by K A Carter
Rhion butted in and said, “D.L. the Palios systems are gone. All gone”
Nario’s eyes widened, “Wait, The Lanx.”
“Your pals have their hands full. Each system is worse than the last.” Corrinne said.
“Haven’t heard from the lanky bastard?” Rhion scratched at his nose just above his red mustache that contained a few gray hairs.
“No, actually I haven’t.”
“Exactly. The Joint General’s Staff is allocating more ships to the sector. As far we can tell, there ain’t much of the Lanx left.”
Nario did his best to hide the concern in his eyes. He couldn’t tell whether it was working or not and seeing Corrinne made it more difficult to cap his emotions.
“There’s something else D.L.,” Rhion said, with no clue as to why he paused for a moment. “Tell him Corrinne,”
“Tell me what?” Nario grew agitated and voiced his words accordingly.”
Nario pondered what it could be. He felt as though he had heard just about every bit of the bad news. It was bad enough the Lanx was in disarray. It could only mean that the CPF and its allies in the Palios system wouldn’t be able to keep the enemy from their doorsteps. Draul, if he remembered their name correctly. For all the trouble it was causing he was curious on what this formidable enemy looked like.
It was unsettling to think that the federation was practically defenseless amidst the separatist Brink. If he didn’t get a chance to unify the governing bodies of the solar system, it would mean that the inner planets would have to relinquish any assets it had past the inner asteroid belt. Whatever left would be up for grabs.
Nario braced himself for whatever it was Corrinne was about to say. He let his shoulders relax and watched as Corrinne opened her mouth to speak.
“Orcus,” she said. “They are working with the Draul.”
Chapter 32: S’tiri
She looked cold in the face. Her complexion showing a blotchy A minor fog covered the edges of the helmet visor. An Irinan fighter pilot.
It took him several minutes to calm her down. Speaking in an ancient dialect only military personnel spoke in time of desperation. It wasn’t a prisoner situation but S’tiri felt that it would expedite her situation.
The fighter pilot clung to the edge of the wall where systems hung untouched. She panted as though her suit scrubbers weren’t working and with each breath her gripped her wound tighter.
“Your name and rank?” S’tiri asked.
She didn’t respond right away, but instead looked at him and the others with sad eyes. Pyx, Nilus, Garrek, all of them standing tentatively. “A’tai Field Operative D’ara M’sulei.”
He hadn’t heard of her so she must’ve been a recruit that had been shipped out in the wake of the war. It was a subtle pleasantry to see and hear an Irinan in his presents again. It had felt like it too long before . For the sake of circumstances, it had been.
S’tiri had trouble recalling his rank before being captured. A byproduct of whatever serum the beast that called himself Thalus had used on him. He spent a second recollecting and went with something generic. “A’tai Official S’tiri Z’etamurod.”
The fighter pilot let out a sigh and tried to posture herself more accordingly. An official was in her presence. “Oh,” she said. “Sorry sir,”
“Don’t be. What happened here?” S’tiri asked as he gently placed a left hand on her shoulder and gestured awkwardly to tell her to relax.
“Our squadron racked up with the N’uas taking on this ship and a few others. From the looks of it we were winning. Next thing we know, navigational coordinators in the fighters went wild. Like some sort of jammer went off. I was the lucky one. The others flew right into open space and they picked each of them off.”
S’tiri processed the information with a blink and asked. “Where is the rest of the fleet?”
“There’s a pretty good chance they aren’t even in the system. If there still is one that is.”
“Not in the system,” he said aloud not fluctuating his voice in the form of a question.
“A portion of Draul ships went planetside while we were still in battle. U’naan issued an executive order. All high-ranking officials to be evacuated.”
S’tiri was hoping that meant that some of the people he knew had gotten out. But there was no way he could figure out the whereabouts of his longtime friend Donas, or the aggravating agent Z’oni. Despite the people around him who were there to help, he missed being around his own kind.
