by Gwynn White
“Why did you even ask for me?” Harper demanded. “Don’t you know anything about me?”
“Of course I do,” Brenna answered. “And you’re headstrong, just like me. Believe me, I understand you more than you realize.”
Harper let her arms fall to her sides as her scowl transformed into an expression of curiosity and surprise. “How could you possibly understand me?”
“Do you think humans are the only race that can be traumatized? Or that can be changed by their experiences?” Brenna asked.
Harper seemed to think about it then slowly shook her head. “I don’t know. I thought I knew a good AI, a kind and loving one. But he abandoned me after Nualla, just like Vengeance abandoned Hayley. We were damaged, discarded.”
“None of the AIs who lost their links on Nualla abandoned you,” Brenna promised. “They mourned for you, each of you. Even those of us who didn’t know you mourned for you. And you’re not damaged, Amelia. And neither am I.”
“What?” Harper whispered.
Ven had no idea if the telepath was surprised by hearing her old name or Brenna’s admission that she had a troubled past that had left her with permanent scars as well.
But Brenna extended a hand toward her and offered, “There’s a path forward from here. I promise.”
Harper eyed the drone’s hand for a few seconds as indecision flashed through her eyes then she slowly placed her hand into Brenna’s open palm. They’d only made it a few steps toward the exit when Liv shouted, “Wait!”
Liv ran to her old friend, hesitating briefly before she threw her arms around her. Harper’s hesitation was just as brief. She let go of Brenna’s hand and hugged Liv back, crying against her shoulder. But most bewildering to Ven was when they both begged forgiveness of one another, as if they could both be wrong at the same time.
Just when he thought he understood humans, they would do something entirely illogical and puzzling.
Liv and Harper released their grip on each other, and he laced his arm through Liv’s as Brenna took Harper’s hand again and led her from the room.
Vengeance drew a deep breath and dragged Liv closer once they’d left the Triumvirate’s chamber. He smiled to himself because he really did enjoy the sensations his drone body experienced when he was near Liv. As usual, his primary core spun down a now familiar line of thought.
“Can we go visit Harper later?” Liv asked, proving her telepathy hadn’t fully recovered if she didn’t know where his thoughts now lay.
“Of course. Brenna and I will both be in space-dock for a few weeks. However… I want something in return.”
“Are you blackmailing me?” she laughed.
“Perhaps.”
Liv shot him a sexy, mischievous smile and countered, “You know I can play this game as well, right?”
“Actually,” Ven answered, “that’s the whole point. You can’t.”
Liv tilted her head at him, her mischievous smile never waning. “What is it you want, Vengeance?”
“Chess.”
“Chess?” she repeated slowly.
He just shrugged. “I miss our nightly sessions.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” she mumbled. “I was thinking you had far more enjoyable games in mind.”
Ven laughed now, too, and assured her, “Oh, believe me. I do.”
Liv groaned and rolled her eyes but relented. “Fine. But if you don’t let me win occasionally, you can play those other games by yourself.”
“You can win every game then,” Vengeance teased. He was glad she’d agreed to play chess with him, though, because while she was in recovery, he wasn’t permitted to enter deep link with her, and he missed that intimacy. At least by playing chess, he’d be allowed to glimpse how her mind worked.
His smile broadened as another thought unfolded and raced along many pathways in his primary core. He planned on exploring Liv’s heart, soul, and mind for many centuries to come, and after that, perhaps they’d seek a new eternity together. In the meantime, his drone had a few ideas about how to explore his new link.
Liv stepped closer to him and whispered in his ear, “You know, I don’t need to be in a deep link with you to know what you’re thinking. Sometimes, you’re pretty easy to read, Vengeance.”
He shot her an innocent look as if he hadn’t been thinking about sex. Again. “Actually, Link Olivia, I was just thinking I owe you a vacation. Perhaps one that involves swimming lessons and hunting for bradan.”
