Hard Bargain, page 1
Hard Bargain
Shadow of the Dominion: Book 2
Blaze Ward
Knotted Road Press
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Read More!
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
1
Kyriaki
It was odd, as Kyriaki thought about it. She kept a secret that many people would kill for. One of the darkest, most dangerous things possible, anywhere in the galaxy, as far as she knew.
She should have arrested the man. Hauled him back to Cronus Prime in chains, where she would have been celebrated as one of the greatest security officers of all time. But every time she thought about it, Valentinian Tarasicodissa got into her head and muddled everything. And he didn’t know the truth about Dave. Only she did.
Knew that Dave had volunteered to go to his death at her command, if she would just let him rescue his captain first. Had even offered gain, after it was done.
Instead, she had helped him rescue his kidnapped captain, and then provided him an escape afterwards, when he was ready to surrender to her and her badge, and go home to be executed as a traitor. And she still didn’t really understand why.
She supposed, lying in her warm bed trying to sleep, that it might make her a traitor as well. Certainly, if the truth ever came out, there would be no distance she could run to escape.
Even Dave Hall, the name the man went by now, would be simply shot by his hunters, but Inspector Kyriaki Apokapes, an honored officer of the Dominion’s Internal Security forces, would be seen as a worse conspirator.
They would never stop hunting her down if they found out. Even death would only be an escape for her soul, as her comrades would disinter her corpse to haul home and burn, if nothing else.
And she could offer no good excuse for her actions. Lots of bad ones, but that just made her a bad person. Dave Hall wasn’t behind any of them, other than as an example of an honorable man.
And then there was the reason she couldn’t explain. The man that had caused her to stay her execution. Valentinian.
Nobody would believe that she had felt an instant attraction to Captain Valentinian Tarasicodissa, even before she knew his name. That he just smelled right, in a way unlike anyone else she had ever met. That part of her reason for digging so deep into the man’s past in the first place came from a desire to find something she could hate about him. To justify walking away.
And that things only got worse when that hateful thing, whatever it might have been, wasn’t there.
Or that she felt like she owed Dave Hall for backing her up at that moment when the bad guys might have gotten away with whatever murder and mayhem they had planned.
She still could have arrested him at the end. The man had actually closed up his telescoping baton sword and been ready to hand it to her, so that she could put him in cuffs and make the arrest of a lifetime.
After he had just killed or disabled at least five men armed with flamer pistols in a small office. A space he had reached by using some sort of parkour technique to bounce off the side of a building and catch a grip on a fire escape five meters in the air with one hand, and then pull himself up so he could climb the rest of the way.
She couldn’t do that today, and Dave Hall was nearly twice her age, at least fifty years old, an age when one’s physical capabilities had already receded to the point that one must rely on their wits to get by. What must that man have been like when he first ascended the throne?
Good enough to win a Tournament of Domination. Good enough to get himself appointed Supreme Leader of the entire Dominion, and then hold that title for twenty-five years.
Good enough to suffer a secret mid-life crisis. To plan a way to fake his own death and escape the gilded cage he had lived in, and then somehow maneuver a number of highly competent players in such a way that he would have disappeared forever, had Inspector Kyriaki Apokapes, White Hat cop, not pressed. Not dug into Tarasicodissa’s background and turned her own bosses onto the captain’s trail.
Kyriaki gave up sleep and threw back the blanket. She slid across the bed and pulled on a pair of loose, warm pants to go with the shirt she slept in. She was awake, and that wasn’t going to change for a while.
She could survive a night with little sleep. Wouldn’t be the first. Not likely to be the last, not while she wore the Dominion’s White Beret.
Instead, she pulled her pillows up and leaned herself back against the headboard to meditate. Almost as good as sleep, and maybe she would be able to calm all her racing thoughts enough that she could catnap for a while before dawn.
Tomorrow, she would need to give evidence before a grand jury in the case of the Dominion versus Axarnashalic ’Nash’ Bogomelous. It was an airtight case. She had arrested the man in the act of kidnapping two Dominion citizens with force and deadly weapons. And she had legitimately deputized Dave Hall to help her, so the six men killed or crippled in the process of getting arrested all got charged with capital murder to go with everything else.
They were all going down, and she would still look like a hero.
Kyriaki was already prepared to seem extremely surprised and disappointed when Valentinian and Dave failed to show up at the hearing, but their absence would not impact the case. Lianearia Cleray was no longer chartering Valentinian’s ship, the Longshot Hypothesis, and had remained behind on Tartarus while her troupe put on performances and the woman sought alternate transport.
