Shades of Treason (18 page)

“You may have been right about the loyalty training,” Hagan said, chewing.

Rykus looked at him like he’d look at a trip wire across his path. “I might have been?”

“It alters the way they reason.”

“I believe I was clear on that point three years ago.”

Ash felt the mental swoosh of Hagan’s annoyance but didn’t see any sign of it on his face.

“You couldn’t give me concrete examples of the changes then,” Hagan said. “I thought you were overreacting.”

“I wasn’t chosen for the position because I overreact.”

Another flare of annoyance, but Hagan’s tone remained calm and thoughtful when he said, “True. I was under a lot of pressure from certain members of the senate. The size of the Fleet and Fighting Corps made them nervous. Some senators were threatening to leave. The Anomaly Program was a way to have a smaller Fighting Corps and—”

“‘One anomaly is worth ten soldiers,’” Ash quoted. Then she smiled. “I watched the hearings, Chancellor.” She’d watched Rykus. “It was a great show, and yet despite all your work, the Fighting Corps has still expanded.”

“The Sariceans hadn’t taken over the Kelin Mines then,” Hagan said. “That was a direct threat to the well-being and prosperity of the Coalition worlds. We needed manpower to retake what was ours. We have an obligation to protect the citizens within our territories.” His gaze speared Ash. “
You
have an obligation to protect them.”

She was protecting them by preserving the Coalition. Why Hagan couldn’t see that, she didn’t know. Perhaps he didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want to see the cracks in the alliance he had so much influence in. Like Hagan, most planetary leaders saw the benefit of being part of the Coalition, but some didn’t. Some, like Rykus’s home world, shied away from giving up any power to a central authority, no matter how loosely that authority governed them. They looked for abuses of power and reasons to convince their people they needed to secede. That’s why she couldn’t give up the cipher. Even if Jevan and Hagan’s assistant were the only two telepaths in the Coalition, the knowledge of their existence would be enough to make a number of worlds withdraw.

It will destroy the Coalition
, she told Hagan.

“Then so be it,” he snarled. The vehemence took her by surprise. So did the sound of a twig breaking from the edge of the forest.

“Cover!” Rykus shouted, but Ash was already moving. Bark exploded off the trees to her left as she rammed into Hagan.

“Down!” she yelled, flinging them both toward the valley.

Ash kicked and grabbed as she slid down the steep incline.

She found a good handhold, flipped to her stomach. “Rykus!”

“Here.” His calm, steady voice came from her right. He was flattened against the slope too, his gun—their only weapon—drawn and ready.

He focused behind her. “Stay down.”

Turning to her right, she saw Hagan working his way up the rocky slope.

She grabbed a fistful of his uniform. “You want your head blown off?”

“They’re Coalition soldiers,” the chancellor said.

“They shot at us.”

“At
you
, Lieutenant. As far as they know, I’m your hostage. I’ll talk to them. I’ll make sure you aren’t harmed, and
when
you decrypt the files, I’ll clear your name.”

Her hand shook, but she didn’t release his uniform. Her instincts screamed this was a bad idea.

“Take one more step and I’ll blow the war chancellor’s head off,” Ash yelled. She hadn’t heard anyone move, but the soldiers weren’t firing, and she needed time to think.

“She’s lying,” Hagan called out. “She’s unarmed. I’m War Chancellor Grammet Hagan. I’m coming up.”

“Hands over your head,” someone yelled back. “Move slowly.”

Hagan tugged his uniform free and climbed.

“You need a booster, Ash,” Rykus said.

Her nostrils flared. Her fail-safe was with Hagan on this. He wanted her to be taken back into custody.

She looked down at the valley—no, the Deep Fucking Canyon—below. She might be able to find a survivable way down, but damn it. She needed Hagan.

Craning her neck, she looked up in time to see the chancellor pull himself to the top of the cliff. He made it to the flat ground, rose to his knees, arms held out to either side.

“Are you injured?” a soldier above asked.

