Fated Blades

CHAPTER 2

The aerial waited for them on a private landing dock on the seventh floor, sleek, silver with black accents, its lines refined and perfect. A large model, with a walk-in cargo hold, it looked like a bird of prey, designed for precision and speed, a hair short of a military ship. She liked it.

Ramona raised her eyebrows. “A little high profile, maybe?”

“As you said, time is a factor.”

Her belongings waited in a neat pile by the aerial: a large waterproof, fire-retardant bag with necessities and a few changes of clothes, a weapon case containing her favorite energy rifle, and a hideous chartreuse gown vacuum sealed in resilient plastic.

Matias frowned at the gown.

“You’re going to visit your sick aunt, and I’m going to the wedding of my childhood friend, whom I haven’t seen in ten years,” she informed him.

“But why is it so . . . aesthetically lacking?”

“It’s tradition. The uglier the bridesmaid’s dress, the better the bride looks. Also, it’s a great distraction. Everyone who witnessed me leaving will remember this monstrosity and little else.”

“It is rather memorable. Where did you find this on such short notice?”

It was the dress she wore the first time she met Gabriel. She had worn it in silent protest against the engagement she didn’t want. “I have my ways.”

He reached for her bag. “May I?”

“Please.”

Matias picked up her baggage and walked up the ramp into the aerial. She followed him, carrying her rifle and her dress. She liked the way he moved, balanced, relaxed but ready. The martial art of seco was fluid, relying on speed and constant movement, which was why the secare children started their training by learning dances rather than specific battle stances. But there was a vast gulf between a dancer and a martial artist. Matias moved like a fighter.

They deposited her belongings next to his large enviro-proof bag, which was stuffed so full it would be in danger of ripping if it wasn’t made of tear-resistant fabric, and made their way to the cabin. Dual pilot seats. In a pinch, either of them could fly. This was a combat ship masquerading as a luxury aerial. That meant the sensitivity of the controls and the acceleration were a step above commercial transport. There would be a world of difference between flying this craft and an ordinary civilian vehicle. Most pilots would overcorrect and crash.

This ought to be interesting.

Matias activated the console and went through a quick checklist. “The Davenports are the obvious choice.”

She’d thought about it too. Like the two of them, the Davenports had thrown all their resources into the production of a working seco generator but had made the least progress.

“And likely the wrong one,” she said. “My husband led a rather cushy existence. I take it your wife enjoyed the same?”

“I gave her everything she wanted. Almost everything.”

Her curiosity spiked. She really wanted to know what hid behind that almost, but his tone told her questions wouldn’t be answered.

“Stealing the research carries a lot of risk. They wouldn’t have done it unless the payday was worth it, and they expected to survive. The buyer must have promised money and protection.”

“And the Davenports aren’t in a position to provide either,” Matias finished for her.

“Their finances are stretched”—she almost said “even thinner than ours” and then remembered who she was talking to—“dangerously thin. Of course, they’re desperate enough to lie to get what they want.”

Matias touched the controls, and the aerial soared in a smooth curve. She barely felt the acceleration. He angled the vehicle with practiced ease and effortlessly joined the stream of aerials speeding through the air above New Delphi.

When Matias was eighteen years old, he had left the planet for five years. Her family never figured out where he went or what he was doing, but now she had a pretty good idea. Whatever he did had involved piloting small combat craft and lots of it.

At the time he left, she was fifteen. She’d envied him the freedom.

“Cassida would have done her homework,” he said. “She’s thorough, and she had access to our database. Our Davenport file is extensive. I trust yours is as well.”

She nodded. “So, it’s not the Davenports.”

“No.”

“Still have to check.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I don’t want to hurt them.”

He spared her a long, careful look. “Compassion? At a time like this?”

“Were you happy in your marriage, Matias?”

“Happiness is overrated.”

“The Davenports are happy. They just had a baby. I don’t want to wreck that without a reason.”

