by R S Penney
Keli waited without speaking.
When the silence became uncomfortable, Rajel cleared his throat. “Adren is dangerous. It's for your own safety.”
“I see.”
“I'm serious.”
A wry grin blossomed on Keli's face, followed by soft laughter that made the man step back. “I'm sure you are,” she said. “If you wish to observe the interrogation, I have no objections.”
She turned away from him, gliding toward Adren's cell at the end of the corridor. In seconds, Rajel was moving past her, pressing his hand against the panel on the wall and opening the door.
Inside, she found a cell almost identical to the one that had been used to cage Isara. Adren had a table, some chairs and a bed in the corner. A tablet had been provided with reading material to prevent him from succumbing to boredom.
The man stood with his back to the entrance, dressed in the usual gray prison garb. Dark hairs on the back of his head curled over the collar that encircled his neck. “So, you decided to take my offer.”
Keli was not surprised by his ability to sense who had come through the door. The collar prevented him from lashing out with his talent, but he would still be able to pick up the odd telepathic impression if he didn't strain too hard. Enough to sense the flavour of her mind anyway.
She stepped into the cell, heeled boots clicking on the floor, and made her way to the small table. “I've decided to indulge my curiosity,” she said. “Whether or not that will result in a plea deal depends on what you offer.”
She sat down, arranging her skirts, and then fixed her gaze upon his back. “Before we begin, I should remind you that you have the right to have an attorney present,” she said. “Though I'm told you waived it.”
Adren whirled around, smiling at her like an eager young man on his first date. “I have indeed,” he said. “You're going to be poking around in my mind. There seems to be no point in having a lawyer here if I'm just going to surrender my secrets anyway.”
“I'd like to know why.”
That came from Rajel.
The young Justice Keeper paced deeper into the cell – the door sliding shut once he was no longer in the threshold – and leaned his shoulder against the wall. His smile was nothing short of menacing. “Why are you suddenly so eager to cooperate.”
Adren shrugged. “What do I gain by resisting?”
Sinking into the chair with arms folded, Keli turned her face up to the ceiling. “All right,” she began. “Why don't we start with a detailed account of how you got here? What ship brought you?”
“Touch my mind,” Adren said. “Find out.”
Keli's first reaction was to insist that she had no desire to experience his thoughts again, but she quickly thought better of it. This interrogation session was being recorded to ensure that Adren's rights were being respected. If the man wanted to give permission for her to poke around in his mind, why not take the opportunity.
She closed her eyes and concentrated, reaching out with her senses, focusing on the images that floated off Adren's body like little puffs of steam. Each one a distinct thought. She had to push past the surface, but she found no resistance. Adren's desire to commune with her was sincere.
Keli was pulled into a memory, finding herself in the narrow corridor of a ship that hummed as its engines powered down. She braced a hand on either wall when something jostled the small craft, the touch of metal rough against her fingers.
Wetting her lips, Keli shut her eyes and forced herself to remain calm. “Where are we?” she demanded. “Is this the ship that brought you to Leyria?”
She turned around.
Adren was right there, leaning one shoulder against the wall to her left, completely nonchalant about all of this. “One of several,” he admitted. “This one brought me across the border, into Leyrian Space. It was called the Raveira.”
“How did you get on board?”
With a cheeky little grin, Adren let his head bob from side to side. “Stowed away,” he said. “It wasn't so hard. Just sneak into the cargo hold, keep quiet and mask your presence from anyone who comes down to check the supplies.”
“This doesn't look like the cargo hold.”
“No,” Adren said. “I came up for the battle.”
“Battle?”
His grin made her very uneasy, and the way he looked at her…Keli had to fight the urge to punch him. It wouldn't hurt in this simulated reality – not much, anyway – but it would be satisfying. “We were harassed by a Leyrian border patrol,” Adren explained. “They were quite convinced that we were shipping weapons.”
