“Payment, I’ve fed you a lot of information and asked nothing in return,” he said, “until now.”
“I don’t have much money, as you can see,” she said pointing at his expensive drone umbrella.
“I got enough credits. What I want is information and two of your prisoners.”
Info and releasing Sarah and Chris? There’s no way in hell that can end well. “I can’t do that. I can’t put my friends at risk.”
“They won’t be at risk, and no one will know you had anything to do with it. Hell, I’ll make you look like a hero in the aftermath.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“You can and you will if you want your friends to think you’re the elite hacker they think you are.” She bit her lip. She couldn’t have that secret released if she was going to continue in the HLF. Knowing how to hack was one thing, finding targets to hack was another. “I can always just stop feeding you information. Let’s see how long you last having to find networks to hack on your own, only to find that there’s no valuable data inside.” He then conjured a small holo window between the two. Within it, there was a single file, an executable one written in the Hashmedaian language. “This is a virus; put it into your systems. Once I give you the OK, you can delete it and claim that you stopped a virus attack. The two EDF soldiers from Alpha Centauri will be set free, however, so I recommend you and your friends keep your heads down until you are cleared. Sarah has a bit of a trigger finger.”
Eupiar’s red nonglowing eyes looked intently at the file for several seconds. “That’s it?” she asked.
“That’s it. Nobody gets hurt, provided they stay away. Your group will be free to continue on, and I’ll keep whispering to you new targets to hit when Hannah fails to have correct visions.”
Eupiar paused for a moment, and then reached for her phone. The desktop of her phone loaded in a holo window as she swiped a file from the man into her phone’s holo window. “Good girl,” he said with a patronizing pat across her shoulder.
“You live up to your name, User,” Eupiar said.
“Just call me Deep Throat.”
… … …
►► HLF Headquarters, Northern Canada
► Sol System
“OK I take everything back,” Sarah said to Chris. “I think they are going to kill us.”
Sarah looked for something that could be used as a weapon inside the small holding cell the two of them were placed in—well, makeshift holding cell, to be exact. It was clearly at one point sleeping quarters, before being cleared out and having a force field installed next to its exit. Makes sense, Sarah figured. Whatever this place was, it was Hashmedai-built. The bulkheads and corridors all brought back memories of the time they hijacked a Hashmedai ship to board the command ship. Furthermore, Hashmedai never held captives long, and therefore never built holding cells. She saw nothing but meal trays and water cups along the unclean rusty floors.
“What makes you say that?” asked Chris. “They’ve been feeding us and kept us alive this long.”
“And haven’t bothered to check in or give us any food for the day,” Sarah said. “If you were planning to off your prisoners, would you waste food on them after the decision was made?”
“Probably not.”
Sarah made another pass across the room, her head bobbing all about, looking for something that could kill. “There’s got to be something we can use to—” Suddenly all power throughout the facility was shut down. The force field dropped as the doors leading to the main corridors slid up. “Get outta here,” she finished.
Chris moved toward the door. His eyes were lit right up. “There’s no way this is legit.”
The two peaked out into the corridor. Darkness was all they saw, and Sarah could barely see her hand in front of her face. Well this is creepy as fuck.
“Clear,” Chris reported from his observation of the corridor. “I guess we walk in a random direction until we hit a wall.”
“Or lost guards.”
For thirty-five minutes, Sarah and Chris aimlessly moved throughout the structure, with no light to aid them. They passed a few locked doors, and Sarah heard people on the other side of them. Some were banging on the doors, asking for help, while others rambled on about their frustration.
Two stray patrols provided the duo with weapons—after Sarah and Chris jumped and choked them out, of course. So these are the eRifles everyone’s been talking about, Sarah thought as she held one up. The light from its display and built-in flashlight became the only source of light in the dark corridor. And most importantly, a means for the two to defend themselves, now that it was clear not everyone was trapped behind doors.