“And if they had a part in this?”

She sighed. “Then I’ll cut them in half. Isn’t that what I’m famous for?”

“Very well. We will be gentle as a summer breeze until we have a reason not to be,” Matias promised.

“Thank you.”

He touched the console, and the aerial swooped down and to the left, banking gently. Ahead the Davenport building rose in the middle of a small park, an undulating flame of orange glass wrapped in an envelope of black callosteel ribbons. The ribbons curved around the building, skimming the solar glass but never touching it, with the widest gap between them barely two meters tall.

At this time of day, Damien Davenport would be at home, while Haider Davenport would be in his office on the twenty-third floor, safe behind that shatterproof solar glass and callosteel designed to hold the enormous structure of the building together through the hardest earthquake. The ribbon envelope was impact resistant. It would take a blast from a midgrade energy cannon to even scratch it.

Twenty-two floors of building security, about a hundred private guards, and several automated turrets. All the standard toys of a successful kinsmen family ready to protect its territory.

Matias steered the aerial toward the tower. “Since you want to minimalize casualties, do you have a plan?”

“How good a pilot are you?”

The woman was insane.

Matias gently tilted the control stick, bringing the aerial down another sixty centimeters. He had positioned the craft slightly above the twenty-third floor of the Davenport building, with the rear of the aerial facing the building and tilted just a touch toward it. The gap between callosteel ribbons widened here to make the best of a spectacular city vista, and the rear cameras presented Matias with a great view of the solar glass window and Haider Davenport behind it, sprawled in his chair, his blond head leaning back on the headrest. The man was passed out.

“Give me another twenty centimeters,” Ramona murmured from the back.

He edged the aerial closer. A meter from the ribbon. This was as close as he dared to get. Another ten centimeters and the current circulating through the metal would short-circuit the aerial’s control system.

This was an idiotic plan. First, she would have to clear the empty air between the aerial and the ribbon, then fifteen centimeters of callosteel, then another fifty-centimeter gap to the solar glass, and then she would have to cut her way through a three-centimeter-thick glass pane, and she would have to be blindingly fast, or she would plummet to her death.

The screen in the dash showed Ramona backing up. She pressed herself against the partition separating the cabin from the cargo hold. Her eyes were focused and calm.

He could just not open the door.

Unfortunately, they had only three options. First, they could ask for a meeting. There was no guarantee the Davenports would agree, and knowing Haider, he would stall as long as he could to gather intel. They couldn’t afford to waste time.

Second, he could land on the roof, dodging the cannon fire. They could break in, kill their way down to Haider’s office, and get what they needed. That way meant Davenport guards would die defending their employers. He had decided long ago that he was the kind of man who didn’t start fights. He finished them, and he never stooped to unprovoked murder. Their ancestors were ruthless killers, but that was six generations ago. Now both he and Ramona were more kinsmen than secare, and the way she wanted to handle the Davenports confirmed what he’d already suspected. Ramona would execute her enemies without hesitation, yet given a choice, she preferred to avoid killing. Life was fragile and precious.

That only left option three, titled “Open the Cargo Door.” He hated option three.

There had to be some other way, some method that didn’t end with Ramona plunging to the ground two hundred meters below, every bone in her body broken. She was an enemy, but it was a truly horrible way to die. If she fell to her death while he was piloting the aerial, nobody would believe that he wasn’t complicit in her death. It would plunge their families into a war.

Ramona took a deep breath . . .

He thumbed the cargo door release. Wind tore into the aerial, but he was ready for it, and the craft barely trembled.

She sprinted, a streak of white, and dived, her arms raised above her head. Her seco blades tore out of her forearms, splaying out like two pieces of radiant red silk. For a fraction of a second, she looked like an angel in white, soaring on glowing bloodred wings, and then the seco field snapped into rigid blades, and she sliced through the solar window and dropped into the hole.

Chunks of amber glass rained down.