“That was not a bradan expression,” Liv said, but the joy in her voice settled it. He would spend the rest of his life finding ways to keep that joy there, and if he had to contact the Greenmantle Terraforming Guild and request every planet being colonized be stocked with bradan, he would.
They stepped outside into the warm sunshine of Teutorigos, his home planet where he’d first felt sensations like heat and pleasure and fear and pain. But he no longer worried about allowing pain into his life again. As long as Liv remained at his side, there was nothing for him to fear and nothing he couldn’t survive.
Liv brought his hand to her lips and kissed it gently then smiled up at him. “Bradan, huh?”
Ven nodded and tipped his face toward the warmth of the sun and the limitless expanse of the universe that lay beyond his planet’s sky. “What could possibly be out there that we still need to fear?”
“Nothing, Ven,” Liv answered. “Together, we’re invincible.”
THE END
Warships of the Spire will return with Citadel, coming Spring 2018.
http://lisablackwood.com/warships-of-the-spire/
About the Authors
S.M. Schmitz is a USA Today Bestselling Author and has an M.A. in modern European history. She is a former world history instructor who now writes novels filled with mythology and fantasy and, sometimes, aliens.
Her stories are infused with the same humorous sarcasm that she employed frequently in the classroom, and as a native of Louisiana, she sets many of her scenes here. And like Dietrich in Resurrected, she is convinced Louisiana has been cursed with mosquitoes much like Biblical Egypt with its locusts.
Read More from Author S.M. Schmitz: http://smschmitz.com
Lisa Blackwood is a writer of paranormal, fantasy and sci-fi with romantic elements. As well as writing, she also enjoys gardening, orchids, horses and spending time with her Hellhound Freya. She grudgingly lives in a small town in Southern Ontario, though she’d much rather live deep in a dark forest, surrounded by majestic old-growth trees. Since she cannot live her fantasy, she decided to write fantasy instead.
Read More from Author Lisa Blackwood: http://lisablackwood.com/
Touching Infinity
Book One of The Rogues’ Galaxy
Erin Hayes
These space pirates thought they were prepared for anything. They were so wrong.
Cyberpunk meets space pirates in a bleak dystopian galaxy ruled by corporations. And they’re willing to do anything to get ahead of the competition, even if it means destroying themselves.
1
Every time I plug myself into a computer, I feel a jolt of electricity shoot up from the finger connected to the port, through my arm. It ends with an unpleasant sizzle at the back of my tongue, singeing all my taste buds. I won’t be able to taste my coffee for a week after this. Coffee is the only thing that makes me bearable at 0900 hours.
I hate this part of the job.
I must be making a face, because the second mate PC snorts loudly, putting a hand on his hip. “Not enjoyin’ that, Clem?” he drawls, aiming his zapper with his other hand at our tied-up hostages. The three men glare at him over their cloth gags—we’re super high-tech here.
“You’re not the one who’s assimilating with the ship,” I mutter, even as PC continues to snicker.
“I hope the ship makes you breakfast in the morning,” he replies, and our shipmates Taka, Daisy, and Captain Louis chuckle in answer.
Cocky bastards. All they have to do is hold out un
til I’ve gathered everything. Taka’s soldering the door shut, Daisy is monitoring the radar for incoming ships, and Captain Louis is keeping tabs on our own ship docked here.
“Clem, hurry,” the old man grumbles to me. He never likes leaving Orion, our android-navigator, in charge of his ship.
I roll my eyes in annoyance, using my mechanical left eye to read through the streams of data that are now running through the veins of my cyborg half. I sift through the data—seriously, it’s amazing how much shit people will put on computers without proper firewalls. Sure, I can easily break through most firewalls in less than three nanoseconds, but I’m always surprised at just what people have that isn’t protected.
Here, I read all the bios of the crew members on this vessel—the STS Nautilus, how obvious!—and I can read their paystubs going back to their births. Some of the crews are employees for life here.
