27


My mother and my sister came to visit me in my hospital room. It was a welcome relief from the hellish boredom and draconian rules of the place. The medical staff didn’t allow cigars, whiskey, or anything that resembled fun—and they didn’t want me to leave and go after Ayers.
“Halek, what kind of mess did you get into?” my mother asked while my sister silently gave me a hug and then stepped back, almost out of my peripheral vision. “You need to rely on your team more. I’ve been in this game long enough to know solo missions are dangerous.”
“You’re right,” I said. “We started out together, but the situation changed.”
“Yes, that is often how it goes.” For a moment, she seemed far away, and I wondered how well I really knew her. She talked about missions like she had been forced to do them alone. The last several months had taught me she understood Union politics and that she had been playing a dangerous game to give me the tools and clues I needed to find her and defeat Nebs.
I never considered that she had been a field operative, but that was my guess now. Maybe that had been before she met my father.
“You have a very complex family,” X-37 said to me privately. “I have noted several instances that suggest both women are trained at espionage. Your sister is much younger, but old enough to have completed almost any training the Union would’ve had to offer her.”
“Are you going after Ayers by yourself,” Hannah asked.
“I’ll take a team—probably three ships with the best people I can pull from Xad, Wallach, and the Union.”
She frowned at the last part. If my sister had been trained by the Union, she no longer held any loyalty or affection for it—or the people who had kept her prisoner for Nebs.
“I want to help,” she said. The simplicity of her statement caught me off guard. My mother didn’t interrupt, which made me believe she knew this was coming and may have even planned it.
“Okay, here’s your first test,” I said. “Give me a situation briefing.”
“The Bright Lance and other ships are all reporting they are secured,” she began. “AI Mavis predicts the damage can be repaired in less than one standard week. Follow-up scans of the planet where you were nearly killed by insects show that there was an ancient civilization there that is long since extinct.”
“I was going to tell you that,” X-37 said privately.
“That brings us to the Alon,” my sister Hannah said. “The scout ship you chased was part of a rearguard. It seems that the Alon have already been here and were doing a final check of the area before leaving. Your appearance and rather poorly thought out chase has changed that.”
I kept my mouth shut with effort.
“During the Slayer crisis, the bridge crew was still sharp enough to maintain operations, including fleet security. There have been three reconnaissance missions against us. All ships are believed to belong to the Alon.”
“What about Ayers? Did they have anything to do with his escape?”
“There is no information linking Ayers to the Alon, but it is too early to tell,” Hannah said. “What I can say with confidence is that he took a small, slip tunnel capable ship and fled the system. Most of the partially complete alien hybrid experiments are with him. Would you like to see the footage from their escape?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Can we do it on the observation deck so I can smoke a cigar?”
Without a word, she handed me a tablet, cigar, and a heating tab to light a Presidential.
I accepted all three items but didn’t light up. Chewing on the cigar would have to be enough. A cloud of smoke would only draw nurses, which would be an interruption I didn’t need right now.
“The ship Doctor Ayers took was the Lady Faith, a surprisingly well-equipped pleasure yacht that will be very difficult to catch,” Hannah said. “Before we continue, however, I want to finish with the planet in this system. Under other circumstances, it might be an ideal resource for the exodus fleet. But, I’ve discussed this with Captain Younger, her advisor, and a collective of AI advisors from the other ships in the fleet. The planet has evolved several surprising and unique defensive mechanisms that won’t tolerate our presence there. We are marking it for future exploration but don’t believe we can stay long enough to make it work, especially if we have Alon ships creeping about.”
“What about the archaeological sites?” I asked.
“They appear to be primitive and there is clear evidence visible from high orbit to indicate the Alon have already excavated all sites larger than a single dwelling,” Hannah said.
I nodded and waited for her to continue.
“We now have two priorities of approximately equal value,” she said.
I detected her Union training in the way she spoke. She’d been to a high-level academy, possibly for fleet operations. She was only in her twenties, but she seemed an old soul. I was slightly embarrassed not to know her exact age, but I’d had a lot on my mind over the last decade.
