by K. D. Austin
“So what do we do with the sergeant now?” Hanna asked.
“Learn what he knows,” Arden said and bent down to roll the GalMar onto his back.
“I was thinking more like shove him out an air lock without a pressure suit.”
“We need someone to give us the information we’re looking for,” Arden said patiently.
“Yes. And?” Hanna said a little whinier than intended.
Arden tried poorly to hide a smile.
“I know you’re not fond of him, Hanna. Though he is rather handsome.”
Hanna looked up at Arden and scowled.
Arden laughed. “I saw you checking him out.”
“His looks have nothing to do with anything. He’s a GalMar that seems to have a special hatred for me for some unknown reason.”
“True. But as a Galactic Marine, he should have all the info we need,” he answered.
“What’re we going to do, threaten him to help us?”
“We’re going to mind-hack him, of course, and find out what the GalMars know about our treasure and crew.”
“You’re the boss,” Hanna said, realizing that at some point she’d joined Arden’s Scourge band in her own head.
Arden smiled at that simple acknowledgement. “Come on then. Let’s get started. This isn’t going to get any easier if he recovers.”
“What do we need to do?” Hanna asked him as they located the ports on both the sergeant’s wrist and neck.
“You get into his mind, Hanna. I’ll guide you. But you’ll have to do the real work. We need more than just a suggestion. You’ll need to scan his mind like you do the net.”
“I don’t know if I can do it,” Hanna admitted.
Arden opened his mouth to say something. Hanna cut him off.
“But I’ll do his best.”
Arden nodded.
“Then let’s do it, Hanna.”
Chapter 15
After accessing Sergeant Lance’s system, Hanna put him into an implant-induced coma just as a doctor-technician would do for any necessary adjustments to the internal computer system. Afterward Hanna killed off the interference virus and then spent the next forty-five minutes fumbling around trying to scan Sergeant Lance’s mind. No matter what Arden said, reading a mind was as close to scanning the net as swimming was to flying a spaceship.
There wasn’t much, but soon she found something she thought would be useful. Hanna told Arden what she’d found, and he exploded with excitement.
“That’s great, Hanna! It’s just what we needed! Gallus. Of course. That’s where they’ve hidden the treasure and crew.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am now!”
Arden jumped up. Hanna thought he was going to fly to the planet that instant. Maybe without a ship. She stopped him with her next statement. “The treasure is Khsharayan tech?”
Arden turned slowly, his expression unreadable. “The GalMars know that?”
Hanna nodded.
Arden’s brow furrowed for a minute and then cleared. “Nothing to be done about it. I’d hoped they didn’t know what they had found, but I guess that was asking for too much.”
Hanna moved closer to the huge man, laying her hand on his muscled forearm. “I didn’t think any Khsharayan technology still existed in the galaxy. The last of it was destroyed in the Last Galactic War over two centuries ago.”
“So I had also believed. The Last Galactic War was the end of any surviving alien technology from an empire that existed millennia before humans even stood erect, and the beginning of the GalMars. A truly dark moment in history.”
“But you found some?”
Arden nodded, and his eyes shone. “My missing crew’s leader was a guy named Potts. He’d been a geologist or archaeologist or some such boring thing before he somehow ended up on the wrong side of the GalMars. He had been working for years on a belief that something from the Khsharayan still existed. I funded his expedition, because I knew the profit potential of anything he might find.”
“But the GalMars got to him first.”
Arden’s eyes blazed. “But now we know where they are.” He started toward the door again. Then he stopped and looked at the GalMar lying on the floor still.
“What are we going to do with him?” Hanna asked.
“He’s coming with us, of course.”
“What! Are you crazy?” Hanna said, almost choking in her surprise.
Arden gave her a patient look. “Look. He’s here, and we’re going to make the best of it. But we’ll need to make him one of us.”
