by Andria Stone
“Well, damn,” Axel drawled, smoothing the stubble on his jawline. “That sounds like a whole herd of elephants to me.”
For Mark, the trip to Mars hadn’t been an easy one. He’d been unable to shake the anxiety growing in the pit of his stomach as they’d approached the expanse where he’d killed Beth Coulter. In the vastness of space, he couldn’t be sure of the exact location. It didn’t matter. He felt a chill, which wasn’t going away anytime soon.
Coulter had sabotaged the Terran Space Command’s mission to Jupiter, killing his brother, Erik, as well as 151 other scientists on the Europa Mission. Not to mention the dozens she’d murdered afterward. As a result, he’d taken her life in retribution.
In his heart, he’d known her death wouldn’t be the end of it. Her insidious plan of world building with metal cyborgs, clones, and reprogrammed neural implants wasn’t over yet. It should be no surprise he’d come face to face with Coulter’s Phase Two tucked away on an unsuspecting Mars. His gut had been tied in knots since finding the dead body today. Although the red cuff marks were gone, he still sensed the presence of the restraints on his wrists. He might never rid himself of the cruelty she’d inflicted.
The original purpose for their trip had been to provide support for Eva’s terraforming experiment on the surface while the others celebrated a group holiday, but those plans were fading fast. He wanted to start turning over every rock on the planet until he found the Parkers, or Königs, or whatever they called themselves, along with every secret they were hiding. However, now he must consider the welfare of five other people, which meant he’d have to do things differently than before.
***
After a delicious Italian dinner at Nero’s for Maeve’s birthday, Axel strolled hand in hand with his lady around the Green Level of the space station. The station’s Tyson Gravity Field environment enabled normal living without the assistance of grav boots. They found a secluded garden spot for some quiet time with a splendid rotating view of the dusty red planet offset by a galaxy of stars. He nuzzled Maeve’s ear, drawing in a deep breath of her heady scent.
Sadly, the day’s events had monopolized their conversation for most of the evening.
“We’ve overcome more than Mark will ever experience,” she said. “I think he’s having flashbacks.”
Axel hugged her close. “I could see it in his eyes the minute I walked in. Panic. He controlled it, but it was there. It had to be the cuffs. Coulter restrained him like a lab rat on her medpod for hours. She injected him with a shitload of drugs while trying to get the human augmentation data out of him.”
“Yes, I saw it, too, in his body language,” Maeve agreed. “Sometimes, people develop phobias after a traumatic event. It’s been about six months since the incident. You need to make sure he gets plenty of heavy workouts to keep both his mind and body healthy.” She snuggled up next to him. “He’s not like us.”
Axel gazed at the amazing woman sitting beside him. Moonlight shimmered in her pale hair and danced off the crystal gems in her indigo jacket. As a sergeant in the Terran Military, he never could have been with Colonel Maeve Sorayne. Thus, his life would never have been complete. He didn’t know how long this would last, so he was savoring every day he had.
When he’d found Mark being tortured by Coulter, Axel had surrendered to prevent her mercenaries from killing Mark. No good deed goes unpunished, and they’d shot Axel twice in the process. Having been a soldier for years, he’d suffered injuries before. That time his luck had run out; the damage had been too severe. He’d undergone augmentation surgery for his left arm and leg. Seven years prior, Maeve had also chosen the same procedure for both her left limbs as a result of battle wounds suffered in the Australian APPNEX Campaign.
Maeve still served, yet due to upgraded regulations, neither he nor Kamryn could return to their armored unit. Instead, they’d joined Mark in his hunt for the remnants of Coulter’s network. As equal partners in his MAVREK venture, the combined four ships—plus the valuable BioKlon medical equipment commandeered from the TMD—had made them wealthy. Axel found he liked having money and traveling in well-appointed spaceships as opposed to bare bones military crafts, especially with a weapons locker full of new toys.
He’d give it up in a nanosecond, though, if he had to make a choice. He’d even trade in both cyborg limbs for metal prostheses and live in a shack with a dirt floor if it would make Maeve happy. She made it all worthwhile.
