Unsanctioned Reprisal

by Eddie R. Hicks

  “We’ll have to check all cameras in the area,” Foster said. “Look for any that has deleted footage, it should at least give us a general idea as to where she’s heading.”

  “Assuming it’s not a trap,” Blackmar said. “Remember she could hack into anything, she could easily hack random cameras; delete the footage to throw us off.”

  “Well not anything,” Foster said, recalling everything she learnt about HNI. “Military grade HNI ain’t hackable.”

  “Then how the hell did she steal the passcode to the trains from one of my officers?” said Blackmar.”

  “That’s . . . a very good question,” Foster drily said.

  There was little else for Foster to do. She wasn’t military to start with, or from this century. She holstered her pistol and backed away to allow the security team to handle things. “Well, keep me posted.”

  “Of course, Captain, I’ll have my men continue searching,” Blackmar said to her.

  Foster made it as far as the apartment’s elevator, when Blackmar called out to her from behind, running to catch up with her. She grimaced, wondering what was up as he seemed content on remaining behind to search Pierce’s apartment not long ago. Now he wanted to ride the elevator down with her.

  “Sorry to pull you off your ship after your encounter so suddenly,” Blackmar said as the two boarded the elevator.

  Foster pushed the ground floor button, commanding the elevator to lower after its doors shut. “Its fine, Nereid and Odelea are going over what we learned.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Blackmar said. “I don’t like keeping secrets from people, now more than ever.”

  “Y’all keeping secrets now?”

  “This station is home to twelve million,” he said. “There’s no way we could evacuate everyone in time in a calm nonchaotic manner if there is a fleet beyond that vortex waiting for the right time to strike. So, yeah, I need to keep this hush-hush, and hope the navy gets off their fucking ass and gives us the support we need.”

  “Can’t the Imperial and Union navies help? They have their own people living here too.”

  “There’s a limit to how many ships they can have in the system, unless approved by the UNE. Besides, most of their forces in the system are protecting their respective wormholes.”

  She sighed dejectedly. “And so, we’s right back to before.”

  “The government needs to take this threat seriously,” he said. “Hopefully your newfound intel and whatever your science team discovers will make that happen.”

  “A science team with a missing key person,” she said drily.

  “We’ll find Doctor Pierce. I’ll see to it that every ship is searched before they leave the station.”

  “That’s gonna piss off a lot of people with the delays it will create, ain’t it?”

  “I don’t give a fuck.” The elevator arrived at the ground floor, the two departed into the streets. “The timing of this hacker, Pierce’s disappearance, the missing fleet, the navy dragging their feet, EISS running up and down without my consent, and the shitstorm waiting for us in the maelstrom. Foster, do you really think this is all just one big inconvenient coincidence?”

  Blackmar’s words made her stop as the fake sunlight above hit her porcelain skin. Her grimacing face added everything together, and then factored in that the Dragon Knight and Maiden, and evidently now Maraschino, all possessed the power to hack military grade HNI.

  Foster’s voice became grim. “We need to act fast.”

  “Yeah, we do.”

  XSV Johannes Kepler docked in UNE hangar

  Amicitia Station 14, Arietis system

  October 15, 2118, 13:59 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  Foster stepped onto the bridge of the Kepler, savoring the aftertaste of her lunch. A Caesar salad made with lettuce from Aervounis, served with a side of grilled poultry from the Hashmedai colony Taxah. Chef Bailey’s ability to fuse human and alien cuisine together was unmatched. She made a mental note to recommend it to Odelea in hopes that she would eat something other than apples, minus the dressing and protein of course, as she approached her and Nereid at the science officer’s station.

  The two girls were hard at work studying a number of holo screens, typing into holographic keyboards, and sharing personal thoughts about the data they were analyzing, trying their best to fill the void Pierce had left.

  “Please tell me y’all have good news,” Foster said to the two.

  “We might, Captain,” Odelea said, pushing a holo screen at Foster. “With Nereid’s help, we’ve managed to gain a better understanding of the songs the bio-ships use and the telemetry data they were transmitting.”

  “The ships gathering in the maelstrom were directing other Draconians ships to their location from another,” Nereid said.

  “What location is that?” Foster asked.

  “As we know, they use the maelstrom as a means of interstellar travel and the ships we saw were reinforcements,” Odelea said. “Therefore, these new ships had to have originated someplace in normal space, then travelled through the maelstrom, arriving at the unopened vortex that will connect with the Arietis system.”

  “Their homeworld?”

  “Perhaps, or a base, I do not know.”

  Odelea waved for Foster to stand closer to her and the computer workstation. A new projection appeared. It was a map of the galaxy. “The two of us managed to break down the songs into special coordinates from where the new Draconian ships are arriving from. However, without knowing what type of unit of measurement they use, I have no idea exactly where these coordinates point to.”

  “Hmmm.” Foster looked at their quantum computing android standing motionlessly. “EVE, any input?”

  “I ran the numbers provided by Scholar Odelea and Nereid and converted them into all known means of measurement within the galaxy,” EVE said. The holo screen Foster was looking at changed, showing a map of the galaxy and various lines pointing to no place in particular. “As you can see, none of these points to any specific system or planetary object.”

