The Skypirate Page 13

  “He nearly escaped after the woman died,” Califa went on. “He knew the mountains well, they said. Only General Corling’s direct orders made them keep after him.”

  Dax froze. “He gave specific orders to capture this man?”

  “So I heard. One of my cadets came in on the ship that transported the Triotian. He was badly beaten, she said. Corling had ordered it. After he had ordered the prisoner dragged through the streets of Triotia, so he could see the body of the old king, hanging at the temple.”

  Dax swore, suppressing a shudder. “Damn him.”

  Califa was staring at him now. “It must have been something personal,” she said. “I heard that Corling personally oversaw his banding, and was the first to test the collar’s systems. He’s never done that, to my knowledge.”

  Dax fought down nausea. “So this was . . . a special prisoner.”

  “I suppose,” Califa said slowly. “I never really thought about it before, but that is quite odd. Perhaps that’s why they were so zealous when he escaped. Corling was more than furious, he was . . .”

  “What?” Dax prodded when she trailed off.

  “It sounds absurd, but I think . . . frightened? As if this man could hurt him somehow.”

  And who could hurt the man who had conquered Trios? Only one possibility came to Dax’s mind, and it seemed far too extraordinary to be true. Yet his gut told him it was true, had been telling him since she’d begun the incredible tale.

  “Why did he not just kill him, then?”

  Califa was watching him steadily now, considering. “I heard—the Coalition has an effective telerien of its own—that Corling wanted him a slave. That he was seen screaming at the prisoner that it was a fitting punishment for him.”

  Fitting punishment. Dax was reeling now. All the pieces were there. The timing of his capture. God help him, the woman, the small, dark-haired woman in a world of golden manes. The description of the unwilling slave. His demeanor. His stubbornness. A determination and courage strong enough to risk maiming to escape. His proud carriage and the grass-green eyes that, in a world of green eyes, belonged only to one family. The family that owned the hills north of Triotia. The family that would be the only possible threat to the man who had conquered their world.

  The royal family of Trios.

  Dax’s muscles went slack. He sank down onto the floor, sagging back against the base of the table.

  “Dare,” he whispered brokenly. “Dear God, Dare.”

  He was alive. Prince Darian of Trios. No, Dax thought numbly, king now, after the brutal murder of his father. No wonder Corling thought enslavement such a fitting punishment. And no wonder he was so enraged—and frightened—at the escape of the only gold collar to ever slip the chains of Coalition bondage.

  “Dare,” he murmured again, sickness at what had happened warring against a fierce, violent joy that Dare had proven himself a Triotian and a true king with his escape. “Our king is alive.”

  His hand had come up, instinctively wiping at his eyes, before he even realized his eyes were damp. He heard a soft, quick intake of breath, and instinctively raised his head.

  Califa was staring at him, pale blue eyes wide with shock and wonder.

  “Eos, preserve us,” she whispered. “You’re Triotian!”

  Chapter 9

  “IT ALL MAKES sense now,” Califa said. “Why only Coalition targets. Your reaction anytime Trios or anything to do with it is even mentioned. Why you were so furious when I spoke of Trios being a source of crystal for the Coalition.”

  Dax didn’t react. He just sat on the floor, where he had been since the moment he had realized that the slave she’d known as Wolf was, incredibly, Darian of Trios. The hereditary royal prince, she thought, stunned. She stared at Dax.

  When she had surmised he was Triotian, she had seen the truth of her guess in his eyes, but he had yet to admit it. She watched him for a moment, thinking. Then, slowly, she said, “I wondered if that was the link, if hatred of the Coalition was the tie that binds your crew together.”

  “Many have reason to despise the Coalition.” His voice was distant, vague.

  “So they go along with you, getting their revenge while they help you get yours, for the destruction of your world?”

  “They don’t know.”

  Califa blinked. “Don’t know? That you’re Triotian?”

  He let out a long, slow, breath. “It is of no import to them,” he said, admitting now the truth of his origin, in a voice that said he was too weary to hide it any longer. “They all have their own reasons for hating the Coalition.”

  But nothing to match the bloodshed and destruction the Coalition had visited on Trios, Califa thought. No wonder he had kept it secret; the Coalition’s largest rewards were offered for surviving Triotians. If they ever found out the skypirate whose head they already wanted was also Triotian . . .

  “So only Rina knows?”

  He spoke quickly. “Rina knows nothing.”

  He was lying. She knew he was. She studied him as he sat there on the floor. Somehow their status had reversed. She was now the questioner. He looked drained, and her instincts told her now was the time to get whatever answers she could; he was too strong for this state to last long.

  “Even Rina,” she said slowly. “When we were alone, in quarters talking, she ran like a brollet when the word Triotian came up. And when she spoke General Corling’s name, she couldn’t apologize to you fast enough.”

  “It meant nothing. There are many people who don’t wish to hear the name of the Coalition’s most predatory animal.”

  His voice was a shade too insistent, his tone just a bit too sharp, as if he were hastening to divert her.

  “But that night, in your quarters, when we spoke of the dulcetpipe, and Triotian artifacts . . .”

