The Five Moons saga continues with Book 2: Convolute dropping you right into the middle of the action as the Syndicate’s last mobsters hunt down a Special Forces agent in the streets of Habston, the biggest little city on quickly becomes a running gun battle as Dallas Blake and the crew of the Five Moons tries to save him.
After Emma and Sophie unwind one of the alien mysteries of the ship, the Five Moons is enlisted by Special Forces to transport their agents to Daggan-7. But the alien technology of this ship is not about to give Dallas any breaks. In the worst of places, at the worst of times, he suddenly finds himself embroiled in yet another alien enigma with only a cryptic error message to give him a clue.
Even so, the gut-wrenching twists and turns of fate don’t quit for Dallas Blake and the crew of the Five Moons. Trying to escape from one villain, Dallas and crew fall right into the hands of yet another — Sarsen Tabbot, the Merc Commander responsible for the death of Dallas’ whole family.
Intertwined in this whole mess is a real spy-vs-spy story pitting Special Forces against an old nemesis, with Dallas and the crew of the Five Moons caught in the middle.
If you love to hate a good villain, Five Moons: Convolute will give you a couple of real doozies to get your blood boiling. This story is as convoluted as it gets.
Sample Chapters down below
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Rated #1 New Release in Science Fiction and Fantasy by Amazon 3/21/2016!
Reader’s Favorite Rated Five Moons: Convolute a Five Star Read!
Reviewed by Charles Remington for Readers’ Favorite…
“Five Moons: Convolute is the sort of book that science fiction fans long for – a good, fast-moving plot, evil villains, faster than light inter-dimensional space travel, lots of gadgets, machines, sleek spaceships bristling with weaponry, and all liberally sprinkled with exotic ladies, some of whom are divinely evil. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and took to Dallas Blake, a character who seems to have elements of Han Solo, John Walton (if you can remember the TV series) and Pa Larkin (The Darling Buds of May). Bill Parker has created a science fiction classic – long may the series continue.”
Read their review: Readers’ Favorites review of Five Moons: Convolute
- Amazon Kindle
- File Size: 3680 KB
- Print Length: 174 pages
- Publisher: Five Moons Publications; 2 edition (July 8, 2020)
- Publication Date: July 8, 2020
- Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B08CP7GW68
- Amazon Paperback
- Series: Five Moons (Book 2)
- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Independently published (July 9, 2020)
- Language: English
- ISBN-13: 979-8665000855
- ASIN: B08CPHFTK8
Sample Chapters
Prologue
“We come in peace” is what we told the Anoza when human explorers first encountered them, but you would have to ask the Anoza how that worked out for them. Oh, it all started out with good intentions. The Anoza shared their advanced timequake starship technology with us, and a starship was even built from it, the Tesseract. But alas, the humans trailed evil behind them in their jump wakes like a foul stench, so the road to hell was surely paved with all of those good intentions. Union Fleet flew an unmarked ship into space docks after the Corporate War, intending to secretly scrap it out, intending to get rid of the evidence of the evil that was done.
By the end of the Corporate War, Dallas Blake had lost everything: his wife, his daughter, his whole family, his home world. He was a man in need of far more than just a new beginning. What Dallas needed was a resurrection. Dallas went to those same Union Fleet space docks with good intentions. He intended to start his life over. He intended to buy a war surplus scout-class ship. Instead, he unknowingly bought the Tesseract. That is where this whole story began. It all began with a starship like no other, a starship with more enigmas than answers. It all began with artificials that seemed way too human. It all began with the guns-blazing rescue of Emma from the mercenaries. It all began with a single leaf in the wind.
~~~
I am he who stands at the center of Five Moons’ shadows and I say, yes! By all means! Ask us what we think of humans! By the evil in their hearts did I find the blood of four innocents on my hands! Clay of Earth, know this to the very core of you: yours were the people cast into the outer darkness because of the evil in their hearts.
A gift was made to them of Tesseract, but they were found unworthy.
Leaf in the Wind, you were unexpected but exactly what we needed. At the very gates of hell, by my intercession did the one who was dead in his heart but still walking save the Tesseract from destruction. His resurrection was only the first step. He justified our choice of him by fulfilling the purpose for which the gift of Tesseract was made. In this, we do rejoice.
