He froze.
“It’s not a question is it? It’s a statement,” she said.
He looked down at his finger, fighting the urge to start tapping again.
“What is missing… is what matters,” she offered.
“What the hell does that mean?” he whispered. “And how do you know?”
She picked up the cup and held it up to her nose. It smelled like sweetened sulfuric acid, laced with chocolate… and possibly moose dung. She shook her head and put it down. On an adjacent table. “What do you remember with any certainty about what happened?”
“The explosion of the Elysium Sun,” he said, closing his eyes and trying to dig into his memory. He clawed at the fog and it shredded like a dream in the morning light. Tattered remnants and flashes.
“What else?”
“We were attacked. By a ship. But not really attacked. It was sabotage?” He shook his head. “Intruders? Appearing from the walls.”
He opened his eyes and glared at her. “I do remember watching the Sun blow up? Don’t I?”
She nodded.
“And then I remember attacking the Tahrat...”
The Tahrat?
She nodded again, confirming the strange word that he didn’t recognize. “Do you remember anything after that?”
He stared at her and then through her. “A Tacra Un? That can’t be right. Can it?
“Actually, all of that’s right,” she said. “Do you remember where it was?”
He shook his head and looked down at the mug in front of him. A set of coordinates popped into his mind, but he couldn’t articulate them.
“You do, don’t you?” she asked.
He tilted his head to the side but couldn’t answer.
“It’s best if you don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t hurt yourself. It will come back to you when you need it.”
“You know what happened, don’t you?”
She reached into the pocket of her vest and pulled out something.
“Don’t touch it!” he roared as he recognized it without knowing why. He heard a female voice in his head say the same thing, at the same time. Don’t touch it!
She smiled as he looked around, embarrassed at his outburst. Fortunately, the café was empty, and nobody was close enough on the concourse to notice.
“Don’t touch it?” he said, his uncertainty turning it into a question rather than a statement.
She held the spiderlike thing in her palm. “You remember what this is?”
He nodded. “It’s an Urah Un.”
She held it out to him. “It’s yours.”
He shook his head and let her drop it on the table in front of him. One tentacle twitched like a dying spider.
“Kai said when you started remembering I should give it back to you.” She poked it with a finger, and it rolled toward him.
“You’re not supposed to be able to touch that,” he said. “What the hell?”
She looked at him evenly.
“Unless you’re a plusser?”
“Or a STIF,” she added. “But I never liked college that much.”
“That means…”
She winked at him. “Let’s keep that just between us. Please. Kaycee doesn’t know for sure, and it’s better if it stays that way.”
He nodded. Slowly. He remembered that he’d suspected Ammo was augmented, although he’d never gotten around to asking directly. “But I’m not a plusser,” he said, as several disjointed images came back to him.
“Qara?” she asked.
“An accident? I touched her,” he said.
She nodded.
“This all feels so familiar to me, but it’s like I’m remembering it with someone else’s mind.”
“Because the memory block they put on you is wearing thin.”
“Memory block?” He felt his face wrinkling oddly as he fought down a sudden wave of nausea. “I’m not sure I like the idea of someone altering my memories.”
“It will all come back to you, but you and the others all agreed to it,” she said. “Kai knew we’d be boarded on the way home. She expected the interrogation to be invasive, and if you didn’t have any memory to dig out, they couldn’t get any information from you. They did it to protect us. You in particular, with your new wiring.”
“I remember that. I think,” he said. “Traumatic Stress… something.”
“Kai wanted me to make sure you understood that she really does trust you, and she figured that, because of your new enhancements, you’d eventually remember on your own. Your brain is different—”
“It feels like it’s melting right now.”
“I’m sure it does,” she said, reaching out and touching his arm. The Urah Un twitched again. “She knew that only Kaycee and I would be able to resist a deep interrogation, so she let us keep our memories.”
“She trusted Kaycee even with her being a STIF?” he asked. “Doesn’t that make her the enemy?”
“See, you remember more than you thought you did.” She winked.
“Seriously, why Kaycee?”
“That surprised me too, but she’s disillusioned enough not to trust the Institute anymore either. And Kai thought you might occasionally need a doctor who understood what was going on in your brain.”
“I still have so many holes to fill,” he said. “Will I ever get it back?”
“Do you want to remember?”
“I need to know the truth,” he said. “All of it.”
“Then put that on,” she said, flicking at his Urah Un with her fingertip.
He looked down at it for only a second before he picked it up and dropped it in his palm, watching as it uncoiled and dissolved into his skin. He stared at it. Familiar and yet so alien.
When he glanced up at her she was smiling. She held her hand out and he saw the faint line of her own glove against her palm.
“You’ve done this before, too,” she whispered, taking his hand.
His awareness dissolved into hers and he heard her thoughts. You don’t know how long I have waited to do this.
He would have blushed at her admission, but as he fell deeper into her awareness, he felt something else. Something she didn’t want him to see.
Fear.
