Chapter 892: Dinner And Talks About The Corridor [Bonus - ]

Chapter 892: Dinner And Talks About The Corridor [Bonus Chapter]

Maya dropped every scrap of stone shell she had left, letting it crumble off her body and fall around her feet, and she poured everything into one last strike, every ounce of mana left in her Core driven down through her legs and into the earth.

’Heart of the Mountain!’

GROOOOOOM!

The entire training ground heaved as a huge fist of solid red rock, ten feet across, tore up out of the earth directly beneath Aki’s feet and shot toward the sky, launching a whole pillar of earth upward like a geyser.

Aki crouched on top of the rising pillar and rode it as it climbed twenty, thirty, forty feet into the air, and at the very peak, she leaped off and flipped once in midair high above the floodlights, with her blue hair streaming and the starlight blade blazing in her hand like a falling star as she dropped back down toward the training ground.

Maya looked up and saw her falling out of the night sky, and she raised her hands only to realize there was nothing left in them.

THUD!

Aki’s shoes hit the red earth one pace in front of her and the tip of the starlight blade came to rest half an inch from the hollow of Maya’s throat, perfectly still and humming softly, while the pillar of stone behind them groaned and cracked and crumbled back into the earth in a long rolling rumble that left the whole training ground silent.

Maya stood frozen with her chest heaving with her hair plastered to her face with sweat and her arms hanging empty at her sides, staring down at the glowing point under her chin before she finally looked up at Aki’s face.

Aki was smiling at her, and there was no mockery or cruelty in her eyes at all, only a warm sincere respect.

“You weren’t too slow,” Aki said softly. “Not at the end, anyway… That last one almost got me, Lieutenant. I mean it.”

’Though I know you were still holding back of course…’

Maya stared at her, and then, against every ounce of military discipline drilled into her since she was sixteen, a crooked breathless laugh broke out of her throat.

“Almost,” she wheezed. “Almost isn’t good enough, Your Highness, and you know it…”

“No, it isn’t,” Aki agreed, and let the starlight sword dissolve into drifting silver motes. “But it was really, really close.”

Maya took one step back, straightened her spine as best she could and slammed her fist across her chest so hard it echoed.

THUD!

“I yield,” she said, her voice ringing out across the training ground, loud and clear and proud. “And I’m honored, Your Highness.”

For one more second, nobody moved, and then the training ground erupted.

The soldiers roared, stamping their boots and pounding their fists against their chests and whistling from the stands, and the cheering rolled out across the whole base until soldiers from the motor pools and barracks came running over to see what was happening.

A huge sergeant at the front of the crowd was bellowing “PRINCESS! PRINCESS! PRINCESS!” at the top of his lungs, and within seconds, half the training ground had picked it up.

Aki turned pink and looked over toward Kara, completely flustered by the noise.

Kara was standing at the edge of the ring with her arm resting on the railing and the beetle pin in her fingers, smiling at her with a quiet glowing pride that made Aki’s heart skip.

Leona stepped forward with her arms still folded, gave Maya a long look and then turned to Aki.

“Referee calls it for the princess,” she said dryly. “And just for the record, Lieutenant, you were too slow.”

“Leona, I swear to God…” Maya groaned, dragging a hand down her filthy face. “Can you let me have one moment? Just one?”

She was smiling when she said it, though, and when the soldiers swarmed into the ring a moment later to slap her on the back and shout over each other, she pushed her way through them straight to Aki and held out her hand.

Aki took it, and Maya’s grip was rough and calloused and very firm, and she held on a moment longer than she needed to, looking Aki straight in the eye.

“Teach me how you saw that last one coming,” she said quietly, under the noise. “Not now, I know you’ve got enough on your plate… but someday… Please.”

Aki blinked at her, then smiled.

“Only if you teach me how you made the ground do that,” she said. “That dome was the scariest thing anyone’s done to me in weeks, and I’ve been to a World Council summit…”

Maya laughed again and the sound carried.

