Hope's Folly (6 page)

Out of habit, she studied their weaponry more than their faces. No Carvers here; not even Stingers. Standard issue Mag-5 pistols, and their rifles were boring Blue Surgers. She'd trained on them, could dismantle them in her sleep, which was, in her opinion, all they were worth. But, yeah, get shot by a Surger and it still hurt like a bitch and could put you flat-out dead if someone's aim was good. Not center mass, as they were taught. That only worked on the good guys, but it wasn't the good guys who needed shooting. It was the bad guys, and they were smart enough to wear body armor. Good luck getting a standard Surger to penetrate that.

Okay, maybe at point-blank.

But at point-blank, the bad guys had already shot you dead with their nice powerful Carver-12s.

No, with a Surger you had to go for the throat or brain. Stop the blood flow, stop the body functions. Even then, some slag-head twilighting on
rafthkra
might still come at you, full bore.

She'd had to assist station cops twice in her short career, taking down gun-wielding twilighters Surgers couldn't stop. Her Carver-10 had.

That's why she liked working for ImpSec. They carried Carver-10s, minimum. Carver-12s on shipside duty. She'd even heard of 15s, when they worked the rim or were assigned to an admiral's personal protection. Totally apex, to quote Lyza, who was by now sleeping in Rya's bed in Rya's apartment, possibly even with Rya's former lover.

And was warm.

After this, a Stryker-class cruiser might seem like a damned tropical vacation.

The shuttle waiting room at the end of the corridor was crowded. Not surprising. According to the schedule board, the room serviced three shuttles: one dirt-side to Umoran, one to the moon colony, and one spaceside to the shipyards in orbit around Seth. She wondered how many of those huddled down on the hard bench seats had seen Commander Dina Adney's coded transmit on available crew positions for the new Alliance fleet. A lot, probably, because this was, after all, Calth, and Calth had almost wholly formally withdrawn from the Empire after the dissolution of the Admirals’ Council several months ago.

Only the Walker Colonies and Port January were playing coy, but then, Port January had long been an Imperial base of operations.

She spied an empty row of bench seats facing the floor-to-ceiling viewports and headed for them, only to realize why they were empty. They were broken, their seat backs still connected but the seat bottoms stripped out. She turned and walked again past humans hunched into coats, children huddled close in a mother's or father's lap, and a few Takas lounging casually, not bothered by the cold at all, their furred hands and wrists sticking out of lightweight shirts or thermals. Shipyard patches on their chests marked them as returning workers.

The schedule board suspended over the center of the room flashed, catching her eye. A low groan went around the room even before she finished reading the advisory that all shuttles were delayed one hour due to heightened security concerns.

A baby wailed loudly.

Rya completely concurred with the sentiment and tossed her empty tea container into a trash bin.

Movement near the dirtside shuttle tubeway signaled a family vacating several of the benchlike seats— the delay likely meant time for a lavatory stop, or maybe food. Rya was only a row away. She quickened her steps, then slowed, her duffel bumping her hip. An elderly man and woman pulled themselves off the cold decking, tugging two toddlers with them as they ambled for the seats. A pair of hard-body guys did as well. Dockworkers, Rya guessed, noting their stained coveralls made from a heavy-duty tan fabric. Both wore dark high-necked thermals underneath. They were dressed to deal with the cold temperatures on the docks, not the artificially controlled environment on a ship.

She stepped in front of the men, blocking their path, trying to give the people with the small kids a chance to get there first.

The bearded hard-body stared levelly at her as she shifted her stance until she stood bladed to him, gun-side away. Ingrained habit. The man was about her age and not much taller than she was, maybe five-ten. But he outweighed her by at least sixty pounds, and Rya was no lightweight—a factor Matt Crowley had found less than appealing.

“I have hips, I have thighs,” she'd told him more than once when he'd patted her ample rump with some snippy comment. “Get used to it.”

The bearded man's gaze dropped to her chest, as if he'd heard her thoughts.

Okay, so she had an ample chest too.

“Kind of you to let them have the seats,” she told him, bringing his gaze back to her face as her right hand found the small laser tucked against her back.

