Unwelcome Dental Advice

This is the first chapter of the first book of set three. Confused yet? You won’t be when everything is published and you can read them all in order. Trust the process. Book III-I is entitled No Return. This will be the last teaser I give for a while, since I’ve only written the four and a half books. Check back here for other writing.

III-I-I-XXXIII

“I am so fucking late,” Katarina Savinus said, looking down at her watch. The digital display flashed a warning, claiming that if she didn’t make it to the bridge in five more minutes, Commander Hiraak would demote her into the ground. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she repeated with each step.

The Ithian High Command had sent them out weeks ago to orbit a rock in the middle of nowhere, searching for the remnants of an ancient species they only knew by the name “Servitors.” These Servitors were supposed to have been a dominant force thousands, maybe even millions, of years ago. Somewhere along the way, they either all died out or they simply retreated into the vastness of space. Yet they left clues to their existence, one of which was a repeating beacon here on this hunk of rock in the middle of space that had no name. Only a month ago did they receive a transmission from this quadrant. It was a series of blips on a screen to one of the scope-dopes at High Command, but it was enough to warrant the warship Nesperia to be sent with scientific teams to investigate.

Any information regarding the existence of these servitors was considered extremely important, and High Command jumped at the chance to obtain it. At 0056 hours, Kat led the salvage team down to the asteroid – which was as large as the entire Deimos region of Ithmar – to sift through the unexplored northwestern hemisphere. What she and her team found could change everything. The entire expedition had been captured on her bodysuit cam, and now Katarina carried that evidence to the bridge so they could transmit her findings to Command.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she cursed again, scurrying as fast as she could through the oversized warship’s corridors.

“You’re late,” Commander Hiraak said flatly, as the double doors gave a pneumatic hiss when they opened, and Katarina stepped through.

The bridge of the Nesperia was small, compared to some of the capital ships in the fleet. There were several monitors with engineers running numbers on them, the pilot and co-pilot sat at the helm at the windows, and a single chair at the center, where Commander Hiraak typically sat. Right now, however, the commander was standing with his back turned to the door, looking over a holographic display of the asteroid they orbited.

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” Lieutenant Savinus replied, frowning.

Hiraak turned; he was a handsome man, tall and well-built with a meticulously groomed beard and hair slicked back with enough grease to start a kitchen fire. “Do you have the recording?”

“Right here, sir,” she said, holding up the data key.

Hiraak smiled. “Then let’s start, shall we?”

The commander swiped his left hand at the holo-display, causing it to move aside. “Tivas, patch me through to the High Command, and bring it up on display.”

Tivas, their communications officer replied in affirmation. The holo-display flickered and an image of ten Ithian men and women came into view. They had all been talking to one another in some meeting or another, but news of servitor information always took precedence. Each of them turned toward the projector and looked on eagerly.

“Commander Hiraak,” Tanaan Pavin announced. “Are you ready to show us what you’ve discovered?”

“We are,” Hiraak replied. “May I present Lieutenant Katarina Savinus, the team lead who found the vessel?”

Katarina smiled and stepped forward. “Ladies and gentlemen of the High Command. At 2317 hours last night, our radar crews pinged a radio signal from the southwestern hemisphere of Asteroid 14.074k. My team was scrambled to investigate, and at 0113 hours, we discovered a derelict servitor vessel under a pile of basalt that had collapsed an undetermined number of years prior.” Kat inserted the data splinter and transmitted the recording from her bodysuit over the encrypted channel to the High Command, playing the video feedback in real time for them. “As you can see here, the vessel is diamond shaped, looking a lot like a child’s eight-sided die. There are two dozen bores leading out of the bottom of the vessel, where metal – for a lack of a better term – ‘tentacles’ can extend or retract. The purpose of these tentacles has not yet been determined.

“My team was able to penetrate the outer hull and travel inside the vessel, where we astonishingly found items with words that automatically translated from the Servitor mother language to our own dialect, simply by virtue of proximity. If you look here, you can see one of my teammates interacting with a data pad, and the words are translated in real time to the user, based on what language the user speaks.”

The High Command watched with interest as a crew member picked up the data pad and the words and letters on the pad changed to a recognizable language over time.

At this, Jarek Farthings chimed in. “Were you able to interact with this data pad? Or were these items stuck on a singular page?”

“We were able to interact with it. The terminal gave us much information, which I will be uploading separately from this video,” Kat replied. “The most interesting discovery is yet to come, however. Further into the cargo hold, we found what appeared to be a safe. We couldn’t determine the method by which the safe could be opened, but we brought several plasma torches with us, and were able to cut into it after an hour and a half. Whatever metal they used to build the safe was like nothing we’d ever come across before. It cooled almost instantly. We had to crank up the torches to maximum level to put a dent in it.”