The maze of darkened bulkheads led them to a large sliding door, which, unlike the rest, still had power. It slowly slid open as they stepped closer to it; a cold breeze of air hit their faces. It was natural cold air…from the outside. They entered the room before them. It wasn’t actually a room—it was a massive hangar bay. Knocked over Hashmedai interceptors littered the hangar bay. The fighters all bore the scars of battle and rust was starting to form all across them as well. The main entrance to the hangar was wide open. By the looks, it had been for some time. Snow and ice spilled in from the outside, and as they got closer to it, some of the overturned fighters were straight up, buried under the snow.
Both Sarah and Chris looked out the hangar doors. The night sky was present, along with a whole lot of snow and ice for miles. As they stepped outside into their newfound freedom, Sarah looked back at the structure that was once their prison for a good while; she paused and became temporally oblivious to the freezing cold winds blowing against her black hair.
Chris stopped to look back at her after realizing she wasn’t keeping up with him. “What’s wrong?” he shouted to her.
“It was a ship,” she replied, and then she tilted her head back toward him. “We were on a fucking Hashmedai Stratosphere frigate.”
Chris too looked at what she was seeing. A crash-landed ship, partially buried underneath god knows how much snow and ice.
… … …
►► ESV Winston Churchill, Earth Orbit
► Sol System
“Captain, we are receiving a transmission from Earth,” said the Winston Churchill’s communication operator, Lieutenant Yates.
Xavier grimaced at hearing that. “From whom?” he asked.
“Unknown source, sir,” Yates reported as she reexamined her holographic window.
“Put it through,” Xavier ordered. The central hologram on the bridge transformed into an image of a man in a dark room wearing a fedora. There was too much darkness in the room, making it hard to see his face. “This is Captain Martin Xavier of the ESV Winston Churchill. To whom am I speaking?”
The man spoke. “Captain Xavier, I have some very important information for you.” Two pictures loaded in front of him, one of Sarah and one of Chris. “These personnel, they are important to you, yes?”
“You have information on their location?” Xavier asked.
“That and more, but you need to act quickly,” the mysterious man said. “Or they’ll be suffering from the effects of hypothermia very soon.” He was relieved to hear that they were indeed alive, even if it was a strange and shady source. “I will be transmitting their location to you now, but as I said, you need to move now before it is too late.”
“You still haven’t answered my first question.” Xavier stepped closer to the hologram, staring at the figure directly in the eyes. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“Deep Throat,” he said. “That’s all you need to know for now.” His hologram vanished, and the previous 3-D projection of Earth appeared.
The bridge crew all stood at their stations, unmoving, paralyzed with shock, while younger ones like Ensign Chavez laughed after hearing the person call himself Deep Throat. EVE, on the other hand, continued her duties with no emotion on her artificial face—typical machine.
Xavier got t
he bridge crew to snap back into focus by shouting, “Well, you heard the gentleman! Get a transport fired up with a search and rescue team on the double to those coordinates!”
“I’m on it, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Benson said as he turned to his terminal.
Ensign Chavez was still laughing while his weightless body sat in his seat. “Ensign,” Xavier called out to him in a stern tone of voice. “Is there any clown makeup on yer face?”
His laughter stopped immediately. “No sir!”
“So you’re not the fucking joker, then?” asked Xavier.
“No, sir, not at all,” Chavez said, now with a serious tone.
“Then what’s so funny?” Xavier pressed on.
“Nothing, sir, it won’t happen again.” The young ensign returned to his duties of maintaining the Winston Churchill’s orbit around Earth.
“See to it that it doesn’t,” said Xavier. “Deep Throat was no joke to the Whitehouse back in the old world.”
Deep down inside, however, Xavier couldn’t blame the ensign for laughing. He too was once a young lad who giggled when the story of the Watergate was explained to him. Hell, Xavier’s younger self would have laughed just as hard as Chavez did, knowing that someone called himself that name.
