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

the magenta catsuit into the incinerator.
    It was a shame. The stretchy fabric was supremely comfortable and she loved its hideous color. She supposed, at some point soon, she was going to have break down and do some shopping. One more reason to get in touch with Ariel: she had always been so much better at that kind of thing.
    In the cabin she shared with Mykah, Coni sat back from her screen. It showed Raena sitting quietly in the lounge, bent over a piece of eye-piercing red fabric.
    When Coni started to monitor Raena, it had been with hazy notions of continuing her research on humans. She’d thought Raena might serve as an example of the last of the Imperials, but now that Coni had pried so deeply into Raena’s Imperial record, it was clear that the little woman never actually bought into the Empire’s rhetoric. Raena didn’t even seem to have held an official rank. She was enlisted as Thallian’s aide, but the role seemed fluid and ill-defined.
    While Raena had done as Thallian ordered her, he had clearly been a loose cannon, under surveillance by his superiors even before Raena’s defection showed how precariously he held his command together.
    Beyond the way Thallian isolated Raena from his crew, she had been an object of ridicule—and worse, aware of it. Everyone aboard the Arbiter seemed to know how much she meant to their commander—and exactly what she did for him behind closed doors. It meant that, on the rare occasions that she stepped out of her commander’s shadow, the crew shunned her.
    Coni tried to imagine Raena’s life onboard the Arbiter . No doubt she held herself aloof from her shipmates, as she had initially done from the crew of the Veracity . At first Coni had thought that Raena interacted chiefly with Mykah because she still harbored Imperial prejudice, however unspoken, against anyone nonhuman. Now, looking over Raena’s life, Coni wondered that Raena was brave enough to speak to any of them at all. She had always been surrounded by humans—and for the most part, humanity had treated her shamefully.
    Little wonder she preferred her own company to anyone else’s.

CHAPTER 5

    T he crew of the Veracity gathered every afternoon—Galactic Standard Time—to watch the news. Everything was available online eventually, but the crew found comfort in watching the “best news team in the galaxy” run down the biggest news stories of the day.
    Raena never joined them. Rarely did the news concern itself with humanity. Most news stories referenced peoples and planets and political systems she’d never heard of. Instead of troubling her crewmates with the breadth of her ignorance, Raena took her shift in the cockpit, monitoring their flight, while the others debated the new scandals of the day.
    So she hadn’t really been paying attention until the good-natured banter between the others fell into uneasy silence. The lack of voices caught her notice.
    She hit the comm button. “Everything okay?”
    “Come back,” Mykah said. “Everything just changed.”
    A cold shiver paced up Raena’s spine. She locked everything in the cockpit down so it could be left unattended, before she strode back to the lounge.
    She had no idea what she expected, but the squirrel-faced creature paused on the screen wasn’t it. “What’s happened?”
    “Mellix uncovered a flaw in the tesseract drive,” Haoun said.
    Raena twitched her head no, not grasping what that meant.
    “The tesseract is the newest star drive technology,” Vezali explained. “Every big ship built in the last five years has one. The shipbuilding cartels have really pushed the technology, creating incredible demand for it. It’s revised travel times across the galaxy. ”
    “Mellix has drawn a pattern between the sporadic disappearances of transport ships over the past five years,” Mykah explained. “They’ve been jumping into tesseract and never coming out.”
    “At first the manufacturer blamed pilot error: exiting into asteroid