Lost Alliance (Dragonfire Station Books 1-3): A Galactic Empire series

by Zen DiPietro

  “Poppy and Olag? You’re kidding, right?”

  A slow grin spread across his face. He hadn’t dropped those names by accident. “Nope.”

  She snickered. “Oh, man. I can’t wait to call them that.”

  “At your own peril,” Raptor warned.

  “No worries. Apparently, I was the top of my class in close combat.”

  He laughed. “Well, among them, anyway.”

  “What, someone surpassed me?” That was a little disappointing.

  “Just barely.”

  “Who? I demand a rematch.”

  “Hawk.”

  “Oh. Well, Prelin’s ass. I take back my challenge.” She loved a good fight, but if she went up against Hawk, she’d have to fight to kill. He outmatched her too much in size and strength.

  “You barely edged out Peregrine,” he added. “And I tied her.”

  “Huh. I must have been a heck of a teacher, then.”

  He didn’t answer. He just kept frowning up at the ceiling.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He sighed and reluctantly met her gaze. “It’s just…I always wondered how you and I would have ended up if we hadn’t gone into intelligence. How different life might have looked, you know? Sometimes I think about what our kids would have looked like.”

  Her stomach dropped. Well, shit. This was not where she wanted things to go. She did not want to deal with soppy, leftover sentiments from the past. “Uhm… Really?”

  He snorted. “Hell, no. Can’t believe you fell for that.” He laughed in delight.

  Relief flooded her, followed by irritation that he’d gotten the better of her. “Do. Not. Do that again,” she enunciated forcefully. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  He laughed harder, dissolving into a hail of guffaws as he held his stomach. “You should have seen your face.”

  “Right. Well, I think we’re done here.” She crossed the room. “I’ll catch you later.” She paused when the doors opened. “Thanks, though, for helping fill in my memory.”

  He waved her off, still chuckling.

  “Asshole,” she muttered once the door closed. Then she smiled fondly and went to find Peregrine.

  9

  Fragments Chapter 4

  Fallon’s routine filled her days nicely. Each morning, she started with a good hard run and a climb up the wall. Frequently she did so with Brak, since they’d adjusted their schedules to mesh. Afterward, she grabbed a quick breakfast, then did her hypnotherapy session if she had one that day. Still no luck with that, and so far, her teammates hadn’t come up with connections to any two-mooned worlds.

  Otherwise, she spent two to three hours with either Hawk, Peregrine, or Raptor, or sometimes a combination thereof, hearing her life recounted to her from their perspectives. She wondered how her own memories of those shared events would differ. She found it interesting to pay attention not only to the story, but to the specific details her partners found noteworthy. It gave her insight into them that she hadn’t had before.

  Each day she had lunch in the bar—sometimes alone, and sometimes with others. In the afternoons she researched places or other details from the stories that her teammates had recounted to her. If she had time, she went to the rec center and played some sort of board or card game with whoever happened to be there looking for an opponent.

  The rec had caught on, and almost always had a few people in it. Trin’s young patient Mara often visited, having little else to do when not with the doctors or having physical therapy. She’d turned out to be a quick study at playing Go.

  Fallon’s days were finally passing at an even clip, and she felt pleased to have found a proactive way of using the time. Before long, the Onari arrived at the moon base Hawk had directed them to so he could connect with one of his “associates.” By this point, the ship was just a week away from Jerin’s next stop, where they’d take on fresh food and administer whatever basic healthcare might be needed at a small outpost.

  Hawk’s destination looked awfully dubious to Fallon. But since Raptor and Peregrine seemed unconcerned, she pretended to be as well. The four had gathered in Hawk’s quarters as he prepared for his mission.

  The moon had no atmosphere and no orbital elevator. The Onari had edged up close and Hawk now awaited a small transport ship from the moon’s surface.

  “Who do you want to go down with you?” she asked Hawk while he rummaged around in a dirty backpack, taking some things out and putting others in. She considered asking for details about his plans, then decided not to. She just had to trust him.

