The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance (Mammoth Books)

by Trisha Telep

  A sickening thought made her hands go even colder. Had the Faction’s attack on Kel-Paten – and she and Jameson had no doubt the Teaser was a trap aimed specifically for him – been only a part of a larger plan to wipe out all “traitorous” former Triad officers and crew?

  The sound of footsteps made her jerk upright.

  “No change,” Cal told her as he angled around his desk, and then dropped tiredly into his chair. He tapped a screen icon. Data flashed against a white background. “The best Jameson can come up with is that we work from a worst-case scenario. When the admiral regains consciousness, we must assume he’s been reprogrammed to harm this ship, you, the furzels, or all of the above.”

  “You’re sure he will? Wake up, that is?”

  “Jameson’s very sure that if the Faction wanted him dead, he’d be dead.”

  Which meant they didn’t want his death. They wanted a weapon. And there was no weapon quite as insidiously lethal as Branden Kel-Paten with his beyond-human strength, reflexes, and intellect. And his ability to kill with a touch.

  “That’s why I’ve posted security here in sick bay, and why I’m banning you from Room Six,” Cal continued. “And don’t try using your furzel to teleport you in there.”

  “Damn it, Cal, Branden wouldn’t—”

  “He can. He would.”

  “Jameson can’t reprogram his reprogramming?”

  “He’s trying to.”

  “I gave you our list of code words.” Kel-Paten would not be happy about that breach of personal security protocol. But he couldn’t reprimand her until he woke up. And right now Sass would gladly face the stoniest of his reprimands, just to have him back. “His med files—?”

  “Are more incomplete than we realized.” Cal tapped his screen. “We not only ran through the key word list you gave Jameson. We mixed them up and threw in every other possible code we could think of to try and get him to respond. Ship names. Your name. Tank’s. Captain Kel-Tyra’s. Hell, we even uploaded images of winning hands in Starfield Doubles. His systems block everything.”

  She almost suggested they try a losing hand but, no. Branden Kel-Paten never lost.

  Damn it! If only Kel-Tyra would answer.

  “I’m not saying we’re giving up. We will, right up to the last moment, try everything we can to restore him. But we’re at a crossroads here, Captain. That’s why I’ve come back – I’m sorry. You’re not going to like what I must ask you now.”

  What could be worse than not permitting her to touch Branden?

  Gods. No.

  Cal was tapping Branden’s med-file data again. “Something that highly classified isn’t in here. The Triad could never risk our finding out. But I suspect he’s told you. We need that information or this entire ship is at risk.”

  Sass shut her eyes and forced the tremor threatening to surge through her body to stop. She knew what Cal wanted, what Security needed.

  They needed to know the one vulnerability in Kel-Paten’s synthderm mesh body.

  They needed to know how to kill Branden.

  SICK BAY ROOM 6

  Nothing.

  Blackness.

  Pain.

  Cessation of pain.

  Power.

  He came fully awake in a stark gray and white room and immediately cataloged his surroundings and their relative threat index. He ripped the data-feed cables from his wrist port. Someone – the enemy – had tried to gain access to his systems.

  Fools.

  But fools who had enough wisdom not to leave a human security guard in the room with him. That person would be dead before he could even raise his weapon.

  He sat up, ran a second systems diagnostic and oriented himself. Med panels were all labeled in Standard, not Triadian. Definitely the enemy. But U-Cees, not the Rebashee or the Illithians. Not that that mattered much. His mission – it flooded him as soon as he came to consciousness – was to neutralize all enemy personnel, take control of the ship, and deliver it to the Triad.

  Piece o’ cake.

  Piece o’ cake? He shoved the uncharacteristic phrase away. Residual data, likely something he’d overheard while unconscious. It sounded like the usual ridiculous U-Cee slang.

  Eight minutes and seventeen-point-two seconds later – according to the readout in the corner of his vision – the wall screen on his left flickered. Two humans in U-Cee tan uniforms stared at him. One – the male – wore the blue lab coat of a med-tech. The shorter female balanced an overweight black-and-white furzel in her arms.