Axel laced the human fingers of his right hand through the augmented ones in her left as he bent over to kiss her cheek. “Happy birthday, my love.”
Chapter 2
The MAVREK team had journeyed to Mars because their esteemed member, Dr. Eva Jackson, had been invited to participate in a Terraforming Symposium. So, they’d all traveled 34,000,000 miles to the rust colored, dust ball of a planet, where Martian days were 24 hours and 37 minutes long, with a solar rotation of 687 days. As a result, most inhabitants celebrated two birthdays a year. While the Tyson Gravity Field and three surface domes allowed humans to live without the assistance of exoskeleton suits or grav boots, a pressurized environmental suit with oxygen was still required outside.
Under Aurora’s tri-layered dome in the northern hemisphere, sixteen scientists observed the first terraforming—or “worldhouse”—experiment on a non-Terran planet in a biosphere. Their enclosed habitat overflowed with a heavy military presence, VIPs, and a plethora of electronic monitoring equipment. To her credit, Eva Jackson had experienced a modicum of success on her homeworld with terraforming selected desert environments. Today, she sat in a front row window seat, unable to control her excitement.
Although Mark, Axel, Kamryn, and Colonel Sorayne accompanied Eva, they stood against the back wall, their height giving them a clear view over most everyone’s head. After the initial ceremonies were over, they filed out to talk among themselves.
Mark said, “I want to make a donation to the family of the man who died yesterday, Carl Ivarsson. Do we know if he was married or had children? Did he live on Terra, or here on Mars?”
“I’m glad you brought it up. I have news.” Sorayne guided them to a quiet spot away from the activity surrounding the habitat. “He was an undercover detective for the MPLE, which is the reason no prints or ID came up when they scanned him. Since this information surfaced, the bakery owners, shopkeeper and baker are all missing. Mars now believes they’re all complicit in his death.
“The MPLE’s backtracking the leads Ivarsson might have been working on, trying to figure out why he was there in the first place,” Sorayne continued. “The prevailing theory is smuggling. So, Dr. Warren, you’re off the hook. As far as the MPLE’s concerned, you were an innocent bystander.”
Unless he wasn’t. Mark wanted to believe the whole wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time scenario. The churning in his stomach, however, told him just the opposite. He couldn’t shake it. Back on Luna, he’d started trusting his gut feelings; they hadn’t steered him wrong yet. It’s why he still kept a knife in his boot, wore a ballistic proof vest, and always carried at least one gun. “I’m glad they’ve dismissed any involvement on my part, but I’m not convinced he wasn’t mistaken for me.”
Axel stared at him for a long moment. “All right, Mark. We’ll work your angle while the MPLE works theirs. We’ll put our cyber sleuths on it.”
All three MAVREK partners received emergency comm messages from their pilot.
“There’s a problem at the ship,” Kamryn blurted out, spinning around to leave.
Mark grabbed her arm. “Eva,” he said, looking from Axel to Sorayne.
“Go,” Sorayne said, waving him off. “Take my shuttle. I’m sending reinforcements to your ship. I’ll stay with Dr. Jackson.”
The trio sprinted down to the underground docking station, straight onto Sorayne’s waiting shuttle. Within minutes, they were up on the space station, running through a maze of airlock tubes to the MAVREK-II. True to her word, two of the colonel’s troops were stationed at their
ship’s entrance. Petra stood between them, either prepared for action or spoiling for a fight, wearing two sidearms with one of Axel’s new pulse rifles in her hands.
“Nobody’s hurt,” she reported. “We detected a surveillance drone. Ohashi disabled it. She’s dissecting it.”
They boarded the ship, making straight for the Science Lab, which also doubled as their Med Lab, if necessary. At the far end of the lab, Ohashi hovered over a small, spider-like metal drone. She wore a headband with a magnifying visor, her bobbed hair tucked behind her ears, blue wrist-length gloves covering her hands. She worked with microelectronic tweezers, dismantling the circuitry.
Ohashi glanced up at their arrival. “My new security system picked up an intrusion when an object breached our electronic barrier.” She resumed her examination. “We identified it. Sent out rogue commands for it to land. Made it think our ship was its home base. Petra flashed her boobs at a dock worker and got him to fetch it for us.”
