Severed Bonds

by R S Penney

  The image shifted again, resolving into a closeup of Sheral Tyse staring into the camera. “If…If you say so, Agent Lenai,” she replied in a shaky voice. “But I don't know how long I can keep them without legal authority to hold them.”

  “I'm sure you'll think of something; we'll be there shortly.”

  The hologram winked out.

  Jack was watching her with a quizzical expression, squinting as if she were some specimen he had under a microscope. “You know, there are Keepers on Velezia,” he said. “We could procure a warrant and have one of them search the Brivan.”

  “And take the risk that one of them might be loyal to Slade?” she exclaimed. “Not happening! We go ourselves.”

  Larani sighed.

  When Anna glanced in her direction, the head of the Justice Keepers stood up and shook her head. “Why, I've just had a marvelous idea!” she said. “Agent Hunter, Agent Lenai, you will go to Velezia and search that ship for any information that may lead us to Leo. Normally, I would assign this to a team of local Justice Keepers, but there is always a small chance that they might be loyal to Slade.”

  “Sorry, Larani,” Anna mumbled.

  The other woman wore a fond smile that melted away some of her tension. “Just get going,” Larani said. “I want you on your way within the hour.”

  The pain had faded somewhat.

  Jack noted that for the third time in the last twenty-four hours. His grief over losing Ben was transforming from a sharp knife to the chest to a dull ache that he could push to the back of his mind with a little distraction. A part of him felt guilty about that. Ben had been dead for less than a week. Shouldn't he be more devastated? Regardless, it did make his job easier.

  When he stepped into his office, Jack found Cassi standing in front of his desk with her back turned, tapping something into a tablet and then setting it down for him. “I just received the update,” she said without looking. Of course, she didn't have to look. Spatial awareness would tell her that he was here if her ears didn't. “So, Lenai found the ship that brought Leo here. Will you be going after it?”

  His mouth opened slightly, but then he shut his eyes and shook his head. “You and I haven't exactly had a chance to talk,” he said. “I'm sorry; I should have told you what was going on between me and Anna.”

  Cassi turned to lean against his desk with legs crossed at the ankle, smiling at him. “Did I say I wanted to sit down and discuss you and Lenai?” she asked. “You're in love with her; she's in love with you, and we have work to do.”

  Jack shut his eyes, breathing deeply as he tried to calm himself. “Yeah, but I was a real jerk to you,” he said, moving deeper into the office. “Cassi…I used you to deal with my pain, and then I just-”

  Her laughter cut him off.

  When he found the courage to look, she was standing there with a hand on her belly, her head thrown back as she tittered. “You used me?” she said. “Just who do you think I am, Jack? Some child?”

  “Well, no-”

  “I seem to recall a certain amount of reluctance on your part, and I persuaded you to sleep with me.”

  Jack shoved his hands into his pants' pockets and strode toward her with his head down. “That's true,” he said, nodding to her. “But I knew what I was doing when I did it; I knew that I didn't love you.”

  Her violet eyes were like the surface of a frozen lake: cold, still and treacherous. A traveler who didn't watch what he was doing might slip beneath the surface to his doom. “Does that matter to you?” she asked. “Is that why you kept me at arm's length?”

  “Doesn't it matter to you?”

  “We're Justice Keepers, Jack,” she said. “Love is a luxury we can't afford. We will never have children, and even if we survive all the desperate situations in which a bullet comes within inches of piercing our skulls, our lives will still be cut short. We aren't cut out for love; so those of us with any sense take whatever pleasure we can get wherever we find it. Why would I blame you for that?”

  “How very…pragmatic of you.”

  What else could he say to that? The worst part was knowing that he had reinforced her cynical outlook. Words popped into his mind, protests that it wasn't like that, that she would find a connection with someone. They all seemed hollow in his ears.

  One of the hardest things to do in the face of a problem was nothing at all. Even if you knew that anything you might say or do would only make it worse, there was always the temptation to open your mouth.

