Dragon's Nemesis (The Dragon Corps Book 7) Read online

  “Somewhat?” Nyx pressed. She’d seized on the same thing Talon had.

  “Most hostage takers are not actually murderers,” Dess said at once. “It’s rare that they’re emotionally prepared to go through with their threats. This is usually one of the leverage points a hostage negotiator has.”

  “You’ve hedged twice now,” Wraith pointed out. “Then, and right at the start.”

  Nyx’s XO on Team 11 was a woman with white-blonde hair and exceedingly pale skin, made all the more noteworthy due to her black ship uniform. Her resemblance to a wraith ended there, however. She was tall, as most Dragons were, and she was built solidly. Talon wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her in combat—and he wouldn’t particularly want to be in Dess’s shoes, with Wraith staring him down and poking holes in his speech.

  “Yes.” Dess swallowed and blew out her breath slowly. She seemed more regretful than intimidated. “We have some complications in this case. First, I think it is safe to say that Ghost has no compunctions about killing a child.” Her eyes went to Lesedi’s. “I have not been that blunt with Mr. Hugo.”

  Lesedi nodded in understanding. Talon knew her to be discreet and conscientious of her friends’ emotions, but she was also, at her core, a logical person, as was Hugo. It would not be out of the question for her to be honest with him about the possibility of a successful rescue.

  “Second,” Dess continued, “one of the other traditional leverage points a negotiator would have would be the fact that the hostage taker is essentially ruining their own life. The negotiator reminds them that if they kill the hostage, everything they love and want to have is essentially gone. This isn’t in terms of money and power. Hostage takers rarely want that. They want emotional security and a sense of belonging. They want respect, perhaps. The negotiator reminds them that if they kill the hostages, they will not have these things. Their life as they knew it, with the freedoms they enjoyed, will be over. And as we all know, Ghost has already lost that.”

  “Not necessarily.” Talon cleared his throat when she looked at him. “She lost her career as a senator. She lost the status she enjoyed as a shadowy and famously vengeful top smuggler. But she’s still well-known and she has an organization that seems to be humming along, which I’d say means she likely has most of the same people around her. Pulling off this extortion case could only help her reputation, right? When she gets—well, what is she asking for?”

  “That’s the biggest complication.” Dess gave a tight smile that did not reach her eyes. “She hasn’t said what she wants. There have been no demands.” She looked at Lesedi, as if for backup on this most unusual fact.

  Lesedi nodded at all of them. “Nothing has been sent to Hugo, Intelligence as a whole, or the Senate,” she said. “To my knowledge, the video that was sent to him has been transmitted nowhere else.” She tapped her fingers on the wood and shook her head at Talon. “I have no idea what she’s waiting for.”

  The Dragons settled back in their chairs with some confusion. Nyx was staring at the far wall, eyes narrowed in thought, and Wraith was murmuring to Centurion, Nyx’s crew chief. Aegis kept his own counsel, as he always did, looking manifestly unimpressed with the situation in which they found themselves; Talon was still half-expecting that, at some point, Aegis would pull a classic “Dad” move and tell one of their opponents that he wasn’t mad at them, just disappointed.

  Tersi, meanwhile, was staring at Dess as if he might figure out all of her secrets—or, failing that, offer to cook her a romantic dinner.

  Tone it down, man. Talon’s lips twitched.

  “Well, this is a mess,” He said out loud—mostly referring to the hostage situation. “So you have zero idea what Ghost wants, which means…there’s really no negotiation?”

  “Yet,” Dess said. She straightened up, unexpectedly strengthened by this assessment. “But she wants something. She has to want something. If she wanted to make a statement, there are better ways to do it. Keeping the girl alive is risky.”

  “Not if what she wants is to assess our response,” Nyx said at once. She leaned on the table, still gazing into the middle distance. Her fingers toyed with her bottom lip. “Could that be it? She wants to know what we can do if pressed.”

  “Could be,” Aegis agreed. “Could be something coming up in Intelligence that she wants to stop, though. Some operation. Something Hugo will know when he sees it—can’t act on that, she has my daughter.”

