Aurora Resonant: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 3)

by G. S. Jennsen

  She waited another ten seconds on the off chance a message from Alex would arrive along about now announcing her daughter’s return from Amaranthe, safe and sound, bearing scads of intel and an easy answer to the current problem. The ‘safe and sound’ part would be the most important, a thousand times over…but not necessarily the most opportune part.

  The clock ran down. Cognizant such a message could arrive in the following ten seconds or the ten after that but unable to wait any longer, she nodded to herself and the empty room.

  “Do it, Thomas. Authorization code AFX-21X93 Alpha Zulu. Wrap all the usual warnings around the data for appearances…but open it up.”

  20

  ROMANE

  IDCC COLONY

  * * *

  MORGAN HAD BEEN ABSENT longer than usual, and a packed slate waited on her by the time her transport landed back on Romane. She retrieved her skycar for the quick hop over to IDCC Headquarters while she scheduled meetings and made slivers of free time for file reviews and four mission sign-off requests.

  She was helping AEGIS because it was the right thing to do—and because she wanted a say in the next generation of combat attack craft—but no way in hell was she giving up her leadership position in the IDCC. Here, she mattered, and she wasn’t inclined to lie and say authority didn’t suit her.

  Harper was more amenable to giving copious time to AEGIS, but it was mostly due to the fact the IDCC ground response forces were now both well-trained and rarely needed. Before Jenner came calling, Harper was bored, which Morgan secretly kind of preferred in that it had led to some unexpected and deliciously wicked—

  ‘Proximity warning!’ Red lights flashed across the HUD, snapping her out of her reverie. What the—?

  A skycar slammed into her side of the vehicle at full speed, sending it lurching out of the airlane. ‘You are having an accident. Brace for impact.’

  “You think? Manual control!”

  The vehicle shuddered clunkily in her hands as she tried to pull up and level off. It was not a fighter jet—but she was a fighter pilot, dammit, and she was not going to fucking crash in a fucking skycar.

  Another impact and everything flung sideways, her included. Her neck jerked more violently than anyone’s neck should. Nope, this heap was definitely not a fighter jet. She blinked as her vision artificially refocused and her eVi activated provisional medical responses.

  Okay, so she was dealing with a rogue skycar then. Sent to kill her? A thoroughly rational conclusion. Fun.

  She fought the controls in an attempt to veer away from her pursuer, but acceleration functions had been damaged in the last hit and she failed to create any distance before the reprobate attacker struck again. With the jolt the adaptive cushioning gel deployed like a proper safety measure, promptly blocking her access to the controls and her ability to see.

  She clawed it away from the area right in front of her, shoving the insistent material to the side until she was able to grasp the controls again.

  The slender gap she managed to create in the gel revealed a glass high-rise looming due ahead. “Motherfucker—”

  The attacker slammed into the rear of her vehicle at the lower bumper. She went spinning end over end as the gimbal mount broke apart and all controls failed.

  She had microseconds to activate a distress signal transmission from her eVi. On the next revolution the front of her vehicle met the far stronger metal of the building, and everything went black.

  Brooklyn Harper didn’t bemoan the fact she now had more work than three people could do, because not long ago she’d had none. It felt good to work; it might even border on fulfilling.

  After months of struggling to find a new place in the world, one where she felt at home, she now found herself needed on multiple fronts. Important fronts. This did not suck.

  But the reality remained that work was work. She massaged her left shoulder to work out a kink before she prepped to head downstairs.

  The distress signal from Morgan sent her vaulting out of her chair and through the door simultaneously with activating her comm across multiple channels.

  HarperRF: “Romane Emergency Services, report to an incident at Rainaldi and Barclay. Expect injuries on the scene. Romane Tactical, provide backup and institute a two-block security perimeter. RRF Security, pull downtown cam footage from the last twenty minutes.”

  Skycars rarely had accidents, and Morgan certainly didn’t have accidents—not in anything that flew. Which meant whatever was happening was foul play.

