Fated Blades

CHAPTER 6

Ramona opened her eyes. In front of her, a window offered a view of Dahlia wilderness. Huge feather trees spread whorls of narrow silver fronds. Technically, they weren’t trees at all, but giant grasses stretching seventy meters into the air with trunks five meters across at the base. Between them, blue-green Rada evaners, deciduous giants, thrust their massive branches to the sky, each bearing hundreds of thousands of turquoise and indigo leaves. Here and there stranglers flared among the foliage, their distinctive orange leaves and bulbous fruit blazing against the blue-green canopy. Stranglers started their lives as parasitic vines that climbed their host tree to the sunlight, draining it of nutrients and water until it withered and only the strangler remained, now a thriving columnar tree.

It took her a second to remember where she was. Her back ached. A slow soft pain washed over her hips. At least her mouth had stopped bleeding and her vision no longer blurred at the edges.

Ramona glanced at Matias in the pilot seat. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Her body made that decision on its own. Using seco exacted its price. The secare ate like pigs and slept like the dead, unless they were in enemy territory.

If she told her family who had watched over her while she’d slept, they would never believe it.

The way they’d battled through the Drewery mansion troubled her. She’d fought beside her brothers before. She and her siblings were trained by the same person, their mother. They started with the same dances as children, and then, as their seco matured, they sliced through the same practice targets, and finally, when their family was put to a test by kinsmen feuds, they killed side by side. But there was never the kind of synergy she experienced with Matias.

She and Matias didn’t fight in the same way. Their technique differed, but it didn’t matter. They moved at the same time, coordinating their defense and attacks without speaking. It was as if they had the exact same instincts.

It was the closest she’d ever come to synchronization.

The original secare fought in pairs. It maximized their survivability and target range. A single secare covered a 180-degree target field in front of them. A pair standing back-to-back covered the entire 360. But synchronization was more than simply doubling the shields and the blades.

Something unexplainable happened when two secare synchronized. Ray Adler, her distant ancestor who’d made Rada his home, called it “a perfect harmony” in his notes. He wrote of a bond, a connection that happened on a seco level that was “stronger than love and family.” Even in his time, in the original unit, the nature of that connection wasn’t understood and not every secare found one, but those who did became more than the sum of their parts.

It was said that a synchronized pair of secare could empty a dreadnought of its marines and crew in mere hours. Two against hundreds, sometimes thousands of combatants. It seemed almost mythical, a legend rather than reality.

Ray Adler had also blamed that connection for the death of his wife. He left no instructions on how it might be achieved. He stopped short of condemning it, but it was clear he thought his descendants would be better off without it.

Despite his wishes, her family had tried to achieve synchronization multiple times over the next generations. She herself had tried. She always thought their battle dances had to be the key. They were the cornerstone of their training, and she was sure they were meant to be danced in pairs, so she studied them and even recruited her brothers to help. She failed. One would’ve thought that two secare siblings close in age, like she and Karion, would be the ideal candidates, but none of the Adlers had ever synchronized with each other.

She studied Matias through her half-lowered eyelashes. And here was a secare who somehow sensed which way she would lean and how she would strike.

It wasn’t true synchronization. It was . . . killer instinct. Mutual understanding between two predators forced into battle together. Imagining anything more was dangerous and foolish.

He glanced at her. A handsome man with hazel eyes and a killer’s instinct . . .

She really had to stop. At least she had an excuse for her bout of temporary insanity. So much had happened today. It felt like a week had passed since this morning. Was it even still the same day?

“It’s still today, isn’t it?” she asked. Oh, now that was a perfectly lucid question.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Feels like an eternity ago. How long was I out?”

“A couple of hours.”

“How long to Adra?”

He checked the display. “About two and a half hours. Might be more. There’s a storm coming in. We’ll have to swing south to go around it in about ten klicks.”

Getting out of the villa had taken some doing. The atrium had an emergency skylight, a safety measure mandated by the government so if a fire occurred, birds and other wildlife could escape. Matias had activated it through his link with the Drewerys’ servers. They’d gone through it at a ridiculous speed, expecting the Vandal gunships to follow. Matias had taken over the SAMs and was prepared to lay down cover fire, but the two sleek craft were nowhere in sight. She had a feeling their pilots were in pieces, either in the atrium or in the hallway. Or possibly in the office.

To both her and Matias, killing was like breathing, simple and natural. Uncomplicated. Slicing through human beings was after all the reason for the secare’s existence. Children in their families started martial training as soon as they could follow adults’ commands. She was three when she’d learned her first dance.