THE END
Chapter One
Peitre Rykova was a small cog in a large machine designed to deliver illicit cargo. He slipped in quietly in the night, unloaded a frak load of Keto-blue and then disappeared. He never touched the money or the cargo with his own hands, but the runs paid well for the risk. It wasn’t enough to own his own ship yet, but he knew his place. He also knew his future would hold ever bigger rewards as he moved up through the air supply in the Commonwealth of the Underground Market.
Today he was delivering drugs. Soon it would be weapons. And then, someday he’d command a raider. It was his destiny. Even if reaching it meant he hauled recycler biscuits, he was determined to sit in a big seat. A much bigger seat.
Tamilis Two was a mining colony. New and growing, and full of miners looking to forget the harsh reality of working on the rocks. Keto-blue was their drug of choice this week. Last week it was Blackroot Sniff, and next week it would be something else. It didn’t matter what they called it, it was slow-motion death and Peitre was willing to deliver it.
He sat in the control pit staring at the sensor screens. It was his fourth run to Tamilis, and he knew there’d be nothing to see. They dropped down in a small clearing several klicks from one of the outlying communities and his two handlers shoved the skids out the lower hold doors and into the dirt. He kept the coils hot and his eyes open because he was smart enough to know that even though it was a low risk drop, it was when you got lazy that you got snapped.
“Vas is das?” Gregor said. His voice sounded confused, and it sat Peitre up in his seat.
“Is it moving?” Darsa asked. She sounded more annoyed than anything.
“I got nothing on the screens. What are you seeing?” he asked.
“A l
ight to the north,” she said. “It looks like a fire maybe.”
He leaned forward and looked out the side window. He could see the glow they were talking about over the trees. It was blue green and dancing like lightning. The screens still showed nothing but the darkness and the infrared shapes of several animals lurking around the edge of the clearing.
“Is brighter now,” Gregor said. “I should check, da?”
“No. Shove the load and get back aboard,” he ordered. “Whatever it is, we don’t need to eyeball it.”
He could hear Darsa grunt as she heaved against the next skid. “It’s getting closer,” she said as the thump told him another pallet was off his deck.
“What is frakking that?” Gregor said.
Peitre still couldn’t see anything on the screen, but when he looked back out the window the entire sky was alive with blue green tendrils of plasma. “Screw this. Get inside and lock down!”
He held his hand over the engine controls and watched the red light that told him the hatch was still open.
“Gregor get back to the ship!” Darsa hollered. “He’s running for the trees gawdamn him. Should I get him?”
The plasma seemed to be dropping toward the ground and Peitre swallowed hard. “No. Leave him. Are you inside?”
“On the ramp,” she said.
He flipped the control override and slammed the hatch. Hopefully, she was clear of the door and aboard. Otherwise he would have to answer for losing both his crewmembers.
He pulled back on the control yoke and hit the drive.
They leapt skyward slicing through the plasma fire like a missile. Warning lights flashed in waves across his console, but he kept his eyes glued on the sky above him. Only one thought filled his mind. Getting away.
As he gained altitude, he dared a glimpse to the side. He could see what looked like several shuttles leaping upward as distant sparks rising above a writhing ocean of green and blue fire. He knew if he could make it to space, he could get away. Unlike the other ships trying to escape, the Dragonfly Class courier ship he was piloting had big coils and lots of legs.
He glanced down to check the charge on his cruise engines, relieved to see they were ready.
He could feel the thinning air buffeting them as they climbed. Strangely it seemed to be rising around them and not letting him escape to the vacuum of space. They were at eighty klick and it still felt like he was in the low atmosphere. And in a typhoon.
Ahead of him, a shuttle climbed, and he adjusted his heading to give himself a clear path around it.
He leaned forward and glanced back at the planet as it fell behind. Swirling pools of incandescence rippled like molten craters across the surface. It looked like a glowing membrane of translucent energy holding back the vacuum of space. Where he could see through the fire, it seemed as if the surface of the world was dissolving into blackness.
Almost like something was emptying the world from the inside.
He shivered and tore his eyes away. Another minute and he’d be able to jump up to cruise.
“Still with me down there?” he asked, remembering Darsa was on the ramp when he slammed the hatch.
“Da. Broke my frakking nose with the door, you dimflatch fragwad,” she hissed.
“You can thank me later,” he said. He knew she’d hand him his eggs in a bag once they were safe. At the moment he didn’t have time to think about anything except flying.
Glancing ahead, he realized that somehow the shuttle was still in front of them. It jerked back and forth like it was dodging demons. He’d been closing on it, but now trying to dodge its wild gyrations, it seemed that no matter how hard he jinked, it always tumbled back into his path.
He jerked hard to the side, but the shuttle veered in the same direction.
There’s no way this idiot’s going to cost us our line out of here!
He jammed down on the controls and spun hard over, twisting into a slicing corkscrew. “Out of the way flatbrain!” he snarled.
He looked into the windows of the shuttle as it slipped by only meters from a collision. He would have flipped the other pilot a hand gesture but a flash of light dancing across the shuttle’s hull caught his eye before he had a chance.
