by M. D. Cooper
Juasa sighed and killed the connection. Hemry wasn’t going to budge. He didn’t have any special love for the captain, but he had always been chummy with Anna.
That’s what it was. She had seen Kelly and Tali with Anna last time they were on Tsarina station. These two were Anna’s girls.
What is Anna up to?
The shuttle touched down and a minute later, Jan walked out.
“Stars, it’s good to have gravity again. Didn’t know how much I missed it!” she exclaimed.
“Didn’t you have gravity on the shuttle?” Juasa asked.
Jan shrugged. “Yeah, and now I have it here, too. I have no idea how that woman managed so long in zero-g. She seems way too prissy for something like that.
“Takes all kinds,” Juasa replied.
She looked inside the shuttle and saw Mandy give her a nervous wave.
“We have it from here, Jan,” Juasa said. “We’ll put the crates in the secure lockup, and we’ll be good to go.”
“I don’t think so,” a voice said from behind Juasa, and she turned to see Anna enter the bay, with Hemry and a few of the engineering crew following after.
“Shit,” Juasa whispered.
“Trying to call your new mistress?” Anna asked. “Don’t think I didn’t see how you looked at her. Ferris might be too stupid to know when he’s being played, but I’m not. You’re offline, Juasa. Sam’s un-Linked you.”
Juasa felt her connection to the shipnet fall away. She tried to reach Katrina through the maintenance subsystem that they had used to chat, but was disconnected mid-send.
“Did they bring all eight?” Anna asked Jan.
“Uh huh,” Jan nodded. “I faked an episode in the san so they could load them up, thinking they were so clever.”
“Excellent,” Anna said with a broad smile. “Now we just have to wait for the Verisimilitude to arrive, and we can finish this up.”
Verisimilitude, Juasa knew that name…
“Shit,” she whispered. “You sold us out. The Verisimilitude is a Blackadder ship.”
“’Us’ is relative,” Jan said as she approached Juasa. “When Anna and I compared notes, we realized that Ferris was going to take a big, tasty piece of the pie, and leave us with the scraps. That’s a Streamer ship over there, I have no doubt about it. Thing is, we’re all pretty sure you already knew that. You had some sort of side deal planned all along. But now you’ve been sold out, and so has the captain; but the rest of us? We’ve been dealt in.”
Juasa couldn’t believe what was happening. That Jan and Hemry would side with Anna against the captain—against KiStar. It was insane.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Juasa pleaded. “Ferris has been acting weird, not me. I’ve just been trying to fly under the radar while he proved his virility to Verisa.”
As Juasa was speaking, she heard a scream and a thud. She turned to see Kelly pulling Mandy out of the shuttle.
“Stop it, what are you all doing?” Mandy shouted as Kelly grabbed her by the hair.
“Getting you off the shuttle,” Kelly said before tossing Mandy to the ground. “Now shut it.”
“So what’s your plan?” Juasa asked. “Sell these eight pods to the highest bidder, and then tell KiStar we were robbed?”
Anna nodded. “Very close. “Though there’s some debate as to whether or not we even go back into Bollam’s. The Havermere’s FTL capable. We’ll be richer than gods, and can go wherever we want. Why would we stay here?”
“And what of Verisa and her ship?” Juasa asked. “Just gonna sell them, too?”
Hemry chuckled and Anna replied, “You’re on a roll, Ju. You bet we are. I don’t know how much you mean to Verisa, but we’re going to try to use you for bait, or as a hostage. Whichever. If Verisa really is so sweet on you, maybe she’ll trade her life for yours.”
“What about Sam?” Juasa asked as she backed further away from Anna. “How could he go against KiStar?”
“I’m not,” Sam said aloud. “But Hemry hasn’t given me much choice in the matter….”
“You shackled him?” Juasa asked, her eyes wide. She had always thought that Hemry and Sam got along well.
Hemry shrugged. “He wouldn’t play along. There are emergency protocols for a rebellious ship’s AI. I enacted them.”
Juasa stood dumbfounded for a moment, then turned and ran toward the shuttle.
If I can just get inside and hit the emergency door closure—
She had one foot inside the shuttle when her head snapped back, and she stopped short with a shriek. Juasa twisted to see that Kelly had her by the hair.
“Nice try,” the big woman laughed before throwing Juasa to the ground. Tali approached and kicked her in the ribs, and she curled up in a fetal position.
“Please…” Juasa moaned. “Just let me go, I don’t know anything….”
“Sure, right after this,” Kelly said.
Juasa looked up at her attackers just in time to see a boot slam into her face.
Then everything went black.
SEDUCTION
STELLAR DATE: 11.17.8511 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Voyager
REGION: Scattered Disk, Bollam’s World System (58 Eridani)
“Wine?” Katrina asked, as Ferris lounged on her bed—or, more accurately, above her bed.
“Always,” Ferris replied, then laughed at his own joke. “I have to admit, Verisa, I had wondered about your ship. It’s very…sterile; not like I expected your vessel to be. But this, this is more like it.”
Katrina had worried about that. Given that her entire time on the Voyager had been spent in interstellar space, there hadn’t been a lot of opportunity to decorate. The only things she had brought aboard—other than clothing—was the one case of mementos.
However, when she entered her cabin, something quite surprising had greeted her.
Troy had used the fab systems aboard the ship to create a lush apartment with draperies on the bulkheads, carpets on the floors, and a large bed in the center of the room. Pictures adorned the walls, and wooden furniture stood around the edges of the space.
At least half of it was holoprojections; though they were so good, even Katrina could barely separate what was real from what was not.
Ferris seemed completely taken in.
