Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  “You wanna play, too?” he asked her, tightening his hold on her until she squealed and grabbed hold of his arm. “I’m sure you’d be almost as much fun.”

  “Stop it!” Stacy cried.

  Dylan couldn’t even raise his head to see what was happening, but he could hear every word being said and he knew that his companions, the men and women whom he’d hired, were all going to be killed, and it was all his fault. It was his responsibility. But before that happened things were going to get a lot worse for the girls than they already were. They needed help, and they needed it now. He had to do something. He pulled his left foot underneath him slowly and tried to stand up, but the warriors’ leader kicked him in his already tortured ribs and he collapsed sideways back to the deck. At least now he could see what was going on.

  The warrior-leader pulled Stacy close to him and turned her head, forcing her to look up at him. “You cry out for your companion,” he said quietly, grinning the evil, teeth-baring grin of the criminally insane, “but you should fear more for yourself, little one.” Glaring defiantly back up at him, Stacy promptly spat right in his face. He wiped her spittle away with his free hand and then grabbed the front of her top and lifted her up off her feet, his eyes wide with rage. “Zig den Naku kres!” he shouted.

  The subordinate warriors grabbed Verdai by the arms and pulled him out of his chair. He twisted and pulled against them, but his efforts were in vein, and as soon as they had him under total control their leader laid his burden out across the table.

  “No!” Nicole screamed, but her captor tightened his arm around her throat and choked off any further protest on her part.

  Stacy tried to sit up, but the warrior-leader pushed back against her chest and easily held her down. She lashed out, kicking and punching at anything she could reach, but her efforts, like Verdai’s, proved futile. “Ben zil tah!” the leader commanded.

  The bloody-faced warrior left Verdai to his comrade and moved to help his superior. He grabbed Stacy’s flailing arms and held them together, then pulled a set of restraints from his belt and tightened them around her wrists. Then he stepped over Dylan, moving in behind the chair, and pulled her arms up over her head, out of his superior’s way.

  Then, as though she were just beginning to realize that nothing she might do was going to stop what was about to happen to her, Stacy began to cry. Obviously unaffected by her sobbing pleas to be let go, the warrior-leader slipped his fingers down inside the waistband of her shorts and pulled until the fastener broke loose and the zipper ripped apart. He pulled them down off of her and tossed them aside, then literally tore off her panties, forced his way between her legs, and then started to unfasten his trousers. The son-of-a-bitch intended to rape her right there in front of everyone, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.

  “Shin!” the bloody-faced warrior called out, holding an old fashioned hand-held Solfleet transceiver out to his superior. “Meg’pa tun.”

  The leader grabbed the transceiver from his subordinate and spoke angrily into it. “Ven!”

  “Shin, dobek tan vish!” the voice on the other end exclaimed. “Sas rish tel!”

  “Das.”

  Without another word, the Naku warriors and their human companion grabbed up their prisoners and headed back to their vessel.

  * * *

  “They’re moving aft, Captain,” Packard reported. “Toward the larger breach.”

  “You mean the pirates are moving aft, don’t you, Mister Packard?” she asked, looking over at him for confirmation.

  “No, ma’am,” he assured her. “I mean they’re all moving aft. Looks like the pirates are herding everyone back to their ship.”

  She stood up and gazed at the screen. “Put your monitor up,” she directed. A second or two later the entire bridge crew could see what Packard had been seeing on his smaller screen. Sure enough, every organic heat signature on the yacht was moving toward the aft breach. A couple of them were obviously being carried and some of the others were clearly being taken by force against their will. Captain Leslie hadn’t expected that. The bridge crew had all agreed after Galloway’s revelation about the missing or stolen attack shuttles that no Solfleet Marines were involved, and pirates weren’t known for taking prisoners. They usually just killed everyone or incapacitated them and left them to die aboard their crippled ship.

  “They may not be pirates after all,” she observed aloud. “Mister Packard, show them how displeased their actions make me feel.”

  “You got it, Captain. One totally useless Marine attack shuttle, coming right up.”

