Breaking Point Read online

  As Vega watched the power meter in his HUD creep upward, Faisal searched the planet for Gendin, Reel, and Silky. So far, Faisal hadn’t detected any signs of them. Either they had vanished thanks to a new jamming routine Silky was using, or they had already made it off-world.

  Faisal provided a running commentary on his search, but Vega had silenced the channel. He didn’t have the energy or the mental focus to help him. He was still dazed and exhausted.

  After dumping his Centurion armor along the way to the engineering station, Vega had stripped off the bodysuit he wore underneath. It was ripped and stained blue with his blood. His synth-skin was covered in scratches, cuts, and deep bruises.

  His nose was broken, and he had a hairline fracture along his brow. A glance at his reflection had shown his face to be a bloody, bruised mess. All thanks to Gendin’s force-knuckles.

  The cracked ribs were a significant concern. Given that chunks of concrete and a steel beam had fallen onto him, he should be thankful that the damage wasn't worse.

  His biggest problem, though, was the damage to his right temple where the plasma bolt had pierced his helmet after his force field went down. A large patch of skin was burned away, and his skull was scorched and cracked, the shot having nearly penetrated through to his brain.

  One more shot and she would've killed me. The thought flashed through his brain repeatedly. It was a moment he wouldn't soon forget.

  The concussive damage from all those attacks still had his HUD flickering, and his vision hazed along the edges. He wasn’t even close to being fit for duty. His body had immediately released a swarm of nanobots to begin making repairs, but it would take a week or more for them to entirely fix his ribs, skull, brow, and nose.

  A hundred years ago, it would've only taken the bots a couple of days to make those repairs, but they deteriorated over time, and he'd yet to find a way to replace them. He'd extracted some from another android he'd killed but then discovered that nanobots were keyed to their host.

  The only repositories of unlinked bots would be on Terra, Mars, or Venus. Assuming any bots there had survived the Tekk Plague. And no one could enter the Terran system. The still active defense systems, untouched by the plague, were strong enough to keep out the entire Federation armada.

  He could boost his nanobots' effectiveness by ten percent by shutting down all his systems. That would also increase the recharge rate for his heart. But he didn't want to do that given the situation.

  The most effective thing he could do would be to return to the Spider’s Lair, his home base, a small space station located in the depths of space between two uninhabited star systems.

  There he could enter the android restoration chamber he’d salvaged from a wrecked naval vessel and more than triple the rate of healing. The chamber alone could fully restore his synth-skin.

  Unfortunately, the Spider's Lair was many light years away.

  Faisal swooped in. “Bad news, boss. I’m almost certain they’ve scarpered.”

  “Evidence?”

  “Aside from the fact I can’t detect them anywhere?”

  “Yes,” Vega responded, irritated that Faisal wouldn’t just get on with it.

  “Not long after the explosion, a starship departed for Titus II. I don’t have a passenger manifest for it or anything. Which makes it an excellent candidate for Gendin and Reel. Also, I don’t think the ship is as likely to get boarded and searched by the government in the Titus system.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a Hydrogenist ship. Which is a good play. I think it’s unlikely people would suspect they’d be onboard a ship filled with those idiots.”

  “The government and maybe some minor players might fall for it. But the Reapers, Thousand Worlders, and any bounty hunter worth a damn will search every ship they possibly can.”

  “But they can’t physically search them all, and a beat-up Hydrogenist ship coming to the Titus system from Zayer, following a flight plan they filed a long time ago, isn’t going to make them a priority. Most will scan the vessel, but then when…that chippy…jams their sensors, they’ll move on.”

  Vega nodded. “I’ll agree that it’s a good move, linking up with the Hydrogenists. Set a course for the Zayer system.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to scan for a few more hours, boss?”

  “There’s no point. Even if they’re still here, I’m out of commission.”

  “We could take out the Hydrogenist ship, boss. It hasn’t made it anywhere near the breakpoint yet. If we hurry, we might be able to catch up to them.”

