Cloak of War E-Book

Rhonda Mason

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The bloody tournament to determine the new empress of the intergalactic empire may be over, but for exiled princess Kayla Reinumon, the battle is just beginning. To free her home planet from occupation, Kayla must infiltrate the highest reaches of imperial power. But when a deadly nanovirus threatens to ravage the empire, it will take more than diplomacy to protect her homeworld from all-out war.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Rhonda Mason

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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Acknowledgments

About the Author

Coming Soon from Titan Books

Also Available from Titan Books

Also available from Rhonda Mason and Titan Books

THE EMPRESS GAME

EXILE’S THRONE

(August 2017)

The Empress Game: Cloak of WarPrint edition ISBN: 9781783299430E-book ISBN: 9781783299447

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: October 201610 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 2016 by Rhonda Mason

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

What did you think of this book? We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at: [email protected], or write to us at the above address.

To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive offers online, please sign up for the Titan newsletter on our website: www.titanbooks.com

This book is dedicated to my amazing husband, James Douglass.Not only is he my biggest supporter and best friend, but he alsogave me the greatest gift a writer could ask for: Time.

Dear James, I hope you hear all of the unspokenwords in my heart when I say, “I love you.”

1

PRINCESS ISONDE VERILEY’S TOWNHOUSEFALANAR CITY, SOVEREIGN PLANET FALANAR, HOMEWORLD OF THE SAKIEN EMPIRE

Kayla Reinumon lay wide awake in the darkness of a bedroom, on a bed too comfortable to be her own. A high window gave a glimpse of the city skyline of Falanar at this late night hour. Things looked muted, quiet.

And foreign. Nothing like her homeworld of Ordoch in Wyrd Space. Or the slum side of Altair Tri, where she’d been exiled for the last five years. It was somewhere in between, a place as alien to her as she was to it.

A place she found herself stranded in.

As it often did, the night’s quiet weighed on her, like a g-force on her chest, breaking loose questions she couldn’t answer, doubts she ignored during the flurry of her waking hours.

“Who am I?” she whispered to the dark.

She’d always known, since the moment of birth, who she was. She was a Wyrd, member of an advanced race of psionics. More importantly, she was a ro’haar. She was one half of a bonded pair, trained in martial arts to protect her il’haar—her twin, Vayne—as he protected her with his superior psionic gifts.

Kayla Reinumon, ro’haar.

A title that meant everything. An empty title now. A title that mocked her.

Vayne was long gone. He and their younger brother Corinth had blasted off from Falanar two weeks ago, headed for sanctuary.

What was a ro’haar without her il’haar?

Just a Wyrd.

Wyrds had psi powers, though, and she had lost hers. What was a Wyrd without her powers?

Just a person. Nothing more.

So, who was she supposed to be now?

The comm in the room buzzed with an incoming transmission. “Princess Isonde? Are you awake?”

Princess Isonde, Kayla’s assumed identity, while the real princess died slowly in a coma. Was that the only identity Kayla had left?

Kayla rolled out of bed and absently retrieved her kris from beneath her pillow. Its mate sat atop the shelving unit near the door. She gave the dagger a pat before thumbing the comm’s switch.

“What is it, Orna? I’m sleeping.”

No, she wasn’t, and hadn’t since her brothers had fled Falanar and left her in the wake of their hyperstream. She strapped one kris to her bare thigh.

“Ambassador Bredard of Geth needs to speak with you; he says it’s quite urgent.” Her junior aide sounded harried. “The word ‘emergency’ was mentioned more than once.”

Kayla blinked dry eyes at the chronometer. “At three in the morning?” He wouldn’t be the first person to come seeking an audience with her in the dead of night—not even the dozenth. Oh-three-hundred on Falanar was another planet’s mid-day commodities market crash, or a dinnertime peace accord crisis.

Isonde, she was learning, lived an exhausting life.

Kayla couldn’t decide if she wanted to be left alone with her demons, or saved from them by hours of mind-numbing political wrangling.