Hanna stared wide-eyed at Arden. She couldn’t believe that he wanted to mind-hack a GalMar so he’d think he was a member of a pirate crew. That was an absolutely absurd idea. But, as baffled as Hanna was by Arden’s crazy idea, another part of her mind was already figuring out how to solve the problem, determining what pieces of Lance’s life she’d need to keep and what parts to change.
Hanna realized Arden was still talking to her, trying to convince her of his plan. Hanna cut him off.
“I know how we’ll do it,” Hanna said, clearly shocking him. “It should be the least change possible. I’m thinking, make him believe he is a GalMar undercover working inside a pirate band and that we are informants who are helping him. It’ll be easier than trying to rewrite his whole life, and much more stable.”
“Brilliant. The best lies are part truth,” Arden said, nodding.
Using Arden’s theories on how the mind-net could be reworked, they began the work of rewriting Lance’s life slightly. After a few minutes navigating his mind, Hanna gasped. “We’re not the first people in here. There’s an entire program overlaying his thought processes.”
“Interesting,” Arden said. “Guess someone out there has come to at least some of the realizations I have about what’s possible. Will it interfere with what you’re doing?”
“I don’t think so. I can’t tell exactly what it’s doing to Sergeant Lance, but it seems to have some effect on his mood and emotions.”
“Maybe it’s why he’s so angry,” Arden said and laughed lightly.
Hanna thought that might very well be true. She disabled it after some hesitation but didn’t want to risk whatever someone else had done to the man messing up what she was doing to him.
“Call him Lance,” she said. “That’s how he thinks of himself. Not Sergeant Lance or Sergeant.”
“Of course, you could change that. We could call him Lance the Looker. Or the Long Lance.”
“He called himself The Lance when he poorly pretended to be a pirate?” Hanna said, laughing.
“He should’ve added the ‘long’ part.” Arden waggled his eyebrows.
“Have you been looking?”
“Maybe,” Arden said and winked at her.
“Right. Let’s stick with Lance. The fewer changes we make, the more his mind will accept them.”
“You’re no fun,” Arden said and slapped her butt.
“Save that for later. I’m working,” Hanna said and winked at Arden.
As the mind-hack continued, Arden convinced Hanna that they should also put in a loyalty drive toward her specifically. Hanna didn’t like the idea at first, but Arden insisted that it would be vital if some of Lance’s true memories resurfaced unexpectedly. The loyalty drive would hopefully counter the man’s odd vendetta against Hanna.
Ultimately, the still-fresh memory of her beating convinced Hanna to agree with Arden.
It turned out that converting his obsession with killing her into extreme devotion to Hanna wasn’t that hard. She just had to swap out one kind of obsession for another. Lance was now a Scourge pirate, at least a GalMar undercover as a Scourge, and Hanna was his best friend, the one who’d let him in on this assignment. And at Arden’s urging, her sometimes lover. Hanna resisted that for much longer than the loyalty drive, but Arden assured her she didn’t have to screw the man, but his belief that they were already casual lovers would remove the potential sexual tension that co
uld arise and cause problems.
“And hey,” Arden said with a wink, “if you get bored with just fucking me, you have a built-in sloppy second. What more could a girl want?”
“Both of you at once?” Hanna said and laughed at the surprise and interest that lit Arden’s face. She just hoped she was a good-enough actor to keep up the charade with Lance.
After she finished the hack and set a time for Lance to reawaken, she and the recently healed Salvor set about turning an empty room into Lance’s quarters while Arden briefed the remainder of the pirates on their new mate. Soon they’d wake up the new Lance and learn if the mind-hack had really worked.
Chapter 16
Lance slowly opened his eyes and looked around. For a moment, confusion reigned in his mind. Where was he? How had he gotten here? What had happened to him? He felt relieved to see Arden and Hanna sitting beside his bed, especially Hanna. He had some vague fear that something almost happened to her. He saw her gulp, and lunged up from the bed. His speed clearly surprised her because she stumbled back and tripped over her own feet. Lance was off the bed and catching her before she had a chance to fall.
