Excerpt from Alibies by Sabrina

The phone lay in the middle of the floor, dial tone long since gone. Emma picked it up from the floor and stared at it a moment, then replaced it on it’s base. Probably out of charge and useless now. She turned away, planning on a quick trip to her room and to bed. It was past midnight and she didn’t want to deal with it anymore, “it” being Adrienne’s miscarriage, her husband’s dickheadedness, her own hallucinations, as Stacy suggested Hodges might be, and especially not Home Guard. If she could get past Hodges’ room without too nasty an encounter, she’d fall onto the covers and sleep, sleep, sleep until sunlight through the blinds woke her. Or not. Maybe she’d sleep through the day or even the week. She could dream, anyway.

The phone rang behind her. Emma stopped, surprised. She’d been sure there’d be no charge left.

The caller ID showed “caller unknown,” so she touched the red mute button.

When she checked, the charge indicator showed zero. Broken maybe. Like so many things.

Emma shook her head. Melodrama wasn’t something she indulged in often. Tonight it colored every thought.
She’d reached the soft carpet of the hall when the phone rang yet again. Louder than before, which wasn’t possible since she was farther away than when it rang the first time. Ridiculous, really. She didn’t quite run back across the space between herself and the phone, but she hustled.

The phone quit as soon as she reached the high table where it sat. “Unknown” stuttered and blinked at her on the little screen, as if struggling through low battery life. Throwing the thing across the room might be a lot of fun but not terribly smart. Clutching your purse to your side because you didn’t want to be parted from the gun inside was a pretty clear indication she needed a working phone. She did have her cell though.

Emma reconsidered throwing the handset, then set it back in the cradle. Stacy’s talk stayed with her, not because the woman had offered anything so amazingly astute, but for the talk itself. If Emma saw Hodges in every sunset and dealt with his ghost every night, that indicated she hadn’t finished dealing with her grief. It wasn’t quite what Stacy had said, but what Emma took away from their conversation.

“Hodges, if you’re doing this, I’d like you to stop. I’ve had a really rough day and I need to go to bed. Okay?”

No answer save silence.

The sillies struck and Emma offered a bad movie imitation. “Well, um, okay then, I’m just gonna have to go ahead and ask you to come back another time...”

The phone rang again, jangling until the entire contraption shook from base to handset. Emma eeped and clutched her purse tighter, going so far as to reach inside, as if a .38 might be of any use against a deranged phone. Clutching the gun, she stared at the phone as if expecting it to jump off the base and skitter across the floor after her.

No such thing happened. It just wouldn’t stop ringing. It seemed to grow exponentially louder until all that existed within the house was what was historically the most obnoxious sound in the world.

Emma gathered her courage and strode to the phone. She stopped a stride short of being able to pick it up and leaned in to read who was calling, expecting “unknown” again.

It said, “No.”

A hand batted the phone off its base. It was her own. She could tell because her fingers hurt from the force of the contact. The handset flew free of the base and broke apart on the floor. Emma didn’t even know she was pointing the .38 until the phone quit its ringing. Hands shaking, she kept the gun pointed at the broken pieces of plastic that used to be her phone's handset. When nothing more happened for several long seconds, Emma lowered the gun. As she did, that large, comforting hand she always associated with her husband returned to enfold her. At first her heartbeat magnified beneath that not quite restrictive warmth, then slowed to a regular cadence.

As she relaxed, the warmth and comforting presence of that hand lessened until it was gone. All that was left was Emma.

“Fuck it. It’s getting way too weird around here.”

She pulled her cell and considered. Before she could talk herself out of it, she’d dialed Sean.

Excerpt: Gruesome Darkness

She advanced a step at a time into the swirling mist, her suit AI shifting small lights onto items in the hallways to get a better look at them, categorizing and dismissing them as little or no threat, moving on. Occasionally it marked an item of interest in her HUD: a body, dead; a piece of debris sticking out of a wall at a dangerous angle; a stencil indicating water passages 40m this way, PFC 70m that way.

On her left, a door. Ice spray around the door indicated moist air blown out into the vacuum as the door seal was gradually opened. The AI marked this, and the frozen drag marks across the floor. Jan swung her weapon through the opening and inspected the room beyond.

A small cafeteria. Three bodies, still swelling, twitching. An eye burst while Jan watched, and her rising gorge needled her out of stunned immobility.

Someone had just opened this door, and killed these people by doing so. She swung herself around along the path of the frozen drag marks, off down the hall toward the PFC. She saw a flicker of light and movement in the distance.

“Zoom!” she ordered, and brought her weapon up to sight along it while her vision leapt forward.

“Low light!” The mode shifted to amplification, and her field of view went blurry green, but then resolved.

What was she seeing?

