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  Hayley released the naniates, lifting the poultice to check on Quark’s wound. It was nearly completely healed.

  “You want to save my life?” she said, looking back at Tibor.

  “I will remain with you until I do,” he replied.

  “Good, then you can carry me out of here after I pass out.”

  “What?” Tibor said.

  Hayley looked at Quark. “You should be able to walk. Get dressed and let’s go.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Quark replied, smiling. “Nice work, kid.”

  Hayley didn’t hear the compliment. The colors around her faded toward black. She slipped to her knees and would have fallen completely to the floor if Tibor hadn’t caught her.

  Then the world went away for awhile.

  13

  The moment Hayley woke up, she knew she was somewhere else. She wasn’t completely sure what kind of somewhere else, but the drab, pitted walls, missing windows, lumpy mattress, and threadbare blankets suggested it wasn’t anywhere all that nice.

  They were still on TDS, then.

  At least she was alive.

  She heard voices from the room beyond hers. Quark and Tibor. She didn’t try to get up right away, figuring to listen to their conversation first. Besides, her head was pounding, and she was struggling to return focus to the world and reign in the color and the darkness.

  “You’re sure you don’t know who set us up?” Quark said.

  He didn’t sound like he believed the Goreshin’s earlier answer. He might have if she was there, and could watch the Nephilim’s qi. It wasn’t impossible to lie to her. She had been lied to before. But it was more difficult, and it usually took at least some level of awareness of her situation.

  “I told you. I was a slave, Colonel,” Tibor said. “Not even a good slave. The alterations didn’t work on me the way they did on the others. You saw Guls. He was the second weakest of our group, and he was a full meter taller than me. And he had his hair.”

  “What about the strongest?”

  “White.” Tibor groaned. “Between the others and White? It isn’t even close. I stayed as far from him as I could.”

  “Any idea what makes one of you bigger or stronger than the others?”

  “No. I’m not a scientist.”

  “I expect Hayley’s going to wake up soon. We need a plan to get off this fragging rock by the time she does.”

  “You have a ship?”

  “I don’t know. Devain said she burned it. I’m not ready to believe that. The link was in our dropship, but it was destroyed. We want to call in the cavalry; we need to send a message out.”

  “Easier said than done. Kelvar is a poor planet, Colonel, but I’m sure you already figured that out. Worse for you, it’s also highly controlled by the Nephilim. If anyone saw us enter this building-”

  “Nobody saw us.”

  “If anyone did, they would have no qualms about turning us in.”

  “Nobody saw us,” Quark repeated. “How well do you know this place? Well enough to get us to an uplink station?”

  “No. Devain let us out, but only as a group. White is hers, one hundred percent. Was hers. He believes in what the Nephilim are trying to do. I was a captured slave. The others were captured slaves. He fragging volunteered. Maybe that’s why he came out the strongest? Because he wanted to change? I don’t know. Anyway, we went to the local bars; we did some trading. We didn’t go near government facilities. Why would we? We lived in one.”

  “Good point and I don’t blame you. When you say you did trading, what kind of trading was it?”

  “Drugs, mainly. Narcotics. It helped with the pain.”

  “From Devain?”

  “In part. The change didn’t hurt before the mutation. Now it does. We can’t alter too often, or it gets unbearable. Most times, we didn’t have a choice.”

  “You know if your source sold electronics? I can rig a com if I can get the right equipment.”

  “I thought you were a soldier?”

  Quark laughed. “I am. Lover. Fighter. Survivor. The last one’s the important one. You never know when you’re going to be stranded on some backwater shithole of a planet. No offense.”

  “None taken. This isn’t my idea of paradise either.”

  “You came from the Extant?”

  “Yes. The Alqus Prophetic.”

  “I take it Devain was one of Thraven’s?”

  “Yes. There are a large number of his followers who don’t believe he’s dead. They’re willing to do anything to finish his invasion. The research they’ve been doing is part of that.”

  “Getting bold without the Queen around?”

  Tibor didn’t reply. Hayley guessed he had shrugged or nodded. Either way, she had heard enough. She felt around near her head until she found her visor and slid it over her head. Then she took a few moments to gather her focus. It was more challenging without the naniates she had collected.

  “I can tell you this much, Colonel,” Tibor said. “The naniates that came from Hell’s Gate? They’re unstable. They keep mutating themselves. That’s how Devain was able to get so far in such a short time. The Nephilim Gift, the Shard’s Light, neither one of them were viable. My point being, if I was a smarter individual, I might think they were doing it on purpose.”

  “Like they want the mutations to happen?”

  “Yes.”

  Quark sighed. “That’s bigger than I’m ready to think about right now. I’m already pissed as hell about Devain wiping out my team. If she killed Nibia, too? Forget it. I’ll track down every fragging research hole in this galaxy and the fragging Extant and kill every last Venerant, Evolent, Honorant, and Prophet responsible.”

  “And I’ll be there with you,” Hayley said, entering the room.

  Quark turned his head and smiled at her. “Hal you doing?”

