Heaven's Queen (16 page)

The blow sent Natalia flying off me, her gun and handset spinning off wildly into the dark. I’d barely registered the loss of her weight on my back before Rupert snatched me up. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I replied as he set me back on my feet.

Given my record for self-reporting injury, I wasn’t insulted when Rupert ran his hands over my ribs and back to check for himself, but other than a little bruising and my wounded pride, I really was fine. When he was satisfied, he let me go and jogged down the pipe toward Natalia’s unconscious body. “I’m sorry about how that went,” he said, leaning down to grab her. “I wanted to get her gun farther away from you before I attacked, but I ran out of time.”

“No worries,” I said. “That was good work. You were scary as hell. For a moment there, I thought you were really going to let her turn me in.”

The horrified look on Rupert’s face destroyed the last of my doubts. Just melted that tiny warning voice away like snow in the sun. In its place, trust sprang up so fast and strong it made my chest hurt.

“I hope you know I’d never do that,” he said, turning back to Natalia.

I grabbed his sleeve to stop him, pulling gently until he looked at me again. “I do,” I said firmly. “I believe you, Rupert.”

It was such a simple thing, a small confession, but the moment the deep, relieved breath left his lips, I knew it had meant as much to Rupert as it had to me. I wished I could have said more. I had the desperate urge to cement the new bond that had settled between us, to build and expand on it until nothing could ever tear it down again, but we were still in enemy territory, and there was work to do.

My thermal shirt and cargo pants were destroyed where Natalia had thrown me down on the pipe, the fabric stained a horrid greasy black all down the front and on the back where her boot had been. I stripped them off and tossed them in the trash around us, leaving myself yet again in only my tank top and underarmor leggings. My filthy socks followed as I got into my armor. Once I was suited up with my guns in place, I shoved my still relatively clean coat and boots into my armor case before locking it tight.

Carrying the Lady’s case would be awkward if we had to run and gun, but like hell was I leaving it again. Besides, now that I was back in my Lady Gray with her six-hundred-pound lift limit, I barely felt the weight. What I
did
feel was ready to get some revenge for being dropped on.

When I turned around to find Natalia, I saw that Rupert had already propped her up against the cluster of vertical pipes I’d used as cover earlier. When she was steady, he hopped down into the trash below us only to return a few seconds later with a long piece of steel rebar. Before I could ask what he needed it for, he bent the heavy metal rod like a rope, lashing the woman to the pipes before twisting the ends together to make sure she stayed that way.

“Will that actually hold her?” I asked as he stepped back.

“Not forever,” Rupert admitted. “But it should slow her down. Eyes gain strength with age, and she is much younger than I am. She’ll get free eventually, but we’ll be long gone by then.”

I walked over to join him, tilting my head to look down at Natalia’s face. It was relaxed with no sign of trauma, almost like she was just asleep. “What did you do to her? It’s like you pressed her off switch.”

“I basically did.”

At my disbelieving look, he reached up and tapped the part of his forehead just above where his eyebrows met. “The symbiont remakes our bodies when it’s implanted, but xith’cal and human physiology can never match up perfectly. One of the reasons the xith’cal’s heads are so armored is because the front of their brain is incredibly susceptible to swelling. Since we lack the protective ridges to prevent it when our scales are retracted, a nice, hard blow to the right place on the front of an unarmored symbiont’s head will send them into a comalike state for several hours.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked, staring down at Natalia’s unconscious body. I wasn’t a doctor, but brain swelling did not sound good.

Rupert shrugged. “The symbiont’s regenerative system repairs the damage eventually, but she will have a massive headache when she wakes. Even so, it’s preferable to bleeding her out, which is the only other way to disable a symbiont for long periods of time.”

“I don’t know,” I said, reaching for my gun. “Seems like it would be a lot simpler just to kill her.”

“It would,” Rupert agreed, bending down to check her pulse one last time. “But I won’t. Maria was just following orders, and she’s not a bad person. Or, at least, no worse than any of us.” He smiled. “She was kind to her daughters whenever she could be. I always liked that about her.”

As he fussed over her, I felt a strange pang of emotion I didn’t like. It was such an odd, uncomfortable feeling that it took me several moments to recognize it as a twinge of jealousy.

