Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  Then again, that one officer had agreed to let them go. For some reason she found she trusted him—he had a pleasant face, if not exactly handsome, but there was something steady and level in his eyes that seemed to inspire trust. He’d given his word. She had to take his promise at face value and hope he had meant it.

  “How far?” she asked, changing the subject. Maybe later she could discuss her doubts and worries with Thorn, but she didn’t want to do it now in front of Jerem, who was clearly still riding the euphoria of his rescue and who perhaps didn’t realize how close a call the whole thing had been.

  “Approximately nineteen standard hours,” Thorn replied. His hands moved easily across the console. “We’re just about to drop into subspace.” He reached for the handle that activated the subspace drive and pulled it down.

  Miala gripped the back of Thorn’s seat as the Fury jumped forward. She probably should have just stayed strapped down in the holding cell until they had dropped out of normal space, but she couldn’t have stood another minute in the confined space of the dim little chamber. Besides, this wasn’t really so bad. It wasn’t much worse than standing up in one of Rilsport’s public transports while the driver accelerated to merge with traffic.

  “Cool,” Jerem breathed, watching the chaotic play of light and dark outside the ship’s forward viewports. Miala had taken him into space before, but only to New Chicago and back, and therefore he had never seen subspace in all its unsettling glory. He looked over at his father. “So how does it work?”

  Thorn gave his son an amused glance. “How does what work?”

  “The subspace drive.”

  At that question the mercenary actually chuckled. “Can’t tell you for sure, Jerem. All that concerns me is that it does work, not how. I can perform some repairs if I have to, but if you’re looking for the theory...” He shrugged. “I can’t help you there.”

  Jerem appeared to consider Thorn’s reply for a moment. “Well, I guess that makes sense.” Then he turned back to look outside, chin on his hands as he continued to study the churning heavens. Suddenly his eyelids drooped a little, and he gave what sounded like a jaw-cracking yawn.

  At once Miala asked, “Jerem, did you get any sleep last night?”

  He managed to look both guilty and proud at the same time. “Sure. I think I must have gotten at least two hours. I couldn’t tell for sure, since I was in the ventilation shafts after I escaped, and there wasn’t a chrono, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” she repeated, trying to give him a stern glance and knowing she had failed miserably. How many eight-year-olds could have broken themselves out of whatever place the kidnappers had been keeping him and gotten away through the ventilation system?

  Not many, she thought. Just Eryk Thorn’s son...and yours.

  “Well,” she went on, “I think you should really get some sleep.”

  “Mom!” Jerem groaned. “I don’t need to sleep. I’m fine—”

  “Your mother’s right,” Thorn remarked. “It’s nineteen standard hours to Gaia. Plenty of time for you to sleep and still be awake when we make planetfall.”

  Jerem still looked sulky, but after glancing from his father’s face to Miala’s, he appeared to realize he was outnumbered. He heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Fine. I’ll go lie down. But I won’t sleep.”

  “Of course not,” Miala replied, trying not to smile. After everything he’d been through, Jerem would probably be asleep about five standard seconds after his head hit the lumpy pillow on Eryk Thorn’s cot. Then she asked, “Do you want me to come with you and tuck you in?”

  “Mo-om!” Jerem protested, sounding more put out than ever. “I’m not a baby.”

  After that Miala maintained a tactful silence, and waited behind Thorn’s seat while Jerem undid his restraints and then slid out of the copilot’s chair. Still with an aggrieved air that announced to everyone present he thought he was being woefully misused, Jerem stalked out of the cockpit and down the short corridor that led to the one passenger cabin on board.

  After the door had shut behind him, Miala climbed into the seat he had just abandoned. For a few moments neither she nor Thorn said anything.

  Then the mercenary commented, “He sounds fine.”

  She turned and looked at him, this man who had taken her away from Iradia and who had helped her to conceive a son in a night of passion. He had rescued her once again on her home world and then come to her adoptive one, only to find a child whose existence he had never suspected—a son who could have been taken from him before they even came to know one another. If Jerem’s father had been anyone but Eryk Thorn, he probably would be dead now, she thought, and shivered a little.

