by T. J. Quinn
Deck B had a hundred barracks rooms off the main corridor, and all of them had been closed and life support cut. There was no way I could search them all before the last ones ran out of air. While I was consulting my team as to Nora’s whereabouts, AI ran a scan of all the barracks on our deck. But it was taking too long.
I started opening rooms manually. I didn’t even have to go in because I would scent Nora if she were inside the moment the door opened. I had checked ten rooms and was starting to feel frantic when AI commed me that there were two lifeforms in Barracks B50. They opened it automatically, and I sprinted down the corridor reminding myself the AI said lifeforms. It meant whoever was there was alive.
The room was brightly lit when I got to it and lunged inside. My Nora was lying on the floor with blood oozing from a wound on her head, apparently unconscious. As I went to her, I heard an angry scream and the flutter of a dragon’s wings as it swooped down at my head. One of our passengers had smuggled an Artaenian dragon aboard as a pet. (I learned what it was after we got it back to its owner.)
I thanked the fates that she was still breathing, she had somehow been knocked out. I picked her up and commed control to send a drone to capture the frightened dragon. Then I commed the Kurellis to have a floating stretcher waiting at the boarding tube to take Nora to sickbay. She moaned, starting to regain consciousness, and put her arms around my neck as I was carrying her.
In sickbay, the AI Medic cleaned the wound on Nora’s scalp and applied a few cc’s of nanite gel. It also sent a squirt up her nose for the concussion. About an hour later, she became oriented enough to tell me what happened. The whole incident left me badly shaken because she could have died had we not found her in time.
The thought of losing my mate nearly made me hyperventilate. It was a stark terror that squeezed my heart. It could literally kill me at this point in our relationship. Without Nora, that wouldn’t matter to me. I loved her that much.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
NORA
It was such a stupid thing to happen. The young Uatu woman was frantic when I was in her barracks to make sure they all got out.
“I can’t go without Leeko,” she cried. “With all this commotion he’s spooked and won’t come down. If I leave him here, he will die.”
“What’s a Leeko?” I asked.
“He’s an Artaenian flying dragon. He was just a baby when I found him in the yard at the slave compound,” she told me. “I raised him on scraps of food I saved out from every meal, and some of the others gave me their leftover food, too. He’s really very sweet, but he’s scared right now, and he won’t come down.”
I could easily understand why she wouldn’t leave him behind. I had found a tiny kitten once while I was in nursing school. I bottle fed that baby around the clock, and he grew up to be a big beautiful boy. I loved that cat, and my parents did, too. He went to Florida with him.
I knew if I were in her place, I couldn’t leave my pet in this failing starship to die in the cold dark of space.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Moralla Weyatu,” she replied.
“Okay, Moralla, you have to go with the others. I promise I will get some help to catch Leeko and bring him to you on the Kurellis,” I told her urgently. She started to cry as I practically pushed her out the doorway.
Well, that just upset Leeko even more. He swooped down at my head, and I ducked and hurried to get out of his way. I must have caught my foot on the leg of one of the bunk. I remember falling then lights out. I must have hit my head on one of the metal bedframes when I fell.
When I roused the first time, I realized Sahvin was carrying me, and I put my arms around him. The next time I woke, he was holding my hand to his cheek looking very worried.
“Hey, Sahv, I’m okay, honey,” I told him. “It doesn’t even hurt now.”
He blinked and looked at me as though he couldn’t believe I had spoken to him. His eyes looked suspiciously moist until he blinked again. “Ah, Nora, don’t ever scare me like that again!” he asserted. “I nearly lost my mind when I found you laying on the floor with blood dripping from your head.”
I sat up slowly and turned, dangling my feet over the side of the treatment lounger, and held out my arms to him. “Come here, sweetheart.”
He got up from the padded stool and came into my arms. I hugged him to me and pressed my cheek against his firm chest. “I’m sorry, Sahv. It was a stupid accident. Until today, I’d never even heard of an Artaenian flying dragon. Did they get him off the Rauner?”
“Yes, and they took him back to the girl, Moralla. She had smuggled him onto the ship wrapped in her clothing,” he said. “She cried when Argen put him into her hands. He cuddled up in her arms like nothing happened.”
“I never got a good look at him. Is he cute?”
“The others thought so. Harper said he looked like a four-legged dragon on one of the fantasy books she read as a little girl. Scarlet thought he acted a lot like a dog.” Sahvin told me.
“He doesn’t breathe fire or anything does he?”
“What a mess that would be if he did!” He just stood there holding me, rubbing my back as we talked. I could hear his heartbeat slowing to a more relaxed level. “He looks like some of the reptiles from Earth, but I looked it up on my AI tablet, and he’s warm-blooded, and they prefer warm climates.”
“Aren’t the largest population centers in temperate regions?”