  The view on the main screen reverted to that of the vessels ahead of them and a moment passed in near silence while Packard retargeted the weapons. Then the Sentinel cut loose on the shuttle with everything it had. Twin lasers cut deep along its wings, sheering one of them completely off in the first few seconds, as missiles and torpedoes hammered their way through the hull and pulverized the command deck.

  “Cease fire!” Leslie barked seconds later. “Damage assessment.”

  “Command deck completely destroyed,” Packard reported, starting down the short list on his scanner display. “Remaining atmosphere wing is buckling. Severe damage to their weapons and propulsion systems.” Packard looked up at the main screen. “The yacht has broken free.”

  Leslie turned back to her chair and tapped the comm switch. “Leslie to Security.”

  “Lieutenant Marks here, Captain.”

  “Prepare for multiple hostage rescue and arrest operations, Lieutenant. Two small vessels dead ahead. Both are damaged, one of them severely. We’ll try towing one of them if we have to, but I want you and Flight Control to try to figure out a way to make them both fit in the bay first. Given their condition, I’m afraid our magnebeam might crush them.”

  “Understood, Captain.”

  Leslie sat back down, tucked that always wayward lock of hair behind her ear again, and then finally relaxed.

  Chapter 59

  There it was again. That incessant tapping noise. It seemed that every time he was about to drift off to sleep that damn noise would return. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. How the hell was anyone supposed to get any decent shuteye with all that noise? What the hell was it, anyway? A dripping faucet? Someone drumming their fingers on something? It didn’t sound like either one of those things. Not really. In fact, it sounded more like... like footsteps? Of course. That was it. Footsteps. Those tapping noises were someone’s footsteps. And they were approaching this time. Coming closer. Much closer. They stopped right beside him.

  Where was he? Why was he there, wherever ‘there’ was? And why was he in pain? From what he could feel at his fingertips without moving them around too much, he was lying on a mattress... or something similar. But he wasn’t in bed. He felt sure of that much. He would have remembered going to bed. And he was in pain. A hospital? A medbay? Something had happened. What? What had happened? And why were his thoughts so... jumbled? What did he remember? He was aboard the Star Eagle with the others. What were their names? Verdai Gen. He was the Naku he’d been talking with. Nicole had been there, too, and her little sister Stacy had joined in. Their brother Geoff and their friend Carlos Garcia had been up on the flight deck. Anyone else? No, he didn’t think so. There were only the five of them. Six, counting himself. So he’d been talking with Verdai and Nicole when... They’d been attacked. Their ship had been disabled and they’d been boarded by a group of Naku warriors, no doubt seeking him out to avenge Cortan’s dishonor and subsequent death. They’d tried to defend themselves. They’d fought as hard as they could. Close-quarters, hand-to-hand combat. Against Naku warriors they’d never stood a chance. Geoff and Carlos had been beaten unconscious, perhaps even killed. More blood on his hands. The rest of them... What had happened to the rest of them? Had they been taken prisoner? Stacy... Oh God. Poor Stacy. The Naku warrior-leader. He’d thrown her down on the table and brutally raped her.

  That was the last thing he could remembe
r. That must have been when he passed out.

  So what did the Naku warriors have in store for him now? Perhaps if he opened his eyes he’d find out, because whoever had just walked up to him hadn’t walked away yet. Or if they had, he hadn’t heard them. So the question was, should he open his eyes now and face whatever was coming and get it over with, or should he feign unconsciousness for a little while longer and perhaps overhear something that might clue him in to what was going on?

  And what good would that do? He didn’t understand a word of Naku.

  He opened his eyes, slowly at first, but the room’s lights, while bright enough to let him see, were at the same time low enough not to cause him any more discomfort than he was already experiencing. The first thing he realized was that he wasn’t lying in anyone’s a holding cell. What he could see of the room without moving his head was too clean, to well kept. Instead, he lay on some kind of medical diagnostic bed, in a hospital exam room from the looks of things. Or, perhaps in a ship’s medical bay. The second thing he realized was that a middle-aged Asian gentleman wearing a light green medical tunic was standing beside him, gazing down at a tablet that he was holding with a very serious look on his face.

