“No promises!” Raukash rumbled. The Tarkan was a fairly new addition to the ship, though he’d been around since blazing Aramon found his mate nearly a year ago. His words probably embodied the other half of the ship, the guys who were secretly hoping for that one female to ease their lonely nights. Too many romantics on the ship these days.
“Report back in three,” Asmoded demanded, cutting through the joking and laughing I was gladnotto be present for in person. He must have reached the bridge, and he must have been moving fast to do so already, not that he sounded winded. Three days: that’s how long he was willing to give me the ‘no contact’ I’d suggested was needed for the mission. It was also the estimate I’d made it would take me to infiltrate the structure we’d located, erase the opposition, and blow it all up.
“Report back in three,” I echoed, and then I cut the connection. I sent the small ship racing toward the planet, no flourishes to my flying like Aramon might have done, just a straight route down to the landing coordinates the twins and Mitnick had agreed on. Relief raced through my veins as we streaked through space and then began entering the planet’s atmosphere. Finally alone. Finally, a moment to regroup my tattered shields and soothe nerves so raw they never stopped aching.
“Feel better yet, Val?” I asked my symbiont. Only a small portion of her had not gone into the armor she’d created over my flesh. It sat in the navigator’s seat next to me, shaped like a Riho—cute and cuddly, with a long, slinky tail, small pointed ears, and a tiny snout with huge eyes. She was so covered in fluffy silver fur that she looked like a poofed-up ball, just a long tail and body, her paws hidden beneath her. Her mouth pulled into a grin, revealing the sharp canines of a predator, and something easy and light drifted through the back of my brain. Yes, she did feel better, that was good.
I might be loyal to Asmoded for many reasons, part of me was even still true to the tenets of the Sons of Ragnar, but Val would always come first, always.
Something pinged across the ship’s sensors just as we’d reached an altitude of less than three thousand miles. Faint, so faint that it was barely there at all. A signal that came, not from the gloomy structure I was headed toward on one of the very few slips of land on this planet, but from deep inside the ocean.
Chapter 3
Frederique
The year 2257, January third, Kazakhstan airstrip.
My hands were clammy, so I kept them clasped behind my back, my posture ramrod straight so as not to betray my nerves. This mission was sanctioned by the European consulates, who were rapidly losing power inside the emerging UAR power structure. We knew—all of us—that if we did not act now, the UAR would control all of Earth and, soon, expand to include much of the Quadrant. We could no longer offer resistance on our own; we needed help.
“Did you hear?” Kadri said under her breath from my left. She had her braids piled high and, against protocol, wore a beautiful, colorful scarf as a headband to keep them out of her face. No one had told her to take it off, because this mission would take us so far, we might never see our families again. We were grasping at straws—reports of a species that had once tried to defy the early formation of the UAR, back when it was still underground and unknown to the greater public. The Kertinal. We were going to travel through deep space, in stasis, for at least two years to find these people and hope they were willing to help.
We needed a powerful counterpart to keep the Dragnell and the Praxidar in check, and they might be it.
“Did I hear what?” I asked Kadri just as quietly. Our commanding officer was standing on the tarmac in front of us, giving us a departing speech that was boring and long-winded.He had a bushy mustache just this side of regulations, and a bald head. His odd, shuffling steps as he paced in front of us—a crew of ten, plus myself—made me think of Poirot. My mom had devoured all those books, reading them to me on sunny days in the hospital when she fell ill. They had forever inspired me to remain curious and to always ask questions.
“New laws went into place in America, something about ending prisons, as they’re inhumane. Now it’s fines or straight to execution, no appeals.” I twisted my head to stare at Kadri in utter shock. What now? How was that possible, and why weren’t people rioting in the streets about this? I was not entirely surprised I’d missed it, we’d been quarantined, completely sequestered, for the past seven days. I’d been consumed with mission prep, not outside news.
From my other side, Jones twisted his torso just enough to lean in toward me. “England is in the final stages of abolishing its royalty. They’ll join the UAR next—no doubt.” That would make them the seventh European country to make that pledge. NATO was already gone; it was just us, this final push from nations unwilling to take that fatal plunge.
“Do we really have to wait for him to finish his speech?” Kadri asked, the urgency in her voice obvious. It was that same urgency I felt, but five minutes wouldn’t make much of a difference on a two-year journey. By the time we’d reached the Kertinal, the UAR could already have control of everything. We just hoped that they would see the danger of so much concentrated power bordering their Quadrant and be willing to make some kind of treaty about it. Something that would stop the UAR from massively mistreating the people in it.
Finally, our commander finished his speech, and we boarded the spaceship waiting for us. It had been fueled to the max and outfitted with as many automated systems as possible. Once we launched, the entire crew would go into stasis, and we’d rely on the autopilot and auto-wakecycle to guide us to our destination and wake us. It was a terrifying thought—to trust a machine to that extent—but a chance I was willing to take for a glimmer of hope.
