Burning Bright Read online

  “Lead on,” I instructed her.

  We followed the Lieutenant Colonel deeper into the dark hallways of the abandoned police station. We walked for another two minutes, and she led us to an office roughly four times the size of hers.

  “There should be a terminal port at that desk,” Juliette said as she pointed to the far side of the room. The place had obviously been looted. There was spray paint all over the walls, ceiling, and floor. There was even some paint on the broken bits of furniture stacked in the corner.

  “Got it,” Zea moved over to the terminal station, sat down, plugged her cord in and sat motionless for a few long minutes. Finally, she sighed and pulled the cable out of the desk. “Nope.”

  “Let’s go down to the command center,” Juliette said.

  We followed her out of the office and down the hall to the stairwell where Byron and I once walked.

  “Fuck, this place is so creepy,” Zea whispered as we descended the stairs.

  “We’ll be done soon, Blondie,” Juliette soothed, but the hacker just grunted. When we reached the bottom door to the command center, the policewoman pulled out her card to unlock it. “Here you go. I’d try the center terminals first.”

  “On it,” Zea answered as she moved toward the raised platform in the middle of the room.

  “So…” Juliette whispered to me as soon as the hacker had moved across the room.

  “So?” I asked.

  “What’s the real deal with you two?”

  “We are working on stuff,” I said.

  “Stuff? What’s there to work on? Is it Eve? She’s obviously in love with you, too. I thought you and she were--”

  “Listen, Juliette, come on. This isn’t really any of your business. Just leave it alone.”

  “I’m nosy. It’s what I do. You’ve got four beautiful women on your ship. You aren’t sleeping with any of them? Are you gay?”

  “No, I--”

  “Maybe you prefer redheads?” she asked with a snicker.

  “You are plenty good looking,” I said.

  “I know I am, but thanks. You saying there is a chance? I’m not really looking for a relationship or anything. Just a roll in the hay, if you know what I mean. I find you hotter than the core of a blue star.”

  “I can’t tell if you are joking or not,” I said with a sigh.

  “I know. My sarcasm is part of my charm.”

  “You do it because you don’t want to get hurt.”

  “Maybe,” she said, and then she didn’t speak for a few moments.

  “Nope! Damn it!” Zea called out.

  “Shit,” Juliette swore. “That’s really weird. This thing has access to all the security systems on the station.”

  “There is good news though,” Zea said as she walked toward us. “I was able to see someone accessed the system during that time frame. They didn’t copy anything over, but I saw their query search terms.

  “Oh?” I asked.

  “Yep. They were looking for something called ‘Parnarta.’ Ever heard of it?”

  “No,” I said, “but it’s another lead.”

  “I know of a few other places we can try. There is another one of Nebula Gammon’s administrative buildings around the corner.” Juliette pointed up, and we followed her to the stairwell.

  “Smith, what is the status?” the police officer asked when we reached the first floor of the station.

  “Captain Lennis has not replied, ma’am,” he answered.

  “He’s probably in discussion with them about the hold time,” Juliette said. “Let me know as soon as he contacts you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied, and she let go of the button of her transponder.

  “Where is the next building?” Zea asked when we walked out the front of the police station.

  “That way.” Juliette pointed to the right, but a second later she whipped her head in the other direction.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Don’t say you heard something,” Zea pleaded with a whisper.

  “I heard something.”

  “Fucking ghosts.” Zea put her hand on her pistol grip but didn’t draw it.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” I said. “Trust me, I’d hear something moving. My ears are sensitive.”

  “Must be my imagination,” Juliette said.

  “I’m gonna trust your imagination. Let’s hurry the fuck over to this next terminal.” Zea was already walking into the darkness, and both Juliette and I had to take a few quick steps to catch up to her.

  “Should be right around this corner,” the redhead said as she shone her flashlight at the second building on the left. “Yep. There it is. The ugly-looking three-story building.”