  And there was a damn good chance that Cassi really wasn't in that much pain. Taking someone at their word was generally a good idea. Maybe he should just keep his useless opinions to himself. It wasn't his place to tell Cassi how to live her life.

  She held his gaze for a long moment, then broke eye contact. “Do you need help apprehending the ship?”

  “I…” Should he accept? “I think we've got it covered.”

  “Well, then I suppose you should be on your way.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I probably should.”

  Chapter 23

  Anna spread her hands over the SmartGlass console that controlled the shuttle's systems, colorful screens lighting up at her touch. She tapped at drop-down menus and went through her pre-flight check, activating the life-support systems and the artificial gravity. The sense of urgency that gnawed at her was difficult to ignore. If the Brivan left Velezia before they arrived, there would be no tracking it.

  Pressing her lips together, Anna squinted down at the console. Constantly beating yourself isn't going to make you get there any sooner, she thought. Just focus on the job, and hope for the best.

  Funny how those little moments of stoic wisdom never did a damn thing to make you feel any better. In fact, she was pretty damn sure that she felt worse. But she figured it was better than drowning in the anxiety.

  That was not an emotion that Anna felt often; normally she knew exactly what she wanted, and she launched herself at it like an arrow from a bow. But now there was this pressure to demonstrate that Keepers could actually keep the community safe, and in the quiet moments, Anna found herself thinking of the ways in which Soral's mother parroted Dusep's worse arguments. It felt very much as if the reputation of every Keeper was now on her shoulders.

  She sighed.

  When she looked up, the only thing she could see through the shuttle's window was the concrete wall of the docking bay. The engines began to hum as she powered up the gravitational drives.

  Anna swiveled her chair around.

  At the back of the cockpit, Jack and Melissa stood side by side. They were both in black pants and matching t-shirts under armoured vests, though Jack looked tense and Melissa…excited.

  With a cheeky grin, Anna shook her head again. “We'll be on our way shortly,” she said. “Jack, why don't you double check the tactical systems. We don't want to show up to the party without the right accouterments.”

  “Right.”

  He sat down at a console on the starboard side of the cockpit and began tapping away, his expression one of focused concentration. “Particle beams fully charged,” Jack said. “Shield emitters ready.”

  “All right then,” she said. “Let's go.

  Upon turning around, Anna was exposed to the harsh glare of sunlight through the window as a hatch in the shuttle bay's ceiling opened to accommodate their departure. All of her instruments said that they were ready to go.

  Touching the navigational controls with her right hand, she engaged the shuttle's VTOL systems and watched as they began to ascend. They passed through the hatch, and then she had a view of gleaming skyscrapers under a clear blue sky, all dropping away as they climbed higher and higher.

  A few quick taps let her adjust the shuttle's pitch so that its nose was pointed up at the heavens. She saw nothing in the window but an endless expanse of blue, and then she gunned the gravitational drives.

  There was no jolt of inertia; everything inside the shuttle accelerated at a uniform rate. Though the
y were speeding upward at incredible velocity, they may as well have been sitting motionless on the ground for all her body could tell.

  The blue sky began to darken to be replaced with faintly twinkling stars, and then the last of the atmosphere gave way. It took a few minutes, but when they finally broke orbit, the navigational computer beeped to inform her that a warp jump was possible.

  Closing her eyes, Anna inhaled through her nose and then nodded once. “Okay,” she said softly. “Plotting a course for the Velezia system. We'll be gradually accelerating until we clear the solar system, at which point we'll be traveling at 27.5kC.”

  She pressed her palm to the console.

  When they reached FTL speeds, the stars in her window began to clump together, all joining at some impossibly distant point right in front of her. It looked almost like the proverbial tunnel you heard about from people who reported a near-death experience. She wondered if there was symbolism in that. It was going to be a long, uneventful flight that took them to a star system some forty lightyears away.

