Friendly Fire

by Michelle Levigne

  Her bracelet buzzed when she stepped into the first open lift. Three short bursts meant ship business. She tucked the ti box closer in the crook of her arm, slapped the lift control, and pressed the connector point to open the link.

  "Triple omega alert." The voice was Treinna Lore, head of communications and chief linguist.

  "I know."

  "How do -- never mind. How far are you from --" She snorted. "Never mind again. I can see you on the locator. We're prepping your tube right now."

  "How much time do I have?" M'kar clenched her fist but refrained from slamming it into the lift controls. Experience had proven that doing so didn't make it move any faster. Especially if she dented the control panel deeply enough to damage something.

  She found it ironic that she had used the medical hibernation tube to entirely shut down her psionics often enough for it to be referred to as "her" tube.

  "Plenty. Switford was playing with the new sensors, seeing how much farther we can extend them. We got the incoming manifest before the station. Diplomatic ship. Despite diplomacy being half our purpose for being out here, sometimes I really hate that word."

  "Preach it, sister."

  That got a snort from Treinna. "There are good diplomats. Us. And bad diplomats."

  The ones who only want benefits from joining the Alliance, and are offended when they are given responsibilities, Thyal offered.

  Would it really be violating Enlo's laws to ask your father to put a mental whammy on all the delegates from Nisandros? You know, reprogram them?

  Thyal's laughter was infectious enough to make her grin, despite the pressure and the sickening sense of panic that arose every time the mind-hunters came near.

  "One registered mind-hunter," Treinna was saying. "Doesn't mean they don't have a couple rogues. Maybe here already."

  "That occurred to me. So help me, someday I will go home and skin my cousins alive. With my fingernails. On my way." The lift doors parted. She barely looked for anyone waiting to board before hurtling out and down the passageway.

  Triple omega alert wasn’t Fleet code, but the verbal shorthand the crew had created over their years and missions together. She thanked Enlo she had chosen to wear civilian clothes while touring the station. While she was identifiably Nisandrian, no one could tag her as a Fleet officer. Yet again, she cursed the ancestor who had created the pigments that bonded with her genetic structure, so her tattoos could never be removed. Twenty ships were currently on leave, being repaired, or picking up cargo at Sheffroab Station. That was a lot of ships to search, if anyone from the incoming Nisandrian ship learned a Nisandrian woman had been seen here.

  However, not being in uniform might not help. The mind-hunters sent by her father’s clan would know M'kar served in the Fleet, while mind-hunters sent by the other clans wouldn’t. If she was lucky. M’kar knew better than to trust to luck. Anyone who knew Ashrock’s half-blood daughter had joined the Fleet would make Fleet vessels a top priority target anywhere a Nisandrian woman had been sighted. The continuing diplomatic talks between the council of clan heads on Nisandros and the Alliance didn’t give the mind-hunters and envoys the diplomatic power and right to board a Fleet vessel or search a military-run space station whenever they wanted. However, if they could come up with enough valid evidence that she was present, they could use their diplomatic status to gain access to the ship. From there, the mind-hunters could try some mental whammy until they made M’kar’s friends into enemies, to give her into their custody. The trick was making sure they couldn’t catch a whiff of her psionic scent in the first place.

  M'kar jumped into a null-G shaft, normally used for cargo, to descend three levels to the deck where she could access the habitable levels of the Defender.

  She had joined the Fleet first because she wanted to serve. Her next reason was to prevent being hauled back to Nisandros and forced into a dynastic and political marriage for the good of the clan. Technically, she had the right to refuse any marriage. No man on Nisandros, if he knew what was good for him, took an unwilling bride. The problem was that M'kar was the first daughter born to her clan's ruling bloodline in five centuries. That made her special.

