by Greg Dragon
Cilas flew at full throttle towards the rusty hull, and Helga stayed on his heels as close as she could. Taking a chance to glance back at their ship, she saw how well the cloak had been working. There was distortion around its shape, but at a glance you couldn’t see it, though she knew that they would still register as a tiny blip on the radar.
They were at the shields now, and her helmet’s alarms began to scream. They had to pass through it slowly, fooling the generator that they were tiny pieces of debris, or else it would pulse and send them flying off into oblivion.
Cilas motioned to the tether. “Unclip your end,” he said through comms. Helga complied immediately, without understanding why he’d want to detach. Without the tether, she kept up as best she could, using their rockets to stay in position.
Suddenly Cilas was nudging himself inside the shields, passing the translucent barrier to reach the hull. Seeing him do this, Helga tried the same maneuver, but she must have moved too quickly since the shield rejected her.
She was pushed away violently, forcing her to max the rockets in order to slow down. It was a brief moment of panic but she focused on not going into a wicked spin. Once that occurred it would be the end for her, so she remembered her training and got herself under control. Once she was good, she flew back towards the ship, but there was now a huge boulder lodged inside her throat.
Thype me, she thought. I came in too fast like an idiot. She could barely breathe from the panic that invaded her body, but she focused on her job and found a way to push it down. On the second approach, she saw on the HUD that her fuel was all but depleted. One last shot, she thought, seeing Cilas climbing along the hull. If I miss again, it will be death. A long, lonely, drifting death.
Biting down hard and slowing her breathing, she flew near the shields and pulsed her rockets. Relaxing a bit, she closed her eyes, believed in herself, and nudged inside. A part of her expected to be rejected again, her luck run short and demise inevitable.
Don’t panic, she thought, and then something grabbed her arm. She opened her eyes and saw the large gloved hand of Cilas from within the shield.
He had attached the tether to the ship and was now using it as an anchor. He pulled her in slowly and she grabbed the tether, still worried that rejection was inevitable. Within a few minutes she was next to him, and he put his arm around her waist.
They stood breathing heavily against the hull, and she shifted her position to fully embrace him. If they didn’t have helmets she would have kissed him then and there. She no longer cared, now that she had been so close to death. She saw him gesture upwards, then freed the rest of the tether from his waist. Now he hooked that to her belt so that they were both anchored to the ship.
When he motioned to his back, Helga remembered the attachments for their magnetic boots. She reached inside his pack and pulled them out, and he reached into hers and did the same.
Though her heart was still beating thunderously in her ears, Helga knew that the time for hesitation was long gone. Now it was move or die, and Cilas would be relying on her to do more than watch his back. They clumsily aided each other in attaching the magnetic soles. When they both had them on, they activated the grips and started the walk towards their target.
They found the small porthole after a few minutes of searching, and Cilas knelt down to peer inside. He held this position for what seemed like an eternity, then looked up at her and gave her the thumbs up.
Pulling out torches, they went to work on the glass, melting away screws to loosen the exterior aesthetic. This work took a long time, and Helga worried that they would be discovered. The ship should recognize the intrusion and alert it to the bridge. Though with the Inginus pressing them for identification, she hoped that their pilot would be distracted.
The frame came off, and then the first layer of glass, revealing the reinforced crystal pane that would be the real challenge to dislodge. Cilas unhooked the tether from their waists, and then attached the frame to one end. He welded the other to the grill of the crystal pane, working as if he had done this before.
“Give it some room,” he said, and Helga backed away. After a count of three, he heaved the frame out past the shield, leaving the tether in its wake. When the tether was taut, he reeled it back in, and that was when Helga realized his plan.
As soon as the metal frame came in contact with the outer shield, it rejected it violently and threw it out into space. Cilas barely got out of the way as the inertia yanked the crystal pane free, leaving a hole inside the hull where the porthole had once been.
Two figures flew out, ejected violently into the vacuum of space, and Helga stared at Cilas with horror. She wondered if he’d known that they were inside. She had been under the impression that it was empty!
“Now it’s clear,” he said with a smile. “We need to get in and ditch these suits, immediately. Security protocol will seal the doors, giving us about ten minutes to prep for combat.”
“I know the drill,” she said, still stunned by the death of those two unfortunate souls.
Cilas gripped an edge and then pulled himself inside, powering down his magnetic boots. Helga did the same, but her EVA was too bulky. She was struggling to be fast, but got stuck halfway inside the hole. Every ship had the means to repair itself, and portholes had metal panels to seal the glass.
She feared that she would be in the way once the processes began, but she got inside through sheer force of will and scrambled away from the hole. Once inside, she saw that they were in one of the crew quarters, with rows of bunks lined up on the wall.
Cilas was already out of his EVA suit, and holding on to what appeared to be a table. Helga didn’t know how he’d done it—removing that bulky suit so fast—but she understood the need for speed at this point. An alarm was going off, and as expected, a section of the hull slid shut, covering the porthole. The alarms went silent when the vacuum sealed, but she could hear men on the other side of the door.
