Firestorm: The Relissarium Wars Space Opera Series, Book 4

by Andrew C Broderick

  “Would it be possible for me to see Hojae then?” If he wasn’t too seriously injured, that might be the best place for Makram to start on his own interrogation.

  “First, I need to get a look at you.” Seneca led him to an empty exam table, and had him sit on the edge. A tapping noise made Makram look up. Seneca was lost in thought, tapping his finger on the back of his clipboard. “No, no. This won’t do. I thought I might be able to do your examination without the need for you to put on an exam gown, but I really need to be able to examine you properly. Go change out of your clothes and put this on. He tossed Makram a piece of fabric, wrapped in cellophane.

  Grinding his teeth, Makram took the small package and walked into the changing room. It had four glass panels that were see-through when the room was empty to show vacancy. Once someone was inside, the glass automatically shifted its particles to appear frosted and provide privacy for the patient.

  The plastic wrap opened easily. The thin gown inside may as well have been made of the same material as the container it came in. It was thin, and provided very little reassurance that his body was covered. Makram peeled off his clothes and put on the gown, as directed. He just wanted to get this over with as soon as possible. Once the gown was in place, he carried his things back over to the exam table that Seneca was waiting beside.

  “I’ll take those.” The doctor grabbed Makram’s clothing, and tossed it into a chute before Makram even had a chance to cry out in dismay.

  “Hey! What did you do that for?”

  “All patient clothing must undergo a sterilization process, especially if the patient has had any space travel in the past twenty-four hours. It makes sure that there aren’t any hazardous particles trapped in the fibers. You’ve probably been exposed to hazardous materials, when the ship broke up. It wouldn’t do much good to heal you, and then just place you back into poisonous clothing, now would it? Lie down on the table, please.”

  Disgruntled, Makram did as he was told. Seneca dipped his hands in the liquid latex solution that had replaced gloves. ,No matter how many exams he had undergone, the feel of the neogloves always made him a little squeamish. He would never admit to it, but something about the texture make his skin squirm. He tensed as Seneca began pressing along his abdomen and flexing each joint to inspect for swelling. When it was time to examine Makram’s mouth, Seneca pressed a small button on his spectacles. A thin but powerful beam of light shone forth.

  “Ah. It seems I overreacted a bit. You seem to have bitten your cheek—probably during your impact with the water. I see no other signs of internal bleeding. I’ll have Danthois come back and escort you to the holding cell.”

  “Wait!” Makram sat up a little too quickly. His head swam. “Can’t I just stay in the sickbay with my crew? It’s not like I’m going anywhere. I just want to keep an eye on them and make sure they’re okay. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “Makram, if you screw me over on this—”

  “I won’t. I promise. Just let me stay here. I’m wearing this ridiculous medical gown. It’s not like I’m going to go traipsing around the base with my backside exposed.”

  Seneca sighed, but eventually gave in. “Fine. I have other things that need my attention anyway.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.” The doctor stared pointedly over the rims of his glasses at Makram. “I mean it. Don’t mention it to anyone. I don’t need any extra hassle.”

  Makram mimed zipping his lips, and locking them closed. Once the doctor was out of the immediate area, Makram hopped off the table and walked back over to Hubard. “I’ve never seen Cherish so beat up before.”

  “She’s a tough little cog, but she isn’t invincible. I’m putting in the Relissarium upgrades to hopefully prevent anything like this happening again. She will be stronger, faster, and almost impenetrable once I’m done with her. The Brotherhood have sunk too much money and too many resources into her rebuilds to lose her now.”

  “What do you think about all of this? Who do you think the traitor is?”

  Hubard sighed and set his tools down. “I don’t know. I trust all of you with my life. If it is one of our own, I’m afraid it will unravel the trust within our team. As dangerous as our missions are, we can’t afford not to trust our comrades to have our backs. If one of us is the spy, you need to find them. A team that is full of suspicions is no team at all.”

  His words struck a chord in Makram, and renewed his determination to get to the bottom of the issue. “Where did they put Hojae? I think I’ll go see him first. None of the others are really in any condition to talk right now.”

  “Our little Josti is just through there.” Hubard pointed to a set of sealed metal doors. “You’ll need this.”

  Inside of the older man’s hand was a small pin, which could be clipped onto the collar of a lab coat. Makram identified it as an RFID chip. So, he had been wrong about the bio scanner. It was actually much simpler than that. Makram nodded his head in thanks, and clipped the pin onto his tiny medical gown.

  The metal doors slid open easily as he approached. The same delicate voice he had heard before chimed again, “The doctor will see you now.” The automated voice made Hojae look up in surprise. He had clearly expected to be on his own for quite a while longer.

  “Did they find the spy?” Hojae pushed himself up on the table.

  “Not yet. That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Me?”

  “What happened when you got away from the guards back on Relisse? You were gone for quite a while. What were you doing?”

  “I was trying to survive. I thought that would be obvious. There wasn’t much I could do to help you all. There were so many of them, and Karl made sure they took our weapons. I tried to find a weapon stash or something that would let me come back to help you, but you know only Cherish has the ability to store the maps. I’m not proud of it, but I got turned around quite a few times.”