Chapter 15
►► HLF Headquarters, Northern Canada
► Sol System
Jazz’s vision slowly began to refocus after looking directly into the brilliant flash of light from a psionic teleport. After all the teleporting around he did when he first encountered the Hashmedai, he figured he’d be used to it by now. Then again, it had been almost a solid year since he’d worked with psionics; every mission he and Veloshira undertook resulted in them being on foot or relaying on a ship to get them to where they need to be.
Dollon, the Hashmedai psionic Destiny called for, carried Whigli’s blood-soaked body toward the back entrance wherever the hell they got teleported to. Jazz saw computers, holographic windows, and command chairs, all looking like they were Hashmedai built. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say this was the bridge of a Hashmedai warship, a badly damaged one. An alarm bellowed as a team of humans and Hashmedai frantically worked to contain whatever situation they encountered. He heard a few of them mention something about power being taken off-line and another talk about prisoners escaping.
Veloshira stood next to Jazz. She carried the same perplexed look on her face that Jazz had, while her head moved, analyzing the area where they were. “This is a stratosphere frigate,” Veloshira said to Jazz. “Shade class, judging by the layout of this bridge.”
“I didn’t recall seeing any Hashmedai ships in orbit or in the skies when we arrived,” Jazz said.
“There weren’t any. This must have crash-landed during the war,” Veloshira concluded.
“Report!” Destiny demanded.
A teenage-looking girl with a human-and-Hashmedai complexion hysterically interacted with four of five holo screens. “It’s a virus! I’m flushing it out of the systems now.”
Destiny stood behind the girl and asked. “What did it do, Eupiar?”
“Knocked out all power,” Eupiar said, reading a report holo screen. “Copied and transmitted some of our databanks and was about to enable self-destruct.”
“Fuck!” Destiny yelled as her fist slammed into the wall.
“It’s gone now, and power is coming back online,” Eupiar added.
“Good job, Eupiar,” Destiny said to her. “Find out who did this so I know whose throat I need to slit next.” Eupiar’s face flushed while processing Destiny’s last statement. Destiny then backed away from her, and approached Jazz. “I leave for a few hours, and look what happens.”
“Destiny, Hannah is requesting an update in regard to your mission,” Eupiar reported.
Destiny’s eyes rolled as she said, “So what you’re saying is she didn’t fully predict the outcome. Come with me, Jazz; we need to bring you up to speed. That and I’m sure you and your friend here have a shitload of questions.”
“Veloshira,” Jazz said. “And she don’t speak a lick of English, either.”
Jazz and Veloshira followed Destiny as she led them toward the exit to the bridge. The alarm was still echoing. “Shut off that fucking noise,” Destiny requested. “I got a big enough headache as is.”
… … …
A brief elevator ride and a trek across three connecting dark corridors led Jazz, Veloshira, and Destiny to a room guarded by two armed personnel, one Hashmedai, the other human. Inside was a bed, in which a woman wearing a sleeveless black Victorian-era dress rested. As the sliding doors to the room shut, the woman arose. As Jazz recalled, Eupiar back up on the bridge mentioned the name Hannah. He thought nothing of it—just a coincidence that someone had the same name as Alisha’s daughter. After all, Alisha and Hannah left Earth with Radiance to escape the Hashmedai invasion, a move he strongly opposed.
The figure that rose up from her slumber to great them, however, said otherwise. The long black hair, soft porcelain skin, the face of a woman who was clearly one-quarter Japanese and one-quarter French Canadian—and in some way, she looked almost exactly like Alisha when she and Jazz were married. Holy hell, how did she get here? he wondered. First Destiny, now Hannah. Everyone had aged so much from the last time he saw them.
“Jake,” Hannah softly said to him. “Or do you still prefer Jazz? Your motives are hard to predict these days.”
Predict? Hannah had suffered from some kind of strange mental disorder as a child. Doctors couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. Then there was that Linl that kidnapped her during the invasion. Did he do something to her in that lab? She rolled out of her bed and stepped toward Jazz, as his mind was still struggling to process the fact that she went from a twelve-year-old girl to…she’d be thirty-four now, damn near his age.
