A Hero for the Empire: The Dragon's Bidding, Book 1 Read online

  She dropped to a fighter’s crouch. A chufting pervert. He must get his jollies from rough sex and killing his partner afterward. What would she expect from a merc, and a good-looking one at that? Why were the cute ones always such jerks? Her fingers curled into fists as she recalled Jeferi’s betrayal.

  “I gather it’s going to be the hard way.” He rolled his eyes and activated his comm. “Sergeant Bartonelli, would you join me, please?”

  A guard would be here in seconds. Fitz glanced at the pistol he’d dropped when he jumped her. His gaze followed hers, and he shook his head, walking to retrieve the weapon.

  He had to go down now, hard and fast. She pirouetted and spun kicked, putting all her unaugmented strength into the thrust, driving her heel toward his crotch. He twisted at the last second, taking the blow on his hip. She followed up with a punch to the stomach, but he deflected it, hammered his elbow into the side of her head and on the back swing nailed her from the other direction.

  She drove her knee into his solar plexus, then smashed her elbow on the back of his head. He shrugged off the blow and wrapped her in a bear hug, pinning her arms. She head butted him. His weight shifted as he prepared to body slam her. If she went down, he was coming with her. She tangled her fist in his braid and locked her legs around his waist. Over balanced, they fell.

  Instead of the floor, they hit the bed, the last place she wanted to be with this madman. She squirmed, kicking and punching, but he used his greater size and weight to restrain her. Her grip in his hair twisted his neck at an awkward angle and pressed the side of his head against her shoulder. She swung for his face, but he blocked it, captured her wrist and pinned it.

  His other hand closed around her throat, not tightening, only threatening. “Stop it. I don’t want to kill you, but I will if you force me to.”

  “Get spaced, pervert.” Fitz grabbed his ear in her teeth, ready to bite when a woman’s voice startled her.

  “Sir? Uh, would you like me to come back in a few minutes? You know, when the two of you have…ah, finished?”

  Fitz felt him sigh, the brush of his chest against hers disturbingly intimate.

  “Sergeant, I called you to assist me in interrogating this prisoner.”

  “You seem to be doing a pretty good job by yourself, sir.”

  “Bartonelli, you had better not be laughing.”

  “Oh, no, sir. Not at all. Nothing funny here.” The woman barely contained her amusement.

  “And you, let go of me,” he said to Fitz. “And get your bleeding tongue out of my ear.”

  As she released her hold on his braid, he pushed off her, hooked her arm and dragged her to her feet. He shoved her toward Bartonelli.

  “Keep a close eye on her, Sergeant. If she moves, stun her.” He scooped up the pistol and began searching the room.

  The sergeant was short and muscular with dark eyes and café au lait skin. Her black hair was stubble cut except for a curly crest dyed florescent purple. A tattoo of a tank bursting through a wall decorated the forearm that held a weapon pointed at Fitz’s midsection.

  Bartonelli squinted at her. “Nice suit you got there. Kinda makes me want to toss my cookies, all that changing color. This the latest thing Madam Waller makes her girls wear?”

  The blond-haired man held up Fitz’s spike. “Not unless Waller’s started augmenting her hookers.”

  Bartonelli’s pistol snapped up. “Damn, another augie assassin.”

  Fitz raised both hands, palm outward. “Hey, I’m not an assassin. I just came here to talk to Youngblood…” Her voice juddered to a halt as the remark registered.

  Another assassin? Blondie’s remark about killing the other woman took on a new perspective. So there was a hit out on Youngblood? One of the few things she’d been able to learn was that Janos Tritico and his goons at the Department of Internal Security had him under surveillance, but why decide to take him out now? Unless they’d learned how important Youngblood’s cooperation was to the success of this operation. Suspicion spawned a cold lump under her breastbone. Had her mission been compromised?

  “When? When did this assassin show up?”

  Blondie’s eyes narrowed. “Fifteen days ago, local time, but I’m sure you already knew that.”