Pressing a hand against the wall on either side of her, Keli held herself upright as the ship swayed. She tossed her head about. “Why would an Antauran ship be carrying weapons across the Leyrian border? There are no Antaurans to use them.”
“It seems that some of your new friends became convinced that Antauran terrorist cells were operating on the Fringe Worlds.”
“And what did they find when they searched this ship?”
Adren practically giggled, stumbling back as another blast shook them and almost falling on his ass. “Medical supplies!” he exclaimed. “Antibiotics developed on Antaur that we gave to Leyria as part of the treaty we signed twenty years ago.”
The memory dissolved to mist, metal walls collapsing, the floor vanishing beneath her feet. Before Keli could protest, the mist solidified into trees and dirt and rocks, colour bleeding into the new setting. She recognized it.
The forest where Adren had been hiding.
Turning slowly on the spot, Keli felt creases in her brow. “Why are we here?” she asked, glancing from side to side. “Why bring me to this-”
A blurry, indistinct creature came at her, flowing around trees and over small clefts in the ground. The noise it made was something between a moan and a breath that came scraping out of its lungs. And despite the open sky above, it echoed as if they were deep inside a cave.
Keli's mouth worked soundlessly. Then she gave her head a shake. “No. I'm not wasting time on this.” The creature was still coming but she refused to pay it any mind. “Take us back to the ship.”
“It can sense you,” Adren said. “It wants you.”
“Take us back to the ship!”
The Overseer loomed over Keli from the narrow space between two trees, then bent to bring its face within inches of hers. Like a child inspecting a bug. She could almost see glimpses of two glowing eyes. It shouldn't have frightened her so much; it wasn't real.
It wasn't real…
…Was it?
Gods above, could this be an actual Overseer making telepathic contact with her mind? Perhaps using Adren as some kind of relay? There was no way to know the extent of their telepathic abilities. Keli couldn't even begin to guess.
Adren stepped up beside her with a smile on his face, reaching out to gently pat the Overseer the way one might caress the long face of a horse. “It can sense your power, you know,” he mumbled. “It knows that there hasn't been a telepath as strong as you in over five generations.”
“Take us back to the ship!”
“Serve them,” Adren said. “And they will make you a queen.”
Keli ripped herself out of the memory. It felt like being shoved back into her body, hit with a sudden jolt of sensation. She was back in the cell, and she nearly fell out of the chair before she gained control of herself.
To her surprise, Rajel was kneeling at her side, holding her hand between both of his. By the look on his face…He was genuinely concerned. “Are you all right?” There was no venom in his voice. “What did he do to you?”
Adren was slumped against the wall, bent double and rubbing his temples with the tips of his fingers. “They want you,” he whispered. “Just you. They told me as much. You can't escape them, Keli.”
“I can try.”
With deliberate slowness, Keli rose from her chair, pressed her lips together and nodded to the man. “I think this little ruse of yours has gone far enough,�
�� she said. “You can rot in this cell for all I care.”
She turned abruptly, paced to the door and waited for it to open. When it did, she left the cell with no intention of ever returning.
The quarters that Captain Desarin had assigned her felt a bit cramped to Anna, and that was made worse by the near-constant presence of Cassiara Seyrus. Having the other woman along for this trip was a plus – being able to bounce ideas off someone else made it easier to analyze what scant evidence they had from Jack's sensor logs – but Anna just couldn't get past the fact that she was stuck sharing a room with Jack's most recent ex. Or whatever it was they were to each other.
There were times when she looked at Cassi and found herself imagining the things this woman might have done with Jack in the months when Anna had been keeping her distance. It made her uneasy…And a little jealous.
After twenty minutes of looking over the data from Jack's shuttle, Anna wanted to groan. She had reviewed the sensor logs multiple times, poured over those readings in excruciating detail, and still she had very little of use.