That realization made me like it even less. I’d barely come around to the idea of being in love; jealousy was
way
outside of my comfort zone. But when Rupert stood to walk away, I was the one he looked back for, and low as love had brought me, I was not above giving Natalia a superior look before I turned to follow him.

“We don’t have much time,” he said, jogging down the pipe, back the way we’d come. “She would have reported her intention before chasing us, and the others will come looking when she doesn’t check in.”

“How did they find us so quickly, anyway?” I said as I struggled to keep up. “Drones move faster through hyperspace than manned ships, but even if Anthony sent his report the second we took off, it couldn’t have gotten to Paradox in less than five hours.”

Rupert slowed down until we were running side by side. “Once the message got to Paradox, all they’d have to do was tell a daughter. What one daughter knows, they all know. After that, tracking down a rogue Paradoxian military ship would have been simple. Once they found our destination, all they had to do was scramble the closest teams.”

“You keep teams way out here?” I asked.

“The Eyes have a maximum two-hour response time to ninety-seven percent of colonized worlds,” Rupert said proudly. “Teams are evenly spread all across the jump gate network to ensure this. Otherwise, we’d show up too late to stop most phantom attacks.”

“Even for a pirate camp?”

Rupert’s face fell into a scowl. “All people, no matter their status, deserve protection from phantoms.”

I was a little surprised by how fiercely he said this, but I really shouldn’t have been. Considering what the phantoms had taken from him—his home, his family, his entire culture—I could understand exactly why Rupert would never want that to happen to anyone, pirates or not. Not that it helped us at the moment.

“Well, good on them for being on the ball,” I muttered. “But what do we do now?”

“What we were already planning to do,” Rupert said. “Get a ship and get off-planet.” He glanced at me. “Your armor is going to be a problem.”

“Not as big a problem as we’re going to have if you try to make me take it off,” I snapped.

He sighed, but I didn’t care. I was in full-on fight mode now, and there was no way in hell I was taking off my suit. Fortunately, Rupert didn’t push the issue.

“They’ve locked down the starport for sure,” he said, pulling out his handset.

“Even here?” I asked.

Rupert nodded. “Kessel might be run by pirates, but the Eyes can swing a lot of power when they want to. Even the head of a criminal haven wouldn’t dare deny someone with that kind of clearance, not if he wants to avoid bringing a battleship down on his head. The governor’s probably falling all over himself to make sure the Eye team has no reason to call for backup.”

“If that’s how it is, we’ll just have to find another way off-world,” I said, looking up at the shanty city above us. “That’s the good thing about smuggling holes, though. There’s always another way out.”

I already had a pretty good idea how we’d do it, too. We’d reached the ladder back up by this point, and Rupert was taking the opportunity to stop and check the system warnings on his handset to see what the Eyes had closed down. While he did that, I pulled up my suit’s records on Kessel and started rooting through my old mission notes.

Sure enough, a bit of searching turned up an old briefing about an illegal airfield that had been a possible escape route for a target we’d been hunting. We’d gotten him before he’d made it anywhere near the place, but I still had the location saved in my suit’s memory. When I told Rupert my plan, though, he didn’t seem enthused.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You’re a high-value target, and the Eyes like to work quietly. Even if we could convince a smuggler to sell us a hyperdrive-capable ship, they’d just sell us out to the Eyes the moment they were offered the right price.”

“Better sold out and in the air than waiting around down here,” I said. “It’ll be fine. We’ll just have to be sneaky.”

“With your armor standing out like a silver beacon?” Rupert said. “I don’t see that happening.”

I blew out an angry breath. Rupert made a good point, but again, no armor was not an option. I was trying to think of some way to reconcile the two when I looked down to see that the pipe’s thick grime had formed a crust on the bottom of my Lady’s lovely silver boots during the run over here. I leaned down to wipe the stuff off, cursing under my breath, but as I struggled futilely with the oily dirt, a brilliant idea came to me.

“Rupert,” I said, straightening up. “I think I know how we’re going to get out, but you’re going to have to help me.” Because there was absolutely no way I could do this on my own.

“Always,” Rupert said. “What did you have in mind?”

