The First Legion had no ability to produce antimatter, and their limited stores of antimatter left over from the Republic or stolen from the Protectorate of Mars were restricted to missile production. The transport shifted in space as her massive fusion engines engaged. “We will teleport every twelve hours after that for six days, arriving in Aquila on the sixteenth.” “If Lieutenant Zhao keeps us on course as planned, I will teleport us toward Aquila in four hours,” she continued. She spoke with the soft contralto of a much older woman, with nothing to the generated voice to remind Ring of Fire’s crew of what horrors lurked in the heart of their engine room. The voice that emerged on Ring’s bridge was computer-generated-Sharon no more had vocal cords than she had hands-and it showed none of Sharon’s thoughts.

Ajello was Ring of Fire’s Captain, once an officer of the Republic of Faith and Reason’s Space Assault Force. “Sharon, do we have a course worked up for Aquila?” Colonel Tzafrir Ajello asked. So, she’d begged, sat up and rolled over-and now she had an incredible scope of access to the assault transport’s computer systems. She recognized response-reward training…and eighteen-year-old disembodied brain Sharon Deveraux was determined not to be trained.īut she had no intention of letting her masters think that. But back when she’d been alive, fifteen-year-old Sharon Deveraux had trained puppies. But the Legion had needed more, so they’d carefully, oh so carefully, woken her up and trained her.Īnd yet she was still dead. Her body might be long gone, cremated in the morgue of a far away laboratory, but her magic remained.įor three years, she’d been nothing more than a component in a system that teleported Ring of Fire from star system to star system.

She’d spent three years in a coma, only awoken by electronic commands forcing her to cast a single spell. Pleasure and pain were the push of a button for the people who commanded Sharon, and they used them freely to command her.Īnd yet…she’d done the math. Her… masters had given her access to the ship’s internal sensors as one of the first things after they’d lifted her from her semi-coma. She’d been conscious to that concept of her existence and current state for about a year. Her brain currently resided in a tank full of nutrients and wires buried deep in the Engineering department of the First Legion interstellar assault transport Ring of Fire. This was something she still wasn’t entirely comfortable with, though the evidence was hard to argue with.

Voice of Mars by Glynn Stewart