He activated the autopilot course he’d programed a few minutes ago, jumped out of his seat, sprinted to the cargo bay, and leaped across the gap. The ground yawned at him, far below, and then he landed on the luxurious Solean pine floor of Haider’s office.

Ramona stood with her back to the office door. A gash smoked lightly behind her—she’d cut the alarm wires running through the door, triggering a lockdown. Haider struck at her, a lethal whirlwind with a short sword gripped in each hand. The Davenport family produced offspring with enhanced speed and coordination, and Haider’s flurry of attacks was so fast Matias could barely follow it with his naked eye.

Ramona had reshaped her seco blades into circular shields, fifty centimeters wide, and glided away from Haider, parrying his furious strikes in a controlled frenzy. Her shields stretched and shifted with her will, creating an impenetrable barrier between her and her attacker.

Matias charged across the office.

Haider spun to him, alerted by his combat implant, slashing as he turned, but it was too late. Matias dropped under the strike and kicked, sweeping Haider’s legs from under him. Haider landed well, flexed, and sprang to his feet to find Matias’s right blade pointed at his neck. The tip stopped five centimeters short of Haider’s throat.

Ramona plucked the sword from Haider’s right hand. “Don’t move.” Her voice was calm and reassuring. “We just want to talk.”

Haider tossed his remaining sword onto the desk, crossed his arms, and leaned against it. The desk quaked and slid apart. The right half thudded to the floor, sliced on the diagonal.

Haider spun around to look at it and turned back, his face twisted by disgust. “Damn it.”

Ramona hid a smile.

Matias glanced at her. “When did you even cut this?”

“On my way to the door. I wanted to slow him down.”

Haider stared at the two of them. Slightly below average height, he was built like a gymnast, compact, strong, with powerful arms and broad shoulders. He came from an old family, and the planet had put its stamp on him before he was even born. He was a classic Dahlia blond, with golden hair and skin almost as bronze as hers. No matter what your ancestors looked like, once you made your home in the province of Dahlia, it saturated you with sunlight.

He was also truly fast with those blades, and he’d reacted instantly, going from completely asleep into full assault in a blink. It had taken all her concentration and skill to parry.

“Am I seeing things?” Haider pondered, almost as if talking to himself. “Clearly this is just a weirdly specific bad dream, one where two people who hate each other team up to bust into my office and destroy my prized furniture.”

“Bill me,” Matias said.

Ha!

Haider knocked on the still-standing half of the wooden desk. “It’s old, you savage. Three hundred years old, brought to this planet by my great-great, however many greats, grandfather. It’s irreplaceable.”

Ramona felt a slight tinge of guilt. “It’s a clean cut,” she offered. “It can be fixed.”

A screen on the wall came to life. A harried woman with dark hair and worried eyes appeared. Derra Lee, Davenport’s chief of security. “Are you . . .”

“I’m fine,” Haider snapped. “Meeting with the new redecorating team.”

Derra squinted at the two of them. “Would you like me to send up some tea for everybody?”

A bit obvious for a code phrase.

“I said I’m fine. Keep your goons downstairs. I will expect a full report after this.”

Haider dismissed the screen with a flick of his fingers, sighed, and looked at the two of them. “Fine. You have my undivided attention. What the hell was so important?”

If he knew, he was a great actor. She’d have to approach this carefully, choosing just the right words . . .

“Did you pay my wife and her husband to steal from us?” Matias asked.

Damn it.

Silence claimed the office.

Haider blinked a few times and looked at her. “Is he serious?”

She shrugged. “I’ve never seen him smile, in person or in an image.”

More silence.

Haider opened his mouth and laughed.

“Is that a yes or a no?” Matias growled.

Haider shook, bent forward, and held his hand out.

“I think he needs a moment,” Ramona told Matias. “I don’t think he’s involved.”

“I can see that, but I still need to hear it.”

Haider choked a little bit and kept laughing.

