by Terry Mixon
He didn’t answer, but his reddening face told Kelsey everything she needed to know.
“Ewwwww! That’s gross! And I should’ve known she’d try something like this.”
Sommerville smiled a little. “Actually, she was very resistant to the idea. I had to be a very attentive suitor. She told me you’d be angry, though I’m not exactly sure why. You barely know me.”
Kelsey opened her mouth to respond but closed it without revealing her mother’s dark past. That was really a private family problem. And none of her business.
She and her mother had made their peace. A thin, hard-won peace, but something real. Kelsey wasn’t going to throw that away so easily.
Perhaps he was right. Her mother was obviously very persuasive when she put her mind to it.
“Let me think about that and talk with her before I commit,” she finally said. “What kind of assurances would I have for her safety?”
“She’d be the one and only ambassador from a foreign power we’ve ever had. I can guarantee that she would never be in the slightest danger.”
“Fine. All I can do is talk with her and get back to you. And seriously? You’re sleeping with my mother? She’s twice your age.”
“And her experience shows.”
“Stop. You’re going to make me hurl in my helmet.”
“I meant that in a nonsexual way, but—”
“Seriously! I don’t want to know!”
After making a show of shuddering, she continued. “I think I see our ride approaching. Do me a favor. Don’t tell anyone with implants that we’re from an offshoot of the Old Empire. That’ll cause some serious problems for them until we make a few things clear.”
“If the picket commander is who I think it is, that’s not a concern. We have some Fleet officers and a few members of the higher orders, but not so many that it’s a big risk. I’ll want to know why before we get to our eventual destination.”
“I promise to explain everything before then,” she said.
The approaching confrontation was actually a relief. The knowledge that her mother was once again on the prowl had her upset. Perhaps, as Sommerville thought, this was his doing, but he didn’t understand how manipulative Kelsey’s mother was.
Then again, she supposed a degree of manipulation was needed in a diplomatic envoy.
The bright dot approaching them grew into a cutter that slowed to a stop near them. It pivoted and lowered its ramp, showing Kelsey a man standing inside ready to haul them inside. Thankfully, neither one of them needed assistance.
“Commander Sommerville can come inside,” the man inside the cutter said. “Whoever is with him needs to stay outside until we verify he isn’t under duress.”
She supposed that was a reasonable precaution, so she jetted to a halt and watched as the man closed the cutter up behind Sommerville. She supposed it was possible the cutter would leave with him, but she doubted that. He’d want his people and ship back.
Ten minutes later, her thoughts were vindicated when the ramp opened and Sommerville gestured for her to come inside. Once she was in, he closed the ramp and started flooding the compartment with air. The man had vanished into the front of the cutter, no doubt locking the door behind him.
Once her helmet was folded back, she strapped in. “Did you two have a nice talk?”
“If you consider being peppered with questions a talk, sure. Oh, and scanning to make sure I didn’t have some kind of bomb compelling me to be on your side.”
“Paranoid much?”
He laughed. “When you’re dealing with the System Lords and their minions, a certain level of paranoia is appropriate. I think I convinced him I was speaking for myself, so now he just thinks I’m crazy.”
“Hopefully I can convince your friends I’m being serious.”
“Me, too.”
The ride back to the picket ship was uneventful, and they soon docked. A pair of armed guards was waiting for them inside with their weapons drawn. One of them had a hand scanner.
“Strip off the vacuum suit and stand here with your arms raised,” he said.
Kelsey slowly removed her vacuum suit, folded it, and set it on the deck and let them start scanning. She noticed the moment the man found her Raider enhancements because of his shocked expression.
“I can’t take those out, and they’re actually part of my proof,” she said. “You have stunners to keep me in line.”
“What am I seeing?” the man asked hesitantly.
“Artificial muscles, graphene-coated bones, a pharmacology unit, and everything else that goes into making a Marine Raider.”
“What’s a Marine Raider?” the other man asked.
“Something from a dark past that none of us expected to ever see again,” Sommerville said.
Now the men looked even more unsettled. After a shared look, they cuffed her hands in front of her. They used plastic cuffs that would be more than good enough for a regular person of even Talbot’s size but were nowhere near good enough to hold her.
“Do you want me to pretend these can hold me?” she asked. “Or shall I prove what I was saying?”
“Prove it,” Sommerville said, turning back to face her. “They won’t believe you otherwise.”
One yank snapped the cuffs, and she calmly handed them back over to the man who’d cuffed her. He took them automatically, too stunned to do otherwise.
“Very impressive,” a voice from up the corridor said. It was the man they’d spoken to earlier.
“They tell me you’re acting of your own free will, Don. Is that right?”
“Everything is nautical,” the Rebel Empire officer said.
“That’s the all-clear codeword,” he told her as an aside. “Now they’ll have to change it.”
The man stepped closer and looked Sommerville up and down. “You seem healthy enough. I was worried.” With that, he wrapped his arms around Sommerville, and the two men hugged one another.
That was a more… enthusiastic greeting than Kelsey had expected.
