Unsanctioned Reprisal

by Eddie R. Hicks

  “I’m with Chevallier on this,” he said, and stood with Chevallier, giving hateful looks at Phylarlie. “I don’t accept gifts from murderers, or appreciate you talking about the great admiral like that.”

  “Murderer?” Phylarlie laughed while requesting her wineglass back. “Don’t tell me you believe those rumors that I killed to keep my title as lord.”

  “I’ve seen what you’re capable of, killing in cold blood,” Boyd said. “I wouldn’t put it past you.”

  Foster took a step back from the two with her hands held out. “Both of you need to chill out!”

  Phylarlie swirled her wine, then took a sip of it. “You’re upset that I killed someone important to you?” she asked. “Tell me who it was? I’ve killed lots of people over the years; it’s hard to keep track of their faces.”

  “Groom Lake, Nevada 2018. Keys, Glover, Roberts, Victor, and Cortez,” Boyd said. “Five names of two billion.”

  Phylarlie paused, sizing up Boyd’s appearance. She handed her wineglass back to the loinclothed man. “The navy SEALs.” Phylarlie left her resting place, walking over to Boyd, licking her lips, walking circles around him, and stopping when she pointed at his abs. “Did my dagger leave a scar?”

  “2018 . . .” Foster murmured as she connected the dots. “Phylarlie, you were part of the Imperial invasion?”

  “She was there before they attacked,” Boyd said. “Probably part of some scouting team.”

  “I was there to prevent a war,” Phylarlie said amidst the glares of contempt from Foster, Boyd, and Chevallier, the three humans around during that time.

  Phylarlie moved back to her seat, shaking her head at the three and adding, “This is why we in the Empire force our troops to copulate frequently, people are happier that way, something you three aren’t.” She sat, cross-legged, stretching her arms across her couch, smiling at them seductively. “As I said, you will be here until my team is ready and your chef has helped the Imperial family’s personal chef redeem himself. Take the time to eat, drink, and fuck. Rid yourselves of that anger.”

  Maxwell’s cybernetic hands stroked his mohawk. “Sir, please?”

  “No,” Boyd spat.

  “She so wants the D’,” Maxwell said, pointing to a Hashmedai woman resting on a pile of pillows in the corner. His eyes locked onto her friends standing behind. “And so does her, her, her, and definitely her.”

  Boyd reiterated. “No, we’re going back to the ship.”

  “I’d take it as a personal insult if you did,” Phylarlie cut in.

  “Too fucking bad,” he said to her, walking to the exit.

  “I’d be more inclined to order my people to work faster, if I didn’t feel insulted by my guests from across the galaxy,” Phylarlie said. “I’m sure the empress would do the same. Don’t you agree, Captain Foster?”

  “Sergeant,” Foster said to Boyd, stopping his footsteps. “We need this ASAP.”

  “Listen to her, Foster, she doesn’t give a fuck about our mission,” Boyd replied with a higher tone of voice. “We’re here to save not just the UNE, but the whole galaxy . . . including the Empire and this sleazy pleasure palace. She should be busting her people to move quickly already.”

  “But she ain’t and you walkin’ out ain’t gonna fix that problem,” Foster said. Boyd rolled his eyes while she stood closer to him and whispered. “Look, I don’t like her now I know she was around during the invasion. But we need to pay lip service here before the station falls, taking the rest of us with it.”

  Boyd turned away from the exit, with his arms crossed. Phylarlie was pleased. “Having a change of heart?” she asked him.

  “Can we at least get an ETA on how much longer this will take?” Boyd asked Phylarlie.

  “Well . . . now you’re staying, I’ll be more than happy to find that information for you.”

  Arrangements for the six to stay in the manor were made. A group of servants rose to the task of escorting them away. Foster stopped them, there was one last thing she forgot to do. She approached Phylarlie, tossing her a data crystal. Her Hashmedai reflexes acquired it swiftly.

  “That’s for Yominv,” Foster said. “He’s the tech from out in these parts that was in contact with Blackmar. General Irons wanted him to have that, some kind of thank you gift.”

