by T J Mott
Chapter 26
The room exploded into instant chaos. Saar’s booming shouts cut through the noise, reaching Thaddeus’s ears. “This is an outrage! That man deserves a lifetime of torment, not to be pampered by some spoiled, self-righteous queen who isn’t fit to rule a barn!”
Other, similar retorts blasted across the room. “My entire family died because he stole our fleet of weapons!” “Our stockholders will not stand for this! Expect to hear from our lawyers!” “I spent three years in prison because of him, and you make him a prince?!”
Even amplified, Captain Dontun’s words could barely be heard over the riot. “Silence! Order! There will be order in the room, I demand it!” But it was useless. Many of the commoners in the crowd started to shuffle out of the room, but with all the commotion it was not clear who was going where, and the outer edges of the room quickly became a confusing fluid of shouting people.
High Prince Saar stepped around his table and entered the inner ring of the room. His chin was tilted down and he looked forward from the tops of his eyes which blazed with murderous intent. He took slow, careful steps towards Thaddeus, as if trying not to draw attention to himself. But just in time, a squad of large, armored Xionne soldiers wielding personal defense weapons forced their way to the center and surrounded Thaddeus, Dontun, and the rest of Dontun’s men. They pointed their guns at Saar and he stopped his advance, though the pained, manic expression on his face indicated that stopping himself was perhaps the most difficult action he’d ever made in his life.
“Silence!” Dontun’s voice buzzed over the barely-audible intercom. “Everyone but the Queen and her entourage must leave the room at once! Order! Order!”
Slowly the noise died down as the crowd filtered out of the room. High Prince Saar stood his ground, his face a seething mask of intense rage, until most of the room was empty. Then he screamed obscenities in his native language at Dontun and the Queen and stomped out of the room.
After a few more minutes they were relatively alone. Dontun’s men unchained Thaddeus who immediately collapsed to the floor without the shackle holding him upright. A couple men hauled him back to his feet and supported him.
The Queen stepped up to him. She looked to be in her early forties, and up close, she was relatively handsome. “Despite their naïve ideas, this will not be easy for you,” she declared. “Evil living subjugated by good is never easy for monsters like you. It goes against everything within you. But I will succeed, and it will bring great honor to my throne.”
Thaddeus simply had no response for that.
“Your Majesty, we will escort you to your ship, and once there arrange for payment?” Dontun’s eyes were wide in wonder and joy at the windfall he’d just made.
“Yes, Captain, that will be fine. The sooner I can get underway, the better. There is much work to be done.”
“Of course.” He gestured to the Xionne troops around him and the group left the auction hall, passing into the large corridor outside which eventually led to one of the main gambling halls. Thaddeus’ stimulants were beginning to expire and he stumbled along, half walking, half-dragged. Adelia was ahead of him, and he sighed in relief that Saar wouldn’t be torturing her to death after all. This Queen definitely held some very outlandish philosophical beliefs, but to Thaddeus it seemed Adelia would be safe from now on. She had just spent eight hundred million credits on the pair of them. Surely there was little chance of Adelia being sold back into slavery for what would be, by comparison, pocket change.
I guess the universe decided that being cruel to Saar was more important than being cruel to me, for once. I’m off the hook.
What a strange universe.
He felt so tired now. His anxiety and fears melted away, and now he just wanted to lay down and sleep. In the back of his mind, he wondered what it would be like to join a harem of “evil” men, but he supposed he’d find out soon enough.
As long as they let him sleep first.
***
“They’ve left the auction hall. From the uniforms, it looks like they’re being escorted by a squad of soldiers from the Xionne Star Kingdom.”
Commodore Wilcox stood in the X-11’s cramped bridge and watched the video feed on his monitor, which showed real-time footage from the Marines who were covertly tailing Dontun’s entourage. Wilcox shook his head as he watched them lead Marcell towards the Queen’s ship. Marcell could barely walk. “They really did him in,” he muttered to himself.
