Shades of Treason (3 page)

The plan would be called genius if it worked. If it didn’t work…

Well, Rykus would most likely be dead if the plan failed. The war and the future of the Coalition would be someone else’s problem.

He and Bayis walked past the loud
clank, clank, clank
of a spacer pounding a wall panel back into place; then they stepped into the
Obsidian’s
central lift. Gears ground as it fought the artificial gravity. Rykus glanced at the admiral, but Bayis kept his attention focused on the lift’s oil-smeared door.

“You could always turn the gravity off,” Rykus suggested.

Bayis’s eyebrows lowered a small, almost imperceptible fraction. He waited until the lift doors groaned open before he responded to Rykus’s comment. “I’ll be sure to tell the war chancellor you’re looking forward to meeting with him.”

If Rykus hadn’t had a mother lode of responsibilities weighing him down, he might have laughed. Instead, he acknowledged Bayis’s victory with a nod that said point-to-you.

They parted ways, and Rykus walked half the length of the ship—not a quick jaunt—before he stopped in the middle of a cross-corridor. He wanted to hole up in his quarters with Ash’s file, but if he did, he’d pass out. He hadn’t slept in well over twenty-four hours, not since he’d learned what Ash had done.

What Ash had
allegedly
done.

He needed a good shot of energy to make it through the rest of his shift. He could take the lift down to the
Obsidian’s
gym, work off some excess tension until he cleared his head, or he could pump himself full of caffeine in the officer mess hall. The noise and the conversation of the latter might be a good distraction, so he hooked a right turn at the cross-corridor —

And nearly ran into a face from his past.

CHAPTER THREE

“KATIE?” HE SAID, making her name a low rumble to disguise his surprise.

“Commander Rykus.” She didn’t look at the curious spacers who glanced their way. He did. He glared until they continued on with their business, then he turned his attention back to the woman he’d almost married.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. Then he noticed her med-sack and grimaced. The medical specialist from Caruth. She’d come on the war chancellor’s shuttle and was here to evaluate Ash. He should have been prepared for the possibility she would arrive.

“I was summoned.” She kept her tone professionally neutral. Obviously, Katie had been prepared to see him.

He dug through his memories for something to say, but they were buried beneath too many layers of numbers and tactics and training-sims. He couldn’t push the upcoming mission from his mind any more than he could push away Ash’s alleged betrayal.

“I didn’t know you’d made medical specialist,” he said, settling on the first safe topic that came to mind.

“I was promoted two years ago.” Katie smiled. It was a pretty smile, one any man would beg to see on her lips, but there was something hesitant about it too, something pensive.

Had it been that long since he’d spoken to her? They’d separated—more accurately, Katie had left him—three weeks after Ash’s class of anomalies graduated. He’d been immersed in training and testing the two years they’d dated. He hadn’t had time to focus on a relationship that had been falling apart for months.

“I should have called,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have answered.”

He took the punch without comment. He deserved it. Katie Monick was a beautiful woman. Intelligent. Compassionate.
Passionate
. He hadn’t treated her right, hadn’t given her enough attention.

A moment of silence stretched, became awkward. She seemed to be waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t know what she wanted to hear. When he didn’t speak, she sighed, and when her chest rose and fell, the overhead lighting reflected off her insignia.

“Well, a belated congratulations then. The promotion was well deserved.”

She shrugged. “I decided to focus on my career after we… Well, I decided to focus on my career.”

“That’s good. Very good.”

Hell. He’d dated this woman for two years. He should be able to carry on a better conversation than this, but he was exhausted, frustrated with Ash, and worried about Operation Star Dive. He wasn’t at the top of his game.

“Yes.” Katie stepped to the side of the corridor so a few spacers could pass more easily. “Things are going well. How are your soldiers?”

So that’s how it was going to be, a slip back into an old habit. The last few months they were together, all they could find to talk about was their work. He’d talked in vague terms about his cadets; she’d talked in vague terms about her patients.

“They’re fine.” They were fine today. In three days? Computer models said up to forty percent of them would be dead.

Unless Ash gave him the cipher.