A former business partner of Bogomelous, she would be all too happy to see that man prosecuted, right after he got out of the hospital from the wound Dave had inflicted on him with a blunt sword. The kind that had permanently shattered the man’s knee cap, when she knew Hall was good enough to have severed his shin instead. Hall hadn’t missed with his swing.
No, Dave and Valentinian would officially disappear. Gone, just like that. She had warned both of them to do exactly that before calling in the local Security detachment to arrest everyone.
And they had.
She believed Dave Hall that Valentinian didn’t know the truth, but could still be relied upon to flee at the first opportunity. And she would cover for both of them as long as she could, for reasons she could barely explain to herself.
A chime on her nightstand caused Kyriaki’s eyes to open, her meditative state shattering like a dropped glass. That tone was reserved for the security band, and nobody on this planet knew to get a hold of her that way.
She leaned over and grabbed the card-reader, checking the sender. Ambassador Rodosthenis Mataraci. Her boss’s boss back home. The head of the White Hats on Dominion Prime, the Dominator’s Winter Palace station in orbit of Cronus Prime, the capital itself.
Here.
Have arrived with news. Urgent we meet soonest. Send location and ETA. RM
Well, that was one way to completely ruin her evening. Nothing like possibly getting your hand caught in the cookie jar at the very moment you were apparently suffering a crisis of conscience.
It was a good thing Valentinian and Dave had a good head start.
Their time had just run out.
Hopefully, not hers as well.
2
Valentinian
It was a thing of utter beauty to Valentinian. A rarity in a hand of poker that was almost unbeatable, but he had to be careful not to spook his fish by betting too heavy, too quickly.
He scowled at his cards, like he was going to try to bluff a High Stack/Low Stack, rather than the Mixed Pyramid he had drawn with his sixth card. It was a four color mess: Crowns, Trophies, Swords, and Coins, but the only real way someone would beat him right now was to pull their own Perfect Pyramid, and he only ever seen that happen twice in his life.
For the nigglingest moment, he wondered if the four people at the table with him had somehow managed to stack the deck, to get him all in right now, where they could clean him out, but that wouldn’t be that much money. Valentinian was too cheap to ever play poker with people for more than a few hundred Solars. Or, since he was now in Laurentian space, aboard Bohrne Station, the currency was Union Krodageni. The conversion wasn’t an exact science, but the twenty-five hundred or so in front of him came out to about five hundred Solars, after he paid arbitrage fees to the bank to convert them for him.
Certainly not enough to warrant even a high-powered game, and this looked to be pretty small potatoes, even for a shithole in the middle of nowhere like this space station.
Valentinian had only gotten into the game out of boredom, more than anything. And to keep his card skills sharp. He had originally won the stake that bought his Anuradhan cargo transport, Longshot Hypothesis, in a much more rigged game, three years ago, when the big players had set up a deep-pockets mark and let Valentinian quietly rake off a couple of nice pots towards the end as camouflage for their impending sledgehammer on the sucker.
Look around the table. If you can’t spot the mark, it’s you.
Valentinian was pretty sure two or maybe three of the other players were marks for the old guy who had been at the table the longest.
Valentinian studied the man across the table. They weren’t in the classic back room, but this was at least a quiet, well-lit corner in a reasonably laidback bar, on a backwoods station on the far side of Laurentia, well away from the Dominion. Not the end of the civilized universe, but you could smell it from here. Hit warpspace and run hard and you’d be there in two weeks.
The old man smiled at Valentinian with his eyes and nothing else. Like he had somehow marked the cards ahead of time and knew what Valentinian held in his hand. And had checked the bid on a High Stack of Shields showing, deferring to the big kid on Valentinian’s left who had more money than sense, the one with maybe a whiff of desperation.
And a tendency towards verbal abuse of people perhaps a shade out of line for total strangers met in a bar.
But the kid was big. And probably thought that size meant something. Like maybe Valentinian wouldn’t just shoot him with a shock pistol or hit him with a chair in a bar fight. To say nothing of the old man. Valentinian knew better than to start shit with that one, just from the way he held his eyes.
And he didn’t need to, with the one, big dude at the bar, dressed like a common spacer off a freight transport and watching the game with a vaguely interested eye. Plus a telescoping baton tucked into a pocket that Valentinian had seen Dave use in close combat to kill people so fast they died on their feet first and then fell over.
The kid dropped a hundred Union Krodageni into the pot and thrust out his jaw smugly, like maybe he could buy everyone else into folding their strong hands and letting him rake it with a weak one. The old man’s behavior made a lot more sense if he didn’t like the kid, and had the skill to stack the deck on a shuffle.
Yet another reason Valentinian never gambled with money he didn’t want to lose at the table. This was just for entertainment tonight, because he had wanted to be around people for a few hours.
But sure, he could play.