“Ambassador who?” The name wasn’t familiar at all. The province of Geth she remembered—a contentious nation on a Sovereign Planet, pushing for dominance and threatening military force. Isonde’s home nation had cut diplomatic ties with them.

“Bredard.” The aide was very clear on the name, and none too pleased, by the sound of it.

Kayla looked back at the bed—Isonde’s bed, her own private battleground—even as her mind spun on the name. “Can he be put off?” She hated going in blind. Playing the part of Isonde took more than a convincing hologram and an air of authority. It took research and study to be up to date on the latest political situations, to gain at least a basic understanding of the players involved.

“I don’t think he’s leaving, Princess. I could barely contain him in the front lounge. A few more minutes and he’ll make a run for your room.”

If Orna couldn’t put him off, it couldn’t be done. The girl was a master at screening the various political entities clamoring for Isonde’s time and only allowing the most important through.

That settled it. Kayla wasn’t here on Falanar just to make appearances as the triumphant princess, fresh from her victory in the Empress Game. She was here to act as Isonde while the princess was still in her coma, until Malkor—her Malkor, Senior Agent Malkor Rua of the IDC—could find someone better suited for the job.

And Isonde, Kayla knew, would be knowledgeable of the importance of such a visit from this Ambassador Bredard of Geth. She wouldn’t hesitate to take the meeting.

“Tell him I’ll be down shortly.” The sleeping tunic and robe she’d been wearing would be the most comfortable, but Isonde never arrived anywhere looking less than micro-precise in her attire. Kayla sighed and headed to the dressing room.

Fifteen minutes later she arrived at the lounge, looking elegant, if austere. Her sole consideration for comfort had been swapping out a long skirt for leggings so that she could strap a kris to each thigh.

Rawn, her favorite of Isonde’s guards, stood sentry outside the front lounge.

“How did you pull the midnight shift?” she asked him with a smile.

“Ethan had a rough afternoon with the new baby, so I sent him home to get some extra sleep. I was due to start in a few hours anyway.”

“You’re a big softie, Rawn, you know that?” Not to mention big in general, with a physique that would have frightened her a month ago if she hadn’t gotten used to dealing with the larger males.

He returned her smile. “Just don’t tell anyone.”

Kayla straightened her shoulders and gave him the nod to open the doors.

Bredard waited in the shadows near the bank of windows, silhouetted against the sleeping city. Lights dotted the night behind him like a swath of electronic stars across the backdrop of towering buildings, with the exception of a dark blot mid-center. A power outage uptown? A single lamp illuminated the room, its weak light spinning out a web of intimacy—or secrecy.

Imperials did love their games.

After a day like hers had been she was too weary for such affectations. The lounge doors slid shut behind her and she tapped the base of a second lamp, bringing up enough light to make her squint for a moment. His gaze fell immediately to the kris and she pretended not to notice.

“Princess Isonde.” Bredard gave the traditional Piran greeting, touching right fingertips to right shoulder, then lowering his arm, palm up. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me.”

If the Gethans had a traditional greeting she certainly didn’t know it. “Good evening, Ambassador. Unusual circumstances.”

His gaze drifted again to her kris. “I apologize for the lateness of the hour. I fear this is known as the only way to have a moment of your time without scheduling weeks in advance.”

Lovely. She’d have to tell Orna to be stricter or they’d be deluged with visitors.

She gestured toward chairs arranged opposite each other across a low table—it was what Isonde would do. Left to her own instincts, Kayla would prefer to stand, one hand resting on a kris’s handle, her back to the door she knew Rawn guarded from the other side. The tenor of the room, Bredard’s posed stance near the dark embrasure of the windows, set her slightly on edge. What sort of meeting did he intend?

He took a winding course to the chairs, tapping the base of the first lamp as he went, powering it down, and sat facing the windows. She took the seat opposite, annoyed to find herself looking into the only lit lamp in the room directly behind him.

She stared him down. Let him start the conversation. That would work much better than her demanding, “Well, what do you want?” in a perfectly Kayla tone. He was well-dressed and handsome, she supposed, in the blunt-featured, craggy way of some imperials. He seemed to have more in common with Trinan and Vid, IDC agents from Malkor’s octet, than he did with most diplomats.

