With that the Captain left, and Gavit turned back to Dorik. “As if you weren’t rich enough? You’re about to become the richest bastard in the galaxy!”
Dorik just sat there, stunned. The licensing contracts alone to allow other companies to produce the engine would allow him to buy his own planet, maybe even a solar system. It didn’t matter that his wife and family were Chelots. He turned to Gavit. “I couldn’t have done this without you, all of you,” he continued, turning to them all. “And I’ll do everything to get these out there as soon as possible.”
Chris slapped Dorik on the back. “Just make sure we’re some of the first to get them.”
UCSB Date: 1005.375
PQ-452, UCSBS-Wolfsbane, Drobile System
It had been an exhausting cycle for Arion. All he wanted to do now was to climb into his bunk and go to sleep. The Captain had the whole ship on alert, so, of course, Tadeh Qudas and Blazer had extended that down to the rest of them even more. Blazer had made the team drill constantly to the point that patrol missions would feel like a break. The one highlight would be the mission debrief. Arion had fought to keep a straight face as Blazer did his best to dress down Gavit and Chris about where the pair should and should not be having sex aboard ship. Apparently, their latest dalliance had taken them down to the ground vehicle hangar; the marines were none too happy about finding spilled seminal fluid and ruined underwear on the seats of their tanks.
Thinking about that brought a smile to his face as he keyed his room open only to find his computer terminal active - silhouetting a familiar shape. The cycle had definitely taken a turn for the better. “Alieha!” he called and rushed in.
Alieha turned around in his chair and beamed back at him, still dressed in her jumpsuit. “Look who finally came home. Do you know how late it is?” she teased.
Arion stopped and looked back out at the messy common area. “And where’s my dinner?” he asked smiling.
“I thought you were the cook in this relationship?” she replied and stood.
Arion stepped in close, the door sliding shut behind him. “Well, if I’d known you’d come back I’d have made you something.”
Alieha wrapped her arms around his muscular frame and kissed him. “I just got in, hyperspace seemed to realize how much I wanted to get back.”
“I’ll have to thank it when we get to leave this system,” he replied between kisses as they shuffled towards the bed.
Alieha pulled away and began to unzip her jumpsuit. “I’ve been looking forward to this for too long.”
Arion stared at her for a long moment, and overcome by the moment, said. “Marry me.”
Alieha’s hand froze. She stared back at him. “What?”
Arion smiled and moved in close to her, guided her to the bed, where they sat. This felt right to him, the last piece of a puzzle falling into place. Alieha, his wife: it all worked. The whole of his universe felt alive in that moment. “Marry me. I mean, I love you. You love me. We’re great together. I know this isn’t some grand crazy proposal, but why don’t we get married? Right now. Let’s run to the Captain, or one of the shipboard priests and get married.”
Alieha just sat there on the bed, silent, unable to speak for a long moment. Arion wasn’t sure what to expect, but this wasn’t it. Then she turned away from him without a word spoken. Self-doubt flooded over Arion. He began to question if he’d gone too far or too fast. Would she have wanted some grand gesture? Three wouldn’t have. More self-doubt, his universe darkening. Despite everything he’d shared about his time with Three, he’d known this woman before him for a little over half an annura. And for most of that, she’d been away. She had to know so little about him, and most of what he knew about her, he’d learned from a robotic duplicate.
“Arion, I have to tell you something.”
Arion looked back at her, unsure when he’d turned away.
She hadn’t turned to face him again, but he could read the tension in her shoulders. He wouldn’t like what he was about to hear. “Arion, you know that despite my business, I always spend a great deal of time aboard this ship when I come - much more than any other cargo hauler ever would.”
Arion had heard that, but had never really questioned why. He’d seen her conduct the other parts of her business from here seamlessly: coordinating cargoes, managing investments, and commissioning jobs through other haulers. “You said that the Captain and Admiral pay you a retainer, and that allows you to stay and do all the behind the scenes work.”
