Category: writing

Rebecca Ariel Reid spends a lot of time in the UNSETIC Files universe missing.  She is the close friend and business partner of Cassidy Beckett, who runs their New Age bookstore and supernatural supply shop in Hell’s Kitchen after Becca vanishes in Alberta, Canada, without a trace (this is an incident referenced in Truth Will Set You Free).  She reappears much later, alone, without the Central Park pack that she’d traveled with years before and a mystery to solve that will tie her to UNSETIC tighter than she and Beckett ever could have imagined.

The scene that follows is the good-bye shared between Becca Reid and her mate, Ioan Griffin, the pack’s alpha.

  

The tribe was singing a mourning song, beautiful and haunting. It sent shivers down Rebecca Reid’s spine, though not because of its beauty.

“Who died?” She whispered. No one had been out hunting today, she’d thought.

Ioan Griffin’s arms tightened around her waist, breath warm against her ear. She could feel his heartbeat as she leaned against his chest, heard him take a deep, almost ragged breath before he spoke softly. “No one yet,” he said. “But they’re playing it for us. For the pack.”

She stiffened, staring up at him. Ioan was staring back at the fire, at the circle of singers clustered in its flickering light. His jaw was set, but it quivered a little, betraying him. It was weakness he’d never show to anyone else.

But they belonged to each other, and she’d have seen it where no one else would have.

“Ioan, why would they do that?”

“I have to ask you something,” he whispered, ignoring the question. “To do something, but you’re not going to say no. Not this time.”

Her brows knit as she stared at him. “What is it?”

He hesitated, closing his eyes for a moment before he looked at her square. “You need to stay behind this time.”

“What?” Why would he– “I’m the best shot the pack has, Ioan, and you’ve said yourself that without my cover fire, half of what you’ve accomplished wouldn’t have been possible. I’m not letting you guys go into that place without me.”

“I’m not risking you,” he growled, letting go of her waist. He took her face in his hands instead, scarred, calloused thumbs stroking her jaw. “You’re staying behind. So I have a reason to make that music into a lie.” He nodded toward the fire, to the singers and their mourning song. “They don’t expect us to live through this. It’s a suicide mission.”

“And you volunteered for it anyway,” she said softly, eyes widening. “Ioan, why?”

His expression softened and he rested his forehead against hers. “Because someone taught me that there are things that need doing, no matter how dangerous, for the good of the whole.”

She slumped. “My father.”

He shook his head slightly. “No. You.”

Her chest convulsed as she swallowed a sob, wouldn’t let it tear its way free of her throat. She gripped his face, brought his lips to hers. The salt of their shared tears mixed against their lips in that hungry kiss.

He stroked her cheeks as they both came up for air, their foreheads pressed together. “We’ve been betrayed, Becca,” he whispered. “We’ve been betrayed and we don’t know who did it. The clan leaves as soon as the song is done. They’re going to evacuate the town. There are defenses set up to protect this place, defenses that Moonshadow’s grandfather set up fifty years ago.” Ioan swallowed, looking away for a moment, then continued in a thick whisper. “I’m not going to ask you to leave with them, but I will ask you to leave.

“Three days, Becca. If we’re not back in three days, go home. Go back to New York. I will find you. I promise.”

“Ioan—”

“No,” he whispered fiercely, traces of silver starting to overshadow the blue of his eyes. “No, listen to me. You are the light of my heart and I can’t stand to see you hurt, but you’re not staying just because I want you to be safe. You’re smarter than the rest of us by half and more. If we don’t make it back in three days, you have to figure out who betrayed us, who betrayed the pack, the clan, maybe everyone—maybe every single one of the nahuali left in the world, maybe every living thing left on this planet. I don’t think anyone else can. Do that for me.” He swallowed. “Promise you’ll do that for me.”

She kissed him again, a long, gentle kiss, then squeezed her eyes shut, nodding as she stepped back from the pack’s alpha, from her mate.

“I promise.”

