Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (4 page)

The current interview moved on to the looting of the Templar tombworld. “What did the Thallians want with the things they stole from the Templar tombs?” the interviewer asked.

Mykah deflected it deftly. “That’s a better question for the survivors of the
Arbiter
.”

“How did you know that the Thallians had been there?”

“Old Imperial footage showed Marchan had visited the Templar tombs before the Plague began. We were curious to know what had interested him there.”

“Did you visit the tombs yourself?”

“All of them were sealed except for the one you see in the avalanche footage.”

“And what did the Thallians find there?”

“It’s impossible to guess,” Mykah said.

Raena grinned to herself. That was the tomb in which she’d been imprisoned. Thanks to Kavanaugh and Sloane, she’d been out for nearly a week before the Thallians came to look for her.

Coni rounded the corner out of the galley and stopped short at the sight of Raena just standing in the passage outside the cockpit. “What are you doing?” she blurted, surprised.

Raena waved Coni to follow her back into the galley. “I was eavesdropping on the interview,” she said. “I guess I’ve never listened to one before.”

“They all tend to ask the same questions,” Coni admitted. The sight of the little assassin standing so still in the hallway had really startled her, although she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the sense of seeing Raena
working
.

Before Coni could puzzle it out, the little woman surprised her by asking, “Coni, could you help me with something?”

Coni knew Mykah was openhearted enough to say “Sure” to anything anyone asked. She was more cautious by nature. “What do you need?”

“If we take work on any civilized world, I’m going to need a new identity record. I don’t even know what all I’ll need. Could you help me figure it out?”

“Yes.” Coni found she was relieved by the request, but couldn’t name what it was she had feared to be asked.

“I’d like to keep my own name,” Raena said. “Since I’m genetically identical to the person in the old Imperial databases, does it make sense to claim to be my own daughter?”

“I think we could do that.”

“Good.” Raena sighed as if honestly relieved. “Any idea where I could have been born that there wouldn’t be a record of a hospital birth? Even my mother, crazy as she was, recorded my real birthday.”

“I’ll see what I can turn up as a likely possibility.” Coni’s thoughts were already ticking ahead on the problem. It sounded like an intriguing puzzle. “Who would you like to claim as your father?”

Raena poured herself a glass of water and had a long swallow. “Thallian would be the obvious candidate, except that I don’t want to be linked to him. If I claimed Gavin Sloane—another reasonable possibility—maybe I could get a court to award me some support.” She grinned as if the idea amused her, but then shook her head. “I don’t really want or need Gavin’s help, though. I guess it’s better if I’m just orphaned.”

Then she grinned again. “How about this? What if the old Raena—the Raena of the Imperial era, the one on the run from Thallian—had a child while she tried to hide from the Empire? Maybe she got pregnant on the
Arbiter
, some torrid affair with one of her shipmates under Thallian’s nose, and ran away in order to protect her unborn child?”

“All right,” Coni agreed. Clearly, Raena enjoyed the idea of the fictional romance. “If that was the case, where could you have been left behind on your mother’s flight?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I even remember all the places I ran through. I really only remember the places I was captured—and I don’t see how that can help us now.”

Coni slipped the handheld from her jacket pocket and made some notes.

“Whatever else we do,” Raena said thoughtfully, “I hate to think that this imaginary self grew up a slave, so let’s make sure that doesn’t happen to her. I spent three years legally enslaved myself. They were probably the safest, most secure years of my childhood, but I always understood that my purpose was to do whatever was necessary, even die if I had to, in order to allow Ariel time to escape. I wouldn’t wish that pressure on even a made-up person.”

“I understand.” Coni’s attention was already absorbed with the problem. The trick was to fill in the intervening years—the years when Raena had been imprisoned—with plausible occurrences.

She turned the question of Raena’s past around a different way. Where could she have been educated? It had to have been somewhere that would explain why no one had ever heard of her, why no schoolmates would argue with her schooling: some dumping ground for human orphans that the Empire would have ignored in its death throes and no do-gooders like the Human Safety Commission would have disrupted.

