Copyright © 2012 Scott Moon
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CREW doors, three inches thick, held him captive. Kin lacked a cutting torch, explosive charge, or miracle password to escape. What he had was time. He tried to sleep through quarantine. When the door opened, he wouldn’t get a chance to rest for days.
He turned around to discover Orlan had left something—pictures of Zosia Milton and Jack Tenderfoot.
Boot Camp. Advanced Infantry School. A few from the front line, posed with weapons up and helmets down. Happy times, although it hadn’t seemed that way.
The images were not temporary copies made to be easily recycled, but studio prints. Someone had spent money on them. Kin had never bothered with mementos.
But Orlan had.
You’re still a homicidal maniac. A backstabbing thug.
The door opened. Becca entered. She was taller than he remembered, but not by much. He assumed his memories had reduced her height to match his image of her as a girl. It seemed unlikely that being a Shock Trooper had actually made her taller. Her hair was short. Her uniform was neat, and she was as fit as any soldier Kin had ever met, although not as muscular as Captain Raien.
“Do you want out of here?” Becca asked.
“Where are we going?” Kin asked. He saw Raien and her bodyguards waiting in the hall.
“Captain Raien wants to talk with you and then we’re going for a walk,” Becca said. She moved aside and the captain walked into the small room.
Raien closed the door, leaving the two guards and Becca in the hallway. She stepped near him, hips touching his, hands on his body, her chest an inch away because she leaned back slightly to look at him. She held each of his eyes.
Kin didn’t speak.
She looked at his face, his neck, and his shoulders. She touched the side of his face with one hand and rested her other on his oblique muscles.
She sighed. “There is no time now, and I’m afraid that once you make peace with your girlfriend, you won’t have time for me at all.”
“Please,” Kin said. He liked Raien, but his heart ached for the woman waiting in the hall. Other men would know what to say to a jealous lover. Kin searched for words and found none.
She kissed him on the lips but didn’t linger. “I’m better than she is, just so you know.”
“Says who?”
She shrugged and backed away, starting a tour of the small room. “No one says anything. I just know I’m better. You can tell by the eyes. She doesn’t know anything about men except how to be one. Her Shock Trooper brothers trust her absolutely. She has bled for them and they’d die for her.”
“What do you want, Raien?”
“She’s pretty,” Raien said. She considered the water dispenser but let her hand fall without opening it.
“What do you want?”
She glanced over her shoulder and smiled. For a trained killer, she had the vixen act down perfectly. “I want to make her uncomfortable. We don’t actually have time to get it on, but it must feel like forever for her. Or maybe we could play a little? No. I am not that cruel. I don’t start things I can’t finish.”
Kin wanted out of the game. He waited in silence. She opened the door, simultaneously assuming the aura of a captain again. “You should have come straight to me once you found the Reaper. The commander was not pleased. And you should have waited for a Fleet unit before pursuing it. You owe me, Kin Roland, and I will collect.”
Becca watched from the hallway, impassive. She could have been standing guard on the bridge of a warship or watching an execution.
Kin focused on Raien, because she wasn’t done with him, but he also watched Becca in the background.
“The commander is sending Sergeant Orlan after the Reaper for the Weapon’s Research and Development Division,” Kin said.
“Predictable,” Raien said. “It’ll end badly.” She turned to Becca. “Don’t keep him out too long. The commander must know where he is at all times.”
“Yes, Captain,” Becca said. Raien and her guards walked away. Kin sensed the two men didn’t like him.
“Becca, it’s good to see you,” Kin said.
She brushed the side of her head. The movement echoed her long-ago mannerisms. Her hair had been longer and she often pushed it behind one ear. Now she merely smoothed the buzz cut. He saw her well-defined biceps and scars on her forearms. She’d been in some conflicts where armor hadn’t protected her.
When she smiled and took his hand, Kin almost tripped because his knees started shaking. He dreamed of her often. Now that she was here, he felt like a boy. The darkness afflicting him since Hellsbreach fell away like a shroud. Light and color flowed into the world, terrifying him. Life was suddenly precious. He had something to lose and felt he would lose it as soon as she spoke.
“I have things to tell you, Kin. I paid people to rescue you, but it didn’t work out.”
“I’m alive.”
She smiled and faced him. “You are. Now I can stop feeling guilty about prolonging your death. I thought you must have lived for days in the cold of space.”
They walked. Kin remembered the feel of her soft, girl-like hand. The hand he held now could have been his own, except for size. Her grip was strong and her skin was calloused. She abruptly let go and continued to walk. They entered the cafeteria of the ship. The enormous room was mostly empty, but a few men and women ate quietly at distant tables.
“The pirates picked me out of the jettisoned garbage field. I worked with them until I paid their transport fee and disembarked at some shady port on a dark moon,” Kin said.
“Greedy bastards. They were paid in advance. I sold Father’s holdings on Earth.”
Kin was stunned. Property on Earth was priceless. Becca could have hired every pirate in three sectors for what one acre of land on Earth was worth. He studied her, but her outrage didn’t match the extreme injustice of the fraud. “That’s a lot of money.”
“I don’t need money. I have the Fleet,” Becca said. “After I realized you were gone, I volunteered for the first Shock Troop Brigade I could find. They didn’t want to take me, but I killed a few people and changed their minds.”
They sat at the table and talked. Kin savored every second and guarded their privacy. Two crewmen approached the table, but Kin glared at them and they walked away. Unlike Orlan, Becca was an experienced space warrior. She had boarded fifty ships and been repelled during half the attacks. Nothing was more dangerous than retreating from a failed ship-to-ship assault.
Only twenty vessel-to-vessel boardings had occurred during the entire Fleet history before the Imperials came. Hellsbreach had been dangerous, a suicide mission for almost everyone who made planetfall, but fighting on a ship in the void of space was equally dangerous. Becca had nerves of steel and the casual fatalism of a warrior who had fought too many times and understood the proximity of death.
“Commander Westwood has agreed to take any person from this planet who desires passage, but he’ll cram every last one into a transport vessel like prisoners. Conditions will be inhumane. Many will die, but I think your friend Laura Keen has convinced everyone it’s their only choice,” Becca said. “If Sergeant Orlan and his thugs capture the Reaper alive, Westwood will probably order the monster on the same ship, locked down and separated from the civilian quarters by a compartment without atmosphere. In theory, they should be perfectly safe, but if they realize who their neighbor is, they’ll live in terror of what could happen.”
“Has Westwood lost his mind?”
“No one has ever captured a Reaper. I wouldn’t worry about it. Orlan doesn’t have a good record with bringing back live prisoners,” Becca said.
“Orlan wants me to help him hunt the Reaper.”