  Well, hell.

  Emergency Services had already reached the scene when Brooklyn arrived. Rescue vehicles hovered in the air around a gaping hole halfway up the Galaxy First Communications building, and personnel surrounded a vehicle embedded between the first and second floors. Though crushed, its distinctive red and gold paint marked it as a rental from the main spaceport—not Morgan’s skycar.

  Her eyes darted up to the hole three hundred fifteen meters above.

  Focus, Harper. You have to focus.

  She jogged over to where an ad-hoc command post had been established on the ground, grabbed an ER officer by the arm and pointed. “Get me up there.”

  The man hesitated, then seemed to recognize her. “Yes, ma’am. The riser is about to take some additional equipment up. You can hitch a ride, but grab a helmet and gloves first. The wreckage is a mess.”

  His casual words chilled her to the bone, but her outward bearing didn’t waver. She retrieved the safety gear from the back of the emergency vehicle and hopped on the riser as it began ascending.

  During the twenty-second ride she prepared herself for what she might find in the rubble. She’d seen more than one crash scene—enough to know regardless of what it looked like, injuries could be treated and wounds would heal. The important thing in the early minutes was to effect the rescue, safely but quickly, in the narrow window of time when treatment remained an option.

  The walls of the building had bent and yielded, as they were designed to do. The glass had of course shattered to cover most of the surrounding surfaces and the ground below.

  Inside, the fixtures didn’t prove quite so sturdy as the scaffolding. Morgan’s skycar had plowed into a storage room—storage of heavy equipment. Racks and crates had tumbled down to bury the vehicle.

  She grabbed a lever included in the riser load and climbed through the open window. Two rescue personnel were working to move the heaviest, most unwieldy debris away from the wreckage, and a third passed her to retrieve the supplies from the riser. He eyed her briefly but didn’t challenge her.

  She ducked under a beam lodged diagonally from the ceiling to the rear of the battered skycar in order to reach the passenger side, then shoved the end of the lever under the edge of a thick slab of metal blocking access.

  “It’s not safe in here, ma’am!”

  “No shit.” She grunted, threw her muscle onto the lever and heaved the debris up and out of the way.

  “But you—”

  “Am RRF—now shut up and do your job.” The clatter of a rack falling to the side a second later suggested the man obeyed.

  The frame of the skycar had partially held, but impact with the robust building façade strained it to the brink of failure. The roof sagged down into the cab and the front and rear sections had crumpled.

  Harper strained to lift a long sheet away from where the right-side door should’ve been, but it didn’t budge; one end of it was trapped beneath a displaced rack. Another pair of hands appeared at the other end to hold the rack up while she yanked the sheet free and shoved it to the side. When she turned back, she found the interior was exposed.

  The adaptive cushioning gel had deployed as designed, coating the passenger cabin in soft, semi-pliable material then shrinking back once the impacts ceased to allow movement.

  Morgan’s bloodied, bruised right arm rested at an unnatural angle against debris that had fallen through the shattered windshield. Her legs disappeared beneath a mangled dash, b
ut at first glance her chest looked intact and unpunctured.

  Her head was another matter. Her face was a swollen mess of cuts. Blood streamed down from a long cut above her forehead; her nose and mouth were both bloody. Worse, dried blood was caked beneath her right ear.

  Dammit, the gel should have provided better protection than that—but Morgan had probably been stupid and fought the gel and the crash until the last instant.

  Brooklyn leaned into the cab and touched Morgan’s cheek, taking disproportionate comfort in the faint exhale of air tickling her forearm. Breathing was a good sign, even if it was terribly weak. “Lekkas? Morgan, can you hear me?”

  No response. Not so much as a flutter of eyelashes.

  She shouted over her shoulder. “Get medical techs and a mobile gurney up here, now!”

  The medics loaded Morgan into the ambulance, body immobilized and a crash unit in place around her, keeping her alive. Barely.

