Final Break: A Space Opera Adventure (Shades of Starlight Book 4), page 10
A city appeared, with glowing yellow lights winking from the gloom. It hardly inspired confidence that they’d find a ride.
As if sensing his doubt, the captain said, “I know it doesn’t look like much, but the city spreads out for a ways. There are platforms for ships all over, instead of a single landing area. Gets you around the usual Amber checkpoints. Head for the center, and you should find what you need.”
Easier said than done, if the town had Obsidian Force people who knew him.
But if he could convince the captain not to space him after he’d stowed away, surely it was good practice for securing another, more legal, ride—and for the peace talks.
The ship set down at the edge of town. Jules exchanged nods with the engineer while Alexei said goodbye to the captain.
“Thanks again, man.”
“Good luck. And thanks for stowing away.”
Alexei laughed. “Glad it worked out. For all of us. I’ll be in touch when I can.”
“I believe you.”
All he’d had to promise was a few prism cores, which he or Jules or Perrin could surely manage.
He and Jules jumped onto the wooden platform and moved away as the ship left them behind, soon vanishing into the dark sky. The air was cool and laced with an unfamiliar scent that might have just been moisture. Not something they had a lot of on Neridia. Rickety wood and rope bridges connected this platform to the next, and when he peered over the edge, the water below reflected his silhouette.
The plan was to hide their faces, head into town, and buy passage off the planet, pretending to be freelancers in search of work. Hooded cloaks from the crew made him feel like he was skulking. He would have preferred something more straightforward. But he also preferred staying alive.
They followed the swaying bridges and winding platforms toward the densely packed area, where multiple platforms were connected and full of buildings. Most were wood, but some were of rusted pre-fab panels. Wooden boats were docked throughout, weaving among the buildings and sometimes beneath if the stilts lifted the structures high enough above the water.
People wrapped in cloaks like theirs hurried around, heads down. Something gnawed at him. The mood was familiar—like that on Neridia right before violence erupted and his predecessor was assassinated.
“We shouldn’t linger here,” he murmured.
Before Jules could answer, someone stepped in front of them, blocking their path. “Which side are you on?”
“What are the options?” Jules asked.
Alexei elbowed her. “No one’s side. We don’t want trouble. We’re just passing through.”
“No one’s passing through, not right now. There’s fighting ahead.”
“How do we find passage off the planet?”
The man laughed without mirth. “Good luck with that.”
With that hopeful pronouncement, the man moved on.
Alexei took Jules’s arm as they rerouted to a smaller bridge. It offered a view of more of the city, and he spotted groups exchanging fire. Pulses of light illuminated the dark trees and buildings. Sporadic. Not a full battle, but like opponents were warning each other not to come closer.
“Wonder which side this is?” Jules asked.
“Which is worse for us?”
“I’m sure whichever it is, that’s the one we’re on.”
“I’m not sure I admire your cynicism the way I do your honesty and your deviousness.”
She shrugged. “This trip isn’t exactly going as planned.”
“We made it this far, didn’t we?” he asked. “We should try to find the colony’s leader.”
“How do you know the leader is loyal and not fighting with the revolutionaries?”
It was a fair point, but surely not that many colony leaders were in full-out rebellion. If he could meet the person, they could figure something out. “We need someone in authority so we can call for help for our friends. Samir is an aide to a colony leader, and your crew works for a respected shipping company, and they were on an official government assignment.”
“How do you know you can trust these people? For one, you’re from the Cobalt Republic, and this is the Amber Alliance. We don’t know how enthusiastic the other empires are about the peace talks. Not to mention the moles in the militaries.” She waved a hand. “Besides, they have bigger worries right now. They’re not likely to spare a ship, if they even have one.”
“You excel at shooting down my ideas. So, wise and all-knowing traveler, what do you think we should do?”
She stared at the city. “We need more information. How long the fighting has been going on, how widespread it is. We could always purchase supplies then call back our smuggler friends and return with them to check on our people ourselves.”
Despite his concern for Samir, Alexei shook his head. “Going backwards isn’t an option. How about we start with comms? I’ll call Finley and tell her what happened so the leaders of the talks know I’m on my way. You can call Perrin and see if she can send someone for our friends and for us.”
“Can we do this without being seen?” Jules asked. “There’s obviously a large number of Obsidian Force supporters here. What if they recognize you and decide they want you dead?”
“We’ll just have to be careful. Then once we’ve made the calls, we’ll try to find a ship.”
“We could wait, see if the fighting dies down. This doesn’t look like a full battle. More like people are restless and occasionally shooting at each other.”
“We don’t have time to spare. There has to be a way. We’ll find it.” Alexei watched more shots light the night. There were challenges, yes, but if he found the right person, this could work.
“I know this is important to you,” Jules said, “but no one will blame you if you can’t make it.”
“It’s like you don’t want to go on at all.” He shifted to face her.
“Of course I do. You think I want to stay here? It smells like mud.”
“No, there’s more to it than that. What is it, Jules? There’s something you aren’t telling me.”
