Return Of The Queen: The Kurtherian Endgame™ Book Eight

by Anderle, Michael

  Christina gave him a little shove, grunting with indignation. “I knew you weren’t listening! You haven’t heard a word I’ve said since we said goodbye to Debbie. What gives?”

  Kai shrugged. “Just thinking about what Bethany Anne said.”

  Christina’s curiosity had been piqued by Bethany Anne and Alexis pulling Kai to the side when they’d arrived at the Meredith Reynolds, but he’d kept the reason for the conversation to himself so far. “What did she say?”

  Kai blushed, jamming his hands into his pockets. “Most of it wasn’t repeatable. The rest, well, I can’t tell you just yet.” He glanced at her. “Do you trust me?”

  Christina nodded and slipped her arm through Kai’s. “With my life.”

  Kai smiled. “Good. If I survive what Bethany Anne has planned, you’re going to be a happy woman, I promise.” He stopped, looking around. “Wait, we’ve gone too far. Weren’t we supposed to be at the park by now?”

  “Mark Billingsly Memorial Park?” Christina asked, grinning when Kai nodded forlornly. “Don’t sweat it. I know a shortcut if you don’t mind a bit of a climb.”

  Kai discovered that “a bit of a climb” was actually a run and a jump over the back fence of a house bordering the park.

  Christina and Kai laughed breathlessly as they ran from the disgruntled resident yelling at them from the kitchen window.

  “Well, that was an experience,” Kai panted as they came to a stop at the entrance to the botanical gardens inside the park.

  “It took me right back to being sixteen,” Christina admitted. “But now you have to tell me why we’re here.”

  Kai glanced at the map of the park on the wall by the entrance to get his bearings before giving her a mysterious smile. “You’ll find out soon. Would you care to take a walk?”

  Christina accepted Kai’s outstretched hand. “Okay, but don’t keep me waiting too long for an answer.” She shrugged at the look of indignation that earned her. “I didn’t say the rules were fair.”

  Kai laughed. “They don’t always go in your favor, you know.”

  Christina declined to reply. She snuggled into Kai’s shoulder as they strolled along a tree-lined path to the center of the park. Soft lights appeared in the distance, resolving into a gazebo as they walked closer.

  “Sounds like someone’s having a party,” Christina commented, hearing music coming from behind the gauzy privacy curtains. She sniffed, the scent of cooking meat tickling her senses. “Smells like one, too.”

  Kai let go of Christina’s hand and darted to the steps. “Welcome to liberty. No proposal.” He waved his hands in protestation as she scanned his body for the telltale lines of a ring box. “I promise.”

  “What are you playing at?” Christina looked at him skeptically as she walked past him. She entered the gazebo and found a table set for six. Alexis and K’aia were preparing drinks at the wet bar, and Gabriel and Trey were manning the grill.

  She allowed Kai to get her chair and shook out her napkin with a smile as Alexis filled their glasses. “What is all this in honor of?”

  “We don’t have much time between now and departure,” Alexis replied. “We need to plan our next moves as a team, and I thought this was better than a stuffy meeting room.”

  Christina shrugged as she picked up her glass. “I mean, we could have gone dancing on our night off.”

  Alexis wiggled her eyebrows. “So sorry if you confused me for someone on her first shore leave. Dancing is on the agenda for after dinner.”

  Gabriel and Trey joined them, each carrying a tray piled with cooked meats to go with the cornbread and mashed potatoes already on the table. Organized chaos reigned for a few minutes while everyone filled their plate.

  Alexis cleared her throat. “Mom has assigned Gabriel and me to the Reynolds until Grandpa gets back with our info on the Leath operation. She wants us to help Takal with his project.”

  “Which leaves us combing the newsfeeds and reports for possible cult activity,” Christina stated. “Well, when we’re not on duty. Michael wants us to assist with keeping the troops in line while they’re aboard the Baba Yaga. Apparently, he’s scaring them more than necessary when they arrive.”

  Gabriel nodded, pushing his potatoes around his plate with his fork. “The second we get another lead, we’re out of here. I’d prefer we had time to prepare for the mission, but Reynolds needs all the help he can get.”

