“It might take more than a few days for Z and me to figure this out,” I said.
“I can wait as long as it takes. I do not want to make her jealous, or make you regret the passion you give me.”
“I would never--” I began to say, but she put her finger to my lips.
“You would because you love her and don’t want to hurt her. I will speak with her more. She does not believe my words when I tell her I want the three of us to be together.”
“I have trouble believing that.” I laughed as I pulled her hand away from my lips. Then I kissed her fingers and shifted so we both could get off my bed.
“You don’t have my powers,” Eve said with a coy smile, then she gestured to my door, and I followed her out of my suite and into the bridge.
Z and the twins were waiting for us, and I gave the three blonde women a nod before I sat in my chair.
“You sleep okay?” Z asked, but she didn’t look at me.
“Yeah. Thanks for asking. How did the drone investigation go?”
“We had three broken units. Their design is interesting. There is no direct control link to any of the units,” the twin on my left said, and I leaned closer to her so that I could taste her scent. It was Kasta.
“What does that mean?” I asked after the woman paused for a few moments.
“Nothing controls them directly. They have firmware programmed into them. They communicate with the nearby units using a simple electromagnetic interface and firmware can be updated across units,” Paula explained, and I turned to nod at her once she finished.
“So can we hack the software and get them to stop?” I turned to Z.
“Negative, Captain,” Z shook her head. “Well, actually. Yes, I could, but I’d need a bunch of live-- errr working units to try and reprogram. Then I’d have to test to make sure it updates the other units.
“First Z would have to break the encryption,” Kasta said.
“Yeah, I didn’t mention that, but it’s not that big of a deal. It will take eight hours at the most.”
“So, we need to capture some without damaging them, then we’ll need at least eight hours?” I asked so that I understood it in layman’s terms.
“Ha!” Z laughed. “You are such an optimist. Maybe we can do it in eight hours, maybe it will take longer. Maybe we won’t be able to do it.”
“There is another possibility we thought of,” Paula said, and I turned to her. “If Lith Dae created these drones, and Faddy said there was a group of citizens that were able to hijack the code, there might be some sort of control center on the planet.”
“But you just said there was no direct control method. Is there--”
“There isn’t, but there could be a terminal somewhere on the planet that would update all the firmware of the drones with a few commands. I still think we need to catch a few of these drones so we can play around with them, but we might be able to expedite everything if this Captain Renalta guy can give us the info.” Z pointed at Persephone's screen where the Lith Dae Navy ships floated in orbit.
“Adam, Captain Renalta is sending us communication,” Eve said.
“Ehhh. Impatient fuck, the sun just rose on the city below,” Z grunted.
“Alright, open the communications,” I said to Eve.
“Yes, Captain,” she replied as she pressed one of the buttons on her control terminal.
“Greetings Captain Renalta,” I said. “We are getting ready to land on the surface.”
“Good,” he replied. “I’ll be taking a shuttle. You will be doing the same?”
“Yes. I’m trusting your fleet won’t attack us.”
“No, Captain Adam. As I said, we have a business offer for you and your crew. It is important to us that it is completed.”
“I’ll bring one of my crew members. We’ll have our sidearms, but no other weapons.”
“Very well, I will bring my commander. You do not need to bring any weapons,” he said.
“There are thousands of hostile drones on the planet. I’m gonna feel a lot safer with a handgun on me.” I laughed, and the man chuckled along with me.
“We’ll meet you planetside in a few minutes,” Renalta said, and then Eve indicated he had cut off the communication.
“I can’t shake the feeling that we are totally going to get fucked by this asshole,” Z said with a long sigh.
“You always think that,” I said.
“Yeah, and we almost always do!” the hacker laughed. “Seriously though, what do you want me to do if those fucks fire on us while you and Eve are down on the shuttle?”
“Just fly to the other side of the planet. Use the transponder to let us know, and we’ll try to get out of the atmosphere as fast as we can.”
“But what if you can’t? What if we have to run?” Z asked with a pained expression.
“Let’s hope that doesn’t happen,” I said. Then I nodded to the twins and turned to Eve. “You ready?” I asked the vampire.
“Yes. Let us do what we can to help these people,” she replied, and then we walked toward the elevator.
Chapter 7
“There is something else we must speak about,” Eve said once our shuttle had exited out of Persephone’s top diamond shaped bay.
“Oh?” I asked as I increased the throttle on the small craft and banked it down toward the planet below us. The visor in front of us wasn’t a screen, it was actually an ultra-hard glass cockpit, but it had sensors overlaid in-between the panes, and the navigation system highlighted the shuttle leaving the largest of the Lith Dae ships.
“Yes. I am getting hungry.”
“Uhhh. Hungry for food, or…” I glanced over at her, and she frowned a bit.
“Blood. It has been more than two weeks since I fed on the corrupt police officers in Queen’s Hat.”
“You’ve gone longer than that without drinking any--”
“Yes. Do not be alarmed, my love. It is a faint hunger. The forecasting of small pangs. I’ve spent many years without feeding, so I understand what my endurance is like. I am not worried about becoming some sort of monster who needs to eat the crew.”