A minute ticked by. Two. She resisted the urge to sigh with impatience—barely. What sort of quasi-cloak-and-dagger nonsense had he roused her from bed for? Hopefully he would be quick. She had more not-sleeping to do. She could be lying awake, worrying over the whereabouts of her brothers, the war crime charges levied against her people, and best of all, the fractured state of her relationship with Malkor.

On second thought, maybe Bredard could drag this out all night.

The silence stretched to uncomfortable levels and she cracked first. “You have my full attention, Ambassador.”

“The full attention of Princess Isonde?”

His reply put her on guard. She nodded once. “Of course.”

“That’s odd, because the Princess Isonde I know wouldn’t come to a meeting armed with daggers.”

“The Isonde you knew hadn’t survived a terrorist attack and a brush with death at her own attempted wedding, either.” Radical elements from within the empire had tried to infect the planetary rulers of the galaxy with the incurable Tetratock Nanovirus after the Empress Game. Kayla had thwarted the attack and avoided infection by the slimmest margin.

“The Isonde I know,” he said, “wouldn’t come to a midnight meeting with a Gethan—period.”

Stars burn it! What else didn’t she know about Piran’s involvement with Geth? She should have put him off until the morning and spent the night researching. Damn Orna for being intimidated into summoning her.

“Things have changed,” Kayla said. “I am no longer simply one of Piran’s representatives on the Sovereign Council, I have wider concerns.” At least, Isonde would, if she ever woke from her coma, married Prince Ardin and took her place on the elite Council of Seven at his side. Bredard didn’t need to know those concerns stretched beyond the empire, to the fate of Kayla’s homeworld in Wyrd Space.

“Things have indeed changed,” Bredard said, “and not for the better, I fear.” His gaze switched to the windows behind her for a moment and an uneasy feeling prickled across her skin, the sensation of being watched from the shadows. She casually lowered one hand from the chair’s armrest to sit atop a kris.

“I wouldn’t be here like this if they hadn’t,” he said. “Things were rolling along smoothly. The results were… promising. However, your recent activities have forced my hand.”

He’d have to be more specific than that.

In the last few months Kayla had impersonated one of the most influential women in the empire, perpetrated that fraud throughout the entire Empress Game, won the rank of Empress-Apparent and a seat on the Council of Seven, helped uncover a clandestine division working within the Imperial Diplomatic Corps, freed prisoners of war that had been experimented on for five years, and killed the empire’s Grand Advisor of Science and Technology.

To name a few of her activities.

He couldn’t know about any of those, though. She and Malkor’s octet had kept all of the details tightly contained, so he must mean one of the more mundane aspects of her charade as Isonde. Which, though? Which of her recent political maneuvers would affect Geth?

And why couldn’t he have scheduled this meeting with her in advance so she could have prepared?

With no notion of how else to go on, she went for the most controversial of her decisions in the past week.

“Piran stands behind its decision to boycott Timpania’s sale of gallenium ore until they improve conditions in the refineries.” Anything that impacted the empire’s supply of the precious fuel resource would have everyone riled. “If you came to change my mind about it, I’m sorry to say my father and I are quite in accord on this.” Star travel depended on gallenium ore. As the largest supplier, Timpania had the rest of the empire in an economic stranglehold over it.

“If I cared about gallenium I would have arranged a meeting with Isonde’s father to discuss it.”

The bastard knew about the identity switch—why else would he refer to her in the third person—but how?

Bredard lifted one finger from where it had lain on the armrest. “I’ve come about something more personal.”

Suddenly the air felt close, thick—too shallow for two people. His attention shifted past her again in a way it shouldn’t have if they were alone. As she drew breath to question him, a hand clamped over her mouth from behind with the force of a vacuum seal. Bredard sat at ease as an arm encircled her throat, locking her against the chair and holding her prisoner.

