Energize (From the Logs of Daniel Quinn Book 1) Read online

  I was suddenly back in a familiar room, a small but manageable space for someone with my living habits. I wasn’t exhausted anymore from all the running, nor was I scared of being caught. I was happy and excited. Something was happening on this night, something I had prepared for. My body moved through the room, my mouth stretched out in a wide smile. I remember going into my bedroom to change out of my uniform. That’s when everything changed and the room seemed to darken into a moment that would leave a scar on my soul, the moment when I saw my bedroom covered in blood and a body lay dead in front of me.

  The present returned as quickly as it had left. I was back in the cartography room. Only small remnants of the vision remained in my mind. Captain Sarah King, the woman standing in front of me, was still grinning. In the time that I relived my memories the guards had completely surrounded me. As I looked into her eyes my thoughts grew reckless and angry, pouring out the intense hatred I had for her.

  Kill her!

  The words echoed in my mind as loud as the alarms did throughout the ship. A small part of me in the darkest corners of my mind wanted to end her life. She was certainly close enough. I would instantly be killed once I took her throat in my hands, but I should have just enough time to end her.

  I lowered my shoulders and let out a sigh. I wouldn’t kill her. I couldn’t.

  “Quinn,” she said to me, the voice sending chills throughout my body, causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up. “I cannot tell you how nice it is to see you. It’s been a long time.”

  What was I supposed to say? My entire thought process froze. I don’t think it was fear. The hatred counteracted that. I tried to calm my thoughts, as impossible as that seemed.

  Just keep talking to her, I thought as I grit my teeth together.

  “Not long enough,” I said.

  King looked amused by my response, but otherwise unaffected. She stepped closer, the look of her, the smell of her was the same as I remembered years ago. The senses sent shockwaves through my body.

  “We have been looking for you for a long time, Quinn. I see the years haven’t been terribly kind to you, but you did manage to replace your eye! Let’s hope you manage to hold onto that one” she said as she laughed softly, and then she deeply inhaled through her nose. “At least you keep yourself clean, despite your filthy persona.”

  “Well, the dirtier you are the itchier the body gets. Who likes that?” I could only throw sarcasm at her for so long. “Listen, why don’t you just do what we know you’re going to do? Throw me in jail, or kill me here and now. Just do it quickly please.”

  King circled me, eyeing me up and down. “No inquiries about old friends? I know Lieutenant Hobbes has missed you terribly.” She stuck out her bottom lip as she finished her sentence.

  The name hit me like a punch to the gut. Jason Hobbes had been one of my closest friends for as long as I can remember. The last time I saw him was when I fled for my life to escape the Echelon the first time. Jason helped me escape. In my last memory of him I screamed and pounded on a shuttle door as I watched the guards seize him. I knew he would die after that, but was it possible he was still alive?

  I lunged at King and wrapped my hands around her uniform. With a boiling rage I growled out at her.

  “Where is he? What have you done with him?”

  Every guard raised their weapon at my head, but King put her hand up to stop them from firing at me.

  “He’s doing well enough I suppose,” she muttered. “I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time to see him now that you’re back where you belong.”

  I let go of her collar and backed away from her.

  The amusement in her voice sickened me. I took a deep breath and tried to tell myself that she was toying with me, trying to break me mentally. Some small part of me wanted to surrender just for the chance to see Jason again. The two of us did everything we could to protect each other. We were like brothers.

  As I stood there in disbelief, King’s eyes traveled over my body and locked onto the ring that hung around my neck. She stepped closer. One of her guards recommended against it, but she raised her hand to silence him. With her opposite hand, she slid her fingers under the ring, palming it. I felt my heart racing, hammering against my chest.

  “Drop . . . the ring . . . now,” I growled out. She let go of it, her eyes widening. I palmed the ring and closed my hand tight around it. “I keep this on me to remember what I lost,” I said to her, my voice growing colder by the minute. “I keep this to remember everything you took from me . . . Commander!”

  Sarah King flinched when I called her by her previous designation. For a brief moment the tables seemed to turn. That didn’t last long of course. She had the guards and the ship and quickly regained her composure.

  “Speaking of taking things from others,” she said, her voice cold and calculated. “You have something I want. Tell me where my artificial intelligence program is and you will be treated somewhat fairly.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say to her, so I laughed. I wish I could say it was a pleasing, satisfied laugh. I think at that point I lost my mind. She pursed her lips and furrowed her brow.

  “We’ll see how amused you are when we break you Quinn,” she said. “Then you will tell us everything.”

  At that exact moment, the ring I held onto trembled. My breath stopped as I felt it, but no one took notice of my expression. A short static noise echoed through the room, and then a high pitched man spoke over the intercom.

  “Captain King, this is lookout,” the voice said.

  “I read you lookout, I’m currently indisposed, if you could please wait…”

  “I’m sorry sir, but this can’t wait. We are picking up a vessel on scanners, no known registration.”

  For the first time in hours, I felt a genuine smile creep up on me. My hands trembled with anticipation. There was actually a chance I could still get out of this.

