Shades of Treason (23 page)

“You volunteering to help me out?” She peered over her shoulder.

Kal smiled and let his gaze rove over her. “Anytime, sweetheart.”

“Is the route clear?” Rykus’s abrupt question cut through the air.

“The main force is east of us,” Kalver said, his drawl shifting into a rigid staccato. “But we’ll need to stay invisible for a while.”

Rykus looked at her. “That means quiet and stealthy. Do you think you can handle that?”

“I can handle it.” She choked back the
sir
that wanted to claw its way to her lips. Rykus’s movements, his tone, and the way he loomed made the air seem thick. He was doing it on purpose, putting distance between them. She didn’t regret sleeping with him, but… did he regret sleeping with her?

Well, that would certainly be a new experience
, she thought with a soft, self-deprecating laugh.

The sound drew Kalver’s attention. She shrugged at his raised eyebrow, but when he turned away, she was almost certain she caught a faint smile behind his beard. He was used to her laughs and not-quite-appropriate behavior. She’d gotten him and the other anomalies loaded with extra physical training for it dozens of times back on Caruth.

She stretched sore muscles and let Kalver take the lead. He set a slow, steady pace for the first hour. Several times they stopped. They kept immobile in the dark. On two of those occasions, Coalition soldiers stalked past them. One had come close enough for Ash to reach out and touch. It had taken all her concentration to remain stationary and concealed in her camouflage of shadows and leaves. Her limbs felt like they were filled with lightning, and her hand had itched to confiscate the soldier’s weapon. Everyone but her was armed.

After the last encounter, Kalver had increased their pace. The forest thickened, but she still caught a glance of the relief cruisers that passed overhead every twenty minutes. Some of them came from the outpost they were headed for. If they were lucky, the stress of the bombardment and its aftermath would make the soldiers at the outpost tired and careless. She could hop on one of the cruisers and ride it into Ephron City, where she could disappear until she decided the best way to track down Jevan. He had a copy of the Sariceans’ files. She’d kill him, decrypt the stolen data, then decide who else she needed to destroy in order to preserve and protect the Coalition.

Her hands, no longer shaking since she’d injected the booster, clenched at her sides.

Soon
.

Soon Jevan and everyone associated with him would pay for what they’d done.

Kalver slowed until he maintained pace beside her. “You doing all right?”

She forced her fists to relax. “I’d be better if you’d let me borrow that rifle.”

“Not a chance.” His quiet drawl didn’t disguise the threat in his voice.

Ash smiled. Kal had always been uptight about his weapons.

Kal eyed her. “You really can’t talk about anything?”

She kept her gaze straight ahead and said nothing.

He chuckled. “The shit you get yourself into…”

She wished she could say this wasn’t her fault, but it was. She’d let Jevan snake his way into her life. She hadn’t loved him, but she’d liked him. He’d claimed to be like her, a street kid who’d benefited from the Coalition’s humanitarian programs. He’d said he went into politics to help the weak, and he’d supported her not-quite-legal efforts to protect the aid workers on Glory. That’s why she’d always made herself available when he’d called and wanted to grab a drink, but she should have seen through the façade, known he had other motives. He’d always asked about her schedule, her missions. She’d never told him anything, but he’d learned the information anyway, and that’s how he’d been able to intercept her team and…

“How long have you been on this rock?” she asked, using the words to loosen up a throat that suddenly felt raw.

“Six months,” Kalver said. “I’m with the QRF. Gamma Team.”

Ash would have whistled if the sound wouldn’t have carried. Quick Reaction Force: Gamma Team was legendary. Any time the impossible was pulled off, it was attributed to the Gammas whether they were involved or not. She’d heard they’d conducted urban warfare on Daden, simultaneously boarded three pirate vessels outside the Yolan System, and rescued high-level hostages in the Aberdonian Revolt. That last op had been a work of art. Zero casualties.

“Does the team know what you are?” she asked.

“Just my lead. He’s smart enough to keep it to himself. Too many hotheads would want to test me.”

Ash nodded. Most anomalies kept their identities to themselves, especially if they came into contact with members of the other special forces. The QRF teams were made up of highly trained, physically fit soldiers who thought they were tougher than everyone else in the KU, and they had a habit of trying to prove it. Problem was they weren’t tougher than anomalies. One day they would realize it and stop picking fights.