“They sure did,” the Marine captain in charge of the ship’s two platoons replied morosely. “He’s lucky to be alive. I hope the medical equipment on this ship can handle him in that state.”
“It will have to,” Wilcox answered uncertainly. “We can’t stop anywhere to treat him, not with the entire region stirred up against him like this. We’ll need to keep him stable until we return to Headquarters.”
“Captain!” someone said over the comm channel. “We’ve spotted enemy troops on the move! Prince Saar is going to intercept them!”
Wilcox looked at the Marine captain. “Captain, go do your Marine thing. Bring the Admiral back by any means necessary.”
“Aye, Commodore.”
***
They entered the gambling hall. Thaddeus grew more and more weary with each step as they dragged him along, and he wondered if he was starting to die, or whether he was just exhausted beyond his limits.
Suddenly, a loud explosion deafened him. A blast concussion slammed into him, stunning him and the men who half-carried, half-dragged him, and he instantly collapsed in pain to the ground. A simultaneous flash of light blinded him, searing an afterimage of the gambling hall into his retinas as he fell, and then through the ringing in his hears he heard the muted sounds of small-arms weapons fire. He immediately knew that Saar was attacking them. The Prince’s insatiable thirst for revenge had driven him well into madness, and now he would do anything to recover Thaddeus.
Almost like how I’d do anything to return to Earth, Thad thought as he lay crumpled on the ground, unable to see or hear much of anything.
Someone picked him up and threw him over a shoulder, then took off running. He bounced around too much to see much of anything around him, and each bounce reignited the sharp pain in his left arm. The dull noises of shouting and gunfire continued, sounding muted, barely audible through the ringing in his ears. He soon smelled smoke, ozone, and burning propellant.
The man carrying him collapsed and Thad crashed to the ground. He reflexively put his hands out in front of him to break his fall, but he landed on his stump. Once again, he was shocked at how much pain one could feel, and he screamed out in agony. But his face bounced hard into the floor just a moment later, stunning him back into silence and leaving him with sinus pain.
He rolled around and tried to bring himself to his feet, hoping that the latest surge of adrenaline would give him enough strength to escape, but then something exploded and flashed nearby. The scene in front of him flashed brilliantly, saturating his vision with a searing white-hot light and remaining burned into his retinas for the next few seconds. He felt, rather than saw, himself fall down to the floor again, completely stunned and unable to balance. His head was spinning and he felt like he was caught in the grasp of a malfunctioning gravity generator that couldn’t decide on which way should be ‘down’.
His vision began to clear up, and the next thing he knew, he was being dragged by the shackles on his ankles, sliding across the floor on his back as smoke and laser beams flashed above him. His shirt heated up from friction with the carpet and he could feel rugburns forming, and he idly asked himself if there was any limit to the number of different kinds of wounds one could acquire in such a short time. The shouting and gunfire continued, and he watched through the smoky haze as the overhead lights passed over him one-by-one. His head bounced and rolled to the side, and as he was dragged along he got a too-close glimpse of a nearby corpse whose face was now a bloody, smoking crater where the beam from a high-powere
d laser carbine had found its target.
“We got them!” a voice shouted through the chaos, although it sounded distant and underwater. He tried to kick at whoever was dragging him, but another stun grenade went off nearby and he was getting too shaken up to make any sense of the action.
He felt an abrupt, intense burning sensation in his left calf, and even through the tough mental haze that clouded his senses, he knew that he’d just been shot by a laser weapon. And he didn’t even cry out. At this point every part of his body hurt in a multitude of ways, and he didn’t think it was possible to add any more pain to that which he already felt.
