Laura Jo Phillips

The Katres’ Summer

Book Three of the Soul-Linked Saga

by

Laura Jo Phillips

Copyright © 2011 by Kathleen Honsinger

Cover art/design Copyright © 2011 by Kathleen Honsinger

All rights reserved.

Cover Background Image
: Hubble Space Telescope image, captured on February 4, 2004, of the dust cloud surrounding the star V838 Monocerotis.  Credit to United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Hubble Heritage Team, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).  We express deep appreciation to the dedicated scientists, engineers, and technicians associated with bringing this and so many other stunning Hubble Space Telescope images to the public for these many years.  You have shown us the glory and the beauty of the Cosmos and, in doing so, have enriched the human Mind, stirred the human Heart, and lifted the human Soul.

DEDICATION

As always...

For my husband, best friend, constant companion and partner in fantastic, amazing, star-reaching dreams and fantasies.  Thank you for sharing your life, mind and imagination with me.  Once again, and always, I never could have done this, and had so much fun doing it, without you.

For Mom, Grandma, and Great-Grandma---Thank you all for the creativity you passed along to me, as well as the heart to do something with it.  There is a little bit of each of you in these books, just as there is a little bit of each of you in me.

The Bearens’ Hope

Book Four of the Soul-Linked Saga

by

Laura Jo Phillips

Available Spring 2012

A sneak peek

will be available to read online soon.

Look for it at:

www.laurajophillips.com

Chapter 1

Summer Whitney browsed through book titles, already knowing what was there, but hoping that one might inspire her imagination for new ideas. 

Advanced Logistical Issues in Interstellar Naval Combat, Introduction to Metaspacial Fusion Plasma Physics for Naval Engineers, The Xarthax-Arkellian Wars:  A Strategic History, A Comparative Ecological Profile of Tau-Ceti II and  Epsilon Indi IV, Mineralogy and Gemology in the Thousand Worlds with Emphasis on Echthaww and Jasan, Issues in Intellectual Psychometrics for Highly Able Adults....

That last one caught her attention and she opened it up and began scanning the table of contents.  After a few moments she sighed inwardly and put it back in its place on her mental shelf. 

“What good is it to remember every word of every book I’ve ever read if I’ve never read anything helpful?”
she wondered.  “
Now, something entitled
How to Escape From A Slave Compound In the Middle of Nowhere On An Unfamiliar Planet, 
that
would be helpful.”

More than anything, Summer wanted to stand up and pace her cold, bare little cell.  She wanted to beat her fists against the locked metal door, yell and cry and beg to be released.  She had never thrown a tantrum of any sort, but she wanted to now, and would have if there hadn’t been a security camera trained on her every single moment she was alone in her cell.  Nothing in her life had prepared her for the past long year of captivity, and she was certain that she would have lost her mind long ago if not for her father.  Every time she needed a boost of courage, and that had happened quite frequently over the past year, she told herself to think like Father.  What would Father do?  How would Father act?  What would Father think?

The soft snick of the electronic lock being released on her cell door warned her that the night was over.  She focused for a moment on the control node for the mass of microscopic nano-bots that had been injected into her brain so many months earlier, and sent it a reactivation order. 

The ability to control computers with her mind was something she had played with since she was a child.  She had never dreamed how important it would become to her sanity.  Even so, the Controller had a firm grip on her brain by the time she realized it was there, so it had taken her months to wrest control of her brain away from it, and to gain control of the nano-bots at the same time.  It would have been easier to disable them altogether, but she had quickly come to realize that she needed them. 

By then she had become familiar with the physical tasks the Keepers put her and her fellow prisoners through on a daily basis.  There was no way she could ever force herself to stand in one position for hours at a time with no sign of movement, or to push herself through the long, strenuous sessions of physical exercise each day without collapsing on the floor in exhaustion.  Only the Controller could force her physical body to act and react as the Keepers expected.  So, disabling it was not an option.  Instead, she worked to gain control of the Controller, and eventually, she had succeeded.

The door to her cell opened and the familiar face of Keeper Tesla stepped in.  “Stand,” Tesla ordered the Controller, not unkindly.

