by M. D. Cooper
“Of course,” Sera said after a long sigh. “It’s OK, Tanis. I’ll be fine.”
Flaherty didn’t move, and Andrea fixed him with a penetrating stare. “You too. This is family business.”
Sera nodded slowly. Flaherty grunted in disapproval, but he left without protest.
THE REAL DEAL
STELLAR DATE: 12.29.8929 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS Intrepid
REGION: Ascella System, Galactic North of the Corona Australis star forming region
“Here it is,” Sera said as she pushed the case forward with her foot. “I’ve copied all the logs for safekeeping. They’re stored in crystal backup with the Intrepid’s AI, Bob. I used to think that I wanted to use them to press charges against you, Mark, but I’ve since realized that I really don’t care. What’s done is in the past. You’re less than scum to me and not worth further consideration. So, take the CriEn and get the hell out of here.”
Marks’ long-schooled expression broke into a wide sneer. “And I’ve always known you were pathetic. You never press the advantage when you have it.” He looked her over. “Nice skin by the way. Is that an upgrade, or an extension of your bad fashion sense?”
Sera’s heart rate rose. Mark always knew how to get under her skin.
“It’s a souvenir I got when getting the module back after you lost it. As for not taking your ass before the commission? It’s called compassion…or maybe in your case, pity.” Sera gave Mark a disdainful look. “I don’t think you’d last in a work camp, and I doubt you’re reprogrammable—too stupid.”
“I think it’s you that’s lacking in necessary mental faculties. I’ve been cleared of all wrongdoing. You, on the other hand…there are some people in high places that would like to talk to you. They were content to let you hide out forever, but now that you gave the Intrepid our graviton tech, they want to have a chat with your sorry ass,” Mark said with a cold smile.
Sera pivoted in her seat and showed Mark her rear. “I don’t think it’s sorry at all. Why don’t you come over here and kiss it?”
“Enough!” Andrea snapped. “We’re to bring you back to Airtha. Father has grown weary of you gallivanting about the Inner Stars as some sort of kinky pirate. It’s time to come home.”
Sera pushed down the resentment she always felt around Andrea and gave a mischievous smile as she straightened in her chair. “I wasn’t really planning to go back to the Inner Stars. I’m going to New Canaan with the Intrepid. I think I’ll settle down there.”
“No. You’re. Not.” Andrea stood and spoke each word slowly, her lips curling around the words as if she hated the sound of them.
Sera stood and gestured to the door. “Andrea, you always like to think you’re in charge. But here, you’re not. There’s an entire platoon of Marines out there who will kick your ass from here to the Core if you don’t leave now.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mark rise, but she was distracted by Andrea reaching for her arm.
“Stop being childish. You’re a Tomlinson. You will come with us.”
Sera grabbed Andrea’s wrist and twisted her arm behind her back, spinning her sister around in the process.
“Don’t think you can touch me. I’m…” Sera’s words faded as she felt a pinch on the back of her neck.
She tried to scream for help across the Link before everything went dark.
* * * * *
“I hope this doesn’t take too long,” Tanis said as they waited in the ballroom for Sera to have her conversation with Andrea and Mark.
“Why?” Terrane asked. “Do you have somewhere you need to be?”
“Funny,” Tanis gave him a dry look. “Not sure if you remember, but the leadership voted me in as the governor the other day, and I have a newborn baby waiting for me. There’s always somewhere I need to be.”
Terrance chuckled in response. “I wonder what they’re talking about in there?”
“Sera figures they’re going to try and strong-arm her into going with them back to wherever it is they’re going back to. I really want to snoop, but they’ve deployed so much nano in there to mask their chat that I’d have to wage a war to take it all down.”
“I hope she chooses not to go,” Terrance shook his head. “Her sister seems like a real—”
The door opened and Sera exited with Andrea and Mark trailing close behind. Andrea held the data crystal in its clear case, and Mark held the case containing the CriEn.
“Tanis, Terrance, I’ve decided to return to Airtha with my sister and Mark,” Sera said with far less emotion than Tanis would have expected from such an announcement.
Tanis stepped forward and put a hand on Sera’s forearm. “Are you sure?”
Tanis saw sadness in her friend’s eyes as she placed her left hand on Tanis’s shoulder and nodded. “I must, I hope you’ll understand.”
“Understand what?” Tanis asked and then saw Sera move her right arm to a telltale position. Her eyes darted down to see the fingers on Sera’s right hand flow together to form a wide blade. Tanis tried to pull back, but Sera held her close, and, with a lightning-fast jab, pushed the blade under Tanis’s ribs and into her heart.
At the same moment, Mark yelled, “Look out, she’s trying to kill the governor!”