 General Jackson “Longshot” Hunter has been in the intelligence game for decades.  The head of Alliance SpecOps, he’s done everything in his power to prevent his operatives from suffering the personal tragedies he has–sometimes successfully, sometimes not.  With war with the Imperium looming on the horizon, Hunter faces the greatest fight of his life: to protect a man he’s come to regard as the son he never had and to save humanity from itself–and a threat long dead.

The story in Longshot takes place largely during the events if Redeemer and was an experiment from several years ago in centering a story on Jack Hunter, the chief of Alliance SpecOps and the chief of military intelligence back on Epsilon.  It’s part character study, part background, part thought and timeline organization. In Chapter 3, we get to learn more about the politics going on at the heart of the Alliance.

  

Three

The crowds were thick at the officer’s club as Hunter walked in shortly before one in the afternoon for his meeting with Admiral Patricus Wheeling. Wheeling was Navy, the commander in charge of the near border fleet. They interacted often enough, given that special operations and intelligence concerns were most important in areas where they might face incursions, but Hunter had been dreading meetings with the admiral lately for an array of reasons.

If Flannery is his opening salvo, I’m leaving.

Wheeling nodded to him as Hunter located that day’s table, tucked quietly into one corner of the officer’s club. He slid into the seat across from his colleague and reached for his water glass. 

“Afternoon, Pat.”

“Jackson.” Wheeling actually smiled. Hunter smothered a grimace.

I’m not going to like how this meeting is going to go, am I?

No. Probably not at all.

“What are we going to go rounds on today?” Hunter asked, trying to keep any trace of weariness from his voice. “What do you need?”

“Well, I need softcopy of the updated patrol circles for the Imperium Eighth Fleet on the other side of the border,” Wheeling said. “Something I should be asking about?”

He shot Wheeling a glower and the other man winced.

“It’s the anniversary of something that I’m forgetting, isn’t it, General?”

“No,” Hunter said quietly, and that was a true enough statement. It wasn’t a day of any particular significance beyond the data he’d caught and the fact that he’d chosen this particular morning to go down to the cemetery, leaving his aide behind to make contact directly with his old friend Ross out beyond the borders–their first overt contact with a representative of the Resistance that hadn’t come through faceless cut-outs or been through an undercover agent on the ground.

No, I just took a major step toward what we should have been doing decades ago when the peace began to break almost as soon as the ink was dry on the Weber-Paxton Treaty.

“You’re defensive today,” Wheeling observed.

“Hardly. I was just expecting your opening to be another complaint about Casey Flannery and the orders I gave concerning her.”

Wheeling’s eyes slid shut for a moment and he leaned back in his chair. “She has filed a grievance.”

“Another one?”

The admiral nodded slightly. “She feels that she’s been unjustly punished for actions taken that she believed, at the time, were in the best interest of Alliance security. She thought your agent had gone rogue.”

“Did you watch the video?”

“I did.” Wheeling sighed. “I should be angrier than a wet hornet that you had the Vanguard’s security systems rigged with a secondary video capture array.”

“I didn’t do anything of the sort,” Hunter said, taking a deep swallow from his glass. “That was General Marr, before my time. He arranged for it after the sabotage of the Westerfall. Every new ship coming out of the shipyards at Amandine and Ryval is equipped with the secondary array and every ship that goes in for refit gets the same treatment. Don’t blame that failsafe on me, just be grateful that Captain York figured out what was happening before Casey Flannery murdered my officer.”

“He did provoke her,” Wheeling murmured.

“He was stalling in the only way he could in a situation like that,” Hunter said, feeling a faint pounding begin to rise behind his eyes. This was going to be another damned long lunch. “I probably would have used much the same tactics if it were me. What was she demanding in this complaint and how long are you going to let this continue? You’ve obviously watched the damned video. You know exactly what happened.”

Wheeling stared at a spot somewhere beyond Hunter’s shoulder. “They have history, don’t they?”

“The fact that she made it out of the Academy rather than being expelled for conduct unbecoming is owed completely to two things–Aaron Taylor’s mercy and mine.”

Wheeling’s gaze met his again abruptly and Hunter couldn’t help but give him a wolfish grin.