“Yeah, I'm Mr. Wonderful,” he drawled with a quick glance to his friend. His hands edged into his pockets.

She palmed the laser, flicking the setting to stun.

“So now I gotta go sit on the floor again,” he continued. “It's real cold on your ass, you know. I think you should come and keep me warm.”

“I think you'll do just fine by yourself.” She put her professional tone in her voice. “Have a good one, gentlemen. Now, move on.”

Maybe it was the tone of her voice, or maybe it was that Mr. Wonderful's friend's gaze flicked to her beret and down again, possibly catching the outline of the gun in the shoulder holster that even her womanly charms and leather jacket failed to fully hide. He nudged his friend. “Let's go, Alvie.”

“Hey!”

“We're going now.” Alvie's friend grabbed Alvie by the arm and steered him in the opposite direction.

Rya tucked away the L7 at the small of her back and didn't miss the low comment when they were a few steps away.

“Striper? Shit.”

No, not a striper. ImpSec Special Protection Service. Polite, professional, and prepared to kill.

She sighed, caught the grateful gaze of the elderly woman with the sleeping toddler in her lap, and shrugged her acknowledgment.

The
shuttle delayed
sign still flashed. Rya wandered away from the tubeway hatchlock and finally ended up leaning against the wall—holding up the bulkhead, as her father would say—where the corridor dead-ended into the waiting area. There was a heat vent overhead, the little warmth trickling out a pleasure almost beyond words at this point.

A few more people stood and filed out, tired of waiting or hungry, or both. Or just needing to move. Mr. Wonderful and friend claimed two seats quickly, but she didn't intervene this time, because no one smaller, weaker, or older needed them.

She glanced away from them and watched the corridor instead.

That's when she saw him. A solitary figure in a bluish-gray thermal overcoat that her mind automatically tagged as
Fleet-issue,
moving with a determined but limping gait. He leaned on his cane with every other step, the wide strap of a duffel a dark stripe against the fabric of his coat.

He was too far for her to see his face, but as he moved under the dim overhead lights, his short-cropped silver hair made her immediately tag him as a veteran. Not recent Fleet, then. Probably a casualty from the Boundary Wars twenty years ago.

Officer? Yeah, she tagged that too. It was in the way that he held himself, in spite of the pain and his limp. The set of his shoulders. The lift of his chin. Retired officer, silver-haired, probably in his seventies. Coming here at Commander Adney's call?

God, were they down to that now? Relying on rheumy old men to try to stop Tage's insanity?

An end seat on the long bench bordering the bulkhead became available when a fidgety young man in plain green coveralls pushed himself out of it and loped for the corridor. She slid quickly into it, next to a dozing Takan shipyard worker on her left. She'd give the space to the old man when he passed by, as he'd have to given his current trajectory. Then maybe she'd splurge on another half mug of sweet tea to thaw her insides and her hands. It was only money, and the damned shuttle—

The old man, about fifteen feet from her now, limped under a dangling spotlight, the harsh glow illuminating his face. And Rya, already rising to offer him her seat, was surprised to realize two things.

He was not an old man at all. And he had the most incredible blue eyes she'd seen in years.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said, because that's what she'd planned to say. And, old or not, he was still limping. Injured. Weaker than she was.

He hesitated slightly, those marvelous blue eyes narrowing in a face that was masculine in a classic, rugged sort of way that set her body to tingling.
Damn.

“You want this seat?” she continued, tugging her duffel's strap over her left shoulder. “I was just leaving. The shuttle's delayed and seats are hard to come by in here. And this one's under the heat vent.”

He stopped in front of her and leaned on his cane.

Rya looked up. Yeah,
up.
Six-two, three. Stocky, maybe two thirty-five. Fleet thermal coats were a thin fabric. He had wide shoulders, a muscular neck, and a dual shoulder holster. She judged that too.

Something flashed over his face, a wariness, then it was gone.

Her beret. He was Fleet. He knew its significance: ImpSec. And if he'd ever worked out of Aldan Prime, he knew it could also mean
assassin.
But his features had relaxed, and he wasn't reaching for whatever rested snugly in his shoulder holsters. Not Fleet inner circle, then.

