Jen took the opportunity to walk up to the podium, draw her gun, and point it at him.
"Remember me, you bastard?"
Auction mouth did a double take, and did indeed seem to recognize her. The grin vanished, and his face went white.
"I remember you too," said a voice behind her.
Jen didn’t look. She didn’t need to. The rustle of movement took only seconds, and I let my own grin loose.
Almost everyone there had pulled a gun, and they were all aimed at Jen. I peeked down from above, and all arms pointed to the same place, in a giant fan shape. Only those in the inner rings could actually draw a bead on Jen, but this was still several dozen guns.
Mouth on a podium let his grin out again.
"Nice to see you again my dear. Let me have your gun dearie, before some of these nice people decide to shoot you. I would so hate to lose such valuable merchandise a second time."
Jen's grin shifted to feral, and his slipped once again.
"Let's do it arsehole!"
And she shot him.
The noise of dozens of guns not firing followed over the next two seconds.
"Nobody move!" yelled Tasha.
Her team were spread around the crowd, heavy weapons aimed inwards. Heads jerked around to see who'd yelled, and some of the reactions were priceless. Marines were the last thing they expected to see today.
"Drop them," commanded Tasha.
Guns clattered on the deck. No-one moved.
I moved. Big mouth was down behind the podium, Jen still covering him with her gun. She'd shot him in the shoulder, and he lay there whimpering. I walked past her, and stood above him.
"Help me," he said.
I kneeled beside him, grabbed his other side hand, and rammed it against his wound. He groaned.
"Hold this," I said. "No-one is else is going to. If you're good, we might allow a doctor to see you."
"Do you know who I am?" he bellowed.
"Yes. You’re scum who sells people into slavery. Jen should have hit you in the neck, so you could never talk again."
"Good thing she's such a lousy shot."
"She's an excellent shot. I told her she wasn’t allowed to kill anyone."
"Who are you?"
Just for an instant, I changed my appearance. A dark cloak appeared around me, the hood pulled over my head, my face shadowed and indistinct. My fist, held near his face, glowed a white hot looking blue.
He shuddered violently, and I turned it off.
"Death. Now be quiet, or I might decide to let Jen shoot you again."
He whimpered for a moment, and began begging for me not to do it.
"Fuck it," I said, stood, and walked back to Jen.
Behind me, the man made a serious effort to talk, but no sound came out of his mouth.
It never would again.
Fifty Seven
The process of separating pirates and slave owners from those here for the entertainment value, took a while.
With the remainder of the roaming security force also locked away in their own cells, Sasha and her team joined Tasha's, and Sasha took over the processing.
There was one difficult moment, when Jen recognized the man who'd been top bidder at her auction, and tried to remove all his teeth. The doctor on duty at the nearest medical suite, managed to save some of them.
I gave Jen the look, and she, Jess, and Lea, went back to the ship. She had work to do there anyway.
Satisfied Sasha had things under control, with the Sergeant's team now roaming the station individually as a de-facto security patrol, I found a nice empty spot, and moved myself back to the ship as well.
We invited the mining company to take back their station, claimed their bounty, and suggested they bring both a security force, and some system protection.
It took them two days to arrive, by which time Jen was itching to be somewhere else. The rest of us were as well.
Jen and Sasha met the company representative at the dock. Sasha passed security of the station over to her counterpart, and took him for a tour of the detainees.
Jen escorted the mining team to station management, and they took control of the station back. After some negotiations, the company paid the bounty being offered, plus bonuses, and assigned Jen a lawyer. She didn’t understand why she needed a lawyer, until he pointed out how many rewards were on offer for information about missing people, now identified to be here on the station, or on the ships docked to it. Many of the rewards had clauses increasing the payout, for safe return of the missing.
I mainly slept, and kept well out of everything. I’d done my bit, and wasn’t really interested in what else happened as a result.
So of course, when several men entered my living room, and pointed guns at me, I was completely unprepared for it, but managed not to do something precipitate.
They gathered Jen, Jess, Lea, and me, at the airlock. Our hands were restrained behind out backs, but we could walk unhindered.
We were taken to station security, and put into an empty cell together.
"What's going on?" Jess finally asked.
We'd had no response to the same question from our captors, so I'm not sure why she expected one now.
"Pretty obvious I would have thought," said Jen, bitterly.
"No good deed goes unpunished?" I suggested.
She nodded.
We waited, until at length, the same lawyer appeared. He chivvied the guard out, so he wouldn’t be overheard.
"Sector military ordered your arrest," he said. "Apparently they thought you were dead."
He seemed to find it quite funny.
"But alas, someone recognized you when your message to us was sent on to them, as part of requesting some system defense."
"I knew suggesting that would be a bad idea," muttered Jess.
"Military will be here tomorrow apparently, and we’ve been ordered to keep you locked up until they arrive."