  “Maybe they don’t have a world of their own,” Williams said, as he unexpectedly joined them. “Just a random space station or something out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Such a theory is highly unlikely, Commander,” EVE said. “The Draconian bio-ships are mostly organic, so still require food and water to operate.”

  “Then you got to take into account those dragons,” Foster said. “It would need to be a pretty big space station to provide enough food and water to keep all that operating and allow space for their young to be born and grow up.”

  “Between their soldiers, ships, and dragons, they would need to be near planets, and lots of them, for food and water,” Odelea added. “And if what Pierce said was true, and the construct on Jacobus was a hatchery, then that proves the dragons do rely on planets to survive and procreate.”

  “I also saw quick glimpses of their world, in my engram vision,” Foster said. “So, for sure, there’s at least one planet out there where they operate from.” Foster briefly thought back to that moment when the monolith gave her the tattoos and mysterious powers. There was a globular in the skies, an enormous cluster of stars. She snapped her fingers. “Wait, can any of y’all access Pierce’s files from that station?”

  Odelea typed in a string of commands. “I can, what do you wish to see, Captain?”

  “Check out his recent ones, just before we left for Kapteyn’s Star, the second time around.”

  Odelea pulled up the requested documents and displayed them on the holo screen. Many of them were star charts, planets, and star systems discovered between 2033 and 2118. “You think he left something for us to find?”

  “In my vision, I saw clusters of stars,” Foster said. “Pierce went to brush up on all known knowledge of star clusters and globulars in and around the galaxy, hoping I might recognize one of them. Just, we didn’t get the chance to finish up, the navy called us to help them with their operation.”
>
  Odelea accessed the files. Breathtaking pictures taken by high-powered telescopes appeared showing every star cluster and globular known to the galactic community.

  Foster recognized some of them. “Yeah these are the files we were looking at.”

  “Anything look familiar, Captain?” Odelea asked her.

  Foster winced. “Nothing . . .” Odelea flicked past photo after photo, they all looked the same to Foster. Except for one. “Wait, flip back to that last one.” Odelea did so, and a projection of a cluster of stars appeared, they were so densely packed together the appeared as a ball of white light with millions of dots orbiting it. “Zoom in and enhance on the right side.” The projection of the star cluster enlarged. It seemed vaguely familiar. “A lot of these look the same to me, but this one . . . it does seem different from the rest, almost familiar.”

  “Same here . . .” Williams added as he leaned in closer.

  All eyes were on him. “Really, Dom?”

  “That dream I was talking to you about . . .” Williams said. “I saw those stars in the skies, and I—”

  “Painted pictures of them,” Foster cut in having remembered his artwork and the star cluster depicted in them looked exactly the same as the one on the projection.

  Everyone’s gaze shifted back to the holo screen as Odelea pulled up more information about the cluster. “This is a globular cluster called, Omega Centauri.”

  It got Foster thinking. “Hmm, EVE, show me a path from our current location to Omega Centauri.”

  EVE created a holographic map of the galaxy, showing the location of the Arietis system, one of many stars in the Orion arm, and a line traveling to Omega Centauri.

  It was at the edge of the galaxy.

  “That’s quite the distance,” Williams said, reading the data that outputted. “Over sixteen thousand light-years . . .”

  “Nereid, were all of the ships in the maelstrom communicating with the ships in Kapteyn’s Star system?” Foster asked her.

  “I heard a few songs directed to them,” she replied. “I have that data documented.”

  “Including telemetry data about the distances between the two fleets?”

  Nereid nodded. “Yes.”

  “EVE, show us a path between the location of the vortex in this system and the estimated location of the Draconian fleet in Kapteyn’s Star system,” Foster asked, and eagerly waited for the android to make the calculations.

  A line between the vortex’s location in the Arietis system and the location of the Draconian fleet in the Kapteyn’s Star system appeared on the galaxy map. “Okay . . .” Foster said slowly, while selecting her words carefully. “Now, let’s assume the light-year distances between the vortexes here in Arietis and Kapteyn’s Star are the same as the numbers corresponding to telemetry data from the songs of the two fleets.”

  “In that case, one light-year would be equal to thirteen units of their unit of measurement in space,” EVE said.

  “Let’s call this unit . . . dragon light-years.”

  “Seriously, Becca?” Williams snorted.

  Foster threw her hands up. “What? I thought it sounded pretty cute. But, getting back to the point, how many dragon light-years away is Omega Centauri from our current location, EVE?”

  “Using the data you have provided, Captain, it would be approximately two hundred twenty-six thousand, and two hundred dragon light-years.”

  “And what was the number we pulled from the songs being transmitted to the new ships entering the maelstrom?”

  “Two hundred twenty-six thousand, and two hundred of their units.”

  Foster smirked. “It’s a perfect match.”

  Repeated tests and adjustments confirmed five minutes later, that Draconian fleet was communicating with another force located somewhere within Omega Centauri.

  “There we have it.” Foster was looking and smiling at the projection and a line pointing to the largest galactic globular cluster. “This is the location of either their homeworld, or a major stronghold.”

