ShakenandStirred (4 page)

Tosha took a few steps away from the shuttle, turned to watch him shoo her onward and then she started a slow sprint that turned into a full run with cartwheels as she picked up speed. Her school gymnastics came out as she flipped, twisted and spun into the centre of the plain.

Tosha looked back at Mix in the shuttle and she started to shake the ground she stood on. Her thoughts began to play her favourite songs and she waved her hands in the air, cutting swaths in the ground as she began to sing along.

The ground trembled, a few volcanoes shot up when she called them and in general, she had a wonderful time. Her muscles were humming pleasantly when she finished turning the plain into a maze of broken stone, new hills and steaming craters.

Her walk back to the shuttle took considerably longer than her trip out, but she did what she could to heal the marks she had made as she walked. The volcanoes ceased their spewing, the fissures sealed up and fine tremors in the ground turned the craters into more gentle slopes.

She was quite pleased with her efforts. The position of the sun told her she had been at it for hours.

Mix sat on the steps of the shuttle with his head propped in his hands like a six-year-old. When she got within twenty feet, he stood up and started clapping madly. "That was amazing."

She gave him a curtsy and a tired smile. "Thank you. That was a lot of fun."

He helped her remove the wires and sensors, folding them carefully and replacing them in the case. "I can tell. The absorbers were having quite the time keeping the impact of your frolics under control."

Free of the wires, she stretched and twisted to get her muscles to unclench.

"There is a transmission from Morganti that we need to take. You can unclench on the way." He ushered her into the shuttle and closed the door behind her.

She yawned and plopped into the navigator's chair. "What kind of transmission?"

"I don't know yet. I only know it is encoded and we have to be verified before it will load the link to Relay." He moved quickly and lifted them from the safe surface of the buffered zone without delay.

"Who is Relay?"

"The commanding officer of Morganti base, same as Might is ours. Relay is hooked into all of the communication networks spider webbing throughout the Alliance and beyond. If there is something that we can do without being asked by any planetary body, she will send us to do it."

"Is that how you guys keep busy?"

He chuckled. "No, most of the time, we are requested by governments and agencies who cannot deal with their issues on their own. We handle raiders, natural disasters, act as arbitrators, even occasionally engage in espionage as well as investigations."

Tosha whistled low and long. "So, you go where you are needed and do what you can. That is fascinating. I really can't think of a practical application for my talent."

Mix smiled and hit the thrusters. "I am sure we will think of something."

Tosha sat back and with the expression on his face, she was convinced he already had.

Chapter Seven

The woman in the vid screen had very precise features, which were bracketed by a headpiece that extended from the crown of her head down to each cheekbone. "Vortex, thank you for getting back to me so quickly."

"Not a problem, Relay. This is my partner, Tosha." He introduced them with a flourish of his hand.

"Shake, I believe, would be suitable for her. Shake and Vortex has a nice ring to it." The woman's eyes gleamed.

Tosha scowled. "Don't I get to pick my own alias?"

"No, but if you find it unsuitable, you can tender an alternative to your commanding officer at a later time."

It was reasonable, but it still didn't sit right. Her back got up every time someone tried to control her destiny and the name she would be known by was in that category.

"Pleased to meet you, Relay. To what do we owe this honour?" She put a bit of sweetness into her voice, but Relay's gaze told her she wasn't fooling anyone.

"There has been an escape on Talimatic, a high-security facility that caters to law-breaking talents. Normally, I would send a team from Udell, but they are busy. You are the only set that is free to handle this."

"Send the info to our shuttle. Does the head of Talimatic know we are coming?"

"I will make sure that they do. The escapee killed three guards and is heading to the wastes. Talimatic is not equipped for this kind of retrieval. He is one dangerous character." Relay's eyes flicked rapidly before regaining focus. "You have all the information. Fuel up and you have complete jump clearance."

"Understood, Relay. We are on our way."