  “If we destroy that ship, we kill Reel, and she’s worth a lot.”

  Faisal hovered in lower and closer to him. The glossy black cog was the size of two fists when his blades were retracted.

  “Look, boss, I get that. But Reel is small potatoes next to the girl. Losing Reel is acceptable if it means we can take out Gendin and…that chippy. We should’ve killed Reel and Gendin immediately when we had the upper hand. Capturing them wasn’t worth it.”

  “Hindsight, Faisal.”

  They'd had a good strategy. The missile they'd fired should have taken out Silky. If it had, then Silky never would've foiled their plans in the factory.

  “That chippy’s the mastermind, boss. He’s our most dangerous adversary here. Don’t forget the role he played in the Fall of the Benevolence. He’s dangerous. Taking out the Hydrogenist ship will neutralize him. Take out all three, and the girl’s most skilled allies are out of the picture.”

  Vega would never admit it to Faisal, but taking out Mitsuki Reel appealed to him greatly. The memory of the impact resonated in his mind even as the ache continued. She was lined up for a second shot… He could be dead now. All his grand plans ruined…

  Vega sighed. “Maybe destroying the Hydrogenist ship and killing them now is the right call. The problem is we don’t know the girl’s location. So without them, we have no leverage.”

  "We know she can't be too far away, boss. So we keep searching and stay vigilant. She'll emerge, especially once Gendin and Reel have been taken out. She can't stay in deep space forever. And we know she'll make a mistake. She's young and foolhardy, and she's already made a huge blunder once."

  Vega gazed at his reflection in Faisal's surface. His nose was bent, his forehead darkening with a bruise, dried blood smeared across his face. He turned and out of the corner of his eye peered at the deep wound and the fracture lines on the part of his titanium skull that was exposed.

  Rage swelled within him, and the face in Faisal’s surface hardened.

  “Set an intercept course for the Hydrogenist ship, Faisal. Pour everything we’ve got into the engines.”

  10

  Tekeru Jones

  Tekeru Jones woke suddenly and cried out when a pale orange fluff of fur pounced onto his chest and mewed loudly into his face.

  Heart hammering, he leaned his head up and stared into the triangular face of a little starkat, a kitten on the verge of becoming a cat. Panic subsiding, Tekeru groaned and chuckled as he plopped his head back on the pillow.

  “Peachy.”

  The slender starkat lowered its front half while keeping its butt up and swished its extraordinarily long, fluffy tail back and forth.

  Tekeru held a hand out to the side and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. Peachy hopped off his chest and went to the outstretched hand to get his scruff scratched. As he curled his fingers underneath the cat’s chin and rubbed, Tekeru closed his eyes and attempted to relax his mind and return to sleep.

  But his heart rate was up, and he couldn’t calm the thoughts that built rapidly from gloomy clouds into a raging storm. Now that he was awake everything that had happened over the last two days came rushing back.

  Peachy was not his cat. Peachy had belonged to Urlanda. But Urlanda was dead. Along with twenty-three other comrades, including his mentor and the leader of the expedition, Professor Bonz, and two of his best friends, Rylee and Lake. All of them killed senselessly.
Murdered by pirates. And for no good reason. They’d never harmed anyone and had few valuables worth stealing.

  As part of what would have been a two-year research mission, they had gone to the Kor system to explore a partially terraformed planet, a project abandoned a century ago with the collapse of the Benevolence.

  Tekeru had invested his life into that expedition, giving up the comforts of home and a girlfriend unwilling to wait for his return. He was an assistant professor at the University of Stygia. It was not the most prestigious place he could have gone, but his desire had been for research, not teaching. And so he had turned down tenured positions at five different elite universities that had all sought him out.

  He was too humble to admit it to others, but the truth was that he was brilliant. With hard work and dedication, he was bound to become one of the top academics in his field. Five to ten years of research before taking up a full position at a university could catapult him to the top.