“Yes. Moralla will have to keep him inside in the winter because he has no fur,” he said. “On some worlds, they eat them, but they are smart and can be trained much like Scarlet’s dog.”
“Then, I wouldn’t want to eat them.” Then I laughed. “Probably tastes like chicken.”
“That’s what you say about most of the protein cuts from the food processor,” he chuckled.
“Yeah, and it’s a good thing I like chicken.”
“We can go to our cabin, now,” he said resting his cheek on top of my head. “The AI Medic said you could leave when you awoke.”
I slid off the lounger and stood, still wrapped in his strong arms.
“Then, I think we better. I think someone needs some very personal attention.” I smiled up at him, and he dropped a light kiss of promise on my lips.”
I’ve always heard that make-up sex is really hot. Well, I found out that terrified-your-mate-is-going-to-die-but-doesn’t is way hotter. Energized by the infusion of nanites and stimulant, we made love for hours like we did when we first bonded. It seemed like the bonding pheromones resurged. Whatever the cause, I think I fell in love even more deeply with Sahvin that day.
Almost on a daily basis, I continue to be astounded and blessed to be loved with the passion and devotion Sahvin shares so freely with me. Whenever I have said that to him, his answer is always the same.
“That’s because we are meomee---solmatu---soulmates in any language.“
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SAHVIN
Nora was right. I did need her personal attention after the terror I felt at the prospect of losing her. We barely got the door to our cabin closed before we were pulling off each other’s clothes. I lifted her to wrap her legs around me and put my cock inside her as soon as we were naked and carried her to our bed that way.
My calm soon returned as I lay on top of her kissing and caressing her as I thrust in and out of her intermittently. We had plenty of time to climb to that summit of ecstasy that we almost always reached together. It was so much more than mere sexual pleasure that brought us together, although I have always found that in her arms.
As meomee, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Nora is the other half of my soul that I had been missing all my life until I found her. That is the best way I can explain it.
It is the reason I feel I must see this mission through to the end with the Farseek Mercenary Brigade. Without their generosity in rescuing aliens like Nora and me along with their own people, she would have ended up as some alien’s sex toy,
and I would have died in the mines on Breskaa.
As we journeyed to the next rendezvous in the Nikdoke system, we learned that Command would terminate our mission after we filled the Kurellis. After we finished collecting Uatu people and whoever else wanted to be freed with them, we would all return to Farseek. After the ambush by the Sargans at the rendezvous with the Kurellis, Command believed they had figured out what we were doing.
It wasn’t that hard to figure out, going by the worlds we had already hit. They just had to check their records for the most significant pockets of Uatu people enslaved then set traps for us. Our AI team had found a new entry in the Sargus AI Network that they believe was planted since the mercenaries had begun their raids. The file listed a thousand Uatu on a backwater colony deep into the heart of the Empire.
They had covered their tracks pretty well to make it look older than it was, but our AI found inconsistencies with the previous entries. They tried to conceal the fact that there was a military base on that planet with a fleet of battlecruisers and battle carriers. It wasn’t just a guess. Two dreads went there on a recon mission and saw them orbiting the planet en masse. They couldn’t even try shuttling a team to the planet to see if there really were a thousand Uatu there. It was way too dangerous.
One heavily armed Dreadnaught could take a more massive Sargan battlecruiser with a good captain at the helm, but it was risky. In the time it took for us to evacuate everyone from the Rauner, the four dreads destroyed two of the battlecruisers and disabled one. With more time, I felt confident they could have taken them all, but they blinked out right after we did.
We learned all this at our first briefing back on Dread One three weeks later. They also informed us that we were all wanted fugitives by the Sargus Empire which was no great surprise. We could face execution or life on Julconi, the prison planet.
So, instead of the next closest planet where Uatu people had been enslaved, we set our sights on the world farthest from Julconi to break the pattern.
Lastly, the holographic story exalting the benefits of a free society without slavery had been widely distributed throughout the Sargus Empire. They couldn’t stop it from spreading. Our AI system built by the best developers in the Consortium was able to piggyback the story on a virus that spread to every system linked to the primary central AI at the heart of the Empire. As soon as they purged it, the virus would reinject it into the main AI.
It was a powerful message. I hoped it did cause the oppressed to rebel and bring down the Sargus Empire from within.
Considering some faction in the Consortium was responsible for the destruction of Farseek and the enslavement of its people, Command decided to flood their market with the story as well. As far as they were concerned, they no longer owed anything to the Consortium.
Farseek had already declared its independence from the Consortium the day they discovered their world in ruin. The Consortium tabled the vote on whether to accept Farseek’s withdrawal pending the results of their investigation of the Sargan invasion. As long as the Consortium was financing the rebuilding the Farseek Brigade wouldn’t contest it.
Nora and I had simple dreams. We looked forward to the day we all could go to Farseek to make our home and make our family. Until then we were home to each other.
