Enemy Games (24 page)

“I want those thieves,” Kannoi snarled, “begging for death in my interrogation room.”

“Who the Hells are these people?” Janka ground out. “Medi team! Docking bay E-six. Three officers down! Ooze venom.”

Ooze venom?
Damen bit back a curse. Jay had turned a racial allergy into a weapon? No wonder she’d waited to the last minute to arm and spring that trap.

“They’re neutralized and isolated aboard that freighter,” Damen said to the room at large. “You can recover them at your leisure. Change your primary access codes to secure your systems from me.”

“Thank you,” Guild Mistress Kannoi said. “I am pleased.”

“Ops to Major Sindrivik!” a trembling female voice rasped.

“Sindrivik, go ahead,” he replied.

“The freighter has fired engines!”

D
AMEN bolted to standing, his hands flat on the panel. “You’ve had that ship in dock for months and you didn’t deactivate the engines?”

“It was the first thing we did!” Janka protested.

“What the Three Hells is going on?” Damen demanded.

The guild mistress growled a curse. “Janka! Where are Vala and her brat? They will be my guests until Damen returns with those agents in custody.”

“We’re a little too busy to search the tunnels!” Janka retorted.

Damen closed his eyes to hide the emotion surging through him. Elation because his family wasn’t on station to be held over his head any longer. Sorrow and regret at Vala’s death. He hadn’t loved her. He’d believed she hadn’t loved him, even though she’d always welcomed him into her bed when he was on station. Until this trip. Until Jayleia had seen what he couldn’t.

She’d rescued him and the people he’d sworn to protect.

He opened his eyes.

The guild had no idea what had been done to them.

He clenched his teeth and his hands to battle back the ingrained conditioning whispering to him that his loyalties were inextricably bound to his people and to this station.

No.

Not. Anymore.

Jayleia’s blood ran in his veins now.

Damen forced a passably civil tone on his tongue. “How do you propose I retrieve them for you, Guild Mistress?”

“Your ship,” she snapped. “Alert your commanders that you have been released from UMOPG custody, Major. I will not have it said that this government broke faith with a signed, sealed treaty.”

Now that the Chekydran were pummeling the station? Convenient.

“Understood,” he said, pulse hammering against the confines of his skin. “The
Kawl Fergus
has tow capacity. If I am required to blow their engines, I have teleport on board as well.”

“Go,” she ordered. “Should it occur to you to cross me, remember, when you report to your Empire, that the guild gives up nothing without gaining something in return. Your transfer to the Claugh nib Dovvyth came through me. Ask yourself what I profit by having insinuated you into their ranks. Bring the spies back alive and I’ll trade you. Full disclosure for their rotting corpses in Janka’s prison.”

Chill fingers ripped through Damen’s heart. Did that mean she had a data transmitter embedded in him somewhere? He’d seen one before, in Captain Ari Idylle. If TFC could plant listening devices inside a soldier’s head, why couldn’t his people do the same?

The hand he lifted to punch the com button for ops shook. “Sindrivik to ops.”

“Ops! All due respect, Major,” Calmin said, “I’ve got a real cravuul-dung storm here.”

“Guild mistress’s orders,” he replied. “Single teleport to the cockpit of the
Kawl Fergus
and emergency clearance for immediate departure, please.”

“Major . . .”

“Do it!” Kannoi snapped.

“Stand by to teleport,” the ops head said.

“On your mark,” Damen replied.

“On my mark, aye. Three, two, one, mark.”

A moment’s disorientation and Damen stood trembling in the cockpit of his ship. He leaped for the controls, slamming a sonic shield to life before unlocking his panels and firing his engines.

The com chirped.

“Ops to
Kawl Fergus
.”

“
Kawl Fergus,
go ahead,” Damen said.

“You are cleared for immediate departure. Transmitting tracking data on the freighter.”

“Acknowledged. I am receiving.”

“Clear skies, Major,” Calmin replied.

The line died.

Depressurization warning lights flashed in the bay. Damen nudged his engine output. The
Kawl Fergus
rose.

The dock doors parted. It took every ounce of his control to keep from slamming through the slow moving barrier.

The lights flashing in the bay died. Clear skies. Except for two Chekydran and a biomech mother ship out there lurking behind who knew which moon or asteroid.

Engines to thirty.

The
Kawl Fergus
slipped out of Silver City and into space.

Damen brought up the tracking data for the ore freighter, set his shields to maximum, and throttled up. He couldn’t follow Jay too closely without the risk of leading mercenaries and agents after her.

So many other captains had blown free of the station, the lanes were clogged with traffic. He had a legitimate excuse to power back and weave through the other vessels. Anyone trying to get a bead on him would have a difficult time keeping track of one small craft among the hundreds littering the lanes.

It took an hour of maneuvering, ramping speed, cutting back, dodging here, and ducking there, before he hit the outer beacon. The automated navigational buoy pinged his com.

He opened a line.

“Final tracking information, Major,” Janka said. “Get those bastards and do it now.”

Damen fired his interstellar drive in answer. The shrill of the warming engine drowned out anything more Janka might have said.

Damen forced himself to double-check his navigational data. The nav system chimed. Course laid and locked.

