Starship Eternal (War Eternal Book 1) (33 page)

"You do this to all the new recruits, don't you?" Mitchell said.
 

Ilanka laughed. She was standing opposite of him on an old, worn gel mat, barefoot and dressed in her grays. Her hair was tied back behind her head in a pony-tail, her face glimmering with the sweat of her exertion. "Only the recruits I like. You are good fighter."

They'd been sparring for an hour, hand-to-hand, in the back corner of the gym. Ilanka had made him promise to come down with her before they reached Liberty, and after two days portioned between reviewing data on the Goliath and sleeping with Millie, he had made good on his word.

"I'm not," he said. "Bigger, yes. Longer reach. You're just as good as I am." He wasn't being nice. He had been a mid-level martial artist on the Greylock, and Ilanka was giving him a tough workout. His size advantage was the only thing keeping him ahead on the point system they had agreed to.

"Sticks will even things out then, yes?" she said. She was holding her own pair of the sparring sticks, and with the press of a button they extended out just a little further than his, giving her an even reach. The sticks could be used as an extension of the arm, or more like a knife - that was up to the user's discretion. The fact that Mitchell had never used them before left him feeling more than a little overmatched before they even started.

"I think you might have a slight advantage," he replied. He practiced the wrist snap that activated the shock-tip a few more times. The he slapped himself on the arm with it to test the potency.

It hurt. A tight sting formed where the tip touched him, and then spread up his arm as a shockwave of painful heat. He had to control himself to keep his grip on the other stick, and his clenched his jaw in a successful effort to not cry out. Painful. Survivable.

"That was dumb thing to do," Ilanka said.
 

"Better than being hit and not knowing what to expect."

"True. Are you ready?"

"As ready as I'll ever be."

She nodded and then charged him, her sticks spinning in her hands. He backpedaled away from her, certain that she had just completely suckered him to get even with his point lead.

"You hustled me," he said as he frantically tried to keep up with her strikes. He felt the stick tapping him on the shoulder, the elbow, the thigh. She hadn't activated the shock. Not yet.
 

"Is only fair," she said. She backed up a step, making him think she was going to give him a breath. Instead, she flicked her wrist at the same time she extended the stick. The tip caught him on the back of the hand, and the shock made him drop one of the sticks.

"No, it isn't," he grunted. He tried to bend down to pick it up, but she threatened another shock, changing his tactics.

"War is never fair, no?"

"That depends on who you ask."
 

He stepped forward, trying to get past her guard with his stick, which he held more like a knife - a weapon he was more comfortable with. She batted it aside and caught him on the shoulder, bringing another stinging wave of pain.

"Also true," she replied. "It is all fair to me."

They moved across the mat, trading blocks and attacks. Mitchell took three more hits on his appendages, each strike causing him pain.
 

"What is score now?" Ilanka asked.

"I thought you were keeping track."

"I am. It is twelve to ten, your lead." She smacked him on the arm with the stick. "Twelve to eleven."

"I don't suppose you want to quit now?" he asked. The stick came in at him again, and he dove to the side, rolling away from her and back to his feet.

"You are supposed to quit when ahead, no?"
 

"Yes. How about if I quit?"

"Then you forfeit and I win."

He caught her incoming wrist with his free hand, quickly snapping the stick against her thigh. Her face tightened, but she didn't seem to notice the blow otherwise. "Thirteen to eleven."

"Nice," she said. She backed up a step and they faced-off. Then she came at him again, a flurry of blows and three incredibly fast taps hitting him in rapid succession and leaving him disarmed and struggling to shake it off. "Fourteen to thirteen," she said.

Mitchell laughed. "Damn. I quit." He tried to straighten himself up. "This won't leave me impotent, will it?"

"Millie would have my head for that," Ilanka replied. "No."
 

The mention of Millie having anyone's head drove them both to an immediate silence. While they both knew Anderson's demise had been self-precipitated and necessary, it was still an uncomfortable topic. He was well-liked among the rest of the crew, and it had taken the backing of Shank, Ilanka, and surprisingly, himself to help calm the nerves that had resulted. It didn't help that Millie had informed them of the decision to abandon the assigned mission and head to Liberty immediately after. If it hadn't been for Cormac standing guard in full-exo and Shanks' reassurances to his grunts, things might have gotten ugly. The scene had shown him how much pull Shank had, and that if Anderson had ever wanted command more than he wanted sex with Millie, he might have been able to pull it off.

"What happened between you and Anderson?" Mitchell asked. "That made you enemies." He hadn't even realized they were until he had seen the look she gave him, once he was paralyzed and broken.

"He was onboard because he went on a rampage after a campaign on Exelon, which is my home world."

"The attempted coup? That was years ago."

"Before I was enlisted, when I was little girl. I was in small town, Stovic, outside the capital where the coup took place. Anderson was part of the Space Marine company that arrived to bolster the government defenses. After the revolutionaries had been defeated, he took it on himself to go to nearby towns and rape some of the women, and kill some of the men."

"He told you all of this?"

"Yes, when he learned I was from Exelon. We got into argument, and he began to brag about what he had done. He told me he might be my father, and I broke his nose and his arm before Millie put a stop to it."

"She should have let you kill him then."

"She might agree with you now. It was the reason he wasn't allowed off ship. He couldn't be trusted not to do it again, but he had other skills, especially training new meat. I think the only reason he never attacked Millie was because of that bionic hand of hers. Your promotion, and your favor in our Captain's bed was more than he could take."

"It was a stupid thing to do."

