The woman grumbled. “But that doesn’t change them from stealing other identities. No one is safe until these criminals are brought to justice.”
“Criminals? Really?” The man supporting shifters balked. “You’re trying to tell me that Emmaline Grayson was a criminal?” The video changed to a scene of a teenager being dragged away. She fought like anyone would, but the men easily overpowered her, hurting her. She slumped in their arms and even from the grainy footage, Mila could see blood. “What did she, an honor roll high school student, do to deserve such treatment? What justifies stealing a child from her home, beating her, and leaving her hospitalized?”
“Come now,” the woman scoffed, “that is one instance of police brutality.”
The shifter supporter leaned forward. “Thirty-four percent of shifters in the camps are underage. They’re children too unaware of what they are to even know to hide it.”
Mila flinched, the statement hitting too close to home. She shut it off. She didn’t want to hear how much the world hated her kind, how bad others had it, or more importantly, what her fate would be if she got caught.
Mila rubbed her hands on May’s pants as she fidgeted in line, May’s bag digging into her shoulder. This will work. They won’t question a verified ID. She tried not to stare in awe at the giant spacecraft looming in the background. It was a veritable antique, from back when ships could still enter atmosphere. It had a MAG GRAV system, for crying out loud.
A half hour later, a woman in uniform glanced at May’s ID, then up at Mila’s face, which now matched May’s. Satisfied, she barked a bunk and station assignment at her before telling her to report to med bay. Mila dashed off, following the guy before her. May would want this.
He hadn’t been able to confirm the kill. Without the confirmation, he didn’t get paid. He’d orchestrated that attack to make it look like a mugging gone wrong, but his lackeys fled before they knew for certain May Trace was no more.
So now he sat, scope steady and ready, monitoring each person who boarded the ship, searching for the one who didn’t belong. The one who should be dead. Emergency services never found a body, and neither she nor any Jane Does showed up at the ER.
His left side had long since gone numb when his scope zeroed in on her, twitching in line.
His job wasn’t finished.
Kyle Avery walked beside the captain as they ambled through the ship, discussing security protocols and the mission—in as vague terms as possible. They both knew the stakes. If this mission didn’t succeed…
They passed crew members and guests, the uniforms blending into a seamless mob as intended. But as he walked by one woman, he looked behind himself and stopped, something sending all his instincts on alert. She raced away, harried like everyone else. No one was familiar with this model of ship anymore so most of the crew would struggle for a few days getting accustomed to the layout.
But something just felt off about her. He couldn’t put his finger on it, though. Same uniform, nondescript hair, everything seemed regulation, no different from anyone else on board, but something told him she didn’t belong.
“Avery?”
He spun on his heels. “Yes, Captain?”
“Is something wrong?”
He turned around, but she’d disappeared around a corner. “No, Captain.” He continued walking, keeping pace with Captain Faulk. He didn’t know what to think. She had felt off, wrong, but he didn’t have that gut-wrenching feeling he got when a mission went FUBAR. He didn’t believe she was a threat—just a mystery.
Mila’s gut felt like she’d swallowed acid, maybe hydrochloric acid. Or that stuff they use to dissolve mortar.
Chaos.
Medical personnel and security staff lined the walls of the med bay, standing at little temporary tables with QuiKits. Every few seconds, someone would bark out, “Next,” and the line would move forward.
Mila was losing her shit. The same thing kept running through her brain. What are they testing for? Was it to confirm identity? But no, QuiKits couldn’t do genomic identity testing. And they couldn’t do identity testing onboard. The databases required to store the data would be enormous, and running that much information through secured connections took time, even today. Checking against billions and billions of bases took a long, long time, no matter how powerful your computer system.
But QuiKits could test for specific genotypes. It could test for shifters. If it tested that, she was dead. She wanted to open her mouth. She wanted to ask someone what was going on, what they were testing for, but knew it would spell her doom if she did.
She was a freak. Even excluding her shifter status, no one else had come onboard clueless. She didn’t know their mission, didn’t know their protocols, didn’t know shit.
Mila hadn’t served in the NSS for ten years. In fact, she’d never served in the NSS since she’d never finished her training.
Someone barked, “Next,” and Mila realized no one stood in front of her.
She walked up to the only open station and took a deep breath, too worried to look the guy in the eye.
“Hand,” he said as he busied himself opening the kit.
Mila stuck her arm out and sneaked a peek at the packaging. “QuiKit: STD Panel,” it read, and she let out a breath.
Big black block letters marked every corridor, so Mila only made one wrong turn before finding her bunk. Two beds were bolted to the wall of the tiny room, one on top of the other, and two wardrobes abutted the opposite wall. Nothing else. Her arms and shoulders skimmed the wardrobes and metal bed frame as she walked down the middle. She almost hunched sideways to get around the ladder to the top bunk.
“Hi,” she said to her roommate. “Name’s May Trace.” She’d been practicing using the name ad nauseam over the last twenty-four hours. She repeated it in her head even now. “I’m a pilot.”
