Ghost in the Machine (Corwint Central Agent Files)

by C. E. Kilgore

  Corwint Central Agent Files Book 1:

  Ghost in the Machine

  By C.E. Kilgore

  Copyright ©2012 C.E. Kilgore

  Corwint Central Agent Files Book Series

  Book 1: Ghost in the Machine

  Book 2: Whispers from Exile

  Book 3: Tracing the Stars (Coming Fall 2013)

  Corwint Central Agent Files Side Stories

  Brel - To Even Have Dreams

  Jehdra – According to Plan

  Acknowledgments

  This book is dedicated to several people of my heart who have helped me get to where I am now:

  To my father Miles, who taught me that I can do anything.

  To my high school English teacher Mr. J. Garret, who always encouraged me to write.

  To my best friend and husband, Nathaniel, who has supported me in everything that I do.

  To all those who have touched my life, even in the smallest of ways, and helped me to keep moving forward.

  For updates, information and bonus content,

  visit us at

  www.cekilgore.com

  Table of Contents

  Prologue – Beyond the Glass

  1 Dreams

  2 Central

  3 Zera

  4 Last Star

  5 Make an Exit

  6 Control

  7 Workout

  8 Ghost in the Machine

  9 Plans

  10 Connection

  11 Turn and Burn

  12 Different

  13 Overwhelmed

  14 Black Tea

  15 Chronos

  16 Impaired Judgments

  17 T’jaros

  18 Aftermath

  19 Velstrae

  20 Everything

  21 Jarren

  22 Veltu’azi

  23 Truth

  24 Gokem

  25 Wraith

  26 Tir

  27 Barren

  28 Broken

  29 Adonae Tu

  30 Solukae Noyai

  31 Rapture

  32 Rule Six

  Epilogue – Inkaryk

  Book 2: Whispers From Exile Preview

  Prologue – Beyond the Glass

  The harsh Berian winter wind blew flakes of crystalized snow against the large picture window that made up the back wall of the modest hotel room. Orynn sat on the heated bench seat with her forehead pressed against the cold glass. The reflection of her liquid mercury colored irises stared out at the city street several stories below the room with a disconnected longing. She watched as people walked by in their thick winter attire, clinging to one another against the bitter frost as they entered and exited the warmth of the various shops and restaurants lining the street. A group of children darted between arm linked couples and light posts as they threw mounds of snow at one another. It brought a small smile to her lips as she watched their playing, and before she could stop herself, she let out a quiet laugh.

  “Orynn?” An irritated female voice behind her called her name and brought her out of her thoughts. “Have you heard a single word I just said?”

  Orynn turned her head to the source of the voice. She started to give a dishonest nod to her mother, but the look in her mother’s eyes made her rethink her decision. With a sigh, she tucked a strand of her white hair behind her ear and shook her head. “No, my mother. I am sorry for my disrespect.”

  Tersai let out a long exhale to cool her frustration and stepped closer to her daughter. Her own silver eyes glanced out of the window to see what had taken over her daughter’s attention this time. The scene playing out in the street below made Tersai take in another long breath. Her eyes refocused on the reflection of her and her daughter in the window glass and she saw the sad longing in her daughter’s eyes. In the reflection, they resembled one another closely in appearance, height and even age. To most, they would be seen as sisters and possibly even twins. Despite the appearance, Orynn was much younger. Perhaps still too young.

  “Perhaps it would be best if I did not take you on this mission.”

  Orynn looked back up at her mother pleadingly. “No, please. I am sorry, A’kai.”

  “This will be a much longer mission than our previous ones. It will require us to be around many others on a large ship for a prolonged period of time.” Tersai glanced back out into the street below. “You still want to be part of their lives and that is starting to concern me. How can I be sure that you will be able to cut the connections when it becomes necessary?”

  Orynn frowned. So we are having this conversation again. “You have taught me well. I will be ready and I will do as I have been taught.”

  “Will you?” Tersai stared down into her daughter’s eyes. It was almost like looking at a mirror image, but where her own eyes had grown cold in the face of nearly five hundred years of reality, her daughter’s eyes still held that dangerous flicker of hope that things for them could be different. That hope was something that a Vesparian could not afford. “You are still too young for this. I will contact your sister and she will continue your training while I am away.”

  “No!” Orynn let her anger show through as she stood away from the bench. The last thing she wanted was to be passed over to her sister. Asha would be just as annoyed with the idea of having to stop what she was doing to come and look after her failure of a younger sibling. She didn’t feel like putting up with Asha telling her what a poor Vesparian she was turning out to be. The thought of having to listen to Asha’s arrogant tone only pushed her anger further.

  “That, right there, is what concerns me.” Tersai felt the strong empathic wave of anger emanating from her daughter. “You still have not learned to fully control your emotional aura. If I had been a Common, you may have affected me with your anger.”

