Embrace the Romance

by S. E. Smith

  Valkyr landed on the speedster and chirped.

  Karissa reached out to stroke his head. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you both.”

  “Where to now?” Grant asked. “Your hotel?”

  “Can we go home? To the Zephyr? I know we can’t stay there long term but it feels safe to me, cozy.”

  “You’re the rock star who can afford to buy an entire hotel and you want to sleep in my tiny bachelor officer’s cabin?” He laughed.

  She wagged her finger. “Not a bachelor any more, Officer Barton.”

  Lully will be worried. We should go.

  “The name is Grant,” he whispered, pulling her close, right before he kissed her.

  Karissa’s final concert on Callillia was a sellout. Hastily arranged as a charity event, to raise funds for the orphanage where she’d grown up, as well as to benefit the surviving victims of the mountain landslide, which wiped out several villages, the performance was as smooth as Grant could make it. Twilka connected them with an experienced producer and many of the other performers donated their time and expertise.

  Ted had left the planet, right ahead of the Sectors-wide warrants being issued for his arrest.

  Grant stood in his usual spot backstage and watched as his beloved sang her heart out on one of her classic hits. Then she changed pace, telling the audience, “I’ve been writing new songs, inspired by being home on Calillia again, and other life events.” She glanced at him and blew him a kiss as the band went into the first notes of what people in the know felt was going to be her next mega hit.

  Alone in the spotlight, her black hair flowing and her dress a marvel of layers of iridescent silk in many colors, sprinkled with glowing points of light like distant stars, she sang about an eagle and a songbird brought together by destiny, kept apart by forces beyond their control, yet fighting to be together, united in their unshakable love.

  She wears my feathers in her hair. Does she know the Qaazamiri meaning when a woman wears such a token from a warrior and his eagle?

  Valkyr’s voice in his head sounded amused.

  “She does,” Grant said.

  Good.

  Karissa rose slowly into the air, her antigrav the best military grade unit available. Her dress swirled gracefully around her. The spotlight caught Valkyr and Lully as the birds flew with her, the three of them twining in an intricate aerial ballet that complemented her lyrics perfectly. Lully sang full throated, her notes accenting Karissa’s in an impossibly perfect harmony.

  As she sang the final note, the light went out and Karissa descended to the stage amid the thunderous applause and cheers of the crowd. Grant was on the darkened stage to catch her in his arms and they were kissing when the lights came up again.

  The songbird and the eagle, together for the world to see.

  Also by Veronica Scott

  SF Sectors Romances

  Escape From Zulaire

  Wreck of the Nebula Dream

  Mission to Mahjundar

  Star Cruise: Marooned

  Star Cruise: Outbreak

  Star Cruise Stowaway: A Novella With Rescue Golden Token Short Stories

  Hostage to the Stars

  Star Survivor

  Danger in the Stars

  Two Against the Stars

  Lady of the Star Wind

  Trapped on Talonque

  About the Author

  Best Selling Science Fiction, Fantasy & Paranormal Romance author, as well as the “SciFi Encounters” columnist for the USA Today Happy Ever After blog, Veronica Scott grew up in a house with a library as its heart. Dad loved science fiction, Mom loved ancient history and Veronica thought there needed to be more romance in everything. When she ran out of books to read, she started writing her own stories.

  Seven time winner of the SFR Galaxy Award, as well as a National Excellence in Romance Fiction Award, Veronica is also the proud recipient of a NASA Exceptional Service Medal relating to her former day job, not her romances! She recently was honored to read the part of Star Trek Crew Member in the audiobook production of Harlan Ellison’s “The City On the Edge of Forever.”

  https://veronicascott.wordpress.com/

  Time Trap

  A Project Enterprise Story

  By

  Pauline Baird Jones

  About Time Trap

  Hiding in time is not as easy as you’d think…

  USAF Engineer Master Sergeant Briggs—only his mother called him by his first name—is not enjoying his birthday. A year older and ordered to recuperate on a quiet bay away from the Garradian outpost, he’s ready to mutiny and go back to his beloved engines. When his friends send him a gift from Area 51, he figures it will relieve his boredom for an hour or so.

  Until he turns it on and he gets his second present of the day.

  Madison, and her parrot partner, Sir Rupert, are on the track of a traitor to the Rebellion when they time travel into a trap. Their only way out is via an old transport pad, but instead of sending them somewhere, it sends them back in time. Straight into the arms of the one man who could kick her tires and light her fires.

  She would like to get to know the handsome engineer, but the trouble following her can get people erased from existence. The fact he’s a hero, like her lost brother, just makes her want to protect him more.

  Briggs doesn’t trust time travelers—with good reason—but now he has to work with the unlikely pair because trouble is coming. Trouble that puts an outpost filled with geeks and ancient technology at risk. It’s not the first time he’s worked with a woman to save the universe, but it’s the first time he’s wanted to keep her for himself.

  If only she were a little older…

  With a Time Service Interdiction Force on their heels, can the three craft a plan that will save a base full of geniuses and technology and get them the happy ending they deserve?

