StarFlight: The Prism Baronies (Beyond the Outer Rim Book 2)

by Reiter

  “Very well then,” Qeldrun said, lowering his hand. “So be it. You can set the autopilot for NayFall. I am sure you know where that is.”

  “I can find my homeland without a navigational computer,” she smiled brightly as she turned. Images of her family’s estate ran through her mind, covering the elation she felt in having found truths that did not speak of the fury she had building in her heart to destroy the man who had at one time been her mentor.

  “No,” she thought, “we do not know what he can do!”

  “Mr. Vidé, what is your estimated time of arrival to NayFall?” Qeldrun asked, watching the Jeelah female take her leave of him.

  “Eleven days,” the synthesized voice answered.

  “Very well. You may begin the process of setting your more protective programs to ensure my safe arrival to NayFall as well as the monitoring of anything coming from Black Gate. I want you to find the means to tag the Xara-Mansura so that I will know where it is at all times!”

  “It shall be done.”

  “Then you may rejoin us in the slower world, and begin your sojourn to NayFall,” Qeldrun directed. He chuckled, running his hands over the cold stone. There was something to the feel of it! He wondered if the woman had petrified him to the point of suspended animation. There was nothing coming from within the stone, nothing at all, and that pleased Professor O’Zhar greatly. “Take up some discrete occupancy somewhere in Tallbridge, where you may make contact with me once you do.” The popping sound coming from the speakers told the man that the Jockey had indeed disconnected from the ship. Though his range was nearly at its maximum, Qeldrun could still feel his latest puppet. He was cursing the Professor as he went about the duties he had been given to perform. Qeldrun smiled, looking at his most recent find.

  “And now we await the arrival of your friends and their ship,” he whispered, “… where you have undoubtedly stored the materials I seek. You are an excellent gamesman, my friend. You made it to where I had to take outside assistance just to capture you. It is a testament of my good fortune you had already managed to acquire such a motivated opponent!”

  ** b *** t *** o *** r **

  (Rims Time: XII-4203.01)

  Jocasta had awakened from better sleep cycles, but she knew her restlessness was not the result of anything to do with her bedding. Nothing aboard ship felt right, and she had twice stirred from her sleep, opening a channel to her First Mate… just to see if he was up too. The soft voice of Satithe had responded and tried to console Jocasta, but the woman would not receive it. Like everyone else aboard ship, Jocasta kept Satithe from speaking to her for any good length of time and dismissed her quickly. It made the summons she had received after breakfast something of a mystery.

  After threatening to shoot Roc, she was finally given her second cup of loaded coffee and made her way the main lab. Stepping inside, she turned to see Tuitonn, Teela, Bantar, Amosse, Deolun, Jovasor, and Kryltane standing around one of Dungias’ observation drones. Jocasta remembered being chased across the Tovask Sky Mining Station and started to smile, but it never registered on her face.

  No one was working; they were all waiting and looking at Jocasta as she entered the room. She also noticed that with the exception of Tuitonn and Jovasor, each person had a slight blemish or bruise on their face.

  “This is a damn shame,” she thought, “being made to feel scared on my own ship!

  “Well good morning, Brain Trust,” she said in a voice that somehow sounded worse than she felt. She put the back of her hand to her mouth and cleared her throat.

  “Good morning, Captain,” Kryltane replied and Jocasta could immediately see who the leader of this group was. “Thank you for coming.”

  “So you’re the ringleader of this intellectual posse here?” she asked with a slight smile.

  “No, I am,” Annsura said as she came out of one of the storage closets.

  “Cutter,” Jocasta acknowledged her. “Interesting… I can’t say I saw that coming.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Annsura muttered, tossing a device to Kryltane who caught it. “Is that what you were looking for?” she asked.

  “Yes, this is it,” the young man answered. “Thank you.” He looked at Jocasta and went back to the drone, inserting the device he had just received. It projected a small energy dome over a workstation.

  “Perhaps now is a good time for you and I to step outside,” Jocasta said, glaring at Annsura. “Breaking things in here gets costly… breaking you is still pretty cheap!”