Something had one of the swelling corpses. It was mottled, and hairless, and its bulging teardrop eyes did not reflect her lamps. It turned to her and bared sharp, pointed teeth, and she could see crystals of blood flaking away at the corners of it’s lips.

It didn’t have a suit. It was dragging a writhing, bulging corpse into the lock at the end of the hall.

Jan froze.

A grue?

Every legend of haunted derelicts came back to her at once, and the vacuum-silence and swirling mist in the darkness was suddenly more than she could bear. Stories of corpses stuck in the guns and antennae after a battle, bloating and thrashing and somehow being possessed by some nameless horror from out of the unholy emptiness between the stars, something that had ridden in on a hull and waited for a body, of a hunger for still-warm flesh and blood -

Stop it, Jan! Get hold of yourself! You’re a Federal Marine. That’s madness!

But there it was. She had seen it with her own eyes, pulling a body through a lock to do who knew what to it on the other side.

No. I panicked, misinterpreted what I saw.

“Video playback of the last minute.”

Her HUD opaqued and then replaced the live augmentation feed with the recorded video from sixty seconds ago. She had been advancing, looking down at the floor, up at the wall, left to the doorway, every direction but down the hall where it must have already been dragging the body. She saw the muzzle of the weapon swing into the room, the suit lights play over everything, her HUD marking one, two, three corpses.

“Stop.” She took the time to look at the display citing body temperature as primary evidence, estimating they had been dead for several hours. They were still thrashing and twitching, visibly expanding in the vacuum, but were already dead. It was just decompression. Creepy, but explainable.

She was suddenly overcome by the intolerable feeling that the grue was standing right beside her while her screen was masked. “Visual!”

Her faceplate cleared and she jerked the rifle up, pushing the creature away - but she was alone in the corridor. The skin on her scalp tightened, her flesh prickling all along her back and arms, her stomach rolled, but she was alone. She swallowed.

“Get a grip, Wakelin.” She gripped her rifle, hefted it. She’d almost fired with no target.

She turned around, full circle; she did it again, going the other direction.

“Stop it.” She smelled her own sweat, felt it run down her nose, drip  down her lip so she could taste the salt.

“Current visual inset, 1:6. Continue playback.”

She backed into a corner of the cafeteria so that the little window showed the room in front of her, and her back wasn’t so exposed. She kept looking up, expecting something to drop on her out of the low ceiling, but forced herself to watch the playback.

Her previous viewpoint rotated and followed the icy drag trail back out through the door.

“Now,” she told herself, “we’ll see what this really is.”

The image swung up. Zoomed in. Augmented.

There it was, dragging a body from the room behind. Hairless, skin lumpy and mottled, moving with a limp and shudder. Bulging eyes wide open, but dark, featureless. Mouth open, predator’s pointed canines - too many of them. Flecks of blood still dripping amid a sheen of foam. Swollen tongue darting out and back in again as it stared at her, and kept dragging a body into the tiny rotating lock, cuddling it close so as not to lose any parts in the mechanism.

Exactly as she’d seen it the first time. No suit. No breather. Triggering the lock and disappearing from view.

It had been right there, and had worked the lock.

Her bladder decided this was a good time to use the suit’s evacuation system.

Excerpt: Telepathic Warfare

The armada stopped outside the heliopause to scan the system and plot as safe a final jump into station space as possible. They had intentionally come in under high compression so that the outgoing wave would be slow, allowing the Poetry to jump through and surprise the waiting Fleet with the sudden, unannounced arrival of a hostile rogue telepath. A wing of ships had been assigned to go in with her to run interference, to draw fire and make sure she was able to finish her assigned tasks and perhaps get away to be used again later.

She braced for the nasty ride that was sure to result from the push through their expanding compression wave, and telepathically gave the order to go. Fifteen ships engaged their engines and pushed for station space amid the swarming forces of Fleet at high fold.

Two of them wormholed on entry, scattering absurd energy cones ahead at the station from the local ships that they’d spliced. The other dozen ships in the assault force completely disengaged their compression systems and came in at full throttle under vectored thrust only, riding in behind the compression wave released by their unannounced arrival and targeting anything that wasn’t already exploding with every weapon available. Guns blazing, broadcasting missiles as fast as they could be loaded and fired, a dozen vessels attacked the fleet as a kamikaze strike force trying with all their suicidal focus to draw attention to themselves and do as much damage as possible.

Behind them in the Poetry she waited, concentrating on being innocuous. Don’t notice me. See what a threat those other ships are? Make sure they don’t hit you. They are crazy, dangerous. You should avoid them. Someone else will kill them soon. Just get out of the way. Move aside, dodge, hide, flee...

Nothing worked like playing on the basic fight-or-flight reflex of humans, and flight was always a good option for humans already tired of fighting. Just get a little closer...