To the one who flies the now convolute, once Tesseract I say: Leaf in the Wind, I sent you to save five moons. Instead, seven have you brought back from the edge. In this, we do rejoice, but our work has just begun. We have far yet to go, you and I.
Leaf in the Wind, the gift that was once made to the unworthy is now in your hands. To take the next step, you must see what is right before your own eyes.
Chapter One: Crossfire
Like a hunted animal, Bob Langart skulked from cover to cover through Habston, trying desperately to make it to the Pig and Whistle. Ahead of him, he saw two men. Those hunting him were in twos. He turned down yet another alleyway not knowing, not caring where it led. By now, he was all turned around anyway, so any direction would do.
Why are they hunting me? Why me? But they are. I am just tech support. I am not a field agent, he protested to himself, as if that would do him any good. More footfalls in the distance behind him pushed him ever faster forward but to where? Remember your training, he kept reminding himself, but that was years ago. Change directions. Look for a place to hole up. Onward he pressed, but he was not in good shape. The sweat running into his eyes burned.
~~~
Two small five sided stars, one red and one blue, tattoos on the hand, marked the men Nikola sent to do his bidding. Each man had knowingly signed his soul over to this devil who walked in human flesh. For the riches, for the drugs, each man had his own excuse and dared not question any other. Some needed no excuse. They were as evil as Nikola himself.
All they knew is that the arrogant Special Forces agent tried to kill him, tried to kill Nikola himself would you believe, and failed. Nikola found that one. How this mark was involved, no one knew or even cared. They only knew that Nikola was so intent on the death of this one that they followed him to Panara-5 to finish what they were sent to do.
Where the mark was headed, they hadn’t a clue, but it was somewhere here in Habston. Harry set the snipers up in a pattern. Eventually, the mark would break cover. When he did, finish this ugly business they would.
~~~
Bob was on the move when he got his first break, a tablet left carelessly on a windowsill. He almost did what he knew he must not, but he caught himself at the last second. These people nailed Wayne so quickly, but Wayne was the best there was. Why was that? How did they do that? Wayne trusted something that he shouldn’t have. Wayne was a brilliant field agent, but he was definitely not a techie at all. Before all of this, Bob so wanted to be like Wayne, a field agent. What a great honor it was to be selected as Wayne’s field tech support, but neither of them saw this coming. How did this outworld gang of thugs track down and kill a highly skilled Special Forces field agent? How did they do that?
Settings, Bob worked on. Make it not report its location. Now turn back on the GPS and let it guide the way. No messages, no wi-fi, none of that was needed right now. Just navigate for me, he told it. That would be as good as it gets for now. Okay, let’s see. The Pig and Whistle was just six blocks away, but six blocks to run this gauntlet of gangsters in broad daylight may as well have been six kilometers.
Clothes hung out to dry! What a find! A light blue work shirt… too big… but it did fit over his. He rolled up the sleeves. What he wouldn’t give right now for a hat. Think. Look around. This alley was a treasure trove of carelessly discarded stuff. Pick up a few tools left lying about, and you look just like any other workman. There were workmen everywhere in the streets. He was set.
Out into the moving groups of people Bob ventured, now looking like he knew exactly where he was going. Match the pace of those around you, he remembered from his training. The tablet in his pocket told him, “Turn left onto Merriam Street.” And so he did. Walking briskly now, he followed a group of men all headed to work themselves, but this only got him three blocks closer, as the group of men was headed another way.
“Turn Right onto High Street. The Pig and Whistle is 87 meters ahead on your right,” the tablet told him. The sweat running into his eyes burned again. He wiped them with his sleeve while he kept on moving along with the other people going the same way.
~~~
“Unit-three, High Street,” the voice reported to Mick. “Possible mark.”
“What do you mean by ‘possible’?” Mick questioned the report.
“Right size, right build, but I can’t see his face. Possible mark is walking away from me,” Unit-three came back. They sent Mick the video. He squinted hard at it for several long seconds looking at every little detail before he noticed the standard Union Fleet issue boots.
“Unit-three, you are go for the hit. I repeat — the hit is go.”
