Dana Cartwright Mission 3: Kal-King (21 page)

Cartwright grinned back. “You amaze me, Mac!” She walked around the Terrin Hale and Franklin Shepherd holographic avatars, frozen in place amid the set of the
LoStar
main deck.

Marina noticed Dana’s interest in Shepherd. “I programmed him as I recall from last year. Did I get
 
something wrong?”

“I haven’t seen my father…” Dana shuddered, full of emotion, “…for fourteen years.” Her eyes misted up. “He looks well.”

Marina pointed to Terrin Hale’s avatar. “Mother dotes on him. Such displays of love and emotion are rare among Enturians.” She chuckled, rather embarrassed by the memories.

“At least, you’re near them.”

Mackenna interrupted. “Um, we need you to program your avatar, ma’am.”

“Not sure I know how,” Dana responded. “I haven’t studied V-R procedures.”

Mackenna handed her a padlet. “Oh, it’s mostly automated these days. Computer? Create avatar of Dana J. Cartwright, and accept programming from padlet.”

An avatar form appeared beside the other two, identical to Dana as she stood there, even down to her bare feet.
 

Dana scanned the padlet appearance instructions, and began by adding boots, which, to her amazement, instantly appeared.

“They’ll never know the difference,” Mackenna assured.

“What about weapons? What if they…” Macao began to interrogate Mackenna.

Dana lost interest, even in her own avatar, going back to stand near Terrin Hale and Franklin Shepherd, wishing an “if only” wish, wondering, “Can we program for Shelby, too?”

Mackenna shook his head, “Yes, but we’d need a very recent image of her, and a lot more time. Captain McHale gave us only an hour. A program like this normally takes days.”

“Where will we be?” Macao asked.

Mackenna pointed to the main bridge above them.

“All authentic?” Dana wondered. “August is very intelligent. Don’t underestimate him.”

Marina Carver blinked, obviously calculating the odds and preparing to recount them, just the way a science officer might.

Mackenna coaxed them to finish up and then called out, “Computer, compile and run program Mac-One.”

Janz Macao questioned the avatars, while Marina and Mackenna modified the voices slightly. The Dana avatar voice was already identical to hers.

Captain McHale called down, “Ten minute warning!”

Mackenna motioned Dana and Janz to follow him up to the bridge.

“What about…” Janz pointed to Carver.

Mackenna chuckled. He pointed to the real Captain Carver up on the bridge level.

“Impressive!” Macao offered. He let Mackenna and Dana lead, took a long, hard look around and declared, “Shouldn’t there be more people about?”

“All at the conference,” Captain Carver answered.
 

“Is that plausible? Seems like there should be a security detail for Master Captain Hale,” Dana interrupted.

Mackenna countered, “There’s no time.”

“Two-minute warning,” came Captain McHale’s voice.

They settled down at the bridge consoles, watching the lower deck on the monitors.

Dana held her breath, as she watched August and March materialize on the deck below.

“Show time,” Mackenna whispered, grinning happily. “This is the fun part.”

Captain McHale watched the forward view screen, listening in to the conversations, fretting that something might go wrong. His fingers hurt from clenching them so tightly, from the moment Augustus Kaelin King and Doctor March Garcia materialized.

It didn’t help to have Xalier beside the command chair, hissing and baring teeth, an instinctual response to the slave owner and ‘king’ of Crown Enterprises.

As they watched, August spent a long, long time staring at Shepherd, finally locking mismatched eyes to mismatched eyes.

So long did King stare that Commander Coe worried, “Do you think he suspects something?”

Then King finally spoke, addressing Shepherd. “So, you’re the man I can blame for this!” August pounded his fists on the robo-chair.

The Shepherd avatar responded coolly, “I was in one of those myself for nearly twenty-five years.”

King scoffed, “Oh, really?”

“After the assassination attempt on our lives,” Shepherd indicated Hale and himself, “I was in a deep coma. Fortunately, my Star Service medical orders expressly prohibited termination, else I wouldn’t be here today. And, thanks to January, who reached deep down into my soul to revive me.”

The Dana avatar simply nodded affirmation.

