Secrets of Rahjen Read online

  SLO

  Secrets of Rahjen

  Star Lawyers Origins – Book 3

  Tom Shepherd

  Bookbag Press

  Kansas City, MO / Tucson, AZ / Geneva, Switzerland

  SLO

  Secrets of Rahjen

  Copyright © 2019 Tom Shepherd

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN- 9781701395725

  Cover designed by

  Juan José Padrón

  Note to readers of the Star Lawyers books:

  Star Lawyers Origins is a new series, which compliments the Star Lawyers books and brings a whole new set of voices from different eras along the time line in the Star Lawyers Universe. Now we move to book three of the spin-off series, Secrets of Rahjen, which requires a caveat to readers who enjoyed Stardate and Bad Moon Rising.

  Although Secrets of Rahjen brings the central characters in the trilogy together again, seven years have passed and they are no longer middle schoolers but full adults. The language content and sensual interactions must shift accordingly.

  Mark and Keshikka are lovers; Tanella Blake is no longer a child prodigy but has earned a PhD in theoretical physics and married Dr. Perry Jennings; and airhead Sally Ann Palmer has become a highly sought computer programmer. If the trilogy were motion pictures instead of books, parts One and Two would likely be rated PG, Book Three Secrets of Rahjen would be rated R due to factors (language, adult situations, etc.) which classify movies today.

  Just like people do, the young characters of Stardate and Bad Moon Rising have grown up. The next level is spicy, frisky, sexy, and a little naughty, as the adventure, humor, and romance continues during the early days of humanity’s march to the stars.

  Welcome back to the expanded Star Lawyers Universe.

  For a free copy of the short-story prequel to the Star Lawyers main series:

  “Knife Fight at Olathe-5”

  For

  Kelly, Cindy, Kristy,

  Diana, Hannah, Amber

  and everyone who met Tanella and Sally Ann

  at Spirit Creek.

  Technology doesn’t change who we are, it magnifies who we are. The good and the bad.

  When your time comes, and it will, you’ll never be ready. But you’re not supposed to be. Find the hope in the unexpected. Find the courage in the challenge.

  You won’t be here for the end of the story.

  Tim Cook, Apple CEO

  Stanford University Graduation Address*

  Sunday, 16 June 2019 T.C.E.

  *Complete video remarks, Encyclopedia Galactica, 2974 Edition

  11100010 10000000 10011100 01001110 01110101 01101000 00101101 01110101 01101000 00101110 11100010 10000000 10011101 00001101 00001010 11100010 10000000 10011100 01011001 01100001 01101000 00101101 01101000 01110101 01101000 00101110

  Translation:

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Yah-huh.”

  Sally Ann Palmer

  16 June 2019

  Prologue: Scientific Union

  Palo Alto, California

  March 2018

  Black sky wore its brightest stars like diamonds scattered across the roof of the city when Perry Jennings parked his dilapidated Mustang convertible on the top tier of the student parking facility. He turned to his date, the brilliant doctoral student Tanella Blake, and smiled slightly but made no move to open the doors or close the distance between them. They were platonic friends. So far.

  He poked his glasses back onto his nose. Tanella smiled at the gesture. It was a losing battle; they kept slipping. “You’re a lot of fun to be with, Tanella.”

  “Fun?” She smiled slightly. “I’ve been accused of many things, but never that.”

  “My internship is ending this term,” Perry said. “I need to start teaching and doing original research.”

  Her smile faded. “Will you be leaving?”

  The physicist shrugged. “Should I stay?”

  “Do you have the option?”

  “I have an offer here at Stanford, another at Princeton.”

  “So, you could stay here indefinitely.”

  “Theoretically. But I’ll become an instructor, which means we can’t continue these lively conversations over Pizza Hut fare.”

  Now she frowned. “No fraternizing.”

  “Correct.”

  “Is there any way around the problem?” She pulled out her phone and Googled the specific policies they would be violating. “I could talk to Campus HR, write a release.”

  He shook his head. “They won’t allow instructors to socialize with graduate students. Understandable in today’s Me, Too climate.”

  “Our meals together infused with physics and politics have kept my sanity, but I don’t want to damage your career.”

  “Good. I have a workaround to propose.”

  She perked up. “I thought you said we couldn’t—”

  “Marry me.”

  Tanella’s full lips opened but no sound came out. She turned away while Perry argued his hypothesis.

  “Stanford can’t object if you go to dinner with your spouse. And if we agree to cohabitate, it will save rent. Doesn’t that make sense? We’d make such a great team. Intellectually, I mean.”

  “Intellectually?” Tanella stared out the windshield at the Palo Alto cityscape, avoiding his eyes.

  “Why, yes,” he said brightly. “You’ll receive your PhD next spring. Think of what we can accomplish as a couple if—”

  “Marry you?” She glared at him. “You’ve never even kissed me.”

  Now his mouth dropped open. “I… I always assumed you just wanted companionship. Someone who could usually keep up with your ideas, who understood the math.”

  “Perry, you’re a good physicist, but not that good.”

  He grasped the steering wheel, staring blindly into the night. “Then why have you continued to have dinner with me?”