  “Who are you?” Dylan asked him weakly. His voice was scratchy, his throat a little sore.

  The gentleman peered down over the top of his tablet, and a friendly smile so wide that it reduced his almond eyes to little more than a pair of narrow crescents appeared briefly on his full, round face. “Well,” he began as he folded his arms across his chest, hugging his tablet. “I see you’re finally awake.” He spoke with a strong accent. “Welcome back. My name is Doctor Chun-Hwan Lee. I’m Chief Medical Officer aboard the Solfleet Patrol Cruiser Sentinel.”

  A ship’s medbay then. “How...”

  Doctor Lee raised a hand to silence him. “If you don’t mind, I’ll leave it to the captain to answer any questions you might have about how you got here,” he said. “I probably couldn’t answer them anyway, even if I wanted to. My job, Mister Richards, is simply to see to it that you get well enough to ask them.”

  Mister Richards? Was that the right name? Yes. Richards. Mister Eric Richards. For now, at least. “How do you know my name?”

  “Oh, quite simply. You were unconscious when our security police brought you aboard. The captain wanted you identified as quickly as possible, so we searched your pockets and found your identicard. It says ‘Eric Richards’ right on it.”

  Dylan sighed and thanked God that he’d only been carrying one of his false identicards on his person at the time. He’d stashed the rest in his crew bag. “I guess that was a pretty dumb question.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’re still groggy from the sedatives, so you’re allowed to ask one dumb question.” When Dylan didn’t respond to that, the doctor said, “Tell you what. I’ll ask you a dumb question in return to make you feel better. How are you feeling?”

  “Groggy, like you said.”

  The doctor smiled again. “How are you feeling besides that?”

  Dylan drew as deep a breath as he could manage, testing his ribs, and found the effort more than a little bit painful. He sighed. “I feel like I just wrestled a grizzly bear in the middle of an active fusion drive... and lost.”

  Another smile. “I’m not surprised.”

  “All jokes aside, Doc, how am I? The whole truth.”

  “The whole truth,” the doctor repeated. “All right. You have a number of minor cuts here and there, several bruises, and a couple cracked ribs. Nothing too serious there, but some of those injuries look to be slightly older than the others. It looks to me like you’ve had a rough last few days.”

  Dylan snickered, then closed his eyes and groaned with the pain it caused in his chest. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Indeed. Well, I’ll leave that to the captain as well. Your shoulder was your most serious injury by far. Your biotronics, advanced as they were, were a total loss and had to be replaced. As for the remaining flesh, believe me, you don’t want to know. Suffice to say that we had to operate immediately if we were going to have any chance at all of salvaging your arm. I’ll tell you, it was extremely delicate surgery, but it went well enough.”

  Salvaging his arm? Surgery had gone well enough? That was just great. They’d replaced the biotronics in his shoulder. That meant that what he had now was a good twenty years behind the technology that had been available when his shoulder was originally reconstructed, so he felt more than a little concerned that his shoulder might never be quite the same again. But he also realized that that concern was secondary, at least for the moment, because if this chief medical officer had happened to notice just how advanced his biotronics were the way the doctor back on Mandela Station had... or worse, if he’d discovered the microlarm receiver that he’d attached to its main sensory input processor, then ‘Eric Richards’ was going to have a lot of explaining to do to the ship’s captain. And right now, ‘Eric Richards’ didn’t have a clue as to what he might say.

  “Will I regain full use of my arm?” he asked Doctor Lee. That was, after all, the most logical next question to ask.

  “You should,” Doctor Lee answered non-committally. “For now though, just try to rest.”

  ‘Should.’ Well, that was better than nothing. “What happened to the others—the people I was traveling with?” he then asked. He feared the answer might be hard to hear, but he’d had to ask. He’d needed to ask.