The act of taking a life was physically easy. The aftermath, not so much. The enemies had been armed and trained, and each of them had ended plenty of lives on their own. Still, she felt uneasy. Hollow and flat. Usually sleep helped, but she must not have gotten enough.

Matias had gotten even less.

She stretched and sat up straighter. “Let me drive.”

“It’s fine.”

“You have to be tired.”

“I’m not tired,” he assured her in a patient voice. “I’m fine.”

Aha. “So, you’re going to do the man thing?”

“What man thing?”

“The one where you heroically decide to pilot the entire distance and then be tired and irritable and expect special treatment for it.”

He gave her a flat look.

“I’m perfectly capable of piloting an aerial,” she said. “I’ve piloted them since I was twelve years old.”

“Who let you do that?”

“My grandma. You flew to the Davenports, then to the villa, and now you’ve been flying for another two hours. I know you’re tired.”

He sighed. His fingers flickered across the console, and her own console lit up. She took a couple of seconds to orient herself, checked the plotted course, checked the radar, ran the math in her head on the storm bypass, and nudged the stick, altering course slightly. The aerial responded instantly.

“Smooth,” she said.

“I have them custom built.” He leaned back into his seat, reclining, raised his arms, and braided his fingers behind his head.

Matias in repose. She wished she could take a picture. Her brothers would lose their minds.

“Have you thought of what happens when we get to Adra?” he asked.

The festival was massive. Finding either Cassida or Gabriel even with the latest facial recognition software would be impossible. They had to rely on human psychology instead.

“Everything you told me about the Vandals suggests that subterfuge isn’t their strong suit.”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

His pose was still relaxed, but his expression hardened. Every time the Vandals were mentioned, Matias snapped into battle mode. Something had happened between Matias and the Vandals. Something beyond simply being warned about the danger they posed. He braced himself like a man who had been exposed to that danger firsthand. She was dying to know what it was. But Matias was a deeply private man. He trusted no one and revealed very little, and when he allowed her a glimpse into his thoughts, it felt almost like a gift. A small acknowledgment of the camaraderie they shared as partners. She didn’t want to press him for it. It would mean much more if he decided to tell her on his own.

Why does it even matter? Why do I care about what a Baena thinks of me?

“We won’t find Cassida,” she said. “Most likely her father stashed her away in some safe house filled with his private guards armed to the teeth. They’re maintaining a complete blackout, because they know the moment we notice any activity, we’ll descend on their hidey-hole with weapons hot and seco out.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t think Varden Plant will be that cautious. He and the other two Vandal officers we watched on Davenport’s recording have bulletproof Dahlia IDs, and they think like soldiers, not like spies.”

Matias nodded. “The Vandals will act as a unit. They will take over a hotel, some place they can secure, and once they do that, they will start patrolling the exchange site.”

She smiled. “Festival hotel prices are insane. People make reservations a year in advance. Forty Vandals applied for the asylum. We killed sixteen. So, we’re looking for twenty-four newly minted asylum seekers staying together and paying premium rates.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard.”

“They’ll stick out like a sore thumb. Once we find their reservations, following them will be a snap. People at the festival are happy and carefree. These guys will be the opposite of that. We’ll have seven days to learn everything we can about them.”

He frowned. “I always found it ridiculous. Perfectly reasonable people become tourists and suddenly decide that nothing bad can happen to them. It’s like a switch is flipped. Suddenly they’re drinking too much and stumbling through dark streets with their implants unsecured. They walk into traffic. They hang off the rails next to signs expressly forbidding it. They think every stranger is a friendly local.”

She shook her head. “Matias, do you ever relax? Do you even know what that word means?”

He smiled. “I do. I have even been known to allow myself a sensible chuckle on occasion.”

She squinted at him. “My family had you under loose surveillance since you were born. The only time I ever saw you laugh was when you stabbed Drewery’s career through the heart.”

“He deserved it.”

He did. Matias had been married for three years. It must’ve grated on him the entire time. Having met Drewery, she had no idea how he had endured for so long.

“I’m relaxed right now,” Matias said. “This is it right here. You’re watching it happen.”

“I feel so privileged.”

“You should.”

“Since you’re so relaxed, perhaps you could clear something up for me,” Ramona said. “I seem to recall an article I read about a month ago regarding that Monroe chemical spill. The provincial special prosecutor had filed a formal inquiry with the federal government requesting access to certain sealed records. Now why would he do that after two years?”

