Ensign Probus

by Wendie Nordgren

  Drex took a small visual displacement shield from his pocket. “This device will render you invisible. You will remain within a foot of me. When we leave, I will open the transport door, pause to look around for dangers, and while I do, you will get in and move to the next seat so that I may sit with no one the wiser. Do you understand?”

  Henry nodded.

  In a smooth motion, Drex attached the device to him and activated it. Then, he escorted me back to my seat.

  “Is everything okay?” Phillip asked.

  “Yes, I just had the urge to lick icing from Drex’s face and didn’t want to offend your delicate sensibilities.” I winked at Phillip who thought nothing of it and went back to stuffing his face.

  Getting Henry into our transport went off without a hitch, and after we had boarded our ship, Drex made him visible which proved to be more of a challenge than making him invisible. He had to find the device on an invisible man who had never before used the shielding and couldn’t do more than guide his hands to it.

  Phillip stared at him for a moment in shock before recognizing him. “Henry, you look like shit! What the hell happened to you?”

  “He’s bleeding,” I said, seeing dark-red blood on the side of his tan work shirt.

  Henry broke down, but Phillip took over and ushered him into the lift and up to the Infirmary. Of course, I followed, and Drex and my team followed me. Jazon took the ladies to the Imperial Deck. I had a feeling he’d already learned all to be known from Henry’s mind, and from his expression he didn’t like it. Phillip got Henry up onto an exam bed. Dr. Savelli hurried to assist. As Henry’s clothing was removed, several severe injuries were revealed, including blaster shots.

  “What happened?” I asked from as close as the doctors would allow me to get.

  “They’re trying to kill me to shut me up like they killed everyone else! Please, you’ve gotta help me. The Enforcers are in on it, and so is the Militia. They’ll kill me.” Tears streaked his face.

  Phillip injected him with a tranquilizer. “Hey, calm down, buddy. You’re safe. We’ve got you,” Phillip said reassuringly. “Slow down and tell us about it.” While he spoke, Phillip wiped tears and blood from Henry’s face. He looked feverish and like he hadn’t eaten for several days.

  Both doctors worked to stabilize him and treat his injuries. I cringed when Dr. Savelli cut his dirty, bloodied shirt from him revealing a piece of shrapnel embedded in his side.

  “How did this happen?” Phillip asked in a calm, gently inquisitive tone. The wound looked infected.

  Dr. Savelli applied a numbing agent, and Phillip got to work removing it. The tranquilizer had started to take effect, and Dr. Savelli placed an IV in Henry’s arm. Henry’s eyes began to glaze over as he relaxed. He said, “A few months back, I took a job. Got hired as a crewman on a merchant vessel, a big one. The Captain did supply runs for some unsavory individuals, if you catch my drift, but I kept my mouth shut and my head down because the credits were good. We were heading out and hadn’t even left the sector when something hit us. I don’t know what the fuck it was. I was in the cargo hold finishing up when we started listing hard to port. Internal stabilizers had been shot to hell. Unsecured crates and supplies came crashing down on me. Out the viewport, I saw a ship. I didn’t know if it was coming to our aid or attacking, but I saw a beam touch it. A green light washed over it, and it was just fucking gone. Just like that. Gone. Sirens in the ship were blaring. Abandon ship lights were flashing. I could hear the hull screaming like it was being torn to shreds, like a wild thing dying. I crawled out from under some crates and got my ass into an escape pod.”

  I looked away while Phillip pulled a piece of shrapnel from his side. He said, “That’s the last of it.”

  Dr. Savelli said, “I’ll close it up.” He sterilized the wound and applied nanites to it.

  Henry groggily said, “The escape pods landed out in the desert somewhere. I thought help would come, but some badass dudes with military grade weapons showed up. They shot the Captain in the head. I couldn’t believe it. I watched his brains fucking slide in chunks down his escape pod. It wasn’t a rescue. It was a fucking slaughter. They were executing the bridge crew, one by one. I closed my pod so it would look like a dud and hid. I wasn’t the only one with that idea. We all split up and got to a town, but they hunted us down. They fucking hunted us and kept killing. Shit.” He tried to run his fingers through his hair but found his arm hooked to an IV and let his arm go back to rest on the medical bed.