  Orynn lowered her eyes and took in a breath to steady her anger. Once again, her mother was right. With a thought, her aura calmed and dissipated. “I am sorry, but A’kai, please. I know that I still have much to learn, but I am one hundred and eighty years old. I am no longer a child who needs to be kept by her sister. I am ready for this.”

  Tersai knew her daughter did indeed have a great deal to learn, but it was not about how to control her empathy. At almost two hundred years of age, Orynn was still considered young by her people’s standards and so her lapse in emotional control from time to time was expected. It was not the real reason Tersai was having second thoughts about taking her daughter with her on this mission. The largest concern was her daughter’s heart. She was still so very much like her father.

  “Look at them, Orynn.” Tersai nodded towards the window and they both stepped closer to look down at the street. “They live such fleeting lives. Even the longer lived races are still just a blink in the eyes of a Vesparian. They try so hard to fill those short lives with so much that it gives them a powerful energy, and I understand how those energies can be so tempting for you. You want to feel it with them and be a part of it. You want to be surrounded by the strength of their joy and their sadness. You want to know them, and you want to be known. You want to exist.”

  “Rule two.” Orynn whispered at her own reflection. “We do not exist, but allow existence to move around us.”

  Tersai wrapped an arm around her daughter’s shoulders and squeezed her gently. “I know it is hard, my daughter. I too have stood where you stand, with my own mother reminding me of our place in this universe. We must stand apart, but remember that what we do is important. What we do helps those people to continue living their lives freely. In a small way, we exist with each of them, even if they must never know it.”

  Orynn thought over her mother’s wor
ds as the glass frosted over with the setting of the sun. The view of the street below and the people moving about their lives became obscured and distorted. She knew that part of what her mother was saying was true. They were doing important work that was helping to keep planets like Berian Two free of the growing influence of the Xen’dari Empire. Still, she could not deny the part of her heart that forever longed to do that work out in the open instead of hidden behind false identities and shallow relationships. Her mother said it was her father’s heart that gave her that longing to make connections with others and be part of existence. He had been a man of Corwint whose lifespan had been just as fleeting as those on the street, and there were times when she wished she had been more like her father in that respect.

  But she was Vesparian, and it was perhaps time she began acting more like one.

  “I understand, my mother.” She turned her eyes back to her mother and nodded with a soft smile. “I understand, and I am ready to allow existence to move around me if it will let us help these people.”

  Tersai smiled and kissed her daughter’s forehead. “I am so proud of you, my daughter.”

  Orynn let the soft warmth of her mother’s aura surround her, but she could not stop her eyes from turning back to the street below them. She may have said the words her mother wanted to hear, but her father’s heart could not be silenced so easily. The way Vesparians lived their lives within a set of rules that governed how they were to move through the universe without existing in it had been in place for a very long time. The longevity of their race made them slow to change, but she felt as if things had to change or one day her people would cease to exist entirely, even from one another. It was a secret fear that she kept for herself, tucked away in her heart along with her secret longing that one day she would be able to walk down the street on a cold winter day and have people smile at her because they knew who she was.

  It was a secret hope that one day she would know real friendship, despite rule three warning against it.

  It was a secret dream that one day she would know the real emotion of love and that it would be her own, even though rule five forbid it.

  That dream and that hope kept her father’s heart beating strongly within her, and despite her desire to make her mother proud, she refused to let him go.

  1 Dreams

  Thirty-five years later.

  Even when he slept, he was awake.

  The mind of a Mechatronic Automaton, which was comprised of a network of constantly firing electrical synaptic pulses that connected the multiple processors required to operate a being as complex as he was, wasn’t prone to going offline. At least not completely.

  He often wondered if the mental activities that occurred while he was in a state of sleep were akin to the dreaming minds of those who were not machines, often referred to as Organics or Breathers, depending on how polite you were intending to be. He, however, never dreamed of walks on the beach, monsters lurking from the shadows, or giving speeches in the nude. Unlike the dreams of Breathers, his thought processes were, what he liked to boast, much more logical. He could spend an entire recharge session working on a calculation needed for improving the intake ratio of their ship’s engine, or mapping the best route to their current destination down to the very smallest speck of space junk floating in the vast void of empty darkness.

  It seemed, to him at least, to be a much better use of time than thinking about some imagined scenario that would, probability speaking, never happen.

  Despite the differences he liked to focus on between his “dreams” and those of the Breathers, one similarity seemed to be undeniable. Being woken up and pulled out of your current thoughts by the insistent beeping of a communicator was one of the biggest annoyances in the universe.

  With a fumbling hand searching for the connect button, the communicator was pushed off the nightstand and onto the pile of clothes below. A muffled voice emanated from the inside of the pant leg where the communicator had landed.

  “Ethan? Are you there?” The male voice on the other end of the communicator was more than a little perturbed. “Ethan? C’mon you big hunk o’scrap, pick up the damn line.”

