Shades of Honor (An Anomaly Novel Book 2) Read online

  Shades of Honor

  An Anomaly Novel, Book 2

  Sandy Williams

  Contents

  Shades of Honor

  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

  The Shadow Reader

  Also by Sandy Williams

  About the Author

  SHADES OF HONOR

  by Sandy Williams

  1

  The air raid siren shook the walls of the wide rotunda, rattling the transpara-shield dome above the tiled floor. The politicians below it glanced upward at the noise, but when the t-dome didn’t flicker or spark, they continued their conversations and idle walks.

  “Everyone meander for your lives,” Ash muttered. She didn’t bother to look at the comm-cuff looped around her wrist to see if the siren was a false alarm. Like the politicians she was assigned to protect, she knew it wasn’t worth a single tap on the cuff screen.

  This assignment wasn’t worth a tap on the cuff.

  “You going to move, Ashdyn?” The terse question came over the voice-link hooked over her ear. Ash’s gaze traveled across the rotunda to where Hauch, one of her new teammates, stood guard. His big body blocked off the entrance to the subterranean conference corridor, an underground complex that was the most secure meeting place on Meryk. And inside one of those rooms—the Werth Room, though Ash wasn’t supposed to have that intel—the most powerful individual in the Coalition sat at a data-table plotting a course of action that would decide the future of the Known Universe.

  The minister prime had been plotting that course for a full standard month.

  Ash bounced on her toes. It was the only way to expel the sudden burst of energy that urged her to run. The alarm hadn’t caused it. This damn assignment did. Her skills and training were wasted here. There wasn’t one telepath among those politicians. And even if there had been, Ash couldn’t guarantee she’d detect them.

  This was not the best way to preserve and protect the Coalition.

  “Answer me, Ashdyn.”

  Ash’s nostrils flared at the use of her full last name. Hauch didn’t know her. No one on this new team did. And she didn’t care to know them. The only names that mattered to Ash were now laser-carved into Merykian granite in a memorial on the other side of the city.

  Ash exhaled, unwilling to let that pain back in. “Give it two minutes. They’ll announce the false alarm.”

  She shifted in her too-tight body armor. Her custom-fitted armor had been confiscated after the disastrous mission to Chalos II, and since her financial accounts were still locked down, she hadn’t been able to purchase a new set.

  “It’s not your job to anticipate false alarms. It’s your job to clear the rotunda.” The look Hauch gave her said he blamed her for this assignment. From the beginning, he’d been the soldier most resistant to her presence on the team.

  No, that wasn’t true. Ash was the soldier most resistant to her presence. If she’d put in the effort, she could have proved she belonged. All she would have had to do was run a few of her typical stunts. Then she’d earn their acceptance.

  A loud laugh bounced off the rotunda walls. More politicians. They looked important in their light-trimmed suits. Their expensive comm-cuffs glittered beneath the artificial lights, and assistants trailed them as if they were centers of gravity, pulling worlds into their orbits.

  “If you don’t move your ass,” Hauch said, “I’ll have you assigned to sanitation duty with the bots.”

  “That shit would be more entertaining than this.”

  “What did you say?”

  The threat in Hauch’s voice didn’t faze her. She’d spent a year training under the most intimidating man in the universe. She’d resisted Rykus’s influence, his interrogations, his accusations. And then, after she’d proved her innocence and found her sanity again, she’d resisted his attempt to put light-years between them. Instead, they’d spent four days together on a tachyon capsule that bent space and time to bring them to Meryk.

  To Meryk. Where Rykus had been taken in for “questioning” and they were separated.

  “You heard me, Hauch.” It might have been unfair to take her frustration out on the other soldier, but Ash was pissed the prime wouldn’t tell her anything about Rykus’s whereabouts. And she was pissed she couldn’t find him on her own. All she knew was that he’d left Meryk. It had taken her hours to uncover that information, but she’d found his name hidden beneath layers of security on the manifest of a capsule that left the star system two days after they’d arrived. The capsule had six destinations, and so far, Ash hadn’t found Rykus listed on any of the debarkation reports.

  She stepped away from the wall where she’d stood for the past two hours. Hauch looked like he was about to leave his post too, but not to clear the rotunda. No. He wanted to leave his post so he could rip her head off.

  “I’ll meet you halfway,” she said.

  When he stepped away from the door, she knew he’d taken her words for what they were: an invitation to fight. Ash would take the heat for the altercation, probably get demoted and transferred to a team not half as skilled as this one, but hey, Ash had been blamed for worse.

  She should do it. Stretch her muscles, bruise some skin, get kicked off the team. At least then Hauch and the others could get a real assignment.

  “The rotunda.” Hauch’s tone contained enough rage to melt that door behind him.

  Ash’s gaze focused on that door. Well, why not?

  She strode across the rotunda, carving a straight-line path through the crowd.

  None of the politicians paid attention to her, and she didn’t pay attention to them. I only have eyes for you, Hauch.

  When she was five paces from him, he took another step away from the door. “Clear the famginn rotunda!”