Tanis stumbled backward, knowing she probably wore a dumbfounded look on her face as blood poured out of the wound and down her chest. Sera held onto her and pulled her arm back for another strike, this one aimed right at her eye.
Tanis raised an arm to block the blow, but she felt her strength leaving her as the blood pooled around her feet. Sera’s knife-hand inched closer to her eye and she pushed with all her might for a momentary struggle that felt like minutes.
Then, just as her strength was about to give out, strong hands grabbed Sera and pulled her back. Tanis saw Flaherty yelling in Sera’s ear for her to stop. The pair struggled for a moment more, and then Sera’s synthetic skin became slick and she twisted out of Flaherty’s grasp.
Sera lunged at Tanis without a moment’s pause and Tanis sidestepped; then smashed her clasped hands down on Sera’s wrist before slamming into her and knocking her friend to the ground.
Tanis stumbled and fell, as well. She struggled to rise when she heard Angela call on the combat net.
Without hesitation, first squad fired a round of low-power pulse shots at Sera while squads two and three advanced on Andrea and Mark with their weapons leveled.
Tanis nodded, as her arteries shunted over to her second heart—a backup she had added to her body after nearly dying on the Regal Dawn when a railgun slug had torn through her chest.
“What are you doing?” Mark called out. “Kill her! She’s dangerous, she tried to kill your governor!”
Four Marines approached Sera, who lay crumpled on the ground, moaning in pain from the multiple pulse shots. They bent and secured her before a team of medics moved in.
Angela said.
“What’s her condition?” Tanis asked the medics as they bent over Sera’s prone form.
“Broken ribs, fractured skull, but otherwise, O
K. She’d be one massive bruise from that many pulse shots if she didn’t have her fancy epidermis.”
Tanis said privately to Angela.
Angela responded absently as she deployed nano to inspect Sera and determine why her Link was down.
Tanis didn’t reply. She hadn’t expected a comment like that from Angela, and didn’t have time to tell if it was true or if her friend was needling her.
Tanis lifted her hand and peered at the gaping wound in her chest. It had stopped gushing blood, and her nano were slowly stitching the wound closed. A medic approached her, but she waved the man off, before turning to Mark and Andrea.
“What did you do to her?” Tanis demanded as she approached the pair.
Mark’s mouth was agape as he stared at Tanis. “How are you standing? She punctured your heart! She had to have—look at all the blood.”
Tanis turned and looked at what was at least a liter of blood on the floor.
“I’m resilient,” she said, though she didn’t feel it. A wave of lightheadedness washed over her and she stumbled.
The medic hadn’t moved far and caught Tanis before she fell. He signaled a pair of Marines, and they each took an arm and guided her to a chair.
“Governor, you may be the toughest woman in the galaxy, but you still need blood to function.”
“So it would seem,” Tanis grunted.
“Take them to holding, search and secure them,” Tanis directed the Marines while looking at Mark and Andrea. She almost told them to get Jessica for an interrogation but recalled that her specialist in that area was off the ship, gallivanting about the Orion Arm on her secret mission.
“I’ll be with them before long,” she said with a grimace as the medic punched a probe through her skin.
“Sorry,” he said absently. “I thought you’d’ve already shut off your pain receptors. You’ve got a whack of blood pooled around your right lung. It’s best to pull it out right now before it forms a hematoma.”
“A whack?” Tanis asked. “Is that a medical term?”
“Yeah,” the man chuckled. “Right above a touch, but not quite a shit-load.”
Tanis laughed and then winced. “Stop being funny,” she chided the medic.
Somehow, the pain reminded her of birth, which reminded her of Cary and Joe.
“Shit,” she swore.
Tanis could tell from Joe’s tone that he was worried, but not too worried. She supposed that her suffering grievous injury had happened enough through their years that he would inevitably start to handle it with more aplomb.
she said privately to Angela.
It stung for a moment, but then Tanis realized she felt the same way.
Tanis sent him a mental nod. Sera had been her friend for close to a year now. People could certainly hide their true persona for longer—especially ones trained in spy craft like Sera—but Tanis really felt as though something had happened to her.
She knew that Mark, at the least, had been in Sera’s unit when she worked for the Hand. If anyone had the tech to subvert a person in minutes, the Transcend’s black-ops organization would be just the group.
“Are you done yet?” she asked the medic.
“If I were done, would I still be crouched down here, sucking blood out of your torso?”
Tanis had to hold back a laugh. She liked this guy. Not many people talked to her like that anymore; it was refreshing.
“Give me just one more minute, then you can go kick the crap out of someone, ma’am,” he added the last after glancing up at her face.