“No one assaults one of my cadets and I don’t hear about it, no matter how quiet everyone tries to keep the matter. You get one second chance and then you pray to whatever deity you believe in that you don’t need another one. I did nothing because Taylor elected not to report it, a decision I’m fairly certain he arrived at on his own, with no intervention of any of his classmates or friends.”

“Bloody hell, Jackson,” Wheeling breathed. “You are a fucking spider, aren’t you?”

One corner of his mouth twitched into a smile. “Only when it suits me. So what was she asking for this time?”

“She wants her rank and her posting back.”

Hunter shook his head. “She has to earn her rank back and she’s never getting posted back to any ship that will bring her that close to the border ever again. Leave her where she is where she can’t do any more damage to Taylor or his operational security.” Not to mention any potential damage she may to do her sister if she were to find out that Captain Flannery is alive and in the Borderworlds.

Memory was a tricky thing, especially when all evidence pointed to manipulation of it by Imperium psychics and scientists.

The more Hunter learned about the Imperium’s Project: Seket, the less he liked it.

He leaned back in his chair, giving Wheeling a stony look. “Put an end to it, Pat.”

“I don’t know that I can.”

“If you won’t, I’ll go to Diane and you know she will. The last thing you need is me going to the Admiral of the Navy about this, and if I do, Casey Flannery will be dealing with far, far worse than a rank reduction and a reassignment. I was merciful, Pat, merciful in a way that I didn’t have to be. She assaulted a fellow officer and could have killed him. I’m not so sure she didn’t intend to kill him. That the very least, she should be cooling her heels in the stockade for a year and facing dishonorable discharge. I didn’t do that to her out of respect for her late parents and the fact that when she’s not got it in her head that her sister’s lover is the enemy, she’s actually a decent officer.”

Wheeling averted his gaze. “I still don’t understand why your division is the only one that allows that kind of relationship to develop.”

“Allows? Hell, we practically encourage it. If you knew half of what I had to ask the men and women under my command to do, you’d never question why it’s allowed ever again.” Hunter shook his head. “My people are too few and too loyal to penalize them for something like falling in love with the person that they’ve been working with since Academy day one. If we had to reassign one of them every time that happened, I’d lose too many good people.”

“How many?”

Hunter snorted. This was a conversation he’d had once or twice before. The explanation never changed. “It depends on the graduating class. Some are more prone to it than others, it seems. In Flannery and Taylor’s class, it’s just them. The class before, there were three couples. The class after, none.” And in my class, there were two, and then there was Kath and Joe’s class and they were the only ones. It just depends on the makeup and the circumstances. “The numbers are typically small, but if one transfers out, the other is typically finished shortly thereafter. If they’re allowed to keep doing what they’re doing, we usually get another four or five years of service out of them rather than losing one to reassignment and the other two to three months later because they discover that solo operations aren’t their cup of tea. Everyone thinks they can handle it but it’s usually a lie they’re telling themselves.”

“So you’re saying that if you followed the regulations that bind every other division, you’d lose each pair that started a relationship?” Wheeling shook his head slowly. “Why not just…make them change partners?”

“That’s a more complicated question,” Hunter said. “Most people don’t realize exactly how much of the training these men and women get is based on honing their ability to work with one specific individual–the individual they were matched to in the Academy. Of course, some of the techniques will translate, but there’s something about working with the same person over and over again over the course of days and months and years that gives even non-psychics an almost supernatural awareness of their partners.” Hunter crossed his arms. “Greg O’Malley is still on your staff, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, he translates your reports into Navy-speak for the rest of my staff and cuts out the parts that keep me awake at night.”

Hunter nodded slowly. “Ask him about when he was still with SpecOps. Ask him about working with Alicia Kelley.”

Wheeling stared at him. “You remember all of their names, too, don’t you? Even after they’ve left the service or passed or transferred or whatever.”

“I have fewer people to do a larger job,” Hunter said softly. “Of course I remember their names.” I remember most of their faces, too, and the faces of the families when they’ve been lost under my command and I’ve delivered the news.

He was the only division chief attached to the Epsilon Alliance Armed Forces that personally informed the families when their son or daughter, husband or wife, mother or father or sister or brother had been lost in the line of duty. Sometimes it was in person, sometimes it was holocomm.