“You’ve read the anomaly’s file?” he asked Katie.

She shook her head. “It’s classified. I didn’t get it until we docked.”

Then she wouldn’t have a preliminary assessment of Ash’s mental state. He wanted someone to tell him he hadn’t missed something important during Ash’s training. If he missed something with Ash, he might have missed it with others. The training the anomalies received and the booster they injected biweekly gave them the capability to kill and destroy with remarkable efficiency. Even with the loyalty training, Rykus and the other instructors were careful about who they accepted into the program. They didn’t want the wrong man or woman to graduate and join the ranks of the Fighting Corps.

He felt Katie studying him. When he looked up, some of the stiffness in her posture melted away.

“You’re not personally responsible for every anomaly you’ve trained.”

He was responsible for this one. The loyalty training hadn’t taken hold of Ash like it had the other recruits, but he’d thought her smirking, her bending of rules and regulations, was just one of the many quirks the soldiers sent to him so often had. Every cadet who’d been under his command was a little crazy, a little off in some way. All anomalies were.

Exhaustion pulled down on his shoulders. He forced himself to straighten. “I was heading to the officers’ mess. Join me for coffee?”

Katie hesitated. “I need to read Ashdyn’s file.”

“And you’ll need to interview her fail-safe.”

Again, she gave him a slightly sad smile, but she nodded and turned left toward the lift that would take them up a level to the mess hall. The doors slid open when they approached. He gestured Katie inside. As he followed her in, he took note of the curves beneath her snugly fitted uniform and the blond hair that—as per regulation—she’d twisted into a long, loose braid.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said.

She turned so quickly he almost ran into her. “Don’t,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

“Fair?”

The doors slid shut behind them.

“My feelings for you never changed, Rhys.”

“Neither did mine.”

“I know.” She closed her eyes briefly, then let out a sigh. “That was the problem. I thought they would after a while, but… well, they didn’t. All I ever was to you was a pleasant distraction.”

“You were much more than that, Katie.”

She shrugged. “A good friend then. A sister.”

He almost choked. “We slept together.”

“I know,” she said pointedly.

He was about to object again when the lift doors slid open. A pair of spacers stepped aside so they could exit. Now wasn’t the time or the place for this discussion. Besides, maybe she had a point. Maybe she had been only a distraction to him. He’d sometimes needed one after dealing with anomalies all day. He sure as hell had needed one after dealing with Ash.

Off-duty spacers and soldiers crowded the room. A few men and women acknowledged his presence with a nod, but most were absorbed in conversations or focused on the wide screens that played vids of the latest news reports from around the Known Universe. When Javery, Rykus’s home world, appeared behind a reporter with a marquee that read KU Breaking News, he focused all his attention on finding a table.

Katie eyed him as she sank into a chair near the rear wall. “The Coalition isn’t going to be able to convince Javery to join, is it?”

“Not with my father whispering in the prime minister’s ear.”

“Has the senate asked you to speak to him?”

He grunted out an affirmative, then tapped on the table to bring up the menu.

“
Have
you spoken to him?” she asked.

“Once or twice.”

“Once or twice in the past few months? Or the past few years?”

He looked up from the menu. “He wants the Coalition to fail, and he tried to sabotage my career.”

“He apologized—”

“Only after he thought I’d been killed. Caruthian brew?”

Katie pinched her mouth shut at the abrupt subject change. Then she relaxed and said, “With
radda
leaf.”

“You have capsule sickness?” he asked, his tone softening. Most people could traverse the universe on a tachyon capsule without a problem as long as they didn’t move when the capsule entered and exited the time-bend, but Katie had never been one of those individuals.

“The leaf will help,” she said.

So would sleep and electrolytes, but he dutifully keyed in her order and requested the same, minus the leaf, for himself. A
bleep
acknowledged his request and confirmed a debit from the account linked to his comm-cuff.

“You’ve spoken with Ashdyn?” Katie asked.

“Yes,” he said. Then he added, “It didn’t work.”

