Honor Lost Page 18

  But I knew we couldn’t risk Ophelia’s life on Derry’s chem-driven whims. He didn’t see her as a person, just a disposable thing. He’d kill her for kicks, knowing it might hurt me.

  I slowly lowered my gun to the deck, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw C-X doing the same thing with her right hand. Her left, concealed from the angle at which she stood, was moving. Unclipping a light grenade. I eased the net device out of my pocket the same way as I made a show of disarming.

  Derry didn’t see it coming. He was starting to smile, that quirk of victory curling right at the corners, when C-X slid the light grenade across the floor, ducked away, and I threw my arm over my eyes. Even with that, I saw right through my arm, saw the bones illuminated by the crippling glow, and was half-blinded. Only half, though. Derry, caught off guard, reeled and went to his knees. He lost the gun and remote control as he clutched at his eyes, and I followed up by throwing the net at him. It spread out as it sailed toward him, and the intelligent circuits in the thing sought him out, wrapped around him in an unbreakable embrace, and tightened to package him up.

  Derry was screaming. Words, but I wasn’t listening; I knew the tune well enough without the lyrics. He’d always had an explosive temper hidden behind a slick wall of charm. I still had fuzzy vision, but I walked over to where he lay helpless and scooped up the remote and weapon. Chao-Xing joined me.

  “Noisy,” she said.

  I could feel the cool water of Ophelia’s relief pouring over me, and it soothed a fire that I wasn’t even aware had been burning inside me. She wasn’t pleading for Derry, but neither did she hate him, precisely. Rather like she’d never expected anything else from him. That was sadder, maybe, than any rage would have been. I walked over and reached through the fibers of the net to take away his toys.

  “Stand aside,” said Jury’s smooth, calm voice, and I blinked and turned around. “Justice will be done.”

  “Jury—”

  “Justice will be done, Zara Cole.”

  I shrugged and stepped aside. Chao-Xing took a couple of paces back.

  And Jury said, “Derry McKinnon, your sentence for multiple capital offenses is death. Do you have anything to say?”

  Derry said some shit, a torrent of abuse, of pleading, of defiance, but it boiled down to one thing: he took orders from Torian Deluca, and Deluca was going to have something to say about it if anything happened to him.

  Jury let him wind down. When he finally took a breath, the bot said, “Torian Deluca will be judged according to his own crimes.”

  Interlude: Nadim

  I swim in the cold, and I feel alone for the first time, knowing that Zara has gone to meet someone she once loved and now loathes. Someone who wants to kill her and sent a robot to do it for him.

  I try not to think of Zara, earthbound, dirty, hungry, believing in this Derry of hers; I try not to remember the bittersweet of her memories of him. It is not that I believe she will turn to him; I know she will not.

  It’s that I fear she will not forgive herself for what she has to do.

  Zara will survive this. I have no doubt of that. But being lost in the silence, so far away I cannot feel her or know her thoughts . . . that is hard. I can only wait with Bea, both of us consumed with gentle worry and hard doubts.

  Zara will come back to us.

  She must come back.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Lost Lives

  THE LAW KILLED Derry. Jury did it fast, with a single shot to the head, a burn that came and went so fast I almost missed it. Derry couldn’t have felt a thing; his body went limp, his eyes empty of soul, his pretty mouth relaxed.

  Dead in the net, he almost looked his age. Eighteen, I figured. Barely enough life to know what he was losing.

  It hurt. Not because I loved him or anything; I didn’t, even at this last moment. I just pitied him. I tried to remember that chem had its hooks in him and he couldn’t control his actions with that demon on his shoulder, but that was a hard thing to keep in mind when treachery left you bleeding.

  I remembered to breathe, finally, and blinked away the last of the light bomb. Kneeling, I unlocked the net; ironically, because this was his ship, his weapons, the net had been keyed to his thumbprint. If he’d had the presence of mind to use that, he might have lived. Probably not, but in a very real way, the chem had killed him as much as Jury’s sentence.

  I used his thumbprint to open the strands; it unwrapped itself and whipped the net back into the storage compartment. I put it aside and turned Derry over on his back. Crossed his hands on his chest.