The nano-bots in Summer’s brain instantly complied with the order and Summer felt her body sit up on the hard, narrow shelf that served as her bed, swing her legs over the side and stand.  Keeper Tesla stepped forward and swept Summer’s long, black hair back away from her face. 

“After you feed this morning you will not attend training with the others,” the woman said.  “Instead, you will go to the groomers.  You have been purchased.”

Shock radiated through Summer like a wave of ice.  She was glad the nano-bots were in control; otherwise she would have certainly given herself away.   

Keeper Tesla continued speaking as she removed the short, coarse night shift from Summer’s immobile body and replaced it with an equally short, slightly less coarse day shift.  “Once the groomers are finished, you will be packaged and transferred to the Office to await final shipment.”

Keeper Tesla tossed the night shift onto the bed and stood before Summer once more.  “I’m not sure why I am telling you this,” she said.  “I might as well be talking to a post.” 

Not for the first time Summer wondered why it was that the Keepers didn’t seem to know that she was still herself inside her head.  She had examined the nano-bots and their software very carefully many times, and she knew that they were specifically designed to keep her mental capacities whole and untouched while they took over her physical body. 

Summer pondered the question even as the Controller obeyed Keeper Tesla’s commands and moved her body out of the cell and down the hall to the cafeteria.  Summer had, on several occasions, tested the Controllers on her fellow prisoners.  She could only do it when she was in close proximity to them, and that didn’t happen often.  Over the course of several months she had been able to examine the Controllers on about a dozen of the other women.  Each of them had Controllers that were different from her own.  Their Controllers took over their minds completely.  Those women could not even think a thought that the Controller did not tell them to think.  Just thinking of that would have made Summer shudder if the Controller hadn’t been in charge.  But, something inside of Summer told her that those women were still there.  They were prisoners deep inside their own minds, but they still existed.  If the Controllers in their brains were disabled or removed, they would be released.  She knew it.  She just wasn’t sure how such a thing could be done without causing permanent brain damage.

But her own Controller was different.  It wasn’t because of her ability to control computer processors, either.  It was different in many ways from the one used on her fellow prisoners.  She was both relieved and frightened by that knowledge.  In her experience, being singled out was rarely a good thing.

Maxim Katre forced himself to stop pacing and leaned against the side of the ground-car instead.  He folded his arms across his chest, exerting all of his self-control to remain motionless when his body wanted nothing more than to continue its restless pacing.  He gazed up the busy street toward the spaceport while he waited for his brothers to return, trying yet again to understand his own feelings.

For months now he had felt as though he had an itch he couldn’t scratch.  There was something nagging at him, an almost constant urge to do...
something
.  But he did not know what.  Several times over the past few months he had even caught himself leaping from his bed out of a sound sleep, instantly ready for battle.

He had, of course, discussed his feelings with his brothers and had been disturbed to learn that they, too, were having strange feelings and impulses.  Theirs were not quite as intense as his own were, but strong enough to have them on edge nearly as much as he was.  They all wanted to put it down to the intense grief they felt over the recent deaths in their family.  But none of them could deny that the strange feelings had begun a year earlier, about the same time as Arima Saige Lobo had arrived.  The loss of their family members had occurred a full three months after that.

Maxim’s attention was drawn by the sight of a white ground-truck pulling into traffic from a parking lot beneath the building across the street from where he stood.  He watched as the vehicle entered traffic, then stopped at the corner briefly before turning off of the main thoroughfare and out of sight. 

There was nothing outwardly disturbing or significant about the vehicle.  It was an ordinary ground-truck like thousands of others in the small city of Badia surrounding the spaceport.  He wondered why it had caught his attention and could come up with no logical explanation. 

Suddenly he had that nagging, need-to-do-something feeling again, stronger than ever.  His hands clenched into fists and he found himself pacing the sidewalk again without having made a conscious decision to do so.  This was getting to be ridiculous.  Perhaps he needed to go to a Healer.  If Riata were still alive, he would have already gone to her.  But then, Riata had known things about the Jasani that no other Healer knew.

As he paced, Maxim’s gaze kept returning to the tall building across the street that the white ground-truck had pulled out of.  He had the strangest urge to cross the street and enter the building.  He shook his head at himself.

“Maxim, would you open the trunk please?” Ranim asked.