“I did not,” Petra protested.
“All the data’s been downloaded to an old tablet, in case it blows up.” Ohashi pointed a blue finger to it on her workstation. “Flight logs are being decrypted.”
Kamryn stepped forward with hands on her hips. As a six-foot-tall, 175 pound brunette with a well-defined figure, she commanded attention. “Okay, somebody has to say it. Mark was the target. There’s no question about it now.”
“You were right.” Axel spread his hands, leaning back against the counter with one ankle crossed over the other.
“This is one of those times when I don’t enjoy being right,” Mark returned. “It means they mistook the detective for me.”
“No, not necessarily.” Petra braced her rifle against Ohashi’s workstation. “It means your two paths converged. You were both moving toward the same point, he just got there a few minutes before you did. Axel, weren’t you law enforcement before you became a soldier?”
“Four years in Phoenix.”
“Would you waste time tracking down a lead if you didn’t think it had merit?”
“No.”
“Kamryn, you were DEA before joining the TMD?”
“Yes, in Vancouver. I know where you’re going with this, so, no, we didn’t have extra resources to spend chasing down false leads.”
“My point, exactly. The MPLE agent either had proof, or was working on getting proof that these people were guilty of a crime. If they weren’t guilty, why run? I also think they must’ve learned about the terraforming experiment on Mars from the media, figured we were coming and were waiting to spring a trap. For Mark and Eva.”
“Eva’s planetside—”
“Don’t worry, Mark,” Petra said. “We commed Sorayne with an update. She’s providing security for Eva.”
The tablet sitting next to Ohashi rumbled to life with the sound of an Old Earth racecar engine. “Decryption’s finished.” She kept working. “Let it sit for a while, make sure there’s no self-destruct protocol.”
The men went to work out in the small gym onboard. Everyone else wandered around the ship for the next hour until the data had been compiled. In the meantime, Eva returned with Sorayne. They met in the conference room, where Ohashi began her report.
“The drone was custom built on Mars. The satellite-based tracking program located its original home base as the same address on record for the Parker’s residence—I checked. An MPLE tour of the premises might be in order. Brother and sister lived together. Kinky,” she added in a mutter, “if you ask me.”
Eva waggled her fingers at Ohashi.
“Wait,” Ohashi said, raising her hand to halt any questions. “That home base was overridden with one on this station, about here….” She spun her screen around to provide everyone with a schematic view of the space station. Flipping through the different levels, she narrowed it down to the Command & Control section. “The C'n'C is responsible for traffic in and out of the station. Someone in the Tower with clearances to security codes had access to this drone.”
Kamryn pointed to the electronic remnants scattered across the workstation. “How many legs did it have?”
Ohashi looked up. “Six. Why?”
“Anything with more than four legs is not your friend.”
Petra gave her two thumbs up.
Ohashi resumed. “Just so everybody knows, I haven’t been off the ship since we arrived. I’m leaving the ship to go shopping and have dinner on the station tonight, then tomorrow I’m going planetside, even if I have to buy a shuttle ticket.”
“Me, too,” chimed Petra.
“Me, three,” said Eva, not about to be left behind.
Axel slapped his hands on the mahogany table, grabbing their attention. “Not without escorts, you won’t.”
Mark nodded. “I’ll go with them.”
“No, you can’t,” Kamryn said. “You and Eva are not allowed to be outside this ship together. It’s against every rule in the book. I’m sorry if it sounds heartless or calculated, but we can’t afford to lose both of you at the same time. It’s not how security works.”
Sorayne stood. “I’ll furnish armed guards. No one leaves until they get here.”
Mark walked her to the entry hatch. “In case you haven’t noticed, Axel and I are outnumbered here. It’s important we keep these ladies happy. I’m going to put in an order for their escorts. One of Eva’s boyfriends was bronze, beefy, and super smart. Petra likes mature men. Send a guy with a sense of humor for Ohashi. Just make sure they can shoot the eye out of a moving cyborg. You’ve got two ships full of testosterone over there. It shouldn’t be hard to fill that order, right, Colonel?”