  According to the interpretations of her boostifak cousin, the clan scholar, B'keerimo, "special" meant the normal rules and traditions didn't apply. Some spiritual leaders decreed she was spoken of in prophecy. Which meant she had to sacrifice her right of choice to spend her life in scholarly pursuits or as a warrior, and accept a political marriage. It wouldn't be so bad if she had to marry, say, Ke'Niq of the Rissor Clan. Ke'Niq, unfortunately, was second son of the second son. The chosen bridegroom, Ke'Jor, firstborn of the firstborn of Rissor, was a nose picker. At least he was when M'kar had to endure two luns of hospitality in the Rissor Clan fortress when she was a child. The prelude to forcing the marriage on her, despite her being underage, was the proverbial twig that unbalanced the pendulum of fate and convinced her father discretion overrode valor. It was time to get his foreign wife and half-blood daughter off the planet.

  A good mind-hunter could focus on the particular mental frequency characteristic of a specific geno-type. The Gatekeepers had transplanted the Human races to other worlds according to geno-types, so their characteristic brain frequencies were easily identified. The Alliance hadn't been in existence long enough for intermarriages to "muddy" the mental waters yet.

  To make matters worse, M'kar's mental frequency was unique, since she had inherited the animal-focused psionic Talent of her mother's family line. While her shields were extraordinarily strong, she couldn't entirely muffle the reverberation that resulted when a mind-hunter sent out a mental "ping" locator burst.

  Unless she was so deeply unconscious there was essentially no mind to respond. M'kar had decked the over-eager Academy medical student who had come up with the theory. In defense of her bad temper that day, she had just evaded the sixth royal kidnapping attempt in as many luns. By that time, the students under the banner of Infrenx had become a tightly knit group. Her classmates took keen delight in using their Talents to defend her. The bounty offered by her clan kept increasing, while those willing to go to the effort and suffer the consequences of failure decreased exponentially. By the time she graduated from the Academy, there were no bounty hunters desperate enough to attempt to kidnap an unwilling bride who had poked out the eye of the first assassin who came after her when she was only four years old.

  Despite being phrased so badly by the hapless medical student, the theory worked: deep unconsciousness shut down M'kar's brain, leaving no wave to detect. The medical hibernation tube Treinna and Dr. Tahl were preparing for her now would put her into a medically induced coma, slowing all her body functions to one hundredth of their normal rate, and essentially turning off her brain. She would have to stay in the tube, asleep and hiding, until the Nisandrian diplomatic ship had left this portion of the galaxy, and her friends could determine that no mind-hunters had been left behind to ambush her.

  Chapter Three

  "Do not need this right now," M'kar muttered as she reached the access level for the Defender. She slowed her pace and looked around. All the efforts to hide would be wasted if someone noticed a Nisandrian woman going into the ship.

  "Friends in station sensors are slowing them," Treinna reported less than two minutes later, as M'kar dashed into the tube prep room. "We've got nearly two hours before they're close enough for a general testing-the-waters mindsweep."

  "Thank you, Enlo, for small favors." M'kar pulled the data wafer out of her pocket and put it and the ti box down on the counter, along with her knife and belt.

  "Did you get any clues while you were wandering around?"

  "Clues." For a moment, M'kar couldn't remember what they had talked about before she left the ship more than two hours ago. "Oh. Right." She stepped into the changing room.

  "Critter-chatter."

  "Oh, yeah. Big-time." She bent over to pull off her boots and leggings. Her bio-liner was enough for modesty a
nd allowed the various feeding and monitoring input prongs to penetrate her skin.

  "Meaning?"

  "See that ti box?"

  "Not a souvenir?"

  M'kar snorted.

  "More of Cynes' brainless genius?"

  "What?" She flipped aside the curtain and stepped out into the med-bay. "Jorono Cynes is loose? And here? Does this ba'hee follow us around the universe?"

  "Seems like it." Treinna snickered. "Genys got called to the station office to deal with him. He sold a half-dozen of his hooples before Decker and his gang spotted him."

  "Well, at least it was only a half-dozen."

  She grinned when Treinna snorted and muttered, "Half-dozen, my aunt's …" and didn't finish the comment.

  "Organic or mech?" She stepped over to the bank of tubes and tipped out the control panel to set it for her bio-stats and enter the security code for releasing her when the danger had passed.

  "Mech."

  "Disaster averted."

  "That's your opinion. What's in the box if not ti?"