He didn’t have to explain what “it” was. The only reason Ash was on board the
Obsidian
was because he was her fail-safe and should have been able to command her compliance. It was merely convenient that he was also the officer in charge of the assault on the shipyard.

A groove formed between Katie’s eyebrows. “No one told me she’d snapped.”

“She isn’t acting like she has,” he said. “Admiral Bayis thinks the Sariceans broke her loyalty training.”

“They broke—” Katie cut off her words when a squat metal box on wheels rolled up with their order. Rykus passed Katie her coffee and cupped his own steaming mug between his hands, letting it heat his palms. When the bot retreated, Katie said, “You can’t break the loyalty training without breaking her mind.”

“She isn’t showing any signs of snapping.”

“She inexplicably murdered her team,” Katie said. “I’d say that’s a sign.”

“The Sariceans could have gotten to her before she came to Caruth.” He pulled his coffee mug closer. “Maybe they found a way to prevent the loyalty training from taking hold.”

Katie stirred the steaming black liquid in her mug with a straw and studied him. He met her blue eyes, kept his expression rigid and stony.

“You think she’s innocent.” She sat back in her chair and chewed on her lower lip.

“She’s not denying the evidence.”

“But you don’t believe it,” she said.

Honestly, he didn’t know what he believed. The evidence was irrefutable. It would be crazy not to see that it all pointed to Ash, but maybe that’s what bothered him. It was too obvious, and Ash wasn’t careless. If she truly was a Saricean agent, she would have covered her tracks. She knew how. If she would just explain her behavior or tell him she was framed, he might believe her. He’d at least try to help. So why the hell wouldn’t she talk to him?

“I don’t think she’s snapped,” he said. By default, that made Ash a traitor.

His words and the unspoken conclusion hung between them.

“Her mental breakdown could have been temporary. I’ll be able to tell you more after I evaluate her.” She took the straw out of her coffee and set it aside. A few seconds later, she said, “They still talk about you on Caruth. Your tap-out rate hasn’t been broken yet.”

He acknowledged her words with a grunt, then took a sip of his drink, letting it burn down his throat. He’d had a talent for identifying the cadets who would walk to the data-con in front of the barracks, tap in their ID-sigs, and quit the training program. Roughly two percent of the population of the Known Universe was identified as anomalies each year. Out of those, less than one percent agreed to travel to Caruth and let themselves be brainwashed into obeying the commands of a stranger. And out of that one percent, very few were women. That’s why there’d been so much pressure from the intelligence committee to pass Ash. No woman had ever completed the training, and they yearned for an anomaly with one more weapon in her arsenal.

Ash was exactly what they desired: beautiful, lethal, and supremely intelligent. More importantly, she was willing to submit to the loyalty training. Only the desperate agreed to go through that terror and give up their free will.

Was Ash desperate enough to commit treason? She was from Glory. Few people survived on that planet without losing their souls.

“How’s the new instructor working out?” He took a long draught of his coffee and let the bitter liquid chase away all thoughts of his cadet.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SLEEP-SLAB WAS hard and lumpy, and the transparent blanket too thin for Ash to sleep well. She tried resting on her side so she could use her arms as a pillow, but the metal support beams hurt her hip, and her cuffs dug grooves into her wrists. They didn’t want her to be comfortable. Probably didn’t want her to get much sleep at all.

She must have drifted off for at least a few minutes though. When she became aware of her surroundings again, she felt somebody watching her. She knew it was Rykus by the smell of his aftershave, but she kept her eyes closed and focused on recapturing the elusive memories from her dream.

Jevan, her deceitful, manipulative farce of a fiancé, shouldn’t have stepped onto her team’s shuttle—he shouldn’t have been carrying a gun and grinning—and for the first time in her life, Ash had frozen. She didn’t think that was possible, to be struck immobile by fear. Maybe she’d still been rattled from the stun grenade the boarders had thrown into the shuttle, but she’d let him approach. It still hadn’t clicked—she hadn’t made all the connections, not until Jevan picked up the comm-cuff that held the stolen data she’d re-encrypted.

Jevan’s presence wasn’t a coincidence. Jevan was an enemy.