by Viola Grace
Trained in an abbey, she is finally out, married to a vampire, and looking for a fight within a day. Whatever will she do on day two?
To protect herself and those around her, Ebra has spent the last twelve years at an abbey, training to be a good wife and mother... and assassin, commander, warrior, spy, and interior decorator. It was a full education that helped her manage the syndrome that made her so deadly.
Assigned to the man her parents decided to give her to, she trusts her family not to do anything stupid. The offer to cure her is a surprise as there is only one cure. Death.
The treatment that is offered is a cloned body without her flawed DNA and transfer of most of her consciousness before they destroy the original body. She would like a second opinion.
A convenient attack on the space vessel she is on gives her the chance to escape her fate with minimal bloodshed. Getting caught by the man she proposed to is a bit of a surprise, but she is nothing if not adaptable.
Changing from one suitor to the next is easy enough, but is the vampire going to be happy with the lady in his embrace, or will he have second thoughts?
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Fighting Syndrome
Copyright © 2020 by Viola Grace
ISBN: 978-1-989892-37-4
©Cover art by Angela Waters
All rights reserved. With the exception of review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the express permission of the publisher.
Published by Viola Grace
Look for me online at violagrace.com
Fighting Syndrome
Stand-Alone Tales Book 13
By
Viola Grace
Chapter One
Ebra looked around the abbey and fixed her veil as she watched the shuttle descend.
The mother superior murmured, “Don’t worry. You are just headed to your marriage. It is a good thing. Sister Weller will be with you until you meet your fiancé. You will be fine.”
Ebra looked at her instructor, bodyguard, and mentor. “You don’t mind the time away from the abbey?”
“I will experience what I can, and then, I shall return home and do penance.” Sister Weller grinned. “You can’t sin on a good scale if you never leave home.”
Ebra snorted and took up her small bag. “Thank you for your guidance, Mother.”
“You are most welcome, daughter. Take care, and don’t forget to write. We didn’t go through years of calligraphy for you to discard it just because you are about to become a queen.” The mother superior smiled gently.
The two men in royal livery stepped forward and bowed. “We are here to escort Mistress Ebra Arthun to the royal court of Urnet.”
Sister Weller stepped forward. “We are ready to proceed.”
Ebra looked at the men, and they held out a scanner. She stepped forward and put her hand on the plate. The plate chirped, and her identity was confirmed.
One of the guards said, “Why are you dressed like that?”
“I have been here for the last ten years. It would be rude to stand out.” She folded her hands in her dark robes and smiled slightly.
The guards blinked and were slightly dazed. She sighed. It seemed that the effects of her syndrome remained. She hadn’t seen a man for a while, and she thought the effect she had might have worn off. Apparently not.
Sister Weller stepped forward. “Please, let us be on our way.”
The men shook their heads and led the way to the shuttle. With one final look at the abbey, Ebra followed the strangers and headed to her future as the wife of a powerful man. It was what she had been raised for, after all.
She was strapped in and breathing calmly as they left the world where she had been safe and protected. Sister Weller was nearby, and they sat in silence as the shuttle flew skyward and headed for a large warship.
When they were docking, she asked the question that had been in her mind since she had gotten the message from her royal house. “Is the prince going to be on board?”
“He is on the way. We will meet him en route.” The guard who wasn’t at the controls smiled back at her.
She nodded and looked forward, focusing on appearing as ladylike and non-threatening as possible. That had been the first part of her training.
Her body was hers to control, her mind had to remain clear, and her movements needed to be focused. She could not lose control.
Ebra got up and followed the guards out of the shuttle. When she was facing the medical team, her stomach flipped. “What is going on?”
The doctor smiled and bowed. “I am Dr. Rejis. I am here to assist with treating your Storner Syndrome.”
She was instantly tense. “Treatment? Really? That’s interesting. As far as I was aware, it is stamped into my DNA.”
He smiled brightly. “I have made amazing strides regarding the syndrome. If you come with me, I can explain it. Do you know much about your condition?”
“I have more than a passing familiarity with it.” She stepped with the doctor, and Sister Weller tried to follow. The other members of the med team moved to stop her.
Ebra stopped, and the doctor was a few steps ahead when he realized she wasn’t with him.
“What are you doing, miss?”
“My companion is essential to my equilibrium. I will not proceed without her.”
The doctor paused, and then, he nodded. “Very well. Allow the sister to accompany us.”
Something was very wrong, but Ebra was on a warship with precisely one person on her side. She was going to keep that person near her at all times.
They walked into the center of the ship, and that made Ebra uneasy. It was going to take a bit of effort to get out if she needed to. She inhaled and exhaled in a controlled manner. No sense borrowing trouble. The treatment might be completely benign.
