“If my dad has anything to do with it, this AI doesn’t stand a chance. Who’s Plato?”
“An AI that Ted created.”
“Damn, Dad! You’ve been busy.”
Ted’s eyes brightened. “You wouldn’t believe the technology we have access to. Immersive holographic interfaces, direct links between the brain and the AI, with aliens like my friend Ankh.”
Rence, Lita, and Billy enjoyed seeing their father so excited, but they had no idea what he was talking about.
“Ankh, an alien about this tall—” Joseph held his hand waist high. “—with a big head, no emotions, loves nothing more than to think about stuff.”
“You don’t know Ankh at all,” Ted complained. “I thought we were getting a ride somewhere.”
“If all you need is space for your ship to land, there’s a park right around the corner. We can walk.”
Ted’s eyes unfocused for a moment. “Plato says that he can land the ship.”
The group walked away. Dokken stayed on the grass, preferring to fight his way through weeds instead of walking on pavement. Not if he didn’t have to.
“Nice dog,” Lita said. Dokken trotted over to walk at her side, always keeping one eye on Cory.
“He’s sentient, or so they tell me,” Kai said. “Don’t feed him or he’ll get your fingers.” Kai held up his hand, but his nanocytes had already repaired the damage that Dokken had done. “You get the point.”
“No. You got the point!” Lita quipped. Dokken dog-laughed and nuzzled Lita’s hip. “He’s a sweetheart.”
They turned the corner and watched the ship descend. The hatch popped open and the stairs descended.
“Your chariot to the stars awaits, madam,” Joseph said, bowing and sweeping an arm toward the ship. The Podder stuffed himself into the hatchway.
“That’s our friend, Bundin.” The Podder waved his tentacle arms.
“You people are weird,” Rence said.
“Call your mother. OFTEN!” Ted emphasized as he climbed aboard. The hatch closed and the ship rapidly ascended, racing to the east.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Onyx Station
The back of the mechanic’s shop was as pristine as the front, which was for the “regular customers.” In the back was where Pete kept the parts and items that would get him a bit more attention than he probably wanted.
“What’s under that cover?” Eddie asked, pointing to a large, oddly-shaped mass in the corner of the room.
“I don’t believe that’s what you asked to see,” Nathan said, checking over his shoulder.
“I’m looking at what I came for,” Hatch bellowed from under a black 1969 Camaro parked in the center of the clean garage set up in a corner of the hangar bay. The Londil, who resembled a giant octopus, had flattened himself to fit under the car, his tentacles wagging out in different directions as he completed his inspection.
Julianna tapped her foot, growing impatient. “Well, maybe you’ll be done soon. We need to get back to Ricky Bobby.”
“I’ll be done when I’m done. It’s as simple as that.” Hatch’s voice was muffled and full of irritation.
“Oh, and look at the timing on this,” Nathan said, turning to Terry and Char as they approached from the front of the shop. “Did Pete get you sorted out with the parts you needed?”
“He did. Some interesting finds he hooked us up with. Ankh asked for them, but I have no idea why.” Terry’s eyes dropped to the immaculate car in front of them. “What is this? Oh, you are a beautiful lady! Is that a nineteen-sixty-nine Camaro?”
Hatch spilled out from under the car, inflating into his usual bulbous form, tentacles waving around as he righted himself. “Yes, and it’s mine as of ten minutes ago, so don’t get any ideas.”
Nathan smiled politely. “So much for introductions. Hatch, this is Terry Henry Walton and Charumati, from the Bad Company.”
Terry extended a hand, but thought better of it after seeing the irritated expression on the Londil’s face. His tentacles remained at his sides.
“And this is Captain Teach and Commander Fregin, from Ghost Squadron,” Nathan said, motioning to the pair at his side.
“Ghost Squadron.” Terry looked behind him to make sure there were no unwanted ears in the area. “You guys fly under the radar, take missions that we can’t. Sometimes I wish we weren’t so high-profile, but the boss has different ideas.”
