Seach woke with a start, images of his dream floating through his vision and for a confused second he couldn’t remember where he was. Past and present melded together, his memory coming into full focus. He frowned and rubbed his face, trying to settle the anxiety that filled his gut but it was too late. All of it was there again, vivid and real and he could see it like snapshots in his mind.

Ganymede, their third or fourth assignment, he couldn’t remember, and the most wretched excuse for a satellite in the galaxy. He didn’t care if it was big enough to qualify for a planet, it was useless, nothing but rock and ice.

“Shiite territory,” Relo’s voice rang through him, sounding just as grim as it had that day. “Eastern edge of the Galileo Regio. The terrain is sulcus … lots of grooves and burrows. There will be no shortage of cover but very little clear line of sight so watch what you’re aiming at.”

Sulcus, Seach thought with a scowl. All those damn burrows twisted and curved, making a near impossible labyrinth on the planet’s surface. And their enemy knew every nook and cranny.

Jo sprung the first ambush. Seach could remember her calm, clear command coming over the earwire, alerting them of the problem. Fifteen seconds later came the explosion.

Seach lifted his face from his hands and stared at the medical table. Jorry was still unconscious. She looked better this time, he thought. She wasn’t covered in abrasions, bleeding and broken in several places. She was just unconscious. If it wasn’t for the bruises around her taps or the strange burn marks linking each tap together she might just have been asleep, but at least she still looked like her.

And yet he was more frightened this time than he had been back then.

Why was that? What was different?

He stood and paced, moving closer to the table. The holographic readout hovering above her showed that everything was steady. She was healing, albeit slowly.

“How’s she doing?” Devon asked.

Startled, Seach glanced back at the doorway but it was empty. Remembering that Devon was in the pilot’s nest, he found the screen at the left wall instead and tried to smile at his son’s image. Of course Devon was watching. The boy had only managed to leave the medical unit because Seach had mentioned that someone needed to be in the nest.

“She’s steady,” Seach said.

They were quiet for a moment. Devon was being merciful with his questions, Seach knew. He’d asked a few questions the first day, little clarifying questions about the Tapped Division and why they’d been kept a secret, but he seemed too concerned about Jo’s recovery to go into detail.

Thank God for small miracles, Seach thought.

“You should try to rest, Dad.”

He glanced up at the screen again, not bothering to smile this time. The worry he could read in Devon’s blue eyes humbled him and for an unguarded moment he lost his place in the conversation. For twenty odd years Seach had done everything in his power to keep that look off Devon’s face; the look of fear and uncertainty, the look that anticipated pain and loss. He imagined most parents shared in that plight, trying to shield their children from every pain. And now he was staring right at it, confronted with the near loss of Jo and the shattering of their family unity.

God help him, it hurt too much to look.

Seach turned back to Jo because somehow that was better. Not much, but better.

“She’ll be alright,” he said, mostly to himself.

She had to be because he didn’t want to do this alone.

“I know, Dad. There’s nobody more stubborn than Mom.”

Seach huffed a rueful laugh. “No, son. She’s not stubborn. She just never stops to ask herself if she can handle what’s coming. She just assumes that she can make it all work.”

“Then she’ll make it work this time too,” Devon said.

Seach looked to the readout again. A single blue line blipped across the screen in a steady display of her heartbeat. He stared at it for a moment and forced himself to relax.

“Yeah,” he said, gently brushing the hair away from her temple. Her skin was smooth and cool under his fingers and he let them linger, carefully tracing the outline of her ear. “Yeah, she will.”

~*~*~

The bones and muscles surrounding her taps flared with pain, all of her muscles contracting and knotting in reaction. Even her scalp hurt. Why did her scalp hurt?

For a long time she just laid there, breathing, trying to get used to the pain. She knew by instinct that she was safe. She could hear the familiar thrum of Zephyr’s filtration, smelled the slightly pine scent of automatic cleaner somewhere nearby. Eventually, after who knows how long, Jorry fought her eyes open. She was in the medical unit on Zephyr, she recognized that immediately.

Clinical white walls boxed her in, several of them flashing blue readouts that were too far away for her to see. Two white robotic arms swiveled down from the diagnosis box above her, skimming over her body with a light, careful touch. They stopped at her feet, the hand limbs tucking away to be replaced by long, needle-like tools that immediately alarmed her.

