by J. R. Mabry
“Books,” Jeff smiled. “It’s…a bit of a hobby.”
“Do you collect antiques?” Nira asked.
“Uh…not really. More like I consume them.”
“You actually read those old things?” Nira looked shocked. “Can’t you find those on the Lookup?”
“I probably could,” Jeff said. “But the medium is…novel.” He grinned at the pun. No one else seemed to get it. It didn’t matter. “I like the feel of the book in my hand. I like the smell of the paper. I like coming across the printing flaws and errors. It’s…I guess it makes me feel connected to the past. It makes me feel…human.”
“Is there any doubt that you’re human?” Nira asked, picking up a butter knife and holding it out defensively in front of her. “Anything you need to tell us, Captain?”
Pho laughed, and Nira couldn’t stop the smile from breaking out across her face.
Jeff sighed. It was good to see them like this. They were letting off some steam, enjoying themselves, feeling safe and hopeful for the first time since…since their world had ended. It was good for them, and Jeff was glad of it.
But there was business to attend to. He bided his time until they had ordered. Jeff wondered if he could anticipate their selections, but he was mostly wrong. He’d expected Emma to order a salad, but instead, she’d selected BBQ ribs and slaw. He hadn’t seen that coming. Nira chose a Thai dish he’d never heard of, while Pho chose a Brazilian Paella. Jeff shook his head and ordered steak and potatoes. He was not an imaginative eater and he made no apologies for it.
Once the waiter exited the room, Jeff put his elbows on the table and cleared his throat. “I guess you’re all wondering what the plan is.”
“I’m hoping there is one,” Emma said. She was not quite smiling, hovering on the lip of approval and its opposite, waiting him out.
“We’re in a new world,” Jeff said. That was obvious to all of them. He looked down at the silver in front of him. “And it’s not our world. I…I can’t tell you where your allegiances should lie here. And you need to be free to choose them. Our old…obligations are moot. You don’t owe anything further to me or to the CDF…because there is no CDF. Not here, not any more.”
When his words stopped, there was dead silence. Six eyes were on him, Pho’s mouth was open. He wished the young man would close it, but there was always something about the kid that unsettled him—his elfin appearance, or the awkwardness of his movements…it was always something.
“We all need to make a new start. You can go to Authority space, you can join up with the rebellion. You can…hell, get a plot of land and be a farmer. Teach. Start a family. Do…whatever you want to do. I release you. There’s a whole new world here,” he waved at the space dock outside their window. “Go and explore it.”
“With what cash?” Emma asked. She crossed her arms and her brow was furrowed. She wasn’t liking this one bit, and that made Jeff uncomfortable. Not that he’d expected her to like it. It was, in fact, what he was dreading most.
Jeff took three chit cards from his pocket and put them in the middle of the table. “We’ve all been exploring the station—and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I haven’t just been buying paperbacks, though. I’ve been busy…arranging some business.”
Emma raised one eyebrow, which Jeff took to mean, What business?
“As you might expect, four tons of poly explosive is worth a good deal of money. Even if the buyer has to extract it, it’s worth more than any of us would make in our lifetimes. And then the ship…that’s worth a good deal, too. I have…I’ve sold both.”
There was an eruption of protest and alarm. Jeff held his hand up for silence. When he got it, he continued, “The ship is still at our dock and you have twenty-four hours of access to collect your effects.”
They all visibly relaxed. He should have led with that…but then how would he…never mind. He got there. They’re fine. So far. Jeff took a deep breath. He waved toward the chit cards. “I opened bank accounts for all of you in your legal names—you can change those if you want, of course, but it was expedient. These cards will give you access until you can square your neural registrations with the networks here. And if you lose them, don’t worry—they’re cross-registered with your neural serial numbers at the bank, the…” he looked up, remembering, “Dogstar Credit System. There are two or three major banks here, but Dogstar seems to be the biggest and most reliable—I checked it out. There’s a Dogstar portal on every level of this place, and I even remember seeing the name on Sol Station, so it’s not even confined to neutral space or the rebellion, or…wherever. Your money will be secure.”