  He shoved a lumpy, leather-wrapped thing into the backpack and gave it all a good shake before zipping it closed. “Raptor. My guy has access to some datastreams that he might be able to jack into.”

  “So your guy’s a data broker as well as a…trader?” Which was the most polite term she could come up with.

  “That’s right. Good guy. Long as you don’t turn your back on him.” Hawk grinned like it was a joke, but Fallon was sure it wasn’t.

  “All right. Keep us posted.” She glanced from Hawk to Raptor.

  “You got it.” Hawk winked at her. He was entirely too blasé about it all, but she supposed this was his schtick and he’d know if he should be worried. She knew he wouldn’t put Raptor in unnecessary danger.

  “I’ll leave you two to prepare, then.”

  “Good luck,” Peregrine told them, following Fallon to the door.

  “I’m just excited to be going along on one of these adventures.” Raptor looked quite pleased about the situation.

  Hawk shot him a glare of disdain. “You wouldn’t be going this time, either, if the PAC didn’t want to smoosh us into space dust. So don’t get used to it.”

  Fallon and Peregrine left them to bicker, and the door slid shut behind them.

  “You’re sure they’ll be okay?” Fallon looked at the closed door, frowning.

  Per shrugged. “No, but I have faith that they can get the job done. Hawk knows what he’s doing.”

  Despite being prefaced by a negative, Peregrine’s response actually made Fallon feel better. She turned from the door to face her partner. “Well, you’re the only one left, so why don’t you spend the rest of the morning telling me about the time we had to steal data from Zerellus. You mentioned that last time.”

  “Right. Your quarters or mine?” Peregrine had been a good sport about all of the recent storytelling. Much better than Hawk, who didn’t actually mind the narrative so much as the responsibility of telling Fallon her own past. He always seemed far less comfortable than Peregrine or Raptor about sharing his personal observations of her.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Fallon answered. “They’re essentially the same.”

  Hawk and Raptor returned hours later with the electronics Peregrine had wanted and some data for Raptor to rip apart, along with frustratingly closed mouths. Fallon had hoped for some details, but nope. Ah, well. At least they’d been successful.

  The next morning, Fallon had her eleventh hypnotherapy session. Afterward, she asked Brak and Jerin, “So how long do we keep doing this? I’ve looked up studies on hypnotherapy, and they show that if a patient hasn’t recovered any memories by the tenth session, the likelihood of success is less than ten percent.”

  The doctors exchanged a look. “That’s true,” Jerin agreed slowly. “But Brak and I are willing to continue as long as you wish. Less than ten percent is still a chance.”

  “I’m not just wasting your time? You both must have far better things to do.” She felt increasingly bitter about her persistent memory loss, not to mention wasting the doctors’ time. She didn’t want to be a burden on anyone. Least of all her team. Maybe she should stop making them tell her about the past, too. Nothing she did seemed to help. An uncharacteristic feeling of negativity rose in her.

  Jerin put a gentle hand on Fallon’s shoulder. “It’s never a waste of time to help a friend.”

  Jerin’s warmth and caring deflated Fallon’
s poor mood, leaving her feeling merely empty. She rubbed a hand over her eyes, not used to so much emotional disarray. “I think I’m just tired.”

  “Fatigue is a normal side effect of the therapy. A nap is a good idea.”

  “Thanks. That sounds good, actually. I think I’ll do that.”

  Back in her quarters, Fallon didn’t bother to change into lounge clothes. She simply lay down on the bed, pulled a blanket to her chin, and plunged headlong into sleep.

  A handsome guy smiled at her, but he looked weird. Like he was looking at her through a clear globe or something, making his face seem distant and distorted. His mouth moved, but she couldn’t make out any words. It was like a slow-motion scene in a holo-vid.

  She reached toward the sphere, but her touch made it cloud over. The guy disappeared, and she immediately missed him. He’d made her feel tethered to something secure, and now she felt she’d been set adrift.

