Authors: Saje Williams
Saje Williams
time. “You wouldn’t happen to be looking for some new Mirage agents?”
he asked Jaz, only half in jest.
She shrugged. “Maybe. Could be. But I’d recommend you wait until the High Court convenes before you make any decisions in that direction.”
“Great. More wait and see. Well, Val, I’d guess you have a choice.
Either go to TAU housing and hope the bitch hasn’t blocked your access, or just come with me while I rustle up a room for myself. That is, if you don’t mind sharing a bunk with a corpse.”
“You’re not a corpse,” Val told him, laughing. “And at least you wouldn’t hog the covers.”
“This is true. Though there’s no natural rhythm here on Starhaven for me to follow. I don’t sleep much here. After a while even vampires need some downtime, and it’s hard to know when to take it without a sun to mark the time.”
She hadn’t thought of that. “Is that healthy?”
He nodded to Jaz and Morrigan and they headed off down the hall just as a group of what he assumed to be healers arrived on the scene.
Some were mages—recognizable in magesight by the spells hovering around them—and some were not.
Psis, most likely,
he mused. People like Val who’d learned to merge their telekinetic talents with their knowledge of anatomy and biology. Or so he assumed. He knew even less about that end of things than he did of magical healing.
“I don’t know about healthy,” he told her, once they’d passed, “but I know I get pretty goofy if I don’t get at least
some
rest now and again.
That’s another way we vamps are different than the immortals. The original immortals, at least. They don’t have to sleep. An hour or two of meditation every few days seems to suit them just fine.”
“That’s kinda creepy when you think about it. No wonder half of them are crazy.”
He snorted gracelessly. “You might be surprised. Most of the immortals you know now aren’t from the original group—the ones who fled their homeworld when it was more or less destroyed by the Cen. Of all of them, only Athena holds any kind of power here on Starhaven.
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Fenris was an ordinary man until Loki changed him—back in the days of myth—and Kali, well, she’s an example of what happens when you ignore the law of unintended consequences.”
There were a lot of things about the immortals she didn’t know, Val realized. Like most of her fellow agents, she’d taken a lot on faith. They lived forever, could survive nearly any injury, and had powers most humans couldn’t imagine. She’d always assumed that the immortals were all of a kind, but now Raven was telling her that it wasn’t true. That even the immortals here had different origins from one another. “Kali is
what?”
He turned a corner and led them down an adjacent corridor, this one considerably narrower than the Hall of the Worldgate, with a ceiling no more than thirty feet above their heads. “The Cen tried to turn Kali against the human race, thinking that just because she was a criminal, she’d be willing to sell out her own kind. They gave her a symsuit and it healed the chemical imbalance in her head that made her the fucked up individual she was. At least, that’s the theory.
“She turned against them and earned her place fighting beside us in the War.”
“What about Jaz? You knew her back on Earth, didn’t you?”
“She’s a bit of a mystery. She was mortal before she got into her little war with Athena, but came back several months later as an immortal.
She’s never advertised how she did it, and I have a sneaking suspicion she has a secret formula tucked away somewhere. Jaz holds her cards close to her chest. The only people she confides in are Artificer and that goddam imp of hers.”
Val knew who Artificer was. The thin, balding mage-engineer who ran Magitech. All the agents were familiar with him. Magitech made most of their gear, including their agency symbols, portable ‘gate modules, and Personal Communication Devices.
Which reminded her—she needed to get a new one. Goban had taken hers from her before throwing her in his dungeon. Of course she had no idea if she’d be able to get one on agency credit, or have to hope that her www.samhainpublishing.com 301
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back-pay had been credited to her own account. There was no way she could afford to replace the PCD, particularly with anything that wouldn’t scream
alien
on any low-tech world she happened to visit, with what she’d had in her account before accepting the assignment.
She wouldn’t put it past Athena to freeze her account. Agents were pretty much at the mercy of their employers in this respect. At least until they gained enough of a reputation on their own merits to warrant special consideration. “I need to go by Magitech,” she told him.
