Target_Earth by Vaughn Heppner

Author:Vaughn Heppner [Heppner, Vaughn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-17T22:00:00+00:00

-48-

I’d guessed right. The enemy domination machine must have been on the heavy cruiser. When Rollo came to from my sucker punch, he was mortified by what he’d been doing and saying these past days. Ella felt the same way.

“Orcus must have gained control of us in the Tau Ceti System,” she said.

We were in the Light Cruiser Thistle Down’s bridge heading for Earth orbit with the battlejumpers parked there. The other light cruiser remained in Moon orbit, a remote-controlled vessel under Luna Command.

“That doesn’t seem right,” I said. “Wouldn’t Orcus have plundered the GEV in that case? He never did, which implies that he never had the opportunity.”

“I think he could have,” Ella said. “But the plundering action would have been too much for the mind machine to overcome in us.”

“You’re referring to the domination machine?”

“That. I think Orcus must have had a Jelk-like mind machine. I checked myself soon after…regaining my will. My brainwaves were subtly different from a test I’d taken several years ago.”

“Wouldn’t altered brainwaves be an effect from the domination machine?”

“Possibly,” Ella said. “I still give it a higher probability that Orcus first altered our minds in order to make us more receptive to the domination machine. I put you in the stasis tube, as you were near death. That part is correct. Thus, you never received the first alteration because you were too weak to undergo the process. Perhaps that’s why you were able to resist the domination machine so easily.”

I’d undergone some intense training while in the Curator’s service that made me even more unlikely to fall prey to such forces, but I didn’t bother saying anything about it.

Instead, I asked, “Why would Orcus want me alive instead of dead?”

“Maybe Jennifer ordered him to keep you alive.”

“But Jennifer hates me.”

“Exactly,” Ella said.

“Oh. You mean Jennifer hates me so much that she wants to make me pay the hard way for what I did to her.”

“She wants to torture you just as Abaddon tortured her.”

I shuddered while thinking about that. Most times, I put her terrible ordeal out of my mind. I didn’t like to think what Abaddon had done to twist Jen. She’d been such a sweet girl, and now she was a murderous harridan hatching devilish, genocidal plots.

Once more, I resolved to save her. Yet, the more I tried, the more it seemed to move out of reach. For instance, couldn’t Orcus have installed latent commands in our minds? Well, in their minds.

I asked Ella about that.

“I can devise some tests,” she said. “Maybe I should get started on them.”

“Good idea.”

Ella left the bridge.

Rollo was slumped in a chair, staring at the main screen with Earth growing larger as we approached the planet.

“Sorry about hitting you,” I said.

Rollo shook his head. He had a bruise on his chin and another on the back of his head, and a hangdog look in his eyes. “I needed it,” he said. “Just like I needed the whippings my old man gave me when I was a kid.

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