She tried to remember what they were for just as she felt simultaneous electric shocks zap into the taps buried into her heels. It was the tiniest amount of energy but it still hurt to absorb. She suppressed a groan, feeling the burn through the soles of her feet, up her calves and tapering off as it hit her thighs. Her body went to work, utilizing the new energy to continue the healing process.

How am I not dead?

Devon shifted in the chair beside her and she glanced at him. He had his elbows on his knees, and stared at the floor with the most confused, worried look she’d ever seen on him. Jorry took the moment to watch him. She’d known when he was a baby that he would be handsome. He had good features; sharp blue eyes, a strong jaw and nose, but it was his smile that could capture a room. He had a charming grin, all boyish and full of laughter.

But he wasn’t smiling now.

Her heart pinched at the concern on his face and she lifted a hand to get his attention.

He finally looked at her and sat up. “Mom,” he said with relief.

She tried to smile for him but her face hurt too.

“Don’t move,” Devon said. He pulled a syringe off the counter beside him and removed the safety cap from the needle. “Dad said to give this to you as soon as you woke up.”

He swabbed the side of her arm and stabbed. She wasn’t certain if she was proud or annoyed at the lack of hesitance in him. Needles weren’t her favorite thing, but at least he knew how to get a job done regardless of nerves or personal feelings. She was pretty sure he didn’t like needles either.

“He said it would help you function, but that the medical system would default to normal human needs so it wouldn’t give you the extra adrenaline,” Devon said, putting the cap back on the needle and returning it to the counter with a look of distaste.

She was right. He didn’t like needles.

Adrenaline worked far better than low-grade electrical shocks when it came to healing, she could already feel several knots loosen in her back and gave a sigh of relief. Carefully, so as not to upset her already unhappy body, she started to sit up, draping her legs over the side of the exam table.

“He said …” Devon steadied her by an arm and turned so that they were facing. “That the energy you tapped into from the star could have killed you.”

She met his eyes but didn’t deny it. They watched each other for a long moment, the seconds ticking by as she tried to determine what to say. Part of her wanted to go back to sleep, to avoid this conversation and all the pain that would come with it. When she still hadn’t responded he took a deep breath and looked at the ground again.

“He also said that you’re deserters from the Consulate army,” Devon’s voice changed a little. It was more cautious, like he was worried about her answer.

“What else did your father tell you?”

His hand was still on her arm but he moved it now, his fingers tentative as he grazed one of her taps. The halogen lights in the room glinted off the circular discs and she suddenly missed her jacket. She’d kept them covered for so long she’d almost forgotten how foreign they could look against her fair skin.

“All my research said about the Tapped program was that it was top secret, the surgery to create a tapped soldier was classified,” Devon frowned as he spoke. “There’s no official record of Tapped soldiers being relieved from the Consulate military.”

“That’s because we weren’t.”

“So you’re deserters.”

She nodded.

“Alright,” he said, swallowing down this information with a look she couldn’t quite identify. Then he looked at her again and his mouth twitched into a smirk. “What I don’t get is how you still look the way you do. I mean, that was over thirty years ago but you haven’t aged at all.”

Of all the things he could start this conversation with her age was what he chose?

Jorry stared at him for a moment, trying to decide if this was a trap of some kind. But this was Devon and their cover was already blown so it didn’t seem to matter. She took a deep breath and tried to think of where to start.

“The taps have an effect on the energy inherent to our bodies. They keep us healthy and youthful.” She gestured to the row of discs lining her left arm. “They follow our meridian lines, the lines that the ancient Chinese believed led to inner power … or chi. Thousands of years ago acupuncture followed some of these lines, finding pressure points and muscle groups that could alleviate tension and the like.”

From acupuncture to super-soldier, she thought; God this was impossible to explain.

“The taps … they give you access to the energy around you, too,” Devon said carefully. “That’s how you could redirect the galvanizer bolt they fired at you.”

“And how I touched a star,” Jorry nodded, pleased to see he was processing things already.

Her mother had never understood the science behind the procedure. Of course, it had all been quite new back then. Science, and the Consulate, had come a long way since.

Devon stared at her, a look of bafflement on his face.

“Stars are just big balls of nuclear fusion,” she explained.

“I know what stars are, Mom,” he said testily. “What I don’t understand is how you can touch one.”

She blinked, realizing her mistake.