“I get it, but you’ll need blood soon?”
“No,” she said as she shook her head. “That is what I want to speak with you about. I do not really understand how I get my powers. I know they did things to my DNA. I know I already had psychic abilities before they began their work, but I thought the blood was the fuel. It isn’t though. While you were resting at Queen’s Hat, I restocked all of our medical supplies. I added a large surplus of items to help you recover from your shifting, and I also bought a variety of blood products. I thought they would be useful if we needed to perform heavy surgery, or I could just eat them to recharge my magic.”
“I’m guessing that you have tried to eat some,” I said.
“Yes.” She sighed. “Most of the products I bought were synthetic, but some were natural. I had tried the synthetic before we left from Jatal’s moon, but it did nothing to ease the small amount of hunger I felt. I tried the bag that came from a human while Z, Kasta, and Paula were working on the drones. It didn’t appear to work either. It tasted fine, but the hunger is still present.”
“That’s not good. Maybe they lied, and the blood wasn’t real?” I raised an eyebrow.
“It tasted real, the synthetic tasted a bit different, still pleasant though.” She shrugged and my brain tried to make sense of the lovely woman speaking about her taste for blood.
“What are our options then?” I asked.
“I am unsure. As I said, the hunger is bearable, I will probably be able to tolerate it for a long time, but if I use my powers, it will be difficult.”
“Can you drink from me?” I asked as I engaged the autopilot controls that would guide the shuttle through the atmosphere of Uraniel.
“No,” she said. “I cannot.”
“I wouldn’t mind. You could just take some when you needed it.” As soon as I said the words, I realized my life w
as incredibly strange. I would do anything for her.
“I know you would do anything for me, Adam, but your blood isn’t clean. I can not drink it.”
“What?” I felt my heart sink into my stomach and I turned away from the controls of the shuttle to look at her.
“No, no. Sorry, my love, it is the wrong term. You have been experimented on. You are changed. I feel your passion and your honor, but your blood wouldn’t charge me because it has been changed. This is why I cannot feed on certain others that we have found. Their blood is different, either from too many drugs or mutation. I can sense it in them and I know it will not work.”
“Ahh,” I said as I tried to shrug off her words.
“I do not want to hurt you, either. Even though you would do anything for me, I do not want you to experience pain just so I avoid a mild discomfort.”
“I am thinking about Z; when she first saw you feeding on the guards in the Elaka Nota control tower, she asked if we were going to need to keep prisoners on our ship so that you could feed on them.” I let out a laugh, and it helped me recover from my bruised feelings. I really shouldn’t have been sensitive about this, but I felt powerless to help the woman I loved.
“I do not believe it will come to that. In our quest to help others, we will stand in the path of evil men and women. I will feed off them. I wanted to tell you so you knew it was the only solution. There should be no secrets between us.” Her hand rested on my shoulder, and she blessed me with a beautiful smile.
“Agreed. No secrets,” I said as I took her hand in mine. I lifted her fingers to my lips and kissed the back of her hand. Eve let out a soft gasp of pleasure when my lips touched her skin, and I glanced up into her red eyes.
“When you kiss or touch me, the hunger disappears,” she whispered with a smile.
“I’ll have to do more of it,” I smirked at her.
“Yes, but Z.” She frowned. “Will you speak with her when we get back?”
Our shuttle was shaking a bit from the atmosphere entrance, and I turned to face the surface of the fast approaching planet.
“What do I say? ‘Hey, I love you, and Eve, but it makes me feel terrible to feel this way. I don’t know what to do, but I really want to fuck both of you, but yet I don’t because that is messed up and I feel like I’m behaving dishonorably and ungrateful to both of you’?”
“You could say that, but it isn’t exactly what she wants to hear. Remember that she is nervous about Paula and Kasta taking her role on the ship and in your heart.”
“I don’t know why she would think that about Paula and Kasta. They are--”
“You haven’t spoken to Z since we landed on Jatal’s moon. Even just a conversation where you affirmed you still care for her, and you need space to figure out our relationship, would put her more at ease.”
“Got it,” I said. “I’ll talk to her as soon as we get back.”
“Good,” Eve said with a nod. “I will continue to speak to her about our relationship.”
“Your and mine?” I asked.
“No, although that is part of it. I meant my relationship with her. I had told her I loved her at Queen’s Hat. It has made her uncomfortable. I understand, but she is coming to accept that my feelings are true.” Eve smiled at me, but I just shook my head.
“Fuck, this is so weird.” I let out a dry chuckle.
“You think it strange, but my heart is filled with joy and love.” Eve shrugged. “Perhaps you both are the strange ones.”
I laughed and then pressed the button on the console to take control of the shuttle. The field was a few thousand meters ahead of us, and I steered the craft toward a landing approach. We set down almost right on top of the spot where Persephone’s thrusters had torched the field, and then I leaned back in my chair after I cut off the engines.
