“I’ll give you this much, you make a much better teacher than you do a mentor.”
After I spoke those words, Deveron looked up from the desk he was sitting at while raising an eyebrow. “I think I’ll take that as a compliment, even if that is a very low bar.” His face twisted into a slight grimace then before he added, “It’s vaguely possible that I should have gone a different route when it came to finding a way to avoid letting anyone at Crossroads know who I really was and what I was doing there.” He paused briefly to consider. “Then again, I do make a rather compelling lazy asshole.”
“Like you were born for the job,” I shot back with a grin.
It had been a couple of weeks since the arrival of the Olympus, and things had once more settled into something of a routine. At least, as much as a routine as they ever really got in this life. Puriel and the others were… well, not exactly settling in yet, but working on it. It was going to take a lot for most of the people around here to be at all comfortable with the man who had been Zeus being on the station, and probably even longer for him to be comfortable being around the rest of us. He was mostly keeping to himself, in the private apartments that he had been given to stay in. According to Tabbris, Sariel was spending a lot of time in there too, the two of them talking about… stuff. We weren’t sure exactly what was going on there, only that she was one of the few people he saw regularly beyond that Aletheia lady, Spark, the newly-dubbed Jehoel (formerly Omni), the rest of the Seosten children, and his own daughter, Theia.
And my grandparents. I couldn’t forget about that. Any time that they didn’t spend with my dad and the rest of our family, they were with Puriel. Apparently they had gotten pretty close over the time that they had been out there, which was just another layer of crazy for me. My grandparents were best friends with Hercules and pretty close to Zeus. I just–what was my life?
As those thoughts worked their way through my mind, Deveron spoke up. “So you think I’m doing a passable job at this gig, huh? Better than the guy back at Crossroads?” His words were clearly teasing, and he was already rising from the desk while shuffling some papers together.
I pretended to consider for a moment. “Well, the last guy was Sands’ and Sarah’s dad, sooo I’d say you’ve got a few legs up on him as far as personality goes. Don’t get me wrong, he was a pretty good English Lit teacher, really got us into some cool books. But there’s something about the way he completely betrayed you and my mom, and turned the whole rebellion into an open war that ended up killing probably thousands of people that just… I dunno, rubs me the wrong way. Maybe I’m overly-sensitive.”
Snorting audibly, Deveron shook his head. I saw a brief flash of the genuine anger he felt toward his old friend cross his face before he smothered it. “Yeah, I think he rubs me the wrong way too.” With that, he finished gathering those papers and gestured. “Your mom wanted me to make sure you eat something before we do this thing tonight. And you know she’ll ask, so let’s go. How’s your stomach? You nervous?”
Shaking my head, I walked with him out of the classroom. “I mean, yes and no. If we’re lucky, we’re actually gonna find Senny’s dad, maybe even Gordon’s. That’s huge. And, you know, it’s dangerous, especially if we can’t get out of there before that Kyril Shamon guy shows up. Then it’ll get really bad. But I think we can do it. I think we can jump in there, deal with the guards, and get out with the prisoners. We’ve been doing that sort of thing all year, saving Alters from Loyalists. This is just… on one of their home turfs. But they have no idea we’re coming, and–” I cut myself off, grimacing. “Yeah, I keep going back and forth. But we’re ready for it. We planned it out, we’ve got the numbers, we’ve got–we’ve got this.”
Deveron watched me briefly as we walked down the corridor, passing several other groups of people. He hesitated, clearly considering his next words before carefully asking, “Do you feel bad that your mother’s not going to be there after all?”
Yeah, that was a thing. We had originally planned on Mom being part of this whole rescue. But a couple of days ago, a handful of very injured Alters had arrived and begged for her help. Their little haven in South America (Peru, specifically) was under assault by a group of Loyalist Eden’s Garden people, who were staging repeated attacks to weaken their defenses. Apparently some of the people there were old friends of Mom’s, people who had helped her back during the first war. She couldn’t abandon them. So she and Lillian Patters, Rebecca’s grandmother/Mom’s old roommate and best friend, had gone down there with a few others to help. Including Dare, who managed to get herself invited to help somehow without actually risking explaining just why she cared so much.
