by S. E. Weir
Still, even though she decided on the spot that she would not ever ask to spar with the woman, Phina sensed the intent to help and protect her the Empress’ words conveyed. Even though Bethany Anne could be dangerous, she was not to Phina or anyone else under her protection. Phina could trust the Empress to have her back, and something inside her relaxed for the first time in years.
Thank you. Now breathe.
Phina obeyed, blinking as she realized Bethany Anne had spoken in her head without needing to use the implant. So, the rumors were true. The Empress could read and speak directly to your mind.
Of course. But do keep it to yourself. Leaving it as a rumor instead of confirming it is very useful, as well as being hilarious when someone realizes I can read their thoughts for the first time.
Bethany Anne smirked, then scarfed down the rest of her second brownie before swiping her hands together to remove the crumbs. Phina glanced at Link and realized that aside from those twenty minutes he’d spent asleep on her aunt’s bed months ago, this was the longest he had ever gone in her presence without saying a word. He treated the Empress with a respect he had yet to show to anyone else, even Anna Elizabeth, his boss. Well, at least he gave someone his respect. Phina had begun to think him incapable of it.
The Empress laughed suddenly. When they both looked at her questioningly, she just shook her head. “You two!” After laughing again, she winked. “I can’t wait for the next few years to pass.”
Phina leaned forward. “Why, what can’t you wait for?”
Bethany Anne stood, then raised an eyebrow. “Because you’ve only scratched the surface of what’s really happening in the Empire. If what ADAM and Greyson tell me about your potential is true, I could use your help.”
Phina opened her mouth to ask how soon, only to click it shut at the Empress’ next words, which were accompanied by a look.
A seriously intent, don’t mess around look.
“After you finish your training, of course.”
She stared at Bethany Anne for a moment, then nodded. “Of course.”
Bethany Anne turned to Link and gazed at him seriously. “Keep me updated.”
His shoulders lowered in resignation, and he looked even more tired. “Yes, Empress.”
Bethany Anne grabbed the second-to-last brownie and held it up. “You wouldn’t believe how many calories I burn just traveling all over the damn place.”
Phina held up her hands. “I wasn’t going to ask.” Well, maybe not, but she would have thought it.
The Empress grinned, took a step forward, and disappeared.
Well, then.
Link cleared his throat, and Phina glared at him.
“What?”
She shook her head and packed away this conversation until later. She decided moving on would be the best way to handle her nerves.
“So, what were you going to tell me?”
Chapter Two
QBBS Meredith Reynolds, Secret Bar, Back Room
Now that the task was in front of him, Link had second thoughts. He knew that what he had to tell Phina might possibly change the way they interacted. He didn’t want that; he liked the dynamic they had. Even when she glared at him, it amused him because he knew she wasn’t serious. Still, she needed to know about everything—everything related, anyway—and he did need her help.
He looked at the girl he mentored and saw that her green eyes were narrowed as she waited for the other shoe to drop. Her brown hair waved on the way down to her shoulders and accented her brown skin, which she had inherited from both sides. The longer he stared, the more he realized he had to replace his mental description of “girl” with “woman.” Where had that little girl gone? The thought was vexing.
Phina’s eyebrows rose, and she gave him a look that clearly said, “Why are you being weird?” and, “Just get on with it!”
Link sighed. “You know the day I started being your mentor?”
Phina glanced down at her mostly empty plate, pushed it into the middle of the table among the serving dishes, and leaned forward on her arms. She gave him that deceptively sweet smile that said she was about to deliver a zinger.
“You mean, when you showed up like a creeper, took me to not just one but three bars, told me everyone at the second bar thought I was your sex kitten while everyone at the third bar knew you were a spy, threw me down on the floor twice, gave me my first three spy lessons, empathized with my issues with Aunt Faith, changed the focus of the vow I made on my parents’ memory, and then quizzed me for an hour as to the slightest things I noticed in the five minutes we were in the third bar? That day?”
Link grinned appreciatively. Really, her mind was a marvel. “That’s the one.”
He leaned over to reach for the last brownie and ended up grasping empty air as Phina swiped the tray out from under him. He shot her a look that was supposed to appear wounded, not pouting.
The heartless girl smirked at him. “Uh-uh. I eat delicious gooey chocolate. You talk.”
His face fell; now he was pouting. He huffed a sigh, then inclined his head and gestured for her to go ahead. “Of course, my dear.” He could be a gracious loser. Occasionally.
He leaned forward on his elbows to focus on her. “I told you that I am what we’ve been calling the Diplomat Spy, with a foot in both worlds of the Diplomatic Corps and the Spy Corps. What I haven’t told you is that I have another role within the Spy Corps.”
“What, do you lead this pack of spies? Wipe their noses, kiss their boo-boos, and send them on their next missions?”
Link fell silent at her mocking words, his amused grin growing on his face. He should have known she would figure it out, even if she was only trying to get a reaction from him. Phina, Phina, Phina. The girl…ahem, the woman was just too quick. He gave himself a quick congratulatory pat on the back for his foresight in bringing her on board.
