Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (5 page)

Kavanaugh reached into the octagonal metal box on his desk. Inside the Templar box lay coiled a length of black hair, easily more than a meter long. He knew who had killed the Thallians, who had destroyed their city and set their slaves free.

He’d bet good money she was on the
Veracity
even now.

So why would Raena release the recordings she’d made of the booby-trap she’d set on her Templar tomb? She wasn’t condemning Sloane for funding the grave robbing. Was she trying to misdirect the media: to protect Sloane—or Kavanaugh himself?

He was too tired to figure out Raena’s motives tonight—and after finishing the too-sweet bottle of xyshin, he was too drunk. He powered the screen down and kicked off his boots, stretching out on his bunk in his clothes.

He fell immediately into a dream, as if it had been waiting for him.

CHAPTER 3

K
avanaugh had serious qualms about robbing Templar graves. It was bad enough that the rest of the galaxy blamed humans for exterminating the Templars. If the galaxy discovered that a human team was now looting their graves, he didn’t like to think where that would lead.

Still, as Sloane said, it wasn’t as if the bugs inside the tombs were using the weapons and armor buried with them. And it wasn’t as if Sloane hadn’t paid off every official in the quadrant who might be intrigued by what the “archaeological” team was doing.

That Sloane could loot the Templar tombs without a second thought saddened Kavanaugh. And yet here Kavanaugh found himself, leading the team, wondering how in the hell he’d volunteered for this.

At least the impossibly hard stone kept the caves’ contents incorrupt: metal was as polished as the day it had been entombed, corpses as fresh. In the past couple of weeks, Kavanaugh had seen more than he wanted of dead bugs contorted by the Templar plague.

Nothing indicated that this particular cavern would be different than the others. If it had been up to Kavanaugh, he’d have let the men close down the machinery for the night, sent them back to the bunkers to get out of the knifing, granular wind. Unfortunately, Sloane had made it clear to him that not meeting the quota would cost Kavanaugh his job. He was on the verge of saying, “Fine, I quit,” but the boss, long ago, had been a friend.

When they opened this tomb, the huge explosion dropped the ground from beneath their feet. Then the blast wave knocked the team back against the loader, holding them in place a moment, air crushed from their lungs. When it released them, Kavanaugh commented, “Think you used too much.”

“I used just enough,” Taki huffed.

Kavanaugh always had a moment, as he slithered past the edge of a slab, when he feared it would rock back into place and crush him. Or worse, it would rock back after he’d passed it, trapping him inside the tomb. No telling how long it would take someone to die inside one of those graves, how long until the air ran out or dehydration made breathing cease to matter. It wasn’t as if Sloane would feel he had enough invested in the team to rescue anyone.

Most of the tombs they’d entered had warehoused whole companies of bugs, the dead warriors of a single starship buried together. Kavanaugh played his light around the inside this cavern to find only a single catafalque, an uncarved slab of obsidian roughly in the center of the room.
Whoever lay atop it must be important,
he thought. Shouldn’t take too long to loot one body.

Kavanaugh peeled off his face shield and lifted his flask, sucking down the last half of its contents. His boot knocked something over. When he bent down to retrieve it, he found an Imperial-issue electric torch. Damn. Had someone beaten them to this one?

“What’s a human girl doing in here?” Taki asked.

Kavanaugh stopped fiddling with the torch to see his team had converged around the catafalque. He couldn’t make sense of what they were saying. Why would there be a human girl inside a Templar tomb?

“There’s your dancing girl,” Curcovic teased. “Maybe you can wake her with a kiss.”

“’Cept for the dust,” Lim commented.

“Well, yeah, ’cept for the dust, Lim. Damn, man, don’t you have any imagination?”

“What did you have in mind?” Lim asked skeptically.

“Are you sure she’s human?” Kavanaugh asked as he took another drink.

“I think she’s just a kid,” Curcovic added. “No armor. You think she was somebody important’s kid?”

“She’s the best thing I’ve seen on this rock so far,” Taki pointed out.

Kavanaugh was crossing the uneven floor to join them when a low female voice said clearly, “No.”

From that point on, she took down all of Kavanaugh’s men. She could have killed them as if they’d been standing still, but she’d disabled them instead. He suspected that was because they posed no real threat to her.

Cold sweat ran into Kavanaugh’s eyes. He held the flask in his gun hand. He’d have to drop it to draw his weapon.

“We didn’t mean you any harm,” he said gently as he let go of the flask.

She wheeled toward him. “I know you.” Her voice was rusty. “Switch on your light. I want to see your face.”

With his left hand, Kavanaugh pulled his torch out of his pocket. He held it to illuminate the left side of his face.

“No,” she said, her voice desolate. “You only remind me of someone I used to know.” She was moving toward the mouth of the tomb. Kavanaugh shivered at the thought that she might knock the chocks aside and seal them in.

“Where will you go?” he asked desperately. “It’s a rock out there. Barren. You can’t get off-world without our help.”

Somewhere in the darkness, she laughed. The sound wasn’t entirely sane. “You’re grave robbers. You’re going to help me?”

“We’re archaeologists,” Kavanaugh lied. “We work for Gavin Sloane.”

Her response was completely unexpected. “Gavin? Still alive?”

“I’m here, Raena,” Sloane said calmly. He switched on a torch, angled down at his feet. He stood just inside the mouth of the tomb.

“Is it really you?” Raena asked. She made Kavanaugh think of a child, desperate for comfort from the dark.

“It’s really me.” He crossed the room to her, engulfed her in his arms.