  “It is rather ugly,” Zea said, “but I’m willing to ignore its warts if its got what we need so we can get out of here quicker.”

  “Let me unlock the front door,” Juliette said as she slid her card through the key slot by the double steel doors at the entrance. The door didn’t make a clicking sound, so the redhead swiped the card again.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Lock isn’t working,” she said.

  “I can try to--” Zea started to say, but Juliette interrupted her.

  “The power is off. I don’t think you’ve got enough computer skills to fix that.”

  “Nope. Shit.” Zea sighed.

  I stepped into the doors and knocked lightly on the metal. It felt solid, but I wouldn’t know for sure until I gave it a few kicks.

  “I don’t think that’s going to work,” Juliette said as I stepped back from the door.

  “And it’s going to get the attention of all the ghosts and shit down here,” Zea whined.

  “For the love of the stars, Blondie. You are a computer expert. There are no such things as ghosts.” Juliette covered her face with her hands as she let out an exasperated sigh.

  Zea inhaled to reply, but before she could, I slammed my boot into the seam of the double doors. I hadn’t really expected it to work, but the locking mechanism snapped, and the doors flew open with a deafening crack.

  “Huh. That actually worked,” Juliette said.

  “After you.” I gestured into the dark building, and the policewoman entered.

  “I’m just fucking with her, I don’t actually believe in ghosts,” Zea whispered as she leaned her mouth into my ear. Her breath was warm and soft against the side of my neck, and the darkness around us suddenly felt less oppressive.

  “Ahh, I figured,” I replied.

  “Well, I’m not gonna be surprised if there are ghosts and shit down here, but you know. I’m not too worried about it.” She chuckled and lightly slapped my ass before she walked inside.

  “I’m not familiar with the layout of this building, but we can probably find the biggest office on the ground floor and use that one,” Juliette said as she pointed her flashlight beam past the small foyer and into one of the hallways. There were three leading out from the main entrance area, and I pointed toward the one on the far right.

  Some of the doors were locked, but we eventually found an open one. The terminals in here weren’t looted, but the power wasn’t working, and Zea asked me to yank one of the machines off its desk so she could get to the connection which led into the ground.

  “This shit is so old and crusty,” the hacker said with disgust as she plugged her cord into the slot on the desk.

  “At least a hundred years.” Juliette shrugged, but Zea didn’t answer. She was doing her usual rigid stance while she closed her eyes.

  “How does it work?” I whispered to her.

  “Huh?” she opened one of her eyes to look at me, and the orb glimmered from the light on our suits.

  “What do you see when you close your eyes? Sometimes you close them. Sometimes you don’t.”

  “Oh, ahhh. It’s a command prompt nine times out of ten. Sometimes I’m able to really interface with it and I can get a GUI running.”

  “GUI?” I asked.


  “Graphical User Interface. I pretty much see what’s on the display screen. I can see it with my eyes open, but the light from our flashlights is kind of distracting.

  “So it’s like having a screen in your eyes?” Juliette asked. “Why not just get display glasses?”

  “It’s more to it than that, I don’t have to type, or do any sort of manual input. I can think of what I want to happen, and it happens immediately. Hacking is an art and a science of preparedness. I’ve built eighty-seven different executable tools I keep in my computer. When I first access a system, I’ll upload what I think I need to use into here,” she tapped her head where the cord plugged into her skull, “so I can instantly use it. I can also write code on the fly, build new tools, or mutate ones I already have if I need to. I would have to manually type all that in if I used a visor.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “Thanks for explaining it to me. Can you show me more when we have some downtime?”

  “Yeah. I’d love to. Of course, we don’t really have any downtime.” She let out a little laugh, and it looked like her cheeks were blushing a bit.

  “Hey, Blondie, enough flirting. Can you see anything in there or not?” Juliette sounded a bit annoyed, but Zea didn’t say anything in reply. She just closed her eyes and took a long breath.