King turned on the platinum-haired women. “You’re Hale,” he said, acknowledging the older. “Who are you?”

“Captain of the
LoStar
, Marina Carver — your sister.”

“Sister?” March frowned. “That’s not possible.”

“I am your older, half-sister, raised on Enturize.”

King’s expression changed to a much deeper scowl. “Where are the others?”

“June and July, the twins, are aboard the
Forester
.”

“Are they perfect?” King demanded, pointing at her with a gnarled finger.

“No one is perfect,” Shepherd countered. “We are all unique individuals — everyone in this universe is!”

“Hah!” King growled, and the robo-chair began to spin in a circle.

McHale frowned, “This is not going well.”

Coe nodded in agreement.

“Text a message to Mackenna to steer the conversation to the conference and the treaty so we can get King’s reaction.”

“And tell him to get a DNA sample,” Xalier added, “by touching him…or him touching something.”

The voyeurs on the bridge waited.

Marina Carver nodded to Mackenna, and directed her avatar to interrupt down below. “Won’t you join us in the conference room so we can discuss…”

“Discuss what? Our childhoods! Hah!” King scorned her, making the robo-chair circle around her. “I’ve had enough.”

Shepherd extended his right hand to shake.

King ignored it.

The Dana avatar stepped in front of the robo-chair, forcing it to stop. She reached out, and rested her hand on King’s gnarled fingers. “August? Please let April run some scans on your DNA. She’s had tremendous success with Novem.”

“Return my slave!” King pushed her hand away. “The Republic has no jurisdiction over my enterprises.”

“He’s not your slave. He’s your brother…our brother,” Dana countered.

August glared and swatted at her second attempt to touch him. He tapped a device pinned to his chest; he and March dematerialized.

“Freeze program,” Mackenna ordered. All the avatars stopped in their places. “Do you think you got a DNA sample?”

“I hoped by touching him I could,” Dana answered.

Mackenna asked, “Computer? Analyze hand of avatar Dana J. Cartwright. Did touching King retrieve sufficient DNA for a scan?”

“Affirmative,” came the voice from
Thresher
’s feminine computer system.

“Excellent! Send to medical and begin detailed DNA analysis.”

Janz Macao watched Dana’s reaction, sensing distress.

Shalee coaxed him to rest his left hand on her shoulder, re-establishing the telepathic link.

I’m afraid! August is plotting something, I’m convinced of it.
Dana told them.
I sensed it empathetically, when the avatar touched him.

 
A suspicion? It was only your avatar that…

No, it’s more than that. March knows… We must separate them. I think I can win March over, but not August.

Shalee’s laughter stopped their ruminations.
Only Princess Micah can do that. She has Shelby’s eyes.

Macao seemed ready to protest, but Dana beat him to it.

What’s that got to do with it, Your Highness?

Shalee chuckled, but offered no response.

August fumed, his robo-chair tracing circles on the deck of the ship’s rotunda.

March watched, increasingly annoyed. “Won’t you tell me why you did that?”

August gave no indication he was even listening, so March answered his own question. “Do you hate so much? I would have liked to visit with Hale and Shepherd and learn more about the procedures and DNA modifications they did.”

King scoffed, and finally came to a standstill, glaring at his brother. “Go back then, you fool. Are you so easily taken in by liars!”

When March began to protest, August ran his robo-chair up the ramp and into the main conference room.

“Computer? Display coordinates just used to return us to
Kalis
?”

Numbers appeared on the view screen.

“Center and locate!”

The reticle centered over the midship of
SS Thresher
.

“They lied. They created a facade, a fake, a fraud,” August taunted, resuming his robo-chair spinning as he plotted.

“Why?” March shut his mismatched eyes, feeling intensely competing emotions of anger and betrayal.

“Wrong question, brother! Better to ask, how can we make them pay?” August hissed.

March shivered.

“Alert down there!” Captain McHale’s voice called, “We’re detecting an argument between King and Garcia. They know it was a fake!”

Mackenna groaned. “Damn! How? What could have…”

Marina Carver stood, Dana and Janz jumped up, too. They all descended to the main deck, inspecting the avatars.

“How could they detect anything?” Mackenna demanded.
 