There was no point in standing. This would clearly take a while. Ramona walked over to an elegant couch and sat. Matias remained standing, looming over Haider like some dark shadow.

Finally, Haider straightened. “Worth it. Do you know how long it’s been since I laughed like that? It was an ugly desk, anyway.”

“I need an answer,” Matias demanded. His voice was cold enough to freeze the marrow in one’s bones.

“No,” Haider said. “I wasn’t involved in any shenanigans with your spouses. Let me open a window into my life. My company is on the verge of bankruptcy. I’m reduced to borrowing money from distant relatives I hate and swore to never talk to again. Our precious son, who is now four months old, somehow inherited the Tarim mutation, despite numerous assurances by the best genetic firm on the planet that nothing of the sort could ever happen. That means he could simply stop breathing at any moment until he clears his first year. My husband is the carrier. He blames himself, no matter how many times I explain that it’s patently absurd, and he obsessively watches our son every waking moment, and when he should be sleeping, he takes boosters to keep himself awake to watch him some more, because he doesn’t trust the best medical personnel our dwindling money can buy. In the past four months, I had to watch Damien, the calmest, most rational being I know, turn into a paranoid, anxious ghost. He doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t eat, he barely lets me take care of him. I worry about our baby. I worry about my husband. I worry about my five-year-old sister, whom I adopted after my parents passed, because she keeps asking us every five minutes if her nephew is going to die. I worry about keeping the food on our table and salvaging the legacy my family has built. The only time I get any peace is at work, here in my office, when my brain gives out, exhausted by my frantic efforts to keep us afloat, and I shut down into a blissful stupor, which the two of you so rudely interrupted with your unnecessary acrobatics. Have you forgotten how to place a call? Have you considered the painfully obvious method of having your people contact my people, so all of us could peacefully meet in a nice neutral setting? What is wrong with the two of you?”

The office went silent. She saw the signs of fatigue now, the bloodshot eyes, the slight sagging in the skin of the face, and the deeper lines. This was a man on the verge of collapse. Considering that, his response to her attack was doubly impressive.

“His wife is screwing my husband,” she told him. “They have the entirety of our seco research, and they’ve disappeared.”

Matias pivoted to her.

“He deserves an honest answer,” she told him.

“Well.” Haider took a deep breath, pulled his chair from behind his ruined desk, and sat in it. “I am sorry. I know nothing about this. They didn’t come to us, probably because they realize we can’t pay them. Not as much as they would need to make it worth your combined wrath, anyway.”

As she suspected.

“Even if they had approached us, we would pass,” Haider continued. “Davenport, Inc., has abandoned its seco initiative.”

What?

“Since when?” Matias asked.

“Since the beginning of the month. We can’t stabilize the field fluctuations. I can no longer justify throwing good money after bad. We simply can’t afford it.”

Wow. The shock must have shown on her face because Haider shrugged. “It is what it is. Have you been able to stabilize the field?”

“Yes,” they said at the same time.

“I hate you both.”

She still struggled with the enormity of the loss his company would take. “Walking away after all this time . . .”

“It’s not a complete wash,” Haider said. “We’ve stumbled on a significantly more efficient way to calibrate the Kelly-particle agitator to sustain a constant flow of energy. It has multiple industrial applications.”

He caught on to the expressions on their faces and leaned forward, his eyes suddenly bright. “The two of you haven’t figured it out.”

Neither of them answered.

“Ha! I have something you don’t! You are running out of money. You can’t afford to keep researching it indefinitely. You and you are going to pay me for that tech. All the money.” He leaned back in his chair, spread his arms wide, and howled at the ceiling. “I’m the smartest man in the world!”

Matias looked like he was considering cutting Haider’s head off out of sheer irritation.

“I’ll pit you against each other and make you bid for it,” Haider continued. “Or, better, I’ll want a percentage of each sale. I’ll own this planet.”

