FOURTEEN

The Prime Sovereign Governor leaned in to listen to the hologram. “We just received a report from a communication drone returning through the wormhole from the Krakko-9 system. Highgun Galt is still alive, and an intruder escaped Krakko-9 city security in a stolen patrol car.” The speaking hologram was a thin man in a lab coat, one of the print techs from Prime Labs.

The Sovereign Governor sighed and let his back rest into his chair, adjusting his crimson military dress coat pinned with numerous medals. “So, it’s her. Why didn’t she complete the missions? Didn’t they just reprint her? Did they not reboot her memory implants? What the hell is going on down there, Doctor? Are you sure you are being thorough with our assassin prints? Your quality control carries immense responsibility for the success of Prime military operations.”

The hologram doctor scrolled through a datapad. “We are searching for answers ourselves, Governor. There are many theories at the moment, but no clear answer. All protocols were followed for a fresh print. It makes no sense. Somehow, she has found a way to override her directive and abandon her mission.”

“Override?” The Governor paused, and his breaths became heavy and noticeable throughout the room. “I thought that was impossible.”

“It seems we missed something. It’s possible, though it has never happened in thousands of bio-prints, that there has been some kind of quantum synapse evolution. But we still don’t think it likely.”

The Governor sighed. “Send another comm-drone through the wormhole with a directive to allow our occupying forces in the Black Eye system to hunt her down and disintegrate her on site.”

The man looked confused for seconds. “Shouldn’t that be a request handled by Prime Naval officers? I’m just a scientist with all respect, Governor.”

“No!” The Governor shouted. “Vera is your problem created by your team responsible for whatever havoc she causes. Now send the comm-drone. I will send you an official watermark with my signature so that there will be no confusion as to the authenticity of the order.”

“Certainly, Governor. We will prepare the comm-drone at once.”

The hologram blipped out. The Governor put his feet up on his oaken desk, legs crossed and called out, “Martha! Shoulder rub!” The governor grinned when the beautiful blond-haired service android appeared in his doorway.

“Yes, Governor. Right away.” She said.

FIFTEEN

Vera slowly tumbled into orbit within the patrol car. She had sent out a distress beacon on Nancy’s frequency. She hoped Nancy would receive it and intercept before Krakko-9 security patrols discovered her.

She climbed out of the patrol car and let it tumble away from her until it was just a blinking dot in the dead silence of space. Crystals appeared on her skin from the cold. Her joints stiffened, and, after a few minutes, she knew she was completely frozen. This way it would be extremely difficult for any scans from Krakko-9 to find her, but Nancy would home in on her once she received the signal Vera had broadcasted. Until then, the view was at least beautiful. Krakko-9 was a moon mosaicked with artificial light. She waited.

SIXTEEN

Azec stared down at the frozen dead woman on his cargo bay floor. What elegant physique! What symmetry in her face! Her DNA alone was valuable. He grinned wide imagining how pleased the boss of the Scarred Folk would be when he brought her in.

His ship was crumbling around him. He often expected it to explode on acceleration, not knowing when his last struggle for his fringe existence would be. He had scavenged and sold junk for so long he’d forgotten when he started. He saw himself as an explorer, who occasionally found himself inside illegal orbit zones like this one on Krakko-9. He had some pretty good signal diffusers developed by Wygonians that he had installed on his ship. Very illegal of course, but worth the risk. The only way they could detect him was by heat signature and in this high traffic area, no one paid much notice to a heat signature as small as his ships.

He sighed as his ship exited Krakko-9’s no-fly orbit and drifted gently into the nearest gravity highway. He kicked his feet up on the console. No cops to worry about now. He had logged his flight for Gneezex, the ninth planet in the system, a lawless world, home to Motherland and the boss of the Scarred, Wu-jinn. Wu-jinn paid the most for Azec’s plunders and treated him very well. He would certainly be interested in this specimen.

Azec leaned forward closer to the ship’s cockpit microphone. “Inquire! How much for complete female human remains in Motherland on the planet Gneezex?”

