The Warlord's Daughter (6 page)

T
HE JOURNEY TO
Z
ORABETA
was interminable. Wren found that this new loneliness was almost harder to bear than her grief for Sabra. Feeling like an outsider was nothing new: on Barokk, she hadn’t been old enough to be accepted by the guardians and was too old to be peers with their charges. When Sabra was alive the sensation of not fitting in hadn’t been so acute. Onboard the ship, crammed into the underdecks with hundreds of other refugees, she’d never felt so alone.

The voyage was made longer with delays and reroutes due to blockades and unrest in the Borderlands. Traveling by spaceship was no better than it was the first time on the trip to meet her father. Space-sickness soon consumed her. Finally, someone noticed and called for help.

A medic and a guard rousted her from her narrow bunk. She’d lost track of how long she’d lain there, curled on her side. Startled, she felt for the hidden pendant. It was still there.

“I’m going to administer a dose of nanomeds,” the medic said, making her sit up. Others gathered around to watch. Some she knew from Barokk, others were strangers. The ship was beginning to fill up. At some
point she guessed they’d reach capacity and head for Zorabeta. “They’re microscopic computers targeted for health issues. You were going to get them in the camp anyway.” He rooted through a bag of supplies and pulled out a small stick that reminded Wren uncomfortably of the poison dart. “Everyone in the Coalition is inoculated at birth. Your medicine was so backward that none of you were. Well, some of you Drakken have nanos—high-ranking Imperial officers, battlelords and the like. That’s how we find the ones trying to escape. The hardware in their blood gives them away.”

Her father and his men had had nanomeds, but he never saw to her care. If he had, the Triad would have detected the nanomeds. For once she was glad to have been neglected.

She fought dizziness and upset stomach as he pushed a stick against the inside of her elbow. It hissed and left behind a spot of blood. “You should feel some improvement now,” he said.

The magical creatures were inside her now. Nanomeds. She stared at her arm, opening and closing her hand to see if she could detect any differences. She couldn’t, but she felt better almost right away. “Thank you,” she breathed in awe.

The medic turned away to remove his gloves and reapply a cream to his hands. He wiped it off carefully with a cloth, cleaning every part of him that had come in contact with her. He did so in a way that reinforced the perception that the Coalition considered Drakken animals. It was reinforced by an air of superiority—a thousand years’ worth of righteousness. The Coalition
served under goddesses, divine beings, whereas the Drakken followed the orders of mere mortals.

The medic packed up and left. He wasn’t rude, but he wasn’t friendly, either. Probably the last thing the medic wanted was to treat a Hordish barbarian kindly, but did so because it was his orders. Someone above him, someone even above the captain of this ship, wanted peace to take root, despite the hatred between the two peoples. It was cause for celebration. And also concern, for it meant they wouldn’t give up trying to find her—the warlord’s last surviving child. When it came to peace, her mere existence put it in jeopardy.

A
T THE NEXT STOP
, new arrivals had everyone atwitter. Wren stood with the others as refugee after refugee came aboard. These newcomers were pale and silent. They didn’t interact with anyone, not even the guards. Their eyes were blank. Dead. It was as if they’d retreated inside themselves.

“They survived a massacre,” some whispered.

“Everyone was skulled.”

“What does that mean?” Wren asked.

“Naive girl,” a woman scolded.

“Consider yourself freepin’ blessed for not knowing,” another said. “I saw people who were skulled once. At the base of each one’s skull was a little circle of soot—a hole if you looked closer, about the size of your fingernail. Nice and neat. But if you saw the other side, the face, there was nothing left.”

Wren fought a fresh wave of queasiness, the kind that came from squeamishness and horror, and that meds couldn’t fix. What she felt when her fingers found the
dart embedded in Sabra’s stomach. What she felt when she watched the life leave Ilkka’s eyes. The consequences of hate.

Most of the Barokk citizens listened on along with Wren in appalled silence. Like her, they’d been insulated from the horrors of war. Wren said, “But they’re Drakken.”

“You
are
naive. They’re Drakken, but they’re believers.”