Dr. Rejis walked with her and kept up a surprisingly chipper tone as they moved into the medical bay. “I had them bring in all the equipment that I required. This is now the most medically advanced ship in the Urnet fleet.”
She nodded politely. “It is an excellent achievement.”
The doctor smiled brilliantly at her. “You are not at all like I had imagined.”
“You have imagined me?”
“Yes, I have been staring at your genetic code for two years, since the engagement was announced, I believe. I expected you to be a bit more of a beast, given your condition.”
She smiled softly. “There is a time and a place for everything, doctor. My condition is no longer a concern. The effects of the syndrome have been corrected.”
They entered the medical area, and there were a lot of guards on duty for a place that healed the sick.
Without ceremony, she was marched into the medical bay, and there was an empty med bed waiting for her. The med bed that had a patient chilled her blood.
She swallowed against her suddenly dry throat. “A Jenven blank. I thought they were illegal.”
The doctor beckoned to his assistant. “It is only illegal if you are caught. You won’t fight now, will you, miss?”
She glanced at Sister Weller, who shook her head. “No.”
“Please, climb onto the bed. We need to run the initial scans to make sure the match is perfect.”
Ebra looked at the bed and swallowed again. “You don’t need me to remove the habit?”
“No. That won’t be nece
ssary. You can keep your dignity until the final phase when we need access to your cranial scans. We are not monsters.”
She nodded and got onto the bed, studiously not looking at the blank body with her features. It was sort of a template for life. Grown to match a general shape and fine-tuned with actual DNA.
The process took days and was used for wealthy assholes to replace their bodies with younger, fitter ones. They kept a younger DNA sample and used a current brain scan to fill in all the information.
“So, this is your treatment for Storner?”
“He will have a nearly identical copy of you without the genetic failure that makes you dangerous. There will also be certain memories removed, but that isn’t for you to worry about. You will be reborn inside the new body, and it will be perfect for the Urnet family. A perfect body to bear perfect heirs.”
She was going to comment, but there was a hiss, and she was sedated.
Ebra woke up when the room went silent. She pulled the tubes out of her arm and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She took the interface probe from her sleeve and slid it into the cognitive transfer unit over the blank with her face. A few jabs and she had wrecked their ability to download a mind into the body.
She walked to the screens and looked up their location and the time. She had been out for three hours. They had gone through two gates and were out in an open stretch of space.
She frowned. If she had picked the route, she would never have chosen that route. It was far too exposed for a ship this large with no nearby outposts.
The copy needed to be dealt with. She pulled a filament from the interior of her belt, and she reached behind the neck and started to lance the spine. She looked down the body and grimaced. She was curvy and well-endowed, but the blank had been made into a caricature of a female body. Her female body.
She spiked it in several places to make sure that even if she was knocked out immediately, the blank would not be able to begin the full copy cycle.
She grabbed her bag from the base of the med bed she had just been on, and she headed out to find Sister Weller. She paused and turned back to the blank. She reached into her bag and put her spare habit on the blank before dropping it between the two med beds. Genetically it was her.
The ship’s alarms began to sound, but it wasn’t the sound of an escape. They were under attack. “Really?”
She was hiding behind the door when the medical staff arrived, and someone began shouting that the blank had been taken, and they needed to find it.
Ebra slipped out of the medical bay, and she took a deep breath. She would find Sister Weller with the effects of the syndrome, enhanced senses, and homicidal urges. If Weller wasn’t at her side, she had to be confined somewhere, so she just had to find out where.
She hid from the crew running to duty stations and eventually got a hard hit of the sister’s scent—starch and weapons oil. There were no guards on the room, so Ebra used a jammer for the door and eased into the space. Weller was sitting with her hands together, and she stood up with a smile. “It is about time. I was getting tired of praying. Oh. I have something to atone for. Things are moving right along.”
“We can’t use a pod. We have to get a shuttle. There is nowhere to get help around here.”
“Can you find our way to the shuttle bay?” Sister Weller shook out her skirts.
“Of course. All these years of training won’t go to waste.”
“Can we appeal to the folk attacking this vessel?”
“I doubt it. You only attack a warship if you are at war or want something they have.”
Sister Weller approached the door where two guards rushed in. She struck them both with pinpoint accuracy. The men dropped to the ground. “Well, you are here now. You could be the draw.”
Ebra snorted and began to lead the way down the hall, her bag draped across her body. “They could have tried to get me from the abbey if they wanted to.”
“I dunno. We were pretty well supplied with weapons and personnel. Maybe it was just when you had been transferred. A fuck you to the Urnet family?”
They kept their casual conversation up as they disabled the guards that charged them. Sister Weller used her pressure-point technique to good use, and Ebra used speed and rage.
“I don’t know. It seems rather contrived. Maybe they were after the transfer equipment.”