In his own way he missed them. He missed what he remembered of them, which was the sense of normality that had been surely replaced with the execution of his .
A scratchy creek in the bowels of the Draul scout ship rippled like auditory spider webs. It paralleled the continuous ring of radioactive alarms. It wouldn’t take much more for the exposed reactor to penetrate any shielding that remained.
“Can you move?” S’tiri asked. He stood up and placed his carbine on his back mount. It folded back into a more manageable size.
“Not as though I have a choice,” D’ara said. She spoke it in the ancient language.
S’tiri returned the favor, he knew that the apparent conditions she was in were more than suspicious. Nonetheless she was alive. One Irinan, accompanied by the varied bodies that hovered over them like gawky shadows in the night of the effulgent moon S’tiri and she called A’sampi. By the animated glances she gave whilst attempting to stand, it was clear she had no clue whom the others were.
“Your suit is punctured,” Pyx said. She walked over, examining it closer.
D’ara shifted almost immediately and stood straight, her wound revealing itself to be a amaranthine blood splatter that covered a discernible blaster shot. She had seen them and fought them and it didn’t explain how she survived such a danger.
The Draul as S’tiri remembered them were heinous. What preluded with a blaster shot surely should have resulted in the impalement of such an enemy.
“I’m fine,” shouted D’ara, her wound a clamp of pain to keep her from sustaining a full standing posture.
S’tiri grabbed her elbow and shoulder and perched her up against the wall. “How did you escape?” he said.
She looked down almost in a shame and back up at him. Her face a bare brush of guilt that washed itself away with each signal of assiduous agony.
“I ran,” she said. “It’s all I could do. After, I sealed myself in here. The Draul aboard had been gauged out with one single hit to their reactor core. A fortuitous shot, no doubt. It was simple, I would be left to die. They didn’t hesitate.”
S’tiri swung her arm over his neck and nodded the others back out of the room. “Let’s go. You’ve already been exposed to radiation. You could be dead soon.”
D’ara didn’t refuse and released her muscles and let her weight fall onto him. She kept her legs moving in place and together they walked out.
“Pyx, signal the ship to swing around closer.”
Pyx tapped her two fingers congruent to her thumb onto the suit display and spoke into it. “We need the ship in jump range,” she said.
The palpable Hetoo on the other end said. “Swinging it.”
The inner airlock closed behind them.
Nilus motioned by the controls, his hand sticking in place to press the airlock release at any given time.
Through the window, a light shifted and tumbled to the opposite side of the circle. A cylindrical beam glowed through, and for a moment he couldn’t see anything outside.
“Ready,” said Illa through the suit com.
“Coming,” said Pyx.
Nilus opened the airlock. Everything went weightless and empty. A green tractor pulled them, a slow motion that began to pick up into a considerable gravitational tug.
S’tiri took hold of D’ara’s abdomen. Gripping her wound through the slight hand that she had pressed against it. He put all his force into placing pressure on it as the group was slowly pulled toward the Zeylon.
&
nbsp; In the glistening zenith of the sun that perched behind Mulaya, a tiny ball nearly invisible grew from the surface of the planet. It approached gradually as it hung off the orbit of the glossy ball of green with . Two others joined.
“We’ve got company,” said Garrek, huskily
S’tiri kept focused on them, as the silhouettes grew to unveil their true shape. Elongated spheres that carried cannons on four equal sides that were so big, the barrels overshadowed the fuselage.
“Almost there,” Nilus said.
The Zeylon’s forward airlock was close enough to see.
S’tiri had been so focused on the menacing ships nearing, he forgot to check on D’ara. She clung to him with a fleeting grip. Prior to seeing the ships, S’tiri used the noise of her muffled grunts as reminder that he still had someone still alive in his hands.
Once the ships stopped within a small scanning range of his suit, he knew it couldn’t end well. And D’ara had stopped her heavy breathing. It had turned into a deathly silence. If it weren’t for the fog that blemished her helmet visor as she breathed, he would have thought the worst.