  The sphere became pitted and opaque. A pale bluish light glowed from it. It was a moon. And in front of it, another moon appeared. That felt familiar, like it meant something.

  The first moon moved toward her until it collided with the smaller one, siphoning it up into itself. One moon now. Bigger. Brighter. And still moving toward her.

  She tried to back away, but couldn’t. The moon kept bearing down, filling her entire range of vision and burning her eyes with its glow. She could do nothing as the moon loomed, luminescent and beautiful, yet ominous. It began pressing the air out of her lungs as it crushed her.

  Fallon woke, her breath rasping. She slapped the light panel to brighten the room and sat up. It wasn’t as bad as the first time she’d dreamed about the moons. The images remained clearer, too. She could still picture the guy. A boy, really. Raptor, the way he must have looked as a teenager. As Drew. And those moons again.

  Did it mean anything? Dreaming of Raptor-as-Drew didn’t seem strange, given how many stories he’d told her about their academy and OTS days. She’d spent a good deal of time thinking about them. But the moons again. Why?

  She lay back on the bed, thinking. She didn’t have the sense of alarm like the time she’d gone running through the ship. She just felt frustrated. Her brain had begun to seem like her enemy. Like it was playing games with her. Why couldn’t it just materialize the stories she already knew?

  “Ahh!” she shouted in frustration. That felt really good and no one was likely to hear her over the engines, so she did it again. “AHHHHH!” She let loose a long string of creative swears, as if they were a magical formula for memory retrieval. They eased some of her aggravation.

  “Dammit.” She checked the time. She’d missed lunch, but she didn’t care. She wasn’t hungry. She needed to get out and find something to do though. She didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts.

  Maybe Mara would be looking for someone to play a game with. That, at least, her broken brain could manage to do.

  Fallon followed her established routine and in no time, the Onari docked up to the outpost unimaginatively named PAC Outpost 346. It occurred to Fallon that this little installation marked the halfway point between Dragonfire Station and Earth.

  Raptor bubbled with enthusiasm. This was his first opportunity since Dragonfire to tap directly into an official PAC datastream. He hadn’t come up with anything useful from the data he and Hawk had bought from Hawk’s contact. There might well be something of use there, but sifting through so much dreck without a real idea of what he was looking for had proved problematic.

  Nobody even went aboard Outpost 346. Once the Onari docked, the outpost’s small but efficient crew loaded the hospi-ship, thanked it for the offer of medical help, but declined.

  Which unceremoniously put them back on their way to Earth.

  “Your grip’s a little off.” Fallon adjusted Mara’s fingers, guiding them to the right place on the knife. “Now. Step left, then right, and throw.”

  Mara did as instructed, and this time the knife flew in the right direction, crashing into the target Fallon had installed, then falling to the floor.

  “That was better.” Mara seemed encouraged. She’d filled out during her month on board, and though still a bit pale, she looked much better. She’d stayed longer than the originally projected month, but when the Onari arrived at its next stop, Mara would be taking a transport ship home.

  “Yup. Try again.” Fallon handed her another knife, which promptly thunked to the floor along with the other.

  A couple people sat nearby at the gaming tables, watching, while others went on about their own business, pounding the treadmills or scaling the climbing wall. It pleased Fallon to see the rec center serving the ship’s crew so well.

  Mara didn’t get discouraged or fatigued. She kept tossing and hitting the target, then retrieving the eight knives when she’d thrown the last one. Finally, one of the knives caught off-center of its point and hung for a moment before dropping to the ground. She let out a whoop. “It stuck!”

  “It did. Good job.”

  Mara retrieved the knives again and held them out to Fallon. “Show me again how you do it.”

  “What, with all eight?”

  Mara nodded.

  Fallon shrugged. “Okay.”

  She took a few steps back to increase the distance. Last time she’d thrown a quick cluster of three knives. With eight she could be more showy. She slid six of the knives into the bandolier she wore on her chest—one of her prized possessions, along with her collection of exotic knives. She’d left the latter in storage on Dragonfire, though, choosing to bring only functional items on board the Onari.

