Soldier of Fortune

“Where did you get the car?”

At Jinna’s question, Gideon patted the hood of the Edsel Comet he’d found while she and Mia had been in Jinna’s flat, packing up a few belongings. “Borrowed it,” he said, taking Jinna’s carryall and tossing it into the back seat.

Jinna’s glare moved to Gideon. “Does the owner know you borrowed it?”

“Nope,” he admitted. “And if we can get it back soon enough, he never will. Shall we?” he asked, opening the passenger door with a flourish.

“Best get on,” Mia said, sliding into the back seat.

“Keepers,” Jinna huffed, but she did get in the car, then let out a soft laugh as Elvis hopped in after her.

Even with the sprightly Edsel, the airfield’s main gates were locked by the time they arrived. Luck remained on their side, however, as a pair of tipsy aeronauts toppled out of the late-night tram and Gideon’s party followed them through the personnel gate.

“All I’m saying,” the first aeronaut declared, “is life on airships’d be a deal simpler if we had us some matter transporters like they had back inna day.”

“You’re sauced.” His friend tried to slap the speaker’s arm and hit the air instead, proving the sauce had not been selective in its targets. “Ain’t so nuch thing as matter tranposters. Never ’ave been.”

Jinna, Mia, and Gideon—with Elvis on his shoulder and Jinna’s carryall in his hand—shared a wide-eyed glance.

“A’course there were,” drunk number one insisted. “S’in all’a records ain’t it?”

“Them’s ficshun,” drunk number two opined. “If all’a books our aassestors brought wiff’em was a record, we’d be arse to elbows in fairies, an kaiju, an’ coffee.”

“Oh my,” Gideon whispered.

Jinna elbowed him.

“I don’ know how you can close your mind so, Ken.” Drunk number one shook his head—and almost face planted because of it.

“An’ I don’ know how you can hear past the wind whislin’ through that empty skull, John.”

At this point, the pair turned off toward the passenger liners, and though Gideon feared they were going to come to blows (or, given the level of sobriety, near misses), at least they’d be doing it far, far from him.

“I never did believe in coffee,” Mia said as they wove their way through the anchored cargo vessels.

“I’ve always wanted to,” Gideon said.

“There it is.” Jinna pointed and all three froze, staring at the uniqueness that was the Errant.

“It flies?” Mia looked from the ship to Jinna and back again.

“If it does, I bet they serve coffee too,” Gideon said.

* * *

“She’s nae much to look at, but she’s a rare lass.”

Gideon, watching Rory scramble down from the engine on which he’d been crouched, a torch in one hand and a spanner in the other, shared a glance with Mia. “I can believe that.”

“Maybe this was a bad idea,” Mia said.

“What’s a bad idea?” Rory asked, coming to a landing near Jinna. “And for that matter, what are you lot doing out and about so late?”

“It’s—” Jinna began.

“Jinna’s in trouble,” Mia said at the same time.

“Trouble?” Rory spun to face her. “What sort of trouble? Wait, you’re dead pale,” he added, staring at Jinna. “You’ll come inside and have a cuppa while you tell us what’s what.” Already, he was leading the small party around to the rear gangplank.

“Rory,” a male voice emerged from the gondola as they approached, “have you any progress on that engine pod?”

“I’ve got the connection rewired,” Rory told the newcomer, still shepherding Jinna toward the gangplank, “but we’ve another problem.”

“I’m not sure we can afford any more problems on this job,” the man said as he stepped onto the tarmac. “Oh. Pardon me, Jinna. I didn’t realize Rory had company.” His gaze shifted to Mia, then Gideon, before returning his attention to the mechanic. “What kind of problem are we talking about?”

“Jinna’s got some sort of trouble,” Rory explained, then looked back at the others. “This is John Pitte, captain of the Errant. John, this is Jinna’s friend, Mia, and . . .” He looked at Gideon. “I never caught your name.”

