An alarm trilled shrilly behind her in CIC. “He’s broken through Room Six’s second containment field, Captain,” the CIC officer told her. “Kel-Paten now has complete access to sick bay.”
CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS
Sass was tired, so godsdamned tired. The Regalia was well into third-shift, long past Sass’s bedtime. She couldn’t sleep. She paced the confines of the captain’s quarters, alternately hugging her arms around her waist and thrusting her hands through her short-cropped hair, as she tried not to look at Branden’s soft sweater thrown over the back of their couch. Or his new hiking boots tucked under their bedroom chair.
She could bring him here, show him his own things mixed in with hers, but she knew he wouldn’t believe her. If she even lived long enough to offer him the tour.
She really thought seeing the vid of himself and Ralland Kel-Tyra on the Vax’s bridge would bring him back out of whatever cybernetic hell the Faction had shoved him into. All that effort had got her, though, was a derisive scoffing remark from him.
And an icy-blue stare she remembered far far too well, ever since they first met on the derelict freighter, the Sarna Bogue.
The captain had to make a decision soon. She knew that. The lives of her officers and crew hinged on it. Possibly the very fate of the United Coalition, if Kel-Paten commandeered her ship and handed over to the Faction all the intel the Regalia now held. She could not let the fact that she loved that man more than life itself stand in the way of what she knew had to be done.
Starting with the hard cold realization that the man she loved was no longer even there. Someone, something else, inhabited Branden’s body and cybernetically enhanced mind.
When he breached the first of the two larger containment fields around the sick bay, she would have no choice but to give the order to kill him. She’d already provided the security team with the highly classified data on how to do that.
She hoped Ralland Kel-Tyra would forgive her. She knew she would never forgive herself.
I should have let you kidnap me. She’d told him that in McClellan’s Void, when they had been trapped in another hell of the Faction’s making – in a fabricated universe where all her sins as the infamous mercenary, Lady Sass, were paraded before Kel-Paten. She’d truly believed then that she’d lost him, that he was going to kill her.
But instead, he had admitted that at their first meeting on the decrepit Sarna Bogue twelve years ago he’d fallen in love with her. She’d been shocked. He’d said he’d known from that moment that, no matter who she was now or who she’d been, he wanted her in his life forever.
It was just a godsdamned mullytrocking shame that “forever” turned out to last only seven months.
She stared with all her might at her quarter’s outer bulkhead, as if she could pierce her ship’s hull with just her emotions, and send a message to the godsdamned mullytrocking Triad Faction – the same message she’d leveled at then-Captain Kel-Paten’s Vaxxar a dozen years earlier: Fuck you and the equinnard you rode in on.
It had certainly worked back then, changing her life and his. He’d told her more than once that it was a phrase he’d always associate with his “green-eyed vixen” . . .
She spun and bolted for her closet. “Tank, come! I need you now.”
SICK BAY
Kel-Paten almost enjoyed dismantling the Regalia’s containment fields. They were a bit better than he’d anticipated, with a few unexpected twists and turns in the coding. It was a skillful pattern he’d come across only once before, a long time ago. That, too, was a pleasurable memory – as far as any ’cybe with emo-inhibitors could experience pleasure, that is. He tried recalling the details but they remained, oddly, elusive.
Unimportant, then. His programming automatically worked to a structured hierarchy. If and when that memory was needed to provide something of value, it would be there.
Until then . . .
There was a subtle change in the air currents. He spun to his right with unerring precision. Not toward the doors to the corridor. They were sealed. Not to any air duct or inner office door. Those posed no threat. But to . . .
“Captain Sebastian.” He powered up fully. Even through his gloves, one touch would kill her. A brush of his fingers would render her unconscious. He could hold her hostage until he took control of her ship.
But how had she . . . ?
His brain searched, gathered, analyzed, redacted, gathered, analyzed, and redacted again. Two-point-
seven seconds passed. She was unarmed. She had that fat furzel at her feet. She . . .
She was out of uniform, in patched and faded freighter grays, a ratty-looking red cap bearing the logo of a Kesh Valirr night-house perched askew on her short-cropped pale hair.
“Vaxxar, this is the Sarna Bogue,” she said crisply. “Fuck you and the equinnard you rode in on.”
His body went rigid. His mind whirled, latching onto a coded sequence string of instructions that unpacked so quickly he was momentarily blinded in a blizzard of images and sounds and data.
Override. Execute. Override. Execute. Override. Execute.
His breath was sucked harshly out of his lungs. He bent over at the waist, gloved hands on his knees, and gasped for air, which suddenly tasted sweet and fresh – not stale and bitter as it had moments before.
He stared up at his green-eyed vixen. The galaxy slowly and elegantly righted itself.
Still hunched over, he focused his gaze on the name-patch above the single bar on her threadbare shirt.
That insignia was the only part of her attire that was remotely regulation. He read her name and her rank aloud. “Lieutenant Sebastian.”
She nodded, her mouth quivering slightly. “Captain Kel-Paten.” Her voice, he noted, wavered. Was she frightened of him? She needn’t be. He could never, would never hurt her.
He straightened, clearing his throat. “Where in hell am I?” This was not the bridge of the Sarna Bogue, though he could have sworn, moments ago, that that was where he was.
The furzel scampered across the decking and plopped down at his boots, then flipped onto its back, baring its very plump belly. A small high-pitched childlike voice exploded in Kel-Paten’s head: Brandenfriend! Tank loooves you. MommySass loooves you. Rub belly, please?
He glanced down at the furry creature then back up at Lieutenant Sebastian. Tears trailed down her face – yet, illogically, she was grinning. He fought the urge to wipe those tears away. He shouldn’t touch her.
He was Kel-Paten. She’d be afraid. Yet . . .
She stepped toward him and he didn’t try to stop her when she took his lethal gloved hand in her own, her fingers curling through his, flooding him with a surprising warmth.
“Sebastian?” He paused, embarrassed by the roughness of his voice.
“Kel-Paten.” She paused too, and smiled up at him through her tears. “Welcome back, flyboy.”
CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS
Branden Kel-Paten picked up the sweater he had no memory of wearing, then inspected the hiking boots he had no memory of acquiring, then cataloged the forty-six other items that were his in a closet he shared with . . .