A genderless voice replied, “It is illegal to sell human remains in the Black Eye System but in Motherland on the planet Gneezex human remains are bought and sold on the black market for as much as twenty-thousand krakks if the specimen is younger and of a high genetic grade.”

Azec nodded. “Not bad. I could get this old wreck in shape for almost that much. What you think, Pol?”

“Some things could be improved to normal function again, yes,” Pol his ship’s computer said. “Right now, I believe other concerns need your attention. There is an intruder trying to open the cargo bay door and enter the ship’s interior.”

“What?” Azec jumped up and ran through the pentagonal halls to the cargo bay door. He peered through the reinforced space grade window. Nothing unusual, except no frozen dead girl.

An icy arm wrapped around his neck and began constricting his throat with incredible strength. In seconds he might pass out and never wake up. “Gurrrg. Hey… Ga!” he tried to plea. Everything got blurry then.

“I won’t kill you if you shut the fuck up and do as I say.” It was a woman’s voice.

“Also, you’re going to sit your ass on the floor while I take control of your ship. I need it to turn back and find my own ship. After that, I will let you go, okay?” The arm tightened around his throat again after the last. Darkness bloomed in petals around a growing tunnel vision.

She was so fucking strong. He nodded, his chin pressing against her cold skin. He began to kick and flail. He tried to pry away her arm with his hands, pulling and clawing with his fingers to no avail. She lifted him off the floor then, his feet kicking hopelessly in the air. This was a fight he would not win.

“Okay! Okay!” he grunted, straining for breath.

She dropped him then. His knees seared in pain from the grated steel on the floor. “Oww!” He grabbed his knees in agony.

“Turn around!” she said.

Azec turned around on his knees and as his vision returned, his jaw dropped when he saw who she was. “You’re alive?”

“I guess so. As you understand it,” the woman said. She held out a pair of bio-locking security cuffs. “Hold out your hands.”

“Those are mine!” Azec said, offended. How could she have found them so quickly? A thought made him smile then. “Alright, then.” He held out his hands. “Won’t do ya much good. They’re coded to unlock to my DNA.” He snickered and shrugged.

“Not anymore,” she said.

Azec twisted his hands back repeatedly, pressing his finger pad on an oval of blank space on the outer edge of the cuffs. They did not open. He closed his eyes, biting his upper lip and exhaled slowly. This was not going well.

“I’m not going to kill you, but if you somehow manage to get those off, I will consider it,” the woman said.

“You’re synthetic! That’s how you survived space!” Azec said.

“No, try again. I bleed just like you.”

“You hacked my ship. Unlocked the cargo bay door. You hacked my cuffs. There’s parts of you that aren’t organic for sure.”

The woman grinned. “Stay put.” She turned and headed away toward the cockpit.

SEVENTEEN

Vera’s fingers danced at lightning speed tapping markers on the grimy human trader’s ship’s view screen controls, flipping from every angle and back again around their perimeters. “Where is she? Why didn’t she hear my hail and retrieve me from Krakko-9’s orbit? Something’s wrong.” She swiped her hand across the control panel, flipping the nav location map up on screen and pointed to a grid coordinate. “Nancy was here and…” She traced her finger over seven squares. “We were here where I was picked up from orbit.”

“Lose your ship, Lady?” the human shouted from where she’d left him cuffed sitting on the floor.

She looked back and saw him shaking his head, his hair disheveled and unkempt as was his salty stubble and tattered mismatched clothing. “Scarred Folk got it, I’ll bet you. They always snag the salvage around here, even right by the Krakko-9’s back door. The Scarred Folk. They pay good for junk, though.”

Vera glared back at him. “I didn’t ask for your assessment of my private business, fuck-face! I doubt pirates could breach my A.I.’s security. She’s quite advanced.”

“You don’t know The Scarred Folk. Clever lot, they are. Black Hats. They got hacks that scare the Highgun so much he lets them alone long as they don’t interfere too much with Krakko-9 patrol officers’ business.”