  Chao-Xing watched me without comment, then said, “Should we put him out the airlock?” Burial in space was common for Honors. It was how I’d want to go. But I shook my head.

  “Jury should take him back,” I said. “He doesn’t belong here. And besides—” I turned to look at Jury. “You wanted to have a talk with Deluca, right?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Ophelia and I will return to Earth.” Then Jury hesitated for a second. “Do you study haiku, Honor Cole?”

  “Not a bit,” I said.

  “Would you like me to make one for Derry McKinnon? EMITU has taught me how.”

  I nodded.

  “Darkness; eventide / A quiet and welcome death / in these perfect stars,” said the bot who had killed him.

  I sucked in a hard breath.

  Good-bye, Derry.

  I stood up and said, “C-X, we should figure out how to uninstall the shit Derry put into Ophelia,” I said. “Make sure she’s free before we leave her. Then she can decide to do whatever she chooses.”

  “What about the other one? Quell, and Jon Anderson?”

  “If they come at us, then . . . Ophelia? Will you intercede for us? Explain all this to Quell?”

  Two bright flashes of light nearly blinded me again. I guess that meant yes, with emphasis.

  Chao-Xing took a deep breath, held it, and let it out. “Let’s get to work.”

  It took the better part of three hours to dismantle the two devices we found; one had been embedded in one of Ophelia’s nerve clusters, and the other near an organ that looked frighteningly familiar. Heart or lungs or something equivalent; I’d seen it in Nadim up close and personal before, and here I was, locked into a suit and swimming again through what passed as blood for the Leviathan. It was difficult, exacting work to be sure I didn’t damage any of the nerves they’d wired the shock device into, but I’d always been better at this than most. The Earth sons of bitches had probably done a lot more damage installing it, but it looked like that had mostly healed.

  Time to go. Suncross and company were waiting behind a spinning planetoid. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” I said to Jury.

  “That gives me much latitude, Zara Cole.”

  Was that a joke? Maybe. I smiled like it was. “Take care of Ophelia. She can’t feel your presence like she would an organic crew, so you’ll need to talk to her a lot.”

  A flutter of light confirmed my words, and Jury said, “Understood. I will communicate effectively. She will not feel alone.”

  Chao-Xing nudged me. “We’ve got to go. I don’t think Honor Anderson was in on the murder mission, so he really does want to arrest you. He has no idea the orders will be rescinded as soon as Jury takes care of Deluca.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, we don’t want to fight Quell again. Better to just play keep-away. Take care of it, you two.”

  “Affirmative,” Jury said, and Ophelia flashed her agreement as well.

  I called Suncross to request our ride. After suiting up, we borrowed a booster pack, and I held on to Chao-Xing as she propelled us away from Ophelia to drift, waiting for pickup. Once we were safe in the lizard ship docking bay, she said, “I have to ask. What was your plan?”

  “What makes you think I didn’t just give myself up and trust to luck?”

  Chao-Xing gave me a look that said she knew me better than that. “Really?”

  “Nah, you’re right. I thought if I preten
ded to surrender myself to justice that Jury might turn on Derry and decide he was the one who deserved punishment. There was a chance that he’d go the other way and drag me all the way to Deluca.” In all candor, I’d bet hard that Jury’s free thinking would come down in my favor.

  “Why did you take the risk?” she asked quietly.

  “It was the only way to be sure that the conflict would stop with me. I didn’t want Nadim getting hurt because of me. Typhon either, really. And I felt bad about hurting Quell when we fought.”

  Chao-Xing’s expression shifted slightly, though I couldn’t read her reaction. “You’ve changed, Zara. It was a gamble, but you risked yourself to save everyone else. I admit, I didn’t see it when you were first chosen, but . . . you are Honors material all the way.”

  I smirked. “We gonna hug now?”

  “Don’t even try.”