“Very brave of you, Lieutenant, I’ll give you that,” Leona added from behind them. “Very loud too… Mostly loud, if I’m being honest.”

Lara leaned over to Kara, licked the last of the sauce off her fingers and smiled slowly.

“The little thing won,” she purred, her jade eyes glittering. “Which means I win too… Now tell me what you sleep in, handsome.”

“No,” Kara said, without even looking at her, tucking the beetle pin carefully into her pocket.

“But you promised,” Lara said, sounding genuinely wounded, which was impressive for a woman who’d eaten four fish and a skewer in the last six hours.

“I never promised anything, Lara,” Kara said patiently. “You made a bet with yourself, out loud, while standing next to me. That’s not the same thing at all…”

“And I won it,” Lara said, deeply and completely pleased with herself, as if that settled the matter forever. “So I’ll just have to find out on my own, then. I’m very very good at finding things…”

’That’s a problem for future me,’ Kara decided. ’Future me can deal with it… Future me is very capable of handling horny women.’

It would be an issue if Future him was horny, what if he actually gave into her nagging?

At the edge of the crowd, a path was opening as the soldiers stopped cheering one by one and snapped to attention, and a tall figure in a dark olive coat walked through them toward the center of the training ground with her raven-black ponytail swinging and her boots crunching across the torn red earth.

She looked tired, and her phone was still buzzing faintly in her pocket, but her feline eyes were sharp and bright as they swept across the crumbling stone, the split dome and her exhausted little sister standing in the middle of it all.

Da Silva looked at Maya, then at Aki, then slowly back at the wreckage, and something like a smile tugged at the corner of her scarred mouth.

“I leave you alone for one day,” she said. “One day, and I come back to craters…”

“She asked for it!” Aki said quickly, pointing at Maya with both hands as if that explained the craters, the split dome and the crumbling pillar of stone behind her.

“I did ask for it, High Marshal,” Maya admitted, straightening up as best she could, though her knees were visibly shaking. “In front of everyone. Very loudly…”

“I know,” Da Silva said dryly. “I heard you asking from the other side of the base, through two concrete walls and a parliament briefing.”

She looked her little sister up and down, taking in the sweat, the dirt and the cracked armor, and her voice softened just slightly. “You fought well, Maya. I saw the end of it…”

Maya’s eyes went wide, and her cheeks colored faintly under the dirt then Da Silva’s eyes found Kara at the edge of the ring, and her smile faded into something more serious.

“Dinner,” she said. “Tonight. The four of you, and Lara too, if she can be trusted at a table without eating it.”

She held Kara’s gaze steadily.

“We need to talk about the Corridor.”

…

The High Marshal’s quarters sat at the very tip of the Rio Negro Garrison, on the end of the peninsula where the land ran out and the river opened wide on three sides, and it was smaller than Aki had expected.

There was no palace and no gilded hall, only a long low building of dark stone and timber with wide glass doors that opened onto a covered terrace hanging out over the water.

The walls inside were lined with maps, old campaign flags and a rack of well-worn sabers, the furniture was heavy and plain and comfortable, and the only decorations were a few framed photographs of soldiers, most of them young and grinning, and a single huge fang from a river leviathan mounted over the fireplace.

…It looked like the home of someone who spent very little time at home.

Dinner was laid out on a long wooden table on the terrace under strings of warm yellow lights, with the dark river glittering below and the distant towers of Nova Manaus glowing across the water like a field of fallen stars.

There was grilled tambaqui fish stuffed with herbs, black beans simmered with smoked meat, fried cassava, bowls of rice, fresh mango and passion fruit, and a heavy clay jug of something cold and sweet.

Lara looked at the table, and her jade eyes lit up.

“I like this house,” she announced, and sat down before anyone else could.

Da Silva sat at the head of the table in a plain dark shirt with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and her ponytail loose, out of her uniform for the first time since they’d met her, and she looked younger without it, and more tired.

Maya sat stiffly beside her, freshly showered, with a bandage on one forearm and her shoulders still sore from the spar, while Leona leaned back in her chair at the far end with a glass in her hand and her usual dry watchful expression.

