Reborn, page 1
REBORN
CAPTAIN DARING, BOOK THREE
BLAZE WARD
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
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Also by Blaze Ward
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CHAPTER 1
Joie Dearing studied her image in the mirror. It was the middle of the night, but she hadn’t really been able to sleep. Or get back under after waking from her first sleep.
Too wound up. Too something.
She hadn’t undergone her first surgery, so she still represented a cybernetic Human. One arm, one eye, one ear replaced after that truck bomb in Egypt. Bullet-proof cloth under the skin of her torso. Argenite alloy reinforcing a lot of her bones.
She wasn’t all that worried about Yormevs and his alien Heecha scientists being able to take her apart and put her back together. They’d been planning for something along those lines for more than a year, but hadn’t found the person they’d wanted to do it on until she came along.
She would be whole again. Human, at least briefly. All the electronic and metal parts would be removed. Organic parts quick-grown to replace them.
And then the fun began. Or whatever you wanted to call it.
Her foe was a US Army General who had taken all the genetic engineering research Technology Research Command had done and upgraded himself and at least a handful of others into what Joie had just started calling Advanced Model Humans. AMH, because the military was all about the three-letter acronym for things. The TLA, as it were.
Not fertile, so not a new species.
Not yet.
That was coming, but the Heecha had made it clear that the other aliens, the Danorak, had meddled too much in a world that was supposed to be off limits. Before Humans became a serious threat to the rest of the galaxy, somebody would drop a Carrington Event on the Earth.
Blow up every satellite in orbit at once. Collapse the power grids worldwide. Disrupt and poison every computer network in existence, because they’d already penetrated all of them to see what the dangerous monkeys on Earth were up to.
Was she enough to stop that? Even with her friends, there were less than a dozen of them. Against the full might of a US Government that might not be certain what TRC was up to, but had certainly supported wars everywhere. Troops everywhere. Assassinations and revolutions everywhere.
Hegemonic power gone bad. Rank and sour. Willing to tear the rest of the world down rather than allow others to have an opinion that challenged the grim Yankee way of thinking.
Multiplied now by angry aliens bringing their own conflicts and issues down here to Earth.
Joie took a deep breath and turned on the light. She had slept in panties and a T-shirt, with the temperature in her cabin set just right.
Texican skin. It had been Mexico before the white slaver colonists arrived in the early nineteenth century. After 1848, it became the United States, but the southwestern corner of the US had a lot of people living there already who weren’t white as the Eastern Seaboard would later classify things in law.
Long black hair, straight to her shoulder blades and usually kept in a pony tail or a braid, since she had two hands now to do that. Dark eyes. Dark skin. Tall at one hundred and eighty centimeters. Impossibly heavy today because of the Argenite alloy. Athletic and muscular, but nobody would ever guess she weighed ninety-two kilograms most days.
That would go away, but she’d have the muscles built up. Better, her fucking fake boobs would go away and she’d be back to what she’d been when she’d just been a soldier. Before some—male—idiot in command had decided that the best way to make her an agent involved inserting a couple of half-grapefruits.
Not that she had strong opinions on the topic or anything.
She’d missed being Human, but they had turned her into Captain Daring and sent her out again and again to save the world. Their idea of the world. Which involved killing a lot of people because she’d been ordered to.
Joie would have to explain that eventually and hope that there really was a loving and forgiving God out there somewhere.
Then again, maybe they all deserved to be in hell.
Joie flexed her hands into fists in the dimness of her room then released them. That helped a little, but not much. Maybe what she needed was just to go do forms for a while. She’d stayed extremely late in the dojo with Sifu Wěn—Teacher Wěn—more than once, even sleeping on the couch.
She got up. Found baggy pants and put them on, skipping socks and shoes as she made her way out the hatch and into the rest of the Heecha ship. And it was a ship.
Starship. Traveling in space in ways she hadn’t asked and they hadn’t volunteered.
Joie already knew too much. If she was successful, she would be accepting voluntary exile from Earth for the rest of her life, so that nobody could ever figure out what had happened.
Or how to replicate everything.
She just had to find everybody who knew the truth first, and remove them as well. Technically, instead of metaphorically.
Exiled to the stars. All of them together.