Matias shrugged.

“The article hinted that new information had come to light.”

Another shrug.

“It was you. You leaked it to the prosecutorial office.”

He sighed. “It bothered me.”

“Matias! An upstanding, conservative kinsman like yourself getting involved in politics. How brazen of you. What will the people think?”

Teasing Matias Baena. Like playing with fire.

“It’s not politics. It’s justice.”

Ramona hid a smile. Kinsmen like them didn’t get involved in government. It was a tradition as old as Rada itself. They occupied a special niche in the society, and like Drewery, they recognized that they didn’t represent an average citizen. The families lobbied to look after their business interests, and some were related to politicians through marriage, but if any kinsman ever ran for office, they would be shunned by their peers. If Drewery had bothered to pay attention, he would’ve realized that Matias would never break that tradition.

“Most of Drewery’s sins involve theft on a corporate level,” Matias said. “He defrauds taxpayers. It’s wrong but faceless. This one had specific people attached to it. Families. Children. There were images of the bodies in the file.”

“How did you do it? Drewery’s server security would’ve alerted him the moment you copied the files.”

“I memorized the contents during a particularly excruciating Rada’s Settlement Day party. I’ve been diving into his server for the last four months during every family function. It was like swimming through a sewer.”

“I’m glad you leaked it. What Drewery did, it’s just not done.”

“Yes,” Matias agreed. “It’s not done.”

A spot of turquoise two shades lighter than the canopy caught Ramona’s eye. A smooth dome, crisscrossed by strands of glittering white, all but smothered by the stranglers and obscured by evaner branches. A First Wave temple. They dotted the planet, footprints left on Rada by the failed attempt at first settlement centuries ago.

Matias settled deeper into the seat and closed his eyes.

Ahead the storm loomed, a wall of gray under angry dark clouds. Wind buffeted the aerial. She executed a smooth turn to the south, keeping the storm and the wind on her left.

The aerial jerked. The console went dark. Every system, every display, everything died in an instant.

She looked up at the windshield and saw a glowing hole growing in the nose of the aerial. Orbital particle beam flashed in her head. A craft in orbit had locked onto their aerial’s signal and punched a hole in its engine with a subatomic particle disruptor, frying all the onboard electronics. The aerial was dead. It just didn’t know it yet.

Matias jerked upright in his seat.

She pulled the lever, initiating crash protocols. Their harnesses clicked in unison.

They had about five seconds of acceleration left. If the OPB hit them again, they were dead.

She pulled the stick right, turning the aerial’s back to the storm to catch the wind.

“You’ve got this,” Matias said.

He said it like he had no doubt she would land.

Ramona squeezed the last push from the engines to angle the craft for an optimal glide.

The world vanished. There was only the aerial, the wind, and the forest below, rushing at them at breakneck speed, and she floated in the middle of it, attuned to the shaking craft as if it were an aching limb.

A tangle of orange stranglers flared directly ahead. The strangler trunks were mostly hollow. They would break, dissipating some of their speed. She steered for the orange clump.

The forest yawned at her.

With a metal screech, the aerial plowed into the trees.

“Brace!” Matias barked.

The cabin shook, jerking their seats side to side, as if some prehistoric deity were pounding on it with a giant hammer. Branches snapped, scraping against the windshield; then suddenly they were through. Ramona saw the forest floor and tried to pull up on pure instinct, but the stick was useless. The inert heap of metal and plastic that used to be their aerial collided with the ground and plowed through the roots and soil, heading straight for a huge evaner tree.

She jerked her seco shields up on pure instinct.

The aerial grazed the colossal trunk. The impact spun them. They hurtled left and stopped, wedged against another tree.

The seat whispered, deflating.

We’ve survived.

The red force field in front of her was too dark. She glanced right. Matias had thrust his left arm out, adding one of his shields to her own. He’d tried to protect her from the impact.

Their gazes met. He pulled his seco back into his arms and clicked his harness open. “The OPB.”

She released her harness and leaped out of her seat. They scrambled to the cargo hold, grabbing what they could. Matias charged the door, a seco blade spilling out of his right arm like blood. He slashed, once, twice, and the door fell aside. They sprinted away from the craft into the woods.

They were twenty meters away when a second OPB tore through the air in a blinding purple pulse and minced the aerial to pieces.

Matias pressed against the trunk of a big evaner. Ramona squeezed in next to him.

Two hundred meters away, a debris field at the end of a long furrow marked the spot where their aerial had exploded.

