“ArchAngel. She said Bethany Anne would most likely choose you, as you had the role when we all went to China.” John continued his staring contest.
Gabrielle stared up at John for ten seconds. “Shit,” she finally spat. Gabrielle turned around and started walking back out of the bay. “Don’t think I’ll forget this, John!” she called over her shoulder
John turned around. “No, that would make life too easy,” he agreed.
John heard Gabrielle yell right before stepping through the doors, “I heard that!”
John looked back to make sure the doors had closed. “Of course you did. You can hear an ant fart in a hurricane.” John settled in the Pod and started locking in, The Pod doors closed and sealed. “ArchAngel, how is Gabrielle?”
“She is telling me that I need to discuss ‘girls sticking together’ with her some time.”
John chuckled, “Does she not realize you could just as easily look like a guy?”
“Probably, but since my avatar is Bethany Anne, I doubt it comes to mind.”
“No, probably not.” John finished clicking his straps. “Take me out.” He paused before asking, “Why did you want her to stay behind?”
“Because I’ve analyzed the data, John. You will go and support Bethany Anne. You won’t judge her, and you won’t condemn her. In all things, you are her rock, and she leans on you. You are the best choice.”
The Pod slipped through the gravitic shield into space. In moments, it was streaking through space eighty miles above Earth.
“You might as well take me to the address, ArchAngel.”
“Understood, John. You will arrive in eighteen minutes.”
One-half day’s march from Shennongjia Peak, Hubei
Bai leaned back against a tree, pushing his pack into a small space between the branches, allowing him to take some of the weight off of his back. Zhu nodded to his friend as he came up.
Bai said, “Any idea if our trackers have any clue where we are going?”
Zhu nodded. “Yes, we were chosen to take the second group who left. I listened in on the conversations, and it seems that our group met with another group. The new group stopped for a little while and then left.”
“That’s good, right? That means our group slowed down, and we won’t have to follow them too far?” Bai asked.
Zhu shook his head. “Bai, they stopped and had a meeting with something that joined them. That something walked with cat’s tracks, our tracker claims. He wasn’t happy about it at all.”
“Why not? We know they can turn into some sort of werecat, what is their problem? We all have some silver on us.”
“Bai, what do cats do more than most animals?” Zhu looked into the forest, up into the limbs of the trees above them.
Bai followed his friend’s glance and thought about it. “They hunt.”
Zhu nodded. “They hunt. And now, they are hunting us with the intellect of a human and a cat.”
“That’s not good,” Bai agreed, trying to peer harder into the foliage above them. “You think they are setting up a trap?”
Zhu looked at his friend. “Jian told Shun and me to count on it.”
Bai nodded and checked his rifle, making sure his silver rounds were loaded for the fourth time this morning.
CHAPTER THREE
Etheric
“I’m saying,” Gunter ground out. “How do we know she wasn’t lying to us?”
“Do you know where the fuck we are?” Klaus asked, looking into the grayness in every direction. “I can’t see shit. Neither can either of you. So, she says she would find us unless we moved.”
“Like I trust that woman with anything! Have you finally figured out who she is?”
“Yes, I know where I saw her face,” Klaus admitted.
“And?” Gunter pushed.
“She is the head of TQB,” Klaus looked into the distance, but nothing changed. He still couldn’t see anything, like looking through the fog on a cold morning.
“What kind of shit does she have if she can send us to some other part of the Earth,” Dieter snapped his fingers, “like that?”
“What makes you think,” Klaus asked, turning to Dieter, “that we are on Earth?”
TQB Base, Colorado USA
Mason accepted a cup of coffee from Jasmin. She had taken him and his daughter from the room where they had appeared after the gray… place.
Now, he was sitting at a table, with Anne asleep in the chair next to him, her head on his shoulder. Her arms were wrapped around his, making sure he didn’t move while she slept.
He knew his job was incredibly secret but honestly hadn’t thought it would ever affect his wife or his children. Now, the reality of how casually he had played with their safety shamed him. The last week and a half had been a nightmare.
With some of the secret technology he worked on, he had never expected to be so easily awed by the abilities of someone outside the people with whom he worked.
Mason wished he had some paper or something to write his thoughts down. He kept going through the events, trying to sear them into his long-term memory. Maybe one day he would understand the technology she must have used to accomplish the act.