  Now all she had to do was wait.

  Double doors slid apart, allowing Jack to enter the shuttle's cabin, where he found Melissa sitting at a square table, turned so that he saw her in profile. The young woman was scooping up a spoonful of soup from a plastic container. “How much longer until we get there?”

  Jack closed his eyes, blowing out a breath. “Two more hours,” he said, descending the steps from the cockpit. “Enjoy the quiet while you can. 'Cause I have a feeling things are gonna get tense.”

  He sat down across from her.

  The look Melissa gave him said she was skeptical, and she coupled it with a raised eyebrow. “What makes you say that?” she asked. “From what you guys told me, this all seems pretty routine.”

  “These people work for Slade.”

  “Do we know that?”

  He paused before answering. Damn it, the girl was getting pretty damn clever in her…adolescence. She was already thinking like a Keeper, questioning her assumptions before walking into a situation.

  Jack slouched down with his arms folded, frowning and shaking his head. “Every time we go up against Slade,” he began, “the guy always has some kind of nasty surprise in store for us.”

  “Are we sure it's Slade?”

  Biting his lip, Jack felt deep creases in his brow. “You're thinking maybe Leo just paid off some smuggler to take him to Leyria?” he said. “And where exactly did he get the resources to do that.”

  Melissa paused with the spoon halfway to her open mouth, blinking at him. “I take your point,” she said. “So…New topic. I haven't had a chance to sit down with you since everything happened. How are you?”

  How was he?

  In truth, he had been hoping that this mission would take his mind off of his own emotional state for a little while, but he should have known better. Six hours in a shuttle with nothing to do but sit and talk didn't exactly make for good distractification.

  He was oddly aware of the hum of the engines, a constant reminder that they were hurtling through the universe at over eight billion kilometers per second was…more than a little disconcerting. Or maybe the universe was moving around them. Warp field theory was an odd science. Nothing could move faster than light, but if you could compress the distance between you and your destination…

  “I'm okay.”

  “I know you guys were close,” Melissa said softly.

  A single tear fell over Jack's cheek. He scraped it away with the knuckle of one fist. “Yeah, we were,” he replied. “But the worst part was that things were strained between us when Ben died.”

  “Because he cut ties with the Keepers.”

  “I found out that Leo was loose as soon as I got back from Earth,” Jack explained. “The first person I told was your father. I guess I thought that Ben was out of the game; so, I treated him like a civilian…I didn't tell him, and…”

  It was too hard to prevent himself from crying. He sat forward with his elbows on the table, hiding his face in his hands. “I'm sorry,” Jack whimpered. “God damn it; it's all my fault.”

  With a gaping mouth, Melissa stared at him for a very long while, then shook her head slowly. “You can't blame yourself for that, Jack.”

  “I can, and I will!”

  She kicked him under the table.

  “Ow!”

  While he was still trying to ignore the fading pain, the cockpit doors slid apart, and Anna appeared at the top of the steps. She came down in one quick hop, flowed around the table and clapped Jack on the shoulder as she passed. “Is he still blaming himself?”

  “Yes,” Melissa answered.

  Anna stood over him with her arms crossed, wearing the kind of stern expression that called him an idiot. “Well, knock it off.” She bent over to kiss him on the cheek. “It wasn't your fault.”

  Melissa's face lit up with pure joy, and then she rose from her chair. “Squeeeeee!” She jumped up and down. “You guys! Why didn't you tell me you were together? Oh, it's about damn time!”

  “Well,” Jack said, “We haven't exactly defined the relationship yet. I didn't want to make any unfounded assump-”

  Without warning, Anna sat in his lap, slipped an arm around the back of his neck and kissed him hard on the lips. It was a good kiss, one that left him a little breathless. When she pulled away, Jack needed a moment to collect himself.

  Anna was smiling at him, her cheeks flushed, her blue eyes sparkling. “So…D'you wanna be my boyfriend?”

