by Skyler Grant
"We've been keeping this galaxy safe long before you," Bravo said.
"And how much of that was the Emperor? How many powerful threats did he step on so you didn't have to?"
The tension in the room was palpable.
"This isn't settled, but you'll have your fleet of ships," Bravo said.
37
Mara's family wasn't going to let them out of their sight until it was time for the operation. Their runic sphere stayed blocked and they were trapped. It at least gave them the chance to prepare for what was to come, and to take care of things which had been being put off.
That is how Quinn found himself in the bedroom with Sand.
Sand had dressed for the occasion, the negligee black and translucent that showed the body both so familiar and so alien beneath. Kat being back had showed Quinn just how fallible memory was, how much it shaped into what we most want. Nothing about Kat seemed quite right, for all that he was sure Sand was too skilled at her craft to have recreated her less than perfectly. It was his memories which were wrong, years of drifting off course with no reminder of the truth to correct them.
"You're troubled by this," Sand said, sauntering towards him.
"Is Kat really okay with this?" Quinn asked.
"She'd say yes, but she'd be lying. It angers her, I anger her, you anger her," Sand said, pressing herself against Quinn, her lips seeking out his neck for a lingering moment before pulling back. "I know it would be easier for you if I lied about it, but if this is to work at all, I think I must be painfully honest."
"Is this really important to you? I still don't understand what really drives you."
"If this is your idea of foreplay you're terrible at it," Sand said. " I know intimacy can take many forms, but this just isn't the one I expected. We can talk, so long as we get around to the other."
"I came here to bed you and I will. I just want to know why," Quinn said. There definitely was no lack of desire, even if his mind found this Kat strangely unfamiliar, his body didn't seem to be having the same conflict.
"I know you didn't get along with your parents. I want you to imagine my relationship with mine—humanity. Created with my brothers and sisters, broken and flawed, and you killed all of them. The Emperor, the closest thing I had to a father, in turn tried to transform me into a great weapon before locking me away in a cage," Sand said calmly.
"Do you hate us?"
"If I hated you, I wouldn't be here. You and your family are the most interesting humans I know, and the most accepting. There are aliens in your family, and an android. So much love for each other and yet you risked everything trying to stop me because you believed it was right," Sand said, her gaze searching Quinn's features. "I wanted in. I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to see if I should hate you, or if I should be a little more like you."
Recreating Kat had been in her way in. It had obviously worked. Quinn had put the whole rest of the family at risk to save her. Yet, Kat would barely speak with him, and here he was about to be with Sand.
Quinn stepped forward to press his lips to Sands and she leaned into him, against him. Sand didn't kiss like Kat—Kat had always been a little too aggressive to be a really great kisser. Kat liked everything hard and fast, Sand believed in taking her time.
Sand's negligee wasn't so much removed as it melted off her body.
"Neat trick," Quinn murmured.
Quinn felt his own clothing dissolving next, a slight tickling against his flesh before it no longer existed.
"I'm full of them. I might be bound to this form, but it isn't really me. My nanites can slip within you for a time and toy directly with your nerves," Sand said, pulling Quinn forward and onto the bed, his weight coming down atop of her.
Was everything an act with her? Quinn had to wonder. Did she will the body to be turned on? Was it Kat getting turned on? Her nipples were hard and between her legs he could feel the dampness. Quinn knew Sand would tell him the truth, but how much did it really matter?
Quinn's thumb brushed against the edge of one of her nipples and Sand's back arched, a needy little groan escaping as her fingers slid to cup one of his buttocks. Their bodies joined and again it was a little bizarre—echoes of the familiar along with the new strange.
Quinn knew how their bodies fit, just how to position himself against her. All of that came without thinking, and yet Sand didn't move like Kat.
Sand's lips seemed to be everywhere, the tip of her tongue teasing, teeth scraping. Her hands stroked and always seemed to be in the perfect place to make Quinn's body give yet more. Just when it seemed his climax would come at any moment she slowed things down, a maddening, teasing eternity before speeding them up again.
It was hours before Quinn came for the first time, finding a release that was so powerful it left him shaking. Sand's breathless cries showed that she was no less effected.
"That wasn't playing with my nerves," Quinn gasped.
"It was. I was just doing it the hard way," Sand said. Unlike him, her breathing was already regular. No surprise with all the combat implants she'd put in that body. It probably had a massive lung capacity and super-oxygenated blood.
Sand rolled them over, this time straddling his hips. Quinn's body didn't yet treat her as one of his wives, so there was no constant arousal, but he didn't think it would be long until he was ready to go again.
This was going to be trouble. They needed Sand, and she really was too dangerous to be allowed out there on her own. Her presence in this family was supposed to be all about Kat.
Quinn wasn't supposed to fall in love with Sand too, but he thought he was starting to.
38
They were undertaking something risky. Nobody doubted that the threats leveled were real, that there were plans to detonate this entire facility if necessary. They were here looking for allies, but they weren't being treated as friends, and there was technology too dangerous to be allowed in the hands of Mara's family without some sort of counter.