  “Check all transit, delivery, and cargo drops on our schedule and see if it matches any design in the ESA database. Do it quickly. We need to know if it’s hostile or just passing through.”

  King watched me as she waited for her lookout to scan the vessel. She was smart. If this ship was the one I hoped for, the timing had to be quick and precise. We waited. She waited. The guard hadn’t arrested me yet. I was shocked no one seemed to hear my heart slamming against my chest like a drum.

  “Captain, lookout. We do not have any scheduled rendezvous nor is the ship listed in our database. It’s approaching visual range.”

  Any second now.

  “Hey Commander!” I said loudly. King almost jumped, but her expression of hate didn’t falter. “I forgot to tell you, it’s not just Quinn anymore, it’s Captain Quinn.” I finished the statement with a wide grin, teeth showing, and my eyebrows rose as I pointed right at the stone attached to the ring. The diamond that had once rested on the ring was replaced with a clear colored micro-drive, the same one I just used to steal a huge amount of ESA data.

  “Next time try looking right under your nose, or in this case . . . mine.”

  “No! Grab him!”

  Too late. In one single second, I watched as King and her guards leapt toward me. The stone emitted a scanning beam covering my entire body, which then shifted my entire being off of the Echelon. Imagine someone grabbing every single part of your body and pulling you at a velocity so intense, that you traveled from one side of a planet or ship to the other in seconds. That’s exactly what happened to me. I was pulled, my mass and energy teleported from the cartography station to a small closet sized control room, the walls and floor a dirty shade of copper.

  I was on the bridge of my ship. Technically I was lying on my back and my body felt like it had just fallen from the ceiling three meters above, but I wasn’t going to complain at the moment. Instead I turned my head to the empty navigation station and yelled out.

  “Al! Get us out of here now!”

  The control console lit up and b
egan computing coordinates. At the same time a voice came through the speaker system, a couple of the lights blinking as it spoke.

  “You do not have to scream sir. Activating slingspace velocity now.”

  The engine growled and the deck plates trembled. I raced to the front window to see, only for a second, the ESA Echelon off my starboard bow. Less than five seconds later my ship turned and shot forward into a speed faster than light. I counted to ten, pinched myself, and dropped to the ground.

  Somehow I once again escaped the jaws of the beast...and for now I was safe.

  TWO

  “I want to know how I ended up on that damn ship,” I said to my computer console.

  An hour had passed since my nearly fatal run in with the Echelon, but now I was cruising in the opposite direction at full slingspace velocity. I always thought the term sounded odd, but the act of traveling faster than light derived from old fashioned slingshots and catapults centuries ago. In addition to my main engine core which controlled my thrusters, my ship had a secondary core specifically built to charge enough power over time to launch the ship forward into slingspace.

  Unfortunately this could cause problems. My ship is so old that it can’t operate with both the thrusters and slingspace drive at full power at the same time. In order to escape the Echelon, we had to drop out of slingspace, power down its core, and then activate the thrusters. Once Al maneuvered her into a new position, we shut down the thrusters and primed the slingspace core. We repeated the process a few times to make sure the Echelon couldn’t track us. If the two cores were ever activated at the same time the ship could shake apart.

  Now that we had jumped a few times and masked the exhaust trail of my ship, I felt I could rest a little easier. The jumps had depleted my fuel tanks considerably and I had questions about everything that had occurred, but at least I was back on the bridge of my ship. I named her the Kestrel Belle.

  The Kestrel class star cruiser, designed to mimic the shape of a falcon was created before the ESA and other agencies constructed newer, state of the art ships. She was small, quick, and easy to maneuver with only one crewman—me. Though I guess that wasn’t really true. I had a lot of help from the advanced artificial intelligence that was installed into my ship’s mainframe. He wasn’t technically sentient, but I had a funny feeling if I told him that he would take offense.

  “Captain,” he said, his voice strangely human except for an occasional monotone vocal intonation. “I ran several diagnostics on the Starcade, specifically the job the ESA used to capture you. I found abnormalities in the source code.”

  I remembered the job post. The Starcade was an enormous, intergalactic bulletin board used by mercenaries, bounty hunters, and anyone else who operated outside the law. If someone needed a job done with no questions asked, they posted it to the Starcade and waited for a potential application process. Depending on the type of job it was, be it smuggling supplies, infiltration, or even assassination, mercs would bid for the opportunity to get the job. If the employer liked the resume and fee, then a deal was made and the job started.

  Two days ago, I was hired for a simple escort. I would travel to an installation where I would be used as a hired protector of a high ranking government official. I had to admit, the details were scarce, but that wasn’t anything new. Sometimes Starcade submissions were nothing more than one or two words like ‘Target Pursuit’ or ‘Smuggle Operation’. I was confident I could accomplish an escort job, so I put in my fee. I was accepted immediately.

  That’s when the red flags should have been going off in my head. I didn’t know of any job that hired a merc after one submission. Maybe this job was high priority and they couldn’t afford to wait. That was possible, but there was one other reason I should have realized it was a set up.

