“With one exception,” she said. “But to be precise, I’m not a crèche augment. I am an alpha augment.”
“What’s that?” Ethan said.
“A prototype.” she said, glancing over at Kaycee.
“You can’t be. The plusser program has been ongoing since before the Coalition was formed.”
Kai chuckled. “You really don’t know who I am, do you?”
She shook her head.
“You can look me up, I’m sure there will be something about me in the historical records somewhere.” She turned in her seat to look at the doctor. “Kai is short for Kylla, and my last name before I married Edison Wentworth was Torrance.”
Ethan gasped. “I recognize the name Edison Wentworth.”
“He was my first husband. But I was at the battle at L-2 Shipyard. And L-4 Prime.”
“The records confirm that Kylla Torrance was the person piloting the Tahrat Shan Che at L-2 shipyard,” Marti announced, opening an image on the wallscreen that showed a woman that looked like she might have been the slightly younger sister of the person sitting in front of them.
“I looked so much younger then,” she said.
Ethan blinked several times in surprise. So did Kaycee. If she was the same Kylla Torrance, she would have to be over 150 years old.
The captain shook it off first. “At this point I don’t care who is driving that Shan Takhu ship. I need you two to hammer out your differences and get me the best solution. Otherwise we’re turning around and going home.”
“We can’t do that, Captain Walker. I’ve explained to you that we’ve got no home to go back to.”
“Then you convince her that we need to go on,” he said, nodding at Kaycee. “Or that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
“But—”
“You have until Rene finishes the repairs.” He got up and started to walk out of his office but stopped and added, “Ammo, keep them from killing each other until they come to terms.”
Pausing just outside the door, he took in several deep breaths to clear his head of the pheromones. Gradually the fog lifted, but he knew it was all relative. He leaned against the bulkhead and ran down his list of priorities.
Secure the ship.
Finish the repairs.
Run like hell.
In that order.
He could already hear the voices behind him rising to the level of warfare and he stepped away before he tapped into his collarcomm. “Quinn, have you deployed security around our key systems yet?”
“Working on it, Cap’n. We’ve got a lot of manpower now but none of them have much training so it’s going slow,” he said.
“Understood,” Ethan said. “I also want your handlers tooled for deadly force.”
There was a slight pause as Quinn processed the implications of the orders. “Aye, Cap’n. What about the volunteers?”
“Leave them with stunners, but I think you might need to be ready for real trouble.”
“What flavor?”
“I don’t know for sure. If we’re lucky it will be pirates,” Ethan said.
“Not much different from fanatic terrorists.”
“With a Shan Takhu ship,” he added.
“Oh. I’ll pass the word to the troops.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
By the time Ethan got to engineering there was a pile of parts stacked up behind Rene and he was head down inside a twisted hole of access panels and metal frame members. Three of Kai’s people were trying to catch the pieces he flung out of the opening and Ethan had to duck to keep from being clobbered by what looked like a piece of power conduit casing that tumbled through the air as he walked up.
“How’s it going?” he hollered. He stood off to the side in case another piece of hardware came flying past.
“It’s fragged,” the engineer said, squirming as he heaved himself out of the opening. Once he had his feet on the deck, he nodded across the room to where an unrecognizable piece of hardware sat on a scanner bench. “It looks like they cut it the same way as the one in the container’s system.”
“How bad is it?”
“Bad. They scored this one so it would blow toward the secondary coupler. That’s why we lost both. It also took out a dozen other smaller sub-systems. It was masterful work.”
“You can buy the guy a drink some other time,” Ethan said.
“More like unbag his eggs,” he hissed. “With a torch.”
“I’ll hold him down,” the captain said. “So how long to get it up and running?”
“Most of a day, minimum,” he said.
“It’d be good if you don’t waste any time.”
“Nojo. Any more pointless advice for me?” He looked down at the floor. “Sorry. I hate stress, you know.”
“I scan,” Ethan said, smiling a little. “I’m… concerned. Turns out we might be facing Jetaar.”
“Frak me. You don’t really think so, do you?” the engineer asked.
Ethan shrugged. “Odds are it’s a Shan Takhu ship out there. That gives us two options as to who it is.”
“And neither of them is fuzzy feeling,” Rene said with a sigh. “I can get you partial power on one of the starboard couplers in six hours if I don’t breathe. You won’t have drive coils for ten.”
“Do what you can. I’ll stay out of your air supply.”
The engineer nodded, picking up a tool and heading back to his technical excavation work. Ethan stared after him for almost a minute before he felt Quinn standing behind him.
“I’m thinking four volunteers in engineering, plus two outside the door here and then two on each deck posted outside the lift gate. With one of our handlers on each deck floating, that will cover the whole ship.”
“That’s fourteen plus the regulars?” Ethan confirmed.
“Aye, Cap’n. At least until we get moving again,” he said. “Once we’ve got our legs back, we can stand half of them down. Sleep is a good thing.”
“Yah, I think I read about it once.”
