Points of Departure (The Robert Fenaday and Shasti Rainhell Chronicle Book 3) Read online

  ***** Shasti’s next stop was Mmok’s isolation cell in Sickbay. She was still in charge of security, and Mmok, commander of the Confed robot force, was a far more dangerous prisoner than Henlesch. The cyborg was still in sickbay, uninjured but under psychological care from the empathic Arpen. His strong feelings for Arpen and his unwillingness to kill Telisan’s fiancée rendered him their prisoner. Otherwise Sidhe would be in his hands, and they would all be under arrest. She slipped into Sickbay, trying to avoid Arpen or Mourner. Chang nodded at her, but used to her silences, said nothing. She cycled through the doors to the iso-cell.

  Mmok, a tall slender human, silently watched her enter. His one human eye was a cold gray, set in a face as pale as her own. A metallic headpiece covered half his skull and a black-green square of ceramic-steel took the place of his other eye. More cosmetically pleasing replacements were available. Mmok disdained them as he did most other social conventions. Three-quarters of his body had been cybernetically replaced, repairs for the damage done by a Conchirri anti-tank beamgun. Mmok served as Mandela’s watchdog and giving out information was not his business. She guessed him to be in his thirties.

  “Come to see the monkey in the cage?” Mmok asked. He sat on his bunk, a book face down next to him. His cyborg arm was attached to the wall by a long chain, something Telisan insisted on.

  “I was curious,” she said evenly. “I thought you died on Enshar.”

  “Like you give a fuck,” he snapped.

  “I heard about your capture,” she said, ignoring the response.

  “You surrendered to Arpen when she drew a pistol on you on the bridge. Surrendered, despite having your killer robots with you. Why? Why didn’t you shoot Arpen? You could easily have retaken the ship.”

  “Fuck you,” he replied. “Mmok,” she said wearily, “I realize you are a man of few words. Try for something a bit more original.”

  “Fuck you and the Frokossi speedhound you rode in on.”

  Shasti suppressed the desire to disassemble the cyborg. “Why, Mmok?”

  A long minute passed. Shasti waited easily. It was her game.

  Finally, Mmok looked up at her. “She was the first person to treat me as a human being, not a piece of equipment, in years,” he said, surprising her. “I just couldn’t do it.”

  “I don’t understand,” she replied.

  He grinned. “Sorry, Assassin. If I have to explain it more, then it is pointless.”

  Rage lit in her and she stood, fighting for control. “You,” she said finally, “are not the only being to ever be treated as property.” She started out of the cell, not trusting herself to remain.

  “Rainhell,” he called.

  She turned, murder in her eyes.

  “Sorry,” Mmok said, looking away, “I’ll call foul on that last one.”

  She could only stare, confused.

  “Talk some sense into him,” Mmok continued, still looking away. “He’s gotten dozens, maybe hundreds, of people killed looking for his wife. He’ll get all of us killed and start a war before we are ready. All for one person, who wouldn’t agree to such a mission if you asked her.”

  She shook her head slowly. “You don’t know him. There has never been any reasoning with him when it comes to her. There’s even less chance now.”

  “We all gonna die,” Mmok said in resignation.

  Shasti shrugged. “Yes, almost certainly.”

  She left the cyborg to his book, heading back to her cabin. It was time to face Vaughn’s message. Once there, she secured the lock, then powered up her own computer. She paused to pet Risky, the K-9 she had adopted on Enshar. The genetically enhanced, shepherd had been made by human scientists on Earth but as he put his head in her lap and wagged his tail he seemed no different than any dog.. It seemed that the Confederacy had fewer problems with the engineering of animals than humans. She placed the data crystal into the comp, settling back into her chair with a sigh. The holomonitor lit up, projecting the image of Mikhail Vaughn, now leader of the Denshi, under the careful eye of General Dominici. She had seen him only once, when he tried to kill her in the offport of Marathon. He was as she remembered, tall, solid and handsome, piercing blue eyes under hair as jet black as her own.