He had let her in the house when the dog had taken off upstairs. He couldn’t let Anne off of her bed, or the bombs would go off. He had run after the dog and stumbled on the steps. Like he had been pushed aside.
Pushed aside.
His face tightened up. Did she run past him that fast?
He made it up the stairs to see the woman already in the room, speaking in a quick, clipped voice to the dog. She hadn’t moved Anne yet, but she saw him enter the room. She popped him on the forehead, and everything went gray. Then, she was there with Anne and the dog. “We have to go,” she told him and handed Anne to him. When he took her, she grabbed his arm and the dog.
And then the four of them were in a rock room. “Wait here,” she said in a commanding voice. “Someone will come to get you.”
Then she was gone again.
Where the hell was he supposed to go? He was still holding Anne tight to his chest, just holding her as she cried, when there was a knock on the door hard enough to get his attention. He opened the door, and a woman asked him to follow her to this room and then brought them some breakfast.
Anne fell asleep, and here he was, wondering what would happen to Sheila now.
—
The three men could hear the voices before they could discern the vague outlines of two people walking towards them.
They heard a woman’s voice. “I’m saying that killing them here is easier to clean up. As in, there isn’t any cleanup.”
A third figure trailing the first two resolved. They heard a dog’s chuff emerge from the mist.
The gargantuan figure beside her seemed to be trying to argue for the three of them.
“I understand you didn’t like returning and getting singed in the fire.”
Another chuff.
“You either, Ashur.”
“I might have been unlucky enough to come back into a broken piece of wall, that would have been a real downer.”
They were getting closer.
“How come you guys didn’t?”
“I can peek out now. I’ve figured out how to barely look and make sure. The fucking fire was still damned hot. That shit burns like a motherfucker.” She was close enough for the three men to discern her features. “Ah, here are my three camel tea-baggers now.”
The dog stopped and lay down on the ground.
“So, where is the wife?” she asked them. They kept their mouths shut.
“Oh? You are so out of your league, penis tips, that life as you know it doesn’t exist. You aren’t even grade school athletes against a pro. This is like a pro team against a tank full of goldfish.”
She looked them over and then amended, “Dead goldfish.”
She reached under her jacket and pulled out a scabbarded short sword. “You know, for some reason, there
is this misunderstanding that good people should be nice to Schweinehunde such as yourself. Personally, I don’t agree and since my overly large friend here,” she thumbed the man next to her, “really isn’t my conscience and this isn’t a good-cop-bad-cop routine like you’re thinking, you can all kiss my ass.” There was a chuff behind her. “I know, stay back, you hate getting blood out of your coat.”
She took the scabbard off. “Eenie meany miny moe. Dieter, my friend, you can go.” She was ten feet away and then Gunter and Klaus jumped back because she had stabbed Dieter through the gut with her sword. Her left hand was choking him and she easily held him off the ground while he struggled. She looked over her shoulder and spoke to the man behind her, “I told you, much cleaner here.”
The big man shrugged. “All I said is it would be easier to get the wife’s location from people that were alive, even if you had to leave them alive.”
When she turned around, Gunter and Klaus took another involuntary step back. The figure in front of them was from a nightmare. Her face had red glowing eyes, her teeth had grown, and she smiled at them like they were snacks. “I never said I had to have live people to get my answers, John. I can always ask them when I kill them the second time.”
“She’s in a warehouse!” Gunter screamed. “On the east side out by Green Valley in Vegas, I swear!”
“Shut up, Gunter.” Klaus hissed. “That is our only negotiation card.” Scared or not, Klaus knew that the woman was the only thing that might get them out of this predicament.
Dieter had stopped struggling in her grip. His lifeless body was still hanging above the ground, his blood puddling at her feet. She seemed to finally notice he had expired. “That was uneventful,” she muttered, acting annoyed and tossing the body aside. Both men were shocked. Dieter’s lifeless body had been thrown twenty feet away into the mist. She’d never noticed his weight.
The frightening woman took a step towards the two men. “Who paid you to do this?”
Klaus spoke up, “Will you let us go if we tell you what we know?” His voice, usually assured, was cracking.
“Klaus Weber,” her voice changed, softer but unyielding. “Stand still and tell me what you know. Who paid you to do this?”
