks of Ravstar, an unwitting participant in a charade to pass her off as a Eugenes high-born. Helio Veradin, the girl’s savior and benefactor, had never planned for his ward to come across a half-Sceeloid creature like Tristic, who would sense her true nature. What a precious and delicate surprise the girl had been. The perfect host—with some alterations, of course. In assuming Erelah’s body permanently, Tristic would know welcome among the Eugenes elite. There, aided by the Sight, Tristic would embed herself in their hallowed Council of First and consume them from within.

Then the girl had escaped.

Ignorant of the excitement that welled across from him, Wren showed more pictures, crude flat things on the tablet. Then she saw the secondary energy signatures. Wren was clever for a Human, having detected multiple entry points that were all part of the same signature.

The girl. The ship. It could only belong to the ship. Jocosta. All was not lost. If the Humans found the ship, then maybe…just maybe I may find my perfectly imperfect girl
.
I will live on. I will be eternal.

Finally she spoke. Strange, hearing her words in Maynard's voice: “I believe I can help you, Miles Wren.”

19

“What am I looking at?” Major Amber Snowden didn’t bother to slow down on the treadmill. She flung sweat from her forehead. Wren’s lip curled with disgust as he held the tablet out for her to read.

Would it kill the man to use the gym? Might do a world of good for those skinny bones of his.

“The vessel is a Eugenes stryker class. This array data is from eight days ago.”

“So? Someone lost an old stryker.” She frowned. The location was a nest for marauders that preyed on smaller ships stupid enough to traverse the area. It was a comfortable distance away, which made it none of their business. “Bad neighborhood too. They’ll find it up on cinderblocks in the morning.”

Her XO didn’t even bother to ask for an explanation of her joke. He was a Martian kid and would probably never know what it was like to ride in an automobile. A shame.

“Major, this borders the same location where we found the prisoner three weeks ago.”

“That creep?” She felt a visceral urge to dismiss anything associated with Maynard, (which was a stupid name, by the way). And not just because he was an alien hostile. The Eugenes may look Human, but there was something expressly
alien
about him. To the point where it made her skin crawl.

Wren had been spending way too much time with their houseguest.

She powered down the treadmill and straddled the belt as it slowed down. Grabbing the tablet from him, she tapped through the pages. Another drawback to commanding a station filled with geeks. No one talked plain damn English. Not even her own XO, who walked the line between command and research. Everything had equations, charts.

“Intel says this location isn’t settled,” she said, thrusting the tablet back at him. “Just pirate activity. There’s been no sign of Regime or Fleet presence in this region. As I understand it, they’re incapable of travel here and consider this whole belt off limits.”

Roughbook’s location was a good blind. None of the natives that
could
travel out here
did
. It was likely they still believed Sceeloid occupied it.

There’d only been the incident two years ago with the
Agamemnon
, a deep-sleep cargo with personnel and provisions destined for Roughbook. They’d found the
Aggie
adrift, and the Human cargo—six eggheads—were missing, cryo coffins and all.

Snowden stepped off the treadmill. “That’s two vessels in less than a month. First a Eugenes lifeboat and now one of their assault vessels. Do we have a problem?”

A small craft like a stryker needed support or a base of operations. It was highly unlikely the ship was on its own.

“Indeterminate,” Wren said. “The prisoner claims to not know much about the region. He’s willing to provide a scan code frequency for us to track the targets like this. But he wants certain assurances.”

“Assurances. What are you? His lawyer?” Snowden balled the towel up and flung it into the recycle bin. Wren flinched at the sudden motion. “The fact that he’s still sucking in my air and eating my food is amazing.”