Pirate's Bane; Black Star
Chapter 10; The Fan

Alex looks not at Agent Coreance but at the cup of water she swirls around in front of her, her eyes tracking the water as it winds its way around the metal of the cup. “We took refuge from the pirates that we knew would be tracking us in the creator of a large asteroid, anchoring ourselves to it and turning off the engine completely. For two days we did nothing but float with that damn rock and check our sensors on a nearly constant basis to make sure we hadn’t or weren’t being fallowed.”

Agent Coreance for his part looks as if he is listening, keeping most of his eyes at least on her, looking her dead in the eye even though her eyes were down looking only at the cup, the majority of his attention though is solely focusing on the pad in his lower hands and the results of her biological scan from the trip to the toilet. “And were you followed?” He asks though he wants to ask something else entirely.

“We didn’t think we were but we must have been for what happened later, they must have been tracking us or worse they had been following us and just stayed in the shadows or in some kind of stealth ship.” Alex says softly into her cup. “Maybe when those damn bastards felt better they might have activated a beacon for their other ships, hell maybe it was the doctor who did the signaling, I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter since they came at us none the less.”

As much as his attention was held by the pad his focus shifts with the mention of the doctor. “Why would you suggest the doctor would be the one to signal the pirates?”

“Simple,” Alex said stopping the cup and watching as the water stopped swirling, “he was their leader.”

“Can I ask if the doctor ever examined you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did he know who you were?”

“No, but what are you getting at?”

“Nothing, please continue, tell me what happened once the two you saved were back on their feet.”

Alex looked at her with a raised eyebrow, she could tell something about Agent Coreance and she could tell something was running around his brain like a commit around black hole. “Gladly but you might not like what I tell you.”

“I have not liked or disliked anything you have said thus far so I doubt I will be affected anymore by this.”

The night before we decided to leave the asteroid Lerra and I made love once again, it was great and it should have put me to sleep like it had every time before but this time I was so worried that I wasn’t able to sleep even though my body was completely relaxed it was just that my mind was running like a rat in a maze, so while she slept I gave her one last kiss on her forehead before I crawled out of bed and called in a few favors. I wasn’t hated by everyone in the Alliance military, many realized that I had done what I thought was right to save the Iowa and its crew and hadn’t meant to kill anyone but it had still happened, don’t get me wrong they were few but I still had them. I asked the few I knew of a few pointed questions but didn’t ask them anything that might have been considered a military secret. I knew that I wouldn’t get any fast responses, they would have had to look up the answers before they could even respond and beyond that they had to send me back the information over a satellite system that crisscrossed space sporadically making communication even slower. To keep myself occupied I cleaned my shotgun, I hardly used it but cleaning it gave me something to do like a nervous habit. I had rebuilt the gun after cleaning ever part and was rubbing it down with oil both to polish and protect it when I got a notification on my tablet about what I had asked. I put the gun down and scrolled down the page until I saw what I had wanted to see but feared I would replace out.

“Damn it.” I tried to be quite but when I cursed Lerra still heard me.

Maybe she hadn’t heard me and it had just been that when Lerra rolled over in the bed, having been turned away from me and not found me where she had expected since she groped around for a moment she opened her eyes to replace out where I was, and groaned with the tightness of sleep. She stretched and before she could get a close, or even focused, look at me I closed the screen on the tablet so she couldn’t see what I had been working on, or what I found out.

“Hey,” I said to her before she could ask me anything, or so I though.

Her eyes were keener than I thought and she had seen me close down my table and what I was trying to hide but she still asked me. “What are you hiding sexy?”

“Nothing.” I tried to lie to her face.

She saw the lie though, I never thought she wouldn’t have, and stared at me, when she did that there was little I could do but tell her the truth, I would tell her anything when she looked at me with those eyes. “Alex.” Her voice was soft but not angry or accusatory just worried is all.

I hadn’t wanted to tell her like this, not until I had confronted the men, but I still sighed and told her the truth. “Those two soldiers we saved, they didn’t come from the Nina, they couldn’t have.”

She looked up at me, looked right into my eyes before she spoke. “How can you be so sure,” she asked me the same way she spoken to me since she awoke, with not anger or accusation just a simple question, “we both saw them and they were wearing S.A. uniforms.”