The video showed several salvagers using plasma energy to burn through the strange box in the cargo hold. Kat fast-forwarded several minutes to get to the more relevant parts. Once her people were through and the door successfully removed, Katarina proceeded inside the structure, where there was a small metal pedestal with a tiny black cube on it. Next to the cube was a large, blue gemstone. It was beautifully cut, long with smooth facets, and gleamed brightly in the light cast by Kat’s headlamp.

“What are these items, Lieutenant?” Bulent Grenning asked.

Katarina shrugged. “I’m not quite sure. There seemed to be some significance to keeping the gemstone near the cube, though. One of my men took the crystal first and began to walk away with it. Not far from the cube, but definitely not next to it, he claimed to experience searing pain. The next thing we knew, spikes shot forth from it and mangled his hand, nearly severing it.” The members of the High Command winced at the thought. “Jesson, our man, will be fine; he’s being fitted with cybernetics as we speak.”

“Commander Hiraak,” Command member Pavin spoke again. “I want these items brought back to Ithmar, Delta Base, as soon as possible. We’re dispatching two salvage ships to your location to have the Servitor vessel extracted from the asteroid and be brought back as well. Lieutenant Savinus, thank you for your services here. We’ll make sure you and your team are given commendations upon your return.”

The image of the Council winked out and was replaced, once again, with the image of the asteroid. The commander turned to her and stood at attention.

“Good work, Lieutenant. You’re dismissed,” and he saluted.

Kat returned the salute and did an about-face. Once she was clear of the bridge, she let out a huge sigh of relief. After straightening herself out, she made her way to her quarters. She would need rest for the extraction tomorrow.

                                                                ————————-

Kat always seemed to dream of home when she was in deep space for long periods of time. It never failed. As soon as her head hit the pillow, thoughts of her mother and father living out by Lake Tirith in the Omega Sector seemed to crop up and give her a sense of longing. She would dream of the times when she was a child, and they’d take her to the lake to swim and snorkel for arpana fish and buried treasures. Kat never found anything, of course. But in her dreams, she’d find all sorts of treasures: chests full of golden coins, pearls as big as a man’s head, and weapons or armor from the first age. The dreams always made her smile when she awoke.

Tonight, she did not dream of such things. Instead, her dreams were filled with horrid visions of her parents in pain. In this dream, her mother was strapped upside down to a crucifix, naked and bleeding from several open cuts. From her eyelids, leaden weights hung, preventing her from blinking. A ball covered in rusty spikes gagged her. Blood poured from her mouth.

Her father had been hoisted in the air by chains with hooks attached. The hooks held him aloft by his skin alone, and Kat found it incredible, while terrifying, that a someone’s skin was resilient enough to hold a 200-pound man in the air. A hand-spun drill bored into her father’s left ear. A woman with spiky leather rotated the crank that drilled into his head. While Kat couldn’t see her face, she could tell that by the expression in her dead eyes that the woman was smiling.

Kat awoke in a cold sweat, thanking the Great Sphere that it was only a dream and that her parents were likely still alive in the Omega Sector. She stood and went to the sink to wash the sweat off her face. Katarina Savinus had long, curled hair that made most women she came across jealous. It was accentuated by her sharp features and deep brown eyes. Her cyber implants, a pair of CalnusTech plates that covered the neural sockets in her temples glistened with sweat. As she washed her face, a light above her door began to flash yellow.

“What the fuck?” she said aloud.

It was the silent alarm. Either they were under attack or about to be. Only officers had access to the silent alarms, but the lights flashed in every room. As quickly as she could, Kat stripped out of her pajamas and slipped into her fatigues. As an officer, she was allowed to keep a sidearm in her room. The rest of the soldiers and laborers had to use the armory to equip themselves. A PP-17d Inyimo plasma pistol was given to every officer. It was new tech, and very limited. The batteries only lasted perhaps a dozen shots before overheating. They could fire small bolts of plasma energy at a close-to-medium range. It could fry through a Karrikan soldier’s armor with a single shot, leaving a hole in their chest the size of a fist.

The Karrikans, she thought to herself as she checked the charge on the pistol’s energy core. There was a good chance that this was a Karrikan attack. It was no secret that they’d set their sights on the Ithian Empire ever since the Great Sphere came to them. It was as though the Karrikans knew something about it and wanted it for themselves. So far, the Great Sphere had done nothing for the ith. It merely floated in their atmosphere, as though it were waiting for something.

If the Karrikans were aboard the Nesperia, they’d be in the cargo hold, looking for whatever relics her team might have uncovered. But first, she needed to contact the bridge to assess the situation.

“Savinus to bridge, come in!” she said after pressing the call button. “I repeat: Savinus to bridge. Come in!”

There was nothing. Not even static. What was going on here? During these kinds of situations, which had become commonplace in the last cycle, the Command Team on the bridge would lock down the flight deck and barricade it. If no one was on the bridge, where else would Commander Hiraak be?

“Shit,” she swore aloud.