Kalver stopped.

“Outpost is ahead,” he said when Rykus caught up with them. “It’s a storage depot and training grounds. Most personnel will be reassigned to search-and-rescue ops, so it won’t be well guarded. I can get past the checkpoint with my ID, but you two will raise alarms.”

“Can you get us over the wall?” Rykus asked.

“Yes, sir.” Kalver unstrapped his comm-cuff and handed it to him. “Once I’m inside, I’ll recon the area, find an invisi-line, then send you the location where I drop it.”

“Good,” Rykus said. “We’ll circle to the north.”

Silently, Kalver proceeded ahead.

She and Rykus started their trek around the outpost. It took over an hour, an hour in which the insects of the forest decided it was time to eat. They buzzed around Ash’s head, landed on exposed skin, and flew into her nose and mouth. They hadn’t been this bad before. Either she’d been too exhausted to notice or the smoke from the forest fires had kept them away.

Ash kept her mouth shut and trudged on. Rykus took them on a path well away from the outpost for most of the journey, and he checked his borrowed comm-cuff from time to time. Kalver had decrypted the pursuit force’s chatter. They were searching for them along a route to Ephron City, not to the outpost. A lucky break.

After a while they veered closer to the outpost. Ash caught glimpses of a black, towering wall.

“I thought this wasn’t a sensitive complex,” Ash said, keeping her voice low. “Why the massive wall?”

Rykus kept his gaze on their path. At first, she thought he might not have heard her question, but then she saw deliberateness in his movements, in the way he didn’t glance her way, that told her he had.

She stopped walking. He took another few steps, then stopped too. He was still close enough for her to hear him sigh.

“The stone’s imported from Mikassia,” he said quietly. “The indigenous vegetation doesn’t like it, so it’s effective in holding back the forest. A wall surrounds Ephron City too.”

“How long were you stationed here?”

“Almost two standard years. The Corps had me data-punching before I transferred to Caruth.”

She looked at him, at his grim expression, as he stared down at the forest floor. Then she focused on his reconstructed shoulder. “While you were recovering.”

“Yeah.”

“I remember your father visiting you here,” she said. “The media wouldn’t stop talking about it. They thought Javery would finally join the Coalition.”

“Not a chance of that.” He wrapped a hand around a thick green plant by his foot and pulled it up.

“Why did you join?” Ash asked, watching him break the plant’s stem. “To piss him off?”

He snorted. “No. I joined because I believed in the collective safety the Coalition offers. Everything else I did to piss him off.”

“Everything else?”

“My father is the grand general of Javery’s armed forces.” He peeled the outer layer of the stem off. “Every success I had, every accolade, promotion, and medal… It was all a personal affront to him. I could have been commanding Javerian soldiers. I could have been saving Javerian lives. It infuriated him every time I made the news.”

“So that’s why you’re always perfect.”

“Perfect.” He let out a bitter laugh. “If I was perfect, I wouldn’t have…” He stopped, looked at her. His mouth opened like he was about to finish the sentence. Then he closed it and swallowed.

“Here.” He handed the stripped plant to her. “Rub this on your exposed skin. It will help with the mosquitoes.”

The inside of the stem was wet with a gel-like substance that smelled like acid. It stung her scrapes and cuts, but it dried quickly, and it did seem to keep some of the insects away.

“What’s this called?” she asked, noting the plant’s smell and the shape and color of its leaves. She had thousands of herbs, roots, weeds, and other vegetation memorized—botanists taught anomalies the most common and useful plants in the KU—but Ash had never come across this one in her studies.

“We called it trip-weed,” he said. “It has a hallucinogenic effect.”

She looked up.

“When you ingest it,” he added. “Not when you spread it on your skin.”

She let a smile curve her lips. “Did you ever ingest it?”

He gave her a look that said she should know the answer to that question.

“Of course you didn’t,” she said with a quiet laugh.

A deep, buzzing sound reached her ears. She almost dismissed it as another flying insect, but then Rykus looked down at the comm-cuff on his wrist.

