High Crimes: A Pax Aeterna Novel (Pax Aeterna Universe Book 5) Read online

  I do as I’m told. The palm reader warms up, flashes a red light, then cools down.

  “Confirmed,” the computer says, “granting access.”

  The moment I hear the door’s mechanism begin to move, I back up to the other end of the hallway and tear off the guard’s uniform, revealing my black outfit and weapons. It’s show time.

  I blink twice to activate my nanites, then run for the doors.

  Halfway there, I fall to my knees, my forward momentum moving me onward and sliding across the ground. I pull out my blaster, which is set to stun, and aim even as the doors slide out of the way and I slide through.

  There is a short arch of five Marines with weapons at a standby in the small semi-circular antechamber. I shoot even as I get to their middle. Three fall to the ground, leaving two standing. These two begin to bring their guns up, but I’m way faster. Before I come to a stop at the feet of the standing Marine, I push against the ground, shifting my weight to the right.

  I’m lifted into the air by this exertion of force, swinging around the Marine so fast that when I get behind him, he doesn’t even realize it yet. I grab him from behind. The other standing Marine hesitates, and I shoot him in the chest.

  The Marine I’m holding struggles with me. The urge comes upon me to snap his neck. I resist and push him forward and shoot him in the back. The door slams back together. It takes the door about ten seconds to open and close; the same time it took me to take down five highly-trained Marines.

  With a sigh, I realize that I’m getting rusty.

  The four doors before me have signs on them. Communications, Room 101, Room 102, and Room 103.

  I enter the communications room. The room is dark, only lit up by the screens of the computer. It is a narrow room, with the workstations on the right hand side, operators sitting on chairs, and a narrow walkway on the left.

  I aim my gun at the three operators, who are all backed up against the other wall.

  “If you do as I say, you’ll live,” I reply. I aim at the one at the back and fire. He crumples to the ground, stunned. His friends think he’s dead.

  They scream. I aim again, and one jumps in front of the other and yells, “Don’t kill any one again. We’ll do what you ask.”

  “Sometime this month or last month, a call was made from this planet to the Tyreesians,” I say, watching as the eyes of the operators widen. “I want to find out where in this station the message came from.”

  “That’s not possible!” the operator in the front replies. “We closely monitor all communications. I think we’d have been able to tell if there was a communication from this office into Tyreesian space.”

  I flash a dry smile. “Except, of course, if you are in league with the traitor.”

  “No!”

  “Then I suggest you get looking,” I bark. I look at the operator behind and say to him, “You, too!”

  They stumble upon each other to get to their computers. I take a position behind them that’s close enough so I can see what they’re doing and far enough so I can respond to threats from outside the room and from them.

  “Don’t try anything stupid,” I mutter. “If you do, I’ll just kill you and that’ll be it. And then I’ll kill whoever comes storming into this place, too…”

  “What the hell…?” mutters one of them.

  I pause, trying to figure out if he’s referring to the computer or to me.

  “Is that what I think it is?” says one to another.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” say the other. Then he looks at me with total disbelief and says, “You’re right. There was an unauthorized communication that came from this office aimed into Tyreesian space. I have its location.”

  My mind begins to race.

  The game.

  It’s fucking afoot.

  Chapter 11

  Zhang

  The moment I see No One heading away from the chaos zone towards the front desk, I realize it’s my task to take down these Separatists. I know this because aside from the fact that I’m the only one left behind with aliens falling all around me either dead or dying, No One and I are a team.

  I’m not sure where she’s going, but I know that wherever it is, she needs to be there. I know that wherever she’s going, it’s for the sake of this mission. I know this because I believe it, not because I have hard evidence.

  It takes a certain amount of trust to do what I’m about to do, which is taking on a bunch of Separatists without any backup from my superior. Many thoughts begin to lay siege to my mind. What if No One is running away? The summit is not in the direction she’s going in. It’s in the other direction as the carnage and chaos. So why is she headed away?

  My mind begins to present several reasonable and logical reasons why she may be going in that direction, one of which is the fact that it’s safe there. She can easily escape through there. There’s no one dying there.

  I swallow hard. I’m crouched on my feet and bullets and laser fire are streaking around me. The screams are almost deafening. The air smells of charred flesh and ozone. Smoke rises from almost every dead body, filling the corridor and reducing visibility.

  The security personnel are incredibly outgunned, outmanned, and outmaneuvered. They can’t shoot indiscriminately at the Separatists because of the aliens who are still alive.

  The Separatists have no such restriction and they scatter and spray the area ahead with laser fire and bullets, melting walls. I wonder when the cavalry will arrive. Isn’t there supposed to be a Marine detachment to every Terran Union facility? Where are the Marines in this installation?

  My heart begins to pound. I have to do something about this situation before it escalates.

  Some aliens are still alive and they manage to go into the elevator. There are about twenty of them remaining and they’re all scrunched up against the closed door of the elevator.

  While the rest of the terrorists face off the remaining guards, the stabber begins to approach the remaining aliens. He isn’t shooting them yet. He’s taunting them. He begins to call them derogatory terms.

