The Far Bank of the Rubicon (The Pax Imperium Wars: Volume 1) (39 page)

Sophia had never felt so abandoned in all her life.

Alex looked furious, like she had broken his trust. For a moment, Sophia just glared at him, refusing to back down, tears streaming.

Dmitri hurried to assist the Prince, getting a towel from the bathroom for his bloody nose. He then finished packing Jonas’ bag.

Helpless to do anything else, Sophia wept in the fury of her betrayal.

Dmitri was still finishing up when one of the guards by the window started making hand signals. She felt the guard behind her tense. The window guard wore goggles. Sophia guessed they let her see in the dark.

A second later, another guard by the door also started making hand signals.

Sophia saw the guards by the window reach down and flip their safeties off. One of them reached behind himself and picked up a shoulder-mounted weapon. He looked back and signaled to Alex.

Alex now had one hand on Jonas and in the other hand he held a pistol of some sort. He nodded back to the guard with the shoulder held weapon.

Even as they did so, the guards at the door started moving backwards as an energy field turned on with an electronic “thwop.” The door was now blocked.

The guard by the window launched the weapon, which left the tube with a gentle swoosh. Sophia guessed it must have been guided by an anti-grav field. He quickly dropped the tube and stepped back from the window as a defensive field similar to that blocking the door flipped on.

The team leader looked at the door, then at Jonas—who had just finished packing his nose with facial tissue and was now drawing his own side arm from the duffle bag. He then turned to face Sophia. In the dark, she could sense, rather than see, that he was sizing her up, trying to determine the threat. It was a testament to the level of her feelings of betrayal that she still wanted him to see her as a threat.

For a moment, Alex leaned in and whispered to Jonas, who nodded and whispered back.

Keeping a hand on Jonas’ shirt, Alex stepped toward Sophia and started whispering in her ear again, dragging Jonas with him. “We have seconds to leave this room before your father’s guards enter and try to kill Jonas. He says I can trust you. Are you going to help us?”

The mix of emotions inside Sophia felt impossible to sort out in such a short period of time. She was still angry, but mostly she felt ashamed of being angry at Jonas when her father was trying to kill him. On the other hand, some part of her fought against that shame.

Tugged on all sides, for a moment she froze, and then she saw Jonas standing there, not even willing to look her in the eye, and some part of her melted. She nodded ‘yes’ vigorously.

The hand was removed from her mouth, and she reached up and wiped her tears on the back of her sleeve, even while the team leader asked, “Where will this take us?”

Sophia turned and said in a quiet voice, “We can go anywhere, but they’ll figure out where we are as soon as they get in the room.”

The team lead pinched his lips and, looking behind him, signaled. Sophia was grabbed by the shoulders again and moved out from in front of the still half-open secret door. Two of the guards from the window went in first.

After that, Jonas came next holding his weapon out but also held onto by the team leader.

Sophia followed. Her head was forced down, and she was pushed into a crouching run as she entered the corridor.

As the last members of team followed, there was a flash in the room behind them.

Sophia felt like the world caved in around her. She was slammed against a wall as dust rained from the ceiling.

As the lights in the hallway failed, she screamed.

Alex had Jonas up and running before the ringing from the explosion had even cleared his head. He tried to look behind him to see what had happened to Sophia and the others. He managed to glimpse a guard dragging her to her feet. Dmitri was there behind him as well.

Jonas had never felt so worthless in all his life. This wasn’t the way this was supposed to happen. He never wanted her to feel abandoned.

Jonas’ thoughts were quickly pushed aside as they came to a branch in the passage. They had to make a decision on which way to go. Alex threw down his heads-up. “I guess I’m going to have to risk this thing,” he said quietly.

Sophia came up behind Jonas.

He made eye contact with her and smiled lamely.

The feral look she gave him in return told Jonas that this wasn’t a nightmare he would wake from anytime soon.

He quickly looked away.

Sophia and Alex conferred for a moment, and the whole group turned to the right.

