Girl From Above #4: Trust (7 page)

“What?” he repeated. Doctor Lloyd’s attention snagged on the rifle. He backed away, likely wondering if I’d turn the weapon on him. “You can’t. We’re meant to be undercover. This is supposed to be
subtle
.”

“Tend to his wound. I don’t want him to die.”

“You shot him?”

“He shot me. I retaliated with equal force.” I shrugged off the rifle and headed between the stacked crates toward the bridge. The locked security hatch gave with a powerful shove.

Three passengers.

The captain, up front and focused on his control console. The female guard, reaching for her weapon. I lifted my rifle at hip height and fired a pulse-round into her hand. The third guard, the one who’d made his desires quite clear, received a round to his hip for his trouble. It wouldn’t kill him, despite the volume of his cries, but it would see him bed-bound for months. I reached the captain and placed the rifle against the back of his head. Four seconds had passed since I’d broken through the door. Not long enough for him to have released a distress signal.

I eased myself around to sit in the empty second’s flight chair while maintaining my grip on the gun against his head. He lifted his trembling hands from the flightdash and turned his thin, pale face toward me.

“I will pilot this vessel back to Chitec. You are redundant.”

“Fleet—”

“I have everything I need to proceed through fleet’s gate checks.”

“There are c-codes, procedures. You can’t just f-fly through the gates.”

“I know. That’s why you’re still alive.” I turned my attention to the bleeding crew. “Move to the back of the bridge, all of you. Tie yourselves up. I will be checking your ties. And believe me when I say I will not hesitate to kill the first person who attempts to stop me.”

The captain blinked back at me.

“Move!”

He did. They all shuffled around, found some packaging wrap, and mutely tied their wrists until only the female guard was left. The hand I’d shot was a bloodied mess.
Threat level: moderate.

I tied her up myself and set her apart from the others.

“I will see to your wounds once I have familiarized myself with these controls,” I said.

She sat in silence, her military mind likely searching for means by which to overpower me.

I returned to the captain’s chair, set the rifle aside, and sat behind the flight controls. Mimir’s atmosphere arched away beneath the vessel’s field of view. We had left the planet’s atmosphere and appeared locked on a course for the jumpgate.

I glanced back at my prisoners. Only the woman was a possible threat; self-preservation had the others compliant.

“What is your name?”

She glared back with seasoned calmness. “Becka Jones.”

Becka Jones would try to be a hero, and she’d die for her trouble. “Becka Jones, it is imperative that I get to Janus. If you do as I say, I will allow this crew to live. I do not want to kill anyone, but I can and will if necessary. Their fates are in your hands.”

She nodded tightly.

I faced the observation window and peered into the star-speckled black.

Count the stars.
A smile lifted my lips.

I was going back to where it all began, and where it would come to an end.

T
here had been
a picture pinned in my cabin on
Starscream
of me and my brother all trussed up in fleet whites on my selection day. It would have been blown to bits with the rest of
Starscream.
It didn’t matter though, because the same asshole in that picture was looking back at me from the mirror in my allocated Island cabin. Sure, he’d gained a few lines around his eyes, a tiny nick of a scar on his ear, and he’d filled out, but he still had that same don’t-give-a-shit look on his face, like the nine systems couldn’t touch him. In fleet, I’d believed it. Nothing could touch me back then. Now I wore that look to make fucking sure nothing did touch me.

I tugged at the jacket and craned my neck to the side, loosening the collar. The stripes stitched into my arm confirmed the rank of lieutenant. I never believed I’d wear the whites again, even under false pretenses. The last day I’d dressed in white was the same day Haley had died.

I dragged a hand across my chin and scratched at the few days’ worth of stubble—almost a beard by fleet standards. An officer would be clean-shaven. Fuck that shit. It was bad enough I had to wear the fucking uniform. Graham Creet would be turning in his grave.

A few knocks rattled the cabin door. “Caleb-Joe?”

Dammit.
Bren.

“The Candes’ warbird is flight-ready in hangar three,” Bren prattled on behind the door. “Francisca’s already aboard her raptor. You’ll need to couple-up out of atmosphere.”

“You mean
Commander
Francisca Olga?” I said, raising my voice so he’d hear, while at the same time pondering the handsome bastard in the mirror.

“She … she looks fetching in white.”

I smiled at his hesitation.
Fetching. My, my.

He’d stayed away from Fran for the most part. That was probably wise. She was trouble. I couldn’t ever claim to be wise and trouble stuck to me like shit.

“Tell me you did not call her
fetching
.”

“She eloquently and imaginatively told me how I should go fuck myself.”

I opened the door. I would not look at his face. No way. And if he said one thing about the uniform, I’d punch him.

I looked. To his credit, he schooled his expression and held out a deep blue long coat. The fleet parade coats held water like a bitch. In training, they made us run the fifteen-mile obstacle course wearing those fucking things. Then they gave us the same coats—cleaned—once we passed selection. The long coats never got any lighter.

I needed a drink.

I snatched the coat.
Brendan Shepperd
was stitched into the inseam of the collar. Tugging the deadweight on and over my shoulders, I headed down the hall, avoiding my brother’s eye. “Where’s One?”