A baby wailed somewhere behind her, its cry dissolving into a series of hiccups.

“AWOL,” Rya said quietly in explanation of her headgear, because that wasn't all that far from the truth. Then she said a name and watched for his reaction. “Adney.”

Confirmation came in the slight lessening of tension around his mouth, an almost imperceptible nod.

“That's pretty much why a lot of us are here,” she said, her voice still low. She didn't know why she'd added that information. No, she did. For some reason she couldn't define, but based on her cop's sense she'd honed over the past few years, she trusted this silver-haired man. It wasn't because he was attractive. She appreciated attractive—okay, her body did—but her mind knew attractive could just be a shallow package. This was something more. He was … He exuded something. An aura of command, of respect?

Yes, command
and
respect, now that she thought about it.

But more than that, she sensed that Adney's request was why he was here. And she wanted him to know he wasn't alone. Because in addition to the aura of command that ringed him like an impenetrable halo, she also felt a deep loneliness in him. A heavy weight that maybe had something to do with his injury, or maybe not.

But it was there and it was palpable.

And it wasn't just her cop's instincts telling her that but her years as the daughter of Lieutenant then Commander then Captain Cory Bennton.

“Would you like to sit, sir?”

“How long is the delay?” His voice was deep, resonant.

“One hour, max, due to heightened security concerns.”

He was shaking his head in dismay.

The Takan on her left rose to his feet and called out to a group exiting toward the corridor. They waved. He headed for them in a long, striding gait.

When Rya turned back, the silver-haired man had let his duffel drop to the floor next to his boots, its strap still in his fingers. It was heavy, but he wasn't going to let it go or out of his sight.

“This is never a pretty maneuver,” he said, and, twisting slightly, angled himself down into the vacant chair.

She sat in the Taka's seat, dropping her duffel to the floor. She caught the tail end of a half smile, half grimace on his face and realized her error. She'd said she was leaving.

“My leg thanks you,” he said with a hint of wry humor, “but my ego is severely deflated.”

She grinned back, doing another mental tally of him as he wedged his cane into a niche on the benchlike seats, then dragged his duffel between them. Early to mid-forties, perhaps; the silver hair was an anomaly. It was thick and, judging from some still-dark patches, had once been a rich brown about as dark as her own. Odd that he hadn't tinted it. Most people did. No one wanted to be mistaken for old.

Maybe he didn't care what people thought. That piqued her curiosity as much as his injury.

“Accident?” She pointed to his right leg, extending stiffly out.

“Let's just say negotiations with a possible enemy combatant didn't go as planned.” He adjusted his coat as he spoke. She glanced at his hands, looking for a wedding ring, then chastised herself at the small warmth she felt on seeing his ringless finger.

She studied his hands again. They were square, strong, the backs dotted with scars.

No mere pretty boy, this former Fleet officer. Engineer, she thought. Or chief of maintenance. Worked with his hands and cared little about gashes and barked knuckles.

“And the loser bought the beer?” she quipped, because part of his mouth was still quirked when he'd answer her question. Not a real combatant, then. Probably a bar fight.

“Something like that.”

His expression sobered.

God, when would she learn her flippancy wasn't appreciated by everyone? The guy had probably been respectfully called Chief by dozens of subbies, and here she was making light of his injury.

The schedule board flashed again, halting whatever apology she was hastily throwing together and hushing a good percentage of the conversations around her.

This time there was a definite announcement. A two-hour delay for the shuttle to the moon colony, and a four-hour delay for the shuttle to Seth's shipyards. The shuttle for Umoran, however, would arrive in fifteen minutes. Boarding would commence ten minutes after that.

Sighs of relief mixed with groans.

“God
damn
it.” This softly, from the man next to her. Well, he'd tagged her as Fleet as clearly as she had him. What were a few epithets between friends?

He leaned forward as if to stand, then stopped, slumping back slightly, his gaze pinned on the wide viewport across the waiting area as if he could see all the way to Seth. Or the shipyards.

Shipyards, she guessed. No doubt as to that being his destination. He hadn't questioned her use of Commander Adney's name.