Read allies and enemies 02 - rogues Online
Authors: amy j murphy
allies and enemies 02 - rogues (39 page)
Corsair’s jaw clenched. His hands turned to fists. Finally, he looked at them. “The Humans.”
The
Allies and Enemies Series
continues with
ALLIES AND ENEMIES: EXILES
[EXCERPT]
The rich taste of the food—
real
food—was enough to make Sela’s eyes water. After existing so long on bland protein wafers and pressed caloric pods, this was bliss, surpassing anything she’d ever consumed within the flat metal walls of the
Storm King’s
perpetually bustling commissary.
Sela found it difficult not to scarf the entire meal down. It was easy to understand why someone would eat for pleasure.
I’d be as big as Ephid.
She pushed the plate away on the carved stone table. This was like no other dining hall. The room, hung with firesilk curtains and colorful glowspheres, seemed absurdly ornate. Despite this, a sullenness mingled with the aroma of the decadent foods.
Jon sat beside her, his plate largely untouched. He’d consumed three glasses of the dark-red wine. Other than answering Kelta’s strangely innocuous questions (the climate on Argos, the quality of the room they’d been assigned), he spoke very little. Their empty words seemed meant to keep the suffocating silence at bay and to avoid discussing the source to their communal grief. In time, the quiet won.
With elbows propped on the table, Jon hunched over the plate. He leaned his forehead against his folded hands. Cautiously, Sela reached out to trace the small of his back, feeling the thrum of the tense muscles there.
Jon straightened, as if suddenly realizing her presence. His eyes had gathered a haze that was part wine, part fatigue. He captured her hand and placed a soft kiss across her knuckles. The two-day growth of beard rasped against her skin.
A hollow ache settled over her full stomach and the food no longer held the same appeal. She was struck with the enormity of his sorrow and helplessness. It reminded her of the days immediately after the destruction of the
Questic
, the acuteness of his mourning for Erelah. For him, it was losing her all over again.
The emotions of others, even Jon, were often mysterious and complex entities, difficult to judge and far harder still to determine what her reaction should be. It stirred an angry protectiveness in her. There was no target, no hostile she could simply mark for retaliation. She found herself wishing for some violent disturbance to shatter the heavy solemn air, an assault, armed intruders, anything. Those attacks against Jon she could fend off, not the ghosts that plagued him.
She bit her lip, then said, in a quiet voice, “Tell me what you need.”
He maneuvered closer. His arm draped across the back of her chair. “Just you.”
A flush built along her neck at his intimate display among strangers. A glance told her that no one else either noticed or cared. Corsair’s unfocused gaze settled on the guttering lamps on the table’s center. The empty wine carafe at his elbow was the fourth he’d finished and he showed no indication of stopping. At first, he’d prowled around the room like an uneasy spike hound. Only at Kelta’s urging did he settle into a chair. Now the matron had long since left the room, muttering an excuse that involved the children under her care.
Just as well
;
Sela could tell from the strange twisting grins and furtive glances at the A6 that she made the woman nervous. Perhaps it was because she stared. Kelta was like no other Eugenes woman she’d encountered before: shrewd, yet refined. She held no rank, but somehow commanded respect, even from the irreverent Corsair.
The air was laden with self-indulgent sorrow. They acted as if death itself had pulled up a chair at the table.
But it had not. Could they not see?
The Humans were unlikely to kill Erelah. If that had been their desire, her corpse would have been left alongside that of the splicer. They wanted her whole, alive. Going so far as to take her stasis-box to preserve her. A small squadron of Humans had taken out the considerable security measures of the keep. It meant their weaponry and training were superior. The fact that they’d left untouched a veritable armory of ordinance supported an assumption that their resources were prodigious.
All for one girl, an annoying one at that.
Any outfit with such firepower and travel capabilities would be difficult to disguise. However, little intelligence had surfaced about these hostiles or their collective, the UEC. Certainly, any of the three Guilds would feel threatened by the incursion into their territories. It would upset the balance of power, which was precarious, at best, in Sela’s estimation.
A nascent idea took root. The strategies of it would take time, purposeful thought. She pushed it to the back, allowing it to grow unattended. Often with such insights, she felt it was best to deny them attention, consciously move on, and allow them to develop on their own.
As Corsair’s chin dipped to his chest under constant pattern of snoring, she urged Jon from the room. Moves sluggish, he followed her to the quarters provided them. Buried in the depths of the absurdly large bed, she folded against him, wanting to touch every part of him, as if by this act she could draw the sorrow from him like a poison.
All the time, the strategy built, running through scenarios, probabilities.
Later, in the restful dark, Sela waited for the sounds of Jon’s breathing to deepen as sleep claimed him. She was careful not to rouse him as she extracted herself from the deep cushions. The cool night air met her bare skin. She found her discarded clothes and dressed in the milky half-light cast by Narasmina’s waning moon.
The idea reached maturity, pushing itself to the front of her mind, piloting her course now.
Leaving her boots behind, she padded down the grand sweep of the staircase and found her way to the dining room. No one. The plates of food remained in the open and the air reeked of stale wine and sorrow.
Off the main corridor, she turned left. The light of a glowsphere puddled beneath a tall set of doors. The room beyond had a cavernous feel. The areas within the circle of light showed surfaces piled high with dusty books and maps. Huddled shapes of statues and woven metalwork brooded in the corners. A large portrait of a young Eugenes female hung over a cold, dark hearth. Something about the room reminded her of the crypt on Newet, the final resting place of Jon’s adoptive ancestors. Both were a place to go and feel sorry for the dead, who, laughably, would no longer care.
“What do you want,
Ty
?”
Corsair’s ragged voice crawled from the shadows. He was sprawled on his back across a low bench, a half-empty bottle of spice rum balanced on his torso. His surly tone told her that he wished to provoke an altercation with her. It was a means to supplant one pain with another. She knew this play and had been guilty of it herself.
It might be preferable to wait until he was sober and better capable of reasoning. But if she waited until the sanity of daylight, Corsair might have already departed on some reckless suicide mission to reclaim Erelah. For this to work, Sela needed him intact.
She stood over him. “I have a proposal for you.”
He sat up, moves unsteady, bottle sloshing violently. It took him two tries to stand. “Sure. But I get to be on top.”
Anger flared. She folded her arms and forced herself to count to ten. “Is that all there is to you? Jokes about copulation? Obviously, Erelah saw something more.”
He swigged from the bottle, dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. His eyes narrowed, darker than blood in the cast-off light. There was danger there. Sela had already planned how she could take him out. He favored one knee at times and the stiffness to his back suggested chronic injury. Two easily exploitable weak points.
“You gonna tell me what you want, Commander Perfect?”
“Ironvale has the largest fleet. Splitdawn has considerable infantry. None of which matters if they cannot move freely about the Reaches.
Poisoncry uses their tech to control the flexers, and therefore controls the other two Guilds.” She spoke slowly, willing him to understand. “What would Splitdawn or Ironvale do to take that control from Poisoncry?”
“Anything.”
She waited for her words to forge through his drunken haze.
Corsair’s eyebrows crept up. “You’re talking about the jdrive. All of Erelah’s work.”
Sela’s smile was grim. “How would you like to start a war?”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The shady underworld of the grade school essay black market was Amy J. Murphy’s introduction to the possibility of writing things for money. Although real life intervened and her career path took a different direction, she continued to work on personal writing projects in the science fiction and horror genres.
Amy has a B.A. in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Originally from New Orleans, Amy now shares a home with her husband and a very entitled dog in the lovely state of Vermont.
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