“Truth is every one of her people volunteered to stand watch. I only picked the best of them and we’ve still got some good ones in reserve,” he said. “They’re all over-qualified, but in damn fine condition.”
“Best bodies genetics can engineer,” he said. “Let’s hope we don’t need all of them.”
“If we do, they’re swinging clubs. We’re out of stunners. Unless you want to give some of them real guns.”
Ethan shook his head. “If it turns out to be Jetaar I might regret that, but for now let’s not take a chance on blowing a hole through to the black. Vacuum sucks.”
“Understood, but I’ll make sure our regulars are over tooled, just in case it turns into a firefight. They can always hand them off to one of the good guys if needs dictate.” He reached behind his back and pulled two live fire pistols out of his belt. He held them out to the captain. “I think you and Ammo should carry these. You’d both be good in a fight and smart enough not to shoot a friendly. Or a wall.”
It had been years since he’d fired a lethal round weapon. He took the guns and hefted them in his hands. They were a lot heavier than he remembered more than double the weight of a stunner. “You’ve got a lot of faith in us,” he said, grinning as he tucked them into the back of his coverall.
“Yah, you’re right. Maybe you should just give both to Ammo,” the handler said with a wink. He spun and headed back across the deck to deploy his people into position.
Ethan watched him get started then made his way out onto the middeck. It surprised him to see that no one who wasn’t working guard duty was around. The lounge was empty except for the far table where Kaycee and Kai sat talking animatedly or glaring. Ammo was with them, but she leaned back and was letting them work it out. She nodded, and he jerked his head to the side to get her to join him by the galley door.
As she approached, he held out her pistol. She raised an eyebrow. “You want me to choose the winner?”
“That bad?”
/> “Not at all,” she said with an exaggerated nod to emphasize she was lying. “I think Kaycee will come around, but it’s personal for her. Kai is kicking her god. That never goes well.”
“Well if you have to shoot one, I trust you to make the right choice,” he said. “I’m on my way back to the ConDeck to give Nuko an update. As soon as I get a coffee. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long one.”
“For all of us,” she said, spinning around and walking back across the room. She pulled the gun out of its holster and checked to make sure it was loaded and ready. She set the gun on the table as she sat back down. He was sure it was because she wasn’t wearing a belt and there was no place else for her to stash it, but Kaycee twisted and look in his direction as it landed between them.
He forced a smile onto his face and turned toward the galley. The door opened just before he touched it and one of Kai’s people stood inside, holding a thermocup and a small urn of coffee. She was a tiny thing, barely as tall as the middle of his rib cage, with short dark hair cut in a shaggy simple style. She looked down at the deck and smiled. “Escabosa Dark?”
“What?”
“You wanted coffee. Escabosa is your favorite isn’t it?” she said. “I heard you thinking about it.”
“You did?”
“Yes, Captain Walker. I promise, I didn’t peek,” she said, answering the question he hadn’t asked. “You’re just leaky.”
He glanced self-consciously down at the front of his coverall before he realized what she meant. She blushed for him.
“I’m Qara.”
She looked up at him and his heart stopped. Almost literally. When her eyes locked on his, he felt… naked. Completely.
“Yes, I was the one who heard him before he came aboard,” she said, again answering him before he spoke.
It was a good thing too because he might have sounded like he’d reentered puberty.
“I wish I’d caught him sooner. I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s alright, I understand that it’s a bit—”
“Frustrating,” she offered.
He nodded. “That wasn’t what I was going to say.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“I guess talking to a telepath is pretty pointless,” he said.
“Not with everybody,” she said. “You seem to be very… comfortable… You just don’t appear to want to hide who you are, or what you think, like most people do. Especially ones that know what I am.”
She tilted her head to the side and smiled sadly. “You’re right, it is very lonely being a telepath. Strange that you’d pick up on that. Almost everyone who isn’t one doesn’t understand what it is like for people to fear you. What it means to live having to hide who you are.”
“That’s why you volunteered to travel out here like this isn’t it?” he asked.
Her smile broadened until her face lit up. “You are very perceptive, Captain Walker.”
“Ethan, please,” he said. “I mean you’ve seen me naked already.”
She blushed again and looked down. “Not until just then, thank you very much.”
“Would you come with me to the ConDeck? I think it might be useful to have you around,” he said, taking the cup. She was careful to make sure their fingers never touched, and he caught it.
“Not a germaphobe,” she said, winking. “I just don’t think you’re ready for that kind of intimacy. At least not without Nuko signing off on it first.”
He made it all the way to the ConDeck before he realized that Qara’s pheromones weren’t attacking him anywhere near as aggressively as Kai’s did. Although there was definitely a different type of distraction between them.
“I’ve been trying to keep them from bothering you as much,” she explained. “I know the distraction frustrates you and so I’m reinforcing your ability to resist. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” he said. It was easy to let her read his mind. It didn’t feel anywhere near as intrusive as he expected.
“That is because I’m only catching what you are broadcasting,” she said. “If I looked deeper, you’d know it and would probably feel a lot less comfortable with it. You really are a surprisingly strong thinker.”
