The Last Child

by Troy Osgood

  Anyone watching would just see a hauler loading cargo but it was an act. I was wired, tense. It had been years since I had been in a situation like this. My life wasn’t much, but it was my life and it was relatively peaceful. I had left war behind and thought I had left this kind of thing as well.

  Pushing the maglifter down the ramp, my eyes searched the hanger. Nothing had changed. It had only been a couple minutes but that could be a lifetime to a trained professional.

  I paused once the crate was on the maglifter.

  What was I doing?

  I hadn’t stopped once the girl had bumped into me. Just running on instinct. The Tiat were chasing her, she was a young girl. Was that really all I needed to know?

  No. I needed the story.

  But would that change anything?

  Without thinking I had agreed to help this girl. Why? There was no way I was leaving her alone now. I was taking a huge risk. This could put me on the Tiat’s list and I had worked long and hard to stay off that.

  My record from my time in the Earth Expeditionary Forces was under lock and key. If the Tiat knew about some of my black ops missions, I would have been on their radar no matter what. That was part of the reason why I mostly operated out in Deep Space and not the Core where the Tiat’s influence was greater.

  I didn’t regret anything I had done. It was war. Was it right? Not all of it.

  Look through the history books, us humans really aren’t that much better than the Tiat. Even our recent history, the last thirty to forty years since we got out to space, has not been that good. Humans get space travel and find a galaxy filled with inhabited worlds. What do you think happened?

  But I’m human and between us and the Tiat? I’ll take us.

  It still didn’t explain why I had instantly chosen to help the girl. I had friends that were Thesan. They had been our first allies when we got into space. I’d fought alongside them. But that wasn’t enough.

  What was I doing?

  Sighing, knowing there probably wasn’t an answer, I pushed the maglifter up the ramp. The Wind’s hold was empty, so just stored the crate against the wall and maglocked it down. Didn’t take long to finish loading the other two.

  The Wind was longer than it was wide, so the hold was shaped that way. Seeing the three crates lined up on one side and the rest of the space with nothing, that just made it seem emptier if that was possible.

  I needed more jobs, bigger and better. I was just getting by. Thankfully I didn’t have a crew that I had to worry about paying.

  One last look out the hanger and I closed the ramp, setting the security locks. Checking my chrono, I still had an hour before my scheduled launch time.

  Hopefully the girl was full because it was question and answer time.

  *****

  She was right where I had left her, kind of.

  She was no longer eating, the plates and stuff still on the table, but she was in the galley. The girl was curled up on the one chair in the room.

  The galley was a long room on one side of the front half of the lower level, a spiral stair in the corner. Going up the stairs you came to a small hall that led to the bridge and turning down the bunk corridor that ended in engineering. On this level, the hold took up most of the space with the galley and next to it the lounge. Simple and straightforward design. Like I said, the Castellans are not the most original shipbuilders out there. What they are known for is efficiently operating ships that rarely break down and are tough as rock.

  I’d had the Nomad’s Wind for almost five years and she had never let me down.

  Cabinets and shelves lined one wall of the galley, with the door to the lounge in the middle, the appliances and more shelves on the other. A long table took up the middle of the space with one cushioned chair in the corner, opposite the stair, bolted to the floor. The chairs for the table were attached to sliders on the floor, so they could move but were essentially locked in. There wasn’t too much loose furniture anywhere on the ship. Things tended to slide while the ship was moving.

  The Thesan was looking at me, legs pulled up to her chest with arms around them. She was still frightened, but more than that she looked tired. I pulled out one of the chairs at the table, hitting the button under the seat that would unlock the slider. I hit another button and swiveled the chair around. Taking the seat I studied her as she studied me.

  “Hi,” I said. It sounded dumb but I didn’t know where else to start.

  I never really liked kids. Never had much to do with them. I had been too busy being a soldier to think about kids and once I got out, this life was no place for a kid.