"What about our marines?" asked Jen.
"Not in any trouble, and the word is someone was very happy to find they weren't dead."
"Our funds?" asked Lea.
"All transactions have been finalized. Your funds are yours. If I come across any more you can claim, I'll drop those funds in your accounts. It's very likely investigations of the people here who had slaves, will lead us to others. The wave you started here will ripple across our space like an unstoppable tidal wave, and given time, all slaves will be found and freed. Having started the process, at least part of every bounty or reward will flow back to you. As now, the mining company will pick up the tab for the legal bills."
"Not much use to us in a cell," muttered Jess.
He grinned at her.
"We'll see about that. They better have their legal ducks all in a row, or we won't be handing you over. Of course, that assumes you're still here at the time."
His grin widened.
I looked daggers at Jess before she could mutter anything more, and she closed her mouth. It was more than obvious he expected our marines to bust us out of here, well before the military showed up.
"I'll take my leave of you now. The company is extremely happy with you, and should anything go unexpectedly bump in the night, no-one is going to look very closely at it until morning. When things settle down, if you ever wish to work for us, we could use a good mercenary ship in the protection of our assets. You have my contact if you need it. In spite of our payments to you, the company still owes you bigtime, so if you need anything we can provide in the future, please ask. Good day to you all."
He left, and the guard didn’t return.
Fifty Eight
I waited until the middle of the station night, before jumping us back to the ship.
Sasha and the troops were waiting for us. There was a short discussion, and we prepared to leave.
Sasha requested the docking clamps be released, and when asked, told the station she'd assumed command of the ship, on the request of the military, who were impoundin
g it away from the station, so we’d be unable to escape. The clamps were released, and Jen backed us away.
Half an hour away, the station suffered a momentary power interruption, during which a key part of their long range scanner array burned out.
"Done," I said.
Jen changed course, to take us well away from both the station, and the jump point.
The following morning, as I sat gazing out into space, Jess and Lea walked in. Tasha was doing her own space gazing, but turned her attention to the girls.
"Thorn," said Jess. "I think we found your home planet."
I looked up, and looked in her eyes to be sure she wasn’t kidding. She wasn’t.
"Where?"
"Would you understand it if I showed you?"
"Probably not. How then?"
"We found two references," said Lea. "One was in the station mission logs, ordering a two man ship on a recon mission. The other was on the logs of one of the smaller ships here, which indicated it'd been on the recon mission."
"Recon? Is that what they call taking slaves now?"
"The logs had nothing about taking slaves," said Jess. "Both seemed to suggest they're looking for a world to put a base on. They seemed to think they'd found it."
I sighed.
"That's just brilliant," I muttered.
"What?" asked Tasha.
"I find where home is, and pirates and slavers have taken it over. Just one of the smallest ships here is all they'd need. Reduce a town to slag, and the leaders would surrender the planet to them."
"They had nothing to fight back with?" asked Jess.
"Not as far as I know. Plenty of hurt making things available, but nothing which could get into orbit. And without being able to threaten a ship in orbit, the threat is all one way. Downwards."
"Well if they have a few ships in orbit," said Tasha, "we can take them on. And as long as they haven’t landed more than a company strength of troops, we can take them on as well, if we have to."
"What do you want to do Thorn?" asked Jen, from the doorway.
Fifty Nine
We jumped into where we thought my home system was, a week later.
I'd had to jump the ship out. And this time, it was a lot longer jump, since the jump point on both sides had military ships guarding it. They knew we were at large in the system somewhere, and eventually we'd be caught if all they did was keep us bottled up.
I spent hours preparing for the jump, gathering energy from the sun, building until I thought I had more than enough.
The jump itself was anti-climax, the ship dropping neatly into the jump lane to jump out on the other side of the next system. I was tired, but not excessively so. The others were amazed we'd jumped so far, but I played it down as having the time to prepare properly. In truth, I’d been amazed myself.
After that, we simply kept out of everyone's way, and headed towards my home. It was after all, a direction no-one was going to expect us to take, and they weren't looking for us yet anyway. All we had to do was not be recognized, until we diverted off the main space-ways.
Over the planet, we found two of the recon ships.
But at the same time, we discovered the planet had no signs of intelligent life.
"There was no intelligent life there," I joked, but I steeled myself for finding this wasn’t my home.
The pirates attacked us while I was musing over possibilities.
Without really thinking, I put up a force wall, and rammed it back towards them, extinguishing missiles, and then the ships.
"I thought someone who shall not be named, didn’t want to kill anyone else?"
Jen sounded a little bitter, but she still wasn’t over the whole ordeal. I'd talked to Jess and Lea about getting her to a shrink again, and they were working on it. But in the meantime, shooting the auctioneer, and beating up the high bidder, hadn't been as cathartic for her as I'd hoped.
I let it go.
"What happened to the people down there?" I asked instead.