Regardless, the bad news always came from their penultimate commander. The day he no longer believed it was important for the news to come from him was the day he would walk away from his post forever.

He’d promised Maida that, too, on his knees one spring afternoon back when the oak that marked her gave was still small enough that his hands would wrap all the way around its trunk. That had been the day Roger Marr retired and gave his post to a much younger but no less world-weary Jackson Hunter.

Some promises are too dear not to keep.

“I don’t envy you that,” Wheeling said softly.

“Nobody does,” Hunter said, his gaze meeting the other man’s. Wheeling’s expression had softened into something close to understanding. “It’s part of the price that I pay for being what I am.”

“There’s always a catch, isn’t there?”

“Yes,” Hunter said quietly. “Yes, there is.”

A waitress came by and took their order, then vanished again, leaving the pair of men staring at each other across water glasses and salt shakers.

“I actually wanted this meeting because someone had to warn you,” Wheeling said after that silence.

“Warn me? About what?”

“They’re calling a vote on the condemnation. You need to stay away from it, Jackson.” 

“Why would I do that, Pat?” There must be a good reason or else he wouldn’t be voicing the warning.

As much as Patricus Wheeling tried to deny it, he knew exactly what could happen if the Resistance suddenly vanished, and what would come after that would be bad–bad for his fleet, bad for the Alliance and–if you asked Hunter–bad for humanity.

Wheeling took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. “Because if you tread too close to this issue, they’re going to lose votes. The resolution’s made it out of committee this time. It’s hitting the floor, but we’ve got to stay out of it and let the politicos do something for once without interfering.”

Hunter shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense, Pat. Shouldn’t they be grasping for any and all advice they can get on the matter? I’m sure half of them don’t much understand our tactical situation right about now.”

“And they don’t really have to,” Wheeling said. “All they really need to understand is that the Imperium violated the sovereignty of a free world and bombed a major city from orbit in an attempt to subjugate and pacify the population, a direct violation to the Weber-Paxton Treaty.”

“There will be three or four people–probably the same ones as last time, mind you–that will make the argument that none of the worlds in the Borderworlds were a party to Weber-Paxton and thus are not protected by its strictures.” The argument sounded bitter as he voiced it, slicked his tongue with foulness that felt so profoundly vile that he was more than half certain that the words were poison in and of themselves. “And there will be two dozen representatives that will believe it and their votes will swing from yay to nay and we’re right back to square one.” Hunter leaned forward, his eyes bright. “Pat, if we don’t start doing something about the Imperium attacks in the Borderworlds, all of those men and women sitting safe and pretty at the Capitol are going to find themselves looking down the torpedo tubes of an Imperium warship as they call for our goddamned surrender.”

Wheeling winced. “That’s why you have to stay away from this. You’re an alarmist and that terrifies the moderates.”

“They should be terrified,” Hunter snapped. “You know how precarious our position is right now. The Borderworlds–and the Resistance that’s out there fighting tooth and nail to defend those worlds that no one else gives enough of a damn about to protect–are the only things that are standing between us and the Imperium fleet on our doorstep.” He crossed his arms, leaning back in his chair and feeling about as petulant as he probably looked.

Wheeling shook his head. “It’s not that dire. You make it sound like they’d be on our doorstep tomorrow if the Resistance collapsed. We’d have two years or so to prepare before the Imperium made it anywhere close to Epsilon.”

“We’d have three weeks before they were hitting Varice,” Hunter said. “Another six weeks after that, they’d be here. No one would be standing in their way.” He leaned forward, smothering a grimace at the shocked look on Wheeling’s face. “Why do you think I’ve been sending my people out into fragging no-man’s land out there on the border? Why do you think I keep sending my people to watch the Resistance, to see how they’re fighting their war against the Imperium? Do you think I like risking their lives like that?”

“No,” Wheeling said, perhaps a touch too quickly. “No, of course not.”

Hunter snorted and glanced toward the ceiling for a moment, taking a few deep, steadying breaths. Wheeling cleared his throat softly.

“Who knows?”

Hunter looked at him again. “Who knows what?”

“What you just told me. About how quickly the Imperium would be here if the Resistance collapsed.”