The hallways always felt wrong, but the Heecha were taller and thinner than Humans in their real form, though they could easily disguise themselves enough to walk in Seattle or Manhattan. The hallways made her unconscious mind slightly queasy.
At least they were empty, because this wing of the ship had been designated for only Humans and a few Heecha who were helping her in her new mission.
Joie walked to a particular hatch and let it slide open in front of her. She wasn’t surprised to find Sifu Wěn lotus in the middle of the dojo floor.
Nobody really knew the truth about the Sifu. Only that a lot of former soldiers had trained with the fifty-something woman and all swore that she was the deadliest person any of them had ever met. Considering what most of them had, as a rule, done in their military careers, that was high praise.
And a little frightening.
Sifu grinned as Joie stepped to the edge of the mat.
Joie folded herself into a similar lotus and focused on her breathing.
“I have given much thought to the nature of change,” Sifu Wěn said abruptly, before Joie even spoke. “About the compression of learning in times of great stress.”
Joie nodded, silent.
“You came to me as broken in spirit as in mind,” Sifu continued. “I had thought at the time to create a form called Wounded Crane, but that would never do because that would have suggested that you were lesser than others. Instead, you were merely as good as any I had ever trained. That was before you got better.”
“Better?” Joie asked, unable to contain the word.
“I have seen Carter Faulkener move,” Sifu Wěn nodded. “Interviewed the man earlier today to understand how you beat him the first time. You came to me broken by Taylor Kehoe, though he was only following orders he now questions. Still, his sin was great and his penance ongoing.”
Joie caught her breath at the harsh vehemence in Sifu’s tones now.
“You could beat Faulkener today, Joie Daring,” the woman said. “So I have been giving thought to your new foes. The ones you mark as Advanced models. Asked myself how I would build such a thing, were it in my power.”
Joie’s eyes sparkled. Nobody knew all the various martial arts Sifu had studied, but there were hints that it might encompass every one practiced today. There were only so many ways to move. Each martial form simply assembled them in different orders and gave them different names, but all came from a single source called Humanity.
General Bouchard might not be Human anymore.
“Have you reconsidered?” Joie asked hopefully.
Sifu had been offered the same sort of upgrade that Joie was going to undertake, and declined, claiming that she was an old woman, set in her ways, despite the fact that both Carter Faulkener and Ernesta Hernandez were in their fifties and sixties. For now.
All three of them would be reverted to somewhere close to twenty-five when it was done. Peak Human performance, upgraded to face Bouchard and his troopers.
“I have given it much thought, but I suspect that your foes will fall into certain traps of behavior that are not readily evident until they face someone prepared to offset and neutralize them,” Sifu said in much more serious tone.
Joie blinked. Sifu thought she was Bouchard’s physical equal on the dojo floor?
“How?” Joie asked.
“I am an old woman, Joie,” Sifu grinned. “I don’t have time to deal with young punks hyped up on their battling power. Or whatever silly shit they call it. If you cannot hit me, you cannot hurt me, so I must endeavor to not be in the way of your fist or foot. And then throw you into a post or in front of a bus driving by.”
Joie’s mouth had fallen open. She managed to close it before any flies took up residence, but it was probably a near thing.
“I will need to see how good you are when you are upgraded,” Sifu nodded. “Then we will know if I can still compete with your foes, or if it will become necessary for me to join you in exile.”
“Just like that?” Joie asked.
“I’ve seen more of this planet than almost anybody, Joie,” Sifu replied, deadly serious. “Those fuckers don’t get to mess up everything. Destroy everything. Not if I can stop them. Now, what do you need?”
Joie rose and considered her needs. She’d walked in here prepared to do forms for an hour or more until she got tired again. Or relaxed enough to actually sleep.
That was unnecessary now. Instead, she rose and bowed at the waist in deep respect for all the things Sifu Wěn had given her.
“I needed to remember that I had friends,” Joie said simply.
CHAPTER 2
Valmy Youri Bouchard. General, United States Army. Commanding General, Technology Research Command.
That title, that responsibility, had allowed him to commandeer an aircraft out of Washington, DC, and fly it halfway across the planet with a small team of operatives who knew most of the truth about himself and his plans.
Most.
Nobody but him knew all of it, but the volunteers he had assembled had all passed every possible test of loyalty he had been able to devise and refine over the years.