His mind cleared up slightly, just enough, and he instantly remembered High Prince Saar and his twisted plans for vengeance on Adelia. It enraged him, and he tried again to fight back. He began to struggle and kick, flailing around as violently as he could, hoping to free himself from whomever was dragging him, but he was far too weak and dazed to have any effective strength. Landing on his wounded arm earlier had brought him to new levels of pain and agony, and his lungs burned from the smoke and ozone-filled air. His struggle burned out quickly as he fell into a coughing fit that threatened to suffocate him to death. Blackness began to flow in, pooling up like liquid at the edges of his vision.
The floor beneath him changed from the casino’s thick, lush carpeting to a smooth, cold, metallic surface. His head thudded across a threshold and slammed into the deck. He felt the hit, but it must have knocked him into temporary unconsciousness because then he was suddenly being carried again, slung across the shoulder of a masked soldier. Behind the soldier, in front of Thaddeus, another soldier carried Adelia in an identical manner, and the few functioning portions of his mind wondered how the hell he was going to carry out his mercy kill in his condition. His heart thudded in his ears, as did the soldier’s heavy footsteps. Everything else was drowned out by an intense ringing. I don’t hear gunfire anymore.
Saar got us. He succeeded, and the fight is over. He tried to strike at the soldier, aiming for the back of his neck, but it was a completely futile move. His blows carried no strength and the his fist glanced harmlessly off the armor. Yet the effort was hard enough that the blackness at the edge of his vision flooded inward, completely blanking out his eyesight. The ringing in his ears slowly gave way to the distant but powerful sound of rushing water.
He fell again, the motion only barely registering in his perception, but he landed onto something fairly soft which surprised him. He felt the characteristic rumble of heavy fusion thrusters throttling up and knew he was aboard one of Saar’s transports, soon to be shuttled to Tor for the High Prince’s sick plans.
His vision cleared up a bit. He sat up, hoping to do something…anything! But as he did, his perception began to blur again and the darkness continued to creep in from the outer edges of his vision. He fought against it, willing himself to remain awake, and stood up, even though he was seconds away from fainting—or dying, he wasn’t sure which. His legs were wobbly but he managed to stay upright. His eyesight shrank to a tiny gray oval at the center of his vision. The only sound he could hear through his ringing ears was that of his own breath, rushing in and out of his smoke-filled lungs with terrible ferocity and sounding like some kind of strange, reciprocating waterfall.
He turned his head, trying to look around and figure out where he was and what was around him, but hands suddenly pressed into his shoulders and shoved him back down. They forced him to lie flat, but he screamed and kicked, shouting as loud as his itchy lungs would let him, feeling his vocal cords rip themselves raw in his throat. He began to taste blood.
And then, quite abruptly, as if a switch had been flipped within him, he felt pleasantly sleepy. His arm quit throbbing, his lungs quit burning, and he forgot about the dozens of cuts, bruises, and other wounds that engulfed his body.
Drugs, he thought. Then he smiled. Good drugs. After a few more seconds, he quit caring about fighting back and accepted the solace, finally feeling relief from the unrelenting pain he’d been suffering for the past day. In the back of his mind, he vaguely remembered that Saar also had Adelia now, but everything seemed so distant now, so far away, as if reality itself was nothing more than a nebulous, fading dream that was slipping away from his memory as each second passed…
His vision was completely black now, but he soon realized it was because his eyes were closed. He opened them back up and saw the bare ceiling of a small hangar which appeared to still be under construction. Much of the plating was missing, exposing the framework and girders and conduits above.
He turned his head to one side and saw a short, obese, red-haired man standing over him, dressed in a familiar, garish one-of-a-kind uniform that would make anyone with a sense of fashion want to vomit. A thick pale mustache adorned his sweaty, reddened face, and he stared down at Thaddeus with an expression of deep concern. “Commodore Wilcox,” Thad said with a drug-induced chuckle, “what are you doing on the Prince’s ship?”
Chapter 27
“Sir, the Panther has just left hyperspace and entered the region.”
Thaddeus Marcell looked up from his work and glanced at the surface of his large faux-wood desk. One of the touchscreens embedded into the tabletop displayed details about the comm channel which had just opened. It identified the speaker as an Ensign Paice, comm officer on duty in the ops center.
