Paladin Read online

  “Why?” Tafa demanded. She had been the one who wanted to learn to spar, and she kept at it with an admirable amount of determination. However, saying that it didn’t come naturally to her would be a massive understatement.

  Simply put, the Yofu were terrible at fighting.

  “Well, say you were here, and I punched you—I’m not really going to punch you, don’t worry. Yes. So you’re here, and my hand is here. Now you see how there’s an opening at my side because my arm is up.”

  “But I got hit,” Tafa protested.

  Gar’s lips twitched, and Barnabas could sense him trying not to laugh or be impatient.

  “Yes, but getting hit once makes sense if you think you can get something worthwhile for it.”

  “Oh, I don’t get this.” Tafa looked at Barnabas. “Is everybody this terrible at it to start with?”

  Barnabas searched desperately for something diplomatic to say, and managed to come up with, “Everyone has different challenges at the start.”

  “Smooth,” Shinigami murmured under her breath. She followed Barnabas’ lead, though, and nodded at Gar. “When he started, he was very inclined to go straight at someone, no matter the consequences. That was something he needed to change. You need to be a bit more assertive.”

  “But I’m not assertive!” Tafa wailed. She put her hands over her eyes. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to make people forget I was there. When it’s just me and someone else in the ring, how are they going to forget me?”

  “They’re not,” Gar said gently.

  “I can’t do this,” Tafa muttered.

  “Tafa.” Barnabas smiled at her. “You know Gar, right? You’ve eaten with him, you’ve lived with him, and he’s been teaching you to spar.”

  Tafa nodded.

  “You know that Gar isn’t trying to hurt you,” Barnabas explained. “You were always worried about Mustafee wanting to hurt you, but he’s not around anymore. He’s quite dead. I checked.”

  Tafa managed a watery laugh.

  “I’m not suggesting you take up a career that requires public speaking,” Barnabas said with a smile, “but doing things like this that are a little uncomfortable makes us less scared the next time we have to do them. Right?”

  “I-I guess?” Tafa looked uncertain.

  “As uncomfortable as it is, I think sparring is good for you,” Barnabas asserted. “Gar is an excellent teacher. Maybe you’ll never be a boxer, but you’ll learn something, and you’ll be a better person for having faced your fears.”

  She stared at him, and he could tell she wasn’t quite persuaded.

  He pulled out the big guns: “Just imagine what sort of paintings you’ll be able to make with all these new experiences you’re having.”

  Her eyes lit up, and she nodded enthusiastically. That decided it.

  “Hell, yeah!” She bounced excitedly. “Let’s do another round.”

  Barnabas nodded to Gar. This should be interesting, he commented to Shinigami and Gar with the implants.

  She’s not bad at any of it, Gar agreed. She’s just really tentative.

  I wonder what she’ll be like with a little bit of self-confidence, Shinigami mused.

  A moment later, her question was partially answered. Tafa launched herself across the floor at Gar, who responded on pure instinct. He slid to one side, swept Tafa’s legs out from under her, and deposited her on her back on the floor with a thud.

  His eyes went wide. “Tafa! I’m so sorry.”

  “Ow,” Tafa managed. She looked up at him for a long moment.

  She’s not injured, Shinigami reported after a quick scan.

  A moment later, Tafa sat up with a grin slowly breaking across her features. “That’s what I was so afraid of?” she asked them. “I was so scared of falling down, and that’s all it was? I mean, it hurt, but…” She scrambled up. “Let’s go again!”

  Gar grinned wryly at her. “Let’s see what you say after falling down for the twentieth time.”

  Barnabas was laughing when the message alert dinged. “It’s Jeltor. Shinigami, should we take it on the bridge?”

  “I want to say hi!” Tafa followed them, Gar at her heels.

  They emerged onto the bridge in high spirits, with Barnabas wrinkling his nose at the smell emanating from Tafa and Gar. It seemed that there was a commonality between most species—when they sweated, it smelled terrible.

