Empress Game 2

by Rhonda Mason

  What the—

  [Incorrect password]

  Bah.

  He retyped it, actually paying attention this time.

  [Incorrect password]

  Piece of shit.

  A third attempt locked him out of his system. Had he missed a prompt to update his password? The IDC had a million passwords for accessing a million different systems and they all needed updating at different times. Total pain in the ass.

  He reset his password via the provided link and got to work.

  Hours later, a pang in his stomach reminded him it was lunchtime. Thank the stars, his eyes needed a break. But first, he wanted to spend a little more time going through the notes he’d gotten from Janeen.

  Malkor unlocked the drawer containing his non-networked complink and plopped the thing on his desk. It wasn’t exactly IDC standard issue. Then again, every agent had a machine they worked offline with. He swiped the biometric strip, entered in his password and—bleep.

  [Incorrect password]

  The hair prickled at the nape of his neck, his fingers freezing over the keyboard. The two machines weren’t synced to rollover passwords on the same day.

  Frutt.

  He shut the lid of the mobile complink, then glanced at his IDC-linked machine. Suddenly that password reset prompt looked a lot more sinister.

  Hacked? How? The system was supposed to be unhackable. Sure, Rigger could crack it. Not many others, though. And his non-networked complink? In order to access that someone had to have been inside his office. Senior Commander Vega was behind this, without a doubt.

  The lock on the desk drawer looked undamaged. Malkor did a sweep of the room for bugs. Sure enough, the lining on the underside of his chair had been peeled back a centimeter and a tiny surveillance device stuck there.

  Mother frutter.

  He left it there, for the moment. Mobile complink tucked under one arm, Malkor headed out of his office and over to the cluster of desks his octet occupied. He nodded to Hekkar, and based on the return look Hekkar gave, his second in command knew something was wrong.

  “Hey, Rigger,” Malkor said, leaning casually into her cube. “You’re looking a little ragged around the edges. Wanna grab some coffee?”

  His tech specialist didn’t miss a beat despite the full cup on her desk. “Absolutely. This report is kicking my ass.”

  “Let’s hit the café across the street. I need a break from that replicated brew.”

  Her smile was genuine at the mention of real coffee. “You buying, boss?” She locked down her station and he gestured for her to lead the way.

  Considering the problem he was about to drop on her, it was the least he could do.

  They made inconsequential chat all the way through the building, past the security checkpoint, out the doors, in line at the café, and while choosing a table outdoors. Silence hit as they each sipped the admittedly delicious coffee and Malkor set his complink on the table. He slid it across toward her like a snake about to bite and one of her eyebrows lifted.

  “What kind of tech support are we needing this morning?” she asked.

  He kept his expression neutral, just two co-workers enjoying a coffee break. “The kind that deals with hacking.”

  Her other brow rose. No doubt she recognized that as his non-linked machine. “An up-close-and-personal job, hmm?”

  She set her coffee aside and flipped open the lid. “Password?”

  “Won’t work. Locked me out and I haven’t done a reset.”

  “Ah.” She started tapping away and Malkor let her work.

  He watched the people passing by as she frowned and mumbled to herself, the minutes ticking, ticking.

  Fifteen minutes later she sat back in her chair, blowing out a sigh of frustration. She powered the machine down and closed the lid. “Well, you’re good and hacked.”

  “I was hoping for ‘they didn’t get past the secondary protocols.’” Though, getting jammed at the login screen would have been ideal.

  “Whoever did this was good. Not as good as me of course, but damn good.” She shook her head, mind clearly still grinding on the problem. “If they hadn’t tripped the guard code I put in on their way out, prompting that password change, we might never have known this had happened.” Even with her calm tone, he could tell she was as worried as he was. “I don’t suppose you last accessed this machine at oh-three-hundred this morning?”

  “Nope. It was in the office and I was home sleeping.”

  “Figured. I hate to state the obvious, but, it had to be an inside job.”

  “Finding a short-range transmitter bug in my office clinched that.” The person on the other end of that little beauty had to be somewhere in the building.

