Captives of the Kratzen (Hearts in Orbit)

by S. C. Mitchell

  “So without her, they couldn’t have gotten here?”

  Carter nodded.

  He went on to bring Tina up to speed on what they’d learned and how they’d come to be here. Talking with her helped pass the journey, though he longed to do more than simply talk.

  Hell, he had the course already plotted back to The Starboard Mist. Why was he manually flying? He finally had some alone time with Tina.

  Engaging the auto pilot, he pulled her from her seat into his lap. This was more like it. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  His lips claimed hers and she responded fully, threading her fingers into his hair and pulling him close. Warm, passionate, she gave back so fully.

  He flipped the switch that turned off the ship’s artificial gravity, and suddenly they were floating. “Ever made love in Zero-G?”

  Widening her eyes, she cocked her head at him. “Well, I’ve only ever made love with you, so . . . no.”

  Chuckling, he shrugged. “I haven’t either. Want to try it?”

  She was floating away from him. He took her hand and pulled her into a hug.

  “With you? Anything.” Her kiss was soft, experimental, but it made him so hard.

  A warning blip from the command console shattered the moment, drawing his attention.

  What now?

  He swam back to the control station and turned the gravity back on. Taking his seat he checked the monitor.

  Gravitational forces had pulled the GRT-11 slightly off course as it passed closest to the Dark Nebula.

  Carter made the course correction, taking an exit vector to avoid getting pulled deeper into the gigantic dust cloud. “You’re rusty, Tina. Your course took us a little too near the nebula’s gravity field.”

  It wasn’t a big thing, but in Tina’s case, a little surprising. She was always very exact in her plotting, making adjustments for any possible interference.

  But she was probably distracted. All that stuff that happened on Quendor.

  Suddenly all business, Tina threw herself back into her seat. “It shouldn’t have. I know this sector probably better than anyone. I used to navigate pirate ships through here all the time.”

  Her fingers flew over the command consol. “What the frack?”

  He shook his head. “It’s no big deal. We all make mistakes.”

  He wanted her back in his lap.

  Was she angry at him for pointing it out? Maybe he should have kept his mouth shut.

  “But this isn’t a mistake. I plotted the right course.”

  Yeah, I should have kept my mouth shut.

  “It really doesn’t matter.”

  She shook her head. “But it does. Look at the readings. The Dark Nebula has too much mass, its gravity field is all wrong. Look.”

  She transferred the readings to his screen.

  A chill coursed through his stomach. She was right. “It’s as if—”

  “Something was hiding in it. Something massive.” Tina started a scan of the system.

  What could it be? A stray planet? A really big asteroid? Whatever was causing the different readings had to be huge, but there were no cosmic events on any of the starcharts that could affect the nebula’s gravitational field.

  She displayed the new scan on both screens. “There’s a lot of interference from the nebula, but it looks like way more mass right in that highlighted area. The dust cloud is very dense right there.

  Perfect for hiding something.

  “When we came through the wormhole from Andromeda, we saw no sign of Kristin Devenport’s command craft, but there were many more motherships than what left with her from Andromeda. She has to be generating a wormhole somewhere to bring more of them over. Do you think this is where she could be hiding?”

  “That would make sense. She’d know the nebula well. Should we check it out?”

  They were too far from The Starboard Mist for direct contact, but Carter sent of a mailpost packet to Rik explaining the situation.

  Galaxynet connections in this sector were sketchy, so the message would probably take a while to get through.

  If that was Kristin’s command craft hiding in the nebula, this could get dangerous. But they needed to know, and there wasn’t a better scout ship than the GRT-11 for a mission like this. Rik would want him to find out whatever he could.

  “Shields and cloaking up. We’ll go in on silent running.” They would move much slower, but would be completely undetectable unless something ran into them. The new parabola cloaking could make them invisible to scans or the naked eye from as close as three meters away. Not that anyone could see them in the nebula.

  He maneuvered toward the dense cloud of gasses and dust. Visibility dropped through the view screen and he had to rely on scanning to avoid any objects in their path.

  “There, look. Is that a hole?” Tina pointed to the cloud representation created by the proximity scanner. On the tri-dimensional display, a dark sphere appeared to be residing in the densest part of the cloud.

  Shrugging, he turned to port, angling toward the sphere. “Let’s go check it out.”

  As the nose of the craft broke the edge of the anomaly, the display screen cleared showing an almost perfect sphere of dark space. As if the dust and gasses had been pushed out from the middle to clear a bubble in space.

  Gooseflesh crept up the back of his neck.

  In the middle of the cleared space, a wormhole pulsed and spun. Beside it was a huge array of Kratzen motherships, linked together into a massive ball.

  Still more motherships streamed out of the wormhole, to connect into the array that was currently the size of a medium planet. There had to be hundreds, possibly thousands of them.

  “Gods. This must be the whole of the Kratzen civilization.”

  They weren’t simply planning on invading a few planets. They had to be planning to conquer the entire galaxy.

