Unsanctioned Reprisal

by Eddie R. Hicks

  Ella went on to mention how the students in attendance, once they graduate, would have mastered the ability to diagnose patients, stop bleeding, force blood vessels to flow better, mend wounds by forcing the skin to seal up, all with their minds. Holographic pictures and diagrams helped illustrate the words she spoke.

  Doctors with psionic powers were standard across the UNE. Their powers, combined with medical tools and medical training, made it possible to better heal and preserve life, compared to non-psionic doctors whom were reliant on their medical training and equipment. Simply put, psionic doctors were a three-in-one deal, non-psionic ones, were a two-in-one. Gene therapy eliminated death from old age, and psionic doctors eliminated death from sickness and accidents. The UNE was striving to become a galactic nation, where nobody died. Ever.

  Until the dragons showed up.

  “Well, it would appear we are out of time,” Ella said with her charming Australian accent. “Any other questions?”

  One Aryile student sitting front row put his hand up. She nodded to him.

  “We all know about the two first human psionics,” the student asked. “What about those that came after? There’s not much talk about them in the texts.”

  Ella gave her reply. “EISS had taken control of the original research facility here on Titan after the Celestial Order wars. The third human psionic and beyond came out of their program and were recruited directly to partake in black ops operations.”

  Avearan smirked as she went to minimize her holo screen full of notes. “Scary, isn’t it?” Ella continued. “Just imagine a teleporting sniper carrying out a covert op mission. So, the short answer to your question is, nobody knows, the third human psionic and those that came after remain top secret military information to this day.”

  “Is that why there’s a military training branch here?” asked another student.

  “Yes, it is,” Ella said. “After EISS got what they wanted, they left and were replaced with the UNE’s new psionic training platform. In time that led to the co-development of nonmilitary based psionic training divisions when I was brought in, such as the one you are in now.”

  “Thanks for the insight.”

  “Not a problem. Any other questions?” There was silence. Ella rubbed her hands together. “Well, should something else come into ye heads, just reach out to me, preferably telepathically since my HNI ain’t working.” Three dozen multispecies students erupted with laughter. “If you need to do it via HNI, then send it to my husband Gavin, who ironically, is also an instructor here.”

  The class was dismissed afterward, spilling out into the halls. Avearan grabbed her bag after shutting off her holo screen and went for the door. Ella’s voice calling out stopped her.

  “Hey, you!”

  Avearan faced the instructor, unable to forget that moment in her life when their two bodies had swapped, thanks to weird alien psionic sorcery many years ago. Ella brushed back her blonde hair while smiling warmly at Avearan.

  “Doctor Chambers, pleasure as always,” Avearan said.

  “So, what was that smirk about earlier?” Ella asked.

  “Earth kept the identities of those mythical psionics secret,” Avearan said. “I’m just surprised it hasn’t been declassified yet.”

  “That’s why I said it was scary,” Ella said. “It means those people are still in service and working under the watchful eye of EISS.” Then came the topic change Avearan was hoping to avoid. Class was done for the day after all. “So, Avearan, how are you?”

  “I’m fine, still getting used to being around so many people that aren’t planning to backstab me.”

  “You’re in the UNE now, not Morutrin or the Empire.”

  “When you’ve been on the run from the Empire and living as a salvager as long as I have, you tend not to trust anyone, you know?”

  “I know all too well of that,” Ella said, grimacing. “Remember, I have your memories.”

  “And I have yours.”

  Avearan in some way helped found the academy. It was the body swap the two had that helped Ella develop her powers better and helped Avearan learn more about xenobiology and medical practice from Ella’s memories. The idea of being a doctor with psionic powers resulted in Ella developing the concept of psionic medicine and perfecting the technique she and the other instructors now passed onto the galaxy. The program Avearan was in, of course, had to be modified as human powers varied differently from Hashmedai and Radiance thanks, in part, to genetic tampering done by the ancient Lyonria race.

  A chime sounded from Avearan’s wrist terminal. It was a custom ringtone to let her know the incoming message, was from an important person.

