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Since all she could hear was Abby and her nurses trying to bring Hugh back from the dead, Jenna was too distraught to think about calling Fallon. However, her AI, Eve, called Simon, Fallon's AI.
Together they made an inquiry to Tatyana, and received nothing in response. Correctly concluding Tatyana was simply too busy to reply, Simon decided to inform his mistress of the Captain's status.
Fallon, who'd been trained by the military, knew she couldn't leave her post until the she knew the ship was safe. She thanked her AI, and simply watched the screen as a single tear traced a path down her cheek.
RyeAnn, who had overheard the report, admired Fallon's sense of duty. She also knew how much Hugh had come to mean to the petite blond. "Go, I'll take care of the ship. Hugh needs you more right now."
Fallon seemed to think about it for a couple of seconds before nodding. She stood, kissed RyeAnn firmly on the lips. "Thank you, and you have the con."
"You're welcome, Commander, and I have the con," RyeAnn answered. She was talking to empty air, for as soon she had finished speaking Fallon ran from the bridge.
"What have we discovered about the Mars situation?" Proconsul Aidan Wills asked.
"Very little good news, I'm afraid. As per the counsel's orders, Eden II and New Geneva are now under martial law. This time the troops are all under our control and soon we will be rotating the people out for conversion.
"As we suspected the freighter Titania was commandeered by the rebels. The special programming we installed for this purpose has been rendered inert by the existence of an advanced AI. We are not sure how it was missed when we had the vessel, but we will conduct an investigation to find out," Minister Fahcup replied.
Erma Fahcup had only recently been promoted to the position of Minister of Intelligence. She'd been promoted after the Council ordered her predecessor put to death for incompetence. Currently she had held the position for almost twenty hours, and was growing increasingly certain she would be following him shortly.
Not that she was incompetent, but she knew how well the Council took bad news, and right now, that's almost all she had.
"Yes, yes, we all know how you came to have the office you now hold. If you wish to keep it, get on with the report," Wills snapped.
"As you will, Proconsul." She gulped and took a deep breath. "We completely underestimated the level of control we had on the Marine regiment at New Geneva and Eden II. It appears that the entire regiment, all of their equipment, and the remaining cryo-chambers left aboard the rogue freighter," Erma instinctively flinched at the explosion she knew was forth-coming from the leader of the Confederacy.
"WHAT?" Wills screamed at her. "How the FUCK did the humans find out about the chambers?"
Erma plunged ahead. "I found a report on former Minister Shields' desk pertaining to the Regimental Commander, one Colonel Wilhelmina Kinds, requesting information on the current disposition of the pods. The initial report was almost two years old. It goes on to mention that since that time, she forged clearance for herself so she could gather the information she wanted on the pods.
"General Stanton reported that she had discovered that a good portion of the chambers were missing, and recommended her immediate replacement with a commander we actually had control of."
Wills was ready to kill, again. "So why wasn't she replaced?"
"Sir, as you know, we are having a lot of difficulty getting the process to work on the military. The upper ranks seem especially resistant to the conditioning. She wasn't replaced simply because we had no one to replace her with," Erma replied, at least that was the truth.
"I want that ship found! I don't care what it takes, but I want that ship recovered or destroyed! Do you understand me, Minister?" Wills said.
"Sir, the report isn't finished. The spy we had at Eden II, Hanna Rene, is aboard the freighter," Erma replied quickly.
"How the hell do you know that?"
"When she failed to report in, her handler, posing as a relative made a few inquiries. She was told that Miss Rene had departed the base with her boyfriend, Hugh Goodwin. When I contacted the handler, I learned a few other interesting facts." Erma paused to consult her notes. "Hugh Goodwin is a category one-alpha male. Although he is only sixteen, he has already fathered two male children. Samples taken from the collected semen indicated a ninety-one percent possibility for a male child.
