He might have thought his words hadn’t carried, but Marcus thrust his arm out and pointed at the Dreth lord and other high-ranking aliens behind him. “There it is—the sign Joan talked about. Their scales rippled with a reddish hue. Most wouldn’t notice it, but that color indicates a deep and pure level of offense.”
Stephanie nodded. “All right, team, ready yourselves. They’re preparing. We want to be able to act at their first move, but not too early. In a real-life scenario, we wouldn’t expect this. We would have had to be a whole lot more observant.”
She began to pull magical energy into herself, determined not to allow what had happened to Frog happen to of her guys. Her mind focused, she flexed her hands and prepared to shield her team from harm above everything else.
The scene remained calm for a moment longer before the first Dreth made his move. As soon as he did so, her team yelled as one and unleashed holy hell on the alien leadership.
The Dreth protection team was shocked and slightly thrown off by the surprise defense. It was something they obviously hadn’t seen coming. Stephanie raised her hand, now shimmering with light, and ran it over her face.
Her features remained the same but she was now covered in a constant shimmering veil. The mask wavered over her to blur her features like a holographic overlay gone wrong.
She couldn’t see it, but when someone else looked at her, they wouldn’t be able to tell who she was or that she was using magic. The effect was designed to help keep her abilities secret until the situation reached the crucial moment when she needed to use them.
It didn’t take the Dreth team long to overcome its initial surprise, and they responded with a concerted attack. Stephanie’s team fought back and dealt with them either by killing or stunning them, or both.
During the battle, she used several subtle spells to hinder the enemy, but nothing they would notice and trace back to her. When all the aliens were dead, the simulation paused, and a woman walked out from the back of the treaty room
She was tall and dressed in a black skirt suit and six-inch heels, with a black lace veil over her face to keep her identity hidden.
“I am your over-viewer,” she announced. “You may call me Strike. At the end of each battle, I will deliver an After-Action Report analyzing your actions. Listen to my comments. They could mean the difference between life and death in the field.”
Frog leaned toward Marcus and whispered. “Is she an AI? Because whoever created her did a top-notch job. Look at those legs.”
Marcus smirked. “It’s all fun and games until you lift that veil and find your Great Uncle Herbert.”
Inside the school, after the students had all gone back to their dorms for the evening, the chancellor called a meeting. He sat with two important financiers and one vital analyst at the table, sipping coffee and scrutinizing the numbers.
The topic was one of those none of them wanted to deal with. The outcome usually worsened every time they met to study the finances. This time, though, it proved a welcome respite from the usual doom and gloom.
He closed the file, removed his glasses, and looked at the team. They responded with relieved smiles, all glad to have found the small glimmer of hope that had been painfully absent in their business connection to the university for quite some time.
“I want to thank whoever put that report together. We needed those insights on how to use Federal money so we could come close to breaking even next semester. The money from ONE R&D has given us the time we need to try to save the school.”
The chancellor looked at the team, but not one of them took credit for it.
“There’s no name on this report, sir,” one of them said as he flipped through it. “In fact, there are no identifying marks at all.”
Oblivious to the meeting closing in the other building, Stephanie’s team were busy controlling a small squadron of armored flying modules. These were tall, tank-like ships sent out from cruisers during space battles for “man-to-man” combat, so to speak. Their presence meant less carnage on the battlefield since both sides tended to hold fire from the bigger ships while the modules battled it out. They were, in essence, the combat troops with the ships serving as fortresses.
She flew forward, directly in the center of the squad, while the men flew close behind her and to each side. “All right, boys, let’s try to keep ourselves out of the firing line. Light their asses up, and if you can, knock the comms out and the weapon ranges on the main ships.”
They called their battle cries as she led them in, firing as she went. Her team swerved skillfully across the sky in evasive maneuvers while they delivered a sustained attack against their opponents.
Frog and Marcus spotted the comms tower first. It was hidden behind a large front-facing wall at the top of the ship. “We got this, boss. You keep the firepower low there in the middle.”
Stephanie looked around warily, a strange sense of caution nagging at her. Frog and Marcus whistled and yelled as they careened through the enemy fire and up to the wall. She zig-zagged until she made it through the hatch into the docking bay of the Dreth ship. The others followed and touched down behind her before they leapt from their modules to race toward the internal doors.
She linked to Frog and Marcus and confirmed that they were headed for their target. “Boys, you need to be careful. There’s always extra protection at the towers.”
Frog scoffed. “Puhlease, these giant idiots don’t have the brains to think up something that simple.”
As they accelerated in a direct approach toward the wall, a flash of light caught her attention. She altered her scan to reveal a grid-like wall of lasers guarding the tower. Her face paled as she screamed over the comms. “Abort, abort! Marcus, Frog, there is a laser field beside the tower. I repeat, a laser field. Abort!”
Her warning came too late. They were going too fast and neither of them noticed the other defenses the Dreth had laid until they were a few feet away from the grid. Before their modules struck the lasers, hatches opened on either side of them and Dreth warriors stepped out onto the hull.