“Kalver’s dropped the line,” he said. “Shouldn’t take us more than ten minutes to get there. Ready?”

At her nod, he led the way again.

They wouldn’t have found the rope if Kal hadn’t sent the location. Ash had spotted invisi-lines before, but those few times had been in situations where she’d been staking out an area for hours and either the wind had blown the rope or something else had moved it, making its digital fibers blur when they reset their translucent colors. The wind wasn’t blowing tonight though, and even with the marker on Rykus’s cuff, they had to drag their hands across the wall to find it.

Rykus motioned her to go up first. Climbing the rope was easier than climbing out of the DFC. Her broken pinky still hurt, but it was a bearable pain, and the booster in her system gave her extra strength. She made it to the top quickly, flattened herself on the wall while she waited for Rykus, then, after throwing the rope down on the other side, she rappelled down.

Kalver waited for them at the bottom.

“Outpost is virtually abandoned,” he whispered. “Minimal security and personnel are rotating in eight-hour shifts to load up relief cruisers. There’s one in the landing zone now. Emergency supplies are almost depleted, so it could be the last one for a while.”

Rykus looked at her. He didn’t know her plan, and she couldn’t tell him. He was following her on faith alone.

The heat that flared through her stomach was unexpected and strong. She bit the inside of her cheek, trying to ignore the sensation.

“Let’s move.” She had to keep her thoughts focused on her goal.

Avoiding the personnel left behind was easy. The outpost was running on backup power, which meant the grounds weren’t lit up as brightly as they’d otherwise be, and few guards were on patrol. Ash followed Kal and Rykus through the shadows and made it quickly to the landing zone on the east side of the complex.

Two soldiers stood outside the relief cruiser. Its side bay door was dropped open, allowing it to easily be loaded. She, Kalver, and Rykus headed to the crew-access door at the front of the cruiser. The two men stood guard while she hacked into the security pad.

Ten seconds, then the door clicked unlocked.

It should have taken her twice that amount of time to break in.

Taking her hands off the security pad, she stepped back, then slowly turned her head.

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE ONLY WARNING Rykus had was the sudden tension that shot through Ash. Then Kalver tossed a pistol to her, spun, and took aim at the soldiers encircling them.

“
Hold your fire.
” The command left Rykus’s lips without a conscious thought. All he saw was the bloodbath that would occur if the two anomalies pulled their triggers.

“Put the weapons down,” a soldier ordered. “Put them down!”

The words were taken up by other men, coming from other directions. All directions.

“Disarm,” Ash yelled at the same time Kalver shouted, “Drop them!”

Anomalies were trained to lay their lives down for the mission. They’d go down fighting, taking out the opposition until they breathed their last breaths.

Rykus couldn’t let that happen.

He put his hands in the air, well away from his holstered gun. “Ash—”

“Everyone hold your fire.” Admiral Bayis’s booming voice came from the now-open door of the relief cruiser. He stepped to the threshold, a sidearm in his hand. “Commander, they have sixty seconds to lay down their weapons.”

Bayis had personally come dirtside to recapture Ash. The significance of that wasn’t lost on Rykus. Neither was the significance that these soldiers hadn’t killed them on sight. They weren’t Brandt’s men.

“Ash, Kalver,” he said, his heart hammering against his chest. “These are Coalition men. Friendlies. No blood needs to be shed here.”

Kalver’s breathing was deep and regulated. Ash’s was shallow and rapid. Her hand clenched on the grip of her pistol.

“Put the weapons down,” Rykus said.

Kalver’s jaw clenched, but he removed his finger from the trigger and laid the rifle on the ground.

“Ash.” Rykus wanted to step between her and the soldiers who threatened her life, but he feared any movement would set off a massacre.

“Did you walk me into this ambush?” Ash demanded.

The accusation sliced through him. “No. I swear I didn’t know.”

“You were monitoring communications on the cuff.”

“And Kalver was monitoring them on his voice-link,” Rykus said. “All chatter indicated the pursuit force was heading toward Ephron City.”

“Then how did they know we’d be here?”

“We slipped a slave code into your comm-cuff when you contacted me.” Bayis’s voice was serene compared to Ash’s.

“You can’t do that in a two-minute window,” she said.