Her hand rose up toward Jazz’s tall body and gently stroked the right side of his face. It was a blissful feeling, as if Alisha had come back and wanted Jazz back. Her hands came down toward his neck. She had no plans to let him go just yet, and part of him didn’t want her too. Get a grip on yourself, soldier boy! She’s was your fucking stepdaughter! She finally let go of him, and thank god for that.
“We have been waiting a long time for your return, Jazz,” Hannah said. “Chloe is back as well, and we now await our final invited guest to Earth.” Jazz saw Destiny grimace. The tone of Hannah’s voice was…creepy. Like her sanity had been stripped away all these years. “Leave us,” Hannah said to Destiny and Veloshira.
“As you wish,” Destiny said.
“Go with Destiny,” Jazz explained to Veloshira in the Hashmedai language.
“What is going on? When will we be pushing forth with our mission?” Veloshira asked.
“I don’t know,” was all Jazz could say.
The two exited via the sliding doors, leaving Jazz and Hannah the sole people standing in her room. “All right, what’s goin’ on?” Jazz asked.
“Sit with me. We have to catch up,” Hannah said.
“I’ll stand,” Jazz said. After all, the only place to sit was the bed.
“You should sit with her,” said a voice. Jazz looked around, but saw no one else. It definitely wasn’t Hannah who said that.
No, it can’t be!
“Why not?” said the mysterious voice in Jazz’s head. “I said I’d be in touch.”
Memories of the past came into Jazz’s head. He “died” during the invasion of Earth, only to be fully healed by Kroshka, and the strange red gem pendant she wore. Shortly after his revival and discovery of Hannah being held captive by the Celestial Order, there was a brief period where a voice, a female voice, called out to him. Well, isn’t this just one big convenient reunion.
“But a necessary reunion,” Hannah said. Jazz’s attention snapped back to her.
Hannah held something behind her back, removed from the nightstand next to her bed. His thoughts into the past distracted him from noticing Hannah walk off…and distr
acted him from taking notice of a third person behind him, who rested his or her head along the sides of his muscular arms.
The sudden and unexpected shock of another person in the room triggered Jazz’s body to leap to the side. There were now two critical questions on his mind on top of the dozens of unanswered ones. How did Hannah know what Jazz was thinking? And who the hell is this person who seemingly appeared out of nowhere? He started at the person; she was a woman who bore a strikingly similar appearance to Kroshka…only she had long black hair and looked human. The outfit she wore was a two-piece snow-white mesh dress that gave off bright light. Enough to illuminate the side of the already dark room she was in.
“Who the fuck are you?” Jazz asked.
“Emelia, this is Emelia, Jazz,” Hannah said, still holding and hiding an object behind her dress. “The voice that called out to you, the voice that told me what was on your mind just now, is the noncorporeal keeper of the orb that rests within Kroshka’s gem.”
“Right,” Jazz said.
“She’s also the reason you are alive today.”
Jazz cut in, the volume of his voice raised. “I need some legit answers,” he said to Hannah. “Now!”
“Had you sat down like I demanded, you could have gotten them,” Hannah calmly replied.
“You should have listened to her,” Emelia chimed in.
Jazz ignored the strange figure and continued to press on toward Hannah. “The fuck does it matter if I sit or stand?”
“Watch your tone with her,” Emelia said.
Jazz’s head tilted toward Emelia, and he asked. “Or else what?”
Had he not taken his eyes off Hannah, he would have seen her reveal what she held behind her back. An ePistol. A single bullet left the chamber of the weapon and ripped through the side of Jazz’s head, as Hannah’s index finger that pulled the trigger cocked back.
… … …
Jazz awoke, staring at the ceiling of Hannah’s room with a massive migraine. Looking gently from side to side was all he was able to do; there was very little energy in his body. He felt his body resting on the soft smooth blankets of Hannah’s bed. Hannah sat next to him with the grin of a lunatic stretched out across her face, still firmly holding the pistol in her slender hands.
Uprising of the Exiled (Splintered Galaxy Book 2) Page 21