“A private conflict solution enterprise has to be visible because you stop wars. People have to trust that your word is good,” Nathan replied.
Teach took the hand Terry had offered to Hatch, his eyes wide with excitement. “This is quite the honor. You guys are legendary. We heard what you did at Alchon Prime.”
“Thank you,” Char said. “Just for your ears, I’ll have to say that it wasn’t our finest hour. Terry blew the engine with us inside. It wasn’t pretty.”
“I did that, but Ted demanded action.”
Hatch scooted around to the other side of the car, not distracted by the meeting.
“Don’t mind Hatch.” Julianna waved a hand in the mechanic’s direction. “We dragged him off the ship to inspect parts, which is when he came across his newest find. He’s not really a people person.”
“People, Podder, Crenellians, Kezzin, Yollin, I make no exceptions. I dislike them all,” Hatch chimed in from the other side of the vehicle, his eyes studying every detail.
Eddie laughed, but Julianna looked unimpressed, obviously used to the cantankerous mechanic’s attitude.
“Doctor A’Din Hatcherik has a fondness for classic cars, as you can see,” Nathan said, casting a look back at the Camaro.
“As do I,” Terry stated.
“Wait,” Char said. “The Doctor A’Din Hatcherik? As in the one responsible for the design of the Q-Ship?”
“As well as many of the other technological advances the Federation enjoys,” Teach said.
“Damn, that’s pretty impressive,” Terry stated, his eyes still checking out the vehicle from a distance. “I think you need to meet Ted, but he’s on Earth delivering the Interstellar Instantaneous Communication System, the IICS. He also has the miniaturized Etheric power supply. You may find some uses for it.”
Nathan coughed into his hand. “I already transferred the design,” he whispered.
“What brings you two to Onyx Station?” Teach asked, an easy grin on his face.
“If you can believe it, a little R and R,” Terry answered.
“I can’t believe it,” Julianna said dryly.
Eddie scoffed at his partner. “We take vacations. Just last week, I took you to Sagano for a tropical getaway.”
“By getaway, you mean we were hiding from pirates,” Julianna retorted.
The group laughed, easily able to relate to the demands of the job.
“Terry and I bought an All Guns Blazing franchise that we’ll set up on Keeg Station, in the Dren Cluster. It’ll have its own gate pretty soon, but with your Q-Ship, you don’t need a commercial gate. Have Nathan give you the coordinates if you don’t have them already and stop on by. Give us a couple months to get the pub up and running. We’ll name a drink after you.”
“Deal. After our next mission. We have some scumbags we need to rid the universe of first, but after that, we’ll bring Ricky Bobby for a visit.”
“If your ship takes any damage, consider Spires Harbor for your repairs. Soon to be the biggest shipyard in the known universe.”
“Are you sure about that?” Nathan asked.
“It’s our tagline. I’m sure about that.”
Hatch harrumphed and held out his tentacles, impatience written across his face.
“Great to meet you, but it looks like we’re leaving.”
“Same here. Our lawyer wants us to sign more papers. You’d think we could do it with a thumbprint and a DNA sample, but no, sign in triplicate, all twelve hundred pages…”
“Bureaucrats. Why do we allow them to exist?” Hatch interjected, looking
pointedly at Nathan.
Keeg Station
The recruits were dogged. Heads hung in exhaustion. They were eighteen hours into a twenty-four-hour combat exercise. Without having a training area, they extended the cargo bay into space. Every recruit had a suit of some sort in which to operate in the frigid vacuum outside the station. Some suits had limited dexterity, but those were a stopgap while waiting for their mech suits to be designed and manufactured, if that was possible.
Mardigan was convinced it was. He was happy to announce that the cryo-drone design was large enough to encompass all body sizes. The recruits weren’t as pleased with the news as he thought they should be.
No one wanted to think they’d be injured badly enough to require being frozen so their brains wouldn’t die. It provided little comfort, because they would still suffer the pain of their wounds and die, but then they’d wake up from it. The recruits expressed their dismay at the thought. Only K’Thrall found the thought of remembering one’s own death intriguing.