Her kris were already in her hands by the time the arm secured its grip. She slashed one wavy blade across the hand at her mouth, catching her cheek with the tip and spilling a warm rivulet of fluid down her chin in the process. The hand held firm. She swung her other arm overhead backward, hoping to sink her blade in the flesh of her attacker’s shoulder, if she wasn’t lucky enough to hit his jugular. Instead her blade shanked off something harder than it, tearing a line through flesh as the blade slid aside.

The arm about her throat tightened, constricting blood flow to her brain as the hand bruised her lips against her teeth. She tried to twist and drop beneath her attacker’s arm but it held like a garrote and about as tightly. A scent like… lubricant? hit her right before Bredard drew a pistol from his pocket.

“Enough.”

She desperately sucked air in through her nostrils, breathing what little she could get down her trachea, and raised her hands, kris away from her body. Even with the pistol trained on her, it was hard not to kick her feet out and keep struggling with the arm strangling her closer to darkness each passing second. The lubricant smell was everywhere and a clear fluid glistened on one of her hands in the weak light.

She tried to still her rampaging heart and focus.

Where had the second man come from? She flashed through her memory since arriving—the black spot of the city’s landscape, as seen from the windows. Not a power outage, a cloaking device of some sort, used to hide another person’s presence. A cloak that couldn’t flawlessly render the complicated scene behind it, presenting the outline of buildings without the shifting lights.

A rushing sounded in her ears. In a second she was going to have to choose between getting shot for making a move or being passively strangled to unconsciousness.

“If you promise not to make a sound, I’ll have Siño release you.”

Blinking was all she could manage. Luckily, he took it in the affirmative. Siño released his grasp and she sucked in air, filling her burning lungs even as she studied Bredard’s weapon.

The design of the pistol was unfamiliar to her—how in the void had he gotten it past her security filters? For that matter, how had Siño gotten past? And who the frutt did they think they were, assaulting her in her home?

“Knives, if you please.” Pistol still trained on her, Bredard gestured and Siño came around from behind her chair. Blood rimmed the gash she’d opened on the back of his hand. More disturbing, though, was the clear fluid oozing out of it. The wound on his shoulder showed an equally small amount of blood, with a larger stain forming on his shirt.

“I find biocybes are a bit more effective in a fight than your average person,” Bredard said. “Considering your current predicament, I’m guessing you agree.”

If Siño had military biocybernetic enhancements, which she suspected he did, that was some seriously high-level tech for an “ambassador.”

Siño reached out his injured hand for her weapons, and through the cut she caught sight of a series of flesh-colored tubes, some severed, running beneath his skin. Her stomach gave a sick roll as she imagined biocybernetics threaded through her own body.

She had the urge to stab her kris through his outstretched hand. She’d been taken by surprise like a novice, brought down by an imperial and his mechanical monkey in less than three minutes. Her chest burned with wounded pride. It didn’t matter that Wyrd training couldn’t save her from a pistol blast at close range; she should never have been caught in this position in the first place.

Life on Falanar was making her soft.

She handed over her kris with the feeling of being declawed, and turned her attention back to Bredard. His satisfied expression begged for her fist.

“That’s better. Here’s the way of it: we’re going to have a little chat. You alert the guard outside to our presence, I’ll shoot you.” He said it so matter-of-factly that she didn’t doubt him. “Siño—the door.”

Siño must have brought a pack of gear, hidden by the cloaking device, because he disappeared from view before returning with what looked like a mini towel rack. He affixed it to the door, one square mount on each side of the door’s center seam, a ten centimeter bar connecting them. Depending on the sealant, the lock bar could hold against a powered jack.

Finished, Siño positioned himself beside her chair.

“I’ve come with a message for you, Princess Isonde.”

“Ever heard of a comm device?”

He quirked his lips, then nodded to the biocybe.

Even prepared for it, the backhand snapped her head to the side. It opened the cut on her cheek she’d given herself earlier.

“I find comms lack the appropriate tone.”

She tried to loosen her muscles and roll with the motion, but the second backhand still felt like a brick to the face. She forearm-blocked the third and Bredard raised the pistol a little.

“Come now, take it like a man. Or should I say, like a ro’haar.

