Hailey's Comet Anthology Read online

  Hailey’s Comet

  Volumes 5 - 9

  By Selma J. Lewis

  Copyright 2019 Selma J. Lewis.

  All rights reserved.

  Dedicated to Richard Patton,

  creator of the United Orion Empire

  and the beings who live there.

  (www.VoyagerDawn.com)

  Hailey’s Comet 5: Site Unseen

  From One Assignment to Another

  The Customer

  A Not-so-empty Yacht

  Dr. Ramirez

  How to Damage a Wraith in one Millisecond

  A Good Night’s Sleep

  Problem Number Two

  Missing Agent

  Day after Day

  On the Trail

  Not What She Planned

  Revelations

  Holding Pattern

  Rescue Party - a Day Late

  Survivors

  Epilogue

  Hailey’s Comet 6: Memory

  From One Assignment to the Next

  Sigmatál

  Corporal Lipton

  Sergeant Landry

  Corporal Bracken

  The Trackers

  Round Up

  Clean Up

  Hailey’s Comet 7: Revenge

  The Deal

  Crash

  Dacara

  Mystery Man

  Smástirni

  Karen

  Mama

  The Client

  Larisse

  Epilogue

  Hailey’s Comet 8: Evaluation

  Rehabilitation

  Introduction

  Mission

  Island

  The Havva Industry

  Creepy Conley

  Pitching In

  Agent Derek Cochella

  Layers of a Wraith

  Mané vs. Kiyoto

  The Mané Mystery

  ’Fessing Up

  Epilogue

  Hailey’s Comet 9: Humanity

  Agent Cochella meets Ram

  The Angel, the Geek, and the Crank

  Ruckus in the Medical Wing

  Co-recovery

  The Road Less Traveled by Wraiths

  Hierarchy

  Light One Colony

  The Specialist

  Unofficial Mission

  Surgery

  Preparations

  Ceremony

  Epilogue

  Hailey’s Comet 5: Site Unseen

  By Selma J. Lewis

  From One Assignment to Another

  “I said, wait for my signal!”

  “I had a clear shot,” the marine corporal replied from three meters to Hailey’s right.

  He’s upset the entire timetable, Hailey thought while quickly recalculating when would be their best chance to attack. The rebels were hiding behind boulders, willing to have an old-fashioned shoot-out with the marines and the Wraith in the trench. But the Wraith preferred controlling the situation and ensuring the right outcome. Unfortunately, the marines that were assigned to assist her were also itching for a shoot-out.

  The marines muttered to each other, not knowing that she could hear everything they said. “There are only six of them. We can take ‘em!”

  “I know, right? What the hell are we waiting for?”

  “Gimme a clear shot, and I’ll take it. I don’t care what the ‘man in black’ says.”

  “It’s not a man.”

  “How do you know?”

  “’Cause the sergeant referred to it as ‘she’.”

  “Whatever. If I have to listen to that robotic voice from that helmet for much longer, I’m gonna shoot it off her damn head.”

  “Watch it, Coop. She can shoot your eyebrow off your damn head.” Several grunts snickered.

  “Who said we need a Wraith on this mission anyway? We could’ve had this whole rebel nest cleared out by now if we just stormed it like we should’ve.”

  Hailey finally addressed the troops. She turned the robotic voice synthesizer off and her own voice proceeded out of her helmet. “Marines, SWORD put me in charge of this mission because if I wasn’t here, you would already be dead. There are not six rebels over there; there are twenty-two. If the five of you had stormed their stronghold, you would never have taken a shot because you would’ve been blown up by the buried mines they have scattered around in front of those boulders.” She drew a picture in the ground. “We’re here. They’re here,” she said, drawing a trench and several circles to represent the boulders. “There are hidden mines here, here, here, here, here, here, and here,” she explained, making dots on the landscape between the two camps.

  “If they’re hidden, how do you know they’re there?” one marine asked.