  “You were called here for a reason, Captain,” Annsura noted.

  “And one more cross word out of you means that reason better not be dependent on you breathing!”

  “Then do it, Captain!” Annsura snapped as she walked to stand directly in front of Jocasta. “Take my blades and my life! I’d rather be dead than wallowing around this ship doing nothing, like some people!” Although she did blink, Annsura did not move when Jocasta took hold of her neck.

  “Shotgun, what was the report you gave me just yester–”

  “We’ve come across something since then, Captain!” Teela said, coming forward, rushing her words. “Cutter got us all together and… told us we needed to try again, and we did. We found something. Something that we missed… something that Z must have missed too.” Teela gently placed her hand on Jocasta’s arm. “We’ve been up all night confirming what we found, and I think we’ve finally put everything together.

  “Captain, I don’t necessarily appreciate her methods either,” Teela stressed. “But Cutter is right. We weren’t really doing anything. We picked up scanners and walked around Z’s last known location. None of us thought about what we were doing… none of us did what we’re supposed to do! Please, Captain.”

  The grip around Annsura’s neck eased before Jocasta pulled her hand away. “This isn’t finished, missy!” she whispered before turning to the others. She cleared her throat again and handed her coffee cup to Annsura. “Here, drink that!” she directed before looking at the group of researchers. She took in a deep breath and squared her shoulders before exhaling. “Okay then, impress me!”

  Kryltane looked back at the others and Jovasor nodded for him to continue. The young man swallowed hard and then handed a pair of goggles to Jocasta. “You’ll need to hold on to these. You don’t have to put them on now, but you will at some point.

  “At the behest of Cutter, we took another look at the park,” Kryltane explained and Jocasta held up her hand to have him stop.

  “Why?” she asked, looking at Annsura.

  “Z has got to be one of the hardest of us to bring down,” Annsura explained. “If we didn’t figure how he had been taken, I figured we were all in for the same level of trouble when we caught up to the people who took him. I thought it better than assigning shore leave, anyway.”

  “Dammit, Cutter, stand the hell down!” Jocasta said as her elevated hand became a fist. “For your information, the ship is on port-lock!”

  “But we’re not even docked with anything!” Annsura argued as the others looked at each other.

  “Tell that to the man who’s got his finger on the button of an energy delivery system with over a thousand firing ports!” Jocasta countered. “I kept this little factoid between me and Satithe because while we’re not able to go after our First Officer, I didn’t see any good coming out of the crew bearing a grudge against Black Gate and thinking up something stupid to do! We’ve got enough enemies for the moment, and we don’t even know who all of them are!”

  “That’s only a true statement if you’ve added to the number in the last two days, Captain,” Kryltane said with a hopeful smile. “Because we do know who was helping Professor O’Zhar with the trap in the park!”

  “We do?” Jocasta asked in surprise.

  “Well, we have a very definite lead,” Kryltane clarified. “He’s a Cyber-Line Jockey named Talthwynn Vidé. His net-handle is NBA, which stands for the Net Black Assassin though I doubt he has any real affil
iation with them.”

  “I should be able to clarify that,” Jocasta thought.

  Kryltane went over to one of the many display screens and hit a button to bring up blocks of quarantined code. “He lives in the Garnet Barony and his scan-code was all over Satithe, but in a totally harmless capacity, and it’s been there for a while. I think Z might have been zeroing him.”

  “Any notion as to why?” Jocasta asked, not at all surprised that her Chief Engineer had been on top of things.

  “It’s still too early for me to tell,” Kryltane started. “I’ve been working on recreating the capture scenario… and we’re under orders that after this meeting we’re supposed to get no less than eight hours’ sleep. But whatever the reason, I’m pretty sure it was Vidé who started this mess.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me,” Jocasta returned, wanting to get back to the main reason why she had been called to the room. It seemed both odd and wrong to be standing in the room without its normal occupant. “Okay, we have another name on the Get List. Back to it, Shotgun.”

