Assassination Protocol: An Intergalactic Space Opera Adventure (Cerberus Book 1) Read online

  “Analysis confirms that the subject is on the verge of a Blitz overdose,” Taia spoke in Nolan’s ear implant. “Findings include a gravely compromised liver, virtually inactive digestive and metabolic functions, and signs of cardiovascular damage.”

  “So, she’s in bad shape,” Nolan said.

  “Yes.”

  Nolan swore again. “What are the chances she’ll survive full detoxification protocol?”

  “Calculating.” A second passed before Taia spoke again. “2.75%, given her current condition.”

  Damn it! Nolan’s eyes locked on the unconscious Silverguard. She had to have taken a bloody lot of Blitz to end up in such a state. As he’d nearly learned the hard way, quitting the opioid cold turkey could actually kill those dependent upon it. In her weakened condition, she couldn’t survive the Heavy Detox—what he grimly referred to as Hell Week, because it felt like an entire week of sheer torture crammed into 48 hours. That left him only one option.

  “Then we need to start stepping her down.” Nolan winced. The very idea of giving the woman doses of Blitz—increasingly smaller with each consecutive dose to wean her off the dependence—disgusted him. He wanted to help her get clean, but to do that, he’d have to keep a steady supply of the drug in her bloodstream until she was strong enough to survive the detox. “Can you get what we need?” he asked Taia.

  The screen on Nolan’s wall flickered to life, displaying the image of a glass vial filled with neon pink liquid. “Six ampules of Blitz have been ordered, along with the necessary IV nutrients and medications to counteract existing organ damage.” Another compartment in the roof opened and a long, sinewy steel cable dropped toward the woman, jabbing her with a needle. “Beginning the administration of IV fluids.”

  Nolan nodded. “Good.” It would take a few bags of concentrated fluids and nutrients to help the woman recover sufficient strength to survive the detoxification process. Hopefully, Taia could use her Underground Market connections to get everything she needed. It would be a long, likely painful recovery, but if the woman could just survive the Hell Week detoxing, she’d have a real chance at getting back to a normal life.

  Whatever that meant for a Silverguard no longer serving the Empire.

  Nolan’s eyes drifted back to the screen. To the pink-filled glass bottle in the image. His hand twitched at his side, aching to reach out and grab the bottle, to find relief in the neon liquid within. He could forget everything—his spine, Jared’s imprisonment, his work for the Protection Bureau—at least for a little while. Blitz offered an escape, one he’d used so many times before.

  Yet his hand remained unmoving. He needed only to look down at the woman on the couch, to see the pallor of her skin, the sunken gauntness of her cheeks, the emaciation already beginning to show beneath the mid-thigh skirt and cropped T-shirt. The sight brought back the memory he’d clung to all these years whenever the urge to shoot up hit him.

  He’d looked like that. Wasted, his once-powerful soldier’s frame nothing but shrunken flesh stretched over bone. He had sworn to himself that he’d never be like that again. He’d never be that weak.

  Nolan reached into his pocket and drew out the bronze medallion. His fingers turned it over and over, stroking the faded features. Four years, ten months, three weeks, and three days. Those words were a promise to himself.

  His eyes went back to the tattoo on the woman’s wrist. He forced himself to look past the needle marks pocking the skin near the pommel of the ornately drawn sword, instead taking in the detail of the tattoo itself. The hard, sweeping angles of those draconic wings, the way the metallic silver ink seemed to gleam in the soft glow of his room, as if dangerously sharp.

  And again, the question came to him. What is a Silverguard doing with a lowlife like that? Wolfe might have been the leader of his small band of thugs—or, better yet, judging by that pleasure craft parked outside the Spacer’s Paradise, someone higher up the scumbag food chain—but he didn’t seem the sort of person who’d have a Silverguard at his side. Silverguards were the elite soldiers of the Empire; they didn’t stoop to hanging around thugs and gangbangers.

  Just one more question to ask her when she wakes up. It would be a while before she was semi-coherent; Taia would have to keep her pretty heavily Blitzed-out for at least a day, maybe two depending on how well the step-down process went and how fast the IV fluids, nutrients, and meds repaired her drug-damaged body.

