The new Draiken story appears in the Jan/February 2018 ANALOG. Here, the first couple of pages:
Reunited after years of separation, the two old enemies Draiken and Thorne somehow refrain from killing one another and instead take to traveling together.
They are strange companions, neither strangers nor friends, occasional sex partners but not lovers.
The places they need to reach on this quest more important to him than to her, are neither travel hubs or capitols. Direct passage from here to there is often not quite possible. They must journey in segments, some difficult, some expensive, some downright illegal.
While enroute they spend much of their time in starship cargo holds, entombed in their bluegel crypts, fully unaware of the passage of time as their transports plow the twisted topology that interstellar travelers must use instead of straight lines.
By necessity they wake often, as they arrive at one interim port or another, to arrange the next legs of their journey. Some of these ports are once-green worlds now reduced to rancid industrial hells, while others are undeveloped backwaters that the give and take of civilized commerce have passed by. They stay a little while at one before moving on to another, at times treating these intervals as vacations, but more frequently taking them as maddening delays as they follow a circuitous route to one world, in particular.
Their adventures are numerous, their close calls profound. Books could be written about their more minor exploits.
Once upon a time they worked for different sides in a war where the allegiances kept changing, where momentary power shifts either rendered them precarious allies or required them to once again regard one another as targets. Now that circumstances have temporarily positioned them as allies again, they continue to stumble, often clumsily, between one state and the next. Draiken begins no day knowing for sure whether Thorne will be silent or voluble, cheerful or withdrawn to the point of hostility; whether she’ll pull him into her bed, or attempt to slit his throat. She does all these things, and yet somehow they survive: two intimate strangers, traveling together as man and wife, but living as feral dogs in a common cage.
More than once, during the peaceful interludes, she lies with her cheek against his chest. In one cover identity he has thick chest hair, which she explores with a fingertip, whispering that there are any number of congenial worlds that exist under bright and life-giving suns. There are places with blue water and warm breezes where the two of them could call themselves any name they choose and live in peace while waiting for the final darkness to take them. In such places, she says, they could pretend that the wars they’d known had never been fought, that the scars they’ve inflicted on one another have never been wounds spilling blood.
He reminds her that he’s tried this once on a world as beautiful as any. It didn’t work then. Even with nobody hunting him, he’d still lived with the furtiveness of any fugitive.
She points out that she hadn’t been with him then. Maybe, she supposes, if she ever followed him to a place like that, they could find shared peace in the fiction that none of the trespasses between them ever took place.
Maybe, he allows back. It would be nice.
The premise is dropped without resolution.
On multiple occasions she tries to kill him. On two of those, he needs to do her injury in order to protect himself. On the third, she inflicts what would be a mortal wound, but recoils at what she’s done and drags him to an AIsource Medical kiosk for emergency surgery.
Once, during weeks they spend aboard a slow-moving luxury transport, he wakes paralyzed, the victim of a neural tap she’s implanted on him during the night. She’s stripped and spread-eagled him, leaving him to stare face-up at a ceiling defined by horizontal support beams. She stretches out alongside him, the curves of her current body glowing in the overhead light, as she presses the tip of a dagger against the softest part of his throat. “You would be dead,” she assures him in a whisper as soft as the sound of leaves fluttering in breeze, “before it even began to occur to you that you were dying.” She draws the sharp edge across his skin, teasing the thin line between the natural resistance of the meat and the superior slicing capacity of the blade, not cutting but exploring the very border of his flesh giving way. Although he knows as well as she does just how long it would take a deep slash in any particular place to kill him, had in fact had the information drilled into him long before carrying out his first field operation, she amuses herself, for a while, telling him how his death would play out, were she to apply just a bit more pressure in any given place; less than twelve seconds here, a leisurely four minutes there, hours or days of helpless agony in this other place. She points out that, paralyzed as he is, he would not be able to address his wounds or cry for help, any more than he can talk her out of his murder now.
He can only wait and experience this as it happens, his mind finding occasional comfort in thoughts of that other, far gentler woman on Greeve. Aletha had offered him an alternative to resuming the madness of his old existence. She’d been willing to take him into her life, and to save him, as long as he returned the favor and also saved her. As he endures the insult of Thorne’s blade, he can only wonder whatever happened to that far gentler soul, whether she’d ever found anyone worthier of her than he had turned out to be. Or had he been her last chance of peace, just as she’d been his?
For the rest, check out the Jan/February 2018 ANALOG.