Hailey's Comet Anthology Page 8

He stared at her and seethed. She glanced at his wilted little Kinkade and “tsk”ed. He began to advance on her with murder in his eyes. “Are you sure you want to try that?” she asked with derision. He backed off. “Finally, a good decision,” she congratulated him.

  “You think I’m through with you? Don’t count on it. Sentries! Kill the target on sight.” He stormed out of the room leaving the door wide open. Hailey quickly closed it and retrieved the comm from the pocket in the robe. She slipped through the sliced wall and sat on the unused cot in that room.

  “Mandy, do you have a comm, or anything that can record?”

  “No. My luggage was on the ship. He said the porter would bring it, but obviously… no porter.”

  “Ask the others, please. I need to splice together some words I recorded.”

  “Then why do you need another comm?”

  “I’ll play one of the words at a time on this one and record on the other one.”

  “You don’t need to do that. You can splice right on that comm.”

  “You know how to do that?”

  “Sure. I used to do that with my parents’ voices so I could program the car.”

  Hailey smiled. She retrieved her multi-tool and began to slice through the wall just above the floor. A ten-centimeter slice was enough to pass the comm through. “I’ve been recording him for days. There’s a lot to go through, but here’s what you need to put together: ‘Sentries, belay all previous orders. Obey orders from the target only. Acknowledge.’ Got it?”

  “Hold on, what was after ‘obey orders’?”

  “From the target only. Acknowledge.”

  “Got it.”

  “Read it back to me.”

  “Sentries, belay – is that a word? Belay?”

  “Yeah, it means ‘disregard.’”

  “You got him to say that?”

  “Yeah. Read the whole command back.”

  “Sentries, belay all previous orders. Obey orders from the target only. Acknowledge.”

  “Perfect. If you let Kinkade in, be sure he can’t see this hole or the comm.”

  “I got it, Hailey.”

  “When you’re finished, just slip it through. I’ll come get it.”

  “OK.”

  “Thanks, Mandy.” Hailey wedged the cot against the door and sat down to calm herself. Her adrenaline was off the scale. She had to admit, she missed the limbic monitor’s positive aspects. Breathe. Calm. Think. The thinking part is done. When Mandy has the command, all I have to do is play it for the sentries. Hailey concentrated on breathe and calm. For the first time, she began to feel hope. Her heart settled. Her body chemistry normalized. Her mind cleared. She chose to think about pleasant things: dinners with Laura, visits with Karen, laughing with Jackson, staring at the sky with Carter.

  Suddenly, the comm slipped through the slit in the wall and Hailey heard Kinkade talking to Mandy. “Why’d you have the door blocked? Don’t you want breakfast?”

  “Where is it?”

  “Answer me.”

  “Trip, I heard gunshots! I didn’t know what was going on. It was just the first thing that came to mind.”

  “C’mon. You can come out here and eat. And take a shower, too. You stink.” Mandy followed Kinkade out of the cell. “MUPA, clean and disinfect this room.” Hailey was pretty sure Mandy had pushed the comm through to keep it hidden, not because she’d finished the job. Hailey would just have to wait.

  On the Trail

  Two weeks after Comet left on her mission, the Kinkade yacht, Emerald, made an appearance at Ganymede space port. The analysts commed Lucky to tell her the ship just came out of compression and docked at gate B13.

  “Comm the local authorities to hold the ship there under some pretense. They shouldn’t mention SWORD.” Laura watched her comm. If Comet was on that ship, she would comm now that they were out of compression.

  Laura couldn’t understand her new ability to worry. She had never worried about anyone, at least not with a physiological reaction like she now experienced. Of course, during her career as a Wraith, she had concerns for the people she served, but this was different. Comet was important to her. A close friend… like a daughter, even. Or a little sister, Lucky corrected herself. I’m not that old!

