“Later,” Bel said. She let down her capsule, neatened her tunic, and straightened up, gathering her confidence back with the movement. “Sorry I’m late. I stopped to pick some things up. What do you know about Jainan?”
Gairad looked up as well, so Kiem told both of them. He started with the emergency conference with the Emperor and Rakal, adding what Rakal had said about interrogation, but his explanation was jagged and all over the place. He skipped back to Audel’s hacking attempts and the folder of blackmail material they’d found on Aren and the other senior officers. Then he stopped. “Sorry, Gairad, give us a minute,” he said, and pulled Bel aside to tell her about the video.
As Bel listened, her expression grew flatter. “Explains a lot” was all she said.
“You knew?”
“No,” Bel said. “I felt something was wrong, but you can probably guess why I wasn’t going to push someone to give up their secrets. We all have something to hide. I think Saffer knew, though.”
Saffer. Everything came back to Aren Saffer, Taam’s best friend. “And he was blackmailing you?”
Bel glanced at Gairad, who was hunched over the flight plan and scowling as if she could intimidate it into giving her Jainan’s exact coordinates. “That shithead was in deep enough with Evn Afkeli and the Blue Star to pick up that I’m a raider. I thought he was just scared I’d figure him out. I should have realized he had a reason to make me leave just now—but I didn’t know he was going after Jainan.” She eyed Kiem. “Jury’s out, but I’m thinking he may have misjudged the blackmail.”
“He’s going to regret he ever tried it,” Kiem said. “If I catch him near Jainan, I’m going to haul him out by his shiny collar tabs and dump him on the Emperor’s lap so she can end him. Or on Rakal. No, he’d flatten Rakal. Come and look at this.”
He enlarged the screen with a jab and threw Gairad’s flight plan up on the wall alongside an image of the cluster. The great bulk of Carissi Station swam among the automated plants and minor habitats like a whale among a gleaming school of fish. The Kingfisher refinery sailed at the edge of the school.
Bel tapped the refinery. “He has to be here,” she said. “It’s the only military-owned habitat, and we know he’s not on the station. Got an up-to-date schematic?” she added, without much hope.
“Yes,” Gairad said unexpectedly. She opened up a diagram of the refinery bristling with annotations. “The mass readings are off, but I figured it out. There has to be a section here.” One of the annotations glowed red, showing a storage module slotted in at the back of the central cylinder. “Shielded. But it has to be there or the rotation of the whole habitat would be off.”
“Nice work,” Bel said approvingly. “Shielded clandestine module. That’s where I’d put my high-value prisoners.”
Hearing high-value prisoners felt like someone was scraping a nail down Kiem’s spine. He steeled himself not to show that. “If I can get you there, can you break in?”
“Depends,” Bel said. She traced some of the antennae that extended from the refinery. “I can brute-force most door models, as long as they’re not brand-new. But there’ll be monitoring and alarm fields before we even get there—if our shuttle doesn’t have the right keys built into it, any alarms will go straight to their control room.”
“So we need a military shuttle,” Kiem said slowly.
“Yes. Do you have one hanging above your bed?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Kiem said. There was an urgent, fizzing feeling under his skin as possibilities unfolded in his mind. “Listen, if anyone asks you afterward: I ordered you into this. You didn’t have a choice.”
Bel rolled her eyes. “We’ll have an uphill job to convince them you’re capable of making threats. But keep the kid out of this.”
“I’m eighteen,” Gairad said. “I’m coming too.”
Bel opened her mouth, but Kiem got there first. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Just don’t get hurt, or you’re another diplomatic incident.” Bel gave him an exasperated look, and Kiem raised his hands placatingly. “If it were me, I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t go and—and something happened.”
“Ugh, if we have to,” Bel said. “I’m not arming her, though.”
“What?” Kiem said. “Arming her?”
Bel leaned down to open her vacuum capsule. She pushed aside clothes and devices until she reached something at the base and gestured a command sequence. The side of the vacuum capsule clicked open in a way Kiem was fairly sure wasn’t standard—but he recognized that capsule. He was fairly sure she’d had it when she arrived on Iskat. Inside the false compartment nestled two lumps protected by layers of gray sheeting. Bel unwrapped one. “Seen one of these before? It’s an incapacitator gun.”
The electric feeling in Kiem’s blood grew stronger. This was a bad idea, but he was all out of good ones. He held out his hands and gestured for her to toss it over. “I know what a capper is.”
“From vids?”
“My mother.” Kiem caught it when Bel threw it. “She sent me to army cadet camp one horrible month when I was sixteen.” The capper was oddly light in his hands. He’d forgotten what these things felt like.
Bel eyed him dubiously. “So you can use one?”
“There was a reason they sent me home early,” Kiem said. He lined up the sight.
“Don’t hold the trigger like that!” Bel said. Gairad leaned away. “Gods, okay, I’m rethinking my position on arming the kid.”
Kiem lowered it. “It doesn’t matter. We’re only going to use them for bluffing, okay? Nobody gets hurt.”
“Sure, that will go down well,” Bel said. “‘Yes, Your Majesty, we did steal a shuttle and break into a military base, but nobody got hurt, so that’s all right.’”
Kiem forced himself to shrug and reached for a smile. “Here’s the way I see it,” he said, in a totally reasonable voice that for some reason made both Bel and Gairad look at him warily. “If they didn’t want us to break in, they shouldn’t have tried holding Jainan there. Let’s make them reconsider.”
CHAPTER 25
“I wouldn’t call it a war,” Aren said.
There was a terrible brilliance to him, sitting casually with the warehouse lights casting a halo of white around his hair, in the middle of a weapons stockpile that could take out a small continent. Jainan forced his voice to stay under control. “Then what would you call it?”
“A quick rebalancing of power,” Aren said. “A tactical strike, if you like. No offense, but Thea has the military capability of a preschooler with a hangover. We’d barely have to take two cities before you sued for peace. You set yourselves up for this, you know,” he added. “If you hadn’t kicked up so much fuss about your system resources, Kingfisher might still be a mining operation.” He laughed. “No, I take that back, we’d still have the Resolution to deal with.”