They hadn’t gone far when they came around another corner and nearly ran into Duke Malek as he was backing out of a darkened room into the secret hallway.

Alex tensed quickly, perhaps as startled to see Malek as Malek was to see them. In light of the chaos of the moment, he was surprisingly alone, without any bodyguards. Jonas wondered what would cause him to ditch them. He was dressed in black and gray fatigues and holding a small weapon.

A whole series of emotions played across Malek’s face, one after another. Fury, fear, and then calculated, cloying words.

He looked at Jonas and tried to find a way out of the tight corner he was caught in. “My Lord, I am so glad to find you! When I heard the attacks, I feared the worst, but I see my daughter found you first. This way. I will lead you.” Malek tried to turn and walk away.

Face still bloodied, Jonas stood, raised his side arm, and pointed it at Malek’s heart.

Malek jumped a little, clearly worried he was going to be shot outright.

Rage crystallized in Jonas. If not for his military training, Malek’s assumption might have been correct, but that wasn’t the way he wanted this to happen. He’d killed a few men during the battle for the
Indiana
. He’d had his fill of that kind of unrestrained rage and wasn’t interested in giving into it again unless he had to. “Duke Malek, you are charged with treason against the House of Athena. You will put down your weapon and come with us. You will receive a military trial on the Ares in front of a group of your peers.”

“My peers…” Malek chewed on the words as if he had just eaten poison.

Jonas watched Malek’s grip on the weapon in his hand tighten. He heard the rest of the squad surrounding him raise their guns, as well.

“No, Athena. There will be no trial.”

His hatred unmasked, Malek’s eyes shifted to his daughter, and his arm started to move. “You betrayed me.”

Jonas fired, along with others from his squad.

Malek winced from the pain but managed to fire wildly.

Sophia screamed.

Malek fell forward and did not move, several rounds lodged in his chest.

Jonas turned to see Dmitri falling to the ground, clutching his throat as blood gushed between his fingers.

Jonas rushed to his mentor’s side, cradling him in his arms. “No! No! No!”

The medic in the squad came forward, pushing the bloodied Jonas aside.

“God, no! God, no, don’t do this! Please, don’t! Why him? God, if you’re there, you have to let him live!”

Dmitri died almost instantly. There was little that could be done. The anti-personnel round in Malek’s weapon had been designed to tear apart huge chunks of flesh. For all intents and purposes, his head was severed from his body.

Within five minutes, Jonas was being forced to his feet again and made to run. His mind no longer focused on the present.

Jonas paid attention to very little until they ran into Jack, Anna, and the rest of their intelligence staff. Coming to, he realized Jack was speaking.

“They’re hitting the fleet pretty hard. It looks to be all of Malek’s remaining forces. They launched their first salvos about the same time that the assets started moving on this planet, but the fleet’s holding its own.”

Alex asked, “What’s the evac plan?”

“Fleet evac is already on the way. We need to go up to the roof. They hit the shuttle in the first wave. It’s gone, along with its crew.”

Jonas wasn’t sure he could get any lower, but here were four more lives he would now have on his conscience. He felt hollow, as if someone had scooped out all of his insides and put in their place the whole vacuum of space.
This is all my fault
, thought Jonas.

Last night after the party, Jack and Alex had both agreed they had enough to bring Malek in for treason, which was the goal of their mission. However, Jonas had insisted on staying until at least nine o’clock the next morning to see if they could get an interview with Holland and so flush out the spy as well. In truth, he hadn’t yet taken the time to talk to Sophia, and he didn’t want to leave without at least writing a letter. He had prevailed, and this had been the result. His first real mission, and it had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Using his connection to intraspace, Elijah Summers vectored most of the remaining palace forces out of the way as the group moved toward the roof. He tripped several alarms in other parts of the palace, leading Malek’s forces on a wild goose chase.

He wondered what they would do if they knew the bastard was dead. Summers hadn’t expected to run into Malek in the secret corridors, let alone to find him coming from his own room holding a weapon. What a fool. He got nothing less than he deserved. Malek’s suicidal lunacy had kept Katana from having to kill him later.

