Annihilation (Star Force Series) (13 page)

“Sandra, let her go. Don’t you dare break her arm.”

“She’s trouble, Kyle. I’ve been watching her almost as much as you have.”

“I’m sure you have. Now let her go. She’s unarmed.”

Reluctantly, Sandra let Alexa go. The young woman whirled around angrily, but with one look at Sandra’s murderous eyes, her protests died in her throat. She pushed past and ran down the corridor holding her shoulder which was probably numb and throbbing.

“Cry-baby,” Sandra said. “I didn’t even break it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I would have felt the bones crack.”

“Sandra, may I remind you I’m trying to make peace with Earth? That this is a diplomatic meeting between the Empire and Star Force?”

“That’s how you see it. I see it as a security risk.”

I sighed and headed back up to the bridge. I knew there was no point in arguing with Sandra. Quite possibly, she was right anyway. This girl might be star-struck by me, or she might be putting on an act. Either way, it was probably for the best that I kept my distance.

“Do you think she’s pretty, Kyle?” Sandra asked me as she stalked along at my side.

“I guess so… In a childish way.”

“That’s bullshit.”

I tried to keep my face neutral. I knew she was watching me closely. I’d found Lieutenant Brighton very attractive, but I wasn’t going to let Sandra know that. The lieutenant would live longer if I pretended I didn’t care about her.

“Look, she’s just somebody’s kid who got assigned to coming out here to further her career. You need to control that jealous streak of yours.”

“She’d better not be planning to further her career with your help,” Sandra said dangerously.

“If advancing her career is the plan, she should be running from me,” I said with a laugh. “I’m not exactly on Emperor Crow’s A-list—more like his ‘most wanted’ list.”

Sandra fell silent, but I could tell she was pissed off about Alexa. I knew enough about women to take the “silent treatment” for the gift it was. I kept my mouth shut all the way up to the bridge.

I checked every report in my queue and read about a thousand emails. When I finally retired to my quarters, Sandra shadowed me. She still wasn’t talking, and that was just fine with me. There were less than nine hours left before we arrived at Eden-8 and slid into orbit. I was tired and didn’t want to waste them.

I flopped out on my bunk, arms over my head. I didn’t even bother with a shower. About ninety seconds after my head hit the pillow, I fell into a light dream. It was a good dream, something about hunting crows in cornfields and orchards with an old .22 rifle I had as a kid.

I had a thin smile on my lips when I was rudely awakened. I grunted in surprise as a weight thumped down on my chest. My arms snapped up and gripped my assailant. I squeezed—it was reflexive to do so.

“Ow,” Sandra said. “I can’t believe this, but you’re actually hurting me. You can’t do that to a normal person, Kyle. You’d break their bones.”

My eyes fluttered open. Sandra was sitting on my chest like an insolent housecat. I had her wrists clamped firmly in my hands. She struggled, but couldn’t free herself.

Like all Star Force marines, we had both been nanotized. That meant our bloodstreams were teeming with millions of tiny robots. These robots had the job of healing our bodies, but more importantly, they had already altered them. During an excruciating multi-hour ordeal, they changed the internal structures of any human they were injected into. The Nano technology was beyond our own, but we used it wherever we could. Our bones were harder, our muscles more dense. We moved faster and hit harder than any other humans in history.

Even with all those physical improvements, Sandra and I stood out as unique. Like very few others, we’d gone through additional treatments. We’d been improved by taking microbial baths administered by Marvin. The Microbes in question were a sentient species, capable of collective thought and action. They’d worked on our bodies at a biochemical level, altering them. As a result, Sandra was one of the fastest beings I’d ever encountered, and I was one of the strongest.

She writhed in my grip as I came fully awake.

“Let me go, or I’m going to kick you,” she said.

I kept my grip and smiled. “When you jump on a sleeping marine’s chest, you’ve got some explaining to do.”

“I’ll kick you.”

“I don’t think so.”

She glared at me darkly, and I let her go a moment later. I was having fun, but I also wanted to have sex again at some point in this relationship.

Sandra jerked her arms away from my hands and crossed them under her breasts. She stayed sitting on my chest, however. I didn’t complain about that. She had been a fit, shapely young woman when I first met her. After undergoing physical transformations, she was as cut and sculpted as an Olympic gymnast. Due to my own physical alterations, her weight didn’t bother me at all. To me, she felt as if she weighed ten pounds or so.

“Clearly, you want to tell me something,” I said.

“I’m feeling jealous.”

“You don’t say? Never would have suspected it.”

“You liked that girl. She was normal, soft, young. You
liked
her.”

“She seemed friendly. But she’s only a kid to me.”

She slapped me across the face. She moved so fast, I couldn’t react quickly enough to grab her wrist. A trickle of blood ran from my cheeks where they’d been smashed into my teeth. A normal man would have been seriously injured. In my case, it didn’t really hurt, but it did sting a bit.

“What was that for?”

“For lying. I was a young girl when we first met. You went for me quickly enough. Don’t forget I can read your physical responses, Kyle. I could hear your blood pound in your veins. I could hear your breathing accelerate.”

“Yeah? Did Alexa get turned on too?”

I shouldn’t have said that. I
knew
I shouldn’t have said that. But I was stinging a bit from the bash in the mouth. I was tired, and sometimes when I’m tired my mouth gets one second ahead of my brain. This was one of those times.

Her hand flashed out of the dark again. This time, I knew it was coming. I had my own hand up to block hers.

Unfortunately, I’d guessed wrong. I’d expected her to go for a right-cross again. But she surprised me, using her left. She was ambidextrous, and I should have anticipated the move, but I didn’t. She caught me a good one, slamming me in the right ear. This hurt even more than my cheek did. Something about getting hit in the ear—even after all my treatments, it hurt.

