Spectra's Gambit

by Vincent Trigili

  “We don’t know that she has,” said the steel-eyed man.

  “Who did they take with them?” asked Henrick.

  “Three other spiritualists. No one of note,” he replied.

  The old man turned and smiled. “So a group of spiritualists has headed out on its own, led by Spectra. This is wonderful news for us.”

  “I don’t understand,” the other replied.

  “Wizards don’t trust spiritualists, and they do their best to discourage any use of that power line, to the point that the majority of spiritualists will never even learn the basic powers of the spiritual line.”

  “Are you implying that they left because they are disgruntled?” he asked.

  “Or they were asked to leave; impossible to guess right now, but it is likely that Spectra is up to something, otherwise they would have taken more powerful magi with them when traveling that far from support,” said the old man.

  “Dusty is still with her, and previously he has kept her from us.”

  “Spectra is crafty, and she has always been the one in control. I believe Dusty does not even know what is going on.”

  “We have a couple of operatives out that way. Should I tell them to try to make contact?” asked the steel-eyed man.

  “No, not yet, but put a tail on them. I want to know everything that they do out there. They would not have gone so far without Vydor’s knowledge and probably even his permission, so they may very well be doing something for him. If so, I need to know what his interest is out there.”

  The old man gestured at his computer and activated a three-dimensional map of the galaxy. Using various hand gestures he manipulated it until the Phareon region was centered in the display. “Ah, yes, that is right; one table was found out there.”

  “Who destroyed it?” asked the steel-eyed man.

  “I am not sure; Vydor just said that it had been dealt with. I detected the destruction from my vantage point in the Spirit Realm, but paid it no heed at the time.”

  “It seems odd for that lone table to be so far away from the rest.”

  “Yes. I suspect they felt the distance would keep it safe. Still, it might be good for you to investigate the site where the table was; see if you can learn anything from the ruins,” said the old man.

  “How am I going to get out there? We don’t have a gate point,” he said.

  “Of course we do,” said Henrick as he cast a spell and opened a gate.

  Chapter Ten

  The last time I had visited this bar I was bringing a gift for the leader of the Wolf Pack. That gift granted me some protection from the other patrons there, many of whom had personal reasons to want me dead. This time I was answering a summons from the Wolf Pack’s leader, and I could not guess why he had called me. What I did know is that when one of the most dangerous and powerful criminals in the quadrant calls a special agent to a meeting, something big is up.

  The bar was in a space station in the middle of nowhere. The entire station was a haven for criminals and outlaws. It was unlikely any law-abiding citizen would even know about the place, never mind visit. If they did, there was a good chance it would be the last time they were ever seen. Fights to the death were common and there was no real law enforcement. There was only an uneasy truce, loosely controlled by the strongest and most feared of the criminals.

  I walked up to his table, doing my best to ignore the room around us. Like the last time I had met him here, his two associates Fang and Claw were nowhere to be seen but I knew they would be close enough to intervene should I try anything stupid.

  “Greetings, Special Agent Byron,” he said as I approached his table.

  “Hello. I must say I was surprised to get your message,” I said.

  “The last time we met you gave us a new set of blades,” he said, drawing one of the swords from its sheath.

  I had stolen the swords from the military and used them to trade with him for information, but when I gave him the swords they had each had a short, curved steel blade with a gold grip and were decorated with several colorful gemstones. The one he had just drawn was long, straight and pure black from pummel to point.

  “Yes, it looks quite different now, but works just as well. It appears that these blades pick up traits from their owners and change to match,” he said.

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “I must say, these blades are a true work of art. They cut right through most armor and are perfectly balanced. We have been very pleased with your gift,” he said.

  “I am glad, but surely a ‘thank you’ card would have sufficed,” I said.

  “Perhaps. I have information for you, information that I know you will need to act upon right away,” he said.

  “Information always comes with a cost,” I said.

  “Indeed. I believe that you will be useful to me in the future, so I am willing to let you owe me for this,” he said.

  As always, he held all the cards in our negotiations. He knew very well that I would not turn down the information he offered, because he knew that I knew he would not have summoned me out here unless it was extremely valuable information. The problem was that it put me in his debt again, and he was the kind of man who would call in his debts when he needed them; nor was he the kind of man that you said ‘no’ to.

  “You know that my ability to repay you is limited since I am, after all, on the side of the law,” I said. By right I should have been trying to find a way to arrest him, but I was not foolish enough to think I would survive such an attempt. Besides, it was advantageous having an underworld kingpin who saw me as useful.

  “That may not be true tomorrow,” he said.

  “Oh?” I had no idea what he meant by that. He sat there in silence, betraying nothing. Although completely expressionless, I suspected he was enjoying this exchange. “All right, you win. What do you have for me?”