The sniper set the mark’s head in the reticle, while his spotter got range into the sniper rifle’s computer. The computer ran its deadly calculations all the way down to a slight adjustment for Coriolis Effect and lit its green ‘go’ dot in the virtual scope display. But the mark was on the move now and not an easy target at over four hundred meters. The sniper rifle’s miniature servos tracked the mark erratically as he moved amongst other people on the crowded street. The green ‘go’ dot lit and went out, came back on for a second, and blinked back off again. The tracking reticle jumped erratically from the mark to other nearby people and back again. It was just aggravating. Unable to track him on auto, the sniper had to re-aim the pulse-rifle manually.
~~~
Bob was almost there! He strode right up to the door to the Pig and Whistle. He grabbed the handle and pulled… just as the pulse round pierced his shoulder and shattered a hole in the door beyond. Stunned and in shock, he staggered forward to fall face down onto the table where Dallas and Kip had been quietly eating their lunch and sipping a Habston Lager.
~~~
“Splash!” the sniper reported. “The target is down! The target is down!”
“Can you see the body on the ground?” Mick demanded.
“No! Damn! The damned mark fell into the damned building! Huge blood mark on the wall. The mark is down, and you can take that to the bank,” the sniper responded, damned certain that he had done the evil deed. He quickly began to repack his gun into its case.
“Team-seven! Team-seven! I want a visual! Get me a visual!” Mick demanded, knowing only too well the wrath of Nikola for screw-ups. You didn’t get the mark if you don’t have the proof.
~~~
“Special… Forces …,” the man lying face down on the table barely mumbled, before he passed out right on top of Dallas’ sandwich.
[Mariah, incoming wounded! Have Luke and Sam set up a secure perimeter! Shields up! Red Alert!] Dallas told her quickly, as Kip field dressed the wound with napkins.
Seconds later, two men burst into the front door, guns drawn. That was all that Hack needed to see. The rail-gun pistol, tucked neatly into his right leg structure, was out in a flash. As the men raised their weapons to fire, Hack dropped them both where they stood.
That was enough to force Dallas and Kip to move the man to the flatbed, parked in the alley behind the Pig and Whistle, the owner ushering them out quickly, glad that this battle was moving out of his establishment… or so he thought. He wasn’t back inside for ten seconds when two more men with weapons drawn burst into his front door.
“You just missed them!” he told the men. “They just ran out the family entrance!” He pointed them at the family entrance on the opposite side of the building from the alley. They ran out in hot pursuit of that lie.
~
Dallas put the man between boxes and bags on the back of the flatbed. Hack covered it all with a tarp and climbed in next to Dallas. Dallas calmly drove the flatbed out of the alley. He meandered down the road past groups of men all running frantically around as if they just lost something. Kip circled around the other way, taking a different route. Dallas did really well getting as far as he did: all the way to the edge of town. The man under the tarp was stirring, but they appeared to be alone as Kip pulled in behind him. Dallas began pushing the flatbed down that road as fast as it could go.
Then the red-alert warning went off. The flatbed’s shields deployed automatically… just ahead of a sniper round pulse impact. They had to make it back to the ship. The race was on. Kip pushed flares to confuse the auto-lock on the snipers’ rifles, forcing them to aim and fire manually. That got them farther down the road, but behind in the distance, three speeders were advancing on them. The fire became intense, with multiple rounds landing on both the flatbed’s rear shields and the assault bike’s rear shields.
A welcome sight, Kip’s fighter came straight at them real low, Rachel at the helm, firing on all targets. She made short order of those speeders and was laying heavy fire down on the snipers as Dallas and Kip banked hard around the bend. Luke and Sam had held their ground, as well they should. It was Mariah that sent Rachel out to even the playing field. Mariah sat at Dallas’ tactical display feeding Rachel targets until the firing ceased. She heard the flatbed roll hard and fast up the gangway, and come to an abrupt stop.
It was a mad scramble from there for Dallas and Kip to get the man into Medlab. For just a brief time, the man was wide-awake and realized where he was. “Nikola’s men won’t quit ‘till I’m dead,” he warned Dallas and Kip just before Medlab put his lights out to work on him.
“Actually, they have,” Kip reported to Dallas. “Rachel is telling me that the few that are left are scrambling elbows and assholes for their ship, to get away.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Dallas told him. “Tell her to destroy the ship. If they get back to that underworld scum, they will tell him right where to find us. We can’t let that happen.”
A few minutes later Kip reported, “Rachel says it’s done. The ship is down.”