Sorayne chuckled, shaking her head. “I’ll be back with three prime specimens. While they’re gone, we can map out a plan to bring down the rest of Coulter’s Martian network.”
***
Time dragged on as Axel sat at the conference table, listening to differing viewpoints of going public versus keeping their information a secret and acting on it themselves. The arguments were civil, for the most part, not counting a few flare ups; a foregone conclusion with four alpha personalities in one small space without a referee.
“I still don’t think bringing the Martian authorities in on this is the right way to go,” Mark said, asserting his opinion for the third time.
Sorayne played devil’s advocate. “If we don’t, some or all of you could get arrested for subverting their laws. Dr. Warren, you barely escaped that fate the first fifteen minutes you were here. Martian Law Enforcement is very militarized. We’re not in Terran space anymore, we’re in their space, which means we need to tread lightly.”
Anger flushed Kamryn’s cheeks. Unable to remain seated, she paced around the room. “We don’t know who to trust. The Parkers—or Königs—are dirty as hell. Their two employees are either dead or dirty. At least one high-ranking person in charge of this space station is in league with them. Plus, there’s at least one murdering cyborg on the loose—God only knows how many more—and does anyone really think no clones are hiding on Mars? Damn, we’re up to our armpits in shit this time.”
Axel reached out to Mark with an encouraging clap on the shoulder. “I understand why you don’t trust other people to make the right decisions when it pertains to Coulter. We’re not on Terra, or even Luna, where we’d have contacts or friends to pull our butts out of the fire. The best way to proceed is to bring our data, along with our suspicions, to General Dimitrios at HQ on Terra. From his position, he’ll know who to contact here, as well as how much of the classified information to share about Coulter, BioKlon, the cyborgs, and the clones.”
Axel put his human palm down in the center of the table. He looked up at Kamryn, standing across from him, hopeful she’d agree with his assessment. After an awkward moment, she moved to put her hand over his. They looked at Mark, who acquiesced, placing his hand on top of theirs. Sorayne sealed the decision with her augmented hand.
The stress evaporated as they reached an agreement.
“Thank you,” Sorayne said, breathing a sigh of relief. “I didn’t relish having to bail any of you out of a Martian jail.”
The other three laughed. “Well,” Axel said, “it wouldn’t be the first time somebody bailed us out.”
Each one took turns recounting their version of getting arrested on Luna with General Yates’s daughter, Scarlett, then having her mother show up with JAG officers to bail them out. Kamryn went to the galley and returned with beer for everyone.
Axel made the trip for the next round of beer. Pausing on the way back, he listened to the raucous laughter of his friends as their high-spirited voices carried in the quiet ship. The storytelling grew more elaborate as the number of beers consumed increased. Axel heard more laughter coming from the rear of the ship, the three MAVREK women returning with their escorts after a busy evening out, which included a few drinks. As everyone crowded into the conference room, the mouthwatering aroma of Mexican food filled the air.
“We brought gifts,” Eva said, slurring a little as she plopped two insulated bags of food in front of Axel. He pushed one toward Sorayne.
With a campy grin, Petra delivered the last two, then spun around, showing off her new holographic tunic and skin-tight black leather pants. Standing still, her tunic looked like blue-green watercolors fading together. Moving, the colors changed to flames of reddish-orange, which matched the crimson tips of her hair. “Don’t I look divine?”
More giggles.
“You certainly do.” Mark grabbed his tablet and Petra posed so he could capture an image for posterity.
Sorayne waved the military escorts out to the passenger seating area in the rear of the ship. They ate while the ladies jabbered about their evening on the Station until Axel noticed Sorayne tilt her head sideways, as if listening to her comm. She left several seconds later without anyone except Axel noticing. He followed her back to the soldiers, who stood as she approached.
“Report, Sergeant Griffin.”
The eldest of the three, Griffin, stepped forward. “Yes, ma’am. Per your orders, we kept a tight surveillance on the protectees. Noticed something we consider a little, um…creepy.”
