Double-Cross

Once, Anjali Patel and Mikhail Grikov were soldiers on opposing sides of an intergalactic war. They met, fell in love and decided to go on the run together.

Now Anjali and Mikhail are trying to eke out a living on the independent worlds of the galactic rim, while attempting to stay under the radar of those pursuing them.

When they are hired to retrieve a shipment of bootleg medical nanobots, it seems like a routine job at first. But it quickly turns out that they are not the only ones who are after the nanobots. And their client has an agenda of her own.

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More information:

• This is a short story of 5100 words or approx. 20 print pages in the In Love and War series, but may be read as a standalone. This story is a digital premiere and has never been published previously.
• Double-Cross was one of the stories I wrote during the 2017 July short story challenge. The idea was to write a short story per day in July 2017.
• Like many stories in the July challenge, Double-Cross was inspired by concept art. Usually, I use only a single piece of concept art for inspiration. Double-cross, however, was inspired by two pieces of artwork, this one and this one. I came across the second piece of art, when I didn’t know where the story should go, after Anjali and Mikhail had recovered the nanobots at the market. The artwork sparked an idea about what should happen next.
• Just like Dead World, Double-Cross starts out with Anjali and Mikhail on a retrieval mission. And any retrieval mission needs a MacGuffin. For Dead World, the MacGuffin was a Republican superweapon, whose name I got from a generator. It was perfectly appropriate in that case, since the superweapon turns out to be fake anyway. However, for Double-Cross I needed a MacGuffin that was somewhat more convincing than something spat out by a generator. So I eventually resorted to bootleg medical nanobots, since medical nanobots already play an important role in the In Love and War series. And of course, the nature of the MacGuffin also influenced the conclusion of the story.
• The cover is once again stock art by the talented Thai artist Tithi Luadthong a.k.a. Grandfailure.