“Luke and Sam,” Dallas called them. “Talk to Rachel. Recon that ship for survivors. Do a complete sweep. Get all the intel you can out of it that you can. You know the drill. Call Mom for help if you need to ID anything.”
“Right, Cap,” Luke acknowledged. Dallas watched them lift on assault bikes and fly off into the distance.
“Geez,” Dallas said to Kip in the ensuing calm. “I was waiting for a job to drop into our laps but not like this. Hell, the man ruined my sandwich.” They both laughed.
“You guys have been in some real beauty bar fights,” Mariah complained, her hands on her hips, “but this one really takes the cake. Did you have to pick a fight with a whole damned battalion?”
That prompted Kip to recount the whole running battle while Dallas scratched his head.
“The guy said something about Special Forces, just before he keeled over right on top of my damned Reuben,” Dallas complained. “I only had a couple bites before he wrecked it.”
“Good Lord! All you think about is food! Maybe I should have Jane make us Reubens for dinner then tonight,” Mariah told him in utter disbelief.
“Nah, that’s okay. The moment passed,” He said with a big smirk. She hit him.
“Ow! Hey! What ever happened to my rule about not hitting the captain?”
“It went the same way as my ass rules I guess,” she said with a smirk.
“You still hit like a girl.”
“I am a girl!”
“Oh, yeah,” he agreed with an evil leer.
“Pow! Zoom!” she threatened him with a clenched fist.
“Not hit him!” Sophie protested as she and Emma came to see what all the commotion was about. “He’s my Ka.” She came to Dallas’ defense.
“Like I said,” Mariah reminded him. “Somebody is a raging daddy’s girl.”
“Works for me,” he said smugly. “It’s nice to be loved.”
“I’ll love you all right,” she threatened.
“Bring it on,” he took up the challenge.
“Henry love,” Jessica asked Hack, “Can you please get my boxes from the flatbed?” Hack gladly fetched her boxes. As he unstrapped and unloaded each one, he held them up for her inspection. To Jessica’s relief, despite the bloodstains, none of them had any damage from all the commotion, not even the one she bought for Hack. Well, it was for her too, technically. The boxes were the real reason that Dallas had gone into town in the first place, but then he just had to stop at the Pig and Whistle for that damned Reuben.
This was what she spent some of her money on, the hardware she needed to go full-blown techno like Mariah. Hack put it all in neatly organized piles in the computer bay, except for the one Jessica bought for him. He put that one on the shelf with some of his other parts. Hack next followed Mariah’s task list to unpack and arrange it all for her.
~~~
Rachel linked the tracking data on the downed ship to Luke and Sam’s assault bike. Luke was flying in the right general direction as the nav popped up, so their bike only made a few minor course corrections.
“Thanks, Rachel Baby,” he whispered to her.
“Prrr,” she responded. Fortunately, the gangsters’ ship went down in a clear area with no people. Luke flew in low and slow for a general looksee and reconnoiter. Rachel had hit one engine of the gangster’s ship under full power with a pulse round as it made for orbit, so that was pretty much a mess.
~~~
Mickey Mechanic and Johnny Knuckles were sincerely pissed when that ship had taken off without waiting for them, but they were much relieved that they weren’t on it when they saw its fate. On foot, they were very close as Luke and Sam appeared overhead. Mick led Johnny under the cover of a group of some pine-looking trees to watch the boys land and go into the wreck of the ship.
~~~
Luke went after the computers while Sam collected tablets and took photos of everything. Having done this task enough times in the service, they pretty much knew what to go after. Sam found a couple of small boxes that he could not identify. He bagged and tagged those special and set them aside. All this was pretty gruesome work around the number of dead gangsters. Luke noted that each of the gangsters had the two-star tattoo on their hands and made sure to get photos of those for Dallas and Mariah.
~~~
All the while, Mick and Johnny Knuckles were working their way ever closer. They ran from cover to cover, making the final sprint across twenty meters of open clearing. Their goal was to steal the assault bike and get away. Mick took the controls, but Rachel saw what was going on from overhead and linked commands to the assault bike to lock them out.
[Luke, two men are trying to steal your bike,] she alerted him, as Mick tried to figure out why the bike would not startup. What neither Johnny Knuckles nor Mick was expecting was the powerful shock that Luke triggered the bike to release. It threw them both off a couple meters away and left them gasping for air while Luke and Sam appeared almost on top of them, guns drawn.