  “A female, I didn’t know her but had seen her in the mess hall, ran to the Enforcers for help. A crowd was there, so I thought we were saved, but I was feeling paranoid so I hung back. They took her to their offices, and a short time later, those dudes with the guns showed up. I don’t know if they killed her or not. I hid and slowly made my way back here. It was hard to travel with no credits and hiding the whole time, but I made it and came back here, and that’s when I saw your ship and watched for you, Phillip, and Yukihyo.”

  Drex asked, “What was the name of your ship?”

  Henry said, “She was the Asylum.”

  Drex took a biometric read from Henry. “Tell me the name of the city in which the Enforcers took custody of the female crew member.” After Henry told him, he entered the information into his vid-screen, and I knew what our next mission would be. Drex said to Henry, “You are safe here. Stay aboard, follow orders, and don’t contact anyone.” Turning to my team and me, he said, “Ensigns, you’re with me.”

  Phillip nodded to me. “Go on. We’ve got him. Henry’s about to take a nap.”

  My team and I followed Drex into the lift. In a conference room on the Command Deck, he ordered us to locate and map desert regions near the city where the female crew member of the Asylum had last been seen with the Enforcers.

  Had the soldiers, who Henry had seen, taken the female crew member or had they gotten the Enforcers to make her disappear? One thing was certain. Henry had seen too much, and if those men found him, they would kill him.

  I said, “We have something in common with Henry. We don’t know who we can trust.”

  Clark said, “You’re wrong. We can trust each other.”

  I rolled my eyes at him and asked, “Were you fucking listening? I said, ‘We have something in common.’ The ‘we’ refers to all of us. Why are you acting all high and mighty?”

  Clark said, “I’m not. I was trying to make a fucking point about how we’re a team but also family. What crawled up your ass?”

  I flipped Clark off and sat on the chair he held out for me.

  “I’d love to,” he said.

  “Oh, I know you would. Allow me to clarify. We,” I motioned around the room at all of us who were present, “can trust each other. We can’t trust the Militia or the Enforcers.”

  Drex asked, “Not even Quaid and Eric?” He watched me with dark, empty eyes. They reminded me of shark eyes.

  On Tora, we had joked in the past about Eric and Quaid being sharks and me being a baby seal. Maybe, it was true. Perhaps, Quaid had been playing me throughout our courtship and marriage, but he’d grown tired of the game. He couldn’t concentrate on his mission while keeping my Omnes Videntes out of his mind. He didn’t want them or me knowing the truth. He was using me. He had to be. Was Eric playing the same game? Had they been ordered to do so? The Galaxic Militia was their life. Eric barely knew me, even if we were family. I had a feeling I knew who he’d always put first, and it sure wasn’t me.

  Clark snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Are you an ensign or a princess today? Get to work.”

  I scowled at him, picked up my vid-screen, and sent Terre a quick message to go on with their plans today without me. Then, I turned my full attention to the task at hand. Henry had given us the break in the case that we needed. Drex taught us how to trace humanoid DNA from the scene of a crime all the way to the point where it revealed the aggressor. However, today, we had to trace it from the victim back to the location of the
degrading crime scene. Several days had passed since the ships had vanished and the escape pods had landed. The biometric scan Drex had taken provided us with a map of the victim’s movements and did a lot to narrow down the possibilities. Drex taught us how to enter the information into our probes. We were going to hunt Henry from the town and out into the desert where the probes had landed.

  I asked, “Henry suspects the Enforcers and the Militia are in on the attack of the Asylum. How else would the escape pods have vanished from all orbital records? They reentered Earth’s atmosphere, but there’s no record of it? Come on.” I said incredulously. “Someone on the inside made those readings vanish. Otherwise, I would have known about this location when I was on Arachne after Uncle Lee gave me the data chip.”

  Clark gave me a look similar to the one I had given him earlier. Clearly, everyone had already come to that conclusion.

  Drex said, “Gear up. Meet me in the flight bay in twenty minutes.”