Subatomic particle disruptors capable of hitting a target on the ground from orbit were expensive and heavy. Most larger military vessels didn’t bother with them because at that range they didn’t pack enough power. They were precision weapons, deployed against small targets: satellites, beacons, underground bunkers. He’d never expected they would use them against an aerial.

“The Vandals?” she guessed.

“Yes. Unless Drewery bought himself an orbital defense patrol vessel of corsair class or higher.”

“That would be pushing it, even for him.”

Particle beams left no traces. They wouldn’t register on planetary defenses unless someone was in visual range, but the presence of a warship, even one with a diplomatic tag, would. To fire at them, the Vandal warship would have had to drop into low orbit. There was a limited amount of time before Orbital Traffic Control would make them move. The Vandals could stall for a bit, but eventually they would have to return to their designated traffic lane.

“I have no uplink,” Ramona murmured.

He tried his implant. Nothing. Perfect. Just perfect.

The first edge of the storm rolled across the sky toward them. Lightning flashed, snaking through the dark churning clouds in an electric burst of blue.

Right now, they had bigger problems than lack of signal. In a few minutes, the storm would break over their heads. It wouldn’t be a gentle rain; it would be the kind of deluge that made the gardens of Dahlia possible. The forest would do little to stop it. They had to find shelter.

Ramona dug in her bag and pulled out a rifle. “I think I saw a First Wave temple when we were flying.”

A temple . . . he recalled being small and standing next to his grandfather, holding his hand and looking up at a bright-blue bubble of precursor transparite caught in a web of silver filaments above their heads.

“Which way?” he asked.

Ramona waved vaguely to her left and clicked the rifle’s scope, activating it.

“Why the rifle?”

“Point cloud scanner.” She grinned.

The point cloud scope tagged the environment, differentiating between shapes. The temple would be large and round. It should stand out among the trees like a mushroom in the grass.

Ramona hung the rifle over her shoulder and faced the tree. “Give me a boost?”

He cupped his hands. She stepped on them, and he straightened, propelling her upward. Ramona caught a branch, pulled herself up, and scrambled into the crown.

A long moment passed.

“Found it,” she called down. “Two klicks. Think it’s safe to tag it?”

“Yes.”

The rifle popped. Ramona had shot at the temple, and the rifle’s targeting computer recorded the trajectory of the round. They would follow the scope the way mythical ancients followed a thread through a labyrinth. As long as the storm gave them another fifteen minutes, they would make it.

Lightning tore the clouds above them. Thunder rumbled, the heavens opened, and the rainstorm doused the forest.

Matias swore.

Visibility shrank to near zero. Matias sliced at the tangle of vines in front of him.

“A little to the left,” Ramona called out behind him.

He pulled his feet out of the mud, strode a couple of meters forward, angling to the left, and slashed again, carving a path through the brush.

The forest floor was soup. Mud sucked at their feet and gave way under their weight. The rain had soaked through their clothes in seconds. Warm at first, it felt almost icy now. All around them the canopy shook and trembled, not blocking the rain but channeling it into thousands of streams. If something lunged at them through the brush now, they would never see it coming.

He hacked and cut, half-blind, while Ramona followed him, staring into the scope. If they wandered off course, even by a few meters, they could walk right by the temple and never realize it was there.

His left knee was fucking killing him. He had put most of his weight on it in that damn hallway, shielding himself and Ramona from the sonic cannon, and after that second blast hurled him into the wall, he’d fallen right on it. His back hurt, his head hurt, too, and the crash had done them no favors despite the state-of-the-art crash seats, but the knee would require attention as soon as they stopped and he could get the med kit out of his bag. If he didn’t treat it, it would either lock up tomorrow or swell, and he had no idea what the next day would bring.

A wide leaf dumped a few liters of water right down his back. It ran under his collar and washed down his spine. Matias gritted his teeth and kept cutting. Using seco tired you out. He needed sleep and food. He didn’t care in which order, but he had to get one of them soon, because his endurance was at its limit.

A tangle of stranglers towered ahead. He ripped into them, sinking into the mindless rhythm of slashing strikes. Cut, cut, step. Cut, cut, step.

A hand grabbed his shoulder. “Matias!”

He turned to her.

Ramona pointed to the right. “We found it.”

He looked in the direction she was pointing.

A blue-and-white dome rose to the side, wrapped in a net of strangler branches. It looked like a bubble of pure blue caught in a web of silver filaments anchoring it to the ground. Two wide ramps led to the entrance.

