“Mary!” I tried to sit up, but the pain in my stomach stopped me from lifting more than a couple inches before falling down on my back.
“Dean, you have to calm down. You’ve been through a lot, but you’re healing faster than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
The hybrid blood in me helped with the healing process. Mae’s blood.
“Is she going to be okay?” I asked, seeing her chest rise and fall slowly. That was a good sign.
Nick stood between us, looking every bit the part of the doctor for the first time since I’d met him. He was a natural.
“She’s sustained a lot of wounds, but none in themselves are life-threatening. She was shot in the legs and the left shoulder. The suits are made to prevent the serious burning from the beams, but flesh and veins were still seriously damaged. She’ll be fine, but I have her sedated for the time being, while the grafting heals.”
“Are you telling me you have the ability to graft new skin on this ship?” I asked, dumbfounded.
He nodded, smiling widely. “We do. It’s amazing what we learned from the Kraski databases. I don’t think we’ve even begun to scratch the surface. Give us another ten years to analyze and decipher it all, and we could be living in a world with no illness, disease, or famine for that matter.”
The idea was a lofty one, but admirable. Earth needed hope now more than ever.
“Where’s Slate?” I asked, feeling foolish for not having asked after him yet.
“I’m right here, boss,” the big man said, stepping in from the hallway. “I wanted to give you some privacy while you woke up.” His arm was in a sling. He saw me looking at it. “It’s just sprained. I’ll be back to normal in no time.”
“Slate’s being humble. He dragged you two onto the ship and hasn’t left your side since,” Nick said. “I’m going to go grab some sleep, if you don’t mind. Dean, I left some painkillers beside you. If it gets to be too much, take one and rest.” With that, he left the room, leaving me alone with Slate and my unconscious fiancée.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, sliding a chair up beside my twin bed.
“Do you mind passing me another pillow?” I asked, and he even stuffed it under my head. I cringed at the movement in my gut, but propped up, I could speak to him properly, instead of staring at the ceiling.
“I’m not sure how I’m feeling. We got the device, met the Bhlat, and survived.” I looked over to Mary, hoping to God she was going to be all right. She should have stayed with me. She was always trying to protect others first, and it nearly got her killed.
“That we did.”
“How many did you take on out there?” I asked.
“Killed five of them. By all accounts, there were about twelve or so on board – that we saw. There could have been more hiding out.”
“What were they doing there? If they knew there was a device with the capability to destroy them, why not destroy the station and leave it at that?” I asked, stumped.
He passed me a bottle of water from beside the bed, helping himself to one as well.
“I’m not sure. That’s above my pay grade.”
“Take a stab at it,” I coaxed.
He stared at the wall for a minute. Slate was a trained soldier, but from my experience with him, he was a lot smarter than even he gave himself credit for.
“Kareem said they were chased away, forced to leave the device hidden because they didn’t have their DNA yet. The Bhlat are a big force, we can assume, so maybe they left soldiers here in the off chance the Deltra came back. They pretended it was dead, in hopes of luring them back. Or they’re no better than space pirates, trying to get someone to board, and then stealing their ships. Either way, I doubt they knew about the hidden killing machine Kareem left behind,” Slate said, impressing me with his speculation.
“But fifty years? It doesn’t add up. Unless Mae was able to communicate to them?”
“There was no ship there. They had to have been dropped off some time ago.”
“What happened with the grav-system out there?” I looked to the ceiling, even though I had no idea what direction the Deltra ship stood.
He smiled at this. “We were losing, and I wanted something to turn the tides.”
“Thank God you did, because I was about to get shot.”
“And how did that work out for you?” He nodded at my stomach.
“I got shot,” I said, laughing along with him. “Stop, it hurts.” My hand settled on my wound, which was extremely tender to the touch.
“Sorry, boss. No more jokes.”
“Are we still at the station?” I asked.
“We moved away a few thousand kilometers.” He crossed the room and picked up a tablet. “See?” He showed me the image from the viewscreen on the bridge. The ship lingered there, just in orbit of a gorgeous, lifeless world, particles, water, and ice creating a visually stunning ring around the planet.
“I can’t believe something so beautiful can be so treacherous at the same time,” I said, still staring at the planet on the tablet.
“I had a girlfriend like that in high school,” Slate said, straight-faced at first. Soon we were laughing, and I was literally busting a gut. The pills beside my bed were starting to call for me.
“You guys are going to want to see this.” Clare’s voice came through the room’s speakers. Slate’s tablet switched to the map mode; Clare was pushing through. A small icon blinked once again on it. “Mae’s ship is back and moving fast.”
TWENTY-ONE
“Mae’s ship?” I blurted, hardly able to believe what I was seeing. “How is that possible?”.
“We don’t know. She’s heading out from the asteroid field we passed just now. Maybe she found a way to hide from our sensors inside it.” Clare slapped her palm to her forehead. “We should have gone back and checked. Sit a ship on a large enough hunk of rock, with just the right amount of radioactive metals inside it, and it would probably jam our sensors.”
I nearly smiled at Mae’s move. She’d hidden from us on an asteroid and was now getting away.
“Follow her,” I said.
