Of Sea and Stars (Partners Book 3) Read online

  Of Sea and Stars

  Copyright © 2016 by Melissa Good

  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

  Other Titles from Melissa Good

  About the Author

  Visit Us On Line

  ALSO BY MELISSA GOOD

  Dar and Kerry Series

  Tropical Storm

  Hurricane Watch

  Eye of the Storm

  Red Sky At Morning

  Thicker Than Water

  Terrors of the High Seas

  Tropical Convergence

  Stormy Waters

  Moving Target

  Storm Surge: Book One

  Storm Surge: Book Two

  Winds of Change: Book One

  Winds of Change: Book Two

  Partners Series

  Partners: Book One

  Partners: Book Two

  Of Sea and Stars

  Of Sea and Stars

  by

  Melissa Good

  Silver Dragon Books

  by Regal Crest

  Tennessee

  Copyright © 2016 by Melissa Good

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The characters, incidents and dialogue herein are fictional and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN 978-1-61929-298-7

  eBook ISBN 978-1-61929-299-4

  First Printing 2016

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design by Acorn Graphics

  Published by:

  Regal Crest Enterprises

  1042 Mount Lebanon Rd

  Maryville, TN 37804

  Find us on the World Wide Web at http://www.regalcrest.biz

  Published in the United States of America

  Chapter One

  THE BOOMING ROAR sent a shuddering wave through solid rock, causing dust and bits of stone to fall from the ceilings. Jump-suited figures hastened to cover their heads.

  “Son of a bitch!” Jason Anders knocked a piece of granite chip off his shoulder. “What are they doing out there?”

  “Blasting,” A tech supervisor told him, heading for the food line. “Again. I know we needed the updates but we need some sleep, too.”

  Jason ruffled his hair and observed the rock dust floating down from it. “Nice.” He was brown haired and good looking, with a squarely built head and a lean, muscular body encased in black fabric with teal blue piping at the neck.

  Here in the Citadel he wore no weapons, but there was an edge to him that suggested he might want to. In the hairline on the right side of his head there were healing blaster scars, still vivid and red.

  He looked around and spotted a tall, dark haired woman entering the mess. “Hey! Jesslyn!” He waved her over, half standing and sweeping the dust off the top of the table. “C’mere!”

  Senior agent Jesslyn Drake ambled over and picked up a chair at his table, dumping the debris off it onto the floor before she sat down. “What?” Like Jason, she was also lean and muscular, in the same gear but the rank pips at her neck had bars—his didn’t.

  “What’s the racket?” Jason asked, as his partner, Brent, came over with a tray. “They blowing up the cavern?” He waggled his eyebrows at her. “Figured they might have told you, at least.”

  “Finally decided to put a forward facing dock load in,” Jess said. “Closing up the roof. One of the donks said we were idiots for having an opening that let rain in every time we opened it.”

  Jason grinned a little. “Got a point.”

  “Got a point,” Jess wryly agreed. “Lot of things just get to be how they get to be, you know?”

  “I think they just like blowing stuff up,” Brent said, forking into his seaweed. “Couldn’t sleep for a week when they put in those new guns.” Burly and bull necked, with his crew cut freshly shortened, Jason’s tech shook his head in annoyance. “Jerks.”

  “It’ll be over soon,” Jason said. “It will, right?” he asked Jess.

  “Two more intake tunnels, but after that, yeah,” Jess replied. “Need the power to run all those new fitting bays.”

  A double bong sounded overhead. “Drake to Ops.”

  “Crap.” Jess pushed herself to her feet. “Now what?”

  “They can’t take a crap without you, Jessie.” Jason chuckled and gave her a slap on the leg. “If you’re going up there see if El’s called in. She’s late reporting.”

  “Sure.” Jess regretfully bypassed the chow line and wound her way through the crowd and out the door. She turned right and moved down the long arched passageway deep inside the Citadel’s rugged mountain structure.

  The hallways bore signs of new construction, and she passed newly set doors that would lead into newly blasted and cut chambers, glad at least the corridor that held her quarters was on the other side of ops and not up for any mods.

  Construction group members were busy all over, sanding and smoothing the new walls and openings, and moving jet pads around with piles of building material on them.

  The freshening up was nice, but she, like the rest of the agents and techs stationed at Base Ten was more than ready for it all to be done.

  She cleared the crossroads and went down the passage to ops, walking through a solid blue ring that laid a tickle over the surface of her skin and then through a second before she reached the door, the extra security added just recently after a more than embarrassing breach.

  The rings passed her mutely though and she palmed into ops. She stepped into a lock filled with sensors, and at the quadrants, raw and powerful blasters that could turn a person her size into plasma gooked dust in under a second. She didn’t even look at them, but merely waited for the inner door to slide aside to let her on her way.

  “Ah, Drake.” Commander Bensen Alters turned from the main console. “Thanks for coming up.”

  “Problem?” Jess asked. “Jason asked me to ask if Elaine logged in.”