She nodded. “That’s only partially true. And while the retainer is ‘paid’ by the Captain, it comes from the CIS.”
Arion felt his eyes go hard and back straighten. “Confed Intelligence Services? Why?”
She sighed, still refused to face him. “Did you ever wonder what Three did to gain entrance to the academy?”
“She told me that she was an intelligence analyst.”
Alieha cocked her head to the side. “That was how it started,” she began and turned to face him. “But you went to a Special Operations Academy, and even though she wasn’t in that program…”
“She had to have had a kill, but she was a synthetic...”
“She was a robot, and couldn’t kill. She’d got in on based on my kill, she had all the memories, but,” she looked at her hands. “none of the blood, and could never kill again. You see, I was recruited right out of school as an analyst on the civilian side of the CIS.”
The way Alieha spoke, it was like one of his mock-counseling sessions, where another cadet would confess to some deep secret about themselves. He felt his face begin to turn thoughtful, like a psychologist, and stopped. He needed to hear this and understand it at an even deeper level.
“Within an annura, I was approached by my leadership. They saw I could be much more than just an analyst. But I was a good analyst, really good. I could follow the numbers better than anyone in my section, see trends, figure out illicit cargo transfers with just a glance. It’s what’s allowed me to turn my off-ship business into such a successful venture. I make good money doing what I do. The CIS retainer, it isn’t why I keep doing what I do for them. I do it because I believe in the Confederation and want to do my part.”
Arion nodded in understanding and resisted the urge to reach out to her.
“But CIS saw that I could do more than what I was doing back then. So, they asked me to consider becoming a deep-cover operative.”
Arion felt his hearts seize for a moment. The path she was about to take him down wouldn’t just be dark, if what he’d heard from, and about, other deep-cover operatives was even close to true. Worse, the little doubts he’d kept buried deep in his mind crept out. Could she be here to see if we have another spy on our team?
“Over the next two annura, I infiltrated two different smuggling groups and helped bring them down. It was good work, great work, and then, there was my last op.” She took a deep breath and looked away again for a moment. “I worked my way into a gang that was smuggling Confed tech to the Galactic Federation, closing the tech gap – the tech gap that had kept the Confederation safe for almost two centuries.”
Arion nodded in consideration. For most of the war, prior to the armistice, the Confederation had maintained a massive technological advantage over the Galactic Federation. It had kept the actual shooting war to a minimum. The Confederation mostly fought against weaker border incursions, pushing the Geffers back into their own space. What their ships lacked in sophistication the Geffers made up for in numbers and ferocity. But they’d learned from the Confederation.
Using spies, smugglers and salvage, they’d reverse-engineer Confed weapons and systems in starts and stops. The Barker Class was one of the last major ship designs that had been introduced prior to the armistice, and was built as big as it was to be able to stand against the Confederation. The massive firepower the class sported was part of that. Over-engineered and robust, the ship’s Razer cannons were a major leap at the time and were intended to overwhelm a s
hip in the initial stages of combat, or from across a system.
That technological edge had all but disappeared during the armistice when the Galactic Federation had leapt ahead to virtually equal the Confederation technologically. They’d been steadily closing that gap ever since and, as the Stealth Sloop had shown, had surpassed the Confederation in some fields. Realization washed over Arion. “How long ago was this?”
Alieha sighed, turned, and looked him in the eyes. “Arion. How old do you think I am?”
Arion was never good at guessing anyone’s age. When he’d known her, Three had appeared to be his age. Alieha however, when he compared her to his memories of Three, looked maybe six or seven annura older. That made sense to him. Alieha’s uncle would have likely constructed the biodroids to look like Alieha at the beginning of the three annura program. “Um, Thirty, Thirty-One?”
“Arion, while I am relatively thirty-one, I was born in 955. I ended up spending twenty annura in suspended animation.”