“Hanna! I’m glad you’re okay,” he said, pulling her into an embrace. She felt stiff against him at first but then wrapped her arms around him.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” she said into his ear in a voice that sounded somehow off. Lance released her so he could see her face. She stepped back quickly.
“Are you okay?” Lance searched her face, trying to determine what was wrong. He couldn’t shake an odd feeling that there was something amiss here, but it was just outside his grasp.
Hanna nodded. “I was just worried about you, Lance.”
Arden stepped forward and clasped Lance’s shoulder. “We were all worried about you.”
“What happened to me?” Lance said, shaking his head in a vain attempt to clear the cobwebs that had spread in his mind. His head throbbed suddenly, and the room started dimming. He sat down heavily on his bed.
Hanna and Arden moved quickly. Hanna sat beside him and put an arm around him. “Take it easy, Lance. You suffered a virus attack. It took us a bit to track it down and clean it out of your system.”
“A virus?”
Hanna nodded. “Interference virus. It dropped all the filters on your internal net. You had a serious information overload.” She squeezed him briefly with her arm. “You’re tough, though. A lot of people end up drooling and pissing through a tube after that.”
“Glad I had you to save me,” he said, gently bumping into her and realizing she was wearing holographic clothes, as he couldn’t feel them. He was intrigued as to why and a bit aroused as he wondered how undressed she was underneath. However, his head continued to pound. “I think I need to lay back down if that’s okay.”
Arden held out his hand, and Hanna took it. He helped her off Lance’s bed. “Rest well. We have about forty-eight hours before we reach the rendezvous point.”
Lance tried to think, but his headache was consuming his mind. “Rendezvous?”
“Yes, with the GalMar informant you set up for us. They’re supposed to have info about the ‘treasure.’”
That didn’t help Lance any. It all seemed familiar. He knew the “treasure” was why he was here with the Scourge. But it all seemed like something he’d dreamed instead of reality. Maybe a rest would help clear his mind. At the moment he couldn’t even remember being attacked. Hanna and Arden left him alone, and Lance slid back into sleep.
Chapter 17
In the morning, Arden, Salvor, Lance, and Hanna all gathered around the big conference table in The Scourge of the Stars’s command center. Hanna had been worried about the efficacy of the mind-hack last night. She feared that removing the previous hack and laying in new memories all at once had damaged the man’s brain or at least his CHI. However, this morning Lance seemed normal. He acted like he belonged on the station with the pirates.
While Hanna was reassured that the mind-hack on Lance had actually worked, it was also disconcerting to see him acting like he’d been here on this station with this crew for months when in truth he had hardly been here for a more than a day. Hanna was even more impressed by how easily the Scourge treated Lance like he was a senior member of the band and happily ignored the fact that he’d tried to kill them all just yesterday.
Arden interrupted her train of thought by starting the meeting. “After much delicate work, Hanna was finally able to decipher more of the transmission we received from our lost band members,” Arden announced, clearly surprising everyone else around the table except her. Hanna knew where the information had truly come from.
“What did it say?” Salvor asked, almost hopping out of his chair. Hanna realized this was the longest she’d ever seen him sit.
“From what Hanna can tell, Potts, and presumably the rest of the team, were on Gallus, in the Robinson system, when they ‘disappeared.’”
“Gallus!” Lance and Salvor said at the same time.
This time Salvor did hop up and began pacing the room. “That’s so close to Benn. We were right there,” he said, shaking his head.
“Yes, but we did the best we could with the information we had then, Salvor. But now we know where they were, so hopefully we can find them. I want the four of us to take the shuttle and head to Gallus. In the meantime Venus will complete the random somnium-space jumps to keep the GalMars off our asses. After we find the treasure, we’ll rendezvous at predetermined coordinates known only to me and Venus.”