Move aside, flee; distance yourself from the Dominion's battles; be safe.

So far no one was shooting at Poetry. Push a little harder - move them toward rebellion.

Fleet has failed to keep you safe. Go it on your own. Leave them behind. Stop giving them your lives and livelihoods.

Go home. Your worlds don’t need them. They take and take, your wealth, your youth, your choice!

She gripped the rail and gritted her teeth, pouring out her will in a whitewash of shifted priority.

Take care of yourself and your own people first!

She felt them respond. No one wanted to fight any more.

The telepathy reached Reese before the signals declaring targets, before the reports of the compression wave, before even Warner’s sudden alarm.

Move aside, flee; distance yourself from the Dominion's battles; be safe.

He received. His supernaturally receptive mind opened and took in, embraced and amplified and absorbed her transmitted power, and it rooted in his basic primal dichotomies and triggered the intended response. He withdrew, balled into himself and hid from the universe. Reese was out of the fight.

His squad of telemetry-linked mecha detected his withdrawal and evaluated it against his duty. He was willfully rejecting his assigned task, and aside from the reasoning, he knew it, and so they knew it. They voted and had no dissent, and triggered his control system as a warning. Both his pleasure and pain centers flared with brief voltage, then the pleasure charge faded leaving only the pain.

Then the charge was removed.

It brought him out of the telepathically induced cocoon very effectively. His conditioning took over and he built a wall before stopping to think about what had happened.

He’d been shaped, manipulated by a strong telepath geared toward suggestion.

Rogue.

The fleet became unimportant. The station, the assault, the Delegates became unimportant.

Even the Victory could be sacrificed if it became necessary. Higher conditioning engaged. A telepath was a resource that could not be built; they could only be found and trained. A starship, even a jump ship, could be replaced.

A rogue telepath was a loose cannon that had to be silenced at all costs. If she could be collected as a resource, a Rectification class battleship was a fair trade. If not, she had to be neutralized, and the Victory, Collegium Station, and all the fleet nearby were acceptable losses.

A quick telemetry command send the order for any available torpedo to target the Poetry, though the message might not make it across the intervening space in time, and he hoped to keep her from getting away or dying.

Telepathic combat was not Reese’s forté as a receiver, but he’d been trained. Time to put his weakness to the test.

I see you.

The new thought blossomed out from the Victory, the PsioniCorps agent there informing the field that Fleet was still watching Rather than threatening or commanding obedience, it only informed, an admonition that each should do as he believed was right, since there could be no escape. The omniscient eye of the Dominion would find them all out, and whatever followed was only what each deserved.

In particular, however, Reese directed his attention at her, and cast the light of his own perceptions across the field. There she was, naked and exposed. Here, this is the rogue who is trying to manipulate you.

She screamed, literally and figuratively, verbally and telepathically. Exposed!

She turned and focused her rage on him. You, DIE!

But Reese was listening, carefully touching her with his gentle perceptions, and knew what she was planning as she coiled for a most direct and lethal strike. He had been very well trained; he had already erected a barricade of disdain for her crude, brutal methods, and used it to deflect the force of her order. He turned away his open mind, gave her only the back of his metaphorical hand as he brushed the directive aside as the screaming of a spoiled child, yet kept that soft contact so that he knew when she was done.

The force of her assault shuddered the careful bunker he’d constructed in his mind, introduced cracks by the sheer, unadulterated purity of her malice. He blinked, writhed in his tank, but managed by the barest margin to maintain his outward facade. This would require finesse, and he’d best not make any more mistakes.

She struck directly, with strength and ferocity. He touched her and anticipated each move, redirected it like an ancient warrior brushing her straight lines aside and into circles. He had been trained in hand to hand combat, and had spent many hundreds of hours riding the experience of Warner, who was a true master of the art. He turned away, turned her as well, guiding her thoughts to the fact that he was unimpressed, embarrassed for her, shedding disdain that soaked her will and washed away some of her confidence.

She was so strong! He knew that if he ever let her get a firm grip on his mind just once that he would truly die, but she was careless and clumsy and undisciplined, and though she had learned to use her mental weapons very well, she had never really learned any defense other than a good offense.

Reese was strong enough, but his forté was not frontal assault. He was a listener. His teachers had known that.

He listened. He touched her, felt her fear that she might not be able to stand her own against an actual Fleet telepath. He heard her need to prove herself. He tasted her sharp, stinging pain that he had so easily brushed aside her best, strongest attack, and shown only disdain for her. He smelled the acrid terror that he had so easily been able to expose her, when anonymity had always been her power.

She didn’t even have a name. She had erased it, expunged it from her own misty mind long ago. An invisible girl needed no name.