  The adrenaline from the rescue evaporated, leaving behind a creeping frigidness in Brooklyn’s bones. It felt like fear, but not the fear of impending combat or a dangerous mission gone bad. The fear which seized her now marked a trepidation that her soul had been broken, snatched out of her body and stolen away. She didn’t want to move, lest it prove to be true.

  She blinked. Falling apart now wasn’t going to do anyone any good, least of all herself. She was a Marine, and while she couldn’t do anything more to help Morgan survive right now, she could do her damn job.

  So she wrangled the damnable emotions under a semblance of control, dug up a facsimile of her usual cool disdain, and located the on-scene commander back at the command post. “You’ve got security on the other vehicle?”

  “We did, ma’am, but it’s empty, and wrecked enough that someone couldn’t have escaped from it.”

  She nodded understanding. “Means the nav system was hacked. Don’t let anyone touch that vehicle until Forensics techs get here—and get Forensics techs here ASAP. This is now a crime scene. I want them crawling through every centimeter of the vehicle. Have them also scour Commander Lekkas’ vehicle for tampering and a possible tracking device, then impound what’s left of both vehicles.”

  HarperRF: “Romane Investigations, I need detectives down here interviewing witnesses before I lift the perimeter blockade. In light of other attacks on high-value IDCC individuals on multiple planets, I’m declaring this an official IDCC matter. The lead investigator is to report all findings directly to me.”

  While she waited on Forensics to arrive, she double-checked the blockade security and inspected the remains of the other vehicle. Three detectives arrived just after Forensics, and she spent several minutes explaining to them what she knew and what she needed to know.

  Finally, there was nothing left for her to do here. She stood in the middle of the street and surveyed the scene a final time—then hurried to her skycar. Until investigators gave her a perpetrator to strangle with her bare hands, she could do her job from the hospital.

  AMARANTHE

  21

  SERIFOS

  ANDROMEDA GALAXY

  LGG REGION VI

  * * *

  THELKT LONAERVIN MANAGED GUEST AMENITIES at Plousia Chateau, the largest resort on Serifos, a planet inhabited almost entirely because of its colorful, aromatic flora. The damn flowers were so ubiquitous at Plousia they’d all but constructed the buildings out of them.

  Eren had met the Novoloume anarch on a mission nearly a quarter century earlier. Novoloume were, with a few exceptions, the only anarchs able to continue to operate fully within the bounds of Accepted society after they joined the movement. Those who did so acted as spies, information traders and brokers while continuing to present a public face of professional, deferential service to the Directorate.

  They lived on a tightrope strung over the abyss every day, thus those who did it successfully tended to be quite adept at both manipulation and deception. The anarch leadership was cognizant of this, of course, and such individuals were thoroughly vetted. Novoloume were among the longer-lived Accepted Species, and Thelkt had been a loyal anarch for going on one hundred twenty years now.

  Eren picked his way through the crowd filling the first floor ballroom. He worked to stay on a trajectory that would take him to the illuminated spiral ramp in the center while keeping an expression of glazed indifference etched onto his features.

  Above, there would be room to breathe—and greater exposure—but here on the first level the air was too suffocating to even form a coherent sentence.

  Someone grabbed his hand as he passed. Eren spun to find an Idoni woman sporting a stunning mane of cerulean curls and vivid rainbow irises attired in a wrap he’d hardly classify as ‘clothing.’ She smiled wolfishly at him and ran her other hand down his outer thigh. “Dance with me.”

  I don’t dance, he grumbled to himself—but he suspected dancing wasn’t what she had in mind in any event. He’d activated his Idoni integral false-front layer before entering Plousia, accurately assuming a third of the guests at a minimum were going to be Idoni, so he should be safe for this sort of interaction. Still had to act the part, though.

  He grasped her roughly at the waist and pulled her close. “Sorry, lovely, have a date to keep upstairs. Maybe I’ll be back.” He kissed her full on the mouth for a very long second then released her and allowed the crowd to swallow him up.

