Three Worlds - Seduce Me In Dreams Part 2

Ravenna shivered as she cast her eyes down from the heavens and looked at the village, at her jailers, whom she had once treated with respect and honor. A deference they had more than reciprocated. The level of their betrayal burned within her like a fury. She was biding her time, though, before she let them feel it. They all would.

There was not much time, but there was enough. If Bronse came in time, she would wish to help him in every way she could imagine, so that they would meet as they were destined to and would both survive that meeting.

But if he came too late ...?

She would already have been sacrificed for the "good of her people," which would make any chance of saving her almost, if not completely, impossible.

Lieutenant Commander Morse groaned as a high-pitched tone penetrated his sleep. He knew the tone and he knew it inevitably meant that he was not going to get his full eight hours of rack time. Not that he wouldn't survive. He had hundreds of times before. But the First Actives were on downtime, and that meant sleep, beer, and women, and hopefully lots of all three at that. If Bronse had reactivated them without telling him again, he was going to shoot him in the head first and ask questions much, much later.

Lasher gave in and reached to touch the communications pad with a light brush of a finger.

"Morse here."

"Sorry to bother you, Lieutenant, but I have a little problem and I think I'm going to need your ... umm ... special skills to a.s.sist me on the matter."

Masin hesitated for a beat, suddenly coming awake and processing a shipload of information at once.

"Trick?" he asked with surprise.

"Aye, sir."

"Chief, why the h.e.l.l are you calling me at this hour? And don't tell me it's official when I know your a.s.s is strapped to a bed in Medbay."

"No, sir. Actually, I'd like to keep it really unofficial ... if you grasp my meaning."

Lasher sat up suddenly. Trick was never this vague. Not unless he had a d.a.m.n good reason to be. He was practically speaking in code. A very obvious code, Lasher realized as he smacked himself in his thick head for not being quicker on the uptake the first time Trick had greeted him.

"On my way," he said shortly, punching the b.u.t.ton to cut off the communication.

He leapt out of bed and began to jerk on his black uniform pants. His eyes dropped to his knife and gun in antic.i.p.ation of dressing them on next.

Lasher had to enter a special code in order to access Medbay after hours. Luckily his rank allowed him access to that code. He was cautious as he entered the bay, not having a clue as to what he would find. The medics' station was abandoned; apparently the night medics were making rounds or doing whatever it was they did. Feeling grateful rather than suspicious, Lasher walked freely back through the halls of the huge bay to Trick's room, the location of which he already knew by heart. He pa.s.sed a second medics' station and gave a smart salute to the man behind the desk, who automatically jumped up in haste and saluted back. Lasher chuckled to himself. Privilege number one in ETF was always the awe/respect factor that made it rare for the crew members' movements and actions to be questioned.

He pushed into Trick's room. He immediately stepped back to lock the door when he saw Bronse sitting on the chair near the chief's bed with a grim expression on his face, dressed in full uniform and just as armed as Lasher was.

"Have a seat," Bronse commanded politely, indicating a chair on the opposite side of Trick's bed.

Lasher did so without question or hesitation. As he drew himself into the chair, he noted the CompuVid on the table resting across Trick's lap. Apparently the chief had grown bored, and someone had plugged him into the Universal Database to amuse him or shut him up. Possibly both. There was nothing less tolerable than a high-adrenaline soldier stuck with bed rest.

"Comfy?" Bronse's sardonic tone was not lost on Lasher.

"As a babe," Masin said with a cheeky grin.

"Well, then, Trick, how about telling the lieutenant commander here a bedtime story?"

Trick grinned and saluted the commander enthusiastically, although his hand quickly recoiled to his flank as the sharp movement tugged at his healing wound. His first words came out a little strangled with pain.

"I was getting bored, you know. Almost a week down here by myself and all. So I found ways to entertain myself-"

"Let's skip the 'chasing nurses' part of the story, soldier."

"Well ..." Trick grinned, clearly unrepentant. "The medic in charge got tired of me bugging everyone, so he jacked me into the Universal Database. So I'm flying all over the U.D. and I thought it would be funny to ... uh ... visit some places I'd never seen before."