  “He is fine,” Miala replied. “He’s your son. To him this was probably all one big adventure.”

  Thorn watched her for a moment, dark eyes opaque, unreadable. “And what was it for you?”

  Good question, that. Moments of unspeakable terror, mixed with moments of impossible joy, the horror of Jerem’s kidnapping somehow made almost bearable by knowing that she didn’t have to face it alone, that Eryk Thorn was there to prop her up through all the doubt and worry and strain. She couldn’t even say she wished it had never happened, since it had brought Thorn back to her.

  She said at last, “It was a chance for us to be a family.”

  For a few seconds the mercenary said nothing. Then he reached out and laid his hand on top of hers, letting her feel the warmth and strength of his fingers. Somehow she still had difficulty believing he was really here, that he was taking her and Jerem to the homeland of his people. Such actions signaled a shift, she knew—Eryk Thorn had never allowed any associations, any connections other than the spurious ones that might come into being during his brief stints in the pay of one crime lord or another. He, the eternally rootless, appeared ready at last to reclaim his heritage.

  Of this New Zealand she knew little, except that it had survived a good deal of Gaia’s ecological devastation because of its isolation. It sounded wild and desolate, although at least not as outwardly inhospitable as Iradia. Life there would not be one of comfort and luxury, unlike the one she had known on Nova Angeles. But we can start fresh, she thought, remembering the satchel she had brought on board and the riches it contained. Fifteen million units is plenty to begin a new life.

  She had hoped and dreamed through many long, lonely years that one day Thorn would return to her. It had never seemed possible that those dreams might actually come true. And now that they had, what else could she possibly want?

  A sudden thought occurred to her, and her mouth curved in a smile.

  “What are you plotting now?” Thorn inquired, eyebrow lifting.

  “Nothing much,” she answered, and gave his hand a squeeze. “I was only thinking how much I’d like for Jerem to have a sister….”

  Thank you for reading Blood Will Tell.

  The second book in the Gaian Consortium Series, Breath of Life, is available at all vendors. Sign up for Christine Pope’s newsletter for new releases and great deals, or follow the author on Facebook.

  Archangel Down

  Archangel Project. Book 1

  By C. Gockel

  In the year 2432, humans think they are alone in the universe. They’re wrong.

  Commander Noa Sato plans a peaceful leave on her home planet Luddeccea ... but winds up interrogated and imprisoned for her involvement in the Archangel Project. A project she knows nothing about.

  Professor James Sinclair wakes in the snow, not remembering the past twenty four hours, or knowing why he is being pursued. The only thing he knows is that he has to find Commander Sato, a woman he’s never met.

  A military officer from the colonies and a civilian from Old Earth, they couldn’t have less in common. But they have to work together to save the lives of millions—and their own.

  Every step of the way they are haunted by the final words of a secret transmission:

  The archangel is down.

  To my
dad, Jim Evans. Thanks for getting me hooked on sci-fi, fantasy, and comic books. I miss you.

  1

  “We know you are a part of the Archangel Project.”

  Commander Noa Sato of the Galactic Fleet glared across the table. Two men wearing the dark green uniforms of planet Luddeccea’s Local Guard glared back at her. Her arms were shackled behind her back to the cold metal chair she sat on. The room was chilly—she could smell the cold of it, along with the odors of various bodily fluids. Her back ached, her mouth was as dry as lizzar skin, and she thought the bright lights of the interrogation room might leave her permanently blind.

  “I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she spat.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I’m on leave,” she explained for the hundredth time. “I thought I’d spend my vacation visiting my brother on the planet where I grew up. Is that so difficult to understand?” Agitated, she spun her engagement and wedding rings around on her finger. Closing her eyes, she thought of her brother, Kenji, and inwardly begged his forgiveness. When they’d picked her up, she’d assumed this was all a misunderstanding. She hadn’t meant to pull him into this.