“Well, I didn’t literally touch it. The taps just allow me access to its energy. Or … all energy, really. I can take the energy in this room and manipulate it any way I wish. In the case of the star, I took the energy from its fusion reaction and redirected it into Zephyr’s accelerators.”

His eyebrows pinched together in concern. “What about radiation? Nuclear fusion is dangerous, isn’t it? There’s a reason we don’t use them on ships.”

“The reason we don’t use nuclear fusion on ships is because the process of creating that fusion is dangerous and toxic to humans. Having a fusion reactor on board a cramped little ship almost guarantees that people will get sick,” Jorry said. “I tapped into a fusion reaction that had already been created outside the ship. Radiation isn’t any more of a concern than normal for space travel.”

He looked away from her. He was still frowning but she recognized the puzzlement on his face. It was the same look he gave a new set of engineering plans. He was fascinated, as any engineer would be who was confronted by the impossibility of tapped soldiers, and Jorry felt suddenly uncomfortable. She didn’t want to be another science puzzle for him. She didn’t want him to stop seeing her for who she was.

This was all so awkward. Where was Seach?

She glanced at the door but it was empty. Beyond the short corridor she couldn’t see anyone in the nest either. That seemed odd.

“What about bioelectricity?” Devon asked.

Jorry stiffened, her attention snapping back to Devon. “What about it?” She asked.

“Can you access it too?”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “But we don’t.”

“Why not?”

She suppressed a shiver and checked the door again. A thousand voices echoed through her, each of them distinct and recognizable and for a tortured moment she couldn’t breathe. She rubbed her face, forcing them away, banishing them to a corner in her mind before they could overwhelm her.

“We swore not to,” she said quietly.

“Alright,” Devon said. His brow pinched in concern or confusion, probably both. “Why?”

Jorry sighed and closed her eyes. “Tapping into a person isn’t like tapping into an electrical current. We can’t limit how much of it we take. If we tap into a human being, we take all of the energy there … and the person dies. Instantly.”

“I see,” Devon said.

She left off the important bit. She couldn’t quite determine how to explain what happened after that energy was transferred, after her taps had absorbed another being and their voice suddenly seeped into her. It was more than just energy, their memories and their lives were suddenly as vivid to her as if they were her own, as though something more had been reallocated and was now molded to her consciousness.

“Well there’s obviously a limit to how much energy you can take in,” Devon said.

“Yes. And we only take it in long enough to manipulate it.” Jorry said, relieved with the change in conversation. “We call the process ‘reallocating’. We take it in and then we tell it what to do.”

“How?”

She glanced again at the door. “Where’s your father?”

“He’ll be back in a minute,” Devon said. “Come on, Mom. Help me understand.”

Jorry frowned and rubbed her forehead. How many times had doctors and scientists and officials asked that same question of her? And she was just as clueless to answer it now as she had been back then.

“That’s not so easy to explain,” she said. “When you’re tapped things look different. Energy … looks different. You feel it and know it, just like you know how to breathe. It’s just something we can do.”

“It’s like magnets,” Seach said as he walked in. “We know how a magnet works, positive versus negative charges, and we can anticipate how a magnet will react, but in the end we still don’t know precisely why it reacts that way.”

Seach gave her a communicating look that said he was glad she was all right, but angry as hell.

Par for the course, she thought and rubbed her face again.

“This was a lot easier when I thought you were just pirates,” Devon said.

Seach chuckled, moving to lean against the medical bed beside her. “Afraid not, son. Jo and I are a lot of things, but we don’t attack civilians if we don’t have to.”

“So what happened? I mean, none of the histories really say what happened to Tapped soldiers after the war.”

Jorry felt her heart stutter in her chest, renewed pain washing through her. Relo’s face flashed in her mind – not the video image like normal but his actual face smiling at her in some bunker.

“We didn’t disappear, we just got a new name,” Seach said and Relo’s face vanished.

She fidgeted on the table, unsettled by the memory. She didn’t want to talk about this. Ever. It wasn’t just the danger they were putting Devon in, it was Relo. It was thinking of Relo as a Grey Man, his mind utterly lost to that cursed final tap.

“What do you mean?” Devon asked uncertainly.

