The Phoenix Reckoning (The Phoenix Conspiracy Series Book 6)

by Richard Sanders

  Perfect, thought Calvin, happy for the privacy. Rain did not seem to notice his entrance.

  He walked over to her, only to find her unconscious. Calvin felt his heart leap in his chest and he grabbed her with both arms, gently shaking her. “Rain. Rain!”

  She awoke after a few seconds. At first she was obviously unaware of her surroundings and confused, but then everything seemed to click together.

  “Why, hello, Calvin,” she said with a smile.

  “Rain,” he said, still feeling his heart beating like a snare drum. “Are you all right?”

  “Of course I am. Why do you ask?” She stood up and looked up into his eyes. The blueness of her irises never ceased to amaze him.

  “You weren’t conscious,” said Calvin. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I was asleep,” she said, dismissively. “That was all. I think we’ve all been a little overworked and under-slept since…well, pretty much the beginning.” She laughed. Calvin could only manage a slight chuckle; he remained worried about her. He was no medical expert, but it didn’t seem normal for her to have drifted off like that, and then been so difficult to awaken, even though now she seemed completely fine. Perhaps she was right, and she was merely a deep sleeper. I suppose I’m being paranoid, thought Calvin.

  “I think you should have Dr. Andrews take a look at you, just in case,” said Calvin.

  Rain laughed. Then, when Calvin didn’t, she said, “Oh, you’re serious?”

  “Yes,” said Calvin, nodding.

  “Oh well, all right then, I suppose. I’ll ask him to do it tomorrow,” said Rain. “If those really are the captain’s orders.”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Calvin. He had lost Christine due to negligence on his part; he wasn’t about to endanger Rain in the same way. And, although she had confided in him that she was terminally ill, Calvin intended to keep her around for as long as he possibly could. For all he knew they would live out the rest of their lives together on this mission; perhaps none of the Nighthawk’s many souls was fated to return.

  “Now those aren’t the only captain’s orders,” said Calvin, as coyly as he could manage. He pulled Rain close to him and bent her over for a kiss. She was stiff at first, obviously taken off guard, but then she relented and kissed him back, deeply.

  “Well, that too was unexpected,” she said, as soon as she had the chance. “You really are a man of surprises, Mr. Cross,” she teased.

  “I like to think so,” he said. He kissed her again then led her by the hand toward her apartment. Before he could open the door, he found himself kissing her some more. He pressed her warm body up against the bulkhead and kissed her neck, her cheek, and finally her lips again. Her body responded to him and she kissed him back, pulling him in even closer, her hands somehow found their way under his uniform shirt and explored his back muscles while he lost himself in her mouth, supporting her head with his right hand and holding her tightly against himself with his left. It was a moment of pure, animalistic passion.

  “Can we please take this inside?” said Calvin, catching a breath.

  “Oh, yes,” said Rain, looking eager to surrender herself to her every impulse. She opened the door and yanked on his arm, practically throwing him inside her quarters. He grabbed her and pulled her close to him, the momentum carried them forward and they collapsed on her bed, embracing tightly.

  “You know something, Doctor,” said Calvin with a teasing smile. “I think I rather like you.” He kissed her again, stifling her reply. She giggled.

  He shifted himself on the bed, practically picking her up as he did—much to her delight—and then laid her down. She spread her legs, allowing him to crawl on top of her, and he kissed her repeatedly, all over, slowly working his way back up to her lips. All the while she seemed blissful and reciprocated his every affection.

  He then reached under her scrubs and glided his hands slowly up her chest, stopping as he felt her tender breasts. They felt warm, and soft—even through her bra—and had just the right firmness. They were neither small nor large and seemed to fit into his hands perfectly, as if made for them. He gave them each a gentle squeeze, then reached around her to undo the clasp.

  “I love you,” he said, thoughtlessly, as he found the clasp behind her back and began to fight its insufferable resistance. The damn thing seemed to be welded together.

