Shades of Treason (7 page)

His mistake. She grabbed the Maven and redirected the line of fire over her shoulder.

The guard jerked the gun back. She held on, let him pull her to her feet, then she pushed forward and landed a kick to his groin. When he doubled over, she followed up with a knee to his nose.

Adrenaline and the familiarity of a move she’d practiced over and over again on Caruth dulled her pain. She turned, the guard’s gun in her good hand, and pointed it at the interrogator.

Fifteen seconds,
her mental clock told her. This was already taking too long.

She backed toward the cell’s exit, weapon locked on the man who’d hurt her.

“Lieutenant Ashdyn.” He didn’t sound cold and emotionless now. He sounded scared. Big bullets of sweat beaded on his forehead.

“Walk forward,” she ordered. When he didn’t comply, she fired a blast that tore through the flesh of his upper arm. He cried out, clutching it.

“If you value your life, move. Now.”

Blinking rapidly, he approached until he was half a pace away.

Just in time. The door clicked behind her.

Two guards rushed in to save their comrades’ lives. But their entry was unplanned and uncoordinated. Ash had already circled behind the interrogator. They couldn’t shoot her without hitting him.

But
she
could shoot
them
.

CHAPTER SEVEN

RYKUS TOOK A sip of his third cup of coffee, but the words on his screen remained blurred. His mind was fuzzy, split between his responsibilities as the commanding officer of the
Obsidian’s
contingent of soldiers and his limited amount of time to determine if his anomaly deserved to become a lab rat. He hadn’t gotten anywhere with her files.

Rotating his left shoulder, he stretched the artificial ligaments in the reconstructed joint. He’d have to make sleep a priority soon. He couldn’t lead his soldiers in the shipyard assault fueled only by stimulants. That’s how mistakes were born, and during the mission, he couldn’t afford to be anything but precise and perfect. If he wasn’t, too many lives would be lost.

Too many lives will be lost anyway
. He scowled at the numbers again, but they weren’t intimidated.

“Ninety-five percent is more accurate than most raid ops get,” his XO said, sitting across from him and staring at the same data.

“The schematics aren’t even seventy percent accurate.” Rykus tossed his stylus onto his desk. It was a hunch, a gut instinct that told him this thoroughly researched mission the Intelligence Committee had concocted was destined to turn into an epic disaster. The council thought they had every door, every corridor, lift, and stairwell mapped within inches of their actual locations. But Rykus didn’t trust their calculations. He wanted information from real sources, from eyes on the ground or from the Sariceans’ own databanks, not from some researcher’s made-up algorithm.

“Sometimes I-Com gets things right,” Brookins said.

He met the other man’s gaze. Clay Brookins had been his XO for the past two years. Before him, Rykus had gone through half a dozen officers, all men and women who did nothing but agree with him. They thought his appointment to the anomaly program and his status as a war hero made him infallible. He wasn’t, and he needed an XO who would punch holes in his plans. Brookins was that man.

He also happened to be the only anomaly on the ship. Not one of Rykus’s cadets, and not loyalty trained, thank God. But that’s what made him an asset. Every anomaly thought his time on Caruth was the toughest, his instructor the most demanding. Brookins had made it clear he thought Rykus was overrated. He’d stated up front that he’d rip apart every one of Rykus’s ideas. He’d go out of his way to disagree and would be hell to work with. Rykus had held out his hand and said, “Welcome to my team.”

“Everyone knows the risks,” Brookins said.

Rykus glared at the other man. “They haven’t seen these numbers.”

“Not the risk of the specific operation, but the risk of doing nothing.” The anomaly’s expression was hard, unforgiving. “The Sariceans don’t have to like the Coalition, but their raids on our member worlds are unacceptable. Their disregard for human life—for anyone who doesn’t believe in the sanctity of their home world—is unacceptable. We shouldn’t just be raiding this shipyard. We should take the battle to Saris—”

“That won’t happen,” Rykus said, cutting him off. Brookins wasn’t the only one in the Coalition who felt that way, but attacking Saris would stir up the Known Universe. Native Sariceans weren’t the only ones who believed Saris had been visited by a god or the gods sometime in the past. Billions of others, all scattered through the KU, believed it as well. The Coalition wanted to defend its member worlds against Saricean aggression, not start a religious war, and right now, I-Com and the senate thought the best way to do that was by launching a preemptive attack on one of the Saricean shipyards.