Sommerville turned toward her with a smile. “Kelsey Bandar, meet my older brother Gavin. Gavin Sommerville, this is Crown Princess Kelsey Bandar of the New Terran Empire.”
“The what?” the elder Sommerville asked. “I think I need to hear this all from the beginning. It’s a little hard to believe, even after seeing how enhanced she is.”
Kelsey nodded. “Let me give you the Reader’s Digest version.”
The man held up his hand. “The what?”
“Sorry,” she said. “Old Empire slang. The condensed version. I’m from a splinter of the Old Empire that the System Lords never located. We’re on the way to Terra to get something to stop them. We inadvertently hijacked your brother and are returning him, his people, and his ship in exchange for directions.”
The man gestured up the corridor. “Let’s adjourn to my wardroom so that I can hear everything you have to say. If I think you’re telling me the truth, I’ll send you on with a recommendation to help you. But I’ll need a lot of proof, and I’m not sure how you can provide it.”
She smiled. “I have my ways. Shall we?”
23
Olivia wasn’t happy at being sidelined from questioning Fielding and pushed back. She’d caught Kelsey Two and Jared on their way to confront Fielding and stopped them in the corridor.
“I realize you want to make this happen right away,” she told them, “but this is something best done methodically. A few hours aren’t going to make a difference. In fact, it might be useful if we let him stew for a while, and then I can take lead.”
“I’m not going to object,” Kelsey said swiftly. “I’ll admit that this is an uncomfortable thing for me. I’d rather you do the talking and I can provide muscle.”
“I’m not an interrogator,” Jared admitted. “Are you?”
“I’ve known a few,” Olivia said. “They’re not exactly the most sociable types, if you know what I mean. Still, if you listen to what they say, you’ll
learn some interesting skills.”
Kelsey frowned. “They didn’t torture people, did they?”
Olivia laughed. “Pain isn’t a very effective interrogation tool, according to the people I’ve met. It just gets people to tell you what they think you want to hear. Drugs and psychology are apparently the answers these days. Since I doubt Doctor Stone would be inclined to use drugs, we’ll try intimidation first.
“But let’s just take our time. We can wait to see if Kelsey needs anything from us while Fielding waits on us for a change. Let’s not rush ahead and spoil our chances.”
With their agreement, she led them to the compartment where they’d relocated the FTL com. It was almost an hour before someone called them and asked for specific recognition codes, which she provided.
Once they had them, she told the person on the other end of the com that she would be indisposed for a while and to verify with Kelsey that she wasn’t needed any longer. They gave her the all clear.
She rose to her feet with a smile. “Finally, we seem to have gotten Kelsey the leg up she needed, so we should see if we can do the same for ourselves. Shall we?”
“What’s the plan going to be?” Jared asked as they headed toward where they were holding Fielding and his guards.
“I’m going to make this up as I go,” she said. “Don’t go in expecting anything. If he defies us, we can always backtrack, though that will cost us time. I’m hoping that we won’t need to do that, but we still don’t know how long it’ll take Kelsey to get to Terra. If she even can.”
She ordered the marines to bring Fielding to a nearby conference room and secure him. Then they waited.
A few minutes later, the two men dragged Fielding in and cuffed him to the chair against one of the bulkheads. Olivia and her companions sat on the far side of the table to gain what psychological advantage they could. The marines remained on either side of the Rebel Empire noble.
“I’m sure you’re wondering why we’ve brought you here,” she said with a bright smile.
“You’re traitors,” he sneered. “Whatever it is you want, I’m not going to provide it.”
“Treason is in the eye of the beholder. So is betrayal. You were going to blow us up. I caught your men preparing to sabotage the bioweapon and kill all of us with the Omega Plague. I think that’s an excellent place to start. Why?”
“Does it matter? Telling you won’t change how you respond to it.”
“It can hardly put you in a worse position,” she countered.
“I suppose not. The Lords are going to clean up everyone involved in this mission. No one will live to tell the tale. My intention was to leave your ship at one of the upcoming systems and then disappear. I’d have taken my nephew with me, of course, except that he’s joined you.”
That last came out much more angrily than Olivia would’ve expected. Somehow, she just didn’t see the man attached to anyone other than himself. Apparently, she’d been wrong.
“And since you’re in the process of betraying the Lords, are you so shocked that we are as well?”
He laughed. “What a complicated game we play in the higher orders. I was and am looking out for myself and my family. If you fail to arrive at Terra, they will believe you dead and the ship destroyed. They wouldn’t be looking for me or Austin. I’d already made arrangements for us to vanish.”
“Personally, I have no objection to your plans,” Jared said. “Right up until they resulted in the deaths of me and my friends, of course. Since you don’t really care about this mission, perhaps we can come to an agreement that sees both plans carried out and the Lords played for fools.”
“Or will you try to declare you won’t see them betrayed at Terra?” Olivia asked. “Do you really lose anything if we carry out our own plans there?”
“I came late to the conversation on the station, so I really don’t know what you intend,” Fielding said. “And I suppose I don’t care. You have me now, and if I want to get away from you, I’ll have to pay. What is it you want? Money?”