  She didn’t reply back, just kept looking at me with those bright eyes.

  “My name is Arek. What’s yours?”

  Nothing.

  It wasn’t a blank stare. She could understand me. She just didn’t want to talk. Or maybe she couldn’t?

  I leaned forward in the chair.

  “Look, you ran into me and needed help, so I helped. But now I need to know more,” I tried to keep my voice even, calm and soothing. This is something that I had no training for. “I can’t help you unless you talk to me.”

  She lowered her legs and held her hands out in front. Her fingers started dancing, moving quickly in patterns and shapes. It wasn’t random. She was forming specific shapes. She was trying to speak.

  Sign language. Great.

  “Hold on,” I said leaning back. “I don’t know what all that means.”

  So she couldn’t talk. That would make this much more difficult.

  “We’ll start simple okay?”

  The girl nodded.

  “We can get into why the Tiat want you later, but for now you want to avoid them?”

  A nod.

  “Did they take you from your family?”

  A nod and a sadness crept into her eyes. She was trying to be strong, to keep it out but it wasn’t happening, it was too painful. I gave her a minute to compose herself.

  “Is your family here on the asteroid?”

  A shake of the head. No. I had a follow up, asking about the fate of her family, but figured that one could wait.

  “Is there anyone here that you could go to? Friends? Other Thesans?”

  Another shake.

  What to do with her? I sure as hell couldn’t leave her here. Not with the Tiat. Even without the Tiat, I couldn’t leave a young girl alone on a rock like this.

  The chrono on my wristcomm beeped. Time to start the preflight as my designated departure was almost here.

  I guess I was stuck with her for now.

  “You can come with me,” I said. “For now. I have to go to Dynuit to drop off cargo and we’ll figure out what to do with you there. Okay?”

  The girl moved quick. She was out of the chair and had her arms wrapped around me pretty damn fast. Quicker then I had thought she would move. I had to remember, she was a young girl, but she was still a Thesan with everything that meant.

  I pushed her away and stood up. She was smiling as she sat back down.

  “I need to go get the ship ready for the flight. It’s a long trip so we’ll have plenty of time to talk then.”

  Her eyes followed me as I moved to the stair. Metal steps, grated, with a tight radius. I looked at the girl looking at me as I walked up then, trying to give her a reassuring smile. She quickly disappeared from view as my head passed the room’s ceiling. I stepped out onto the upper level corridor wondering how I’d manage to communicate with her.

  I needed answers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Acknowledged control,” I said into the communications headset I now wore. “Have a good one.”

  I clicked off the connection to CU145792 Dock Control and concentrated on flying the Wind. I lifted off the dock floor, using the thrusters mounted underneath. The ship shook a little and I heard the Thesan girl walk into the bridge. I had left the door open so if she came up from the galley she could find me easily. She took a seat in the co-pilots station
and looked out the view window at the magbarrier and stars beyond.

  I loved looking at the field of stars. Bright white dots on a black background. Each one with so much possibility and mystery. Some I had been to and some that no one had ever been to in the entire history of the galaxy. It’s crazy to think of. The galaxy is huge and it’s just one of an infinite number of galaxies. Only like a tenth of this one had been explored so far. So many inhabited and uninhabited worlds. So much to discover.

  So much to be afraid of.

  I adjusted the controls and flew the ship into the middle of the hanger, following the lights and lines painted on the metal floor. There really wasn’t much I needed to do, just some fine tuning, as the asteroids guidance system kept the ship on the right path. There was a time when landing in docks like this was all manual, but nowadays every place was automated; even backwater rocks like this one. It was rare to find a dock that wasn’t. Unless you were a fighter jock, flying a starship wasn’t that difficult.

  The Wind turned so that we were facing the magbarrier and large opening of the hanger directly. The guidance system pushed the ship forward and the opening grew larger and larger until all we could see was the starfield outside. There was another shudder of the ship as we crossed the barrier, everything getting tinted in blue, and we were floating outside the bay with the thrusters pushing us away from the asteroid.

