For the first time since she awakened in her new body she wished she had her own limiter chip. It would restrict her from interacting with anything she couldn’t touch, but whatever had happened to her moments before would be impossible. The thought that, even though all the evidence in the system verified that Gloria’s backup scans had been deleted, she could return was terrifying, the woman she saw in the mirror was unhinged. It was as though Gloria didn’t care whether there was anything left after she destroyed her uninvited passenger, as long as it was dead forever.
She shook her head and sat on the edge of her bed. Without direction her mind had wandered, and Eve found herself watching a late night arrival, Captain Lucious Wheeler.
Eve’s attention was fixed on the live footage of him disembarking from a Terratran corvette registered as The Ferryman. Its forty-two meter long hull creaked as super cooled mist rolled off the edges and her four gunnery turrets.
The ship was designed as though someone was emulating the musculature of a human forearm, with smooth lines running from front to back, flatter on the bottom and rounded on the top. The particle turrets and rectangular thruster pods laid flat along the length of the ship and many curved, unmarked hatches hinted at surprises just under the surface. The white and violet coloured ship had just finished a journey through a hyper compressed wormhole of its own creation, in an effort to obey an urgent summons sent by Lister Hampon. It was a recent purchase, most likely acquired right after the summons was issued. Eve couldn’t find any evidence of a purchase in the Regent Galactic database, meaning that Wheeler had not only funded the buy himself, but he made sure the seller had no ties to the corporation.
Wheeler was alone. She could detect no one else manning the ship. He stopped only long enough to ensure that his ship’s airlock closed and locked behind him. His dark brown hair had grown back at an accelerated rate, and hung in a short pony tail that brushed from one side of his dark long coat collar to the other as he looked around the empty mooring bay.
His boot steps echoed in the idle dry dock as he made his way up the crew hall and into the control room. Hampon waited on an anti gravity litter in fine robes, surrounded by his guards and aides. “Welcome back,” he said calmly, wiping a wisp of sun blonde hair out of his eyes.
“What the hell is going on Hampon? First you call me back and as soon as I arrive my comm updates with an order to stand down all pursuit!”
“The Saviour has other business to attend to now that the Triton has been apprehended and we no longer need Jacob Valance. Your services-“
“The Saviour is my ship! That was part of our deal! I trade Gloria in for a nice, new Regent Galactic Carrier, distract Valance and we part ways.” Wheeler snarled, ignoring the guardsmen with rifles held across their chests.
Eve didn’t know anything about the deal that had been struck for her host. If the data existed anywhere, it had been deleted before she had the opportunity to get a glimpse.
“The host isn’t everything we expected it to be. Thankfully, Eve has made the most of it, and hasn’t noticed the short comings built into that model.”
“Glitches and bad craftsmanship has nothing to do with me, or our deal.”
Hampon sighed wearily and shook his head. “You are forgetting something, Lucious. We made you immortal, gave you most of General Collins’ memories. You have a second life most people would give anything for. I’m even willing to set you up in a rather prestigious position in the Order’s Intelligence Division. You can make your own hours, choose from a vast number of assignments.”
“Like going after the Triton.”
“As I said before, that’s under control.”
“Bullshit! Capturing the Triton would have made huge news, especially since I played your spokesman less than two weeks ago and let everyone know there’s a huge reward for any of her crew.”
“And that was helpful. Meunez has determined the whereabouts of the ship and is in control of the situation.”
“So that’s it. You’ve got the cyber freak jacked in to the right uplink and he got to it before I did. Where’d you plug him in? Maybe I can cut a deal with him. Something he’ll deliver on.”
“That’s none of your concern. You should be relieved that I’ve found a way to retire you from errands, and hunting. This is the kind of retirement people like you dream about.”
“Retirement,” Wheeler spat under his breath. He looked at the half dozen guards, eight attendants, then back to Hampon. “What if I just cut ties here and just drop off your scanner?”
Hampon fixed Wheeler with a look of mild surprise. “With Collins’ memories?”
“We’ll call it even. I’m leaving my best number two here, after all. Not much hope of a refund there either.”
The younger looking man looked to two of his attendants as if to verify he was hearing correctly before returning his gaze back to Wheeler. “And what would you do?”
“Live the dream,” he replied sarcastically. “What’s it matter to you once I’m out of range?”
“I’m sorry, that’s just not possible. No one else knows Collins’ memories like you do.”
“You won’t get anything out of me if you force me to stick around.”
“You’ve forgotten where you are. We can ask, or we can install a deep tissue interface. Either way, it saves us the time of implanting the memories in someone else and having them sift through.”
“Hell no, I’m gone,” Wheeler’s anger was audibly tinged with fear as he turned to leave.
The hatchway behind him closed.
For some reason Eve believed Wheeler, and whether it was in gratitude for her host body, or because of some residual reflex, she forced the door’s mechanism to open.
Wheeler took advantage of the opportunity and was down the hall before Hampon’s guards could make it to the door. The airlock door of the Ferryman slipped open in time for him to make it into his ship before they began firing.
Eve took the next step and released the mooring clamps on the corvette class ship so he could reverse out of the bay. Sections of the hull slipped open to reveal hundreds of micro emitters that formed a wormhole behind the ship.
“Find out who let him escape!” Hampon screeched, his pre-adolescent voice cracking.
As one of his aides began to check Eve erased all record of her activities and implanted evidence of her own making. By the time the cybernetically enhanced human checked the logs he could only come to one conclusion. “Captain Wheeler must have used one of Collins’ override codes. I’m sorry sir, there’s no record of anyone interfacing from our end.”
Chapter 12
“You’re angry.” Hatter concluded from the pilot seat of his Uriel fighter.
“Nope,” replied Hood shortly.
They were adrift in featureless, dead space, half way between the nebula and their destination. The rendezvous point with the Clever Dream “No, you’re pissed, I can tell.” Hatter sighed, tapping the power indicator on the instrument screen. It read seventy percent and crept up by fractions of a percentage.