He examined her familiar eyes, navy in the darkness, her delicate features. She wasn’t usually one to back down in the face of difficulties. Was that innocent face hiding secrets?
“If you don’t talk in the next ten seconds,” he said, gambling on his suspicion being correct, “I’m making a break for the nearest soldier and telling him everything.”
“No, don’t.” She reached out but stopped before touching him.
His stomach sank. Shades. He’d hoped he was wrong. What was she keeping from him? “Don’t make me count down.”
“You’re supposed to be the diplomat. You sound like a dictator.” She tried to keep her voice light, but he detected a hint of worry.
“Part of diplomacy is setting limits. Knowing when it’s a negotiation and when it’s not. Unless you change my mind in three seconds, this is not.”
The words she blurted out were not what he’d expected to hear. “I’m working with the Obsidian Force, okay?”
The words escaped her, drawn out by Alexei’s penetrating gaze. His blue eyes had pinned Jules in place, so direct and open and so shaded perceptive. And now they couldn’t be unsaid.
He stilled. “You’re what? My hearing must have been damaged, because I think you just said—”
“I worked for them.” She folded her arms around her stomach. “And if they find out you’re alive and I’m with you, everything is ruined.”
“Which is it?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Work or worked? Which is it?”
She didn’t answer.
He glanced around, his usually friendly face blank. She had done that. Broken him.
He took her arm, not painfully but strongly, and steered her down a deserted platform and against a building.
“Talk,” he said.
The intensity of his gaze was fiercer than Neridia’s sun. She wanted to talk less than she wanted to enter one of his mines. The outcome seemed equally perilous.
“Look, Jules, I want to understand. Talk to me.”
His gentle, earnest tone was hard to resist.
The truth was out there. Her only choice now was to make him see. To hope their history and his compassion were enough to keep him from turning her in.
“It started about a year ago,” she said. “We’d been smuggling for months. You know about that, why we do it.”
He nodded.
“My home planet, like I told you, things were bad. My cousins were still there, two of them.” She dug her nails into her palms and stared at the empty walkways, wishing someone would save her from this conversation. “There was a black fever outbreak, and Elle, my cousin, my best friend. She died.”
A soft sound came from Alexei’s throat. His eyes were fixed on her, but she couldn’t look at him.
This was only the second time she’d said those words aloud. Jules had told her crew the bare details before she returned home for Elle’s memorial, and she hadn’t spoken of it again. Elle, who’d always been the life of the party, sparkling and magnetic, would have pouted at the thought that Jules hadn’t properly kept her memory alive. She’d assumed talking about it would hurt, but saying Elle’s name felt freeing.
“After she was gone,” Jules said, “her brother talked to people who wanted to do more than smuggle goods. They wanted to make real change. By the time I arrived for the funeral, he was in, and he wanted me to join him.”
Shouting came from nearby then faded. Alexei continued to wait. Giving her rope to hang herself. And yet, unloading was sort of a relief.
“I couldn’t smuggle anything dangerous, not without my crew knowing. And they don’t know, about any of this. But I got to travel lots. So I passed along information. States of the colonies, their opinions about the empires, needs they had. Then we were on a planet that manufactures armored surface vehicles for the Confed military. We passed the power station, and I thought, why not take the opportunity to shut it down? Stop them from supplying the troops with more ways to attack people. So, I took it.”
A muscle jumped in Alexei’s jaw.
He didn’t need to know that she’d found the explosion glorious and it had fueled her longing to do more. At first.
She forged on. “Ezra and the others loved it. That led to more jobs. I didn’t know much about the Obsidian Force then. It was before the SilverSpark hacker released those files, before most people knew there was a whole revolution brewing. I was just enjoying making things difficult for the people who’d made our lives so hard. Who had let my cousin die.”
“I’m so sorry about your cousin, but Jules, they’re terrorists.”
Her stomach revolted, and her chest was tight. It sounded harsh, and yet he wasn’t wrong. She’d never meant to cause terror or hurt innocent people. She had just wanted to help. She couldn’t bear the thought of him judging her, equating her with them.
“What happened after the files?” he asked.
“Not long before them, there was this job on Greeva 3 that, well, went badly. Not the way you’re thinking. No one was injured. I broke the refrigeration unit on a ship taking dairy products to the Amber primary. I’d done something similar on a Cobalt world, and the colonists got to keep their products for once. But the Amber Alliance, they decided they’d rather let everything go to waste and punish the colony by canceling a return shipment of produce and increasing quotas. The whole city was in trouble, and hungry, and that was on me.”
And it cemented in her mind how awful empires could be.
Shadows shifted in his eyes.
“Then the SilverSpark files were released, and I learned who I’d been working for. The Obsidian Force keeps things separate. I reported to my cousin on Abernath. I never knew what anyone else was up to, or who my jobs came from. I’d tell him where I was going, and he’d pass along an assignment or suggestion. Sometimes I’d change it if I didn’t think it was safe, or come up with my own idea, especially after Greeva 3. Which didn’t concern them, the way innocent people had been affected. At the time, I figured they didn’t understand how bad it truly was.
