>>How long do you think it would take?<<
Longer than both of you would believe, but way shorter than I would believe.
>>I’ve done the calculations, Bethany Anne.<<
Of course you have, she butted in, but ADAM ignored her.
>>We have never been out of communication, not including sleep time, for more than four hours and sixteen minutes. In any instances longer than three hours and forty-seven minutes, it was you who instigated the communication.<<
Huh. She thought about that a moment. That is way shorter than I would have thought. I’ll have to see if there is a subconscious need on my part to check in, or if you guys are just that needy and I’m trying to make sure you are ok.
>>How can an AI be needy?<<
You’re a guy. Guys are always needy.
>>That doesn’t even make sense.<<
Actually, I might have to agree with her on that one. Even Kurtherian males can be needy at times.
>>Well,<< ADAM made a sniffing noise on their connection, >>I am not needy.<<
Suit yourself, she told him. She could feel the two of them talking as she disengaged.
John continued their conversation. “Given that we’re on a ‘hearts and minds’ mission, can I say you pretty much suck at it?”
“That’s what I was trying to explain to Cheryl Lynn,” she grumbled before downing the rest of her coffee. She tossed the recyclable cup into the proper chute. “I’m not the right person to place in front of others, considering my previous methods of negotiation.”
John took a sip, eyeing her a moment before commenting, “You mean if you aren’t able to just slap them around for being stupid.”
Bethany Anne didn’t answer him for a moment. “I have a short temper.” She pulled a chair out from the table.
“I wouldn’t sit there if I were you,” John told her.
She raised her eyebrows in confusion, looking at the chair and back at John. “What am I missing?”
“Weight?” John asked. “Remember three weeks ago when you sat in one of the chairs on the Meredith Reynolds?”
“And squished it.” TOM added through the speakers.
Bethany Anne looked at the speaker and zapped her friend mentally. Don’t ever suggest a woman is heavy!
She turned to John. “I took care of that.”
But, TOM asked, you are wearing armor. It isn’t like I’m saying you’re fat.
And you had better not, or we will have a discussion that will make you wish for the days you were in the doghouse.
Strangely enough, TOM was silent for a few moments.
Bethany Anne sat down, and the chair didn’t bow in the slightest. “I asked ADAM to pay attention and adjust my weight to normal me if I was about to do something stupid like sitting on a chair or table that wasn’t rated for my armored weight.”
John just shrugged and turned around, sticking his head back out the door, “Incoming, president and his posse.”
Bethany Anne stood back up. “Be right back.” She sidestepped and disappeared. A moment later, she returned holding the Noel-ni teenager. She pointed to the chair and in his language told him, “Take a seat.”
The youth, face wet with tears and eyes full of fright, nodded and sat down. Bethany Anne observed that he didn’t even move when the president walked in and noticed him sitting there.
She spoke first. “I have someone from your world I believe you would like back. He has purposely hurt one of my people. However, I would consider releasing him, if you provide me one of mine in exchange.”
Aerlix’ eye only twitched slightly when he saw the youth. “Oh? Who would that be exactly?” If he could get back to the world with the youth unhurt, it would go a long way toward shutting down his detractors. Some, he was sure, were calling on everyone to toss the Empress off their world right now.
Sometimes trying to govern an insular society into the future could be a challenge. Aerlix had come into his position thinking he would be able to help change his people’s parochial focus, but he’d had little success so far. The damned Insularists called for more and more military, but frankly his people needed more infrastructure, not more bombs.
But fear was what drove them, so fear was what he had to deal with. Elections were just two seasons away, and he doubted he would be able to pull off a second term. Sometimes what you thought was best wasn’t what the rest of your people believed should be.
He had wanted to give peace a chance, but what could one do? This Empress had just shown his people how pitifully weak they were. The Etheric Empire had upped the game.
This meant that the neighborhood had just gotten more dangerous, as everyone would be trying to catch up. The Etheric Empire might be focusing on the Kurtherians, but they had—unwittingly or not—just changed the dynamics of the political groups in this area of space.
If he leaned that way, Aerlix could build a military supply company and ride the wave of investment that was bound to happen when another group came into power.
Until that happened, however, he needed to make peace with the Empress. Creating a group of people that felt strong enough to shake lasers at the Etheric Empire would have to be the role of some other government after him.
Two days later, the Etheric Empire left the Noel-ni capital.
Their consulate on the planet had been hit with a hundred and eighty-two requests to repatriate Yollins back to Yoll, if the Empress would help them.
She commanded one of her ships to stay behind and gave everyone forty-eight hours to make it to the shuttles for liftoff.
It would take that long for D’leck’s husband to be returned from the prison planet. Whether D’leck wished him back in the future or not, Bethany Anne refused to allow him to waste away.
Perhaps, like Bethany Anne herself, Sis’tael would appreciate a closer relationship with her father sometime in the future.
Even old hardheads, Bethany Anne had come to understand, could learn something about being wrong.