  Califa’s eyes widened as the truth, obvious now, struck.

  “Eos, she’s Triotian, too, isn’t she? I should have seen it, that hair, and her eyes . . . She said that she told you her story after you rescued her, but she had started to say something else. She started to say she told you after she realized you were also Triotian, didn’t she? That’s why she trusts you so completely.”

  Fear flickered in his eyes. Califa caught her breath; that was something she’d never expected, to see fear there. It was a measure of how much he loved the girl, she supposed, that he would be afraid for her but never for himself. As if she needed any proof after Rina’s story. Were the scars still visible, she wondered, from the brutal whipping he’d endured for the simple cause of putting a child’s mind at rest?

  She sat back down on the chair she’d left and leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees as she looked at him. “You must know I would never do anything to hurt Rina. I . . . have come to care a great deal for her.”

  “I know that. She . . . cares for you, too.”

  Or she did. Califa heard the unspoken words clearly. Of course, she thought. Rina would hate her, as a representative of the brute force that had left her orphaned and homeless. That she had taken no part in the Trios campaign would make little difference to either of them.

  Dax closed his eyes for a moment. Califa wondered if it was a sign of trust, or merely how exhausted he was.

  You know which it is, she snapped to herself. Don’t be a fool by wishing it otherwise. You saw how he reacted to what you’ve done, to who you are. She forced back the misery that was trying to rise up and swamp her.

  “Is her skin dyed somehow?” she asked.

  His eyes snapped open. He hesitated, then nodded slowly. “Something Roxton knew of. From a tree that grows on Clarion. Nelcar makes it up.”

  “Is that what you use on your hair as well?”

  His mouth twisted into a wry expression that wasn’t quite a smile. “You are a snowfox,” he said
. “Tenacious.” He let out a long breath. “My hair,” he said, “is my own.”

  “But I though all Triotians—”

  “—were blond. The beautiful golden ones. I know. Most people think that. But there are—” He stopped, and let out a long, slow breath. “There were a few of us, one of every thousand or so, who was dark. Only born to those like us.” His mouth twisted again, nowhere near a smile this time. “The sons and daughters of the evening star, they called us.”

  “The evening star? As in . . . ?”

  He lifted his gaze to her face. “Yes,” he said with a shrug, confirming her guess as to the source of the name of his ship. “Foolish sentimentality, I realize.”

  She shook her head. “I think most people name their ships after something that is special to them. Shaylah named hers the Sunbird, after a mythical bird of Arellia that legend says flew to the stars.”

  Dax drew back a little, his brow furrowing, as if he were searching for a memory. “The Sunbird . . .” He sat up sharply. “Shaylah Graymist. Graymist and the Sunbird.” He stared at Califa. “That’s her?”

  “Yes, why—”

  “My God, the Sunbird is the ship that took out Cryon’s Wanderer last year. One starfighter with a crew of—what, twenty?—against a Diaxin class cruiser with six fighters and a crew of a hundred!”

  “Last year?” Califa asked.

  “Yes, right after the last circuit of the Tarx comet, out in Sector Twenty-Two. It’s already become legend among us, how the Sunbird blew up her own shuttle while the Wanderer had a tractor beam locked on it. It damaged Cryon’s ship beyond repair. I can think of only one other pilot who would have been able to pull off such a gambit.”

  He shook his head in remembered wonder. “The only way they knew the name of the craft that had destroyed them was by finding the name on a piece of the shuttle debris. That Shaylah of yours must be quite a captain.” One corner of his mouth lifted quizzically. “Although what a Coalition starfighter was doing way out there is still a mystery.”

  “Hiding,” Califa whispered, shaken as it came to her.

  “What?”

  “They were hiding,” she said again. “That was . . . after she left for the last time.”

  Dax went still. “You mean after she broke Dare out of Ossuary? They were together, then?”

  She nodded. “And alone. Her crew was still on leave.”

  “They fought off that heavy cruiser . . . alone?”

  “I don’t know how. On a Rigel starfighter, the con and the weapons station must both be manned in a fight,” she said. “Shaylah could not have done both.”

  “Then Dare was flying.”

  Califa blinked. “Your prince is a pilot?”

  Dax’s voice went soft with regret, and his eyes dark with a pain that bordered on anguish. “The best I’ve ever seen, though I never told him so.”

  “He’s that one pilot you mentioned?” Califa asked, her tone gentle in the face of his sorrow.

  “Yes.” He shook his head as if that would rid him of the pain. Then a smile, both sad and joyous, curved his lips. “I should have guessed sooner. That stunt with the shuttle had all the earmarks of one of Dare’s.”

  “They must have . . . survived that fight, then?” She couldn’t control the sound of trembling in her voice. She remembered her silent prayer that Shaylah be all right; somehow, this knowledge had become more important to her than almost anything. Except the fact that Dax hated her.

  “Yes, they did.” His voice was jubilant, yet gentle, as if he saw and understood her compelling need to know. “Cryon saw the fighter take off like a bat out of Hades, while they sat there drifting, until a freighter came along and towed them in. For the price of their entire cargo, of course.”