  “What about Eli and the others?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we tell them?”

  Drex tried to hide his annoyance before I saw it, but through our bond I could feel it, and it made me feel stupid. The looks I got from my team didn’t help. Drex said, “Rovek isn’t present, so I’ll pretend like you didn’t just question an order.”

  I blushed when I realized what I had done. I needed to keep my roles better separated in my own mind.

  Drex said, “Dearest One, my team and a few guards are already there. Jazon reported Henry’s thoughts to us before we boarded the ship. We never waste time during an investigation, but you and your team still need to learn and are being included. The shadow trails behind. It does not lead.”

  Sensing my dismayed feeling at having been left out, he took my hand and placed it on his arm. “Hurry and change. Demonstrate your ability to utilize what you have just learned and make me proud.”

  On the Imperial Deck, I discovered that my ladies had foregone the adventure we had planned for the day, a visit to Paris, and rescheduled due to rain. Instead, they were busy working on our costumes for the Day of the Dead celebration. Tracy kept the ladies distracted, knowing I didn’t have time to try on anything they were making. Jazon and Kaoti waited for me by the lift. I was surprised they hadn’t gone with the team that had already tracked down the escape pods. Each of the men wore fatigues and had weapons strapped to every part of themselves. I snorted as I imagined tiny blasters strapped to their dicks.

  Knowing my thoughts, Jazon chuckled.

  “Where’s Thunderdrop?”

  “He’s teaching the spiderling to play ball with Niklos and Poppy,” Kaoti replied.

  “Aww, how sweet! That’s so cute!”

  “Indeed. Now, let’s go find residual brain tissue.” Kaoti gave me his sweet smile.

  I swallowed down bile and followed them from the lift and over to fighter ships where I was directed to sit in the passenger seat behind Kaoti. Not getting to fly put me in a bad mood. Kaoti didn’t care. He kept a hand on me until I was safely seated. I asked, “What’s the point of us even going if they are already there?”

  Kaoti asked, “What is the point of studying to be an Inquisitor if there are already Inquisitors?”

  I made a gagging noise.

  Sliding into the pilot’s seat, Kaoti said, “Don’t make sounds like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It sounded like you had a dick stuck in your throat.”

  I threw my head back and laughed.

  In our helmets, I heard Dario saying, “On my mark.” Then, a signal blared, and every fighter in my docking bay took off. I realized then why Kaoti was piloting.

  I said, “This is a coordinated effort. Teams are flying off in different directions so the Militia has a harder time tracking us.” I watched while fighters spilled out of Cormac’s ship like angry hornets leaving a nest.

  “Very good. The next step will be to track down the men who hunted the survivors of the Asylum. If we can find their base of operations, we’ll have them.”

  Beneath my shirt, I could feel the sphere practically humming with eager anticipation. “Do you think we’ll find this alien being’s other half there?”

  “Perhaps.”

  I stopped talking and paid attention to Kaoti’s piloting skills.

  He said, “Check yourself, Cedrenus.”

  I couldn’t see what my teammate had done, but he must have corrected it.

  A short time later, Kaoti landed our fighter on a barren cement airfield that looked like it hadn’t been used in centuries. It was in the middle of nowhere. Scraggly bushes grew out of the sandy ground, and tumbleweed rolled across it in the distant horizon. Heavily armed Inquisitors patrolled the area. Several other fighters were nearby. A soldier drove a roller from a stealth vessel and over to us. Then, he got out of it and saluted Kaoti.

  “Get in,” my bodyguard ordered.

  I sat on the passenger seat.

  Drex strode over to us and said, “Alright. You are searching for the murders of the Asylum’s crew. What do you do?”

  Knowing the question was rhetorical, I removed my probe from my pack and activated it. We were only a few miles away from the desert where the escape pods had landed, so my probe was able to pick up the faint trace of Henry’s biometric trail. I tracked it and told Kaoti the coordinates. The guys were getting to ride hover bikes and wore helmets. I frowned as I watched them race past us on their way to the site.

