WE HAVE CONTACT (The Kurtherian Gambit Book 12)

by Michael Anderle

  “Who’s with you?” Gabrielle called out.

  “No one,” Bethany Anne called over her shoulder.

  “Oh shit,” Scott muttered, “this is going to hurt.”

  “Anyone think to bring some ibuprofen?” Darryl asked.

  —-

  “Fucking shit those claws HURT!” Gabrielle hissed. She was holding her stomach where the shirt was torn away along with part of her stomach muscle, blood flowing down her arm soaking her pants.

  “Tell me about it,” Eric bitched, holding a towel to his arm.

  “She’s playing us, people,” John said as he leaned over, arms on his knees gasping for air. “She has broken us up, surprised us with a few new moves…”

  “Don’t forget the claws,” Scott, leaning against the wall, interrupted, “for God’s sake, don’t forget the claws.”

  “Why aren’t you scratched, John?” Darryl asked. He had ripped his shirt off and applied it to his own chest wounds.

  “Lots and lots of previous beatings,” John admitted before standing up. All of them kept their eyes on Bethany Anne, who was on the other side of the room, breathing hard as well, eyeing them all, her eyes slightly red.

  “What do you think Gabrielle?” John asked.

  “I think,” Gabrielle answered, pulling her arm away now that her stomach had healed enough, “That I’ve gotten … lazy in my training.” Eric tossed her a towel which she used to clean the blood as best she could off of her arm. “And somehow, I’m going to get that …” Gabrielle noticed Bethany Anne’s raised eyebrow, “… woman … back.”

  “That works for me,” Darryl said, “I vote you two go in there and wear her down, then the three of us will come in and clean up!”

  The five chuckled a moment before Eric said, “You know, I’m willing to go in high if you are willing to take her low, Gabrielle.”

  Gabrielle turned to look at Eric, but he was still looking at Bethany Anne. She whispered, “You have a plan, cowboy?” Eric slowly nodded his head up and down.

  Gabrielle smiled, her eyes getting hard looking down the room at Bethany Anne, “Hell yeah, I’ve got your back!” Behind the two of them, the three guys looked to each other and shared a smile. If nothing else, Eric was going to make a point.

  It might be a painful point, they thought, but it would be a point!

  “Wait till I’m a third of the way across before you chase me. Then time it right, ok?”

  “Time what right?” Gabrielle hissed, but Eric was already running hard across the room, screaming.

  “Gott Verdammt maverick!” Gabrielle took off after him. She hadn’t gone three steps when Eric jumped. Not a small jump, but one that had his head almost hitting the ceiling twenty feet up as he flew across the room. Gabrielle wanted to yell that Bethany Anne was just going to wait for him to land before she kicked the shit out of the softball he was…Oh!

  Gabrielle smiled, he wasn’t setting himself up for a hit, he was setting HER up to hit first. Eric had used his knowledge of the boss to offer Gabrielle the perfect opportunity to make a very painful point. It was the most delicious and manipulatable weakness Bethany Anne had.

  And, it was working. Bethany Anne flicked her eyes to Gabrielle before looking back up to Eric, a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth as she eyed her guard’s trajectory.

  Hook, line and sinker! Gabrielle bolted ahead, using a large amount of her etheric reserves to slam into Bethany Anne and the two of them hit the wall with an ear crushing bang! The protection mats on the wall did little to smother the loud impact the two bodies made when they connected.

  “Fucking shit!” Bethany Anne yelled, swiping at Gabrielle with a clawed hand. Her hand tore a hole in the wall protection where Gabrielle had just been. Almost too late, Bethany Anne remembered Eric and she had moved far enough to only suffer part of his kick, rebounding off of the wall before she fell to the floor and rolled, coming up ready for them and …

  Smiling?

  “About fucking time you people think to use what you know against me!” Bethany Anne’s eyes lost their slightly red tint and her claws retracting into her fingers.

  Gabrielle noticed Eric wasn’t letting up his guard, so she moved slightly to his right, so Bethany Anne couldn’t catch them both together.

  “Alright, practice halted.” Bethany Anne said and Eric relaxed. Gabrielle looked to the wall where the chunk of the mat was missing and shivered. That would have seriously hurt like hell if it had connected.

  “Anyone need blood?” Bethany Anne asked.

  Eric had walked over to the ice chest and opened it, “Gab!” Gabrielle turned to see a blood bag flying through the air her way. Gabrielle caught the bag and grew her fangs to use them to drain some of the contents without finishing the whole bag.

  “It’s an unpretentious B-negative.” He smiled at her and then looked to the guys and Bethany. They all shook their heads.

  They caught Bethany Anne’s eyes looking around the room and so her team looked to see what she was looking at.

  The room was a mess, closer to almost destroyed.