“I want to know something first,” Kelsey said. “You sabotaged the Lord back in that system. Why? You’d already planned to kill us and vanish. Why do something that dangerous?”
“Since I didn’t know you were going to betray the Lords like I intended, I had to make sure to at least carry that part of the mission out.”
“That’s a lie,” Olivia said. “If you blew up the Lord, we’d never get to a populated system for you to escape in. Or did you have the extension code all along? If so, why play this game at all?
“No, you came here for something else. You had a plan for getting out all along. You’re not going to get away with that nonsense. What was your real plan, and how did you intend to get to another system?”
“I see no purpose in saying since you’re going to kill me anyway.”
“Perhaps not,” Olivia said. “It doesn’t matter to me whether you live or die, but I’m willing to trade your life for something I want. The passage codes to get to Terra from here.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re still going there? Why?”
“In the end, that’s not really something you need to concern yourself with,” she said coolly. “Our purposes are our own.”
“I do care, since you dare not allow me off your ship before you get there,” he retorted. “That means you’ll have to keep me with you through whatever madness you intend.”
She laughed. “You’re being shortsighted. I have a much easier way of assuring that you never tell anyone about us or what we’ve done so far.” She tapped her head meaningfully.
His eyes widened. “No!”
“Oh, yes. You gave Austin the code to disarm his bomb, but we’d already done so in a much more meaningful way. We rewrote the code in his implants so that it wouldn’t go off, no matter what signals are sent to it. We can’t be sure enough to remove it, but I have utter confidence nothing he does or even an external signal will ever set it off.”
That was a lie. They’d actually removed the bomb once Kelsey had identified the antitampering circuit and how it worked. They didn’t have the code to disarm the bomb, but without the corrupted implant code, it could be safely removed. The AIs hadn’t ever imagined that was possible, so they’d left that flaw in the process that Lily and Kelsey could exploit.
“We’ll rewrite your implant code so that you won’t be able to talk about this ship or anyone on it to anyone, or even the fact that implant code can be altered. I wouldn’t try to have anyone research doing the same, if I were you. We included that. If you do any of those things, you’ll have the most epic headache in history. A short one, but quite debilitating, I’m afraid.”
Olivia leaned forward and smiled wolfishly. “The only bargaining point to have me keep the program as loose as possible is giving me what I want to know. We’ll drop you and your people off short of Terra with complete assurance that you’ll never tell anyone about us. In fact, I feel confident you’ll want to forget you ever met us as quickly as possible.”
The man blinked as he considered his options. “You could be lying.”
“I could be,” she admitted, “but the only way to know for sure is to risk instant death. You have no loyalty to the System Lords, so I doubt you’ll feel much inclination to betray us once you’re free.
“And before you ask more tiresome questions, there is nothing stopping me from shoving you out an airlock if you give me the codes. So you’ll be free to give them to me at every system we transit. If they work, great. If they don’t, I shoot you before I die.”
He gave her the ghost of a smile. “You can be very persuasive, Lady… I’m afraid I don’t know your actual name.”
“And you don’t need to. Lady Keaton is quite acceptable for the remaining week we have to spend together.”
“Of course. What about the bioweapon?”
“Gone,” Jared said. “The Lord assisted us with deactivating the plasma bombs. We then ejected the crates and destroyed them. The O
mega Plague is dead. I’ll assume you made plans on your end to destroy the lab where it was grown.”
“Indeed. The Lords will be displeased that they’ll have to start over, as I made certain all the research data they got was fatally flawed. The project will have to be started over. Which they will do, I assure you. You’re only buying time.”
“A problem we’ll deal with,” she said firmly. “Now, the only remaining question in my mind is what you were really doing on the station with the AI. You sabotaged it, yes, but you had a second purpose there. What was it?”
“My own business,” he said coldly. “I’m willing to agree to your terms, but I have nothing to say about what I was doing.”
“Very well, then,” she said as she rose. “Take him back to his cell. One of you remain inside for additional instructions.”
The marines removed Fielding’s restraints, and one of them escorted him out into the corridor. The remaining man came close to the table.
“Get him partway there and then stun him,” Olivia said. “Take him to the medical center and have Doctor Stone secure him to a table.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the marine said before exiting the conference room.
“Are you really going to turn his bomb back on?” Kelsey asked, a frown on her face.
“No,” Olivia said with a smile. “But he won’t know that. We’ll wipe the corrupted code in his implants and let him think whatever he will. I very seriously doubt he’ll attempt to do anything that risks his own life by testing the limits.”
“What about the rest of his story?” Jared asked. “We need to know what he was up to. He might’ve done anything.”
Olivia rose to her feet. “He’s got everything interesting on his implants encrypted. We checked after you came back. He’s forgotten we have another source of data, though.”
“The guard he had with him,” Kelsey said. “He left one in his cutter and took the other with him. Do you think his data is unencrypted?”
“Probably not, but I think I might be able to make that man talk more easily than Fielding. Especially after I mention how he was never expected to survive this trip.”