I was in charge, but I’d only received mission control by a hair’s breadth. It had almost been Davidson instead. As an experienced navigator and pilot—skills rarely combined at such high quality—he’d nearly gotten the post. My background in xeno-biology and diplomacy had won out. Not that I’d ever been a diplomat myself, but both my parents had been, and I’d been all over the world, seeing the insides of many embassies as a result. They’d wanted someone at the helm who could control their temper and have a greater understanding of the alien species she was dealing with.
Davidson had been pissed, but he was dealing; his desire to be on the mission regardless of status was admirable. He was standing just beyond Jones, spine straight, shoulders out, the handsome profile of his chin jutting forward. A beautiful man, he’d made a few advances toward me before it became clear I’d be his superior officer. Then he’d refocused on Kadri, and she’d blown him off, since she batted for the other team—which was totally fair—and he’d takenthatrejection with laughter and grace. This was a good crew, dragged together from the corners of Europe, with Jones our one American defector, his role programming the stasis pods absolutely crucial.
This was a one-way trip, possibly doomed to fail. As we marched aboard the ship and took up our positions, we all knew it. We shared grim but determined looks as we went by rote through the launching sequence. Then came the hard part, when we reached space and had to navigate through the ships patrolling Earth’s solar system. Dragnell ships of superior build and speed, more advanced than anything Earth could cook up. A Praxidar science vessel was there to observe and study—supposedly to help us overcome all disease—but I had much darker thoughts on that subject. They’d been there nearly a century now, and cancer still wasn’t out of the world. My mom had died from it.
This was when Davidson proved every bit of his worth on the mission. As a navigator, he assisted our pilot for whom he was the backup, in case the pilot was out. The two worked well together, heads ducked close, Davidson’s nav port gleaming where the thin cable connected to the base of his skull. Like trusting a ship to wake me when it was time, I had a hard time trusting a wire going directly into my brain not to fry any brain cells.
The ships were much more daunting to look at when we passed them in space. At the same time, they also seemed smaller. I’d thought they’d be bigger, given the pictures I’d seen and the stats I’d read on them. Everything seemed smaller in space, though—especially Earth: a tiny blue ball with a pretty cloud cover, one half in the dark, glittering with lights.
“First time in space for you, right?” Jones asked quietly from next to me. The older man was fit, which had helped get him on this mission, but he was also a very experienced stasis technician. He’d done hundreds of flights to and from the colonies, with lots of stints in stasis himself. He seemed calm,in his element out here, and I was grateful for that kind of steadiness. I just nodded, not willing to voice it loudly where Davidson could hear. It made him scoff, chafing at the bit to know that the captain in charge had never been off the planet before, despite my specialty being alien species.
“Don’t worry. Soon you’ll be in stasis, and you’ll feel no worry at all.” Somehow, those were not exactly comforting words. When, three hours later, we exited the solar system completely unhindered by the Dragnell or Praxidar, it became the moment of truth. I had to lead by example, so I was one of the first to go under inside the captain’s quarters. My wake sequence would be set to go first, and I’d trained with Jones on how to wake him in case the computer didn’t do that automatically. He had assured me multiple times that the computer would not fail, not unless it was sabotaged.
Then Craven, our head engineer, had assured me that sabotage was out of the question, he’d checked every bolt and screw himself. So that was it. I lay down in the pod, said my goodbyes—couched in “see you tomorrow”—and out I was, sleeping like the dead for two whole years. I might as well have died in that time; I wouldn’t have known if it happened. I just knew that when I woke, everything would have changed. If I woke...
Chapter 4
The Sineater
Slicing through the water felt good, my body propelled by the jets in the soles of my boots. I’d left the shuttle where I’d landed it, in the assigned coordinates, just like Mitnick had wanted. Then I’d gone to the edge of the water and gone in, only a small amount of supplies strapped to my body, and Val curled around me in a protective layer of armor and oxygen. I did not need any of the diving gear included on the shuttle, not for a small foray like this.
All I wanted was to find out what this strange extra signal was—so faint that it had not managed to reach beyond the planet’s atmosphere, faint enough that even theVarakartoom’s sensitive scanners had not picked it up. I wondered if that meant it was old, a relic from a past society that had perished here. It was easy to picture such a thing—we’d run into such a situation on Yiophus, after all. If so, would the captain’s mate want to investigate?
I doubted Asmoded would let his human female set foot on a planet labeled as dangerous as this one. Unless I found proof that it was perfectly safe, maybe. Even so, she’d only recently given birth to their first child, and the captain had been feeling extra protective. So had his adult son, Saisir, for that matter. He’d been shadowing Mandy if Asmoded wasn’t with her. She’d leaked delicious hints of frustration over that more than once.