  His databanks brought up the humans’ corresponding files: Dr Caleb Monterro, CMO. Captain Tasha Sebastian. Both assigned to the Regalia. The furzel was of no importance and, if necessary, easily terminated.

  Excellent. He was exactly where he needed to be.

  “How are you feeling, Admiral?” Sebastian asked. The furzel wiggled in her arms then slid down, out of view.

  “Optimal.” He plucked the useless data feed from the diagnostic bed and dropped it. “A waste of time. But you already know that, Sebastian.”

  Something flickered across Sebastian’s face. He was programmed to unerringly interpret over one hundred and forty human facial expressions, and another sixty-seven nonhuman ones. He labeled what he saw in her face as “disappointment” and “grief”.

  Disappointed he was alive? Too bad.

  Grief because perhaps before they trapped him in this sick-bay room, he’d killed someone she cared about? Good.

  “Kel-Paten.” She paused.

  He stared at her. Waited. When she said nothing more, he continued to wait. U-Cees and their infantile games.

  “Do you really need me to state name, rank, and serial number?” he asked curtly.

  “We’re not the enemy. I know you don’t believe that right now, Branden. But we’re not.”

  The use of his first name by this U-Cee trash annoyed him. He stated name, rank, and serial number.

  The wall screen blanked.

  Time to get to work. He had a mission to complete. And Bio-’cybernetic Kinetic Programmable Apparatus-Ten never failed.

  DR CALEB MONTERRO’S OFFICE, SICK BAY

  “Captain . . .”

  The gentle tone in Cal’s voice was exactly what Sass didn’t need. Damn it! She missed, really missed Doc Eden Fynn-Serafino, her former CMO, right now. “Don’t coddle me, Doctor. I can handle this.” She stopped at his office door.

  Tank leaned against her ankle. Brandenfriend gone. Gone. Mommy sad.

  “Evacuate sick bay. Disable all equipment, especially data and comm feeds. Put a double containment field around the admiral’s room. Then another pair around the sick bay itself. Yes.” Her raised hand stilled Cal Monterro’s comment. “He will get through those. Eventually. But it will slow him down. We need time, Cal. Time. We have to reach Captain Kel-Tyra. Since Tank couldn’t make telepathic contact with Branden, Kel-Tyra’s now our only chance of finding those key code words.” She refused to voice her fear that Rall Kel-Tyra might already be dead.

  “A security team—”

  “In the corridor. Only. I’m not—” And she clenched her eyes shut for a moment. “I’m not ordering his . . . assassination. Not yet.”

  Cal’s mouth tightened.

  “Alert me when he breaches the first set of fields,” Sass told him. Then she headed doggedly out into the Regalia’s gray utilitarian corridor, Tank padding softly – and sadly – at her heels.

  CAPTAIN TASHA SEBASTIAN’S OFFICE

  Admiral Cayla “Ace” Edmonds’s communication came in an hour and a half later. Right after the security update that Kel-Paten had already neutralized the first of Room Six’s containment fields and was working steadily on the second.

  “The shuttle Captain Kel-Tyra was traveling in came under attack by unknown bogies five hours ago, standard shiptime. We believe he made it to Lightridge Station, but Lightridge’s commsat’s ceased responding. I’ve got a battle group three lighthours out from station. It’s a godsdamned mullytrock, Sass. I�
�m sorry. As soon as I have something, you’ll know. Edmonds out.”

  Sass gripped the edges of her office chair and shoved herself to her feet. She had to try to save him. Brandon had more than once been willing to sacrifice his life for hers. He’d loved her in spite of what he was and who she was. She loved him because of what they were together.

  She knew better than to ask for sick bay’s containment fields to be dropped. She settled for using the comm screen in CIC that – as it was her ship’s Combat Information Center – had triple-secure emergency links to all key stations on the Regalia. It took a few minutes to re-establish sick bay’s severed audio and video links. And that was a risk. Kel-Paten could spike in. But at least if he did, CIC’s firewalls had the best chance of stopping him.

  She didn’t know how he knew that the screen in his room had come on quietly, only that he turned casually – if anything Kel-Paten did under full ’cybe power could be said to be casual – and raked her with a luminous icy-blue gaze, his expression unchanging and unreadable.