  I hit the controls and the engines that had been in standby came to life. The ship picked up speed as it switched from thrusters to the drive engines. I fought against the limited gravity of the asteroid and took the ship in a loop away from it.

  I turned the ship so that the girl could get a good look at the asteroid belt that contained CU145792. Lights dotted the rock as well as the large opening of the hanger. Lights could be seen on other asteroids in the belts, more mines owned by the Culkin Union, but only CU145792 was inhabited. It had probably been stripped of all it’s ore awhile ago and now just served as the living quarters.

  Turning the ship again I headed towards the edge of this system on a course that would avoid other asteroids and junk floating in space. I could leave the system on any trajectory and still get to my destination but that might mean more jumps.

  Hopping system to system was like plotting a course on a map. You went from point A to point B to get to point C. You could try jumping from A to C, but that could lead you into uncharted ion storms, nebulas or any of the other thousand dangers of the wild space between systems. All jumps started and ended at the edges of the different systems. That led to hours of in-system travel at normal drive speed and not jumpspeed. Slow. But in-system hops were dangerous. Safer to go the long way.

  Inner core worlds built large docking stations at the edges of their systems to help cut down on the amount of in-system traffic. A freighter the size of the Wind could go in-system and even planetside, but larger ones had to stop at the stations.

  I keyed in the navorders for the hop to Dynuit and once the computer had finished calculating I hit the activation button.

  Technically it’s called Outersystem Warping into warpspace using stardrives but everyone calls it starhopping, or just hopping, into wildspace.

  The stars that were points of light elongated and disappeared as the Nomad’s Wind shot into the wild space between systems. The view outside the window became nothing but a foggy white with streaks of black. The fog looked like it drifted around the ship as we flew at speeds that blew the mind when you tried to think about them. No one knew what this space between systems was really made of, dark matter was the prevailing theory, but I didn’t care. Looking at this always filled me with peace.

  Ships didn’t really need view windows and a lot of the newer models didn’t have them. I’d never own a ship that didn’t. The views well flying were spectacular.

  The Thesan girl leaned forward at the station for a better look. She was smiling, eyes wide with wonder. She’d probably never seen this view before. Not many people took the time to really see what space had to offer.

  Where the girl was sitting gave me an idea.

  The Wind’s control room, cockpit, bridge and whatever other words it was called, had four stations. The pilot’s on the right, co-pilots on the left and down a couple steps were the navigation and weapons stations or what amounted to weapons on this ship. A couple plasma cannons for defense but that station also controlled the shields. The pilot’s station had secondary controls for all those functions. The walls were covered in dials, buttons, displays and read-outs. Lots of flashing lights. Each station was a desk with the controls and a chair. Each desk had a couple monitors and an input keyboard.

  Dynuit was three jumps from the asteroid. Each jump was about six hours long. That seemed like a long time but when you measured distance in light years, it was crazy to think of the distance covered in just six hours.

  It gave us plenty of time.

  I stood up and the girl looked at me. I walked over to her station and pointed at the input keyboard.

  “You understand spoken Tradelan but can you write it?” I asked.

  The girl looked at the keyboard in thought, finally looking up at me and smiling. She looked down at the keyboard and with her long fingers that ended in short nails, she started typing.

  On the screen I saw the word YES.

  Now we were getting somewhere.

  I shifted so I could look at her and the screen.

  “Let’s start easy,” I told her. “What’s your name?”

  KAYLIA

  “Nice to meet you Kaylia,” I said, speaking it slowly and looking at her to see if I got the pronunciation right.

  She smiled. Nailed it the first time.

  “How old are you?”

  THIRTEEN SEASONS

  “Where are you from?”