  Suncross held a celebration for our safe return, which was nice but also involved more alcohol, and this time I let myself have some. After two I quit, and even then, the drinks laid me out for most of the return trip. Yeah. Lizards were hardy. While I was flat, Suncross and Chao-Xing—who’d sipped, not chugged—talked strategies. Suncross also told her that he’d written some epic ballads about us. That was nice. I didn’t want to hear them, but I was polite listening to the short one. It took up a lot of travel time.

  I admit it: when I finally felt the outer whispers of Nadim’s warm presence, I gasped and had to fight the sting of grateful tears at the corners of my eyes.

  Don’t ever do that again, he whispered like a distant dream.

  No, I told him. I won’t. I never wanted to be that far from him again.

  Suncross said, “We approach your ship, Zhang Chao-Xing.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “You can say our names? Like, the right way?”

  “Yes, of course, Zeerakull.”

  “Then—”

  Suncross and the whole crew hissed in amusement. “Humans. You expected no more, correct? Zara Cole, we tell our stories across nine galaxies. If we could not pronounce as simple a sound as your names, we would be out of business. We just liked the way the translator mishandled it.” To my utter shock, he switched to flawless English. Sounded like pure middle North America. Detroit, maybe. “We thought it would be funny. It is funny. But if it offends, we will stop.”

  I opened my mouth, closed it, then finally said, “I kind of like Zeerakull too. And since when do you speak—”

  Three out of four hands waved that away. I was starting to figure out that his level of investment in what he said was indicated by the gestures. “English? It’s a nice language. I studied a few days. You have some good literature.” He switched to Chinese, and thank God my translator picked it up. “However, there are other languages of your planet that are much more lyrical and interesting.”

  “How many do you speak?” C-X asked him, raising an eyebrow.

  “Unsure,” he said. “The twenty most spoken at present time?”

  “In a few days,” I said.

  “Leisure time,” Suncross said. “There is value to learning the ways of allies, Zeerakull.”

  I felt . . . well, ashamed was a good word for it. I hadn’t studied the Bruqvisz cultures, or their language, or even what those damn gestures meant when he made them. I had work to do.

  I bowed my head in what I hoped he’d take for respect; I meant it that way. He returned it, ruff rising and falling in a special gesture I was determined to look up once I got home. “Thank you, Suncross,” I said. “You’re a true friend.”

  “Ally,” he corrected. “Friends you don’t pay.”

  “Earth ways,” I told him. “You’re my friend. And I can pay you if I want.”

  He laughed. It showed a lot of sharp teeth, involved some hissing, and a year ago it would have made me reach for my gun. But now I just grinned back and held out a fist.

  He bumped it.

  “Good talk,” I said. “We’ll be heading home now. Thanks for the ride.”

  “Always pleasant to have guests. Especially when they don’t break things.”

  “Well, we’ve got that in common too, how about that? Humans are the same.”

  I thanked all his crew in turn, which seemed to please Suncross; Chao-Xing made the rounds with me. Afterward, she said, “I underestimated them.”

  “Well, to be fair, I think they wanted us to underestimate them. Part of the game.”

  She nodded slowly. “I didn’t think we’d make it back, to be honest. Odds were not in our favor.”

  “Never are, are they? Doesn’t it make you feel good when we win, though?”

  She gave me a weird look. “You should see someone about that adrenaline problem.”

  Yusuf picked us up from our free-floating, and Marko was there to pull us in, both wearing formal black uniforms; there were smiles and welcomes, and though C-X wasn’t a hugger, she got nods and handshakes in the crowded Hopper. When we docked, Typhon’s presence descended, greeting me first. Not warm like Nadim’s; he was vast, a being who could intimidate half a galaxy just by coming into it. But welcoming, in a chilly sort of way. It wasn’t what I’d think of as a real bond, but he was working on it. And so were his human crew. Having Yusuf in the mix had helped, I thought, the way Starcurrent had helped us.

  The others scattered from the docking bay as I paused to acknowledge the Elder.

  Typhon also spoke to me this time, directly. “Zara Cole,” he said. “I am pleased you are alive.”

  “Well, thanks. And I’m pleased too.”