The Lith Dae shuttle set down fifty meters away, and I flipped through the scanner controls on my terminal to see if I could find a way to zoom in on their cockpit. It took me a few moments to find the switch, but I was rewarded by a screen popping up in the lower righthand corner of my display. It showed a single woman and man in the other craft standing from their pilot chairs. Then they turned away from their controls and moved to the back of their shuttle.
“Alright. Looks like they only have the two of them,” I said as I stood.
“I do not have a good feel for their minds yet, but I will once we begin to speak to them,” Eve said as she walked to the exit door of the shuttle behind me.
“Let’s hope they don’t try anything stupid.” I hit the button to open the door, then I hit the other button to extend the ramp. I checked to make sure that my pistols were set correctly in their holsters, and then I walked down the ramp.
“Greetings!” the man called from across the grass. The voice sounded like Captain Renalta, and my shoulders relaxed a bit.
“Greetings,” I said as I reached the grass. I kept my eyes on the uniformed man and woman as I walked through the tall grass, but they matched pace with me, and the four of us came to stand face to face between our shuttles.
“I am Captain Renalta, of the Lith Dae Navy.” He was a lean man, with peppered black hair, blue eyes, and a strong jaw. He looked like the kind of guy that would grace a military recruitment poster.
“I’m Adam,” I said as I shook his outstretched hand. He wasn’t as tall or broad as me, but he still had a strong grip.
“This is my first mate, Eve,” I nodded to the vampire woman, and she held out her hand to Captain Renalta.
“Pleasure! This is Commander Tunar-Roz,” Renalta said after he shook Eve’s hand.
“Nice to meet you,” I said as I reached my hand out to the woman. She also looked as if she was cut from a stern military cloth. Her brown hair was pulled back tight against her skull without a single loose strand. Her uniform was perfectly pressed, and she stood at full attention. She nodded curtly to me before she shook my hand, but I saw her eye narrow when she touched Eve’s hand.
“We don’t allow body-modders in our Navy,” Captain Renalta asked as he looked at Eve and me with a bemused expression.
“I can understand why.” I didn’t know if the man was trying to pull anything out of me, so I just answered as simply as possible. “Can you tell us more about this job?”
“I’ll get there. First, I would like to get to know you both a bit more,” the blue-eyed man said as he looked at me.
“We are traders,” I said with a shrug.
“Your ship looks military, as does that armor.” He nodded at the plates on my chest.
“We’ve been successful so far,” I said.
“That’s how it often is with your type,” Commander Tunar-Roz said as she shook her head. “But then one bad run and that’s it.”
“Space travel tends to end that way. One mistake and you are dead. I try to be cautious. What is the job?”
They have new code to halt the drones. There are two control towers in each city, but the original hacking attempt came from the location in one of the bunkers here. He wants us to upload the new code into the control tower. He thinks we could have destroyed the other three Lith Dae Navy ships, but Captain Lachie was a political rival of his, and he will take all the glory in his fleet if he does this assignment without any other help. Their culture is very cut-throat, and re-claiming this world for their government will ensure his promotion.
“I’m sorry, can you repeat that?” I asked. Renalta had asked me a question while Eve spoke through my mind, and I hadn’t been able to pay attention to both conversations.
“Which system are you from?” he asked.
“I am from Sol. Lived on one of Jupiter's moons,” I said.
“You are a long way from home. Were you a soldier? You have the bearing of one.”
“A marine actually,” I said.
“Ahh! Even better,” he replied with a wide smile. “If you need something done, send a marine, eh?”
“And you need something done. That is why we a
re here,” I said as I gestured to the field. “I surmise it is something to do with these drones.”
“Their programming was tampered with,” the commander said, and I turned to look at her. “To fix them, new code must be uploaded into the control towers. This will disable the drones and allow us to occupy the planet again.”
The code will not disable the drones, it will change their commands so that they will no longer attack starships or anyone wearing a Lith Dae marker insignia on their person.
“When you say it like that, it sounds simple,” I said, “but we are down here talking, so I guess there is more to it.”
“Aye.” Captain Renalta pointed toward the distant city. “The signal towers use the metal of the buildings. The control room is in the top area of the northwest bunker where the citizens of this planet are hiding. The entire network is linked together deep underground, and you can’t enter any of the bunkers unless a command is given from another one.”
“So you can’t get in to upload the code?” I asked.
“Correct,” he replied.
“So how are we going to get inside?”
“The southeast bunker can open the hatch doors for the northwest one,” he answered, and I sensed a bit of annoyance on his face.
“But we can’t get into the southeast bunker without another one opening it. Or am I understanding you wrong?”
“No, you are correct. We’ve been studying the layout for some time. The cluster of bunkers in this city has a direct link with terminals in the government center. We have figured out a way to open the southeast bunker for a few minutes. This will require another piece of software being uploaded to that system,” Commander Tunar-Roz said.
“So someone needs to upload the file in the government center to open the southeast bunker, then someone needs to go into the southeast bunker and open the northwest bunker’s doors, then the new files will have to be uploaded into the control room terminal of the northwest bunker to turn off the drones?”
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