  “Reverting to your native tongue? That’s unprofessional.” Soldiers adapted to Coalition common speech, dress, customs, pretty much everything unless they were in a high-stress situation or on leave. That vein popping out of Hauch’s forehead told her exactly how high his blood pressure had spiked.

  Not high enough yet. She needed him pissed off a little more, just enough to move another centimeter…

  He stepped into her personal space, his height and broad shoulders practically blocking out the t-dome above them.

  A leg sweep and a hard hit to his chest sent the big man to the ground.

  The attack didn’t keep Hauch down. He was back on his feet and reaching for her more quickly than she’d expected, but a twist of her arm and a careful jab to his throat had him choking long enough to tap her comm-cuff and send her clearance key to the door’s security panel.

  It opened. She darted over the threshold, started to seal the door, but Hauch was up again. This time he locked his hand around her wrist and wrenched her arm into a Hraurkurian Hold, a grappling position that would keep even a strong man restrained for a good while.

  But Hauch didn’t know Ash was an anomaly, that she was smarter, stronger,
faster and much more skilled than the average person. And like most men who weren’t assholes, Hauch was trying not to break her.

  His mistake.

  Ignoring the sharp pain in her shoulder, she angled her body toward Hauch as far as her ill-fitting armor would allow, then she funneled all her strength into her legs and jumped. When Hauch’s strong arms brought her back down, she kicked the side of his knee.

  It popped in a way that guaranteed he’d be limping for a few days, and Ash was free. While he was off-balance, she gave him a hard shove backward.

  But she still didn’t have time to get the door shut. Hauch stretched his injured leg over the threshold. A sensor registered the object, preventing the door from sliding shut, then her teammate was up and lunging forward.

  “Stay down, damn it.” She barely dodged his attack. Her counter was sloppy, but Hauch put his weight on his injured leg, and the knee didn’t hold him. He tried to push through it, to make it work. Ash respected the effort—her teammates weren’t amateurs—but a damaged joint was a damaged joint. He went down, and she was able to leverage his weight over her hip and deposit him back on the opposite side of the door.

  “I’m doing this for you, pal.” She tapped an emergency closure command into the keypad beside the door. It slammed shut in Hauch’s face.

  “Hauch to Trident Team.” His words grated over the voice-link hooked over her ear. “Ashdyn’s lost it. She left her post and is in the secure corridor. Intent undetermined.”

  “You don’t waste time, do you, Hauch?” She started running. The emergency closure code she’d used on the door also contained a lockdown element. It secured all doors in and out of the underground complex. But since it was easy for her to implement, it would also be easy for her teammates to override it. She had three, maybe four minutes.

  “Ashdyn, unlock the doors.” That was Liles, her team lead, who’d been guarding a different entrance to the underground for the past two hours.

  “Sorry, boss,” Ash said. “Already committed.”

  “Team, switch comm channel to the one we used on the Gamden Raid.”

  “Not fair.” Ash’s halfhearted protest didn’t draw a response. Her voice-link clicked as Hauch and Mandell, her third teammate, followed Liles’s order and switched channels. It was definitely possible Ash might end up back in a cell after this.

  It didn’t matter. One way or another, she was done with guard duty.

  Rykus was hoping for a reprimand and rank reduction, but one look at the faces of the three-person panel guaranteed he would receive far worse than that.

  A dishonorable discharge.

  Prison time.

  Perhaps permanent grounding to his home world.

  He stood too straight, but it was the only way to contain the anxiety punching holes in his heart. He hadn’t felt this way in almost twenty standard years, not since he’d stood before his father and told him he was leaving the Javerian military to join the Coalition.

  Clasping his hands behind his back, he stood in the center of the room and made sure his expression matched the grim faces that stared up at him. Up because the two men and one woman were sitting at a long table that had been hastily shoved into the room, not on a raised platform where the Coalition’s soldiers typically met with justice. The legal proceedings had been closed to the public, closed to the media, closed to every individual who might leak a syllable of sensitive information.

  “Commander Rhys Rykus,” Magistrate Dietz, the man serving as head of the panel, said. “We’ve reached a judgment.”

  Judgment. The words pelted him like shrapnel. He’d told himself he could handle whatever sentence they threw at him, but he hadn’t known until that moment how much his identity was linked to the Fighting Corps. He’d defied his father when he’d joined the interplanetary force, and he’d given everything he had to it for the past two decades. He’d expected to give more for twice that long. Who would he be if he was forced to return to civilian life?

  “Multiple charges of misconduct have been brought against you,” the magistrate said. “We are meeting here today to address each one.”

  Dietz’s voice rang loud, as if he were addressing a large audience, not a single individual standing three paces away. The man had too much experience with politicians and cameras. Rykus had limited and regrettable experience in front of both, and he had to squeeze his teeth together to keep himself from demanding that Dietz get to the point. Showmanship wasn’t needed here.

  “First, I will remind you that you have undertaken an oath of silence. Not one word of these proceedings will make it past these walls.”

  The oath had been taken by all four people in the room. Ash had insisted on the secrecy.

