by C. R Corbin
Relkor (Rialan Captives Book 1)
By C.R Corbin
Table of contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
More from the author
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CHAPTER ONE
Kelly
The air was still and stagnant, it runs out of vents that have far too much rust on them to be called new. I have a can of soda in my hand that has long since lost its fizz, but I don't pay it any mind.
After all, this was my first interstellar mission.
I had been campaigning to receive an honor such as this. To wander the cosmos even in this beater ship was an achievement that I will forever cherish. I sit there on the smooth leather couch and stretch my feet out, my feet dash along the foamed armrests as I looked over my shoulder to see if there was anyone else awake. It was just Jeremy trying to take some photos of the void as we passed. This infinite black firmament stretched on for eternity and to some it may have provoked a sense of dread, of an emptiness that rendered all meaning of life null.
But I saw it as calming, soothing, perhaps even a bit pretty.
I folded my hands on my lap while recalling the events of the day. We had been in space for about 2 months at this point and I had built up a rapport with most of the crew. Jeremy was your typical wannabe womanizer with a mouth too big for his own good, my best friend Penny was currently asleep in the lower deck of the ship...well acting like she was sleeping. I knew quite well that she was probably scrolling through the saved stories that she had on her phone, perhaps she might even still have a connection to the solar system's internet system. The last place that had any service was Pluto and we were only slightly away from it at this point, it was still possible that she could be listening in.
To think that I had grown up in the desert of Arizona where light was everywhere you looked and now I was in eternal blackness, it was a bit strange to me. Some might say that it might even be a bit ironic that someone that grew up in such a sunny place would eventually make their living traveling through the dark. I could still remember the ATVs, the summer nights spent in the yard with franks and burgers, the winters where I only had to wear a hoodie and I Was good to go, it was as if humanity hadn't advanced at all when I was there. It was like I was living a life that was frozen in time, technology would never change how we lived back home. There would be cookouts, fights, love, school, all of it would stay the same with a few minor changes. For one, we never had to worry about driving anymore and farms were a distant memory, at least that's what all the old people were talking about, they mostly lived up to a hundred and talked about how it was when they were toddlers. Distant memories of our primal existence.
But out here, the true might of humanity's scientific and creative achievements were displayed in full force.
I touched the window as the electromagnetic field on it ripples, waves of blue and yellow light shimmers off of the spot I touched and I stepped back to sit down once more. It was a bit strange to think of, but we were actually travelling away from the sun towards Alpha Centauri. Apparently, there was something there that the big wigs needed to see and I wasn't going to complain. This trip was a great way to meet people and do something that most people would never get the chance to do.
I knew when I was young I had wanted to be a traveler, an adventurer of sorts and I was never quite sure how to. Through my grades, I ended up graduating and ending up at a pretty good school where a career fair informed me of the details of this new occupation that I cherish so much. I had started off as a data cruncher back home and now I was responsible for maintaining the ship's firmware. I've thought that dreams of this magnitude could ever be touched but I was here, that was enough evidence.
On a single hand I could count the crew members that I knew. The others I had just met in passing as other workers on this ship, I never really bothered to talk to them. There was Xu, an engineer from China that worked in the lower hulls, a talkative sort who would often spend the nights reading tragic novels, he had told me once that the angst amused him. Jeremy, who was the resident biologist in charge of maintaining part of our oxygen generator which featured an assortment of plants and algae, Penny, a physicist from England that was...well a physicist that was less cold and calculating and more warm and stubborn, our captain Hasan, he was a former officer in the Egyptian Army and through his marks the UN put him here, nice enough guy I suppose, and Par, her full name was much longer but she was our resident doctor from Thailand, a bubbly woman that mostly worried about common colds and scraped elbows.
There were countless others but the ones I listed were the ones that I interacted with the most.
We were supposed to be heading for a planet on Alpha Centauri that we think might have some water. It would make the job of terraforming the place much easier and cut back on costs dramatically. For all of humanity's achievements such as fusion energy and ending world hunger we still couldn't really figure out how to terraform a planet or moon in a cost effective manner. Some of the biologists on our ship had said that the tech might not even be available for another hundred years. A hundred years! We couldn't wait that long! I wanted to live and die on one of these new colonies damnit! It was one of my dreams!
But alas, it was going to be a distant one should I keep whining like this and procrastinate. I had been sitting here long enough, might as well head back to the office and get some number crunching done.
"Where are you headed off to?" Jeremy called from his spot on the couch. I frowned and glanced over at him while he looked back at me. He smiled and waved his hand, that long brown hair of his shaking over his shoulders as his flannel shirt dashed along the couch. His empty beer can sat on the floor with his half eaten bar of chocolate. What slob of this magnitude really thought that they were a womanizer?
"To work." I responded with an amused smile with my body turned to the window.
"This late?" he asks incredulously, "Why don't you take a break?"