  On the display, they saw Jeltor on the bridge of a surprisingly small ship, and his typically impressive powersuit had been replaced with something clunky and battered. Barnabas frowned.

  “Jeltor. Is everything all right?”

  “No,” Jeltor said bluntly. “Just a few moments ago, the Yennai Corporation attacked Coyopa.”

  “It’s a nominally-habitable planet on the edge of Sector 942,” Shinigami reported. “Very close to 958. There’s a very strange set of articles about… Not the time, I’m sure. Go on, Jeltor.”

  I think that was personal growth, Barnabas commented wryly.

  Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up, fuzzball.

  So…you don’t like the beard? Barnabas touched his chin self-consciously, where there was the fine stubble of a beard he had been attempting to grow out. Shinigami’s constantly-shifting appearance had inspired him to try new things.

  I was trying to find a way to tell you. Not that it makes any sense for me to bother, though, since you clearly don’t listen. Your hair is still red.

  Auburn. It’s auburn.

  Call a spade a spade. You’re a ginger.

  Hmph.

  The exchange had passed in a split-second, and Jeltor was still trying to find words. “He wanted to make a point,” the Jotun said finally. “Coyopa is a place that no one but Jotuns want, so I don’t think there were any aliens. He was trying to punish us for helping you.”

  “Punish— Jeltor, why are you acting like it already happened?” Barnabas frowned. “You said it was just a few minutes ago. We’re en route. Should we—”

  “Don’t bother,” Jeltor expressed sadly. “There’s nothing left. He nuked it. A few ships got out, mine included. Many of the rest…” He paused. “They were civilians, Barnabas. On vacation. There was only a nominal military presence there. He picked a target that couldn’t fight back and he—” He broke off.

  Barnabas’ face was white with fury. “He attacked civilians?”

  “He said it was justice for our Navy helping you. He’s demanded they turn me over to face his justice as well. I…don’t know what else.” Jeltor gave a sound like a sigh, and his jellyfish-like body turned several brilliant colors before returning to its normal blue. “I stopped watching the message after that.”

  “You did the right thing,” Barnabas said.

  “I know. I know he had to be taken down—”

  “No, I mean not listening to the message. From what little I saw in his children’s memories, he’s…not entirely sane.” Barnabas shook his head, his eyes distant as he thought through the memories from Uleq and Ilia Yennai. “I don’t think there’s much to be gained from listening to him.”

  “All the same, could you send the message to us?” Shinigami asked.

  Jeltor nodded. “I’ll transmit it in a moment. In the meantime, I suppose I should go back to Jotuna and see what they want to do with me.”

  “What they want to—” Barnabas sputtered. “They’re not turning you over?”

  “They might.”

  “For the love of— We will meet you at Jotuna, then.” Barnabas’ voice was cold. “And I will explain to them that if they want to bow to the whims of a complete madman, they can turn themselves over, or no one. Koel Yennai is a megalomaniac. We are not bargaining with him.”

  Jeltor paused but bobbed in a way that Barnabas knew was similar to nodding. “I would be glad to have you speak in my defense.”

  “No defense is needed,” Barnabas contended. “But I will be glad to speak to them, yes. I will see you—”

  The klaxons wailed, and Shinigami flick
ered in her seat. When she came back, she was wearing armor—and a cold expression.

  “There’s a Yennai scout ship on our scanners,” she reported.

  “Jeltor, we’ll have to call you back,” Barnabas relayed hastily. He ended the call and nodded to Shinigami. “Let’s get this scout ship before it gets word back to Koel.”

  3

  Shinigami cloaked the ship at once. The term actually covered a whole range of technologies developed specifically for her. She’d be visible to sharp-sighted individuals looking out of particularly clear windows on ships that were very close to them, but otherwise, they would not be seen.

  Which was good, given that they should almost certainly assume the ship had already seen them—

  A moment later, she did not need to assume. The ship angled toward them and accelerated, weapons primed. The Shinigami’s scanners caught a budding electrical charge. The scout ship had intended to paralyze them, then call for help.