  “Or she may have gone off the deep end,” Wraith muttered. “The bitch is crazy.”

  The rest of the Dragons laughed, but Dess shook her head. “In my experience, very few people lack rationality.”

  Talon guessed that she hadn’t met many Dragons before. She spoke carefully, seemingly not wanting to upset Wraith, but Dragons were blunt and expected to call one another out on misconceptions, and be called out in turn on their own.

  “Usually, a person who does something like this is startlingly rational,” Dess continued, when there was no opposition, “perhaps with one or two key facts they believe that other people wouldn’t. It’s not that their behavior is irrational, it’s that their beliefs are wrong. When someone does something like this, it’s because they’ve assessed their options and believe there is no other way to achieve their goals.”

  “What if she just wants an ongoing hostage?” Tersi suggested suddenly. “Like—” He snapped his fingers, clearly trying to think of something. “Like in the middle ages, when the king would have everyone’s heirs so they wouldn’t do anything stupid.”

  The people at the table nodded.

  “She wants him pulling his punches,” Nyx said slowly. She nodded. “Just as a matter of course.”

  “That could be it,” Lesedi agreed. “That could easily be it.”

  Dess looked a little worried. “But if she doesn’t want anything specific—”

  “Oh, she wants something specific,” Talon assured her. “It might be just having Hugo in her pocket. It might be for her to be taking a hand in running the Alliance again—just to run it, or to drive it into the ground. She has an aim.” He sighed. “We just have to find out what it is.”

  “And where she is,” Tersi muttered.

  Nyx joined in. “Where the kid is….”

  “What kind of weapons they have,” Centurion said, settling back in his chair.

  “How many people they have,” Wraith chimed in.

  “What sort of systems they have,” Lesedi agreed.

  Everyone looked at Aegis.

  He harrumphed. “And kill them.”

  The group started laughing, and Talon gave a nod at his XO, grinning. As much as he missed Nyx, he’d enjoyed Aegis’s presence in meetings for reasons exactly like this. To his surprise, Dess looked somewhat pale. Not everyone was comfortable with jokes about death, he figured. He gave her a reassuring smile and looked at the rest.

  “Where do we go from here?”

  “We’re staying,” Lesedi said. “Tera knows ways in and out of the Intelligence properties that no one else can track, but they’re all physical, so we have to stay here if we want to communicate with Hugo—and someone needs to.”

  Everyone nodded.

  “You and I split up,” Nyx suggested to Talon. “We’re trying to find out, what? What she wants, and what her resources are.” She looked at Dess. “Hugo contacted you. Why? It can’t just be because you’re a good hostage negotiator.”

  Dess had gone very still. She swallowed, looked away, shook her head. “I think Mr. Hugo thinks more of me than he should.”

  After her confident, well-articulated manner, it was a strange reversal of course. Talon and Nyx frowned at one another.

  “Can you figure out what Ghost wants?” Nyx asked her pointedly.

  Dess swallowed.

  “She has as good a chance as anybody,” Lesedi said.

  Talon nodded decisively. “Good enough. We’ll figure out what resources Ghost has.”

  “We’ll figure that out,” Nyx
said easily. When Talon frowned at her, she gave him a tiny smile and let her fingers drum on the table slightly. “You all take Ms. Tasper and focus on tracking any leads you can with regards to what Ghost wants.”

  Her pinky finger double-tapped, almost unnoticeable in the rhythm of the drumming. It was pointing at Tersi. This was a method of signaling she and Talon had devised between the two of them—for higher-stakes situations than this, of course, but it was one of the few signals of theirs that Tersi didn’t know. Talon fought a grin as he nodded.

  “Right. Everyone get ready to move out. Contact only for important updates, and with all precautions taken.”