Valentinian made a performance of checking his cards again, like he was trying to do some fancy mathing in his head without giving away too much.
“Bid’s one hundred to you, punk,” the kid said roughly.
Valentinian fixed the man with a blank, owl stare. It was rude to think of him as a kid, since he was probably a few years older than Valentinian’s twenty-three, but he had all the polish and sophistication of a sixteen-year-old on his first trip away from home.
The old man smiled, again only with his eyes.
“Huh,” Valentinian decided to play along. He could lose three quarters of the chips in front of him right now and still break even tonight. These people were amateurs. Plus there was all the entertainment he’d had playing, which was its own value. “Guess I’ll meet that. No, let’s raise it eighteen.”
It sounded like an annoying number. Right now, he was more interested in irritating the kid than cleaning out the two folks on the right. Wouldn’t stop him, mind you, but they might only be considered collateral damage, and not the primary target.
“Eighteen?” the kid rasped. “What the hell?”
Nearest person on his right folded, but Valentinian wasn’t surprised. He was pretty sure that the person was a she, but it was hard to tell, as they were muffled to the eyeballs in a warm coat, scarf, fingerless gloves, and a knit cap. And it was already warm enough in here that Valentinian was reconsidering wearing his black jacket, the light shell he wore most places because he kept his ship a few degrees cooler than anyone else did.
Any way to save a few Solars on his fuel bill.
That triggered the other player to fold, too, leaving just the old man.
“Call,” the man drawled. “No, tell you what. Raise you eleven.”
“What the hell is wrong with you people?” the kid growled louder than was politely necessary for folks less than a table away.
“I believe the call is twenty-nine?” Valentinian let his voice get supercilious at the punk. Just because.
“Fifty,” the punk grabbed five coins and flung them almost across the table.
The person in the cold weather gear shoved two runaways back into the middle.
“Twenty-two to me?” Valentinian asked absently.
“I believe thirty-two,” the old man responded in the sort of tone that suggested afternoon tea instead of evening poker.
“Oh, yes. Of course,” Valentinian said. “How silly of me.”
He made a performance out of counting out thirty-two coins, counting them again, and then counting them a third time just because, before carefully adding them to the pile, just to watch steam emerge from the kid’s ears in frustration.
“Fold,” the old man suddenly turned his cards over and leaned back with the faintest hint of a wink on the side of his face the kid wouldn’t see.
Huh. So it was a set-up.
What did you do to piss off that old man, punk?
Old guy was still the dealer, so the seventh cards went out. Face down. The Build card from which you were supposed to erect a perfect pyramid. If you could.
The punk’s eyes flashed with anger for the briefest instant, like he had missed drawing the card he needed and was hoping four of a kind would be enough.
Might be, in some games. With people who didn’t loathe you. Or old men who could stack decks as adroitly as this one apparently had.
It would be the last hand, that was for certain. Valentinian wasn’t going to play for these stakes with a card sharp. Old man probably realized that, and had decided to take the punk down a peg in the process.
Looking at his Build card, Valentinian had the second Capstone of Crowns, so it was almost mathematically impossible that a better hand could exist on the table. And certainly not with the three Wedgestones the kid was showing.
Valentinian watched the kid start to push his whole stack forward.
“All in,” he growled, looking at Valentinian with an angry dare in his eyes.
“Count it,” Valentinian challenged. “I’ve got more chips than you do.”
Serious grumbling. Angry words that stayed just enough under the breath that Valentinian could pretend he didn’t hear them if he wanted to.
The old man’s right hand had strayed off the table, almost absently. Valentinian didn’t figure the guy would come up shooting, and Dave was close enough that the big guy could do something if he did, but that hand might come back up with a pistol, if the kid got out of hand.
Which smelled kinda likely right now.
“Seven hundred and fifty-eight Union Krodageni,” the kid snarled in a voice only barely human.
Valentinian barely glanced at the kid, watching the old man’s eyes, but the man didn’t move. Perhaps nodded just a hint.
Valentinian counted out chips. Seven hundred and fifty eight was a tiny amount right now, maybe a quarter of what was in front of him. He pushed it forward a little with a cold smile. Then he picked up a chip and tossed it in as well.
“Raise you one,” Valentinian said quietly.
“That’s all I got,” the kid snarled.
“Pity,” Valentinian said in a voice like death. “Guess you’re out, then. Unless you have something that maybe is worth an extra Krodageni. Rules say table stakes only, but since it’s just you and me right now, I’m willing to stretch them, just a bit. This once, mind you.”
The kid thought about it for a few seconds and then stabbed a hand inside his jacket so quickly that the old man’s pistol was up and centered on his face before anybody at the table could blink.
