Voide smiled and shook her head. John got the feeling that her demeanor this time was more pity than anger.
“That’s what the history logs show, isn’t it?” Voide said, her voice far calmer than John had expected.
“It is,” John affirmed.
“Let me clue you to how the world works outside your hermit world. History and truth are rarely synonymous. The gauntlet shredded the Prophane fleet and turned a slaughter into victory. The humans lost two ships, and those only because they strayed a little too close to the intercept route and were accidentally locked onto by Prophane missiles that had gone ballistic after losing lock on the flagship. That’s the truth of the lauded Lowery Rout. It wasn’t Empire Navy brilliance and strategic tactics that won the day but Prophane psychotically pursuing a Pariah.”
“You.”
“Me.”
“That is incredible!” John said, taking a deep breath and trying to process what he had just heard. “But how can you be certain it was seeing you that triggered that response?”
“And the mental sluggishness returns.”
“Enough with the insults! It’s a serious question.”
“Because, genius, this has only ever happened when there was a Pariah officer on the bridge during a broadcast hail. The Navy repeated the experiment several times with myself and with other Pariahs. It happened every time there was a Pariah on board the broadcasting ship, and never under any other circumstance.”
John’s skeptical mind was going off the charts. Either he was being duped for the enjoyment of a sociopath, or he was sitting in the vehicle with a key person in the shaping of galactic history. For all the awe and wonder he battled to contain, he just couldn’t believe the former wasn’t the best explanation here. Furthermore, of all the things to shine him on about, something so deeply personal just seemed out of character for Voide.
“Then why is this the first I have heard of this?” John probed, letting his skepticism have a little leash.
“I’m sorry, pale,” Voide replied, her ascerbic sarcasm returning in full force. “Is the Empire Navy in the habit of informing every citizen of its top secret mission briefings and its experimental combat tactics?”
She had a point. Even the Old Empire was not above secrets and coverups. If a commander had lucked into turning a massacre into a victory, it was doubtful that would be what showed up in the reports.
“Okay, point made. But Molon said you were with GalSec before, not the Imperial Navy. How’d that happen?”
“Once the Navy confirmed this thing they called the Pariah effect, they started using us as bait to set traps and turn the tide of battle. That’s the only reason they have managed to slow the Prophane Advance as much as they have. Once this became common practice, I resigned my Naval commission and joined GalSec.”
“I can understand why ‘bait’ isn’t exactly an endearing career choice. Were you thinking the Empire’s covert operations division would treat you more fairly?”
“No,” Voide answered, flashing her signature feral grin. “I figured if I was going to be bait, I might as well be somewhere I could shoot back. GalSec was thrilled to have a dual-purpose Pariah agent and lab rat all rolled into one.”
Suddenly a deep blush came over Voide’s face. John wasn’t sure how that was possible with her disguise, but figured it must be built into the technology to register her biometric responses and relay them into the human illusion.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asked.
Voide spun her gaze toward him. Apparently he had done it again. Her burning anger washed over him as John wracked his mind to figure out what he had said to warrant such a response.
“Look, you inquisitive pale,” Voide said with more invective than John had managed to elicit previously in this roller-coaster conversation. “I have no idea why I just dumped all that out to you. Maybe you’re some kind of brain-twiddler like that blue-skinned scarecrow of a comms officer. Whatever the reason, if you breathe so much as one word of this to anyone, I promise you will wear your lungs as a hat.”
“Hey, I won’t say a word,” John assured her.
He meant it too, not merely fearing her threats of bronchial haberdashery, but because he was moved that Voide would trust him with such an intimate part of her history.
“You won’t if you like being alive,” she reiterated.
“I do,” John affirmed, “and I swear.”
“You won’t have to keep that promise long, pale,” Voide said, suddenly relaxing in both tone and posture.
Not sure exactly how to take that statement, her change in demeanor gave John the willies as much or more than her angry outburst had. Was she planning to kill him?
“What do you mean?” John asked, not entirely sure he wanted the answer.
Voide must have sensed his apprehension. She laughed aloud and gave his shoulder a playful shove.
“Relax, pale. I’m not going to eat you. I only meant that by tomorrow we will get paid and you will be gone. So, I suppose it doesn’t make any difference if some hick doctor on a backwater dirtball world knows the truth. I mean, who are you going to tell, your pigs and chickens?”
John had never seen this side of the icy security chief. It intrigued him. He was no psychologist, but she was clearly trying to cover up letting her guard down. Deep down he felt an instinct to provoke her, given her unwarranted hostility toward him, but instead his compassion won out.
“Voide, whatever you think of me, I am glad to listen if you need to talk. It’s just you and me out here. I’ll treat whatever you say to me as I would anything under doctor-patient privilege. Keeping confidence is part of being a doctor. Besides, bottling up your emotions can affect your health in very real ways.”
“Listen you glorified veterinarian,” she almost spat the snarl in his face. “If you want to psychoanalyze someone, analyze Mel. That mawkish waif loves that kind of crap. Me, I got a job to do: get you home and get you back.”
“There’s no need to get angry, Voide.”