  Certainly, Lucky was more than adequately old to be Comet’s mother, but she settled on the notion that Comet was like a kid sister. Laura couldn’t remember ever having a sister. She couldn’t remember much from her childhood. She had a vague impression that, overall, it was not happy. Her memories of the Scabbard were much happier and her life as a Wraith had purpose and meaning and honor. But she had never had a personal relationship that amounted to more than superficial friendship or a simple working partnership.

  She didn’t even know what a personal relationship was supposed to be like. Comet, on the other hand, had several personal relationships – unheard of in the world of Wraiths. Somehow, she formed a bond with her mother, Karen, when she shouldn’t have exceptionally strong feelings for her. She befriended Slam, a former Wraith a little older than Lucky. She called him Uncle Carter, of all things. How, in one week, had she developed a relationship with Carter Flynn that led her to call him uncle? Laura wondered.

  And then there was Jackson: a love that never died, despite the time and distance and limbic monitors. Laura watched them together for several days many years back, when Hailey was looking for answers at the Scabbard. Jax and Comet had a connection, despite the LMs. It seemed to Lucky, at times, that they didn’t have LMs at all. Maybe Comet’s LM didn’t work like Lucky’s did. Maybe it had different modes. It was, after all, several generations newer than Lucky’s. Lucky wondered if she could get a replacement LM, or if she should just get hers extracted. It had never occurred to her before. But now, as she worried about Comet, waiting for her to comm, she realized she loved the young Wraith and would do anything to ensure her safe return.

  She loved someone in the galaxy, and she wanted to feel it.

  Laura waited an hour before she booked a seat on a transport to Ganymede. She commed Spice to tell her she was leaving the station to follow a lead on Comet. Spice showed up at the airlock, right on time.

  “I didn’t mean you had to come along,” Lucky said. “I just wanted to keep you informed.”

  “My doctors want to keep me here another week. To hell with that. I feel fine!” She strode past Lucky and entered the transport. Lucky followed her.

  “What about your handler?”

  “Donner thinks I’ll be here for the next week,” Spice smiled. “Got it covered.”

  “The doctors will comm Donner.”

  “The doctors think I’m resting on the R&R level of the Scabbard. That was the only way they’d let me out of their sick bay.”

  Laura smiled. “Well done, Spice.”

  Spice returned the smile. “Let’s see what mischief Comet’s gotten into this time.”

  “A report from the analysts,” Laura said as they travelled from the Scabbard to Ganymede, a twelve-hour compression jump.

  “How’d you get a comm in compression?” Spice asked.

  “I don’t know. The analysts are their own kind of spooks. Anyway, says the ship is docked with a plan to stay for five days, then depart on a course to Larisse.”

  “Larisse? Rich boy only visits the best, huh?”

  “We’ve got to interview him before he goes there.”

  “You mean, interview?” Spice asked, raising a fist.

  Laura smiled and shook her head. “Only if necessary. Ram will have our heads if we create bad press in an upscale place like Ganymede.”

  “Who’s Ram?”

  Laura looked past Spice. Ram was another one of Comet’s relations, but Lucky wouldn’t spread Hailey’s personal information around SWORD. “Agent Mendez, PR director.”

  “Didn’t know we have a PR director.”

  “Sure you did. It’s in the org chart you all learned—." Spice smiled. Laura chuckled. “You just don’t care.”
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br />   “I keep a low profile, but the whole thing about SWORD’s image and worrying about how the things I do will come out in the press? You’re right: I don’t care. When I’m doing a job, I do the job.”

  “In any case, we’re not on a ‘job’ so we’d better not make waves on Ganymede. Copy?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Spice replied with a smirk.

  “Hey, Deke, Trip’s ship is back. Did y’know that?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not leaving for five days.”

  “I’ll take the extra five days on board Luxury Longboat!”

  “Settle, Mal. I already tried. Crew won’t let anyone on board until the day they take off.”

  “Did you talk to Trip?”

  “He wasn’t there. Crew said he’s on Larisse.”

  “Is that where he’s taking us?”

  “Maybe. He said it was a surprise, but that’s not much of a surprise. We’ve all been there before.”