Arion sat back, agog. “What?”
“The whole operation went sideways. I was with the tech smugglers on a job, this was about an annura into the armistice. One of their new recruits recognized me. Before I could stop him,” she looked down at her hands. “He was the first, and so far as I know, only person I’ve ever killed.”
Arion couldn’t speak. It was one thing to engage in ship to ship combat, so cold and clinical, a situation where you rarely saw your enemy. There was a certain level of cognitive dissonance. It was, after all, just a target, an object. You could almost, and many pilots did, ignore that there was a sentient being inside. It was something else entirely to kill someone face to face, where the truth was right there in front of you. “What happened?”
“He’d seen me earlier, but I’d missed him. He’d been in one of the other gangs I’d brought down. He confronted me when I was placing a beacon that would track the shipment back to wherever the Galactic Federation was reverse-engineering the tech. I had no choice. I stabbed him in the throat. I never thought I’d actually have to use that training. Before I could hide the body, one of the other smugglers and his Geffer contact spotted me. They started shooting before I could even get a word out. So I ran, ran as fast as I could.
“I made it to my personal launch. The crew worked out of a mega freighter, and some of us had our own personal craft. I made it to mine…”
Arion wanted to reach out to her, to hold her. Her story was coming in fits and stops now, pieces out of order, but he knew to expect that. He also knew that any interference on his part could close this door into her past forever.
“The mega freighter, nobody notices them. They skirt the border all the time, changing their registries whenever they have to. I made it to my escape craft, dodging fire, shooting after I got a blaster. I was never supposed to be a killer. I was just supposed to tag the merchandise and keep a low profile.
“This all went down when we were still in hyperspace. I got to my ship, and saw that we were still in hyperspace. I panicked, they knew where I parked my launch, so they had to know I would run to it. So, I sealed it up and waited until I saw that we were near a jump point. Near enough that my shields might protect me long enough to escape.”
Arion couldn’t believe how desperate and scared she must have been to even entertain such an idea.
“I blasted free of the dock and after holding inside the freighter’s shields long enough to dump everything I had into my own shields, dove through the jump point as we passed it. I wasn’t even sure if it was a Confed system.” She looked away again and shuddered. “My shields didn’t hold. My ship was exposed to naked hyperspace for less than a pulse. That was enough for it to eat away all of my external sensors, mounts and half my hull plating. I don’t know where I came out, but I activated my distress beacon.
“The launch was never meant for long term use, just orbital transfers and maybe flitting back and forth between low-grav worlds. There was enough food aboard for a cycle, but it did come with a suspended animation system for emergencies. I stretched my resources for as long as I could. I was starving and out of water when I finally climbed in that thing. CIS declared me missing in action, until they found me two decades later.”
Arion could scarcely believe it, but he’d heard wilder stories. He’d even seen the remains of a refugee ship that, in order to escape the war, had spent over a century at just below the speed of light traveling between star systems. It had run afoul of space debris and had been destroyed. The surviving crew had barely aged an annura from when they’d begun their exodus. Arion hadn’t studied the tech much, but he knew that stasis pods used specially tuned slipstream bulbs to mimic that effect.
“A group of junkers picked me up. What a haul right? A Confed deep-cover escape capsule? I was lucky though. They were honest and didn’t just dump my body or kill the systems and me with them. They took me back to the CIS where I was debriefed.”
She got up and walked over to a mirror, and just stared into it. “They tried to paint it like it was a good thing. ‘It’ll be fine Alieha,’ and ‘don’t worry, you’ll get all your back pay,’ or, ‘yes, you’ve more than earned your franchise.’ Like that made a damn to me. I’d lost twenty annura of my life, and no amount of money or rights as a Confederate could fix that.”
She slammed her fist into the mirror, it flexed and creaked, but didn’t break. Arion realized that he’d never seen her look in a mirror before. She carried a grooming drone to get herself ready. Could she hate herself so much that she doesn’t even want to risk looking in a mirror?