“Ten minutes,” Cilas had said, and they had already expended several. Helga threw off the helmet and struggled out of the bulky material, making sure to grab her knife and wrist comms from the pack. This ship had oxygen to breathe, and an atmosphere with gravity, allowing them to move around freely.
This is definitely Alliance, she thought. No, human, but not one of ours. This is a militia, possibly pirate, in league with Amatu.
She felt a rage coming on as she realized that they had been sold. The Louines had helped but at the price of selling them off to human gangsters. When she saw Cilas’s face, she recognized the same rage reflected in it. She joined him by the door with her knife raised, staying on his hip the way she was trained.
“Less than a minute,” he whispered, and she nodded, ready for action. Whoever was coming in would get the biggest surprise of their life.
19
If one was to draft up a book on Cilas Mec’s life, each chapter would begin with a situation just like this: Desperate measures, no advantage, and waiting by a door for an unknown enemy. Somehow, the lieutenant and former Second Class Cadet always made it through, and much of it had to do with a natural instinct for survival.
“If you want to be a thinker, you stay on the bridge,” an old instructor once told him. “In the field your brain is a liability. Shut it off and rely on your instinct and training. This is why we have you out here freezing and dying. You must learn to trust your team, suffocate your weaknesses, and defeat the enemy.”
These words—or some variation of them—were drilled into recruits during the grueling days of BLAST. It was this training that kept Cilas calm as he waited. The ticking numbers of an invisible clock counting down inside his head.
There was a hiss, and the sound of metal against metal as the door turned counter-clockwise and swung in towards him and Helga. He held his breath for just a moment, needing to confirm the target before unleashing his tools.
A slender form slipped in wearing an EVA suit, and toting a flobot loaded with a welder and o
ther tools. Helga was on her before he could assess who she was, and that was when he was forced into action. Behind the first woman—who was now on the ground—were two armed men, bearded and grizzled.
Cilas hopped over his partner and put a shoulder into the first while slamming his knife into the thigh of the second. The space beyond the door was a long passageway, but Cilas recognized that they would have sealed the next door in case of a loss of atmosphere. This meant that their screams would not bring reinforcements, so he let his knife sing in a splendid display of stabbing.
By the time he was done the place looked like a slaughterhouse, with blood smeared on the bulkhead, deck, and his person. He turned to check on Helga, and was surprised to find that she had the first woman unconscious on the floor.
This made him happy, since they needed answers, and the Ensign had enough foresight to keep her victim alive. Besides having a hostage, they now had weapons. Cilas relieved the corpses of their pistols and tossed one over to Helga.
“Point of no return,” he said, breathing heavily. “I hope that we’re right about them being pirates.”
“We were right,” Helga said, motioning him over to look at the woman. Cilas walked over and knelt next to the unconscious body. Helga had shredded the EVA with her knife so he could easily remove the topmost portion.
She was young and obviously Vestalian, with light brown skin, freckles on her shoulders, and long, auburn hair. He brushed her hair to the side to reveal her neck, and there at the nape was a slave’s tattoo.
“How did you know not to kill this woman?” Cilas said.
“When I jumped her, the eyes told me that something was wrong,” Helga said. “I still hurt her pretty badly, but it couldn’t be avoided. Those EVAs are pretty thick, and there were three of them. You know how it is, Lieutenant … I just reacted.”
Cilas wondered about Helga’s answer. It wasn’t that he doubted she could read someone’s intentions, but as a person new to killing, he wondered if she was being honest. There had been plenty of situations in the past when a recruit would freeze on a kill.
Most of the time—due to the war—it was a Geralos commando that was the target. From their days as cadets they were taught to hate the lizards, so when it came time to act, most were able to do it.
Cilas had known too many recruits who had lost their lives due to hesitating. Geralos looked different from humans in every way, and they were violently aggressive. Convincing an ESO to kill one for the first time was a lot easier than asking them to take a human’s life. Helga had killed on the moon of Dyn, but that was a Geralos running away from her.
He looked into her eyes to see if she was lying, but what he saw looking back was something indecipherable. Was it anger, fear, or something new? The only thing he was sure of was that it was different—she was different. Here in front of him was a woman he no longer recognized. She seemed older, tired, and hard.
“You and that knife, Lieutenant,” she said, her eyes now wide with wonder. “I don’t want to ever be on the business side of that thing.”
Same humor, Cilas thought, then smiled and got to his feet. “She’s your responsibility now, Ate. We need to move. I think that door on the far end there is going to be locked. Now, this is the crew’s quarters, so there are bound to be stragglers once we get past it. This woman is the only hostage we can afford to take.”
“I got it, Lieutenant. I’ll kill anything that moves,” Helga said. He could tell from the look on her face that she wasn’t thrilled with the plan. “Wait,” she said. “I have an idea. Maybe we don’t have to keep moving blindly through the ship. If we could get her to talk, she could probably help us.”
“Or she could trigger an alarm and get us swarmed within the hour,” Cilas said.
“No disrespect, Lieutenant, but I disagree” Helga said. “If her tattoo tells us anything, she’ll be happy we came onboard.”