“I didn’t throw it,” Gideon replied, his eyes locked on Pitte who, meeting his gaze, moved closer, leaving Gideon to wonder how the man who’d murdered his company could look so—benign? “Gideon Quinn,” he said, “Commander of the—”

“Twelfth Company,” Pitte cut in, and Gideon thought he saw the man shudder.

“John?” Rory’s question bounced off the tension wire connecting the two men.

Pitte blinked, then looked down, then met Gideon’s gaze. “You kept the coat?”

“You didn’t,” Gideon noted.

“No,” John said again. “It didn’t feel right . . .”

Which was all Gideon needed to hear before letting the fury he’d carried in him for over six years loose. Without a word, with barely a sound, he rushed forward, knocking Pitte back so fast his feet left the ground before Gideon threw him into the gondola and wrapped his hands around Pitte’s throat as he had imagined doing every night when he saw the names of the dead soldiers on his cell.

“Six soldiers,” he growled, slamming Pitte’s head back again. “Six of my company died on your order.”

“N-Not mine,” Pitte’s voice croaked out as an arm, presumably Rory’s, snaked around Gideon’s own throat in an attempt to pull him back.

“Liar.”

“No,” Pitte managed to force out. “My fault, but not . . . mine.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said to Pitte as Rory’s arm fell away, only to be replaced by another, heavier, hand on his shoulder.

“You should.” A voice Gideon remembered—a voice he’d last heard on the Nike Escarpment—followed that hand. Listen, the voice continued, but lost to reason, Gideon shook off the ghost in his head.

“Let him go,” another voice snapped from behind, this one unknown, female, and supremely angry.

He might have ignored the order, but it was accompanied by the press of something cold, metallic, and humming at the base of his skull.

“Let him go,” she said again, “or I will be decorating the hull with your brains.”

“Gideon,” Mia’s voice, strangely thick, followed the threat.

“I won’t bother to count to three,” the woman said.

From somewhere nearby, Elvis let out a low croon.

But it was Pitte’s expression—one that had no name but which Gideon had seen in countless mirrors since that day at Nasa—that had his fingers loosening and his hands falling to his sides.

Then, as he watched, Pitte slumped down onto a supporting shoulder that, now that Gideon looked, he could see belonged to a man he’d seen fall at the Nasa Escarpment.

Gideon’s hand half rose, then fell again.

He heard the sound of someone crying, and realized it was Mia.

He began to turn, to tell her . . . something . . . when he felt a sharp thunk at the back of his head, and then he too was slumping, all the way to the cold wet of the tarmac.

“Jagati, that was hardly necessary,” he heard Pitte rasp.

“Were you without oxygen long enough to suffer brain damage?” someone snapped. “Because that was absolutely necessary.”

“You have such a way with people, Quinn,” Dani said, leaning over him on the wet tarmac.

Her dark hair was loose this time, spilling down in a curtain, closing him off from everyone else.

“It’s a skill,” Gideon told her. He reached out to touch that hair, the midnight rain of it, and saw his hand was still shaking from the effort of nearly murdering a man.

She jerked her head back, taking her hair with it.

At her side, Pitte was still supported by Eitan Fehr, who was apparently not dead.

Huh.

Standing next to both men was a tall woman with skin like umber and hair as dark as Dani’s but tumbling in a riot of curls while Dani’s fell straight as the rain currently dampening the airfield.

The woman was holding a gun and glaring at Pitte, which told Gideon this was probably the Jagati who’d knocked him senseless.

To either side, Mia and Elvis, and Jinna and Rory, were looking on in various states of shock and anger.

None of them were moving.

“What?” he asked as Dani, her expression grave, again blocked his vision. “What’s wrong?”

“You,” she told him. “This.” She gestured at the tableaux surrounding them. “What you’re becoming, what Jessup Rand is turning you into.”

“Rand’s not turning me into anything,” he said, then watched her tilt her head in that particular way she had, and cursed. “Fine, what’s he turning me into, then?”

“Him,” she said simply.

“Which would be bad,” Gideon said, amazed at the coldness in his own voice, “if being Rand weren’t working out so well for him.”

And that, he thought as she shook her head and faded into the rain, was exactly the wrong thing to say.