In any case, Mom had hoped to have it taken care of by now, but it was taking too long. So she had asked Deveron to accompany us instead. Which really told me a lot about how much she trusted him, as if I didn’t already know. More to the point, I think it said a lot about how much she trusted me that she didn’t try to insist that I sit it out.
It made sense, of course. I had been doing this stuff for quite a while before Mom was ever freed. Still, it meant a lot that she didn’t try to push the issue or protect me from everything. She trusted me to handle myself. Well, with Deveron for help, but still. I just hoped I was up to earning that trust. Which was probably a big part of why my confidence for this whole trip kept fluctuating. Was it weird that kept I thinking about how I didn’t want to disappoint my mother while going on this mission to literally save a bunch of slaves, including Senny’s dad? Just… strange priorities.
Still, I hesitated only for a moment before shrugging. “Probably not as bad as she feels about not being there. But she’s doing important stuff too. It’s a umm, a big world, you know? Hell, where we’re going isn’t even on this world. I just mean, there’s a lot of people to take care of. Mom… they depend on her. Now that she’s back, she’s got a lot of… responsibilities.” Biting my lip briefly, I added, “All these people care about her too. And they need her.”
Deveron’s hand settled on my shoulder, stopping me from walking. He met my gaze and gave a short nod. “You’re right, they do. That’s something I had to get used to a long time ago too. Sharing someone you love, someone as special as your mom, with the rest of the world isn’t the easiest thing. It hurts sometimes, and whenever you feel bad about it, that makes it worse. As if… as if you’re doing something wrong by being jealous, even if you don’t act on it. Even if you shove it down deep and try to ignore it. Even if it’s just a tiny little flicker of a feeling, you still feel like you did something wrong. Like you’re a horrible person for wanting her to be with you.”
Taking a breath before letting it out, I put my own hand over his on my shoulder. “I guess that’s just the way it goes when you have someone as special as Mom. You have to share her. Other people need her too. I…” My throat closed up briefly before I swallowed hard. “I want to make her proud. I want her to know that she can leave us alone to take care of this other stuff and focus on the things she needs to do.”
Deveron offered me a faint smile at that, his hand squeezing firmly. “Yeah. Well, then we’ll just have to do a good job with this thing. And like I said, part of that involves making sure you fuel up.” He pointed toward the nearby cafeteria. “So let’s get on with that.
“Then we can meet up with everyone else, and get this show on the road.”
*****
So, I ate food. It was pretty great, or at least I assumed it was. I wasn’t really tasting much of it. I needed it, but it was mostly just fifteen minutes of mechanical chewing and swallowing while my mind went over everything that we still needed to do, everything that we had planned. This wasn’t a fly-by-night operation by any means. Thanks to Childs and Fu Hao, we had the general layout of the camp we would be attacking. It wasn’t perfect, as there were parts they didn’t know about or didn’t have the full details of, and they couldn’t tell us the entire guard compliment or… certain other things. But it was something to work off of. We had that, and had spent these past couple weeks developing an actual plan beyond just ‘charge and pray.’ Sure, in the end, our overall goals were ‘run in, grab the prisoners, and get out again before the Victor comes to play,’ but we’d still put some more actual thought into it than that.
That was another reason for Deveron to come along. We had made this plan thinking that Mom would be there, so he had to take her place. We needed someone the people there would recognize as a major figure in the old rebellion. And while Deveron wasn’t the huge leader that my mother was, he had definitely been prominent. After all, he was part of her original team and had been around from the very start. Anyone who knew the Rebellion knew that about Deveron. Well, now that the spell that had removed his identity from their minds had been undone by the spell that Gaia and I had done that brought back everyone’s memories of all that. I hadn’t been sure how that all worked, but according to Deveron himself, everyone else immediately remembered who he was and what he looked like as soon as we had done that. Just one of those side effects, apparently. Not that he minded, of course. By then, there had really been no point to keeping his true identity secret.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
So, Deveron was known, and we could use that to draw the attention of the guards out there. They would immediately recognize him and react. Which would give the rest of us a chance to get in there, deal with whatever guards were still left with the prisoners, and hopefully set things up to escape.