  Ethan moved his head over to the edge of the bed and looked down at the communicator in his pant leg. He smirked and wondered if he should tell his Captain to kiss his ass while he was in there. Thinking better of it, he reached in and fished out the communicator. Leaning up on one elbow, he looked into the view-screen with a few long calibration blinks of his sapphire blue eyes. “A bit early in the morning to be tossing insults, isn’t it Hank?”

  “Never.” Hankarron Eros’s unshaven face appeared as tired as Ethan felt. The young Captain looked as if he had a bit of a wild night, which was not unusual after being out in space for a few months on assignment. Hank was also a bit of a playboy on the surface, even if Ethan knew it was all a cover. The fact that he looked the part, with his light brown wavy hair, puppy-dog brown eyes and a well-practiced impish smile that made the girls blush, made the guise all the harder to question. Most port guards didn’t think to look twice at a flamboyant spice trader with a well-endowed giggling girl on each arm.

  Sometimes drawing attention to yourself is the most effective way to stay hidden.

  Hank rubbed the stubble on his chin and surveyed the Mecha on the other end of the com unit. He had known Ethan now for twenty-four years. The first day was when he had gotten free of his nursemaid and stumbled onto the bridge of his Uncle Jhonis’s ship. He had bumped head first into Ethan’s leg and the Mecha had picked him up by the seat of his overalls, lifting him over six and a half feet in the air to his eye-level and smirked at him. Since that day, they had gotten into and out of more trouble together than he could count. After Jhonis died, Hank took over the family “business” and Ethan stayed by his side.

  He didn't give a geffarion shit if Ethan was a machine dressed in a synthetic skin to look like a man. With all the poor excuses for men he’d seen in his life, Hank was convinced Ethan was a better man than most, including himself. “You look like shit. Did you not plug in last night?”

  “You’re one to talk.” Ethan rolled into a seating position at the edge of the bed and set the communicator back onto the nightstand, propping it up against the base of a lamp. He planted both feet flat on the hard white tile floor and wiggled his toes. Scratching the back of his neck where his black rooted, dark blue hair started, he looked around and tried to regain his bearings.

  Sleeping in a console seat on a spaceship ninety-nine percent of the time made waking up in a soft bed on a natural gravitational planet a disorienting experience. Flashes of the night before erupted from his memory bank and the smirk re-appeared on his grey-blue lips. “And define ‘plug in’.”

  Hank shook his head and gave a gruff laugh. “Uh-hu, I figured as much. The blonde you left with from the bar?”

  “Red head from the hotel lobby.”

  “Red... geeze, Ethan, you’re worse than I am, you know that?”

  “I should hope so. I’ve been doing this for about fifty years longer.” Ethan stretched his arms out and then up, careful not to knock over the lamp. His inner graphene wrapped, titanium composite core skeletal structure felt stiff, and he found that the muscular bands responsible for his motor functions were operating at less than optimal response times.

  Damn. Perhaps plugging in to a charge station would have been a brighter idea than plugging into the red head.

  He glanced over his shoulder to the other side of the bed and wasn’t surprised to find it not-recently vacated. The infrared heat sensors in his eyes told him it hadn’t been slept in for at least four hours. The faint outline of where the red head’s curvaceous body had been was still visible, but the owner of the outline was long-gone. Her curiosity had been satisfied and the embarrassment, or perhaps the revulsion, had set in and she had fled before she had to look the machine next to her in the eyes again.

  “Well, get your ass dressed and meet me at the station. Our mee
ting with Central is in an hour and traffic this time of day on the express is a bitch.”

  “Aye aye, Captain.” Ethan gave the com unit a mock salute as Hank’s face faded into the black glossy screen. Without a second glance to the empty spot beside him on the bed, he stood, stepped into the legs of his casual black pants and pulled them up. He slipped his communicator into his pocket and refocused his eyes on the rest of the small hotel room. It took him a few moments longer to locate his shirt, a white tight fitting long sleeved pullover made from the same breathable and flexible poly-blend nanotech fiber as his pants. He found his black jacket still hanging from the corner of a high back chair near the entrance of the hotel room. All were Central issued garments; a casual comfort blended with protection against tracking, body scanning and the occasional small class firearms.

  After zipping up the sides of his thick soled boots and drawing the cuff of his pant legs down over them, he strode over to the chair and reached for his jacket. He checked all the pockets for their designated contents before slipping it on. His important identification credentials were all logged with an ocular scan, but his civilian identification was still the commonly used One Pass that everyone carried these days.

  One Pass - Recognized in fourteen systems and growing!

  He cursed under his breath. Now that jingle would be stuck in his head for hours.

  The One Pass was still in his left inside jacket pocket and his sunglasses were still in his right. One hundred and twenty-three partners as of last night, and not a single one had ever robbed him of anything except seeing their face in the morning. One hundred and twenty-three, and each one had been gone when he woke up, not that he cared. They had used him to satisfy a curiosity most of the women he encountered seemed to have.

  Were Mecha any different, or any better than an Organic?