Majesty's Offspring (Books 1 & 2)

  ******

  “Wuh dee fook?” The Doc muttered in annoyance as he flung his hands out to steady himself.

  Almost knocking them over, Julius dashed down the corridor like an errant high-priority packet chasing its header. The elevator doors barely had a chance to open when he squeezed inside and disappeared.

  “Wonder what that was about?” Haylek said.

  Freeze shot him a grin. “I have it recorded. Want me to play it back?”

  “No!” Haylek shouted. “It’s none of our business.”

  Although, he had to admit that curiosity was testing his moral firewall.

  Haylek stared at the closed doors for a moment, then a frightening image appeared in his mind of Laina on the ground, covered in blood and bruises: the victim of an angry, drunken pirate. He touched the panel and the doors opened. He swallowed and stepped inside.

  Laina sat on the couch, her eyes locked in silent reverie at the floor. To his relief, she had no bruises on her face, only streaks of runny makeup likely left by now-dry tears.

  As he walked in, she lifted her gaze to acknowledge him. Her eyes were puffy and red. Yet, even in her current state, he still saw a beautiful, powerful woman; his heart sank a bit at seeing her so hurt.

  “Are you okay, Laina?”

  She straightened herself up and nodded. “I’m fine. You boys need to get back to work.”

  Haylek motioned the others to go back to their terminals.

  “Can I get you something?” Haylek asked her.

  Laina stood up gracefully and looked down at him. At that moment, he realized with some embarrassment just how much taller than him she was.

  “I said I’m fine!” she said. “You need to lead …” She pointed toward the hackers. “Find me Chorus.”

  Haylek nodded and scurried over to his terminal. He brought up the hidden packet’s routing intelligence diagram. As he began to write a program to organize the routing paragraphs into a logical order, he glanced behind him. Laina was sitting back down with a flask of liquor and a glass before her. She stared at the glass, a conflict in her eyes—one he knew all too well. An idea came to him.

  He stood up and darted over to her. She looked up at him, apparently startled.

  “Laina, we could use your help,” he said.

  She gave him a wry look and a slight laugh. “Are you joking? I’m not a hacker.”

  “You know how to operate a terminal. That’s all you need. I’ll show you.”

  Laina gave the flask one last glance, a slight grin on her lips as she stood up and followed him. “Okay, show me.”

  Haylek sat her at a terminal and began to show her word and paragraph arrangements for the routing intelligence. Essentially, it was a matching game where she would organize the clutter into the right piles. This would make it easier for the hackers to run the correct algorithms to decipher them, even though the speed at which she could do it would negate the purpose.

  “See the patterns?” Haylek pointed. “You just need to move them around into the correct paragraph buckets. Once they fill up, they will automatically empty and a new set will appear.”

  Laina nodded. “Okay, I think I get it. But it seems like the kind of tedious work a computer could do on its own. Not sure I understand why it’s being done manually like this.”

  Freeze looked like he was going to say something, but Haylek gave him a silencing look.

  “The computers aren’t smart enough,” Haylek said. “They would need to have some A.I. capability in order to do this work—and none of this equipment has that.”

  Laina shrugged. “Okay, I’ll do my best.”

  Satisfied, Haylek sat back down at his terminal and continued his work. It was not long before a message appeared on his screen from Freeze: “Why are you giving her that? A program will do it way faster.”

  Haylek tapped back: “It will keep her busy and keep her mind off whatever’s bothering her. Get back to work.”

  At that moment, he jumped at the sound of the ship alarms, accompanied by the beat of battle drums. He looked over at Laina.

  “What’s going on?” he asked her, not really knowing why he expected her to know anymore than he did.

  Laina made a move to get up from her terminal, then hesitated.

  “Whatever it is, I can’t help anyway,” she said. “I’m going to stay here and help you find Chorus. It’s our only hope right now.”

  Haylek looked at the others. He did not have the heart to tell her that she was just doing busy work that was not really going to help much.

  Just then, the ship intercom came on and Julius’ voice ensued from it.

  “Crew and pilots of the Sea Wolf, this is your captain. I don’t have time for a long pep talk, so I’ll keep this short. We have been engaged by a UEP battlecruiser that is projecting a gravity well. This is going to be a fight to the death. We cannot jump out while that battlecruiser is functioning, and we cannot charge our capacitor for a jump while engaged in combat. So it’s either them or us.

  “If this is our last engagement, then let us make sure that the Sea Wolf’s name lives on forever in tales of its infamy and gallant crew. Let’s see how much luck this old girl still has left in her. Wolf Squadron… launch!”

  Doc and Freeze turned to him, looking dumbfounded and frightened. Haylek should have felt paralyzed, he should have been panicking—but he wasn’t. He grabbed Chorus’ jewel in his hand and squeezed it tight.

  “Continue your work,” he said, conviction in his voice. “We are going to find Chorus—or we will die trying.”

  He turned to each of them. They nodded and went to work on their terminals. Another explosion shook the ship, and the lights in the room flickered. Thankfully, Freeze had the foresight to rig their equipment to its own regulated power supply.

  Haylek and Laina’s eyes locked for a moment, a stern expression on her face.

  “I know you are busy,” she said. “But I need to know if you can do something.”

  “Sure, what is it?”

  “Without distracting from your efforts to find Chorus, is it possible for you to get a conference link open to the Secretary of Peace Office at the Martian Confederacy’s capital?”

  Haylek stared at his terminal and gave a shrug. “Yeah, that would be easy enough… but why?”

  “Do it,” she said. “I need to ask for their help. We can’t do this all alone anymore.”

  The Sea Wolf shook again, the vibrations so strong this time that it rattled Haylek’s teeth. He gave her a nod and turned to his terminal.

  Using the ship’s passive wave connection, he bridged the communication to their network. A jamming signal interrupted the flow, probably from the UEP ship. A slight modification to the header and encryption packet to masquerade its signature as UEP would fix that. Since it was on the passive com network, it would likely go unnoticed by PIG, too. Within seconds, the link-up to the Confed was established.

  Haylek passed the conference link to her terminal. Before long, he could hear her conversing with someone on the other end.

  That request done, he returned his attention to the search.

  Haylek gazed at the Waterfall display. The routing intelligence diagram stared back at him. That complex maze of figures and code hid the location to Chorus—the location to humanity’s only hope. He needed to find her.