No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three (14 page)

The last thing to be returned was Raena’s comm bracelet. Mykah wrapped it around his wrist, but found it too small to clasp. He ended up hooking it around a tool loop on his pants.

Raena didn’t carry a handheld and didn’t wear jewelry, so her life boiled down to weapons. Mykah hesitated to think how much junk he wore stuffed into the pockets of his cargo pants or hidden inside his jacket. When he wore a jacket, that is. At the moment, his jacket was being towed across the galaxy aboard the
Veracity
.

Somehow Raena survived with only the clothes on her back and what she could tuck into her boot-tops or carry around in her head. It made him sad.

He packed everything of Raena’s into a single disposable shopping bag. When he returned to the street, Coni handed him the Stinger Vezali had bought him.

“Haoun called,” Coni reported. “He’s found a Na’ash passenger ship bound for Kai.”

“When do they leave?”

“As soon as we get there.”

“Let’s go.”

*   *   *

When the
Khangho
diverted from the flight plan, the comm screeched at them. Raena switched it off again.

“You don’t know nothing about Kai, do you?” Bihn accused. “The whole planet is desert, except for Kai City. It’s a rock, nothing but abandoned Templar ghost towns. Soon as you contact your ship, Planetary Security will know exactly where you are.”

“Then I better do it now.” She signed into her online scrambler. Once the computer had connected, she keyed in the
Veracity
’s comm code and said simply, “I’m on Kai. Come and get me.”

No one answered right away, but she would have been startled if they’d been on the ship, waiting for her call. They were probably still on Lautan, trying to figure out where she’d gone.

While she was at it, she put in Ariel’s code, too. “Hey, I’m never going to forgive you for dragging me to Kai.”

Then she signed out of the scrambler and shut the comm off again.

“Somebody’s following us,” Bihn said.

“Planetary Security?”

Bihn gave her a look that expressed his contempt for Kai’s Planetary Security.

“You think it’s the guys in gray?”

“Watch Chale’s head,” he ordered, before banking the ship sharply starboard. Raena clutched the crash webbing and hoped she wouldn’t be thrown to the deck.

“What’d you do to piss these guys off?” Bihn demanded.

“I honestly do not know. They attacked Mellix on Capital City and I kneecapped five or six of them.”

“Should’ve killed them,” he grumbled.

“You don’t think that would have pissed the rest off more?”

He didn’t answer and she didn’t push it. She’d seen people flying for their lives before.

The comm screeched again. Raena leaned forward to slap the channel open. “We are under attack,” she said through gritted teeth. “If you want your prisoner, you’re going to have to come to our aid.”

Bihn went into a steep climb that pressed Raena away from the comm.

“You have escape pods?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“All right, I’m outta here. They should let you go after that, right?”

“Who knows?” he answered. “At least it will split their fire.”

“Good enough.” She pitched the plasma rifle down the hall. Since they were climbing almost straight up, Raena wasn’t sure where it would end up, other than a long way from Bihn’s reach. She struggled up out of Chale’s lap to the arm of the copilot’s chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and jumped, plummeting down through the ship, bare feet first, knees slightly bent to absorb the shock of whatever was going to stop her fall.

*   *   *

The Na’ash ship was a large yacht apparently hauled out of mothballs to make the pleasure planet circuit. Although the captain and her crew were Na’ash like Haoun, the twelve passengers ran a gamut.

Mykah sent Coni off to their cabin with Raena’s shopping bags, which were practically all the luggage they had. He hoped that when they saw the prices on Kai, they wouldn’t wish they’d done more shopping on Lautan. He and Coni, at least, would need clothes for attending the trial. Vezali never wore much, because she didn’t like anything to impede her tentacles, and Haoun wasn’t picky about what he wore, as long as it was baggy enough.

In the meantime, Mykah consulted the schedule the captain had posted for the guests: welcome drinks, dinner, nightcaps, first breakfast, late breakfast, midday meal. At least the trip would go quickly, with all the eating. Mykah looked forward to getting back on a regular meal schedule.

*   *   *

Raena missed her grab at her cache of weapons as she rocketed past the main hatch. Bihn twisted the ship into a corkscrew that knocked her into every surface in the hallway. She would have thought he was punishing her on purpose, but one of the attackers’ shots landed. The lights went out and the whole ship juddered, before he got it back under control.

“Are you to the pods yet?” he yelled back to her.

“Starboard or port?”

“Port.”

She caught a railing and hung on, winding her legs around it, too. She could see the airlock from here. “Give me a hard left.”

He cranked the ship hard to port and she let go her hold. She caught the handle outside the airlock.

“I’m back to the pods,” she called.

“Get the hell off my ship,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir.” She wished she’d been able to take any of his weapons. She wished the plasma rifle hadn’t vanished. She wished she had food or water or any way to survive in the desert. She wished she hadn’t been dragged back to Kai.

Climbing hand over hand, she got to the first of the escape pods and pounded its escape sequence in. Then she climbed over to the next and sent it to follow the first, and so on, until she crawled into the next to last pod. She’d leave him one, in case he and his crew needed to bail out, too. “I’m in!” she shouted at Bihn.

The pod’s hatch slammed shut, barely missing her head. Teeth clenched in a grin, Raena flung herself onto the bench and pulled the crash web over her as the jets engaged.

Glad to be rid of her, it seemed.

*   *   *

As soon as she noticed the message light flashing, Ariel listened to the snippet from Raena: “I’m never going to forgive you for dragging me to Kai.” Ariel heard the amused fatalism behind Raena’s words. The old joke harkened back to their adolescence together. Hungover, Ariel would groan it in the morning, after Raena had gotten them home safely from yet another ill-considered adventure that Ariel had proposed the night before.

