Operation Artemis (The Drift Nova Force #4) - Susan Hayes Page 0,1

can’t promise it will go the way you hope, but honesty is always the best policy. You always want to base your relationships on the truth.”

He dropped his head and the tips of his ears darkened slightly. “It’s not really a relationship yet.”

She laughed and rose from her chair. “You stepped up and protected your girl from some jerks giving her a hard time, and you got arrested for it. You might not think it’s a relationship, but Irani could have a very different opinion on that. You should ask her.”

“I… okay. I will. Thank you, ma’am.”

It took her another half an hour to arrange for her newest client to be released back to barracks and start rattling a few cages about the piss-poor quality of the report she’d been given. She threw in a few pointed remarks about a biased investigation and the comments made to Reddy. By the time she was done, Bobbi was hopeful that Reddy would soon be a free man.

She checked the time. Interviewing Irani and any other witnesses she could find would have to wait until tomorrow. It was late evening now, and while that was an arbitrary distinction on a space station that ran twenty-four hours a day, her day was nearly done. It was time to go home, eat, and crawl into bed for a few hours. And a few hours was all she’d get. When Colonel Archer had asked her to take on a secret assignment trying to ferret out the mole in the IAF ranks, she’d been prepared for challenges. What she hadn’t considered was that working two jobs meant eating and sleeping became luxuries that didn’t fit well into her new schedule.

When this was done, she was booking a week-long stay on Plasia IV and doing nothing for the first three days but lying in bed and eating ice cream.

Kurt didn’t want to be in the gym this late. Hell, he’d rather not be there at all, but it was a necessity. If he didn’t work off his excess energy safely, he ran the risk of letting his temper get the better of him. He’d worked too long and far too hard to let that happen. So, the more stress he was under, the harder he worked out. Usually, that wasn’t a problem. Lately, though, he’d spent more of his downtime in the gym than anywhere else, including his bed. The problem wasn’t that their new assignment was on a tight deadline with high stakes. He was used to that. It was why he’d signed on with Nova Force in the first place.

He counted out another set of push-ups and then rested while the computer automatically turned up the gravity for his next set. No, the pressure wasn’t what kept getting to him but the fact they were investigating people he knew. Every one of the suspected moles were IAF personnel. Some of them had been to his commander’s wedding for fraxx sakes. The whole team was on edge, all of them bracing for the moment they learned which of their friends and fellow soldiers had betrayed them to the Gray Men, so named because they were a nameless, faceless cabal that hid in the shadows. Some of their number had created the cyborg project. Others had concocted pharmaceuticals designed to alter the minds and bodies of their employees. They were believed to be behind everything from assassinations to black site research labs where cyborgs were experimented on long after they were supposed to have been freed. Their spies were everywhere. No one knew what their endgame was. The stakes were high, the death toll rising, and everyone on Kurt’s team knew they were running out of time.

That was his team’s focus. Kurt had been assigned a secondary task. There was another list of possible suspects—one that most of the team didn’t know about. Only two names were on it: Lieutenant Commander Roberta Castille and Colonel Scott Archer. Castille was a mystery. Archer was the highest-ranking officer in the sector. Kurt’s job was to eliminate them as suspects, and so far, he hadn’t been able to.

Both of them had read the mission file that had been leaked to the Gray Men. The colonel had given Roberta access to that information, which made no sense given she was JAG. Her duties barely intersected with Nova Force’s at all. Then there were Bobbi’s family ties. During an earlier mission they’d learned that a Dr. Oran Castille had been working for his