  One

  Master Sergeant Briggs—yes, he had a first name, but only his mother had ever used it—stared somewhat balefully at the crate delivered to him by the lowliest Airman currently stationed on the so-secret-they-weren’t-even-supposed-to-think-about-it Garradian outpost. No one had wanted to be the one to bring it to him. Rumor was, there was a no-fly zone over his “recuperation sector.” What a bunch of wimps. So he was kinda grouchy about being side-lined for his health. And turning a year older.

  Who wouldn’t be? Jeez, he’d been banished to a freaking hut. So he’d gotten shot. It was a graze. That maybe got an alien infection, but he’d kicked that to the curb. And what do they do? They park him on a bay overlooking a freaking ocean. It was hot, but it wasn’t the heat bugging him. It was all this freaking fresh air. Like he was some kind of beach bum or suffering a mid-life crisis, instead of a guy who lived and died for planes and spaceships and the motors that made them move. His lungs needed engine fumes, not tropical breezes. He needed work, not a birthday present.

  He glared at the crate. It didn’t flee. Just sat there. Only two people he knew would be brassy enough to send him a birthday present, especially right now.

  Sara Donovan and Doc Clementyne.

  He could hear them laughing all the way from the Milky Way. They wouldn’t be laughing when they turned forty five. Five years to fifty. How the hotel did that happen? He wasn’t supposed to get older if he took a trip to a galaxy far, far away. He was pretty sure someone had promised him he’d get younger if he signed on the dotted line. Or if not younger, then that he wouldn’t get older. Some kind of paradox or something.

  About to stomp away from the crate, he hesitated. Donovan and the Doc did know him pretty well. Were they busting his chops? Or sending him a lifeline?

  If they didn’t want to drop and give him twenty when he got back to Earth, there’d better be something interesting in there. He pulled out his army knife—one on steroids—and selected a chunky blade. He applied this—with force—to the nails holding the lid down. Yanked the lid back and tossed it aside. There was a note on top of the straw. At least they’d be
en smart enough not to send him an actual birthday card.

  We found this in the Area 51 garage sale and immediately thought of you.

  Cha-cha-cha,

  Donovan and Doc (and their significant others)

  P.S. According to the files, this was collected on 2789645. Ring any bells?

  Area 51 garage sale. He chuckled. He should have known. Those two did know the way to make his engineer’s heart happy. He dug through the straw, tossing it aside. The late afternoon wind would clear it away. The wind was like the tide. It came. It went. Every freaking day. Weren’t even any damn birds chirping on this blasted place. What kind of island didn’t have birds?

  His hand struck metal, he felt around for the edges, and lifted it clear. Heavy little sucker. It pulled at his wound, but he ignored that and carried it over to the rough table he’d built on his second day of exile, using some of the driftwood washed in by foxtrot tide. The base doc could tell him to take it easy, but she couldn’t make him do it. If he’d had the parts, he’d have given the table an engine. And driven it back to the base.

  He set the big disc down on top of the table and stepped back to study it. Not exactly promising. Looked like a manhole cover. Maybe those two were jerking his chain. Only his knowledge of Donovan and the Doc kept him from heaving it into the surf.

  And the fact that Area 51 did not save manhole covers, not even for garage sales.

  2789645? Actually that did ring a few bells.

  He pulled up the stool he’d also made, and considered the item, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. If memory served—which it might not now that he was so foxtrot old—that was the first planet they’d dropped a team on back in the early days of Project Enterprise, when they weren’t sure any of it was going to work.

  The planet had had a barely habitable atmosphere, some algae that only excited the botanists and this. The geeks had studied it for a while, but had lost interest when it didn’t do anything. No one had asked him to look at it then, and he’d had other priorities, so he didn’t care.

  Now? He might care a little.

  He’d gotten that desperate.

  Why had they sent him this thing? Something about it must have interested them. He leaned back wondering how they got their hands on it, and then how they got it to him for his birthday—all without getting him or themselves flagged and hauled in to explain. Until he remembered who they were. Alone, those two were dangerous. Together? Lethal. He liked that about them. And they could dance. He’d always hoped to find a permanent dance partner—but he didn’t hang out in the right places for that kind of woman.

  He sighed. Reached out a finger and flicked the edge of the metal. He wasn’t worried about touching it. If there’d been any danger in touching it, someone would already be dead. Or turned into an alien.

  It was thicker than a manhole cover. No sign of a seam on the sides. He ran his hands across the top. It was rough, mostly from mild corrosion, he decided. His fingers found indentations that could be an alien version of screws or bolts. He lifted it up and studied the rim, rolling it left, then right. Lines were cut in the rim, not unlike a coin, but then his fingers found two depressions, side by side. He pushed them both. They gave, but nothing happened. Not a surprise. The geeks had probably done that much. He pulled out his cheaters—one of those gifts that keep on giving for crossing into over-forty range—and studied the rim. Was there a seam?

  He turned it over. The bottom was dotted with multiple ovals that formed a circular grid across the surface. He touched one of the holes. It indented about an inch. He felt around. Was that wiring he felt in there?

  “What do you do?” he muttered. The wind and the tide didn’t know.

  Time to see if he could open this bad boy up. Be nice to put one over on the geeks of Area 51.