“Sir, it is highly unusual to take all of a station’s senior crew on an away mission,” Lance protested.
“We’re not GalMars, Lance. We do things the pirate way. Which is to say, however we want to!”
Salvor crowed and hopped around shaking his butt.
“Besides Venus is more than capable of managing the station,” Arden said.
“But—” Lance started to protest more, but Arden cut him off. Hanna guessed Lance was simply protesting to fill the role she had given him on the station. In his mind, he was the head of security for the pirate band.
“Besides, finding the ‘treasure’ and the captured crew is vital to our survival. We can’t finance our operations if we don’t recover that cargo. Nothing, not even this space station, is more important than this goal.”
Salvor and Lance both nodded solemnly. Hanna was again struck by how he really seemed to believe he was a part of this team. Of course, Lance believed Arden, Salvor, and Hanna were informants trying to help him recover the last remaining piece of Khsharayan technology in the known galaxy from a traitorous cell of GalMars, because the best lies were part truth. In reality, Arden wanted to get the treasure back for his pirate crew and screw the GalMar who had stolen it from him. Arden looked at Hanna briefly, and she understood it would be her continued assignment to make sure Lance continued in his fantasy.
“Anyway, I need all of your unique skills to determine what happened to the treasure and recover it if at all possible. We leave in an hour,” Arden said and then stood, ending the meeting.
Lance left quickly, talking about making security preparations for the journey.
Chapter 18
Venus and Salvor provided supply packs for everyone. Hanna was glad to see there were real clothes in hers but didn’t have time to put them on before they boarded. Salvor apparently had a bit more to carry than Hanna. He climbed about the shuttle loaded down with pouches, bandoliers, holsters, sheaths, many of which had even more straps and connectors hanging off of them. Hanna had no idea what most of the first mate’s equipment was for, but the whole package looked dangerous. Hanna heard him mumble some sort of complaint about not being able to pack the GM-6 fighter. He seemed to find it insulting to have to fly the shuttle instead.
Arden stood outside the shuttle and gave some last-minute instructions to Venus, then came aboard.
“Captain on board,” Hanna said over the shuttle’s internal net, and Salvor closed the door with the swit
ch in the cockpit.
Arden turned to Lance and held out his hand. Lance pulled an object about the size of his palm out of one of his many pockets. It was a shiny black oval disc. About the only thing Hanna could recognize about the strange device was the fact it was made of templast. Unlike permaplast, templast could be reshaped over and over again.
As he handed it to Arden, Hanna noticed it had the Scourge’s insignia blazed in red on one side. Arden showed the mysterious device to Hanna and Salvor.
“This is a special tracker of my own design. It’s tuned to our specific locations in the Galactic-net. With this, Venus can find us anywhere in the galaxy.”
Salvor eyed it greedily. “Bova! I didn’t know that was even possible!”
“Hopefully, no one else does either, especially the GalMars,” Arden said and gave a look to Lance, who nodded. “You will all carry one, so what happened to Potts’s team won’t happen again.”
This tracker was brilliant. Hanna didn’t know such a thing was possible either. But her mind began swirling with the possibilities of such a device, especially when she combined it with the mind-hacking possibilities Arden had presented to her.
Then Hanna and Lance moved to the passenger compartment right behind the cockpit. Just as Hanna started to sit down, Salvor blasted off. Hanna could see that the station’s extra-thick blast-sealed doors weren’t open yet. Somehow, Salvor managed to twist the rocketing shuttle through the doors right as they opened without getting so much as a scratch on the shuttle’s custom laser-reflective paint job.
“Must you create danger? I think we’ll find plenty when we get to Gallus,” Lance said in his authoritative Galactic Marine voice. When Salvor turned and stuck out his tongue, Lance laughed. Hanna’s mouth dropped. The man could laugh. And then she was laughing too. She couldn’t help herself; his laugh was infectious, deep and rich.
