“That’s a good thing, right?” Stephanie asked.
Ms E shook her head. “Not if it means they’ll come back for another attempt,” she pointed out. “We need to know to be on the alert for it and maybe even take care of it before it happens.”
“So that’s why you need a security team!” Stephanie exclaimed, and she could have kicked herself.
“That is none of your business. Burt hired me for a very specific set of reasons.”
“Yeah? Well back then, I needed far more care than I do now. You might want to think about that. The team could use a little practice in the quiet spells.”
“I’ll consider it.” Much as she didn’t want to admit it, she could see the girl had a point.
Stephanie bounced excitedly in her seat.
“I said consider,” Ms E snapped, and her companion subsided with a sigh.
“Well, what about the ship, then?” she asked to change the subject, and Burt answered.
“The ship will be ready in six months. I cannot convince the shipyard to work any faster.”
“Where is it?” she asked, and he laughed.
“I will tell you another time. While I’m sure this line is secure, I still don’t want to risk having missed something.”
“Ugh. Okay then.” She groaned and moved to stand.
“There is one more thing,” Ms E began before Stephanie could rise.
She waited until the girl settled again and went on. “The Navy called and the team has a job. I told them I’d called you back from leave and billed them accordingly.”
Stephanie winced. She’d seen the woman’s idea of ‘accordingly.’ It stung like being run over by a train.
“It’s on Earth, so I assume it’s something politically sensitive and probably covert, so I want you to train with stealth and fast, silent missions in mind.”
She glanced at the two cats. “And you need to teach these two miscreants some kind of command that stops them from eating everything they go up against. We might need to have something to interrogate when the day is done.”
Stephanie lowered her hands to scratch the cats’ heads. “It’s okay, boys. She doesn’t mean anything by it.”
“Don’t you believe it,” Ms E told them. “If you eat someone who has the answers we need, you’ll find yourselves the subject of the next team barbecue. Got it?”
Both felines looked at Stephanie and she rubbed their heads. “We’ll work on something, Ms E. Won’t we, boys?”
They leaned against her legs and purred while each one gave Elizabeth an unblinking stare.
“I’ll let Lars know,” Stephanie reassured her and made a show of catching a whiff of herself. “Phew. I need to hit the showers. Thanks for seeing me.”
“Anytime,” she responded and waved her toward the door. “Only next time...”
Stephanie laughed. “What? Shower? I do not smell that bad.”
“No, you don’t. Now get out of here. I have work to do.”
She left, taking the cats with her, and looked forward to unpacking properly, getting clean, and using the pod, again. She’d seen so much on her trip back from Meligorn and her notes had grown since her departure.
It would be good to discover what she could and couldn’t do with what she’d learned.
“Hello, Stephanie,” her AI greeted her as she closed the door behind her.
Bumblebee looked at the ceiling and made a soft chirruping noise.
“And greetings to you, too, Bumblebee,” Sarah replied, “and you Zeekat. It is a pleasure to see your return.”
Both cats stalked past her and into the suite. Zeekat hopped onto the couch, but before Stephanie could protest, Sarah spoke again. “The shower is ready, although I can prepare a bath if you wish to soak after your workout.”
“No, thank you, Sarah. I have scheduled time in the pod this afternoon.”
“Will the cats remain here unsupervised?” If an AI could express disapproval, Sarah managed it.
She smiled. “Of course. They will need the warm forest afternoon sub-routine, I think.”
“I will arrange it,” the AI replied and sounded slightly mollified.
Warm forest afternoon was usually guaranteed to see both cats sleeping in dappled patches of sunshine provided by holographic lighting and pockets of heating. It was one of the quieter options she could choose to keep them entertained while she was in the pod, which reminded her of something.
“Sarah...”
“Yes, Stephanie?”
“Can you put in a request for pods for the cats for me?”
“Certainly, Stephanie.’
She made her way to the bathroom, unsurprised when neither cat followed her in. “Fraidy cats,” she taunted but they merely flicked their tails and ignored her. As she stripped out of her workout clothes, she heard the distinctive sounds of a Meligornian summer and sighed, wishing she was there.
Worlds away from both Meligorn and Earth, two navy shuttles touched down. While they shunned the rudimentary starport a mile out of town and refrained from landing in the town square near the temporary transmitter, they both touched down outside the outpost walls.
One was armed and armored, and the other had devoted more space to supplies and technology. The heavily armored one opened first and twenty Marines jogged out to take up defensive positions around the landing position.
Only when they were in place did the second shuttle open. The men who disembarked from it were as different from the first as their shuttle. They wore only the lightest armor and escorted two self-flying flatbeds loaded with the components for another space link.
The Federation Navy was, for all intents and purposes, replacing the dish Morgana and her team had destroyed, but that didn’t mean they considered the colony a safe place to be.
This turned out to be wiser than they knew—or ever would, if the man who moved carefully across the rooftops overlooking the town square had anything to do with it. He stalked another man, one who had reached the edge of the roof in time to see the shuttles touch down.