Matias rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked at her.

“Clearly, he’s gone crazy with power,” she told him.

Matias didn’t look amused. The word likely wasn’t in his vocabulary. “He’s gone crazy with something.”

“Call me crazy,” Haider told them. “Call me anything you want as long as you pay me.”

Ramona allowed herself a small smile. Licensing from the Davenports would cost her family a fortune, but somehow Haider’s joy was infectious.

“That’s a good plan,” Matias said. “However, unless we recover our files, nobody will be paying you anything.”

Haider sat up, suddenly serious. “That’s right. I just thought of something. About two months ago, we were approached for a complete buyout. They wanted everything, every bit of seco data and research, all of the prototypes, even the failed ones, and the offer came attached with a draconian noncompete. Not only wouldn’t we be able to ever work on seco applications, we couldn’t even utilize any of the side projects we developed as a result. This was ‘abandon the family business, take a lump sum, and retire’ money.”

An alarm went off in her head. “An off-worlder?” she asked.

Haider nodded.

Kinsmen families had spread far and wide through the galaxy. They had come into being because humanity needed a vanguard for its expansion. Their ancestors led the waves of settlers, establishing footholds on dangerous new worlds. Each planet had their own kinsmen culture, but for Rada kinsmen, family was everything. Money mattered less than growing and maintaining the family business, cultivating it, and passing it on to the next generation. Business anchored them to the province. It rooted them, and they grew from it like a tree. Their status, their life purpose, and their self-respect, all of it was wrapped up in family enterprise. No Rada kinsman would ever make that kind of offer to another kinsman. It was an insult, and they would know it would be automatically rejected.

“Do you know the identity of the buyer?” Matias asked.

“No,” Haider said. “And believe me, I tried to find out. The pitch came from a private shipping firm, but I’m positive it was only a cover.”

“Why?” she asked.

“There was a lot of arrogance. It was less an offer than an order, and when we declined, the reaction wasn’t positive. There was no haggling, no bargaining, no attempt to sweeten the deal. We were expected to take the offer on the table, no questions asked. That’s not the way experienced businessmen do deals.”

The Davenports had a deadly reputation. They didn’t actively seek conflict, but if attacked, they retaliated decisively, and they didn’t stop until the threat was neutralized. The way the buyer went about it all but guaranteed failure. The question was, Was it ignorance or arrogance? Perhaps the buyer wanted his offer to be rejected, although she couldn’t imagine why.

“I can tell you that their cover identities were bulletproof,” Haider continued. “Either they have an incredible counterfeiter, or their fake IDs are real.”

Which would mean they were connected to someone local with a lot of power.

“Did you record the meeting?” Matias asked.

And that right there was the difference between being born on Rada or off planet. Of course Haider had recorded the meeting. All of them knew it. What Matias was really asking was to see the recording, but demanding access to another family’s private business dealings would be the height of rudeness.

Haider stared into space for a couple of long breaths. “I forwarded it to your in-boxes.”

Her implant chimed, acknowledging the receipt. They would have to find a secure terminal to view it.

“Hilariously, they demanded that we erase it.” Haider chuckled. “You have what you need. Go forth, brave heroes, track down the traitors, and recover your data so you can pay me. I wouldn’t recover the spouses, however. Seems like a lost cause.”

True, she thought.

Haider waved them off. “You can take the elevator down.”

“No thanks,” Matias said. “The aerial will be just fine.”

He headed to the window. Ramona followed him, paused, and tossed a brief message to Haider’s in-box from her implant.

“What’s this?” Haider asked.

“One of my childhood friends. Two children, natural conception for both. Both born with the Tarim mutation. They are now five and three. I thought you and Damien could use someone to talk to, and Olivia Solis has gone through this gauntlet.”

Haider smiled. “Maybe I won’t take all of your money. Just some of it. Happy hunting, she-wolf.”

She nodded and leaped across the void into the cargo hold.