Three heads turned to look at me, propped up in the captain’s chair wearing a cheap med-suit, and solemnly nodded.
“What choice do we have? If we want to keep the Bhlat from knowing we were here, she’s the last moving piece,” Clare said.
“She has to be exterminated.” Slate stood tall, staring forward toward the map on the viewscreen. His words bothered me, but I knew they shouldn’t. He was right.
“How do we know where she’s going?” Nick asked, still wearing his scrubs.
“We don’t, but we can predict where her current trajectory will take her. We’ll aim for that path, and maybe we can even cross paths. We have the advantage because we can see where she is, but she can’t do the same with us.” Clare was taking charge, and I obliged her. With Mary incapacitated, we needed someone who could fly the ship and think outside the box.
“What do you think she’s doing?” Nick asked.
“She has to be going to the Bhlat. The Kraski are gone, for all we know… but maybe that was a lie from Mae. She had no affiliation with the Deltra, at least none that we knew of.” I thought back to my memories of the Deltra visiting Janine and convincing her to work with them. They, of course, tricked her, just as they had tricked us last year. I looked down at the new Deltra tool I held in my hand and wondered how I had trusted Kareem so quickly. Suddenly, the killing device I was holding made me want to throw up. How had it even gotten into my hands? For all I knew, they were tracking us with it. The urge to release it out the airlock passed over me, but we might still need the damned thing. After that, I was sure I needed to dispose of it, once and for all.
“Make that happen, Clare. Slate, can you give me a hand back to the room? I think I need to rest.” My body was in serious pain, and the events were leaving me lightheaded.
“For sure, boss.” He took most of my weight and soon I was back in the roo
m, lying on the bed looking at the ceiling. I took another pill, and before I knew it, my vision was fading, my brain getting foggy.
__________
“Dean, I’m just going to go for a run. I’ll be back soon, and I’ll make breakfast.” Janine walked over to me at the kitchen island as I was pecking away at my laptop. She leaned over, resting her chin on my shoulder. I turned my head and she kissed my cheek, leaving her freshly applied lip balm. She always wore vanilla. I loved the scent.
“Have a good run. Can we have bacon with breakfast?” I asked. She rolled her eyes.
“Dean, do I go for a run just to counter a couple slices of bacon? Maybe you should join me.” She prodded me in the side with her finger.
“I promise I’ll go next time. I have some work to get done for this afternoon.” It was mostly the truth.
“Okay, babycakes. I’ll be back.” She hopped from one foot to the other, warming up her blood flow. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she didn’t have any makeup on. She was the most beautiful woman I’d even seen.
The door closed, and I went back to working on the Peterson file.
__________
I awoke from the strange dream wondering why I’d remembered that brief moment of my past. It was from eight years ago, probably not even a year after Janine and I had met. The pain pills left my mouth dry, another side effect of the medicine. Finding the bottle of open water on my table, I guzzled half the bottle before setting it down.
The dream had left me shaken, seeing Janine again. Mae looked just like her. I always felt like there was a difference I could notice between them, but since I hadn’t ever seen them together, it was hard to tell. Either that, or my brain filled in the Janine role in my dream with Mae’s face, her nuances.
“Dean,” a coarse voice whispered from across the room.
“Mary!” I exclaimed, so happy she was awake. “I’m here.”
Getting off my bed proved easier this time than the last, and I saw from the tablet on the wall that I’d been out for four hours. The pills really packed a punch.
I pulled the chair Slate had been sitting in and brought it to her bedside.
Mary’s eyes were closed, but she opened them when I touched her hand. It was warm, but not hot to the touch, and I took that as a good sign.
“How are you feeling?” I asked her, squeezing her fingers ever-so-lightly.
She groaned but smiled at me through the pain. “I feel like a fell from a cliff and landed on the ground in a poof just like a cartoon coyote. What happened?”
“You don’t remember? You talked to me, letting me know which room to find you in.”
“No. The Bhlat cornered me, and I tried to shoot my way free, then… nothing.”
“The device worked, and they turned to mush in their suits. It was terrible and lifesaving at the same time. We found you unconscious, and I was barely hanging on. Slate ended up hauling us the pair of us, passed out and bleeding,” I said, getting a slight snicker from her.
“We make quite the team.” She rubbed the back of my hand with her palm.
“We sure do.” I kissed her forehead, getting a shot of pain from my stomach wound, though it felt way better than it had. The hybrid blood was helping me heal from it at a welcome expedited rate.
We talked, and I filled her in on Mae’s ship reappearing. I hated to tell her, but she swore she wanted to know everything. With any luck, we would have time to heal a bit before we were back in battle mode.
“I wish Magnus and Nat were here,” Mary said, mirroring my own thoughts.
“Me too. I still can’t believe they’re married.”
“I wish we were,” Mary said. “I was running around that damned place trying to distract the monster Bhlats and all I could think about was walking on a beach with you, a little boy holding our hands between us. We walked, swinging the boy, sand warm and messy under our bare feet. It was wonderful and scary at the same time. I thought that was it. Like I was having an afterlife vision of what wouldn’t be, if that makes any sense.”