“Fane!” Macao groaned.

A man’s form began to materialize beside them.

“Security alert!” Macao shouted, but it was too late to block the materialization.

Janz inserted himself between the real Dana Cartwright and March.

“How did you do it?” March demanded.

“Do what?”

He pointed to the frozen avatars with his left hand.

Dana stopped Mackenna from responding. “We don’t trust you; and we definitely don’t trust August!”

The doctor produced a hand laser and aimed it at Carver, squeezing the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Macao wrestled the weapon from March’s hand and tore the pin from the doctor’s tunic.

“V-R protocols neutralize all weapons. Consider yourself under arrest for drawing upon a Republic officer,” Macao growled.

“She’s not Republic! She’s Enturian! Sister! Hah!”

The venom in his voice troubled Dana.
 

“Mackenna, scan him for an implant,” she ordered.

March backed away a step, but when Mackenna waived a scanner near the doctor’s neck, it registered an implant device.

“You have a choice, brother. Help us stop him or pay the price.”

“It’s too late,” March admitted.

Just as Dana had collapsed, March sank to the deck.

Janz Macao held Dana back. “Let Mackenna deal with it.”

Marina Carver ordered, “Computer, end program Mac-One.”

The V-R sim reverted to four bare walls. All of the avatars vanished.

Mackenna called for an emergency transfer with March to sickbay, leaving Dana, Janz and Marina behind.

“Fortunate that the protocols were active,” Carver heaved a sigh. “That caught me unprepared.”

Dana turned to Macao, “What do we do now?”

“That’d be up to McHale. You need to warn April, Novem and Dec.”

“I thought Kieran went to do that.”

“No, Dana, you need to go and tell them what happened here.”

 
Macao escorted her and Carver to the MAT station and oversaw the controls, sending Carver first to the
LoStar.
That done, he reset the controls for Dana.

“Do you want this?” he offered the weapon.

“No, security is tight over there.” Dana stepped up onto the pad, lamenting being barefooted.
 

“No time for that!”

“Stay with me?”

Macao nodded. “I can be there in a heartbeat,” which wasn’t exactly true, but did wonders to comfort Dana.

Shalee added,
I will be with you, also.

Security officers escorted Dana Cartwright to Commodore Jai, and then abandoned her. Kieran signaled for silence.

She complied, watching as he did from the skybox high above the conference hall as a thousand delegations down below met in session, in the bowl-shaped amphitheater.

Every delegation had a booth shaped like a diamond, each with a center view screen echoing the same image as on the overhead big screens, but with subtitle translations.

Somewhere down there were April, Novem and Dec, along with Prince Korwin, Princess Micah and Ambassador Solon. Dana scanned the people with her eyes.

She touched Kieran’s hand and sent him her fears telepathically, recounting silently the situation on the VR-deck and March’s attempt on Marina Carver’s life.

His eyes widened and he pointed to where the Galaxean Ambassador sat, alone.

“Solon speaks next,” Kieran told her, “then they vote.”

Dana scanned to the left and right of Solon.

“Where is the Alphan delegation?”

Kieran indicated a location nearly directly across from Solon, but the booth was empty.

“Why?”

“The Prince walked out on the Rigelian to protest his verbal attack on interracial marriages.”

Dana blinked. “Where are the Enturians?”

Kieran pointed far to the rear behind Solon. She couldn’t identify anyone there from that distance, and due to the lighting, but it was clear the delegation were huddled closely in a heated discussion.

Overall, nothing seemed amiss.
 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Ambassador Solon lectured for a long time about history and, mostly, on the meaning of a civilized society; nothing Dana hadn’t already heard the Galaxean Ambassador tout over the many years she had know the wise, old man. It reminded her of the old days, where she would steal away from the medical center, to hear lectures by Ambassador Cray of the Alphan delegation, sitting among the Republic guests, nodding right along with them, offering applause as they did.

Living out among the stars required tolerance and compassion, applying logic, resisting the temptation to impose upon other worlds and civilizations peevish, social mores, and traditions.

That said, and in the process, lulling the delegations into a passive agreement, Solon raised his voice and jarred them all awake.