  Two

  They dropped through the time tunnel in a dark rush, the landing a jolt that shook Madison all the way from her toes to the top of her head. Good thing she knew how to stick a landing. She didn’t move and thought she wasn’t breathing until her nostrils filled with the pungent scent of cleaning supplies and the dust their arrival had stirred up. With her knees still bent from the landing, she wiggled her nose, trying to head off an errant sneeze.

  The fear of getting shot helped. This was their most vulnerable moment. It took a few seconds for all the molecules to settle, during which they were an easy target.

  When no one shot them, she eased her weapon free and flicked it to stun. She wasn’t supposed to kill people for fear of messing up the timeline. But they could kill her. So not fair.

  After another moment of assessing silence, she pulled out her handy little scans-for-almost-everything device with her other hand, and flicked it on. The scanner had a fancier name but even its initials were too long to remember. With her weapon extended, she lifted the scanner up next to it and studied the faintly glowing screen, looking for something she might have to shoot, well, stun. No other life signs, at least in the immediate vicinity. She adjusted the settings with her thumb, scanning wider. No one but them so far.

  Of course, the opposition could be wearing a fancy heat-blocking suit, too. But for now the intel that had sent them here looked to be decent. She didn’t let herself get optimistic. There was still a lot that could go wrong.

  Sir Rupert’s claws dug into her shoulder, as he poked his beak up out of his specially designed-for-him backpack. He wasn’t good at whispering, so he used his claws to ask for an update. She felt the soft brush of feathers against her neck and lifted her index finger, her signal for “just a minute.” She changed the settings again, this time scanning for threats inside this room. Found nothing, which would be one of the reasons she’d chosen to arrive here. Even the tightest security types didn’t think about teching up the janitor’s closet. Not that they really needed to double down in this room when this outpost was thick with beyond-the-latest in protection and detection technology—if their intel was right.

  There should be—yup, there they were. The master security feed wires ran into, and out of, a box in the corner of this room. This would be the other reason she’d chosen to arrive here. One really didn’t want to land in a motion-sensor-rich zone to take out, say, the motion sensors.

  She navigated around a bucket, then a mop. Man, you’d think people would come up with a better way to clean in the future.

  She scanned the junction box for alarms, then felt along the sides with her fingers—she liked to use high and low tech—and when she was satisfied there were no trip wires, she shone her light on what looked like a keyhole. She looked closer. Amazing. It was a keyhole. She shook her head, pulled out a lock pick, and popped it open. The guts were high tech again, so she used her handy dandy line-tapping thingy, and soon she was looking at the station’s video feeds on a small screen. She shifted between the various views, looking for signs of trouble. This station was, according to the intel, a kind of safe house and time travel research center.

  As she studied the feeds, she also noted the arrangement of hallways, sleeping areas, offices, a couple of labs, the arrival and departures room, and the inevitable time command center. It pretty much matched the map she’d been given prior to her briefing, and according to her time chronometer, she had nailed her time landing.

  She gave herself a mental thumbs-up because her hands were full.

  Once she was sure of her route, she fired up the recording program, just in case anyone was monitoring this particular time. While that was doing its thing, she went into the guts of the programming, studying their scanning and blocking tech. She wasn’t a geek, but thanks to good briefings, she played one during time ops. She frowned. It wasn’t at the level she’d been told to expect. A niggle of unease created a nagging, unreachable itch between her shoulder blades. If she could have, she’d have flashed out right then, but how did she explain the niggle to the very tough new guy, who probably had something to prove since he’d just been promoted?

  Still uneasy, she turned off anyth
ing she couldn’t false feed, then started her recordings looping. It was kind of old school, but Madison was really old school. And she liked to throw in curveballs so the opposition couldn’t get a good file on her. Being predictable was the kiss of death in the time travel biz.

  She went super high tech on the motion sensors. Motion sensors were evil. And sneaky. The motion sensors were easier to mess over than she’d expected, too. Her niggle went up a notch.

  Sir Rupert must have felt her stiffen. He emerged from his pack and perched on her shoulder so he could ruffle his wings. “Well?”

  “Too easy,” she told him. Of course, there was no way to know if anything she’d done had worked until they opened that door. At that point they’d either get shot or not. Their geeks could jump forward in time and get the latest devices, but so could the Time Service. It was a quiet battle of wits fought across the whole canvas of time, though neither side culled much tech from early in time. Wasn’t much call for catapults in a time outpost, or anywhere else she’d been. Though she remained hopeful. In her opinion there was something kinda majestic about hurling large objects long distances.

  “One or two niggles?” Sir Rupert asked.

  They might have done a few too many ops together. “I’m up to two.”

  “Tell me when you hit three,” he said.

  “Roger that.”

  For a parrot, he had some big, brass ones. And like her, he knew that so much access to so much tech meant these outposts were getting harder and harder to crack, even with good intel from their spies in the Service. They both knew that the quality of the intel had been declining. Hard to pinpoint exactly when with time travel in the mix. All that bouncing around in time, sometimes she forgot what she knew and when. It was the new guy, a former security chief on a space station, who had figured out they had a mole. Which could mean their spies had been erased or reprogrammed.