  Trey leaned in and patted Gabriel on the back. “Then help him. We can take care of prep.” He sat back in his chair. “I’ve been thinking about that. What did Bethany Anne say about the idea of infiltrating the leadership when you brought it up?”

  “She wasn’t against it,” Alexis replied. “But we’re not allowed to make our move on the Leath company until her pet Leath has checked it out.”

  Gabriel spoke up. “Not really sure Mom would appreciate the term ‘pet Leath.’”

  “How about almost-but-not-quite-yet-terminated-with-vengeance-if-he-so-much-as-barks-out-of-turn-Leath?”

  Gabriel blinked a few times. “Pet Leath works.”

  “Good.”

  “What happens if we get to the core of the cult and find a Kurtherian?” Kai pondered.

  “It’s not likely,” Gabriel told him. “There just aren’t that many left that they’d risk themselves.”

  Kai’s face crumpled in confusion. “I don’t get it. I thought they were all hiding somewhere?”

  “Well, yeah, in the Etheric,” Gabriel replied, thinking back to TOM's lessons on Kurtherian history. “Most of them chose Ascension after the split. Gödel is leading the dregs, the ones who didn’t have the power to take the step to the next level of existence.”

  Kai let out a whistle. “They’re still pretty powerful.”

  “Not especially,” Alexis countered. “Gödel is powerful. Without her, the rest of them couldn’t amuse a bunch of five-year-olds at a birthday party.”

  K’aia snickered at the mental image. “So we won’t find a Kurtherian. We will find someone with a connection to Gödel, but I suspect they won’t know who it is pulling their strings.”

  Gabriel nodded. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Trey leaned back in his chair and laced his hands over his full stomach. “Either way, they’re going down.”

  Christina raised her glass. “I’ll drink to that, and to dancing if we’re done here?”

  Alexis grinned as she tapped her Coke bottle against Christina’s glass. “Dancing it is.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  SD Reynolds, Takal's Lab (one week later)

  Reynolds and Izanami stared into each other’s eyes, their faces set in determined lines.

  Reynolds grinned as he slipped through Izanami’s defenses and unleashed his revenge for the handlebar mustache and bright pink mohawk he was currently wearing. “Suits you.”

  Izanami laughed when her armor was replaced with a footsie-onesie complete with fox ears and a big, bushy tail. “Nice try, but you left yourself open.”

  Reynolds examined his hard light drive for changes to the code dictating his appearance and found nothing. “What did you—”

  His hands flew to his mouth when his intended words came out in song.

  Izanami pushed the pointy-eared hood back and flourished a hand at the ribbons holding her hair in bunches. “You don’t mess with a woman’s hair.”

  “You changed mine first!” Reynolds sang. He clapped his hands over his mouth as Izanami, Alexis, and Gabriel laughed. “I hate you.”

  Takal clucked his tongue, looking up from the nest of wires he was soldering inside the chest cavity of the new Reynolds body. “If you two are going to waste bandwidth playing instead of working on solving the mystery of what happened to the captain's last body, the chances are both your bodies will have the same fault.”

  “Reynolds, you have to figure out what you did, or at least why you blocked the memory of it,” Alexis urged, carefully holding up the brain she’d just removed from the defunct b
ody. “There’s got to be something you did that allowed you to draw freely on the Etheric.”

  “Yeah, but what?” Gabriel asked. “The body is saturated with Etheric energy. It’s going to be a challenge to figure out the point of origin in all this melted wiring.”

  “The Queen assured me you two are the best people for the job,” Takal replied without looking up. “It’s fascinating to think that you accessed the Etheric realm entirely accidentally.”

  Reynolds fended off a sneak attack from Izanami, then gasped when his locked memories became visible to him. He grabbed them before they vanished again and examined what he’d lost. “It wasn’t an accident. It was me. I remember now. I did it unconsciously.”

  Takal cursed, blowing rapidly on the finger he’d burned when Reynolds’ booming baritone made him jump. “Can you two please cut it out, for the sake of my sanity!”

  Chastened, Reynolds returned Izanami’s armor and removed the bows from her hair. “Truce?”