  “Sorry, boss.” She gestured to his machine. “This is compromised. I hope you have the info backed up somewhere?”

  “Of course.” Damnit. All of the corroborating info Janeen had given him was on there, the info he’d hoped no one would know he had.

  “I assume the same thing happened to your machine in the office?”

  “Yup.”

  She sighed. “Report the hack on your official machine to InfoSec—they’ll decommission it, get you a new one and look into the hack. As far as this thing goes,” she pushed the complink back across the table, “smash it to bits. Sooner rather than later.”

  He kept a bland, just-enjoying-my-coffee expression on his face.

  “We need to move Dolan’s science data,” he said, in a low voice that barely carried to her. “As of right now stop working on it.”

  Only a slight widening of her eyes gave her surprise away.

  “Hide the chip somewhere, and don’t tell me—don’t tell anyone—where.”

  “You really think that’s necessary? I’ve never brought it to headquarters at all.” There was a mix of caution and disappointment in her tone. No doubt she hated to lose the chance to study all that tech.

  “Definitely.” Malkor finished off his coffee and grabbed his compromised complink. “And, Rigger? Keep it from the rest of the octet.”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  * * *

  Midday in the royal palace found Kayla in the gym—grunting, sweating, and generally getting her ass kicked. Infinitely superior to how she had spent the previous week.

  Turns out that one of her bodyguards, Jed, was an expert in Nguni stick-fighting, a martial art from his homeworld that she had never studied. It hadn’t taken Kayla more than five minutes to convince him to teach her.

  The art consisted of fighting with two sticks, one the isiquili or attacking stick, and one the uboko or defending stick. Jed gave her a tutorial on the basic movements, then proceeded to kick her ass in the sparring ring.

  Anna, Kayla’s other bodyguard, called encouragement from the sideline. She was clapping for Kayla’s particularly nimble dodge when Kayla’s guard slipped. Jed cracked her across the face with a killer blow. Kayla’s head snapped around and the room fell into silence.

  “Princess—” Jed choked off. “Are you—”

  Kayla touched fingers to her split lip, then cupped her jaw for a second. Okay, that might be fractured… She moved her mandible side to side, testing the damage. Hurt like the void, but probably not broken.

  Probably.

  She spat out a glop of blood and grinned at Jed’s horrified expression. “That’ll teach me to let my guard down, eh?” She chuckled. “Damn, you can swing!” She shifted her jaw again. Hopefully not fractured.

  Jed finally relaxed, realizing she wasn’t about to report him or anything. “Well, you did say not to go easy on you.”

  “Yeah,” Kayla agreed. “I had that coming.” She spat out more blood and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. Adrenaline coursed through her body, sung to her, urged her to fight on. She spun the isiquili in her hand. “Another round?”

  Anna chuckled. “I’m not sure Prince Ardin would appreciate his guards brutalizing a foreign ruler.”

  “Then we don’t tell him. Besi
des, this is the most fun I’ve had all week.” Kayla adopted a ready stance and Jed mirrored her. Before they could close, though, Kayla’s mobile comm chirped.

  If that’s Isonde…

  Kayla stomped her way over to the bag where her comm hid. She checked the screen: Rigger’s ID.

  “Something wrong, Rigger?” she asked.

  “Not a bit. I’ve got a vid message to route to you, top priority.” Kayla heard a smile in the woman’s voice. “You’ll want to watch it in private.” And with that she disconnected.

  A chill shivered through Kayla. Who could it be? And why the secrecy?

  Kayla resisted the urge to run back to her rooms—barely. She set the palace guard on edge just by being Wyrd. It wouldn’t go well if she started sprinting through the building with her kris.

  Still, the anticipation nearly killed her as she power-walked through the halls.

  Back in her rooms she locked the doors with her reprogrammed codes and strode right to the comm. The message indicator on the panel blinked unendingly. It was supposed to only blink the number of messages she had, then pause a few seconds before repeating. Since her true identity had been revealed, she’d received a continuous stream of comms from a billion different people across the entire empire. Thankfully, a secondary light beside the private comm channel blinked only once.