  “I . . . see,” Phylarlie said, looking at the data crystal with a scowl. “I’ll see to it personally that he gets this.”

  “So . . . since we are staying after all,” Maxwell said.

  Boyd waved Maxwell off, having given up on him. “Do whatever the fuck you want, Maxwell.”

  “Yes!” Maxwell leaped into a chair with two women wearing nothing but a shawl and loincloth that loosely clung to their bodies. He placed his arms around them. “So, ladies, I know you probably don’t understand what I’m saying. But . . . are those tits real?”

  Boyd went to follow the eager servant guides. “Chevallier, make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

  “Fuck him.” Chevallier followed Boyd.

  “LeBoeuf?”

  “I’ll take care of things here, sir,” LeBoeuf said to him. “Just find us a nice bunk.”

  Two hours had passed since the meet up with Phylarlie. Foster, Boyd, EVE, and Chevallier had been given a large room for the group to stay in and stash their equipment. EVE and Chevallier had left to conduct a brief security check, ensuring they’d be safe while they slept when nightfall came. If it came, Foster wasn’t sure what the day-night cycles on this planet were like, and it being in the polar regions meant there were likely to be times during the year where the sun didn’t set for days, and vice versa.

  She put her wrist terminal away, after confirming with Williams they wouldn’t be returning for a while and joined Boyd. He stood looking out one of the windows and into the snowfields outside. “You and the system lord got history, huh?”

  “She attacked my team, I was the only survivor,” Boyd said. “Then I got framed for killing the late Prince Akeia, pretty sure she was there to avenge him. Hashmedai assassins were targeting me, until the Celestial Order wars came to an end.”

  “And now you’re having a slumber party at her mansion.”

  “Yeah . . . fucking funny how life works sometimes.”

  37 Pierce

  Cargo Hauler

  Morutrin Prime orbit, Morutrin system

  October 16, 2118, 12:22 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  Travis Pierce’s elbow throbbed with enough pain to awake him from his zero-g sleep. It took him a few seconds to remember where he was, and why it was so dark. Penelope had offered him a chance to take a cruise with her to the Morutrin system, via an old dank cargo hauler. She neglected to mention that detail until after the two popped out of the hacked electronic cargo box that was placed in the ship’s hold.

  The second detail she didn’t mention was how long the one-way trip would take. This was hour number twelve of the two drifting about in the pitch-black cargo hold of the ship, a ship that traveled at sub light speeds if Pierce’s calculations were correct.

  Penelope’s glowing eyes and holo screens that floated next to her gave Pierce enough light to get a fix on the stash of protein bars and water bottles that hovered in the corner. Had Penelope not been able to crack the codes on the electronic locks those were stored in Pierce’s body would have been in rough shape. He hadn’t gotten the chance to eat since the ordeal began, nor did he eat on the Kepler—the chef was busy feeding all the survivors from the colony. He didn’t know what was worse about his breakfast, the taste of the bar, or trying to drink water from a bottle with no gravity. He never would have expected his midlife crisis to be like this.

  Most men go out and buy expensive cars or rob the cradle, as the saying goes. Pierce ended up playing the role of a sidekick to a girl that may as well have been a British secret agent. He flushed a little when he envisioned a titillating fantasy, one where he had taken Odelea’s offer and joined her in her quarters and taken the rob the cradle route instead
.

  Technically, Odelea would be the one robbing the cradle, she’s a ninety-eight-year-old woman stuck in a nineteen-year-old’s body!

  “Try not to make too much noise,” Penelope said, scrolling through the contents of her holo window. “We’re not in UNE space anymore, the operators of this ship can space us and not be charged for it.”

  “I’ll go back to thinking about that agent,” Pierce said. “That’s a good way to keep me quiet.”

  “Good way to be distracted too, focus on the present, love.”

  Pierce gave up trying to get the water out of the bottle. His dry mouth hated him for that decision. “Where do we go once we land? Better question, do you see me ever getting the chance to get back to my ship in the future?”