  “Please keep in mind, Captain,” EVE said. “Omega Centauri is a region of space containing ten million closely grouped stars, each one with an average distance of zero point one light-year between each other. Pinpointing the location of an exact star system and planet from our current location is impossible. We would need to get closer.”

  “Not to mention these projections are technically thousands of years out of date,” Odelea said. “Omega Centauri is over sixteen thousand light-years away, the images and data we are viewing were emitted from that region of space the same number of years ago.”

  “Us humans were living in caves back then,” Williams said.

  “Still, it’s a start,” Foster said. “I doubt the entire cluster has upped and vanished during that time. Moved due to stellar drift, yeah, but it should still be somewhat in that area. And let’s not forget, we now know where they’s comin’ from.”

  “Sixteen thousand light-years . . . give or take another one thousand light-years,” Williams said. “How are we going to get there? No wormhole connects that far out, and our ship as fast as it is, would still take us several thousand years to arrive.”

  “I vote not going into cryostasis for that,” Chang jumped in, having overheard their talk. “Losing sixty-eight years, plus the seventeen years we took to travel to Sirius, is enough for me.”

  “The vortex key device has been proven to work,” Foster said. “I can open vortexes, and I can navigate through the maelstrom. We could use their method of traveling here, to get there.”

  “Only that device is burned to shit and Saressea has no idea how to fix it nor does the station’s crew that built it,” Williams said to Foster.

  “And we’s ain’t got the goo to keep us in that maelstrom for a long voyage . . .” Foster said, having remembered the stipulations involved.

  “Then there’s their fleet, and that stealth ship moving around. Who’s to say we won’t encounter them again, even if we enter from another vortex?”

  Odelea reclined in her seat. Pierce’s seat. She was keeping it warm for him. “If only there was another way.”

  The vortex key was originally discovered by the Empire. Its parts and blueprints were passed on in secret to Blackmar and his team on the station, after receiving the core parts from the wreckage in Sol. And as Foster recalled, Blackmar mentioned the existence of another the Empire had.

  She grinned.

  “Put me through to station ops.”

  “Station ops?” Odelea inquired.

  “Blackmar got that device from the Empire,” she said. “I’m willing to wager his contacts there can help us get to Omega Centauri.”

  28 Peiun

  Downtown Core

  Gravity City, Morutrin system

  October 15, 2118, 13:01 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  The human constructed buildings to the left and right of the air car Peiun and Gemini-S, also known as Sarah Vaughan, appeared as a blur of brown, and grey colors. Said blur became more noticeable when Sarah increased the vehicle’s speed to dangerously high numbers, swerving around other cars.

  It felt as if they ventured into a maze with no surface or visible ceiling, with the towering buildings blocking out most of the sky. And for the surface? They were too high up for him to see it from the passenger-side window, a fall from their current height would be fatal. Lines of light and shapes danced across Sarah’s eyes, her HNI was feeding her a tremendous amount of information. The status of her suit and the car’s external cameras he figured, all being distractions. An uncomfortable twist in Peiun’s chest arrived.

  Looking at Sarah made him realize she had a generous amount of cosmetics on; odd considering she was a human soldier. Last time he checked, it wasn’t necessary for them to wear that in a combat situation, neither was the perfume that escaped from the neck of her armor. It was almost as if she was preparing to attend a party, prior to climbing into her combat gear.

  Sarah grunted after the holog
raphic imagery that covered her eyes vanished; she saw something she didn’t like. Her body language alone was a clear indication of that. She yelled, pounding her first against the wheel.

  “Ah, fuck you EISS!”

  EISS, it reminded Peiun of why Sarah allied with him in the first place. It also reminded him of how much of a challenging adversity they would be.

  “Your sister may be in grave danger then,” Peiun said. “I’ve heard of this, EISS group, a human Assassins’ Guild.”

  “It’s more than that, black ops, sabotage, espionage, and yes, the odd assassination when necessary,” Sarah said. “They’re after her and as of now . . .” Sarah looked behind; Peiun’s eyes followed. Two cars approached rapidly, their speed was at the same dangerous levels as the car they were in. “They’re after us.”

  Sarah fiddled with the controls of the car, and its speed increased. It lacked inertia dampers, so Peiun felt the rising G-force push his body into the chair, then rock about whenever she made sharp turns, dives, and ascents to get around the traffic ahead of them.

  And evade the two cars behind.

  Cars zoomed past, one by one. A truck and its trailer came inches away from his passenger-side window. A hard turn to the right placed them close enough for Peiun to see residents in their homes move about in the buildings next to him.

  Rain began to crash into the car two minutes into the high-speed pursuit, enhancing the blurring and distorted view from his window. The two cars remained in their sights, pulling the same turns and rolls needed to slip past traffic and trucks.

  Another sharp turn at a four-way intersection forced Peiun’s body to shift to the left, two seconds after that, red tracer light from magnetic pistols pierced the car. Their pursuers were armed, and they also came back into view, seen from the rear windows that shattered into pieces from the weapon’s fire. The sudden noise and shift in air pressure forced Peiun to duck, not that it mattered, those rounds had the power to travel fast enough to pierce his chair and body within a fraction of a second.