“How much money are we talking about?” Nira asked.
Jeff smiled for the first time. Finally, some good news. “You’ll never need to work again, unless you want to.”
“Take me to a planet with beaches,” Pho said, his face breaking out into something that looked a lot like joy.
“Some of you will have family here,” Jeff said. “You can find them.”
“Some of us have doppelgängers here,” Emma said. “Which makes family complicated.”
“True,” Jeff said.
“What about Wall?” Nira asked.
“What about Wall?” Jeff asked.
“The Wall you killed wasn’t our Wall,” she said. “Our Wall is still being held by the Authority.”
Jeff nodded. “I opened an account for her, too, and sent her a secure message. She’ll be able to access it with her neural serial number.”
“If she ever gets out of jail.”
“They’ll let her out, if they haven’t already. They have no use for her now.” Jeff sounded more sure than he felt. But it did make sense. Besides, there was little he could do about it at the moment.
“What’s she going to do?” Nira asked.
Jeff shrugged. “I sent her a message saying…pretty much what I’m saying to you now. She’ll do…anything she wants.”
“And what are you going to do?” Emma asked.
She still had her arms crossed. Her lips were tight. She didn’t look angry, exactly…not yet, anyway.
Jeff looked away.
“I see.” Now she looked angry. He could feel her eyes drilling him. “Could we have a moment alone, Captain?”
Pho was looking at the ceiling. Nira was studying the lines in her palm. The tension in the room was so thick Jeff felt like he was going to suffocate on it. Jeff rolled his eyes but scooted back from the table.
As soon as they were out of earshot, Emma whirled on him. “You’re going to her, aren’t you?”
She wasn’t wrong. He knew he had to find Jo, but he didn’t know why.
“It’s not her, you know. You do know that, right?” Emma asked. “She’s no more your Jo than Captain Hightower was your Danny.”
Jeff knew it. She was right. And still, it didn’t matter.
“Jeff, I’m right here. And it’s me. It’s really me. I’m your Emma.”
There was so much packed into that word your. It was possessive in every sense.
Emma waited, her eyes fixed on him. He looked back at the table, then back at her. He met her eyes and held them. His face softened into an apologetic frown. He was sorry, really and truly sorry. But the fact was the fact. He had been struggling with it since they’d arrived in this universe. He had to go to her.
But not yet. “I’m not going to deny it, Emma. Yes, I need to seek Jo out…sometime. Sometime…yes, yes, I will. But first…first I need to find someone else.”
Emma cocked her head.
“Well, that was a class A crap-effort,” Tal said.
Captain Daniel Hightower stood at attention before the admiral’s desk. He did not deny it. He did not say anything.
“What happened?”
“They must have detected the explosive, sir—”
“You idiot, I know what happened.” Tal pounded his desk with one balled brown fist. “I want to know why.”
“I can’t say why, sir. W
e got an encoded message from Wall saying that they discovered a flight path anomaly—probably from uneven weight distribution of the explosive.”
“Or maybe someone forgot to change the payload weight defaults.”
“That’s unlikely, but…it’s possible.”
“It’s more than possible,” Tal looked up and blinked, sending Hightower a report. “It’s what fucking happened.”
“So…if you know why…?” Hightower began.
“Because, Captain, I want to fucking hear you say it!”
Danny bit down on his tongue to hold it. Sweat began to bead on his forehead.
“Have you recovered your man?”
“Wall, sir?”
“Yes, fucking Wall.”
Danny shook his head.
“What was that, Captain?”
“No, sir, Admiral sir!” Danny shouted.
“That’s better.” Tal swiveled in his chair and rubbed at his eyes. “And why haven’t you recovered Ensign Wall?”
“We don’t know what happened to her, sir. One minute her signal was there, and the next…well, it just wasn’t.”
“And that tells you what?”
“That she’s either offline or she’s dead, sir.”