  “Yeah. I’m in. I started running a query on anything accessed through a connection in District H during that time stamp. This might take a few minutes.”

  “Alright,” Juliette said, and she turned to the door of the office.

  “Did you hear something?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she answered flatly.

  “You sure?” I asked.

  “Just nervous. I didn’t hear anything, but I feel like we are being watched. It’s not a feeling I get often.”

  “Fucking ghosts. I’m telling you, this place is haunted,” Zea said. She wore a shit-eating grin on her face, but her eyes were still closed.

  “What was it you said about you doing your job and me doing mine?” Juliette grumbled to the hacker.

  “Touché. I’ll shut up now.” Zea’s grin grew wider on her face.

  “I trust your instincts. Wait here.” I stepped out into the hallway and glanced into the darkness. I didn’t hear anything, or smell anything, but I knew that the best pilots tended to have a sixth sense for danger. If Juliette was feeling uncomfortable, I was going to bet there definitely was something out here.

  “I’ll go scout out front,” I whispered back into the room.

  “I’ll go with you,” Juliette said.

  “Hell, no,” Zea moaned. “I’m not staying in here alone. Can you both wait? I just need another minute or two.”

  “I’ll stay,” Juliette said as she rolled her eyes.

  The walk down the dark hallway back to the lobby of the building only took me thirty seconds, but I paused every few steps to listen. My hearing, sight, and sense of smell was more advanced than a normal human, but I still didn’t hear a sound in the dark, dead city. Nor did I smell anything. To ensure there absolutely was nothing there, I turned off the light on my suit and sat completely motionless for a minute and a half. It was a bit of a maddening experience to sit here in total darkness, but I still didn’t hear anything from inside the building or outside in the streets of District H.

  “Sorry, nothing out there that I could find,” I reported to Juliette when I returned to the room where I had left the two women.

  “Meh,” she said with a shrug.

  “Zea, how we looking?” I asked.

  “I just asked her, she didn’t answer,” Juliette said.

  “I’ve got something. They accessed a file with the label P-A-*-*-*-A-*-T-A. Looks like the file was a bit corrupted. It’s a video log. Weird, its creation date was from over a hundred years ago. I’m downloading it.”

  “How is a file created before the station was built on the mainframe?” Juliette asked.

  “Shit, I dunno. They could have taken some storage drives from one of their old terminals. Maybe part of the station was built from another ship. Could be any reason.”

  “The mystery is increasing a bit,” I said. “How did the crew from Dance to the Dirge know the file would be on this station?”

  “We’ll probably know more when we get it back to Persephone. I’ve got it now. Let’s get the hell out of here.” Zea unplugged her cable from the terminal.

  “It will be a ten-minute walk back,” Juliette said. “Let me check with Smith and see how the Elaka Nota situation is.” The redhead reached for her transponder. “Smith? What’s the status?”

  “Still nothing, ma’am.”

  “That’s strange,” Juliette said.

  “He did say he would update me, ma’am.”

  “Are you watching the video feeds for the port where they are?” Juliette asked.

  Smith didn’t answer, and Juliette’s eyes narrowed.

  “Smith? You better fucking tell me you are watching the video feeds.”

  “Uhhh, no, ma’am. Captain Lennis told me that he would--”

  “You idiot! Get them up! Now!”

  “Yes, ma’am! I’m sorry. I just--”

  “Shut the fuck up and turn on the video feeds!”

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” Zea moaned.

  “Oh my god. No!” we heard Smith cry out through the transponder.

  “What?”

  “They’re all dead! All of our security teams are dead!”

  “Where are the Elaka Nota soldiers?”

  “I don’t see them. It doesn't look like they are in the harbor anymore!” Smith’s voice was frantic.

  “Shit,” Zea and I swore in unison as my stomach completed its seventh backflip.

  “Fucking find them, and call all the other captains. Put the whole station on lockdown, red alert. We are under attack.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  “We need to get back to Persephone,” I said as I stepped back out of the door with the two women close on my heels.