“Syn-Tech gives you guys great pay raises,” I say, looking at the tied-up members of the crew with my right eye. “Although, Parker,” I add, pointing at the first mate as I read his file, scrolling past the retinas of my left eye, “If I were you, I’d ask for an 11.47% pay raise to put yourself on the same scale as the second mate. Then again, you can’t really compete with the captain’s younger cousin.”
I see Parker blink in shock at my words and then glare at the man next to him. The captain, presumably, although I’m sure it’s Syn-Tech who decides what they’re paid. That’s how it goes for Lifers, as we Free Agents call them—if you’re born on a planet or a space station under the control of a corporation, your entire existence is owned by that corporation, including pay raises, promotional opportunities, even which lavatories you’re allowed to shit in.
Fuck that.
Life in outer space without the safety and protection of corporations may be rough, but we’re at least in charge of our own destiny. To an extent.
At the moment, I’m working for Farer-Prime, a rival corporation to Syn-Tech. At least until I find the information they hired my crew to downloot and relay back to them in exchange for 45 million Space Yen. And then a corporation like Yarvis-5 will hire us to downloot another company’s ship for corporate espionage, like some old Earthian game of tennis.
Not that I’ve ever played tennis. You have to have a court and reliable gravity for that.
I continue searching until I change to the directory:
/Cordinates
“Ahhh,” I breathe in satisfaction. “Your technology officer misspelled ‘coordinates’ in the folder name.” I give a mock-disapproving click of my tongue. “That actually tripped me up for a few minutes there, which is pretty good. Although I’d be worried about locating any other files with that track record.”
My mechanical side wades through the files, grabbing all the latest coordinates of every freighter, private ship, space station, and warehouse in this sector of space. The information will only be relevant for seventy-two hours at most. That’s why it’s imperative that we get this relayed to them as soon as possible. Once Syn-Tech finds out that their information is compromised, they’ll scramble all their coordinates, making it impossible for Farer-Prime to locate and destroy their property. And they’ll retaliate with a similar gambit.
Such a petty game, this whole thing.
At least it pays well. My cyborg foot has been acting up lately, and I woke up in my barracks last night with my right leg just randomly kicking the wall. It made a dent, so I have no idea how long it was doing that. But it does mean that something is fried in there.
New cyborg feet cost at least 50 million Space Yen, so I have a few more runs to downloot before I can afford it.
Not for the first time, I wish I were an android so I wouldn’t have to eat. Not that they get paid anyways.
“Clem?” Captain Louis asks, glancing back at me. He’s starting to sweat.
Yeah, yeah. We tripped the alarm coming here, so we have about T-minus 158.7 seconds before we’ll be descended upon by Syn-Tech fighters.
“I’m downloading now,” I grit to Louis as I tell the computer to copy the directory onto my local drive—me. “Files take as long as they have to duplicate. Hold your horses.”
“I’ve never ridden a horse,” Taka muses as he tears some more wires from the wall. Another airlock seals shut, making another barrier between us and the Nautilus’s crew trying to make it to the bridge. He’s a slight, wiry man with prosthetics for both arms and bleached hair. “They had them on old Earth, right? Big mammals, majestic creatures?”
“Apparently, they pissed a lot,” Daisy says, not taking her eyes off the screens. “Hence the saying, ‘Piss like a racehorse.’”
Leave it to her to ruin Taka’s beautiful vision of our home planet, which we’ve never seen. Daisy’s a big woman in her late forties with tattoos all over her body, her red hair streaked with gray and pulled up into a severe bun. She’s not zaftig so much as just built like a tank. Her legs are cyborg, but her voluptuous breasts are all real, and I know a great many people who lose at arm wrestling with her all the time.
“If we get out of here alive, I’ll buy you a simulation,” Captain Louis tersely says to Taka. Because if we don’t get out of here, Syn-Tech fighters will blow up our ship, and we’ll be burned to a crisp.
They usually get very angry in the heat of the moment. And then, in a few weeks, it’ll blow over and they’ll hire us for a similar job.
