Excerpt

She floated up to the drifting ship and reached out, her boots silently magnetizing against the hull. All of its external lights were off, and they'd deactivated their beacon. They were running dark and had been for over a week.

The laws were clear. Beacons within spaceships were to be powered on at all times in and around Sol. Unless you were berthed in a space station or under repair, your beacon was on.

Lync took a deep breath. They'd prepared for this mission for weeks, and it was her first solo command. Everything had to be by the book if she had any hopes of getting another posting.

She nodded at the soldier to her right and circled her hand, giving him the signal to begin.

They were a Special Operations Division of CoPE, and each member of her team was from different branches of the Inner and Outer Ring militaries. It was her job to train them into a well-oiled machine, and this was their maiden mission. Seek out and kill all occupants of this terrorist ship floating out in the Oort Cloud.

Their team's military shuttle was coated in a new material she'd never seen before. Somehow, they'd been able to approach this ship undetected. The equipment they were using was also state-of-the art. None of them had ever heard of it before they'd started training for this mission. Whatever it was made of, no one inside was going to hear a thing.

"Strike teams locked and loaded," the soldier in front of her said over their secure comm. "Hull breach in 3… 2… 1, Go! Go! Go!"

His voice echoed over her comm long after he'd stopped talking. She watched on her retinal comm as her strike teams flowed into the breach space and fanned out into four squads of three. Their green dots and a map of the ship were overlaid on her vision.

Each squad had one soldier floating forward, alternating cover from one door to the next, with another watching the rear. They were there to offer suppression fire where necessary, but the goal was controlled strategic gunfire. Most of the crew was asleep except for the bridge.

They'd been monitoring this ship for months and knew their routine. The ship had been wandering throughout the Oort Cloud, searching for something. It took her team a few weeks to break their decryption, but with some secretly placed external spy gear they'd been able to get inside and interface with their comm system.

Squad two was the first to encounter movement. She brought up the camera view from the squad leader on her comm. One of the crew had woken and floated into the hall. They were rubbing their eyes until they saw the squad's lead soldier. He wasn't alive long. The soldier taking up the rear took him out in a well-placed round between the eyes.

The crew member's now lifeless body careened through the cabin and collided with a storage container. Apparently, the container hadn't been latched properly. The contents spilled out and the resulting clanging made the mission go dark in a flash.

"Frak," she muttered as she crossed through the breech gateway into the ship. The hatch cycled, and she was floating inside in a few seconds.

The commotion roused the ship's occupants out of their beds and into the cabin. She watched on her comm as the teams picked them off one at a time.

Suddenly, a door in front of her slid open, and she raised her rifle, training it at the height of the heat signature about to pass through the doorway. A second later she pulled the trigger, and a projectile collided with the crew member's face, entered their head, and exploded inside the skull. It wasn't enough to cause blood to trail nor stream out. The outer shell of the bullet lodged itself into the cranial cavity and sealed the entrance after impact. It was a quick and clean death.

There weren't any additional heat signatures in this hall, so she continued toward the bridge in the heart of the ship. They only had a minute before…

"The core is ours and all the door locks have been cycled," squad lead one's leader said.

"Everyone click in and brace for general breaches in five seconds," she subvocalized and pushed off toward the room with the crew member she'd taken down.

When she touched down against the far outer wall of the sleeping quarters, she reached down and ejected a small tether from the middle of her back, attaching it to the nearest bulkhead. She gave it a tug and the impossibly thin cable retracted. A moment later her body was pulled against the bulkhead.

She flipped up a cloth on her wrist, revealing a small flexible display discreetly hidden beneath. Everyone had better be secure. There wasn't time to confirm. Gunshot warnings flashed on her retinal comm. She tapped the throbbing green button awaiting her on her wrist control and the screen went black.

The breach was hard and fast. Crates, bedding, food, clothes, and bodies all streamed past the room's entrance. The body she'd incapacitated to get in here had been staring at her until the ejecting atmosphere yanked it out the door, colliding with a passing crate in an explosion of blood globules. Everything tumbled toward this and the two additional breaches her team had opened to the vacuum of space.

She studied her retinal comm and watched as two of the members of squad three were suddenly detached by a collision with another loose crate. One of them flatlined on impact, but the other was still alive.

"Shit," she muttered.

The controlled rupture was fast and efficient. Within thirty seconds, the entire ship had vacated. They had soldiers waiting outside the breech to kill anyone who survived in the debris field. A few shots were needed, but otherwise, everyone was dead.