  “Dinner? This isn’t dinner, it’s Pizza Hut!” Tanella leaned against the closed passenger window. “Why didn’t you take me to a French restaurant, like Ambiance?”

  “That’s an American restaurant with French-Asian influences,” Perry said uneasily.

  “I’m a half-Asian who speaks French!”

  “And it’s expensive.”

  “So, do something cheaper. Buy me flowers. Give me a box of chocolates.”

  “You like chocolates?”

  “Everybody likes chocolates!”

  Perry cowered at the door, hand on the latch. “I thought we were colleagues.”

  “When I want a colleague, I’ll go to a Mensa MeetUp.”

  “If you feel that way, why have we met every Wednesday night?”

  “God!” Tanella grabbed her head. “Do I have to write the algorithm for you?”

  “I don’t understand. I thought you wanted to talk physics, politics, and—”

  “As the great American philosopher Sally Ann Palmer once said, ‘You are a fucking idiot.’” She grabbed his hand and pressed it to her breast, leaned against him and they kissed. Not a peck but a deep, tongue-tickling, heart-thumping Frenchie.

  “My God, Tanella. Where did you learn—?”

  “Extensive research in the literature of foreplay and coitus.”

  “You read porn?” Perry stared at her like he was seeing this lovely, African-Asian woman he had been dating almost a year for the first time.

  “Steamy romances,” she said. “No fade to black.”

  “But—”

  “Enough theory. Let’s experiment.”

  They kissed again and this time Perry caressed her boobs as she moaned softly. The kiss lasted through three changes of traffic lights on the street below. He finally gasped, coming up for air.

  “Does that mean you accept my p
roposal?”

  She jingled her apartment keys in his ear. “Ask me again after the honeymoon.”

  Sometime in the night as they rested between sex, Perry rubbed her shoulders and said softly, “You were a virgin.”

  “The sheets will wash.”

  He slapped her bare bottom playfully. “How could someone as lovely as you—”

  “Oh, pooh. Even I recognize that classic male strategy. Tell a smart woman she’s pretty and a pretty woman she’s smart.”

  He rolled her over and they kissed. “I surrender. No strategies. I’ve loved you from the first day you bounced across my vision field, bent on capturing a Stanford doctorate single-handedly. I thought, ‘She must be dating somebody…’ So it took me months to get up the courage to suggest physics-talk over pizza.”

  “I never found any men to talk with. Sure, I was approached frequently. But they were all undergrads who couldn’t—I don’t want to sound dismissive… But they couldn’t communicate with me.”

  “Didn’t you want a boyfriend for something other than communication?”

  “Tell you the truth.” She propped herself up on one elbow. “Many a night after studying all day I’d grab my Kindle, download a new bodice ripper, and dream about alternative realities. Some Universe where I’d march into an off campus bar, pick up a guy, and give it up. But I never did it. Couldn’t make the math work.”

  “Glad you waited?”

  “I am still testing that hypothesis, but the results are encouraging.” She touched his cheek. “I’m so incredibly comfortable with you. Here we are, jaybird naked, and it feels… natural.”

  Perry entwined his fingers with hers. “‘Come, my queen, take hands with me, And rock the ground whereon these sleepers be.’”

  She laughed. “Playing the Shakespeare card already, Professor? Out of fresh ideas, or catching your breath?”

  “None of the above,” he said as they came together again.

  Perry and Tanella made love in her single bed until dawn, then slept past noon and missed classes and assignments. She had never ditched before in her long years as a student. Perry was a good lover, and they found they were compatible in more ways than intellectually.

  “You feel so good,” he said as they coupled yet again in early afternoon. “Why did we wait so long?”

  “Run that Sally Ann quote in your head,” she said, wrapping her legs around his lean body. “And keep screwing me.”

  They married two months later under the domed ceiling and stained glass windows of Stanford’s Memorial Church with a few hundred friends, family, students and faculty in attendance. Her father, Dr. Nathaniel Blake, gave the bride away, and lifelong best friend Sally Ann Palmer was Tanella’s bridesmaid. Perry asked his younger brother to take a break from Harvard Law to be his best man.

  Life seemed perfect. She was ABD for her doctorate, Perry’s star was rising among the physics interns, and she had received a few indications Stanford was interested in her research proposals.

  As she planned her final days as a graduate student over Perry’s superb triple cheese chia seed omelets, newlywed Tanella Jennings was not aware of the order issued by the Lower Horde of the Lutzak Eparchy condemning her to death. While she reviewed the final proofs of her dissertation, a platoon of Lutzak assassins boarded an assault frigate for the journey to Earth from a ringed world in a star system eight thousand light years Rimward of the Terran sun.

  Life in the Bay Area was too good to think about anything but years of married love and physics research ahead. Besides, even if Tanella had been told of the danger, she would not have believed it. She had demonstrated by her PhD studies that Faster Than Light travel was impossible.