"I've had enough breaks."
"Looks like you could use some more. You look like a damn zombie."
"And you look like someone threw a caveman through a landfill."
"A very handsome caveman you must admit."
He wiggled his eyebrows while gazing at me and I laughed at the movement while he chuckled along with me. I sighed and grabbed my things before turning on my heel and walking off. He doesn't say anything else which was somewhat surprising considering he usually likes to chat but I wasn't complaining. I was just happy to get a quiet night to myself.
I gazed at the clocks of the lounge, they were all in digital and glowed a faint gold while attached to the cold stone walls. Apparently, it was quite late already, 11pm, not like time mattered much out here in space where there was no sun, there was only artificial light. There had to be some way to measure when you had to go to sleep or stay up, however.
I grumbled to myself as I marched along the cold steel halls, the ship looked incredibly smooth and cylindrical from the outside and inside it was no different. The hallways were all circular in shape with a single flat metal grate that runs across the floor to give us a place to walk. The walls were a cold grey and the doors off to the side had the room number listed in both paint and braille. I was headed to the upper levels before
I would finally turn down to the basement to get some shut-eye. Tonight I had some code to tend to, after that was done then I could sleep soundly.
I gazed into the medical office to see if Par was still awake and she was. She groggily waves at me while she lifted her head up from her desk. There were piles of latex gloves that degrading in the acid solution that she had set off to the side, her black hair was tied back into a neat ponytail and her petite form was slumped over, those bloodshot eyes of her's gazed at me with a sense of lethargic mirth.
"Hello Kelly." she croaked, that tired voice of her's shimmered with the sound of her accent as well as her infectious confidence.
"Hey Par. You staying up late to work too, huh? You look real out of it. Need a coffee?" I inquired with a small smile forming on my face. Her hands were folded on top of the desk and she yawned while shaking her head, muttering "no" under her breath before I turned on my heel and waved.
I step towards the staircase that I was originally headed towards. There's a chance that I would see Hasan up there and I wasn't really up for that at the moment. Sure he was a pretty good captain but the late hours coupled with the fact that he was likely going to be tired made for one grumpy captain. Judging from how he was regularly I wasn't in a rush to see how he was now.
I run up the metal steps before I turned a sharp corner and headed directly for my office, with a quick turn of the dial on the door and an input of my entrance code, the metal door slides to the side and I swept along the metal floor before falling into my seat. I flicked my wrist and ordered the holographic projectors to turn on and they did. The white light flashes against the big space of empty wall in front of me while I rest in my seat with my fingers dialing along the keyboard that sat on a platform near my lap. The actual physical monitor of the computer flashes on and lines of orange code are displayed while I looked on with glazed eyes.
"Just a few more hours, just a few more hours." was what I told myself, even then I wasn't so sure if I would be able to stay awake. I had promised Hasan that I would be getting this bug sorted out and I still haven't so this would have to be done before he woke up tomorrow and ran his status report.
I let out a low yawn while I gazed at the photos on my desk as the computer was turning on. My mother and father were in one photo, they held my shoulder and gazed into the camera with a proud expression while my graduation cap was just slightly tilted over my forehead. In the photo to its right was a picture of Penny and I, I had met her while she was studying abroad. I allowed myself a wide grin, she only let a small grin mark her lips before the camera flashed in front of us. Soon the hologram flashes with the welcoming screen and I typed my credentials in before drumming my fingers on the countertop.
And then eventually those white lines of text make their way across the screen and I begin.
I rest my wrists on the edge of the counter and begin to drum out the lines of code that would be needed. This was only part of the fix, the rest of my time would be spent combing through lines and lines of this crap just to find that one error. I sighed as I begin to groggily sweep my mouse across the desk in an effort to comb and sift through every inch of this document. I sighed and heard some movement outside, likely a late-night cleaner coming by.
Of all the moments that I spend on this ship the time that I spent in front of this desk to sift through tiny errors like this were the most irritating.
"Alright is it?...Boot no, no not there. Maybe it's further on." I groaned as I think back to the problem that had occurred. Apparently one of the buttons on the ship's browsing sites didn't work.
I eventually find the issue and mark it as complete. To make sure everything worked I checked up on the browsing database and made sure it worked and it did. My head rests against the cool wood while the computer continues to blink in front of me, saving the data that I had just edited.
I just hoped that this planet we were headed towards would be nice.
Apparently, it was going to be cold for a little while, at least until we pumped in the greenhouse gases, that was going to be a drag for sure. The warmest colony that we had was on the moon and that was just about the same temperature if not a bit colder. I comb through the computer to find the image of the planet, the artist's rendition they called it. It would be what the place would look like once our work was finished and it was a true beauty. There were vast blue seas much like there were on any colony and the vegetation would be perfectly suited to the lower levels of light. The world would have to be pumped full of greenhouse gases and the plants there would mostly be low to the ground, shrubs most likely. I smiled and nodded to myself before checking the message board to see if there was anything worth talking about.