“But the files opened my eyes. I called my cousin, told him I might be done. That I hated the empires but I wasn’t working with a group that was kidnapping and assassinating and hurting the people I wanted to help. And he told me—” Her voice cracked.
She was trying to sound unconcerned, unemotional, though that call from Ezra had hurt almost as badly as the one where he’d told her about Elle. Had left her feeling trapped and powerless and small in a way that she hated. She swallowed.
“He said it was too late. That I was one of them. That if I stopped helping, they would reveal I was the one who’d done those sabotage jobs, which would endanger my crew and Perrin’s company, not to mention get me charged with treason in three empires. They have people everywhere. I wouldn’t be able to escape. So, I kept going.”
Ezra hadn’t said it in an aggressive way. He’d stated facts. But the same sentiment from anyone else within the Obsidian Force would carry a definite threat.
The fighting had gone silent. It was fully dark, but a silver sickle moon peeked through a glowing gap in the clouds before they shifted and covered it once more. The scene reminded her of what she’d been doing, ignoring the hesitation, focusing on the challenge of the next job, and pretending the truth about who she was working for wasn’t lingering just out of sight.
“Do you want out?” Alexei asked, his full attention on her.
Her stomach twisted. “It’s not that simple. And like I said, I don’t disagree with their reasons. These peace talks are a nice gesture, but it will take action to bring change.”
“You don’t think the talks will work?” Was that hurt in his voice?
“If I had faith in the empires doing the right thing, I wouldn’t have sabotaged them in the first place. Even if an agreement is reached, which seems doubtful, the Obsidian Force won’t stop fighting. War is inevitable.”
“The galaxy is going to end, and we should let it?” He crossed his arms, and his expression was fierce. “I thought you were a fighter, that once you knew who they were, you’d have found a way to stand up to them. I guess I was wrong.”
His words were a dagger in her heart.
“Is this your fault?” Alexei finally asked. “Us being here?”
She gripped the wooden rail. “I don’t know. I was supposed to make sure you didn’t reach the talks, had planned to strand us somewhere. I had no idea the attack was coming.”
“You don’t sound surprised that they would have killed you, too.”
She shrugged.
He ran a hand through his hair, tugged until it was sticking up. “Did you stop to consider how important this mission was to me? To my planet? To dozens of planets and millions of people? What about the other innocent people suffering?”
That was definitely hurt in his voice. It cut more deeply than anger would have.
“It was the best option,” she said.
“Best for you.”
“And for my crew and my job. And for your safety.”
His jaw worked like he was debating what to say. “So now what? You try to keep stalling me? To talk me out of continuing, like you did on Kirfell?”
She met his gaze. She’d expected fury, or condemnation. She should have known better, should have known he would be his same steady self, seeking always to understand. Shame flashed through her. How could he stand to look at her? But she was doing what she had to do, and she refused to back down from that.
“If the Obsidian Force finds out you’re alive, they’ll assume I helped you. They might expose me. Not to mention they’ll send more killers to try again.”
“You might be able to accept your situation,” he said, “but I don’t accept mine. You want to stay here? Fine. I’ll go ahead without you. I can tell them you died when I reach the talks.”
She didn’t want to be dead. But she also didn’t want to cross the Obsidian Force. Or put her faith in something so likely to disappoint.
“Or,” he said, “you could leave the Obsidian Force for good.”
Brilliant, bright hope swelled in her before dark tendrils of fear smothered it. Like the talks, it was false hope.
When she didn’t answer, he pressed on. “Imagine how much you could help. You know people in the Obsidian Force. You could get us inside information.”
A fist seized her throat. “Yeah, if I want everyone I care about to die. You wanted to know the truth. Now you do. Don’t bother trying to recruit me as some kind of double agent.”
His jaw twitched. “If I try to leave, are you going to stop me?”
“Are you going to turn me in?”
They stared at each other. The challenge on his face formed tiny cracks in her heart.
“No,” he said.
She exhaled hard. “And I won’t stop you. But I’m still coming with you. I might think you’re an idealist with impossible dreams, but you’re a good guy, and you need help.”
His face softened. “Good to know I have a pessimistic revolutionary on my side.”
She scowled. “We do this carefully. Fake names, hide your face, no comms that can be traced. I’ll contact Perrin.”
“So, we sneak into town and find a comm. You have a way to use one securely?”
“I know how to encrypt one, and we have codes for smuggling. Ones the Obsidian Force doesn’t know about,” she added when he opened his mouth.
“Let’s go, then.”
The way he looked at her now, no longer flirting and infatuated but like he didn’t know her at all, sent a plasma storm through her insides. He kept sneaking glances at her, whether out of suspicion or because he now saw her as a project, another helpless soul who needed saving, she wasn’t sure.
Not everyone could be a hero like him, risking everything for lofty dreams and farfetched outcomes. Some people—most people—had to do their best to survive, and take a stand where they could.
That’s what she would continue to do. Make sure he stayed safe, keep him off the radar. Then find a way to convince Ezra and the Obsidian Force that she hadn’t betrayed them all.