“Lieutenant Ashdyn is not to be harmed,” Hagan said. “I’ve spoken with her. We’ve come to an agreement. She’ll—”

Bang
.

Adrenaline surged through Ash’s body, slowing down time and making the
woosh-woosh
of her heart sound loud in her ears. Her hands tightened on the rocks embedded in the canyon, and she watched Hagan’s brain tissue explode out the back of his head.

She heard herself scream “no,” just like she’d screamed no when Jevan’s bullet had slammed into Trevast’s skull. The same agony of disbelief ripped through her, leaving behind a useless, hollow shell. She watched Trevast’s blood splatter, watched his body fall backward, his head crack on the deck.

Then Hagan’s corpse fell through the flashback, landing between her and Rykus. It slid half a meter down the cliff before it hit a rock. Momentum carried his feet over his damaged head, and he rolled down the precipice, end over end, in a cloud of rocks and pebbles.

Screaming, she lunged for the top of the canyon, determined to kill the son of a bitch who’d murdered the one person she could talk to.

“Ash!” Rykus grabbed her arm.

“They killed him.” She reached a hand to a stone at ground level. Bullets sprayed the dirt.

“Get down!”

She reached up again, mad with rage and loss and helplessness.

Rykus jerked her back hard. They slid down the ravine, stopping only when her fail-safe threw his body on top of hers, pressing her into the rocky cliff face.

“Listen, Ash! Think! We have one weapon. They have dozens. We have to run. We have to escape.” He shook her until she looked him in the eyes. “
You
have to survive.”

Fury, determination, and something else, something she couldn’t recognize, burned in his brown eyes. He centered her, brought her sanity back, and despite the hopelessness running through her, she gave in to his pull.

Drawing in one long breath, Ash let all her fears and frustrations go, and she focused on the present, focused on survival. “Race you to the bottom, Rip.”

In retrospect, throwing themselves down the canyon was as suicidal as climbing back over the ridge. Ash tried to hang on to Rykus, to keep him close and safe, but an outcropping of rock hit her elbow, flinging her arm in the air. She lost sight of him in the cloud of dust and debris.

A cloud that saved her life. Bullets pelted the ground around her, but the soldiers couldn’t have seen her. She was too obscured in the haze, and she was falling fast.

Too fast. She slid on her back in a rain of rocks and pebbles, arms and legs scrambling for some way to control her descent. Dry, thorned shrubs tore at her clothes and skin.

The bullets from above became distant thunder in the background compared to the cacophony of her fall. Her shoulder smacked against a sharp, jutting rock, and she went airborne.

She didn’t know how long she hung there, didn’t know which way was up or down. A millennium passed before the canyon gave her an answer, smashing her face-first into the cliff. The ground bruised and cut her, but she slowed. A few more flails of her arms and legs and she finally came to a stop on a relatively level slab.

“Rykus.” She strained to get his name out. Her throat was filled with dirt. She tried to spit, to clear it out of her system, but she had no moisture in her mouth. Rubbing at the grit in her eyes, she searched for her fail-safe.

If he hadn’t been wearing the useless emergency pack, she would have missed him in the dust cloud. But the flash of orange in her peripheral vision caught her attention, and she lunged, grabbing the pack.

Momentum tripled his weight. Ash almost lost her grip, but Rykus caught himself just before skipping over the edge of the slab.

Flipping to his stomach, he aimed his Covar up the cliff face. The soldiers were still shooting. Rykus returned fire in quick but careful bursts. Ash watched, feeling completely useless. All she could do was lie there and watch.

Watch as Rykus’s ammunition ran out.

Watch as a bullet struck his shoulder.

Watch as a man who was supposed to be invincible bled.

Instinct and training and a deep, almost incapacitating panic cracked the ice enclosing her. She threw her body on top of his.

“Fall back!” Rykus shoved her away. “Fall back!”

Fall back? There wasn’t anywhere to fall back to but down.

“Go.” He pushed her over the precipice.

Her chin hit first. Pain radiated down her spine when her neck snapped back, then she was airborne again, an impossible-to-stop human avalanche.