“She departed on a shuttle for Mimir with the doctor right after the meeting. The Chitec transport broke atmosphere several minutes ago.”

She’d left without saying goodbye. Something brittle and sharp twisted in my chest.
Rejection.
Her leaving hurt a lot more than it should have. Shit, I was going soft. First Fran and now One. I redirected the pain into a snarl and flung accusations at Bren instead. “You’re one of the Nine, and you didn’t tell me?”

“There wasn’t time.” He fell into step beside me as we headed for the hangars. My whites were attracting furtive glances, making the back of my neck prickle. I’d wear the uniform until we got off the Island and then I was stripping it off until fleet frisked our asses at the gate.

“No time?” My sharp laugh wasn’t kind. “How long does it take to say, ‘Hey, little brother. I’m one of the Nine.’ Three seconds?”

We paced a few more strides in silence until Bren found his voice. “It was after fleet hit Mimir. I stayed back to help with the cleanup operation. Creet approached me—”

Creet recruited him.

“Well, shit. You were Nine all the while you were on probation with fleet, and when we stole that freighter?
And
when I was trying to get in with them after Lyra?” We’d shared beers on Mimir before my meeting with the hooded-up Fenrir Nine to hand over One. That was before she’d gone nuts. “Wait, you weren’t one of those spooky fuckers in the hoods, were you?”

“No.”

He’d fallen back into stoic commander mode, wearing a mask much like my don’t-give-a-shit one, only his actually looked like he meant it.

“I fed them fleet intelligence. I didn’t have much say in operations then. After fleet hit Mimir hard, you disappeared. I thought you were … I thought something had happened to you. So, I went looking for a way to get back at fleet. Creet helped.”

“Something did happen. I was in Asgard. Again.” A few more strides and I plucked my collar buttons open. “Fuck, Bren, did you feed the Nine intel on me?”

When he didn’t immediately answer, I stopped our march, forcing him to look at me. The truth was right there in his grimace.

“And the hits just keep on coming.”

He gritted his teeth but wouldn’t look away. He wouldn’t give me that victory. “They wanted to know if you could be trusted.”

There were no fucking words to even come up with a reply. “I’m glad One broke your arm.”

I didn’t even have it in me to get angry. Somewhere in that head of his, he probably thought he was doing the noble thing, looking out for me.

“You and your new friends are sending me and Fran on a suicide mission, you know that, right?”

“No, that’s not—”

“Open your eyes, Brother. I’m a fixer; she’s a bent fleet officer.”

“No,” he said with force. “You get in, dump the cargo, and get out. You don’t hang around, not for anyone.”

Not for One, he’d meant. I wasn’t leaving her there. She hadn’t been through hell and back for the Fenrir Nine to write her off as collateral damage.

“Sure,” I lied. “Keep it simple. Get away clean.”

His frown said he knew I was bullshitting. I shrugged. It wasn’t like he hadn’t lied to me.

“You don’t get to leave me,” he said, tucking a hand into his pants pockets and glancing about the hall. He looked smaller, his shoulders slouching. “You’re all I’ve got.”

Well fuck me, he was having brotherly
feelings.
“I’m a hard bastard to kill.”

I strode on before Bren could get any ideas about hugging or shaking hands.

“Tell me you got some luck left,
Lieutenant
Shepperd,” he called.

I raised a middle-finger salute over my shoulder and continued to hangar three, where my ride off the Island waited.

W
hile Fran
and me had been pissing off the pirates on KP92, the Nine had been hard at work sprucing up Fran’s raptor. From my temporary flight position, piloting the Candes’ harrier, I got an eyeful of Fran’s bird rising out of the Island’s hangars. The nine-tailed fox insignia was gone, replaced by fleet’s stars and crescent moon. The lashing rain steamed off Raptor Nine-Nine-One, giving her a rippling heat aura. Lightning flashed, licking across her black panels. It was enough to start me drooling. She looked every inch the majestic bird of prey, but hidden in those deceptively streamlined curves was enough ordinance to deter pirates and blow anything equal her tonnage out of the black. Not much could top a raptor, and I’d always wanted one. Among the few good memories of home were those summers spent lying on my back in the sunbaked cornfields, watching fleet warbirds pull maneuvers over Vancouver airspace.

I piloted the Cande harrier into Mimir’s outer atmosphere, cut the engines, and sent out the towlines.

Fran’s sharp voice came over the comms. “Locked up.”

She pushed the override codes over. The harrier jolted, and the raptor reeled the harrier in. The raptor’s sleek ass and blinking external lights filled the obs window.

Time to go be a lieutenant.
I left the bridge, checking the holstered twin pistols I’d brought along. My boots thumping along the catwalks were too fucking loud and only served to remind me that this ship was doomed. I wasn’t into all that superstitious shit like some who made their living in the black, but I did believe in human fuckups. I’d poked through a few typical smuggling hidey-holes and found the well-packed explosives wrapped in gray and molded into place. After that, I didn’t much feel like hanging around.