"There's no evidence anyone ever lived there," said Jess. "This can't be your home planet."
"Do we have a map of the continents yet?"
"In progress."
I watched as the sensors mapped the planet. But I knew.
Eventually, I pointed to a small bay.
"That's where I lived."
"There's nothing there," said Jen. "You're memory must be at fault."
"I'm going down anyway."
"Thorn?"
"Yes Jen?"
"I'm not waiting. If you go down, you stay there."
Jess and Lea shot confused looks at her.
"I understand."
And I did. She was finally seeing me for what I really was. A threat to her position as captain. And in her damaged state, she couldn’t see how wrong she was.
"Give me five to get my stuff."
She nodded, and I walked off. Behind me, raised voices indicated Jen's position wasn’t acceptable to the others. But it was for me.
Home was down there. I didn't understand the world up here, and I was a threat to it. A serious threat. If I stayed any longer, I'd be revealed for what I was. And when it happened, I’d be hunted, enslaved by governments, and forced to kill for them.
I'd wanted to be a battle mage. I’d become a spacemage. Something more powerful than even the King could have imagined. And in that power, was the seeds of my own destruction.
For my own sake, and those I’d come to love, I needed to put the power away, and take it beyond those who would abuse it.
Tasha was waiting for me at the door into my bedroom.
"Are you really leaving?"
"Yes."
She looked at me, obviously trying to make up her mind about something.
"I'll miss you."
She hugged me, pecked me on the cheek, and left.
I gathered up my backpack, and filled it with what little I had. Which was more than I'd thought, and I copied it to take the rest. With both of them slung over my shoulders, I pressed the button for contacting the main bridge.
"Goodbye."
I jumped.
The last thing I wanted to do, was have girls begging me not to go, so I went before they could.
Where the city had been, only a few short months ago, there was only grass.
Sixty
I wandered the area for weeks, seeking any sign there'd ever been a civilization here.
There was nothing. It wasn’t a case of the civilization having been destroyed, or removed. There were no ruins, no signs of mining, quarrying for stone, or any other of the things people did when they built a city. It had never been.
And yet I remembered everything about it. I stood where my bedroom in the share house had been. I used my sight to peer downwards, seeking buried foundations, or anything at all. Nothing.
I spent days sending my sight all around the world, seeking any signs of people at all. Nothing.
Forced with making a choice about what to do, instead of deciding to make a house, and getting on with living, I decided to try and find where my original home had been.
And to my amazement, I found it. The King's castle was a ruin, and buried meters down, but it was there. It took a while, but I found the foundations of the house I grew up in, and the village around it. There wasn’t much left. I carefully excavated the ruins.
It wasn’t until I'd finished, I realized it wasn’t underwater. The oceans hadn't risen, and the site of my second life, was a plateau a little way inland. I wondered if the advanced society had caused the rising of the seas, as part of its own development. I'd never know now.
I cast my eyes around the ruins.
This was my home.
Was.
And still was. Only now I was truly alone.
I used my magic to rebuild my parent's house, and the furniture it'd had. I created a power generator, and used it to recharge my pad and tablet whenever I needed to, so I could keep reading my books, and keep looking at the images I
had stored. I mixed what I wanted, from three levels of life.
I hunted the local game with magic created weapons, and used magic to plant crops to keep my diet balanced.
My fourth life had begun, and I learned how to live all over again.
* * *
I'm leaving this record here, to be found if anyone ever comes here again. I still have no idea what happened to the advanced civilization I lived amongst only a few months ago, or even why it vanished.
But I can't help thinking it must have been something I did. Or didn’t do.
Somehow, Yesterday's Spacemage in the future, changed the past.
In all likelihood as you read this, I'm long dead now. I accepted this when I came back here, expected it at times to be a lonely existence, but I think it will be a good life. I may or may not update this record. Perhaps not. What happens to me now, isn’t really relevant.
I'll leave it to you, to be the judge of if what I did, was good or bad, right or wrong. In the end, I don’t think it matters.
Things were, things are, and things happen.
We make choices, and we live with them.
I lived with mine.
Thorn.
Last survivor of a planet which was never named.
Acknowledgements
Thanks goes to Kalen O'Donnell for the cover design for this book, and Egosoft for the ship image.
A Message to my Readers
I’ve had a lot of fun writing this book, although it's taken a lot longer than it normally does. At the time of publishing, I'm unsure if this is a standalone book, or the beginning of a trilogy. I'm also not sure if this is part of the Hunter Legacy, or something completely different. Time may tell.
If you have enjoyed this book, I hope you will take the time to leave a review. All reviews are greatly appreciated, as they help assist purchasing decisions by other readers.
Sales and reviews help me to focus on my next project. Sales pay my bills, and my ability to continue writing is dependent on the sales of this book, my previous series, and what comes after.
Yesterday's Spacemage Page 20