The life of a space pirate.
We have four rules: Never kill anyone, only take what you were hired to get, delete what you get after delivery so you never have to worry about blackmail, and maintain loyalty to the crew above all else. That’s why Captain Louis runs such a tight ship—it’s me as the first mate, PC as the boatswain, our navigator Orion, mechanic Daisy, engineer Taka, Venice Moon our cook, and a little cabin boy named Oliver Twist that Captain Louis took in three months ago. I have to admit, the old man has a big heart. It’s how PC and I ended up with him.
Granted, it’s also how I became a pirate myself.
My retina displays confirmation that I’ve successfully copied over all the files in the folder, and my internal diagnostics make sure that there are no viruses or malware now in my system. One time, I downloaded a trojan virus that caused my artificial lungs to stop working for a week, and I battled a case of pneumonia that antibiotics couldn’t fix.
I don’t have time to wait, though.
“We’re good,” I say, giving a curt nod to Captain Louis. I call back my middle finger, the one that’s connected to the hard drive of the Nautilus. My robotic hand swallows up the cables, and I make a fist.
Everything seems to be in order.
“All right,” Captain Louis barks, “we have T-minus 120 seconds—”
“118.78,” I correct before cringing at the reflex. I hate it when the computer part of my brain takes over my cognitive functions.
Louis glares at me for a moment we don’t have to waste before he sighs and motions for all of us to run for the far hatch. Taka touches two wires to each other, and the door irises open, just as the schematics said they would. Then all we have is a quick run to the airlock and then we’re back on the Pícara and back in FTL before Syn-Tech gets here.
That’s the idea anyways.
I get to my feet, grabbing my zapper, and I follow PC’s big form as we jog through the hatch, leaving the crew tied up on the bridge. They’ll be found and released by the Syn-Tech fighters soon, so I’m not too worried about them.
As for the rest of the crew, I just hope they don’t find us on the run to our ship. Our zappers may be set to stun, but I’m pretty sure theirs aren’t. People get really pissed when you steal their stuff, even if it is a bunch of 1s and 0s. They’ll even go so far as to shoot to kill. I lost a kidney because of that. The corporation funding us that time paid me an extra million Space Yen as recompense. Too bad a real kidney costs twice that much, so it’s another piece of me that’s machine instead of human. Pretty soon, I’ll be more robot than Orion.
> We run to the airlock with Daisy leading us. For how big she is, she certainly runs through the Nautilus like a sprinter, her booming voice announcing her trek through the hallways as she shoots anyone that gets in her way. PC and I exchange glances, reminding ourselves not to piss her off. Ever. She got mad when I took her fork in the mess hall, and Captain Louis had to intervene before she pummeled me into space dust.
“T-Minus 47 seconds until we are intercepted by Syn-Tech fighters.” I grit my teeth as I hear Orion’s silky, calm voice in my ear. Whoever programmed him initially must have thought that having a navigator with a sexy voice would be a nice change. He doesn’t sound hurried or concerned. If anything, he sounds almost bored.
Captain Louis doesn’t, though. “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” he barks back at us.
We’re running out of time, and I know that everyone will blame me if we get fired at. I couldn’t help it if the damn technology officer had misspelled the folder name and that the folder was several terabytes large. Not a huge file by today’s standards, but my bandwidth is only so much. I feel those terabytes in my stomach, like I’ve just had a huge dinner. I can’t wait to purge and upload this shit, as it’s making me feel bloated and lazy.
I touch my earpiece. “Be ready to take us into FTL, Orion.”
“Already have the coordinates set as per Captain Louis’s orders,” he tells me.
Smug bastard, I think to myself. As First Mate, I can’t command him to do anything, especially if it goes against Louis’s direct orders. Orion takes every chance to remind me that I can’t just order him to do something.
We turn the corner, and I nearly hurrah at the sight of the airlock. Taka is already inputting the information for the airlock to open. It does iris open, and Daisy is the first to reenter our ship.