Anna had claimed the small desk on the wall opposite the “bedroom” while Cassi sat on one of the couches with her knees apart and her wrists hanging limp as she inspected the carpet. The woman had grown frustrated with this activity. Anna couldn't blame her, but she had found that most cases were ready to crack wide open if you only found the right nugget of information to use as a wedge. Once again, she reviewed the data logs, this time only skimming through their contents.
Anna lounged in a chair, reclining so far that she was practically lying down, and held a tablet up in front of herself. “Come take a look at this,” she said, swiveling around. “Tell me what you see.”
Cassi shuffled across the room in a huff.
She snatched the tablet out of Anna's hand, her face pinched with obvious irritation. “I see the same things we've seen a hundred times now,” she grumbled. “The enemy ship comes through the Gate and sends fighters to intercept Jack.”
“Within seconds of arriving.”
Cassi turned her back and began a slow trek around the room, pausing next to the coffee table with one fist on her hip. “Which raises the question of how they located him so quickly,” she said. “Yes, I know…Maybe it's a new scanning technology.”
Squeezing her eyes shut, Anna shook her head. “Unless they've invented an entirely new branch of physics, that shouldn't be possible,” she explained. “Standard radar pings travel at the Speed of Light. Jack was over three light-minutes away. Three minutes there, three minutes back…”
“It should have taken six minutes to locate him,” Cassi agreed. “Maybe they used a high-resolution telescope. The light that bounced off Jack's shuttle was already on its way when they came through the Gate.”
With an open mouth, Anna looked up at the ceiling and blinked. “It's possible,” she said. “Our ships also use high-res, broad-spectrum telescopes to take a look around when they drop out of warp, but-”
“I know,” Cassi said. “It was a long shot.”
When their stealth systems were activated, Class-2 assault shuttles used low-energy holograms to refract light and heat traps to reduce thermal emissions. It was possible for a sufficiently-powerful telescope and well-coded algorithms to detect the visual distortion and recognize it for what it was, but that telescope would have to be pointed right at Jack, and she had a hard time believing that it just happened to be looking in the right direction immediately after coming through the Gate.
Cassi perched on one of the couches with her legs folded up, hugging her knees as she shuddered. “Which leaves us with a very uncomfortable conclusion,” she mumbled. “These people can detect our ships at sub-light speeds.”
“More to the point,” Anna added. “What do we do when one of our ships crosses paths with one of theirs?”
The other woman had a distant look in her eyes, the haunted stare of someone who was plagued by uncomfortable thoughts. It was becoming clear to Anna that Cassi wasn't just worried about the potential of a military conflict in which her side was at a distinct disadvantage.
She was worried about Jack.
Anna stood up, breathing out slowly, and used the back of one hand to brush her bangs off her forehead. “I think I'm gonna get a snack,” she said, marching to the door. “Do you want anything?”
“You really love him, don't you?”
The question was like an icicle sliding down the back of her shirt. When she turned, Cassi was watching her with those intense violet eyes. “I can see it so clearly,” she said in a glum voice. “Maybe I always did.”
“Do you love him?”
“Not like that.”
Anna felt her eyebrows rise but said nothing. This really wasn't the right time to get into this conversation. Fortunately, she was spared from more awkwardness by a sudden ping over the ship's intercom. “Operative Lenai, Agent Seyrus,” Captain Desarin's voice came through the speaker. “Maybe you want to come to the bridge? We've arrived.”
Chapter 21
The bridge of a Phoenix-Class cruiser was not a large room, but it was big enough for about a dozen crew members to work comfortably. In the exact centre, the captain's chair faced a curved screen of SmartGlass along the front wall.
That chair was occupied by Morris Desarin, who looked very much like the image of authority with his elbow on the armrest. He stroked his chin thoughtfully, eyes fixed dead ahead.
Directly in front of him, the pilot had her back turned as she scanned the readouts of her console, her hands dancing over its surface. A small woman with a bun of brown hair under a black cap to match her uniform, she abruptly sat up straight. “We'll be arriving at the specified coordinates in ten seconds,” she announced.