  She’d learned from Telisan that Vaughn visited Sidhe shortly before they fled the madhouse Marathon degenerated into. He’d wanted to see her, comatose as she was from her injuries, simply to look on her face. Telisan had allowed it reluctantly, in return for information, codes and maps of the Voit-Veru’s systems. The Denlenn ordered two of Mmok’s best killing machines, the Humanform Combat Robots, to hold the powerful Engineered by the arms, with instructions to kill at the least provocation. Vaughn had offered none. He’d merely gazed at her for a few minutes before leaving.

  Now those compelling eyes were before her again.

  “Hello, Shasti Rainhell,” he began. The voice was deep, pleasing, with a hint of a growl. “We have never spoken. I have seen you only twice, during our fight over the rooftops of Marathon and in the sickbay of

  Sidhe . Yet the image of you stays with me vividly. I wish I knew why.

  “You have many reasons for your hatred of Denshi. I know only a few, and they are enough. I do not hold your killing of Pard against you. He was a hard man and not always just.

  “In some small measure of repayment, I offer you something I am sure you want, information on yourself, your origins, your capabilities. Things you were never told while you were with us.

  “You must wonder if you are good, or simply lucky, to have survived so long against so much. The answer is yes and more. Shasti, you are not Third Generation Engineered, as you were told, nor Fourth like myself, or even Fifth Generation, as some thought Antebei to be. You are Generation Unknown. The sole-surviving product of the special lab run by Pard and the Chief Geneticist Negola. You were created in an attempt to leap multiple generations, short-circuiting engineering evolution. All the safeties were thrown out; everything that could be tried was. Thousands died. You alone survived. The crystal contains every record there is on you.

  “You are at the highest end for physical strength for a human. Pound for pound, you may be the strongest Engineered ever created. Ultra-fast healing took with you, as well as resistance to burns. Otherwise that laser hit would have finished you.”

  “I do not know your reaction speed. I know it exceeds my own and, Shasti, I am fast. I am optimized for it.

  “Did you know you cannot drown? The medical records show a filtration system in your lungs. You can process the oxygen out of water.

  “Your night vision is as good as a cat’s. If the reports are right, you can actually change color. Melanin camouflage they called it. I’m envious.

  “I suspect you do not know, or fully understand, the ability called ‘situational awareness.’ It was difficult enough for me, with proper training. It is the ability to sense, to feel, the location, and to some degree, the intention of people around you. It is not telepathy but something akin. In a fight, I can feel the location of people, even the ones behind me. I can image their weapons, even the position of their limbs.

  “Part of it is the superior processing speed of the Engineered brain, recognizing shadows, smells, sounds, patterns of movement, pressure caused by the movement of bodies. All these things integrate in a gestalt.

  “There is more. A standard human who is being watched can feel it, without seeing the watcher. You have a heightened sense of this. A person lurking on the other side of a door will present an image to your mind. It varies. Some perceive such a threat as heaviness in the air, or a shadow. I see sparks hanging in the air, angry hot sparks. The more dire the threat or the intent, the hotter the spark.

  “You may wonder why I am telling you this. I wonder myself. All I know is that since I first saw you, I have been unable to rid myself of the image of your face. I know what Telisan is doing, the danger he and Fenaday are taking you into. I even know why. I know of your relationship with Fenaday. That may
change. If I am to have any hope of seeing you again, you must survive what is to come. So, learn, study and do not forget me.”

  Shasti leaned forward eagerly, her hands flying over the computer, her heart pounding. Her eyes devoured the text and images appearing on the screen.

  Chapter Three

  General Maria Dominici sat in the primary communication center of Army HQ, in the base camp of the First Mountain Infantry, watching the scouts of the Confederate Task Force carefully approach Olympia’s orbit. They have reason to be careful, she thought. Olympia’s naval defense force put up a sporadically fierce, if disjointed battle. With Pard dead, the government fallen, and the Navy minister under arrest, command and control disappeared. She had tried to get the Navy back under control, force them to see the reality of their position. She failed. Navy officers would not heed their oldest enemy, even with the iron fist of the Confederacy swinging down on them.