  “We should have enough time to get back. It will take them at least fifteen minutes to get to Persephone’s dock by train, and locking down the station will stop it from working.” Juliette sounded as if she was trying to reassure us, but it wasn’t helping much. I’d made the wrong choice. I’d guessed they might go for Persephone, but now that it was actually happening I wished I’d just taken Zea’s recommendation and made a run for it.

  “You don’t know Elaka Nota. These guys are the--”

  “Get down!” I shouted as I dove away from the street exit.

  I saw the flash from a gun muzzle on the far roof of a building, and half a second later the bullet tore through the new cuirass and into my chest, shredding my right lung and passing out of my back as if I wasn’t even wearing armor. It should have hurt like hell, yet my mind numbed the pain. I was only concerned with making sure Zea wasn’t in the line of gunfire.

  The blonde hacker was on the ground next to me, and for a split second, I feared that the armor-piercing bullet had passed through me and hit her. Then I realized she was uninjured, and I pushed her away from me just before the next rain of bullets peppered the entrance.

  “Fuck!” Zea and Juliette both screamed as a torrent of metal slugs smashed into the floor at the doorway. I’d managed to roll out of the way so that I was lying beside Zea, and Juliette was still standing next to the double doors.

  “You’re hit!”one of the women shouted, but I couldn’t tell who it was over the snare drum sound of the bullets hitting next to us.

  “I’ll be okay,” I stated as I coughed out a mouthful of blood. For some reason, I still didn’t feel any pain, but it probably meant that my body was beyond shock. Most likely, I’d get a punch of agony in a minute or so.

  “You don’t look like you’ll be okay.” Zea’s hands were on my shoulders, and her face was white with terror.

  “This isn’t the first time I’ve been shot.” I tried to laugh, but instead hacked up another few cups
of blood. The situation wasn’t really funny, but the bullet could have been twenty centimeters to my left and ended my life instantly, so there was at the very least a reason to smile.

  I’d gotten lucky again.

  The bullets stopped for half a second, and Juliette kicked one of her long legs into the right door. It swung closed and made a clicking noise, but the movement caused another flurry of gunfire.

  “Looks like we can tell Lieutenant Smith that we know exactly where those Elaka Nota fuckers are,” Zea said as soon as the gunfire paused.

  Chapter 3

  “Is there a back door?” I asked Juliette, or at least, I tried to ask her, but I ended up coughing when I tried to say “door.”

  “I don’t know, but I’m surprised you can even talk.”

  “I’m tough,” I rasped. “I don’t think the bullet was that large.” The monster in my stomach wanted to come out and obliterate our attackers, but I pushed it back with what was left of my willpower.

  Then the pain from my chest wound punched into my mind, and my brain started to scream.

  I’d be able to heal through this injury even without changing into my tiger-man form, but it would probably take me a good hour, and I’d need to drink a lot of fluids to replace the blood. The beast wasn’t happy with the delay, and it screamed in my mind. It didn’t have unlimited energy, but it could write checks that my human body would have to pay for at a later time. It was why I needed to sleep so much as soon as I shifted back into a human.

  “How many do you think?” I croaked at Juliette as I tried to roll to my feet. The pain was excruciating. It felt almost impossible to push against the ground with my hands.

  “At least six,” she said.

  “I’m going to have to shift,” I said. I didn’t want to right now because it meant that I’d be out of commission as soon as we got back to Persephone, but if I didn’t switch, we might not make it back there.

  “Blondie, see if you can kick the other door closed,” Juliette whispered to Zea.

  “You are fucking crazy! There is no way--” Zea let out a gasp, and I turned to see a drone float in through the single open door. It looked like a thirty-centimeter wide metal eyeball. The robot made absolutely no noise as it traveled through the air, and I guessed they had been the source of Juliette’s uneasy feelings of being watched.