  “I hope we’re going someplace where we can get our hands on some new—”

  “Gentlemen,” a newcomer interrupted. “What’s the news?”

  “Trip’s ship is back, but we can’t get on yet,” Mal supplied.

  “Do you know where he’s taking us?” Deke asked.

  “Indeed, I do,” said the third friend of Trip’s.

  “Well?” Deke asked.

  “Oh, it’s a surprise. You’ll like it.”

  “C’mon. What’s the big secret?”

  “I’m not supposed to tell you guys. At least not until we’re under way.”

  “Well, my curiosity is piqued,” said Mal.

  “See you ‘round, comrades.”

  While Hailey waited for Mandy to return, she fiddled with the comm. If a teenager could figure it out, a Wraith could, she reasoned. She had never been interested in the technical intricacies of her various devices. She knew how to use them, even how to troubleshoot them, but she didn’t dig into the thousand-and-one uses of a comm, and she certainly never tried hacking one. But Mandy had. While Mandy was hacking her comm to joyride in her parents’ car, Hailey was throwing knives and classmates around the gym at the Scabbard training facility.

  It suddenly struck her how different she really was from everyone else in the Empire. She was only the seventy-fourth Wraith ever in the field. Seventy-three Wraiths came before her, and probably a dozen after. During the same time, billions of humans had come and billions more had gone through their mortality in the Empire, each having things in common with many others. Hailey had her classmates: Dutch, Boulder, Spice, Cuss, Rush, and Clamp. They had everything in common, but she never saw them anymore, not since they graduated and became field agents.

  As a Wraith, she knew she was superior to all the grunts in the Navy and non-Wraith SWORD agents at the Scabbard. And average people she met on planets were downright simple compared to her. She respected them as beings of her species, fought for them, protected them, but didn’t ever consider them her equals. They were dim-witted, had slow reactions, and couldn’t remember things they heard or saw five minutes before.

  She suspected that the teachers at the Scabbard drilled the Wraith mantra into their heads so that they wouldn’t ever forget why they served people who were so obviously inferior to them. “It’s your honor to serve the citizens of the Empire,” the teachers said, over and over. And Hailey had served many worthy humans, inferior to her in talents and abilities, but superior to most people in courage and righteousness. For them, it was, indeed, an honor to serve.

  As she struggled with the comm, she became frustrated. She couldn’t even do a simple thing that probably every teen in the Empire had figured out. Hailey thought about that, now that she was dependent on a regular person to help her get out of her current predicament. She wasn’t just “regular” now. She was inferior. There was nothing special about Hailey Ramirez and the Wraith, Comet, was special artificially.

  Hailey had been hacked: SWORD had reached into her inner workings and tweaked her eyes and ears and brain to do things they weren’t meant to do. Even her physical strength and stamina were artificially enhanced by the spinal implant and the circulatory pump. With Comet gone, there was nothing about Hailey Ramirez that was extraordinary. Hailey felt useless and hopeless. She set the comm down, curled up on the cot, and waited for the real hero of the day to return from her shower and breakfast with the master.

  Not What She Planned

  Hailey waited for four days. The day that Mandy was taken from her cell, Kinkade came back every few hours and took another woman out of her cell and didn’t bring her back. All four were gone, and Hailey had no idea what had become of them. It was even possible that Kinkade had tossed them out of the prefab.

  Knowing she had completely failed those four women depressed Hailey a hundred times more than not being able to hack the comm and free herself. She spent most of her time in her own cell, staying away from the holes in the door, feeling anxious and hungry. Kinkade had not brought her anything to eat since the strip-chess incident. By careful rationing, Hailey had made the pitcher of water last, but it was almost gone now.

  When she needed to stretch her legs, she climbed through to the second cell and paced in the small space. She was in there on the fourth day when she heard Mandy on the other side of the wall whispering, “Hailey.” Hailey pressed her face against the wall and blessed whatever had spared her friend.

  “Mandy, are you OK?” she asked.

  “Yeah. How are you?”

  “Starving.”

  “Here.” Mandy squeezed a piece of bread and cheese through the hole.