With slow, deliberate movements, he unslung his rifle and sighted on the open gate leading into the town. He decided he could eliminate at least two before they realized he was there.
And if he was very quick, he could manage one more before they killed him. That would teach them to show their faces here again. Witch or no Witch, someone had to show them.
He took a slow breath in and released it while he allowed the crosshairs to settle on the first Naval technician to come through the gate. The assassin waited patiently. If he fired prematurely, the others would find cover too quickly for him to eliminate any more.
They guided the low-loader in. It was almost a shame to end them before they got the job done, but that didn’t matter. The lesson was all that mattered. When the low-loader cleared the gate and the technicians guided it across the square, he propped himself up on his elbows and took another breath.
Seconds later, he froze when he felt the muzzle of another rifle pressed firmly into the back of his skull.
“If you so much as breathe the wrong way, Wesley, I’ll end your life.”
That voice was familiar. He lowered the rifle and glanced carefully over his shoulder. “Walter?”
The muzzle lifted away so he could turn and face the man, taking the rifle with him. “You don’t understand.”
The look on Walter’s face said he understood all too well. His words confirmed it. “I do, and you’re about to do something insanely stupid. If you shoot even one, the Witch will be back.”
He curled his lip in disbelief. “She has better things to do—and you ain’t a killer.”
As he spoke, he jerked the rifle up but Walter was faster and more of a killer than he had thought. The first shot pounded into his chest and the second shattered his skull.
Aware that he’d drawn attention from the square below, Walter slung his rifle over his shoulder and stared at the body. “I might not be a killer, but I will protect this
town from the likes of you. I didn’t do it the last time, and my family don’t need her to come back.”
He stooped, picked Wesley’s rifle up, and slung it over his shoulder with his own before he turned away. “I’ll let the Navy know to come and get your rebel ass. Help the enemy?” He snorted. “No wonder the Witch was pissed. You deserved worse than a quick death, Wesley.”
Chapter Eleven
On Earth, Stephanie stepped out of her clean clothes and slid into her personal pod. Seconds later, she had passed through the white room and stood beside a fountain set in the cobblestoned center of a courtyard garden.
“Do you like it?” Burt asked and stepped through a vine-entwined archway.
Stephanie looked around them and sat on one of the metal chairs arranged around a circular stone table. “It’s not what I expected.”
He looked at her. “What was?”
“I don’t know.” She gestured at the flowers and foliage around her. “But it wasn’t this.”
He shrugged and drew out the chair opposite her. “What did you have in mind for today?” he asked. “Seeing as I’m still going over your notes.”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “I’m still trying to decide. There have been so many new things to learn that I’m not sure where to start.”
“Well, how about telling me what you know about the Nihilism you met on the pirate ship, or perhaps the magic it wields,” Burt suggested.
Stephanie sat still and considered it for a few long moments before she nodded. “Let’s start with the magic, then.”
“Okay...” he prompted. “What is Nihilistic energy?”
She allowed a small smile to play along her lips. “So you’ve read some of my notes, then.”
He nodded. “Only some. Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
When she saw he wouldn’t say anything more, she took a deep breath. “Right. When I met the Morgana who helped defeat Hitler, she said Nihilistic Energy was the opposite of Creation Energy. I think you were the one who called it anti-matter, right?”
He nodded. “That is correct but tell me what the Morgana told you. Perhaps we can understand it better if we start at the beginning.”
Thinking about how far back the Morgana was in her past, she laughed. “I guess she’s as close to the beginning as we’ll ever get. What she told me was that Nihilistic Energy expands when the matter housing Creation Energy is killed or destroyed, but it doesn’t expand when vessels containing Creation Energy are only cracked or damaged.”
“I get that,” he said. “Do you remember if the Morgana had actually used the Nihilistic energy herself?”
Stephanie shook her head. “No, she said she didn’t use it but that there were some others who were not of Earth who were teaching those working for Hitler, and that they showed them death ceremonies that gave the wielder advanced abilities.”
“So we need to look for magicians who can wield Nihilistic energy...and they will probably be tied to murders—and ritualistic murders at that,” BURT mused, drawing some quick conclusions.
She nodded and her face clouded before she cast him an anxious look. “We need to find them before they get to that stage. And given the fact this liaison was traveling with Dreth pirates, the murders might not even be on Earth.”
“Very good,” he told her, and immediately expanded his search parameters to include both Dreth and Meligornian victims. Across the galaxy, sub-routines sprang to life, duplicating across even the remotest of his reiterations.
Technicians scrambled to investigate multiple spikes in usage across all servers and were left scratching their heads when they faded and server usage returned to normal. Satisfied that his programs would worm their way to where the information was stored, he returned his attention to Stephanie.
“...and that’s basically all she said,” she finished, and he hoped he hadn’t missed anything important. “After that, she wanted to know if the fight had been worth it and if they’d managed to defeat Hitler.”
He nodded. “Noted, and we have already made progress. We know to look for ritualistic murders to see if the aliens have started training magicians.”