  “Not only has Vidé been trying to gain access to Satithe, he’s been tracking your movements, off and on, for years.”

  “Years?” Jocasta asked. “As in…”

  “Some of the code I’ve been able to decipher dates back almost five years, Captain,” Kryltane shared.

  “Before my time with Z,” Jocasta considered. “C’mon Jo, focus! That’s not important right now.”

  “When he couldn’t get into Satithe, he linked into whatever site this ship was close to and hacked their surveillance files. Now this is why I think Z was zeroing him. I found a program on Satithe that tracked Vidé’s hacking. Everything! When he linked up to a remote site, she was watching. And when he made runs at her mainframe, she blocked him. She didn’t obscure every byte of information, but I think everything Vidé received was edited. For instance, he never saw how you resolved an issue, but he was fed the prelude and the result.

  “Z was protecting our moves but allowed the rep to get through?!” Jocasta asked. “That’s so a pirate move!” The woman chuckled once before realization stole her smile. “So he doesn’t know how we handled various crapstacks, but he knows that we handled it… which means he knows to be afraid… and obviously very thorough in his approach.

  “That means he knows you’re coming for him, Jo,” Jocasta thought. “Your only upside is that he doesn’t know that we know. I hate this Jockey already!

  “So the Jockey hacked in and found this Professor asshole somehow?” Jocasta asked.

  “We believe it was Vidé who turned the Professor on to Z,” Kryltane said. “He orchestrated the whole damn thing!” Kryltane walked over to the dome. “He even sent these little bastards; Nanobots!”

  “Are you shitting me?!” Jocasta asked as she walked over to join the group and get a better view. She donned the goggles and looked into the domed area. Held inside the energy field were active state-of-the-art designed micro-robots. “These things don’t come cheap!”

  “And these are some of the best designs I’ve ever seen,” Deolun inserted, unable to contain himself. “Shotgun sent queries to find the manufacturer. As you may or may not know, Nans are illegal in the Rims… except for Ardrian Space and the Prism Baronies. We got a hit from Heliotropis, the Amethyst Barony. A manufacturer there reported three shipments of Nanobots that were stolen sixteen months ago.”

  Teela leaned forward and spoke softly. “Deolun, Kryltane’s giving the report!”

  “And why is that?” Jocasta inquired.

  “He’s the senior man here,” Teela quickly answered. “The only one with a crew name.” Jocasta had to hold herself still for a moment as she breathed, pressing her lips together.

  “Teela, right?” Jocasta asked and the young woman nodded. “Teela, sweetheart, let’s not go and make things more complicated than they are. Shotgun is… the senior man here, and there you have a point. But let me ask you something, is this a kick-ass lab?” There were a couple gasps as Teela nodded her head, ‘yes’. A moan came from Deolun as he bent at the knees. Jocasta held up her hands as she nodded. “I will take all of those reactions as a serious affirmative. I happen to agree with you. This lab is so kick-ass that I hate being in it!

  “You’re all standing here in this room! Everyone here has seen enough of the ship to know there are doors that won’t open for you. There are two such doors, at least, in this lab. Kids, they don’t open for me! And that’s okay because I don’t want them to! Simply put, if you are in here, you’re crew.

  “Cutter put you all to this task and you can best believe if I don’t like what I’m told, Cutter will be taking up the issue with all of you. Shotgun will get it worse because he is senior man, but make no mistake, pain will be mutually shared! So please, mix it up. I expect Deolun to tell me about these bots you’ve found. And why do they almost always look like bugs?!”

  “Because an insect’s body works best for the kind of work these robots are tasked to do,” Deolun explained. “These are carriers and builders and I think they built spell-key.”

  “A spell-key!” Jocasta repeated, her eyes squinting with growing anger.

  Deolun turned to face his captain. “They were in the air, just flying about.”

  “This is the scenario part,” Teela whispered to Jocasta who managed a nod.

  “Anyone who walked into their area breathed them in. Once inside, they went to work on making the key. From what Teela, Bantar, and Amosse have been able to put together… it seems the material could only assist one kind of incantation: the manipulation of ElemahntiA, sometimes called Elementurgy! And… it’s at this point that I have to ask if you’re serious about going after this guy.”