  “Sorry, I gotta take this,” Avearan said, looking at its holographic screen notification.

  “Not a problem, I need to get going,” Ella said, as she too brought her wrist terminal to her face. “Is it Lisette?”

  Avearan smirked. “Yeah.”

  “Tell her I said hi.”

  A non-vocal goodbye by nodding their heads ended the chat. Avearan ventured into the halls while Ella stopped to make a number of calls on her wrist terminal. Wrist terminals were small and light devices that gave those that didn’t have access to HNI, which was extremely rare, the ability to interact with the network and gain access to its benefits.

  In the case of Ella and Avearan, they both received HNI, but the implants failed to work with their brains. Side effects from having their minds swapped doctors assumed. Avearan went through life with two implants in her head being, the psionic chip she got years ago, which no longer had old Hashmedai cybernetic implants to interact with, and an HNI that won’t turn on. Removing both would be fatal, keeping both made her wish she had been born a human during this era.

  She aimed the wrist terminal to her face, establishing a communication call to Lisette. A small hologram of a young woman in her twenties appeared. She had shoulder-length dark brunette hair with wavy purple highlights and gave Avearan a beaming openmouthed smile.

  “Hey!” Lisette’s hologram shouted.

  “What’s up?”

  “I just finished class, you free to swing by my dorm later?”

  “I always have time for you,” Avearan said. “When do you want me there?”

  “Gimme like twenty minutes?”

  “It will probably take me that long to get there.”

  The communication link was replaced with a call ended projection. Avearan brought up a map of the enormous facility and asked it to chart a path that would lead to the dorms where Lisette was staying.

  She arrived at the academy’s residence, just as planned, twenty minutes later. A wide window in the halls treated her eyes to the skies of Titan, sans Saturn, that was on the other side. The students that stayed in the academy’s dorms came from Earth, other UNE controlled worlds, or in the case of Lisette, places like Senkyo, a city on the opposite end of Titan.

  Lisette shared her dorm with another student, who was away, most likely still dealing with their psionic training. The dorm brought back a quick flashback of the five years Avearan spent living in the Imperial psionic training camps on Paryo, and the slave collar she was forced to wear when she went back to her room to sleep. The amount of freedom UNE psionics had was inconceivable to her younger self. If Lisette wasn’t training or studying, she was playing video games, watching human movies, or doing something else that her free will demanded.

  A knock granted Avearan access to Lisette’s bedroom. The lights were off, only lit candles on her computer desk and nightstand illumined the room. Avearan’s shades were no longer needed. She lifted them up resting it up top of her head of purple hair. Lisette stood from her chair, still maintaining that comforting smile wearing a flannel shirt and skinny jeans.

  “How was your day?” Avearan asked.

  “Garbage, right up until this very moment,” Lisette said.

  Lisette went for a tinted glass bottle and poured its opaque reddish contents into two wineglasses. She kept o
ne for herself and offered the other to Avearan. She sipped it, and remembered its familiar and sweet taste, and the first time she drank it, and the only place in the galaxy one could get it.

  “Lisette, is this?”

  Lisette presented the wine bottle to her, pointing at the text written in the Hashmedai language. “Straight from the Empire.”

  And the cost of having it shipped to Saturn’s largest moon likely made her credit chit’s account balance go straight to the negatives.

  “Lisette . . .”

  Lisette silenced her, placing the bottle back on the desk and stepping closer to Avearan. The music in the background changed at the wave of Lisette hand and HNI. It was a form of soft contemporary human music, composed sometime in the late twenty-first century. Lisette held onto Avearan’s hands, placing them onto her shoulders, and then wrapping hers around Avearan’s waist. She swayed her body about in sync with the music, forcing Avearan to do the same. It forced Avearan to slow dance with her.

  “Is there a reason for all this?” Avearan asked her.

  “Yes, it’s called a romantic evening with my girlfriend.”

  “Expensive wine from the Empire, candles . . .”

  “We’re just missing the fancy food part,” Lisette said. “But I’m a broke student, we’ll have to settle with a pizza later.”