  "That is courtesy of my classmate, Garion Dulit, on the Corona. Survey ship," she said, and stepped aside as the tube's front panel popped out and slid upward, to allow her to climb in. "I need you to do two things -- no, more than two. Put the ti box in stasis. If my luck runs out and those indiferps manage to come on board and take me away, tube and all --"

  "Don't give them the code to let you out?"

  "They don't have the brains to think they need a code. By the time they realize they can't release me and this little hidey-hole has its own power supply, completely beyond their ability to tamper … well, there'll be nobody within their grasp to threaten for the code." She stepped up into the tube and turned around to lower herself into the gel filling it. "If they grab me, threaten Genys you’ll tell Captain Rob what really happened on Sandival Station."

  Her chin went under before she settled her head into the cradle to keep her nose and mouth and eyes just above the level of the gel. It would cushion her body, moisturize her skin, provide constant circulation and cleansing of her system, nutrition, and expose her to electrical currents that would keep up the tone of her muscles.

  "Oh, you're nasty." Treinna snickered.

  "Takes one to know one. Threaten to tell if she doesn't hightail it to Le'anka, and deliver that box directly to Master Reydon and Lady Healer Thean. They'll know what to do with it. Don't take it out of stasis until you're in orbit around Le'anka."

  She took a deep breath as the tube pinged three times, warning it was about to close. This was the worst part of the whole process, the feeling she would suffocate. Several times she had nearly suffocated playing the triply intensive Nisandrian version of hide'n'seek with her nasty cousins. Once she learned some of them agreed with the pure-blood faction who wanted her dead, she avoided places that could be sealed, airtight and soundproof.

  "Get the best decryption people working on that data wafer. The Corona picked up major trouble on their way to Sheffroab. Hivers chased them, and they got zapped with something that scrambled a lot of their files. They found a Chute."

  Treinna responded with a string of oaths in two languages that required loud pops and tongue-clicks. M'kar knew they weren't half as foul as they sounded, but they were perfectly expressive of the wonder and all the attendant problems that came with finding a Chute. The interdimensional shortcut could cut hours or luns or even years out of space travel, depending on what galaxies the two ends connected. Battles had been fought for control of a Chute, and the worlds accessible on either side.

  "The data on what's in that box is on that wafer, along with the coordinates. Make sure Thyal, Reydon's son, gets it. I want to help Dulit's crew nail their claim to the Chute, and the world where that critter comes from needs to be protected. If it's half what he hinted at …" M'kar shook her head, then closed her eyes as the panel slid into place.

  "Swear. My life," Treinna said, through the communications grill. The soft hiss of hibernation gas filtered into the tube.

  The gas spilled into M'kar's bloodstream and tugged her down a multi-colored spiral.

  Sleep well, Thyal said.

  Find some way to send a whole shipload of hooples to my cousins, would you?