“Strong?”
“Loud. Single minded,” she offered. “Your thinking is… pure. Most people are of many minds. They tend to confuse themselves more than they confuse each other.”
She paused and then smiled. “I see you understand what I mean.”
He was nodding as they entered the ConDeck and he pointed at one of the jump seats for her. Nuko’s face was on the commscreen and he was relieved to see her. He knew she was alright, but her face on the screen meant they had reestablished real intership communication.
“So, what’s your status?” she asked as he dropped into his seat. She glanced over his shoulder at Qara and raised an eyebrow.
“I am Captain Walker’s early warning system,” she said, answering Nuko’s question.
“Just before we were boarded, Qara felt the mind of one of the men coming aboard. I figured it might be good to have her and her telepathic abilities close to hand if it happens again.”
Nuko’s other eyebrow went up to register full on disbelief.
“She knows you well,” Qara whispered.
He glanced over his shoulder at her and made sure she understood exactly how well they knew each other. The tiny telepath looked down at the floor and blushed so hard she glowed. She nodded. Obviously, she understood his intent.
Turning his intention back to Nuko, he smiled.
“Rene says we’ll have partial power in six hours and the coils back up in ten.”
“That’s a long time to be sitting here naked,” she said. Behind him Qara squeaked.
“Best we can do. They took out both starboard couplers and a lot of secondary systems. It’s a mess in there.”
“Any clues who did it?”
“Considering it looks like they used Shan Takhu tech the list is short. Only two names in fact.”
“You can’t think it was the Institute?”
“Kai confirmed that it was within the performance specifications of the Tahrat ship that the institute has.”
“Kai did?” Nuko looked confused.
“Yah, she’s flown one,” he said.
Nuko’s mouth fell open. “Now I know why she looked familiar. She’s Kylla Torrance. Holy frak. She’s got to be almost 160 years old.”
“That’s who she is, but I didn’t ask how old she was.”
She sat there for several seconds as she processed the new information into her reality. “Alright that’s beside the point. If she says it’s a Tahrat class ship, then it’s the Institute.”
“Or Jetaar,” he added.
“She shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense that it would be him. If he’s got one of those ships working, he’d be after bigger targets than us.”
“Yah, I know,” he agreed. “Honestly, I think I feel safer facing Jetaar.”
“Theoretically, he owes us a favor.”
“Exactly, and even if he doesn’t feel that way, we know what motivates him,” he said.
“Right, but if it’s not him, they didn’t try to take you down either,” she said. “There has to be some other reason behind what they’re doing.”
He nodded. “I think they’re trying to send us a warning. They want us to turn around.”
She studied his face and then frowned. “You’re not inclined to do that are you?”
“I’m not sure yet,” he admitted. “If we don’t, we’re still two weeks from our destination.”
“If that’s really the Tahrat, we don’t stand a chance.”
“Supposedly it is unarmed, but what bothers me is if it’s not Jetaar, then it proves Kai’s case. There’s some big stink happening a lot further down in the burrow.”
“It proves Jetaar’s position, too,” she pointed out. “Didn’t he say he was fighting rot in the Coalition government?�
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Chapter Twenty-Nine
The power was back on, and the Olympus Dawn had starboard sensors again. They could also maneuver some if they needed. Although calling it maneuvering might be generous, it would be more like wallowing in quicksand, but at least they should be able to face toward whatever might come at them.
The biggest relief had come when Marti announced that they also had their big gun back online. As soon as that announcement came, Ethan had Nuko move the Sun out to five hundred klick. They stayed facing in opposite directions so they could cover an attack from either end but at least if something catastrophic happened, they were far enough apart that it wouldn’t take both ships.
Not that their defenses would matter at all, since whoever it was could jump in and hit them from billions of kilometers away.
It didn’t help that he’d spent most of the time since they had restored the sensors, sitting and hypothesizing about how easy it would be to take a freighter out with a reasonably insignificant effort. When you could appear anywhere aboard with a bomb, and then vanish before it went off, there wasn’t much of a strategy against that.
There were hundreds of places where even a few kilograms of high explosive would be enough to vaporize the entire ship.
The only thing that comforted him in all of this was that if they had intended to do that, it would have been over already. But that was also the most frustrating thing, too.
Why hadn’t they done it?
“Dr. Caldwell is coming to see you,” Qara said. She’d been sitting, meditating in the jump seat where he’d left her since he’d talked to Nuko. He’d almost forgotten she was there.
“I should wait in the other room. She wants to talk to you in private,” she added, standing up.
“Isn’t privacy a bit of an illusion?” he asked.
She smiled. “It’s a courtesy. If it makes her more willing to speak her mind with you, then it’s also polite too, isn’t it?”
He shrugged.
“You’re welcome. I’ll be in your office so I’m close if I catch another hostile impression,” she said, answering his thoughts preemptively.
As she walked out, he realized having her able to hear his thoughts didn’t bother him as much as he’d have expected. He could see where it would be damned convenient in a tight spot.
Wings of Earth- Season One Page 77