One piece at a time, things began to click into place. In another session with Chief Administrator Swift and his aide, Jay discovered that Tia’s father had succeeded in getting information from Interstellar Command, Interstellar Intelligence, and the Terran Union. They had complied because of the security threat to the Terran Union but had done so on the condition that the Chief does not release the information beyond his office unless it became imperative to do so. Jay was permitted to know because it directly involved him, and the knowledge of his own identity and what had happened to him was another critical security matter.
Interstellar Security had learned that the Terran Union had been targeted by members of a hostile alien power, the Dhurians. These aliens operated by capturing their foes and sealing them in body sacs containing an immersive bio-agent that penetrated the cells of the victim and overtook the nervous system. To meet the Dhurian threat, Interstellar Command had set up training units in space stations at strategic points in Terran-controlled space. In this training units, Stellarforce personnel had been physically enhanced against outside control and to make their nervous systems compatible with advanced battle exosuits that would make them living weapons against the Dhurians. Jay was a member of one of these elite units, selected after a rigorous physical and mental vetting process. He had been in training at the Sigma Pegasii Station when it came under surprise attack by the Dhurians, who boarded the Station and began to assimilate the personnel. In the battle against the aliens, Jay was cocooned, and the Dhurian bio-agent started to penetrate his suit. The bio-agent contained amoeba-like cellular components that disrupted the interface between Jay and the suit and caused his violent, hallucinatory trauma. Jay’s training and conditioning had thrown off the Dhurian influence enough to allow him to escape his cocoon, but in a mentally compromised state. An extreme and instinctive fight-or-flight response had taken him over, in which Jay retreated into a Transit port and set it to lock on to any outside communications signal and send him to the point of reception. The Transit port found the holo-transmission signal of the concert being beamed to Tia’s birthday party and sent him to a Transit Bay orbiting Sigma Cygni. In a hallucinatory state, Jay had seen the Security personnel at the Colony as Dhurians and engaged them in battle. He commandeered a shuttle, took it down to the planet, took an aircycle stored on board, and fled onto the planet itself to find cover, inadvertently flying right into Tia’s party before being captured.
The good news was that the exosuit protected Jay from the effects of making a hyperjump without a spacesuit, and the suit itself was capable of weathering the jump as well—but the amoeba-like parasites infesting the suit were not so lucky. They died instantaneously, leaving Jay alive but temporarily, violently insane.
Knowing what had happened to him had brought back Jay’s entire life to him, slamming it all into his head with a force that felt to him like the blast of the concussion grenades with which Colonial personnel had finally brought him down at the pavilion. His cognitive and memory enhancements kicked in, helping him with the process of filling in the vast empty space in his mind. He remembered everything, including the things he could still do even without the exosuit, which the Colony had impounded and was keeping under even tighter security than the surveillance placed on Jay himself. His enhancements and training enabled Jay to operate both physically and mentally at an almost superhuman level. And because of the interface between his nervous system and his exosuit, which was still in effect even when Jay was not wearing it, Jay had other capabilities that the Colony did not suspect—and which Jay had not disclosed. He had kept them to himself, partly because of his training to keep them a secret, and because Jay suspected he might have need of them.
When Colonial Security first apprehended him, they had kept Jay in a detention cell. While he was there, he had taken advantage his neural enhancements. He had discreetly, mentally accessed the computer systems in the detention facility and sent the fingers of his mind out into the systems of the entire settlement. He knew the complete layout of his surroundings. He knew that Colonial Security had given his exosuit its own detention cell, an accommodation that amused him. Now that his identity and background were known, he had been provided with an empty apartment in which to stay until Stellarforce issued him transfer orders—or decided what discipline to hold on him for desertion. Jay crashed onto the bed in the apartment and fell asleep for several hours until Colony administrative staff awoke him to bring him a meal. Lying on the bed in the apartment, Jay now recalled his entire life: his family, friends, and upbringing back on Earth, his enrollment at Stellarforce Academy and eventual commission in the Stellaforce itself as one of its most promising young officers, his selection for the Enhanced Operatives Program and his assignment to Sigma Pegasii—everything. Breathing deeply, replaying all the facts of his life and what had brought him here to Sigma Cygni, Jay slowly came back into himself and felt like a whole person again. He was not a cipher, not a blank slate, not an enigma. He was a young human male, just out of boyhood, with a past and future, feelings, and needs. And gradually, one particular need came to the forefront of his mind.
That girl, the one whose party he had crashed—that Tia Swift. Now feeling human again after hours of doubt and confusion and no memory, what came pouring into his mind and his feelings was the memory of the one thing that he loved even better than being a member of the Force and serving his home planet and it all now coalesced around Tia. Even more than service and duty, Jay Goodwill loved sex: the feeling of his body commingling in the deepest, most profound and powerful ways with the body of a warm and willing girl. He had bedded plenty of girls in his twenty-one years. His looks and his uniform had brought him the attention of all the young women he wanted. He had known many a girl’s bed and many a long and exuberant night of joining loins with girls eager to have him inside them. Now, returning fully to himself, Jay wanted nothing more than to return to what made him feel most alive. His head was filled with the lovely face and the limber and leotard-clad form of Tia Swift. And it was not just the way she looked. It was the fire she exhibited when she came up to him in the gym and confronted him about what he did to her party. It was the way that fire simmered down into a warmth of compassion when she learned he had lost his memory and himself. It was the way she looked at him with such concern even after he had so terrified her—and the feeling that charged through both their bodies when he touched her. Jay wanted that feeling back, and more.
Jay’s interrogation of the settlement’s computer systems had given him certain specific pieces of information that he had effortlessly and perfectly committed to memory: the address of the Chief Administrator’s home, where Tia Swift lived with her father. He even knew exactly where her room was. And accessing the computers in Merrill Swift’s office told him that Tia’s father was busy this evening, conferring with Chief Administrators of other colonies that lay in outlying areas of Terran space as Stellarforce and the Union briefed them about the Dhurian situation. If Tia were home tonight, she might well be home alone, which would suit his needs ideally. Outside, night had fallen, which was good. Though he was no longer a prisoner, it stood to reason he should not call too much attention to himself to go where he wanted to go—and do what he wanted to do.