  “I can see the UV signatures. Nasty bombs. Y’don’t even have to step on ‘em. Just get near ‘em and they’ll detect your presence and go off.”

  The grunts looked at each other, sharing similar thoughts. “Then what’s the plan, Agent?”

  Hailey sighed. These marines were as two-dimensional in their thinking as the rebels were. “They have no cover from aerial attack.”

  “Um, Agent. We don’t have a DRAC. Even if we did, they’d hear it coming and scatter.”

  “Which is why we’re not using a DRAC. Because of Itchy-Trigger-Finger over here, they know exactly where we are. There’s only one play left. But first, we need to give them a chance to surrender.”

  “What? Why?” a corporal asked.

  “Because the alternative is that all of them die.”

  “So?”

  “They’re people. We must minimize casualties,” Hailey said.

  “They’re rebels. We only gotta minimize troop and civilian casualties,” the grunt countered.

  “Lucky for the humans over there, I’m calling the shots. Stand by and get your grenades ready to launch over those boulders.”

  Hailey reset her voice modulator to the menacing robotic version and amplified it. “You have one chance to surrender and not be killed. I’ll wait thirty seconds. After that, I guarantee you will be killed. This is your only warning.”

  Hailey started a mental countdown clock in her parietal micrometer. At one second to go, she turned to the marines. At zero, she said, “Launch.”

  Five grenades launched up and out of the trench, over the boulders, and exploded behind the rock barrier the rebels had used for cover. A single man ran out to the left, away from the chaotic scene. The private next to Hailey raised his rifle and took aim. Hailey put her hand on the barrel and forced it down. The man ran over one of the rebel mines and disappeared in a blast of dirt, fire, and smoke.

  From behind their position, a woman crawled toward the trench. “Help,” she called. The marines reached out a couple of hands and pulled her quickly down into the trench. The surviving rebels started shooting from their smoky stronghold. The marines couldn’t see where they were, but Hailey could. A few well-placed ricochets off the rocks, and they were dispatched. The marines hunkered down in the trench. Amid all the noise of falling debris, rifles firing, and people yelling, Hailey heard a threatening snap from her right.

  The woman who took refuge in the trench had opened a holster and was drawing a gun. There were three grunts between her and the Wraith, and the woman was lining up to take a shot at the first. She was talented: she moved innocently – to the casual observer – hiding her weapon behind her bent-up knee. Hailey watched her arm muscles. By the microsecond, she analyzed the woman’s movements. When she was sure the stranger was about to fire, Hailey shot her in the head.

  The marines flinched at the close-up kill. The woman fell over onto the hand that held the gun. Hailey remained vigilant, keeping her pistol pointed at the infiltrator. The marines rounded on her. “Wha
t the hell? You just shot an innocent!”

  Hailey didn’t move. She kept her gun on the fallen rebel. “Get her weapon. Right hand,” she ordered. The nearest marine wrested the woman’s arm from beneath her and found the gun. He took it and passed it down the line. The grunts were shaken. They knew the Wraith had just saved their lives. Hailey knew she had saved their lives three times over. “Stay here,” she said.

  Using the dust and smoke for cover, Hailey snuck around to the rebels’ stronghold, deftly avoiding the landmines. She clearly saw the heat signatures of two surviving rebels. She considered shooting them down from behind. She had, after all, warned them before and promised them only one warning. But she tried to avoid casualties, even rebel ones. She decided to give them a sporting chance.

  “Hey, you two. Time to give up.”

  They spun around and struggled to find the source of the voice in the haze. They coughed and spit dust from their mouths as they scanned the area.

  “Wanna give up? I’ve got you covered,” Hailey said from a different location. The two rebels shot in the direction of the voice, but she had left that spot half-a-second before. “Last chance,” she warned. They shot at her again. Out of the haze, two shots rang out. Two rebels fell down. Two heat signatures began to fade.