  “Shaylah is the best pilot I’ve ever known,” Califa said honestly. Then she looked at him levelly. “But I’m not sure even she—or your prince—would try to dock a shuttle at full throttle aboard a moving ship making a right-angle pass.”

  For a split second he looked pleased at the compliment. But the expression was gone so quickly she couldn’t be sure.

  “You learned to fly on Trios?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “There is—was—a small school.”

  She knew that. That this was why he’d heard of her—and why he’d known of her treatise on tactics—seemed obvious. She also knew it had the finest school in the system, turning out pilots of amazing capability. Some said it was inborn in Triotians, that knack for flying. She didn’t know about that. But now she did know something else.

  “You can’t expect to gain without risk,” she quoted.

  “So they taught us in flight school.”

  “So they teach everyone in flight school. Quark’s axiom.”

  How many times had she heard it, in the academy, and later from superior officers? How many times had she said it herself, lecturing classes of cadets who looked at her with awe? But to hear it from this man, this rakish, reckless corsair of the far reaches? At the time, it had seemed the final seal to the irony that had become her existence.

  But he wasn’t that corsair, that skypirate. He was a Triotian, native of a world her world had destroyed. She tried to keep the trembling from spreading to her hands as she readied herself to ask him the question she thought she already knew the answer to. She doubted he would answer, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking.

  “You knew . . . know Prince Dare? Personally, I mean?” It still rattled her, to know the man she’d used as a slave had been the son of the royal house of Trios. If he still lived, he was a king—if there was anything left to be king of.

  For a long moment Dax had that distant, unfocused look of one lost in memories. “Yes,” he said at last, softly. “We grew up together. Went to school together.”

  “You grew up with a prince?”

  Dax looked at her reproachfully. “Royalty on Trios does not mean what it has on other worlds. There is no divine right to rule presumed. The royal family rules by consent of the people, and that consent can be withdrawn by a vote at anytime the majority of the people feel the family has not upheld their vows of service.”

  “And Darian’s family . . . ?”

  “Has held the throne for ten generations, without so much as talk of change. And rightfully so.”

  She hesitated, but then asked anyway, thinking she had to know just how much he hated her.

  “He was your friend?”

  Dax’s voice went low, harsh. “He was my best friend.”

  Califa’s heart sank. There was no hope for her. He couldn’t help but despise her. He would give his men their way, condemning her to whatever long, painful death they decreed a fitting punishment of a detested Coalition officer.

  Fine. She would at least face it like an officer. The kind she’d wanted to be, the kind she had once thought she was. Perhaps she even had been; it was what she’d represented had been evil and worm-eaten beneath the glorious surface. She drew herself up, knowing that once she explained all to him, any chance she had for his forgiveness would be lost.

  “I know that you will not believe this,” she said. “But I am not the woman I was when . . . your friend was in my power. And I did not know who he was, then. I used him, but even more viciously, I let others use him, in a way I have come to see no person should ever be used. I regret that it took personal experience for me to learn that.”

  With movement so swift Dax couldn’t rise quickly enough to stop her, Califa swept the controller off of the shelf and into her hand. She held it tightly for a moment, staring at it, as Dax slowly straightened and turned to face her.

  “So what will it be, Major Claxton?” She winced at his use of her former rank. “Will you push that button and blow us both to Antares?”

  She didn’t look at him, just continued to
stare at the small power unit in her hand.

  “Do you know,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, “what the most appalling part of a collared slave’s torture is? It is not knowing that another claims to own you. It is not that they control you with pain. It is not even the knowledge that with the push of a button they can annihilate you at will, and you would never even see their face.”

  He said nothing, but she knew he was listening. And she guessed he was watching, warily, to see what she would do.

  “I look at this device now and shudder. Yet I used it, to force a slave’s will to my own. Or gave it to others, whose desires were often more depraved, more evil than anything I could imagine. To know that of myself, that I was capable . . . it makes me wish to use it for my own destruction.”

  She sensed rather than saw Dax tense, could almost feel his muscles going taut, ready.

  “But that would be too kind. Too lenient by far.”

  She looked at him then, not allowing herself to care that he would see the self-loathing in her eyes.

  “Perhaps I can give you that little piece of justice you wanted. It is not enough to atone, there will never be enough, but it is all I have.”

  She cradled the controller on her palm. She looked at it for a long, silent moment, then held it out to Dax.

  He stared at her. “You’re . . . giving it back?”

  “It is what slaves must do. Hand the instrument of their torture to the one who will administer that torture.”

  She heard him let out a low, harsh breath. He hesitated, then reached out with one hand, all the time watching her as if he expected some trick. His fingers closed around the controller, in the process brushing across her palm. She tried to hide the shiver that rippled through her, and wondered if this was all part of some godly plan of retribution, that she should feel this way about a man who could do no less than loathe her.

  Dax stared at the power unit he now held. Then he lifted his gaze to her face. “And this was what you meant by the most appalling thing?”