The haunting spheres hung in place, unflinching and made it a great deal more difficult to focus on the task at hand. He panned his sight to the airlock. An oncoming piece of debris making its way aside the tractor.
Nilus hung on the edges of the airlock as it opened and let Pyx and Garrek in first. S’tiri followed embracing D’ara as Nilus closed the compartment. Gravity restored itself with the push of a panel control that sat in place next to the inner airlock door.
“You okay?” S’tiri asked, abandoning his ancient speak.
No response came from the frail, stiff, body that was D’ara that lay covered in her own blood. She looked dead if not close to it.
The ships were gone by the time S’tiri got unsuited and returned to the bridge. No clue as to what their intentions were. He knew that it was no doubt an extension of the Draul that remained on and around the planet. What didn’t make sense was why the ships chose not to pursue them.
It was a precaution but S’tiri gathered his small flotilla to the edge of the solar system and gave strategizing another go. He had felt foolish for thinking that it was possible to drop out of warp amidst an ongoing war that he himself tipped the balance of. Now that he had an opportunity to think about it, it sounded asinine.
“We monitored the ships that approached as we brought you aboard. I can only conclude that they are sentries,” said Illa. She brought up a recorded image of the spheres, its circumference hiding its exhaust or acceleration.
“Why didn’t they attack?” S’tiri asked. He stepped closer to the image and took note of the unusual vessel. It was clear to him that whatever it was doing, something about getting to the surface of his home planet seemed imperative.
“Proximity,” she responded, matter-of-factly. “I caught it scanning only up to roughly four thousand kilometers ahead of itself. Probably some sort of visual alert it detected. We must’ve been just out of reach.” Illa said.
It didn’t seem like a stroke of luck and though he was remaining calm throughout the process, S’tiri felt knots in his chest like slow moving inertia dampeners that buckled under pressure when throttled in outdated Volgas that would be refitted for mainland races outside the cities. He had been a patron of such games once in his life.
It wasn’t any physical affect. It wasn’t the cyclic gravity the counter-rotating disks provided on each deck. It was unlikely that it was from radiation sickness that seeped through his aperture shields. It was more internal then that. Mental even.
As S’tiri made his way to the newly formed medical bay, he was stricken with an untethered guilt. It wasn’t there before. Now it made itself known in the form of a constant mental barrage of questions. He hadn’t dropped into what he would’ve liked. An opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of his people. In the eyes of himself.
At this point, they may have thought he was dead. It was the only source of guilt relief he could find among his thoughts. It was partial. He was also shamed by the facilitation of the enslavement of his own species. It made him not want to go down to the surface.
It was one thing facing fears in battle and another seeing them at the point of no return. His only hope was D’ara. A small glimmer that with coordinated plan he could possibly find where the leaders and A’tai officials had gone.
S’tiri stepped into the med bay, his eyes attentive to the backside of the room. There she laid. Her wound was being worked on. A medical automaton pinching and cauterizing the wound with a surgical laser that didn’t hurt in surgery but would likely leave a devastating soreness in recovery.
Her eyes opened as though she could hear him approach and her posture shifted to one side. The medical mech retracted its bits and moved the table with utensils on it.
“You saved my life,” she said. D’ara prepared to scoot herself up her bed and failed in a shatteringly visible grit of postsurgical pain.
“I wasn’t going to let you die,” S’tiri responded, standing beside the bed. He helped her sit up gently placing his hands under her arms.
“Who are you really?” D’ara asked, slowly. “This is not an A’tai vessel and you are not U’naan.”
S’tiri grinned to relieve his tiny bit of anxiety at the question. In truth, he didn’t know how to answer it. “No, I’m not A’tai. Not anymore.”
“Then what are you?”