  Shinigami maneuvered the ship up and over the trajectory of the Yennai Corporation ship, then flipped end over end so that the Shinigami was above and behind it.

  Living organisms were predisposed to maneuver according to their idea of where “up” was. They liked rising above the plane of battle, as if they were still preoccupied with the idea of planets and gravity, and that ships should go “up” to fly.

  Sometimes she wondered how these species hadn’t managed to exterminate themselves before they ever got off-planet.

  The scout ship slowed as it approached their last known point and fired two small missiles—the minor sort—to see if it could make the Shinigami swerve and somehow reveal itself.

  It hadn’t accessed its big guns yet.

  “I have an idea,” Barnabas said. He nodded to the image of the scout ship on their screens. “Would you be able to take control of its systems?”

  “I don’t see why not.” Shinigami made her avatar shrug. “Of course…that does mean our cloaking won’t work. They’ll be able to see us with Mark 1 eyeball.”

  “You don’t sound particularly worried.”

  “I’m not. It’s just that we’ll need to keep moving, and you and fish-boy there—” she jerked her head at Gar “tend to lose your lunches when the rollercoaster goes on for too long.”

  “That’s all right,” Gar said serenely. “We stocked up at the last station.” He produced two air sickness bags and passed one to Barnabas. Gar opened his with a flourish. “Do your worst.”

  Barnabas gave a small sigh, but he took his bag without complaint. “Go on. I wasn’t particularly attached to my lunch in any case.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Shinigami said encouragingly. “Attachment is the root of all suffering, you know.” She smiled as she delivered the Buddhist principle, knowing that it would make Barnabas twitch.

  It did. He tried to hide it, but she was an AI, so she could see the minute wince that passed over his face.

  She chuckled as she zoomed in to follow the other ship. She drew up underneath it, signals tangling with its built-in protections, and felt a wave of amusement when the other ship jerked and swerved. Someone must have seen her from a turret.

  “Idiot,” she muttered. “He’s got his hands on the controls while he’s searching for us. Don’t they have any sort of computer intelligence?”

  “That’s a question we should do our best to answer.” Barnabas’ voice was somewhat muffled by the bag. “It will inform our strategy. Whatever you find in his systems, make a note of it.”

  “I’m not like you, Chief. I don’t just forget things I’ve seen.” She swooped out of the way as the scout pilot tried to fire preliminary missiles at them. “Too slow!”

  Gar made a noise like a distressed velociraptor and buried his face in the bag, and Barnabas wrinkled his nose at the smell.

  Shinigami would have been more amused, but her attention was well occupied between her maneuvers and her attempts to get into the systems of the scout ship. Small as it was, it contained a veritable trove of both information and weaponry.

  Its programs and offensive capabilities had clearly been designed by a ruthless and powerful organization. Whereas the purpose of scout ships was usually to find information and allow the rest of the fleet to deploy as necessary, this one also possessed the ability to kill mid-sized ships.

  Shinigami thought of Koel Yennai’s children, and of Barnabas telling her that Ilia had been ordered to kill Uleq. To her surprise, she felt sad. Koel had built his family and his organization the same way—as trained killers, all of them determined to show strength before anything else.

  When had things like that started to make her sad?

  She didn’t have time to think about it. She flipped and fired countermeasures to evade another set of missiles, then returned to hug the top of the scout ship. It tried desperately to evade her. It might not know what she was doing, but it was determined not to let her do it.

  It didn’t have much of a chance. As it twisted and turned, banked sharply and flipped, Shinigami stayed right with it. She hacked her way into its systems slowly but surely until finally she disconnected the manual controls and swung the scout ship to face her. She held it, floating, and smiled.

  Barnabas and Gar, both of whom had been doubled over their airsickness bags, looked up with interest.