Of course, we weren’t leaving Deveron alone to face everything he would be calling down on himself by playing distraction. Nor would he be the only distraction. Professors Tangle and Kohaku, along with Klassin Roe were going to be there too. And while Lillian wasn’t here, their other three teammates were. The cousins, Seamus and Roger Dornan, would be with Deveron while Tribald Kine came along with our group.
Our group, which, beyond Tribald, consisted of myself, Shiori, Columbus, Avalon, Sarah, Sands, Jazz, Douglas, Gordon, Asenath, Twister, and Bobbi. Oh and Senny’s mother, Jiao. She was going along too, since she had something of a vested interest in rescuing her husband. Yeah, that obviously seemed like a lot of people. But we had no idea how much trouble we were going to run into there. And beyond that, there was the fact that the more people we had to get the prisoners together and ready to transport, the better. We needed to deal with guards in the way, take out any transport spell-blocking effects they had (and we knew there were some), and get the prisoners ready to go.
So that was why we had so many going. Everyone in our group had their own jobs to do once we got past the initial push through whatever guards weren’t distracted by Deveron, Tangle, Kohaku, Roe, and the Dornans. Even if we were hoping the actual rescue part of this mission would be a quick in-and-out, it still required a lot of preparation and moving parts. And there were contingency plans just in case various things went wrong.
Besides, before we could do the actual rescue part of the mission, we had to actually get to the prison. And that was… well, that was going to take awhile.
In any case, we had drilled our way through the rescue part a few times and were… well, not exactly totally confident, but about as good as we could be. Things weren’t going to get any better, and if we waited much longer, Shamon might end up moving Tiras. Or Gordon’s father, if he was there. Besides, this was when that transport was supposed to be going there, and using the transport was incredibly important to our plans. No way did we want to wait to find another one. So even without Mom, even without having everything be perfect or having another week to run through drills, this was our time. We had to do it today. Or at least start it. The trip out to this colony world would take more than one day. We were going to have to hit the transport, get ourselves onboard, then settle in for a long journey. Yeah, we could have gotten there faster, but the transport the people there were expecting couldn’t (at least, not without expending a lot more power than they tended to), and we couldn’t give ourselves away that quickly. At least at first, we needed these prison people to think everything was totally normal. All their sensors and spells would tell them the transport was coming, and they had to think it was business as usual.
But first, we had to get the actual transport without letting them get a call off to warn anyone. This whole thing would completely fall apart if the people in the prison had any idea what was going on, or that anything was wrong. This first part might not have been as dangerous as the prison rescue itself, but we could still end up losing everything if we weren’t careful.
“You nervous?” Jazz asked me, interrupting my thoughts as we were all milling around the portal room waiting to make the trip to intercept the supply transport. Everyone was talking in pairs or small groups, anxiousness showing even as we tried to distract one another and avoid dwelling too much on the what-ifs.
“Me, nervous?” I tried to inject my voice with a casual air before coughing. “Yeah, I’d say I’m pretty nervous. How about you?”
“Utterly fucking terrified,” Jazz cheerfully informed me. “Which is kind of weird, cuz we’ve done this sort of thing before, you know?”
“Not like this,” I pointed out. “Raiding the private slave prison of one of the Eden’s Garden Victors on another colony world is a little different than a quick little in and out assault to protect some Alters somewhere here on Earth.”
“Plus you’re nervous about helping Asenath’s dad,” Jazz pointed out before blanching a little. “Just like I’m nervous about finally finding Gordon’s.”
I nodded in agreement. “That too. I know how long Senny and Jiao have been trying to find him. I mean, I lost my mom around the same age they lost him, and I got her back like ten years later. Tiras has been missing for over two hundred years. They deserve to get him back, you know? Plus, like you said, Gordon needs his dad too. So this whole thing is super-important. To them, to Shiori, to me, to… everyone. But it’s also dangerous. There’s a lot that could go wrong.”