  TURESA

  That was one of the Thesan’s colony worlds. Not in their home system, but a neighboring one. Turns out most systems are like Earth's, only one or two habitable planets and a bunch of uninhabitable ones. Because of this, some of the more empire-leaning beings had expanded out into other systems. Thesa had four colony worlds in different systems. Us earthlings had three and counting. The Tiats had seven or eight. I did a quick mental calculation of how many jumps it would be from Dynuit to Turesa. Seven possibly? Nine most likely. It was on the edge of the Inner Core but on the opposite side of the spiral.

  “Kaylia,” I said gently and she looked up at me. “It’s time for the hard questions, okay?”

  She took a deep breath and nodded.

  “Did the Tiat take you from your home?”

  YES

  “Why?”

  She didn’t type, just shrugged. Didn’t know.

  “Did they hurt you? Is that why you can’t talk?”

  NO. BORN MUTE

  “Did they hurt you at all?”

  She shook her head no.

  GRABBED HARD BUT THAT WAS IT

  “How did you get away from the Tiat on the asteroid?”

  She typed for a while, the words coming fast.

  THEY TOOK ME ON SHIP TO THE ASTEROID AND LED ME THROUGH THE STREET TO A BUILDING. WHILE GETTING INTO THE BUILDING I BIT ONE AND MANAGED TO GET AWAY.

  So she had only been on the asteroid for a couple of hours at most. Interesting.

  “Are your parents on Turesa?”

  She lowered her head, hiding her eyes. I hated asking that question because I was afraid I knew the answer. But I needed to be sure.

  After a minute or two Kaylia lifted her head enough to look at the keyboard. She started typing, slower than before.

  TIAT KILLED THEM

  She sagged back in the chair, looking out the view window at the fog of wildspace. I took a step back, leaning against the pilot station.

  Why would the Tiat attack a Thesan family on a Thesan colony world and kidnap a young girl? Thesa and Tiat used to be at war. Twenty years ago. It was what had allied us, the Terrans, with the Thesans. We took their side in the conflict. That war had ende
d with a stalemate and non-aggression pact between the three. There were minor conflicts and each side, the Thesans and Terrans versus the Tiat, would try to sabotage the others operations. Real cold war kind of stuff. Walk up to the line but don’t do enough to step over or at least not get caught. No one in the galaxy wanted another war.

  This though, the killing and kidnapping of citizens, could be what finally crossed the line.

  So why? There had to be more to the story.

  The girl didn’t look like she wanted to answer anymore questions and I didn’t want to ask anymore. I doubted she’d have the answers I wanted. Like the ‘why’. But there was one more I did need.

  “Kaylia,” I said gently leaning forward. She looked over at me, wet lines marking the light fur on her face. She had been silently crying. “Last question.” She nodded. “Is there anyone on Turesa that I can take you to?”

  She lifted her head, looking up at the ceiling, thinking. She finally started typing, pausing as she tried to think of the right words. That was the problem with Tradelan. It did great for the basic things but there were concepts that were unique to one race that didn’t translate into something others could understand. This led to lots of misunderstandings as you tried to put the concept into Tradelan and it got misinterpreted by the other side.

  Kaylia had stopped typing and I looked at the screen.

  MOTHERS LITTERMATE

  Litter? Thesans gave birth to litters? That was interesting. I wonder if it was in numbers similar to earth cats or if it just meant twins. Hard to tell and not really relevant.

  “What’s her name?”

  YOTERRA

  “Will you be okay if I leave you with her?”

  Kaylia nodded. Not enthusiastic but it would have to do.

  Enough questions for now.

  I stepped back and waved at the door.

  “It’s a long trip to Dynuit. We have three six hour jumps. Let me show you to a room where you can sleep.”

  Kaylia stood up, stretching. I wished I had some clothes she could change into and get out of the coveralls. A one-piece suit with a zipper, the Tiat had most likely put her in them. The clothes held her tail down and that had to be getting uncomfortable. I wondered if I had anything that would fit her small frame. Probably not. She was shorter than I was and a lot smaller body wise.