Aki sat beside Kara with the little beetle pin back on her collar, and Lara sat on Kara’s other side, close enough that her bare shoulder brushed Kara’s arm every time she reached for more fish, which was a great deal.

For a while, they just ate, and to Aki’s surprise, the conversation drifted easily and warmly over the food.

Maya told the story of the raid with her hands flying, getting louder and louder until Leona dryly corrected every second detail, and Da Silva told them about the old riverbank cities before the monsters came, also about the year she’d turned fourteen and wrestled one of Lara’s caimans on a dare and lost two teeth.

Lara added, without looking up from her plate, that the caiman had won, and Da Silva threw a piece of cassava at her.

Aki laughed until her stomach hurt.

…Even Leona smiled once behind her glass, then pretended very convincingly that she hadn’t, and Lara simply kept eating through all of it.

Then the plates were cleared away and a fresh jug was set on the table, and Da Silva leaned forward with her forearms on the wood and her fingers laced together as the warmth in her face shifted into something sharper.

Kara recognized that look, since it was the same one she’d worn sitting across from Aki in the Citadel, right before Aki had taken her apart.

“Let’s talk about the Corridor, then,” Da Silva said.

“Of course, Valeria,” Aki said pleasantly, folding her hands in her lap. “Whenever you’re ready…”

“The convoy leaves at dawn,” Da Silva said. “Four hundred heavy machines, two hundred freighters, twelve hundred engineers and workers and three battalions of my soldiers to guard them, every piece of it paid for out of Amazonian accounts, as agreed.”

She paused.

“At cost…”

“As agreed,” Aki said with a little nod.

“And in return, Amazon receives ten percent of the extraction yield,” Da Silva went on, watching her closely.

“As agreed,” Aki said again, with the same calm sweet smile, as if they were discussing the weather and not the richest stretch of void-iron on the planet.

Da Silva’s jaw shifted.

“Aki,” she said carefully, “the situation’s changed since we made that agreement… Columbia’s been running a poaching operation in my country under my nose for two months, and if they were willing to do that, they’ll be willing to sabotage the extraction in the north too… Borealis is still furious about losing the Corridor, and Volkov’s patrols have been shadowing our border for three weeks.”

She spread her hands on the table. “I’m sending my soldiers into a region surrounded by hostile powers, at my own expense, for ten percent… The risk has doubled, and I’m asking for the yield to reflect that.”

Maya looked down at her plate very carefully, while Leona sipped her drink and watched Aki over the rim of her glass with open interest. Kara leaned back in her chair, folded her arm behind her head and settled in to enjoy herself.

Aki tilted her head.

“How much do you want, Valeria?”

“Twenty-five percent,” Da Silva said.

The table went quiet, and Aki looked at her with wide, soft, troubled blue eyes.

“Twenty-five…?” she said, her voice small and sad. “Valeria… that’s so much. Blessed Land would lose a quarter of everything, and Kara’s people would have to cut their own budgets to make up for it…”

“I understand that,” Da Silva said, and her voice gentled the way it always did with Aki. “But my soldiers…”

“No, you’re right,” Aki said quickly, nodding. “You’re absolutely right. Your soldiers are taking all the risk, and you’ve already lost so much to the Columbians…” She sighed softly, then brightened as if an idea had just occurred to her.

“Oh! Speaking of the Columbians… Kara, do you still have Gary’s bag?”

Kara smiled slowly and held out her hand, and the Inventory opened and dropped a small black tactical bag onto the table.

THUMP!

Da Silva looked at it, and her eyes narrowed. “And what exactly is that?”

“The data drives from the command module,” Aki said innocently. “Gary was stuffing them into this bag when Kara found him. I haven’t looked at them yet, but I’d imagine they’ve got everything on them… their routes, their contacts, the eleven beasts they already shipped out and where they went, the buyer across the ocean…”

She paused thoughtfully. “Probably the name of whoever in Columbia signed off on it, too and how much they were paid for it.”

The terrace went completely silent.