The Noel-ni Congress had wanted to play hardball until they understood that Bethany Anne would retrieve the father whether Congress approved or not.
And no.
Bethany Anne would have no problem dropping a rock, a really big rock, right on top of their building.
If they wanted to continue painting her as a child-eating alien bitch, then by God she would play that bitch for all it was worth.
There wasn’t anything the aliens had called her, she realized, that her own people back on Earth hadn’t called her in the past.
This time though, she didn’t shed any tears in the night with only TOM to console her.
Fuck them all!
12
QBBS Meredith Reynolds, Team BMW’s Official Office Area
The drone was small, barely large enough to have the four legs it used for movement. It was as small as an aphid, and could hide in the tiniest of crevices.
Three of them had finally made their way to the designated target’s door.
In a booth in a bar near All Guns Blazing on the second floor, an Ixtali casually drank a human beverage he enjoyed. It was something called “root beer.” It had none of the alcohol of beer, and was sweet. With the straws the bar supplied, X’telent could sip the beverage and swipe through the tablet, whiling away time after he had held strategy sessions with others who utilized the safety of the Empire’s personal meeting rooms.
A splendid cover for his covert efforts.
With the useless council working with the Etheric Empress, it had seemed X’telent’s abilities would go unused.
Until now.
Now he was an open resource, his talents for sale to the highest bidder. Why the idiots didn’t worry that someone might use the fact that their own space station was a safety zone against them, X’telent couldn’t understand.
But that wasn’t his problem.
He had been hired to find out about the R&D technology. He had been smart enough to figure out that the obvious location for resear
ch and development, the well-known Dukes Lab, was too well protected.
Even he wasn’t surprised when his nanos got zapped far away from the inner sanctum. Further, he couldn’t figure a way into the lab through the walls. He just didn’t have the technology to drill through the rock walls into the core.
However, the beer-drinking researchers were something else entirely. It took him less than a week of his spybots listening in All Guns Blazing to figure out they were the ones who had come up with the powerful blast of energy which kept this base safe.
Once he had figured out the location—nicely hidden behind the bar itself—X’telent set his most advanced spybots loose. Actually, he had set three teams of spybots loose.
One went in fast and had been fried immediately. X’telent did further testing and found out that would have been the normal result, no matter where he loosed the bots.
His second team of bots fared better. They got within thirty human feet of the security door before they were found and killed.
But his final team, the ones which plodded along, had passed the last zone of destruction yesterday morning. They would enter as soon as one of the members went into the sanctum.
Which would happen after lunch.
One or more of them always went back there, and his spybots had watched them pass each time.
He reached for his drink, mandibles clicking together in anticipation.
Kitchen area, All Guns Blazing
Inside William’s ear, his name was called. “William, this is Meredith.”
William inhaled deeply and let out his breath. He subvocalized, “Do I have to be the one?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” he asked.
“It’s your regular day,” she replied.
William shook all over, and slapped his arms. “But, it makes me itch to even think that some microscopic little metal bugs are jumping on me.” he said, keeping his voice to himself.
It was a moment before Meredith replied, “Bobcat says that if you don’t hurry up, he will have to do it.”
“Well, that’s fine by—”
“And the whole time he is doing it, he is going to tell the story about your trip to New Orleans back in ’08… No, he changed it to ’09.”
“That…fucker.” William turned his head, looking to where he knew Bobcat would be at the bar behind the kitchen walls.
If he could only zap lasers from his eyes.
He had actually asked John once if the Bitches could do that, but John had laughed and said no. However, apparently it was rumored that Bethany Anne had wanted that capability, but TOM had told her she couldn’t have it.
Plus, if she did, what would she do while her eyes were healing all the time?
“Fine.” He started moving toward the back. It really was his day to check out the offices at lunch time. Figures the little spy bastard would choose his day to do this.
William walked out the back door of the bar and looked around to make sure no one was in the hall. He walked to one of the white panels on the wall and said aloud, “I need in, Meredith.”
There was a click and he pushed open the door that had looked like a normal part of the wall a moment before. He closed it behind him, entering the hallway that was about thirty feet long and allowed for multiple scans to confirm who he was as he walked toward the end.
Outwardly he looked fine. Inwardly he felt little mechanical crawlies all over his body.
God, he wanted to shiver, then, take a bath in something that would kill the little guys. He came up to the door and pressed his hand against a panel. “It’s me, Meredith, open up.”
Meredith’s voice, colored with humor, replied, “That has never been, nor will it ever be, the request for permission, William.”
Forgetting himself for a second, William smiled. “I’m just shitting you, Meredith.” He tried again. “Hey, Meredith, it’s William. Do you have enough of my voice to verify identity?”
“Yes, that’s better,” she replied, and the door cycled open. William stepped inside and the door closed behind him. There was a pause before the other door opened and William stepped into the official office of Team BMW.
Official fake.