"It was. I'm glad he did it. I've waited five years to see him get his."

Mitchell wiped some sweat from his brow with the bottom of his shirt. Millie had said they were the best of the broken. Between her story and Anderson's, along with Ilanka's satisfaction at the Lieutenant's death, he was beginning to understand exactly what she meant. Did that fact that he was glad the man was gone make him one of the broken, too? No, he was sure that had happened the moment Ella had taken the Shot and paid the ultimate price.

A knock on his p-rat interrupted his thoughts. It was Singh. "Do you have something?" he asked.
 

"I do. Come see me in engineering."

"I have to go," Mitchell said to Ilanka. "Singh says she got something. Thanks for the exercise." He leaned in and kissed her cheek.
 

"We'll try again, yes? You need practice with sticks."

"Rematch. Absolutely."

"I'll ride lift with you. I need a shower."

Mitchell wondered what the engineer had found. He had transferred most of the Goliath data to a separate part of the databank so that she could review it, their need for security reduced in their treason. He had searched for more information on the woman in the photo, the one who appeared to be Christine, but there was surprisingly little in the archive and queries had been fruitless. Singh had come up with the idea to create a new algorithm that would work to locate her in references to the other crew members, or to Goliath in general. To find her needle in the other haystacks.

It seemed she had made hay.

Millie was already in engineering when he arrived. She was standing near the data terminal, perusing a list of operational statuses. Watson had only been incarcerated in storage for two days and already the remaining engineer had to make decisions on which systems to fix, with the hopes that they would catch up eventually. Two of Shank's grunts had been dispatched to help her with simple tasks, but teaching them the complex workings of a starship was not a quick or easy process.

"Captain," Mitchell said on entering the space. Millie looked up and him and smiled.
 

"Mitch. Are you cheating on me?"

Mitchell grabbed at his sweaty clothes. "If sparring equals cheating, yes." He knew she was joking. They had both agreed their sexual activity was a casual endeavor, even if the time they spent at it was anything but passing.

Singh didn't react to the ribbing. Then again, she didn't react to anything outwardly. Watson's imprisonment and Anderson's death had both seemed to leave her unaffected.

"What do you have?" Mitchell asked the engineer.

She knocked his p-rat, opening a channel between the three of them and transmitting a dataset of images and videos. "Pick one," she said.

He did, selecting a video of the crew of the Goliath during a routine simulation. The view was focused on the Commander, but he could see Christine's head in the top left corner of the stream.

"Not your best choice," Singh said.
 

The video disappeared, followed up with a photo. He wasn't sure where it had been taken, but it showed a couple of the members of the crew talking in the foreground. Christine was visible in the background. They were all wearing uniforms with name tags pinned to them.

"Taken at a black tie gala, two days before the launch of the Goliath. There were only candid shots, and somehow she avoided being in the foreground of any of them. I only found this one, but it was enough. I employed an algorithm to extrapolate the name from her badge, using the color variations in the shadows around the embossing."

"That sounds hard."

"Not really."

"Who is she?" Millie asked.

"Her name is Major Katherine Asher," Singh said. "She was an Air Force pilot. From what little I found on her in our archives, quite a good one. She served in the Xeno War."

Mitchell stared at her. She was blurry in the background, but the resemblance was unmistakable. If she wasn't Christine Arapo, there had to be a connection somewhere in the family tree.

"What else do you know about her?" Mitchell asked. "You didn't find much?"

"No. Less than I would have expected. Much less. There are thousands of photos and videos in the archives, and each of the crew members turns up as the subject hundreds of times. Except for her. She isn't the focus in any of them, and as the pilot of Earth's first starship, it would be expected she would draw a lot of attention. Especially because she's beautiful."

Mitchell glanced at Singh. He had never seen Christine as beautiful. Pretty, maybe. "So why isn't she?"

"If I had to guess, I would say that someone tried to remove her from the archive."

"Who?" he asked.

"That's a stupid question."

Mitchell bit his lip. Singh certainly wasn't afraid to be blunt. "I won't ask why either, then. She's important to this whole thing, here and now. We need to get Major Arapo off of Liberty and find out what she knows."

"That's not good enough," Millie said. "Christine Arapo can't be Katherine Asher. That would make her four hundred years old." Mitchell started to argue, but she put up her hand to silence him. "Yes, I know you see a strong resemblance. Maybe she's a great-to-the-nth-power grandmother. Maybe it's just a cosmic coincidence. Maybe it has something to do with the whole idea of eternal reincarnation. Or, maybe she's one of them, like your replica was. I don't know, but we can't assume that Major Arapo does either."

"She knows something. She helped me escape."

"Which is why we are still going to try to pick her up, but we need to cast a wide net to make sure we get what we're after. "

"What are you suggesting?"

"Data. As much as we can grab."

"Liberty has public databanks we can-" Singh started to say.

"Not public," Millie said. "Military."

"Military?"

"They have historical records that stretch back to the twenty-first century, copied into the main banks of every major installation on every settled planet. Katherine Asher was military. She'll have a record."

"How do you know it hasn't been erased?" Mitchell asked.

"I don't, but military security is much stronger than civilian. There's a chance those archives are intact."

"I can't break security like that on my own," Singh said. "Not in any reasonable amount of time. I hate to say it, but I need Watson."

There was a long pause while Millie considered the request. Word had gone around the ship about Watson's imprisonment and his past transgressions. The only thing that was keeping the engineer safe was that only the senior officers knew where in the ship he was being held. They couldn't move the equipment to him, which meant he would have to come to the equipment. How long would he last after that?