“I don’t mind admitting that I lost it,” she replied turning to face him. “My handler had become a division director. I decked him, broke his nose and my hand,” she said rubbing her knuckles. “I should have been arrested, but he let me off with a warning. So I took my money and went wild for an annura. I did a lot of stupid things.”
“Is that when your uncle found you?”
She nodded. “He hated what I’d become, and so did I. You have to understand, the last thing I’d done before I went undercover was to talk to my mother. She and my dad were having a hard time of it, and here I was their only child going off to do something stupid, only to disappear for twenty annura.”
Arion wanted to ask, but knew the answer.
“He was the only family I had left. It was horrible.”
Arion stood and walked over to her. “I understand, and it doesn’t change anything about how I feel about you.”
“Even though I’m old enough to be your mother?” she asked, tears in her eyes.
Arion shrugged. “I don’t think any of my mom’s friends are as hot as you.”
She gave him a sidelong glare and shook her head. “I love you Arion, and maybe this is the universe making it possible for us to meet.”
“True, had you met me twenty annura ago, well, there are laws against that.”
She scoffed. “I don’t chase toddlers.”
“I’m not that young.”
“I missed so much, a lifetime, and I’ve lied to you for so long. Why can’t you hate me?”
Arion reached out and turned her to face him fully. “I can’t hate you because I love you. Now please, don’t waste the rest of this life. Take it as a gift. I love you Alieha and I want to be with you forever. This changes nothing for me.”
She swallowed hard. “Yes.”
He looked at her. “What?”
“Yes, I said. If you can accept me, for who I am, who I was, and everything I’ve done, then yes. I will marry you.”
Arion moved to embrace her, but she held up a hand. “Stop. Think about this though. I love and want to be with you too, but you need to process all this. We can’t do this from a purely emotional place,” she said, the tears welling up in her eyes about to flow uncontrollably.
Arion felt himself deflate. She was right. “All right, but I’m still keeping your yes.”
The tears flowed and she began nodding as she reached into her shoulder p
ocket. She fished out an old data card, so old that all the identifiers on it had been worn off and the surface had been imprinted with the pattern of her jumpsuit pocket. She shoved it into his chest. Arion grabbed it and looked down at it. “What is this?”
“It’s me,” she said and ran for the door. “Read that, really read it. If you can still love that woman, then come find me.”
He stared at the card as the door slid away, tears welling up in his own eyes. “You should read mine too,” he heard a voice he couldn’t be sure was his own reply.
Alieha turned back to him. Her face already streaked with tears, and with a weak smile, said. “I already have.” Her smile evaporated into guilt. “I’m still CIS. I read your file, and the files on your whole squadron the cycle after we met.” Arion just stood there dumbfounded as she ran out the door, one thought left on his mind. She was sent to spy on us.
UCSB Date: 1005.376
PQ-451, UCSBS-Wolfsbane, Drobile System
Few things annoyed Gavit more than to be woken up by someone at his hatch. Whether it was someone knocking, or hitting the announcement chime, as they were now, didn’t matter. In a true emergency he’d be paged by his micomm, even if set to private, or the ship’s klaxon would sound. Someone at his hatch at any time meant that they wanted to discuss something personal, or to complain. He tried to force his eyes to stay closed, the comforting weight of Chris still laying on him. He’d awoken like that for the past several cycles, in either his bunk or Chris’. It had become his preferred way to greet the cycle, especially when she woke up first and in the mood.
He didn’t wish to wake Chris as she slept there and looked down at her naked form, admiring the perfection of her skin as he traced his finger down her spine to her tight little rear. There was no set of more perfect butt cheeks in the galaxy so far as he was concerned, even if he’d said otherwise before. The chiming of the door drew him away from his admiration. Annoyed, he did his best to extract himself from beneath her. While he grew angrier at the caller, Chris might kill them.
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