It was Friday evening by the time Sarah was ready for her ultimate mission. The mission that would test ever element of her training and force her to suppress her very personality and compassion. She had had to prepare physically, first. Ever identifying mark on her body had to be removed. And then she had to be scarred. Prosthetics wouldn’t work. The scars were carefully reconstructed to the smallest detail.
And it hurt like daucht. The voice was simpler. A set of nano-bots that Sarah inhaled moved and stretched her vocal cords just enough to perfectly emulate the voice. But the first step had been the surgery. Her cheekbones had been raised to match those of whom she impersonated. Her lower jaw had been altered to hide the fact that it was sharper than it should be. And after three days of surgery Sarah had physically become the mercenary Kiva Andur of Jomanian.
Becoming her mentally was even harder. The blit that was hidden in the mercenary’s body had contained of all things a digi-journal. From it, the imperials had reconstructed every minute detail of Kiva’s relationship with the pirate ship Iien Blian. Or so they hoped. Sarah had determined from her own readings that Kiva rarely stayed on the ship for more than a day at a time. She had only one person on it that she trusted, a half-Vurkan called “Private Ishori.” Kiva had been sent to Laredo City, the capital of planet Texas, to extract a set of stellar coordinates from a three-eyed thug named Sirius White.
The deal had gone bad when her companion Tem Path had read White’s mind. Appearantly, Kiva wanted to know what the coordinates were for and, rather than asking politely, had invited White’s wrath in the form of a psionic virus that had eventually killed Path. In their hide-away, a broken down hospital in the Rio Grande district, Path had relayed to Kiva the info that she had learned from White. Unfortunately, the nature of that data was encrypted on the data cards that were in the blit. So, Sarah had to go convince complete strangers that she was a cruel merc that they knew personally and figure out what the significance of all this was. No problem.
Sarah stepped out into the docking bay from the side room. Among other things, Kiva had left the coordinates for rendezvous with the Iien Blian and much invaluable information about Kiva’s routine while on the ship. From all that the intelligence team at Laredo could determine, Kiva never would spend more than two days on the ship at a time, to avoid being around when and if the law discovered the pirates. Yalm Wessil and General Hammock stepped forward from the middle of the bay.
“Lieutenant,” said Hammock, “I’m not even going to give you any warnings. You have a job to do, and it is time you go do it. Good luck.”
Now Wessil said, “Have you memorized the layout of the ship? You know where to go if you’re told to go to your quarters or your battle station?”
“Yes to all three,” Said Sarah. The voice that came from her mouth surprised her. She would never adapt to having tiny machines manipulate her vocal cords to the pitch and octave of Kiva Andur’s voice. The latest model left only the faintest trace of mechanical feedback, so small it could only be detected by machines knowing exactly what to look for. Needless to say, speaking with another’s voice was quite disconcerting to Sarah, but she would have to get used to it. “I’m ready,” Sarah said at length.
She approached Kiva’s space boat that sat docked in Bay 5 of the Imperial Frigate Enforcer. It was of Senarian design, which made good sense, Andur being from the Confederate world of Jomanian. Sarah inserted everything she thought she would need into the blit in her boot, and anything that Kiva would likely bring into the blit in her thy. It was the same one in the real Andur’s thy, disinfected after removal, of course. It was quite unnerving to have metal where muscle should be. A dormant tracking device had been installed in Kiva’s leg along with a newer model of her implanted blit. Sarah knew that hoping that Kiva would be dumb enough not to remove the tracking device was wishful thinking. Veijan mercenaries didn’t survive as pirates without being very good, and very good meant intelligent as well. That was, of course, if she could be restored to her body.
In less than fifteen minutes, Sarah was ready to take off. She fired up the boat’s sub-light engines and maneuvered out of the docking bay and made for open space. Within another five minutes, Sarah had clearance to jump to the rendezvous point. She set the coordinates and activated the warp drive, and set back to prepare mentally for the deception while the stars elongated and became the vast blue torrent called hyperspace. It was a 2-day flight to the rendezvous point, near her own home planet New Jersey. She emerged from hyperspace near a worthless frozen rock called Yellana. There weren’t many ships in the system, but the few that were there were maintaing a discrete distance from each other. One in particular caught Sarah’s eye. It was a large shuttle, capable of making Warp-Ten easily. And its transponder code matched that of the shuttle that she was supposed to be meeting here. Sarah switched on a comm. channel and hailed the shuttle Lyberia.