  Hayley stifled her groan. He had been using that line for years, and it hadn’t gotten any less corny, even if it was endearing.

  “Better,” she said. “I’m sore, but I’ll live. I heard you two talking.”

  “Of course, you did,” Quark said. “You can hear a Koosian Tree Stalker from half a klick. At least we won’t have to repeat ourselves.”

  “I understand we’re still on TDS. How far did we go from the warehouse?”

  “Not far,” Tibor said. “Four kilometers.”

  “Are we safe here?”

  “For now.”

  “Then you saved my life.”

  The Goreshin shook his head. “No. I saved my own life. Are you eager to be rid of me?”

  Hayley smiled. “Not really. We need all the help we can get.”

  “What we need is someone willing to sell us the kit we need to build a link and contact the Quasar,” Quark said.

  “Won’t they realize something has happened?” Tibor asked.

  “No,” Quark replied. “We run end-to-end Zero Contact Protocol. The Quasar releases the dropship, cloaks and heads off to wait. She only comes back when she gets the signal for pickup, no matter how long it takes. Contrary to how it may seem, this ain’t the first time things have gone sideways on me. I’ve been around a long time.”

  “I can tell,” Tibor said, motioning toward the scar that had taken Quark’s eyes.

  “If we can’t get the kit, we need to try to get off the planet ourselves. I’m not feeling too confident about infiltrating the local starport and stealing a ship at the moment. How many others were in your group?”

  “Besides Nuls and me? White, Hoshus, Klangor, Bale, and Grun.”

  “Five doggies,” Quark said. “After tangling with you, I don’t want to frag with the rest unless we manage to land some serious shooters.”

  “They’ll be sure to cover the starport,” Tibor said. “Or stop us before we can reach it.”

  “I’m surprised they aren’t out there looking for us already,” Hayley said.

  “They’ll wait for someone to report something suspicious,” Quark said. “No sense in panicking
if they think they have us cut off from the mothership and they already have the planet under control.”

  “But you aren’t worried?”

  “I stopped worrying about this shit a hundred years ago.”

  There was a subtle shift in the Colonel’s qi that suggested he wasn’t being totally honest. He was worried. Not about himself. About her.

  “Why do you do it, Colonel?” Tibor asked. “Why keep fighting after all of these years? You must have enough coin to retire comfortably.”

  “Boooorrriiiing,” Quark replied. “This is what I love. Seems crazy to most, but not to me. And Witchy over there even managed to add some conscience to the job. We want to help people who can’t help themselves.”

  “If that’s true, you might want to think about more than escaping,” Tibor said. “The Nephilim have Kelvar under their thumb. That doesn’t mean Kelvar wants it that way.”

  Hayley watched Quark’s qi. His initial reaction to the statement was to shoot it down and move on. But he glanced over at Hayley before he replied, his stance softening.

  “What do you think, Witchy?” he asked.

  “I think we need to contact the Quasar first,” she replied. “Even if we were going to clean up the Nephilim here, we can’t do it without reinforcements.”

  Tibor coughed.

  “You’ll help, but we need more than that. White and the others are too strong for us, especially right now. The Colonel doesn’t even have a gun.”

  Quark laughed. “Good point, Witchy. Let’s start simple. Tibor, where can we find this trader of yours?”

  14

  Hayley felt naked.

  Actually, she felt worse than naked.

  She always did when she had to go anywhere without her visor. It had been part of who she was since she was twelve years old.

  She could still get around without it, but she didn’t want to.

  In this case, she had to.

  The residents of Kelvar had seen her on their way in, and the headgear was too easily recognizable to be discrete. She had no choice but to fold it up and stow it in a tightpack, worn beneath an old, long coat Tibor managed to find for her.

  Despite his promise to stay with her until he saved her life, the Goreshin wasn’t with her now. Neither was Quark. His eyes were also too damn abnormal to ignore, and finding a pair of reflective glasses in a place like this turned out to be an insurmountable challenge, at least in the limited time they had.

  Which left Hayley out on the street, walking among the Outworlders. The humans, the Atmos, the Curlatins. Even a couple of tentacled Rudin and a few large Trovers. Most non-human individuals found themselves on a planet like Kelvar either because they were hoping to make lopsided trades or they were hiding from something.

  There were Nephilim guards around too. Unmodified Goreshin. They stood out because of the way they remained fixed at different locations in the streets, mainly near the corners, their qi guarded and watchful. Her vision was an asset for now because the enemy didn’t know she had it, or how it worked. They didn’t know to guard themselves against it like Quark could when he wanted.

  It upset her to see them now because she should have spotted them earlier, when they had first landed. She had been too nervous and hadn’t been on the lookout for them. She hadn’t been expecting a trap, even though Quark always told them to expect everything was a trap.

  Most of Black Squad was dead because of it.

  Because of her.

  She pushed back against that line of thinking. Guilt and regret like that would only get her and Quark killed. The others knew what they were signing up for when they joined the Riders. They did it because Quark had a reputation for being the best, and every merc wanted to run with the best. For most of them, it had nothing to do with money. It had to do with prestige. Replacing them as soldiers would be easy.

