Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (9 page)

She spread the catsuit across her lap and studied the tear. Fairly quickly she discovered that mending it was beyond her meager sewing skills. She could get holes drilled through the fabric and the floss threaded through the holes, but there was no way to make it look like an adornment rather than a sloppy patch job. In the end, she chucked the magenta catsuit into the incinerator.

It was a shame. The stretchy fabric was supremely comfortable and she loved its hideous color. She supposed, at some point soon, she was going to have break down and do some shopping. One more reason to get in touch with Ariel: she had always been so much better at that kind of thing.

In the cabin she shared with Mykah, Coni sat back from her screen. It showed Raena sitting quietly in the lounge, bent over a piece of eye-piercing red fabric.

When Coni started to monitor Raena, it had been with hazy notions of continuing her research on humans. She’d thought Raena might serve as an example of the last of the Imperials, but now that Coni had pried so deeply into Raena’s Imperial record, it was clear that the little woman never actually bought into the Empire’s rhetoric. Raena didn’t even seem to have held an official rank. She was enlisted as Thallian’s aide, but the role seemed fluid and ill-defined.

While Raena had done as Thallian ordered her, he had clearly been a loose cannon, under surveillance by his superiors even before Raena’s defection showed how precariously he held his command together.

Beyond the way Thallian isolated Raena from his crew, she had been an object of ridicule—and worse, aware of it. Everyone aboard the
Arbiter
seemed to know how much she meant to their commander—and exactly what she did for him behind closed doors. It meant that, on the rare occasions that she stepped out of her commander’s shadow, the crew shunned her.

Coni tried to imagine Raena’s life onboard the
Arbiter
. No doubt she held herself aloof from her shipmates, as she had initially done from the crew of the
Veracity
. At first Coni had thought that Raena interacted chiefly with Mykah because she still harbored Imperial prejudice, however unspoken, against anyone nonhuman. Now, looking over Raena’s life, Coni wondered that Raena was brave enough to speak to any of them at all. She had always been surrounded by humans—and for the most part, humanity had treated her shamefully.

Little wonder she preferred her own company to anyone else’s.

CHAPTER 5

T
he crew of the
Veracity
gathered every afternoon—Galactic Standard Time—to watch the news. Everything was available online eventually, but the crew found comfort in watching the “best news team in the galaxy” run down the biggest news stories of the day.

Raena never joined them. Rarely did the news concern itself with humanity. Most news stories referenced peoples and planets and political systems she’d never heard of. Instead of troubling her crewmates with the breadth of her ignorance, Raena took her shift in the cockpit, monitoring their flight, while the others debated the new scandals of the day.

So she hadn’t really been paying attention until the good-natured banter between the others fell into uneasy silence. The lack of voices caught her notice.

She hit the comm button. “Everything okay?”

“Come back,” Mykah said. “Everything just changed.”

A cold shiver paced up Raena’s spine. She locked everything in the cockpit down so it could be left unattended, before she strode back to the lounge.

She had no idea what she expected, but the squirrel-faced creature paused on the screen wasn’t it. “What’s happened?”

“Mellix uncovered a flaw in the tesseract drive,” Haoun said.

Raena twitched her head no, not grasping what that meant.

“The tesseract is the newest star drive technology,” Vezali explained. “Every big ship built in the last five years has one. The shipbuilding cartels have really pushed the technology, creating incredible demand for it. It’s revised travel times across the galaxy. ”

“Mellix has drawn a pattern between the sporadic disappearances of transport ships over the past five years,” Mykah explained. “They’ve been jumping into tesseract and never coming out.”

“At first the manufacturer blamed pilot error: exiting into asteroid fields, jumping into suns. Then they accused workers of sabotage. Mellix interviewed a whistle-blower, a Shtrell engineer who was assassinated shortly after they spoke. Mellix worked through the documents the guy smuggled out—and they point to a flaw in the drive’s design,” Coni finished.

The four of them gazed at Raena as if they expected her to piece it together on her own.

She struggled to catch up. “How many ships are affected? If it’s only ships built in the last five years …”

Vezali corrected her. “A lot of older ships have been upgraded. A
lot
. Maybe most.”

“This news is going to seriously disrupt interstellar travel,” Mykah said. “It will halt tourism, trade, shipments of food and medicine, relief efforts …”

“Everyone is going to be afraid to leave wherever they find themselves stranded right now,” Coni said. “The whole galaxy is suddenly full of refugees, until they can find a ship with pre-tesseract technology on which to travel.”

Raena sank onto the bench next to Vezali, who shifted her tentacles invitingly to make room. The galaxy will grind to a halt, she finally understood. “Is he sure?”

“Mellix is the most trusted journalist in the galaxy,” Mykah said. No one contradicted his hyperbole. “He wouldn’t have announced it unless he was absolutely certain.”

“We were about to watch the evidence,” Vezali said. “We thought you would want to see it, too.”

“Yes,” Raena said, touched to be thought of when they were all obviously so stunned. “Thank you. But first, before you start—
we
are okay, right? We’re not suddenly going to get trapped in tesseract space?”

“We’re fine,” Haoun said. “We haven’t been able to afford to upgrade our drive yet.”

Vezali nodded her eyestalk. “The
Veracity
still has its original Earther drive. I’ve been hoping we could replace it, but updating the living spaces and media capabilities took precedence over the engine, for the time being.”

“Thank the stars,” Coni said.

Mykah jumped up to rummage around in the galley. Everyone watched him silently, puzzled by his behavior. He returned with a bottle of green on a tray with five glasses. “I get the feeling we’ll want a drink to absorb this news.”