“Lyberia, this is Kiva. Requesting permission to dock.”
“Phoenix! Why aren’t you using your code name?” Came the hasted response from the shuttle commander. Wonderful. Fifteen seconds in and she already made a huge mistake.
“Calm down,” came Sarah’s improvisational reply. “There aren’t any cops for three hundred terra-zivits. I’m not that stupid.” She said it with enough harshness and frustration to not sound apologetic.
“Cops? Phoenix, I ain’t worried about the daucht police. I am thinking that if any of the competition learns who you are, they’ll end our party real quick.” And sure enough, several of the other pirate vessels had set a course for the shuttle. “Never mind, they’re already on there way,” the shuttle pilot added.
“I can handle this,” Sarah shot back with the brash arrogance that one would expect from a mercenary as accomplished as Andur. Sarah did some tinkering and eventually got the reactor to go critical. She set a course directly for the nearest pirate vessel at ramming speed... Any one else, and this would be suicide, unless the shuttle had a transporter. But not Sarah. She knew a few maneuvers.
Placing her index and middle finger together on her forehead, and ignoring the frantic protests of the shuttle’s pilot, Sarah reached out with her life sense ability, the ability to feel other peoples’ ki. She focused on the pilot of the shuttle. Human male, fairly weak, but strong enough for this to work. Sarah pulsated energy around her body, her latent psionic power from her distant Ki’lail heritage and her ki from her less distant Veijan ancestry. And suddenly she was gone, removed forcefully, atom-by-atom, from the doomed space boat. Her vision, indeed all of her physical sense, was gone, but she could feel herself floating through the void of space, drifting closer toward her target. And then reality flooded back over her as she snapped back into a physical existence. Looking at her wrist-clock, she saw that it took 5 minutes to get from A to B at the speed of light.
And then she saw the terrified shuttle pilot swing a blunt object at her. She dodged down and to the right, lifted both her arms in defense, and smacked the man hard enough in the chest to send him staggering back two yards. “You moron. It’s me!”
“Kiva! How the Slin did you get her?”
“Something I picked up on Haven once. Never thought I’d have to use it.” At least the first half of that was true, Sarah told herself. “Now shut up and get us the Slin out of here!” She didn’t feel right swearing when not angry, but she wasn’t playing the part of a moral character.
Just then, a flash outside the cockpit fortiglass confirmed the destruction of the spaceboat. Whether it took any of the pirate ships with it wasn’t important anymore, although for the sakes of the pirates, Sarah hoped that they had noticed the unstable reactor and shot it down before it was close enough to vaporize them. She wasn’t on a mission to slaughter pirates.
By the time the two got into the cockpit, Sarah had recollected the name of the pilot, Geshin Thex, from the journal. Thex flicked some switches and a holographic display showed the position of shuttle Lyberia in relation to the other objects in the system. The pirate vessels had taken the hint and backed off, but there was one large ship that hadn’t broken pursuit, and it had deployed many smaller objects.
“Fighters,” said Thex. “At least 40 of them, coming in from starboard aft.” He switched on the auto-turrets and said to Sarah, “Kiva, take the main gun. I’ll get us ready. They’ll be here in 10 minutes, but it will take at least twelve to get into a clear vector. We’ll have to fight them.”
Sarah stumbled her way to the gun labeled main and climbed the ladder into the swivel seat. She waited there for ten minutes, silently preparing to kill in the name of self-defense. Then the fighters arrived and the time for moral dilemmas was over. The first flight of 12 fighters was closing in from all angles. Suddenly, Thex shifted the shuttle into high gear, and they took off. Sarah aimed carefully and riddled the nearest fighter with fire from her gun. It was a Tye beam-machinegun, and had a very fast rate of fire. In an instant, the first target erupted into a ball of fire and there were 11 left. The aft dorsal gun suddenly flared to life and Sarah saw that there was a Noth’xal woman manning the backup weapon. Had she been on the ship the whole time?