  “Nothing yet, no. But we received this.” He handed her a plas. “Sit down, take your time reading it.”

  Jess did, resting her elbows on her knees as she regarded the plas. “Mini transport?” she muttered. “An enemy team inserted.”

  “Mmm.” Alters took the seat next to her. “Right at the edge of Drake’s Bay.” He watched the angular face of the woman sitting knee to knee with him. “Familiar territory.”

  Jess looked up, then back down at the sheet. The digital signature of the transport was blurry, but clear enough to be identifiable. The ridge line it was tucked behind on the borderlands between Drake’s Bay homestead and the processing center next door. “Could be going to the center,” she said. “They’re not stupid enough to try and get into the Bay.”

  “True,” Alters said. “But with a mini trans, it’s one, or at most a team.” He leaned back in the console command chair. “There’s some contention there. Might be an incursion against you.”

  Jess considered that. “Could be. I pissed a lot of people off. Not giving up the shares screwed them up. They could make a pitch to knock me off.”

  There was no particular e
motion around the words and her face didn’t display any. “After all, who else are they gonna ask? Maybe that’s how they got my dad.”

  Alters nodded in approval. “Was thinking that myself. Given you were supposed to go to the quarterly sector meet up next week—it seems like good timing. Glad you don’t have any illusions about the possibilities.”

  “Mmm.” Jess put the plas down on the console. “Maybe I’ll go over a day or so earlier and flush them out. Put a kill in. If that’s how it went down, someone deserves it,” she said, matter of factly. “Sure beats hanging around here.”

  Alters shifted forward a little. “They’ve been quiet. You put a hurt on them. Two birds with a stone they’re figuring. Maybe take a team with you. I don’t want to waste the opportunity, and you’ve got a message to deliver to the sector they probably won’t much like.”

  They exchanged grimly wry looks. “It’s a mess,” Jess said. “They won’t like it is putting it mildly. Sucks to be them.”

  Alters smiled at her. “Sucks to be them.”

  Jess smiled back. “Home sweet home,” she remarked dryly, standing up. “Thanks for the heads up. I’ll run a book on it and pick a backup team.”

  He nodded. “Good. Listen, Drake, I know this is a big political mess. I get that it’s cramping your ability to assign out and probably long term affecting your career with Interforce.”

  She shrugged. “Dying would do that, too, and that’s where I’ll be heading eventually. Don’t worry about it. Worse things have happened than having to be a knife in the side of my birthplace. My father’s probably somewhere laughing his ass off.”

  “Probably.” He lifted a hand as she turned and headed for the hatch, slipping between two incoming people and causing a belated but distinct motion as they cleared space for her, regardless of the relaxed body posture and smile.

  WILDCARD. NO ONE wanted to mess with her. Alters sighed. Even with the senior grade and the accolades, there was never a sense you knew which way a Drake was going to move, and this one was no exception to that rule.

  And the damned political mess forced by Justin Drake’s machinations was putting a cramp in more than his daughter’s career, since they now had a senior agent who couldn’t be sent across the line and left a major homestead in limbo.

  “Anything for me from Central Legal?” He turned his head and asked comms. “They better call soon.”

  “Nothing yet, sir,” comms reported. “Do you want us to ping them?”

  “Yes.” He rested his elbow on the console and pushed the plas into the recycler as the shift change happened, incoming staff nodding respectfully in his direction, but their respect had a different edge to him than they’d shown to Jess.

  He was old. Alters regarded them dryly. He was past being crazy. Or at least, that’s what they thought.

  “Sir.” The comms on staff turned. “Coded call for you, from West three, encap, eyeball.”

  “Send it over.” He slid an ear cup on and faced his console. “Next crisis.”

  JESS WENT BACK to the mess to get her delayed lunch. Jason and Brent were still there, and April had joined them. All of them looked up as she entered and went to the line, all of them ducking as another boom sounded overhead.

  “Holy crap,” Brent groused.

  Jess cocked her head. “That wasn’t a blast. That’s a carrier coming in at speed.” She turned and regarded the food processor, tapping in a code with an impatient gesture. “C’mon.”

  The bio alt behind the counter, a tall, curly haired, fresh-faced man, leaned forward. “Is it all right, Agent?”

  “Yeah.” Jess glanced up at the bio alt, his neck encircled by a tracework collar above the edge of his pale blue jumpsuit. “I’m just hungry.”

  The man nodded and stepped back, paying careful attention to the machinery his set was designed to manage.

  Jason leaned on the railing and watched the line. “Bet I know which carrier it is,” he teased Jess. “I heard they were doing engine tests on that new pod, and there’s no doubt who’d have called dibs on the first run,” he said, but there was a grin on his face. “Rocket for sure. Can fricken drive a boot at mach two.”

  Jess put her tray down and took the last seat at the four top, not without a sigh. “Well, since I’m effectively grounded, she’s got to do something to polish her rep. At least she’ll get to show off for the grounders next week when I go piss off the entire coast.”