  In the end it did not matter. Olympia’s nascent fleet consisted of purchases from the reduced navies of the Confederate worlds, a few small carriers guarded by a raft of fleet destroyers and frigates. The OSDNF could not stop a Confed task force of capitol ships. It could, however, cost them. Two of the Confederacy’s destroyers were gone. The battle-cruiser Ganymede would struggle to make orbit, rammed by a Spacefire off the Olympian carrier Leonidas. The OSDFN was now gone, destroyed or fled. A handful of smaller vessels surrendered.

  She waited in growing impatience for her Confederation contact, a man known to her only as Mandela, to finally break radio silence. She made sure every media outlet was back on the air, carefully controlled, broadcasting normalcy and order. An exaggeration, but she had made it abundantly clear that there was no one so quiet as a dead troublemaker. The Confed force wanted no quagmire, and she needed the task force to survive. Pard was dead. A new order would arise. Mandela, she knew, had no concern about who imposed that order, so long as it served the Confederacy’s interest. She had to be that person. Not for herself, nor for the Confederacy, but for the sake of Olympia, the great experiment Dr. Alessandro and his eugenicists conceived, home of the superior human. She believed in the dream of human perfection, despite Pard and the Engineered’s efforts to hijack and pervert it.

  Pard, she mused, first of the successful Engineered, people born from mechanical wombs, their DNA altered, deliberately mutated. They had replaced the Selected, people like herself, evolved by the classic and human method of finding the best mate. That would stop now. The lab born would be brought to heel under her control, the labs destroyed. There would be no more generations of Engineereds. The ones alive now would breed back into the population. Eventually, they would understand the need to cooperate with her to preserve what they could of Olympia.

  The days of the laissez-faire Confederacy were drawing to a close, she sensed. History’s winds were blowing and whatever name it bore in the future, the Confederacy of Seven Species would never be the same. The harsh reality of the Xenophobe War and now the Voit-Veru threat would make the Confederacy far more powerful. Planetary governments would wither. The Diaspora of separating humanity would coalesce into something more imperial. It was inevitable.

  “Any signal from the fleet?” she asked, regretting it immediately. The tech would have told her. She was nervous. She could not afford to be.

  “No, ma’am,” replied the tech. “No response to our hail.” Her eldest son, Guytano, a huge man wearing paratroop fatigues with suppressed colonel's insignia, looked over at her and smiled. He knew what she was thinking. She smiled back at him. A stranger would not have credited that they were mother and son. She looked scarcely any older than he did. Her olive-complected face was unlined, though some silver shone in her hair. Dominici appeared to be a superbly athletic woman, in her late thirties or early forties. She was more than sixty and still in the prime of life. She had three sons and twelve perfect grandchildren. It was for them she turned to Mandela. For them she destroyed Pard and tamed the Engineered.

  Her son walked over. “Ambassador Davis is complaining again. He wants to know when he can return to the embassy.”

  “When the damn streets are safe,” she replied.

  “He’s been watching the news video and saying the streets look calm enough,” Guytano replied, with an ironic smile.

  Dominici snorted. She had begun to suspect that, like many of the staff of other worlds sent to Olympia, Davis was chosen more for looks than intelligence. Why couldn’t other worlds make the connection the ancient Greeks had, a healthy mind in a healthy body?

  “Tell him if he enjoys watching fiction so much, he can tune to channel 23 and watch reruns of Captain Sword and the Commandos,” she replied.

  It was her son’s turn to laugh. The show was a notoriously inaccurate video based on the Xenophobe war. Regular soldiers found it highly amusing. “I’ll do that,” he replied.

  “Signal coming in,” announced the young tech. “It’s on the special frequency you were expecting. Signal identifies Confederate warship Polaris, Admiral Xein commanding. Visual denied. ”

  Dominici straightened in her chair. Showtime. “Put it on the main board. All non-essential personnel, clear the room.” Everyone quickly shuffled out, leaving Dominici, her son and the one tech.