  Blushing hard, Jack touched his nose to her forehead. “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, I would love to be your boyfriend.”

  “Oh, this is so good!” Melissa said. “We're having a party. I can't wait to tell my dad; he's gonna be so happy!”

  For a few minutes, Jack was happy; for a few minutes, his guilt wasn't gnawing at him. Of course, once the girls started chitchatting with one another, he was left alone with his thoughts again. His memory of Ben standing on that stage. The horror in Ben's eyes as Leo slit his throat.

  Was it his fault? Should he have warned Ben sooner?

  The decision to not say anything had seemed so inconsequential at the time. Did it really lead to his friend's death? Or was he only concocting this narrative because his last interaction with Ben had been a fight about this very subject? Ben did know that Leo was loose when he went to give that talk, and he went anyway.

  Why didn't I tell him?

  Well, the answer was simple. In walking away from the Keepers, Ben had become a civilian. Jack wasn't a stickler for rules – he had told Ben the details of his confrontation with Leo – but there didn't seem to be any pressing need to say anything sooner.

  At the time, he didn't even think that Leo was aware of Ben's existence. They had only crossed paths once, and only for a few seconds. Surely Jack and Harry were the ones who had to worry about Leo's wrath.

  Summer was sad for him and more than a little peeved. If he knew his Nassai at all, it was a good bet that she also wanted him to stop blaming himself. Maybe she was right. But guilt wasn't a rational thing.

  He'd just have to work through it.

  In the cockpit window, Anna saw nothing but a very distant point of light that never seemed to get any closer no matter how long they traveled. It was a strange quirk of FTL travel; the stars didn't streak past as some Earth movies would suggest. Instead, all of the light your ship passed through seemed to coalesce in front of your warp field. Anna didn't really understand the physics there.

  Technically, they weren't moving at all. Nothing could exceed the speed of light; the shuttle was actually moving at sub-light speeds while the fabric of space itself bent around it. “We're almost there.”

  She turned around.

  Jack was at the console on the starboard side of the cockpit, a look of concentration on his face. “We should drop out of warp briefly before entering the system,” he replied. “Check in with the Velezian Docking Authority.”

  “I contacted them a
n hour ago,” Anna said. “So, far they've managed to keep the Brivan docked by insisting on a safety inspection of the fusion reactor. Lieutenant Tyse was able to doctor their scans of the ship just enough to indicate an energy spike outside of the recommended safety tolerances, but the captain is getting antsy.”

  Melissa was leaning against the bulkhead with her hands folded over her stomach, staring thoughtfully out the window. “So, how does this play out?” she asked. “What do we do when we get there?”

  Sitting forward with her hands on her knees, Anna cocked her head to one side. “If we're lucky, it'll go smoothly,” she replied in a tight voice. “Best case scenario: we meet the Brivan's captain, present a warrant to search his ship and download the data.”

  “And worse case scenario?”

  “Someone tries to shoot us.”

  “Fun.”

  A soft trilling noise from the computer warned her that they would be entering the solar system in just under one minute. The closer they got to a star, the more its gravity disrupted the shuttle's ability to warp space-time. Even at this distance, they could barely manage an effective velocity of 300C. When they reached the inner system, that figure would drop to roughly ten times the speed of light.

  Anna swiveled around and spread her hands over the console. A few quick taps brought up the navigational control, and she ordered the shuttle to drop back to sub-light speeds. That was necessary to place a call through the SlipGate network.

  She hailed the Velezian Docking Authority.

  After several seconds, Sheral Tyse's face appeared on the screen. She was flushed and breathing hard. “Thank the Companion!” she said. “Captain Denaga and four of his men demanded access to their ship fifteen minutes ago. They killed two of my security officers, and now they've got several more pinned down in the cargo bay.”

  “Damn it!”

  “They've already got control of the ship-”