  “I’ve had enough!” said one of her inquisitors. A pair of sharp, pointed pliers emerged in his hand, and suddenly he was on Noa’s side of the table. “Do you understand what I can do with these?”

  Noa tried to keep from screaming … and woke up in the darkness, her whole body shaking, her breathing so fast and ragged her ribs hurt, cold air stinging her lungs. The darkness smelled like cold and various bodily fluids, an unhappy constant with the nightmare. She rubbed her eyes. But the rest had been just a dream. They hadn’t used those pliers except to scare her during the interrogation. When she hadn’t told them what they wanted to hear, they’d brought her to this camp.

  She blinked. Was it unusually bright in the barracks? Stifling a groan, she sat up. Her vision immediately went black. She tried to access the reason why—and for the millionth time remembered her neural interface had been deactivated since she’d arrived here. Sucking in a sharp breath, she clutched her head, fingers drifting to the smooth, cool surface of the neural interface in her left temple. The guards were fond of parroting, “Freedom from information streams is the path to real wisdom,” but it was torture, not freedom.

  Noa’s body swayed. Why was she dizzy? It couldn’t be Luddeccea’s gravity—the planet’s gravity was the same as Earth’s and standard starship grav. Was it malnutrition, or something more sinister? She bit her lip to stifle a bitter laugh. She was being slowly starved to death. How much more sinister could it get?

  The spell finally passed, and she surveyed the barracks. All around her were rough wooden bunks four platforms tall. The beds were narrower than the single bunks on a starship, but each was shared by up to three women packed chest to back beneath thin blankets and without pillows. She could make out their faces—just barely—but it was definitely lighter in the barracks. Noa looked down at her bedmate, Ashley. Noa’s skin was dark as straight Earth coffee. Ashley’s was what Tim’s people would call “peaches and cream.” It made Ashley’s delicate features easy to see, even in low light. As she slept, clutching her crutch like a pillow, her face looked peaceful and her breathing was gentle. Not wanting to wake her, Noa gently folded her side of the blanket over Ashley’s sleeping form. Slipping down the slats at the end of the bed, she padded to the window.

  Peering through the dirty glass, she caught her breath. Sure enough, thick white flakes of snow drifted from the sky, sparkling in the camp’s harsh spotlights. Their barracks was close to the barbed-wire fence that enclosed them, and she could just make out snow catching on the Luddeccean pines in the surrounding forest. Noa pressed a hand to the window. The snow on the dense foliage would throw off heat-seeking scanners, and the thick branches would throw off radar, but it wasn’t bitterly cold—yet. If they were going to escape, now was the time. Her brow furrowed, and she touched her interface. She squinted at the clouds as though she could will herself to see through them. Somewhere above their heads, the satellite that was Time Gate 8 floated just outside the atmosphere above Luddeccea’s equator. The gate allowed instantaneous travel to any other system that had a gate of its own. It also sent and received data. Time Gate 8 and the other satellites that orbited around Luddeccea’s equator acted as relay stations for the vast data traffic of the ethernet. And, she thought more darkly, if her neural interface couldn’t be activated, the satellites would serve as useful landmarks for navigation … if the snow let up.

  Dropping her hand to her side, she balled it into a fist and bowed her head. As a pilot of the Galactic Republic Fleet she’d been given POW training. She was taught to stay put, to obey orders, and not to make foolish escape plans. She closed her eyes. But there was no war going on, and she wasn’t the captive of some pirate clan. She was in a concentration camp on her home world, Luddeccea, which hadn’t declared independence from the Republic. Opening her eyes, she looked down at her wrist. A black ‘H’ and a number had been tattooed there, barely visible against her dark skin. She’d been captured, interrogated, and interned without a trial for being, in the guard’s words, a “heretic.” Not an admissible crime in the Republic. If the Fleet had known she was here, she’d have been rescued by now. Her hands formed fists at her sides. Kenji should have reported her missing. If he hadn’t reported her missing, it had to mean he’d been interned, too … spinning on her heels, she went back to her bunk.

  A few moments later, she was leaning over her bedmate, gently shaking her shoulder. “Ashley, Ashley, wake up, it’s time to leave.”

