Awakening of a Predator (Gravity Book 2)

by Jeremy Kester

  “It’s been what, eight years since you finally left your training with me? And you’ve become a walking painting I see?” he commented on her tattoos.

  Unsheathing two short swords from her waist, 356Q remained completely calm in her response to seeing her former master alive. She had heard the reports, but she had not expected him to be involved.

  “So you are in the ship we followed?” she asked curiously as they both slowly stepped around cautiously assessing each other.

  “I was the one who crashed into this thing to begin with. I am surprised it took your superiors that long to figure out.”

  “They’re… a bit distracted,” she explained choosing her words carefully.

  No other words were exchanged before 356Q charged forward and attacked.

  Haden parried and countered nearly effortlessly. The sounds of metal clashing against metal echoed in the halls. The two spun around, neither gaining any edge on the other. It was a stalemate as quickly as the fight began.

  Again 356Q spun nearly slicing Haden’s arm, though he was just able to dodge the first while locking his blade against the second of 356Q’s.

  Realizing that he had no more time to waste, Haden changed his strategy. He needed only to get a brief hand on her. The option came as he allowed her to break through his defense. It brought her close enough that he then grabbed her with the paralyzer. She dropped instantly. When she hit the floor, he punched her squarely and knocked her out.

  Using the opportunity, Haden ran. He would have enough time to set his trap before he had to engage her again.

  Only three officers met him on his way to the engine room. They were each summarily dispatched, two with the sword, and one with a single dart through the main arteries in the neck.

  As he entered the engine room, there was no one else there. It was there that he realized that the ship’s pursuit of the Regalia had likely been a breech in its original orders. It would explain why there were so few that met him and only one operative aboard.

  Minutes were all that he had to set up and execute his plan. He didn’t know how long it would take 356Q to recover and track him down. He used to be quicker than she was, but that was years ago.

  Haden slid two thin panels from the vest under his shirt. The panels were the same self-designed explosive and siphoning devices he had used in his previous life. They would be more than enough to destroy the ship.

  He placed the two devices near containment and general engineering controls. Activating a holographic display on the devices, he initiated the decryption programs and then synchronized the two. They were designed with limited artificial intelligence capable of becoming integrated into the ship’s systems by adapting to the networks and operating systems. They would hack the computers and were able to download and transmit massive amounts of information quickly. Included in his download were engineering schematics, codes, and other information that may have been of use. Any secondary encryptions were of no consequence as the device kept the encryptions intact for deciphering later.

  Once downloads were complete, it would command the core containments to fail via mass overrides. When containment failed, the radiation and heat would quickly build and rupture. Simultaneous with the ruptures, the devices would then detonate to eliminate fail-safes. Most ships would be destroyed. Haden expected this would be no different based on the sheer size of the core.

  Next was to create a diversionary action to keep attention away from the devices long enough for them to function. Before he could create the diversion though, 356Q appeared. She wasn’t interested in what he was doing as she immediately attacked him. Defensively, he fired two darts that she easily sliced in midair with her swords.

  His eyes widened briefly. He did not recall that her reflexes were as quick as she now displayed. He had to dodge a few slashes as he worked to unsheathe his sword.

  Finally, he swung it out and a loud clang of metal rung through engineering. There was no interest in continuing to fight her. He wanted off of the ship as soon as possible. The timing of the detonations was purposefully set to occur much sooner than he had in the past.

  There was no time to battle with a sociopathic killer.

  356Q set up a tighter defense not allowing Haden to get close enough to use the paralyzer again. Her movements were quick, precise, and extraordinarily graceful. Spinning between the clear side of her body and the tattooed half, she almost looked demonic.

  Instinctively, Haden backed himself towards the airlock. He had to at least reach his suit before he could make any decisions on escaping.

  It would be tricky.

  A slash hit his arm. He winced. Luckily his response was quick enough to prevent it from being much worse than the simple flesh wound it was. Defending against both blades was fully testing his skill, and he was losing.

  Using the narrower hallways, Haden was more easily defending himself and placing more distance. 356Q couldn’t match her form that she held in the open with two blades. If he could, he wanted to try to hit her with a dart. It was a long shot and she would be ready for it. It occurred to him to then allow for them to close in on one another.

  When the two locked swords, he tried to press forward to disallow her from breaking free. Once he had eye contact with her, he fired.

  That moment she winced back, realizing that she was wounded. “Well played,” she coughed as she stumbled back, a dart sticking from her abdomen.

  She recovered quickly. He held up his arm and fired three more darts randomly. She was able to dodge two still while the other blasted through her shoulder. She stayed emotionless but halted her advance. It was futile for her to attack again as she would be dramatically slowed. “You win this time, Rachid,” she said. “Apparently I am still a student.”

  “Not for much longer though,” Haden remarked.

  Alarms began to flash all around the ship. “Containment failure. Secondary systems failure. Core breech beyond reversal. Evacuate the Yorktown,” a robotic voice began announcing.

  He couldn’t quite tell what he saw, but there was a brief flash of something that he never saw from the girl before she turned and disappeared. Choosing to ignore her, Haden turned his attention to escape.