  The members of the other crews filed out and Talon used all of his self-control to keep his face straight as he said to Aegis, “We have some crew files to go over.” To Tersi, he added, as if it were an afterthought, “Could you show Ms. Tasper to the spare bunk?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  DESS FOLLOWED the Dragon known as Tersi through the halls of the Ariane. It was a cramped ship, by her estimation, in every dimension except height; Dragons tended to run tall. Otherwise, the place seemed very utilitarian, not similar in any way to the ships she was used to traveling on.

  She gnawed on her lip and reminded herself to say nothing about that. It wasn’t like a few nights in an uncomfortable room would do her any harm, after all. She’d just have to make sure she didn’t embarrass herself by asking for something they considered a useless luxury.

  She stole a glance at the man ahead of her. He was walking quickly, not encouraging discussion at all. She had done a little bit of research as soon as she knew which Dragon crews she was dealing with, and so she knew his name: James Reinholt. No one seemed to call him James, however, or even Jim.

  They called him Tersi.

  She wondered if there was any meaning to it. She certainly couldn’t think of anything off-hand, the way she could with the others. Aegis and Centurion seemed fairly straightforward. Wraith’s inspiration was likely her coloring and Dess wasn’t sure about Nyx, but it had a nice ring to it.

  Tersi.

  She could just ask, couldn’t she? How did you get your nickname? Or was it a call sign? Was that what they were called? She wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to use the wrong word, after all.

  She was so busy thinking about the term that she didn’t notice he’d stopped and she ran directly into him. She jerked back, cheeks flushing, and felt the strong urge to sink through the floor when her eyes met his.

  Brown eyes, and very nice ones at that, stared down at her with a hint of a smile. He didn’t seem upset with her as she had guessed he would be—he was so businesslike, after all. He didn’t say anything, though, and she found herself staring up at him with her mouth open. She could see some reddish glints in his brown hair. His mouth tended to quirk a bit to one side.

  “Do I have something on my face?” he asked her finally.

  “Oh! Oh.” Dess sank her face into one hand. “No. Sorry. I was just—sorry.”

  “No problem.” He stepped back slightly to gesture with one hand. “This is the spare bunk. Sorry it’s not anything much. The cot’s not too short, but that’s about all I can give you.” He gave her a critical look up and down. “But you probably don’t have a problem with that, anyway.”

  She ran a hand self-consciously over her hair. “Not really, no.” At 5’4”, she had indeed not had a problem with this before. Her main problem right now was that the only other person her height, Lesedi, seemed to be leaving—which meant that Dess was probably going to get a crick in her neck from staring up at people all the time.

  On the other hand, if she straight ahead, she was treated to the sight of a very nicely-muscled chest.

  Her face was going to catch fire if she blushed any harder. She leaned forward to look into the room. “Is there a desk?”

  “Ah, yes.” He ducked into the room—he didn’t need to on the Ariane, but she guessed he’d probably learned to duck whenever he went into a room anywhere else—and pressed a panel on the wall opposite the bed, with two inexplicable-looking metal rods along its edges. The panel sprang out and folded down, held up by thick metal wires and the two rods, which turned out to be legs.

  “You’ll want to sit on the bed,” Tersi explained. He gave a wry shrug. “Space on a ship is kind of a premium.”

  “No, I understand.” Dess nodded. “Thank you. I’m sure you have…a lot of other important missions to be doing. Thank you for helping me with this one.”

  While she was considering the thought that this was probably the stupidest thing anyone had ever said, he gave her a smile.

  “More important than the Head of Intelligence being compromised? Probably not, actually.”

  Dess laughed.

  He leaned against the wall of the room, folding his arms over his chest. It did delightful things to the way the fabric covered his arms and his chest, which made Dess clear her throat hastily and look up at his face.

  “So, how did you get into hostage negotiation, of all things?” He frowned at her.

  “How did a man with a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry wind up as a Dragon?” Dess retorted tartly. Too late, she realized that this was probably more than she should know about him. His eyebrows went up and she found herself stammering. “I—read all of your team’s dossiers. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not—you don’t need to apologize.” He frowned. “Although, why you’re researching us….”