  “Well,” John said wiping sweat off of his forehead, “I think we need to get the group responsible for fixing the ship up here to help figure out a different setup. This equipment, save the metal walls, seems to have taken a beating.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Darryl asked, his voice an octave higher than normal, “I’m pretty sure it was me who took the beating.” He pointed over to the side, “That bench is all fucked up because it was in my way when I was landing. It was in the wrong place at the right time. Equipment taking a beating my ass.”

  Scott and Eric chuckled as Darryl turned back to the team, “So, anybody think to bring some ibuprofen?”

  —

  The team spoke for another ten minutes on what they should work on to do better when fighting a hella-fast opponent with claws. John said he would get with Jean on some arm protection ideas. Gabrielle mentioned making sure they had the equipment to protect them in appropriate spots.

  As they started to leave, Eric called out, “Gabrielle?” She turned to him, “Do you mind staying a moment? I have a question for you.”

  Bethany Anne didn’t look at the two as she stepped in between them and continued to the room’s exit, “Hey!” She said over her shoulder, “nice attack, no need to relive it on my account. You two twerps did well back there. Don’t let it go to your heads.” John, Darryl, and Scott exited the room and closed the door behind them.

  Outside in the hallway, Bethany Anne whispered, “Let’s go!” Her eyes turned red, and she bolted down the corridor, her three Bitches in hot pursuit. It took them only ten seconds to make it to her suite.

  “ArchAngel!” She called out as they bolted through her rooms, “Turn on video of the workout room on the main video screen!”

  The four of them came screaming into her room, Bethany Anne jumping into the air to twist around over Ashur who ducked as his master jumped over him to land on her side of the bed, nearly bouncing off of it.

  The guys all turned to watch Gabrielle tell Eric, “I think that could be fun, I accept.” She then left the room, leaving Eric alone who jumped up into the air, punching high and yelling, “YES!”

  When Eric landed, he tried to straighten his clothes and walked out.

  “ArchAngel, shut off the video,” Bethany Anne said before continuing. “Dammit, we missed it!”

  “The least he could do was trip over himself and give us time to spy on him,” Darryl said.

  “Well, ok guys - time to leave, I’m disgusting and you’re bloody,” she told them.

  “No thanks to you, boss,” Scott said as the three of them started leaving her room. She walked them out of her suite, telling them goodbye before shutting her door and walking back to her room and sitting on the bed. “ArchAngel, play the video back fifteen seconds before what you just showed me.”

  She looked around her room before watching the main screen on her wall a
s her group started splitting up as Eric asked Gabrielle to stay behind.

  “Damn, I wish I had some popcorn.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  QBS ArchAngel

  “What did Coach and Ardesh come up with on the Space Station?” Lance asked over the monitor. Dan, Bethany Anne, Frank, Barb, Marcus, Bobcat, Jeffrey, and others sat around a long table in one of the main meeting rooms for the operations group. There were twenty chairs around the table, with the same amount running along two sides. There were areas for food and beverages and even had two restrooms specific to this room.

  People were expected to be here a while.

  “Ardesh wanted to know if we could figure out a way to see if there was a difference between the light we should receive from a star, and what we are actively receiving,” Marcus answered. “The idea is if our uninvited guest is using some sort of cloaking we aren’t aware of, it warps the light around it and the light is not perfect or some gravity anomaly or something.”

  Lance looked out of the monitor for a moment, chewing on an unlit cigar.

  “So, if they have an appropriate cloaking capability, then this is bust?” he finally asked.

  “No, I think the algorithms they are working on will help us regardless. However, the calculations just came back and this ship is probably a little bigger than the Defender. If you thought finding a pin in a haystack was a challenge, then you don’t want me to tell you the challenge finding a two to three-hundred-foot ship in the vastness of space would be to us.”

  “Unless they are close?” Bethany Anne asked.

  “Well, certainly. The closer the ship, the larger amount of space it will effectively block. The chance of us finding something optically at even a few thousand miles if it has a passable cloaking ability is constrained.”

  “Why can’t we use something like SONAR?” Lance asked.

  “Well, to some degree we can. We have a rough guess as to the metal makeup of the ship, but nothing exact. They aren’t using a coating such as ours, at least not that we can see. However, they aren’t emitting any waves we can pick up at this time so they might have something on the inside of their ship that stops any waste energy leaving the ship for us to sense.”

  “So, no heat then?” Frank continued his questions.

  “No, not at this time.”

  “Gravity anomalies?” Dan put in.

  Jeffrey, as head of Bobcat’s group and the general operations guy on the research side piped in, “We tried to figure out if we could find our own ships, and it has been a problem. Good in a way, as we are able to run silent, run deep. However, if we turn off our transponders, then no one will know where we are.”

  “This can’t be the answer,” Barb interrupted. As the table turned towards the new voice, she realized she had spoke her frustration out loud. Bethany Anne raised an eyebrow to her, so she pushed forward with her thoughts, “I think we should presume that other species have figured out a method to locate ships in space because otherwise, why are they hiding out there?”

