Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (2 page)

“Is it almost lunchtime, Captain? That smells wonderful.”

“I was just about to call the crew. You want to eat first?”

Raena appreciated that he tried to accommodate her, but really, she had to start trying to fit in or else she needed to move on. The longer she held herself apart, the harder it was going to be to settle in—and nowhere else was likely to be a whole lot better than the cushy gig she had now. This crew was small and the work wasn’t demanding. And she had the largest cabin, since she’d been the one to provide the ship.

“No,” she said quietly, picking an apple out of the crisper. “I’ll join you, if you think it won’t put Coni off her food.”

“Nah, czyk is her favorite,” he teased. “Nothing will stop her from eating it.” He pressed the intercom chime.

Raena chose the corner of the table where she could get her back against the wall. Once the crew settled in around the table, she’d be penned in, but they posed no real physical threat to her. Well, maybe Haoun did. The big lizard was strong and could move faster than one might expect, if only for short bursts. He had a calm temperament and quick reflexes, which made him a stellar pilot, but he also calculated for safety rather than excitement. He wouldn’t stir anything up.

Raena watched them all come in, note her presence in the galley, then pick their seats at the table. Coni sat diagonally from her, holding a spot at her side for Mykah. Haoun settled on Raena’s left, easing himself onto a stool designed for a smaller, more humanoid, creature. Vezali slipped into the banquette at Raena’s right, arranging her tentacles under the table. Raena meant to watch to see if the same tentacles always served Vezali as hands, but it was hard to keep track. The tentacles seemed to be in constant flux, changing from feet to hands as Vezali required.

“There’s been a new request to interview you,” Coni said. The blue-furred girl didn’t raise her gaze from the plate Mykah set in front of her. Nothing was stopping her from eating the czyk, Raena was amused to note.

“How was the interview request addressed?” Raena asked.

“They didn’t know your name.”

One of the earliest requests had called her by name. Others had addressed her as Fiana, her mother’s name, which she’d used on Kai while hiding out with Gavin and Ariel. Ariel wouldn’t contact her so obliquely, wouldn’t ever do anything more than leave a message on the Shaad family’s private channel for Raena to retrieve at her leisure. Anyone who called her by name or the Fiana alias knew or was working for Gavin Sloane. Raena didn’t respond to those calls.

“I don’t do interviews,” Raena repeated, same as she always did. She thought Coni must hate acting as her secretary, but she also expected that was the least of her behavior that freaked the blue girl out.

“Is it from a legitimate news outlet?” Mykah asked. Since everyone had been served lunch now, he joined them at the table.

Raena looked down at the plate he’d placed in front of her. Today they were having a slab of some kind of meat glistening in a rich yellow sauce. Ever since she’d come back into the galaxy after her long imprisonment, it amazed her that people still ate meat. With creatures whose heritage looked saurian, octopoid, and some weird pastel-shaded vaguely feline mammal, Raena wondered how the
Veracity
’s crew found any flesh safe or appropriate to eat, unless it was some form of avian creature. Wasn’t everything else someone’s distant relative? Was there a galactic measure of sentience that edible creatures had to fail before they were fit for the table? Raena might be able to ask Mykah, who was continually entertained by her naiveté, but she wouldn’t risk offending any of the others.

On her plate, beside the meat, sat a cluster of roasted grain, garnished with some kind of fancy leaf, and a blue vegetable they’d eaten before. Apparently that was czyk, Coni’s favorite. To Raena, it tasted like tree sap. Not unpleasant, really, just not what she expected when she put a blue stalk of vegetation into her mouth.

She ate her apple first. It was probably the most expensive thing on the table, but since the
Veracity
had collected the Thallian bounty, the crew could afford a few luxuries. Anyway, Raena always tried to ease her stomach into eating with something that passed for human food.

The others tucked into their meals with gusto.

“The interview request seems legitimate,” Coni said between dainty bites. “They asked to talk to the human responsible for hunting down the terrorists who spread the Templar plague. No names were mentioned, other than the Thallians’.”

Mykah was watching Raena when she glanced up.