  “Well, maybe if you didn’t buy that wine.”

  “I wanted our anniversary to be something memorable for you.”

  “We’ve been together for a month.”

  “I don’t care,” Lisette said, as they continued to rock and sway slowly to the music. “What if the Draconians come back to Sol finish the job? What if Captain Foster fails in her mission? It’s better to celebrate a one-month anniversary now, than wait for the one-year mark that might not happen.”

  Guilt hit Avearan, removing the sensual feeling that was starting to flow from her chest. Lisette spent what little credits she had on the wine. She could have gotten something from Earth, or perhaps Titan. But the Empire? She did it to please Avearan, to show how much she cared for her. Avearan needed to up the ante.

  “What are you plans for the mid-term break?” Avearan asked. “If we’re going to celebrate this moment, let’s do it then.”

  “Hmm, I like that,” Lisette said, resting her forehead against Avearan’s, filling her body with blissful vibes. “Traveling comes to mind, I never left Titan.”

  “You’ve been on this moon your whole life?”

  “Why do you think this pasty skin of mine is like this? Can’t get tanned here unless you hit the booths, but that shit is all fake. If you’re gonna get some color, you gotta do it right, under the sun. Like the beaches of the Caribbean.”

  “Your pale complexion was the reason I approached you at first.”

  “Yeah, you thought I was a Hashmedai!”

  “The light that was above you didn’t help, or the purple in your hair.”

  “So, what do you think? You, me, lying under the sun at the beach?” Lisette said. “Is your body going to be able to handle that?”

  “Probably not without lots of ice and water,” Avearan said. “It’s one of the reasons why a colony like Taxah, which is just like Earth, has no cities in and around its equator. The heat and sunlight are too much for my people.”

  “Nothing at all there?”

  “Nope, just wildlife, jungles, beaches and the like, completely untouched.”

  “Well fuck, we should go there instead,” Lisette said. “We could have a whole beach to ourselves.”

  “Why stop at a beach?” Avearan snickered. “We could have a whole island for ourselves.”

  “Babe.” Lisette said, ending the dance. “Can we go to Taxah instead?”

  Traveling to Taxah would require Avearan to return to Imperial space, and face being a runaway psionic. Phylarlie’s protection and ability to put together elaborate lies was the only means for Avearan to return to the Empire briefly, provided she remained in Phylarlie’s manor or within the city of Muro.

  Phylarlie’s recent message and invitation to return to Taxah was also still unanswered. It got her thinking.

  “Now that you mention it,” Avearan said. “The system lord invited me to attend a festival for an upcoming Imperial holiday.”

  “You won’t get in trouble, right?”

  “If Phylarlie invited me, then she has plans to get me there in secret and keep my presence secret too.”

  “Let’s do that,” Lisette said, pulling away from her, and leaping for joy. “Oh man, I can finally leave this rock!”

  “It’s not Earth, but close enough. I’ll make the call when I get the chance.”

  Lisette pulled Avearan to her, embracing her tightly, before running her fingers through Avearan’s hair. She rewarded her with a soft passionate kiss, a long one neither of the two women wanted to break away from.

  10 Pierce

  Draconian construct

  Jacobus, Kapteyn’s Star system

  October 13, 2118, 15:28 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  “Oh, wow, I’m so glad you’re here and safe, Chief,” Pierce said, walking closer to Chevallier within the strange and silent dome-shaped construct. “Foster managed to get the crew back; you’re the last one we never got ahold of.”

  “It’s Master Gunnery Sergeant, now,” Chevallier snorted in her French accent. “EDF-1.”

  Miles approached who Pierce suspected to be the leader of the group, a tall and brawny African-American man. The two exchanged smiles and fist bumps. “Boyd, been a while, how you’ve been holdin’ up?” Miles said to him.

  “Miles . . . well if it isn’t a blast from the past,” Boyd said, then gawked at Pierce. “Chevallier, you know this egghead?”

  “He was the science officer of the Carl Sagan.”