  “Can’t they just shift over your shares to someone else?” Jason asked. “What a pain in the butt, Jess. What was your pop thinking?”

  “He was thinking he didn’t want the Bay to go over to shitheads, some of which he spawned.” Jess munched her fish stew stolidly. “He just wasn’t figuring on me screwing that all up while I was still in active service.”

  “Freak chance,” Jason said.

  “Story of my life.” She paused as the comms link clipped to her jumpsuit chirped and put the ear bud in. “Drake.”

  “Hello, Jess, it’s Dev,” a warm, slightly burring voice answered. “We just finished testing and the new pod is excellent.”

  “We heard you arrive,” Jess said. “C’mon over for lunch.”

  “Be right there.”

  Dev disconnected and Jess removed the bud from her ear, aware that she was smiling for no apparent reason. She cleared her throat. “With any luck legal will pull their heads out of their asses and figure it all out soon.”

  “About as soon as med clears me,” Jason commiserated. “Poor us, stuck here doing centops duty.” He got up and gathered his tray. “Let me clear space for Rocket.” He winked at Jess and made his way out of the mess, dropping his empties off in the bin on the way.

  Brent shook his head. “My run’s up next.” He got up. “See ya.”

  “Does Dev care if they call her that?” April asked, after Brent disappeared. “It’s sort of stupid sounding.” She was a woman of relatively small stature, but with a muscular body and a way of moving that made people tend to get out of her way.

  Jess shrugged. “Nah, Dev doesn’t much care what she’s called. I had to pull up the comic in archives to explain the raccoon part, though. She thought that was pretty funny and she likes cute looking animals.”

  April eyed her, but continued eating in silence.

  The mess door opened and two techs entered, wearing dark green flight suits, carrying comms helmets. The one in the lead was short and female, with straight blonde hair. Following her was a tall, red haired male with an ambling gait.

  Dev came right over to the table and put her helmet down on the empty seat next to Jess. “The new entrance is going to be excellent,” she said. “Did you see the hole?” She ran her fingers through her hair, which was mussed from the helmet and a little sweat stained. “It’s gigantic.”

  “Not yet. Maybe you can take me on a tour after lunch.” Jess winked at her. “We might have two hours clear weather today.”

  “Absolutely,” Dev said at once. “It appeared to be getting better as we were coming in. No lightning or anything like that.”

  Doug, the second tech, put his own helmet down next to April. “Hey, boss.”

  “How was the testing?” April asked.

  “I like the new mods,” Doug said. “But really, we were all there just to watch Rocket fly.” He grinned at Dev, and moved over to the line to get his tray. “With those new power boosts? Booyah.”

  Dev cleared her throat in a diffident sort of way, then joined him in line.

  April continued to clear her own tray. “Been quiet anyway,” she said to Jess. “You haven’t missed much. Just that one patrol down near Picchu.”

  “Haven’t heard from them,” Jess said. “Hope it’s just a tech screwup.”

  Dev came back with a tray full of edibles and sat next to Jess. “The acceleration of the new engine is amazing. At least ten times better than the old ones.”

  “Oh, no.” Jess propped her head up on one fist. “I’m screwed. They’re going to have to bung
ee tie me into that damn chair. Or put me in a rubber padded suit.”

  Doug and April laughed, as Dev regarded her partner with a look of perplexed concern. “Do you want more restraints? I can ask the rigging technicians to adjust your position.”

  Jess reached over and patted her hand. “Relax. It’ll give me a chance to work on my biceps.” She lifted her arms and tensed them as though holding onto a console. “Ahhh!”

  Dev realized she was being razzed. “Maybe we should have them put in a three hundred and sixty-degree gimbal for you.”

  Doug grimaced. “Hey c’mon I’m trying to have some lunch here. Don’t make me think of that upside down stuff you do.”

  April chuckled and shook her head. “So,” she eyed Jess, “I heard through the grapevine you were going out to the seaboard council in a couple days. Want a watch on your back?”

  Jess stared at her as she thoughtfully chewed a mouthful of water grains and krill. Of the agent teams now at the base, there were only a few she felt completely confident of.

  Most were new, fill-ins brought from other bases after the near disaster that caused the destruction of North base, and almost all of Ten. Of the older ones, there were some who so fiercely resented Jess’s promotion to senior it was hard for them to work under her.

  Even all the heroics hadn’t changed that. Jess swallowed her mouthful. She’d changed some minds, and it was good to have some of her worst adversaries dead in the conflict, but there were some who still felt she’d scammed her bars and didn’t deserve to be over them.

  Maybe even had a point.

  But April was different. A newly graduated agent from field school, who’d been with Jess through the trials they’d recently faced. She stayed out of the politics just keeping her head down and her weapons ready.

  Feral, almost, as befit her nomad heritage and Jess liked her as much as she could like another agent. “Sure,” she said, after a long pause. “Didn’t learn from the last time? Crap happens to me.”