“What about the gate system?” Raena asked suddenly. She didn’t understand exactly how they worked, but the gates were Templar tech for the masses. When the Templars controlled galactic trade twenty years ago, the gates provided checkpoints where the Templar could track who was moving what around their galaxy. Although several different FTL drives existed, most people used to travel through the gates.

“The gates don’t go everywhere you might want to,” Haoun explained.

“And a lot of the new tesseract ships are too big to go through the gates,” Vezali explained. “Until the technology improves to allow bigger gates, or the big ships can be re-engineered to have their drives replaced with older tech, they’re grounded.”

“How long is that going to take?” Raena asked. She envisioned ships lining up at shipyards, ready to be retrofitted.

“Old-tech engines of every size are going to have to be recreated practically piece by piece in factories that have switched over to something else. And how are you going to get the new engines delivered to the ships, or get the ships to the factories where the engines are being made? It will take a while to sort it all out,” Haoun said.

The evidence Mellix laid out was meticulous and complex. Raena didn’t understand a lot of it, but it boiled down to the fact that the tesseract drives were based around Templar technology. There was a lot of math—and experts to explain the math—for how the drives worked. The math also accounted for the times when the drives malfunctioned. Apparently, the Templar had workarounds. So far, the surviving galaxy had not discovered them.

“Fucking Templar tech,” Haoun said, as he poured another round of green for everyone. “I’m amazed they got it to work once, let alone installed in all those ships.”

“Getting it to work isn’t the problem,” Vezali countered. “Getting it to stop is a whole ’nother thing. Remember all those plague ships that arrived at their destinations after all the Templars onboard were dead?”

“You think all the tesseract ships that have been lost might show up someday?” Mykah asked.

“Who can say? They went somewhere, whether through space or in time or into another dimension. It’s Templar tech. Their philosophy was really fascinating,” Vezali chirped, full of enthusiasm—or catching a buzz from the green, Raena wasn’t sure. “Have you read any of it?”

The conversation spun onward, but Raena leaned back against the wall, nursing her drink, content to watch her crewmates. She was amused to find she had grown rather fond of them, even Haoun with his hissing, growling voice.

Mykah moved to come sit beside her and top off her glass. “I haven’t read much Templar philosophy, either,” he confided.

Raena laughed. “I haven’t read much of any philosophy. My education is pretty thoroughly lacking.”

That left nowhere for the conversation to go, so Raena retreated into honesty. “I think this stuff is going to my head.”

“It’s pretty strong,” Mykah agreed. “I never tried it until I waited tables on Kai. The restaurants held a party once a week, where all the waitstaff got to sample a different liquor.”

“That sounds like fun,” Raena said.

“Sometimes it was. Most of the time, though, it was hard work. Some of the liquors we served were pretty noxious for humans. We had to try enough of everything that we could report to our patrons what its effects would be. Warn them away from things, if necessary.”

“I hadn’t realized restaurant work could be so dangerous.” Raena smiled at him to show she was teasing.

Mykah grew serious. “What do you think about this?” He waved his glass toward the screen. The liquor slopped close to the edge, but he caught it before it spilled.

“It’s going to be bad,” Raena predicted. “Without the big freighters to haul things around the galaxy, there will be shortages. Riots. Famines.”

“You think?”

“I’m a pessimist.” She had another sip of the green. It was bitter at first, with sweetness underneath. “Even if things don’t get bad right away, there will be rationing and hoarding. People will be unhappy if they don’t get all they want, or if they think their neighbors are getting more.”

Mykah nodded and filled her glass again. He was sitting closer to Raena than she preferred to let people get, unless she was fighting them. Still, she didn’t move back, for fear of insulting him.

“Hey!” Coni snatched the bottle away from him. “Don’t drink it all, you two.”

“Case in point,” Raena observed.

Mykah held up one finger. “You think we ought to apply to haul food?”

The others fell silent to listen to her. Raena nodded. “It’s not glamorous work, but it will be necessary in the short term. If the big ships can’t do it, it’s going to take a flotilla of smaller ones to get the job done. Hungry people aren’t the most patient. Or peaceable.”

She set her glass down. “This stuff is making me see double,” she said. It was only a slight exaggeration. “I’m going to go lie down.”

“Feel better,” Vezali wished.

After she got back to her cabin, Raena wondered if she should have asked Mykah to make her some tea. She really didn’t want to go to sleep and face her dreams, but the disorientation brought on by the green was worse at the moment.

She pulled the coverlet around her shoulders and sat up in the corner of the wall, head on her knees. That kept the bed from spinning.

It didn’t keep her from dreaming.

Raena woke sluggishly. Her wrists were pinned to a chair by heavy cuffs. Cold fluid drained through a plastic tube into the back of her right hand. That, she suspected, was the mind-dampening chemical. When she tried to switch the hair out of her face, she felt the tug of something taped to her scalp. That chilled her more than anything else.

Thallian reached into her field of vision to train a lock of hair out of her eyes, tucking it gently back behind her ear. “You deserve better accommodations, my dear, but you rejected those you had.”

Fear blackened Raena’s vision. Then a searing, nuclear-bright flash exploded in her brain, sweeping thoughts and breath out of its path. Raena felt her body spasm. Her muscles protested when she tried to control the convulsions. Tears of shame melted down her face.

“No mind drugs for you, my love,” Thallian whispered as the torture burned itself out. “The Emperor does not want you stupid and senseless when he asks why you betrayed us.”

She ignored his bitterness and swallowed hard, trying to control her voice. “What’s in the tube?”

“Nourishment. Those shocks will drain you, but you’re not to have food or sleep until we reach the Emperor’s flagship.”