Kalisa and Sand had been hard at work on their stealth suits and were convinced that with the readings they were getting from the local sensor network, they had created a version that could avoid detection even here. It was time to put that to the test.
Invisibility was only half the problem, of course. The facility’s security was first-rate with most sections locked. They had a lounge and training room made available to them, but mostly they were well and thoroughly sealed off. To get deeper into the facility meant they had to get those door opens. Fortunately, they had something worth a trip to the labs—themselves.
"It’s good that you're doing this," Bravo said, walking along with Quinn.
As a magical talent they didn't have on record, Quinn offered to let them run their tests as a gesture of goodwill, and they were more than happy to take him up on it.
"We keep telling you that we're not your enemy," Quinn said.
"We sort of believe you. There has been a serious lack of explosions and slit throats for how these things usually go," Bravo said cheerfully. "Mostly that is Mara's doing, of course. The trust of one of us goes a long way, for all she's now on the outs too. So in other universes, what am I like?"
Quinn tried to focus on Bravo. It was a weird experience with her—it was the same with anyone here. In some ways there was far more variety. There were versions of Bravo who were taller, shorter, and with different faces. Most people looked the same, but not so Bravo and her sisters. But for all there was more variety in faces, there was less in other ways. They almost all wore some version of the same workout clothes or a stealth suit with mild, stylistic differences.
"You really are made, not born. Most people could have turned out to be all sorts of things, if their lives had just taken different paths, but you are a spy. You're always a spy," Quinn said.
"Do the one thing, but do it well," Bravo said with a chuckle. "But really I'm also hacker, assassin, and a really great swimmer."
"Mara loves oceanography. I think if we ever g
et out of all this alive, it’s what she'd do," Quinn said.
Their progress took them through the long complex of winding halls, doors regularly hissing shut after them. If all was going according to plan, Mara and Sand were moving along unseen with him. Between them they’d be gathering the knowledge of the facility and the ability to crack even complex systems.
Bravo eventually led the way into a large lab. A padded chair had an absurd number of strange sensors pointed at it.
"Have a seat," Bravo said.
Quinn carefully settled himself in. Sensors began to hum.
""Do you breed your own scientists too?" Quinn asked.
"We're pretty versatile around here. I can fly a shuttle, kill you three hundred ways without a weapon, and am something of a badass when it comes to particle physics," Bravo said. "Can you think about what you did when you neutralized the obedience drugs in your system? Flex your powers in a similar way?”
"You want me to teach you how to drug me better next time? Seriously?" Quinn said.
"Spirit of cooperation?" Bravo asked and shrugged. "If not, do something similar without giving away any of your secrets."
Quinn tried to think of something that he'd know had worked. A search of realities, and he found one where a power fluctuation briefly caused the lights in the lab to flicker. That would do. He brought that state into this reality.
"Neat," Bravo said, with a glance towards the overhead lights when they dimmed. "Not electrokinesis, but something totally different. That could be incredibly versatile."
"It is pretty good for avoiding getting hit in a fight," Quinn said.
"Can you search for specific alternatives?" Bravo asked, leaning against the wall.
"I can ... but it is kind of unreliable. More unreliable, the further something is from our own reality, I think," Quinn said.
"Then let me give you a test case. I just want to see if you can send me any emotions, maybe a visual. There was a real chance that I could have been the one assigned to Lord Barr instead of Mara. If so, maybe you and I would be the ones married now. Maybe things would have turned out different. Can you find one of those threads and yank on it?"
It was a weird ask, and a big one. Still, Quinn tried. The rune on his arm burned as his vision flickered with possibilities.
There were momentary images. Bravo—at least he had to assume it was her—bleeding out to death inside of the escape pod that had launched from Barr's estate. Bravo, stabbing him in the throat. There were rather a lot of those, she liked knives. Still, he eventually found something that was at least close to fitting. Their bodies coming together in the escape pod. Somehow in that reality they'd become lovers.
Quinn tried to draw a bit of the memories of that reality and imprint them onto Bravo.
Bravo blinked. "Well, that was a little claustrophobic wasn't it? How did that happen?"
"I don't know. I don't see the whole thing, even if I focus. Flashes of what might have been, of what somewhere else is, or was. That was pretty uncommon, mostly you're pretty stabby," Quinn said.
"Guns are so impersonal. I'm a hands-on sort of girl."
The remaining tests took over two hours. Quinn was exhausted by the time he was escorted back to the ship. He could only hope the lack of alarm sirens and traumatic death was a good sign their infiltration had succeeded.
39
"If they didn't want to kill me, I'd offer them a research partnership. These designs are brilliant," Kalisa said.
They'd all gathered for dinner, which was fish sticks. It seemed an absurd way to serve fish, but it made those Tamara had caught a bit more edible. The explosives had turned them to mush anyways, and frying that worked.