  Tina’s hand clutched his upper arm. “What are we going to do?”

  What could they do?

  “We need to get as much information as we can. Then we need to get out of here.”

  He eased the ship out into the open. There was plenty of space between for the GRT-11 to glide through and into the midst of the ships. With cloaking up and on silent running, they should be able to get right into their midst without detection.

  Theoretically.

  Gods, he hated relying on untested theories at times like this, but the ship did have some great specifications.

  As they closed the distance, the buzzerhive of activity became more evident. Smaller ships flew between the big motherships, and he had to swerve out of their way at times. Slowly, they edged their way in, looking to see what they could discover.

  At the center of it all they noted something different, Kristin’s delta-winged command ship. Connection tubes girded it to the other ships.

  He carefully angled his trajectory, sailing close to the mothership hulls, to avoid collisions with the speeding smaller vessels, inching his way toward Kristin’s command craft. One wrong turn, one slight scrape, and they would be revealed.

  Maybe he should turn around. Leave and get Tina and the information back to safety. Then come back on his own.

  Was there time?

  “So much could go wrong. Maybe we should—”

  “No.” Her soft rebuke spoke volumes. “We may never get another chance at this.”

  She was right.

  Damn it.

  But that didn’t make this easier.

  ~ ~ ~

  Tina held her breath as Carter maneuvered between the hulking motherships. At one point they passed within a few meters of a porthole with two Kratzen mantises looking out right at them. Close enough for Tina to see their faceted eyes.
/>   But nothing registered. The bugs never moved. Their eyes didn’t look at the ship, they looked through it.

  She didn’t have a clue how the technology worked, but she sure was glad it did.

  Ahead, on the side of the command craft, a side hatchway scrolled open to let a transport vehicle out.

  “There.” She pointed.

  He stiffened. “Inside? We might not be able to get back out.”

  Dangerous to be sure. Probably suicidal. But they’d never get another chance like this. “If we can find Kristin, kill her, they lose their connection to our galaxy. She’s the conduit, isn’t that what Kirtl told you?”

  He drew in a deep breath and slowly released it. “You know what you’re proposing here?”

  She did. “What are two lives compared to the billions we could be saving?”

  He started moving the ship toward the opening. “You’re the bravest person I’ve ever known.”

  Cold sweat rolled down her back and slid between her breasts. “Frack that. I’m scared as hell.”

  When it came to bravery, there was no way she could ever match Carter. She just prayed this one act, possibly this one last act, would be worth the risk.

  The opening led to an airlock big enough to hold five ships the size of the GRT-11. They glided into the empty space as the door began to roll shut behind them. Another door lay ahead.

  Carter cocked his head. “If that doesn’t open on its own we’re going to have to blast it open. It’s going to make a lot of noise.”

  Tina shrugged, consigned to her fate. “I’m good with that. We may have to take apart the whole ship to find that terraleach, Kristin.”

  His hand hovered over the blaster controls. “Three. Two.”

  The door began to roll open.

  He moved his hand back to the flight controls.

  “Okay. Let’s go see if the terraleach is home.”

  Chapter 35

  The door opened up into a vast chamber. Machinery lined the back wall. Supply boxes, stacked haphazardly, cluttered the floor. Easing the ship slowly out into the room, Carter glided silently past bugs standing less than ten meters away without drawing any attention.

  Amazing.

  The level of technology needed to design a craft like the GRT-11 had to be astronomical.

  But while designing a craft like this was well above his pay grade, flying the ship wasn’t.

  High ceilings in the chamber allowed him to hover higher, rising above the scurrying insectoids to avoid any accidental collisions with them. Designed more like a concert hall than a starship control room, the chamber featured a raised stage at the far end.

  On that stage, the bizarre form of Kristin Devenport drew his gaze. She stood still, eyes glazed as if in full concentration. Her four raptorial legs supported the grotesque, chitinous body. Cables and tubes flowed from her, connecting to the machinery on the wall behind her. Only her head, shoulders, and arms remained human in form, and bore any similarity to the villain who’d tortured and beaten him.

  Tina, eyes wide as she stared out the viewport, had her hand on the blaster holstered at her hip.

  Blasters hadn’t done any good against Kristin’s new body before, but Carter had bigger guns at his control now. He locked the GRT-11’s phase cannons on to her form, and programmed two photon torpedoes to launch her way for good measure.

  Maybe it was too late. Maybe she’d already brought too many Kratzen motherships over for the Fleet to defeat. There sure as hell were a lot of them out there. Still, one thing Carter was dead certain of.

  This monster had to pay for her sins. Kristin Devenport had to die, even if that meant he and Tina had to die taking her out. Here in the Milky Way, her oracles couldn’t talk to her. She couldn’t have any idea they’d even found her, let alone had a target lock on her with the ship’s blasters and photon torpedoes.

  There was no way she could survive this. Problem was, there was probably no way he and Tina were going to survive this either.