The whole office was nothing but a honey trap for those who believed they had figured out a suitable location to spy on the vaunted Etheric Empire. So far they had captured two previous spies trying to get inside the place.
Meredith had informed them days back that they had another contestant trying to abscond with their technology. Marcus had argued to allow them to get in, steal the data, and leave.
They would determine who the guilty party was when their planet exploded from the doctored data.
Bethany Anne had merely looked at the scientist. He sniffed under her glare and admitted, “We can be a bit annoyed with fellows stealing our hard work.”
“You don’t say?” Bethany Anne replied. “While I admire the concept, blowing up a planet of innocents isn’t my idea of just rewards.” She had brought Ashur with her that trip, so she summoned him back and before they left she called to Marcus, “Clean up your data. I don’t want planets going boom.”
A moment later she added. “Unless we do it on purpose.”
William walked over to the main computers and sat down. The computers in this area were on their own network and full of reams of useless data. ADAM’s massive data pull from before TQB Enterprises had left Earth came in handy.
Instead of Earth’s history, they had raided the data from multiple fake histories including George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones universe for European History and Second Life for what day-to-day life had been like when TQB left the world.
Then, for shits and giggles, Bobcat and William had decided to add in midi-chlorians as a description of how some humans were able to exhibit amazing “Jedi powers.” By the end of the night, just a little inebriated, Marcus had added some data from Laurence E. Dahners’ Ell Donsaii series on traveling through the nth dimension by entrapping and using entanglement.
William had wondered if that was a smart idea.
“Why?” Marcus asked, then hiccupped.
“What if it were possible?” he had replied. “Wouldn’t we be giving them the idea of how it works?”
Marcus had just stared at William, his eyes a little bloodshot, before smiling. “One moment!”
He got a vacant look like he did when he was using their internal communications abilities to talk with TOM, and then started placing math symbols in the extra documentation.
Marcus had then rolled back from the computer. “Now, that should give them just enough of the truth to send them down a rabbit hole for ten thousand years.”
William had shrugged. “You really like to fuck over other scientists.”
“No matter the species, cheating is not tolerated,” Marcus had told him.
William went through the motions they always did, checking data, pulling up spreadsheets, and running the latest reports for the fabricated data.
He scratched his chin and mumbled, “That doesn’t look right.” He pushed off the floor with his feet, rolling back to another desk, and hit another keyboard to turn on another monitor.
He liked to keep his input old-school.
He had been working for ten minutes when Meredith whispered in his ear, “What are you doing?”
“Checking the data for the ESD,” he muttered. “Something isn’t right. The original calculations didn’t show the ability to miniaturize the—”
Meredith interrupted, You know this is fabricated, right?
William blinked twice, staring at the screen.
“Well, fuck,” he said aloud before his eyes narrowed. “That’s just…too damned random.” He asked Meredith sub-vocally, “Take screenshots and video of this monitor until I stand up.”
“Understood,” came back.
William worked another ten minutes before getting up, stretching, and heading out of the room.
He went through the security pr
ocess once more. Between the two doors, Meredith confirmed he had no spies on him anymore.
He wasn’t even thinking about the spies. “Get me the guys.”
“Are you including Tina?” she asked.
“What? Of course,” William answered as he went through the security door and clicked it shut. “She’s one of us, isn’t she?”
“Yes, but she is female.”
“Triviality,” he replied. “She’s one of us, ergo one of the guys.” He opened the door to the back of the club and slid into the kitchen, then stepped over to the bar side, catching Bobcat’s attention with a slight nod of his head.
Bobcat narrowed his eyes. He recognized that look on his friend. “Terry!” he called to the other guy behind the bar. “Take over, and call in help if you need it.”
“Yeah, boss!” Terry answered. He was a Guardian, and liked to work the bar when he wasn’t on duty. They had another two days before the ladies and Stephen took over the bar full time.
Bobcat gave William his one-eyebrow rise of questioning, but William just shook his head. “Rounding up the group.”
“Playhouse?” Bobcat asked, and William nodded.
Huh, Bobcat thought. Something just got interesting.
Maybe they would be handing over the bar early.
Gyada’s team had been practicing together, and it was a team, although it was a weird team. She had practiced with Shin’s team, and now she was working with a team of two female Weres who had three Guardian Marines backing them up.
When Peter and Todd had worked with twin Weres Brooklyn and Addison, they decided to try splitting the two girls up as well as putting them together.
It didn’t take more than a few minutes to realize that together was better, which meant they had rethought the two-Guardian-Marine formation and changed it to three. Caden for left, Carter to focus on right and Chris to deal with either back or forward.
Over the next two years, those five had become inseparable. Brooklyn was a five-foot five-inch-tall brunette with an olive complexion and a Marilyn Monroe mole that her sister would have killed to have.
Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Set Three: Books 15-21, Never Submit, Never Surrender, Forever Defend, Might Makes Right, Ahead Full, Capture Death, Life Goes On (Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Sets Book 3) Page 81