Wren blushed hard and clamped her chatty lips closed. She was hungry for answers about her new world, the world she knew nothing about, but not to the point she wanted to risk revealing her identity.

An eavesdropping guard said, “‘Skulling’ is Hordish slang for blowing people’s brains out.” His cheek began to twitch. Surrounded by his former enemy, he gripped his rifle uncomfortably tight. “It was a favorite game of your battlelords. They did it to demoralize us, but all it did was infuriate us. Unlike us, your own believers wouldn’t retaliate, and the warlord knew it. They were defenseless. Still, he set out to kill every last one of them. What you see here was probably the last of it, thank gods. The last victims of the holocaust.” The big guard made the sign of the goddess. “May the likes of that monster never arise again.” He kissed the tips of his fingers and sent his prayer to the heavens as Sabra had done.

Murmurs went around. It took a moment before Wren realized that the others were mumbling prayers and thanks that her father was dead. A few began to weep.

She’d held out a small, selfish hope that the Coalition’s and the Drakken believers’ loathing of the empire drove them to lie, to exaggerate, but seeing the skulling survivors told a different story. Little wonder she was the
most wanted woman in the galaxy. She felt sick in the pit of her soul. Sweat broke out on her forehead. She pushed on her glasses. Then she tore them off, not wanting to see the blank expressions of the survivors—survivors of her father’s atrocities.

Not wanting anyone to realize who she was.

No one else she’d met so far wore glasses. Only her. How long before someone on the warlord’s ship that day remembered she’d worn corrective lenses? She must not be found—by anyone. Found and used. Found and fought over. And risk waking the beast inside her.

She no longer had dear Sabra’s eyes to see. She needed her own.

E
EEP…EEEP…EEEP.

Aral was lying on his stomach in bed.
Eeep…eeep…eeep.
What was that blasted sound? He opened an eye and scanned the environmental panel by his bedside. Indications were normal.
Eeep…eeep…eeep.
He rolled onto his back, actually desiring to return to slumber for once. After a nightmare earlier in his sleep cycle, he’d actually fallen back asleep. It had taken well over a hundred push-ups to exhaust himself to do it. A shot of whiskey and a longing glance at a vial of sleep meds and he was back to sleep. A memory of his father’s sweef-glazed eyes and the stink of it on his breath was enough to convince Aral not to drink more. Nor would he take the risk of medicating himself with the arrival at Zorabeta imminent. He needed all his wits about him to see to Awrenkka’s safe rescue today. Today!

Eeep…eeep…eeep.

“What is that freepin’ sound?” It was coming from his closet.

The PCD, he realized. After his last conversation with Zaafran, he’d stowed the thing. The man had been trying to reach him continuously. For what—to see if he’d captured the warlord’s daughter yet?

Eeep…eeep…eeep.

He stalked to the closet and growled, “Open.” His closet presented a fresh uniform on a spindly robotic arm. “No.”

The uniform disappeared back into the darkness and a soft, black civilian suit glided forward. It dangled from its hanger. “Next,” he commanded to the sound of the muffled beeping. In which pocket did he leave the PCD, and what the hells did Zaafran want now? If it concerned whether he’d sighted the warlord’s daughter, very soon he’d be able to answer in the affirmative.

It was nothing he cared to share with the prime-admiral, however.

Several clothing combinations rotated by. At the thought of Awrenkka, his grogginess began to clear, and his foul humor at being woken from the rare if brief stretch of sleep. If his innards felt sliced by razors at times, she was the salve—the mere thought of her—as she had been that day when he was little more than a boy.

His spare uniform swept stopped in front of him.
Eeep…eeep…eeep.
The beeping sound was loud and sharp.

He fished the PCD out of the pocket where it had been forgotten, grasping it in his fist. For a fraction of a second he considered answering the call. Karbon was gone. There was no reason to be connected by an umbilical cord with the Coalition anymore. With a flick of
his thumbnail, he deactivated the power crystal. “The recipient of this call is unavailable—permanently,” he murmured, mimicking the computerized female voice that came on to authenticate all communication. His work with the Triad and for the Triad was done. It was his turn at life now. Yes, and Awrenkka’s.

