Caught between two powers locked in a cold war a hundred years old, Lucas Ross and the Resistance struggle to maintain the safety and independence of the Borderworlds. The arrival of a new ally and the capture of an old one set Ross on a collision course with his past and revelations that could doom humanity–or save it.
Redeemer is the second book in the Epsilon series, a sequel to 2011’s Broken Stars. The tale is narrated by Lucas Ross, Resistance leader, ER doctor, and former Imperium officer.
Two
23 January 2261
Perie, Caldin – Borderworlds
“Has he pinged you back yet?”
I shook my head, staring out the window of my apartment, out over the snow-covered street. I could see the hospital from here and beyond it, a few streets over, city center and the Cathedral Beyt’knesset Saint Adhara bin Kahlid. The bells were ringing. I didn’t know which service they were calling—I wasn’t exactly a follower of the Faith, not the way Wil or Alexei or some of the others in the Resistance were—but I knew that’s what they meant. Sam watched me from the couch, a cup of coffee cradled in one hand and her chin propped up on the other.
“What do you think it means?”
“I hope it doesn’t mean that something’s happened since Kara left Robinsworld.” I rubbed at my temple, feeling the first faint signs of a building headache. I could hear the soft undercurrent of Sam’s thoughts across the room, which meant that my control was slipping.
Probably stress. There’s been a lot of shit going sideways lately. You’re more tired than usual.
My lips thinned. Sam stayed quiet for a moment, but I could almost taste her worry.
“Are you okay?”
“Of course you’d ask that.”
“Who else would?” she asked. I glanced over toward her and caught sight of a rueful smile. “There’s no one else here to ask it right now, so it’s going to be me whether you like it or not.”
My gaze drifted back toward the window and I didn’t answer her right away. I heard her set down the cup and get up from the couch. I didn’t turn, not even when she joined me by the window, leaning against the wall on the opposite side of it from me. Only then did I meet her gaze, as she stared at me with her arms crossed and concern etched in every plane and angle of her face.
“You don’t have to do this by yourself,” she said.
“I know,” I said. Intellectually, I absolutely agreed with her—I didn’t have to run the Resistance by myself, I didn’t have to shoulder all the burdens I was trying to handle by myself. There were people around to help, including the girl standing in front of me.
She’s not a little girl who needs protecting anymore. She’s a grown woman now. She gave us the victory we needed at Castion. That means something. She was the same age I’d been when I graduated from Coronado Military Academy on Earth, something that felt like it had happened a lifetime ago.
I rested my temple against the window. The chill of it helped a little with the faint throbbing that had started to build. She reached across the gap between us and touched my arm.
“I know that if Wil were here, you’d be talking to him about all of the shit that’s going down. What are you trying to protect me from? It’s not like I haven’t seen hell before—it’s not like I don’t know what you’re carrying. I’ve lived with that weight for years already, Luc. I just want to help you the way you need someone to help you—someone who’s not going to get called back to Epsilon and abandon you whether they want to or not.”
Wincing, I closed my eyes. “Sam—”
“I know you told Kara I’m your second,” she interrupted. “It’s time you start treating me like I am if what you said to her is true.”
My mouth went dry and I opened my eyes again, staring at her. “What?”
“You need to start talking to me, Luc. There shouldn’t be anything about the Resistance that you share with someone else that you don’t share with me. Does that make sense? How am I supposed to help you—how am I supposed to be your number two—if I don’t know what cards are on the table and what’s still in the deck?”
How indeed. I exhaled a sigh. “You’re right.”
“You’re not just saying that, are you?”
“No,” I said, my gaze drifting back out to the city below my window. “No, you’re right. I haven’t been treating you like my second—not the way I should’ve been. It’s just hard. I know there were things your sister didn’t tell me when I was technically her second—probably a lot of things.”
“But probably less than you think,” Sam said, her voice quiet. “My sister trusted you more than I’ve seen her trust anyone.”
“There were probably reasons for that.” I swallowed past the lump that was rising in my throat, tried to shunt the old pain aside. She’d been gone for more than a year now and while sometimes I was able to ignore the pain, it hadn’t faded in the slightest—it was still as sharp as it had been the day Jack Mallek had called to tell me that Korea hadn’t made it home from her supply run.
“Maybe,” Sam agreed. “But I think it was more than you guys sleeping together that let her trust you.” She squeezed my arm gently and I sighed, reaching up to rub at my suddenly stinging eyes. “Whatever you need, I’m here. Whatever you need me to do.”
“I know,” I murmured. “And I’m trying. I just—it’s hard not to instinctually protect you, you know?”
One corner of her mouth curved upward in a rueful smile. “Oh, don’t I ever. I think it’s mutual.”
That made me laugh, at least for a few seconds. She squeezed my arm again before she let go. I shook my head slightly.
“There’s a lot of shit I’ve got to bring you up to speed on.”
“Hopefully we’ll have the luxury of time for you to do that. I know the learning curve’s steep, but I’m already on it, so maybe it won’t be as bad.” She crossed her arms, gazing out the window for a few seconds. “That’s why you want Ren with me, isn’t it? So I can go and do things that you can’t but at the same time, you’re able to use Wil and Mac however you need to for things that you don’t want to send me out to do.”
“You have to admit that Wil’s got a different skillset than what you’ve got,” I said.
“But not all that different,” she countered. “And then there’s Ren.”
“Yeah. Then there’s Ren.”
“Her memory loss isn’t medical, is it?”
