Where’d she get the gun?
Then I remember I had knocked it out of Hoskins’ hand.
Ron and Vincent rushed out to the balcony with Snaps in hand. They stopped when they saw the two of us.
Conversation inside the other room had ceased.
“What happened?” asked Ron.
“Alena shot Hoskins,” I replied.
“Here?” asked Vincent.
“Police! Stand aside!” yelled the voice of Deek Tanny as the man made his way through the crowd.
I wondered why his presence was a surprise. But he was short so I may have missed him in the crowd.
Ron and Vincent put their guns back in their holsters.
When Deek saw me holding a gun by its barrel and the dazed look on Alena’s face, he said, “What’s going on?”
“Alena shot Hoskins.” I pointed over the rail.
“He fell.”
Deek leaned over the rail. Seconds later, he looked at me and then down at the gun still in my hand. “Is that the weapon?”
I nodded and handed it to him. He pulled a plastic bag out of his suit pocket and opened it. I dropped the gun in it and he closed it.
Next, I put my arm around Alena as she buried her face and hands on my right shoulder. She shook as she sobbed.
Deek looked at her and me. “What happened?”
I filled him in about my struggling with Hoskin just before Alena fired.
He said, “Sounds like self-defense. I’ll need your statements.”
I nodded.
“In a minute.”
Ron took Deek and Vincent back into the main room and closed the balcony door. I saw dozens of faces staring at me as the door closed.
Alena cried and trembled in my arms. Finally she raised her face and looked at me. Her makeup was a mess.
“I’ve never killed anyone before.”
“And you wanted to be a spy, eh?” I said. “Spies sometimes have to kill.”
She said nothing.
“You okay?” I asked.
Her eyes filled with tears as she put her arms around me and hugged.
“I know,” I said. “I was shook up the first time I killed.”
She said to my backside, “First time?”
“Yep. You always remember the first one.”
She broke her hug and looked into my eyes with her hands still around my neck. “How many?”
I shook my head. “Can’t remember.”
She returned to her hug and said with plugged up nose, “Juss gib me a minute.”
That minute lasted a long time with her in my arms.
The End
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Copyright © 2016 by Victory Crayne
All rights reserved. No part of this novel may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of Victory Crayne. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.
Names, characters, institutions, organizations, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Greg Banks.
Publisher: Victory Crayne
Laguna Woods, California
Visit my website at www.crayne.com.
ISBN-10: 0988690578
ISBN-13: 978-0-9886905-7-8
Acknowledgments
I cannot give enough thanks to Scott Barnes for his critiques and content editing and for buying two of my short stories for his great ezine, “NewMyths.com.” Thanks to Greg Banks for his cover art and interior design work. Scott and Greg are like geniuses but don’t know it yet. And don’t you dare tell them. They’ll get swelled heads.
Thanks also to Myra Posert for her copy editing. She spotted several mistakes that I overlooked.
This story took many cooks and I'm grateful for the aid of these professionals. I wrote the basic story and learned from them how to make it shine. Any errors that remain are entirely my responsibility.
Live Forever
A Jake Dani/Mike Shapeck Novel
By
Victory Crayne
Chapter 1
“Where am I?”
The room was new. I was certainly not at my apartment nor at the operations center. All I could remember was traveling to Earth and undergoing a nano-rejuvenation.
I glanced around me as I tried to figure out where I could be.
The walls sported a light blue on the top half and beige on the bottom. The bed I lay in was large enough, especially in the length. At six foot one, I often had difficulties in finding a bed I could be comfortable in.
The room contained only my bed, a light brown dresser of four drawers on the opposite wall at the foot of my bed, two upholstered guest chairs in a light brown print, and a small circular brown table between the chairs. No mirror.
On one wall rested a window but the dark blue curtain let in no light. The only door was shut.
I glanced down at my left wrist only to learn my comm was gone. Instead, I stared at the tattoo everyone received soon after they were born. In my baby years, the tattoo could be used to track my location in case I was kidnapped. Later, I got a comm to lay over it, powered by the heat of my blood. Comms became universal when everyone wore one and used theirs to communicate with others.
But no comm rested there. Only the tattoo from my childhood.
The red blanket on my bed didn’t ring any bells. I flipped the cover off and looked at the sheet. White. I was dressed in thin light-blue pajamas I didn’t recognize.
What the hell?
I pulled the cover back and sat up on the edge of my bed. In front of my feet I spotted black slippers of the type worn in hospitals.
None of this made any sense at all.
I put my feet into the slippers and walked to the window.
“Open window.”
But the curtain remained closed.
I looked for a cord to pull and found one of the left side. So I pulled it. That’s when I noticed my fingers were different.
The curtain slid aside but that didn’t help much. The window was covered with a black something. I touched it only to learn it was part of the glass or was painted on the outside. I could not scratch the covering. So I had no idea if it was daylight out or not or where I might be.
That did it. I wanted some answers and I wanted them now. I rushed to the beige door.
“Door open.”
But it didn’t. So I looked for a handle on the sliding door and slid the door aside.
