"I have your back," Pavel said.
"It's your assignment." She grimaced. "I hate being someone's assignment."
"You are a strategic asset. The most important one."
"I heard what Yamanu said."
Pavel turned to look at her, and the reddish cast was back at the edges of his eyes, banked but present. "I like having you as my assignment."
She looked at him and thought about asking. The question had been sitting in her chest for five days, and they were about to go into enemy territory. The honest thing, the Kra-ell thing, would be to ask him now.
Why did you kiss me? Why did you say nothing for days? What do you want?
She opened her mouth. "We should kit up," was what came out instead.
Pavel held her gaze for a moment longer. Then his mouth curved, and he stood, offering her his hand the way a human male might to his lady love, the way the heroes in her books did.
She looked at the offered hand.
She was a Kra-ell warrior, a powerful compeller, and the last person who needed assistance to get up off a bench.
Still, she put her hand in his and let him pull her to her feet.
20
ANANDUR
The water inside the cove was black, cold, and still, and as Anandur surfaced into it, he was glad this portion of the mission was over for now.
Underwater approaches were far from his favorite, especially at night and in enclosed spaces. It had been bad enough out in the open ocean, but there was something about the way sound carried in here, strange and muffled, that put him on edge. He preferred a fight he could see coming, on solid ground, with room to swing, but the cove was the only hidden route onto the island, and they were lucky to have found out about it. This mission would have been much more difficult, probably impossible, if they didn't have this option.
He pulled the rebreather from his mouth, breathed in the dank air, and looked around.
Navuh's slick submarine dominated the area, tethered to an iron ring at the edge of the stone shelf and gleaming in the artificial weak light of the cove. It was a four-person craft with a teardrop hull and a clear canopy and lines that belonged in a billionaire's marina rather than a cave. Navuh's personal escape pod, keptready for the day the island turned on him or the clan finally launched an attack and his forces lost. If everything fell apart, he'd come down through the tunnel with Areana and abandon everyone on the island to fend for themselves.
That had been the plan, but that was not how things had turned out for Navuh.
Areana had stumbled and fallen, and Navuh had leaped off the cliff after her, thinking she'd plummeted to her death. She hadn't because Yamanu had caught her, but Navuh nearly had. The clan had collected his mangled, dying body off the rocks and saved his life.
Shifting his gaze from the luxurious vehicle, Anandur looked at the surveillance cameras mounted high on the cove walls.
The tech crew had surfaced ahead of the main element and looped the feed, so anyone monitoring it, if anyone did, saw nothing of note. They were going ahead of the rest of the team and doing the same to all the other cameras mounted along the tunnel. The chances of anyone watching the feed were small, because it only went to Navuh's private terminal, which Losham now controlled, but it was better not to take chances and handle everything properly.
They weren't an amateur operation, and since Turner had joined the clan, their operational sophistication had truly become unmatched.
Anandur hauled himself up onto the stone shelf above the waterline and reached down to give Brody a hand up.
The shelf was bigger than it had looked in the simulation, a broad flat tongue of rock that ran back into the cliff, and it was already filling with Guardians shedding their dive gear. TheOdus came up after the Guardians, Okidu and Onidu breaking the surface in their dive gear, breathing apparatus and all, riding their scooters like pros. Their dense, part-mechanical bodies sank like anvils, and no one wanted a repeat of what had happened to Okidu during Carol's rescue mission. He'd sunk to the bottom, and they'd had to drag him to the vessel and then pull him up with the use of a winch.
The result was a reboot that unlocked hidden protocols the Odus' creator had embedded in their neural network, leading to sentience. Thankfully, the experience hadn't made Okidu wary of deep water. He was as eager as always to be of service, and so was Onidu, who had also been rebooted by being dunked in a bathtub by Okidu and was gaining sentience along with his brother.
As soon as the Odus were done stripping off their wetsuits and diving equipment, they turned to assist with hauling up the waterproof casings. They weren't heavy, and in their deflated state they were also easy to maneuver. Both those variables would change once the chests were encased inside.
The Odus stacked them next to the dive gear.
Pavel came up over the lip of the shelf next, his usually olive-toned skin looking greenish, and not because of the dim, artificial illumination of the cove.
Like the Odus, the Kra-ell didn't float. Unless they put forth a lot of effort, their dense bodies sank, so naturally, they avoided deep water.