  Rigger would have warned her if it was bad news, right? She jabbed the play button, unable to wait a moment longer.

  Vayne’s face came on the screen and the breath lodged in her throat. The message paused while the system buffered.

  Vayne. His image blurred. She blinked. Tears fell.

  He’s alive still.

  When the message came to life again Corinth’s head appeared over Vayne’s shoulder, staring at the screen as if he could see her through the comm. Her heart flipped over in her chest with a painful thump. Thank you, thank you.

  Even though he’d hit record to get this message started, Vayne sat still, frozen, clearly unsure what to say. What little she could see behind him looked like some kind of cabin on a ship. Tia’tan’s vessel?

  “Kayla,” Vayne said. His voice was a little choked up, and he cleared his throat before continuing. “I hope this makes it to you. Corinth wasn’t sure where to reach you, so we sent this to someone named Rigger. Whom Corinth,” who was smiling at this moment, “assured me we could trust. If you get this, please reply with your comm signature so that we can talk. I hope—” He stopped, but he didn’t need to say anything, she could see it all in his aqua eyes. Please let this reach you; please be okay; please forgive me. “I hope to hear from you soon. Vayne out.”

  The screen went black. She immediately hit play again, watching the brief message one more time, soaking in the sight of her brothers’ faces. Sweet mother, they’re alive. Then she replied, letting them know how to reach her directly, and that she’d wait all day and night to hear from them.

  She thought of comming Malkor, then decided not to. She wanted to hug this truth to her chest alone for a little while. Maybe the rumor of them being in the Mine Field was wrong. Maybe they were still on their way to Ilmena. Maybe they were perfectly safe and sound.

  She didn’t believe that lie for a moment.

  Kayla pulled her hover chair directly in front of the comm and set it on a rocking cadence. She was prepared to wait for hours to hear from her il’haars. Vayne and Corinth must have been doing the same thing on their end because within a half hour they were live on her screen, live and dear and so beautiful it hurt.

  “Kayla,” Vayne said, breaking into a smile. “I can’t believe it worked.” Behind him, Corinth did a slap-clap thing with his hands, grinning.

  “It is so good to see you. Both of you.” Her smile felt like it stretched to her ears. “I was so worried.”

  “You and me both.”

  “Okay, I do not like the sound of that.” She couldn’t see much of the background behind him. “Are you still on Tia’tan’s ship?” They had better be.

  Vayne’s smile faded. “Uh… yes and no. Technically at this moment, yes.”

  Her ro’haar instincts kicked in immediately. “Explain.” They were supposed to be near Wyrd Space by now, beyond the reach of the imperials.

  “Long story, and trust me, you won’t like most of the details.” He shot a look over his shoulder and Tia’tan’s lavender hair came into view. She looked no-nonsense as always. “Short version, we’re stuck in the middle of the Mine Field.”

  “What in the name of Zoola were you doing anywhere near that voidhole?”

  Vayne’s brows furrowed. He looked as pleased with the situation as she felt. Maybe less so. “Also a long story.”

  “I need details, il’haar. Report. Now.” She left no room for compromise. It was that voice that had snapped him out of his stupor in Dolan’s lab, and that tone that, when a ro’haar used it, their il’haar obeyed without question. Even five years away from his ro’haar hadn’t destroyed that instinct in Vayne, and he started from the beginning of an almost unbelievable story.

  Kayla was following him fine, if furiously, up to the point where the rooks chasing them were destroyed by an unknown energy weapon. After that point, things took a slide into crazy land.

  “Wait, what? The feed must have glitched because I thought I heard ‘the Yari.’” Which, of course, was impossible. Naturally, that’s where Vayne’s story continued, with Corinth clearly prompting him at times, albeit silently.

  Vayne finally ended with, “And that’s why we need you to come to the Middle of Nowhere, the center of the Mine Field, to come rescue us.”