“The president, his chief of staff, the vice president and her husband, the Admiral of the Navy, and the Secretaries of State and Defense. They’re trying to keep it quiet so a panic doesn’t erupt, but in some ways that’s counterproductive at this point. The people who need to have all of the facts sadly do not have them at their disposal.”

“Why haven’t you distributed this information more widely?” Wheeling asked quietly, leaning forward now, almost conspiratorially.

“What, within the fleet?” Hunter shook his head and swallowed a sigh. “Everyone with more than half a brain rattling around in his skull knows that we’ll eventually end up at war with Earth again. It’s inevitable–only a matter of when. It doesn’t do any good to terrify anyone at this point when we only have theories on when and how they’re going to hit and with what kind of force. If we play this all right, they’ll never get past the Borderworlds and everyone can sue for peace–one that will work this time, not turn into a ridiculous cold war that we’re deluding ourselves into believing is peace just because it’s the status quo and we’re not constantly shooting each other on our own turf.”

Once upon a time, Maida would have put her hand on his arm and squeezed it before she told him he was being perhaps a little too harsh, a little too hard on the Alliance’s government. That was before the Imperium killed her because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It’s been a long time.

“We can’t keep going on like this, Pat,” Hunter said softly. “There’s got to be an end in sight. If we give the Borderworlds the open support they need, then we ensure our own security. It’s that simple.”

“Nothing’s ever that simple,” Wheeling said, expression deadpan. “A particular bastard told me that once.”

“Really? Who was that?”

“Some jackass intelligence chief who knows too much.”

“Mm.” Hunter closed his eyes for a moment, smiling wryly. “Sounds like my kind of guy.” He sighed, then, opening his eyes and staring at Wheeling as the smile faded. “I mean it, Pat. We’re running out of time and options. If we fight this war on our terms, we can win it. If we let them call the tune we have to dance to, we’re done for.” His lips thinned. “I’ll stay away from this vote, but it’d damned well had better pass this time. It’s already too little and too late, but it’ll be a baby step in the right direction.” He stood from the table.

“Where are you going? You haven’t eaten yet.”

“I’ve lost my appetite,” Hunter said. “Have a good afternoon, Pat.”

Wheeling shook his head slightly. “Stay away from it, Jackson.”

“Don’t worry,” Hunter murmured. “I heard you when you said to leave it alone. I’ll leave it be, you’ve got my word on it. I’ve got too much other crap to be worrying about right now anyhow.”

Like half a dozen operatives from the class of ‘57 undercover with the Resistance. I may have to dispatch more of them soon, but how soon that is remains to be seen.

He gave Wheeling one more wry smile before he turned and walked away.

 General Jackson “Longshot” Hunter has been in the intelligence game for decades.  The head of Alliance SpecOps, he’s done everything in his power to prevent his operatives from suffering the personal tragedies he has–sometimes successfully, sometimes not.  With war with the Imperium looming on the horizon, Hunter faces the greatest fight of his life: to protect a man he’s come to regard as the son he never had and to save humanity from itself–and a threat long dead.

The story in Longshot takes place largely during the events if Redeemer and was an experiment from several years ago in centering a story on Jack Hunter, the chief of Alliance SpecOps and the chief of military intelligence back on Epsilon.  It’s part character study, part background, part thought and timeline organization. In Chapter 2, we get a glimpse of Hunter’s relationship with Aaron Taylor, the narrator in Broken Stars.

  

Two

Daniel Taylor was still an open file in his division. No one knew that, of course, no one except for Hunter, that was the way it was–and the way it would stay until Taylor’s only son was ready to know the truth.

There were a few that were close, knew pieces of the truth. Cyne knew, based on his experience with Lucas Ross, that Taylor wasn’t what he appeared to be, not really. Cornelius Traverse, one of Hunter’s field commanders, had pieced together part of the mystery on his own after debriefing Caren Flannery.

And then there was Flannery herself, who couldn’t remember what she’d begun to piece together about her lover’s father.

I’ve kept your secret, Madeline, and his. Like I promised.

“Are you sure you’re all right, sir?”