  Ash.

  Rykus wanted to close his eyes and remember her, remember those four days and nights on the Fortune’s Citadel, the scars he’d traced with his lips, the body he’d held in his arms, the scent of the woman he’d defied orders to save. But he’d chosen this path—the right, honorable path—and Ash was out of his reach.

  “I understand,” he said.

  Dietz used his stylus to tap something on the data-table. “To the first indictment, the abduction and assassination of War Chancellor Grammet Hagan, the charges have been dropped. The investigation into his death is ongoing, and you have cooperated fully.”

  That was the easy one. Hagan had been assassinated on Ephron, but the stories from the individuals who’d pointed fingers at Rykus fell apart under the most rudimentary questioning. A telepath had been among the force that pursued him and Ash. Ash hadn’t been able to identify the individual who’d killed Hagan, and without any other way of knowing who possessed the power to speak to and alter minds—a power that few people in the Known Universe believed existed—they had no way of capturing the individual.

  “To the second indictment,” Dietz continued. “Violation of an order from a commander of a ship, we have found you not guilty.”

  Rykus’s gaze jerked to Bayis. That charge had been brought directly by the admiral. He hadn’t had a choice. Once Rykus had been accused of Hagan’s murder, Bayis had to follow procedure. He’d confined Rykus to his quarters aboard the Obsidian, shut him off from communications, and denied him access to most of the ship and its databanks. The only reason Rykus had been able to circumvent the detainment was by swallowing his pride and contacting his father, the Grand General of Javery’s armed forces and a man who had a powerful influence on the planet’s politics.

  Bayis’s expression didn’t change. The admiral was a friend, but he was an officer and a professional. If the panel had found him guilty, Bayis would have sat there with the same blank face.

  I should be guilty of this charge. Rykus was being let off because of a technicality, a favor he’d called in. Why?

  “To the third indictment,” Dietz said. “Providing aid and comfort to an accused traitor of the Coalition…”

  Dietz’s words rolled through Rykus’s ears like Rykus’s heart rolled through his chest. This was one of the two charges he feared the most. Not because of the consequences, but because of the implications. The third and fourth indictments proved his judgment had been clouded. They proved that, when it came to Ash, he couldn’t be the steady, unwavering soldier he’d trained his whole life to become.

  Dietz peered up from the data-table. “We have found you not guilty.”

  Air tangled in his lungs. “Sir?”

  “We have found you not guilty.”

  “But—” Did Rykus want to argue for a reversal of the panel’s decision? Aiding a traitor was a serious crime. Not as contemptible as the indictment that would come, but one that would destroy his life. It would certainly destroy his career.

  His gut twisted. He’d always taken responsibility for his actions. He made decisions only after weighing the consequences, and then he accepted those consequences whatever they were.

  “I helped Lieutenant Ashdyn with the full knowledge that she had charges of treason pending against
her.”

  Bayis’s expression remained neutral, but Dietz and Prime Tersa exchanged a look.

  “You’re aware of the repercussions of a guilty charge?” Dietz asked.

  “Fully aware.”

  A muscle in Dietz’s face twitched.

  “Commander.” The prime clasped her hands on the data-table, and her long silver braid swung over her left shoulder. “The circumstances surrounding Lieutenant Ashdyn’s arrest were unconventional. You acted in the best interest of the Coalition. In fact, your actions can be seen as heroic—”

  “Heroic.” The word tasted like acid, and now the verdicts were beginning to make sense. “No.”

  Tersa’s eyebrows went up. “No?”

  “No.” He squeezed the word through gritted teeth.

  “Commander,” Tersa said. “Lieutenant Ashdyn would be dead if it weren’t for your faith in her, and we would be sitting here without any idea of this hidden threat. War Chancellor Hagan was compromised. For how long, we don’t know. But I’m grateful we’re aware of the danger now.”

  He despised the way she emphasized that word, grateful. He’d been thanked too many times in his life for a different event that he didn’t deserve praise for. He wouldn’t accept praise for this one either, especially not when he knew the expectation attached to it.

  “I won’t be paraded—”

  “You’ve served the Coalition bravely for years. You’ve put your life at risk and saved hundreds of thousands of people.”

  “Gaeles Minor was—”

  “The entire Known Universe recognizes your name because of what you did there. The people respect you. I respect you. And you have an obligation to—”

  “I have an obligation to do my duty.” He felt the tendons in his neck tighten. “To honor the military code.” A code he’d violated more than once with Ash. “I damn well won’t—”

  An air raid siren shook the small room. He tensed even though it was undoubtedly another false alarm. Every time a speck of dust shifted in Meryk’s near-space, some newbie technician overreacted and sounded a system-wide alert. The whole of Coalition space was on edge. Since the attack at Ephron, the enemy had been appearing in and out of Coalition space, testing the Fleet’s reaction time, collecting intel, and generally wreaking havoc on interstellar commerce. The Sariceans hadn’t yet appeared in Merykian space, but Rykus almost hoped they would. Here, in the heart of the Coalition, they were ready to meet the enemy.