I winced, turning away from the window. “That’s a complicated question, Sam.”
“I just want to understand what we’re getting into with her. I know you said that you’re going to help her, but if her memory loss isn’t necessarily medical, I just don’t understand what you’re going to do to help her. Is there some psychic bullshit you can do to help her remember?”
“Something like that.”
What am I going to say if she keeps pressing? Do I tell her the truth? Her sister was the only one who truly knew what had made me run from the Imperium, knew the story of how I’d unraveled something that sickened me to my core, how I’d tried to save a reluctant soldier and instead had him save me.
Sam kept starting at me, as if she was waiting for me to elaborate. I kept quiet. Finally, she sighed.
“Why won’t you just tell me?” she whispered.
A shudder went through me. “I—”
The lock on my front door snicked open and we both froze.
“Did you change the codes?” she asked.
“Not since right after the Noah Walker was here,” I said, mouth dry. She was the only one with the code other than me—Wil had been gone by the time I’d gotten around to changing the code, and he would have been the only other person with the access code and an override key.
We were both unarmed.
The door opened and we both went tense, with me ready to shove Sam behind me—and she likely ready to do the same to me.
“Leftenant, you have not changed your code to something more complex. Do you have a death wish?”
I cursed, slumping against the windowsill. “Fucking hell, Alexei. What are you doing here? I told you to stay at the preserve until we told you it was safe to come back.”
The former spy slipped through the door, another figure trailing in his wake. “There was far too much yelling out there,” he said, moving toward my kitchen, likely on a hunt for either coffee or vodka—whichever he happened to come across first. “Besides, someone needed to bring him back.” He waved a hand toward the man who’d accompanied him and I swallowed bile.
“Conrad. God, it’s good to see you.”
He smiled weakly as he pushed the door closed and locked it behind him. Conrad King was skinnier than he’d been when I saw him last, but he was in far better shape than the person I suspected he’d escaped with.
He was also carrying a duffle bag and that made me nervous.
“Good to be seen, sir,” he said quietly. “I’d started to think I’d never see actual civilization again.”
I eyed the bag he carried. “Tell me you didn’t run away from home.”
“Fine,” he said simply, dropping the bag next to the couch and sitting down with a quiet groan. “I won’t. But I do need a place to crash for a few days until I can find a place of my own—or until you send me to another planet where a cell needs a medic.”
“That was what the yelling was about,” Alexei said, now with a cup of coffee, leaning against my counter and watching the three of us with a mixture of curiosity and bland disinterest. It was a look he’d mastered somewhere along the line and it was almost unnerving. “The elder has lost his nerve.”
I blinked, then looked at Conrad, my brow arching slightly.
He took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, nodding. “He’s right. Dad wants out. I told him he could do whatever he wants, but I’m not quitting and I don’t think my brother is, either.” Conrad scrubbed a hand over his face. “He wanted me to stay home, though. Wants me to be safe. I told him no one out here on the border is safe and we never will be until the Imperium knows that they can’t just waltz in and take what they want when they want it. He didn’t like that much.”
“Dr. King is a master of understatement,” Alexei said, sipping his coffee. “The elder went nuclear, said the boy did not understand.”
“I probably made it worse by telling him that he was the one that didn’t understand,” Conrad admitted.
There was a fresh throbbing in my temple as I stared at him—at both of them, really. “So you just walked out?”
“What else would you have me do, Doc? Stick around, give up the fight?” Conrad shook his head slowly. “I can’t do that, not after what I saw. And then—there was a girl that I escaped with.”
“She’s fine,” I said. “She’s safe. You’ll probably see her later.”
“She’s—”
“We know,” Sam said, cutting him off. “We know who and what she is, but she doesn’t. Luc said to let her remember slow, naturally. Otherwise something could end up royally fucked up.” She moved to the kitchen and started a fresh pot of coffee. I exhaled a silent sigh.
“It’s a long story,” I said, still staring at the bag. Alexis was watching me; I could feel the weight of that stare. He’d want to know what was going on and I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d tell him.
How many people can I tell before it gets back to her? How many people can I keep it a secret from and still have the secret be safe? I knuckled my eyes. Exhaustion was nibbling at the edges of my consciousness and it was only a matter of time before it won the battle.
“Well, I’ve got nothing but time right now,” Conrad said, watching me. “Though the look on your face says there’s more pressing matters at hand that’re keeping you up at night.”
“Astute observation,” I muttered, then sucked in a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. “You can crash in the spare bedroom for now but I think we both know that this is the first place your father’s going to come looking for you.”
“No doubt,” Conrad agreed. “But just because he comes looking for me here doesn’t mean I have to leave with him.”
“No. No, you don’t.” A smile started to bloom and I didn’t bother to stop it. Thomas would be madder than a wet hornet, but his son was right about one thing—Conrad was old enough and wise enough to make his own decisions. His father wasn’t required to agree with them or like them, but I wasn’t going to let him stop Conrad, either.
I owed him that much after what he’d been through.
“You should get some sleep while you still can, King,” Alexis said from the counter. “You too, Leftenant.”
He was right about that, but I looked to Sam anyway. She shook her head.
“He’s right. Go get some sleep. I’ll hold down the fort.”
“Wake me if we get a call back,” I said, scrubbing my hand over my face. A hot shower and my bed sounded amazing.
“I will,” Sam promised, waving me off. “And I’ll get Conrad situated. Go on.”
I didn’t wait for anyone to change their mind or another shoe to drop. I went.