THE END
The Deserter
An Aledan Series Short
Christine Mayers
GTQ LLC
Orlando, Florida
Copyright © 2017 by Clarissa Lake
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
GTQ LLC
PO Box 540375
Orlando, FL 32854
www.thesios.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
The Deserter/Christine Myers -- 1st ed.
ISBN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
FIVE
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
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ONE
"Here they come!" Farlo screamed and dropped the mortar round he was about to load. His eyes glittered with excitement in anticipation of the kill. He raised his ion rifle and took slow, deliberate aim at the first of three women. He intended to pick them off one by one. Then he would aim for the last moving target, a lone man carrying a small child under one arm.
Raider Orin Hart looked on with a combination of horror and outrage at what was happening. He was disgusted by the apparent pleasure Farlo took in killing, yet he couldn't look away. Orin prayed the women and man could run fast enough while he fought inside himself about what part he should play in the events before him.
Before Farlo could fire, the fair-haired woman hit him in the chest with a wide beam from her hand laser. The shot took out most of his heart and lungs in the blink of an eye. The four refugees ran toward the small hovercraft about twenty meters from the low dome of their underground dwelling. It was a desperate, last-chance effort to escape the Tregans' attack.
Clenching his jaw until it ached, Orin kept praying that they would make it in time. He watched indifferently, however, as more of his comrades in arms fell in the deadly exchange of weapon fire. All he cared was that he was not one of them.
"No!" The word escaped as a guttural sound from deep in his throat. He saw two of the women cut down barely a meter from the craft. Then the man fell, dropping the little boy as gently as he could as he was dying.
Orin grunted in rage as he saw Damon taking aim at the little Zevian woman. She was utterly defenseless as she paused to snatch up the child in mid-flight. Something snapped in Orin Hart as he realized she and the little boy would be killed, too.
Without considering the consequences, he raised his rifle for the first time since his company began its attack on the desert agricomplex about an hour before. He fired again and again ... on his own comrades.
The bronze-skinned woman stumbled into the open craft, dodging rifle fire with the little boy still clutched in her arms. When the last man fell, Orin stood alone on the small rise. He watched tiny craft as it slowly rose into the air and shot off toward the west, disappearing over the horizon.
After he had taken time to bury the two women and the man, Orin decided to follow the woman and the boy. He knew they wouldn't make it across the desert alone in their badly damaged craft, and neither one looked fit for hiking.
The sun was high in the sky, nearing its red phase when he started his trek across the barren desert plain of Zevus Mar. Except for the lush desert agricomplexes; most of Zevus Mar was a desert. Other than a large cache of Verlian crystals used to make the fuel cells that powered most of the current space crafts, there was little else to attract Tregans to illegally raid the tiny desert planet.
There was nothing Orin wanted. The totalitarian Tregan Government had forced him into the Empire's army and made him come to this godforsaken place to kill innocent people for those valuable rocks. Only Orin Hart had never killed anyone until today. Unfortunately, the Tregan Commander would be highly displeased by his actions . . . Enough so to provide Orin with an eminently slow and painful death---if they ever caught him.
The Tregan military officers were good at providing painful lessons, and Orin had learned to be an obedient soldier one pa
inful lesson at a time. But he didn’t learn exactly what he let his superiors think he had learned. He had learned to pretend he was one of them and make them believe it. When they found the dead men he was leaving behind, they would know it had been an act.
As he was trudging out across the desert from the lush, green agricomplex, pushing steadily on---far into the desert, Orin wondered which of his reasons for leaving pushed him on with more determination. Was he more afraid of dying at twenty-four, or that the woman and boy wouldn't make it to the next oasis? When he found their downed hovercraft abandoned in the middle of the desert just after dawn, he realized it was the latter.
Sometime later, he spotted them in the distance, still nearly an hour's walk from the next complex. Considering that they would see only the Tregan uniform he wore, Orin approached cautiously. The child didn't sense his presence until his massive nearly two-meter frame cast a formidable shadow over the two of them. A look of pure terror contorted his elfin features, and the little boy sobbed, tugging desperately at the bare arm of his fallen companion.
"Nalina! Nalina! He's here. He found us. Please---get up. We have to run." In desperation, the tiny boy reached for the laser on the belt slung loosely around Nalina's slim waist. But Orin clamped a big hand around his wrist and plucked the weapon from the boy's hand.
The boy landed a startling blow to Orin's cheek where the visor of his combat helmet didn't cover, then started to kick and scream in three languages for all he was worth. He couldn't wrench free from Orin's tight but gentle hold on him.
"I won't hurt you. I won't hurt you," Orin repeated in accented Aledan, one of three predominant languages used in trade on Zevus Mar. Gently, awkwardly, Orin cuddled the sobbing child against his shoulder, speaking softly to him in soothing tones like his own mother used to do with him when he was little.