  Impatient with the slowness of organic thought, her mind whirred to convert that to Fleet time. Twelve days ago. Four days after her meeting with Triumvir Maks Kiernan. Plenty of time to line up a shooter from the handful of augies stationed out here in the Alliance. She’d thought they’d taken every security precaution possible, but there must have been a leak.

  She ran her fingers through her sweaty hair, marginally aware of how close to getting stunned the action brought her.

  “Youngblood? Please tell me you managed to keep the old goat alive, because if he’s dead, I am so screwed.”

  The two mercenaries exchanged glances, and Bartonelli snorted as Blondie replied, “Yeah, the old goat is still alive.”

  Youngblood may still be alive, but that wasn’t worth squat if the shit had hit the impeller blades at home. She should be back there to protect Kiernan. That was her job. She was the Triumvir’s Shadow. His position as Supreme Military Commander might insulate him somewhat from DIS’s machinations, but she’d always suspected they were behind the foiled assassination attempt last year. She’d argued with Maks, tried to convince him she needed to be there at his back, but he insisted she was the only person he trusted with this end of the operation.

  “Look, I need to talk to Youngblood.”

  Blondie pulled her into the living room. “Breaking and entering is an odd way to start a conversation. Have you ever heard of calling to make an appointment?”

  “I did call and talked to some major with a funny name who said the colonel wasn’t meeting with anyone. So I took the back door in.”

  “That would be Major Donkenny, the XO, doing what XOs are supposed to do—run interference. I’ll be sure and tell him you find his name amusing.”

  He steered her to the center of the room. “Take your clothes off.”

  “Suck vacuum, Blondie.”

  “Strip or I’ll do it for you.” He produced a slender punch dagger from behind his back. “If you escaped, it would be too easy to evade capture in that suit. A half-naked woman, on the other hand, would stand out.”

  Bartonelli laughed. “Unless it’s payday at the NCO club.”

  “Toss everything over here to the sergeant.” He perched on the edge of the desk, watching her peel off the suit.

  Beneath the uniform, Fitz wore briefs and a gray Fleet-issue undershirt, sweat soaked and plastered to her skin. The cool air raised goose bumps on her arms. Displaying the web of scars from her implantation surgeries usually bothered her, but not now. Let him see them. They would remind him she wasn’t some helpless little girl.

  She stuck out her chin and fisted her hands on her hips. “If you want me to take anything else off, you’re going to have to provide music.”

  A furry body brushed against her legs, shattering her moment of bravado. The cat yawned up at her, walked away and jumped up onto the desk. A curious look passed between man and cat, the silence stretching for several heartbeats before Blondie cut his eyes back to her.

  “I’m not sure I agree with that assessment,” he said.

  As odd as that non sequitur sounded, it confused Fitz more to feel a tickle of laughter in the back of her mind.

  “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? What’s your name?” Blondie asked.

  Fitz crossed her arms and glared at him.

  “You’re in rather a delicate situation,” he said. “I could turn you over to the local government. They’re still annoyed from their last run-in with Imperial weapons technology and would love to trot you out for the newsies, show the Alliance how that big, bad Empire doesn’t respect the accords they signed. I don’t
think your superiors on Scyr would be very happy with you.”

  Fitz imagined her face plastered across millions of tri-D screens. No, that would not be a good thing. For Triumvir Kiernan and his cadre of trusted officers, it could be fatal.

  “Shall we try this again?” he asked. “Under Imperial POW Conventions, you’re permitted to reveal your name, rank and serial number.”

  “FitzWarren, Kimber. Commander. SO54627-3489/AU.”

  He snorted, rubbing one blond eyebrow. “Why am I not surprised?”

  Bartonelli looked puzzled. “Does that name mean something to you, sir?”

  “Yes. It means nameless bastard.”

  Fitz no longer wanted to punch out every upper class jerk who brought up that old insult but perhaps she could make an exception for Blondie.