“You’re right.” I admitted to her but I had to turn away from her eyes because I didn’t want her to see the hurt in my eyes, eyes that I knew were welling at the sides. “They have the correct type of uniforms, the right insignias, the proper marks of rank. Everything about them is correct but that doesn’t mean shit. All of those things can be stolen or replicated. Hell there is an entire division of S.A. military intelligence devoted to stopping just that sort of thing.”

“Alright,” Lerra conceded quietly, which seemed to hurt more than if she had accused me of being paranoid, “so if they aren’t really military then who are they?”

“You got me wrong. I never said that they weren’t military, I just said that they hadn’t come from the Nina.”

“So they are S.A.”

I couldn’t help it I got a bit snippy then and Lerra didn’t deserve it, thinking back I was assuming more than I was explaining. “Oh yeah, they even got the meat tags to prove it.”

Lerra though didn’t take offence to my snippiness, I think she was actual used to it by then and liked it in a sick way. “Do I even what to know what meat tags are?”

I had to explain it to her, it was just too much tempting of an idea not to since I saw the wrinkle of her nose when she said “meat tag,” the very idea disgusted and intrigued her. “Front line soldiers sometimes get their dog tags replicated on their sides, under the arm in case they die in an explosion which would render them otherwise unidentifiable, it’s the least likely place to be blow to hell.”

“Gross.” She said almost meekly, which was strange since I had tattoos and they didn’t bother her and she had a cybernetic arm but I didn’t think about either idea since she continued to probe me about the men before I could think of something else to get her off the topic completely. “Maybe they were assigned to the Nina and something happened and they ended up in the escape shuttle on accident, it’s happened before, we even picked up a few when I was still military.”

“I may not be military any more but I still have a few people back inside who owe me favors, and a few who still like me to boot. I contacted a few of them over the past few days to follow up on a suspicion I had after I looked at the shuttle yesterday. It was damaged but the damage didn’t make any sense to me.”

Lerra actually rolled her eyes at me. “You’re a navigator Alex,” she said with a sigh, she actually sighed at me, “granted you’re a really sexy navigator with a great ass and really, really soft and luscious lips, but you’re not an engineer.” The way she looked at me I couldn’t tell if she was trying to seduce me or goad me into a fight of wills, one I knew I would lose the other I wouldn’t mind losing.

“Are you trying to seduce me into not fallowing this?”

“If I tell you that I am will that get you back in this bed?”

I glared at her under my half closed eye before I answered her, thought I don’t think it had the effect on her I wanted it to have. “No, I was at the top of my class when it came to three dimensional physics, and I know what battle damage looks like. The reserve O2 tanks were punctured as well as the fuel supply but nothing else was punctured and those two places have the strongest shielding on the escape shuttles. For that type of damage to be possible they would have had to have been shot near to point blank with armor piercing rounds from an anti-tank sniper rifle, and I mean a big one like something that could take out a fighter in flight formation near to half a mile away. If the shuttle had been hit like that and in that way it would have been blown to pieces, the fuel would have ignited and the O2 would have exploded, the shuttle would be nothing but shrapnel. Nothing seems to add up right in my head, none of it makes any sense. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, I understand.” Lerra looked understandably concerned when I laid it all out for her and got up from the bed with the sheet and walked to me, wrapping her arms around me and hugging me to her bare chest until my nose was buried in her bust and we were both wrapped safely in the cocoon of the sheet. “Take a breath sweetheart.” She told me rubbing the back of my head with her hand and pressing her lips to my forehead. “I trust you and I believe you. Just tell me what your contacts told you?”

I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with her smell and her calm, I didn’t know if it was her pheromones or what but I found my mind calming as the breath filled my lungs. “The Nina hasn’t reported seeing action in almost three months, not even a single rouge pirate and with those damages they couldn’t have stayed out there for much longer than a day or two maybe even less than that.”

“Alright,” Lerra said tilting my head so I had to look her in the eye, “you’d already convinced me, we’ll go tell James.”

“We can do that in the morning,” I told her taking a hold of her arm and kissed it before I got up from the chair, “now he’d probably be too sleepy to make any sense of anything we said anyway. Besides,” I pulled off my shirt and pulled Lerra back to the bed by the sheet, which she let go of all too easily and I crawled under pocking my head out onto the pillow and coaxing her back into bed with a finger, “if we go now we won’t be able to spend the rest of the night together.”

Lerra sighed and came to join me in the bed. “You, my dear, are insatiable, do you know that?”

“You bring it out of me.” I told her before I coiled my arms around her neck and held her right to me as I kissed her lips.