“Doctor Ayers must be located and destroyed, along with all of his research,” Hannah said. “We must also conduct counter surveillance on the Alon forces. Both Xad and Wallach have fought them over the last several centuries and agree the threat is imminent.”
“Sounds like a large fleet problem.”
“What’s your point, brother?” Hannah asked.
“I’m a Reaper. The best thing I can do is go after Ayers. I think you should mentor under Captain Younger. This fleet needs someone trustworthy with high-level Union training in fleet operations.”
“We’ve discussed this,” she said. “I have a lot more than officer training to fall back on. Some habits will be hard to break.”
“Well that’s a little bit vague and mysterious.”
“It is what it is,” she said.
My mother interrupted. “We are playing for very high stakes now. You need to be on your feet and ready for action as soon as possible. I’ve gone over everything I could learn about your friends and only have a few suggestions on supplemental personnel.”
This wasn’t comfortable, I decided, but didn’t say anything. She had to know I didn’t respond well to authority, even if it was from somebody I loved and cared about. I’d been on my own for a while and was accustomed to making my own decisions.
“Who do you think I should add to my team?” I asked.
“I think you should take the Jellybird and your friends, of course. But the RWS Battle Axe and the Hunter of Xad are also well suited to this mission. I’ve spoken with CSL Locke and Rejon. They’ve agreed to assign their best personnel to those ships to assist you in tracking down Ayers. Their only stipulation is that the doctor be destroyed and that anything you learn from the encounter be shared equally.”
“I can live with that.”
* * *
Every muscle in my body ached as I placed my cybernetic arm on the workbench. My sutures burned and itched. This was like a hangover without experiencing any of the alcohol consumption that should’ve proceeded such misery.
Tom pointed to the areas he had fixed while Henshaw rubbed his chin. The ocular engineer was silent, thoroughly chastened by recent events. I’d never seen him like this and wondered if he was finally realizing that it didn’t matter how smart an individual was unless we all worked together.
“You did good work, Tom,” Henshaw said softly. “Just give me a few minutes to check over the finer details.”
He leaned forward and focused on my cybernetic arm section by section. His artificial eyes blinked and whirled with lights from time to time. When he finally stepped back and crossed his arms, a serious but satisfied look dominated his expression.
“It’s not pretty,” he said. “But the last Reaper isn’t about to win any beauty contests anyway, is he?”
I let that go and moved on to what we really needed to talk about. “What the hell were you thinking, Jimmy?”
“I deserve that, that tone you’re using with me,” he said. “My intentions, I assure you, were for the right reasons. I’ve recently learned the drawbacks of overestimating my own abilities. Ayers has yet to learn that lesson. He is very single-minded and does not see all of the implications of his work.”
I waited for more, and for once, X-37 had nothing to say during the brief silence.
“The DNA that Doctor Ayers used to splice into his human test subjects was not old, not nearly as old as one would assume if it had truly been collected from archaeological sites,” Henshaw said.
“You think these aliens are still out there, maybe even close enough to come after us?” I asked, thinking of the strange white aliens. The fleet’s forensic teams hadn’t been able to determine how long they’d been dead on the Alon ships. Everyone had been a tad bit busy over the last several days.
“I’m almost certain of it, but I can’t prove it. For someone like me, that’s a problem and I refuse to hypothesize further without more data,” Henshaw said. “What I am willing to speculate on is some of the things that Doctor Ayers said when I was attempting to interrogate him on the Lady Faith.”
I listened but was remembering the videos my sister had shown me of the test subjects being ushered onto the Lady Faith, and those with less human appearances being transported in coffin-like crates. Doctor Ayers had several confederates that were, as of yet, unidentified.
“If I were a betting man, and I am, I’d say he is taking his research to the Alon, believing they will be more appreciative patrons of his skills,” Henshaw said. “When I first realized that’s what he intended, I was actually relieved, because I had thought he was going to go to find the aliens. If he chooses to go that route, I think things will go very badly for all of humanity.”
For once, I agreed completely but wanted to hear him say it. “What do you mean?”
“How would we, as humans, respond to a race who had performed such experiments on our people?” he asked. “If Ayers finds the aliens and shows them what he’s done, it will probably be the start of a war of extermination against humanity.”