He engaged the drive.

He was free.

Because of Jayleia.

Because of her foolish gesture with a vial of blood and because of her warrior’s heart that wouldn’t let her leave his family behind.

Except for Vala. Whose fault was it that she was dead? His? Vala’s? Certainly not Jayleia’s.

Damen engaged the autopilot, surged to his feet, and stumbled to his cabin.

He should be searching for and eliminating the listening devices the guild had planted aboard his ship. He needed to report in and warn his commanders that per the guild mistress’s own words, he might be compromised.

Instead, queasy with emotions he couldn’t name digging their jagged hooks into his flesh and pulling, he went straight to the shower, turned on the unit, and slumped as the cleansers sluiced over him.

J
AYLEIA strode into the Temple’s official audience hall, kicking the diaphanous layers of her gem-encrusted, silver skirt out of her way. Ceremonial robes had always been her least favorite Temple attire.

Early morning sunlight washed the rough stone and polished wood of the room in gold.

“You’re late,” the high priestess of the Temple noted in a sharp voice.

“I had good reason,” Jay said, slinging a bag strap from her shoulder. She set the bag at the foot of the dais where Tiassale, the high priestess, sat wrapped in the silver blue robes of her office, her long brown hair twisted into intricate braids piled high atop her head.

The contents of the pack clanked.

The woman lifted an eyebrow. “Good reason? So you’ve always said, yet your excuses have always been found wanting.”

“Only by you,” Jay shot.

“Given that I speak with the voice of the Temple in all things,” Tiassale said, a hint of a sneer in her tone, “my opinion is the only one that matters. Give me one good reason not to have you executed.”

Jayleia pulled her lips back into the smile that wasn’t a smile, the one Damen had taught her. “You’d break my mother’s heart and destroy her legacy.”

Tiassale smirked. “You’ve never been slow to cash in on your mother’s good name and hard work.”

“And you’ve never hesitated to flat-out lie in your quest to rob my mother of her rightful place as high priestess of this Temple,” Jayleia retorted, fists clenched.

Biting back a curse, she rubbed her forehead. A single day on Temple grounds and she’d reverted to acting like an angry, wronged teenager. After six years away, couldn’t she at least pretend she could identify a lost cause when she had her nose rubbed in it?

“Enough,” she grumbled. Was there an opposite of homesickness? What should she call the pinching sensation telling her she simply didn’t fit into her mother’s world anymore? Had she ever? “You have the position you wanted so badly. Say whether the Temple will give refuge to the people I brought.”

Tiassale sat back in her chair, her rage-twisted expression smoothing out a piece at time. “This Temple exiled you for your crimes six years ago.”

Jayleia snorted in derision, but did it softly. She had nothing to gain by pointing out she hadn’t been the only guilty one six years ago. “Yes, it did.”

“What possessed you to return clad in the uniform you were forbidden to wear?”

Jayleia threw her arms wide. The bells tied to the ends of her hair chimed. “Two governments and a network of traitors seem to think I’m the key to finding my father. In the midst of their agents and mercenaries trying to capture or kill me, I ended up with a ship full of abused men, women, and children. Where else could I take them where they would be accepted, welcomed, and nurtured?”

“It didn’t matter to you that by our laws you could be executed for returning?” Tiassale pressed.

“Of course it mattered,” she retorted. “The UMOPG intended to use those people as leverage in the interrogation of a spy. I didn’t have the luxury of saving my skin at the expense of their lives.”

“No. I don’t suppose you did,” Tiassale mused, studying her for several seconds, before she gestured at the bag on the floor between them. “What is that?”

“Silver City’s data store,” Jay replied. “There’s indication that the guild is building a standing military.”

“What?”

Jay nodded. “The Claugh nib Dovvyth sent an agent to retrieve the data. I assume they want to understand what a UMOPG mobilization means, as it appears to predate the war with the Chekydran. Their agent was captured. I completed the mission in his stead.”

“You believe the information you carry impacts the war with the Chekydran as well as detailing the UMOPG’s true motivations?” Tiassale guessed, a troubled light in her eyes. “If you are correct, danger follows your prize.”

“Agreed. If you will accept the refugees, I will transport the data off planet until I can safely entrust it to my father and the leader of the Murbaasch Tu.”

Tiassale shot her a sharp look. “You truly have no idea where your father is?”

“I have ideas,” Jayleia said, “but I’m watched too closely to act on them. I wish I could. I’d have my life back.”

“I wonder.”

Jayleia snapped to attention, dismay flooding her at the grim tone of Tiassale’s voice.

The priestess met her eye. “First, I have no further information regarding your father. Your files are as up to date as my own. This bodes well.”

“He hasn’t been captured,” Jay concluded, relief easing a fraction of her concern.

“Precisely. Second, a representative of the Claugh nib Dovvyth government has arrived on planet with clearances granted by someone within TFC. He comes flying an alliance flag.”

Jay swallowed a curse.

TFC and the Claugh nib Dovvyth boasted a marginal alliance. But that was for the war against the Chekydran. The concept of working together was too new, too unsettling for the alliance to mean anything more than sharing a few wartime dispatches and enemy positions.