Short Story Excerpt from Tales of Mack 'n' Me

I'm working multiple projects at the moment. Strays of Lunar One is still scheduled, but I'd like to have most of the series complete before Book 1 releases, so this is one of those things that will release first. This collection gathers all the short stories that have been written about Mack and Cutter and places them in the order they occur in relation to events in the novels from the Mack 'n' Me 'n' Odyssey series.

This one takes place sometime between The Wolves of Alpha 9 and Diplomacy 101.

Start of Extract

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Stepyan vanished off the Shady without so much as a word. Not surprising for a master assassin, just bad for Mack…and bad for me.

Case was beside herself. She cornered me in the caf before I even hit the counter.

“He’s gone!” she told me, and I stopped dead.

To be fair, I stopped dead because she was standing right in front of me, and I couldn’t move forward. I looked up at her. Best as I could tell, Case had gone from not liking me very much to tolerating me—but I didn’t have a clue as to what she was talking about.

The door slid open and Mack wandered in. He stepped around us and headed straight for the counter.

“Who’s gone?” he wanted to know.

“Steps.” Case turned, following him, and I continued to my morning cup.

Mack made his and headed for the officer’s mess.

“Come and tell me about it,” he instructed, then glanced at me. “You, too, Cutter.”

I got my coffee and went. It would delay the scheduled training session for a little bit longer, and I wasn’t looking forward to getting my ass handed to me…again.

Case was sitting two down from my usual seat, her hands wrapped around her cup of kaff, her knuckles white.

“We have to go after him,” she stated, as soon as the door closed behind me.

Mack took a slow sip of his kaff and watched me head to my spot. Case kept her eyes on Mack, but I caught the fine tremble that ran through her as she waited.

“Where?” Mack asked, and Case’s hands tightened around her cup.

“Arumgito.” The word was barely a whisper. “He got a—”

Tens slammed into the room.

“Mack, we’ve got a…” He caught sight of Case, palmed the door closed, and sat. “You already know.”

Mack raised an eyebrow. “You got something for us?”

Tens closed his eyes, tilting his head back with a sigh as he activated his implant.

The screen on the other side of the room came to life.

“You could say that.”

The message that came up was short and to the point, but Tens also brought up the coding.

“There was some very specific encryption to go with it. Why I took so long to get to it,” he explained.

“And you didn’t notice anyone taking a shuttle,” Mack concluded, suggesting he should have.

Tens shot him a fast grin, and the message on the screen froze before the man on it could speak. A third screen space lit up.

Tens’s tone was smug. “He didn’t take a shuttle.”

Mack froze, and I stared at Tens. If Steps hadn’t taken a shuttle, how had he…

“Personal pick-up,” Tens explained, showing Stepyan open a cleverly concealed compartment in his cabin.

Case shot Tens a glare at his blatant invasion of her partner’s privacy…her killing partner. She and Stepyan weren’t romantically inclined. In fact, if anyone asked me, I didn’t think either of them had a romantic bone in their bodies.

I snuck a glance at Mack, and stifled a snicker at his expression. It was priceless. He heard and gave me a scowl.

“You are bad enough.” His eyes widened as Stepyan donned a heavy bracer that covered his forearm.

Case said nothing, and on-screen Stepyan continued around his cabin, donning armor and picking up weapons. After a second check, he laid his opposite hand over the arm with the bracer, wrapping his fingers around his wrist, and pressing down in a set sequence.

“You catch that?” Mack asked, and Tens nodded.

“Still figuring it out.”

On-screen Stepyan vanished in a flash of light.

“You track that?” Mack asked, glaring at Tens.

“Two seconds,” Tens replied.

The screens cleared, giving way to another. I read the data streams and coding and then watched as the track that was Stepyan’s vanished in a clutter of code and conflicting signals.

“Was that…” I began, just as Tens spoke.

“He was intercepted part-way there.”

We all turned to Case.

“You know why that might be?”

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You will find this story in the up-and-coming Tales of Mack 'n' Me. If you want to read more about the Mack, Cutter and the crew, you can find them in the Mack 'n' Me 'n' Odyssey series. This Books2Read reading list links to the full series, and the retail outlets where they can be found: https://books2read.com/rl/zRAO7G