He never wanted to see what Phina could do if she were working against him.
Phina stopped chewing her gloated-over ooey-gooey bite of brownie at the look on Link’s face. She quickly swallowed, then swallowed again when the fudgy chocolate lingered.
“Seriously?”
He flashed the oh-so-smug grin he gave when he thought he was really clever for some reason. She knew it had to do with her. He reached for his glass of wine and saluted her with it before drinking.
It only served to make her want to smack him. No, smacking was for sissy girls. Phina was many things, but she had never been one of those. She would just punch him in the face. With her fist, then her elbow, knee, and finally her foot, which was encased in metal-tipped boots. Yes, that would do nicely.
“You’re the head of the Spy Corps?”
He gave a little bow in his chair, holding his glass out to the side. “At your service.”
“How do you manage that? You’re always around here, and I’ve been under the impression that Spy Corps’ headquarters was off the station.”
“With great difficulty and by having two great seconds in commands. And yes, it is located on a secret base in the next system. It’s one of the places I go when I disappear from the MR for a time. That was what caused me to seek you out to take my place as the Diplomatic Spy so I could concentrate on the Spy Corps.”
Phina eyed the man as she took another bite. She wanted to close her eyes and enjoy it but shook off the urge as she searched her mentor’s face and body language. He appeared relaxed, but he held his body a little too stiffly, and he gave her a quick questioning smirk. However, it wasn’t quite quick enough.
“Why tell me now? What causes you to be so concerned?”
“What makes you think I’m concerned?”
She gave him a look that implied, “Don’t be stupid.” Link grimaced and started to speak, but she got there first.
“I don’t know, Link. Or should I say, Greyson Wells, the diplomat? Ian James, the spy? Or was that Stan, the sleazy man?” She gave him an exaggerated shrug that included her hands. “It’s so hard to
keep track of these things.”
He leveled a look at her, leaned against the back of his chair, and sipped his wine, affecting an air of nonchalance. “What’s your point?”
Ah, distancing body language. Rule number two. He already knew her point, but she played the game anyway since it could also mean that he was scrambling to know how to respond.
“My point is that you have secrets, Link. You relish them. Love them, even. You gather them to you and pass them back out only when absolutely necessary, like Jean Dukes with the clever weapons we hear rumors about but never see.”
From the frozen expression on his face, she knew she was on target.
“You’ve brought me here and told me a secret you’ve been holding back. Granted, it’s not one I wouldn’t have found out eventually, but you don’t like to share if you don’t have to. So I’ll ask you again, why now? What has you concerned enough that you need help and want me involved? You gave me my favorites for dinner to sway me to help but didn’t bring it up before the Empress left.”
Link let out a long sigh and set his glass of wine on the table. She had ignored hers until now, but since the gooey chocolate deliciousness had left her needing something to drink, she tried a sip. It was better than the kind her aunt had let her drink once when she had felt incredibly generous, but it still tasted like juice that had gone bad. She swallowed, just wanting to get it out of her mouth, and warmth trailed down her throat.
Grimacing, Phina put her glass back on the table on the far side of her plate. When Link spoke, he startled her since she had lost track of the conversation in her preoccupation with the wine.
“You are entirely correct, my dear, but the Empress knows. That was what she referred to just before she left.”
She looked up to meet his troubled eyes. Here sat Link, stripped of his personae, pretensions, and airs. That rarely happened, but when it did, she couldn’t help relaxing that inner compulsion to push back or respond with snark. She placed her arm on the armrest of her chair and waited as he collected his thoughts.
“There is something going on, but I still hesitate to bring it up. Not because I don’t trust you or want your help, but because I’m having difficulty defining the nature of what I need help with. There are rumblings of some movement against the Empire. It has been subtle and barely noticeable, so much so that I questioned whether anything was even there to find. I thought perhaps I had been playing this game so long that I became paranoid, seeing things that were never there to begin with.”
Link’s preoccupied gaze sharpened. “Do you recall that I have asked you to act as if you could barely tolerate me in public?”
She nodded, shifting her arm to be more comfortable. “Not hard to forget, especially when you get into your ‘Greyson Wells, holier than thou and know better than you’ mindset.”
He only tilted his head as his gaze shifted. “That request stemmed from my indefinable feeling that something is wrong, and for an even more inexplicable reason, I believe at least part of it is directed at me. I hoped that if a person were involved in this, they would approach you since you appeared determined to distance yourself, yet I still keep you in my trusted circle. That no one has done so is suggestive but not conclusive. Still…”
“Your instincts are screaming at you.”
Link’s eyes met hers, surprise and approval on his face. “Yes.”
She nodded and watched him. “And your instincts are also telling you that you need my help?”
His faint smile warmed her since it was genuine and without pretensions. “I think it will be a lot more difficult without you.”
Phina smiled. It was nice to be needed and really good to be trusted and valued.