Cilas weighed the odds and decided to take a chance on her idea. The faster they were able to take the ship, the greater their chances of survival. A long battle would have them winded and prone to making mistakes, and not knowing the layout of the ship made that almost guaranteed. Then there was Brise Sol, cloaked and by himself. He would be found and eliminated if they did not succeed.
“Okay, wake her up,” he said, “But make it fast. Whoever is captain will be waiting to hear a report on the breach. When these three don’t answer their comms, they will send spacers to investigate. Then we will be forced to do what we have to do.”
Helga woke the woman up, then covered her mouth to stifle the scream before it could occur. She mounted her in such a way that all Cilas could see was her back, and from the way the woman was kicking her legs, he made to step in and help.
“Ate?” he started, but she held her forefinger up to tell him to wait. Cilas started to object—now he knew what the look was that she had on her face.
Obviously Helga had lost her mind and was torturing this woman unnecessarily. This too was something that Cilas had seen before. When violence happened at the scale that they’d seen, some recruits were prone to become the very thing they feared.
Cilas started forward, but Helga shifted her weight, and now he could see the woman’s face as she allowed her to sit up. He saw her expression change from fear to surprise, and then she did the strangest thing and hugged Helga Ate.
She was definitely Vestalian but spoke an unknown language that Helga seemed to understand. As she spoke, she kept looking back at him, her eyes like a frightened child’s. Helga looked back at him once, then spoke something soft and harmonic. This caused the woman to start crying, and then they hugged again.
“Lieutenant,” Helga said after a time, “This is Ina Reysor, a Meluvian pilot, formerly of the Aqnaqak.”
“Meluvian?” Cilas said, confused by the woman’s human features. Her freckles were plentiful, like a Meluvian’s, but it didn’t explain her dark complexion. Is there a region of Meluvia with people like this, he wondered. If there is, I’m definitely going to have to take my shore leave there.
Helga grunted. “Well, I mean she’s obviously human, but she’s a Meluvian citizen that was kidnapped and enslaved by these pirates.”
“So they are pirates,” Cilas said, feeling the weight fall from his shoulders. He had done what he had to do in killing the two men, but he wanted to be sure they weren’t Alliance. They had come aboard the ship, knowing that it was hostile, but there was always the chance that they were wrong.
“It gets deeper,” Helga continued. “They have clearance codes which gives them access to Alliance space. They have others like her, spacers, stamped and reclaimed as slaves. She said that they were given jobs around the ship. Hers is to handle various repairs.”
“How many of them are actually on this ship?” Cilas said. “Pirates, I mean, not slaves.”
“She doesn’t know, but she estimates about thirty or so,” Helga said.
“She doesn’t speak basic?”
“She does,” Helga said, “but for some reason, she chooses not to use it. She speaks a few languages from Meluvia, and that’s what we’ve been communicating in.”
“So she understands me then. Good,” Cilas said. “She will help us take the ship, but I will need to know who among the captives is trustworthy. A ship run by slaves, jumping around Alliance space unchecked – it defies belief, do you know what I mean? If most of them are former spacers like this one, there should have been a mutiny by now.”
“We tried to mutiny once before and eleven of us lost our lives,” the woman said. “They have the weapons, and we have our marks.” She brushed her hair to the side to show her slave’s tattoo. “There is something inside of us, something they can use. If we are defiant, or deemed worthless, they can kill us, just like this!” She snapped her finger for emphasis, and the sound echoed throughout the passageway.
“What’s with the language games?” Cilas said.
“I do it to prevent them from making small talk with me,”
she said. “I don’t have to tell you what we deal with here, but each of us deals with it in our own way. If I don’t talk to them, I don’t have to understand them. They are animals—”
“Got it, I got it,” Cilas said, not wanting to know more. “You were on the Aqnaqak. How long ago was that? Who was your captain, and what was your rank?”
“I don’t know times or dates. They don’t tell us anything. But my captain was Tara Cor, and I was an Ensign. Ensign Reysor,” she said, smiling.
“Good to meet you, Ensign Reysor. I am Lieutenant Cilas Mec, and if you’re willing to help us take this ship, we’ll have you back with your Aqnaqak family. I’m going to need you to hang back and listen to Ensign Ate. If we play this wrong it can go south fast, and we all will be dead or back in shackles.”
Ina nodded but then she knitted her brow and let out a scream before covering her mouth. Cilas spun and dropped to a knee, firing off a round that struck the bulkhead near the door. It ricocheted into the chest of a pirate, who had come in while they were talking.
Helga fired her own pistol and dropped the second pirate behind the one Cilas shot. It happened so fast that he stood frozen, waiting to see if more would emerge. But the door was open and they could see through it to the compartment beyond. They were alone again, with the exception of the two corpses.
Cilas stared at his handgun. “Freaking kinetic rounds? That first shot went wide, but thank the planets that the ammo wasn’t frangible. Did you see what happened? They use kinetic rounds. If we’re not careful, we can actually put a hole through the hull.”
“Yeah, bullets that ricochet means that we cannot afford a shootout,” Helga said.
“And that was the reinforcements. We’re officially out of time,” Cilas said. “Get her up and let’s get moving, and be careful with your aim. Use your knife when you can. It’s move or die from here on out.”