“I hadn’t had time to decorate too much before I had to go on this trip,” Katrina said. “But once it’s done, I’m going to deck out every deck.”
Ferris laughed softly. “Well done; you’re a regular comedian, Verisa.”
“I try,” Katrina said as she carefully poured the wine into two pouches. “Not the most elegant thing, but they’ll do.”
He took a sip and smiled before letting the pouch float freely above him.
“Damn, I love that outfit,” Ferris said. “You look like a devil. You should get a tail and horns attached. Or modded on…that would be even better.”
“You and your fantasies,” Katrina said with a shake of her head.
“I have a lot of them,” Ferris replied. “Why don’t you polish off that wine, and get over here and find out more of them?”
Katrina complied and drank the wine. A little emotional numbing would be nice right about now. She reached up to pull her outfit’s fastener out of its hidden groove, but Ferris held up his hand.
“Why don’t you leave that on; you’re not going to need to take it off to give me what I want.”
Katrina gave Ferris a lascivious smile as she slinked toward him. “And what about what I want?”
“We’ll get there,” Ferris said with a wink. “But to start with, I think I need some payment for the good work I’ve done he
re.”
Every now and then, I almost, just about, a tiny little bit, don’t hate this guy…then he goes and behaves like this again.
They started off with what Ferris wanted, and then worked their way across each other’s bodies for several minutes, and then Ferris pulled away and pushed himself across the room.
“Sorry, gotta use the san.”
Katrina sighed, and winked at him. “Hurry.”
Ferris had closed the door, and she was wondering if he’d know how to use a zero-g toilet when a message came in from Juasa over the maintenance-subsystem, and the tap into the comm array.
Her mental tone seemed scared, and her words were rushed.
The message cut off, and Katrina tried to reach out to Juasa.
There was no response; not directly, and not through their back channels.
Troy made a gagging sound.
When Ferris exited the san, Katrina was waiting for him.
“Just can’t keep away, is that it?” Ferris asked.
“Something like that,” Katrina replied. She considered giving Ferris a speech about how he needed to treat women like equals and not leverage, but decided it wasn’t worth it.
“Goodnight,” was all she said before activating the nano she had inserted into his body on their first encounter.
Ferris’s eyes widened, and he managed to utter ‘whaa—’ before he went limp.
Katrina guided Ferris’s inert body into the stasis chamber across the corridor, and pushed him into one of the pods.
“Sorry, buddy, no stasis suit for you.”
Katrina replied, trying to hide the worry from her mental voice.
Carl didn’t even hesitate.
Katrina didn’t reply. Carl knew the stakes. Either he succeeded or he didn’t. Either way, she needed more options.
Katrina blinked at the rebuke.
Katrina bit back a response. Troy was right, he was almost always right.
Katrina considered her options. If accessing the Havermere’s systems remotely was out of the question, she may have to go in and do things the hard way.
“Can you activate our stealth systems?” she asked aloud.
Katrina sighed. “Stealth’s probably not a good idea anyway, ‘til we’re under thrust. I don’t really want to try our weapons against theirs, either. From what I understand, their grav shields can just bend our lasers away.”
“They have at least sixty beams on that ship. I don’t think we’d make a dent with those two before they took ours out,” Katrina replied.
“Is the armor rack still powered up?”
“Good. I’m going to get armored up and go EVA across to the Havermere.”
“Troy…We went on this crazy adventure to find a place where we belonged. To find someone special. Well…I have found someone.”
“We might never find them,” Katrina said softly. “You probably know the odds far better than I. But Juasa means something to me, and I can’t just leave her behind.”
Troy didn’t respond as she pushed herself out of her seat and down the ladder shaft toward deck seven and the armory. As she approached the rack, he finally replied.
“Your support…and watch over Carl and the gang. This is going to get dicey.”
CAPTAIN ANNA
STELLAR DATE: 11.17.8511 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: KSS Havermere
REGION: Scattered Disk, Bollam’s World System (58 Eridani)
“Sam,” Anna said as she settled into the command chair on the Havermere’s bridge. “Any change on the Voyager?”
“I have a ship on scan,” Hemry said from one of the bridge consoles. “Profile looks like the Verisimilitude.”
“About time,” Anna said as she brought up the scan data on the bridge’s main holodisplay. “Yeah, if that’s not the Verisimilitude, I don’t know what it would be. Buggers are an hour late, too. We could have this show on the road by now.”
“Do you think that Verisa will surrender the Voyager?” Hemry asked, looking up and meeting Anna’s eyes.
“What choice does she have? We outgun her, and she has no FTL. She can’t run, she can’t hide.”
Hemry’s expression grew clouded. “So long as she doesn’t have any tech we don’t know about.”
Anna snorted. “If she did have an ace up her sleeve, don’t you think she’d have played it by now?”
Hemry didn’t reply and returned his gaze to the console before him, his expression showing more than a little uncertainty.
“Yes, Sam. Now shut up.”
The bridge’s holodisplay changed from the view of the Verisimilitude’s exterior to that of its bridge. Anna’s breath caught. She had expected some senior captain of the Blackadder to be in command of the ship, but it was none other than Jace Kaidan himself.
“You must be Anna,” Jace said through his thick, red beard. “And I assume this ship off your port side is what you claim to be a Streamer vessel?”
Anna swallowed and nodded. “It is, Chieftain Kaidan. We’ve already pulled eight stasis pods from it; all of which we have confirmed to be the genuine article.”
Jace arced an eyebrow. “Have you now? Stasis pods…just eight?”
Anna shook her head. “There were another half dozen or so in their hold, but there are probably more—being a Streamer ship.”
“How certain are you of that? It looks like a Jasepsce model, perhaps an Imperial. Older, but still serviceable.”