  “The room is clear,” Dominici said. “Request visual communications.”

  The screen lit up, revealing the interior of what she recognized as a Star class dreadnought. In the center of the raised dais occupied by the command staff sat an oriental human, Admiral Xein, one of the Confederacy’s most ruthless commanders. His presence was a clear warning to her. Next to him stood another flag officer, a Denlenn. His tawny hair was far darker than Telisan’s, cropped closer to the skull on a face that was even more angular and inhuman than the Denlenn pilot’s.

  It was the man next to him that seized her attention. Middleaged, human, once very powerful and now fighting a spreading midsection. His skin was a dark-chocolate brown, contrasting strongly with the bright, ivory teeth of his broad smile.

  “General Dominici,” Mandela said in a deep, pleasing voice, “so good to see you looking well, and your son Guytano also.”

  “Thank you,” Dominici replied, “I see you are in good health as well. Despite the OSDFN’s best efforts.”

  “Quite impressive those efforts were too,” Mandela said, “as you predicted.” Next to him, the impassive face of Xein drew into a frown. She suspected that, despite her warnings, the Confederation forces had not expected a fight.

  “How are things on the ground?” Mandela asked.

  “Well in hand,” Dominici said. “Pard is dead. Vaughn is under my control and with him most of Denshi. I have control of the capital city. The area around the Confederate embassy is secure, though there has been occasional sniper fire. Ambassador Davis was taken into my protective custody until the area is completely secure. My casualties have not been light, but my forces are intact.”

  “Our satellites are picking up heavy fighting around the naval base at Thrace,” Mandela said.

  Damn, she thought. “Oldark and the Naval Landing Troops are putting up a last-ditch resistance at his combined Navy-Denshi base in the south. They are surrounded by the 69th and 12th armored. Denshi and the Navy have no heavy armor, no way for them to break out, now that you have cleared space of their ships. I am moving up the mountain infantry and paras to take the base. That will end the last of the organized resistance.”

  “Excellent,” Mandela said. “Our heavy ships will be in range of the planet in three hours. Call off your ground assault. We will save you casualties and strike the base from orbit.”

  “No,” she said. “Olympian problems can be handled by Olympians. The Naval detector grid is still intact. I left it so they can see you coming. Perhaps the threat will be enough. Vaughn is already trying to get Oldark to surrender. If not, then we will deal with it on the ground. I have no desire to see the surface of my world, even a small section, rendered sterile for the next hundred years.”
r />   “Little hard on the guys on the ground,” Mandela said, eyebrow raised.

  “When did you develop such a concern for the men on the ground?” she answered scornfully. “You haven’t even asked about your operatives.”

  “Since you mention it,” Mandela said, seemingly unaffected by her comment, “I would like a report on developments in that regard.”

  “The only survivors of the original team were Shasti Rainhell and Daniel Rigg. Denshi killed the rest. They also got most of your on-planet spy network.

  “Fenaday came in and raised hell. Faked his death and somehow got down-world to attack Pard’s complex in a strike we coordinated. Fenaday and Rainhell killed Pard. He almost killed them in return. For a while we thought they were both history.”

  “They survived? How badly are they hurt?” Mandela demanded, showing concern for the first time in her experience of him.

  “Our doctors are among the best in the galaxy,” Dominici said, “and Rainhell is a wonder of the art of the Engineered. Fenaday was closest to death, but he pulled through.”

  “Good,” Mandela said, his face somber. “I would hate to hear of his death.”

  “Your cyberforce destroyed the Denshi compound and the forces there. A most remarkable engagement. I will spend a great deal of time studying it.

  “More importantly, Telisan produced evidence of the VoitVeru: documents, data and best of all, bodies, three bodies, strange creatures, like I have never even imagined. The autopsy records are being uploaded to you.” She gestured to the tech.

  “We have it,” Mandela said triumphantly.

  “Yes,” she returned. “We do. At long last. Incontrovertible proof of what you suspected. The Denshi are in league with a new alien species.”