  “Wait, what did you say?” she asked, sitting up all of a sudden, extracting his hands from under her shirt.

  Oh shit, thought Calvin. I said something wrong, didn’t I? Or maybe I was going too fast?

  “Nothing, just that I really, really like you,” he said, trying to slip his hands back under her shirt and continue where they had left off—she did not let him.

  And in that moment, as if a pang of clarity had struck her like a lightning bolt, she changed. Her eyes sharpened, her expression became concerned, and she pulled away, physically and metaphorically.

  “We have to stop,” she said.

  “What?” he asked, now thinking his chances were quickly dropping. “Why?”

  “Just trust me; it’s for the best,” she seemed awfully insistent. But Calvin wasn’t about to let the matter go so easily.

  “You have me really confused,” he said.

  “We just shouldn’t,” her eyes looked at him firmly, yet pleadingly.

  “Why not?” asked Calvin. “Was it what I said?” he came to the only conclusion that seemed logical to him. “Because I didn’t really know what I was saying…I take it back.”

  She looked shocked, hurt, and confused. “You what?”

  “I don’t…love you?” offered Calvin.

  She gave him a glare that meant this was clearly not the right answer. So telling her I love her is wrong, telling her I don’t love her is wrong; why do women have to be so complicated?

  “I think you should go,” she said.

  Calvin felt wounded. Wounded and confused. “Wait, Rain, please,” he tried to take her hand, she let him. He gazed into her beautiful blue eyes as he spoke. “I really do love you. I didn’t mean that stuff about taking it back.”

  “I know,” she said. “And that’s the problem.”

  “Why is that the problem?” he asked. “Why would that ever be the problem?”

  “You can’t love me. I can’t let you. I’m sorry.”

  “Well it’s too late for that,” said Calvin.

  “I know,” she said gently. “And I’m sorry for that too.” She gave his hand a squeeze and then pulled away.

  Calvin just sat there on the bed, dumbfounded.

  “I’m not angry with you or anything,” said Rain, “or frustrated. It’s just…you can’t love me. We can’t be in love.”

  Calvin looked up at her. “But why the hell not? Is it that you don’t see me in that way?”

  She shook her head. “No, that isn’t the problem. I think you’re one of the sweetest, most beautiful men I’ve ever met.”

  Calvin wasn’t sure how he felt about being described as beautiful, but decided to let it slide. “Then what?”

  Rain looked tightlipped.

  “Okay, I’ll go,” said Calvin, standing up. “But don’t you think you at least owe me an explanation?”

  “It should be obvious, Calvin,” said Rain. “I’m dying.”

  “So what?” Calvin tried to take her in his arms, but she didn’t let him. “So dying people aren’t allowed to be in love?”

  “No, it isn’t that,” she said. “But dying people shouldn’t be in love with…you.”

  “With me? What the hell does that mean?”

  Rain let out a sigh and then, very gingerly, took one of his hands and looked up at him, clearly rehearsing in her mind what she was about to say before saying it.

  “Just tell me,” said Calvin.

  “It’s because of Christine,” said Rain.

  “Christine is long gone,” said Calvin.

  “You haven’t really had time to mourn her and achieve closure yet,”
said Rain.

  “I’ve had years,” said Calvin.

  “But you still believed it was your fault she died,” said Rain.

  Calvin remained silent. That much was true, he supposed, but he didn’t see why it mattered.

  “You hung onto that guilt, and onto her, for years, in a way that was very unhealthy.”

  “But you helped me to free myself of that,” said Calvin. “See, you are great for me.”

  “And when I die, which I will soon,” she said in a voice of deep acceptance, “who will help you get over my death?”

  “That won’t be for a very long time,” argued Calvin. “Besides, people mourn. We mourn and we heal. That doesn’t mean we should deprive ourselves of what beautiful things we can have now.” He looked at her earnestly.

  She looked back at him with a slight, sad-looking frown. “Calvin part of why you’re such a great guy is also why we can’t be together,” she said. “If I weren’t sick, it would be different. We would be great together.”