  “Oh, he’s that Doctor Pierce then?” LeBoeuf said. “The one that wrote those books about mermaids from space visiting ancient African tribes?”

  “Sirius to be precise,” Pierce corrected her.

  The fourth member of the EDF team laughed. He was the other psionic with them, his blond hair cut into a military mohawk. “Are you, Sirius?”

  LeBoeuf rubbed her face. “Oh boy, Maxwell, no jokes, please.”

  “In his defense, we’re now fighting dragons,” Boyd said. “Nobody is laughing at Doctor Pierce’s words, book, and reports nowadays.”

  “What brings you two here to the party?” Maxwell asked.

  Miles offered an explanation. “We got cut off from our group thanks to someone blastin’ Michael George music.”

  “It was George Michael,” Pierce corrected him, as he analyzed the data that outputted onto his wrist terminal of the strange unknown elements the reflective floor, wall, and ceiling tiles were made of.

  “I don’t care! We’re lost, and our comms are out,” Miles spat.

  “Same here, we tracked the source of the jamming to this place,” Boyd said demonstrating with his HNI that his communication holo projection displayed static.

  Pierce looked away from his scans, his lips twisted. “Is that so?”

  “Hopefully, it isn’t our old friend, the Dragon Knight or Maiden,” Chevallier said, smirking at Pierce. “If so I’m going to have to face it alone.”

  “I don’t have HNI like you, Chevallier,” Pierce added.

  “Right, so I’ll be fighting it alone.”

  “Assuming those two are alive to start with,” Pierce said. “We suspected they both met their ends during the battle at Sirius.”

  Chevallier moved forward into the unknown grasping her rifle. “Only one way to find out.”

  Pierce, Miles, and Chevallier’s EDF team continued to explore the crystalline maze of halls that made up the inside of the construct. Or was it Boyd’s EDF team? It was hard to tell with Chevallier and Boyd seemingly competing to take charge and point, their bickering didn’t help.

  The group came to a stop within the center of the dome-shaped construct. The room was wide and hollow, and its ceilin
g was at least a kilometer in height according to Pierce’s scans. A pedestal stood center stage within the chamber. Above it floated a hologram depicting strange shapes and diagrams, and blue light shone away from it, illuminating the ceiling with ghostly imagery. Ahead of the pedestal was a Draconian soldier, interacting with it. Chevallier’s bullets put a number of rounds through its back, ejecting a torrent of steaming hot fluids from its chest. The Draconian was no longer interacting with the pedestal’s hologram.

  Organic-looking pods clung onto the ceiling. Pierce stopped counting the pods at sixteen. If they were organic, there was probably something organic inside as well, something that could be hazardous to everyone’s health if released.

  Those thoughts had him disturbed. He turned to the pedestal with his wrist terminal’s EAD scanning app active, hoping to find something more soothing to fill his thoughts with. The pedestal was scanned up and down, left and right, storing and recording its findings within a plugged-in data crystal.

  “I think this might be the source of the disruption,” Pierce concluded after reading the EAD’s output.

  Chevallier shrugged, standing next to him. “So much for a rematch.”

  “You weren’t seriously hoping it was them?”

  “That bitch knocked me off an office building, and then laughed about it,” Chevallier said. “You better fucking believe I want a piece of her.”

  “Wait a minute,” Pierce said, eyeing the scanned results. Looking down, he took note of the raised platform he stood on where the pedestal was. “This is where the monolith was.”

  “The one that gave Foster those tattoos?” Boyd asked.

  “The very same, and now it’s gone,” Pierce said. “Guess that proves the Draconians had an interest in it; it’s probably why they built this place. They must be doing something with it.”

  Chevallier motioned to the pedestal and hologram floating above it. “And left this thing in its place . . . whatever it is.”

  Pierce waved his wrist terminal around the hologram after setting it to record, turning it into a wrist-mounted camera. A holographic handprint appeared, though the hand appeared to be that of a Draconian, a cross between a human and a dragon. Pierce pressed the palms of his right hand against the hologram, nothing happened.