New Elysium: Weapons of War (Book 2)

Unexpected Gifts - Part 13

Quidquid id est, timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentīs.
(I fear the [Greeks], even those bearing gifts.)
Laocoön, Virgil - Aeneid (II, 49)

Jack walked along the hallway at a brisk pace. His cheek was burning hot from when his sister had slapped him. But deep inside, an icy cold had gripped hold of him.

Things were getting out of control. And he hated it. More than that, he hated the way his sister had turned against him and everything she'd been raised to be. When she arrived she was supposed to understand what he was trying to do here.

Instead, she'd gotten close to Red and turned on him, becoming as savage as he was. Red didn't listen to him anymore either. There had been a time when he would do exactly as he was told, take any mission, no matter how dangerous. His desire for revenge had outweighed everything else and Jack had no problem using that to get what they needed.

At least he'd conveniently gotten himself caught. Jack hadn't meant to lose Dag in their escape. Red had been prepared to die there and Jack hadn't foreseen that Dag would try to stop him out of some misguided notion that there was more to Red than that.

There wasn't. Red had served his purpose brilliantly and with everything they needed, he should have been allowed to cool his revenge in a grave somewhere or in the deep pockets of black space.

He shook his head. There were a lot of should haves. Perhaps he should have accounted for this. Nothing had prepared him for Red's lack of temper or Ember's relationship with him.

New Elysium was his paradise, his creation - his perfect little clockwork world, where everybody had a role to play, like perfect little cogwheels, smoothly interconnecting and keeping the world turning, day after day. And now, cogwheels were springing out of that finely tuned machine, all over the place. All because a few that didn't belong had been tossed in.

Just when had things started to elude his grasp like that?

The more he thought about it, the clearer the answer became. It was when that impertinent woman, Amy Larsson, had come to New Elysium, although she didn't belong. Admittedly, she had been useful, she had even served in the New Elysian fleet for a while. And she was good at what she did - smuggling illegal hardware and refugees, and acquiring whatever the colony needed and that nobody else could get their hands on. She could make the impossible possible, people said about her. But her impossible behavior and lack of respect were precisely what had made it hard to control her. She was unpredictable. And he hated that. He hated her.

It had all gone downhill from there, he realized now.

He recalled a day, about two months ago, when the had for the first time realized that there were cracks in the perfect facade that was New Elysium, and things had begun to slip out of his control.

He was working from his office on Ehring Station that day and doing some routine round. When he had passed through the communications hub, one of the senior technicians had come up to him.

"Fitzroy," he greeted the man with a nod as he saluted. Fitzroy was one of the more useful members of the colony, former military and very obedient. He liked that.

"Sir, Commander Larsson has just sent us a strange message. For some reason, she requested fifty docking bays be allocated to her. She gave her ETA in three hours. I would need special permissions to enable so many bays at once."

Jack blinked at the man in surprise. "Fifty docking bays? What the - what is she thinking? Is this some kind of joke?"

Larsson and her antics were grinding on his nerves, and the last time he had seen her she had had the nerve to ask for his help, to send the fleet to attack Orion's Reach on Astraphos. It would have been a suicide mission. So of course, he had declined. Part of him had hoped she would do something stupid, all on her own. An even smaller part of him was spiteful enough to hope that she would never come back from that trip.