  He watched her closely for her reaction as he explained to the sergeant, “The Warren is a tough neighborhood in Striefbourne City. Its back alleys produce packs of street kids who are tough, ruthless and expendable. In short, the perfect candidates for SpecOps recruiters. Since most of these kids don’t have names, they hang the appellation FitzWarren on all of them. In some ancient language, Fitz means son of, more precisely, bastard son of, so what started out as only ‘an individual from the Warren with no family affiliation’, quickly got distorted to nameless bastard.”

  The blue eyes glittered in amusement. “Commander, I suspect you got into a few fist fights early in your career.”

  The taunts she’d suffered, at the hand of wealthy cadets with old family names, had wounded her, but in some perverse way strengthened her. Once out of the academy and into SpecOps training, the teasing slacked off, disappearing altogether after she began the implantation surgeries. No one had the balls to insult an augie, not if he planned to keep them. If any of her colleagues chose to make fun of her name now, they were careful to do so out of range of her hypersensitive hearing.

  “Now that we’ve been treated to that stimulating lecture on the derivation of my name, who the hell are you?”

  For several heartbeats, he said nothing, only stood with his head inclined toward the cat, then he smiled as if they shared a private joke.

  “Let me see.” He gestured to their surroundings. “We’re in Colonel Youngblood’s quarters.” He pointed to the small insignia on the front of his shirt, a golden dragon set in a ring of stars. “This is Colonel Youngblood’s shirt.” He pulled a red badge from his pocket and held it up. “This is Colonel Youngblood’s ID. Now, who the bloody hell do you think I am?”

  “What? You can’t be Youngblood. He’s an old…”

  “Old goat? Yes, I know. You said that.”

  Fitz knew a man nearing ninety could look young—if he had the creds for the Extend treatments—but there were usually subtle signs to reveal his real age. She only had those few seconds to study his face, but she would have put his age at a few years younger than her, perhaps mid-thirties. His features didn’t show fine lines around his eyes or erosion of subcutaneous tissue. Nor did he exhibit the typical loss of muscle mass seen in Extend recipients. The pain in her jaw could attest to the strength of those muscles, and then, there was the hardness of his body against hers as they lay intertwined on the bed. Heat flamed across her cheeks. If he noticed her furious blushing—and she doubted he missed much—he probably put it down to embarrassment over her performance.

  “You could have told me at any time, instead of letting me make a fool out of myself.”

  “Yes, Commander, but you were doing such a good job of it. Have procedures gotten so shoddy in the Empire that they’re sending out agents without adequate briefings? You might have at least accessed my file, so you’d know you were killing the right person.”

  “I told you, I didn’t come here to shoot your worthless butt; I just need to talk with you.” Fitz brushed tendrils of hair off her forehead. “Of course the first thing I did was try to pull your file, but there’s nothing there. It’s not inactive or deleted. According to Arachne, as an Imperial officer, you never existed. There are still a few people around who remember you, so I was able to build a slim dossier and figure out who you torqued off so badly that they wanted to wipe out your very existence.”

  Youngblood stiffened and the muscles in the side of his jaw jumped as he ground his teeth.

  “Hell, Youngblood. You slugged the Emperor. Not just in private, where he probably would have hit you back, but in council chambers in front of a bunch of senators. I don’t know why the Praetorian Guard didn’t reduce you to your constitute atoms right then and there.”

  “Rantha was wrong. He had no right…”

  “He was still the Dragon Emperor, and even a newly appointed Triumvir can’t get away with decking him in public. It’s bad for the Imperial image.”

  “Commander, unless you came here to discuss ancient history, I suggest you get on with what you came to say, and then get the bloody hell off my base.”

  Fitz shifted her gaze toward the sergeant. “This has a Black Star clearance and is for your ears only.”

  “I have no problem with Bartonelli hearing anything you have to say. She’s been with me for years and I trust her explicitly.”

  Fitz plastered a bored smile on her face and waited. Several minutes ticked past. Youngblood broke first.