  Slowly walking over toward Deolun, Jocasta smiled and snorted a laugh before speaking very softly. “So, by ‘guy’, I’m not sure who you’re referring to. Two possible persons come to mind. So I’m going to ask you to clarify. Do you mean this miserable, site-hacking, crapstack of a corpse that took my First Mate, our Chief Engineer, your teacher, my counsel and best friend in life?!

  “That guy?!” she pressed, not feeling the need to explain that the second option would have been Professor O’Zhar. The steel tone in her voice conveyed so many things that she did not have to say. “I’m really hoping that’s the ‘guy’ you mean because the answer to your question is yes! You better believe I’m serious about going after this ‘guy’!” Jovasor’s hands took soft hold of Jocasta’s shoulders as Deolun swallowed hard. The medical technician turned the captain back to the presentations.

  “Captain, for what I do know of transformative properties, there is less chance for the target body to resist the effects if the process begins inside the body. It was as if Z breathed in a contagion that attacked his body and rendered him helpless.”

  “Wrong again,” Jocasta said, softly pulling away from Jovasor. “He wasn’t helpless. He made his play, knowing I would make mine. And did they get these things past that man’s eyes?! They’re machines! They must’ve given off some kind of jiggowhatsits his goggles should’ve picked up.”

  “Not during that electrical storm,” Kryltane asserted. “And I checked it out, it wasn’t anything the environmental systems conjured up. That program was–”

  “Let me guess,” Jocasta said, holding up her hand again. “It was either offline or running a seriously long diagnostic.”

  “Number two,” Kryltane answered, holding up two fingers. “And with the readings Deolun was able to take from the area, the lightning wasn’t an enervation, but it was a perfect cover for the Nanobots. It made a much bigger signal than they could have generated. It was a damn good trap, Captain, but we can track the trapper.”

  “Do that,” Jocasta said as she started for the door. “While you’re at that, see if you can whip up something to deal with the bots. Cutter, with me.” Jocasta got to the door and stopped. She turned around and looked at one person in particular. “And I’ll tell you another thing, Deolun. One m
ore that Z is: he’s my crew! Mine! Just like the rest of you, and I’m serious about putting blade, blaster, boot and bone to anyone who fucks with my crew!” Jocasta walked out followed quickly by Annsura. The pilot and pirate took enough steps out of the room so that her Second Mate would be clear of the doors, allowing them to close. “Cutter–”

  “I know, Captain,” Annsura said, lowering her eyes to the floor. “I was out of line back there.”

  “Heads up, Cutter.” Annsura looked up to see Jocasta smiling at her. “I’ve got a Cutter with balls enough to kick me square in the ass when I’m not doing what a Captain should be doing.”

  “But you were doing it!” Annsura argued. “I just didn’t–”

  “You looked out for your ship and your people and right now I feel proud… and pretty damn sorry for the ass that took our man. There isn’t a program in the universe that could prepare him for what’s coming his way.

  “But I asked you out here because while you’re seeing to everyone and everything, that doesn’t seem to include you. There’s a parcel in the hangar, been waiting on you for two days.”

  “I didn’t order it, Captain,” Annsura advised.

  “I know, Cutter,” Jocasta said softly. “Z did. I don’t have his words, but I think I know his heart. He wanted you to have whatever’s in that box.

  “The brains are going to be asleep soon,” Jocasta said, turning to leave. “When they bed down, make your rounds and handle that package. And if the thought of that makes you weepy, have Cupid there to dry your tears.”

  “Is that an order, Captain?”

  Jocasta stopped and sighed. “No, it wasn’t. But the Cutter I chose and Z backed has a responsibility to the crew. Last I checked, that included Annsura!” Jocasta walked to the nearest pole and took it up to the deck of her Ready Room. She needed to get to her vault and spend some time with Alpha.

  There is no dignity quite so impressive, no one independence quite so important, as living within your means.

  Calvin Coolidge