Redeemer: A Military Space Opera Series (War Undying Book 2)

by N. D. Redding

  Even Vogron was impressed, perhaps more than the others.

  “You are strong, human. I knew since the first day you entered my cell on Xan, but still, I have underestimated you at every step. I won’t let that happen again.”

  Everyone was pretty excited to have survived another day except for Mitto. On my way to a celebratory night in the social quarters, Mitto rang me up over my INAS.

  “You’ve almost destroyed me with this.”

  “I destroyed nothing. I have given you a feast and your life, Mitto. Don’t you forget it.”

  “We should never have found ourselves at Korva station. The Tanaree is not meant to be thrown into battle every time you have an itch for more power. She doesn’t deserve it.”

  This kind of conversation was slowly getting on my nerves, especially because we had plenty of conversations regarding some of the finer points of who the captain of this ship was.

  “The Tanaree goes where I please.”

  “Until she doesn’t.”

  “Listen to me, Mitto. I’m only going to tell you this one more time: the Tanaree is my ship. I do with it what I please. It’s a tool, nothing else. And since we’re at it, don’t forget who it was that saved you on Xan and kept you alive and fed.”

  “How dare you call it a tool? I’m part of it! It’s the same as calling me a tool!”

  “Mitto, the next time you question my orders mid-fight will be your last time, do you understand that?”

  Mitto was silent for a couple of seconds.

  “You don’t deserve her. She is the most beautiful thing in the universe and you’re treating it like your enemy. I’ve had enough of this. We are stranded in the middle of nowhere, and we have no detrium for a jump. What do we do now, oh Captain?”

  “We celebrate. And after we’re done, we go to sleep,” I said, shoving him from my INAS, but just as I did, I felt the air aboard the ship grow thinner.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Cleansing my ship.”

  16

  There was no doubt in Fars’ mind that we should expel Mitto into space. Let him float around the vacuum until every last bit of energy from his translucent body was released into the nether. But then again, Fars’ opinion meant very little to me nowadays. Anyone’s opinion meant very little since all they cared about was murder, death, and mayhem. I was growing anxious, tired, even hungry, and it was time to decide on some things before we killed each other.

  It’d been almost a month since we’ve been sitting in an empty solar system without enough detrium to jump away. The food processors were on their last legs, and for the last three days, I had to lock away Captain McGill so Vogron wouldn’t eat her. And that damned stench! Since I burned Mitto from the ship’s systems so he wouldn’t suffocate us, all ship controls went wild including air control. Gone were the lovely scents that lingered in every room, gone was the calming music, gone and replaced by silence and the stench of three nervous aliens.

  We have had several fights so far. One of which cost us a hole in the recreation deck. That one was between Fars and Vogron, of course, but spurred on by Arthur. The Templar’s behavior grew more erratic by the day. He was bored out of his mind and tried to find any entertainment he could. As much as I saved McGill from being eaten by Vogron, I had to put her away so Arthur wouldn’t do something even more disgusting.

  “Put him back into the system and activate the distress beacon. Why are we having this conversation at all? I’m bored to death!” Arthur snapped, getting up from the table in the stateroom where I called in a crew meeting.

  On the middle of the table, Mitto sat in a magnetized cage begging us to reinstall him into the system for the last twenty minutes. No, it wasn’t just the last twenty minutes, it had been the last month since we got stranded here.

  “A traitor cannot go unpunished! This is just beneath me and everyone here! Is there nothing more important than raw survival to you, Templar? Has life no other meaning to you, no principles, no depth deeper than what you can feel with your rotten fingers?”

  Fars was pissing me off with this charade. His sense of honor seemed ever more arbitrary and I thought about mentioning some slip-ups he had had in the last few years but decided against it.

  “Again with this shit!” Arthur roared. “You don’t even know how dull you are, do you? Don’t talk to me about depth! I’ve had centuries to think before you even took your first shit! I want to get the hell out of here before I waste another second talking to this sentient lump of meat!”