  Maybe she should have called Malkor over. That way he could validate if she had really heard what she thought she’d heard, or if she was so desperate to see her brothers that she had hallucinated the entire thing.

  She blinked. Rubbed a hand across her eyes. Nope, still there.

  “That is the most insane thing I have ever heard,” she said.

  That, at least, brought half a smile from Vayne. “You should try it from our side. Seriously, though, we need your help to get out of here, Kayla.”

  Which of course had her wanting to leave this second. “You want me to fly to the Mine Field, where fifty percent of the hyperstreams in the area get warped toward the field, and ships get ripped out of stream and deposited randomly.” Talk about terrible odds.

  “Actually, Corinth and Noar have a theory about that. All of the streams trying to go around the Mine Field get bent toward it and distorted. But you’ll be flying straight into the heart of the field. That should negate any ‘bending’ effects.”

  “And this theory would be based on…” She watched Corinth. He squirmed a little, looking away, not meeting her eyes.

  Vayne rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay, so, that part of the plan is really more a hunch than a theory.”

  This got better and better.

  “On the upside, we have the exact coordinates in the Middle of Nowhere for you to take a hyperstream to. We rigged a series of sensors in order to get a message from within the field to the outside. The signal bounces from the closest sensor to the Sicerro, then the next and next, relaying all the way until it reaches the sensor outside of the field. Without the electromagnetic warping of the Mine Field, the sensor can judge its location in space accurately, and relay that back, sensor by sensor, getting the coordinates of the center of the field based on the distance and direction of each of the sensors in the chain from each other.”

  “Why does that not make me feel any better about my odds of making it there alive?”

  Vayne blew out a breath, hunching down a little in his seat. “Admittedly, this is one seriously shitty plan. Our two alternatives are A: walking through a tear in the fabric of space—a tear which is destabilizing as we speak, by the way—into the middle of a warzone on Ordoch, or B: cobbling together an engine with not-so-gently-used parts and ancient tech, then trying to catch a hyperstream in the galaxy’s oldest still-functioning weapons ship.”


  Incredulity must have shown on her face because he said, “Yup, that’s when we decided to call you.”

  For a moment, all she could do was stare at them. What in the— How in the name of— Impossible. The whole thing was impossible.

  Vayne lowered his voice. “I left you behind on Falanar and that eats at me every single day. I’m a failure of an il’haar. I’ve failed you, and I have no right to ask this.” The pain in his eyes shot straight through her chest.

  “Don’t say that, Vayne. You’ve never once failed me.” Even as she’d begged him not to go, not to leave her, she’d understood why he had to do it. Understood his fear of recapture, of being a prisoner again. “I don’t have a ship at hand, and things are… tense here right now.” So damn tense. “I’ll find a way. As soon as I can, I promise. Just sit tight and do not—for any reason—choose option A or B, okay?”

  Vayne chuckled. “Got it. I’m sending you the coordinates now.”

  “Vayne, do something for me,” she said, before he could cut the connection.

  “Anything.”

  “Keep you and Corinth safe. No matter what you have to do.”

  He nodded once, then their image faded from the screen.

  * * *

  Back in his office after coffee with Rigger, Malkor grabbed all necessary datapads, stuffing them into his bag with the compromised mobile complink, before notifying InfoSec of the hack to his IDC complink.

  InfoSec booted him from his office and commandeered the complink. Each octet carried dozens of potentially explosive secrets, and an octet leader’s complink was top-level classified. Info from various missions, especially delicate and inflammatory political negotiations, wasn’t released to other octets except on a need-to-know basis.

  Malkor stationed himself at Janeen’s old desk. Security swept each of his team members’ desks for bugs, but found none.

  Good. At least the heat was off his team.

  Sunset came and went before Malkor decided he’d had enough work for one day. Everyone had already left—though Trinan and Vid were likely to hit the gym and Rigger was guaranteed to work after she made it home. Malkor stretched his back, popping a vertebra back into alignment with a groan. Too much desk time.