Free No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three by Loren Rhoads

Mykah panted. Coni hugged him, desperate for comfort. He kept one arm around her waist and held her close.
    “Why?” Haoun demanded.
    “It’s related to Raena’s arrest somehow,” he said. “Those same agents locked the docking slip just before you came.”
    “You’re lucky you weren’t on the ship,” Coni said.
    “I was off paying our docking fees so we could get out of here.”
    “How did you know they were coming?” Vezali asked.
    “I didn’t. We got a message for Raena from one of the Thallian kids. Someone has apparently started up the cloning machinery on his homeworld again. The kid wanted Raena to go check it out.”
    Stunned silence greeted that news.
    “One of the Thallians invited Raena back to his homeworld,” Haoun echoed. “That’s why you called us to leave?”
    “Yeah, but we can’t go now ’til we find out what’s going on with Raena and the ship.”
    “Planetary Security didn’t seem to be looking for us,” Vezali observed. “Just Raena.”
    Mykah nodded at the shopping bag in Vezali’s tentacle. “Did she steal something again?”
    “Not with me,” Coni said. “We were doing a little legitimate boot shopping when a bounty hunter jumped her.”
    “What happened?”
    “Exactly what you’d expect when someone jumps Raena.”
    Mykah’s smile flashed past, but he said more seriously, “We need to find out what she’s been charged with.”
    Haoun volunteered, “I’ll go to the jail.”
    “Not yet. If there’s a bounty on her, let’s find out what it’s for. She won’t like waiting it out, but they want her alive or the bounty hunter would have shot her instead of engaging her.”
    “Got a plan?” Coni asked.
    “We need to commandeer a public computer so the search can’t be traced to us.”
    “Would the business office at a big hotel do?”
    “Perfect. Haoun, can you find us a hotel?”
    “On it.” He lumbered off.
    “What do you want me to do, Captain?” Vezali sketched a salute with one tentacle.
    “Get us some walking-around weapons? I didn’t have a chance to get anything out of the lockers. I didn’t even grab my jacket. My Stinger’s still in it.”
    “Sure. Meet you for lunch?”
    “Yeah, let’s stick to that plan.”
    After she left, Mykah turned to Coni. “Did you get a chance to install that kill-switch on the Veracity ’s brain?”
    Rather than answer, Coni pulled the handheld’s case out of her shoulder bag and handed it to Mykah. “I’m too wet to do it. Can you sign me in?”
    Mykah wiped the handheld case on his T-shirt before he opened it. Once it booted up, he typed in her passwords and brought the Veracity online. Coni gave him a string of characters in six different languages. He dutifully typed them in. Coni checked over his shoulder to make sure they were right.
    “You’re sure about this?” she asked.
    “Raena’s journal is in there. All your recordings of her. The stories she told the Thallian boy . . . We can’t let anyone get those things. They will destroy her.”
    Coni nodded. She had encrypted some of the early stuff, backed it up in a coded info dump off the Veracity . Mellix had other bits of the Veracity ’s recordings as research about the Messiah drug. But all Coni’s work on understanding humans, her studies of Imperial history, the book she was writing: it made her sick to think so much would be lost. Still, deleting it was the right thing to do. It was her own damn fault for not backing the Veracity ’s memory up somewhere off the ship.
    “Tell it to execute,” Coni said. “Then don’t turn off the handheld until it’s done running.”
    From this point forward, the Veracity would have new memories. They wouldn’t include going to Mellix’s haven in the asteroid belt. They wouldn’t include the days Jain Thallian spent onboard. There wouldn’t be anything that connected Raena to the Imperial assassin she used to be. It was for the best, Coni knew.
    “Now you need a drink,” Mykah said.
    “I