  Replacing them as a family? That was the hard part. The painful part.

  She continued through the streets, following the flow of traffic. Tibor had given her detailed instructions on how to get to and into the Hole, the planet’s thriving black market. She knew she was getting close because she saw more and more offworlders. More non-humans.

  According to Tibor, Kelvar had been a mining planet once, owned by one of the huge conglomerates that had helped found the Outworlds. The mineral deposits had been stripped out a century ago, leaving the city behind. There were miners still pulling trace deposits out of the old mines, enough to trade to passing merchants and keep the planet in business. It was nowhere near enough for it to be profitable for the company.

  There were a lot of planets like that on the Fringe. Settled by corporations to tear out their natural resources and then abandoned when the wells ran dry. There were always cities left behind, and some fared better than others. They were easy targets for the Nephilim to seize because neither the Outworlds or the Republic cared about them all that much.

  It was the circle of life in the galaxy, and she was experiencing it firsthand.

  She made it to an intersection in the street. The eighth intersection since she had left their hiding place. She didn’t slow as she turned left to head down it. This was the one.

  Her job was simple. Enter the Hole, find the trader, convince him to come back to where Quark and Tibor were hiding. Quark never went anywhere without access to coin, and he had saved an awful lot of it over the years. If the trader was of any use at all, they would get what they were after.

  A Nephilim guard was standing on the corner. She made sure to shift her eyes back and forth slightly, even though she couldn’t see anything through them. It had taken practice to learn to not look blind in the instances when she didn’t or couldn’t wear the visor.

  He watched her for a moment and then directed his attention away, not noticing anything out of the ordinary. It was a minor, but important first test.

  She joined the rest of the traffic headed down the street. Unlike most places on most planets, the city of Kelvar Main wasn’t trying very hard to hide its black market. Even the idea of it as a black market was tenuous at best. The things they were selling might be illegal on planets where the overarching governments gave a damn. They were technically illegal here. It was easy and profitable for the local government to turn a blind eye, so they did.

  The Hole was a cordoned-off area two blocks from the main road. It was named after a deep pit in the center of it, a massive crater created when a small Republic warship had managed to survive the entry to slam into the city, leaving the hole in the middle.

  The crash had damaged buildings the planet had no funds to spare on fixing. There was still wreckage scattered within the deepest part of the crater, though the rest of it had been scavenged long ago and sold for scrap.

  The remains of those buildings had become the numerous shops and portals through which the traders and pirates displayed their hauls, making buys and sells under the watchful eyes of local law enforcement, which in this case were the watchful eyes of the Nephilim regime. Devain’s regime before Hayley had killed her. Whoever was her second would be in charge now.

  It meant she had to be even more careful here than she did beyond the warning signs and barriers that separated the site from the rest of the city.

  “Witchy in the Hole,” she whispered to herself as she passed through the open part of the barriers and entered the throng.

  The trader she was looking for was Jakell, a human Outworlder who had grown up as part of a Fringe pirate family. According to Tibor, he was mainly a drug smuggler, but he did side-business trading in random goods that he thought could turn him a nice profit. He was coin-driven through and through, but with just enough sense of morality and self-preservation, they could be fairly sure he wouldn’t sell them out.

  She was supposed to find him in someplace called the Firehose. She didn’t think that was the real name of the place, but that was what her translation chip kept feeding her when Tibor said it. Whatever. She would figure it out.

  She w
alked the circumference of the crater. It had been there long enough nobody paid it much mind, although occasionally a vulture or two would drop in and survey the bottom in search of any small treasure the other vultures might have missed. She noticed one them climbing from the pit holding something up, and wondered if he had found something of value or just needed the moral victory.

  She scanned the storefronts as she passed. Signs were hard for her to discern without the visor, unless their faces were beveled enough for the qi field to sink into them a little bit, or unless they were in some type of energetic state. The result was a lot of blank shapes where she knew there was writing but couldn’t make it out. Over time, she had learned not to be frustrated by it, but now that the stakes were up her inability to read accurately was pissing her off.

  She noticed a Kelvar Law Enforcer resting against the short barrier that kept people from accidentally tumbling into the crater. She was a little hesitant to ask for directions, but his qi suggested he was at ease and might be more receptive to the question.

  His qi shifted as she approached, becoming more cautious. It was immediately obvious individuals didn’t ask questions around here, but she was already committed. She decided to be more nonchalant about it.

  “Firehose?” she said, trying to feign eye contact.

  He stared at her a moment. His qi softened. He didn’t think she was a threat.

  “What?” he said simply.

  “Firehose,” she repeated. “Asshole boyfriend gave me directions. I’m supposed to pick up a package from Jakell for him.”

  The Officer smirked. “You need a new boyfriend.”

  She groaned inwardly. Not this. Anything but this. She hated bullshit attention based purely on surface attributes.

  He pointed a half-revolution back around the crater. “It’s called the Firehouse,” he said. “I hope you’re packing.” His attention turned away from her, in the direction she had just arrived. “Damn it. Not them.”