"Unfortunately he made it to his ship before he could be detained. We suspect he was aided by the very Marines that were supposed to be arresting him. In light of this information, combined with the fact that the remaining cryo-chambers are on that ship, do you wish to rescind the destruction order?" Erma asked matter-of-factly. She didn't want to piss him off, but acting cowed all the time wouldn't help either.
Wills nodded. "Agreed, yes I will rescind that order. Have we gotten any information out of the traitors yet?"
"Although we are certain that at least Captain Reynolds knows the ultimate destination of the rebel base, she has been able to resist the mind probe; it'll be some time before we can extract the information." Erma experienced a moment of déjà vu when she said that, but shrugged it off.
"Very well, keep at it, Minister. Once we locate the hidden base, we can test out the new fleet on it," he chuckled.
Assuming she was dismissed, Erma turned to leave the chamber.
"Oh, Minister?" Wills called.
"Yes, Proconsul?"
"I know you'll be here to make a new report as soon as your spy calls in, won't you?" His tone left little doubt in her mind that if the report wasn't favorable; neither would be her prospects for a future.
Not trusting her voice, she once again tried, unsuccessfully, to swallow her fear. She could only nod her understanding. Showing back-bone could be taken to extremes, especially when you were trying to keep from soiling yourself.
Fallon ran in and threw her arms around a distraught Jenna. "How is he?"
Jenna sniffed, but she was still crying. "They managed to get his heart restarted and there was no interruption of brain activity, however, he's still unconscious, but Abby's pretty confident that the worst is over."
About that time, Emmitt followed closely by Mercedes rushed into the ward. Mercedes stopped by the girls, but Emmitt went on in to the bay where Hugh was.
Mercedes noticed the condition of the two lovers and almost panicked. "What happened?"
Jenna sniffed again, but pulled back from Fallon far enough to answer the girl. "When you isolated Hanna, the biocytes in Hugh tried to kill him. They damn near succeeded too. Abby and her team got his heart restarted before any damage could be done to his brain."
Mercedes bit her lower lip. "Well, no brain damage from oxygen deprivation anyway, do we know what the biocytes are doing?"
Fallon shook her head. "We haven't heard. I think Abby was waiting for Emmitt to get back."
"I've always felt that those fucking biocytes were a mistake. I mean, I'm all for improving technology, but little bio-mechanical robots running around inside you, doing the goddess only knows what? No thanks, you can keep my share," Mercedes said shuddering. "I imagine we'll all have them eventually though; especially if we're going to survive against monsters like that Hanna thing."
"I don't know about that. I doubt that the biocytes make her immune to being shot. Hugh was more a fan of science fiction than I was, but I suppose it's possible for the bugs to make a force shield, but where are they gonna get the energy to sustain it?" Jenna said.
Mercedes shook her head. "It couldn't happen; that type of energy would play holy hell with a person's EM field. That can lead to all sorts of unpleasant things."
"Didn't we just prove one of those impossibilities as being real? The foreign biocytes in Hugh were being controlled by Hanna via a subspace link that should have been lethal to begin with!" Fallon said. "I think we're going to discover many things that are not so far from reality as we believe."
Mercedes was quiet a moment before she nodded slowly. "I think you might be right, Fallon. I think Captain Ayres is correct about the Captain as well, although I think it might be for a different reason."
"What would that be?" Fallon asked. Although she didn't know this girl very well, and Jenna thought she was sexy as hell, Fallon was beginning to like her, even if she had gotten to have sex with Hugh before she did.
"I think Hugh and Jenna are going to be important simply for their creativity, and imaginations. We've become too bound by the knowledge we have. Do you know there hasn't been one single improvement to hyperspace drive theory since it was discovered?" When Fallon and Jenna both shook their heads no, she continued. "It's like that in most fields; just clever variations on the original. We're going to need people with open minds if we're going to get anywhere in this little war, or even as a race."
Neither Fallon nor Jenna realized it, but Mercedes had distracted them from their worry, which had been her real goal all along. Therefore, it surprised both of them when Emmitt and Abby both stepped out of the bay that Hugh was in.