Ariel tried to respond to the message, but got back “unrecognized communications code” in answer. Raena had used a scrambler to call. Not unexpected.

Ariel’s next call was to Tomur Corvas, the Varan attorney who had been her friend since he and his son had adopted one of her orphans. Corvas would know how to defend Raena.

*   *   *

The
Khangho
’s escape pod plummeted straight down. The pod was really bare bones, just the crash web and a small locker beneath the bench. It didn’t have any kind of viewport or controls, not even a comm console. Raena hoped the pod had enough shielding that when she slammed into the ground, it wouldn’t disintegrate on impact.

Some days it just wasn’t worth having walked out of her tomb.

She hoped that the attackers, whoever they were, weren’t about to blow her out of the sky. If the boys in gray were pursuing her, either they wanted to capture her or witness her death, or else they would have simply blown up the truck back on Lautan. She hoped she could escape them a third time.

While she was dropping, Raena twisted around to try the bounty hunters’ keys against the locker. One of them popped the door. Inside she found a rucksack jammed with water pouches, nutrition bars, and other survival supplies. It was the first thing that had gone right in days.

She bit the tab off a pouch of water and sucked its contents down, then a second, then a third. That ought to lighten the pack a little.

She pawed around inside the pack, looking for any kind of weapon. The best she found was a multi-blade survival tool that could be used as a knife. Better than nothing.

The escape pod jerked suddenly upward. After that, its descent became much more gradual. It must have some kind of parachute. That ought to alert her pursuers right where she was landing.

Raena wished she knew how much farther she had to fall. She unclipped herself from the crash web and crouched over to the hatch. The release was a simple red handle. Would it blow the door open explosively and should she save it as her best weapon? Or would it merely glide the door open and politely invite her pursuers in?

She decided it didn’t matter. She was in a mood to run. She pulled the rucksack onto her back and tried to psych herself up to be ready to jump as soon as the ground came close enough.

*   *   *

After they finished dinner on the Na’ash yacht, the
Veracity
’s crew retreated to their suite of rooms to watch the news. There had been another gang of humans arrested with a packet of Messiah, this time on Shtrell.

The news showed the footage of Raena with the Outrider head again.

“It would be awesome to see the androids knit themselves back together,” Vezali said, as she opened a bottle of xyshin with a pair of tentacles. “I didn’t know the Templars had tech that could do that.”

“It was terrifying to watch at the time.” Mykah held out his glass to her. “Raena would take the androids apart, but they’d just reassemble themselves when her back was turned.”

“And they looked completely human?” Vezali poured for Coni and Haoun and passed their glasses to them.

“Yeah,” Mykah said. “They could breathe, sweat, bleed. Absolutely eerie.”

“I don’t understand why tech like that would be wasted to deal in drugs. That’s so specific,” Coni said, “so trivial.”

“I don’t get why, if you had tech like that, you would only make androids that looked like Outrider,” Haoun said. “Why wouldn’t you also make robots that looked like any other species in the galaxy? Is it more possible that the Templar androids only mimic humans—or that there are other camouflaged robots at work in the galaxy even now, doing who knows what?”

That question put an end to the conversation.

Mykah changed the subject. “Are you sure Raena’s identity has held up?”

Coni hugged him. “Absolutely certain. It was tested when we went to Capital City. She will be fine.”

“I hope so. In so many ways, she’s just a babe in the galaxy,” he said. “It’s changed so much and she’s spent so little time in it . . .”

“You’re tired,” Coni diagnosed. “Have you seen Raena? She always lands on her feet.”

CHAPTER 7

R
aena pulled the red lever that blew the door off the escape pod. The wind outside tugged at her, but she kept a good hold on the pod as she looked out. The ground was still a surprisingly long way down. It seemed to be mostly rock, broken by rivers of sand. She wondered if this desert had once been the bed of
an ancient ocean. How long had the Templars lived on Kai? Had they known the planet when this desert had been lush as the jungles on Lautan?

Now that she could see out of the pod, she discovered it was almost sunset on Kai. Perfect. Darkness would give her more shadows in which to hide.

She was still up high enough that there would be plenty of time to put the pod’s homing beacon out of commission before she jumped. Raena hauled herself up onto the roof of the escape pod, but the beacon wasn’t up there. Hm. Maybe she couldn’t smash it until she landed.

The parachute snapped and fluttered above her head, yellow against the crimson sky. She could see where the other pods had landed behind her, their parachutes bright as flowers against the dark brown ground. Turbo skiffs had already stopped to check out two of the other pods. A third skiff still chased the
Khangho
, barely a glint at the horizon’s edge, heading back into space. Excellent. One less thing to worry about.

Raena crouched at the base of the cables connecting the parachute to the pod. She wished she had some gloves. Then she opened up her survival tool and used the blade to saw at one of the three cables. It nearly took her eye out as it twanged past her head.

Gonna have to be more careful, she told herself, or she’d had that scar back again. Maybe this time it really would cost her an eye.

She pulled the spool of survival cord from inside the rucksack and wove herself a sling between the remaining two cables. Once she had herself tied in, she bent and used another tool to pry the cable anchor loose from the top of the escape pod.

The parachute yanked her suddenly upward as the escape pod plunged away beneath her. Raena concentrated on relaxing, letting the wind bear her away. The pursuers would be after her soon enough. They’d be moving faster than windspeed or gravity.

The escape pod clanged down the rock behind her. Only then did she realize how quiet the desert was. The only other sound she heard was the rush of wind in her ears.

Ahead of her rose a mountainous stone mesa cut by a maze of narrow fissures. Raena steered the parachute by shifting her weight. She aimed herself toward the uplands. There might be wildlife there, but she would have more cover than on the bare rock below.