  “Our honor is the only thing that has any meaning, and you abandoned yours so long ago that you convinced yourself it never even existed. There’s a reason they call you the First Betrayer, Templar!”

  “Oh, how hurtful. Is that the best you can do, you fat moron?”

  “Enough of this! I can’t take another minute of your bickering. Arthur, I’m not going to risk a life in a VR torture chamber just because you were too bored to wait for a proper solution. And you, Fars, if I hear another word about your honor, I’ll fucking kill myself, you got that? How can you keep preaching after what you have done?”

  “What I have done? What have I done to dishonor myself?”

  This was the breaking point in our relationship. I didn’t want to go there but hunger and despair drove me to say what I did.

  “You never wanted to go back to Xan for the last fight, didn’t you? You wanted to get back to pick up a stash of snapp you left in your bunk. All the theatrics, all the drama about losing your honor, wanting to be victorious or die in the arena, it was all just a show you’ve put on so nobody would assume how fucked up you really are, you fucking junkie!”

  “Lies!” Fars roared and slammed both hands on the table, shaking Mitto’s cage. “You take that back you damned daybeast! May you never set your sight on the Crater again! I mourn the day I met you!”

  “I mourn the day you were born!”

  It wasn’t my proudest moment, I must admit, but at the time I felt it was necessary to put it all out in the open.

  Fars slammed his fist into my face and I backpedaled several feet, almost slamming into the wall. I pulled out my Ro Sword and pointed it at Fars.

  “All right, let’s have that last arena fight and maybe you do get a chance to get your honor back.”

  “Maybe I will!”

  “Maybe you will if I fall on my own sword and die, you dumb junkie!”

  We stared each other down for several long seconds as Arthur and Vogron watched in amusement. They wanted us to get at each other’s throats. Arthur wanted it so he could be entertained for a couple of minutes, and Vogron wanted it because it would significantly increase the chances of him becoming captain of the ship. And also because he was hungry. And horny. It was a thought that sent shivers down my spine.

  “This is stupid. I don’t want to fight you, Fars,” I said calming myself.

  “After those words, fighting is all we have, Richard Stavos. I won’t be accused of dishonor, not even by you,” he said, fully prepared to attack me. He was sweating profoundly and the scent of a battle-ready Eres filled the room, making me almost want to puke.

  “Then take this sword that Qualt gave me and stick it in my throat,” I said angrily.

  I was so sure of his failing that I had no doubt in my mind what he was going to do. He just kept staring at me like a lost dog.

  “What will it be? Did I dishonor you? Did I call you a liar? Then punish me! If nothing of what I said is true, if it was I who brought shame to you and not you, Fars, then make things right!” I snapped, turning the handle of the sword toward him. “Take the sword and end me right now!”

  Fars grimaced. He ground his teeth and looked like he was having a war with his own mind. Finally, he sat down explosively and crossed his hands across his broad chest.

  “I thought so,” I said, pulling the Ro Sword back into my bloodstream.

  I was growing more detached from Fars for a while now because of what I assumed was the trut
h. Now that I was certain that I had been right, I wanted to shove him out of the airlock and never see his pathetic face again. For an alien from a super-advanced society, his faults seemed brutally human.

  “You know that we don’t have an option, Bloodmancer. We will have to turn on the distress beacon, as the alternative is to starve,” Vogron almost growled as the atmosphere cooled. Mitto was trying to produce words but only weak moans filled his cage.

  “What is it, Mitto? I bet you agree with his statement, huh?”

  “We turn on the distress beacon and we’ll have four different fleets on our asses each more eager to kill us than the last. It’s either that or starvation and death. I know what you three want and I know what Fars wants.”

  Mitto was still trying to helplessly create a sound and it was starting to bother me. The little bastard had stabbed me in the back, and that wasn’t something I could just forget.

  “I think you’re missing a point,” Vogron said again. “If they catch us, we’ll suffer a fate far worse than death. You all know this, right?”