Once their countdown hit zero, and they were confident the vacuum of space had reached all corners of the ship, each of the remaining squads systematically cleared the rooms while she headed toward the core. There were only two enemy holdouts, but they easily disposed of them with shock grenades. Staying stealthy wasn't necessary any longer.

She floated into the ship's control room toward the marker her team had placed and came to a halt before magnetizing her boots to the floor. They didn't want to lose the computer core, so they tagged it in case it was jettisoned during the breach. She removed the tag and reached down to slide open the core command control.

The keyboard slid out and a screen folded upward, waking up and turning on the system once fully deployed. The controls were a primitive design, one she'd read about and trained on, but had never seen in real life. Using the computer required her to touch type commands and manually issue orders to detach the core.

Whatever was in this system, CoPE really wanted to see it. They'd given her a special black bag to house it in. She read about these signal muting bags, but like the ship they'd been training with, she'd never used them before. During their countless practice exercises, they used standard issue bags. This particular bag had been unlocked from their equipment lockers only hours earlier.

The core detached with a confident click, and she carefully slid it in the bag, zipping it up the side before tossing it over her shoulder and securing it against her back. She replaced the core with another canister of equal size and shape. Like everything else about this mission, she had no idea what was inside. It wasn't something she needed to reach the objective, so she didn't need to know.

Once the deed was done, she floated out of the control room toward the exit and brought the team's status up on her retinal comm. The cleanup was far more exciting than the core extraction. All the jettisoned bodies were being reclaimed, and their frozen carcasses were being directed inside.

"Do we have an ETA on the transport tug?" she asked.

"The weirdest thing just happened, Lieutenant," her pilot said. "The tug appeared off our port side. Like it'd been there the whole time. Sorta like those ghost ships people have been reporting out near Jupiter. One minute they're there, and the next they're gone."

They didn't need anyone freaking the others out right now. She had to keep this mission on target. "Let's not get superstitious, soldier. Focus on the task and attach the tug. We need to get this thing back to the shipyard."

"Yessir!" he said and cut the comm.

She studied all the green dots moving throughout the ship on her retinal comm. Everyone was either ticking down their cleanup checklist or preparing this thing to be hauled away. Everyone except for the soldier they'd lost during the sweep. The breech had always been a last resort, but shit happened sometimes, and she couldn't risk the crew catching them off guard.

As she floated out of the ship and toward the probe waiting for her to deposit the core, she thought back to the first time she'd seen soldiers cleaning up a mess like this. They'd been taking out her Ulixi brethren. It was ironic that today it was her doing the same thing. But these people weren't innocent Ulixi. They were terrorists planning gosh knows what out here in the Oort Cloud.

No, this time it was different. The Olivaws were creating a better government with CoPE and the colonies. She didn't know how she knew it, but she did.

She drifted up to the messenger probe and released the bag from her back. It floated around to her front, and she gave it a slight nudge, directing it into the open storage compartment. The probe was tiny. They were designed to relay small packages in and around Sol at inhuman rates of speed. Packages you didn't want to risk being intercepted or stolen. This one was particularly stealthy and appeared to have that same black material as their mission shuttle. She'd have to ask her friends if anyone had specs on the stuff. It looked slick.

The storage door automatically closed once the bag was inside and a launch countdown popped up on her retinal comm. "They weren't wasting time," she muttered to herself and pushed off toward their shuttle.

When she touched down against the hull of the shuttle, she magnetized her boots and spun around to face the probe. "What the hell?"

It disappeared. She scanned left and right, staring into the background star fields of the Milky Way, but there was nothing. No burn plumes, no lights receding into the distance. How the hell was that possible?

"Did anyone see where the messenger probe went?" she subvocalized to her team.

"Negative, sir," squad two's lead said. "Are you ok out there? We're finishing the cleanup and should have everything strapped down and ready for transport in five minutes."

"I'm fine." She brought up the shuttle's navigation controls on her retinal comm. There wasn't a sign of the probe anywhere. "Let's keep an eye out for anything weird. And Floyd, make sure you attach that damn tug properly this time. We don't need another repeat of our first training exercise. You nearly killed everyone."

"Roger that," Floyd said.

The team chuckled over the open channel for a moment and then returned to following their orders. She didn't know what happened to that probe, but didn't want to risk the mission going south now. They were too close.