Kavanaugh jerked awake as he turned over. Too many years of living on shipboard, sleeping on this narrow mattress, saved him. He caught himself just before he rolled right off his bunk. With adrenaline coursing through his system, Kavanaugh found himself completely awake.

Why had he dreamed that Sloane had come down to the planet? Sloane hadn’t ever seen the tomb, as far as Kavanaugh knew. Sloane hadn’t been one to get his hands dirty, if he could bully someone else into it. He lurked in his base on one of the planet’s tiny moons and let Kavanaugh and his men take the risks to find Raena.

Everything else happened in the dream just as he remembered in real life. In fact, it seemed less like the messy chaos of a real dream and more like he was living the memory again. Kavanaugh fumbled the blanket out from beneath himself and pulled it over his body, but still he shivered.

At the time, he hadn’t known that Sloane’s operation had a goal beyond stealing as many of the Templar artifacts as they could pack into crates. That had only been Sloane’s cover story—and a way of funding the expedition. He never let on to the men doing the actual work, but all along he had been really only looking for Raena.

Once again Kavanaugh counted his blessings. He knew Raena had never done well with enclosed spaces. She might have come out of that tomb like a caged animal and killed them all.

In fact, once he’d realized how things might have gone, Kavanaugh had struggled to forgive Sloane for putting him into that kind of danger. Once upon a time, he had counted Sloane as a friend, almost like a big brother. Probably it had just been luck, but when Kavanaugh had been a kid, Sloane was always nearby when he needed help. Then, after they’d finally rescued Raena—well, after Kavanaugh had rescued her—Sloane paid Kavanaugh a goodly sum to get lost. He might have been able to forgive that, if Sloane hadn’t hurt Ariel so badly on their last ride together.

Kavanaugh punched his pillow into a better shape and flopped over into a new position. He might be more comfortable if he’d just get up long enough to take off his clothes, but he didn’t want to get out from under the blanket.

The dream felt wrong in his head, more nightmarish than actual events—and actual events hadn’t been a joy themselves.

Kavanaugh shrugged and tried to settle himself back to sleep. Obviously, the dream must have been brought on by studying the documentary before he passed out. It was nothing but his conscience taunting him. If he were like Sloane—or Raena, for that matter—events in his life wouldn’t trouble his dreams. He’d be immune.

He curled tighter under the blanket and hoped the chill wouldn’t keep him awake long.

Back then, as her imprisonment dragged on, Raena didn’t really sleep any more. She didn’t think of it as sleep, anyway, more like perpetual rest. She lay on her catafalque with her hands folded across her stomach, her legs crossed at her ankles. Maybe it was meditation or maybe she’d just been alone in the dark for so very long that it was the only way she had left to pass the time. Whatever it was, she lay there, still as stone, listening.

For some time, she had heard something she couldn’t identify: a deep booming that echoed and sang through the mountain at whose heart she lay. At first she thought the sound was an explosion, maybe bombardment from space, but it only happened intermittently, with long silences in between. She had no way to measure the intervals, but eventually they stopped making her jump.

She decided that the sound was the precursor to an earthquake, something so massive that it might break the mountain open and allow her to walk away. Hoping for that day wouldn’t bring it closer; she had hoped for release since the slab closed on her tomb. She had no way to measure how long ago that had been. So instead of hoping, she lay still on her catafalque and waited.

The next boom sounded closer, but distance was difficult to judge inside her cocoon of rock. Perhaps this time it
was
an earthquake, since the mountain around her actually shuddered. Fine grit drifted down, falling onto her face, but Raena didn’t bother to reach up to brush it away. What difference did it make? It wasn’t as if anyone was going to see her.

She heard a new sound: grinding, as if rock slid against rock. She was so calm that she lay still and waited for the ceiling to fall. If she were luckier than she had been so far, the falling rock would kill her. She thought about what it would be like to be dead. It was hard for her to imagine an afterlife. What she really wanted was to be blotted out. Her luck had been so bad for so long, though, she figured her fate was to be crushed, maybe pinned in place, but not killed. Pain would bring a new kind of waiting.

Then she heard something like men’s voices. Her imagination had to be working overtime. She listened to them banter, silly things men would say to each other when they felt there was no one to overhear. They were clearly so comfortable amongst themselves that they had a patter, a rhythm, that spoke of camaraderie. Longing submerged her and she wished, more than anything, that she had someone to speak to once more.

“Are you sure she’s human?” one of the men asked.

“I think she’s just a kid,” another suggested. “No armor. You think she was somebody important’s kid?”

“She’s the best thing I’ve seen on this rock so far,” a third pointed out.

Just as she was trying to sort out how many of them there were, a hand brushed across her breast.

That got her attention. This was real, she realized belatedly. There was someone in her tomb … and they were touching her.

She said, “No,” and sat up, straight-arming one of the men away from her. He hit his head on the stone floor and didn’t move again.

Another man backed away, holding a wavering torch beam on her. That allowed her to see a third man fumbling his gun from its holster. She skipped sideways just as the gunslinger cleverly shot his companion. The fallen man’s curses were amusingly creative.

She spun toward the one with the gun, turning a one-handed cartwheel that left her in range to kick the gun from his hand. As it flew from his grip, she twisted around and cracked her fist hard into his chest. The man dropped with satisfying speed.

“We didn’t mean you any harm,” someone else said. His voice seemed somehow familiar. Someone she knew a long time ago … someone from when she was running? A boy’s face rose in her memory.

“I know you.” She grimaced at the rusty sound of her own voice. “Switch on your light. I want to see your face.”