Her roommate glanced up before continuing to unpack. “Santos. Comms,” she said.
Mila ignored the snub and unloaded her bag into her wardrobe, latching everything down.
MAG GRAV systems prevented bone loss, but paled in comparison to modern systems. They didn’t produce gravity. Instead, they used magnetics to simulate the force gravity puts on your body. Any non-magnetic items would fly everywhere once they left Earth.
Mila nodded and headed off to her duty station. She had first shift on the bridge. Though everything else terrified her, she looked forward to flying. She hadn’t flown in so long, she wasn’t sure she would remember how.
What if she failed? Sub-space travel took skill, a skill she hadn’t practiced in far too long.
But even with a sea of doubt coursing through her head, she walked to the bridge with a grin on her face.
For a military ship, slipping aboard proved no challenge at all. Once onboard, he grabbed the first person he found alone, dragged him into a quiet corridor, and snapped his neck. He took in the details, then started his shift.
As a whole, the Orleans might have been old and underwhelming, but stepping onto the bridge would always fill Mila with awe. It brought a huge smile to her face as she stepped into the room. There was a time she’d lived for this moment. The expansive view, the consoles, the controls, even the captain sitting in his chair looking almighty and, she was ashamed to say, hot.
After high school, she and May had trained as pilots. It had been one of the best times of her life, maybe the best. Flying had been her dream and her gift. They’d dreamed of shipping out together, flying side by side, even if it was a ridiculous fantasy.
But Mila had shifted before she ever flew outside simulators. In training, she’d bested every record, but people didn’t hire shifters. That drunken night ten years ago ended her life. She ran. She never stopped running.
Until now.
Out of necessity, Captain Tristan Faulk was on edge. He watched as each person entered the bridge, waiting for word from his Lieutenant on their status. Some personnel he’d worked with before. Others were new to him.
His attention zeroed in on a female officer who swaggered onto the bridge as if she owned the thing. She stopped, her face stretching into a smile he found contagious, then sashayed to the pilot’s seat.
His gut sent him mixed signals about the girl. On the one hand, he couldn’t get his eyes to drift away from how her ass swayed in those tight uniform pants. On the other, his instincts screamed that she wasn’t military. Something about her was wrong. Maybe she had attitude problems. Still, he would check out her file when he got back to his quarters. And he would keep an eye on her from here on out.
On her, not her butt.
Mila sat, waiting for the order to take off. An effervescent sensation bubbled up inside her. She feared she would start giggling at any moment. Nothing would give her away faster than a pilot with a giggling fit.
She cracked her knuckles, rolled her neck, and stretched every muscle group she could think of. A guy next to her couldn’t stop smiling at her. At least he wasn’t laughing.
Mila waited as people around her went about their business. Some raced about, preparing for take off, but many twiddled their thumbs just like her.
While she leaned back in her seat, an officer—high ranked based on the amount of crap on his uniform—spoke to the captain, and took his position. The captain leaned forward and said, “Okay, everyone, final pre-flight checks.”
Mila went though the motions. It had been years, but she told herself it was like riding a bike. She could do this in her sleep, even if doubt kept creeping in.
She put the panel in pre-flight mode, and ran her fingers over the controls, testing their responses. Flaps. Check. Propulsion. Check. Yoke response. Check. She continued through the checklist to the end, then turned and reported to the captain, “Pilot pre-flights complete, captain.” Mila took the controls out of pre-flight mode.
Others echoed her sentiment, the echo growing with each voice. The sounds merged, building toward something. Mila almost held her breath, waiting and eager for the good part. After a few minutes, everyone had reported in.
“All right. Let’s take this baby out. Communications, please confirm our flight status with the tower.”
“Yes, captain,” a guy several stations down from her said. He spoke into the radio, then turned to the captain. “We’re cleared for take off, captain.”
“Take off, pilot.”
“Yes, captain,” Mila said, a great big smile on her face.
Finally.
The USS Orleans was temperamental at the best of times. Tristan watched, almost in awe, as the pilot maneuvered the behemoth into space. She flew as if the Orleans were a fighter jet, not the largest ship that could leave Earth’s surface, a ship so old the engines practically rattled.
Impressive.
And for a moment, he forgot his suspicion of her.
Which left room for other concerns to surface. Like the mission. He liked being a captain, running his crew. He enjoyed the responsibility, the authority. But he’d avoided this type of assignment his entire career, not that command had ever offered him one.
His thoughts strayed to the diplomats hidden among the crew. They’d been breathing down his neck since they’d arrived on board, but he’d kicked them out of the bridge, telling them he couldn’t have the distractions.
Liar.
He didn’t want the distractions.
His gaze roved back to the pilot. Her graceful arms shifted from one control to the next. Once they cleared Earth, they would enter sub-space. Faster-than-light travel didn’t exist. Messages could travel faster than light, but any matter that attempted it didn’t reach the other end in the same condition as it departed.
