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“Rokai is on a special mission. He’s most likely cloaked the ship so that it cannot be seen, and has left all traces of communication on it. But I can find him.” He lifted a small hand-held device out of the bottom of a box and held it triumphantly in the air. Then he turned to his brand new mate. “Grielle, I need to see to this.”

“Alright.”

“I know that it’s not what you expected when I brought you here from Quari. And I know it’s interrupting the three weeks of bonding required by our people to complete the pairing. But this is so very important to Rokai and to our Sire. I know he wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.”

“It’s alright. I understand. I’ll be waiting right here.”

Gaishon walked over to her and gently cupped her cheek, looking down at her lovingly. “I won’t be long. Thank you. I love you, and I’m so glad you joined me here.”

“I am, too. Be careful.”

“I’ll be safe. I’m not leaving the ship. Just our quarters. I’ll return as quickly as I can.”

~~~

Gaishon stepped out into the corridor and was surprised to find Vennie waiting for him.

“I thought that you might need a private place to do whatever it is that you need to do,” Vennie said.

“Is it possible to gain access to the navigations offices? If I could use their systems, it might be completed more quickly.”

“What is that you have to do?” Vennie asked.

“I need to access their tracking soft ware.”

Vennie nodded, then squelched off down the corridor with Gaishon walking restlessly at his side. He liked the male, most aboard ship did, especially since he was a personal friend of the Sirena’s, but when you were in a hurry, he was not the person you wanted at your side.

To his credit, though, Vennie remained with him throughout the entire process. Vennie never spoke a word as he watched Gaishon plug the device he carried with him into the mainframe computer system in the navigations office. He watched silently as Gaishon hacked into the personnel files and accessed Ba Re’s records, then copied the information from Ba Re’s pay records, copy it to his own device, then begin a search using the navigations office computers. Just a few moments later his device chimed and a pinpoint both on his device and the navigations computer began to flash.

“There’s the band,” Gaishon said, marking it and tagging it as ‘Ba Re’ band - Mirilla’. He saved the information then exited that particular screen on his device and began scrolling through several more before he stopped and began to key in a particular code. The view on the screen started rapidly moving through the mapped areas of the multiverse, until it settled on one particular vector. The two dimensional image on the screen was really nothing more than a map. He watched as the screen focused more and more taking him to one particular point on the ground. A bright red arrow appeared. “And there’s the ship, and hopefully Rokai.”

He typed some more codes into the device and waited while the information cleared his device.

“What did you do with it?” Vennie asked.

“I uploaded it all to our ship. When Rokai returns to it, he’ll know there’s information waiting for him.”

“How do you know he’ll return to the ship?” Vennie asked.

“That’s what I’m about to take care of.” Gaishon cleared all screens on his device, then began typing in a long series of coded sequences. Finally, the screen, though still blank, began to glow a soft, light green. “Here goes,” Gaishon said. He pressed several character and numerical combinations together. When the soft green light began to flash he nodded.

“Okay. He’s got the information,” Gaishon said.

“What did you just do?” Vennie asked.

“What Sire Zha Quin asked me to do.”

“No, I’m amazed. I mean, literally, what did you just do. What is that? What does it do?”

“This device used to be the only thing Rokai and I needed to do all that we did. That and a stupid sense of courage.”

“What does it do?”

“Imagine a parasite attaching itself to any living creature. This is an electronic parasite. It becomes part of its host. We command it to whatever we need it to do, in this case track a credit band. It pinpoints its location. Then I located the ship using the navigational computers. Uploaded the location of the band to the ship’s hard drive.”

“How did you get into the hard drive from here?” Vennie asked.

Gaishon lifted the device he was holding.

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