He nodded. “I was thinking the same thing myself. I need to replace my PCD.”
“Replace? I don’t ever remember you wearing one.”
“Mine was destroyed a few years back. I didn’t really have any use for it anyway, considering that my old one wasn’t equipped with any kind of inter-world connection. Since I was alone there, except for Cerberus, who couldn’t use a PCD even if he needed one—which he didn’t—it seemed pretty pointless to request a replacement.”
All very logical, of course, and
so
typically Raven. Had he bothered to jump back and pick up a new PCD, he could have had one
with
the inter-world connection chip installed. But, of course, he wasn’t really interested in communicating with the folks on Starhaven anyway. He liked to think of himself as a loner, but, somehow, when given the opportunity, he accepted leadership as if he was born to it and really seemed to enjoy being part of a team.
Just another one of the internal contradictions that made him the man she loved.
They turned the last corner leading to the teleport disk and ran into Scorpio and a group of his pilots heading in the opposite direction. He gave them a nod and a smile, but he was fairly radiating hostility.
Raven, of course, seemed oblivious. “Glad to see you got out of there in time,” he said.
“Almost didn’t,” Scorpio shot back. “We lost five ships that didn’t make it before the damn thing blew. Over fifteen of my men didn’t get out.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
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A muscle in Scorpio’s jaw jumped and he nodded. “To make matters worse, some muscled bitch showed up at the docks and read me the riot act about permission. Said you didn’t have the authority to give it to us.”
“Athena. She’s talking out her ass.”
Val glanced over at him in surprise.
She
wouldn’t have put it that way. As one of the Agency heads, she had a lot more authority than Raven, and had every right to question his decisions. Or so read the agency charters
she’d
studied. Not that that sort of thing carried a lot of weight with him.
“She threatened to confiscate my ships. She tries that, she’s going to be biting off a bit more than she can chew.”
“She’s not going to confiscate your ships, Scorpio. She’s bluffing.”
Val’s eyebrows shot up as he threw an arm around the mercenary and led him back down the corridor a few dozen feet, murmuring in tones too low for her to hear. After a moment, the man’s face twisted into a grin and he nodded violently.
What the hell is he up to now?
She was almost afraid to ask. She’d thought he’d been bad back on Bryon’s world—and then the thought hit her. Where the hell
was
Bryon? In the confusion after their arrival, she’d lost sight of him and the wolf pack, as well as Cerberus. She wasn’t crazy about them wandering around Starhaven unsupervised. No telling the kind of trouble they could find.
She hoped they’d just became involved in helping the healers sort out the ones most in need of aid, though she found it a little difficult imagining Cerberus being one hell of a lot of assistance in that regard.
She nodded politely at the mercenary troops and waited for Raven and Scorpio to finish with their little male-bonding session.
When they returned, Scorpio was still grinning as if Raven had handed him the keys to the Starhaven weapons lockers. “We’re going to see if we can pitch in and help move some of the injured,” he said. “Be seeing you around, Raven.” He motioned to his men and they headed off down the corridor again.
“What the hell was
that
about?” she asked Raven, who favored her with an enigmatic smile in response.
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“We’re going to make Athena very uncomfortable in the next few days—maybe uncomfortable enough to completely forget about being pissed at you. She’s going to have bigger fish to fry.”
Val digested this and decided she didn’t like the way it settled in her stomach. “What do you mean?”
He sighed. “Okay, Val. I get it. It’s not fair for me to keep you in the dark when I was pissed off at the immortals for doing the same thing to me. But I also don’t want you dragged into something that isn’t your fight. Fenris is okay, but Athena tends to be a major pain in the ass. We plan on adding a new agency to the roster here, someone else to take up some of the slack in council. Scorpio is going to petition them to allow him to establish a new agency—a mercenary agency the others can use when needed. Athena will vote against it, Fenris will more than likely vote in favor, and the Stewards will abstain. Artificer will probably see them as new customers, and Jaz will back him up. She’ll
hate
it. Especially when I petition the Court to create another new agency on top of it.”