It better be worth the cost
.

Rykus leaned back in his chair. “Personnel and equipment for the operation is the same whether we get more information or not. Make sure everyone has what they need, including adequate sleep.”

“Does that last part apply to you, sir?” Brookins asked.

The look Rykus settled on his XO made Brookins’s eyebrows rise; it was supposed to make him snap his mouth shut and give a curt “I’ll make sure it’s done, sir.”

“I’ll get some sleep when you get out of my office,” he said.

Brookins didn’t stand immediately. He maintained eye contact for a good five seconds, long enough to prove he was leaving because he chose to, not because Rykus had given him an order.

The small act of defiance reminded Rykus of Ash, and when Brookins finally exited, Rykus swiped his hand across his screen, returning to the evidence that had been gathered against his cadet.

It was all blatantly irrefutable. There were encrypted communications with Ash’s ID-sig, classified data stored in her comm-cuff, and numerous references to her contact with Saricean agents. Every single piece of evidence should have raised alarms. Why hadn’t they? The Coalition’s intelligence community couldn’t be
this
inept, could it?

He swiped to the next file, Ash’s financial records. They were the most damning of the evidence. Anomalies were some of the highest-paid people in the military. That’s why many of them were willing to travel to Caruth, go through the hell of training, and become dependent on the boosters that fueled their minds and bodies.

Others went for different reasons. About a third of them craved the challenge. They wanted to become the ultimate warriors.

The rest of the anomalies, the majority of the ones who made it through the training, were there because they believed in the Coalition. They were willing to sacrifice their free will and their lives to protect it.

That’s why Ash had signed up. She’d never cared about the money. She’d cared about the Coalition.

But maybe she’d begun to care about money.

Rykus sat straighter in his chair and frowned at the transactions. Every month, the majority of her paycheck disappeared into an account the Coalition hadn’t yet been able to trace. The money Ash lived off was minuscule, barely above poverty level on most planets. At least, it had been up until the day her teammates were murdered. On that day, the equivalent of a standard year’s salary showed up in her account.

And intelligence had linked the source of those funds back to a Saricean financier.

He stood, knocking his chair away from his desk. The evidence
proved
Ash had committed treason. Why the hell couldn’t he convince himself to believe it?

More theories, more scenarios, kicked around inside his head. None of them fit the evidence. None of them explained Ash’s behavior. None of them erased the feeling that he was missing something crucial.

He couldn’t think in his office anymore, so he confirmed the two meetings he had scheduled later that day, ignored a message from his father to call, then logged out of his computer and headed to his hole in the officers’ barracks. His room was a square box, barely big enough to fit a bed and small desk. It was extravagant compared to most crew quarters though. The rank and file shared holes only slightly bigger than this one with five other men or women. Rykus had privacy.

Heading to his desk, he untucked his uniform and took off his comm-cuff. His door pinged while he was rolling up his sleeves. He turned, and the ship announced his visitor as Dr. Kathryn Monick.

“Allow entry,” he said.

Katie stepped into his quarters. He expected her to tap the door-hold button—rumors spread when a man and woman were alone in the same hole, no matter how innocent the visit—but she let the door slide shut behind her.

She stared at his disheveled uniform. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

He shook his head. “Haven’t had a chance to sleep.”

She pursed her lips and nodded, but her eyebrows crooked in a familiar expression.

“What?” he asked, tucking his uniform back in.

“Nothing,” she said far too slowly.

“Katie.”

“You’re having trouble sleeping.”

“I said I haven’t slept, not that I’m having trouble.”

“Oh.” Her tone made it sound like she knew something he didn’t.

“Oh?” He frowned. “Why are you here, Katie?”

“Why did you leave Caruth?”

“Caruth?” The question struck him like undocumented space debris. “Is this visit business or personal?”