“Oh yes. I know who you are, despite who you pretend to be—Isonde, Evelyn, Shadow Panthe—guises that hide the truth of your heritage.” He lowered the pistol to rest on his knee, now that he had her undivided attention. This was about more than imperial power and politics, more than councils and empresses. It went deeper, into much more dangerous territory.

“What I do with that knowledge,” he said, “I’ll leave you to fear, especially if I don’t get what I want.”

She wasn’t merely the woman impersonating Princess Isonde, the soon-to-be Empress-Apparent to the throne of the Sakien Empire. Kayla was one of the few surviving members of the royal family of the Wyrd World Ordoch. She was a sworn enemy of the empire, a fugitive in their lands, hiding in plain sight. If taken prisoner, she could be their greatest piece of leverage in the empire’s struggle to dominate her homeworld.

Worse, if she were killed, she would never see her two il’haars, the brothers she’d been born to protect, again.

“What do you want?” Her face throbbed from Siño’s blows, one side of her mouth already swelling, and the words came out stiffly.

“What I want is you and your twin, Vayne, in the same room, access to certain laboratory equipment which you destroyed, and the genius of the smartest man—Wyrd—I’ve ever known.”

He could only mean one person, the exiled Wyrd and neurobiological engineer Dolan. She smiled with the half of her mouth she could still move. “Whom I killed.”

“Precisely. What I’ll settle for is the data from Dolan’s complinks that you and your pet octet stole from me, data from five years of experiments that could change the nature of our brains.”

Those experiments had been carried out on members of her family, including her beloved twin, for five years. Most of her family had not survived.

“I don’t have access to it.” And if she did, she’d destroy it before handing it over to anyone else.

“Not at the moment, no. Senior Agent Rua does, however, and I believe the two of you have something of an understanding.”

She and Malkor had something of a sexual relationship, to be precise. Or they had, before everything went sideways.

“I would have taken it from him directly, but unlike you, the IDC pays more attention to the security of their buildings’ exteriors, including the windows.”

That at least explained how Siño had gotten in.

She gave him the only answer he’d ever get from her. “Frutt you.”

He laughed, a soft chuckle, and stopped Siño with a gesture when the biocybe would have struck her again. “It’s amusing to me that you think you have a choice.” He rose. “You have one week.”

The pistol lost its aim on her as he straightened his clothes, and she itched to attack. Spring from the chair, one foot on the table, launch at him—

“Oh,” he said, the word freezing her in place, “if revealing your identity and cheating at the Empress Game isn’t enough of a threat, know this: I have something you want.”

She wanted three things from life right now: to be with Malkor, which Bredard couldn’t affect, to free her homeworld from imperial occupation, which was beyond his means, and to be reunited with her brothers and remaining family. That last…

“I see you understand. I have the one thing you do not: knowledge of your il’haars’ location.”

“My family escaped to Wyrd Space.” Escaped, and left her behind.

Bredard arched a brow. “Did they?”

She stiffened as he approached. He forced the muzzle against her temple while Siño pulled something from a pocket.

“I’d sit still for this part, if I were you.”

Electricity crackled in the air one second before pain shot through her from neck to brain to toes, and then she fell into darkness.

* * *

Senior Agent Malkor Rua of the Imperial Diplomatic Corps perched on the edge of a chair in Kayla’s bedroom and studied her reflection in the mirror. He so seldom saw her, hidden as she always was behind the Isonde hologram, and it was a welcome sight.

Or would be, if she didn’t have a split lip, a swollen, just-now-bruising jaw, and a slashed cheek. The biocybe hadn’t been gentle. A frutting biocybe—how had Bredard found one of those rarities?

Kayla could take the beating, he knew, and even now she treated it like it was nothing while she began healing the damage with a medstick.

Neither of them mentioned the real threat screaming through the room—their cover was blown. Bredard, and who knew how many others, knew who Kayla was, knew that Malkor and Isonde had worked with her to fix the Empress Game.

That knowledge was a death sentence if it got out. Not to mention the end of years of planning Malkor, Ardin and Isonde had done. It was something they’d all known could happen when they began this, but now the danger was very, very real.