A
T
Z
ORABETA
, guards boarded the ship. They barked questions and entered information into what Wren learned was called a datapad. She fought to remain calm despite the trembles in her belly.

“Name?”

“Wren Senderin.” It had been Sabra’s last name. It was both a way to remain anonymous and honor the memory of her guardian.

“Birthplace?”

She supposed answering “the Imperial Palace” was not a good idea. “Barokk.”

“Occupation or special skills?”

Sand painting, reciting poetry, serving tea to battlelords, carrying on the Rakkuu bloodline? Purveyor of Rakkuu DNA? Or, perhaps, guide to a priceless treasure. “No.”

He punched in something on his pad, then handed her a data square. “This is the address of your tent when you arrive in the camp. Single, childless women only. No men allowed.”

She slipped the data square in her pocket. The guard gave her another. “Take this to the medical tent. They’ll fix your eyes.”

How she’d ached to be freed of her handicap. She closed her eyes and whispered silent thanks for her
sudden good fortune—not to the goddesses but to anyone, divine or otherwise, who would listen.

“There’s no cause for worry. It comes with no obligation. The medical care is being donated by relief organizations. Top-notch surgeons volunteered to help you Drakken.”

Fates, he thought her worried. “Good sir, I am so happy I am speechless.”

His gaze warmed as if he thought she was sweet. Perhaps there was a time she might have agreed; now she knew better. “I don’t know if you’ll like what you see here once you can,” he said. “This dump isn’t the most scenic place we’ve got. But you’re Triad now. Things like eyeglasses gotta go.”

She took the data square and tucked it away in a pocket. Then she was standing at the top of the gangway, staring down at the spectacle that was Zorabeta refugee camp.

There was a sense of wildness in the camp, of too many people under not quite enough control. Strapping armed Coalition soldiers sauntered amongst the hundreds of bedraggled Drakken, inserting a layer of fear and respect that seemed a very thin barrier between calm and chaos. The odors of too many bodies in need of washing, strange perfumes and other scents that defied description tickled her nose.

A ship screeched overhead. The docks themselves were a noisy place. Trader-pilots relaxed in the shade of their ships, chatting with friends, waiting for freight or simply waiting, looking bored and hot. Others watched the streams of refugees go by. In wonder, she stared at the ships taking off and landing all around her, and the men and women who piloted them to all corners of the
galaxy—and maybe even beyond, she thought with a twinge of envy. She’d never been anywhere outside the books she devoured. And when she finally did have the chance, it was under the worst of circumstances.

“Come on, miss,” one of the guards below called up to her. “You can’t stand there all day.”

A cluster of guards watched her, their expressions amused. Someone gave her a push when she hesitated. She stumbled. Her glasses almost slid off. A panicky push with one finger put them back in place. It took every ounce of guts she had to step forward. The short walk down the ramp seemed miles long and took an eternity. Then she set foot on the ground.

Despite all her fears, despite all that was as yet unknown, she was free. Not a daughter. Not a wife. Free.

Then, with a deeply indrawn breath and a determined push on her glasses, she hurried forward to lose herself in the anonymity of the camp.

“We ‘Earthlings’ are new to the vast galactic arena. What we lack in experience, we make up for in courage and hope. Today we celebrate a promising future, joining our new allies in their wish for enduring peace.”

—Laurel Ramos, President of the United States (address at Unity Day festivities at the United Nations, New York)

“Hell, yeah, I traded my slot in the Thunderbirds to serve on the
Unity.
Wouldn’t you, sir? Star ships, hot alien chicks…we’re talking a new frontier. I always wanted to be a space cowboy.”

—Major Ruben “Tango” Barrientes, USAF pilot (courtesy
Air Force Times
)

A
N EXPLOSION ROCKED
the ship. “Enemy targets in all quadrants, Captain.”

Triad Captain Hadley Keyren noted the first hint of panic in her lead pilot’s voice. There was no time to ponder his terror, or even hers. The time for second-guessing was after a battle. That was, if you had an after.