  “Tomorrow, about midday, you will have a meeting with your boss. Correct?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “At that meeting, Karl will present evidence that you are not human,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Karl has been gunning for your job for some time now and believes he can prove you to be a fraud. I think we both know what will happen next,” he said.

  I did. Karl was a young upstart with too much pride and self-confidence for his own good. Our commander would order a doctor to test my species in order to put Karl in his place, thinking he was doing it for me, but that would be the worst thing he could ever do. But how did Karl know I was not human?

  “You have options, of course,” he said.

  “What are you thinking of?” I asked.

  “We could make sure Karl never arrives at that meeting,” he said with no hint of emotion in his voice.

  I knew he could do that, and I knew that there would be no way to track it back to me. That is what they did: they eliminated high-value targets for a price. They were the best in the industry and whoever hired them was never discovered. “Thank you, but no. I knew this day would come and already have plans in place to deal with it. The warning you are giving me will allow me to execute those plans in such a way that I can protect certain people.”

  “I expected that answer,” he said.

  He must have known that this was the end of my career as a special agent and I would no longer have access to the kind of information that was useful to him. I wondered how he expected me to repay him for this information. “If you will excuse me, I have things to set in motion.”

  “Of course. We will talk again,” he said.

  I turned and walked away from his table, knowing that I had nothing to fear from him so long as he found me valuable, but I was concerned about the other occupants of the bar. The last time I had been here one of them had tried to kill me, but Fang stopped him.

  As I left the bar, two men followed me out. I recognized one; I had put him in prison some years ago.
I was not aware that he had been released, but it did not surprise me. As I passed out of sight from the bar they moved in, drawing daggers.

  I still had the two swords I had received from Zah’rak, and it felt almost as if they jumped into my hands as I spun toward my attackers. They were both taller than me, but much slower. With one blade I parried the knife from the second attacker while swinging up with my other sword, which neatly separated the first attacker from his arm.

  I had spent quite a bit of time training with these primitive weapons and was learning to love them. Before meeting up with Zah’rak the only weapon I had ever expected to need was a good set of blasters, but hunting the dead with him had opened a whole new world of combat, one to which my thin, light build was ideally suited.

  Before they could recover from my opening moves, I pressed my attack and finished them both off. The superior reach of my swords combined with my speed overcame their height advantage and made it a simple affair. As I spun clear of the fight, checking for additional adversaries, I saw Fang leaning on a nearby wall. He gave me a slight salute and then vanished into the shadows.

  I knew better than to stick around and quickly made for the maintenance tunnels, slipping out into the glorious vacuum of space before anyone else could come after me. I was born in the vacuum of space and needed no mundane spacesuit to live and work in this environment. I was one of the Shadow People. I could make myself look human as needed, but here in the safety of my home environment I stretched out my wings and reverted to my natural form.

  Therein lay my problem. If it were ever discovered what I was, I would be killed on the spot. My race was seen as one of dangerous animals lacking morals or intelligence, and to be fair most of my kind fitted that description. A very select few, like myself, were different; but I had already learned the hard way that prejudice is blind to any good that I might do. That is why I had to make my move before Karl met with our commander.

  My flat and thin body shape allowed me to drift through space like a kite in the wind, coasting on gravity waves. It was the most relaxing thing I knew of, just drifting along through the vacuum of space. It was easy to forget, if only briefly, that I had very real concerns and needed to act quickly.

  I coasted on the gravity wakes of the merchant ships that were traveling through the region until I found a hauler going in the direction I wanted to go, then attached myself to the outer hull of the craft and waited.

  I admired the stars and raw beauty of space until the azure energy of jump space wrapped around me. As soon as we cleared jump space I took a quick, deep drink of power from the craft, just enough to satisfy my hunger pains, and leapt from there into space. I drifted on the gravity wakes, hopped onto another craft, and rode that into jump space.

  I jumped across several trade merchant vessels and military supply craft until I reached my destination, a secure military outpost. For what would be the last time, I assumed the human shape of Special Agent Byron. I only had a few hours left before Karl presented his information. I knew that our commander would laugh and want to use this as an opportunity to put Karl in his place, but once they did the species test it would be the end of my charade, not only for me but also for those who had helped me keep my secret over the years. I could not let them suffer over this.

  I slipped into a secure communications room and logged on to the terminal with a fake identification code which I had prepared for just this situation. First I had to cover my tracks, so I fired off a set of scripts to erase any and all logs of my visit to this station and I disabled the room’s security monitoring systems. I would have to sneak off the station undetected but that was a problem for later.

  Next I needed to ‘kill’ myself in the line of duty so that I would have a hero’s funeral. That part was not strictly necessary, but I wanted to leave on a good note. Before I could second-guess myself, I fired off the scripts I had written years ago. They would use access codes and back doors I had created over the years to send a false report that I had died while helping some people escape from certain doom. I included images of my decidedly human corpse being burned, for dramatic effect.