  “At least we’ll die fighting,” Arthur muttered. “Anything is better than dying without doing anything.”

  “They have the tools to stop us from fighting. We are one ship; they have the might of half the galaxy at their disposal. They can keep us in place with grappling beams, they can keep us suspended in a temporary tachyon field and we won’t be even able to kill ourselves. I hate to say it, but I don’t think fighting is our best choice here.”

  Mitto rattled his cage one last time using the last of his powers. I realized he was desperately trying to get something across. I was pretty sure I knew what it was, but I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  I opened the cage and let him feed on the electromagnetism created by my nanites, but just enough so he didn’t starve to death. He climbed up my arm eagerly and sunk his goo into my skin. The moaning slowly turned into full sentences.

  “I can’t believe you’ll let that creature feed on you,” Fars hissed. “Despicable!”

  “What do you want, Mitto?” I asked, ignoring the big Eres.

  “I can change our distress signature… I can make it… different.”

  “I thought about that already. Whatever I do with the distress beacon, our position is too close to our last jump. Anyone with half a brain will realize it’s us.”

  “No… I can do better. I can bounce the signal off the star… I can make it a Ka signal.”

  “What do you mean?” He was now almost at full capacity and his language capabilities had mostly returned beyond the occasional slurring. The only reason why I let him feed was that unless directly connected to the ship, he didn’t have any way to try anything dangerous.

  “I can leave a Ka signature in our distress beacon if we bounce the signal off this dirty star. Anyone looking for the Ka will respond.”

  This was a completely out-of-the-box idea that hadn’t crossed my mind at all. The Greth, the Jareet, the Frey, and the Aloi all kept their ears to the ground for a standard distress signal, but a Ka signal… that was something else.

  “And how is that better? If we pretend to be Ka, the Aloi will come with even more ships and they’ll be ready for war. The traitor’s idea is useless,” Fars said.

  “The goo has a point, Bloodmancer. A Ka signal would deter both the Jareet and the Greth. Neither of those races wants to engage Federation forces, at least not yet. Even the Frey might be reluctant to rush towards it.”

  He was right. A Ka signal would deter most other races and attract everyone leaning toward the Federation, but it would also be very appealing for the Aloi who would come in force as soon as they caught it.

  “Do it,” I said and Mitto almost screamed in excitement.

  I felt him put a drain on my nanites, but if this worked I didn’t mind keeping him around for a while longer. Sure, I saved his life, but without his help, we wouldn’t have come this far.

  Several hours later and a million miles later as we repositioned the Tanaree closer to the star, we sent the modified signal into space hoping for the best. We prepared the ship as best we could. Most of our ammo was spent in the last dogfight so a ship battle was virtually out of the question. Still, when you had nothing to do, you tended to do what you could. Even if it was just polishing the weapon in your hand.

  We sat for hours in my stateroom trying to figure out what the plan should be. Eventually, after another heated debate that involved a bunch of screaming, fighting, accusations, and even tears at one point, we agreed on how to tackle the issue.

  It was one poorly equipped ship versus a whole Aloi fleet, so the plan went like this: we would ram the Tanaree into one of the Crusader-class battleships. Do our best to board the vessel and take over controls. This had to happen very quickly before they decided to blast their own ship out of the sky.

  Once we took control, there were two paths we could choose: either we used the Aloi ship as our means of escape, or if we had enough time, we could transfer the detrium into the Tanaree and blast our way out the same way we came in. If, however, the Aloi brought the prototypes, well, then we’d go pretty much for the same plan minus the little hope of success that we were barely hanging on to. So it would turn into a fancy die-in-a-blaze-of-glory thing where we’d do everything necessary so they couldn’t take us alive. It was a desperate plan in a desperate time. None of us liked it, but none of us had a choice.

  When the signal went off and we prepared the ship, there was little else to do but sit and wait. For the first three hours, we were all itching to get it over with. Another three hours later, I had checked and rechecked my gear six times. Two days after that our battle-readiness was somewhat chipped by doubts over whether anyone would pick anything up.