  “Did you destroy the cousins?” He said it in a distant sort of way, like it mattered not a bit to him whether other Leviathan died, but I also knew that was a kind of shield he was holding between us. He cared.

  “No,” I said. “We saved Ophelia and removed the devices that were installed in her to control her behavior.”

  The Elder wasn’t interested in shock collars. “It is unusual that both Ophelia and Quell had only one crew member. This is . . . not advisable for long journeys. All intelligent life is, to some degree, social. And social beings require interaction.”

  Hmm. Derry was dead. I didn’t know if Jury would count as crew, precisely; he probably couldn’t bond with the ship in any real fashion. That was why I’d warned the bot to talk to her a lot on the way back to Earth.

  Typhon caught me by surprise when he said, “Yusuf would like to speak with you before you depart.”

  “Really?” I shrugged. “Okay. I’ll have a word with him before I head off to Nadim.”

  Nadim’s still-distant feeling of pique made me have to suppress a laugh. I know, I thought at him, though I wasn’t sure he could hear me at this distance. But I’ll be back soon.

  Evidently he could understand, because the pique turned to a wounded acceptance. The emotional equivalent of fine.

  Typhon withdrew—not so much rejecting me as just not caring about me anymore. Well, back at you, Typhon.

  I went searching for Yusuf and took a closer look at him, as there was no chance during the brief pickup—damn, he sure looked a lot better. He was so sick before that it was impossible not to worry about him, but the medicine must be working. “You wanted to talk?”

  “Over coffee, perhaps?”

  “I never turn it down.”

  Yusuf put his hands behind his back and clasped them as we walked, and it made his already excellent posture even better. I felt like a slouch beside him. I resisted the urge to stand straighter. He topped me by several inches and was broader by a good bit; his uniform fit him well, I thought. And he looked comfortable in it.

  “I’m glad to see you back, Zara,” he said. “Chao-Xing wasn’t convinced that whatever plan you had laid on would actually work.”

  “Well, it did, and it didn’t, and I’m really glad she had my back,” I replied. We settled at the table with hefty mugs of coffee, and I blew on the surface while waiting for whatever was on his mind.

  When it came, it surprised me.

&n
bsp; “Quell and Ophelia, the two new Leviathan,” he said. “What is our relationship with them?”

  “Well, Ophelia’s heading back to Earth right now with Jury, but I imagine she’ll be returning. She was grateful for us ridding her of all the tech Deluca had installed to control her. As for Quell . . . honestly, no idea. Still hates us, probably. Or, really, me, since I’m the Most Wanted.”

  “Are you?” he asked. “Still?”

  “Until Jury gets the record straightened out back on Earth, yeah. I don’t think Jon Anderson’s going to play nice until that’s done. And Quell will follow his lead.” I sipped coffee, and it was just what I needed. “Why are you asking?”

  “Quell only has one crew member, and he doesn’t seem to be properly trained for the Journey. Ophelia has no one.”

  “Oh. Oh.” I suddenly realized what this conversation was about. “You’re looking for a new ship.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. I merely wanted to present myself as a prospect,” Yusuf said. “It’s always up to the ship whether to accept. I won’t have a true bond again, I think, but I can be comfort and support.”

  “Would that be enough for you?” It maybe wasn’t polite to ask, but this felt like it needed asking.

  He was quiet for a long moment before he said, “It would have to be, wouldn’t it? It’s that, or go home. And I would miss this. Miss the stars, the Leviathan, the Journey.”

  “What did you do back home?”

  “I was a theoretical physicist,” he said. “And I knew from the first moment on board my beautiful ship that for all my study, everything I knew was only a speck of dust in the scope of the universe. Out here—there’s more. It’s so much more.”

  I understood that. I felt it in my bones. “You think Starcurrent feels like you do? Like ze’d like to find a more permanent place?”

  “That’s the thing. Ze called me. This is zis idea, and I . . . have to agree. Seems like the best solution to everyone’s needs.”

  “Why talk to me about it, then?”

  “Because I already talked to Typhon, Chao-Xing, Marko, Nadim, and Bea,” he said. “And Starcurrent was afraid you’d be mad.”