Hunter waved Cyne away. “I’m fine. Go on, get back to work. I’m sure I gave you work to do, didn’t I?”

“Analysis of Imperium movements on the fringes of the Borderworlds.”

“Then shouldn’t you be doing it?”

“You have a meeting with Admiral Wheeling in two hours.”

Hunter nodded, retreating into his inner office. “I haven’t forgotten, Allyn, than you.” He closed the office door behind him, muttering under his breath. “Who needs a secretary? I have a blind psychic Intelligence analyst for an aide. What was I thinking?”

He snapped on the lights and stepped deeper into his office, knuckling his eyes. Perhaps the sojourn to the cemetery this morning had been ill-advised.

Maida would have told me following your heart is never ill-advised.

He sighed. She’d been gone a long time, but he could still hear her voice without trying, smell the scent of her perfume even though she was a distant memory and the manufacturer of the stuff had gone out of business twenty years ago.

“It’s going to be a long day,” he murmured to himself. “Don’t try to convince yourself otherwise. It’s going to be a bleeding long day.”

He eyed the small pile of data chips waiting for his review that sat next to his reader and wondered, not for the first time, when he was going to finally be able to give this up and retire. At fifty, he was of an age when most officers drawn from the ranks of SpecOps were long out of the game. He was one of the very few exceptions to that rule. Even Cornelius Traverse, one of his most trusted commanders, was a decade and more younger than he was and probably nearing the end of his own career.

Sometimes, you don’t ask for what happens. It just happens.

That was the way it had been when Roger Marr stepped down and named Jackson “Longshot” Hunter his successor to the post of Chief of Intelligence and Special Operations for the Alliance military. It was a thankless job, but someone had to do it.

He sank down into the chair behind his desk, massaging his forehead and hoping to ward off the headache he could already feel forming. The admiral wanted to talk about his position with regards to intervention in the Borderworlds and he knew the conversation wasn’t going to be pleasant.

There’s millions of lives at stake–billions–but all half of them care about is the political apple cart that we might upset and the other half only care about the fact that we’d somehow be seen as the aggressors, not the heroes, which won’t matter as long as public opinion on the border and within the Alliance is with us and as long as we bloody well win.

Whether or not they would win a straight war against the Imperium, when it came to it, was an open question, one they wouldn’t know the answer to until war happened.

Hunter had no illusions. War was coming. It was just a matter of when, how, and whose terms it would, ultimately, be on. Given his background, Hunter was determined to make sure it was on theirs.

He stared forlornly at the stack of chips and turned away from them, snapping on the latest newsfeeds from both local and out-system sources on the widescreen display set along the northern wall of his office, to the right of his desk. About half of what he was about to read on those chips would be hitting the newsnets now and another chunk of that news would be reporting things he’d already read from last week’s set of updates. His eyes narrowed.

Either my people are getting sloppy, or I need to start hiring journalists to work for me.

The Alliance legislature was considering issuing a condemnation–finally–regarding the Imperium bombing of Castion. It only took them the better part of ten weeks to do it. He exhaled a quiet breath and shook his head. “If they actually pass it, anyhow,” he muttered. Odds were fairly good that it would never make it out of committee–someone would decide that it was treading too close to destroying their neutrality when it came to Imperium movements in the Borderworlds and the motion would be quashed.

He reached for the first of the chips on his desk. Green. Field report from a deep assignment.

Probably from Ravenwood. He only had a few assets that were working deep cover assignments–Aaron Taylor, Elizabeth Moore, Travis Connery, and four others. Ravenwood–Moore–was deep cover at the heart of the Imperium, on Earth, trying to sort out their next military move before it was made. He’d sent Connery to Demar to investigate some rumors of old enemies reappearing and hadn’t heard from the man since. In another week, he would start worrying, but not yet. If he worried every time an operative dropped out of contact for more than eight days, he’d have ulcers on top of scar tissue from older ulcers.

And then there was Taylor, whose mother had asked him to take care of her son before she died.

He was trying his damnedest to keep that promise, even if the boy made it hard sometimes.