Really, though, since Raena wasn’t likely to ever apply for any sort of legitimate work, Coni didn’t feel the need to force any accreditation. She just didn’t want it to look like the woman had sprung, fully formed, from a hole in the ground—even if that was exactly what had happened.

“Thanks, Coni,” Raena said softly.

Coni glanced up, saw that Raena was already withdrawing. “My pleasure,” she said, using one of Mykah’s favorite phrases, but her attention didn’t stray far from the puzzle at hand.

Kavanaugh wove through the docking area on Tacauqe, which was mostly deserted at this hour of night. Everyone must either be off in town, enjoying being on the ground, or locked in their ships already, headed for bed. He checked the time. In another hour or so, the commonways would be hopping as everyone stumbled home from the bars.

He checked over his shoulder one last time. No one trailed him as he ducked into his own docking slip.

The
Sundog
was a little human-made hauler, perfect for a man alone to handle. He’d fallen in love with her retro-futurist style as a young man, purchased her with a loan from Doc when he was ready to start out on his own. The hold was a nice size, easy enough to fill without big equipment to shift things and simple to reconfigure for passengers if he decided to take them on. Generally Kavanaugh preferred to haul freight and to travel alone. Fewer complications that way.

He stepped inside and turned by reflex to lock the door. Then he didn’t bother to turn on the lights as he moved through the little ship. The running lights were enough to guide him, although really he could have moved through the familiar ship in complete darkness. The
Sundog
was the only home he had known in his adult life.

Kavanaugh entered his cabin and locked that door after himself, too, as he did every night. Even though the Thallians were gone and Kavanaugh didn’t have anything to fear from them any longer, he still didn’t want to discount force of habit. He remembered what they’d done to Lim, Kavanaugh’s engineer from the grave robbing team on the Templar tombworld. A locked door wouldn’t have stopped them, but it might have given Lim enough time to arm himself before they came in to cut him apart.

Kavanaugh turned on the news in order to have some voices for company as he brushed his teeth and tried to amp down from the day. He told the computer to scan programs in Galactic Standard, switching every minute or so. In this media-saturated galaxy, millions of channels broadcast constantly, but at this hour, celebrity gossip dominated the news. Kavanaugh never paid enough attention to know whom they were gossiping about.

Just as he was going to shut the screen off, footage of sheer black cliffs scoured by gritty winds caught his eye. He sank down onto his bunk, captured. He didn’t feel homesickness so much—who could feel homesick for
that
?—but he had spent a couple of months in that nightmare of wind and obsidian sand. Why, he wondered, would anyone be interested in the Templar tombworld now?

The cameras panned over the bunkers he and his crew had left behind when Sloane broke down the “archaeological dig” and paid the grave robbers off. Kavanaugh had been only too glad to get off that rock.

The next video showed a grainy surveillance recording of some human men, dressed in black livery that harkened back to the Imperial days, exploring the bunkers. Kavanaugh had never seen Thallian in person, for which he thanked the stars. The commentator identified the soldiers’ commander as Revan Thallian, older brother of the infamous Jonan, the Imperial diplomat who’d been convicted in absentia of disseminating the Templar plague. Apparently no one knew for certain if Revan had also been involved in the creation or spread of the plague, but he seemed implicated in the genocide as he ordered his men to explore the Templar graves. It was assumed he had also overseen the looting of them.

Kavanaugh knew the truth of that.

More grainy surveillance footage followed. Directed by a boy who was obviously yet another Thallian, two soldiers attempted to open one of the tombs. The avalanche that followed was almost too quick to comprehend: first there was a mountain. The men were placing charges to shift the slab that sealed its entryway. Then the men, the slab, and the mountain’s face were gone, buried in a rubbish pile of broken stone.

Kavanaugh fumbled the bottle of xyshin out of his coat pocket and knocked back a hefty swallow. His hands shook. Then he set the footage to play again.

While working for Sloane, Kavanaugh and his team had opened more than a dozen Templar tombs. Nothing had ever been booby-trapped. Kavanaugh shuddered at the sight of the death that might have been his.