  “Did you see anything out of the ordinary?”

  “Just the typical Yasta patrols. I had to hide most of the time, to avoid being seen. It seemed like Karl really thought out the ambush. One minute the base had seemed almost deserted. The next, it was crawling with novices.”

  Makram mulled over his answer. “You look like you were pretty lucky with your injuries from the crash.”

  “As do you, commander.” Hojae could sense the slight suspicion in his leader’s questioning. “Josti heal quickly. It is one of the advantages of us being so evolutionarily advanced. More limbs mean the likelihood for one of them to be injured goes up. Over time, our bodies evolved to accommodate for this by increasing the rate at which we heal.”

  Nodding, Makram placed one hand on the Josti’s shoulder. He lowered his voice so that only Hojae could hear him. “Try to stay in the sickbay as long as you can. Trust me, it’s much more comfortable than the alternative. I’ve seen the holding cell. It’s not a place you want to be moved to.”

  “Thank you for the advice, commander. I will take it to heart.”

  “Oh, and Hojae?” Makram paused before he turned to leave. “Try to see if you can remember anything else from the mine, or from any of our recent missions really. If you think of anything that seemed odd or out of place, let me know. If one of us is a spy, I want to be the one to get my hands on them first.”

  Hojae gave a somber bow of his head. The doors opened again. A slight draft from the wooshing doors made Makram’s gown flutter slightly. It caused the commander to lose what little dignity the small square of material had provided. This wasn’t going to work out. He needed to find Seneca again and get a better set of clothes—preferably his own.

  Five

  Cierra’s eyelashes fluttered. The intense bright light overhead made her shield her eyes. She started to sit up, but found herself pressed back down on the table she was on. The pressure was firm, but kind. “Where am I?”

  “Try to lay still for a little longer. You were
knocked out for a few hours.”

  “Makram?” Cierra turned her head to see who had spoken. Hubard and Makram were both beside her bed. “What happened? Where’s everyone else?”

  Glad that he had persuaded Seneca to get his clothing back before any more of his crew had to see him in the ridiculous gown, Makram patted Cierra’s arm lightly. “There was a crash. The cargo ship we were on was pushed to its limit. It broke apart on reentry to Carristoux. The Grand Council sent out a recovery team to get us. You and Cherish have both been out for a few hours. The doc says Theo might be out for several days. Hojae only had superficial injuries. Irane and Rix were mostly unharmed.”

  Someone was missing. Cierra’s foggy brain tried to remember who else had been with them on the ship. “What about Kurga?”

  Tears welled up in Makram’s eyes. “H-he didn’t make it.”

  Heartache drilled into Cierra’s chest. They had lost yet another teammate. Yareck’s death had been hard. Remi’s death had almost broken her. Cierra wasn’t sure how many more losses she could take. Her monitors started beeping frantically, to let the staff know she was in distress. Hubard leapt into action immediately.

  “Cierra, I need you to take a deep breath and calm down, okay? If you can’t get your heartrate under control, they’ll make us leave. Just breathe in and out, okay?”

  She struggled to follow his instructions, but eventually the beeping of the heart monitor slowed. “But everyone else is okay, right? Theo has to live.” Theo was the only other person on the team that had experienced the same type of loss as Cierra. His wife and children had perished in the same worldwide inferno, that had claimed her own husband. She had grown more attached to him during their time together working for the Brotherhood.

  “He’s fine. He had a bit of a concussion. The doctors seem confident he’ll will recover soon. His body just needs time to heal.” Makram tightened his grip on her arm, to keep her focused on the present moment. He didn’t want her to overexert herself.

  “Did…did the council find out who the spy was?” Cierra’s voice wavered, but her heartbeat stayed normal on the monitors.

  “Not yet. Senator Philo has already questioned me. He has Hojae right now. Once you’re fully awake, I’m sure he’ll want to interrogate you as well.”

  Her bottom lip trembled uncertainly. “I should have known sooner. I should have realized that one of us was sabotaging the missions. If I’d picked up on it, maybe Kurga would still be alive.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up over that.” Hubard rubbed his thumb across her forehead in the same way that a father would comfort a small child, after a nightmare. “None of us knew. What happened isn’t your fault, any more that it is Makram’s or my own.”

  Makram remained silent. He knew exactly what Cierra was feeling. He had been blaming himself as well for his team’s deaths and failures. He watched her eyes blink, suddenly as if she were trying to focus on something. “What? What is it?”

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  “We’ll be the deciders of that. What is it?” Hubard leaned in closer to her.

  The internal struggle of reality and fiction furrowed Cierra’s brow for a moment. “I don’t even know if it was real or just a dream. Back in the mines, after the explosion, there was a split second where just before the impact hit the Yasta on the other side of the wall from us, I thought I saw them disappear. That’s crazy right?”