"Translated-I take it-to mean that you hacked into restricted-access sectors?" Lasher queried.

"Which I am totally cleared to do, by the way," Trick argued.

"Under orders, supervision, or reasonable suspicion," Lasher retorted dryly, glancing at Bronse's impa.s.sive expression. Was the commander looking to discipline the junior officer?

"Yeah, well." Trick brushed all that aside with the careless flip of a hand. "So I thought it would make a good joke to hack into the IM database. I mean, all I was going to do was maybe issue you guys some false orders about delivering my favorite foods and an attractive woman."

Lasher glanced at Bronse, who was still playing at being impa.s.sive, but Masin could see the brief glow of humor in his eyes. Clearly something serious had happened; otherwise, the commander would have enjoyed the clever joke. They were always pulling stunts like this during downtime. Actually, it was something of a one-upmanship contest, although mostly among the junior officers.

"To issue orders, however, our young chief had to hack into the command codes in the IM database," said Bronse. "His codes of choice were those of Admiral JuJuren."

Lasher whistled low and with obvious amazement.

"Only you would pick the codes of the hardest a.s.s in the entire IM fleet, Chief," said Lasher. "JuJuren is the one surefire way to get your rank busted down to that of a ground slug if you get caught." Lasher paused only a beat. "Tell me you did not get caught."

Trick scoffed with obvious derision at the very idea.

"But," Bronse said quietly, "our chief did catch something else of interest."

Trick turned the CompuVid screen toward Lasher. With a few light touches on the control pad, cla.s.sified information from internal doc.u.ments started to fly across the screen. Lasher read them quickly, trying to grasp what he was seeing and why it should be of interest. Suddenly a map in 3D with topographical color delineations exploded onto the screen, turning and pivoting on a central axis point that began to fill with names, dates, and what was clearly troop movement and military information in great detail.

"That's the Grinpar Desert. This is the data we just retrieved. North camp ... northwest camp ..." Lasher pointed to the camps as they rotated past him on the screen. "So what's-?"

Bronse almost smiled when Lasher broke off and frowned darkly in his confusion. He loved how quick Masin could be. One man in a million would have noticed a discrepancy that small, in such a short amount of time, even with hints to look for it. Lasher was grim and silent as he finished reading the information that Bronse had told Trick to show him.

"Why?" Lasher ground out suddenly, his anger backbuilding behind his pale jade eyes, the little black flecks floating in the sea of light color seeming more obvious in his outrage.

"Excellent question. According to that information, recon and PhotoVids had already been done prior to our excursion. The IM already had all of the information they needed, so why send us back out there? Which now also casts a peculiar light on why they urged me so strongly to split up the team. Now for the topper."

Bronse nodded to Trick. The young officer pulled up a file that he had recovered from the admiral's erased mail. The letter unfurled good as new on the screen, a testament to the chief's awesome skills. All the protected information on the IM database had "shredder" programs implanted to prevent anyone from doing exactly what he had done after the information was discarded.

A blank directive had been sent from IM headquarters to a receiving computer on Ebbany, divulging the coordinates of Bronse and Trick's location. Attached to that was a command to terminate them.

"That communique is stamped with Admiral JuJuren's personal send-code. Only he knows the code, and only his terminal can accept it and send from it like this," Trick informed Lasher quietly. "The rat-b.a.s.t.a.r.d sold out me and the commander. That was why that armed guard came up on us out of nowhere so suddenly. They didn't expect either of us to make it out alive, and if it weren't for Commander Chapel, we would have been bait for the sand hurricanes by now."

"They?" Lasher bit the word out. "So far I see evidence of only one traitor here."

"I know you aren't that naive. Even an admiral couldn't justify sending the First Active ETF team on a recon that was already done. Someone had to bury the original intel and wipe the database of any information about the team that they'd sent out already. It also struck me that, with all the recon I've done for the IM, except for the major pooch-screw that happened, this was what I would've called-"

"A candy-a.s.sed a.s.signment?" Lasher finished for him. "It wasn't an easy one, but I agree. It wasn't worthy of the First Actives. There are secondary and tertiary teams in the ETF that could've done just as well as we did. Better, apparently, because they didn't have bull's-eyes painted on their naive a.s.ses."