  His laughter was the last thing to touch her mind as darkness took over.

  ~~~~~~

  Captain Hollis had warned Genys that when problems struck, the higher the rank, the bigger and more tangled and stickier the problems became.

  He wasn't joking. He was a master of understatement.

  Jorono Cynes had lied. No surprise. He had organic hooples on board his ship. His first big mistake was to leave them together in one holding bin, allowing them to breed. He was too cheap to buy the equipment that would have warned when a hoople was fertile and identify male from female. Still, common sense said to keep them in solitary confinement, if they had to be kept at all. Problem: the containment field of modulating frequencies to soothe their biological processes and keep them from producing the hallucinogenic farts had malfunctioned. When the station's security team entered Cynes' ship, they weren't prepared for the thickened atmosphere. The gases were strong enough to penetrate the minimal defensive field of the standard security uniform.

  Currently, Sheffroab Station's finest were either curled into fetal balls, skipping around the station giggling like little girls (big, muscle-bound men looked very odd with flowers and ribbons in their hair), or dashing from one section to another at close to the speed of sound, with a hoople or two tucked under each arm. Bad enough, but the giddy idiots were squeezing them. Hooples didn't like to be squeezed. Irritation produced twice as much addictive effluvia as simply eating the wrong things. Or more accurately, eating. Period. Everyone who approached the drugged-out-of-their-skulls lunatics for the first hour they were running amok ended up trying to force them to share the wealth.

  "Share the misery," Genys muttered, when she got the first report from the medical teams currently gathering up the affected and infected. Defender Security was helping Wexel's people deal with the problem. They had better defensive fields and experience handling hoople madness and the aftereffects.

  The crash from hoople madness, fortunately, brought on the fetal ball reaction, which made the growing number of victims easy to contain. Eventually. The sooner anti-intoxicants were administered, the faster the bloodstream and nervous system were restored to normal. Time was of the essence. However, the environmental suits to protect personnel from the hoople gas were in short supply. The longer someone was on the loose and playing an aggressive game of keepaway, inducing hooples to keep farting, the worse the hangover and recovery period.

  "Can it get any worse?" Wexel said, when Genys shared the first report from Tahl, chief medical officer on the Defender.

  "I really wish you hadn't said that." Genys took back the tablet with the stats Tahl had sent. She certainly hadn't understood more than the summary. She doubted he did, either.

  "Captain, we've got trouble." Decker's voice crackled through the communication strip overhead.

  "See? The universe listens and takes it as a challenge. Or a dare." She braced herself. "What kind of trouble, Decker?"

  "Ankuar."

  "As in?"

  "One of the runaways got to Docking Arm two --"

  "Enlo, help us, please." Wexel bowed his head into his hands.

  "We got him with a stunner, but he had a hoople and he was closer to a crew of Ankuar heading out for shore leave than he was to us."

  "Giddy Ankuar. Just what we need." She levered herself up from the chair that had just become uncomfortable. As in an urgent need to be several star systems away. "Where are they?"

  "We're on the station side of the closed airlock. They're on the other side and using each other for battering rams." Decker snickered. "When they aren't playing hoople keepaway."

  "Would anyone be upset if we did a five-second atmospheric evacuation of the whole arm?" Wexel’s face was four shades paler than it h
ad been during the light-and-sound treatment to break the mechanical hoople addiction.

  "How many ships do you have docked there?" Genys said.

  She wanted so much to shout, Yes, do it, release all the atmosphere. The universe would be a slightly better place with one less crew of Ankuar. However, all the diplomatic repercussions to follow would be too high a price to pay. Along with the damage to all the ships that might have had their airlocks open, and any people between their ships and the station.

  "What about the other ships currently docked --"

  "We got through to most of them and warned them to shut their airlocks, start decontamination procedures, and break out environment suits. Eight of the nine ships got the warning in time," Decker reported.

  "The ninth was the Ankuar ship?" Wexel guessed.

  "Told us what we could do with our warning and our hoople problem. Turns out Ankuar have been warned about allegedly fake emergency alerts regarding hooples. Their High Command considers them propaganda and meant to make them, specifically, look like idiots. Kind of like the bankinak hunts we pull on the new trainees during Basic." Decker snorted. "They're screaming right now, furious, locked in their ship. Can't make up their minds if they want us to rescue their crewmen who are giggling and hugging and singing some pretty funny children's songs. Did you know Ankuar voices can reach frequencies only dogs can hear?"

  Genys almost choked, holding back laughter. Everything was being recorded, per regulations, from the moment the alert went out across the station. She did not want future historians to find images of her red-faced and giggling until she cried. Which she knew would happen if she let out the first "bwah-hah!" The captain of the Defender had a certain dignity to maintain.

  And sometimes really hard duties to perform.

  At times like this, she wished she hadn't taken Treinna's dare to learn Ankuaran, all four levels. As soon as she made contact, the captain of the Ankuar ship would call up her records and learn she could speak his language without help of a translation program. She wouldn't be able to blame any gaffs or deliberate miss-steps of the tongue on the computer. Ankuar worshiped their dignity more than Enlo. In fact, they insisted Enlo didn't exist, because their ancestors had outgrown the need for the All-Maker, tracked him down, and destroyed him as obsolete and irrelevant. Like most Ankuar statements in their version of "true history," they couldn't back up their claims. That never stopped them.