Her shoulder hit next, skipping off the rocky ground. She landed on her opposite shoulder and rolled.

She rolled for eons, the ground ripping at her clothes and flesh. Snatches of gray sky and brown earth tumbled through her vision, over and over. Her lungs filled with dirt and dust, her mouth with dirt and blood.

Finally the world went blessedly black.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PEBBLES CRUNCHED NEAR Ash’s head. It was a suspiciously soft, harmless sound, but it was a sound that jerked her back to consciousness.

She caught a reaching hand.

“It’s me.” Rykus sounded like an engine in need of oil. She could barely make out his face through the grit in her eyes.

The dirt was everywhere. Her mouth. Her nose. Her ears. She could feel it rattling around in her lungs.

Rykus coughed. “Status?”

Releasing his hand, she stared up at the haze above them. They should both be dead. If she wasn’t an anomaly, if Rykus wasn’t such an invincible, unconquerable soldier, they would be.

“Status,” Rykus barked again, a deeper rumble in his voice. He was her cold, emotionless fail-safe again. That worked for her. She didn’t know what to do with the other Rykus, the one she’d glimpsed earlier. The one who’d leaned his forehead against hers as if the universe had righted itself when he learned of her innocence.

“My neck isn’t broken. My back is functional. Legs functional.” She tried to swallow, but it was impossible with the grit coating her throat. “Your status?”

“Functional.”

“You were shot.” Her words came out controlled and careful, but she turned her head slightly to look at him, afraid of what she might see.

“Left shoulder,” he said. “The bullet didn’t pass through the
bruidium
.”

She eyed the shoulder. The hole in his uniform was dark and wet, but the damage seemed contained to a relatively small area.

Relaxing, she said, “
Bruidium
? That’s what they used to reconstruct your shoulder? The Coalition does think highly of you, doesn’t it?” The compound was rare, exotic, and expensive enough to fund an entire platoon of special forces soldiers for a standard month.

“The dirt’s stopped the bleeding,” he said, ignoring, as usual, the reference to his past.

“You didn’t hold on to the emergency pack.” He wasn’t going to bleed out, but infection could become a problem.

“I was busy trying not to break my neck.”

A smile bent her lips. “You’re funny.”

She wasn’t certain, but it seemed like her comment made his expression grow more serious.

“There’s a river that runs through the center of the valley—”

“DFC,” she interjected, staring at the cliff face towering high above them. The upper ledge was obscured by the dust cloud their avalanche had caused. “Deep. Fucking. Canyon. Sir.”

A pause. Then, “Canyon. We can get the sand out of our joints there.”

“Then what?” She couldn’t help the frustration that leaked into her voice. She wasn’t defeated, but she’d been knocked down so many times it was difficult to tell which way was up. Hagan’s murder, so soon after she’d unloaded everything, had throttled her.

“Then we keep moving until we find help.”

“Our ‘help’ just assassinated the Coalition’s highest-ranked military officer.”

“I know.” Those two words contained enough force to cause a galaxy to expand. “But they weren’t my men. They weren’t from the
Obsidian
.”

“Oh, you know every soldier on the ship?”

“I know the officers.”

She sniffed. “Of course you do.”

“I trust Admiral Bayis.”

“I don’t.”

A scowl creased Rykus’s face. “Do you have evidence the telepaths have infiltrated the
Obsidian
?”

Still lying on her back, she closed her eyes. If she thought she could get away with it, she would have asked Rykus if he was trying to make her black out. His question was so obviously
un
answerable.

Don’t react. Don’t. React.

Opening her eyes, she saw a barely there grimace on Rykus’s face.

“All right,” he said slowly. “Let’s try this. One blink for yes. Two for no. Have telepaths infiltrated the
Obsidian
?”

The darkness blindsided her. A roar filled her ears, and the world dropped out from underneath her. A chill swept over her skin and she shook. She shook despite the fact that she awoke wrapped in Rykus’s arms.