  With a knife in each hand, Fallon snapped her arms forward and watched as the knives landed in unison, perfectly aligned along the horizontal. She quickly grasped two more and made a trickier throw, firing them into place on a vertical line, creating a diamond shape on the target.

  She went for an even harder shot, choosing to hit the top-left and bottom-right quadrants, then reversed that for the final two knives. When they slammed into the board, she’d created a circle of eight equidistant, perfectly aligned knives. She allowed herself a tiny, smug smile.

  Mara’s face lit up with such a sudden onset of hero worship that Fallon had to restrain a laugh. The two people on the climbing wall remained focused on their own activity, but ones at the tables and the three on treadmills at the other side of the rec clapped and shouted things like, “Wow!” and “Nice!”

  The doors whooshed open and a young woman entered, carrying a baby. The pair sat at one of the gaming tables.

  “I think that’s enough for today. We don’t want to be whipping knives around with a baby nearby.” Fallon grinned at Mara. She wasn’t worried about her own throws, but you never knew with a novice what might happen.

  The girl nodded, then jogged to the target and began collecting the knives. She returned them to Fallon, then sat next to the woman and baby.

  “Have you met Corla?” Mara asked while Fallon wiped the knives on a cloth and slid them into the bandolier.

  “No.” She smiled at the young mother, a mahogany-skinned Zerellian with her hair arranged in a multitude of tiny braids. “Nice to meet you. I’m Fallon. I’m surprised I haven’t seen you by now.”

  Corla settled the baby in her lap, facing the child outward. The tiny girl looked like a miniature version of her mother. Her head wobbled slightly, as if she hadn’t entirely gotten the hang of holding it up. “I’ve been working night nursing shift while Daisy here has her days and nights all mixed up. No point in me working day shift when she’s sleeping the whole time. So unless you’ve hurt yourself or gotten sick late at night, there’s no reason for you to have seen me.” The mother chuckled and gave the baby a tiny bounce, which made the girl’s toothless mouth bloom into a huge smile.

  Fallon laughed along with Mara at the baby’s delight. “She’s gorgeous.” She took a seat next to them, leaning forward to watch the child. She had no idea whether she had any experience with the things.

&nb
sp; “Is it tough to take care of a baby on board a ship?” Fallon asked.

  Corla raised her eyebrows contemplatively. “I imagine the basics are pretty much the same. Her father’s taking the night shift right now too, in ops control, and we just take the feedings and diapers day by day.”

  “So she stays in the nursery while you work?”

  “Sometimes. Other times people watch her for us. The rest of the crew helps out a lot. Daisy has tons of honorary aunts and uncles.”

  “Can I hold her?” Mara asked.

  “Sure. You know how?” Corla settled Daisy into Mara’s lap.

  Mara held the baby confidently. “Oh yeah. I have four younger brothers and sisters.”

  “Big family!” Corla made a silly face at the baby, who laughed.

  Mara seemed to have an enthusiasm for all things baby, and she and Corla talked about sleeping, teething, and all manner of things that did not interest Fallon. Nonetheless, she looked on with a polite attentiveness for several minutes.

  Finally she checked the time. “If you two will excuse me, I’m supposed to meet someone for an early dinner.” To Corla, she said, “It was nice to meet you.”

  “You too.”

  Mara smiled up at Fallon. “Thanks for the throwing lesson. Can we do it again tomorrow?”

  “I’m not sure. If not tomorrow, then the day after,” she promised.

  “Great! I can’t wait!”

  Throwing knives and babies. Mara’s interests seemed to cover a broad spectrum, and Fallon liked that. Hopefully the girl would sample many things before she honed in on what to do with her life.

  As she walked down the corridor to meet Trin and Kellis, Fallon wondered if she’d been given that kind of opportunity. Perhaps she’d always been destined to spy and kill. Her father had certainly started her training early, from what she could tell.

  Kellis and Trin went quiet as she approached, suggesting that Fallon had just been the subject of their conversation.