“You’re the press agent,” Raena told him. “Talk to them only if you want to. Feel free to tell them the same thing you told the others. Keep me out of it.”

“Do you think that smuggler is still looking for you?” Vezali asked.

“Maybe,” Raena said in such a way that it sounded like yes. Gavin Sloane was just as obsessed with her as Jonan Thallian had ever been, without the added fun of psychosis. “Maybe Gavin’s gotten himself a new girlfriend,” she added, but, really, she didn’t think that was likely.

“We need some other work,” Haoun said. The translator around his neck made him sound very urbane, while the actual sound of his sibilant voice still raised the hairs on the back of Raena’s neck. It was some kind of uncomfortable vestigial reaction, completely unconnected with the affable lizard’s presence. Raena refrained from reaching up to rub her neck. “We can’t just hang around,” the big lizard continued. “We can’t just keep living off the last big score.”

Raena had headed up the
Veracity
’s last two big jobs: assassinating the Thallians and revealing the looting of the Templar cemetery world, but she had run out of wrongs she felt morally responsible for righting in the galaxy. Her old scores were, for the most part, settled. The only one that remained she was content to let slide.

“Since the last two jobs were human malfeasance,” Mykah said, “I’d like to uncover someone else’s responsibility for a change.”

“Even humans have rights,” Haoun said. Everyone laughed, save for Raena. The phrase was the punch line to an almost twenty-year-old joke that had circulated the galaxy after the Templar plague and the consequent destruction of the human Empire. Mykah had tried to explain the joke to Raena, had even played her several recordings of it, but as far as Raena could tell, everyone laughed at the punch line because they found it so improbable. Humanity had really screwed things up in the galaxy; many felt that, after the Templar plague was revealed, it was quite likely that the purges hadn’t gone far enough. Human rights were a polite fiction, granted by the rest of the galaxy, but continually subject to reconsideration.

Still, whether she understood the humor or not, she’d chosen the seat with her back to the wall, so Raena knew she had to ride the laughter out. It wasn’t directed at her personally—and Mykah joined in, anyway. Raena inclined her head over her plate and ate in silence.

Then a thought occurred to her. “I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do about the Viridian slave trade,” she asked casually.

“That’s bigger than we are, unfortunately,” Mykah said apologetically. “Slavery has been outlawed on a system by system basis, but even the Council of Worlds hasn’t had any luck wiping it out galaxy-wide.”

“For the future, then,” Raena said. “For now, the four of you will have to decide what work to take. I don’t even know which wrongs can be righted. Just let me know if you find anything that requires some security.”

Ariel walked from her bedroom to the office, where Eilif was already at work for the day. From the back, the woman looked alarmingly like Raena: same shape to her head, same sharp alignment of her shoulders, same ramrod-straight spine. Although she was much younger than Ariel, Eilif had gone gray prematurely, her formerly black hair now pure white. She wore her hair long and loose, flowing down her back as Raena once did. These days, Raena wore her black hair short. She’d whacked it off with a knife last time Ariel had seen her.

“Morning,” Ariel wished.

Eilif jumped, even though she must have heard Ariel come into the room. Poor thing. The widow’s life had been a hell that Ariel struggled not to imagine.

“Good morning,” Eilif answered cheerfully. She got up from her screen to fix Ariel a cup of coffee, something she did every morning without being asked. Even though Ariel told her often how unnecessary the gesture was, Eilif did it anyway. It seemed to make her happy. She’d had so little happiness in her life that Ariel indulged her in this.

“How are things today?” Ariel asked.

“I found a home for the twins,” Eilif said. “Can I give them the news at lunchtime?”

“Tell me about it first,” Ariel said, but she was sure the placement would be secure for the boys. Eilif treated each child as if he or she was one of her own. She wouldn’t send the kids anywhere that might endanger them. Once Ariel had showed her how to search, Eilif was more determined and vigilant than Ariel had ever been when looking into the backgrounds of potential parents.

Ariel wondered if any of Eilif’s own sons had survived Raena’s attack on their father. She knew she would never, ever ask.