Mardigan and Auburn looked at each other. Kim and Christina had listened to the conversation. “The recruits have a good point,” Christina said.
“We could design it in such a way…” Mardigan started, but Kimber held her finger to her lips to stop him.
“Go away,” she said. He was instantly bummed, but saluted and left.
“Why do you have to be that way?” Auburn wasn’t pleased either.
“There’s still a chain of command and some separation is good. Remember when my dad backed out of the direct affairs, refusing to learn the newcomers’ names? To keep from getting too close. We watched hundreds of warriors grow old and die. We saw too many others die in combat. I don’t want to go through that any more than he did.”
Auburn nodded and hugged her with one arm.
Christina continued. “Ramses was a gentle soul. His death was horrific. How would he have come back from that? Not the precipice, but having gone over it and then being pulled back by the Pod-doc.”
“Would you?” Kimber asked.
Christina nodded. “For the sole reason of getting back in the fight and fucking up that guy’s shit. Kill me, will you! I’m gonna kill you right back, butt-hugging fuckwit.”
“I’m not sure I’d want to relive it,” Kimber said softly.
“I’d want you to be good with surviving,” Auburn replied. “We are at the point in our lives where we’re not living for ourselves. We live for others. Look at what the Bad Company does. We fight for others because they can’t. So if our brain gets a little mushy because we died, so what? We need to come back to life. We need to live because we have to keep fighting for the people who can’t fight for themselves. And we live for the rest of us in the Bad Company.”
“Which means I get to come back to life and stomp on the balls of the rotten bastard who snuffed me out. Fucker!” Christina pumped her fist.
“And there’s that, too.” Kimber smiled. “I formally change my position for the aforementioned reasons and will be heretofore recognized as a ‘yes, I want to live’ vote. Freeze me and bring me back.”
“It’s unanimous. We better get back in there before they fall asleep. They have six hours of combat drills remaining.”
“Too late,” Christina said. Once the recruits had sat down, they were out cold. Most slept in their spacesuits, but all were asleep. “Up and at ‘em!”
Pittsburgh, Earth
“Do you have any idea where Sylvia might be?” Cory asked Kailin for the tenth time.
“Not a clue.” Kailin couldn’t expound further and was tired of Cory asking, but he couldn’t blame her. “We’ll find her.”
“Pittsburgh covers a lot of ground,” Joseph said while he studied the imagery of the city over which they hovered. “It’s where three rivers joined, the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio. The natives recognized how fertile the region was. Started with the Adena culture, then the Iroqois, Lenape, Seneca and Shawnee moved in. Once George Washington and the French decided they liked it, the rest was a running battle for control.”
“Why the history lesson, Joseph?” Cory asked.
“Because I’m nervous, dear Cordelia. What we saw in San Francisco bothered me greatly. Chicago? Not much better. It seems as if mankind is devolving. I don’t want any of our families caught up in that, but they are. Look at Kailin and what they did to Ted’s factory.”
“I’m anxious, too.” Cory sighed heavily from her seat on the bridge. The others wedged in around her. Her hand naturally went to Dokken’s head, where she found some comfort in the warmth of his thick hair. “I’m afraid they won’t care, that they’ll still be angry that we left them.”
“They care, greatly,” Petricia said. “I had the pleasure of their company a great deal when we lived in San Francisco. They are wonderful human beings. Sarah is very much like your father, and Sylvia takes after you. Terry Henry is a big personality and sets an ideal that people don’t understand as they try to live up to it.”
Kailin worked his way to the front of the small bridge. “I know exactly what Petricia is trying to say. After Grandpa left, there was a huge void. Everyone had their idea of what would Terry do, but the opportunists jumped in, the little people who could never be the pillar of moral strength that Grandpa was. No one was as selfless. People wanted for themselves—power, stuff, those things. It took two months before they came after me. I’m sorry, Uncle Ted. I lost your factory.”
Ted didn’t look up from the captain’s chair. He was engrossed in a pop-up screen where rows of data scrolled past. His lips moved as if whispering to himself.