Her battleship was surrounded. Enemy ships were
everywhere: a rogue battlelord and his loyalist buddies. How had they so thoroughly caught her off guard? Were they that good, or was she that green?

Her vote landed somewhere in between. Her promotion was only weeks old, and everyone knew how Drakken battlelords fought.

With black, godless souls and no mercy.

Sweat tingled on Hadley’s temples. She fought the same tendrils of panic she’d heard in the pilot’s voice. Half the bridge crew was glancing at her where she stood. They waited for the order that would save them, waited for the order that would turn this losing battle around.

Goddess, guide me through this.

But the gods who she’d prayed to all her life were curiously silent now. She was on her freepin’ own, as her Drakken friend Rakkelle would say.

If only Rakkelle were here. She’d know what to do.

A flash of light. “Incoming!” the weapons officer shouted. Hadley caught the edge of the command console and braced herself. That one almost jarred her molars loose.

“Impact—aft left control pod!” the engineer called out.

“Seal off the pod!” Hadley ordered.

“Done.”

Hadley smelled something burning. Her ship or her pride? Both were equally at risk at going up in smoke.

“Lost two more fighters, Captain.”

Blast it. They were decimating her defenses, killing her crew. The war might be over, but this one was just beginning.

She stalked to the front of the bridge. There was no
way they were going to fight their way out of this one. They were either going to be a casualty, or…

“Ram it.” She made fists. “Pilot, spin her around, on my mark—”

“Ram it?” Stunned would describe the man’s expression and tone. Well, it beat panic.

“Turn this baby around, Lieutenant. We’re going to hit that monster’s ship with our damaged pod to keep our good side functional. Do it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The bridge crew was silent as the pilot obeyed her order. Alarms wailed distantly through the damaged ship.

“Aim for just forward of their star drive.” She was crazy. She knew what the crew was thinking.
We’re going to die anyway—might as well die trying.
Hadley had grown up on a farm on Talo, an outlying provincial world where the sun and the seasons formed the framework of life, not machines. She used to drive fruit to market in a centuries-old truck. Once, road pirates tried to steal the load. Her brother rammed them. Hadley never forgot. He had showed her how. It was just never applied to a starship.

Before this moment.

They were moving full speed when they hit. The impact threw her sideways. She pulled up to her knees. Metal screeched on metal. The vibration rattled her bones. Sparks lit up the starboard view ports. “Jump speed—now,” she ordered. They needed to accelerate away or they were dead. “Jump, jump!”

Grimly in the midst of chaos, she took stock of statistics. Her fighters were still out there. They’d jump without their mother ship. They’d make it to the other
side even if the command ship didn’t. Maybe this wasn’t a victory, but it was a draw; her crew and ship were a total loss, the battle-cruiser was heavily damaged if not an outright hull loss, and her fighters would have survived.

The ship shuddered as it struggled to accelerate. She thought it was going to come apart. The speed crawled higher, but it wasn’t yet at the necessary velocity to jump to hyperspace and safety. The battle-cruiser’s fighters pursued them like a swarm of angry bees.

“Go,” she whispered to her ship, her hand in a fist, her stomach twisting, wasted, her uniform jacket damp with sweat.

Then…then finally…the stars stretched out into streamers, and they were gone. Breaths later, they dropped out of hyperspace in a non-hostile region.

It was utterly silent.

The lights came up on the bridge, and her instructor walked toward her. She couldn’t read his expression. “I’ll pack my things,” she told him. Now that she’d failed, she’d be assigned somewhere else.

“Captain Keyren.”

“Yes, sir.” She stood tall. Might as well look good while receiving the news that takes away your dreams, she reasoned.

“Congratulations,” he said, taking her hand. “You passed. That was a hell of a risk, but I saw no other way out.”

“I passed…”

“Yes.”

“I passed captain school…”

“Now all you have to do is wait for your ship to come out of dry dock.”

Cloud Shadow.
Her own ship. Her first command. She was going to be a captain.
Oh, my goddess.
“Thank you, sir. Thank you.” She turned to the shaken crew and saluted them. “And thank you.”