  Only a few minutes passed before Haden was back in his suit and ready to punch through the airlock at the access point that he entered the ship through.

  In the bridge, David looked up as the alarms flashed. “Shit, shit!” one of the officers called out. “Something’s hacked into the system and shut down containment!”

  “Activate override and secondary containment!” David instructed.

  There was a moment before the increasingly panicked officer turned and yelled, “secondary containment was already disabled and the programming is just gone! Everything’s just gone! We’re hitting the threshold of a full breech already!”

  It was the cloaking systems that enabled Haden’s devices to work so quickly. The radiation and heat dissipation caused systems to run much hotter than any other ship as those energies were typically allowed to dissipate freely. The Yorktown’s containment systems were the most robust in the fleet. They ordinarily could have cooled the engine cores of 7 Alliance frigates.

  “Evacuate the ship! She’s lost!” David commanded. He stood behind the navigation array trying to muster the courage to remain at his post until he was sure the last few people were off of the ship. He didn’t see anything coming up went he was hit hard from behind and went unconscious.

  Before everything blacked out, David thought of the days of debriefings and possible court martial he would have to endure because of that woman.

  “There’s a ton of radiation now marking where the ship is!” Ned called Haden over the com-link. “Are you free of the ship yet?”

  Floating free in space, “I am about 1 kilometer from the ship,” he said trying to judge distance that was truly impossible to judge.

  “That’s not going to be far enough! I am going to risk it!” Ned was flying a sma
ll transport ship that they rented for this purpose.

  Haden assumed that he would have been more than far enough to safely board the ship without it incurring any damage. “I really don’t feel like paying for that piece of crap if you break it,” he joked.

  “I could let you succumb to the radiation poisoning if you survive the explosion. It’s less risk for me.”

  “Just get here now. There can’t be more than a minute before the ship blows.”

  “Already on top of you,” Ned said as Haden looked up to see the transport ship above him and approaching fast.

  As soon as he hit the ship, he grabbed onto whatever he could and yelled “Go! Go! Go!”

  The ship spun around quickly. Despite the zero gravity of deep space, Haden felt the centrifugal force finding it a strain to hold his grip on the hull. The ship then reared forward back towards the direction of the colony. Haden fought the inertia as he watched the back end of the Yorktown glow with a strong white light and then finally explode. “A bit sooner than I thought,” he said to himself before attempting to climb towards the airlock.

  The Yorktown was destroyed.

  Uranus 13 markets and docks

  A few hours later

  Olaph loaded the last box onto the pallet. It was the last of the jobs they were able to contract out. The young woman stood nearby surveying everything that they did. Olaph thought that there was something slightly off about the girl, but he couldn’t place it. They hadn’t paid much mind to the android behind the counter at the café earlier.

  Trike thought differently though. He fawned over the girl. He had already tried asking her several times to meet with him for dinner before they departed. She declined every attempt.

  Sure, she was beautiful from what they could tell, though she kept her face hidden behind the black mask. That much concerned him. “Anyone who purposefully hides their face is hiding access to the truth,” he told Trike quietly to the side.

  Dismissively, Trike mocked him. “There’s nothing in that old nonsense, Olaph. Just enjoy the view while we have it.”

  Xaviera smiled, though the two men couldn’t see it. She was sure that these two would lead her to the man that Adrianna wanted to find. It meant her freedom. It worried her that she had walked away from the café so easily, lured by the woman who spoke so knowingly of getting away. All Xaviera wanted was to live her life without authority.

  Now all she needed was to get aboard the ship into the crew quarters and she would feel safe. Only one other was helping the tall man and the dwarf. It wasn’t Haden Rachid. Rather it was an older woman who came out to inventory everything before it was loaded. She needed to see Haden to be absolutely sure that this was the right ship.

  But she was nervous. She was nervous that Adrianna left her so quickly to take care of something else. She felt that she was being double crossed. But the opportunity was too good.

  Adrianna had told Xaviera to close the shop and move it to another colony, and Adrianna would finance it. Xaviera wanted to go to Rhea. Her ploy was to enlist the Regalia if it was still docked and to confirm if Haden was there or not. It was that simple: a confirmation for a free trip.

  “Do you see him yet?” Adrianna asked over an earpiece. Xaviera refused any other com-link that androids normally could use.

  “You could have come with me to see for yourself,” Xaviera quietly remarked. “I am sure that this is the ship you’re after.” There was no confidence behind it though.

  “I had to check something out, otherwise I would have.” In truth, she had gone to ensure that Xaviera’s indenture was cancelled, permanently. The android asked that it not mean his death, but Adrianna knew it to be the only sure way. And he needed punished for his treatment of the young girl.

  “Their coming back,” Xaviera said hurriedly. “I’ll let you know.”

  Trike toddled out of the ship to meet the young woman. Olaph did not follow behind. Instead, it was an older, military-looking man and the man Adrianna was searching for.

  “Where’s your indenture?” Haden asked immediately of the young girl. He was sure that he recognized her from somewhere before.