  Truthfully, that didn’t matter much to him. Reaching the top wasn’t about attaining a position or accolades. It was about gaining the opportunity to study whatever he wished, using as large a budget as possible.

  But now, after fifteen months of traveling through space, everything had fallen apart. His detailed scans and analyses were preserved on his chippy, Maximilian. But the physical samples he’d taken from many worlds were lost. As was the ship and crew.

  After they’d been ambushed, with one pirate vessel exploding and the other disappearing into wraith space, he’d sent out a distress signal. His ship, the Falling Rain, was in critical condition. Many of the crew had already been lost. There were other survivors, but he’d been stranded on the bridge, unable to reach them.

  The Outworld Ranger arrived as soon as possible, but due to the pirates and a World Bleeders destroyer with its accompanying starfighters, they’d only been able to save him and Peachy. And they’d only escaped thanks to an especially harebrained scheme that he still couldn’t believe had worked.

  He was grateful for their help, obviously, but now he was trapped on the ship with them. And they were highly wanted people with multiple criminal organizations, the Tekk Reapers, the Empire of a Thousand Worlds, countless bounty hunters, and even the Terran Federation government pursuing them.

  He was no longer Tekeru Jones, Assistant Professor. He was Tekeru Jones, wanted criminal. Until he could find a safe way off this ship, their destiny would be his fate.

  And getting off this ship wasn't going to happen anytime soon. They were currently hopping around in the depths of space a few light years beyond the Titus system, waiting for two other members of their team to finish a mission.

  Even when the others returned, he had no idea how long it would be before they ventured near a civilized planet or space station. Although a frontier world might be for the best. If he parted ways with them on a developed planet with a significant government presence, his affiliation with them was likely to be discovered, and he would be immediately seized and questioned by the authorities.

  He'd be lucky if it were the Feds. He had rights as a citizen. They would let him go after questioning him. And he doubted there was much he could tell them that they wouldn't already know. If the crew knew he was going to leave them, then they weren't likely to share their future plans with him.

  But if some other group found him… He shivered at the thought of what they might do to get answers, and what they would do once they were finished.

  Oddly, being a criminal because of his unintentional ties to the people who’d rescued him from certain death wasn’t the weirdest part of this.

  He was now in the company of the hyperphasic messiah, a girl prophesied to restore the Benevolence to the galaxy. While some thought the Messiah to be nothing more than a legend, he had been raised to believe otherwise.

  By the age of fifteen, he had abandoned his parents’ faith in the Source and the divine nature of the Benevolence. However, despite rumors of messiahs being born but never reaching their potential and bringing about change, he did still believe in the messiah concept. It was an idea he had always fancied.

  He had no trouble with the notion that the Benevolence had left behind a failsafe system. Why that failsafe would be a girl born in what seemed a random fashion, he could not even begin to guess. It wasn’t something he had ever given significant thought. Why would he ever expend energy on such a speculative matter?

  To aid the hyperphasic messiah was a high and noble calling, at least according to his parent’s faith. He couldn’t help feeling honored that she wanted his help, but what did he really have to offer? He wasn't a soldier or a pilot or an engineer. He was merely a talented scientist with a specialty in xenobiology.

  Sure, he had done his best to make repairs after the battle, and during it, he had loaned his brainpower to the sensors and weapons stations. But it wasn’t like he actually knew what he was doing.

  Tekeru sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He was in the pilot’s quarters. A wave of dizziness struck then faded. He stretched his arms out, and his elbows creaked. He rotated his shoulders and winced. His right rotator cuff needed a few more days to heal completely, as did the deepest of his bruises.

  Otherwise, thanks to Octavian, rest, an IV, a few hours of lung filtration, and a diluted dose of medibots, he had mostly recovered. The ship’s cog was worth a dozen Tekeru Joneses. Maybe more.