They were anchored to the ship with metal belts and held enormous guns. Before Stephanie had time to warn them, the aliens had unleashed an intersecting field of fire on the two armored modules to destroy their engines. The craft spiraled end over end into the waiting grid.
With a cry of pain and outrage, she pulled on the gMU she could sense all around her. Her eyes turned black and she gritted her teeth against the pulsing galactic energy.
As she watched Frog’s plane shatter into space debris, she used the screen inside her helmet to target the battlefield. Her breathing grew faster and shallower as though she was running a race, and then, she stilled.
In her helmet, she located her targets and used the module’s sensors to show her magic where to go. Between one quick breath and the next, she thrust a huge ray of energy from her hands and screamed her grief to the stars.
The beam rocketed out of the docking bay, guided by what she could see in the helmet. It obliterated the Dreth ambushers who were too slow to retreat into the ship. It leapt from the deck to the comms tower Frog and Marcus had been so intent on targeting. And, after that, it demolished the enemy’s fighter pods and tank modules and the cruisers’ guns and navigation systems. Still rampant, it plunged into the ship to destroy the Dreth themselves. Any enemy not incinerated by the beam itself were sucked into space.
The team gathered and guarded her back while they watched her with sadness in their eyes. They knew she was angry, but her anger manifested in a way that could kill not only the enemy but herself as well. The scene paused and Stephanie released the magic. Her eyes slowly returned to normal.
Strike walked into the stillness to critique their training. She stepped through the vacuum of space and onto the deck of the Dreth docking bay and began going through the list of mistakes everyone had made. This included Frog and Marcus who appeared in the team’s ranks.
Then, she turned to Stephanie an
d put her pen down. “And you. That was completely irresponsible, childish, and reckless. You lost your damned mind. You no longer led your team but put them at risk.”
The girl lowered her head as the AI faded and they were returned to the common room they’d started in. The team gathered around her to give her comfort and pointers.
Marcus squeezed her shoulder. “I think it would have helped if you’d commanded us to stop and told us to haul our dumb-asses back to where you could kick them.”
Frog nodded sagely. “Yeah. You know what they say about splitting the party.”
Before she could reply, Lars interjected. “You do know that when you go all nutso crazy magic lady, you block us out, right? People die in war, and if you don’t get used to that without completely hulking out, you’ll end up costing yourself and the rest of us our lives. We’re your team, your family. Connect with us so we can work as a single unit, not a group of individuals seeing who can be first to get our dumb asses killed.”
By the time they’d talked to her, the day’s training was over. Part of Stephanie felt bad, but the other still felt the burn of watching her men die. She couldn’t allow that to happen in real life. Not ever. And never again in the Virtual World, either.
Chapter Eighteen
The next morning signaled the start of a new day of training and Stephanie was in the mood to beat the system. She was tired of failure and of letting her magic take control. Still, it wasn’t something she really knew how to handle.
She would simply have to make sure her team stayed safe while they accomplished the mission. They started the day with a team breakfast and then headed for the pods. Lars got a kick out of how tough Marcus and Frog acted whenever they walked past the college girls who clearly wondered who they were.
When they reached the pods, Frog wouldn’t shut up about it. “Yeah, they were like, hey, what’s up?”
Lars laughed. “Yeah, wondering why the senior center was visiting.”
Marcus joked. “Frog, the old man.”
Frog snarled. “Get off, Marcus. You were as bad. I saw you puff your sparrow-sized chest out.”
The other man made a muscle. “Sparrow chest? More like a rhino, bitch.”
Stephanie slapped the top of her pod. “Everyone, shut it. Get in game mode and go in. We have to focus. If we don’t, when we reach the real scenario, we’ll all die. Do you want to see that happen?”
The guys quieted instantly and shook their heads as they went to their pods. She tried to ease up a little. “Good. Let’s meet inside.”
Elizabeth walked away from the main pod room as the team climbed in. She headed down the hall and to the left to quietly enter a side room reserved for lecturers. With the door securely closed behind her, she smiled and opened the pod located inside and sat on the edge to remove her shoes.
That particular room was not only set aside for lecturers, but it was special, as well. Located in the same data stream as the team’s pods, it allowed BURT to hack in and speak to her as an AI.
He, of course, changed his voice from the one he used on the phone. However, since the only ability he had to “hear” was to compare the tones of a voice, he didn’t realize that the one he chose was similar enough to his phone voice to make her suspicious.
The suspicion was nothing new, of course. It only added to the boat-load she’d already collected and stored in her head. This was no time to consider it, though. “I need a special setup, AI.”
“What would you like?” BURT answered.
She thought about it for a moment. “I want the operation to start in a bar on a Space Station. This is how it will go…”
“I assume this is some kind of relax mode until the setup is ready.” Lars shrugged and looked around the bar with the rest of the team.
Frog sniffed and smiled at the odor of stale beer in the air. “I miss that smell. Lockdown has been hell. Can you get drunk as an Avatar?”
Marcus rolled his eyes. “No. You can taste it, but it has no physical effect on you.”
The team found a big table to the side and gathered around it. Marcus and Frog raced for the chair and Marcus got there first, knocking the other man to the floor. “Ha! Loser. I guess you get to buy the first round.”