  There was nothing more he could do for her now. She was safe, away from Wolfe and his goons, at least for the time being. Taia would see to her detoxing and alert him if she needed anything more—anything the AI couldn’t automatically handle for him. Taia was more than just the voice of the chip implanted in his brain; she was the closest thing he had to a friend, companion, and partner in his jobs for the Protection Bureau.

  Shit! My jobs!

  He twisted in his wheelchair and his eyes locked on the still-open door to his workshop. One glance at his combat suit, the Balefire, and the assortment of heavy machines and tools installed there would send the woman’s suspicions shooting through the roof.

  Nolan sucked in a breath. “Taia, seal the workshop!”

  The door to the shop slid silently closed at his command. The seam was perfect, invisible to anyone who didn’t know to look for it. There was even a pretty pastoral painting hanging on the wall—one Taia had hung there for him, though Nolan found the peaceful scene irritated him more and more with each viewing—to complete the ambience of normalcy.

  Nolan looked around the single space that served as his living room, kitchen, and dining room. Aside from the Echosteel blade and whetstone on the table, everything looked normal. Nothing stood out that he could see. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that could immediately mark him as Cerberus.

  Yet even that didn’t calm the sudden flare of worry that surged in his stomach. What the hell did I just do?

  He’d acted without hesitation—no way he could have left her there in that condition—and only now realized the danger of the woman’s presence. She’d be no problem in her current drugged-out state, and too miserable during the course of the detoxing process to think of anything beyond survival.

  But after she was better, then what? He couldn’t risk his identity being discovered, but was he cold-hearted enough to throw her back out on the street? He shrugged off the notion before it had even formed in his mind. No way. Not to a Silverguard. There was a code between elite operatives, even among the regular rank-and-file IAF. He couldn’t turn his back on her even after he’d cleaned her up.

  More than that, he owed a debt he could never truly repay. Tanis had pulled him from the gutter, offered him a chance at a new life, even connected him to the people who could outfit him in the first brain-controlled combat suit—a pair of working legs that now enabled him to walk and run. But she’d died before he could settle up. All he could do now was pay it forward. With this woman, a former Silverguard and junkie just as he’d been.

  His only choice now was to conceal any hint of his Cerberus activity. He’d make sure to only come and go when she was unconscious—there would be plenty of that for the next few days. And when she was clean? He’d figure out some way to help her without letting her uncover the truth.

  Doubt and worry nagged at the back of his mind, setting his fingers twitching. His eyes darted back to the wall screen—thankfully, Taia had shut off the screen, and the image with the dangerously tempting bottle of neon pink. Yet even with it gone, he still felt the desire. A hunger burning deep down in the pit of his stomach, an itch at the back of his throat that refused to leave no matter how many times he swallowed.

  The cravings hadn’t gotten so bad in a while. A few months at least. The ghost of a tremor ran through Nolan’s hands. When it got like this, only two things could help him get past the urges.

  “Taia, play that Beethoven song again.”

  The plaintive melody of the “Moonlight Sonata” drifted through the room as Nolan wheeled his
chair toward the table. He picked up the knife and, careful not to strike it against anything that could set it vibrating, began to sharpen it.

  One long, cautious stroke at a time, he ran the blade across the whetstone. The quiet shink, shink sound echoed in time with the lilting strains of the music, bringing with it the calm and focus that helped him to drown out everything else. The world faded—the apartment, the woman, even the chair beneath him—until nothing remained but the rising, swelling music. It didn’t matter that the song had been composed by a man dead more than a thousand years; the emotion and message of the tune reached across the spans of time, soothing his mind and slowing the beating of his heart.

  Hands steady, mind focused, Nolan scraped the knife across the whetstone. Again and again and again, each stroke cutting away at the monster trying to claw its way free of his mind—the monster of appetite, a deep-seated yearning for the peace offered by the Blitz. The peace he found in this simple task came hard, but when he reached that state of inner calm, it felt right in the ways that Blitz had always felt so wrong.