  “Thank you! What’s happening out there? How are the others?” Hailey asked as she crammed the food into her mouth.

  “Trip is being really nice to us. We all stay in his bedroom, get showers and food. I don’t know what happened to him. Maybe he’ll take us home soon.”

  Hailey didn’t respond; her mouth was full.

  “Hailey?”

  “Hmmh?”

  “Just wondering if you were still there. I didn’t ever see Trip bring you any food, so I snuck over here to check on you.”

  “Thnmkoo.”

  “Hailey, I’m sorry I didn’t edit the comm. This is the first time I’ve felt safe sneaking over here. But I don’t think we need it now. The ship will be back in a week or so. Trip’ll take us home,” Mandy said hopefully.

  “No,” Hailey swallowed. “He won’t.”

  “Yeah, I think it’ll be OK. I’ll bring you more food, and water.”

  “I appreciate that. But what we need more is for you to hack this comm and complete the command. You remember the sentences I need?”

  “Yeah, Hailey, but I don’t think –”

  “He won’t take you home. Trust me on that. He’s left me here to starve or be killed by his sentries, and he kidnapped all of you, and those are crimes that’ll put him away for life. If you go home, you’ll report him. He can’t have that.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Please, Mandy. Take the comm and make the command.” Hailey pushed it through to Mandy’s side of the wall.

  “Mandy, what are you doing?” Kinkade asked from her doorway. Hailey froze.

  “Oh, Trip. I had a bracelet and I lost it. I thought maybe I lost it in here.” Mandy stood and walked out with Kinkade.

  “MUPA would’ve picked it up if it found the thing in there. You should check MUPA’s storage cylinder,” Hailey heard as Kinkade’s voice faded away down the hall.

  Hailey pried the opening and looked to the floor right below it. The comm was not there, or at least she couldn’t see it. Either Mandy pocketed the thing or kicked it under the cot. Hailey didn’t know. She sat back and hoped that Mandy wouldn’t trust Kinkade.

  For the past few days, Mandy, Shondra, Luna, and Camille had slept in a group on Kinkade’s floor while he enjoyed the bed, inviting one or two at a time to join him. Five sentries guarded the women and ensured their obedience to Kinkade’s demands. The other seven sentries
still kept Hailey pinned in her quarters, waiting to shoot her the instant they “saw” her.

  During the day, the women sat around in the room, grateful to be out of their separate cells and to have a washroom at their service. But Mandy was unsettled. She had the comm Hailey had given her, but it needed to be recharged. Until she found an opportunity, she paced.

  “Stop that pacing, Mandy,” Camille said. “You’re stressing me out.”

  “We have to help Hailey,” Mandy replied.

  “Like hell we do,” Shondra put in. “She’s done nothing to get us out of here and she’s a SWORD agent, according to you, anyway.”

  “She has been doing things, but now she’s trapped.”

  “Better her than me. Trip is finally acting like himself. I don’t want to mess that up and get tossed back into the cot-in-a-box.”

  “Shall we let you do all the shagging with him then?” Mandy said heatedly. “He was ‘hitting’ all of us at the same time. Then he was literally hitting us!”

  “If shagging Trip gets me outta here, I’ll do it,” Shondra declared.

  “You work on your escape; I’ll work on mine,” Mandy replied.

  “What do you mean by that?” Luna asked.

  “I’m working with Hailey,” Mandy said vaguely.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Camille asked.

  “I need to get this comm recharged. Then I’m gonna create a command for the robots and Hailey will have control over them instead of Trip.”

  “What? You do that and we’ll all get thrown back into the cells,” Shondra cried. “Don’t get us in trouble by trying to pull shit like that.”

  “This is the only way to get power over Trip. I think Hailey’s right: he’s not gonna let us go home, ever,” Mandy argued.

  “He can’t keep us here. People are gonna be looking for us. They’ll know we got on Trip’s yacht,” Shondra said.

  “I didn’t tell anyone. I left in such a hurry,” Luna revealed.