  “They were no help at all. In fact, I had to split my attention so I could keep ‘em all safe. And the complaining! They carry a field pack for ten klicks and start whining about their backs hurting.”

  Laura smiled as she debriefed her asset. “Don’t hold back, Comet. What do you really think?” she said, amused.

  “C’mon, Lucky. You know how grunts are: slow, stupid, trigger-happy. I work better alone. It took me twice as long to hike over there as it should’ve, waitin’ for them to catch up all the time.”

  “Well, it was dark, and their goggles don’t work as well as your ocular implants,” Laura pointed out. Hailey rolled her eyes. Laura continued. “Marines may not be up to our standards, but they’re who we’ve got.”

  “Just send me alone next time.”

  “Well, you’ll be glad I have a solo job for you to do next,” the Wraith’s handler announced cheerfully.

  “Oh yeah? Y’got a good one for me?” Hailey invited the news.

  “Oh, yeah! You’re gonna love this.” It was a figure of speech; Wraiths didn’t love anything and they didn’t get excited about anything. Their emotions were artificially controlled to keep them from getting distracted by non-mission-critical tangents like frustration, friendship, fun, or pheromones. The implant, called the limbic monitor, directed the brain’s chemistry to focus single-mindedly on the mission; it was designed to increase their odds of survival and success.

  Hailey, however, was one of only two Wraiths who could overcome the implant’s effects. She had to make a conscious effort to do it so emotions never blindsided her while she was working, but when she wanted to feel the love she knew she had for her mother, who was on the colony world, Light One, or her love, Jackson, another Wraith who was… somewhere, she could choose to do so. The fact that she had the ability was something she didn’t share with her handler, lest Laura report it to SWORD and the geeks find some way to “fix” it. So, when Laura said Hailey would love her next mission, Laura didn’t know that it wasn’t necessarily just a figure of speech for Hailey.

  Hailey played along. “Is the Titan about to give birth again? That’s a mission I could enjoy.”

  “Hawking, who knows? They can’t tell from orbit if the thing is pregnant. They can’t even figure out how a single creature produced that first offspring while you were there last year.”

  “I still think it wasn’t the first. Those raptor-wolf-things seemed to know exactly when to show up. I think it’s happened many times, but none of ‘em ever survived past the first minute.”

  “The Abraxas Titan is just a mystery,” Laura summarized.

  “OK, so, what’s the mission?” Hailey asked.

  “There’s a guy who’s got more money than he knows how to spend, so he wants to buy an asteroid.”

  Hailey looked at Laura skeptically. “He wants to buy a rock?”

  “One big enough to be terraformed and hold an atmosphere.”

  “What does that have to do with us?”

  “Well, the asteroids have always been licensed out to reputable developers by the UOE Department of Planetoid Development. They haven’t had an interested buyer in years. The department now consists of a director and her assistant. That’s all. No scouts, geeks, nothing.”

  “So, they want a Wraith to go find one? That’s overkill, don’t you think? Maybe EURO can handle it,” Hailey suggested.

  “With all the trouble in the Frontier Disputes, the Empire is cutting budgets to funnel money to the military. SWORD’s being cut by ten percent.”

  “What? SWORD is helping them fight the rebels!” Hailey objected, holding a hand out behind her to indicate the mission she had just completed.

  “And other things. They’d like us to cut back on the other things and concentrate on ending this blasted rebellion once and for all.”

  “But –”

  “I know. There are lots of missions that require the talents of a Wraith, and there aren’t that many of you out there. But SWORD will get the money this guy is paying if we’ll do the job. The DPD is just not equipped anymore.”

  “I’m a contractor,” Hailey muttered.

  “You were specifically requested for this job by Ram,” Laura revealed.

  “Ram? Why does Andre have a say in this?”

  “Because he’s the Director of Public Affairs, and the rich guy is public. Ram thinks you’re the best Wraith for handling the relationship with the buyer.”

  “Why? People are always saying I step on toes, being all blunt and snarky like I am.”