"Thank you. Update me when you are finished. Take care. This is a dangerous assignment. Given a choice, I would not have had it be Shake's first."

"I will take care not to disgrace the Sector Guard. I promise." Tosha smiled. She didn't have a chance to say anything else. The screen went blank.

"Talimatic is one jump away. The shuttle is equipped with a gel shower and a month's worth of rations. Come on, Shake. It's time to meet your destiny." Vortex shoved her out of the room with a hand on her lower back and they returned to the shuttle just as the ground crew cleared it.

She was boosted into the shuttle without ceremony and took her place at the navigator station. Shake buckled her harness into place and waited. Seconds later, the launch engines whined and she was shoved back into her seat.

"We are taking the most direct route, going in fast and hard."

She held the obvious remark back and let the seriousness of their assignment wash over her. The sky flew past them in layers as they climbed at a steeper incline than Shake had ever experienced before.

"He's a killer, isn't he?" Her quiet words carried over the whine of the engines.

Vortex kept his hands on the controls as the ship shuddered. "Three guards dead to escape? Yes, he is."

"How can I bring up the file?" She stared at the nav station and tried to figure it out.

He talked her through it and when the stats were displayed on her screen, her normally cocky attitude took a nose dive.

Rumal Nukid, a Tival by birth, homicidal maniac by choice.

"Read it out to me." His voice was tight.

"Rumal Nukid of Tival extraction. He engaged in every form of DNA manipulation he could the moment he left his home world." She swallowed at the next portion. "He joined a raider team and stole young women and men who showed signs of developing talents on developing worlds. He wasn't shy about killing an entire village to obtain the one talent he was looking for. Once he had them, he sold them on the black market."

"Bastard."

"No kidding. His primary talents are elongating fingernails that double as knives and he calls fire. Talimatic has no idea how he got out of confinement, but he used his claws on the way out. Two of the guards had families."

The low growl coming from Vortex's throat was not a noise she expected him to make.

"The tracking implants put him in the middle of a salt flat. He isn't moving quickly, but he is still on their readouts."

"How was he captured the first time?"

"He crash landed on a water-based world with high-tech restraint equipment. The Solth enforcers restrained him and he was put in stasis until he landed at Talimatic. He has been there for six years."

"Apparently, he was tired of it. Is there any detail about his accommodations?"

"He was scheduled for restricted maintenance. Power suppressing food and forced manicures." She quickly read through the rest of the details. "There is something wrong here. Just a moment."

She skimmed through the documents and hissed. "I found the problem. I think. I am not sure of the exact details, but I know something about grooming and this looks off." She shared her suspicion with him as they entered the jump while still inside the Teklan system.

Her assessment surprised him. "You can tell just by reading that report?"

"The reports were identical until a few weeks ago. That was when they changed. It was a tiny change, but at his growth rate, it is entirely plausible."

"Stupid."

"It could have been accidental. The only question I have is why he is heading for the salt flats? It seems a peculiar place to run to." She answered her own question. "Many criminals act on impulse. He could have simply run in a straight line."

"From his earlier activities, he is a deliberate man. He has a plan. It could be something as simple as that we cannot sneak up on him in the middle of a salt plain."

They approached the beacons and blockades that marked Talimatic as a protected area.

She was getting nervous as he began to recite the clearances that they had been given. "Do we have any kind of weapons?"

"No, and I am setting the ship to gene recognition combined with psi recognition. Put on one of those halos and let it take a reading."

She removed the halo that he gestured to and settled it on her head. Her hair crunched lightly as she pressed the metal ring into place. Lights flashed on the board in front of her. They started at lavender and worked their way to a gleaming white.

"You can remove it now. The ship knows who you are. He won't be able to use tissue samples or one of our corpses to start the shuttle for take-off. If he hacks into the controls, the ship will shut down."

Shake got the idea that he was telling her this for a reason. "You expect us to die?"