Maxim turned to see his brothers approaching him on the sidewalk, both of them loaded down with large boxes.  Maxim smiled briefly as he moved to open the trunk for them. 

When their cousin, Princess Nahoa-Arima Lariah Dracon, had discovered that her long awaited order of new clothes and toys for her daughters and the Lobos’ new daughters had finally reached Jasan, she had been very excited.  When she had then learned that delivery from town to the ranch would be delayed another week, she had been so disappointed that Maxim and his brothers had instantly offered to drive into town to collect the order themselves.  Anything was better than seeing the sadness in Lariah’s eyes, even driving four hours each direction.

As Lonim and Ranim loaded the boxes into the trunk, Maxim wondered if they would have room enough for everything.  Perhaps they should have borrowed Pater’s ground-truck, he thought.  In the end they had to tie a few boxes to the roof, but they managed to get it all into, or onto, the ground-car.  As Maxim finished tying off the last box to insure it did not fall off during the trip back to the ranch, he noticed that both of his younger brothers were staring at the same building across the street that had caught his attention earlier.  He again considered crossing the street and going into the building.  He sighed.  Perhaps all three of them needed to see a Healer.

“That’s done,” he said, to get his brothers’ attention.  They both turned to him with expressions of confusion and frustration on their faces.  To see emotions on Ran’s face was not unexpected, but to see them on Loni was a shock.  Loni rarely allowed his feelings to show.

“Let’s get these home to Lariah,” Maxim said.  Loni and Ran nodded and turned their backs on the building, the set of their shoulders telling Maxim that it was as difficult for them as it was for him.  On impulse, he climbed into the driver’s seat of the ground-car.  He usually let Ran do the driving, but he thought it might help him to keep his mind from wandering for awhile.  Besides, doing nothing when he had an almost constant urge to do
something
was beginning to drive him stir-crazy.

“Controller, open eyes.”

Summer’s eyes opened and she found herself staring at a smallish man with almost delicate features and soft brown eyes.  There was something downright scary about those eyes, in spite of their ordinary color.  Summer didn’t know what it was exactly that tipped her off, but she knew that this mild looking man was very dangerous.

“Controller, follow me,” the man said abruptly before turning and walking away.  Summer’s body followed him obediently as he led her out of a small, cold room that appeared to be a janitor’s store room, then down a long, dimly lit hallway.  He stepped into an elevator, waited for her to enter, and pushed a button.  Summer felt her stomach lurch as the tiny service elevator shot upward.  Seconds later the elevator stopped and the doors slid open.

Summer’s body followed the man as he led the way down another long hallway, this one brightly lit, carpeted, and dotted with several closed doors.  There was even art on the walls, though Summer was unable to turn her head or eyes to look at any of it.

The man reached the end of the hallway and entered the door there which had the name
Lio Perry
stenciled on it in gold letters.  There was nothing else on the door; no company name, no title, no address.  Just the name.  Summer followed the man through the door which he closed behind her.  He then led the way across what appeared to be a very luxurious waiting room to a set of large, ornate double doors with gold-colored door knobs.  He opened one of them and stepped inside, then waited for Summer to follow, closing the door firmly behind her. 

“Stop,” he said.  Summer’s body stopped at once while her mind took in the opulent, but sparsely furnished office.  The man walked around her slowly, examining her carefully in a way that made her feel both nervous and disgusted. 

“So, Miss Summer Whitney,” he said, his smooth voice filled with dark humor and menacing innuendo.  “How does it feel to be locked inside your own mind?” 

If Summer could have, she would have gasped in shock.  As it was, of course, she could not react physically at all.

The man grinned at her.  A decidedly unpleasant expression that made Summer hope that she would not be under this man’s power for very long.

“Yes, I know that you have a different type of Controller, and I know what it does, and what it does not do,” he said.  “I find it extraordinarily amusing.  You and my toy are the only two females to have earned the Prime Controller.  So far.”

Now this was information that Summer found interesting.  

“You have one because you are a
berezi,
of course,” he said.  “My toy has one because I wished it.”  He smiled again, an expression that Summer was already learning to detest.  “It is truly a pity that I have strict orders to keep you in your current...pristine...condition.  I believe I would find you amusing for a day or two.”