  “I was curious.” Dess was so flustered that the unvarnished truth came out. She was used to planning her words, but apparently that wasn’t happening today. “I’d never met any Dragons. I didn’t think I’d work with any. I guess I probably should have guessed you’d be called in for this.” She blew out a breath. “I mean, it makes sense. You train in hostage negotiation, you’ll probably meet people who are your backup, right?”

  Tersi gave a laugh that he hastily turned into a cough. When she looked at him in confusion, he said, “It’s just the thought of Talon hearing that he’s someone’s backup.”

  “I—well, he is, isn’t he?” Dess looked at him. “We’re trying to talk her out of having the hostage. That’s the goal. You don’t want to just storm the place right off.”

  From the look on Tersi’s face, that very well might be what he wanted to do.

  “Is that how you normally do things?” Dess asked him.

  “Well….” He gave a shrug. “Yeah.”

  “You don’t even try to talk to them?”

  “Usually they’re in the middle of killing people when we show up,” he pointed out. “Or taking slaves, running drugs, attacking us—mixed bag, but the point is, the people we deal with are not nice people by any stretch. Ghost definitely fits that description.”

  Dess felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  “Look, maybe it seems cruel,” Tersi said, “but either we kill Ghost on this mission, or we’ll have to kill her some other time. I guarantee you that. She’s not going to give this up. Hell, we already killed her once.”

  “…What?”

  “We stormed her last base,” Tersi explained. “Nyx—the captain of the Conway, she was in the meeting? Her, yeah—she killed that woman. Or, theoretically she did. This whole AI thing is a bit—how much do you know about Ghost?”

  “A fair amount,” Dess said neutrally.

  “What is she now?”

  Dess lifted her shoulders. She found it somewhat amusing that a Dragon, of all people, would ask this question. The Alliance liked to make rules about what counted as acceptable human enhancement and what didn’t, and they walked a fine line when it came to their own elite forces. From the stories Dess had heard, Ghost wasn’t far past some of the Dragons—if you didn’t count the AI, of course.

  “No one’s quite sure what she is,” she said, keeping her voice as smooth as she could. “The best guess would be a cyborg.”

  “Eh, she was a cyborg, but that body was pretty well crispified.” He caught sight of th
e look on her face. “I’m making a muck of this. I know this sort of thing is hard for civilians to understand.”

  “It’s not hard to understand.” Caught off guard, she spoke more sharply than she meant to. “My whole job is to resolve things without violence, and apparently your job is to—” She broke off. “I apologize,” she said, after a moment.

  He watched her for a moment, then pushed himself off the wall. “No, that was, ah—I’ll go.” He hesitated in the doorway, as if he was about to say something else, then just ducked past her and headed down the corridor. Looking after him, she saw his shoulders settle slightly.

  “Just tell me one thing.” She spoke before she could stop herself.

  He stopped and looked at her. He waited, even while she tried to get the courage to say the words out loud.

  “Am I—am I talking her down just to give you all long enough to go in and kill her?”

  No, of course not. She saw the words on his lips. But he took a deep breath and did her the courtesy of giving her the truth. “Probably, yeah.”

  Dess found that she was shaking. She looked down at the floor.

  “Ms. Tasper.” He came back a few steps. “I’m sorry, is there a title I should be using for you?”

  Dess shook her head. She couldn’t look up, even as she heard him come closer.

  “Ghost is ruthless,” Tersi told her. “She’s killed—well, more people than we even know, but enough. She blew up a ship of civilians just to make a point to Nyx. You’re right that she won’t have any compunctions about killing Hugo's daughter. If we don’t stop her, she will continue to work toward her goals, and those goals are going to hurt a lot of people. I think you know that's true.”

  Dess rubbed one thumbnail over the other, a nervous habit from her childhood.

  “Ghost isn’t like most of the people you’ve met,” Tersi told her. “I’m not saying you won’t be useful—I think you’ll be able to get into her head in ways we wouldn’t think of. But this isn’t someone who made an impulsive mistake and they’re going to serve a prison sentence and come out reformed. This is a psychotic bitch who had a whole torture room in her last base.”