Since they’d made the
Veracity
their home, the crew had set about customizing it. It had started life as a troop transport carried aboard the
Arbiter
, an Imperial warship that had masqueraded as a diplomatic courier. After Jonan Thallian and his family followed the Emperor’s command and spread the Templar plague, Thallian had taken the
Arbiter
and its crew into hiding with his family. All through the dissolution of the Empire and the hunt for the plague’s disseminator, the warship and its complement of transports rested beneath the ocean on Thallian’s homeworld. One of Thallian’s brothers commanded the
Veracity
in its middle age, when it served to carry private soldiers on the family’s errands—mostly supply runs, Raena understood, until they’d been ordered to come after her.

The ship’s larger hold had served as a barracks for Thallian’s soldiers. Once the
Veracity
’s crew had settled into their stolen ship, they had dismantled the bunks, added walls, and converted the hold into several nice-sized cabins: one for Haoun—too tall to fit into a human-scale room—and another for Vezali, who preferred to sleep in a tank of water. The others they used as storerooms.

Raena had taken over the smaller secondary hold for her gymnasium, which Vezali helped her to construct and stock. Mostly Raena did resistance training, working against the increased gravity in that room, practicing cartwheels and flips, climbing the walls or hanging from the ceiling, anything to strain her muscles and help her sleep.

And sleep never came easily any more. Raena suspected that was because she’d slept away so much of her imprisonment. During the years of lying in total blackness, she hadn’t noticed much difference between sleeping and waking anyway. Perhaps her body felt it had stored up all the rest she would ever need. Or perhaps some part of her feared to drift away and release its grip on wakefulness, lest she find herself imprisoned again.

Still, she needed rest to recharge. She knew her reflexes got dangerously hair-trigger if she didn’t sleep. Raena had spent enough time drugged against her will that she had a horror of doping herself. The odds of anything creeping up on her while she was vulnerable were slim now—she’d killed most of the creeps herself—but the years of vigilance made relaxing difficult.

To Raena’s way of thinking, a spaceship was all too similar to a prison, whether the lights were on or not. Sometimes, if the
Veracity
wasn’t going anywhere, she’d suit up and go explore the outer hull, just to get
out.
Space might not have air or gravity, but it didn’t make her feel penned in, either.

The only problem with that kind of escape—other than the inability to use it when the ship was traveling—was that she’d inherited her spacesuit from Jain Thallian. No matter what she did to sanitize it, the spacesuit continued to smell like teenaged boy inside.

Today Raena retreated to her gymnasium, to hang from her hands and see just how many times she could raise her feet over her head. The exercise was tedious, but she hoped it would also prove exhausting.

Someone rapped on the hold’s door, metal against metal. Raena looked up to see Mykah peering through the hatch. He grinned.

“Come in,” she called.

“Want some company?”

“I’d be glad for it.” She let go of the chin-up bar and flexed her fingers.

“Wanna spar?”

“Sure.”

He toed out of his deck shoes and stepped barefoot into the room. “Wow,” he grunted. “How high have you got the gravity dialed up today?”

Raena turned a handspring. “Just trying to keep things interesting,” she explained. One of the things she liked about the old Earther ship was its location-specific gravity system. “You want me to set it back to Earth Normal?”

“It’s kind of hard to breathe in here.”

He let her walk past him, her back to him as she adjusted the gravity, before he attacked. She heard him coming, big bare feet slapping the deck, but she didn’t turn. He almost had her before she dodged right, using a grip on his forearm as a pivot point.

He’d gotten too close to the wall to swing his left hand to grab her. Raena continued on around and released him, dancing back.

“Heard me coming?” Mykah asked.

“Like a loader.”

“You’ll have to teach me how to move quieter.”

She stuck out one booted foot. “The higher the heels, the stealthier the step.”

“I doubt that.” He struck out with one leg, trying to catch her off balance. Raena kicked up higher and used the momentum to pull herself over into a walkover. She followed that with a handspring, twisting in midair so that she landed on both feet somewhere to his left, far from where he expected to find her when she came up.

He spun to face her, found her in a crouch. “I’d be dead, wouldn’t I?”

“Depends on what I was armed with,” Raena said.

“Gun? Knife? Bad language?”