How long?
Years.
He was nodding at her, as if he could read her chain of thought. “What commanded your loyalty, Shane?”
Good question. She thought about it for a long time. It wasn’t the Confederacy, which she’d always seen as a self-perpetuating bureaucracy only interested in preserving the status quo. It wasn’t the planetary governments, a lot of whom were pretty nasty and deserved the rebellions that it was her job to put down. Certainly not the TEC. Not even the Occisis marines themselves. That realization hit home, because there was a time when the marines were everything, the marines were her honor. It had been a long time since she’d felt that, she realized. The dozen petty little conflicts she’d been witness to had sapped that out of her.
There really was only one thing that had commanded her loyalty in the end.
“My people,” she said.
Her people, her team, her command, her friends. All of whom had become strangers ever since Colonel Dacham had taken charge. She felt warmth by her eyes and hoped Magnus wouldn’t notice her tears.
“My people,” she repeated coldly.
“That’s good,” Magnus said. “That’s the only loyalty worth anything.” He sank back into his seat, nodding. “So what do you want to do, Shane?”
Put my hands around Klaus Dacham’s neck and slam his head into a bulkhead until his brains ooze out of his mouth.
“I don’t know,” she said.
He made a steeple of his fingers and looked at her over his tapping forefingers. “Perhaps I can offer a suggestion or two.”
* * * *
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Loyal Opposition
“The future is the past’s revenge.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“We are dead men on furlough.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
(1870-1924)
Dominic Magnus was barely aware he was going to recruit Shane until he had done it. It made little sense on the surface, especially as careful as he was being with every other potential member of the team.
It might have been a wave of empathy he felt for Shane. Her forced renunciation of the Confederacy was painfully akin to his own.
Of course, she was lucky enough to come to her decision before people died.
Once he had extended his hand, the corporate leader took over, and he found that he couldn’t withdraw it. Even as Shane stared and tried to refuse his offer, Dom found himself playing Lucifer and turning the offer into something she couldn’t deny.
It wouldn’t be a betrayal, he told her. If she were involved in their heist, her information might actually save the lives of the marines. Perhaps it could even be an act of contrition.
Dom hated himself for the words even as he said them. She was vulnerable, and he was twisting her ...
But the corporation needed her. His people needed her.
He wove his argument seamlessly, even after Shane told him who was in command of the GA&A takeover.
* * * *
Dom left the interview amazed at how calm he was acting. He walked around to the observation room, hands clenching unconsciously. For once, his nervous tics were the farthest thing from his mind.
The door slid aside on Tetsami and Zanzibar, who sat on the other side of the massive one-way mirror behind the desk in the interview room. He could see Shane, still sitting in the room beyond the mirror. Shane had a bemused expression. Dom thought he might have left a little abruptly.
Zanzibar was seated at the monitor’s station, but right now she was ignoring the displays recording Shane’s blood pressure, skin galvanity, pupil dilation, etcetera. Instead, she was looking at Dom with an expression of concern.
“Sir,” Zanzibar’s voice was softer now than it normally was. “She could be lying about—”
“Escort her back to her room. I’ll finish the interview later.” Dom said it slowly and deliberately. He wasn’t sure his mouth would work.
Zanzibar looked at him for a long moment, slowly nodded, and left.
Tetsami looked back through the mirror at Shane. “Are you sure it’s a good idea involving her?”
“The information she has is invaluable.”
“What if she’s a plant?”
“She’s not a plant,” Dom said coldly.
Tetsami turned around slowly and looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time since he’d come into the room. Her expression now showed some of the concern that had crossed Zanzibar’s. Dom realized his cheek was twitching.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“A plant would not have mentioned my—” Dom raised a shaking hand to his face. “Would not have mentioned Klaus Dacham to me.”
“Can I do some—”
“I need to be alone,” Dom whispered.
“But—”
“Now!”
Tetsami circled around him, looking as though she was trying to decide whether or not to be scared. She was through the door before Dom could see which won.
Dom was alone in the observation room.
“Klaus,” he whispered. The harsh name scraped his throat.
He watched as Zanzibar entered the interview room and escorted Shane out. Zanzibar had known him for the better part of a decade, and she could only suspect what this meant. She’d seen only the fringes of the wound that Klaus Dacham was clawing open. Tetsami had no idea. And Shane—
She thought that GA&A had just been stage one in some larger TEC operation.
Did that matter? Would it matter to Klaus?
Helen Dacham’s death had affected both of her sons. Perhaps Klaus even more than him. Amazing how tragedy could sharpen parts of life once thought faded.
Helen was their only parent. She had not been a good mother. She’d been prone to extreme emotion. She drank. She beat her sons. She had her sons beg from Waldgrave’s tourists.
The Executive Command had been a way for both of them, him and Klaus, to escape.
Escape.
Escape was all Dom had ever tried to do.
His hands were on top of the observation chair Zanzibar had been sitting in. His left hand clenched through the upholstery on the headrest, all the way to the chair’s metallic skeleton.
It had been after Dom’s greatest success as a TEC officer. He had single-handedly “suppressed” a military coup on Styx without losing a single TEC operative. He had received commendations on the deftness of the surgical strike.
It was in the glow of that victory that he had received word that Helen Dacham had been on Styx, in Perdition.
Perdition, a city that no longer existed.
He deserted the TEC and had lived within the cracks of the Confederacy until—
For the first time in a decade, he had to face something totally unexpected. And, again, it was his brother.
He looked up at the empty observation room and realized that his whole body was shaking.
“My God, Klaus. Wasn’t it enough for you?”
He pulled on the chair, and his left hand yanked it free of the shaft in the floor. There was a screech as the metal under his left hand bent. He barely felt the pseudoflesh on his fingers crush and give way.