Assassin's Hunger (11 page)

“Exactly. But what if one person or one group controlled the sheerways?”

“They’d control the universe and everyone in it.”

He nodded. “Hold the threads and you hold the entire web.”

“Why bother? The resources required for an undertaking of this magnitude imply an enormous amount of wealth and power already. Why seek more?”

His smile twisted. “For a cyborg mercenary killer, your innocence charms me.”

She tightened her crossed arms around her body. “I’m not innocent.”

“I suppose not,” he murmured. “No one is.”

The soft lilt in his accent cracked, and she thought she might finally have a glimpse inside him, but then he lapsed into silence.

“If you know the
why
,” she pressed, “you’ll have a better sense of
who
.”

“Hermitaj never bothered itself with the
why
. You fought for those who could pay. As do most of us.”

This time, she refused to wonder at the sudden bitterness in his voice. “So, follow the payments. This entity or group isn’t doing the ugly work itself. If there are other mercenaries, like me, they’ll have info.”

“All of it leading to dead ends,” he said. “Sometimes very dead. The captain doesn’t aim to wound when his people are in the line of fire. And it seems our target leaves even fewer dangling threads.”

“But if the target is that fanatical about maintaining control…” She turned back to the scan she’d paused. “Pull up the ship’s security data from the hangar.”

Eril lifted his eyebrows at her order, but then he turned to the console screen beside him. “Here are the vids of the ground troops as they came in.”

“Play audio of any transmission signals.”

He swept his finger over a slider bar. They listened to the burst of chatter like people talking underwater backward. In gibberish.

“Encrypted,” Eril said. “Polycyclic algorithm. It’ll take time to unlock.”

“We don’t care so much what they said, but how they said it.” She fine-tuned her scan and resumed. “A man who wants all the sheerways for himself isn’t going to share—Ah.” She backtracked and crosschecked with the
Asphodel
’s data log. “Found evidence of an outgoing signal using the same encryption.”

“Where in the ship did it originate?”

“It piggybacked out on a standard beacon ping the
Asphodel
sent when it exited the sheerways above Khamaseen.” The
Asphodel
had just been confirming its location, but it had also been revealing itself to its enemy. “The signal could have been planted as malware with any data packet, at any time—Wait. I have a second signal. From a device. Seems to be embedded in debris inside the damaged thruster. Probably attached to the plasma charge.”

“So even if we got away, they’d know where we went.” Eril refreshed the comm screen and tapped the link to the captain. “Captain, we seem to have picked up a passenger.” He forwarded the find then gave Shaxi a quick grin when angry curses exploded from the comm. He muted the sound. “Anything else he should know?”

“It’ll take some time to decrypt, but now we can at least block the signal in the beacon transponder. Rather than destroy the device, I’d suggest leaving the signal active and sending it out via drone on a diverging path. By the time we get to Rampakh, the drone will be hours in the wrong direction.”

“Leading them hours astray.” Eril unmuted the swearing and relayed the proposal to the captain. “If Fariz can add range and speed to the drone and send it along the curve of the storm front in the opposite direction from us, they may think we veered off Rampakh to avoid the sand. Crash the drone in a canyon, and by the time they figure out it isn’t us, we’ll be repaired and on our way.”

Over the comm, the captain’s grunt was both annoyed and approving. “Keep that scan running so we’re sure we aren’t sending any other come-’n’-get-me messages. And I want that signal decrypted.”

“Yes sir,” Eril said. “Anything else we should know?”

“You two make a good team. Stay on it.”

The comm went blank, and Eril repeated one of the captain’s more colorful phrases.

Shaxi smirked. “Did you think he’d call you a hero and give you all their secrets?”

He gave her a look. “Is that not how this works?”

She laughed. The sound surprised her and she swallowed it back.

He shook his head. “I thought he might at least give us something to make the job easier.”

She scoffed again. “Is that
ever
how it works?”

“Good point.” He lifted his tablet and gazed at the screen where thousands of computations of the continuing ship-wide scan and signal decryption were scrolling in fractal patterns. He sidelonged a glance at her. “And this is all in your head?”

She averted her gaze. Looking at it while the same fractals spun in the background of her ocular implant was like looking into the space between two mirrors reflecting each other. It was a weak representation of infinity but it made her queasy nonetheless. “That part is not
my
head,” she noted. “It belongs to something else.”

“But Hermitaj is gone now, so it’s all you.”

She frowned at him. “You think we ever escape our original programming?”

For a heartbeat, he looked stricken. “Once again, good point.” He headed for the nav chamber door without a single glance over his tattooed shoulder. “Since you have the scans locked up, I’ll go help Fariz launch the drone.”

The door hissed shut behind him, and she echoed the noise in the suddenly too-quiet room.

The captain and his woman had secrets. Their vast yet anonymous enemy had secrets. Even the auxo had secrets. She was the only one who seemed too simple for secrets.

If they managed to hide the ship and avoid capture, and if she wasn’t stripped to her component pieces by the shriving storm, maybe she’d work on becoming mysterious herself.

Chapter 8

Was he as programmed as a mercenary cyborg?

The empty blue-gray corridor was like a blank fog around him as Eril strode on autopilot toward engineering. The underwriters had told him how vital this assignment was. They repeated the mantra on the rare occasions he could actually make contact. But they hadn’t needed to: he knew, better than anyone, how hostile forces with an intent to dominate were perfectly willing to destroy the very thing they allegedly wanted. This unknown entity would stop at nothing to control the sheerways.