They hurried to the ruin.

First Wave temples took their form from nephri spiders, which laid their eggs into a drop of their bright-blue mucus and wove their webs into parachutes around it to let the wind carry their offspring to new territories. A near-perfect sphere from above, from the ground the temple resembled an egg set on its side, with its domed roof sloping all the way down, like a web tacked to the forest floor just before it took flight. A pavilion rather than a cathedral, a seamless blend of natural and man made, where its worshippers became part of nature without disrupting it.

The building had no doors or windows, only two entrances, formed by the gaps between the roof and floor, directly opposite each other. Matias strode up the ramp, passed under the ten-meter-tall arch, and entered the temple.

The oval building lay empty, its stone floor strewn with dry leaves. To the left, at the widest, deepest portion of the pavilion, a simple altar, little more than a round basin in the floor, waited, abandoned. Opposite it, at the narrow end, a small spring trickled out of the wall into a series of stone bowls, cascading from the top all the way to the bottom, before vanishing into the floor. The blue roof, opaque from the outside, turned translucent from within, and the silver threads weaving over it glowed slightly, sparking here and there with an intense flash of white.

He would have preferred something with four walls and a door, but it would have to do. At least the stranglers had braided themselves over the other entrance. It would cut down on wind.

Ramona dropped her bag and her rifle onto the stone floor. The rain had plastered her hair to head and face. She looked pale, her lips nearly white, and her blue eyes seemed huge and dark.

She hugged herself, shivering.

He had to get her warm.

Matias walked to the altar. About a meter and a half across, it was the same stone as the floor but polished to near glossy smoothness. He circled it, looking at the rim. There it was, a small sphere of stone embedded in the edge.

“I’ll be back.”

He turned and strode back out into the rain, half slid, half stomped his way to the nearest strangler column as thick as his leg, and knocked on it with his fist. Hollow. Perfect. He slashed with his seco. The trunk remained upright, held up by the fronds and vines above. He grabbed it and pulled. Wood snapped, and the hollow strangler broke free and fell, flinging mud into the air.

He grabbed it, strained, and pulled the severed tree toward the entrance. Ramona ran out of the temple and grabbed the other side, and they hauled it up the ramp and inside.

Ramona wiped rainwater from her face. “Brilliant plan. Except it’s wet and we have no way to burn it.”

“Oh ye of little faith. Do you know how to lay out a fire?”

She snorted at him.

Together, they cut the strangler into logs and arranged them in the altar basin, forming a rough pyramid with the small pieces in the center and larger logs outside.

Ramona stepped back and looked at him expectantly. “I’m waiting for a miracle.”

He dug in his bag, pulled out a small knife, and cut his arm.

“What are you doing?” She actually sounded concerned.

He held his arm over the sphere and squeezed the cut. A few drops of blood fell onto the stone. He crouched and pushed the bloodied sphere with his thumb, trying to twist it in its niche. It resisted. He pushed harder. The stone ball turned, carrying his blood with it.

Something clicked beneath the altar. A jade-green flame sprang from a hidden vent in the center of the basin and licked the strangler logs, and they ignited into a warm orange blaze.

Ramona stared at him. “How?”

“It’s a nephrytine flame with a trigger that reacts to human DNA and hemoglobin. It only lasts for about five minutes or so, but that’s all we need. Fire is a rare part of nature. Water runs freely, available to all, but to harness fire, a sacrifice is required. Technological progress begins with fire, and if one isn’t careful, one can bleed the planet dry to keep the fire burning.”

“How do you even know this?”

“My grandfather showed it to me when I was young. He liked learning odd things. Look at the smoke.”

She tilted her head, watching the thin column of smoke touch the ceiling of the temple and melt into it. “Is it being absorbed?”

He nodded. “The builders didn’t believe in wasting the energy. The dome stays at roughly the same temperature year around.”

“Fascinating.” She pulled a med kit from her bag. “Give me your arm.”

“It’s a scratch.”

“And we’re in the wilderness. It needs to be sterilized and sealed, otherwise it will get infected. And after I finish with your arm, we’re going to look at your leg.”

He gave her an outraged look. “My leg is fine.”

“Uh-huh. So you’re limping for fun?”

“I said—”

She reached for his left knee, and he jerked away and almost fell over.

“You’re being ridiculous,” she told him. “If your knee goes, I can’t carry you all the way to civilization. You are too large and too heavy. Give me your arm, and don’t make me repeat myself.”

He held his arm out and let her fuss over it.