They were still too shocked to say anything as she walked out of the simulator. Beaming, she pushed into the busy corridors of the Ring, the headquarters of the former Coalition military and now the Triad Alliance. The frosty planet Sakka, home to the palace of the goddess-queen, glowed large and luminous outside the view ports.

“Well, sweet thang, you look like you’ve been through hells.”

She braced herself at the sound of Tango’s voice. Sleeves rolled up, the Earthling’s uniform was just shy of being too tight, but snug enough to show every muscle on his body, and then some. He caught up to her, laying his arm over her shoulders.

She lifted his arm and dropped it. He reacted with his “aw, baby” look that she’d long since learned to ignore. The Earthling Major Ruben Barrientes, aka Tango, was tall, blond and insufferably cocky. “I have been through hells, as a matter of fact,” she told him. “Hells and back.”

“I’ll bet. I heard you pulled the quad profile. Don’t feel bad. No one gets out of that one.”

“I did.”

“It’s what separates the men from the boys,” he continued, oblivious to her comment. Then his steps faltered. “Holy shit, Hadley. You did? You
passed?
”

She grinned.

“How?”

“Rammed it.”

“You rammed the ship…”

“Yes.”

“A freepin’ Drakken battle-cruiser? Are you crazy?”

“Guess I am.” If this is what crazy meant, she had to say she quite liked it.

“You owe me a drink in the bar later—and I don’t mean one of those fruity girly drinks, either. You’ve got no excuse. Your boyfriend’s still in the hospital.” He winked at her, then continued on down the corridor.

Once upon a time when they were both newly assigned to the
Unity,
Tango had both horrified and fascinated her. His flirtation had her emotions roiling. Handsome and so very foreign—Texan, to be precise—he almost managed to get her into bed. But there was a complication. A tall, dark and dangerous complication: Former Imperial Wraith Bolivarr, who she didn’t realize at first was the love of her life.

Why would she? Bolivarr was Drakken. She was Coalition. He wore tattoos of a wraith, a highly trained covert operative. Wraiths were masters of deception and of survival. Their own military feared them along with everyone else. She on the other hand was a country girl from the rural planet Talo. Her past was an open book, whereas his was a mystery. Bolivarr knew nothing of his life prior to being found beaten unconscious, naked, and left for dead in a back alley on a down-and-out mining world with nothing but wraith tattoos and a virulent hatred of the warlord’s regime giving hints to his past. He was rescued by Drakken pirates who ended up being assigned to the
Unity,
where he and Hadley had met in the final days of her assignment.

Bolivarr suffered from thought-suppression. It blocked secrets he wasn’t supposed to remember. The
people who had done it to him were probably dead. It made her sick to think of beautiful Bolivarr used as a tool for the warlord, much like the coalition’s now-banned REEF assassins. The difference was that REEFs had hardware installed; they were bioengineered. The Drakken didn’t have technology that advanced. Meds and sometimes surgery were used to alter the brain. The technique was cruder, the results often unpredictable. And, as in Bolivarr’s case, the reality was always cruel.

Bolivarr willingly suffered for the chance to recover his memories. The treatments were rigorous frustrating, and often painful. There was always the risk they’d cause more damage than what had already been done. He’d do it for the chance at a normal life, to be able to, once and for all, know who he was. He didn’t know how long healing would take. “If the meds don’t work, I might need surgery. And then perhaps therapy, depending.”

“I’ll wait for you,” she’d whispered. “I will.”

They continued to see each other between his hospital stays and her shipboard duties. Sometimes they had days on end to be in each other’s company, sharing her quarters or his, acting as if they were already married, which she hoped one day might happen. Other times, like now, they were apart for weeks, with Bolivarr stuck in the hospital after suffering seizures, and her attending captain’s school. While she worked at earning her captain’s stripes, Bolivarr endured experimental treatments of every kind in hopes of uncovering his past. So far, they’d uncovered nothing but nightmares.

