Chapter One
Police work could be tedious, especially on stake outs, but this went beyond the pale. Zoe realized she was well past bored, also beyond uneasy. She’d always been a nervous space traveler, andthatwas when she was traveling coach on a commercial line. If anyone had ever asked her if there was any circumstance that would make her consider traveling solo, and well beyond the frontier, she would’ve told them to be sure and send her for a psyche evaluation if she announced such a thing.
“What the hell am I doing out here?” she muttered to herself for the umpteenth time.
“You are searching for your sister, who was kidnapped by rogue cyborgs,” the computer responded promptly.
Zoe glared at the console. “Half-sister,” she muttered after a significant pause while she tried to decide if responding to the computer constituted space dementia.
“You are searching for your half-sister, who ….”
“Shut up!” Zoe said irritably. She drummed her fingers on the console for a few minutes. “How far are we from the nearest habitable planet?”
Silence greeted the question.
Zoe rolled her eyes. The computer, naturally, was equipped with AI. Unfortunately, even with artificial intelligence, it tended to take everything literally. If being alone for so long didn’t tip her over the edge, she thought the damned computer was going to drive her insane. “Computer respond!” she snapped.
“The last habitable planet surveyed is seventy two hours, thirty three minutes, ten seconds earth standard time, from the current position of the Evening Star 9120, traveling at full hyper-drive. Folding would reduce the estimated time to reach the habitable planet to twenty hours, five minutes, thirty seven seconds. In the event of damage to the Evening Star 9120, it would be necessary to re-calculate the time required to reach the habitable planet according to the drive status.”
Zoe narrowed her eyes. Unfortunately, the computer hadn’t been programmed to react to a glare. “Didn’t I tell you that I wanted you to survey everything and search for anything even remotely habitable?”
“I was ordered to survey worlds we passed close enough to that it was possible to utilize long range sensors.”
“And?” Zoe demanded, holding onto her patience with an effort.
“The last habitable planet ….”
“What about around us? In front of us?”
“Would you like for me to do that now?”
“Now would be a good time, yes,” Zoe snapped, infuriated to discover, after nearly three months of traveling, no less, that the damned computer had interpreted her command to meanonlythe bodies they passed. If she hadn’t known better, she would’ve suspected the thing was deliberately trying to thwart her efforts to find Bronte. Slumping in the pilot’s seat, she resumed drumming her fingers on the console, trying to bring her irritation under control. It was singularly pointless to rail at the computer, although a rousing good argument right about now might help to blow off some of her steam.
She missed her partner, and that was saying something because he rarely had more than two words to say to her—‘let’s go’ and ‘want donuts?’.
Truthfully she supposed she didn’t miss him nearly as much as she missed the life she’d flushed down the toilet to come on this wild goose chase.
She didn’t evenknowBronte. She didn’t understand why she’d felt this compulsion to throw everything away that she’d worked so hard for and go after her.
She’d always meant to meet her half sister—at some point.
She’d told herself that for years anyway, almost ever since she’d discovered her biological father—the randy two-timing bastard—had been contracted and already expecting a child when he’d been pumping her mother.
Well, not quite that long, she supposed. She’d been eight years old before she had actually discovered her background, not that it had required any sleuthing on her part. Her mother had gone ballistic when the old bastard’s woman had died and she’d discovered hestilldidn’t mean to contract with her. She’d spilled the whole tale then, and Zoe had discovered that, not only did she have a name and face to put with ‘father’, but she had a sister, too, one that was only a few months older than she was.
By the time she’d gotten into her teens, she’d been too resentful over the fact that her father refused to acknowledge her to look kindly upon the ‘accepted’ one. At the same time, she’d yearned to get to know her. She’d spent her entire childhood wishing she had a sibling, desperately in need of a playmate and friend that would be there when no one else was.
There’d been no chance of that, though. Her father had taken care to keep his two families separate. The closest she’d come to meeting her sister was a chance glimpse now and then while she was growing up. She’d lost track of Bronte completely for years, until she’d shown up to take over the old man’s practice.
That shouldn’t have bothered her, but it did. It was completely logical and understandable that Bronte, who’d studied to be a doctor, would step in their father’s shoes, and yet it had resurrected all the old feelings of having been shunted aside, the feelings of unworthiness.
She’d let those feelings keep her away, and now she’d missed her chance to get to know her sister.
She pushed those thoughts aside. She wasn’t going to just accept defeat.
It had been a blow when she’d been called in to investigate the abduction and discovered it was Bronte that had been taken. The rogue bastards had taken her with them, though. She didn’t know why, but she knew damned well there wouldn’t have been any reason to take Bronte if they’d meant to kill her.
She was alive—somewhere.