One big guy in a green uniform turned toward me. Behind him stood three robots, dressed in the same green. It was hard to tell when a robot stood at attention. That was their normal posture. But one thing was clear. All four “men” were six foot or higher, and looked quite strong.
“Where am I?”
The guy lifted his left wrist to his mouth.
“He’s awake.”
He gazed upward into my eyes and must have been six foot.
“I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to remain in your room until the doctor comes.”
“Doctor?”
Behind them I observed another wall across a wide hallway. It too had the same color scheme as my room, blue on the top half and beige on the bottom.
I turned to the human male.
“Can you at least tell me where I am?” I asked.
He responded with “I’m sorry, sir. Everything will be explained by the doctor.”
He looked aside. “Door closed and locked.”
The damn thing slid shut. It wouldn’t ope
n on my command but closed on his.
I inserted my fingers in the slot and tried to slide the door aside as before, but it didn’t budge.
I stared at the off-white color of the door for five seconds.
“Damn!”
I was a prisoner.
#
A glance around the room revealed no clock on any wall. Having nothing to do, I retreated to the bed for some serious thinking.
I recalled going to the rejuvenation center to get a template made, paid for by my boss and spymaster, Acorn.
For I was a spy, as were many Bingers. My father Petro’s younger brother was Berry Dani. Berry preferred to call himself by his code name of Acorn.
In the Earth-Durr war of 2035-2043, Dr. Bing used snippets of DNA from captured alien mercons, supposedly to enhance human intelligence, strength, and healing abilities, and inserted the snippets into human embryos. The children born of such experiments became known as Bingers.
After the war ended, human prejudice against the hated mercons persisted and was directed onto the Binger children. Almost every Binger family had at least one member who had died. After hundreds had been killed, they went underground and changed their names.
Berry Dani was born in Omaha, Nebraska from Stetson Fulman and Margaret O’Malley, both full Bingers. They changed their last name to Dani to avoid persecution. Berry’s older brother and my dad, Petro, were thus full Bingers.
Berry married Arlene Smith, a normal human, and had two sons, Charles and Albert.
After graduating from college, Berry went to work for the American CIA and had received promotion after promotion until he worked his way up the org chart to second in command. Along the way, he learned a lot about analysis, field operations and training. When the CIA purged itself of Bingers, he left before his own DNA was discovered.
Then he formed the Binger Intelligence Service, which became known as BIS. He tried to recruit almost every Binger as soon as they finished their education, either from high school or college.
When his son Charles graduated with a bachelor’s degree, he joined BIS. Unfortunately, on a mission inside Russia, Charles Dani got himself killed. His brother Albert turned to a life of crime and on one poorly-planned caper, got caught while taking the jewelry of a rich man’s wife. Acorn pulled a few of his influential strings and managed to get the sentence for Albert commuted, as long as he migrated to the new planet of Rossa and changed his name. Albert chose Ron Boscoe.
On Rossa, Ron and I became buddies and I used his help on several of my private investigator contracts. At one time, Ron came to me to ask for my help on a spy mission. The idea was to rescue my father Petro. I did not know it at the time, but Petro had only joined BIS on condition that Acorn not recruit me. After I rescued my dad, and nearly got killed in the process, I made a deal with him. He was to drop out of BIS and go back home to Earth to care for my mom and run his engineering business. I would take his place as a BIS agent.
I didn’t learn until later that Acorn could hardly believe his good fortune, for he had his eyes on me for a long time.
After several assignments on Rossa in which I excelled as a spy, I heard rumors of my eventually replacing Berry.
Six months ago, I got a coded message from Acorn that he was undergoing the procedure to get a template made in the rejuvenation clinic. Since there existed a small but not zero chance he would die during the process, he wanted me to take over BIS if he couldn’t.
I breathed a sigh when he woke up. I didn’t really want to go to Earth and be stuck behind a desk.
Later, he wanted me to come to the home planet and get a nano-rejuvenation made too. On a BIS nickel. It wasn’t exactly a request. More like an order.
And who wouldn’t want to get a template made? I could later return to the rejuvenation clinic and get a true rejuvenation done. I would have my body turned back to the age of my template but I’d get to keep my memories. Talk about the ideal solution to aging!
Things were quiet on Rossa at the time, so I made the journey from Rossa to Earth, covering the twenty-five light years in about eleven days on Second Class. Ron went with me so he could visit his parents. I left Vincent Stone in charge of the BIS team in York on Rossa.
When I arrived at the clinic, I changed into the blue pajamas and allowed the doctor to inject a sedative into my left arm. The only sensation I got was the full feeling under my skin after the injector hissed. Gone were the days of needles piercing skin. Injectors used compressed air to press a solution under the skin over an artery.
I went to sleep and woke up in this room by myself.
Previous novels
Freedom
Jake Dani gets a call from his girlfriend Mimi after her arrest for protesting slavery on the newly colonized planet of Rossa. Mimi disappears and Jake leads his spy team on operations to find her. But they are up against clever and resourceful crime lords and landowners who will do anything to protect their investments in slavery. Including going after Jake himself.
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Humans Only: A Jake Dani Novel (Jake Dani/Mike Shapeck Book 2) Page 32