Next to him, the Prince walked upright, not even trying to hide. To Summers, he seemed weak, prone to emotional entanglements. Intel said that he and his secretary were close. If he blamed himself for the death, they might be able to use that against Jonas in later interrogations.

Toward the end of their escape to the roof, one small group managed to catch up to the Athenians. However, for some time Summers’ avatar had been trailing them, so he had the team ready when they arrived.

The Athenians fought them off with ease. They were far more disciplined than the rabble here on Pontus.

Even the Prince seemed to come out of his funk when the fighting started. Problems only arose when the Prince let his feelings get the better of him. He fought recklessly.

Summers ended up holding him on the ground, earning him the ire of the Prince. He glared at him but didn’t say anything. The Prince might not like his behavior, but Summers was sure he hadn’t broken cover. The bodyguard of a royal had only one duty and that was to keep the royal alive. If the Prince didn’t like his behavior, so be it.

Of course, that little skirmish allowed the rest of the palace to know their location, but at this point it was too late. As they climbed the last staircase, Summers signaled the waiting Allied transport using the heads-up. By the time they emerged on the roof, the Allied shuttle was dropping noiselessly out of the clouds using only anti-grav propulsion.

Athenian technology always impressed Summers. After spending more than a year immersed in it, he had no doubt that it was far superior to anything they had in the Unity. Athena and its allies just lacked the creativity and will to use it. They always thought conventionally and that had made them a safe and predictable enemy, at least until recently. The defeat at Wales had given his superiors pause. The Seventh Fleet worried them. Summers hoped it wouldn’t be long before he was assigned to infiltrate it, but for now he had been given another task.

Randall’s determination to capture Halloway had changed the plan, but in the end that was all right with Summers. Halloway’s behavior at the party, and in particular his comments to Malek, had shown they were much closer to pinning Summers down than he would have liked. A change of identity was a necessity at that point.

The problem was that Summers hadn’t really had a chance to study the Athenian team. To be truly comfortable, he would have needed a couple of weeks at least to observe his mark, but there hadn’t been any time for that. After the party, neither he nor Randall were completely sure what the Athenians would do. Summers had wondered if they would simply bolt and bomb the palace from space. It would have been a fitting response, considering Malek’s betrayal. That made joining their team urgent, to say the least. He wasn’t sure how he was going to get a member of the team alone, but as he was just about to drop down from the roof and enter their suite through a balcony, he caught a lucky break. The head of Jonas’ security team stepped out of his room to inhale a stimulant.

Summers had killed him effortlessly, then stripped him and dumped his body over the railing where some of Malek’s people had quickly taken it away.

It was a dangerous move, as he had never studied Alexander Beauregard’s habits.

However, even in his own way, Malek had helped his cause. Shortly after taking on Beauregard’s identity, the first alerts came in from the orbiting fleet that an attack was immenent. The Athenian team started moving, working on their emergency evacuation plan.

Shocked at Malek’s behavior for a second, Summers had hesitated, wondering if this were all some sort of trick, or if Malek really still intended to go ahead with the pointless attack. He decided that Malek might want to try to impress his new boss by doing something he thought useful and so decided the attacks were real. He started giving orders, and no one seemed the wiser. All of it played beautifully into Summers’ hand.

The plan to capture Athena, Halloway, and, if possible, Prindle, was beautiful in its simplicity, and best of all, it didn’t rely on Malek or any of his troops. Instead, all of it rested on Katana and the small group of Unity commandos now stationed at an abandoned spaceport nearby.

As Summers watched the shuttle touch down in front of him, he sent a signal to his waiting troops, telling them to be ready.

Jonas’ conversation with Malek’s daughter brought him back to the present. Clearly there was a romantic connection between them. Based on the letter and young Malek’s behavior, Summers guessed that Athena had intended on leaving without telling her—again, weakness and a lack of integrity.

“Sophia, I need you to stay here.” The Prince took a pleading tone. Clearly, the relationship between the two of them would be another key they could use in questioning.