Dallas and Kip arrived seconds later, just in time to help the boys bind up the two gangsters. Just behind Dallas and Kip, a Union shuttle full of armed troopers finally made the scene. Dallas stepped forward to greet them, but at this stage, the troopers didn’t know friend from foe. It was a bit tense for a moment, what with Dallas and company all armed to the teeth.
Then Sergeant Erin O’Rourke recognized Dallas.
“Commodore Blake?” she asked.
“Yes I am,” he responded. In the next five minutes, Dallas explained the whole thing to her from the running gunfight in the Pig and Whistle all the way to downing this ship. Luke filled in the last piece about these two gangsters trying to steal their assault bike.
“This is a Special Forces matter,” Dallas began to explain to her.
“It sure is!” Mickey Mechanic blurted out. “You Special Forces pukes tried to kill Nikola. He says ‘if it’s war you want; then it’s war you get!’”, as the troopers hauled off the two gangsters.
“Sergeant O’Rourke, my team has gathered a lot of intel here that Special Forces really needs to see. I am treating one of their people in my Medlab right now. How soon do you think Special Forces can get here?”
She made a couple of calls in their shuttle and came back out.
“Two days,” she told him. “They told me they can get here in two days.”
“Well, you know exactly where to find me. I will hold onto all of this evidence for them.”
“And I will put these two on ice for two days. It isn’t much of an outpost yet. We only got the four-man brig put up last week, and already you have it half full.”
“You’re going to need a bigger brig,” he advised her. She was afraid he was right.
Hack arrived on the flatbed. “Mariah sent me,” he told Luke.
“Good thing. There is a lot more here than we can carry anyway,” Luke replied. Luke and Sam began loading the flatbed. Dallas and Kip lent a hand. Dallas picked up the bag of small boxes.
“I wonder what these are,” Dallas said out loud, holding up one small white box to look at it real close.
“I was going to ask Mom to look at them,” Sam told him.
“Yeah, let’s do that,” Dallas agreed.
But when they got back to the ship, Mariah was busy with Jessica’s new hardware, and Special Forces wouldn’t arrive for two days. The little white boxes could wait. Adding Jessica’s new hardware was Mariah’s personal priority and all else be damned. It was a very complex process to add all of the new artificial intelligence modules and get it all right, but before she could get to that, she had to replace all of the projectors on the ship with new ones that could handle multiple personas. The new projectors were handcrafted in the outworlds with ten times the memory, 1024 parallel processors, and ten times the range.
Replacing the projectors was a fine dance, with Hack doing all the work to install a new projector while Mariah stood as close as she could get to a still working old one. She had to load the equations into the new one and start it up before she could use it. Only after that was complete could she begin the upgrade of Jessica’s hardware.
“Oh dear,” Mariah shuddered. “Are you really sure you want me to do this?”
“Yes,” Jessica insisted. “You are all freaked out over nothing.”
“Shutting you down is not ‘nothing.’ It is damned scary!” Mariah was all upset.
“I love you dearly, Mariah, but sometimes you are a royal pain in the ass, and you make me crazy. It’s just like going to sleep and waking up. Now, will you please just do what you have to do, and stop your incessant worrying?”
“Okay. Are you ready?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah! Come on! Just do it!”
“Here we go,” Mariah told her friend as she selected [Shutdown] and closed her eyes.
Jessica went silent on the network. Mariah panicked inside. Her hands shook as she very carefully installed all of the new hardware. Hack recorded her every move… just in case she made a mistake she would be able to find it. When it was all done, she started back at square one. She carefully inspected every connector and cable. She checked that she had performed each and every step. Only when she was totally, absolutely, and completely certain that every last bit of it was dead nuts perfect that she powered Jess back up.
Boot Log….
New Aux AIU_02…
… Testing… Good… Connected
New Aux AIU_03…
… Testing… Good… Connected
New Memory Module _02…
… Testing… Good… Connected
New Memory Module _03…
… Testing… Good… Connected
Techno firmware… loaded…
… Testing… Passed
Searching for Atomic Field projectors…
… Found {list…}… Loading Drivers… Connected
Restoring Jessica Ann Miller…
Jessica Ann Miller? What the hell is that all about? Mariah wondered.