  Xaviera shook her head. The question caught her off-guard. “I am actually looking to run away,” she admitted. “I was getting help from someone else, although she couldn’t be with me right now. She was searching for a specific ship and pointed me to this one.” Her tone was guarded, stressed.

  Haden squinted as he heard her speak. Again there was something familiar that he couldn’t place.

  “What are you running away from?” Ned asked curiously.

  Haden held up his hand to stop Ned’s question. “Who’s this woman helping you?”

  “I’m not sure I can say yet.”

  Haden crossed his arms and smile slyly. “That’s alright. I need to know what we are really getting into. I was fine with the initial contract, but seeing you and not your partner concerns me a little. I do not generally like transporting androids escaping from their indenture. It’s a bad business practice. I have to be sure.”

  Xaviera’s eyes widened as did Ned’s when Haden directly mentioned android. Xaviera reached up and pulled the mask from her face exposing the metal. Trike appeared completely unfazed.

  “I am helping a woman find you. She helped me pay off my indenture so that I could deactivate my leash. She needed my help to locate your ship.”

  It didn’t fit, but Haden immediately thought that it was 356Q as he had just encountered her shortly before. He tensed his arm remembering the pain of the wound. It didn’t quite fit though.

  “I can’t allow you to take transport aboard my ship,” Haden said frankly. He was deliberately lying. “We transport goods only. Unless you want to be a part of the crew, I cannot let you board with us. I cannot say that it would be in good form to take a runaway slave right after what I did unless you have something useful to offer us.”

  “I can cook,” she said. Ned’s eyes widened again. Trike smiled widely. Haden seemed disinterested. “I was the cook at the café at the end of the docks. The crates I am paying you to ship are food. I wanted to open a café on Rhea of my own. I would gladly stay aboard the ship and join the crew. ”

  “So what is all this anyway? Just a ploy to weasel your way onto my ship? I didn’t trust this when my first mate came in excitedly talking about you. He runs off at the mouth a little too often.” Haden wasn’t keen on being taken advantage of. He knew that those were the risks in the business he was in, but he was having difficulty believing that there was any genuine reason to take the trouble of having this android aboard.

  Xaviera started to tear up. She didn’t want to stay now that Adrianna pushed her into the first steps. She felt used and helpless. She thought it suddenly stupid being pulled into this romantic tale. It was bullshit.

  Trembling as she hoped that what she was about to do would pay off, Xaviera pulled out a sheetcom that Adrianna had given her and handed it to Haden.

  “She said she was an operative and needed your help to escape the Alliance, Haden Rachid,” she explained as Haden saw the image of himself.

  Haden reached in his pocket and pulled out a small device similar to a sheetcom. He selected an image for display and showed it to Xaviera. “Is this her?”

  Xaviera nodded.

  “Where is she?” Haden changed his demeanor entirely. He became anxious and excited.

  “I don’t know where she-“

  “But she’s here on this colony?”

  “Yes-“

  “Do you have a com-link to her?”

  “Yes-“

  “Call her now. I want to see her now!”

  ARDME Command

  Gabriel reviewed the report. Setting it down, he felt a sense of satisfaction. He felt as though the work he had done was finally going to be able to be seen.

  “This will be starting tomorrow?” Gabriel asked the officer standing before him.

  The officer was standing at full attention. He was a young
officer like Gabriel, but had not been long out of the academy. He was nothing more than a glorified secretary running messages back and forth to Gabriel and the other higher ranking officers. “The stories about the Yorktown have already been loaded up to the networks. We will begin to leak the story of its destruction tomorrow.”

  Gabriel leaned forward. He felt that he was almost pretending to wear his rank, but he was determined to not let that show. The older officers had already challenged him. He had to have one executed for treason. The news of such actions was applauded by General Dimmings. Dimmings found it all rather amusing that his protégé was fitting in so well.

  Gabriel felt that it was an act.

  “Leak the story tonight. Do it at the lowest traffic sector of the network. Let it pick up traction on its own. We don’t want to be so forward with this.”

  The officer was nervous. “Sir,” he stammered. “There’s more news you should know.”

  Gabriel raised his brow annoyed of the possible impending news. “And that is?” he urged.

  “The Yorktown was lost. It was destroyed in orbit of Uranus.”

  The news struck Gabriel as amusing. He wanted to laugh. After all of the effort to bring the ship back to an Alliance station, it had been lost after all. “How?” he inquired.

  The officer swallowed. “Reports from the operative 356Q are that it was Haden Rachid.”

  A strange laugh spilled from Gabriel. The officer stood confused by his superior’s response. “Dismissed, Lieutenant,” instructed Gabriel as he waved his hand pushing the officer out.

  Dimmings had warned them that Rachid could be dangerous. Gabriel wanted him to be left alone. Seven years of silence did not indicate a man who had any interest in challenging the Alliance. But Dimmings wanted him hunted down.

  Sending the new operative as well as 356Q to simultaneously track him was Gabriel’s way of appeasing his commander. He had no hope that they would even find Rachid. If Dimmings was correct in the assessment, then hunting him down was indeed the fool’s folly.

  356Q’s authentication was on the report. “Well, at least she survived,” he remarked aloud. “That’s one less operative I have to replace.”