Jake winnowed the team to ten, including Trevor and a pilot. He dismissed the rest with thanks and a handful of rapid orders for keeping the proper level of security operational in the Nebula Zephyr while he was gone.
“You know this is crazy,” Red said, but with a big grin.
“We have a secret weapon,” Trevor said, rising. “This may take a little time to explain but trust me, it’s a vital part of mission planning. But first, I need all of you to promise not to shoot me.” Someone in the back of the room laughed and he raised his voice. “I’m not joking here. When you’ve heard me out, remember we’re trying to save an innocent woman and accept what I have to say.”
“Go ahead.” Jake’s eyes were narrowed but he lounged in his chair as if the discussion was about nothing more significant than the intraship sports tournament. “We’re tight for time.”
“Most of you probably know I was Special Forces. I was captured behind enemy lines—the details are irrelevant—and was sent to a special prison camp. A freaky red haired alien scientist from some race I never saw before ran this camp and the Chimmer overlords had him doing what he euphemistically referred to as experiments. Those who were lucky died early. I’m too fucking stubborn for my own good and I refused to use the checkout code while there was any hope at all of escaping. I guess the bastard was lonely. He liked to sit in the medlab and talk about the good old days and get drunk on feelgoods while he was torturing people. Me.” Trevor could still hear the bastard’s voice droning on in his mind if he allowed himself to go too deep in memories.
Swallowing hard, he forced himself to continue. “He got mad at the Chimmer commander at one point, felt they disrespected him and didn’t appreciate his ‘science’ enough and he flat out hated the Shemdylann guards. The everyday grunts made fun of him or insulted his dignity or some such bullshit. He was damn arrogant. Maybe even insane.” The triggering effect of revisiting this episode in his life was off the charts. Trevor took a long, shaky breath to regain control. It helped to know his audience was composed of veterans like himself and all the faces turned to him were serious and nonjudgmental. Verlaine was a warm weight against his leg, reassuring.
“Long story short, his deal was screwing with people’s DNA, adding other species’ DNA and trying to make new hybrids. Alien science. I guess he’d seen it done before or been thrown out of such a program on his own planet. I didn’t give a fuck. So one night he has me brought to the lab and he starts in on another attempt to remake me. I don’t remember the details and wouldn’t share them if I did. The key point is he had stolen royal jelly from the Shemdylann cruiser stationed at the camp. They’re like insects in many respects, governed by their enzymes and other elements as to what each one evolves into—worker, drone, soldier, officer, senior officer, noble, queen. He used it on me.”
Trevor closed his eyes and let go of the iron control he’d been maintaining for all these years. Like pent-up lava in a volcano, the change swept over him. Dimly he heard gasps in the room but once he released his grip on his humanity Trevor couldn’t pause the process of transforming into what the alien scientist had made him. When the burning and the aches and the pain receded, he scanned the shocked, white faces and forced himself to stand tall. He was all too painfully aware what he looked like. Deceptively human in most respects but with the addition of two feet in height, glittering web like black-and-green iridescent wings, two telescoping black antennae sprouting from behind his ears and rising above his head, as well as a pair of extra arms below his own arms that ended in pincer like claws. There was an extra eye in the center of his forehead, multifaceted, brilliantly green and capable of providing information in a spectrum his human brain barely comprehended. Best of all from his standpoint, if there was any good in this at all, he had six tightly coiled tentacles lining the exterior of his rib cage, each of which ended in a poisonous barb equipped with virtually unlimited venom as far as he knew. He could wield those like whips to killing effect.
There was silence.
Jake pushed back from the table and walked over to him, hand extended. “Thank you for your service and congratulations on the new suit of battle armor. You’ll be a formidable asset.”
Stunned at his boss’s matter of fact reaction, taking comfort in the calm acceptance Jake showed, Trevor shook his hand. “I never thought of it quite like that. Once I figured out how to reverse the transformation, I never wanted to see myself like this again.”
“Were you rescued?” Owen asked.
He shook his head. This part of the story he was proud of. “I tore the bastard who did this to me limb from limb the first time I transformed. It also turns out I can actually speak Shemdylann—I gained a pair of mutated vocal cords—and because of whatever it was he stole and used to create this version of me, I can order them to do anything literally and they have to obey. I guess if there was a Shemdylann queen on board the other ship she and I’d have to fight it out but there wouldn’t be an individual of such a high rank on a beat-up old clunker. Ninety to ten odds. The higher the rank, the newer and more lethal the ship. Anyone other than a queen is forced by their own biology to submit to me. So I liberated the camp myself, called in a rescue, surrendered the spoils of the operation to the Sectors and spent the next three years in rehab. The rest you know.”
“So once we get you on board,” Red said carefully, “It’s game over for them.”
Trevor nodded. “It should be but remember the creatures have a biological override process where they can band together in a big enough group and push out a queen or even kill her. Again, like some insects. So theoretically if we linger too long or let their whole crew know we’re on board, I could get overwhelmed and it would be game over in a way we wouldn’t like.”
“All right, let’s rough out the rest of the plan to present to Fleming and then we can be on our way in whatever sweet ride Maeve has cooked up for us.” Jake was all business. “Can you transform back? I can’t let passengers or crew see you.” His grin was a bit crooked. “After all, we are a cruise ship.”
“Sure. Go ahead and talk, I can catch most of it while I’m making the change.” Gritting his teeth, but warmed by the reception he’d gotten from his fellow veterans, Trevor shifted. His uniform was worse for the wear but one of Maeve’s service robos delivered a new one in his human size to the conference room a moment later.
Maeve had thrown a schematic for a typical Shemdylann ship of the type they’d been facing in the air over the conference table and there was a tightly focused discussion of the best way to gain access undetected. Apparently the AI had generated a top of the line interceptor for them. She projected the design for what they were going to fly and there were whistles of approval.
“Lucky Jayna can fly those like nobody’s business,” Jake said, looking at the senior woman on the team. “Your skills still up to par?”
“Worked out in the simulator last week,” she said. “Always gotta keep the edge. You never know when an emergency will arise.”
“Glad to see you’ve made good use of all the mountains of illicit cargo you had shipped in under the inspectors’ noses,” Owen said to Maeve.