  “Sergeant, would you please secure a change of clothing for our guest? A florescent yellow stockade jumpsuit would do nicely. And while you’re at it, dispose of that.” He pointed to the camosuit.

  “Wait,” said Fitz. “You can’t do that.”

  “Afraid they’ll dock your pay for the loss of the suit, Commander?”

  “No, but there’s something in the pocket for you.”

  “Would that be a bomb, or perhaps a fast-acting poison?”

  “You’re going to have to look to find out.”

  Bartonelli returned the uniform to her CO and leaned against the desk next to the cat. Arms crossed, she watched the exchange between the two with a speculative smile curving her lips.

  Rather than stick his hand in the pocket, he turned the pants up and shook them until the contents spilled out. A half-eaten ration bar, a data reader, gecko pads and a handful of cred chips clattered onto the desktop.

  Fitz nodded. “The reader. It’s addressed to you.”

  Youngblood stared at the device with its red shell and official seal, then picked it up after lengthy deliberation, flipped it open and scanned the screen. His head snapped up to regard her, one eyebrow arched, and he returned to reading.

  His eyes widened, and the color drained from his face.

  Gotcha.

  Fitz didn’t even try to keep the gloating out of her voice. “Congratulations, Lieutenant Commander, you’ve been officially recalled to active duty and, for the duration of this mission, placed under my direct command.”

  Chapter Three

  “No.”

  He snapped the reader closed and slammed it on the desk so hard Fitz heard the case crack. “Has the Empire developed some bizarre multiple personality disorder? First, you try to kill me and now you want to recall me. I don’t think so. No bloody way the Dragon is getting its claws into me again.”

  “You signed the same contract I did. You swore to do the Dragon’s Bidding for life—no quitting, no walking away.”

  “I didn’t walk away. They threw me out like a bag of garbage.”

  “And you were damn lucky that’s all you got. If I’d been the security chief of the Emperor’s guard—Triumvir or not—you would have left that room in pieces.”

  “You might have tried.” His glare morphed into a smug smile. He picked up the reader and shook it at her. Broken components rattled inside, punctuating each tight word. “Nice try, Commander, but you said it yourself. As far as the Empire is concerned, I don’t exist. Without a copy of that enlistment contract, this is worthless.”

 
She’d warned Kiernan when he issued the recall that the plan might backfire, but Youngblood’s cooperation was so important to this mission, they were willing to use any ploy to convince him to help.

  “Colonel, we can keep up this little pissing match all day, or sit down like two adults and have a reasonable conversation.”

  “You forfeited that right when you sneaked onto my base.” His gaze narrowed. “And how did you do that without tripping any alarms? The perimeter security is tight.”

  “Yeah, your security’s good. I spent most of the night getting my ass chewed off by bugs out in that jungle trying to find a hole. I was about to pack it in when I stopped to read some graffiti on one of the warning signs. That’s when I noticed a tiny gap in the coverage. Not enough for a Normal to use, but enough for me. A couple of the cameras were out of sync. It wouldn’t have tripped any alarms and security would probably catch it on the next recalibration.”

  What had seemed like a stroke of good fortune then now appeared to be too much of a coincidence. “Youngblood, do you have trouble with graffiti?”

  “Not likely, the voltage would knock them on their asses as soon as they touched the fence.”

  “Someone managed to do it, back on the southwest corner of the base. And the curious thing? That’s right where the security breach is located. I suspect DIS has an agent imbedded in the Gold Dragons, someone who’s so entrenched, he has the access to jigger your security protocols and open a door for an assassin without your people noticing. I’d say if you don’t have another augie on your base now, you will shortly, if you don’t get out there and close that breach.” Her voice rose in the snap of command she used on junior officers who’d screwed up.

  Fitz didn’t need to see Youngblood’s body stiffen to know she’d taken the wrong tack. He had trouble with authority and she’d ordered him around—not the best way to win him over. He stared down his aristocratic nose at her, then walked toward the outer door, gesturing for Bartonelli to follow.