"Easy does it. Who can we trust if not our superiors?" Bronse said softly.

"Commander, clearly we can't trust them," Lasher hissed, pointing to the evidence on the screen.

"We can't trust JuJuren or any of his immediate staff," Bronse corrected. "Our advantage here, thanks to Trick, is that JuJuren has no idea we're on to him. Laid up with nothing better to do, Trick can hack the old man right down to his undershorts and find out exactly how far this cancer has spread. Then we can think about how to proceed."

"What if we go active before we know the whole of it?" said Lasher. "Sir, we're grunts. Bottom line. We aren't intel officers. We have to go where the bra.s.s tells us to go, whether we like it or not. Whether we know it means certain death or not. Unless we bring this information to intel."

"Luckily we're a man down, and I took us off duty. They won't countermand my decision until Trick is operational. I say that gives us two weeks. I don't want to wait that long, though. Trick, only the Great Being knows if you'll get detected snooping around. I know ..." Bronse held up a hand to fend off the indignant retort. "I know how good you are, kid, but there's always somebody better. Besides that, I need you to hurry. There are lives at stake here, and I don't want anyone's death on my hands any more than I wanted yours. Copy?"

"Copy, sir."

"Good. Keep low, keep cool, keep quiet," Bronse warned, as he did at the start of all their missions. "Lasher and I will rally with Jus and Ender later and do some fact sharing. For now, sign off and get some rack time under you, kid. I need you healed up fast."

"Aye, sir," Trick said with a c.o.c.ky but eager att.i.tude as he wiped away traces of his forays into the military database and shut down the system.

Lasher and Bronse rose to their feet and together they exited the infirmary. They waited until they were in regular corridors before they began to talk. The hour was still quiet, so they could talk relatively freely, though in soft voices.

"What's your plan, Commander?"

"To sleep with my knife and my laser gun."

"Mmm, I think I'll do the same, even though they targeted you and Trick. My guess is they were targeting you, and Trick was just an unfortunate bystander."

"My guess says you're right," Bronse said grimly. "But why the elaborate setup? And why now? Why me? I don't mean that in a whiny pity party way, either."

"Perish the thought," Masin said with a chuckle.

"My head is reeling with these questions. None of this adds up. I'm sure I've acc.u.mulated an enemy or two over the years, but to get an admiral to order an a.s.sa.s.sination attempt on me? I mean, do I look like I'm going to cause political trouble? I've followed orders since I was-"

"Sperm," Lasher interjected.

"Just about," Bronse agreed. "I thrive on taking orders and doing my job with little to no questions asked. What kind of threat am I to a man like that?"

"Besides being able to break his neck in forty-two different ways?"

"Besides that," Bronse agreed dryly. He sounded exasperated, but in truth he appreciated Lasher's lightening up of the grim circ.u.mstances. In the span of an hour, everything Bronse had believed in and planned on for himself had been thrown into play. His career and his life were both at risk, and he did not know why. That infuriated him almost as much as the impotent feeling that his strings were being pulled by some maniacal IM puppeteer.

"Well, there's always the big three."

"Money, power, and ...?"

"s.e.x."

"Of course," Bronse said, chuckling. "Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to."

"I'm serious. People do d.a.m.n strange things for s.e.x. Some greatly evil, some greatly good. Same goes for the other two. They are man's three most powerful motivators."

"Well, JuJuren has power."

"He could have more. There is always more. Top of the heap is ... who? Prime Minister of the three worlds?"

"Yeah. That's definitely a good one. Or one of the overlords or emperors on the lower rung of Ebbany maybe. It's the most likely to be corruptible, as you know. And it's clear that he's buying favors already. He wouldn't send us there unless he was highly confident of his success and highly confident that he could manipulate what was happening in the territory."

"Okay. What about money?"

"Ebbany is not a rich planet, and even in the developed cities living is hostile. Tari has all the Delran platinum mines. That's where the money lies."