“Business.” Her right thumb rubbed over the surface of the comm-cuff strapped around her left wrist. “Mostly.”

On his best days, he didn’t have patience for this kind of thing. Today wasn’t one of his best days. “Everyone knows why I left. I didn’t approve of the loyalty training.”

She gave a little shrug, and there was that expression again, the one that suggested he wasn’t being honest with her.

“If you have something you want to say, Katie, just say it.”

She looked away and nodded, but not as if she was agreeing with him. It was more like she was agreeing with her own thoughts, whatever they were. When she met his eyes again, her expression was calm, certain.

“I always thought there was another woman.”

Rykus stared. He couldn’t possibly have heard her correctly. “What?”

“When we were together,” she said. “I thought there was someone else.”

He still couldn’t believe her words. He had never, not even once, been unfaithful to a woman. That Katie could accuse him of it
now
, after almost three years apart, suggested she didn’t know him at all.

“Tell me you’re joking.” His voice was so low, so icy, he was surprised she heard him.

“I’m not saying you acted on those feelings, but…” She walked to his desk and waved her comm-cuff over a sensor. The terminal logged her in, and the screen brightened, showing overlapping line graphs which were shaded in different hues of blue.

“The darker color is your vocal imprint from Caruth,” Katie said, pointing. “This is what your voice looks like when you engage an anomaly’s loyalty training to give commands. The lighter blue here”—she moved her finger to indicate the zigzag just below the upper line—”is from earlier today when you ordered Ash to give you the cipher.”

The difference was almost insignificant, but it was there, a subtle dip it seemed, in his tone. Maybe a small variance in his inflection. He knew the graph was significant, but he filed it away in his mind, still caught up on Katie’s insinuation. He was so damn tired of people accusing him of having feelings for Ash.

“That doesn’t mean I’m in love with the woman,” he said, not bothering to keep his irritation in check. “And she has nothing to do with the reason I left Caruth.”

Katie faced him. “You decided to leave
after
Ashdyn’s class graduated. You could have left before the senate implemented the loyalty training.”

“I objected to it before. I didn’t leave then because I gave it a chance. Then I saw what it did to the cadets. One command from me made them ignore their needs and their safety.” Not only was that wrong, but it was dangerous. Rykus and the other instructors were well vetted by the Coalition, but if a new instructor came along and abused his position…

“You’ve seen the loyalty training in action too,” he said, softening his voice. “You’ve seen the way their personalities change.”

Katie’s blue eyes met his. “Did Ashdyn’s personality change?”

“Ash was always—” He cut himself off. Ash had always been a pain in his ass. Apparently, three years apart hadn’t changed that.

“I don’t know,” he said, a weak answer, but it was the truth. Ash had always hidden behind her half smiles and her flirtations. That didn’t change after the loyalty training. But every once in a while, when Ash was exhausted or unguarded, she’d looked at him like he was more than just her instructor. Were those glimpses of her calculated? Sometimes he’d thought so. He’d thought she was letting him see a vulnerability in order to manipulate his emotions. But other times?

Other times, he thought what he saw was real.

“You’ve only attempted to use compulsion twice,” Katie said.

“I haven’t used it more than that because I’m trying to find out what the hell is wrong with her, and I respect her free will.” He held up a hand to stop her reply. “And before you say that’s because I like her, it’s not. I’d do the same for any one of my recruits.”

“Yes,” Katie said. “I’m sure you would have held them the way you held her when she seized.”

“Seeker’s God, Katie, I—”

She held up her hands in surrender. “I’m done. I won’t say anything else.”

“Don’t even think it. You and Bayis both are reading too much into her flirtations.”

“Bayis thinks you’re in lo—”

He flashed her a look that would have made most men snap their mouths shut. Katie just twisted her lips into a halfway-apologetic smile and shrugged.

Rykus turned back to the data-screen, stared at the disparate graphs, and forced the tension out of his body. “The vocal imprints,” he said. “Do you have one from just before she seized?”

“Yes.” She unhooked and flattened her comm-cuff, turning it into a small tablet. She tapped in a command, then waved the device over the desk’s sensor again. “That’s what’s interesting.”