Chapter Eighteen
Unsurprisingly, Ace made them cool their jets for over half an hour, leaving them waiting in an examination room on med level. Jenna had been quiet—also not surprising since they’d confirmed the person she’d trusted and relied on had tried to have her killed.
And now she wanted to go rushing off with some suicidal idea about infiltrating CI HQ on Earth. But, to his mind, they didn’t have proof there’d been any orders in the first place. He wanted to prove Stanton had acted on his own, which was the only hope he had of giving her some kind of life back.
Telling her he planned on organizing leave so he could go with her had mostly been a stalling tactic. Sure, he intended to see Bren about a few weeks’ worth of downtime—which wouldn’t be hard since he was already on medical leave—so that if he did have to chase the fool, stubborn-assed woman halfway to Earth he could.
The door opened and Ace walked in, expression grim, a nurse trailing him. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“What happened?”
Ace glanced at him. “And here I thought you were the one with the terrible poker face.”
“You ever consider that maybe I let you win?” He crossed his arms, going with the deflection, giving his buddy a minute with whatever had put those dire shadows in his gaze.
“That’s a horrifying prospect.” Ace came over to the gurney where Seb was seated. “Hold still for a minute while I scan you,” he murmured, attention mostly on the datapad in his hand as the nurse fired up the scanner, Jenna watching her closely. What was up with that?
“Looking good?” he asked, pushing up to his feet as Ace studied the datapad readouts.
Jenna came over and practically plastered herself to his side, and while she was casual about it, he still got the feeling her entire attention was focused on that nurse, who was doing something in the background.
“The repair is holding well,” Ace reported. “Still a bit of swelling, but nothing out of the ordinary. As long as you take the full six weeks leave Sacha ordered and don’t do any extreme sports like bear wrestling in the meantime, you’ll have your wings back before you know it.”
“Bear wrestling?” Jenna asked, pretty much the first thing she’d said to him in nearly an hour. “Is this another military-college and too-much-beer story?”
“There was no beer, from memory,” Ace replied. “Just Seb being his usual crazy self.”
“Come on, it was only that one time. And I’m pretty sure you were the one who suggested it. Plus it wasn’t a real bear. It was one of those AI lifelike robot animals they use in zoos nowadays.”
“I suggested it as a joke.” Ace shook his head, though a small grin lightened his expression. “That AI bear still could have killed you. I didn’t think you’d actually do it.”
“You know suggestion doesn’t rate heavily in my vocab. Either do it or don’t. No in between.” Ace went to step away, but Seb caught him with a hand on his shoulder. “So, what’s up? Takes a lot to put you down. Did you lose a patient or something?”
Immediately, the full weight of shadows returned to Ace’s gaze. “No. In a lot of ways, this is worse. But not for me.”
Ace stepped away from him and headed for the hatchway.
“Oh, not cryptic at all. Is that all I get?” he said to the sub-doctor’s retreating back. He glanced at Jenna, still pressed into his side, but she wasn’t looking at him, instead she seemed to be covertly watching every move the nurse made. Did she suspect the woman of something?
Ace pulled the door open and leaned out. “Alpha, you can come in now.”
The low swell of icy unease he’d gotten earlier turned into a full gale of arctic apprehension. Oh shit. What had happened? Had Stanton already looked into his past and found out Jenna didn’t exist? He cut a quick look at her, trying to stomp down the panic that she was about to be revealed. She didn’t look worried, but her gaze seemed calculating as Alpha walked in, followed by Bren.
“What’s going on?” His voice came out rough, and he tried to swallow down the tension in the back of his throat, but it was like he had cotton balls stuffed in there.
“Want to take a seat?” Alpha indicated the plastic-padded waiting chairs, but Seb shook his head.
“No, I don’t want to sit down. I want you to tell me what the hell is going on. Right now.”
Alpha and Bren shared a quick, concerned look between them.
“It’s about Lawler.”
The words completely stunned him, like taking a bat to the face.
“Lawler?” he repeated, probably sounding like a moron. He glanced down at Jenna, who didn’t hesitate as she slid her hand into his.
Alpha took a short breath. “He escaped.”
Okay, his whole brain-fail thing was ridiculous, because he just couldn’t get those words to make any sense. He shook his head, trying to jolt the gray matter back into working order.
“What do you mean he escaped?” His voice went up about twenty notches over the last two words, his mind finally deciding to get with the program. But all it offered up was a scalding spurt of rage and disbelief.
“Apparently, Stanton didn’t send him away when CI took him off the Knox. They simply transported him to the Farr Zero. Stanton wanted to have constant, personal contact with him to make sure he was getting as much information about the CI double agents as he could. Around the middle of dead-watch last night, Lawler somehow escaped his containment module and managed to take a pod down to Ilari.”
Oh hell no.
No frigging way. Lawler was supposed to be gone. He was supposed to be getting waterboarded and rotting in the basement of some CI torture facility somewhere. Instead, for all these weeks he’d been sitting over on the Farr Zero? And those frigging drudge rats who’d joined the battlefront of this war all of five minutes ago had let him escape?