"Okay, what about s.e.x?"

s.e.x. Bronse's mind immediately swam to the encounter he'd had in his sleep with Ravenna. He almost laughed at how quickly his body remembered every detail of that dream.

Suddenly he stopped walking.

What if the dreams of Ravenna had something to do with this? She had warned him of danger. Danger to his life and the lives of his crew. She had been warning him, it seemed, for quite some time, but it was only recently that he was able to remember that. What was worse, he understood clearly that there was still a future danger out there, somewhere, most likely on-mission. She had behaved and sounded so urgent. He had the impression that this danger was far more imminent than the two weeks that Trick would need to get fully cleared for returning to duty. It would not be unusual for them to be sent out as a foursome. They had been operating without a communications officer like Trick on and off for a full year now.

Bronse shook his head as if the movement could order his scattered thoughts. Why was he taking the portents of a dream so much to heart? Why did he believe in this warning so implicitly? He wasn't even bothering to question it. He was even less inclined to question it now that he had learned of JuJuren's betrayals. He cast a glance at Lasher, who was patiently awaiting his next thoughts. How much should he share with his second? What if Masin began to think he was losing his mind? Bronse couldn't have his second doubting his sanity or his clarity of thought or purpose. It was his job to inspire confidence in all his junior officers, and that included Lasher.

How could he even begin to explain what he himself did not clearly comprehend? If he believed this dream woman, then he would have to believe that she had an ability that was, quite frankly, inconceivable. A precognition of sorts, and a powerful one at that to be so detailed. But the military had researched and tested paranormal and psychic capabilities dozens of times and had found no foundation for them. If there had been even an ounce of reality to the idea of such abilities, the military would have been the first to exploit and incorporate them into the services.

Then again, until an hour ago, Admiral JuJuren had been the least likely corruptible admiral in the IM services. Bronse would have to be infinitely more cautious in the way he thought about things.

"We aren't just grunts, you know," he corrected Lasher belatedly. "We're all highly intelligent and well diversified. We're always given an objective and a plotting from point A to point B and then back again for extraction, but you tell me how often those best-laid plans have gone off without a hitch."

"Not too d.a.m.n often," Lasher agreed.

"And we'd be dead a hundred times over if we weren't quick on our feet and able to outthink our enemies while keeping an eye on the military horizon. There's a reason why people respect us ... and fear us."

"I know that, sir. I was just making the point that we're still subject to orders and military restrictions."

"I know."

"Why don't you just go to intel with this?" Lasher questioned Bronse further. "Why are you dropping it into Trick's lap?"

"Because I trust Trick. Normally, with him being the new guy, I wouldn't say that so easily. I mean, we're still feeling each other out and all. But Trick came to me with this and made me aware. He wouldn't have done that if he was on JuJuren's payroll."

"So that's it? You're afraid that intel has spies?"

"Aren't you? JuJuren's powerful. Spy or no spy, someone he knows or someone who respects him sees his name come across a desk somewhere and they pick up the phone and tip him off. I don't want that to happen. I want the kid to get some better proof than what he has now. A preponderance of information. This way we get a look at what JuJuren's been doing before the bureaucrats f.u.c.k it all up."

Bronse was silent for another long minute, thinking dark and leading thoughts that he wasn't going to share. Lasher wished he could just ask him to spill whatever he was holding back. However, Lasher had known Bronse long enough to realize that he would just p.i.s.s him off if he pushed him before he was ready.

"Lasher, I have a real sick feeling in my gut again," Bronse informed him gravely.

"I know, sir. I feel it too."

"I don't want Justice and Ender going another minute without being on the update. I'll take Ender. You go to Jus. Make sure everyone stays armed at all times, both day and night rotation, and that means backup and covert weapons too. Tell them to choose something nonstandard for at least one hidden weapon. I want everyone to have something up their sleeve that isn't a well-known military trick. Copy?"

"Aye, loud and clear. What say we round up at midday meal in your quarters? I'll pay a visit to Trick right before then, so I'll have updates to share with the crew if there are any to be had."

"Good idea. I want us acting as though we're on-mission. Make it clear. But I also don't want us raising any suspicion, so everyone needs to appear relaxed and off-mission."

"Got it."