Lasers lanced out from her gun and in a minute there were seven enemy fighters left.
The kitty was good.
Then the shuttle went into a complex series of rolls and spins—evasive maneuvers—that nearly caused Sarah to loose her last meal. She set the inertial dampener in her gun to max and set the turret display to ignore the dizzying starfield. A second target crossed her cross hairs and it was quickly vaporized as well. Finally the fighters were close enough to make out details. They were Zurro class, modified heavily. Sarah had fought their kind before, and there was really nothing to it. The fact that they were the alpha squadron said a lot about the pirates that used them. Two flashes denoted the destruction of two more fighters by the Noth’xal woman. Four left.
The photon cannons on the fighters activated and the display was suddenly filled with red lines denoting enemy attacks. The shuttle began dodging wildly and Sarah found the source of one of the streams of harmful energy and squeezed the trigger. Energy lanced out in tiny glowing bullets of doom and that fighter was dead. Sarah saw his remains drift out of the ball of wreckage. Then there was a violent shake and the side of the shuttle was venting atmosphere. That means the shields are breached, Sarah thought. She then started firing wildly at the three remaining ships and the Noth woman did so as well. Two bright flashes and then another violent hit. The fighter dropped underneath the shuttle where Sarah and the skilled feline couldn’t shoot him. He was undoubtedly the leader. Or maybe just the smartest of the bunch.
The shuttle shuddered and started to flip, but was rocked back the other way by a concussive blast to the ventral shields. Well, at least those still work. Then the fighter shot back up and bee-lined it for the pirate vessel. It was only after that Sarah realized the drives were no longer working.
Then they came to life again. Sarah knew the tactic well. Make an enemy incapable of capturing your ship think you were disabled, then get out of there before the reinforcements could arrive.
The leader had almost rejoined the main body of fighters when Sarah took careful aim and prayed Lord, make my aim true. She switched the cannon to focus mode, so rather than gatlin-like energy balls, it would shoot a golden spear of destructive light. Then she squeezed the trigger and waited for the results. With in five seconds, the fighter exploded and the remaining fighters of the original forty retreated, taking the hint loud and clear.
Sarah powered down the gun as the stars elongated and light was outraced. She slipped back into the cockpit with the Noth’xal, who the journal identified as Mishi Xoluniti.
“So, Thex,” she said, “what has Cortez been up to while I was gone?”
“Don’t be so friendly, Kiva.” Geshin said it with such derision, that Sarah knew Kiva must be ranked lower than he. “The captain is livid, Kiva. You blotched a mission, and cost the captain a lot of money.”
“Daucht,” Sarah swore in character, “That klitching Ki’lail that I was supposed to pay killed Tem Path and would’ve killed me.”
“The captain also told you to go alone. He doesn’t like his instructions being ignored.” This time Thex’s tone suggested he was trying to trap Sarah. If she were already suspected a fake, things would get difficult. If he trapped her here, and didn’t let her know, she was as good as dead.
Sarah shrugged and said, “Did he?” She figured it was about the best non-committal response she could give in this situation.
“You ought to pay more attention, Andur. You don’t get paid to klatch-up”
Sarah was tired from the fight and already perturbed by almost blowing cover. She left the cockpit, throwing a comment about a long day over her shoulder, and headed back to the barest of the three quarters, presumably the one not used by Thex or Mishi. She collapsed on the bunk and drifted off to sleep.
Geshin Thex looked up at Mishi, his copilot and bodyguard. They were both likely thinking the same thing, and there was no point in not bringing it up with her. “Is it just me or does Kiva seem.. um.. off today?”
“Other than I’ve never seen her so accurate in a turret, then not really,” came the Noth’xal’s answer.
“Yeah, but I meant the call. You really believe she forgot to use her call sign? And what of the reports of her death?”
“Well, she is obviously not dead, and… Well, look who speaks. You yourself have neglected the use of your call sign on numerous occasions.”
She had a point.
“Eh… maybe it’s just the adrenaline,” said Thex as he activated the autopilot.