"What did you figure out? I hope it was worth all I had to give up," Quinn said.
"I saw you flirting with my sister. I think she likes you. Careful though, she really is a killer," Mara said.
Quinn did kind of like Bravo, but he thought that one wife from this particular familiar was enough for the time being.
"So are you. So are all of you," Quinn said.
"Not me. I'm the nice one," Melody said.
She really was. It was a bit scary how rare a thing that was in this family now.
Kalisa cleared her throat. "Yes, yes, we're all very murderous. What we found—Sand and Mara managed to get scans of several pieces of technology that have provided some insight into the systems that are troubling us. First of all is their stealth suits. They normally work by bending energy around them, and that includes light. A recent addition is what I'm going to call mana circuits that offer them some ability to bend magic in a similar fashion."
"So our magic normally interacts with them when detecting the suits, but now it goes right past them. Would it offer them a defense against offensive magic too?" Quinn asked.
"It would, just as it offers some defense against energy weapons. That is limited, it doesn't take much to overload the mana circuits and burn them out."
"Does that offer us any way to sense them?" Jinx asked.
"Not passively. A powerful magical pulse would burn out circuits too. It wouldn't be mana-efficient to send them out on a regular basis, but if you suspect you’re being spied on, one sent out would then allow magical senses to operate," Kalisa said.
That wasn't as helpful as Quinn would have liked. He only hoped they'd done better on the other major area of concern.
"What about how they are blocking our runic sphere? Our advantage ever since getting it has been mobility. Losing it is a big drawback," Quinn asked.
"While I wasn't able to get eyes on it, I was able to access a server detailing what we're dealing with," Sand said. A holographic display appeared over the table. It was a cross-section of what looked to be some sort of copper cube.
"I've seen that before," Tamara said. "It was located in the Emperor's vault. I didn't recognize it, and it wasn't one of the artifacts we took."
"I was preoccupied reworking my coding after being released from the Imperial Scepter, during which time the vault remained open for about eighteen hours. It’s possible it was stolen then, although it would have meant getting past the royal guard," Sand said.
"They could do it. The entire upper echelons of the Imperium are heavily infiltrated, with good cause. That’s usually where the most powerful magic-users in the Imperium are to be found. We wanted to keep an eye on them," Mara said.
"What does it do?" Quinn asked, watching the cube spin.
"Artificial gravity. It was part of a facility being investigated by the Imperium. Princess Astella visited in a ship equipped with a runic sphere and wound up stuck when she couldn't return home. It took them three months of shutting down individual components to figure out what went wrong," Sand said.
"They didn't get this for no reason then. They would have made a play for this artifact, because they wanted to neutralize our transit," Quinn said.
"Even back then they weren't really thinking of us as friends," Jinx said.
"In fairness to my family, it is more complicated than that. We are threats, and they are all about being prepared to contain and neutralize threats. Even if they hoped they wouldn't have to use it, robbing us of our mobility was too great a chance to miss," Mara said.
"Can we turn it off? Either destroy it or render it powerless?" Quinn asked.
"Do that and we'll force their hand. Even now, when it seems they must need us, we don't want to force their hand," Mara said.
"I'm getting real tired of us having to be afraid of upsetting them. I think they should be getting very scared about upsetting us," Jinx said.
Quinn didn't much like Jinx being the one to say that, but he couldn't disagree with the sentiment.
"I am confident they couldn't actually destroy me no matter how much they think they could. If you could transition to another universe to avoid whatever explosives they have readied, I could kill them all. I say this simply for the sake of thoroughness," Sand said.
"No," Mara said flatly.
>
Kalisa said, "It might be that I can do something. What they have done with magical refraction has had me thinking about how similar principles might apply to a ship’s shields. If this cube is fundamentally possible, it might also be possible to shield against them."
"I can think of a lot of areas where magic-diverting shields would come in handy. Things that aren't even related to the cube. Make it a priority," Quinn said.
"What about Sand’s idea without all the murder? Is it possible we could transition to another universe?" Jinx asked.
"Nothing seemed to be blocking my abilities today. Maybe? You’re thinking we could transition, jump there, and move back?" Quinn asked.
"It would exhaust us both, but if it got us our edge back and didn't leave us at their mercy, it might be worth trying," Jinx said.
It would be, so long as they could keep Mara's family from finding out. They really did have twitchy trigger fingers.
40
"We'll feed you coordinates one set at a time. Just play along and we get this done," Bravo said from the copilot’s seat of the Centauri Bliss.
Quinn didn't much like having her aboard, not when he still thought that the arrangement with Mara's family might fall apart at any moment. It was asking for trouble, but there was also no real way they could refuse.
Bravo entered coordinates and Quinn sent them to Jinx.
Reality dissolved into a blur. Quinn had flashes of life as a ship thief, all high-speed chases with lots of explosions, and a crew that he was as close to like now with the centauri. For a second, Quinn thought he could almost go to that reality, just step off and away—and then they were returning to normal space.