  Ashley rolled over onto her back. Her eyes opened—visibly blue in the snow-brightness. She stared at Noa dumbly.

  “Today is the day,” Noa whispered. “It’s snowing.”

  Ashley put a hand to her head and ran it through her sparse hair; they’d all been shaved when they arrived. A tattooed ‘A’ for “augment” stood out on her wrist like a black scar. Ashley’s fingers went longingly to her neural interface just as Noa’s had. About three centimeters in diameter, the interfaces were made of copper with titanium and polyfiber exteriors. At the center of each was a circular port that could be hardwired directly to external computer systems via cable, but it was more common to use the internal wireless transmitters. Around the central port, tiny drives, the width and breadth of fingernails, were arranged. When functioning, they could be used for app insertion. Normally, Noa thought neural interfaces looked like flowers—the tiny drives surrounding the central ports like petals. But like every prisoner in the camp, Ashley had a large, ugly, black polyfiber screw jammed into her interface port. The screw disrupted the flow of electrons between neurons and nanos and completely jammed their wireless transmitters. It was a primitive but very effective way to keep inmates from accessing their neural interfaces and the wider universe with their minds.

  “We have to get ready before the others get up,” Noa whispered.

  Ashley stared at her a beat too long, but then sat up and quietly handed Noa her crutch. Noa slid off the bed and down the ladder, crutch in hand, and waited for Ashley. When Ashley had first arrived at the camp, she had a cybernetic limb, her ‘augment,’ having lost her left leg to an accident as a teenager. The guards had ripped the leg off on Ashley’s arrival—no anesthesia, of course. Noa scowled in the darkness, anger bubbling in her gut on Ashley’s behalf. Noa’s thumb went to the stumps of the fingers on her left hand—her ring finger and pinky had been removed for different reasons than Ashley’s leg, but at least Noa’s “surgery” had been quick.

  Ashley stumbled over the side of the bed, and Noa helped her down the ladder. Instead of giving Ashley her noisy wooden crutch, Noa swung Ashley’s arm over her shoulder. Together they went to the corner of the room. There was a waste bin there reeking of vomit. As they drew close, a few scrawny rats scrambled out over the edge. Ashley gasped, and Noa put a finger to her lip for silence as the filthy creatures darted into t
he shadows.

  Holding back her bile, Noa gave Ashley her crutch, released her, and then rolled the waste bin to the side. Ashley immediately went to her good knee and lifted a small piece of floorboard. She pulled out a sack and carefully unwrapped it.

  Inside were a few pieces of bread they’d painstakingly saved over the last two weeks. There were also a few tools in the bundle. Ashley was a cybernetics engineer. Noa wondered if it was her engineering ability, as much as her cybernetic leg, that had gotten her thrown in the camp. Noa’s hand fluttered up to her interface; almost everyone but the most strident fundamentalist Luddecceans were augmented in some way or another in this day and age.

  “It’s all here,” Ashley whispered, snapping Noa back to the present.

  Noa’s bunk mate had created the tools in the bundle from bits of glass, scavenged wire, and castaway cybernetic parts. Along with a precious pair of pliers to remove the bolt, there was also, miracles of miracles, a shattered com chip that Ashley had cemented together with nail polish she’d stolen from a guard. The size of a fingernail, the com chip glittered in the low light. Slipping the chip into a neural drive would give Ashley or Noa the ability to listen to the restricted frequencies the Luddecceans were using.

  “Well done, Ashley,” Noa whispered, patting the woman’s shoulder. She couldn’t help but notice that Ashley was trembling. Outside, she heard guards talking to one another, debating who would wake up which barracks. “Tie it up, and be ready,” Noa said. “As soon as people start waking, we offer to take corpse patrol.” No one wanted corpse patrol—it meant being last in the breakfast line—among other things.

  Visibly shaking, Ashley replaced the board. Noa quickly rolled the waste bin back over it, and helped Ashley up.

  Outside, she heard the guards laughing and their footsteps approaching. Any moment they’d come in.