He slotted the green chip into the terminal that perched on his desk and leaned back while it loaded in. It was a text-only report from Ravenswood as he’d suspected, delivered through cut-outs and couriers rather than transmitted directly from Earth to Epsilon. It was too easy for electronic transmissions, no matter how encrypted, to be intercepted. Physical data could be destroyed more easily than a transmission, which could live on as a ghost for decades. With Moore working on Earth, it was too big of a risk to receive her reports via transmission, too many points where the communication could be intercepted. For Taylor, in the Borderworlds, it was less dangerous.

But not with her. Not there, not at the heart of the Imperium.

Text scrolled across his screen, mundane updates about activity in the Imperium’s legislature. He frowned. Where’s the troop data, Moore? I know you’ve got something for me there.

Half the reason she was there was to try to work her way into the varied echelons of the Imperium military, to get them data on what might be coming either their way or toward the Resistance in the Borderworlds. Any information that needed to be siphoned to the Resistance would be filtered through back channels until it reached the right ears–often, ears that never knew how the information had leaked to them.

The deniability was the only reason that Hunter was allowed to continue that particular operation.

Allowed. As if they allow me to do anything. They couldn’t stop me if they wanted to, though it’s easier when they’re not actively trying to interfere.

It was halfway through the file that a particular datapoint caught his eye.

New commander has been designated to lead Stormer Elites 1st Squadron designated Freedom Alpha. Maj. Corrine Ross, formerly in command of the military police division assigned to the frigate Tallahassee, has been assigned to the post.

Hunter stared at the screen for a long moment, then stood and walked to his office door. He jerked it open and peered at the back of his aide’s head.

“Cyne!”

The younger man jumped, apparently caught off guard by his commander’s sudden appearance–unusual for a psychic of Allyn’s caliber–and twisted toward the sound of his voice. “Sir?”

“Ross. What do you know about his family?”

Allyn blinked for a moment, then swiveled his chair to face him, leaning back slightly and frowning. “He had a fiancée–“

“Not about them.” Hunter was already familiar with Lucas Ross’s connections to one Korea Cooper and her younger sister, Samantha. “Do you know about anyone he had back on Earth? Did he mention anyone from back on Earth?”

“Oh.” His brows knit and his forehead wrinkled, apparently deep in thought for a few long moments. “Yes,” he said finally. “A sister, I think, and an uncle. His parents are dead.”

Hunter nodded slowly. “Sister’s named Corrine?”

“Yes,” Allyn said. “I think so.”

“Bloody hell,” Hunter murmured, glancing back over his shoulder at his desk, at the terminal.

“What’s wrong?”

Hunter shook his head. “Ravenwood sent a report,” he muttered, then turned and walked back into his office. Allyn followed him, brows knitting over blind eyes.

“Sir, if that’s supposed to mean more than you got a report from your deep cover agent on Earth, I’m afraid I’m not quite following the course you’re plotting.”

“Not reading my thoughts, Cyne?”

The psychic smiled lopsidedly. “You made me promise not to unless you gave me permission, sir.”

Or broadcasting, it seems. He snorted. In my experience, orders about when to read someone and when not to read someone have rarely stopped anyone in this line of work. “Ravenwood sent a report,” he repeated.

“You said that already.”

“I know,” Hunter said, sinking back into his chair. “Be patient and let me finish. There’s a datapoint in her report about a Corrine Ross being assigned to a new posting.”

Allyn’s brows knit. “I fail to quite see why Ravensood would include a datapoint like that in her report, since she doesn’t know that we’ve been dealing with Lucas Ross in the Resistance and likely doesn’t know about any connection between the two even if she did know that. You compartmentalized that. I remember talking about it.”

“Of course she doesn’t,” Hunter said. “It’s up to us to make those connections and put together the analysis.” His eyes half lidded and he tilted his head back. “We need to sort out the connection between Ross and the Stormer Elites.”

Allyn stood in the doorway for a moment, then spun and plunged back toward his console, slamming his headset back onto his head even as his fingers began to fly across the keys.

Hunter arched a brow, glancing toward the report on his screen for a moment before he stood again and drifted toward his office’s doorway. “Tripped a synapse?”