“The Scarred Folk?” She scanned her neuro-data for info on them. All she found was that they were a large organization of traders embedded throughout the Black Eye galaxy operated by a controversial cult leader known as Wu-jinn. There were many conspiracy theories as to whether or not the Scarred Folk operated outside the law, but among all of the conspiracies, one thing common was that many feared them, and they had managed to keep their base locations an invitation-only network. To join The Scarred Folk, her research told her one had to abandon all communications and social links to outsiders. “Where can I find the Scarred Folk?”

“Remove these cuffs and I’ll fly you straight to their main hideout,” said the man. “I promise I’ll be good. I’m no match for you anyways.” He held up his fingers showing how crooked and knobby they had become from arthritis. “I got all the old man ailments.” He smiled and moved his brows up and down repeatedly.

“You could be repaired easily, you know,” she said.

“Nope. Too broke. Every scrap of change I can get goes back into the ship and it still barely runs at that. It’s a humble life selling junk, but I have great adventures. Keeps me busy since I retired from the military. Travos-3 veterans get no respect. Even when wounded in battle.” He shrugged, lowered his head.

“Spare me pity stories.” At that instant, a cloud of body odor enveloped her. She pulled her face back in disgust. Her scent receptors had just defrosted. “Holy shit mountain! When did you shower last? You stink up this entire ship. It smells like a rotting dead cow in here! And..,” she indicated the piles of clothing and cluttered stacks of discarded vehicle parts covered in grease all around them. “Well, you’re not very tidy, are you? I could barely find the controls up here.” She kicked an empty can across the grated floor. It bounced with an echoing clatter and rolled in front of his scruffy leather-booted feet.

He shrugged and smiled. “Name’s Azec. Nice to meet you. Make yourself at home.”

“The neural connections in your brain are damaged more than likely from war trauma. That is why you live this way. I’m Vera. Special Ops soldier for Prime.”

Azec lowered his head. “No. No war trauma, though it got nasty sometimes. Wait a minute, you work for Prime?”

“Well, I’m supposed to be, but I recently took a slight detour.” She sighed and walked over to him. She leaned down and he cringed when she put her finger on the bio-scanner on the cuffs. There was an insect-like purr emitted as the cuffs retracted from his wrists and folded into a pocket-sized cube. Azec cringed again when she pointed her finger at him and said, “Don’t try anything. I will kill you in a split second.”

He nodded. “You’ve my word. This is gonna be fun really. The Scarred Folk are friends of mine. Well, they tolerate me, I suppose. I bring them gifts once in a while and, in exchange for that, they stay clear of my doings in the system.”

“What makes you think they have my ship?”

“Because it’s what they do. Their priority is to steal ships, sometimes with their occupants still on board. Then they lock those unfortunate sods up in slave camps and convert them into The Scarred Folk. Some are repurposed as body parts or DNA scraps for the black market. And with very primitive ways. They’re fanatical about being in touch with the ways of ancient humans.” He looked at her up and down from toe to head. “You’ll need to get rid of that patrol uniform. They hate cops.”

“Don’t they have a deal with the Highgun?”

“They do but it ain’t a friendly one.”

“I’ll take care of it. Just set a course for their headquarters or wherever you think its most likely I will find my ship. I intend to get it back.”

“I’ll get us there, but I’ll be dropping you off if it’s all the same to you. The Scarred Folk don’t give back what they’ve taken so nicely, and I don’t need them pissed at me.”

“Agreed,” she said.

Azec started typing the coordinates into the console and soon after the ship’s engines churned up a space-folding bubble, always an unpleasant experience for a few seconds as reality seemed to unhinge itself from all perceptions until the ships space-time dampeners engaged. They were on their way.

EIGHTEEN

Six hours later they landed in a desert on a 1:1 gravity medium-sized moon orbiting a massive gas giant. The atmosphere was abundantly breathable for organics, mostly nitrogen and oxygen. When Vera stepped off the landing platform into the beige sand dune landscape, soft air cooled her skin. There were no trees or vegetation as far as even her cybernetically enhanced vision could see. Canyons and jagged boulders spiked up throughout the landscape like the bleached bones of colossal monsters.