And yet again it was just a bunch of talk of work. I suppose I would have to wait until Friday when we had card games in the lounge to truly enjoy myself. I contemplate turning on a video game for a bit but shook my head, I needed sleep.
All of that time spent in front of the computer had amounted to about an hour and a half, more or less. It was now nearing one o'clock and I needed to be up by 8 tomorrow. Factoring in the walk that I needed to take to get back to bed...I would likely be in the sack at about 2 after brushing my teeth and getting everything done.
Whatever, sleep was for the weak!
I hopped to my feet and walked downstairs, luckily I avoided an encounter with Hasan, he was probably sleeping right about now, now that I thought about it. The only person that would be awake was Jeremy and that was because he was a freak of nature that could live off five hours a night. I marched to the lower levels and opened the door to my room. I stepped inside and walked to the bathroom that was off to the side to rinse my face and brush my teeth. Before I can grab my toothbrush I grab a glance of myself in the mirror and paused for a bit.
"Hello, beautiful." I said in a lethargic and sarcastic voice.
When I set my eyes on my reflection I could see every little flaw that I had on my face, on my body for that matter. My body was much too curvy and there were those dull brown eyes that I hated. They were so boring and common! Penny had those lovely blue orbs that were basically treasured by every man that she had come across. I know that I might come off as somewhat of a career woman but the prospect of actually settling down somewhere was racing through my mind. I have to admit that I liked the idea, no matter how much other's thought that I was just some coldhearted hermit.
I spun the brown locks of hair in my hands while my pale face glances back at me. Perhaps it was the sleep that was weighing me down and making me appear to be so repulsive, if only to myself. I shake my head with a smile and rolled my eyes, I was acting like a 10 year old girl with a schoolyard crush. This was no way for a professional to act. I allowed myself a pout while I circled in front of the mirror, gazing at myself from every angle and imagining what my life would be like if I had the looks of a model.
"Alright enough of that, it's already late." I muttered while I stepped over to my bed, a simple regular sized mattress with some flowery sheets. I take off my shoes, my work pants, and shirt before laying down and tucking myself under the covers. My eyes shut and I exhaled, images of every possible future scenario raced through my mind. Thoughts of picket fences, travel, lonely nights on the stars, and possible accolades make their way through my consciousness as distant fantasies before I separated from the land of the conscious.
CHAPTER TWO
Relkor
"How does it fare now then huh? I beat you fair and square!" My lethan, my brother-in-arms, Xuhar chuckles as he tosses the rolling spindle down, it lands on 5 and I scowled as I hand over some of my credits to him through a couple of taps to the monitor beside me. I rolled my hand over and showed him the disks that I had. He had a much higher number than mine.
"Whatever." I muttered under my rebirth as the monitors shut down. I would have tried to win some back but we both agreed that this was going to be the last round. I had told them that I didn't want to play beyond the l
ast couple of rounds because I had already earned more than enough to buy a new gun or even a new blaster but they never listened.
"Don't be such a sore loser Rel." said Xuhar as he gazed at me with a bemused expression. I smiled and rolled my eyes before getting to my feet and walking over to the counter space where all of our food had been laid out. I quickly grab some hirani chips and tossed them into my mouth. The fried root dashes across my tongue as I whipped it around and ground it into pieces with my fangs. My hands rest on the counter space as I heard them continue to play, rolling their disks on the table while they snatched away more and more of each other's earnings. Looks like Xuhar would be getting rich tonight. The guy rarely ever got this lucky so I didn't really mind it.
My eyes glazed over and I looked at the clock, it was about 40 betras too late to be up and I needed to get to sleep but there was still something that I had wanted to get done, there was still something that we all had to get done for that matter.
We were going to discuss the upcoming raid.
We had been planning this raid for months, after we got tired of raiding our own kind we finally went on the hunt for some new species to raid. We had found one, a young one on the corner of the galaxy that was sending an interstellar ship out with little to no backup. The ship had some security measures but I don't think it would be that much of a bother for us. After all, from the biological data that we had received on the last raid it was well known that the humans were basically weaker versions of ourselves and that was something that reassured all of us. This would be easy pickings for sure.
Perhaps we would get some nice prisoners out of the deal, gercek someone might even find a mate if our research is correct and the humans do turn out to be able to interbreed with us.
I sighed and glanced down at my nearly empty mug before I filled it with more kruska, the liquid stings my tongue and I sloshed it over the roof of my mouth while sighing, the buzz fills my mind as thoughts of the potential money we were going to be getting from this raid run through my mind. We could sell the ship for scrap metal if we did our job well enough, by that I mean if we raid it without practically destroying the ship in the process. Their tech was likely low-level judging by the fact that they were a relatively new species. There were some reports that the "humans' have been in some combat situations before from our straggler ships.