  She didn’t waste his time or hers. Her CIC commander was cutting the link at the five-minute mark.

  “Branden, I know you’re in there, inside whatever they’ve programmed into you. I need you to listen, to really listen to me. Ralland Kel-Tyra came under attack by the Triad Faction out by Lightridge. We have every reason to believe he made it to station. Your people are trying to kill him. They’ve already reprogrammed you. I am not your enemy. The U-Cees are not your enemy. Kel-Tyra is working with us, with the U-Cees, just as you have been for the past seven months. And now his life is threatened. We need your help, your knowledge.”

  His gaze didn’t waver.

  “Damn it all, flyboy, you have to remember!” Her voice rasped. The pain and fear she’d kept tamped down suddenly surfaced.

  Something shifted in his hard expression. Sass didn’t know what it was, only that there was a minuscule change, a slight tightening around his eyes. Then it was gone.

  “If Kel-Tyra has turned traitor, I will deal with him after I take control of your ship.”

  The utter coldness in his tone made her gut clench. This would be her last chance to convince him. She could understand his not remembering her, but Branden and Ralland had spent almost their entire lives together. If anything could shatter Branden’s reprogramming, it had to be Ralland. But there was no way she could now get Ralland here in person. This was her only other option.

  She tapped the left side of her screen. A red icon expanded to a secondary screen showing the green-tinged bridge of the former Triad huntership, the Vaxxar, in total disarray. There was the U-shaped command center, the double-command sling and, in front of that, the curve of the railing. And a familiar tall dark-haired man, gloved hands braced against it.

  The time stamp scrolling in the lower right showed a date four shipweeks past.“United Coalition huntership Regalia, this is Branden Kel-Paten. I don’t know if you can hear me. Our comm array is down. Life support is failing. We can’t control the shields, though we’re trying” The image of Kel-Paten glanced over his left shoulder at a man sitting at a nearby station. Ralland Kel-Tyra, nodding.

  “I repeat. Our comm array is down. Weapons banks, life support depleted. We’re not a threat. We are . . . we are all that’s left. The Triad is no more.”

  “Regalia, if Tash – if Captain Sebastian is on board or anywhere in your Fleet, reach her. Please. Tell her I . . . tell her Branden Kel-Paten hopes – prays – her offer still stands. If you can hear me, Regalia, send us a signal. We have only two hours of air left—”

  A fat black-and-white furzel appeared suddenly on the wide railing in the green-tinged darkness, plumy tail flicking back and forth. Kel-Paten flinched, Ralland Kel-Tyra behind him rising swiftly from his seat. Then, in a blur of movement, Kel-Paten grabbed the furzel, clasping him tightly against his chest, relief and joy written starkly on his gaunt features . . .

  Sass tapped the screen again and the playback stopped.

  “A decent fabrication if a tad overly theatrical,” Kel-Paten said. “But Captain Kel-Tyra doesn’t sit nav on my ship. I suggest you reassign whatever intel officer gave you that erroneous data to the sanitation division. If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

  An alarm trilled shrilly behind her in CIC. “He’s broken through Room Six’s second containment field, Captain,” the CIC officer told her. “Kel-Paten now has complete access to sick bay.”

  CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS

  Sass was tired, so godsdamned tired. The Regalia was well into third-shift, long past Sass’s bedtime. She couldn’t sleep. She paced the confines of the captain’s quarters, alternately hugging her arms around her waist and thrusting her hands through her short-cropped hair, as she tried not to look at Branden’s soft sweater thrown over the back of their couch. Or his new hiking boots tucked under their bedroom chair. She could bring him here, show him his own things mixed in with hers, but she knew he wouldn’t believe her. If she even lived long enough to offer him the tour.

  She really thought seeing the vid of himself and Ralland Kel-Tyra on the Vax’s bridge would bring him back out of whatever cybernetic hell the Faction had shoved him into. All that effort had got her, though, was a derisive scoffing remark from him.

  And an icy-blue stare she remembered far far too well, ever since they first met on the derelict freighter, the Sarna Bogue.