They made their way down and out to the shuttle bays in about twenty minutes. Some of their victims were no doubt up and moving, but they would just have to hit them again. These guys seemed to think that a weapon in the hand was the only dangerous thing coming toward them.
Ebra looked around and found the shuttle that suited her purposes. It was long-range enough to get her where she needed to go but small enough to go fast.
She walked toward the shuttle when four men emerged from it. Sister Weller muttered, “Oh, damn.”
One of the men was a Sandman, another a Kiidar, a third was an elf, and the last was the one that fixed his gaze toward Ebra. He smiled. “Huh. Sisters. You called it Mathon.”
The Sandman inclined his head.
Ebra looked around for any place to hide, and her senses started to riot.
Sister Weller stepped in front of Ebra. “We don’t have any issue with you. We will choose another vessel and go.”
The man stepped toward them, and his voice was low. “Oh, but we want you to come with us. That has been the point of this exercise, after all, Sister.”
Ebra listened to his voice and saw the men approaching them. “Sister Weller?”
“Bank it, there will be time later.” Sister Weller knelt with her hands behind her head.
Ebra growled, but she followed her bodyguard’s order. She knelt and put her hands behind her head.
The man came over and crouched as he put the cuffs on her. “It’s a pity. I heard that you could definitely give me a fight.”
She smiled tightly. “Get me someplace one-on-one where I can’t be punted out of an airlock, and you can have your fight.”
He kissed her quickly. “Good to see you again, Ebra, but that habit doesn’t do anything for you. I can hardly wait to get you out of it.”
The Kiidar came to retrieve her, and she remembered the taste that was now on her lips. “Tonos?”
A crack of laughter came from the interior of the shuttle as she was marched into the space and tied up in the hold next to her companion.
Sister Weller had been carefully handled by the Sandman and assisted to the floor next to her. They waited until they were alone, and then, the sister asked the question that had obviously been on her mind. “So, you know him?”
Ebra was miserable, and she looked over at her friend. “I proposed to him when I was six. I am guessing he didn’t forget.”
Sister Weller laughed her ass off until Ebra kicked her. This wasn’t good.
Chapter Two
Stuck in the hold, she could feel the changes in pitch, and she shivered as they entered a gate. “Did you know there was a gate around here?”
Sister Weller snorted. “I didn’t know there was a gate. I just know that you are safe from genetic tampering, at least.”
Ebra blinked. “Tampering? They were going to kill me, Weller.”
“I don’t understand. They said it was a treatment.”
“It is—sort of. You know about Storner Syndrome, but it is caused by the imbalance between my parents’ genetics. So, the only way to stabilize that is to create a blank, as they did. Then, the fine-tuning is done, and the final phase is to activate the blank’s organs and download my mind into the artificial body. The final step is to destroy the original.” She smiled tightly. “That is the part I wasn’t a fan of. That, and they exaggerated the secondary sexual characteristics on the blank to a ridiculous degree.”
“I thought it looked just like you.”
Ebra glared at her friend, looked down, and then grimaced. “Shut up.”
&
nbsp; Weller laughed. “You have the figure of your mother’s people, and the homicidal tendencies of your father’s and grandmothers’. A genetic blessing from all sides.”
“Oh. Right. A blessing.” She snorted and thudded her head against the wall behind her.
“That sounded like it hurt.”
“It did. A little. Right. I am tired of these cuffs.” She got a monofilament out of her sleeve, pinched it between two fingers, and swung it, splitting the cuff chain. She freed Weller and then used the monofilament to slice off the remaining cuffs off.
She finished her tidying and wove the filament back into her habit.
They exited the gate, and she grunted. “And we are out. I wonder where we are.”
Weller said, “Better than on that warship?”
Ebra chuckled. “Likely, but I don’t know.”
She reached under her scapula and pulled out a deck. “Want to play cards?”
Weller laughed, and they sat in the hold, playing cards for another four hours. When the door opened, they were in the middle of a hand, and Weller held up her hand to forestall any interference. “Just a minute, I think I have her.”
Ebra looked at Weller’s face with a scowl.
“Six of clubs.”
Ebra smiled slowly. “Go fish!”
Weller howled and picked up another card.
The Sandman walked up to them. “Enough. The captain wishes to speak with you.”
Ebra pointed at herself. “Me? I thought I was just being held for ransom or something.”
He sighed and nodded. “Up.”
Sister Weller got to her feet and stood next to Ebra.
“Only Miss Ebra.”
“Oh. I go where she goes. I am her bodyguard.” Weller’s expression was amused.
The Sandman looked at her and then looked at the hold. “You have done a helluva job.”
Weller grabbed Ebra’s arms and flapped them. “Well, she’s not dead!”