Reid sucked her bottom lip between his and stroked his tongue lightly across it. Jessica shivered. This was absolutely worth jumping out of a jet for.
Seven Months of Forever
“Games of Command” Adventure
Linnea Sinclair
CAPTAIN’S OFFICE: UNITED COALITION HUNTERSHIP REGALIA
Chatter strongly indicates the Triad Faction plans a significant move against the U-Cees. Attached is all I know right now. Target or targets have not been conclusively identified—
“One minute!” Captain Tasha Sebastian grumbled at the flashing green icon on her desk screen even though the icon couldn’t hear her. But it made her feel that at least she wasn’t ignoring the damned thing as she studied the information on enemy activity in the Far Reaches.
However, you shouldn’t discount, Sass, that your name is high on the list. After all, you robbed the Faction of an expensive and irreplaceable asset.
It was that expensive and irreplaceable asset that now, via flashing green icon, wanted her attention. He would have to wait. The heavily encrypted packet from the Rebashee Underground took priority – and concentration. She was able to decrypt the data only because she had, after all, spent a good part of her early years as a raft-rat named Sass, and had been trained in the fine art of code-breaking – and ship hijacking – by a Rebashee mercenary.
The same mercenary who’d sent her this information in spite of the fact that the raft-rat was now a United Coalition huntership captain. The Rebashee had no love for either the U-Cees or the Triad Faction.
But they hated the Faction more, especially with the recent assimilation of the Triad by the parasitic Ved’eskhar. “The new and mullytrocking-improved Triad, thanks to the Ved,” Gund’jalar, her mercenary mentor had noted in a previous missive. If ruthless and morally bankrupt could be seen as an improvement. Sass doubted the thousands of Triad citizens psychically tortured saw it as such.
It took her ten more minutes to decrypt and process Gund’jalar’s latest intel. The information was vague and felt as if the Ved-controlled Triad hadn’t yet committed to a definitive course of action.
Or it’s possible , she argued with herself, that our friends in the resistance are finally causing trouble, forcing the Faction to scatter resources. The U-Cees had hoped for that ever since the incursion of the Ved caused the collapse of the original U-Cee-Triad alliance over six months ago. Though she recognized she could be being overly optimistic.
But Gund’jalar wasn’t an alarmist. This was something he wanted her to know now. She noted it.
My sources expect a more detailed update within a few shipdays if not hours. As soon as I know, so will you. Until then, my friend and best student, watch your back.
She closed the packet and filed it under three levels of encryption that, thanks to new security protocols Kel-Paten devised, could only be accessed by herself or Kel-Paten. There was still work to do with their personal protocols, but running a five-ship patrol group in the Far Reaches – right on the edge of the Triad border – had, understandably, taken precedence.
“Okay. Next?”
The flashing green icon was still there. She tapped it.
My office. Five minutes. Coffee awaits. BKP
A second box pulsed behind the first. Impatience thy name is Branden Kel-Paten. She opened that too with a swipe of her finger.
Your coffee’s getting cold. We may have to explore other forms of heat . . .BKP
That made her grin in spite of the dire tone in the intel from Gund’jalar. For a man – she rarely thought of Branden as a bio-’cybe anymore – who was a virgin a mere seven months ago, he was a quick learner of these “other” forms of heat.
“The admiral beckons,” she told the plump and purring black-and-white furzel sprawled across the corner of her desk. She hadn’t intended to update Kel-Paten on Gund’jalar’s information until she received the specifics promised in the second report. But Branden, a former Triad admiral, had been working with his own sources – Triad expats, for one – and a comparison of intel at this point might be advisable considering they were in the Far Reaches.
Looove Brandenfriend, was the telepathic furzel’s answer. That and a furry bared belly. She gave Tank’s belly a quick rub then headed for her office door. “Tell Branden I’m on my—”
The general quarters alarm whooped through the Regalia’s corridors. Sass spun back toward her desk.
“Tank, go blink! Blink to your kennel now.” The furzel, well used to emergencies after their recent Faction-sponsored insanity in McClellan’s Void, teleported – blinked – out of Sass’s office and, according to the icon on her comp screen, into the safety of his personal life-pod in her quarters.
She slapped her shoulder comm link, connecting to the officer of the watch on the bridge. “Captain here. Status.”
The information the OOW gave her as she jogged toward the lift made her gut clench: an interstellar thermal wave a few light-minutes out. It had sufficient power to turn a huntership like the Regalia – not to mention the two cruisers and two frigates traveling with her – into a ragged line of deep-space debris.
The fact that she’d faced such a wave twice before only made her throat tighten.
Three times is never the charm it’s purported to be.
She lunged out of the lift, colliding with a tall dark-haired man in freighter grays, his hands encased in black gloves. Admiral Branden Kel-Paten was a commanding presence even though he no longer wore an intimidating, black, enemy Triad uniform. He’d lost more than his virginity seven months earlier: with his defection from the Triad, Branden had lost his history, his home, his fleet, his commission. That the U-
Cees’ very formidable former enemy was still referred to as admiral was only because the half-human, half-cybernetic officer continued to earn it.
“We must be some kind of damned vortex magnet,” Sass said tersely as Kel-Paten propelled her toward the bridge, one hand firmly grasping her forearm.
“Statistically improbable, Sass, but I won’t disagree with you.” The flat tone of his deep voice told her he was fully in his ’cybe function. That and the luminous glow of his eyes.
“Captain on deck,” the officer of the watch sang out.
Sass waved the bridge crew back to their seats with a perfunctory, “As you were.”
Kel-Paten slid into the chair next to hers in the center of the U-shaped bridge and, with a quick motion of his wrist, spiked into the ship’s systems through the cybernetic interfaces that augmented his body.
Collision alarms fell silent. Sass gleaned her data the old-fashioned way, studying what the screens and holographic master plot board before her told her. Yes, it was a thermal wave, but this time . . .
“McAbian residue readings are inconsistent with vortex formation,” Kel-Paten announced over the low, tense rumble of voices around them. “No known binary-collision region in this sector. Energy signature is not indicative of an interstellar gas cavity.”
“So it’s not a star fart. Then what—?”
An object flashed onto the Regalia’s short-range screens. A ship – less than three lightminutes out – impossibly, improbably hurtling through the blackness of deep space on a direct course for Regalia’s patrol group.