Kayla’s fingers were sure and strong as she applied the medstick to the bruising, something she’d probably done thousands of times in her history as a ro’haar.

“Let me do that,” he said. He had to do something. Fix something. Smash something. Anything to get away from this feeling of lack of control.

Kayla’s gaze met his in the mirror, seeming to really see him for the first time. She held him suspended as he waited for her to relent. Supreme self-sufficiency had been her credo for the last five years and even now, despite the bond they shared, it took an effort for her to lean on him.

She nodded.

He hadn’t come near her when he arrived twenty minutes ago to get her account of what happened with Bredard and Siño. Unlike most people who had been assaulted in the night, in the one place they should have been the safest, it wasn’t her instinct to rush into a strong pair of arms for comfort. It wasn’t her instinct to rush to anyone. He’d known from the set of her shoulders when he entered that what she needed was space and the chance to remind herself that she was strong.

“Sit.”

She chose a stiff-backed chair beside the table that held the medical case with its assortment of medsticks. Her face looked worse up close, but its puffiness didn’t soften the determined set of her features. She hadn’t called him here in the dead of night to be a concerned lover, or even a friend. She’d summoned him as an IDC agent and a co-conspirator whose clandestine activities had been discovered.

Frutt. They were really into it now. How had Bredard found out? Had someone betrayed them?

And what of the evidence? The hologram biostrip that Rigger had designed, with Corinth and Kayla’s help, was so advanced that no one would believe its possibilities if they didn’t see it firsthand. Was it time to destroy the thing and all of Rigger’s schematics? Without the hologram itself as evidence, maybe they could argue that such a switch during the Empress Game would have been impossible, given the empire’s low-level tech.

He took the medstick from Kayla and focused its beam on her jaw, working first on the hematoma. This, at least, was a problem he could fix.

“Hekkar’s looking into it,” he said. “I think you’re right about the biocybe entering through the window.” Hekkar Tial, his second in command, was studying the lounge where the attack had taken place. Rigger, his octet’s tech specialist, was investigating how they had circumvented the outside security systems.

“Rawn found hydrofluoric gel around the edge of the pane,” she said, “which explains how they got it loose without smashing it—they dissolved a thin line of the glass where it met the casing. Something tacky had held it in place by the corners once the biocybe entered, and I hadn’t noticed in the dim light.” He could almost hear the thought: I should have. “I bet it’s also how they got the weapon in. They left the same way.”

She stiffened when he touched her chin to tilt her head to get a better angle on her swollen mouth. He ignored the reaction, just like he’d ignored the stiffness between them since she had decided to leave him behind on Falanar. The broken state of their relationship would have to wait for a day when they weren’t being blackmailed with their lives in the balance.

She waited for him to finish the first round of healing on her mouth before speaking. “I’ve never seen a pistol like it before.”

“I think we both know where he would have gotten tech for a new weapon design.”

The kin’shaa, Dolan. The most sophisticated neurobiological engineer ever born in the Wyrd Worlds. He’d gone too far in his experiments, warping the minds and destroying the free will of innocent people, and had been stripped of the psionic powers inherent to all Wyrds as a punishment. He’d been banished from Wyrd Space and defected to the Sakien Empire, bringing with him a level of technology the imperials wouldn’t have reached in a generation. He’d been doling out that technology to clandestine groups in the IDC and the government and continuing his research with their support.

At least he had been, until a few weeks ago when Kayla had staked him through the throat and Vayne pulverized his body.

She batted Malkor’s hand away so she could talk. “Bredard said, ‘Did they?’ when I told him my family had escaped to Wyrd Space. ‘Did they.’” For the first time since Malkor had arrived, something akin to fear showed in her gaze. “What did he mean?”

“He was bullshitting you.” Only, Malkor wasn’t sure. Couldn’t be sure. And that uncertainty would never be enough for Kayla.

“I can’t ignore it.”

He could see she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Her finger tapped a staccato rhythm against one of the kris strapped to her thigh. Thankfully Bredard had left those behind.

“There’s nothing we can do about it tonight,” he said.