“You wouldn’t survive seeing me angry. Face it, pale, you’re cargo. You might as well be a crate of cabbage or a sack of seeds. We get paid, you get delivered, and that is that.”
Was that truly how she viewed him, as nothing more than cargo? What about Molon and the others? They seemed genuine enough, but they were mercenaries after all. In John’s estimation, these mercenaries didn’t overly value their own lives. Why should they value his?
“Look, I get it,” John said, unwilling to surrender the possibility that he might be on the verge of real progress with the Prophane security officer. “You are all hard and terrifying. Be that way if you want to. It was a long drive, I was just trying to make conversation, and I genuinely wanted to know more about you.”
“Get this, pale,” Voide’s hardness remained unwavering. “I’m not interested in forming any bonds of camaraderie or swapping spit in the shower with you. You’re a job, period. By tomorrow, you won’t even be a lingering memory.”
“Not even a lingering memory?”
“That’s right.”
“Harsh,” John risked a joke, hoping to lighten the mood. “Are you sure we haven’t dated before?”
The scowl he received in return was much less violent a response than he had expected. Voide shifted in her seat, turning to look at the road ahead and once again folding her arms across her chest.
“Look, Doc,” she said, her voice once again calm and collected. “Just focus on the mission. How much farther to your house?”
For someone who didn’t care, Voide had a lot to say. Furthermore, this was the first time he could recall that she’d addressed him as “Doc” instead of the pejorative “pale”. He doubted that Voide would be his best buddy anytime soon, but maybe there was some hope of rising above the status of cargo in her estimation.
Still, pointing out her change in how she addressed him, or mocking her sudden just-business stoicism would likely prove unwise. Whatever else she was, Void
e was genuinely dangerous. Her orders might keep her from doing him harm, but John wasn’t ready to be the test subject for that particular experiment.
“Not far,” he succinctly reassured. “Another couple of kilometers. My house is about midway between the starport and the city proper.”
The glowing ball of Tede Alpha settled lower on the horizon. John slowed the vehicle upon approaching a mid-sized farmhouse set back about fifty meters from the road. The sun had set the sky ablaze with an orange glow, igniting in stunning brilliance the wispy fingers of clouds floating in the dusky sky. Unfortunately, there was no time to lay out on the mesa awaiting the beautiful Tede sunset, and no suitable company for it even if there had been enough time.
John suddenly tensed and pulled the CUV off the road just before the driveway leading to the farm house.
“This it?” Voide asked, eyeing the modest abode. “I thought you were rich?”
“We choose to live simply. And yeah, this is it, but something is off.”
“What’s wrong?” Voide asked, visibly tensing.
“You see those personal ATVs?” John asked, nodding toward a quartet of single-rider, four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles parked in front of the farm house.
“Yeah.”
“They aren’t mine.”
Voide reached into a satchel attached to the waist of her jumpsuit, pulled out a small revolver, and tossed it to John.
“Stay here!” Voide said, the tone of command unmistakable in her voice.
Without another word, she slipped quietly from the CUV, touching a button on the belt of her suit. John watched through the vehicle windows as Voide instantly faded to a shimmering, transparent silhouette. Where a moment before had stood Star Wolf’s chief of security, now was nothing more than a roughly Voide-sized light-distortion slipping silently toward the house.
“Stealth suit!” John whispered to himself, fascinated by yet another high-tech toy in the hands of a Star Wolf crewmember.
As Voide drew close to the point halfway between the vehicle and the house, John saw the outline of someone inside the house move past one of the windows. Suddenly all the rage and frustration he had suppressed and tried to forget since his escape from the Dawnstar facility boiled to the surface. The inquisitor on Ratuen had stolen almost everything from John when that devil’s spawn had killed Elena. There was no way John was going to sit idly by while some roving band of punks invaded his home to take whatever was left.
John opened the driver’s side door of the CUV and started toward the house. Following in Voide’s footsteps, he awkwardly fumbled with the small slug-thrower Voide had tossed to him before giving up and shoving it in his jacket pocket.
Voide’s translucent silhouette slipped silently up to the side door, bounding across the terrain easily in Tede’s low gravity. John did his best to stay low and approach the house as quietly as she, wanting to help her any way he could.
The small handgun weighed oddly in his pocket. He was a healer, not a killer, and while he regularly enjoyed sport bow hunting, he had never discharged a firearm in his life. Still, judging from the vehicles, there clearly were at least four intruders inside, and he felt that he could not simply leave Voide facing those odds alone.
Voide’s stealth-suited shadow disappeared against the side of the house when one of the intruders again crossed in front of the large front windows. John dove flat onto the grass to attempt to preserve surprise. The lower gravity made the fall seem to last forever. There was no indication he had been spotted, but he had lost sight of Voide. Only the side door, now slightly ajar, gave him indication she had already slipped inside.
John regained his feet and bounded lightly across the last few yards to the house. Suddenly, sounds of battle rang out from inside; gunfire and clanging steel. John reached in his pocket and extracted the pistol Voide had given him. It still felt foreign in his hand, and he hoped there was nothing more complicated to its operation than pointing and pulling the trigger.