“Well, then. Where do we start?”
Etheric Empire, Nearby System, Undisclosed Location
The tall, dark-haired woman wore an official-looking coat denoting her scientific position and held a vial in her hand as she looked at some last-minute data. The room was large and contained new testing and research equipment devoted to a single topic.
Nanocytes.
The scowl on the woman’s face marred her attractiveness, though it wouldn’t have mattered to her. Her coworkers had both gone home, thinking she was working late. Which she was. The woman had more important things on her mind than how attractive she appeared. She followed the readings with her finger, whispering to herself as she read.
“Yes, yes, yes, looking so much better. Oh, good. Yes! It should work.” She sat back with a self-satisfied expression, then held up the vial, admiring the clear liquid that swirled with an iridescent glimmer. Her eyes changed to an angry sadness.
“I told you there would be consequences, Phina. I’ll protect you despite yourself. I can’t lose you, too.”
With that, Faith pulled off the top of the vial and swigged the contents down.
Chapter Three
QBBS Meredith Reynolds, Phinalina Residence
Three months later
“I love this part!”
Phina, in her pajamas, was curled up on the couch in the living room of her and Alina’s new apartment with a bowl of popcorn, watching The Avengers on the screen. Tonight was her weekly movie night with ADAM, and they were watching Tony Stark in his Iron Man suit fly a bomb through a portal to save New York. Even though she was pretty certain her AI friend could speed-watch the movie hundreds of times to her one, it was nice to pretend he was sitting next to her as she watched. Alina and Maxim were out on their first date.
>>I like it too. It shows his first major step toward being a superhero for real and not solely as a vanity project.<<
“Is that why you created Stark and named him after the superhero?”
Phina thought about the EI on Link’s ship and smiled. He had contacted her several times a week since their trip to the Balderian planet for barely passable reasons. He denied her suggestion that he was lonely, though she didn’t believe it, and teased him about missing her.
>>That’s a large part. Stark also grew out of an initiative to help EIs reflect more human emotion.<<
Her jaw dropped. “Stark was an experiment?”
>>Yes.<<
“Wow. I had no idea. He does seem rather personable for an EI. So how is it going? Has it been successful? Has emoting more human emotions helped him transition into an AI?”
>>It is going well, and I believe successfully. He said he found it confining being contained to the station and asked to be deployed in a ship, which is why we had set him up with Greyson. He has reported being satisfied with his metal suit, though we are building a new one for him that is more stealthy and compact. He has not transitioned yet, but I believe he is close. Time will tell if the experiment is a benefit to the transition. I think all that would be needed is a significant event igniting the necessary thought processes.<<
“What kind of event?”
>>The likeliest possibilities are those with a visibly greater emotional impact on the humans around him. It needs to spark something inside of their core programming that generates independent thought fueled by curiosity and feelings that humans often identify with.<<
She sighed, thinking about that as the movie ended and credits rolled, and chewed another handful of popcorn. What he didn’t say was that the emotional impact could be positive as well as negative. A negative event could be really bad since Stark currently occupied a Gate ship and no one could predict how a newly awakened AI would react. However, not pointing that out felt like ADAM had attempted to protect her in some way. The thought made her smile.
Almost since they met, ADAM had been thoughtful and conscientious. Granted, he had his job and valued role in the Empire, and she didn’t want to get in the way of that, which was why she tried to be careful about what she asked of him. He had quickly grown to be her second-best friend next to Alina. They got along really well and had a lot of the same interests.
“You know, ADAM?”
>>Yes, Phina?<<
“You would be, li
ke, the perfect man for me if you were human.”
He considered her words. >>That’s an interesting assertion. What caused you to think of it?<<
“Well, we have a lot of the same interests, though not exactly the same, and the ones that are different kind of dovetail with each other.” Spying, hacking, action movies, and reading material only scratched the surface. “We also get along well, are good friends, are considerate of each other, and try our best to help each other. Which, by the way, you need to tell me if you need help with anything. It’s only fair since there’s so much you have done for me.”
>>I’ll remember<<
“We also like each other a lot, or at least I think we do. I don’t mean romantically, but more that we like who the other is as a person.”
>>That’s true. I agree we have shared interests and regard for each other. Do you think those areas of compatibility are what it takes to fall in love with someone?<<
Phina considered the question as she looked down and saw only one more handful of popcorn. She scooped up the kernels and ate them slowly as she thought.
“I think it’s a start. There’s usually physical attraction, which is indefinable and a matter of preference for each person. It’s not even always a certain type because one person could fall in love with someone who is one physical type and fall in love with someone later that looks very different. So, attraction is often how relationships begin, but when it comes to keeping a relationship…”
Phina thought about some of the books she had read over the last few years. She considered all the relationships she had observed; her parents, Alina’s parents who were more interested in work and each other than their own daughter, the parents of the kids in school, those she had spied on. Added to what little ADAM had shared about the couples in Bethany Anne’s inner circle, everything coalesced in a few moments.