“When you
what?”
Val exclaimed. “How long have been thinking about this?”
“All of about fifteen minutes,” he admitted. “But isn’t it just a great idea?”
She had her doubts, but she wasn’t going to mention them now. “And what, pray tell, would this agency represent?”
“We’d be bodyguards. We’d assign agents to watch other agents’
backs. No more going it alone because the original agency didn’t have more than one operative available to send. Do you know how many agents we lose every year because there aren’t enough to go around?”
She shrugged. She honestly had no idea. “And you’re assuming you could recruit enough operatives for
this
agency when the other two can’t because…?”
“Because, unlike TAU and Sash, I don’t plan on trying to recruit and train—indoctrinate—them from childhood on. I’ll recruit people who already know how to do the job, from Earth Prime and other universes.”
They reached the teleporter and stepped onto the dais together.
“Magitech,” he said, and the corridor faded from view, replaced an 304
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instant later with a bustling hallway filled with people of nearly all description, from humans and elves to goblins and even a few hybrids.
“You plan on running this agency yourself?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Nope. I’m going to get Morrigan to run it.”
Val stared at him in shock. “And you’ve talked to her about this?”
She already knew he hadn’t. Not if he’d only had the idea fifteen minutes previous.
“Nope. But she’ll agree.”
“And you know this how?”
“Because the agency will have another purpose. We’ll also train assassins.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No. As much as we’d like to pretend it’s not true, we both know that assassins have a viable role to play in some of our missions. Imagine how much easier it would have been if we could’ve just sent someone in to take out the officers of the Church without having to fight a bunch of—
mostly—innocent guardsmen. I could’ve also used an assassin in my battle with the underworld.
“As much as I hate to say it, I can only be in one place at a time.”
She shook her head, genuinely dismayed by what he was suggesting.
“I don’t like it, Raven. Assassins? It seems so…barbaric.”
“What’s really barbaric,” he shot back, stepping off the dais and holding out a hand, “is sending young men and women to die in a war that could be avoided by taking out the one responsible for the motivation in the first place.”
She took his hand and let herself be helped off the dais, even though she really didn’t need the assistance. “I don’t know…”
“It’s not your problem, Val. I’ve got plans for you anyway, and they don’t include assassinations or playing bodyguard.”
“You have plans for
me?”
The revelation stunned her. “And what gives you the right to make
any
plans for me, Raven?”
“The fact that I love you and want you to be safe and sane. Do you really think you can wreak the kind of destruction you did on all those soldiers without eventually suffering for it? I know you’ve relegated the www.samhainpublishing.com 305
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memories to a big black hole in your mind, but they
will
resurface, sooner or later. I’m guessing sooner. You have a tremendous talent, but I think using it to destroy is a waste of your potential. I’d like to see you turn it to more constructive pursuits.”
“Okay—what are you getting at?” She didn’t want to even think about his analysis of her eventual response to her using her gift as a weapon as she had. Not just a weapon, but a weapon capable of killing many people in one fell swoop.
She shuddered.
He pulled her into an oblique corner and leaned close, pressing his lips against her cheek. “Seeing those healers running to help the wounded hybrids made me realize how truly unique your gift could be, if you were trained in the medical arts. All you need is the education and you could knit bone, regenerate flesh, and save lives. What if there was an agency here on Starhaven dedicated to healing rather than killing and destruction?”
“It’s worth talking about,” she acknowledged. “But I’m years away from heading such an agency.” It was actually a very good idea. Right now TAU and Sash maintained their own healing corps—TAU’s devoted to the psionic end of things, Sash the magical, with the Stewards taking up some of the slack when necessary. If they could house all the healers under one roof, and give them an agency to call their own—with their own agency symbol and freedom to act as their conscience saw fit…