Jorry looked up at Seach. Whatever anger he had toward her was momentarily forgotten. All his focus was on Devon, on helping him understand the truth, and Jorry felt her heart twist. It was a familiar ache, an ache that recognized how much he loved this boy. He was just as terrified of this conversation as she was.

“As near as we can tell the Consulate felt threatened by us,” Jorry said. “Soldiers who had access to energy, who could clear a room full of men in under six seconds were good for the war effort but …”

“But what if one ever chose to go against the Consulate?” Seach asked, taking up a familiar argument. “Think of the damage they could do.”

“But they still needed us to enforce the galaxy-wide treaty,” Jorry said. “So they devised a new tap. The ‘final tap’ as they called it. Inserted at the base of the neck, it cuts off all higher brain functions and replaces us with an easily controllable computer chip.”

“Grey Men,” Devon said, his voice soft and horrified. “That’s the new name, isn’t it. They turned you all into Grey Men.”

Jorry tried to smile at him, saddened and proud at the same time. He put the pieces of the puzzle together so quickly, but there was more to tell and she had no idea how he might react to it. A deep part of her raged against telling him at all, but she’d promised him the truth and there was no getting around it now.

“How did you escape?” Devon asked.

She met Seach’s gaze for a moment. His mouth twisted into a scowl and she could see heavy emotion warring in him.

“Tango Five was a unit of three, Devon,” she said. “When we went in for our debriefing we … well, we recognized that something was wrong.”

She trailed off, unable to think of how to explain this part. Seach’s hand covered hers, warm and startling and she glanced down. She could feel the tap at the base of his palm, saw the secure curl of his fingers around her hand, and relaxed.

“Jo, Relo, and I were suspicious from the moment we got our orders,” Seach said. “We’d seen enough war and knew the Consulate well enough to see through the bullshit they were feeding us. So when we got to Gliese for our debriefing we decided to scout things out. Jo and I were running reconnaissance while Relo … Relo was up with the brass.”

Jorry listened, strangely comforted by the sound of Seach’s voice as he told the story. She could see it all, had replayed that day over and over in her head, pouring over the details and hunting for something, anything, that she might have done differently. She could have gone up to see General Harris instead, leaving Relo with Seach, but that would never have worked. She was the tech specialist, she was the one who had to do the hacking.

“Once Jo discovered exactly what the Consulate had planned for us she gave the abort signal and we all …”

Devon raised a hand, halting the story. “How exactly do you hear each other?”

Seach flashed a grin and turned his head, pointing to a spot just behind his left ear. “Surgically implanted communications, specially designed and on a frequency only Tango Five and its team can get.”

“But … why not use them all the time? Not that it wasn’t amusing watching you heckle that agent into using your face like a punching bag, but Mom could have acted sooner if she’d known what was going on,” Devon said.

Jorry glanced at Seach but his face was clean, long since healed by his taps. She realized after a moment that she’d never actually seen the extent of the damage the agents had done to him and felt her eye twitch. Heckling was something Seach had a unique talent for and she had no doubt he’d been beaten quite excessively for it.

“Because there is one other person who might be listening,” Seach said, glancing sidelong at her.

“Relo,” Devon said, realization dawning on his face. “He was captured then? He’s a Grey Man?”

Jorry flinched, suddenly remembering the conversation. How could she be so angry with Seach over getting hurt while discussing the events surrounding Relo’s sacrifice? There was something wrong here, something off, she just couldn’t put her finger on it.

“He sacrificed himself so that we could get away,” Jorry said stiffly, forcing herself to focus. “We’ve been in hiding ever since.”

Devon nodded slowly. She watched him, uncertain how to continue the conversation. For a brief second she considered closing the subject. He knew their history now, was there any reason he had to know his parentage, too?

A surge of jealousy boiled through her; jealousy against Melanie and the connection she had to Devon. It wasn’t fair, she thought. None of this was fair. What right did Melanie have to Devon? She’d never known the boy, hadn’t watched him grow or taught him to read. Jorry had done all that. Jorry had been there, for years had been there, showing him the finer points of coding and watching him grow into a young man.

She stared at Devon for a long, mournful moment. His face was scrunched in thought, his mouth pursed the way it always did when he was working through a math problem. This news hadn’t shattered him, hadn’t yanked the carpet out from under him, but what was coming next certainly would.

Jorry took a deep, steadying breath and closed her fingers on Seach’s hand.

“Devon,” she said gently. “There’s more.”