  “Just a moment…”

  Shinigami worked her way into the messaging systems. There, in no less than three distinct places, she found embedded location tracking for any messages, as well as a subprogram that scanned and mapped any pulsars to send back.

  That last one amused her. Humans had once done the same thing. They’d sent a tiny craft called Voyager out into the stars with a map of pulsars engraved on a plaque that would lead anyone who found it back to Earth.

  It had been a remarkably hopeful gesture from a species that had decided to trust that the universe was more likely to be a good place than a bad one. Those who made Voyager had wagered—wagered with their descendants’ lives—that it would not fall into the hands of anyone who would come and steamroll Earth.

  Shinigami thought this was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard.

  She didn’t mention any of this to Barnabas, who would probably wax poetic about the power of hope and how the universe wasn’t an inherently bad place. For someone who liked to think of himself as a jaded vigilante he really was hopelessly idealistic sometimes.

  She snickered to herself quietly as she corrupted the data the messaging systems had attempted to relay back. Koel wasn’t likely to think it was an accident the location tracking didn’t work.

  On the other hand, she didn’t want to give him any more clues than she had to about her capabilities. Embedding random number generators and white noise into his data was a fairly basic technique, and something he couldn’t reverse-engineer.

  She nodded to Barnabas. “You’re good to go in three…two…one.”

  Barnabas focused on the ship displayed on his screens. He wished he could see Koel’s face right now. Something about the male unsettled him in a way few people did. The hint of madness behind the eyes, perhaps. Koel was an entirely rational, logical person…

  After you factored in his completely sociopathic view of the universe.

  “It’s all beginning to come apart for you,” Barnabas mused, “isn’t it? You’d spent so long being careful, working from the shadows, and then as things began to accelerate, it all went wrong.

  “You hold us responsible for the deaths of your children, perhaps. Yes, I was the one who ended their lives. But you were the one who raised them to be what they were. You were the one who terrified them into believing that you were a god, with infinite power over their life and death. Had I not been there, Ilia would have killed Uleq on your orders. You made both your children murderers. Do not rage at me for bringing them to account. Indeed, you have no one to blame but yourself for the fact that they are lost.

  “Though I do not believe for one moment that you ever wanted your child
ren to live their own lives and build their own destinies. You wanted them to glorify you, nothing more.”

  Barnabas paused. What he wanted was for the Yennai Corporation to be extinguished. He also wanted Koel Yennai to face justice.

  And he wanted those things to happen with a minimum of collateral damage.

  But what could he say that would not prompt Koel to kill more innocents? He did not even know what Koel’s aims were. Perhaps the deaths of his children had spurred him to action earlier than he had planned. Perhaps he hoped to establish some sort of empire.

  Barnabas needed to end this, and for that…he needed Koel to want to kill him more than anything else.

  “You would never have succeeded.” He scoffed. “Your children were weak. They begged for their lives, and would have betrayed you in an instant if they thought it would save them. That is what you have built, Koel. Your underlings are like whipped dogs who cringe and cower for a single bit of kindness from you, and then when you need them most…turn on you.

  “You will be destroyed by your own folly. You wanted power, no matter the cost to anyone else, and your legacy will be ruin and failure. It will be me they will remember, not you. It will be my name on the lips of billions. It will be my vision that shapes the universe.”

  Barnabas cut the connection.

  “Your name will be on the lips of billions?” Shinigami asked him. “That sounds like your nightmare.”

  “I was going to say,” Gar murmured.

  Barnabas shrugged. “I couldn’t think of anything that would piss him off more than to tell him that I was going to get everything he wanted.” He shuddered. “Who in their right mind would want to be known by billions? He should have asked Bethany Anne if being in charge of everything brings any joy.”

  “You’re making a logical error,” Shinigami told him. “Bethany Anne doesn’t enjoy power, because she’s legitimately trying to make things better and balance the interests of her citizens. That’s a thankless shit-show. If you don’t care about them, though, and you can just trample all over them on a whim, power’s much easier to handle.”