  My reputation as a mercenary was less than stellar. In a short few years submitting my name for jobs on the Starcade, I had been accepted less than a dozen times, and my completion rating wasn’t exactly 100%. In fact, I’d be lying if I said it was over 50%. I was young, naive, and didn’t know how deep and terrifying some of these jobs would be. It was no secret that I wasn’t the most trustworthy bidder.

  When I was hired two days ago, Al and I had discussed the oddity of the quick hire and instructional transmission. It stated that I had to wait on a space station in sector three for a shuttle to pick me up. Weapons and armor would be provided to me when I arrived at my destination. Did this all sound odd to me? Yes. Was it completely unheard of in the history of the Starcade? No. In the end, I decided that I needed the money, and took the job. You know how it ended, with my incarceration and transfer to the Echelon.

  “So let me guess,” I said to Al. “The source code was a native ESA signal.”

  “That is correct Captain. In fact, multiple ESA signals were in the Starcade, all different jobs and requirements.”

  Stars above, I thought. Sarah King was combing the damn galaxy for me, and it worked. I considered my options and tried to think of a location I could travel where I would be safe, well moderately safe, and at the same time could shop out for information. I could only think of one such place.

  “Al, set a course for Galaxy One Alpha.”

  “Yes sir, altering course now. Stand by.”

  The ship modified its course and I felt my equilibrium shift causing a slight bout of dizziness. After a while it was something you got used to. I sat down on the cold, metal floor and angled my head under the computer console so I could remove the panel underneath it. A red glow emanated from inside illuminating a vast array of circuitry. In the center was a square shaped motherboard, one that many of the wires and chips were connected to.

  I took the ring that still hung on the necklace and held it close to my eyes. The knotting was a shimmering silver color which led around and met on each side, tying together where the diamond sat, or used to. I carefully detached the micro-drive from the ring and connected it to the motherboard above me.

  “Sir,” Al said. I was so deep in thought that his voice boomed in my ears and caused me to jump. Thankfully I didn’t drop the small device. “Why are you touching me?”

  That comment made me laugh. When he was first installed on the ship, he was a lifeless, emotionless computer program that didn’t understand simple human concepts. After years of traveling with me, lonely and depressed, I took to talking to Al like he was my best friend. He adapted to me as much as I did to him, growing his own unique personality. He requested I name him shortly after, so I called him Al because the abbreviation of ‘A.I.’ on his motherboard was written in a font where the capital ‘I’ looked like a lowercase ‘l’. It wasn’t the most original way to name him, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “I’m reinstalling the micro-drive you lent me. I downloaded some information that may prove to be useful.”

  “Understood. I was content with the results of the successful teleportation I initiated. For a moment I was concerned you would not survive the process,” he said to me. I nearly dropped the micro-drive.

  “Are you telling me there was a chance I wouldn’t have teleported off that ship?” I asked.

  “Incorrect sir. You would have teleported, but the percentage of completing the process with your full mass was only 57%.”

  Well, it was nice to know my ass wasn’t flying around somewhere in deep space at the moment. I took in a breath and let it out slowly, continuing to connect the drive to his mainframe. When I was finished, I closed the panel and waited in my chair. The rest was up to him.

  “Accessing data . . . Classified. That is unacceptable. Bypassing . . . Coordinates, data logs, star charts, and personnel review . . . sir there is a formidable amount of information here. It is odd though that the data patterns are erratic.”

  “How so?” I asked. The records that he listed made it seem like the ESA was searching for something.

  “There are a variety of records, however none of them are listed consistently or collectively. If I had to guess, I would
say that this data has been intentionally scrambled to confuse anyone who illegally tries to access it.”

  Well gee, who would want to do that? I chuckled to myself.

  “So what you’re telling me is that you are looking at a pile of puzzle pieces. Can you put it all back together so it can be accessed?”

  “. . . Interesting use of terms Captain. Following your train of thought, I would say yes. With time I should be able to re-sequence the collections.”

  I could feel the tension in me evaporating. In a matter of hours Al would have complete access to the files I took from the Echelon. I could only imagine what kind of data was listed, and even more so, what it could do for me. Depending on what Al could find, maybe I could prove that I was an innocent man, falsely accused of murder and mutiny, or maybe it had valuable information that I could use. After my run in with King and discovering that Jason Hobbes was alive, maybe I could find and help him. Of course, none of this would come to pass if all it turned out to be was a blueprint for a kitchen refit.

  “Alright,” I said, trying not to sound too excited. “I’m going to try and rest. Let me know when you’ve finished.”

  The Kestrel Belle wasn’t all that large. Beyond the bridge was a single corridor. The Captain’s and crew quarters were on the left, and the mess hall was on the right. At the end of the corridor which was an overall length of about thirty meters, a set of stairs led down to the second floor which held the armory and main access to the cargo bay. There was a third floor as well that led to engineering.

  A ship this size was meant to operate at full capacity with half a dozen people. Of course, having an advanced artificial intelligence program onboard allowed me to cheat the system. Although, even with Al on the ship I still felt the need for some type of human interaction. Even in space the crew quarters grew dust.