  Part One

  Bricchetti Memoirs

  No. 019-6A

  Agents of Rahjen

  One

  Where do we pick up the story? Seven years after my first off-world jaunt with Keshikka. That’s a good place to start. I’d just turned twenty-one, my junior year at Augusta State University, and thought I knew everything. My best friend, Aaron Hooper, moved to the West Coast right after high school. He stopped calling me and changed his cell number. The dude even dropped out of social media.

  Little did I suspect what was going on. My best friend? He should’ve told me, after all we’d been through together. My social network had big holes in the net.

  But you probably want to know what happened after I got home from that first stardate with Keshikka, right?

  The Princess and I kept chatting almost daily through the pendalux-enhanced cell phone she gave me. Every six months, more or less, Kay-Kay and Uncle Wricket swept into orbit and teleported me aboard her starboat for another extended weekend. We visited lots of interesting places, but since Aaron had dropped off the grid, I couldn’t talk to anybody about those jaunts at Faster-Than-Light speed. Well, except Zack Griffin, the ex-Marine who, like Aaron, had tagged along when Keshikka and I had our first off-planet date.

  In the weeks after our return to Earth, I talked to Zack by phone and Facebook Instant Messenger a few times. Then he stopped responding, too, so I showed up at the convenience store on Windsor Springs Road where he worked. The kid at the counter said Zack’s Marine Reserve unit had been called to active duty and shipped out to places unknown, somewhere overseas., but he didn’t know the specifics.

  I kept checking on Zack, even called his girlfriend, who now said she was his ex and bit my ear off with a mangry tirade about what a jerk he was for leaving without saying goodbye. Apparently, the Z-man had decided to make a career of the Corps.

  Well, Semper Fi, man. Thank you for your service.

  But I missed having somebody to talk to about the mind-spinning adventure we’d experienced in deep space. Anybody else would have written me off as a nutjob and sic’d the guys in the white coats after me.

  Routine off-planet excursions with Keshikka continued during my early college years. Our relationship transitioned smoothly from boyfriend-girlfriend, to first love, to fully adult lovers who slept together and basically couldn’t get enough of each other’s company. The days between excursions grew shorter, and by the time I turned twenty-one we were spending two or three weekends a month making love, either in her quarters aboard the starboat or under skies filled with multiple moons. Nothing out there mattered as long as we were together.

  Her tough-minded father, General Hakkian Granth, Warlord of the Seven Miyosian Worlds, grudgingly accepted the idea that his daughter and heir apparent to the imperial throne would likely mate with a human being. Actually, I think the old S.O.B. liked me but refused to say it aloud.

  Then during my junior year of college, everything suddenly changed. It started when Tanella Jennings-Blake sent an invitation to attend her graduation from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Tanella skipped several grades to finish high school at fifteen.

  She was twenty-one, like me, but I was a struggling undergrad while girl genius had earned a PhD in theoretical physics summa cum laude. According to the invitation Tanella and Perry Jennings, her new husband, also requested my attendance at a combination graduation and house-warming reception in their home after the ceremonies. I googled Perry Jennings and learned he was a physics instructor on the Stanford faculty.

  Why didn’t that surprise me?

  I had decided to RSVP in the negative when my princess made contact from somewhere off-world. Fortunately, I was studying in my room, so she could show up as a full-body holographic image. Another nice pendalux enhancement added during one of our interstellar outings.

  She was about my age, no longer the teenager I’d captured in that selfie at the end of our first date. If teen-Keshikka had been strikingly cute, the Princess and heiress to the imperial galactic throne was now a breathtakingly beautiful woman. Red-gold hair with amber eyes and a sleek, mature body with all the curves and bulges in the right places. On a beach in a skimpy swimsuit she would’ve made every head swivel as she pranced past. I wanted to throw her on the b
ed and make love until the Universe stopped spinning.

  But she was an intangible projection, and my mother was due home from work any minute. And my family didn’t know about Keshikka. Mom was now head dietitian at the VA hospital, and Dad managed a new car dealership on Washington Road. The curse of living with your parents to cut college expenses. No hanky-panky with your honey on the homestead.

  Oh, yeah. Sister Julie was down the hall yakking with her newest boyfriend. Liam, Ethan, Rashid, or something. I couldn’t keep up. Well, she was sixteen that year, and I’ll admit it, she was kinda hot. The guys buzzed around her like bugs on a Georgia summer night.

  “You should go to Tanella’s graduation,” Kay-Kay said.

  “In California? College student here, scraping to survive.”

  “You live at home, and your parents are paying the tuition.”

  “Air fare, lodging? No tengo dinero. And it’s this-coming Sunday. June 16, three days from now.”

  “What if Wricket and I provide transportation?”

  “If you’re heading to near earth orbit, I’d rather hop aboard and spend some quality time with my galactic sweetheart.”

  “I want to see you, too. Among other things.” Keshikka’s voice curled into a purring sound.

  “So, beam me up. We’ll make out in the jungle room while Wricket pilots the ship to someplace away from schools and teachers.”

  “Or you could take me to the graduation as your plus-one.”

  “Honey bee, you don’t even know Tanella very well. And it’s likely her lunatic BFF, Sally Ann Palmer, will show up and try to seduce me. Again.”