  “I’m almost done searching through the EISS files,” she said, handing him a copy of the holo screen that had her attention. It looked like a confidential dossier of an operative, a woman with long brown hair tied back, green eyes and stare that was colder than Penelope’s. “This woman is our ticket, a black-ops operative, Chloe Vaughan of the EDF, codename Gemini-C.”

  “You know where to find her?”

  “No, but EISS does,” Penelope said. “She betrayed them and went into hiding on Morutrin Prime. I think they’re closing in on her location now, we need to make sure they don’t.”

  “If she betrayed them, then that makes her a traitor to the UNE.”

  “Think, Travis, think, you got the PhD here.”

  “Ugh . . .” PhD comments were starting to get to him.

  “Something happened on the mission Vaughan was on, something she didn’t agree with and took matters into her own hands, as well as Devorei’s data crystal.”

  “Your hacker friend . . .” He stroked his chin. “She knows what he knows then.”

  “You have no idea. I learned a lot about EISS since you, being the gentleman that you are, helped me poke around in their most secret databases. A few people in EISS have been funding Terran Legion operations. That poor bugger that got his brains fired was one of them. The gunman that came after you was another.”

  “The Terran Legion, you mean that anti-alien group?”

  “The very same one that was talked about in that news broadcast,” she said. “Their numbers have been increasing quickly since the Draconians’ incursion, so has EISS’ secret support and funding to them.”

  Pierce felt sick to his stomach. He wasn’t sure if it was the protein bar he ate, or the facts she just revealed. “Oh, man.”

  “Luckily, it’s not all of EISS doing this from what I’ve gathered, just rogue members acting on their own accord.”

  “If corrupted EISS agents are funding and pulling the strings of the Terran Legion, then . . .” He began to put things together. It wasn’t a pretty picture. “Then the mission Chloe was on, and quite possibly others, was ordered by the Terran Legion and EISS alliance in secret.”

  “That’s my take, that agent was overseeing a number of missions, as was an old friend of yours.”

  Penelope tossed another hologram for him to look at, stolen from her EISS hack. His eyes opened wide when he saw the man in question on the projection. “Moriston . . .”

  “Moriston was participating in the op Chloe and her sister was on.”

  “What was their objective?”

  “That, I can’t find . . . Only Moriston and Devorei knew by the looks of things.”

  Starport platform

  Port Shala, Morutrin Prime, Morutrin system

  October 16, 2118, 13:48 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  The cargo hauler the two stowed away on remained idle long enough for Penelope to perform her techno wizardry, and force its massive barnlike doors open. The duo vanished behind a number of parked transports and smaller ships on the starport’s landing platform at the edge of a Linl built metropolis.

  She kept her face buried in holo screens. One of them held a map of the city they were in, which helped her lead the two down inside the port, and through its wide corridors. The second screen that had her attention, displayed a top-down map of another city, one called Gravity City, from what Pierce was able to view while looking over her shoulder.

  There were a number of pulsing dots on the map, they were all moving to a specific location. The background audio from the projection was full of military blabber and codenames. It was like a group people were coordinating an ambush.

  “Shit . . .” Penelope stopped moving. Pierce was forced to do the same.

  “Talk to me, Penelope, what’s going on?”

  “We’re a tad late,” she said. “EISS is moving in on an asset I completely forgot about.”

  She ran to a train platform, overhanging off the side of the high-rise starport. Her frustrated hands ran through her silver hair and pulled on it. She hissed like the Hashmedai he forgot she was.

  “Help me find a train traveling to Gravity City,” she asked, frantically reading all the holographic train times and network maps. They were all written in the Linl language.

  Only the cities with heavy human populations had English and Chinese translations written underneath it. They found a platform that had what she was desperately seeking two stories down. Too bad the next train was due to arrive in thirty minutes.

  “What’s so important in Gravity City?”