Mist, he named her, and sent it across the starship crews, pointed them at her little gondola. She is ethereal, ephemeral, she wanders among people like fog and is MISSED, but fades to insignificance under the light of day. There she is, in a derelict ship with no armor, no weapons.

STOP! He turned and deflected her insistence with wry humor and derision, a snicker. It hit him hard; he ceased his projection, drew into himself to tighten the wall, but again kept a tendril of attention not on what she wanted, but on how she felt about what he said.

She was terrified. She was appalled. He strained, but reached out, using all his will, and though he managed only a brief flash against her order - There she is -  she shuddered under the exposure.

For any telepath, having someone’s direct attention was like being the target of a shouted megaphone monologue. Reese knew that better than anyone, for as a strong receiver he suffered more than most under the focused attention of many. It had taken him a great deal of training to learn to erect the barriers that would protect him, but all that training and practice paid off now as he used the same skills to parry her projected will.

He sensed that she had always lived in terror of that feeling, the barrage of thoughts that were so hard to keep out, when a group realized you could hear them and flared up in fear and revulsion, casting hatred, berating you, and mentally shutting their eyes and plugging their ears and screaming LALALALALALALALALA!! in your general direction.

Now he used that, a twofold sword that would cut them both if he didn’t manage it with finesse. He flicked the tassle at her as he grinned.

There, he poked again. Right there, in that ship, that one, on the bridge, in the Captain’s chair, naked but for a blanket she pulls around herself because she’s feeling insecure. A child! Poor little girl -

STOP! STOP, STOP IT! In her panic, she focused all her energy on telling him not to do this, and he had to relent, to hide behind an image hand-waving lack of care, whatever, heaping more disdain, but he felt the force of her rising fury driving his blood pressure up. So very strong...

But his guards also sensed his dutiful intent as well as his distress, and again voted unanimously to trigger a flood of endorphins and corticosteroids to augment his performance at a critical moment. He felt the rush, the elation, the confidence and strength that pure bodily chemicals could add, and they were exactly what he needed.

Lies and the fear of detection, he whispered, slowly coaxing himself past her injunction against pointing the fleet’s attention toward her again. A child sneaking cookies, having a tantrum that she’s been caught, ashamed of her petty need, her vanity, the malice we all abhor. He clenched his teeth. There, he managed, again turning them to focus back on her, pointing with a telepathic finger, gesturing broadly to her ship, waving a symbolic spotlight over in her direction, though even now he couldn’t quite indicate her specifically. Even so, he felt her recoil, the shackles of her power shattering as she curled up in her revulsion.

~fine~ she hissed. He heard her seethe. Let’s see how you like it. He felt her breathe in, gather her power, and push it out.

No, look at HIM. Listen to HIM. Pay attention to HIM!

And they did. They were all turned to her, sizzling with the hostility he had suggested but focused and receptive. The power of her telepathy rolled outward, specialized and concentrated on controlling and manipulating others, and burned into their brains. They could not help but do as she had bid.

The crews of the combined fleet rotated their minds to him like a vast field of reflectors in the sun, slowly focusing all their collective attention on the Receiver. Reese had played a gamble, and this was how the cards had fallen. He folded up behind his Happy Place and prepared for the onslaught.

They turned. They focused.

They listened, with the impetus of her power behind the intensity of their rapt, careful, complete attention.

With that sort of open and channelled mindset, even a receiver like Reese could drop very binding suggestions on a sweeping scale.

Thank you, he told them, blinded beneath the glare of their open minds, but speaking into the crowd behind the stage lights that cooked him. Thank you all for coming, for listening to ME, the representative of the rightful authority here, the person placed for your protection. Close your ears to HER. Do not listen to anything further that she says. Do not let her lies and manipulation harm you anymore.

She realized too late what she had done.

NO!

He continued, reinforcing the protection he could now give to his captive audience. She must be silenced. You cannot let her get away to harm others. He redirected their attention toward her again, but carefully now. Do not listen to her, but do not let her get away. Keep your eyes on her, but your ears deaf to what she wants.

The glare of their attention began to lessen as they kept their metaphorical ears attuned to him, but their watchfulness turned back to her. Hear me, see her. Do not let her hide. Do not let her escape. Do not let her manipulate you any further.

She withered under the heat and hostility of their gaze. In terror, in boundless indignation, she resorted to pure imagery, pushing their anger and resentment back toward him, but the tide was against her.

He recalled his early youth on a catamaran on Crest. His father would say he had the weather gauge on her.

Reese sighed as she withered, wilted under the strain and collapsed, drawing inward, but without any training, and no defense but to hide.

There was no hiding from this. He felt pity for her, but the pang of a warning from his mecha guard excised it. Pity for a rogue was not allowed.