Free Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two by Loren Rhoads

bigotry wasn’t as dead as Mykah might have hoped, even if the terminology had fallen out of fashion. At least she’d been able to ensure that Gavin couldn’t go back for any more treasures.
    “I didn’t know this was going to be so complicated,” Raena said. “It honestly never occurred to me to try to bring Thallian to justice. I was so frightened of him that all I could think of was ending him, erasing his power over me, and his threats … As it was, you know I barely escaped. If Eilif hadn’t turned on him at the last moment, I might still be his prisoner. Maybe, with an army, we could have swept in there and pulled the Thallians out. Or we could have all died as the ocean crashed through the domes on top of us. Surrender was never anything Thallian contemplated, at least not as long as I knew him. Suicide, though, if he could take all his enemies with him: he would have seen that as another path to glorious victory.”
    She looked around the table, met each of their eyes. “I’m sorry I dragged you all into this.”
    “I’m glad that you did,” Vezali said quickly. “I’m honored to have helped you bring justice to the Thallians. Even if it’s not the justice that the rest of the galaxy thinks they want. I have always felt that public executions are unnecessary, bloodthirsty spectacles. We should be better than that.”
    “I’m honored, too,” Mykah said. “You did your part, Raena, the part only you could do. Now I’m doing mine. I’ve studied the galactic media my whole life. And I get to stand up for us scattered humans, show we’re not all bad. I’m happy.”
    “I’m just along for the ride,” Haoun said.
    Raena laughed along with the others, glad to have gotten the joke for a change.
    She wasn’t ready to let the conversation slip away just yet, though. She caught Coni’s eyes. “You’ve studied humans,” she said. “Do you think we should be more closely controlled?”
    “I’m continuing to monitor the situation,” Coni answered. Her tone was so serious that Raena was unsure if she was joking or not. She wished she could glance away to check Mykah’s reaction, but she met Coni’s eyes instead and nodded.
    After lunch, at loose ends, Raena threaded her way through the Veracity ’s engine, stepping over cables and ducking under conduits. It amazed her how well the old ship ran with Vezali continually pulling it apart and putting it back together.
    Imperial ships like the Veracity had clunky FTL drives that generated a hyperspace bubble around the ship. It made them tricky to pilot; you had to calculate the course very carefully and broadcast your location constantly to warn other ships to get out of your way. Raena didn’t know exactly how all the moving parts worked, only the right sequence of buttons to push. She’d only ever learned to pilot well enough to run, not for the joy of flying like Ariel had.
    Raena must have made enough noise coming through the engine room to alert Vezali. From somewhere overhead, the tentacled girl asked, “Can you bring me the mag spanner?”
    Raena glanced around for the tool, located it hung neatly on the wall amidst the other spanners, and pulled it free.
    Vezali leaned down from a crawlspace overhead and reached out a delicately pointed pink tentacle. Raena held the tool up and let Vezali find her own grip.
    The girl hung suspended upside down, some tentacles wrapped around handholds inside the engine, others bracing her in place. Now that Raena counted them, she found that Vezali had an odd number of tentacles. The largest central one she referred to as her root. She used it mostly for balance, when she was upright, and something to sit on when she wasn’t moving. Raena thought it was probably a continuation of Vezali’s spine, although she couldn’t say for sure if Vezali had bones or cartilage or if she was simply held upright by muscle strength—or force of will.
    Raena envied the girl her flexibility of body and the ability to