  “I don’t mind that you’re sick,” interjected Calvin. “I can help you. I can be there for you!”

  Rain shook her head. “If we gave in to…our feelings, yes, it would be pleasant, and beautiful, for a while. But then when I go, you’ll be left behind. And I will be yet another Christine. You will feel guilt for my death, even though you couldn’t stop it. It’s just who you are,” she said, obviously sincere. As much as he wanted to tell her she was completely wrong and being ridiculous, a part of him wondered if it were true.

  “I could never do that to you,” said Rain. “I refuse to. I will not leave you like that.”

  “And you’d give up all that we are—all that we could be—because of that?” asked Calvin.

  “Not all that we are,” said Rain. “But all that we could be…I’m afraid so.”

  Calvin shook his head. “No, no, no. This makes no sense. The truth is, we’re all probably going to be dead in a few days or weeks anyway. We’re going into Polarian Forbidden Space—no one has ever returned from there,” he said desperately. “We are likely headed toward a very quick, tragic end. Why shouldn’t we try to enjoy the love that we could have until that happens?”

  “Calvin, I know you, you’re a survivor. You will find a way out of this,” she insisted faithfully. “And you’ll take as many people on this ship with you that you can, maybe even all of them. You will make it through this.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know that.”

  “You can’t know that,” insisted Calvin.

  Rain just looked at him with a soft, sad smile. “But we can be friends. Great friends. And I will be there for you as much as I can, to help you save the Empire.”

  “So, friends then?” asked Calvin, almost unable to believe he was saying the words.

  “Friends,” said Rain. “Loyal friends.”

  CHAPTER 12

  It was strange, even though the humans had not been his people, and in the end, had ultimately abandoned him to die on a Rahajiim supercruiser, Alex still thought of himself as the crude name the humans had given him—Alex. He shared this knowledge with none of his associates; to the Advent, he was still his given name Ol’ixe, rank Proxitor.

  He supposed he could not blame the humans for betraying him in the end; it was merely payback for what Alex had done to them—which had been to turn them over to the Advent—and payback was a concept that the humans, although primitive, seemed to understand at nearly the same level as the Rotham. Reciprocity. It was a cornerstone of natural selection; without it there could be no cooperation, and without cooperation there would be no social order, nor any progress. But reciprocity worked in both directions, and when one reaped negativity toward someone, then one often harvested negativity in return. Alex had been a fool to believe the humans would let him go along with them on their nearly ill-fated escape. And, truth be told, he was lucky they had decided to let him keep his life. In fact, by stranding him on the Rahajiim supercruiser, although momentarily a desperate situation, they had done him a tremendous favor.

  The humans had made their escape attempt, absurdly jumping into alteredspace while only mere meters away—if that—from the supercruiser’s hangar, evidently preferring a swift death. Meanwhile, Alex had been free and alive on the supercruiser. He had needed to eliminate a low ranking technician and replace him, posing as a shipmate so lowly that no one would look twice at him—while also remaining out of sight as much as he could. This gave him the advantage of not being hunted by the Teldari, who assumed all the fugitives had been killed in the Action Information Center, or else had attempted to jump away on the drone control ship, so they didn’t know to be looking for him.

  Alex then used his time to return to the AIC as part of a cleanup crew, again no one asked any questions and he made eye contact with no one, and, while he was there helping to remove bodies and scrub blood from the carpets, he had discreetly put in an order for one of the drone fighter craft in one of the supercruiser’s hangars to be transferred to one of the fleet’s mobile launching platforms. At that point it had been a game of slipping away from the AIC, getting to the hangar without drawing suspicion, and then getting inside the auxiliary maintenance hatch of the drone starfighter before it was automatically removed from the supercruiser and launched into space.