He then shot a perplexed look at Commodore Cooper, who sat with Abano and Covier across the wooden desk in the sparsely-decorated room he called his main office.
Thad had been forced to leave behind the Panther, which had been left drifting near the Waverly system after a hyperdrive failure. He’d been preparing to send out a flotilla to rescue the corvette and its crew, but if the Panther was now here…
“Uh…can you get me a comm link?” he asked. His voice pitched upward in surprise.
“Hold on one moment…link is open. Audio only.”
“Captain Simon?” Thaddeus said carefully. “Welcome back. Glad to see you got your hyperdrive working. I was about to send out a force to assist you.”
“No, actually this is Reynolds, but Simon is here too.” Thaddeus’s jaw fell slack. Others had survived his ship’s destruction? And then been recovered by the Panther? “Uh…who am I speaking with?” Reynolds asked. “My comm unit must be malfunctioning. It’s identifying you as Admiral Marcell…whom, I regret to inform you, did not survive the Caracal’s destruction.”
Thad smiled. News sometimes traveled impossibly slow across the interstellar expanses, even more so in the Independent Regions. During his return trip Captain Reynolds had clearly missed everything about the Cadrian Casino, although that was an easy mistake to make with all the news coverage focusing on the Emperor’s death. “No, it’s quite correct, Captain. I’m glad you survived, too.”
“Son of a gun. The man who recovered our lifepod, a Captain Dontun, told us that Lieutenant Poulsen and I were the only survivors!”
“How…interesting,” Thad said, suppressing a shudder as Dontun’s name triggered a cascade of unpleasant memories. “The same captain who recovered me, and told me I was the only survivor. Which was clearly a lie because he actually had Adelia, too. I wonder how many others there are, and where they are now.” Hopefully any other crew from the Caracal would soon begin trickling in through some of the established Blue Fleet rally points, where they would eventually meet up with some of the Organization’s logistic ships and find their way back to Headquarters.
“Ah, so Adelia survived as well? Your mission was successful after all, in some degree.”
Thaddeus glanced down at the still-bandaged stump below his left elbow and gritted his teeth, once again reminded of the price he’d paid for her recovery. At the moment, an opioid prescription—and a little booze—kept most of the physical pain in check. But he still had a long and hard recovery ahead of him, and he already knew the changes would be hard to cope with. “Yeah, I suppose so. I still need Gray Fleet to debrief her and see what she can tel
l us about Earth though, once she’s ready. Until then, there’s still lots more work to be done.” He smiled again. Reynolds’ return definitely made things easier. Thaddeus simply didn’t have time to manage Blue Fleet anymore, and he’d been worried that the fleet’s operations would struggle until he could locate a new commander. “By the way, if you are crazy enough to stick around after all that craziness, you are now a full Commodore in complete command of Blue Fleet, with all the rights, privileges, and pay of the rank.”
“I…thank you sir, I gladly accept.”
“Glad to hear it.” Thaddeus said. The promotion was long overdue. Reynolds had been in practical command of the fleet and its day-to-day operations for a couple of years now, yet Thaddeus had been unwilling to give up his role as the listed commander, which hadn’t been fair to Reynolds. He would continue to work with Blue Fleet when he needed to, but not as its direct commander. “Welcome home, Commodore.”
“Thank you, Admiral.” The channel terminated.
Thad smiled at Cooper. “Well, things aren’t quite as bad as we thought.”
“True. And I’m happy to report that you’re getting your other missing corvettes back, too. I just received word that Governor Gage has released the Shrike and Owl and their crews, so they’ll be back any week now.”
He felt an immense weight lift from his shoulders. The fate of his Waverly flotilla, all four ships presumed lost, had been dragging him down ever since his return. Three surviving ships. In the end, I only lost the Caracal. “How did you manage that?”