  Kaoti said, “Buckle up.” He waited. He would stubbornly sit there all day until I obeyed. Once I was secure in my seat, he drove across the hard ground at a sedate pace. I imagined the cacti could move faster.

  I couldn’t even see my team’s dust. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, speed up.”

  Kaoti ignored me and drove how he wanted.

  Annoyed with him and his driving, I tried to learn what I could from my readings. That was when something odd caught my attention. “Hey. Wait a minute. Stop.”

  “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

  “No. Look at this.” My screen’s scanner kept getting fuzzy each time it swept over a particular small area off to our right.

  Kaoti took it from me, examined the anomaly for himself, and then spoke into his communicator. After reporting our deviation, he let me direct him while he drove to check it out. “Stay put,” he ordered when we arrived.

  Humoring him, I stayed in my seat and continued scanning. Then, I felt heat rise in my cheeks. I was probably being stupid. On my scans, it was small enough to be an old piece of tin. It was probably an ancient soda can. Sand whipped up on the horizon. Someone was coming our way and fast.

  “Kaoti!” I called out in warning.

  “I know.”

  From within the sandstorm, two hunky Inquisitors on hover bikes appeared. Their muscles bulged, stretching out their short sleeves. I smiled sensing Eli. Powering down, he removed his black helmet and approached Kaoti. I blanched when the other male’s identity was revealed. It was Inquisitor Cormac Gordian, and he’d brought a case with him. Somehow, I doubted it was full of fudge. Kaoti came back to me and drove us in the direction from which Eli and Cormac had come.

  “Well, what was it, an aluminum can?”

  “No, and I want you to learn from this. You were disappointed to be trailing behind your team, but don’t you remember? During the cadets’ training activity, racing to find their beacons got most of them caught. It can benefit an Inquisitor to be slow and methodical. Had we been speeding along, you wouldn’t have found a small piece of wreckage which I was able to identify as having belonged to the Good Fortune.”

  His words hit me like ice water.

  “I’m sorry, Teagan, but whatever weapon caused the damage I noted to the metal of the hull, changing its molecular signature, would have left no survivors.”

  I felt remorse for the Lee family’s loss and for a family member who I had never even gotten the chance to meet. From what Henry had told us, the Good Fortune had probably seen a ship in distress and gone
to render aid. They’d been caught and destroyed for it.

  Kaoti slowed to a stop, got out, and walked around to my side to help me from the roller. He said, “Concentrate on your task.”

  I looked around. “There’s nothing here.”

  “An attempt was made to destroy all evidence to hide the truth. Such is usually the case where a crime has been committed. Your job is to uncover it.”

  My team was going over the area in a standard grid search pattern. Reinitiating my probe, I began my own search for trace amounts of humanoid DNA. Like my teammates, I found the faintest traces and ran them through our genetic databases until I had matches for a few members of the Asylum’s crew and enough proof to corroborate Henry’s story.

  “Should we assume they’re all dead?” I asked.

  Rovek said, “Henry survived. Never assume anything. Always find irrefutable proof.”

  I felt an odd desire to put a little distance between myself and everyone else. I was still under several sets of watchful eyes, but I started scanning an area of ground which was undisturbed by the boot prints of Inquisitors. After a few minutes, my probe’s scanner detected something. I ran the genetic sequence, but it didn’t show up as a match for any of Henry’s crewmembers. “Rovek, what’s this?” I called out. I waited while he walked over to me.

  Then, he ran his own scans, crouching and analyzing the hard, cracked ground. “This had to be deliberate.”

  Kaoti came over to crouch at his side and took his own readings.

  I looked over his shoulder. “Saliva? You know what my babies say, spit happens.” Whatever the two of them seemed to have figured out, I hadn’t gotten it yet.

  Kaoti said, “A highly trained, covert operative would never leave evidence behind. Either they are setting a trap for us, or they are planning an ambush.”

  “Who? Who are they?” I asked.

  Rovek said, “Teagan, run it through the criminal genetic databases.”

  Doing as he ordered, my knees turned to jelly, and I dropped toward the ground. Kaoti caught me and held me steady until the shock faded. “No, it can’t be. They’re dead.”