Hadley hurried through the corridors to the medical wing. Her heart gave a happy little leap at the sight of Bolivarr, in bed, quietly intense as he sketched on a
datapad. His eternal calm was probably part of his training to be a wraith. She tried not to dwell on what else he was trained to do. A lock of black hair hung over his forehead. She itched to brush it away, and to feel his warm embrace.

For once, he didn’t sense her presence. He was too focused on his drawing. The stylus scratched over the surface, then he paused to ponder his work. He appeared confused, even troubled. Her heart went out to him. To not know who you were, or what secrets your mind kept hidden, was awful.

He needed a hug. Hells, she needed one after the morning she’d had. She bounced inside and landed on the edge of the bed. No medical assistants in sight. They’d have shooed her off. He glanced up, and she caught him midlaugh, kissing him full on the mouth.

Goddess, the man could kiss. Luckily, no one stormed the room to investigate. His pulse must be off the charts, she thought, because hers sure was.

“You just kissed the Triad’s newest ship captain,” she murmured against his lips.

He moved her back to look at her. He was so handsome when he was happy that it stole her breath away. “Congratulations, Captain Keyren.”

“That’s Hadley to you.”

“Hadley my
love,
you mean. Let’s go out tonight to celebrate your achievement. Dinner, even drinks.” They weren’t big drinkers and as a rule stayed out of the bar. It was more than she could say about the rest of the Drakken he’d come aboard with. System-wide there was a ban on sweef in effect, the homemade rotgut liquor inexplicably loved by so many Drakken military.
It was distilled from a type of evergreen tree—and tasted like it. The smell alone made Hadley’s eyes water. Worse, sweef was highly addictive and rotted teeth. She’d seen Tango consume a shot on a dare once. Fighter pilot bravado. Bolivarr had never touched the stuff. Um, that he remembered. Then Bolivarr’s face fell. “If I can convince them to let me out of here for a few hours.”

“I’d rather you get well. We’ll celebrate when you’re out of this hospital.”

“We’ll celebrate more than that.” His eyes turned dark as he lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to the underside of her wrist. “I want to kiss you everywhere,” he said. “And I mean everywhere.”

A med tech entered the room. They jumped apart. Hadley felt warm from her blushing face to her curling toes. They remained silent until the tech finished replacing some supplies and left. Then she melted into laughter.

She pointed to the datapad Bolivarr had turned upside down. “What are you working on?”

“An unfinished drawing of an unfinished thought. A half-remembered dream.” He turned the datapad so she could see it. Five circles formed an elongated pentagon. “This keeps showing up in my thoughts. I don’t know why.” He showed her some other sketches. “Runes. I think. I don’t know.” He groaned and dropped the pad. “I want to know, Hadley. I’m tired of waiting. Maybe this is the key. Maybe this will unlock everything.”

She ached with the frustration he must feel not being able to remember. “Every tiny piece remembered is one closer to finishing the puzzle.”

“I know.” Sadness flickered around his features despite his smile. Bolivarr was such a gentle spirit,
shy and sweet with those tragic eyes. It was exactly that aura of innocence that had won over her heart. She wanted to erase the melancholy that was always a part of him. Even when he was laughing it was there in the background, as if he missed something terribly. Or someone.

He’d been a wraith, a loner by profession, but maybe there were loved ones in Bolivarr’s life. Or a lover. Even a wife. She tried to dismiss her worries as silly, futile jealousy, but what if there was someone who meant so much to him that even with total memory loss, he grieved their loss? What if? It scared her. After all, she may very well have lost her heart to someone whose heart already belonged to someone else.

Together they studied the drawings, most of them of the same five small circles, and some with borders filled in creating pentagons of various sizes. “It looks like an obelisk,” he said, his focus back on his drawings.

“Without the border, those five marks remind me of one of the patterns my grandmother and her friends used to weave into their quilts and paint on pottery. Something that ancient warriors wore on their armor, I think. The guards of the birthplace of the goddesses, or some such thing.” Her home planet Talo was a rural world with a tradition of folklore and fairy tales as rich as its farmland. “Life was a bit slow, you know. At night there was nothing else to do but make quilts and make up stories.”