"I expect us to be prepared. We are going up against a homicidal maniac and I am trying to cover our basics. Nothing is more basic than life and death." Vortex was trying to bolster her spirits and failing miserably.

"If we manage this, you are so going to owe me." She took a deep breath and centred herself. "Too bad I worked out this morning. I could have used more energy."

"You will do fine. We will have him subdued and back in the prison in no time." Vortex's attempts to cheer her up almost made her laugh.

"Spa day. Full body massage. Swimming lessons. I think I will deserve them all." She twisted her head and loosened her neck and the muscles that were tense.

That distracted him. "You can't swim?"

"I can but not very well. If I had slipped into the pool with only that sheet on, I would have been done for." She chuckled as he finished the final clearances that would allow them to approach the planet.

He raised his hand. "Interesting. I volunteer for administering the full-body massage."

"Then we had better survive this. There. We both have incentive now." She laughed as he took them to the final approach.

He grinned and a gleam of anticipation came to those beautiful blue eyes. She didn't have the heart to tell him she couldn't leave without him. The shuttle was far beyond her abilities to fly.

Once they landed, it would take off with Vortex at the controls or not at all.

Chapter Eight

Tracking a slowly moving Tival on a salt flat would have been easier if a predator hadn't eaten the embedded tracker.

"He carved it out of his thigh, damn it!" Vortex was kneeling on the dirt examining the bird that was limping along the ground.

"Can we scan for species?" Shake was keeping a lookout. She opened her senses to determine the composition of the ground she was standing on and idly worked through the layers. The mineral content gave her some trouble, but she muscled through.

"Yes, but not very effectively. We have some hand scanners that will narrow things down once we get an approximate heading." He left the bird on the ground and turned back to the ship.

Sweeping the area with her gaze, Shake moved back to the shuttle. The tension in the air was incredible. Her senses were on high alert when she came across a slight problem. There was a thin crust of dirt under their shuttle. The rest was hollow.

"Vortex?"

"Yes?"

"We have a problem." Her feet were already on the steps to the shuttle so she remained in place.

He looked at her in surprise. "What?"

"Since we landed, something has dug out the ground under our shuttle. We are on a thin layer of dirt and minerals. Nothing else is keeping this shuttle up."

He closed his eyes and moved slowly to hand her a scanner. "I programmed it for Tival."

"Okay. Just let me…yes. He is underneath us. The bird was a lure." Shake was whispering. In her mind, if she could keep the noise down, they wouldn't collapse.

"Can you do anything with the soil level?" He strapped a scanner onto his wrist.

"Not without shaking us into the hole. Lava would work, but it would take too long to get that much of it here."

Vortex nodded. "You start on that, I will move the ship." He moved past her and cautiously felt his way to solid ground.

Shake kept the eye contact with him and nodded when he was on solid ground. As the wind wrapped around him in an increasingly large funnel, she understood what he was going to do.

She held onto the railings next to the stairs as the wind picked up speed. He focussed his energy toward the shuttle and with a tremendous amount of rocking and screeching metal, it took flight.

The funnel was bending toward her and wrapping the shuttle from nose to tail. He lifted it from the trap and slowly moved it to solid ground. She told him it was the right spot with the universal thumbs-up signal and he gently deposited their shuttle in the safe zone.

She was smiling in relief until a figure shot out of the ground and attacked Vortex.

Shake was out of the shuttle, having hit the door lock, in seconds.

Bloody slashes were appearing on Vortex's uniform as he engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the killer.

Fighting the urge to scream with every thud and impact of flesh on flesh, Shake approached the melee.

She froze when a strike to the head sent Vortex to the ground and the creature they were hunting turned toward her.

"Hello, pet. Are you going to be as much trouble as this one?" Elegantly long fingers waved toward Vortex.

Rumal would have been considered very handsome if not for the blood dripping from his fingers and the cruel set to his lips. His even features and piercing green eyes combined with his burgundy hair made him both colourful and striking.