  His eyes locked on the shining metal, twelve inches of impossibly sharp Echosteel beneath his fingers. Jared had been the sort of egghead who’d know which genius scientist found reverbium. Nolan only knew what happened when vibrations ran through the blade, and what that knife would do to flesh, bone, or metal.

  Every Silverguard had received an Echosteel blade the day they were accepted into the corps. Nolan’s had been gifted to him by Master Sergeant Kane, call sign Wyvern, leader of Warbeast Team. Its handle was simple black gunmetal, its crossguard etched with the three-headed face of Cerberus, the ancient beast of Old Terran mythology. But those decorations did nothing to detract from the utter lethality of the plain Echosteel blade.

  “Sorry to disturb, Nolan,” Taia said in his ear. “But we’re about to have company.”

  The next instant, the sound of someone hammering on his door nearly drowned out the final strains of the music.

  THUD, THUD, THUD!

  “Open up!” a voice, angry and sharp, echoed through the speakers in Nolan’s room. “Open this door now, or I swear I’ll blow it open!”

  Chapter Seven

  Nolan set the Echosteel blade down on the table and snatched the pistol from his holster. “Taia, hallway cameras!”

  He had no fear of being overheard; in addition to the door being reinforced durasteel, it was also soundproofed. He could detonate a Silverguard thermal grenade inside his room and no one in the hall would hear.

  The wall screen flickered to life, showing the three figures standing out in the hallway. Jaek and Hector stood in a protective wall of muscle around their leader, blasters drawn and held low. Wolfe’s face was red and flushed with fury as he pounded on Nolan’s door with the butt of a wicked-looking shotgun.

  “Someone in there?” Wolfe shouted. “You seen my strung-out whore here on the stairs?”

  Nolan’s jaw clenched. A part of him wanted to give Taia the command to open the door; he’d have no problem claiming self-defense if he shot three armed thugs storming into his house. But that would draw the wrong kind of attention. The IDF, for one, which meant a storm of paperwork and far too many questions. Whatever street thug held Wolfe’s leash, as well. The woman on his couch wouldn’t be the only one that might get caught in the crossfire. He couldn’t put anyone in the Spacer’s Paradise in danger, either.

  Again, Wolfe hammered at the door. “Come on!” he shouted. “You in there?”

  For a moment, Nolan thought the mustachioed gangbanger would level his gun and shoot at the door. He hoped Wolfe did. The shotgun blast would bounce off the durasteel and make a vicious mess of Wolfe’s midsection. The bastard wouldn’t be messing with any Blitzed-out junkies after that. Probably not ever. Modern medicine could only do so much to deal with that sort of damage.

  To his dismay, one of Wolfe’s thugs stopped their leader. “Boss, I think no one’s home,” Hector rumbled.

  “Maybe she crawled up the stairs?” Jaek said. His voice rang with desperate hope. “Maybe she was just faking it.”

  That brought Wolfe rounding on the goon. “Even if she was, she wouldn’t have gotten away if you’d been where I bloody told you to be!” His gold teeth flashed in the dim light of the stairwell.

  “I said I was sorry, boss!” Jaek ducked his huge head. “But you’d have been madder if the IDF towed the Baggin’ Wagon.”

  Disgust squirmed in Nolan’s gut. Of course he gave his cruiser a name like that! The more he saw of Wolfe, the more the man revolted him.

  Hector came to his comrade’s rescue. “Come on, boss. Let’s check upstairs. She can’t have gotten far in her state.”

  “I swear,” Wolfe snarled at Jaek as he stomped up the stairs, “if the bitch gets away, I’ll cut out your liver, spit-roast it in tiny chunks, and feed it to my…” His voice trailed off as he left the range of the hallway camera’s microphones. Nolan watched until the three pairs of feet—two in combat boots, one in a pair of hideous silver-tipped shoes—disappeared up the stairs.

  Only once the trio was gone did he holster his pistol. “Ugh.” He grimaced. “I need a shower just listening to them.”

