Chapter 12

“Yes, and the man who killed her suffered. It took me a week to kill him. Afterward, I wished I could have made him suffer more,” Mary said, looking at the woman growling. Mary was gone within two seconds, making the woman think it might have just been a dream. Mary loaded up the speeder, still seething. She was almost to the point of seeing only red. Taking off, she was a mile away when she stopped, flipping on her comp. She looked at her site.

AH! Perfect an assassination! She called her client and set up the meeting. An hour afterward, the mark was dead. Reading everything about this case, she saw that it would help a lot of people. Pulling right up to the back wall, Mary walked all the way to the man. Slitting his throat, she simply walked out and went to meet her client. Pulling up, she saw that the man thought he could capture her. Calling him, she told him that he had one more chance to meet her ALONE, or he’d be her next mark.

Finally paid, she warned the man again that what he saw wasn’t her real face. With that, she was gone in a few seconds. The man, visibly shaken, felt he was lucky. No one challenged the Willow and lived. Pulling into the palace, Mary was still pissed at the nerve of that woman after the way she’d beat the hell out of a ten-year-old. The fucking bitch expected Mary to forgive her? Do you want to start a relationship with her?

Obviously, the bitch was more psycho than Mary thought she was. Heading to the lab, she didn’t even open the door. Just phased through. Picking up Jim’s notes, she threw herself into what he’d been doing. The apparatus was almost complete, but Mary was wondering if they could send it, as they still needed a tracking system and a point to send it to. Finishing up, Mary started drawing up ideas for a focal point to send. She’d finished and was working on it when Jim walked in twelve hours later.

Looking it over and all the plans she had made, he agreed he had been focused on the sending unit, now they needed to work on the receiving unit. Jim and Mary worked tirelessly for the next two days, developing a receiving unit. Though it was flawed from the start, after two days, it appeared they had the basics in place. It appeared that when the matter was destabilized or phased out, just like the MTM, there was no problem. It was actually moving the matter over a longer distance with the energy beam.

Every time the beam went through something, the matter tried to stabilize. It was not really good when going through something, but it went solid halfway through. Neither of them had barely slept in those two days when the hallucinations started. Not bad, just little things at first. Then it started getting worse. By the end of the third day, they both knew that they had to rest. Mary was seeing her sister twirling and dancing behind her. Jim was feeling no better, seeing his whole family slaughtered, his stepmother covered in blood. Shaking their heads to clear them, they realized that the other obviously had ghosts in their past that were going to rear their ugly heads if they didn’t sleep.

Mary and Jim decided to take a day off. Locking up, Jim looked at Mary, knowing the many things she had done, many of them dealing out death. He nodded to her, handing her a key. Looking at Jim as if he were crazy, then laughing, Jim smiled. It had been too long since he’d heard her laugh. He forgot what a joyful sound it really was. Mary laughed. NOW he thought of getting her a key, though she didn’t really need it. Just the thought that he trusted her enough to give her a key gave her a sense of trust she hadn’t had in over four or five years. Amber met Jim on the way to the bedroom.

“We’ve been trying to contact you since you went in,” she said. “It seems your mother came out of the coma, she’s awake and has been staring at the wall muttering about her daughter Mary?” Amber was really confused now.

Jim just nodded, “Tell them I’ll come by tomorrow. I need rest. I haven’t slept in almost three days, and I’m starting to hallucinate. I’ve already relived arriving at the station after the Krong attack, finding them all...” Amber held him tightly. It had taken a long time and a lot of patience to get out of him, just what happened. It was heralded as a turning point in the history of the empire and the greatest victory by just five people to stop an entire invading race.

Jim collapsed in the bed, the visions still replaying, the hoard of ships around the station, the new shields that he’d installed the day before, stronger than anything ever seen, holding off the largest invading force the empire had ever seen. Jim had gone in, destroying thousands before he could even guess where the station was. Two hours later, his reactor was straining to maintain his shields and life support, and Jim’s plasma cannons were stretched almost to the point that they were about to break off. The empire had promised help but was too far away to be here in time. Jim had just returned from a supply run when he saw a huge disturbance, and then the rift in hyperspace opened and spewed an ever-increasing number of ships.

Jim’s AI, Dickie, had been keeping count, but Jim stopped listening when the count reached ten thousand, and they kept coming for almost another hour. Jim docked, rushing in to check on his family. His little sister and brother were both dead. The Krong had found a weak spot in his shield, hitting it repeatedly, though it made them an easier target. Eventually, the stinger beams finally got through. His brother had tried to protect his sister, probably taking another hundred or more ships before he lost consciousness. A few beams weren’t bad, but he’d taken a few hundred protecting his sister. His sister, though young, had tried to increase the shields and had actually gotten twenty percent more before Stingers got her.