"How is he?" Fallon anxiously.
"Stable, and on his way to a full recovery. The invader biocytes mostly self-destructed when their control signal was lost, which is what caused the biggest problem. But the biocytes we injected him with managed to repair the damage almost as quickly as it happened. Still it was a close thing. For now, the biocytes are keeping him asleep until they can get him cleaned up, and get most of the foreign material out of him. He'll be out for at least the rest of the evening," Abby reported.
Ignoring the last part of what Abby said, Jenna asked, "Can we see him?"
"Well, like I said, he'll be out until tomorrow at least. He's also pretty bruised up and he got pretty bloody there for a bit. However, Ellie was cleaning him up, so you can look in on him, but I want the pair of you back in your own quarters, and in bed sleeping within the hour."
Jenna just nodded meekly, and Fallon grinned, but turned to Emmitt. "What's the story with the invader Biocytes? Are they all destroyed?"
Emmitt nodded. "It looks that way. You should have seem the floor in my lab when we kicked that shift device on. It was like the whole thing was on fire for a moment. However, the equipment in my lab reported that all of them were destroyed, so I'm basing an assumption on that. I did ask Tatyana to perform a shipwide scan to make sure."
"Okay, let me know when that scan's complete and what the results are; I'm certain that Captain Ayres and her crew would like to get back to their own ship." Fallon asked.
"Will do, Commander," Emmitt replied.
"Doctor, I'm not in the military anymore, so you can call me Fallon."
He chuckled. "You're not in the Confederation Military anymore..."
Fallon was going to ask what he'd meant by that, but he'd already made it to the door. Abby had excused herself to look in on a couple of other patients she had, and so the three young women stepped into the bay Hugh was in, and looked down at his sleeping face.
"Even when he's asleep, there's a magnetism to him. He's definitely someone special," Mercedes said softly. "I could tell that the first time I saw him."
Jenna chuckled and lightly slapped her arm. "Are you sure it wasn't the fact that less than two minutes later he had his cock buried in you?"
Mercedes blushed. "Well, there is that too, but that's not really what I was talking about."
"Sorry, I couldn't help taking a poke at you; you looked so serious!" Jenna said. She was getting back to her playful self now that she knew Hugh was going to be okay.
"I know what you mean, Mercedes," Fallon said smiling at her soon-to-be wife. "I first met Hugh almost a year ago, when Jenna came aboard the Redshift for training. Back then, he just seemed like every other boy I've ever met. Then yesterday morning, when Jenna and he showed up at my table for breakfast ... Hugh is the first and only male I've ever been attracted too. I don't think I could explain it either."
"Explain what, Beautiful?" Hugh asked.
"You're awake!?" Jenna almost shouted, and dropped on his chest to hug him.
"We were trying to understand our feelings toward you, my love," Fallon replied.
"Feelings..." Hugh repeated groggily. Suddenly his eyes snapped wide open and he tried to sit up, dislodging Jenna. "Anna is still in her! She needs help! Fallon, we've ... got..." just as suddenly he sagged back into the bed. " ... to help..." Once again Hugh returned to the realm of dreams.
"Just what in the hell is going on in here?" Abby asked as she burst through the curtain. "I said he was asleep, but he's not so deep he can't woken up by noise!"
"It was Hugh himself, Doctor! He opened his eyes and spoke to us! Although I think he was dreaming 'cause he didn't make sense," Mercedes tried to explain.
"There is no way the biocytes would have allowed him to awaken on his own. Now, all of you ... out! Let the Captain rest! You should be resting too! So get moving!" The diminutive medic hiked a thumb over her should to indicate the trio should leave.
"But..." Jenna started, but dropped it when she saw the stern look from Abby.
The three girls all gave Hugh a kiss on the cheeks before they trooped out. They said their good-nights, and Fallon led Jenna back to their quarters. They held hands and it was obvious they were in love.
Mercedes watched the couple walk away and sighed, she turned, and went back to her lonely quarters.