  Amidst the racket of gun fire and regardless of the smoky hallway, he shouts at them, insulting their species and calling them inferior and evil. As he makes each step and speaks each word, my anger builds and mounts.

  I’m crouched by the left wall between the aliens and the approaching stabber. Opposite from me is a wooden door. I lift myself up until I’m resting on my haunches, getting ready to strike.

  “You fuckers need to leave us humans alone!” he roars as he approaches, his gun primed on the thick mass of Sonali, Kurta, and Drupadi.

  “Your disgraceful breeds need to crawl back to the slimy, dirty world where you came from.”

  He fires a warning shot to their right, causing them to tremble and scream some more.

  “We are The Human Confederation,” he says as he approaches. “We don’t deal with inferior creatures. We only deal with humans. Your deaths will prove the point that we will no longer tolerate your kind to pollute our perfect genetic pool.”

  He stops right in front of me.

  I reach for my gun and find my holster empty. My heart climbs to my chest.

  “Die, fuckers!”

  Without thinking, I blink twice and launch myself into the air at the stabber. In midair, my nanites, which I’ve not activated since I started this mission, come online, adding speed and power to my flight.

  I slam onto the stabber, feeling one of his bones break. He’s lifted like paper by my forward push and we both smash into the door. The door is torn off its hinges by the force and we come into a stadium-like theater with a podium at the base.

  We land on the steps of the aisle and I roll, holding him in my tight grip as though he weighed less than a pound. I come to my knees and then fling him with one arm.

  The stabber flies all the way across the room, the entire twenty seven yards stretch, and slams into the edge of the podium. The metal edge bends on impact. I don’t hear
it, but I know the impact would have shattered all the bones in the stabber’s body.

  I come to my feet, nanites surging through my veins. I look at the limp body as it’s interposed in the small bend it’s made on the podium. The stabber looks dead, his gun lying on the ground, his eyes closed, his chest rigid. One action and he’s dead. While I won’t beat up myself about killing the stabber, I do beat up myself about using my nanites.

  I was operated on and enhanced at a very old age, when I was eighteen. I’m not as powerful as No One, who received her nanites implant when she was way younger than me. But I’m powerful nonetheless. At first, it felt cool to be able to do stuff without the aid of something external. It felt cool to have your own personal computer in your head, speaking to you and analyzing things for you as you go about.

  However, when I realized that I’d been turned into a machine of death and carnage, I began to hate it. Seeing people die so easily at my hands and realizing how it makes me feel even more powerful scared the shit out of me. I decided if I couldn’t appreciate the worth of a human life, then I had no business wielding such power.

  Men were like paper in my hands. Things that people thought impossible was a walk in the park for me. Yet, instead of becoming better with it, it made me think, feel, and act worse. This brought me to the conclusion that toys, gadgets, and trinkets don’t make a person good. It’s more of the inner stuff—how people let their mind control their actions, how they make decisions…that’s what makes a person good.

  I swore to never use my nanites for any such purposes—up until now. Look what I’ve done.

  I turn away from the sight of the stabber’s immobile body.

  I sigh, my heart heating up with anger. Anger at the Separatist for being such an ass. Anger, because he made me break my vow. Anger, for not acting earlier with my nanites, knowing I was eventually going to do so.

  And most importantly, anger, for the people who died today. All of them my conscience.

  Then, I hear movement behind me. I swivel on my feet just in time to see the stabber flying towards me at an incalculable speed. I bring up my hands to block him just in time, before he slams into my shoulder first.

  The force of the impact knocks the wind out of my lungs. I’m jolted into the air. The forward momentum sends us out of the theatre, through the opening in the wall, and back into the hallway.

  He slams me into the wall on the opposite side. The impact sends a powerful and painful wave across my body, causing my bones to quiver in their fleshly cast. The hallway trembles at the force of the impact.

  I shake off the impending unconsciousness and shoot off the stabber into the floor. Then we go back through the opening. I stop to kick him in midair. He tumbles into the aisle several yards down, but comes up again.

  “Traitor!” he yells.

  I’m still confused.

  “You’re nanite-enhanced?”

  “Just like you,” he arises. His eyes have taken a blood red configuration. His muscles are buffed up, stronger than usual. The veins on his face are slightly visible and flashes with red light.

  I swallow hard when I realize that his nanite enhancement is over the top. He’s more powerful than I am. But they were done much later in life. And most likely unauthorized. His mind has been affected. I look beyond him and see his weapon lying just by the podium.

  The stabber sees my gaze, but doesn’t follow it.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t have to use it.”

  He zips towards me.

  I run towards him as well. We reach each other in the fraction of a second. He dodges my punch but I can’t dodge his in time. He slams a fist into my abdomen, causing me to sputter blood. He lifts me into the air and smashes me against the chairs. I crash into them, destroying an entire area of chairs, all of which are metal.

  Pain wreaks havoc in all my bones.