And
he
would stop at nothing to stop it.

He went to engineering and found Fariz. The wiry engineer was already up to his elbows in drone parts. “I’m here to help,” he said.

He only wished he was absolutely certain that his “helping” wasn’t worse than their enemies.

Working together, they prepped the drone for its suicide flight and were done within the half hour. Fariz messaged the captain. “All we need is the signaling device,” he said.

“On its way,” the captain replied. He patched through an image of a tethered figure wedged alongside the damaged thruster. Against the bright, raw edges of twisted metal, Shaxi’s smooth, dark curves looked particularly beautiful—and breathtakingly fragile.

Eril’s breath caught in his throat as if the wind that whipped her short hair into a platinum corona had stolen the oxygen from his lungs.

He stabbed his finger at the comm. “You sent her out there while we’re still in flight?!”

The captain’s voice was calm, with more than a hint of reprimand. “Her idea. We don’t have the luxury of setting down, and she was concerned the device might be sensitive to a remote extraction unit.”

When he gritted his teeth, Eril could almost taste the sand fogging the open air around her. He slammed out of engineering as much as he could slam the smooth door and hurried to the lower deck. But Shaxi and Jorr were already returning, Jorr tossing a fist-sized tracker in his hand.

“Get that to Fariz without breaking it,” Eril snapped at him.

Jorr rolled his eyes. “We’re going to augur it into a canyon. A few more bumps won’t hurt.”

Eril couldn’t show the fear that had shot through him, seeing Shaxi straining against the wind on the
outside
of the ship, but anger was an acceptable substitute. He lowered his chin and stared at Jorr. “The same can’t be said for you.”

Jorr lifted his lip in a sneer. “Said the man who didn’t even bring a knife to the plasma fight.”

Shaxi coughed, a harsh sound, and spiked her fingers through her hair. Dust puffed up around her, and the astringent stink of scorched metal wafted toward him. “The engineer is waiting,” she reminded them curtly. “We need to launch that drone.”

Jorr gave her a respectful half-salute and strode ahead of them after one last hard stare at Eril.

Shaxi gave him a slitted glare of her own. “What in any hells was that about?”

He paced alongside her so he didn’t have to meet her eyes. “You almost sound like the captain now.”

“You were the one giving orders just a second ago.”

“I can’t believe you were out in an open thruster.”

“It wasn’t operational. And someone needed to retrieve the tracking device.”

“That’s why we have robots,” he snapped.

“
I’m
a robot,” she snapped back.

He swallowed his fury. “You’re more than that.”

“Half more than that.” Her voice dripped sarcasm.

Being with this crew was making her more a real girl every day, he thought wryly. He managed not to say it aloud.

“You can’t get sucked out of the ship,” he said instead. “We need you.”

After a moment, she nodded, although the gesture was tentative and jerky, as if she didn’t quite believe him.

“First stop, med bay,” he said.

To his surprise, she followed him without another question, but she looked around when they entered. “Do we need to recalibrate another scanner?”

“This time we need to fix you,” he said.

She stared at him warily. “I’m not broken. Not that way.”

He gestured, taking in the length of her body. “You ripped your nice new uniform there and there, and you have a bad case of road rash.”

She peered down. “There are no roads out here.”

“Find the reference yourself.” He rummaged through several drawers to gather the materials he needed. “Hop up on the exam table.”

She gave a scornful sniff. “I’m not going to faint.”

“Gives me better access.”

After a moment, she acquiesced. “Give me the skin sealant.”

“I’ll do it.”

She scowled. “I can—”

“I see how good a job you did on your own. When you blush, the scars show.”

“I don’t blush,” she said. “And even if I did, you can’t see the blood in my skin.”

But the subtle glow to her cheeks told her lie, and the faint white lines of old injuries made him the honest one this time.

“Blushing,” he noted.

She touched her fingertips to her face, and he took the opportunity to slice off the sleeve of her uniform.

“What are you—?” When she lowered her hands to ward him off, he slipped off the detached sleeve.

“It was ruined anyway,” he said.

She’d obviously twisted through the torn metal and caught herself in a couple places. The wound across her upper arm sliced through the dermis and into muscle, but she didn’t twitch as he probed for fragments.

Keeping his tone noncommittal, he asked, “Did Hermitaj use nanotech on its people? Am I going to find anything in here that will fight back?”

She shook her head. “Nano was deemed too destabilizing.”

He grunted. “I’m surprised. If anyone was going to break convention on nanotech in humans, it’d be Hermitaj.”

“They tried, but whenever they integrated nano, it tried to counteract their other programming.”

“The nano wanted to make you fully human again? I’m not sure if that’s ironic or terrible.” He flushed the wound, catching the overflow of decontaminant fluid in a towel, and added an inner layer of sealant. “Let that sit a moment while I look at your leg.”

She eyed him. “Are you going to rip off my pants too?”

As inappropriate and unnecessary and out-of-nowhere as the question was, his body responded. His muscles tightened, and if the med scanners had been focused on him, he had no doubt it would’ve shown his temperature spiking by several degrees.

She was half machine, he reminded himself. But then, he was all monster.

“Lie down,” he said. His voice was lower than he’d intended, and rougher.

She reclined to one side, angling her hip toward him where her legging was torn over her thigh, below the curve of her hipbone.

With deliberate care, making sure his hands did not tremble, he snipped the tear wider, exposing more of her dark skin. Blood streaked her like some subtle, fierce tattoo, completely unacceptable on any civilized planet.