Now, he was standing in a hotel room in Hanoi. The premises would have been sealed off, had that been necessary, but he’d already seen everything he needed to see. And told the Vietnamese government more than they needed to know, but not enough to compromise his team.
Either the team on the ground already or the one he’d brought with him.
It had been enough to show the Russian and Chinese representatives the decapitated head of Carter Faulkener in a bucket of ice to convince them. That had ratcheted down tensions tremendously over the last few days.
Even the Russians were willing to behave if you killed someone they wanted dead. They didn’t get to keep the head. Even dead, Mithras had too many secrets he could give up. It had been packed on dry ice and sent back to the States for analysis.
But Valmy had a bigger problem. One that would get out eventually, no matter what bribes and threats he offered to everyone involved. So he was in a room that had belonged to Kehoe. The door frame had been damaged when Garrison Konicek had kicked the door in after nobody could find Kehoe. Or Sergeant Stone. Or Daring and her old boyfriend Graydon.
Gone. Poof, like some magic trick.
Worse, Konicek and Chelsea Vanlaere had been left behind by whatever had happened. And something had happened, because Kehoe’s room had been locked and chained from the inside, even with him gone.
Valmy sat on an uncomfortable queen-sized bed and listened as Konicek completed his briefing.
Nothing had changed in the twelve hours that Valmy had been in flight. Or the hour drive to the hotel.
Valmy got up and paced. Konicek and Vanlaere both moved out of his way, the former moving to the bed and the latter putting her butt against a wall.
There was a desk. It still had a computer bag next to it, with a charger in the pocket and other detritus of life on the road. Things Kehoe would have taken with him, given a choice in the matter. Similarly, Stone or someone had left an unfired semi-automatic pistol in the room safe.
Suitcases were here and in rooms belonging to the four that had disappeared, along with all their clothes save what they had been wearing. Phones left behind in two cases, but not four.
Taken out of their beds? Bed. Graydon’s room had shown no sign of sleeping, while Daring’s had two bodies worth of mussiness.
Valmy turned at the end of a pace and considered.
“Gather up everything,” he ordered. “Even stuff that maybe belongs to the hotel. We’ll pay a fine. Whatever. No evidence left behind.”
“Sir?” Konicek blurted.
“This room, this hotel,” he said. “Too exposed. Too compromised. We will evacuate the premises and get to the airport as soon as possible.”
“What if they come back, sir?” Vanlaere asked.
“It’s been days, Lieutenant.” he turned to her. “They won’t be. Whoever took them means business. We need to get back to where we have access to our own team and resources. And quickly.”
“I thought the Russians were mollified, sir,” Konicek spoke up. “They’ve seen Faulkener’s head.”
“And by now they know that the team responsible for it has vanished without a trace,” he replied. “That will make them nervous, but for other reasons.”
“Because we don’t know, General?” Vanlaere asked.
“Oh, I have a few ideas,” he smiled. “But this is not the place to brief you about what’s really going on.”
“We have other enemies we don’t know about?”
“You don’t know about, Vanlaere,” he corrected her. “Time to fix that.”
CHAPTER 3
Ernesta studied herself in the mirror. Sixty-one years old. Gray hair. Crow’s feet and laugh lines. Dressed in comfortable jeans and a loose sweater because they kept it too cold on this ship.
Medium height. Medium build. Just right to disappear into a crowd when she’d been younger and doing things that the Mexican government had frowned upon.
Well, officially. For a few bribes, the right men had generally turned a blind eye, leaving her mostly to deal with the foolish Americans and their ignorant arrogance about culture and their prudish demands that the rest of the world believe the same things they did.
She was older now. A grandmother many times over, with one son who was a doctor and a second who was one of her Regional Managers in the family business. At least for now.
Ernesta Hernandez might never return to Guadalajara. Nor to the life of luxurious crime she had known. Folks would have to step up and handle things, but she’d been training everyone for this day for years, even before she knew it was coming.
And it was coming.
Tomorrow, a stranger would greet her in the mirror. A younger woman. One looking enough like Joie Daring to pass as a sister, or at least a cousin. To be twenty-five again? Even without being able to have any more children, what could she do, knowing everything she did now?