At the back of the bridge, near several rear-facing consoles that analyzed sensor data, Anna waited with her hands clasped in front of herself. Her heart was thumping at a steady rhythm. Not racing, but not relaxed either. She was quite aware of the tightness in her belly. This felt very much like the kind of anticipation she often experienced before going into battle. Hopefully, it wouldn't come to that.
Cassi was at her side, standing almost at attention, her gaze fixed upon the screen. “Here we go,” she murmured with so little volume it was unlikely anybody else heard it.
The screen darkened to display what appeared to be an endless tunnel with a single point of light in the distance, a point of light that came no closer no matter how far they traveled. Without warning, it split apart into millions of tiny white flecks that spread out around their ship, surrounding them on all sides.
One dot grew larger than the others, turned blue and then hung there in the distance, beckoning them onward with soft pulses. Millions of kilometers away, it still felt like it should have been able to sear this room to ash in seconds.
The Oniara star.
“Tactical report,” Desarin ordered.
A young man at a station behind the captain's chair spread his hands across his console and checked the readouts. Tall and handsome with light brown skin and a dark goatee, he drew in a nervous breath before answering. “No ships detected, and no warp trails either.”
“That doesn't mean anything,” Anna cut in without invitation. “Our scanning tech becomes unreliable at distances of more than about fifteen light-seconds, but the enemy has clearly found a way to overcome that limitation.”
The captain grunted.
He turned slowly in his chair, facing Anna with a stern expression, and then nodded his agreement. “I share your concerns, Operative Lenai,” he said. “Have you determined how they were able to accomplish this?”
Anna backed away from him with her arms folded, then leaned her weight against the bulkhead. “Not yet,” she answered, shaking her head. “I haven't seen anything in the shuttle's sensor data to indicate an active scan.”
“Troubling.”
“To say the least.”
With surprising speed, the captain whirled around to face the s
creen, pressed his hands to the armrests of his chair and rose slightly. “We have Agent Hunter's last known position,” he said. “I suggest we start there.”
“It will take approximately two minutes to reach those coordinates at 0.25C,” the pilot informed him.
“Let's do it.”
The trip required another brief warp jump – there was no way of reaching such speeds with conventional engines, and even if it were possible, the relativistic effects would not be fun – but it wasn't long before they were scanning the spot where Jack had battled the enemy fighters.
The tension in Anna's chest became a fist squeezing her heart. She knew there was little hope of finding anything that would help them track down the battlecruiser, but she kept hoping that if she just did her part, maybe the pieces would fall into place. It was a faint hope. A pointless hope. Somehow, she could already tell this would be a fruitless exercise.
“Anything?” Captain Desarin asked.
The young officer at one of the rear stations – a handsome young man with tanned skin and dirty-blonde hair – shook his head. “Long-range scanners picked up some debris about two million kilometers from here.”
“From the shuttle?”
“We're too far off to tell.”
Another warp jump and another two minutes where Anna felt as if a black hole had formed in the pit of her stomach, and then they were scanning the debris field. When the captain ordered a visual display, the screen lit up with what appeared to be the starboard wing of Jack's shuttle.
Anna went pale, her head sinking with some terrible weight. “Bleakness take me,” she whispered. “Please let him be all right.” Knowing Jack's shuttle had been damaged in battle and actually seeing the wreckage were two very different things. The possibility of his death suddenly seemed much more real.
The pilot swiveled around to face her commanding officer. She was a lovely young woman with bronze skin and large almond-shaped eyes. “The debris appears to be caught in the star's gravity,” she said. “On its current path, it will be consumed in a little under two years.”
Desarin leaned back against the seat cushion, mopping a hand over his face. “Bring it aboard,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Let's see if there's anything that we can learn about the people who attacked Agent Hunter.”