  “I’ll skin you alive,” he roars as he walks towards me. “When I’m done, I’ll kill you slowly. I’ll make you suffer…”

  I roll unto my feet and lunge for him. I feint a punch, which he tries to deflect with his hands. In the last second, I bend, pushing all my energy into my front momentum. I slam into his abdomen, hearing the air gush out of his lungs. The impact carries us about and through the air.

  We smash into the wall, then slide down to the floor. I’m hardly down when the stabber slams his two feet onto my chest, sending me tumbling all the way across the theater. I hit an exposed shard of metal that pierces me in my side.

  A scream escapes my mouth. I am about to pull myself out of the metal shard so my nanites can heal me, but then the stabber lands by my side and smashes his feet onto my body, sending the shard deeper into me. I hover on the brink of shock, scream upon scream escaping my mouth.

  Up his leg, I see a small holster.

  I lunge for it, grab the gun, and aim. The stabber’s eyes widen. He can’t respond in time. I shoot the man in the head. He crumples to the ground before me.

  This time, he’s dead for good.

  Chapter 12

  No One

  I stun both operators after they tell me where the communications came from. They collapse in their chairs, limp and with a look of surprise plastered across their face. I couldn’t have them alerting the whole workplace that an invasion is underway. Shooting them is better than risking using a shackle or something that they can easily come out of.

  I exit the communications room. On the floor, one of the marines begins to wake up. Stuns usually last at least an hour. The only way someone can revive from a stun so early is if they are nanites-enhanced, or if they got shot in any of their limbs and not in their head or major organ.

  As I can’t have any of these guys recovering and then looking for me, I stand over the marine, aim, and shoot him straight in the head. His head jerks like I’ve dropped a very heavy load on it. Then, he goes limp again. I look around at the other unconscious marines. No movement at all.

  I proceed into room 103, where the communications operators told me the signal came from. I open the door and slip into a narrow corridor. There are many doors leading into different parts of the office. I walk through the corridor, my hand clenching my weapon.

  I’m nimble on my feet because I’m now in the core of the Operations Command center. Any one of the agents behind these doors can come out at any moment and raise an alarm.

  Armada Intelligence agents aren’t knock-offs of Marines or Armada officers. These guys are specially trained to kill. They may not be Division 51, but they’re way more skilled and powerful than your run of the mill Marine or starship security officer.

  I know I can fend off three or four, but more than that and I will be taken down—nanites or not. So, I have to be very quiet.

  I get to the fifth door on the right. I stand back and prepare to smash in. I hold off on that course of action and think for a moment.

  I don’t want to make any rash decision. Counter intelligence was as fine a field of operations as intelligence. As agents, we weren’t only trained in the art of intelligence, we were also trained in the art of counter intelligence, for the purpose of evading it. Then, we were trained on special skills to nab people who try to evade counter intelligence.

  I stand by the door, keeping my back to the wall and think for a moment. What if the officer behind this door isn’t really the traitor? What if he’s just a victim?

  I begin to imagine a scenario, during lunchtime, when this officer goes out and the real traitor comes from three doors down to send an encrypted communication to the Tyreesians telling them of the defection. Then the traitor slips out just in time before he’s caught.

  If this scenario were correct, then I’ll be knocking down the wrong door and confronting an innocent officer. He or she will definitely make a fuss and others will come in. I’ll have to reveal my identity and make them back away, but by the time they listen to me and the innocent officer explains that he knows nothing about it, the real traitor will be gone.
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  On the other hand, this could be the actual traitor. Maybe the Tyreesians gave him a special device that allows him to send messages that the communications officer can never detect or decipher. Maybe that’s what gave him the temerity to use his workstation at the office.

  I wonder what they promised him. Why would he be working for the Tyreesians? Did they promise him money? Women? Power?

  I know the Armada doesn’t pay the best wages in all of the Terran Union. Hell, even corporations pay their security chiefs way more than the Armada Intelligence pays its top operatives. But you don’t do this job for money. It’s doing what’s right and the patriotism to the Terran Union.

  It’s not about whether the government pays you well or not. For some, it’s about the thrill. It’s about the power and authority. No matter how rich someone is, there are still certain things money can’t buy. But as an intelligence officer, there’s virtually nothing you can’t do. We change the galaxy as officers of the Armada. That’s the motivation, not money.

  So what did they offer him?

  Power? What kind of power? Physical enhancements?

  Nanite technology is very rare. In fact, it’s so rare that it’s considered a myth by some civilians. Sure, you can get it on the black market. But you’re probably going to go crazy.

  Nanite technology is greatly coveted to say the least. I don’t have a problem with mine. The only reason I’m not publicly known to be nanite-enhanced is because of my status as an intelligence officer. The less people know about me, the greater the chances of my missions being a success will be.

  Maybe the Tyreesians have discovered nanite technology and have perfected it. Maybe they’re planning on giving this traitor the technology. Maybe this is what they offered him.

  I seriously doubt a poorly-paid Armada Intelligence officer can resist the chance to have nanites coursing through their veins—nanite technology can make you virtually indestructible. It can make you powerful. It can make you a superhuman…a super hero or super villain.