  He sighed, shifting his gaze to Tina. So beautiful. It wasn’t fair. He should have found a way to get her to safety. “I love you.”

  Her gaze met his. She reached out and he took her hand.

  “Do you think there is a Vestil Heaven? Life beyond? Could we, maybe meet up there?”

  He’d never been a very religious man. He hadn’t ever considered the afterlife.

  “I hope so. I haven’t had enough time with you.”

  She sighed. “We need to do this. We need to stop her.”

  “I know.” He did. No one would get this chance again. The entire galaxy stood at risk.

  She smiled that amazing, brilliant smile and squeezed his hand. “I love you. Do it.”

  He executed the commands and the ship hummed and bucked as the weaponry fired.

  He had a brief view of Kristin’s face, her mouth and eyes wide with shock, before the world exploded around them. A bright flash filled the view screens before they darkened. The ship shook.

  Equipment and pieces of the ship fell like rain, crashing into the deck behind him. The ship’s hull wrinkled, as it was pushed in toward him, pinning his legs under the ruined control console.

  He pitched forward, his head striking the control panel. His mind whirling, he gave up the struggle to keep awake. Dying would be better if he couldn’t feel it anyway.

  But he did feel something. Tina’s warm hand still held his, clutching tightly, holding on, as he plunged into unconsciousness.

  ~ ~ ~

  An electrical sizzle and snap, the stench of gandasol hanging in the air, and bone chilling cold were Tina’s first sensations as she pulled herself back into consciousness. Her head and back ached and she couldn’t feel her legs. Was heaven supposed to hurt this much?

  She wrenched open one eye then the other. The inky blackness round her made her wonder why she even bothered. Only the occasional spark from the damaged equipment around her shed any illumination at all.

  Weightless, she drifted, but wreckage encapsulated her almost completely and she could barely move.

  She shivered. The hull must have survived the explosions somehow intact. No power. No life support system. Limited air. The fates had been cruel enough to let her survive a quick death only to suffocate and freeze slowly in the void of space.

  A slight warmth radiated through the palm of her left hand. She squeezed to find Carter’s hand still holding hers. Under the wreckage she could barely move, but her fingers found his wrist and noted a weak pulse.

  “Carter?” Her voice was horse, raspy.

  He didn’t reply. Maybe that was for the best.

  Stay asleep, my love. Drift off to death.

  Thin illumination floated in her peripheral vision to the right. She craned her neck to see out a viewport.

  Cracks ran the length and width of the steelglass portal, rippling a spiderweb-like design in the clear metal. Beyond, stars occasionally winked into view between dark objects that floated past.

  Wreckage?

  How much of the Kratzen fleet had they taken out?

  And hadn’t they been in the center of the Dark Nebula? She shouldn’t have been able to see stars through the dense dust.

  She pulled in a stuttering breath. Oxygen low. Not long now.

  She put her questions away. Time enough after, if there was an after.

  Letting herself be seduced by the lure of an afterlife with Carter, she felt a faint wash of warmth through her body. One last gift he’d given her as the stars in the shattered steelglass portal winked out one at a time.

  Chapter 36

  Tina walked with Carter under azure skies. A bright sun lit their way as they walked hand in hand through a field of tall, green grasses. No worries reared their ugly heads to mar he
r perfect day.

  She had to be dreaming.

  If she’d been awake, she and Carter would be rolling in the frackin’ grass, tearing each other’s clothes off.

  Still, it was a nice dream.

  At least until the loud thunk set the world around them quaking and shaking. His hand slipped from hers. She lost her balance and fell into a deep, dark crevice that opened at her feet.

  Clawing her way back to consciousness, she forced open her sleep-gummed eyes. The pain remained in her back and neck, and she still couldn’t feel her legs. But the air was richer and it was certainly warmer. Through the shattered porthole, light filtered into the ship.

  Listening hard, she swore she could hear muffled speech. Then a snap and a sizzle.

  “Carter?”

  She’d lost contact with his hand. She stretched out her fingers searching, but she couldn’t find him.

  Gravity pulled at her once again. Things must have shifted in the cabin.

  Then more light entered as a burst of sparks created a long thin line down the side of the hull to her right. It turned into a horizontal line and continued into a rough square.

  An arccutter, it had to be.

  Rescue?

  The hull piece was pulled away and a face appeared in the opening. A face she recognized. Wasat Pinder, one of The Starboard Mist’s engineering specialists.

  “Anyone in here?”

  “Wasat.” Her voice cracked, she could barely squeak out his name.

  Had he heard her?

  “Of course they’re in there, fizzlebrain. Get ‘em out.” Magda’s voice had never sounded sweeter.

  ~ ~ ~

  “But Luna . . .” Tina gave her best impression of Poluvian puppy eyes.

  Luna huffed. “If I put Carter in here with you, you two will only undo all the work Magda’s put in to putting you both back together. Do you have any idea how close you came to dying on us? Rest, heal, plenty of time for . . . that, later.”