The words were all but easily translated. He dozed off for a brief moment and tried to think to himself what it was about it that made him so uncomfortable. What am I? he thought. It morphed into a philosophical question not answered by the blunt explanation of a soldier without a flag. Though that would be an accurate description.
S’tiri rose to exit the room. He slowed his walk to match his flowing thoughts.
“I …I don’t know.”
“It’s clear you want to help,” she said. “I don’t care about the rest. Whether you’re a deserter or a mercenary. It doesn’t really matter now. You’re here. That is good enough for me.”
S’tiri stopped in his tracks and turned back around to see her staring admiringly. He smiled back beneath morose eyes. He wanted to say thank you.
“So, what’s next then?” D’ara said.
“You heal,” he responded.
“Okay, then what?”
His shoulders shrunk into his back. He felt a quick gust of relief. It was okay he didn’t know how to explain himself to anyone or that he didn’t know anything beyond that he needed to do something.
“Then we find the A’tai.”
Chapter 33: Jericho
If he didn’t know any better, Jericho would have mistaken what he was seeing for some sort of replica of old Earth he used to see in the opulent resort ads that hugged the side of buildings in the districts he used to wander.
It was the worst kind of longing. Dortrus wasn’t similar enough to Titan, for him to replace the two and feel comfort, but was alike just enough that he yearned to return even more. He tried not to face the idea so briskly in hopes that if he waited on fixating over it, it would actually be true. Somewhere in the fluff of the artificial enunciation, was honesty. At least he could hope there was. For the time being, it would settle his stomach and he could get back to the task at hand.
A group of three in front of him, Anda, Morris, and Zen. A few others had branched out. Scud, Keon, most of the others left with the idea to find anything that made sense of why the ship had brought them there.
By the looks of it, Morris and Zen were getting along well enough. A contrariety to how he surely viewed her when they had first met. The brush grew thicker and with the rise of vegetation their bodies disappeared and all Jericho could see were the tops of their shoulders and up.
“Doesn’t look inhabited by humans to me,” said Anda in a voice that made him smile. She hung just a little ahead of him shouldering a blaster that’s scope was nearly as big as the blaster itself.
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nbsp; “Yeah well looks can be deceiving,” he responded.
For a moment Jericho could hear the sounds of water rushing over rock beds and a crackle of indigenous wood. Out of the blissful aesthetics came a roar. One that shook the ground beneath them as though it came from such a place.
“Oh shit,” Anda said. She gripped her blaster off her shoulder and aimed down its excessive scope. A minute later she said, “I told you. I have a feeling about these things.”
Jericho didn’t respond right away instead moved up beside her.
“Morris,” he whispered firmly. “Zen.”
“Yeah Cap, we heard it too.” Morris’ voice carried through the com.
“We got a problem.” Zen said.
He sped up to see what it was, muscling through the high grass and folding it with the swing of an arm. “What is it?” he said as he broke from the grass.
“Just look.”
Jericho peered down at a cliff that sunk at least a thousand feet. Unidentifiable beasts roamed the smaller grass patches that were separated by rock formations. Another roar came.
“This must be what happened to them,” Anda said.
Jericho scanned below, the largest of the beasts foraging the surroundings amongst the smaller animals. He knew that it was a better thing to be up at the top.
The planet proved to be an unclaimed wilderness that stretched on to the curving horizon. If there were any humans on Dortrus before now, it seemed as though they all were gone. No immediate traces or signatures that any of them may have left behind.
Jericho led the other three to rendezvous with Scud and Keon. Unfortunately, locking onto their location presented dense forestation. It was an uneasy idea. But that’s where they were. If they made it through, there couldn’t be anything dangerous ahead. Otherwise Scud would’ve said something.
“See this?” said Scud. “Manmade for sure.” He flailed a hand at a cavern opening, its darkness shadowing an unknown depth. Steps crafted into the stone that lowered down into the blackness.
“We’re not going in there,” Zen said. She took a step back.