  “There was an Imperial starship captain searching for the same ship Devorei and the EISS black ops team boarded. I installed a trojan into his HNI, just in case he came across what I’m searching for.”

  “And EISS is moving in to capture him,” Pierce said. “I guess he found it.”

  “His mission had nothing to do with Devorei, just a lucky coincidence the two ships were important to us both.” She waved her hands creating a holo communication window in its wake. “Whatever it is he found, EISS is willing to put their pursuit of Chloe on hold for it.”

  “This train won’t be here for a while, then there’s the travel time . . . whatever that is.”

  “We won’t make it in time.” The communication screen powered on. She flicked her hair back and looked directly into it. “Hello, Captain Peiun. You don’t know me, but I know quite a bit about you. Right now, you need to follow my instructions exactly and quickly. Your life is in danger.”

  38 Peiun

  High rise apartment

  Gravity City, Morutrin Prime, Morutrin system

  October 16, 2118, 13:30 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  Like a newly refueled starship that was operating dangerously low on helium-3 fuel, Peiun’s body woke up the next day fully engineered. Stress, anxiety, cloudy thoughts were removed from his body and mind that was required to remain in the young prime age it was with gene therapy.

  He got up from the bed he slept on with Sarah. She wasn’t anywhere to be seen, probably tending to the data that was literally ripped out from the head of Cody. There was no shame in what he had done. If Cody had truly been a member of the Terran Legion movement, then Peiun’s sweat and traces of his seed on the bed sheets that he shared with a human woman, will go down as the final insult to Cody and his group founded on hatred.

  In the living room, Peiun found Sarah standing and examining the contents of the holo screen, now that it finally finished its decryption. She was still naked and didn’t seem to mind him looking at her female figure and body art. He approached her after slipping back into his pants, walking over the corpse of Cody, whom neither cared to clean up.

  She waved her index finger at him. “I didn’t say you can get dressed.”

  He smirked and allowed his pants to fall back to the floor. “I take orders from Imperial admirals and the throne only.”

  “After last night? You could have fooled me,” she said.

  “Yes, about last night . . . I—”

  “Your pull-out game is weak,” she cut in laughing. “Don’t worry, I took a bullet through my tubes years ago, I can’t have children anymore. I hope Mom and Dad aren’t turning in their graves.”

  “I am no
t familiar with that human expression.”

  “Lost my family during the Imperial invasion.” She typed into the holo keyboard to browse through the files on Cody’s HNI. “I’m sure you’ve heard this story from a human like me that lived through that era.”

  “Far too many times, I’m afraid.”

  “Truth be told, I used to hate your kind, like a lot.”

  He had a hard time believing that statement. What the two shared before passing out on top of each other, was anything but hate. “What changed?” he asked her.

  “The end of the Celestial Order wars, and the change of heart the Empire had after it ended. It took half a century, but eventually I learned how to bury the hatchet. Too bad these Terran Legion motherfuckers haven’t.”

  He stood next to her, looking at the projection while she leaned her body against his. “Anything useful?”

  “He doesn’t know where my sister is . . .” she said. “Either that or those files were damaged.”

  “I am sorry to discover this.”

  “The Terrans received a lot of funding from EISS recently,” she returned to the holo screen, enlarging a number of documents Cody had viewed with his Terran and EISS allies. “EISS funding them would explain how they were able to come up in the news so fast. The funding doubled after the Draconian attacks.”

  A blurry video of a man appeared in the projection. Sarah wasn’t able to clean the image up any better. The data file was most likely damaged when Peiun pulled the HNI out from Cody’s head. Her face leaned forward, staring at the image for a solid minute.

  Her face became enraged. “Albert fucking Moriston! I knew it!”

  “His middle name is ‘Fucking?’”

  “Moriston, Durendal . . . shit, there’s hella people in the military and EISS that’s affiliated with the Terrans,” she said. “Looks like they had the Fortune Runner rigged to monitor it if anyone boarded to investigate.”

  “That would explain why they came after me,” he said. “Is there anything there about Alesyna? My ship’s psionic.”