I told him, and Rupert’s face broke into a smile. “That just might work,” he said, pointing at the ground. “Get down, let’s try.”

I swallowed. Even though it had been my idea, I suddenly felt like a prisoner on her way to the gallows. Fortunately, Rupert was there to make me go through with it, glaring at me until I fell to my knees. But it wasn’t until he leaned over to coat his hand in pipe grime that I realized just how much this was going to
suck
.

And oh god, it did.

“Did you have to be so damn thorough?” I groaned.

“Devi, relax,” Rupert said, his voice infinitely patient as he finished cleaning his hands with a cloth bandage from our first-aid kit. “It will come off.”

I barely heard him. All I could think about was my suit. Rupert had smeared pipe grime over every inch of my Lady’s silver surface. I could already feel the oily dirt working its way into my joints, and even my helmet was caked in it. Rupert had used his claws to scuff my finish as well, leaving my priceless custom suit looking like a banged up, filthy piece of scavenged spacer gear. Which, admittedly, was the entire point, still. “My baby,” I whimpered, brushing my hands over what had been a peerless, mist silver paint job. “My beautiful girl.”

“Three hours in your case’s nano-repair and your Lady will be back to her usual pristine condition,” Rupert reminded me. “This is only temporary. Everything will be fine.”

“Don’t ‘fine’ me,” I snapped, pulling Sasha out to make sure he hadn’t gummed up her trigger. “I don’t see you rolling around in the dirt.”

That was a little harsh considering this whole thing had been my idea, but Rupert laughed it off. “That’s because there are, at most, five people on this entire planet who could recognize me, one of whom is currently tied to a pipe.” He grinned at me as he slung our bags over his shoulder. “Think of this as the price of fame.”

I rolled my eyes and holstered my gun. “Let’s just get to the airfield. The sooner we’re off this rock, the sooner I can get this gunk off my baby.”

Rupert stepped aside, motioning for me to lead the way.

Now that I had my suit, going up through the Pipes took significantly less time than going down. Between the maps I’d logged on my previous visits and my density sensors, I was able to find the quickest, safest path no problem. Unfortunately, this made me feel even worse about covering my Lady in grime. Such a good, wonderful suit did
not
deserve such treatment.

But the disguise seemed to be working. Every time I’d come to Kessel before, people had stared at my shining armor in fear and respect. Now, dirt made me invisible. I would have thought the Lady’s custom profile would have been a dead giveaway, dirt or no, but I always forget how little non-Paradoxians know about good armor. Other than a few sideways glances at my plasma shotgun, we made it all the way back up to the underground bazaar without a hitch.

“We should disguise your suit more often,” Rupert murmured as we wove our way through the crowded tables. “This is nice, almost like I’m undercover again.”

“What’s the point of having an amazing suit if no one notices?” I scoffed, checking my map. “Okay, unless they closed down in the last three years, our exit should be through there.” I nodded at the doors on the opposite side of the building. “Let’s go.”

We struck out across the market floor, passing booths full of guns, supplies, Republic Starfleet patrol maps, scan-proof cargo containers, and pirated corporate AIs. But as we walked through the panoply of everything a professional criminal could possibly need, I finally understood how Rupert had been able to get cash for his Warrant. You don’t exactly do a lot of sightseeing on a crash mission, so I’d never noticed it before, but most businesses down here were operating on paper money. It felt quaintly old-fashioned, like one of those historic villages they took you to on school trips, only with contraband instead of cheap souvenirs. If the stakes hadn’t been so high, it might have been fun to look around now that I wasn’t here as a raider. But we had no time, so Rupert and I pushed through the crowd as fast as we dared, making a beeline for the door I’d marked on my map.

I kept my eyes peeled for symbionts the whole way, though even I had to admit they’d be impossible to spot in the crowd. Fortunately, so were we. My plan was actually working better than I’d thought. Since there was cash everywhere, most of the shops employed armored guards, several of which had suits even dirtier than mine. There were also plenty of buyers with bodyguards walking beside them just like I was walking with Rupert. With so many pairs, we blended in seamlessly, especially now that the sun was going down and the resulting cold was driving everyone underground, filling the market to bursting.