  “Good morning, sir,” Max said. “I trust you slept snugly. You seem well rested.”

  Tekeru glanced at his HUD to check the time. “After sixteen hours, I should hope I would be.” He placed his feet firmly on the floor, intending to stand, but he didn’t. “Anything exciting going on?”

  “The ship completed a short hyperspace jump a few minutes before you woke, sir. We are still in deep space, and we are safe for the moment.”

  “That’s good news. How’s Mr. Bishop?”

  “He is recovering, sir. He woke up and ate a few hours ago then returned to bed. The full dose of medibots he received should have him back to normal in another day or two.”

  “What about the rest of the crew?”

  “Octavian is currently affecting repairs on a damaged electrical system that connects to the fusion drive. Seneca is performing a full repair on the patched wall inside cargo bay one. Ms. Kyralla Vim is working on the flak cannon. Ms. Oona is meditating in the command chair and keeping watch. Mostly, I suspect, she is loaning brainpower to the ship’s automated systems, some of which can make repairs on their own.”

  “Some of the ship’s systems are capable of self-repair?”

  “This is a highly advanced ship, sir. Until the battle, it was in pristine condition, as if purchased new before the Fall and immediately stored away until recently.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “I would not think so, sir. But I would not have thought running into the hyperphasic messiah likely either.”

  “What do you think of Oona? Do you think she’s the real deal?”

  “I think she is not a standard human nor any registered variation, sir. And her abilities are beyond remarkable. I searched the galactic net, and everything I learned about messiahs points to her being just that. Supposedly, there have been many who all perished young.”

  Tekeru scratched his fingers through the rapidly accumulating scruff on his chin. “There have been others?”

  “Apparently. They must undergo an awakening before their abilities are fully realized, sir, but none have yet survived that process. This awakening takes place in their teenage years. Assuming they reach them. As you can see, if discovered, many dangerous groups pursue them.”

  “And Oona hasn’t gone through it yet?”

  “Apparently not, sir.”

  Tekeru shifted to the edge of the bed and placed more weight on his feet, but still, he did not stand.

  “Do the others need help?”

  “I am sure they do, sir. We are not in immediate danger here, and they have no plans to do an
ything other than make small hyperspace jumps every few hours. Still, they must be prepared for anything at any time, so it’s essential that repairs be completed as soon as possible.”

  Tekeru nodded. “I should get up and take Kyralla’s place. I’m sure she could use some rest, and I’ve already got some experience working on the flak cannon.”

  “A good plan, sir.”

  Tekeru shifted his weight again. He intended to get up, take a shower, put on his clothes, and get some food. Then he could get to work helping the others. But he couldn’t bring himself to move.

  Frozen, he sat there on the edge of the bed, minute after minute ticking by.

  “Is there something wrong, sir?”

  “No.”

  “All your vitals appear normal, sir. Yet you seem lethargic and…disinterested. What is the matter?”

  “Honestly…”

  Suddenly, Tekeru broke down crying. He moaned and sobbed uncontrollably. He couldn’t stop. He hadn’t cried like this since his grandfather had died when he was thirteen. He had no idea what to do with these emotions or how to handle it. It was outside of his realm of expertise.

  “Sir, is there anything I can help you with?”

  Tekeru made no response. This wasn’t something Max could help with. Max was smart. But even for a 6G, he was uncommonly poor at recognizing and understanding human emotions.

  He’d tried to upgrade Max’s software to fix that. But there were no reliable updates anymore. At least none that he would trust. The chippy’s default personality matrix had been set a hundred thirty years ago, and no one could completely change it now.

  Like all chippy’s over the 4G level, he was a relic from before the Fall. Tekeru had inherited Max from his grandfather. Which was fortunate, because you couldn’t buy a 6G on an assistant professor’s income.

  Tekeru rolled back into bed, curled up into a ball, and cried. He cried out the stress of almost dying and the almost certain end of the career he had spent years working for and then the loss of his friends and companions.