  Izanami snickered as he drew the note out. “Temporary ceasefire. This approach is obviously working.”

  Reynolds shook his head. “No need. I have my memories back.”

  Alexis placed the brain on the second workbench for Gabriel’s inspection. “What did you remember?” she asked eagerly, returning to her station to begin stripping the burned-out power cells from the spinal column.

  “I drew energy directly from the Etheric through my power cells,” Reynolds clarified, thankfully without slipping into rhyming verse. “Both times I’ve done it were when all was lost. On the first occasion, I was merged with my ship. This time I had no choice but to sacrifice my body or allow Jiya to die.”

  Takal breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s not a complicated workaround. Now that I’m aware you can extract that amount of energy, it’s just a question of building in the appropriate hardware to channel it safely through your body.”

  “That shouldn’t be too difficult,” Alexis told him. She dropped her tools and crossed to the clear boards where Takal did his planning. “If Reynolds doesn’t mind a little extra width, that is.”

  “That depends on what you mean by extra width,” Reynolds told her.

  Izanami raised an eyebrow. “Now who’s vain?”

  Alexis wiped the corner of one board clean and sketched out one of the vertebrae-shaped cases that currently held Reynolds’ power cells. “We’d have to make you taller to compensate, of course, but increasing the size of the casings means there’s room to insulate the cells.”

  “Isolate them from the rest of the body, yes. It’s a start.” Takal stared at nothing for a moment, his mind running the calculations for the adjustments. When his attention returned to the real world, it was with a look of disappointment at the progress he’d made so far on the new bodies. “We’ll have to scrap these and begin again.”

  He removed his apron and used it to wipe his hands clean. “It is what it is. I’ll go find Jiya and tell her to halt on the printing process until you two have updated the specs.”

  “We should call Mom first and update her,” Alexis called after Takal as he hurried out of the lab.

  “He gets very focused,” Reynolds explained, seeing that the twins were confused by his engineer’s behavior. “He’ll be back once Jiya tells him I already informed her about the changes.”

  Gabriel shook his head fondly. “I like the old guy. He reminds me of Marcus.”

  Alexis snickered. “That’s funny, he reminds me of Bobcat. Never mind. We need to let Mom know we had a breakthrough.”

  Bethany Anne answered Alexis’ call almost immediately. She smiled at them from the wallscreen, her gaze hovering on Reynolds. “Do we have progress?”

  “Some,” Reynolds replied. “I have recovered my missing memories.”

  “That’s great!” Bethany Anne told him. “What happened on the water planet?”

  “He got all heroic and derestricted the draw on his power cells to keep the Pod moving,” Izanami cut in before Reynolds could reply.

  “It is my duty to protect my crew,” Reynolds protested. “To protect all life.”

  “I didn’t say I disagreed with your decision,” Izanami assured him. “It was a noble thing to do.”

  Alexis laughed. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve said about Reynolds since I got here.”

  “Yeah. Are you feeling okay?” Gabriel inquired with a smirk.

  “I have work. You can return me to the Baba Yaga,” Izanami narrowed her eyes at the twins before disappearing in a shower of light.

  Reynolds got to his feet and bowed to Bethany Anne. “Izanami is correct. We have already lost too much time. I am able to resume my duties with your permission, my Queen.”

  Bethany Anne cleared her throat. “Can a repeat of Reynolds frying himself be avoided?”

  Gabriel nodded. “We think so. We have to start again with revised plans for the bodies, testing as we go, but it’s looking good.”

  “What about the damage?” Bethany Anne pressed her lips together. “It doesn’t sit well with me to think this will happen again the next time Reynolds finds himself in a life-or-death situation.”

  “We’re working around the issue,” Gabriel assured her. “The damage wasn’t caused by Etheric energy. It was the accompanying electromagnetic surge from the massive energy transfer Reynolds made that took out his vulnerable systems, leading to cascading failures across the rest of his functions.”

  Alexis grinned and pointed at Gabriel. “What he said. We’re going to be focusing on helping Takal until Grandpa comes through with our intel.”