  The captain had to make a decision soon. She knew that. The lives of her officers and crew hinged on it. Possibly the very fate of the United Coalition, if Kel-Paten commandeered her ship and handed over to the Faction all the intel the Regalia now held. She could not let the fact that she loved that man more than life itself stand in the way of what she knew had to be done.

  Starting with the hard cold realization that the man she loved was no longer even there. Someone, something else, inhabited Branden’s body and cybernetically enhanced mind.

  When he breached the first of the two larger containment fields around the sick bay, she would have no choice but to give the order to kill him. She’d already provided the security team with the highly classified data on how to do that.

  She hoped Ralland Kel-Tyra would forgive her. She knew she would never forgive herself.

  I should have let you kidnap me. She’d told him that in McClellan’s Void, when they had been trapped in another hell of the Faction’s making – in a fabricated universe where all her sins as the infamous mercenary, Lady Sass, were paraded before Kel-Paten. She’d truly believed then that she’d lost him, that he was going to kill her.

  But instead, he had admitted that at their first meeting on the decrepit Sarna Bogue twelve years ago he’d fallen in love with her. She’d been shocked. He’d said he’d known from that moment that, no matter who she was now or who she’d been, he wanted her in his life forever.

  It was just a godsdamned mullytrocking shame that “forever” turned out to last only seven months.

  She stared with all her might at her quarter’s outer bulkhead, as if she could pierce her ship’s hull with just her emotions, and send a message to the godsdamned mullytrocking Triad Faction – the same message she’d leveled at then-Captain Kel-Paten’s Vaxxar a dozen years earlier:

  Fuck you and the equinnard you rode in on.

  It had certainly worked back then, changing her life and his. He’d told her more than once that it was a phrase he’d always associate with his “green-eyed vixen” . . .

  She spun and bolted for her closet. “Tank, come! I need you now.”

  SICK BAY

  Kel-Paten almost enjoyed dismantling the Regalia’s containment fields. They were a bit better than he’d anticipated, with a few unexpected twists and turns in the coding. It was a skillful pattern he’d come across only once before, a long time ago. That, too, was a pleasurable memory – as far as any ’cybe with emo-inhibitors could experience pleasure, that is. He tried recalling the details but they remained, oddly, elusive.

  Unimportant, then. His programmin
g automatically worked to a structured hierarchy. If and when that memory was needed to provide something of value, it would be there.

  Until then . . .

  There was a subtle change in the air currents. He spun to his right with unerring precision. Not toward the doors to the corridor. They were sealed. Not to any air duct or inner office door. Those posed no threat. But to . . .

  “Captain Sebastian.” He powered up fully. Even through his gloves, one touch would kill her. A brush of his fingers would render her unconscious. He could hold her hostage until he took control of her ship.

  But how had she . . . ?

  His brain searched, gathered, analyzed, redacted, gathered, analyzed, and redacted again. Two-point-seven seconds passed. She was unarmed. She had that fat furzel at her feet. She . . .

  She was out of uniform, in patched and faded freighter grays, a ratty-looking red cap bearing the logo of a Kesh Valirr night-house perched askew on her short-cropped pale hair.

  “Vaxxar, this is the Sarna Bogue,” she said crisply. “Fuck you and the equinnard you rode in on.”

  His body went rigid. His mind whirled, latching onto a coded sequence string of instructions that unpacked so quickly he was momentarily blinded in a blizzard of images and sounds and data.

  Override. Execute. Override. Execute. Override. Execute.

  His breath was sucked harshly out of his lungs. He bent over at the waist, gloved hands on his knees, and gasped for air, which suddenly tasted sweet and fresh – not stale and bitter as it had moments before.

  He stared up at his green-eyed vixen. The galaxy slowly and elegantly righted itself.

  Still hunched over, he focused his gaze on the name-patch above the single bar on her threadbare shirt. That insignia was the only part of her attire that was remotely regulation. He read her name and her rank aloud. “Lieutenant Sebastian.”

  She nodded, her mouth quivering slightly. “Captain Kel-Paten.” Her voice, he noted, wavered. Was she frightened of him? She needn’t be. He could never, would never hurt her.