As John reached for the doorknob, a masked man in black, bleeding from a long slash across his chest, barreled out the door. The masked man bowled into John, forcing him to grab hold of the man in an attempt to keep himself from falling. In the process, John dropped the revolver and it skittered several yards away from the jumble of falling bodies.
The two men tumbled into a tangled pile, their momentum carrying them several yards from the door before rolling to a halt. Fortunately for John, the man was more intent on making his escape than fighting. Half scrambling, half crawling, the masked intruder crossed the ten yards to one of the ATV’s and hit the starter switch.
The man was halfway across the field to the west, heading for the woods, when the sound of breaking glass rang out. John saw a small, thin, black blur fly straight from his front window and strike the man in the shoulder as he drove away. Despite being clearly wounded and in pain, the fleeing intruder did not let off the throttle of the ATV. Slumping over the handlebars to provide a smaller target for any further shots, he continued to weave his way toward the woods.
Moments later, two more bloody and battered masked men crashed through the already damaged front window, stumbling and tumbling toward two more ATVs. One of the men held a machine pistol set to full auto, and he spun mid-bound to empty his entire magazine in a deadly spray back into the house.
John crawled for the revolver, intending to try to get at least a shot or two off at the fleeing bandits. By the time he had picked up the pistol and turned, the men were well off across the field behind their fleeing cohort. John squeezed off a few rounds anyhow, to no effect, with the recoil from the pistol stinging his untrained hands.
Voide, having disabled her stealth field, rushed out the side door, her bloody katana in one hand and her bow in the other. She made no attempt to nock another arrow.
“Stop wasting bullets,” she half-growled at John. “You couldn’t hit them from this distance even if you knew how to shoot, which you clearly don’t. One won’t get away though.”
“You caught one?”
“Not exactly,” Voide answered. “He’s dead inside.”
“We need one alive to question. Can’t you shoot one of them with your bow before they get away?”
“I can’t judge the drop right in this half-gravity,” Voide replied with a shake of her head as she pressed the button to fold her high tech bow and replace it in the bandolier. “My first shot was meant to take out a tire but I nearly overshot him entirely. Those three are gone, but we need to move quickly. They might be back with reinforcements soon.”
John eyed the lone one-man ATV still parked in front of the house, handed the pistol back to Voide, and rushed inside. He stood in stunned silence as he surveyed the wreck his home had become. Obviously, they had been searching for something, and had left nothing undisturbed in the course of their search. Holes were bashed into walls, furniture had been shredded, every box or container in the house was opened and emptied. He had seen tornados that did less damage.
There in the middle of his living room lay a masked man, blood pouring from a hole in his chest where his heart should have been. John moved swiftly to him, physician’s instincts taking over, but there was nothing John could do.
He sensed Voide’s presence slipping up quietly behind him as he knelt beside the fallen intruder. A bit of red and black ink on the man’s collarbone was visible in an area where his mask had separated from his shirt.
“What’s that?” Voide asked.
John pulled down the man’s collar and gasped. The man’s upper chest bore a tattoo of a lion’s head in red and black. The words Fratres Leonis were etched in a banner below the emblem.
“You’ve seen this tattoo before?” Voide asked.
“Yes. It is the mark of the Brothers of the Lion.”
“Religious monks?”
“A radical sect,” John answered with a sigh.
“I take it they do more than just pray for change?”
“You could say that. T
hey are fierce resistance fighters. The Brothers have been waging guerilla actions against the Provisional Imperium and the New Halberan Empire since shortly after the Shattering.”
“Aren’t you a Faithful, too? What’s their quarrel with you?”
John shook his head as he looked into Voide’s eyes. He was used to defending his faith against unbelievers and scoffers, but her inquiry seemed genuine. None of the usual condescension he had seen from unbelievers resonated in her voice. She seemed genuinely puzzled why fellow Faithful might be behind this raid on his home. John shared her confusion. He had expected Dawnstar goons, but for Faithful to be ransacking his home...
“I honestly have no idea,” John admitted. “The Brothers are allied with the Theocracy of the Faithful. Tede is a Theocracy-held world. This makes no sense…unless.”
“Unless what?”
John didn’t answer. Instead he sprinted toward the back of the house. Bursting into the master bedroom, as equally trashed as the rest of the house, John made his way toward the large double closet. He knelt down and tore back the carpet, revealing below it a subtle, rectangular outline in the flooring boards. Clawing at the edge, he freed the section of floor and tossed it aside revealing the face of a safe sunk into the concrete foundation. John punched in an eight-digit code and the safe door beeped and popped open.
Reaching inside, he tossed aside several folders filled with documents and a couple bundles of Tede paper currency. He turned toward Voide, holding in his hands a small decorative cube pendant dangling at the end of a necklace chain.
“This had to be what they were after.”
“And this bit of costume jewelry is what, exactly?” Voide asked.
“All of Elena’s research on malmorphsy. It’s a modified datacube made to resemble a simple pendant. It was Elena’s idea.”
Suddenly Voide dropped into a crouch and began to look around. She pulled a small electronic device from a zippered pocket, activated it, and began scanning the room.
Star Wolf (Shattered Galaxy) Page 9