  All of this, he had managed to do. And then, when he was inside the drone starfighter, which nobody knew, since Rotham fightercraft were automated, he had manually disabled and sabotaged part of the vessel’s sublight drive while it was travelling between the supercruiser and the mobile launching platform. Since the fleet had, evidently, been in some tremendous hurry to launch and begin their attack on the humans in Thetican System, the fleet decided that leaving one automated but broken starfighter behind meant next to nothing and so, after about thirty minutes, the fleet jumped away. This left Alex and his gently sabotaged short range, automated fightercraft alone. Just as he had planned. After that, it had merely been a matter of contacting his Advent allies over secured kataspace frequencies, using secure Advent codes, and then awaiting retrieval, which came about three hours later.

  “You’re alive?” had been the Nau’s reaction, once Alex had exited the retrieved starfighter and stepped out onto the deck of the Advent starship.

  “I am alive,” he had told them. He knew the mission he had been sent on had been a suicide mission by intent, and so he had spent the past several hours concocting the perfect reason for why he remained alive, when his allies had all been slaughtered, and yet he was not a coward or a deserter because if it.

  “How is this possible?” the Nau had asked, somewhat suspiciously.

  “We did not know if our transmissions were getting through,” Alex lied. “And so one of us had to survive in order to relay the information we discovered, just in case the transmissions failed.” It was a simple enough lie and one Alex told in such a deadpan manner that he nearly believed it himself.

  The Nau and other Advent officers had no trouble accepting this. They informed him what he already knew—that the transmissions had come through loudly and clearly—and that even as they spoke the data was being combed through and analyzed by the best Advent analysts available.

  “You are a hero,” the Nau had praised him. And, like anyone would do in his position, Alex had taken the compliment in stride and smiled, glad his escape was not something that he would have to explain further.

  Because of the sensitivity of the data that the Advent team had extracted, and its many implications, the Advent had decided to make their move against the Rahajiim as quickly as possible. As such, after a short debriefing, in which Alex told the Nau that the humans had died honorably, helping the Advent until the very end—a lie he hadn’t been quite sure why he had felt motivated to tell—the Nau had proven eager to give Alex his next assignment. There had been no time for rest, recuperation, or recovery. It was already onto the next thing.

  “The Rahajiim have made their moves; now i
t is time for our countermoves, if we are to save our Republic.”

  This conversation had led to a briefing, a re-outfitting of gear, a relocation to the surface of Ro itself, and ultimately to here.

  He carved his way through a window using a special glass cutter and slipped inside the estate of Senator Hexupor T’rin Ze’lo. Disguised as one of the servants, and careful not to make eye contact with the house staff, he slipped through the corridors and up the grand staircase to the suite of honor itself.

  The Advent had decided that the information they had collected from the supercruiser—which many of the Advent’s best operatives had died for—was enough to put a stop to the Rahajiim once and for all. “Their day is over,” the Great Nau had said. That had been music to Alex’s ears. Now, as a fully re-instated Proxitor of the Advent, he knew his task and made his approach. Upon reaching the top of the staircase, he allowed one of the housekeepers to pass by before slipping inside the grand entrance to the suite of honor. Once he’d gained entrance, he cable-tied the doors shut and then snuck up behind the senator’s personal servant and, using a chokehold, crushingly pressed against the man’s windpipe until he was thoroughly incapacitated.

  There, thought Alex. That ought to guarantee us the privacy we need for this little chat. He then opened the door to the senator’s study and confronted Senator Ze’lo himself.

  “I asked not to be disturbed,” the senator said angrily, not yet turning to see who had intruded upon him. He sat in a large padded chair, with a hot beverage on his desk, and an electronic pad in his hands, ostensibly reading. Whether he read for pleasure or was perusing the minutes of the previous day’s session made no difference to Alex. What was important was that they were alone. Alex took a moment to search the room for any obvious signs of cameras or microphones, and, although he couldn’t be perfectly certain none were disguised somewhere, he was happy to see that there appeared to be no recording devices in the room—just like he had planned, based on the estate’s blueprints, which the Advent had supplied him before sending him to make this approach.