If no one was answering in the flight deck, then something was seriously wrong. Kat quietly opened the door to her quarters manually, hoping to prevent herself from being heard. Satisfied that no one had been alerted to her presence, she slinked out of her room and snuck through the halls. Something was wrong with the main power. Emergency lights had been tripped, which meant that the main generators on either engine were out. At this point, she was just glad they still had oxygen and gravity. There was an emergency generator belowdecks. Hopefully the Karrikans didn’t know their ship layouts.

Wishful thinking, that, she thought to herself. Of course, they knew the layout of their ships. In the last five months alone, three of their warships had been captured in border disputes. The Karrikans had come up with a weapon that could disable a ship’s primary engines, leaving the vessel dead in the water and able to be boarded. They were clever sons of bitches, that was for sure.

Every room she passed was open, and blood was splattered everywhere. Large hunks of flesh and bone clung to the ceilings and walls, dripping and making a wet splattering sound. The sound alone made her want to gag, but the smell of flesh was what put Kat over the edge, forcing her to vomit. That’s when she first heard it: the eerie sound of a woman playfully singing.

“’B’ is for ‘blood,’ which I will spill. ‘C’ is for ‘Cythera,’ who makes the kill. ‘D’ is for ‘death’, an act which I will. ‘E’ is for ‘everyone’ of which one remains still.”

A haunting realization came over Kat. “Of which one remains still?” Was she the only one left?

No, no, no. Wake up Kat!

Lieutenant Savinus pinched herself hard enough to leave a red mark on her hand, and then a voice spoke to her in her head.

There you are!

Cold sweat beaded down her forehead. When Kat turned, she was greeted by the shape of a woman – the same woman from her earlier dream – clad in spike-covered leather which had been smeared in blood. Some of the spikes had pieces of flesh clinging to them. There was a leather mask with a zipper across the mouth of the woman’s face, and her eyes were cold and dead. A blonde, blood-covered ponytail flopped about from the back of her head. Through her head was a bench vise with a spike driving through her skull. The woman inched nearer to Katarina, twisting the vise tighter and pushing the spike further through the skull. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head in pain. Or was it pleasure?

Kat tried to scream, but no sound came out.

                                                                ————————-

Katarina Savinus awoke in bed at her parents’ house in the Omega Sector. It had been two years since the tragedy aboard the Nesperia. Only she lived through the assault, which was still considered an open case. The cameras aboard the ship which recorded every second of every day showed a shadow going through the ship and picking off the crew members one by one. Kat was brought in for a special trial to explain her survival, for which she had difficulty describing what she saw, compared to what the council saw.

The terrifying woman in black leather with the vise in her head never appeared on the recordings. Judges took Kat’s testimony for what it was, and she was discharged from service under honorable conditions, pending a psyche eval. Now she lived with her family and worked for a private security firm employed by Inyimo Tech, one of the leading robotic tech companies. Inyimo was responsible for much of the virtual and artificial intelligence that was found in homes today. It wasn’t glorious work, virtually being a security guard, but it was an honest living considering everything she’d been through. Kat was just thankful to be employed at all, since her psyche evaluations were inconclusive. Many companies wouldn’t hire someone under such circumstances, but Gregarius Inyimo seemed to see something in her, and hired her on the spot.

“Bad dreams, sweetie?” her mother said, walking in the room with a glass of ice water.

“Your blood pressure is too high, Katarina. And your heart rate is elevated. Might I suggest some form of relaxing stretching, such as yoga? I can turn on a soothing mix of music from the Sigma Sector.” It was the standardized Inyimo Virtual Intelligence system that almost every house had installed. The VIS, or Virtual Intelligence Suite, was able to give generic health assessments on the fly, and provide myriad solutions, to boot. It was the equivalent of a live-in maid and home practitioner all in one. All for the low, low monthly price of 67.00 credits. The suite installed at the Savinus home was named “Violet,” and had the sweet voice of a woman born to sing.

“I’m fine. Thank you, Violet,” Katarina replied. “And yes, mother. I had another dream of the Nesperia. They’re still trying to figure out what exactly happened out there. Kalvin called the other day to say that there was a break in the case but couldn’t say what. I’m going in today, before work, to discuss the findings.”

Her mother sighed. Kat was a spitting image of her mother, only now Sally Savinus had shorter gray hair and dark circles under her eyes, which she hid with tons of makeup. “It’ll be good to put this behind us. Was there any news about the settlement?”

Kat rolled her eyes. It was clear that while her parents enjoyed having her around to help, they had no intention of harboring their daughter for the long haul. “No, mother. I assure you, once IT finalizes my promotion, I’ll be out of your hair.”

“Oh, Kat,” her mother groaned. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

But Katarina was already getting out of bed and dressing. She didn’t want to shower, she just wanted out. A shower could be taken at IT.

“The temperature is 53.7° with a slight southwesterly wind, gusting at four to seven knots. Might I suggest a light, wind-resistant jacket?” Violet said sweetly.

Kat rolled her eyes once again and snatched her black leather jacket from the hook next to the door. “See you tonight. I’ll let you know what happens.”