The other man stood and grumbled. “Assholes. One of these days, I’ll be the one who saves the day and then everyone will want a piece of me.”
“Gross,” Brenden teased. “You’d let us take a piece of that? Sorry, bro, but I’m into chicks. It’s cool if you’re not.”
Frog tried to respond but instead, waved his hands in a gesture of frustrated surrender and headed to the bar. He stepped into an empty place at the counter and caught the bartender’s attention. “Six beers, please. Your house draft.”
The bartender poured the beers and gave him a tray to carry them. Smart avatar, considering he was notorious for sticking his fingers in a person’s beer to get it where it needed to go. He put the tray on the uplifted palm of one hand and held the edge with the fingertips of the other. Turning, he bumped lightly into a guy. “Sorry, dude.”
The guy turned, and Frog registered two Dreth standing behind a human in overalls. The aliens both had beers in their hands and snarls on their faces.
They stepped forward and said something in their language. The human turned, laughing, and gave one of the warriors a high five. “Good one, dude.”
“I’m sorry,” Frog said, irritated by the whole situation. “What did he say?”
The guy turned back, a smirk on his lips. “He asked when they started letting the poor kids into the party.”
He gritted his teeth but took a deep breath, nodded curtly, and maneuvered to walk past them. As he turned, he muttered under his breath, “Dreth-loving bitch.”
The stranger must have heard him, because he grabbed his arm and spun him back, the smirk gone. Frog managed to keep the beers on the tray. “What the hell did you say to me?”
He shook his head. “Nothing worth repeating.”
“You think you’re hot shit? Is that it?” the guy said and, without waiting for a reply, he raised his hands and shoved him in the chest.
Frog watched it happen as if he were caught in slow motion. The tray took flight, beer spilled everywhere, and the glasses plummeted to the floor and shattered.
Without thinking, he snapped his hand up and caught the heckler by the wrist. “That was a bad move.”
Back at the table, the team discussed one of the fights from the day before. They had won it, but it had taken them curling Frog into a ball to send him through a tiny duct and out the other side to successfully complete the mission.
They all laughed wildly as they relived the moment but Stephanie jerked her head around. Immediately, her eyes turned black.
Everyone rose as one and Lars reached for her as they looked for their teammate.
The guy broke Frog’s grip and thrust him back. The bodyguard glared at his opponent before he looked down at his front and swiped at the beer that had settled on his ship suit. “You douche. There’s beer all over the place. I should make you clean it up. But it’s your lucky day and I’ll give you a pass, so back the hell off and go your own way.”
The Dreth and the human exchanged glances and laughed. “Or what, little man?”
Before Frog could answer, the lights over the bar and in the ceiling began to flicker. The beer in the man’s hand shimmied and shook before the glass exploded. One by one, every glass in the bar began to shatter to strew the floor with shards and brews. Frog, the asshole, and the two closest Dreth looked around and tried to identify what the hell was going on.
Frog had a fair idea. He glanced at the table, where Stephanie stood facing them, her eyes black and a wild wind blowing her hair around her head. He could almost feel the rage dripping from her. “Oh, shit…”
She stormed forward and pushed him out of the way to grasp the guy by the throat. He gurgled in protest when she picked him up and hurled him over the bar. Her gaze immediately so
ught the two Dreth warriors. She was coming unglued and as soon as her fist pounded into the first alien, she began to attack in full force.
That was when the rest of the bar joined the fray. Dreth, Meligornian, and humans alike entered the melee. Magic erupted everywhere, and she beat the hell out of the two Dreth who had messed with Frog.
The woman in the veil walked out from the kitchen behind the bar. Her shoes crunched on the glass scattered over the floor. “Stop!” she commanded, and the entire scenario froze. This time, even Stephanie and the team were trapped in place.
For an AI, Strike was extremely attractive. Today, similar to the days before, she wore a sleek black dress but instead of a veil, had added an all-black mask to cover her face. No one could see her lips move when she spoke, but they could all hear her. She pointed at Frog. “Wrong. You should have immediately gone to the team. No words. Your pride almost got you killed.”
Her arm shifted to the men at the table. “Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. Not only did you let Stephanie beast-out like a maniac, you didn’t even try to stop her. No one watched her closely enough, and none of you watched Frog’s back in an unfamiliar bar in an unfamiliar part of town. Did you forget this was a training exercise? Not a single one of you paid attention to shit.”
She whirled and walked over to Stephanie, tilting her head so that she was eye to eye with her. The girl lowered her gaze, the only thing she could move at that point. “And you? Right now, you’re the team disaster, not its leader. You didn’t lock down your emotions and this space station is simply one giant spaceship. If you wreck the walls in here, you’ll all tread vacuum. Dumb-asses.”
After a moment of stunned silence in the wake of her tirade, she looked up. “AI, put Burt on the line. How did Stephanie connect to her security guy inside the Virtual World? She could feel him in trouble. I saw her pivot to find him before he even got hurt. Do you allow that?”
Witch Of The Federation (Federal Histories Book 2) Page 18