  “All five of them are alive and well,” Doctor Lee assured him. Dylan closed his eyes and sighed with relief. No more blood on his hands. Not this time, at least. “We’re taking good care of them,” he continued, “so you needn’t bother worrying yourself about them. Just concentrate on your own recovery.”

  Dylan opened his eyes again. He wanted more than that. He wanted specifics. “Come on, Doc,” he said. “I’m the guy who hired them for this trip. If it weren’t for me, they wouldn’t even have been out here. I’m responsible for what happened, to them and to their ship. Can’t you tell me something more than just ‘they’re alive and well’ and ‘we’re taking good care of them?’”

  The doctor hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “All right,” he acquiesced. “That Naku fellow, Verdai Gen, suffered nothing more serious than a couple of minor hairline fractures and a large abrasion on his scalp. He’ll be up and around in a couple of days. The other two gentlemen, however, had quite a variety of broken bones, contusions, and a few internal injuries, so they’ll be down a little longer. A week. Perhaps ten days before they’ll be ready for release. The young ladies—my staff tells me they’re sisters?” Dylan nodded to confirm that for him. “Yes, well, I’m told they were both very fortunate. They only suffered a few minor bumps and bruises. The elder sister had a split lip as well, but it was only superficial. They’re both resting quite comfortably in visitors’ quarters.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “The younger sister, Stacy. Are you sure nothing else happened to her?”

  The doctor shook his head slightly as he answered, “No, I don’t believe she suffered any other injuries or...” A look of understanding washed over him as though he’d just realized what Dylan had been hinting at. “Ah, yes,” he said, nodding. “I had forgotten all about that.”

  Forgotten? Really? The chief medical officer aboard a Solfleet vessel had forgotten about something that had happened to one of his patients? Unlikely. So what was Doctor Lee trying to avoid telling him?

  “What do you think happened to her, Mister Richards?” the doctor asked him.

  “I think she was raped,” Dylan replied straightforwardly.

  “Given her state of undress when you were all brought aboard, my staff and I thought the same thing, so one of my colleagues did a complete work up on her. I’m very pleased to be able to tell you that she was not raped or otherwise sexually assaulted.”

  Dylan sighed with relief once more, and said, “Thank God for that
.” He really hadn’t wanted to have to live with that on his conscience.

  “Yes. Thank God,” the doctor agreed. Then he went on, “Apparently, we arrived on the scene before your attackers could...”

  “What about them?” Dylan asked, interrupting. “What happened to those Naku warriors who attacked us?”

  “That’s a question you’ll have to ask the captain, Mister Richards.”

  Dylan had figured as much and said, “I understand.”

  “Speaking of whom, if you’ll excuse me,” the doctor said, bringing their conversation to a close, “I have to update the captain on your condition.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Dylan said. “For everything.”

  “You’re welcome,” the doctor answered as he turned to leave.

  * * *

  “What’s our E-T-A to Saturn Station, helmsman?” Captain Leslie asked as she emerged from her ready room back onto the bridge, that wayward lock of her hair finally under control.

  “Flight Ops expects to have everything squared away in the hangar bay in about twenty minutes or so, Captain,” the helmsman reported. “Should be about another twenty-five to thirty minutes after that.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.” She crossed to the center seat, dropped into it as though she’d just run a marathon and was totally exhausted, and then breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Then, lowering her voice so that only Commander Galloway would hear what she said, she told him, “I’m glad that’s finally over, Nate.”

  “What’s that, Captain?” Galloway asked her, just as quietly.

  “I just had a long heart-to-heart discussion with Admiral Westbrook. I don’t mind telling you, something about that woman just rubs me the wrong way. I swear, she has all the warmth of the dark side of Pluto’s polar cap in the middle of a winter night.”

  Galloway snickered. He’d had to deal with Westbrook on more than one occasion himself and he couldn’t have agreed with his captain more. He understood exactly what she was talking about. “What’s Her Royal Highness the Ice Queen’s problem this time?” he asked her, making it very clear that the two of them were on the same page where Westbrook was concerned.