“Sure is,” the other girl agreed. “But that’s part of why your little sister isn’t coming with us on the trip, isn’t it?”
Yeah, Tabbris wasn’t going to be along for the ride. Not exactly. She was staying back here so that if anything went wrong, and our communications were cut off, she could still reach me and let the people back here know they needed to mount (another) rescue. It was one of our contingency plans. There had to be several of them because, well, again, a Victor’s prison colony on another planet. A hell of a lot of things could go wrong. We were trying to stay ahead of at least all the possibilities we could think of. It was impossible to plan for everything, but we were doing our best.
“Sure,” I confirmed. “She… didn’t like the idea at first, but you know, it’s important. I think she thought we were just trying to keep her out of danger at first. But she understands. Besides, she deserves the chance to spend more time with her family. With the rest of her family,” I amended quietly. It had only been a couple weeks since Tabbris got her siblings back, after all. They needed to be together, that whole family. Bringing her along on this trip, which would take at least a week each direction, wouldn’t be fair. And I knew Tabbris felt torn between wanting to help me and not wanting to be away from her new siblings for that long. So, the whole ‘stay here and be ready to call in the cavalry if we need you’ was a good, valid reason to stop her from agonizing over making that decision.
Besides, if I really needed her, she could always jump to me.
Meanwhile, Persephone was staying back here too. She and the other Olympians around the station were working on a whole thing that had to do with the Seosten ghosts, their old crewmates. She had offered to come along, but I thought it was better that she spend time with them. She had spent so long not really being accepted by the crew of the Olympus that this chance to actually work with them was… it was important. Besides, I wanted her to know that she could be her own person with her own life, her own friends, her own… everything. She didn’t have to always be helping me or doing what I wanted her to do.
By that point, Gordon had stepped over to join us. As always, the black boy’s face was serious and collected. But I had known the boy long enough that I could see through that. He was nervous, his eyes flicking around occasionally, while his mouth was pressed tight to stop himself from biting his lip. It was clearly all he could do to keep up appearances. And who could blame him? This was his dad we were talking about. Yeah, there was no guarantee that he was actually there, but this was undoubtedly the closest Gordon had ever gotten to finding him.
Still, when he spoke, the boy managed to keep his voice about as flat as ever. “It’s almost time.”
Meeting his gaze, I tentatively asked, “Think we’re ready for this?”
He gave a single, short nod. “As ready as we’ll ever be without taking more time than we actually have.” There was a brief pause before he added, “Half of me wishes we had more time and the other half wishes it was over already.”
I very nearly put a hand on his shoulder, but stopped myself. Gordon didn’t like to be touched. So, instead I simply replied, “Yeah, don’t worry, I know what you mean. But no matter what happens with this, you’re gonna be closer to getting your dad back. Either he’ll be there, or someone there will know more about where he is. Even if we have to tear that whole place apart and ransack the brains of everyone there, we’ll find him.”
Gordon looked at me in contemplative silence for a moment before replying, “I know you’re being encouraging. Thank you. But you know as well as I do that we don’t have a lot of time there. We need to get in and out before reinforcements show up. We don’t have the firepower to deal with the Victor himself.”
“Yeah, we’ll have to work fast,” I agreed. “But we can do that. We’ve got the people, we’ve got surprise on our side, and we’re ready.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Professor Kohaku announced from behind me as she and Klassin Roe approached.
Her voice made everyone else look over and quiet down as well. Avalon came up to one side of me, and I could see Shiori meet my gaze from where she was standing next to Asenath, Bobbi, and the ghost of Seth. Yeah, he wasn’t going to be left out of this.
“It’s time?” Gordon asked, his own voice filling the silence that had briefly settled over the room.
Deveron, joining Kohaku and Klassin, confirmed, “Yeah, it’s time. We’re not gonna get a better chance than this. You all know your parts. You know where we’re going, how we’re hitting that transport, and how we’re gonna make sure they can’t call for help. We’ve been over it, you’re ready.
“So no more planning. No more training. Let’s load up and get out there.”