“It makes a lot of sense. I love you, Mary. Let’s go stop Mae from doing whatever it is she’s up to, and go home,” I said, wishing it were that easy.
“Deal. Now where can I find one of those crazy pills you were talking about?”
__________
“Has she changed course at all?” I asked. We were all on the bridge, six days after the adventure that had resulted in two of us being badly wounded. Slate still had a few bruises, mostly healed by that point.
“Nothing substantial. She only moves when there’s something standing between her and her target. Wherever that is.” Clare had gone from bubbly engineer to focused pilot. Mary took some light duties now, but she needed to walk around with crutches, which they surprisingly had stored on the ship.
I passed around the freshly heated freezer-pack dinners, though we really didn’t know what time our internal clocks were working on since we all had such different schedules. With just the five of us, we had to split the small number of chores.
I bent down, passing Clare a dinner plate, and noticed my side didn’t hurt at all any more from the movement. It was almost entirely healed. I only wished Mary had the same success. She was still in a lot of pain, popping more pills than she thought was healthy.
“Where the hell is she bringing us?” I asked for the hundredth time.
“I guess we won’t know until we get there,” Mary said between bites of her heated-up quinoa mixture.
The map on the side of the viewscreen flashed, expanding at Clare’s direction. Mae’s ship icon blinked and was gone, the map zooming out once again.
“Son of a bitch. Another wormhole?” Nick asked.
Setting my plate down, I almost looked for Carey, who would inevitably come sniffing around looking for a way to steal the chicken off my plate. But Carey was on another ship heading to a new world. As the map expanded, and I saw the universe enlarge around us, I suddenly wanted to be sitting back on Earth with Mary and Carey, in front of a fireplace at a resort in Vermont.
“That slows us down a bit, since we were aiming to cut her off on her trajectory. Looks like we can get to that spot in an hour.”
“At least we have time to eat,” Nick said, nearly getting a smile from Clare.
TWENTY-TWO
The wormhole was hard to spot again, but there it was, a window into another galaxy.
“Sending in probes,” Clare said.
“I’m no scientist, but even a theoretical wormhole is near impossible to work, let alone stay open,” I said, baffled by the phenomena.
Clare turned while the probes shot back data. “You’re right. They need an outside force.”
I pondered that before standing up fast, nearly knocking my empty plate over. “Outside force like technology?”
She nodded, pursing her lips slightly. “Sure. If there was a way for them to keep the gateway open, that might make sense. Bear in mind, I have no real understanding of this other than the Hawking books I read in college.”
“Send more probes out. Look for any electrical or nuclear radiance that isn’t coming from us.”
We waited for the results to come back.
“Probe 9351 found something. Wait.” Clare was almost giddy with excitement. “9714 found the same results.”
“Take us to one, please,” I said, standing behind the helm’s console.
Slate zoomed on the coordinates, and we saw a hovering satellite. No doubt this was one of the things keeping the gateway open.
“Look, I find this fascinating too, but every second we stay here looking at this piece of alien metal, Mae is getting closer to her target,” Slate said, clearly agitated.
“Just record their emittance frequency, and let’s get out of here.” I had a plan for when we passed back through the fold in space. If we came back.
Soon we were hovering in front of the wormhole. I was holding the device with Bhlat DNA affixed to its sensors. Just holding it was making me fe
el better about going into the mouth of the beast.
“Everyone strapped in this time?” Mary asked from her seat.
“Affirmative,” Slate said after a quick scan of the bridge.
“Three… two… one.” Clare eased the ship into the opening, and it felt like we entered the gates of hell. The ship lurched back and forth, like a boat in a tumultuous storm on the sea. The inertial dampeners, already patched up after our last venture, kicked in and out, and it felt like my head was going to rip clean off my shoulders. As badly as I felt, I worried for Mary as we tossed about, but just as quickly as it started, it ended as we exited the other end.
“Are you all okay?” I asked, getting out of my seat to cross over to Mary.
Her eyes were closed, and blood ran from her lips. My hand ran to her face, and her eyes darted open. “It’s all right. It’s just me,” I said calmly.
Her fingers traced her mouth, coming away with her blood on the tips. “I’m fine. I bit my tongue.”
“Well, that was better than the first time,” Slate said, getting up too. The map had zoomed once again, and Clare left the bridge to check on the engineer room. “She’s not using her FTL yet. That could mean a couple of things. Either she’s having trouble with her ship or the target’s near.”
Slate looked every bit as imposing as I’d seen him before. If I didn’t know better, he was itching for a battle; a final showdown.
Clare’s voice came through the console speakers. “Everything checks out here. We should be good to go.”
Mary moved to the helm position, though I could see her wince in pain at doing so.
“She’s slowing down,” Mary said, pointing to the map. “We’ll be at her location in thirty minutes.”
“It’d be a lot faster if we just toss this baby into FTL for a minute,” I suggested, getting a smile in return from Slate.
“I like the cut of your jib, boss. I’ll suit up. Care to join me?” he asked, and I didn’t answer because he wouldn’t like to hear what I really thought. I just nodded sullenly, anxious for a resolution to this chase, but worried about what that outcome would look like.
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