“We put them in the security office on deck 74,” Lieutenant Smith said as he approached Tanis. “They didn’t give us a fight, but weren’t too happy when we took the data crystal and that case.”
“I want everything within half a klick of that office locked down,” Tanis said. “And I want you to board their ship and move it to a secure hanger. Comb over every inch of that thing.”
The lieutenant snapped off a sharp salute and stepped back, waiting to escort her.
“Smith, I can make it there myself,” Tanis looked up at him with a raised eyebrow.
He nodded. “I’m sure you can, sir. I’m coming along to protect any innocent folks in your path.”
Tanis stifled a laugh and grimaced. “Why is everyone being funny all of a sudden? Can’t you see I have a chest-wound here?”
“Not anymore, you don’t,” the medic said as he stood up. “Though, please do come to the hospital before the day’s out. We do need to replace your heart. It’s a nice trick you pulled with a backup, but it can’t stand up to serious strain. I just put a medseal on the skin for now. Try not to tear it off. The bandages are to keep you from shredding your muscles further.”
Tanis stood slowly, expecting a dizzy spell, but she didn’t experience any untoward symptoms.
“Nicely done,” she complimented the medic before turning to Lieutenant Smith. “Lead the way.”
WATCHPOINT
STELLAR DATE: 12.29.8929 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS Intrepid
REGION: Ascella System, Galactic North of the Corona Australis star forming region
“Alert coming in from the envoy’s ship,” the scan officer announced. “It’s code red.”
“What do we have?” General Greer grunted, wondering what the Tomlinson scions had managed to screw up this time.
“It’s from Serge, on their ship. He’s being forcibly boarded—something’s gone wrong.”
“Lieutenant Lindal, if one of our envoy’s ships is being boarded, it’s a foregone conclusion that something’s gone wrong. What is the content of his message?” Greer asked, resisting the urge to review the message himself. Lindal had to learn how to dispense relevant details at some point in his career.
“Not much, just that it was armored soldiers and that they were not invited. His last transmission was that he was being brought aboard their ship. Our scopes show the envoy’s vessel being moved into a hanger,” Lindal said.
“Wait,” General Greer suddenly realized what was amiss. “You said that Serge sent the message while still on his ship? He was supposed to be part of the diplomatic team. Mark was supposed to stay on the ship.”
“Yes, thank you. I get the implications,” Greer said with a frown.
While the nature of the falling out between Seraphina Tomlinson and Mark Festus was not widely known, Greer’s command of a watchpoint had put him in the need-to-know group. He was certain there were details above his pay-grade, but he knew that both Sera and Mark blamed one another for the deaths of their team and the loss of a CriEn module—advanced tech that the denizens of the Inner Stars should never be allowed to possess.
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At least, not until they were properly uplifted.
Regardless of those details, the mission dossier clearly spelled out the need for Mark to remain on the envoy ship and not board the Intrepid. Knowing Sera’s volatile personality, there was little need to speculate on what would happen at the reunion of those two individuals.
Greer had no idea what possible course of logic could have allowed Andrea to put the two of them together in a room.
Granted, Andrea Tomlinson didn’t possess great restraint, either. However, her father, the President of the Transcend Interstellar Alliance, put great faith in her abilities. She had taken the lead on dozens of diplomatic missions—as much because people feared her as for her ability to solve issues without conflict.
However, Andrea’s presence on the team was obvious. She was to strong-arm her younger sister, the errant Seraphina, home to Airtha in the Huygens System.
He steepled his fingers and considered his options.
Obviously, sitting by and doing nothing was not an option, but he knew the value of the Intrepid, this colony ship from a bygone era. The Transcend would benefit greatly from its technology—enough to finally give them the edge they needed over the Orion Guard.
Any response would require a delicate balance. They must demonstrate enough force to show that the Transcend would not take the abduction of its diplomats lightly, but not so much as to make these colonists think that they were too militant.
“Lieutenant Beezer, I want groups seven and thirteen to exit their hangers and jump to the Intrepid. Inform them that I wish their ships to flank the colony vessel, but keep a hundred-thousand kilometers distance from their fleet.”
Of the fourteen fleet groups stationed at the watchpoint, seven and thirteen were the rapid response units, always ready to deploy and defend the watchpoint or to travel across the stars to project the Transcend’s might where needed.
Each group contained one-hundred and twenty-one ships, anchored by thirty-six medium cruisers and eleven dreadnaughts. It was possible that the Intrepid was a match for the watchpoint’s ships, but he had spent hundreds of hours analyzing the Battle of Bollam’s World, and he believed he knew how to deal with their stasis shields and even the playing field.