Klaus bit down hard, trying to keep the information to himself. He kept hearing her command resonating in his mind, he played what he would say to her over and over and finally stopped thinking about it when she said, “That’s enough, you don’t need to tell me multiple times.”
Her man said, “Bethany Anne, we don’t have time to track all of this down right now. We need to get back to the ArchAngel. We have a meeting with the Japanese pretty soon.”
She looked disgusted. “Okay... fine. I don’t think this prick knows anything, sounds like a typical dark web merc job. I know someone bored who needs something to do.”
Why? What do trophy wives do except check on truant children and blow up houses?
Shut. Up. TOM.
Klaus, aghast that he had been talking the whole time he thought he was keeping the secrets to himself never saw the flick of the blade that cut his head off.
Gunter, his mouth open as Klaus’s body dropped to the ground, finally recognized she was cleaning her sword on Klaus’s shirt. Her face, eyes normal, looked up at him. “And now, we come to miny moe.”
—
Mason Jayden woke up, his arm numb from Anne’s tight grip. He heard people coming down the hall outside his room. His mind foggy, he was trying to remember how he and his daughter had ended up in here and realized he must have nodded off for a few minutes.
Then he heard it, he heard her voice. “Sheila?” he whispered. He couldn’t quite make out the words the voice was speaking, it was still too far away, but Mason thought it was his wife. He looked down to figure out how to extricate himself from his daughter, but she was already waking up.
“Mom?” she called out, eyes half-closed. “MOM?”
She pushed her chair back when they both heard a ‘baby?’ come from down the hallway and another, louder, “Mason?”
Mason’s chair shot back to the wall, he grabbed Anne’s hand as they reached the door to see Sheila running down the hall, crying. The family reunion was intense as the three hugged, all crying pretty loudly.
“Ma’am?”
Bethany Anne turned around. She and John had left some personal space for the three to reunite. “Yes?”
The woman, one of the base logistics and planning employees who had been helping, smiled. “Ma’am, what do you want me to do for the family?”
Bethany Anne turned towards the family. John noticed she frowned and whispered to herself. “I hate this.”
Her eyes went vacant for a second, then she frowned. “Well, fuckity fuck.” She sighed. “Call ArchAngel. We need this family with us,” she said. “John and I will grab Ashur from the cafeteria and head out. When Mason asks, tell him the Queen has said she will be able to protect his family much better than those who failed him.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said.
“C’mon John, let’s fetch the white wonder dog and get back to the ship.”
They walked past the woman, who continued to wait patiently a distance away from the reunited family. She listened to Bethany Anne and John talking as they walked down the hall.
“Did I understand,” John started, “that Ashur is looking for a bitch or is that your idea?”
“Nice, nice play on words, Mr. Grimes.”
“I try my best,” he said smirked, “when speaking to trophy wives.”
“John,” she heard Bethany Anne say as the two tracked around a corner, “I swear if you keep up that shit, payback will be a bitch.”
“Oh, you pray to him, too?” his voice trailed off.
QBS ArchAngel above Japan
Tabitha’s Pod moved slowly through the gravitic shield holding the air in the Pod bay on the Archangel. She saw Barnabas waiting for her as the doors cracked open. She unclipped herself and smiled at him.
“Hey you, Big ‘B’!” Her grin widened when Barnabas frowned a little at her new nickname for him. She had decided that if she was going to live for the next few hundred years, she was going to do her dead level best to tweak him just a little bit every chance she got.
Her latest choice was pet names, since you always have to be hacking and testing what you think might work. She wasn’t sure if this new name was going to last for more than a couple of months, or hell, it could last well into the next century.
Barnabas turned his grimace into a smile, understanding that she had just laid down a challenge. “Hello Tabitha, I trust your trip was enjoyable?”
She followed him towards the Pod bay exit. He looked over his shoulder at her and asked, “Do you know why we wanted you to join us here on the ArchAngel?”
She shrugged. “Honestly, Big B, I figure you’ve got something that needs doing, and you need just the right sass and ass to get the job done.”
Barnabas hung his head. Tabitha might be more of a challenge than he had ever encountered in his many, many centuries. “I don't recall too many ladies ever telling me that they have the right, and I quote, sass and ass, to get the job done. Usually, they tell men to stop looking down there and that their faces are up here.”
The Kurtherian Gambit Omnibus 05 - The Fans Version: My Ride is a Bitch - Don't Cross This Line - Never Submit Page 3