  “You think you’ve got it bad?” Taia sent a little spike of electricity into Nolan’s brain—not painful, just enough to convey her simulated irritation. “I’ve got to keep his face in my facial recognition database!”

  Nolan grinned. “You’re right, Taia, you’ve got it way worse. Keep an eye on him and his goons until they leave, yeah?”

  “Will do.”

  Though the intrusion had shattered the near-meditative trance he entered whenever he sharpened his blade, the threat had given him a new sense of calm—the calm of a soldier ready for battle. If Wolfe came back and tried his luck at that door again, Nolan would be ready.

  Sliding his Echosteel blade into its sheath on the wheelchair, next to his blaster holster, Nolan wheeled himself over to the woman lying on his couch. Just a few minutes of IV fluids had already done her some good; a hint of color had returned to her pallid cheeks, and she appeared to be resting a bit easier. As soon as the IV nutrient bags Taia had ordered arrived, the process of recovery could begin. It would be long and grueling, but the woman was a Silverguard, toughest of the tough. If years of war with the Terran League hadn’t put her six feet under, she’d have what it took to get through this battle, too.

  Again, Nolan found himself studying her. This time, he looked beyond the symptoms of Blitz overdose, looking for anything that hinted at who she was. The only identifying brand on her was the Silverguard tattoo. Like his, the dagger had been customized to be unique. Where his bore a three-headed, fiery-eyed dog—a nod to his Silverguard call sign—her tattoo depicted a necklace of burning skulls draped around the crossguard.

  Aside from that, nothing indicated who she was or where she had come from. She could have been Exodian, Genesian, or even Old Terran. Despite her pallor, her skin appeared a slightly darker shade of brown than his, and her hair was a near-black beneath the blonde dye. Her fade haircut and simple clothing gave away nothing; they weren’t exactly uncommon for New Avaloners. With the Blitz wasting away the muscles she’d had to develop during her years in the IAF’s special ops corps, she had a slim physique now bordering on emaciated.

  But nothing about her spoke about her past. About who she’d been before her years in the IAF and Silverguard, or who she had become in the time since. No way she was on active duty—the Silverguard had damned strict regulations about the use of recreational drugs—but how long had she been out? A while, by the looks of it, and life hadn’t been kind.

  Then again, is it ever? This woman wouldn’t be the only soldier to find her post-military life challenging. Nolan had, too, as had so many other IAFers and the few Silverguards he’d run across. All of them had to find a way to make a living, to find meaning outside the corps. The Imperial government’s disability paycheck had seen to the former; he hadn’t had the latter until the da
y Agent Styver offered him his first hit job, the day he’d discovered that Jared had been arrested.

  It wasn’t the sort of meaning he’d expected. He hadn’t exactly had childhood dreams of being the Empire’s killer-for-hire, but at least the jobs gave him focus, something to do, to keep his concentration and skills sharp rather than wasting them the way he had during his Blitz days. For a man like him, it was the best he could hope for. At least he could console himself with the knowledge that his hits typically took out men like German French, scumbags thriving in the highest and lowest levels of Exodian society. Civil service of a very grim, bloody sort.

  With a grunt, Nolan settled back into the cushions of his wheelchair. For now, he had nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. He could only wait—until Wolfe gave up his hunt for the woman and left, and until Agent Styver delivered the info packet to the dead drop.

  “Taia, run a facial scan of our guest,” Nolan said. “See what you can find.”

  “Already running, Nolan. I began searching my databases the moment you picked her up off the stairs.”

  “Well, damn!” Nolan’s eyebrows rose. “Have I ever told you you’re a work of art?”

  “Not as often as you should,” Taia said. “Nor do you sleep as often or as long as you should. Scans of your brain indicate that your mental functions will begin to drop by 5% in the next two hours if you don’t rest.”

  Nolan chuckled. “Yes, dear.” He settled back into his chair until he found a comfortable position. “Want to play me that new sound you were talking about earlier?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Taia cooed, in a voice that sounded suspiciously like Jadis’ sultry tones. It seemed she’d picked up something new.