  He made a hard right turn, weaving around to make sure she didn’t follow him and waiting until a group of people began traversing the ramp before heading up alongside them.

  The atmosphere on the next level was noticeably more refined, if no less debaucherous. More relevantly, he was now able to move a meter or two in any direction without being jostled.

  Thelkt’s booth was located far across the floor, near the ramp up to the third level. The entrance to the ramp was heavily guarded, and he chose not to contemplate what went on above.

  The Novoloume had two customers occupying him, so Eren hunted for somewhere to loiter within line-of-sight of the booth. He settled for observing an interpretive dance routine staged near one of the refreshment bars.

  Places such as Plousia could almost make one start to be convinced there wasn’t such a problem with the Directorate’s rule or the society it had crafted. Luxury abounded, with not a choke collar in sight—well, not an involuntary one.

  One could live an effectively immortal existence of perpetual comfort and ease here…but it was an exclusive club. Anaden-only, and all you had to do to join was give up your soul in exchange.

  He never did figure out what the dancers were interpreting, and when the guests in Thelkt’s booth vacated, Eren wandered over and slid in across from the anarch with a casual nod. Thelkt didn’t attempt to draw closer in greeting; he knew of Eren’s distaste for the Novoloume’s persuasive pheromones.

  “Have a drink, my friend.”

  Eren accepted the bubbling flute without argument, telling himself it should make their interaction look more natural from afar.

  “Fabulous outfit.”

  “Don’t start, Thelkt. It’s called undercover.”

  “Only for an Idoni would ‘undercover’ mean so splendidly bright and garish.”

  He scowled at Thelkt until the man held up a hand in surrender. “No offense meant. I’m confident it’s all suitably ‘brooding black’ underneath. So, this is a pleasant surprise. I didn’t realize you were on the Briseis mission.”

  “I’m not. I’m here about something else. Information.”

  “You know I must be careful. Too many delves at once will arouse suspicion.” Thelkt gave an elegant wave to a passing guest, his opalescent skin rippling to pale mauve in acknowledgment.

  Eren leaned back and adopted a relaxed pose. “No additional work is required—this is information I believe you already possess.”

  “Interesting. Ask your questions, but do try to smile every few sentences. You look positively morose, and no one at Plousia dares be morose.”

 
He made the effort, relying on muscle memory and genetics to don the proper deportment. “You know something about a mission several years ago to infiltrate the Machim data network. It failed, but I’m under the impression the goal was to cripple their warships’ targeting systems.”

  “Send them flying in circles chasing their sterns. Yes, that would have been such a delight to see. Regrettably, Joyoun died attempting to complete the mission. He was a friend, so I mourn its failure for more than simply a missed chance for sadistic pleasure. What do you wish to know about it?”

  He thought of Cosime. This was why he didn’t want to involve her in the very off-the-books mission. Infiltrating a Machim facility was a near-certain death sentence, and taking any action related to infiltrating a Machim facility came uncomfortably close to the same.

  “I am sorry. I need to find out where Joyoun hit, what kind of information he believed was accessible from there and what his tactical method was—and the reason he failed.”

  “I understand. Pardon me a moment.” Thelkt stood as an impeccably dressed Idoni approached, an unfamiliar serpent-like alien in a shock collar trailing along behind. It seemed he’d been wrong before; the collars weren’t necessarily voluntary after all.

  Thelkt met the man halfway and well clear of the booth, dipping his chin in deference as the man gestured and talked for several minutes. Eventually the man turned on a heel and led his pet up the ramp to the third level, causing Eren to ponder what depravity the serpent might be intended for.

  Thelkt returned to the booth before the train of thought led to too dark of a place.

  “Who was that?”

  “My employer. Avdei elasson-Idoni.”

  “Arae anathema, Thelkt!” Eren shuddered, fighting against the impulse to crawl under the table and hide. He’d just been four meters from one of the Idoni Primor’s chief deputies, and he’d been sitting there whistling and lounging like he didn’t have a sane bone in his body.