  “Well, he knows you visit your mother, and he knows about Carter Flynn. Other Wraiths fail to form the friendships you do. He can’t figure out why you have the knack…”

  “I fake it,” Hailey said, attempting to redirect any wondering thoughts Laura might have on the subject.

  “…but he wants to tap your ability, fake or not,” Laura finished.

  Hailey shrugged. She was not at liberty to refuse an assignment. She went where SWORD told her to go, and she accomplished the missions SWORD assigned her. “Take me to dinner before I leave?” Hailey requested.

  “You bet. The timing is great. There’s a shuttle going to Mars, Ganymede, and Neptune tomorrow. I’ll make the arrangements to stow your ship on board.”

  The Customer

  Hailey arrived on Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, after a one-week compression jump on the shuttle Aurora. She absorbed all the information Laura had provided about the rich asteroid buyer she was to meet, plus a complete history of the terraforming, development, and maintenance of the Belt worlds. Finally, she read as much as Laura could provide about the uninhabited rocks in the asteroid belt that were massive enough to be terraformed and subsequently hold on to an atmosphere. Obviously, the buyer would be interested in one of those.

  Other than absorbing everything Laura had provided, she enjoyed catching up on sleep and eating three meals a day. The well-equipped gym was another perk. The Aurora was no pleasure cruiser, but it was better than hitching a ride on a cargo transport. The only down-side was the company: a group of Marines at the end of their tours of duty in the Frontier, heading back to Kurésh Military Base on Mars, bragging about their heroic – mediocre, Hailey corrected in her head – exploits in the Frontier Disputes.

  On Ganymede, Hailey proceeded to the residence of her client. Artemis Kinkade, the Third, was what the ancients called “old money.” Artemis Kinkade, the elder, had built a real estate empire with the money he inherited from his father’s quasi-royal wealth, and Artemis Kinkade Junior followed in his father’s footsteps, expanding the fame of the Kinkade name to almost every civilized world in the Empire. Artemis Kinkade III was like his father and grandfather in name only. He
was not interested in forcing the Kinkade name onto the business, residential, commercial, and amusement sectors of every inhabited city of any consequence.

  Instead, Artemis III liked to play. He longed for the life his great-grandfather lived, with a royal title unearned, an income for doing nothing, and scores of female admirers willing to fulfill his every whim. He showered jewels and haute couture clothes on his lady friends and found himself pictured with them in several news feeds per day.

  For all his fame, Hailey Ramirez had never heard of him. She didn’t know what he looked like until she saw the photo Laura had provided, and she couldn’t fathom the amount of money his family had. Why, she wondered, do the rich feel the need always to become richer?

  If she didn’t have a limbic monitor, she might have become angry about a single family that had more annual income than SWORD’s and EURO’s entire budgets combined. Good thing the LM worked perfectly to keep her emotions and temper on perpetual dispassion. Hailey’s own life was marked by years of homelessness and poverty, followed by a life of service to an Empire full of people who didn’t even know she was there. Royalty versus orphan; wealthy versus impoverished; famous versus anonymous; Artemis Kinkade III versus Agent Hailey Ramirez. They couldn’t be more opposite.

  When Hailey entered the foyer of Kinkade’s grand home on Ganymede, she ignored the trappings of wealth around her and focused on reading the body language of her host. She was surprised to find him relaxed and gracious as he welcomed her inside. “You’re the SWORD agent?” he said with a friendly smile and a handshake.

  “Yes. I’m Agent Hailey Ramirez, Mr. Kinkade.”

  “Call me Trip,” he replied easily.

  “Trip?” Hailey accessed all the information in her mental database. Nowhere was “Trip” listed as an alias for Artemis Kinkade of any generation.

  “Y’know, ‘cause I’m the third,” he explained.

  “The third Artemis Kinkade,” Hailey acknowledged. “But ‘Trip’ would imply being a triplet, not the third, sequentially.”