  “What you most likely saw was them, being blasted by the shockwave. It is possible that a direct hit could have vaporized the closest bodies.” Hubard thought back to the makeup of the bomb they had used on the Yasta mine. It was possible that such an impact could have destroyed the bodies within a certain range, so suddenly that to the naked human eye they appeared to vanish.

  “No, no. It wasn’t like that.” Cierra struggled to focus on the memory. “It was almost like they were cloaked.”

  “Cloaked?” Makram was beginning to worry that Cierra had suffered more brain injuries than Seneca had let on.

  “Hubard…” she let her voice trail off meekly, “do you think they could have found a way to use Relissarium as a part of some cloaking technology?”

  The old man scratched his cheek thoughtfully. “I don’t think that would be very likely, but I’ve seen enough in my day—and invented enough for that matter—to know better than to say it’s impossible. I doubt that was it, but I’ll think about it more. The main properties we’ve focused on so far with Relissarium has been its ability to cut through almost anything, and its ability to absorb energy. The idea that such a metal would also be used in a cloaking device seems peculiar to me.” Something buzzed in Hubard’s pocket.

  “What is it?” Makram leaned over to see the small screen on the device Hubard pulled from his borrowed lab coat.

  “Cherish is awake now. I need to go run some diagnostics to make sure all of her systems are functioning properly with the new upgrades. You stay with Cierra. I don’t think it would be good to leave her to her thoughts just now.” Hubard looked at Makram pointedly, and was answered with a simple nod.

  “Go make sure she’s okay. I’ve got this.” The leader of the Strike Force Retaliation team gave Cierra a reassuring smile. “I’m not going anywhere, okay? It’s all going to be okay. We always make it through, don’t we?”

  Cierra’s eyes were glossy with tears again. “Most of us anyway.”

  Six

  The doors opened easily for Hubard, as he walked back over to the table where he had been working on Cherish. He had given the entrance chip to Makram. Seneca had shown him where he could sterilize his hands and dress in medical scrubs and lab coat, when they had first arrived. The doctor had been under strict orders to give Hubard everything he needed in order to save the Brotherhood’s investment in Cherish. Hubard had only managed to swipe one extra chip, but still it had already come in handy. The automated voice chimed overhead as he entered Cherish’s room, “The doctor will see you now.”

  Cherish was already sitting upright on the table. Her back was straight, and her eyes were responsive. “I feel…different.”

  “Well, I imagine you would. I took the opportunity to install several upgrades for you.” A diagnostic podium lit up, as the chip on Hubard’s lapel came within range. “We need to run a few tests to make sure everything is in working order. Do you think you are ready for that?”

  “Yes. Should I feel…lighter? My density has changed.”

  “That would be the Relissarium I installed.” Hubard beamed proudly at the woman in front of him. He considered her to be a sort of daughter. It was true that at this point she was much more machine than human, but that didn’t matter. He had created her. “I’m going to punch in some code and transmit it to your central database. Let me know if you have any trouble deciphering it.”

  Cherish tilted her head up. Her eyes squinted at the ceiling as she focused on the incoming information. “That all seemed fairly straight forward.”

  “Good. Consider that to be your new user manual, if you will. I’ll go over some of the new features with you, but you can use that for a guide when you’re on your own. Okay, Cherish, why don’t we start with something easy. Can you lift your left arm for me and then your right?”

  Her arms moved as he directed. “It may take me a bit to get used to this new density. I feel as if I’m suddenly much lighter. It reminds me of when I was human. My mother would take me to get my yearly haircut. I always felt lighter then as well.”

  Hubard rarely heard her mention her strictly human life, before she had been selected for augmentation by the Brotherhood. He wondered if it was a side effect of her humanity trying to deal with the near-death experience she had just endured, or if it could possibly be a reaction from her new upgrades. Either way, he made a note in her chart.

  “Can you give me just a light burst from your jet packs? I want to make sure they’re functional, but I don’t want you to bust through the sickbay ceiling.” He hovered his finger above the input pa
nel on the diagnostic podium, and waited for her to try the new exhaust recycling valve he had put in.

  In a moment, Cherish shot a foot and a half off of the table. She quickly adjusted the trim, and began a slow, controlled descent until she was seated again. “I’d like to have a few hours in the training room to perfect the regulation of my new hardware. I’d much rather learn in a controlled environment than under fire. Do you think we can arrange that?”

  “The Relissarium will have superior application in flight, but I think it may be a bit difficult to arrange any training time at the moment.”

  “Why?”

  Hubard felt her eyes on him, gauging every subtlety of expression. “The Grand Council of the Masters is still interrogating us, about the spy in our midst. You’ve been unconscious, so you haven’t really been aware of everything that’s been going on since we got here.” He gave her a rundown of the status of the rest of the crew, including Kurga. She took the news better than Cierra had.

  A speaker in the wall came to life. “Hey, Hubard, Cierra was wanting to know if everything was looking good with Cherish. I tried to reassure her, but she’s a bit…well…emotional.” There was the sound of skin smacking against skin followed by a muffled ‘ow.’ “Well, you are!”