The discovery of sub-space allowed for interstellar travel. Sub-space didn’t act like normal space did. Like how tachyonic particles didn’t follow the same rules as normal particles, sub-space had its own unique set of rules. One of those rules made it possible to travel many light years in a matter of months.
“Entering sub-space momentarily,” she said, her hands still flying over the controls.
He loved this part. Around him, the universe bent and contorted like a funhouse mirror. Then it righted itself as they arrived in sub-space, but this place brought to mind the other side of Alice’s mirror. Nothing seemed quite right. Distances seemed distorted, visual range shifted. Many pilots had difficulty flying in sub-space. Many others couldn’t and never received credentials for off-planet flight.
But this pilot traversed the surreal landscape of sub-space as if it were no big thing. Planets, moons, and asteroids flew toward them at speed. Sub-space seemed a compression of normal space, with distances between objects reduced. It meant navigation could be tricky if planets were close. Even hundreds of millions of miles apart in normal space could end up so close that a large ship like the Orleans maneuvered between them with difficulty.
But gravity wasn’t a problem in sub-space. It didn’t exist in sub-space the same way it did in normal space, leaving planets and stars misshapen and bloated. A pilot could come as close as one wished to a planet without fearing being sucked into its gravitational field.
He winced as they passed close to a planet’s rings, but relaxed when nothing happened. The pilot never even batted an eye at the near miss. Either she knew her skills well or she was utterly insane.
His new persona didn’t work the first shift. Unfortunately, his target did. At the doorway to the bridge, he leaned against a wall out of sight, but close enough to keep tabs on her. He had patience.
He would finish the job.
Once her shift ended, she followed her roommate, Santos, to the mess hall. After picking up a tray of something that vaguely resembled food, she approached Santos, the only person she knew on this boat. “Mind if I sit with you?”
Santos shrugged and continued eating.
So much for conversation.
Mila dug in. At least she could say that while it looked like gruel, it didn’t taste bad. Behind her, people spouted hate, and Mila tried to ignore it, but failed.
“They’re just a bunch of fucking monsters,” one guy said.
“I hear they can’t even enter our atmosphere. Why would we ally ourselves with weaklings like that?”
“I know, right?”
“Hello, my buds!” A guy sat down next to them, distracting her from the venom behind her.
He must work a later shift. She looked over at him between bites and realized it was the guy who’d been sitting next to her on the bridge. He had a big, goofy smile on his face. She couldn’t for the life of her figure out how he had so much energy after working eight hours.
“Luke Hall, communications,” he said, reaching out his hand for a handshake.
Mila, she almost said. “May Trace, pilot.”
“Well, it’s a pleasure to fly with you, May. That was some smooth sailing.” His entire body communicated with him.
“Thanks. So, you’re both in communications?”
“I’m the maths guy. She’s the computer genius.”
“Cool.”
Mila didn’t understand the TAT system. It required both a mathematician and a computer scientist to operate. If they made a mistake, it could alter the rules of the universe, breaking cause and effect.
Yeah, oops.
But on the plus side, they could send real-time messages with Earth… so long as they didn’t fuck up the calculations.
Not that she had anyone to send messages to. She thought of her parents, but they probably thought she was dead.
Like May.
Mila shook her head, trying to tear the morbid thought from her psyche. She had to snap out of it. She couldn’t keep doing this to herself.
“So,” Luke said, rubbing his hands together, “who’s up for a game of poker?”
Santos jumped right in. Mila stared, surprised at her roommate’s zeal, but agreed as well.
A few hours, and a shameful sum of money lighter, Mila excused herself to head back to her bunk. Her skin crawled from the amount
of social interaction she’d incurred. Sure, she kept to herself on the bridge, but she’d socialized more in the canteen than she had in years.
She passed a couple women talking between themselves as she reached her bunk assignment.
“The Incirrina just scare the crap out of me. I mean, what do they want? Nobody wants nothing for something, ya’ know?”
“That’s for the government to handle. Just focus on your job.”
“But what if they want to invade?”
“Remember? They can’t enter our atmosphere. How could they possibly invade?”
Mila entered her bunk, sighing and relaxing into the door when it closed behind her, closing off the rest of the ship.
Hopefully, her roommate wouldn’t return until she’d taken everyone’s money.
He was unfortunate enough to have picked someone on the worst shift for trying to catch his target alone. As soon as Trace’s shift ended, his started. By the time he got off shift, she was asleep in her bunk, which had privacy locks. He’d checked, and the locks were engaged. He might have to pick another identity if he couldn’t find an opportunity soon.
“So, what do you think of her? I like her,” Luke said with gusto. Her money had dwindled to almost nothing in front of her. She’d never felt less deserving of her nickname, Lucky, in her life. She looked across the table to the ornery Santos’s pile. It looked like a dragon’s treasure. And she had the attitude to match. Pity, because if Luke were into girls, she would totally go for that dark skin and exotic eyes.
“I don’t know. There’s something not quite right about her.”
Mila's Shift Page 2