Only when I was safely inside the raptor’s airlock—the chimes counting down—did I shake off the unease. Sure, the bomb disguised as a harrier was technically only a few meters away, but it was out of sight. The rest I could put out of mind. When the airlock pressure seal gasped, I got a lung full of dry, chemical-tinged warbird air and made my way through the curved, ultra-white passages toward the bridge. There would be plenty of time to familiarize myself with Fran’s pride and joy, once we were properly black bound. Before that, I had to report to my senior officer.

Much of the jutting bridge consisted of the horizontal crescent obs window and the bank of flickering controls beneath it. A row back, the weapons consoles stood empty. We didn’t have the crew necessary to start a war. Just two—enough to get our towed harrier and us back to the original system under the guise of captured spoils.
Keep it simple. Get away clean.

I sat in the second’s flight chair and watched Mimir shrink to moon size beneath us, deliberately not looking at Fran. Seeing her in those whites would fuck with my head. I had enough issues with her without the glaring irony slapping me in the face.

“Has your raptor got a name,
Captain,
besides Nine-Nine-One?” I finally asked as she turned her bird toward the star-dusted black.

“No.” Curt.

I slumped back in the chair and stole a quick sideways glance at her. She stared hard at the flightdash, her jaw set and her stance rigid. She’d pinned her hair back tight against her skull, accentuating the scar on her cheek and sharpening her Spanish features.

“She’s gotta have a name,” I said.

“Why? She’s carrying a crew bent on killing over two hundred thousand people. What should her name be?” Finally Fran looked at me. Her glare could have cut glass. “Lieutenant?”

Shit, this is off-the-scale fucked-up.
“I won’t let that happen.”

“Because they’re not paying you enough?”

I’d flown with her long enough to know when to back the fuck off. She was looking for a fight, for someone or something to take her fears out on. Once, I would have played the game. We’d have fought, with words, maybe even gotten physical, probably sexual too. But I wasn’t taking her bait today.

“There’ll be another way. There’s always another way.”

She punched at a flightdash button that saw the stars turn to brittle slashes against the black. “There’s a package for you in your cabin.”

Blatantly dismissed, I curbed my tongue and left her wrestling with her morals. She thought she had issues? I was the one relying on a woman who’d tried to kill me to fly me into the heart of fleet territory, right into Chen Hung’s back yard.

My cabin was marginally larger than a closet, with another closet at one end to wash up in. The walls were white, the floor was white, the bunk was fucking white. On my first deployment, patrolling a backwater pirate route, me and the rookie fleet crew had hung up holosheets and downloaded from the cloud anything and everything, just as long as it wasn’t white. Fleet’s obsession with all things white was enough to drive a man to drink.

I shrugged off Bren’s coat and my pistols and set them aside, then frowned at the small box sitting on the bunk. No distinguishing marks, just a blue plastic container. I gently picked it up, popped the lid, and hoped this was all some cosmic joke. Maybe there would be a note from Bren inside telling me to laugh it up. There wasn’t. A cylindrical remote trigger sat nestled in specialist foam to keep it from getting knocked and prematurely blowing Fran and me apart. Icy fear skittered across my skin. There wasn’t any fucking foam wrap around the harrier attached to our hull. If we nudged anything—a Janus dock for example—that bitch could blow.

I closed the lid, wrapped the box and pistols in Bren’s coat, and buried it at the bottom of a narrow closet. That was where the trigger would stay.

Straightening, I caught sight of the fleet asshole in the mirror. If I didn’t know better, I’d have reckoned he was afraid.

“I need a drink.”

I tugged off the white jacket and tossed it aside. My gray compression top might as well have been spray-painted over my chest and arms, but it beat the whites. I ruffled my hair, hissed in a breath, and left my cabin for a tour of the ship.

On the surface, there wasn’t much to see. The engines would be worth a look if we hit landfall before Janus. Otherwise, she was fleet-clean, too white and ultra efficient, and as quiet as a Chitec lab.

One.
My thoughts strayed as I surveyed the catwalks.

One just had to be the hero. I could have stopped her. If she’d waited for me on the Island, I could have taken her on that excursion. Nobody would have ever found us. Fran would have called it running away. I’d have called it surviving. Dad had taught me that life lesson. But maybe I wanted more than to survive. Maybe it was time to start living? The sound of my dry laugh echoed down the white, curved walkways.
Great time to decide you wanna live, asshole.

With a dry mouth and uncomfortable thoughts, I hit the mess, which was little more than a single-person walkway with a fuckload of hidey-holes and a breakfast bar. A quick search revealed packets of desiccated food and powdered nutrients.

I tossed the food packets onto the counter and braced my arms against the countertop. “I miss
Starscream
.”

“Looking for this?”

Fran leaned against the door seal, holding a bottle of whiskey and a wry smile. Bren was right: she did look good in whites. She looked better than good. She looked right. The jacket and pants molded to her, somehow making her taller, straighter, more untouchable. I shouldn’t be surprised—it wasn’t like I hadn’t jerked off to imagined scenes just like this one—but the reality left me hollow. Seeing her wrapped head to toe in whites cemented that part of me that had never really gotten on board with the fact she was fleet. She couldn’t be, not Fran. Yet there she was, Commander Olga, all wrapped up in white with the stripes to prove it.