Jessica suddenly appeared next to Mariah totally nude… but definitely alive. Parts of her were firm, and parts of her wiggled just as they were supposed to. The cool air gave her goose bumps, and her nipples got hard. Oh, yeah, all of her was working just fine. It all felt so new and yet at the same time so familiar. Why is that? Why does this feel so familiar?
Mariah handed her a robe. She had anticipated this. After all, Jessica was the free spirit of the crew. What else should she have expected?
“Well?” Mariah asked her?
“Oh, this feels sooo good,” she decided after a few long seconds.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I said,” Mariah remembered as she checked Jessica’s diagnostic screens over. It must have been because Jessica’s mental health numbers were as high as they could get. Nonetheless, you just had to know that Mariah wasn’t satisfied with anything less than perfection. Today that was a good thing because there was definitely something wrong.
“I don’t seem to have my normal helm control,” Jessica suddenly discovered. “I have nothing but a slew of error codes. You can panic now if that would help.”
“No, it won’t help at all to panic. I don’t understand. I set all the pointers just like all the documentation says, to ‘Core_Helm_Control#nn.’” She was scratching her head and looking back at the backup documents that she made before all of this when the solution jumped right out at her – that was not what the pointers were set to just before the move. The previous settings all looked like gibberish, but she faithfully copied them and restored each one. The whole time Jess worried that this would scotch all of the work they had done to get her this far.
“Okay! Okay! I have helm control again! We are Golden! Whatever you just did worked! I feel like I am back to where I once belonged.” Now Jessica really was happy.
“Maybe so my naked Jay Bird. Let’s get you some of your new clothes.”
“You mean I can’t walk around the ship naked?” Jess teased her.
Mariah just gave her one of her ‘looks.’
“Okay. Clothes it is. I might even try some of sexy thong undies you made me buy.”
“Yes, dear Jess, you must wear undies.”
Sometimes I will and sometimes I won’t, Jess thought to herself.
~~~
Dallas sat on his bridge when he just wanted to be alone to think but was not one to miss a trick. When his helm suddenly went dead, he panicked for an instant, until he remembered that all helm control went through Jessica’s artificial intelligence module, and Mariah did warn him that she was working on Jessica’s new hardware. What did surprise him, though, is what he saw when it returned. On his display was a whole page full of the same alien pictographs that he remembered from Mariah’s ‘think tank.’
He sat there for the longest time just looking at the pictographs until it seemed like they floated in the air in front of him. In that intense quiet…
I am He who stands at the center of Five Moons’ shadows.
He clearly heard that in his mind! But in that same instant, the quiet in his mind was broken. When he looked again, his helm control screen was back to normal.
I am not hallucinating. This ship clearly has a mind of its own! One that he knew nothing about until this very instant.
[Mariah Love, what just happened to my helm?]
[Why? Is yours not working now, too?] she asked, this time in rather a panic.
[It is now, but I need to see you when you are done with Jess. It’s very important.]
[Good, then turn around, and have a look at your new and improved, real-live copilot.]
“You are truly a wonderful sight to behold,” Dallas said when he turned to see them enter.
“Thank you,” she said blushing and all embarrassed. She was even more surprised when he had to get up to give her a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. Now that got her heart all aflutter.
Jess took some time to let her new body get used to her place on the bridge. Her butt felt good in the copilot’s seat where it belonged. In fact, that had an all too familiar feel about it, although her butt told her that it would feel a lot better without those damned uncomfortable thong undies.
When he sensed that the time was right, Dallas did his best to explain to Mariah what had happened with his helm control screen, “For several seconds, it was blue with white alien pictographs. Then I heard a voice say, ‘I am He who stands at the center of Five Moons’ shadows.’ Then all of that suddenly disappeared and the regular Helm Control screen was back.”
“Well, I did have some problems with Jessica’s helm pointers,” Mariah quickly surmised.
“Can you query one of those strange pointers?” Dallas asked.
Mariah, never one to let a detail go unrecorded, set up to do just that and sent her first query down the network… but got no response. So then, she sent the next, and then the next, and then the next, all to no avail. Nothing came back from any one of them.
“Send them to me,” Dallas suggested. Maybe it has to come from the captain’s console… and that worked… a whole blue screen full of alien pictographs popped up for a few seconds. “Will you look at that!” he said as the screen dissolved. None of them saw anything more than that single screen of alien pictographs. Nor did they hear anything at all.