  Marcus added, “Just so the table knows, we don’t actively worry about our space probes hitting asteroids when we send them out. Even in the most populated area, the asteroid belt, you have to do some fuzzy math to get the asteroids to get close enough so just one exists in space the size of Rhode Island. Sure, there are groups, but those are easy enough to bypass. With the calculations of using the asteroids in a single plane, you might have two thousand small one meter asteroids inside the space of the United States.”

  “So, no Star Wars running around and dodging big rocks with your spaceship?” William asked.

  Marcus shook his head, “Only if you absolutely wanted to do that. You would have to purposefully find that group. Likewise, this ship is an infinitesimally small dot on a galactic sized piece of paper.”

  “Ok, so by actively hiding, we assume they are aware of methods to find them.” Bethany Anne said when Marcus interrupted again.

  “Assuming they are still here,” he said.

  Bethany Anne nodded to him, “Yes, that is the safe assumption as you will find out in a second. We’ve been looking and looking, but can’t find them so far. That leads to your thought that maybe they have left. We have new information folks. We have a new anomaly out at Entry/Exit Point 1.”

  ADAM, have ArchAngel bring the video from the Defender online.

  >>Done.<<

  Behind the group on both long sides of the table, a shot of space came into view. On it, a large circle, green with undulating waves floating in and around it.

  It was beautiful and wasn’t supposed to be in the middle of space.

  “What…is that?” Dan asked.

  “That,” Bethany Anne nodded to her left wall, “Is what TOM calls an Annex Gate. Defender ran across it three hours ago. It doesn’t show up on any of our sensors so far, but it is in the area that ship came from. Our closest guess, is our uninvited guest came through that point. TOM’s guess is our friend is going to leave by that gate.”

  “So, the sons-a-bitches are still here, right?” Lance asked. While he and Bethany Anne had spoken when they received the video, they hadn’t had time to talk out any ideas.

  “That’s my guess, Dad.” It was times like this, that Bethany Anne would resort to calling him Dad, instead of General or Lance. Facing the unknown was one thing that would get Bethany Anne to occasionally slip and acknowledge him as her dad during conversations. Fortunately, no one in the group was going to pass on that information to others who would love to know their connection.

  “So, what’s an Annex Gate?” Frank asked, “I can guess from the name we aren’t going to be too fond of the idea.”

  TOM, why don’t you answer over the speakers?

  Very well, Bethany Anne, he replied.

  “Hello everyone,” The warm, but still slightly electronic voice came through the speakers in the room, “This is TOM. Bethany Anne has asked me to include myself in this conversation.”

  Bethany Anne was amused when a buzz went around the room. She realized speaking to him, or hearing him was a special event for most of those here. Even Marcus would often text with TOM instead of talking. Barb turned her head to look at Bethany Anne with a question on her face. Bethany Anne smiled and nodded that it was, indeed, the alien.

  “Please remember, a lot of my information is ten of your centuries or more out of date. However, even back then, there were several alien civilizations that had gates showing the traits you see on the video. They are called Annex Gates because most space-faring nations are inquisitive and acquisition focused in nature. They often need to leave their home planet, driving them to overcome the challenges of early space travel. Most do not immediately jump to technology which makes space travel safe.”

  “Except us,” Jeffrey said.

  “No, that is not true, Jeffrey,” TOM replied, “Your species has had multiple different efforts which killed many people. Not many from a statistical standpoint, but as a percentage of those trying to attain space, it is approximately as high as those trying to attain the top of Mt. Everest, which is four percent. Right now, the belief is that for public space travel to be successful, it needs to be less than one percent. However, you have suffered a higher percentage for a few decades.”

  Jeffrey shrugged, “Sorry, for us it seems like we have done this for only a few years and suddenly we have the ability to use gravity generators to make it happen.”

  “True, but that is because we have been raised up as a species, for better or worse, by Kurtherians,” Bethany Anne answered, “So, from our total history it is a short amount of time, but if things had worked out the way Kurtherians normally do this, we would already be out there in space, fighting some other civilizations for our Kurtherian Overlords.”

  “Can we agree to call them the Seven?” TOM asked over the speakers.

  “Sure,” Bethany Anne answered, “For everyone not up to date, there are twelve clans of Kurtherians. TOM is from a group of five, who damn near ca
n’t step on a roach…”

  “I’m getting better about that,” TOM interrupted.

  “That’s because Bethany Anne is a bad influence,” Lance said to general chuckles around the table.

  “That is likely the case, General Reynolds. However, what is more likely is the many long conversations we have had related to the necessity of what she calls pruning. It is, in a way, the same thing our geneticists did to our DNA lines.”

  “Just later staged pruning,” Bethany Anne agreed, “So, the psychotic Kurtherians are the Seven, go on TOM.”