“There’s nothing we can do about it at all. Damnit.” She pressed her lips together in frustration and the split he hadn’t finished healing yet dribbled blood. “It’s only been two weeks,” she said. “They haven’t reached the edge of Imperial Space yet; they could be anywhere. They would have had to drop out of their hyperstream periodically—anything could have happened.”

“Or nothing could have happened.” But Imperial Space was a treacherous place.

“Then why haven’t we heard from them?”

It’s true; he’d expected to have heard from her two brothers at least, even if the other rescued members of her family or the Ilmenans hadn’t thought to assure her of their progress. They might have at least sent her a final farewell.

“I’m sure we will.”

Her fingers tapped faster. “That assurance is useless to me.”

He set down the medstick with a snap. “We have more immediate concerns right now.” He had entirely too many concerns at the moment.

She frowned fiercely at him but didn’t argue.

“I know you’re worried about your brothers. I’m worried too. Their lives aren’t the ones in immediate danger, though.”

“Bredard wouldn’t have killed me, not while he thinks he can get Dolan’s research data from me.”

“And when he realizes he can’t?”

“We’ll have to think of something before then.”

“Bah.” He reached for the medstick again and directed it to her lip. They sat in silence while he worked, she not looking at him, he trying not to stare at her. This was at most the third time they’d been in the same room in the last few weeks, and then only because she’d been attacked. They were both too busy to steal quiet moments together, and in truth, the awkwardness between them was more than he wanted to deal with right now.

She loved him, as much as he loved her. Apparently that hadn’t been enough to keep her here. Kayla had chosen to leave him behind with no more than a word about it on her way to the spacedocks. She’d chosen life with her brothers over a life with him. If the Wyrds hadn’t been forced into an emergency departure she’d be with them now.

How did he reconcile his feelings for her with knowing he’d always be a distant second choice to her brothers, so far behind that she hadn’t even consulted him before making the decision to leave? Intellectually he understood her choice, if not her methods. None of that eased the rift between them.

He finished healing her mouth and returned the medstick to its case.

“I’m going to start skimming vessel logs for the last two weeks,” she said, “see if I can find any mention of the Ilmenans’ starship.” The words came out fuzzy, the numbing effect of the medstick having reached her lips. She was already heading in the direction of the complink.

“Sleep’s a better option right now, Kayla.” Stars knew she had an impossibly full schedule tomorrow in her charade as Isonde.

“I slept already, remember?”

“Being stunned into unconsciousness for an hour before Rawn cut the lounge doors open and revived you doesn’t count as sleeping.”

She winked. Winked. After what happened… So Kayla.

He took a syringe from the medcase. “Sleep, or I’ll sedate you myself.”

Her eyes narrowed, judging his seriousness, so he waved the syringe around a little. He must have looked convincing because she grumbled and changed course for the bed.

She was asleep in less than five minutes.

2

Early next morning, Kayla and half a dozen politicians gathered in Archon Raorin’s sumptuous office—one of hundreds of offices tucked into the wings of the Sovereign Council seat. While informal, the breakfast meeting was in some ways more important than the emergency session of council starting in an hour. Everyone seated in the padded hover chairs looked ill at ease, despite the micro-fine controls that adjusted every aspect of the chairs for maximum comfort.

Coffee was poured, fruit and pastries delicately selected, small talk made. Kayla tilted her seat upright so as not to get too comfortable. She’d gotten maybe three hours of sleep and fatigue ground her down, despite the high stakes of this morning’s meeting. Also, her jaw ached. A medstick had healed the soft tissue damage but the joint remained stiff.

Those gathered spoke in low tones, a side conversation here or there, an air of expectant waiting hanging about the room. Archon Raorin’s gaze flitted first to the door, then the chronometer embedded in the wall. He caught her watching him and gave her barely noticeable smile that she took as encouragement. Encouragement for Isonde. Kayla was back to wearing the hologram and playing her part as a member of the Sovereign Council representing the Sovereign Planet Piran, betrothed to Prince Ardin, and soon to take her seat on the exalted Council of Seven.