Mariah just shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.
“What was that?” Dallas asked her.
“Who the hell knows?” she responded. “Nothing I have ever seen before.”
Well, if Mariah didn’t know what the hell it was, then Dallas was left with no other choice; he gave up for now and went down for diner.
“How is this going to work?” Dallas asked as they all sat down in the mess. “Who will be in charge of the helm when Jessica isn’t there?”
“That’s the beauty of this,” Mariah explained to him. “Jess is always there… well, a part of her is anyway. She has multiple intelligence modules all running simultaneously. One of them is always running the helm 24/7.”
“So your girl Jess is always on the job, sometimes even in person.”
Dinner was a pleasant celebration. Everyone could hardly wait to see Jessica. Even their new houseguest found her candy to his eyes. It was obvious from his expression. Feeding all these people had Jane so happy that she was actually humming a tune. Can you feature that, a happy android, humming a tune? Come on. How weird is that?
Even Kip had to come see, and so did Rachel. Rachel was using this opportunity to convince Kip to let her go full-blown techno, too. Jessica cried to see how everyone celebrated the new ‘her,’ and it was good. Everyone hugged her and kissed her. She used every opportunity to feel them up close against her. Emma and Sophie were happy that now they could even touch Aunt Jessica. She even had a real lap for them to sit on now. How great was that?
All along, Bob had not forgotten the business that brought him here. He was trying his best to be a polite, and patient and a proper guest. He looked at everyone in the mess, but he still hadn’t put together this whole operation yet. It was like a military unit and then again not at all. It was a family, but in what he considered almost an open war zone, that was not the safest place for a family to be, and yet here they all were… and he thanked God for that, or he would be dead meat right now.
“There is a question on your face,” Dallas said to him as dinner faded away.
“It’s not my place to ask what brings you all to settle here,” he answered honestly.
“Making a difference starts with me,” Dallas replied. “I am outworld flesh and outworld bone. I will make this a safer place if I can. I will lead by example for any willing to follow.”
“Oh, kind of like an outworld lawman?” Bob ventured.
Dallas laughed a little, a private joke of sorts. “Actually my wife, Mariah, is the one who serves the law. A proper Union lawyer, she was accepted to the bar, and a tigress of the law she is for sure. As for me, I serve only what is right, and what is just. Sometimes that’s the law, and sometimes it’s not exactly. Let’s call that outworld law if you will.”
“I know what you mean. Special Forces is like that, too, in a way. That’s why I joined. I wanted to make a difference.” Bob was good with this. In fact, he felt a kind of kinship in this.
Mariah joined them, tossing Bob one of the boxes Sam found in the wreckage.
“You need to look at this,” she told Bob. “You are tech support, right?”
“Yes, I am, but Dallas just told me that you are a lawyer,” he responded now confused.
“That I am by my own choice, but the problem was that Union Fleet didn’t need lawyers during the war. What Union Fleet needed were Science Officers. They didn’t give a rat’s ass about what I wanted, they retrained me into what they needed, but it turned out okay in the end. I am actually very comfortable in either job now.”
“Why do I need to look at this?” Bob returned to her original statement.
“It’s made to track down Special Forces agents by their special Mindlinks. It only works on those frequencies, but even worse — it has your Special Forces encryption protocol broken. It can eavesdrop on everything in your displays.”
“Oh crap!” Bob said. “That’s not good at all.”
“But why were they hunting me down?” was his next logical question.
“I am going to guess that before they got your partner, he was sending you back images of what he was seeing. Please don’t tell me. Just make sure that you store those images, and show them to your people. They were so important that Nikola hunted you across two worlds to get them,” Dallas told him.
Dallas is exactly right, Bob thought. I can’t show them to anyone but Special Forces.
“You are right,” Bob agreed. “I will do just that.”
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Double Dragon Publishing
2015 -2020
Kindle Version
ISBN-10: 1-77115-291-5
ISBN-13: 9781771152914
Genre: Science Fiction/Dark Fantasy
eBook Length: 167 Pages
Published: March 2016
ASIN: B01CJ1H8UC
Paperback Version
ISBN-10: 1530451450
ISBN-13: 9781530451456
Genre: Science Fiction/Dark Fantasy
Book Length: 184 Pages
Published: March 2016