I grunted and grabbed her. We grappled for a second, and I flipped her over on the bed and landed on top of her. A normal woman would have been crushed down by my weight and pinned, helpless.

But Sandra was no normal woman. My weight meant nothing to her. She kneed me, twisted and I was flying across the room. She was so fast!

I bounced off the lockers and came up in a crouch. We faced one another, breathing hard.

We’d fought before, but this was more serious than usual. The whole thing surprised me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

She heaved a huge sigh and stretched out on the bed. “I’m sorry,” she said.

I stood straight, but I didn’t step closer to her. Sandra was moody, but this was unusual, even for her. I didn’t say anything. Blood dribbled from my chin, but I ignored it.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose it’s because she’s a normal human girl. Younger, prettier, but most of all…normal. I know you miss that. I hate that she’s something you want. I hate that she’s something I can’t be.”

I opened the lockers and rummaged out a bottle of vodka. Usually, I was a beer man. But tonight I felt the need for something stronger. I poured and she appeared at my side.

“I don’t like it straight,” she said.

Funny comments swam in my head, but this time I managed to stop them before they came out of my mouth. Instead, I got out a mixer and gave her a drink. Our glasses clinked and ice cubes tinkled inside.

We drank our beverages in relative silence. I didn’t bother to make up lies, telling her I wasn’t attracted to Alexa, and that she was prettier than that Earth-girl tramp. I didn’t even bother to apologize for the changes in my heart rate when the girl came near. She was too smart for that kind of talk. More importantly, I knew that if I made any more false moves, she might go off again. I did my damnedest to say nothing at all.

So we drank, and afterward we made love. She’d always been a demanding, strenuous lover, but this time our activities were more intense than usual.

It was good, and when I finally did get some sleep, it was the sleep of exhaustion.

-12-

We made planetfall precisely on time over Eden-8. I sipped coffee and blinked my red eyes. The nanites cleared the toxins left over from alcohol faster than normal human livers could ever manage, but somehow I still felt hard liquor in my brain the next day.

“There’s a report from the task force in the Thor system, sir,” Miklos said.

I glanced at him. “Anything serious?”

“If it was I would have awakened you.”

I nodded, and flicked my finger over the screen of a tablet. It was from Captain Sarin. I’d left her in charge out there. She said there were some odd readings from the bottom of the seabed on Yale. I frowned.

“Nothing’s changed? Just these vibrations?”

“Right sir, looks as if someone is trying to use the ring to communicate.”

When the rings were used to relay transmissions from one star system to another, they did so through a process of sympathetic resonance. Since the rings were essentially in two places at one time, if you could cause one to vibrate slightly, you were logically vibrating the one on the far side at the same time. Using this system and applying a code to the vibrations allowed for the instantaneous transmission of message over countless lightyears.

“Jasmine is blocking this, right?”

“Of course, sir,” Miklos said. “The instant the signal was detected, the fleet began jamming it.”

“But we still don’t know who is trying to send what message through, do we?”

“No sir. We do know the message is not intended for us. It could be the Macros trying to talk to the Crustaceans, or the other way around.”

I frowned. “What possible motivation could the Crustaceans have for communicating with their masters now? Don’t they know the machines are trying to kill them all?”

Miklos shrugged. “Anything is possible, sir. We just don’t know. I feel forced to remind you that the Crustaceans did not agree to ally with us. For whatever reason, they are still technically allied with the Macros.”

“I don’t like it. But I do understand it. The Crustaceans are coldly logical when it comes to their own survival. They don’t fear us as much as they do the machines.”

Miklos made a vague gesture that seemed to indicate I could be right, but he wasn’t agreeing fully. I ordered some coffee and headed for the docking ports. The carrier wasn’t built to land in an atmosphere, so we boarded smaller ships to take us down to Shadowguard.

When I finally stood on the battlements of my castle in the sky, I felt better. I liked it here. There were good memories already building, and somehow the place made me relax. I paced the walls for an hour, watching the sun drop over the horizon. The nights fell quickly here, and dawn was never far away.

Tonight we were having a formal state dinner. This was the perfect place for it, and it would be our first. General Kerr had told us he’d make a formal announcement concerning Earth’s diplomatic intentions at the dinner. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, but I was looking forward to the meal. The kitchens and chefs on staff at Shadowguard were the best in the Eden system.

I started off the evening by showing General Kerr and his entourage around. Alexa was noticeably present, but subdued.

Sandra was noticeably absent. But I knew she was lurking around somewhere nearby. She might be on the battlements or on the central mountain crag that anchored the fortress. My relationship with her was an odd one. She was part bodyguard, part lover—and part something else. We’d been through so much together I couldn’t imagine life without her shadow casting itself over mine.

I knew that wherever she was, she was watching me, but I tried not to think about her. I knew I needed to clear my mind.

I showed them most of the rooms, but not the command-and-control center, of course. We passed a number of dungeon-like doors which hid sensitive equipment, leaving them unopened. I knew that just looking at our hardware wouldn’t be enough for them to gather much intel about it, but decided to err on the side of caution.

Instead, I showed them the battlements, the views and the ballroom where we would shortly have dinner.

“This is it, huh?” Kerr asked me. “Let me tell you something, Riggs. This is a fine medieval castle. The trouble is I’ve seen them before, plenty of them. We’ve got them all over Europe clutching the top of one Alp or another. I’m not terribly impressed by anything other than the view.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, General,” I said evenly.

“I know you’re hiding your real tech somewhere. I’m surprised you aren’t proud enough to show off what it can do. Have you figured out how to spy on Earth through the rings, yet?”