Craning forward painfully against the acceleration he tried to locate the source of the light. As he watched, bright sparks leapt up from one of the pits, consuming one of the fleeing shuttles with green glowing fire. Another wave of sparks shot up, and another shuttle vanished.
“No fucking way!” he growled. The coils were still hot, and ignoring the proximity warning on his console, he slammed his hand down on the cruise drive icon just as the green fireflies wrapped around and across his window.
When Peitre came awake, his ship was tumbling in space. G-forces smashed him back and forth in his seat. The gravity was off and only the emergency transceiver showed any sign of life. Its faint glow was enough to illuminate the inside of his control pit but nothing else. Blood splatters spread across most of the interior surfaces and struggling to find strength, he brought a hand up and rubbed across his face confirming he was the source of the crimson mess.
He pulled down on the yoke. Nothing happened.
The damage had to be bad for the maneuvering thrusters to be offline. The groaning of metal as the ship spun violently sounded like it was on the verge of coming apart. He gripped the armrests of his seat and watched the stars streaking past.
No planet, no moons.
He’d gotten clear of whatever was happening on Tamilis, but he realized his situation wasn’t any better than it had been before. The tear of shearing hull plating punctuated his thoughts with a searing certainty.
“Hold together baby,” he whispered, forcing his arm toward the emergency transceiver control panel. It was too far away to reach from his seat.
Some idiot engineer must have designed it to go there.
He knew the Astromere was only a few light years away. It was an old cargo ship loaded heavy with Keto-blue, and not fast even if it was empty, but it would only take an hour to get to him. If he could just hold on until they got here.
Taking a deep breath and heaving his body forward, he pulled himself out of his seat and lurched toward the emergency transceiver. The gyrations threw him sidewise as he tried to wedge into place and activate the distress signal. Finally, he managed to tap the right icon.
Without thinking, he let his grip slip, and he slammed around the inside of the control pit, bouncing off edges of consoles and the top of his seat railing helplessly. As he hit the forward window, he caught a glimpse of a ship.
An orbital shuttle? This far out?
He crashed against the back bulkhead. The emergency hatch groaned as he smashed into it. Rebounding forward, he spun wildly in the center of the room before the motion of the ship hurled him once again rearward toward the door.
Curling, he hit it with the flat of his back, knocking the air out of his lungs just before it gave way. He rolled as the atmosphere around him swept him out into the vacuum of space. Silently screaming out the nitrogen that boiled up in his lungs, his brain refused to accept the inevitability of his impending death.
He opened his eyes and realized he was tumbling toward the shuttle.
For a brief instant hope flickered as a spark in his mind. But even in that moment he knew he was traveling too fast to grab on. And even if he did, he’d never make it inside before the narcosis boiling in his blood made it impossible to move.
This time though, he completed the obscene gesture before he slammed into the shuttle’s windshield.
Mercifully his skull took the blow, and he was dead before his blood finished boiling away in his lungs.
Chapter Two
Escabosa was a magical place. It was everything that anyone could want in a vacation destination. Perfect weather that was not too warm or too cool. Trees, mountains, and warm sweet air that was easy to breathe. Even the gravity, at slightly less than one standard G, was gentle.
Paradise surrounded him for as far as the eye could see, but Ethan Walker was restless. Unsettled thoughts ate at him from deep inside where the warm sunshine and relaxing waves of the swaying ocean could not soothe them away.
He stared up at the crimson-tinged sky and tried to think about nothing. To just feel the air on his skin and the water under him.
It wasn’t working.
I guess I enjoy being miserable, he sighed after another interminable interval of forced silence.
Meditate, she said.
It will help, she said.
All it did was remind him that his own brain was new. Deep inside he felt it. Everything around him looked and smelled different. Voices sounded different. Even light looked funny to him. Ever since Qara had rewired his mind with her telepathic overload, nothing felt right.
You’ll get used to it, she said.
So far that had been impossible and lying on a raft a hundred meters from shore, he was certain that it wouldn’t get any easier, no matter how hard he tried to force himself to fit into his new reality.
Get used to it.
There was no doubt in his mind he wasn’t going to ‘get used to it.’ Not ever.
He also knew he’d eventually learn to work around it. He had to. He had a starship to run and a business to build.
Or maybe it was better to say rebuild.
He’d lost four crewmembers and one entire ship in the last two years of command. It certainly wasn’t going according to plan, by any permutation of reality he could imagine.
Rolling up on his side, he looked down into the crystal clear water, watching an enormous fish slither snake-like across the sandy bottom several meters below. He slapped the flat of his palm against the surface of the water, startling it away.
The flat of his palm.
He pulled his hand up and looked at the thin film of his Urah Un, barely seeing it against his skin. Although almost invisible to his eyes, it made his hand look and feel different. Not like it was his own.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t only his hand that felt alien. Everything else was different too.
His mind, his body, the world around him. The Coalition. Even the universe. It had all changed somehow.
Wings of Earth- Season One Page 85