The third time he watched the avalanche footage—slowed down as much as he could make it—he recognized the dimly colored Templar characters painted above the tomb’s doorway. The voiceover said it labeled this as the Templar Master’s tomb, the grave of the leader of the Templars at the time of their genocide.

The tomb was empty, the narrator said. More recent—less grainy—footage showed the plundered tomb as it stood now. The fallen stone had been cleared away, piled neatly on either side of the entryway. The camera moved past the silent heaps of rock and entered the tomb itself, empty save for the lone catafalque in its center.

The video crew had set fire to a collection of pots around the edges of the room, highlighting the massive tomb’s interior dimensions. The cave was much larger than Kavanaugh had suspected. Its ceiling soared upward inside the mountain, easily twice as high as its diameter.

“What was here?” the narrator wanted to know. He raised an antique hand torch. Kavanaugh recognized it as the Imperial-issue torch he’d tripped over the day his men had opened the tomb. Revan’s men hadn’t left it behind; the Emperor’s had, when they imprisoned Raena Zacari there.

The documentary’s narrator was a spindly creature with a pinched mouth and oversized black eyes, as much a bug as the Templars had been. Kavanaugh could see that the barely restrained anger evident in his voice wasn’t feigned. “Did the Thallians steal or destroy the Templar Master’s body?” the narrator asked. “Wasn’t the genocide of the entire Templar people enough for them? Did they have to desecrate the lost people’s graves as well?”

Kavanaugh had another drink. He knew who had been in that tomb, because he had been the one to let her out.

He watched the documentary to its end, then watched it again from its very beginning. All throughout, it remained solely focused on the Thallians, blaming them and no one else for the desecration of the tombs. Kavanaugh, Sloane, and Raena Zacari were never mentioned.

Kavanaugh was tempted to call Sloane, to tell him to watch his back. If the Thallians had been able to trace the archaeological dig back to members of Kavanaugh’s crew—and thereby identify Sloane and find Raena—then others might be able to do so, also.

Except that Kavanaugh and Sloane weren’t on speaking terms any longer. Kavanaugh certainly owed the older man no more loyalty. Anyway, even if he did, he told himself he didn’t know how to go about reaching Sloane easily. He’d have to do his own searching around. It wasn’t as if Sloane wanted to be found by anyone other than Raena.

Kavanaugh skipped back in the documentary and watched the collapse of the Templar Master’s tomb again. Raena had rigged that, he was certain of it. It must have been in the interval between the time Kavanaugh’s men roused her and let her out of her prison cell and later that night, when she’d showed up outside their bunker and asked for Kavanaugh’s help to get off the tombworld. He hadn’t known where she’d gone in the meantime, but he’d assumed she had been attempting to steal their hopper. Sloane had trashed it to keep them planet-bound. Once she’d seen the damage, she would have known she couldn’t escape without help from above.

Now Kavanaugh understood what Raena had done to occupy herself in the interim. She’d set the booby-trap, knowing that the Thallians would follow her to the Templar tomb planet. As soon as she’d escaped her imprisonment, she was already scheming not to be taken back in again. The level of justified paranoia she'd perfected was inspiring.

Where, he wondered, had the video of the Thallians come from? While his men worked in the Templar tombs, Kavanaugh had known about the old Imperial surveillance cameras, but most of them were damaged by the constant gritty winds. At least, the few he’d bothered to test hadn’t worked. He wouldn’t have put it past Sloane to repair some of the cameras in order to spy on the looters in his employ, but why would Sloane release the footage of the Thallians on-world to the news? Why would he want to draw any attention to the looting at all? As a matter of character, Sloane was wily enough to keep himself beneath the radar.

Kavanaugh sped ahead to the credits of the documentary. Among the experts thanked were the crew of the
Veracity
.

That rang a bell. Kavanaugh keyed in a quick search and found the connection. The
Veracity
had been the first ship to pick up the distress call from Thallian’s homeworld. The
Veracity
had saved hundreds of lives, all the soldiers who had survived hidden for decades after Jonan Thallian took his Imperial warship into the depths of his home ocean and enslaved its crew. After all the Thallians were dead, the
Veracity
had been the ship to break the news of the collapse of the domes of Thallian’s underwater city.