“Plato, can you take us on a slow pass over the populated areas of Pittsburgh? Petricia and I will search for anyone tapping into the Etheric.”
“I have a search pattern established. I am sorry that my sensors cannot pick up these emanations. I will project a map before each of you, simply tap the spots where you feel the special people and I will build a database.”
“Looks like we need room to maneuver,” Joseph suggested.
“Please clear the bridge,” Plato requested.
The others wanted to stay. Cory stood, wished the vampires luck, and worked her way off the bridge. Kailin poured into the corridor, bounced off Bundin’s shell, and fell to the deck. Dokken turned his head back and forth as he wondered what he’d just seen.
“When will I be able to get off the ship?” Bundin asked.
“For fuck’s sake,” Kailin said, sitting and rubbing his arm. “We’re looking for Cory’s daughters!”
“And that is exactly what I want to do. I came along to help.” The Podder sounded hurt.
“This time, you will go with us whenever we get off the ship,” Cory promised.
“I want to help,” Bundin said.
“Is this more of the Terry Henry Walton effect?” Kailin asked. Cory’s eyes glowed blue in the twilight of the corridor. The hatch to the bridge remained open, but the lights were dimmed as Joseph and Petricia worked with the holographic maps. Ted was in his own world, communing with Plato on what Ted considered as the most important project. No one else knew what that was until Ted told them.
“It wasn’t TH but Joseph who saved me,” Bundin began. “The influence of this group of humans is being felt far and wide. They ended the civil war on my planet. They brought peace to us. At a high cost. As I’ve seen in the short time that I’ve known them, everything comes at a price. Terry lets everyone know what that price is and lets them decide if they are willing to pay it. Everyone agrees. You should have seen Joseph break into that ship at Alchon Prime when I was starting to run out of air. We fight for each other probably more than we fight others.”
Cory closed her eyes and looked down. Softly, she started to speak. “Ramses was never a warrior, but he became one because I had to go to war. With my healing gift, I couldn’t turn my back on the injured. And he wouldn’t turn his back on me. I’m not blaming myself that he was killed. The Skrima killed him. He fought as well as he could, but
it wasn’t good enough, not against a hell-spawned enemy like them. Before we go back into combat, I want everyone to be sure that they will fight like warriors possessed, even when the enemy are the very demons we fear.”
“The battle with Ten will be far different. We may never fire a shot,” Bundin said. “That man in there is the key to whether we can end Ten’s enslavement of the kidnapped humans or not.”
They looked at Ted, sitting in the captain’s chair but not looking captainly. Petricia carefully touched a spot on her map that kept moving slowly around her. Joseph tapped a spot and thrust his arm in the air.
“Found her!” he yelled.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Onyx Station
“By all that’s holy in this bald monkey-ass world, don’t make me sign any more papers!”
“I assure you that no one is making you do anything. That premise alone could void this packet of contracts. Are you making that accusation?”
“No,” Terry said sheepishly. “I meant to say, will we ever be fucking done signing our fucking lives away?”
“You are an angry man,” Rivka said. She was half Terry Henry’s size. She climbed down from the barstool and stood to her full height, and she was still shorter than a sitting TH. “I have a job to do, and I don’t think you respect it! Nathan asked me to do this as a personal favor. Yes. I’m an intern. Yes. I’m a woman. You get over that, do your job, and I’ll do mine!”
“He doesn’t have anything against you being an intern or a woman,” Char said, pointing at the sheaf of papers. “He despises bureaucrats who embrace paperwork as the epitome of productivity.”
“You think I like this?”
“How could you not?” Terry declared.
“Okay, maybe I do, but it’s in the sense of putting a puzzle together where there are no holes. You will be able to defend your bar before the Queen and the universe! No one will take it away from you, except for AGB Enterprises if you violate the branding or fail to make your purchases from them or fail to pay them their revenue, although you’ve made that payment automatic by agreeing to use AGB Enterprises Accounting and Banking as declared on this form.” Rivka dug halfway through the stack and pointed to a page.
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