“So what’s your best guess?”
“She could be offline. Maybe they’re holding her in the brig.”
“But we know they’ve reached Epworth Station. And our eyes and ears there report no sign of Wall.”
“True.” Danny blinked. “In all likelihood, she’s dead.”
“So what are we going to do with their Wall?”
“Kill her, sir?”
Tal blinked. “You really are a sociopathic monster, aren’t you? The only thing standing between you and galactic genocide is your rank. God help us.” Tal looked away.
Danny felt heat rising on his neck. He said nothing.
“She’s not a spy. She’s not even a fucking threat.” He sighed. “Give her a ticket to Epworth Station and let’s wash our hands of this whole affair.”
Danny said nothing.
“Is that understood, Captain?”
“Sir, yes sir.”
“No tricks, no underhanded passive-aggressive schemes. Just release her, give her a ticket and wave bye-bye.”
“Yes sir.”
“That’s an order.”
“I understand, sir.”
“Don’t test me, Captain.”
“No, sir.” Danny waited a few moments. The time seemed to crawl by. “Will that be all, sir?”
“No, that will not be all.”
Tal was angry about something else, it seemed. Danny took a deep breath, fortifying himself against the next onslaught.
“Have you read about the defeat at Aken?”
“It’s all over the news, sir. I’ve read the classified reports, too.” Danny chanced a glance directly at the admiral. Finally, something that wasn’t his fault. “Hell of a thing, sir.”
“Your ex, rebel captain Jo Taylor—”
“She’s captain, now? I mean, not acting-captain?”
“Our sources say it was a field promotion, but that it came from the top, from Alinto herself.”
Danny nodded. Good for Jo, he thought, but didn’t say it.
“As I was saying,” Tal said, an edge returning to his voice.
“Sorry, sir.”
“Your ex, Captain Jo Taylor, has won herself the distinction of becoming public enemy number one.”
Danny nodded. Those were the admiral’s words, but the news of her victory over the Eisenhower—and the subsequent turning of the battle into a humiliating defeat for Authority forces—was all that the news feeds could talk about.
“Have you seen this?” Tal tripped a switch on his desk console and a display lit up, hovering over the desk in the space between them. It was a holographic political cartoon showing Jo—looking bustier and sexier than he ever remembered her—as a giant, astride two starships, rodeo-style, with one foot planted on each ship. She held the reins taut in her left hand, while her right waved a nautical captain’s cap behind her. Her mouth was open in a howl of victory, and blood smeared her mouth like an explosion of mashed lipstick, covering her chin.
“No, sir. I haven’t seen that…not until now.”
“My fellow admirals are not happy about this. She caught us with our pants around our ankles. We look like idiots.”
“Yes, sir.”
“She needs to pay.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You need to make her pay.” Tal stood and leaned over his desk, his head jutting through the cartoon, his eyes dark and mean.
“Yes sir.” So that was it. Well, he didn’t know what to do with shame, but he certainly knew what to do with an order. That such an order entailed killing a woman he had once been intimate with bothered him not at all. There was a sweetness to the notion that he had never felt before. He savored it. It made his heart rate jump. It made him hard. He grinned. “With pleasure, sir.”
A note from the authors:
Thanks so much for reading our book—we hope you enjoyed it, and that you will continue the story in Oblivion Quest.
And if you can, please post an honest review at amazon or whichever site you purchase books from. It doesn’t have to be long, just a sentence or two with your feelings and opinions. It helps authors so much when you leave a review, and we’d be so grateful for yours! Thank you for taking the time, and thanks for reading!
—J.R. Mabry & B.J. West
The Adventure Continues…
Make sure to read the next thrilling novel in the Oblivion saga:
OBLIVION QUEST
by J.R. Mabry & B.J. West
In a parallel reality you gamble everything on an insane search. Now everyone wants you dead—friends, aliens, even lovers. And the only weapon you’ve got could wipe out yet another universe…get Oblivion Quest today!