  Now that the false report had been sent, command would quickly shut down my access to everything and there would be a rush to make sure any information I had had access to was secure. I had considerable access and authority, so they would take no chances.

  I put a false recording into the security system to make it look as if this room had been empty the whole time and slipped out of the room. The guards were distracted playing some dice and card game and paid no mind to my coming and going. I quickly made my way into the robotic maintenance shaft. These shafts ran throughout all stations, but no one ever thought about them. As people never went into these shafts, they usually had little to no air and generally poor environmental conditions, but none of that mattered to a native of the hard vacuum of space like myself.

  I would need to head to a neutral crossroads and find a place to lie low for a while. Just before I slipped out of the maintenance shaft into space I packed all of my Special Agent Byron IDs, key passes, and anything else tied to that life into a bag. I would find a place to dispose of it along the way, but I could not risk leaving it here. Special Agent Byron was dead, and it was Greymere’s turn to rise up. This was the fourth or fifth time I’d had to kill myself and start again. I hated it more and more each time. I longed for a place to call ‘home’ where I could just be myself.

  After the third time I restarted life I had stopped making friends, so very few people would miss me this time around. My co-workers would remember me as disconnected and probably arrogant, at best. It was a lonely life, but you have to play the hand you are dealt. I longed deeply for the companionship of a real friend, perhaps even a mate, but unfortunately that was not to be.

  Once the bag was packed, I left the maintenance shaft and coasted on the gravity wakes until I found a supply ship leaving the station. I attached myself to the hull and sipped on the power ever so slightly until it jumped away from the outpost.

  Once I reached the civilian shipping lanes it was easy to hop from ship to ship until I found a convoy heading toward Hospital Station. I knew that many large fleets passed through it. From there I could easily attach myself to a major trade fleet. I would hitch a ride to leave the quadrant and start life again somewhere far from here.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Dusty, I still think I should come along for the test,” said Shea.

  “I know how you feel, but really it’s only a quarter jump out and back, and I promised Spectra we could fly it like a training mission. Really, nothing is going to happen,” I said.

  It had been several weeks since they had started working to upgrade Nemesis, and we were finally ready for a test run. With his upgrades in place, Nemesis was significantly faster and had much greater firepower than when we had purchased him. The engineers from home had worked miracles with his armor and shielding, producing results I would not have thought possible. In addition, they had ripped out the old pulse cannons and replaced them with our trademark grand stave cannons. They only had an effective range of twenty-five kilometers, but inside that range they were far more powerful than any mundane weapon currently available.

  “Besides, you are needed here to work on the vaccine,” I said. Spectra’s guess had been right, and we’d found infected lice among the sleeping Cathratinairians. It looked like we had caught it early enough to stop it before the lice had had a chance to leave the station, but there was no way to know for sure. A vaccine was their only real chance. “That is far more important than a test run.”

  She reached out and placed her hand on my shoulder. Looking deep into my eyes she said, “Dusty, you know that no matter what happens, I will always be here for you, don’t you?”

  “Yes; but really, we are only going out and back,” I said.

  “I know, but something is coming, and I just wanted to make sure both you and Spectra remember that you
can always come to me.” With that she walked away.

  Her words were haunting me as I boarded Nemesis and went to the bridge. Shea was the most rock-solid person I had ever met and, if something was bothering her, it made me afraid. I would have to talk about it with Spectra soon, but first we had this training mission to run.

  “Okay, as we discussed, Jade, you take the lead now. Spectra and I will just watch. Your mission is to undock from the station, fly out of the gravity wake, and then execute a quarter power jump. After the jump we will do a full systems diagnostic and then come back here. Understood?” I asked.

  “Yes, Master,” said Jade.

  Once everyone had taken their positions and we were loaded into the launch queue, I said, “Nemesis, maintain passive sensor sweeps and make sure we are not surprised out there.”

  Once we were clear of the station, but before we could finish aligning for the jump, Nemesis said, “Master Dusty? I think I see something.”

  “What is it?” I asked. I was surprised to hear him call me “master.” He must have been copying the behavior of the rest of the team.

  “Not far from here there is a debris field that is not on any map,” he said.

  “Do an active sensor sweep and tell me what you find,” I said.

  I watched tactical light up as the data came in, and then Nemesis reported, “I think there was a fight there. It looks like the remains of several small craft, and the damage signatures are consistent with pulsar cannons.”

  “Any active ships?” I asked.

  “No, it appears deserted,” he said.

  “Change of plans, then. Set a new jump exit to two hundred kilometers shy of that debris field and engage the cloak as soon as we clear jump space.” I didn’t like the idea of a fight happening so close to the hospital. As far as I knew the area had been peaceful for a long time and I hoped that our presence was not changing that.