  I used the time to catch up with the one person on this ship that wasn’t a war-hungry alien, Captain McGill of the Dusk Ascendancy. She had been spending her time sitting in one of our jail cells, probably pondering my demise. I was still baffled by the idea that human society had managed to evolve within Aloi space, so I brought Arthur with me to see if there were holes in her story. I also brought Fars just in case Arthur decided to do something stupid.

  McGill jumped up when she saw the three of us walk in. Her expression was that of a person trying to look dignified while awaiting death. I replicated a chair and sat across from her cell as the force field between us flickered. McGill was the first to speak.

  “Have you come to finish me off?”

  “I could do that,” Arthur jumped in.

  “I came to talk to you. The Templar is here to see if your story checks out.”

  “And that blue thing? Is that your servant?”

  “I’m nobody’s servant! I’m a warrior of the Eres!”

  “You might not want to insult my crew, McGill. They’re very short-tempered.”

  She scanned the three of us but said nothing. Thoughts of horrible ways to die must have flashed through her mind.

  “Now, explain to me why the Aloi didn’t turn you all into ravager-churning wombs?”

  She grimaced at my words. I must have hit a spot, but we all knew that the Aloi were basically a machine. Heartless and efficient.

  “Why would I share the history of my people with you? So you can tell your Federation masters where to find and enslave us?”

  “There are no slaves in the Federation, McGill. You’ve been lied to by the Aloi.”

  “I could say the same.”

  The Dusk Ascendancy seemed to be heavily indoctrinated by the Aloi, a fact that was surprising only because the Aloi didn’t usually indoctrinate. They just integrated others into their society. And yet, there she was, and apparently, a whole lot of other humans lived under the rule of the Aloi.

  “Listen to me carefully, McGill. I would never do something to bring harm to another innocent human or alien. I know what the propaganda says about the Crimson Death and the evil Bloodmancer, but none of it is true.”

  Arthur gave me a surprise
d look.

  “It isn’t?” he asked mockingly.

  “You’re not helping.”

  “I’m just asking you to rephrase if possible.”

  I rolled my eyes and let out a deep breath before I went on.

  “All right, some of it is true. You don’t have to give me coordinates, you don’t have to give me a hint of where your worlds are, what they look like, or how they are organized. Just simply tell me what your arrangement with the Aloi is and how they treat you. Because as far as we know, and as far as Arthur here can confirm, the Aloi don’t ally themselves with other races. They only assimilate.”

  “That’s just not true!” she blurted out, seemingly unaware of her own words.

  “All right, good. Let’s say that I believe you. You exist, the Dusk Ascendancy exists obviously, so what happened?”

  She pouted her lips and looked to the side, obviously lost in deep thought.

  “We’re a free people. That’s all I can tell you.” She looked away and then back at me again. “What else can I tell you? Our ancestors came from Old Earth centuries ago. They worked and toiled and fought to make the first colony a livable place while keeping the virtues of Old Earth in our hearts and minds. When the Aloi came, we were nothing more than a stain on an inhospitable planet. It was them who gave us the means to grow and prosper and so we have for all these years. That’s our story.”

  She stopped and waited for me to speak, so I indulged her.

  “What about the Aloi doctrine? How did they explain that we were enemies?”

  “The Aloi told us how the Ka took control of humankind more than two centuries ago. They explained how the Ka made you fight their wars, how the social and cultural prosperity of Old Earth and its colonies had been substituted with a warmongering mentality. There’s nothing we have in common anymore. The Dusk Ascendancy doesn’t work for the Aloi or the Ka, we are the only free humans in this galaxy.”

  These were incredible things she spoke of. Things that would earn you a death sentence in the Federation. To claim it was better before the Federation integrated us... That alone was a thought so dangerous that it could land you disciplinary measures. Sure, there were people in the Federation who would spurt such things when drunk, but they’d be quickly silenced. To have a high-ranking military official say it, well, I couldn’t even begin to imagine the outcome.