“I still think you should do something more to that patrol uniform,” Azec said. “You still look like a cop. Ripping off the logos and rank patches isn’t enough.” He was heading down the boarding ramp behind her.

“I need the armor sewn within it. Besides, there was nothing I would dare to touch without sanitizing it on your ship. And all those stinking piles of clothes should be burned.”

“I could’ve left you frozen out in space for the Krakko-9 patrol to find, possibly a year later. Be glad my heap of trash happened upon you. You might at least want to shoulder that rifle. Walking up to them with it held in your arms ready to blast them might be offensive.”

She ignored his advice. “So, this is the right direction? It seems pretty desolate and there are no lifeforms showing up on my scans.”

“Oh, it’s here. We gotta walk a ways to see it is all. It’s a clever thing these The Scarred Folk have for their hideout. It’s actually pretty amazing, but you can’t see it ‘til you’re right up on it. I wasn’t about to land too close or else they might get leery and start shooting.”

Vera stopped and turned to stare at him for several seconds, running thousands of facial scans for micro-expressions indicating deceit. Nothing. She had to trust him for now. “I thought you were going drop me off and be on your way?”

“I should probably at least escort you in,” Azec said. “They know me already, and well, I didn’t want to just leave you here and let them nab you for scrap. I don’t meet too many bio-prints. You’re the first actually. I wanted to make sure you got in safely.”

She grinned and turned back around. They walked for about an hour across the bright rocky desert. The sand had an unusual reflective property. It sparkled colorful patches like oil floating in water. It glowed in places. “Curious,” she said aloud.

“What?” Azec asked.

Vera just shook her head. “Nothing. The sand is strange looking is all.”

Azec chuckled. “Wait ‘til you see what else it does.”

Vera narrowed her eyes at him.

They came upon a large circular depression in the sand where it looked as though there was a sinkhole here at one time. It was about fifty meters across.

“Here we are,” Azec said.

“This hole?”

“Go ahead, toss in a good heavy stone.”

Vera grabbed a piece of rock and tossed it into the depression. It tumbled with a puff of dust. Then, after a few seconds, sunk into the sand.

“So what. Is this a trick?”

“That’s the entrance. Very camouflaged.”

“Seems problematic for an operative settlement.”

“Oh yeah, well. This is like a back door. Going in the main entrance might rouse too much unwanted attention from the guards and security drones. Those drones are buggy as hell. They shoot at everything nearby sometimes.”

“You’re saying these Scarred Folk took my ship and its underground?” Vera said. “This is getting ridiculous. Your facial cues are not off, but I’m starting to doubt your good will.” She pointed the rifle at his face.

“That’s just it. I know I seem like a loony, but please, please trust me. Your ship is down there. I know it because I saw them scouting about where you said your ship was supposed to be. I do have my own reasons for coming along with you, see I’m compelled to visit this place pretty regular for my own health. So, shall we get on with it? Just jump in like you were gonna have a swim.”

“Health reasons?” Vera raised a skeptical brow. She charged the rifle to fire and a high-pitched whistle sounded as the weapon loaded itself. “You first,” she said.

“Okay, but don’t leave me down there alone for too long.” Then Azec jumped into the depression in the sand and it swallowed him whole like the rock she’d tossed in earlier.

Vera waited for a while. Everything about this seemed irrational beyond measure. She remembered the reason she had ended up with Azec in the first place, also irrational. What was happening to her? Why did she abandon her mission? Why didn’t she assassinate the Highgun? She defied orders programmed into her neural drive, something she was not supposed to be able to override. The dreams. The blackouts. Something else she couldn’t put into a rational or logical thought thread. Her biologically 3D printed brain was taunting her get that scroll back and open it or die trying. Resisting this urge seemed like the most terrifying thing to do. She couldn’t explain it, but she had no other choice. She had to find it. “Fuck it,” she said.

She closed her eyes and jumped into the sand.

Next Chapter: Part 6: Motherland