“And to start scanning space for any new kinds of ships,” she added. “It’s not like they’ll come in something they borrowed from the Dreth or even the Meligornians, and seeing as they’re already here...”
BURT initiated additional inquiries.
“And we need to know how to find the power itself,” she went on. “I can’t use an energy that isn’t there, so if humans hundreds of years ago used Nihilistic Energy, it has to exist somewhere on Earth already.”
“And if the alien used it out where the pirates attacked the freighter, it must exist in space, as well.”
“Or the alien had some kind of battery to store it in.”
“And since that would be a concentrated form of the energy, perhaps it shows up as something in the electronic surveillance systems. I will see what I can organize to gain access to that data.”
“That’s good, Burt.”
He allowed himself a small smile. “It is. Now, let’s see what we can discover from what you remember of your encounter with the alien emissary.”
Her brow furrowed and she gripped the edge of the table.
“He was arrogant,” she began and stared at the tabletop rather than look at him., “and old. He kept calling me ‘young one.’” Her hands clenched. “He spoke of taking me as a prize.”
“What did he look like?” BURT’s voice was gentle as he diverted her from the anger and outrage he saw in her eyes.
“He... He didn’t look like anything. Under his armor, there was nothing to see. I could feel he was there but I couldn’t sense his magic. He was simply a big heap of...nothing—a nothing monster or one made of the dark.”
“And his magic?” he pressed to guide her forward past the fear rising in her voice.
“It felt like nothing. I told him he was vacuum and the opposite of Energy, and he said I had some knowledge but not enough. He said his people consumed and that they always did.”
She stared at him now but she didn’t actually see him. Looking at her carefully, BURT realized she was staring not at him but through him, her eyes fixed on the alien in her past.
“What did he mean by that?” she asked. “And if they always consume, what will they leave behind when they get here?”
“That’s a good question,” he told her. “I will have someone check into what happened during World War II. Perhaps there is something in the surviving histories. And I will ask my Meligornian and Dreth contacts to see if they have any particularly dark times in their histories that might suggest these creatures have been encountered before.”
“If they have, maybe they had their own Morganas, too,” Stephanie suggested. “And maybe some of them have descendants who survived.”
“Maybe,” BURT agreed, “but if they do, I do not see them emerging. I will look into that, too.”
She nodded, but her gaze was still distant as though she still thought about her encounter with Nihilism and it worried her.
That will not do, BURT mused and tried to prompt her to shift onto something she did have some control over.
“We need to find a way to sense the Nihilistic Energy.”
Stephanie frowned. “There was nothing to sense, though. But…I wonder if I could contact one of the older Morganas again.”
“How did you do it the last time?” he asked. “Given the Morganas are your ancestors and, I presume, all dead.”
“Funny you should mention that,” she told him. “I think the only time I’ve ever contacted one was after I’d powered the engines on the Meligorn Dreamer.”
“You almost died doing that,” he reminded her and she grinned.
“Exactly.” Her grin faded and she frowned. “Maybe that’s not such a good idea.”
“I would prefer it we found an alternative.”
She was silent for a while and clearly contemplated
the idea a little longer.
“Yeah, me too.” She finally sighed. “So, I guess that leaves us trying to find all the answers on our own.”
“We could start by thinking of Nihilistic Energy as anti-matter,” BURT mused aloud.
“That’s one way to think of it,” Stephanie answered. “All I know is that when I was fighting him, it was like there was a big hole of energy absorption. It drained the energy right out of me, like…like a…I don’t know.” She shivered. “It was like it destroyed reality wherever it touched it.”
“And yet it existed inside it,” he replied. “Whereas if anti-matter touches matter, they explode.”
“Well, he didn’t do that,” she observed, “or maybe he did. It would explain why no one’s been able to find him yet. Who knows if magical energy performs the same way?”
“Let’s assume it does,” he told her. “What does it mean for what you want to do?”
Again, she stared at him but seemed to look at something else entirely. Watching her, BURT thought he understood the human saying, “you can almost see the wheels turn.” He pursued that idea a little longer.
The saying was old, made when things were run with cogs and wires. How would a human say that now?
She interrupted his musings. “When matter and anti-matter meet, they explode and release energy. So, let’s assume that when Nihilistic Energy and Creation Energy meet, they do the same thing. Hah!” Her face brightened for a moment. “Those aliens are really dumb, then, because the explosion isn’t destruction but creation because it creates energy—it doesn’t consume it.”
Her frown took hold as her mind considered the possibilities of this. “So, like a nuclear reactor collides particles to create power, we could use both kinds of magic to do the same...maybe. Or we could do something like they did in CERN.”
CERN? He ran a hurried search or two and found references to the Swiss institute’s research into matter and anti-matter, but she didn’t wait for him to catch up.
“Only they said it would take them one hundred million years and a shit-ton of cash to make one gram of anti-matter and that all the antimatter they’d made would only be enough to light an electric light bulb for a few minutes.”
Witch Of The Federation III (Federal Histories Book 3) Page 12