“Yes, sir,” Allyn said. “When I was on Caldin, I remember catching edges of stories–newsfeeds, documentaries, that kind of thing. I remember the Stormer Elites.”

“In what context?”

Allyn paused, his long fingers stilling in the midst of their dance across the keys. “Every war except for the Secession War,” he said. “And this one.”

“Of course,” Hunter murmured, then nodded to him. “Keep going. Keep talking.”

If they didn’t see action in the Secession Wars, that’s significant on its own. He cast his mind back to all the histories he’d read over the years.

“It doesn’t look like anyone quite knows what they were doing during the Secession War,” Allyn said as his fingers resumed their key-pounding symphony. “But they reappeared a few years after it ended in one of the celebrations commemorating the victory over the Preytax in the Second War.”

Hunter frowned slightly. “They were heroes of those wars.” It was starting to filter back. A small division, one of the few that happened to be assigned off-world when the Preytax–the only hostile non-human race they’d encountered over the course of three hundred years of space exploration–had landed on Earth and occupied the planet.

“Yes, sir,” Allyn agreed. “I’m looking at the old historical rosters. We’ve named bases and ships after them for decades. The Andros-Raymond. Collins-Ross on Varice.”

“Collins-Ross.” Hunter straightened from his cross-armed lean against the doorframe and prowled toward his aide’s desk. “Where did that name come from?”

Allyn stopped, half turning toward him. “According to the official records from the War Archive, or historian speculation based on official records?”

“Whichever you can give me in the next ten seconds.”

“Official records show that the original 19th Stormers were assigned to Beta Centauri under the command of one Major Irin Collins at the time of the Invasion. There were three squadrons in the original 19th, the Jaguars, Freedom Alpha, and the Aces Beta.”

There’s one half of the Collins-Ross. What’s the other half? Hunter stared at his aide for a moment. “Well?”

“Well what, sir?”

“Not reading my thoughts?”

“You ordered me not to unless you told me otherwise,” he said again, a bare hint of censure in the reminder. “I assume you want the reason for Ross, though.”

“Bingo.” Hunter crossed his arms, looming over his aide. It was useless to peer at the man’s computer screen; it was inactive. Allyn’s unique circumstances made him the perfect aide–the specially designed headset fed rapid-fire data into the trained intelligence agent’s brain, making the need for a monitor all but moot. They kept it for appearance’s sake. There was no reason to unduly unnerve anyone.

“That’s taken a little bit more digging,” Allyn said. “But I’ve got it now. There was a medic that got attached to the unit after the 15th Support Detachment escaped Io in the wake of the Preytax assault. His name was Lucas Ross.” Allyn paused, then said softly, “They got married on Varice after the First War was over.”

“Well,” Hunter said dryly. “That explains a lot.” That doesn’t sound like a coincidence to me at all. Lucas Ross, a medic from Earth attached to the Stormer Elites, by all accounts heroes of humanity, and then another Lucas Ross, also a medic from Earth, two centuries later playing the freedom fighter in the Borderworlds? No. This can’t be a coincidence. It’s connected. They’re connected—which means that Corrine Ross just stepped into her ancestor’s shoes and I’ll be damned if the Imperium didn’t put her in that position for a reason.

That reason probably had more to do with her brother than with Corrine Ross herself.

“You don’t think–”

“I strongly suspect it.” Hunter smiled slightly. “Compile it into a report–everything you can put together for me on the Stormers–and have it ready for me when I get back from that damned meeting with Wheeler.”

“That’s not a lot of time, sir.”

“I know it’s not,” Hunter said. “Preliminary findings will be sufficient for now. Anything that you’re sure on, flag it for me.” He shook his head slowly, staring at his aide. “Someone’s tugging at Lucas Ross’s strings and I doubt he’s realized it yet. Someone’s doing some clumsy manipulation and I want to figure out who and why.”

“Are you sure that’s what it is?” Allyn asked softly.

“I go with my gut as often as I go with hard data, Allyn,” the general said softly. “Get me the data I need and we’ll see what happens after that.”

Ross is a key to all of this. I’m just not sure what lock he fits into yet, but I’m sure as hell going to figure it out.

With that, he turned and vanished back into his office.