  Bethany Anne pursed her lips, then smiled at their identical hopeful expressions. “You will know as soon as I hear from him. Until then, you’re needed where you are.”

  The twins exchanged a disappointed glance when Bethany Anne dropped the connection.

  “There has to be something else we can do,” Gabriel stated, returning to his workbench.

  “Not until Grandpa gets back. We haven’t got anything to go on, anyway.” Alexis plunged her hands back into the defunct android body. “I can’t believe you’d prefer chasing our asses around open space to this. Relax, okay?”

  “I didn’t say I preferred it,” Gabriel told her. “But I can’t relax, knowing there are people out there who intend Mom harm. We know that the Leath company has connections to the cult.”

  “Yes, but we don’t know how many of the people involved with the company are innocent. We can’t march in there throwing our weight around until we have what we need.” She worked the power cell she was extracting loose from the silicone inside the casing with a soft pop. “Patience, brother mine. When we make our move on Shoken Carriers, we’ll have everything we need to get in and out with a minimum of bloodshed.”

  Gabriel lined the power cells up on his bench when Alexis passed them over. “Usually, you’re the impatient one.”

  Alexis snorted. “Don’t mistake my restraint. I’m as mad as you that these people exist. But we do this right, or it only gets worse for Mom.”

  Devon, First City, Federation Consulate

  Harkkat hurried through the building with the holofiles clutched tightly in his arms. He burst into his office out of breath but too caught up in his discovery to realize he was pulling air in gasps.

  “Ca… Ca…”

  “Consul, do you require medical assistance?” CEREBRO inquired from the speaker.

  “No, no.” Harkkat’s panting eased now he’d stopped putting so much stress on his body. He laid the holofile on his desk and stared at it a moment. “Call General Reynolds.”

  He sagged into the chair behind his desk and poured himself a drink while he waited for CEREBRO to connect him.

  The General appeared on the wallscreen a few moments later, looking harried. “Harkkat. You’ll have to make it quick. The council is about to enter session.”

  Harkkat nodded. “Is it looking to be a long session, General? I have the information you requested on Shoken Carriers, but it will take
some time to talk you through my findings.”

  “Why?” Lance asked.

  “I found evidence this goes way beyond the company,” Harkkat replied. “A trail of financial transactions that led me all over the Federation before I got to the really interesting dirt.”

  General Reynolds held up a finger. “I’ll call back in a few minutes.”

  The screen went blank. It was twenty minutes before Lance called back, which gave Harkkat time to attach the request complete form he’d been filling out when his asset reported in to the requisitions form Captain Nickie Grimes had dropped on him without warning two weeks ago, and file them both with CEREBRO.

  This business ran on favors, and Nickie never failed to call hers in with the maximum amount of theater.

  Still, he’d had worse from the Queen’s head of intelligence, a laconic man with a network of assets that made Harkkat’s careful collation over the last few decades look like amateur hour.

  “This is the last time I’m going to backdate your paperwork without informing Tabitha,” CEREBRO informed Harkkat.

  Harkkat threw up his hands. “Inform her. It might save me from Nickie’s demands. Why in seven hells does she need all this equipment?”

  CEREBRO chuckled. “Whatever the reason, it will be a good one, Consul. The General is calling.”

  “Onscreen,” Harkkat requested. “General. I was wondering if perhaps you’d been pulled into the session after all.”

  Lance shook his head, his expression that of a man with a bad taste in his mouth. “It was a near thing, and now I owe Zahlock a favor, so this had better be good.”

  Harkkat offered the General a pained expression. “Apologies for the inconvenience. Still, I believe you’ll find what I have for you worth any time you owe that Shrillexian stick-in-the-ass.”

  “Zahlock is an honorable male and a diligent delegate,” Lance stated. “However much of a stickler for the letter of the law he is, I’d trust him at my back in a fight, which is more than I can say for you.”

  Harkkat bowed his head. “I earned that.”

  “I don’t buy your penitent act for a second,” Lance told him. “My grandchildren are the operatives on this assignment. If they get hurt because you decided to hold back, I won’t be held accountable for my actions. Do I make myself pointedly clear?”