The rage boiling inside was like nothing he’d ever felt before. Like his actual insides were turning to lava and he was about to hit combustion point.
“And?” The word didn’t come out at much more than a growl.
Alpha’s expression was nothing short of edgy. “And we don’t know. The pod went down hard. The atmo-thrusters to slow descent didn’t fire properly. Would have been a rough landing, and he might not have survived. But no one has been down to check the wreckage because the pod landed deep behind enemy lines. Yang is trying, but I doubt UEF will sanction any kind of recovery team.”
No, the bastards sure as hell probably wouldn’t. As far as they’d be concerned, the matter was neatly wrapped up and out of their hands. They’d choose to believe Lawler hadn’t survived. And if he had? There’d be some bullshit about acceptable loss, despite the information Lawler had concerning the Knox and everyone on board.
“That’s not all,” Bren put in, sending an aftershock through him. Nothing could be worse than the news they’d already given him.
“They think—actually, they’re pretty sure—Lawler had inside help to escape.”
“So, the Farr Zero has been compromised by CSS double agents as well?” Jenna asked, which was a good thing, since his mind had descended into a blur of furious disbelief.
“Not the Farr Zero,” Leigh replied in a grim voice. “CI.”
The only outward sign Jenna made at this bombshell was to tighten her grip on his arm, nails digging in through his shirt. As for him, the information was like the last piece of the puzzle he’d been missing, kicking his thoughts back into action.
It made too much sense. Stanton was CSS. That’s why he’d tried to have Jenna killed. Stanton had been acting on his own, carrying out some twisted agenda for the enemy.
There was only one solution. He dropped Jenna’s hand and went to step past Alpha, but his ex-CO stopped him with a hand in the middle of his chest.
“Where are you going?” From Alpha’s tone, he’d probably already guessed.
“To the ground, to see for myself whether that asshole burned. Someone has to make sure he’s too dead to pass on any more intel.”
“Bren and I knew you’d want to go running off half-cocked. But you’re grounded. Plus, not even CI has sent agents in as far as that pod landed. There’s no way of getting in and out without getting yourself killed.”
Seb glanced at Jenna, who was staring at him with a weighty expression. She could do it. She could get them that far in and out of enemy territory without getting them killed.
Turning his attention back to Alpha, he locked down every muscle in his body, his last thread of common sense telling him that taking Alpha down to get out of this room probably wouldn’t end well for either of them.
“You can’t stop me. I’m on leave. If I want to hop a shuttle to the ground and take a goddamned afternoon stroll, you get no say. Now get out of my way.”
Alpha shook his head. “I can’t stop you, I’m not your CO anymore. But Bren and Yang can. Technically, Stanton ordered you confined to the ship, and Yang still hasn’t found a way around that.”
Stanton. The beginning and end to every little problem in his life right now. The rage flamed higher, and he clenched his fists, fighting the blind urge to strike out.
“Stanton can go fuck himself. Get out of my way, Leigh.”
Alpha glanced past him. “Jenna, can you—”
He lunged forward and grabbed the collar of Alpha’s shirt. “Don’t bring her into this. It’s got nothing to do with her. Lawler needs to pay for what he did. Since Stanton and everyone else seems incapable of doing it, I’m going to make sure the bastard is dead myself. Don’t you get it? He knows everything about us. He knows enough to bring down this entire ship.”
“Seb, just take a minute to think about this, about your career, everything you’ve worked for—”
“None of that matters!” He shoved Alpha back. “How am I supposed to live with myself, knowing there’s a possibility Lawler walked away? Any future attack, any time they seem to know what we’re going to do before we do it, I’ll be wondering if he’s there somewhere in the background, giving them everything they need to defeat us. Those deaths will be on me.”
The burning had reached his lungs, and every sawing breath he took hurt just a little bit more. Alpha stepped in again and caught both his shoulders, grip almost bruising.
“It hurt all of us in squad when the truth came out about Lawler, and I know for you, that cut deeper than any. But it’s not worth getting yourself killed over. It’s not your fight any longer.”
“Like hell it—”
A sharp prick registered in his upper arm, and he glanced over to see Ace holding a slim dosing gun.
“Sorry, buddy. I know you’re going to hate me for this, but we’re trying to keep you from getting yourself killed.”
“What—” Before he could utter another word, everything tilted sharply, and he lost his balance, tipping forward into Alpha, who caught him against his chest.
Disbelief stole some of the rage as his limbs rapidly went numb and heavy. They’d drugged him, the damned underhanded assholes.
Ace took one of his arms over a shoulder, and between him and Alpha, they got him to the bed while Bren and Jenna watched on with concern on their faces.
Oh yeah, they all better be concerned. Because when he woke up, he was going to have some serious words. And probably a few fists for Ace and Alpha. But not even his tongue or jaw responded to his need to tell his buddies what he thought of their tactics. And then his eyes got too heavy and slid closed, leaving him trapped behind a veil of darkness.