by Martin HC
He sat quietly, not quite sure how to answer, Tira simply looked at him as she placed her card on the table between them.
“Did you understand the questions?”
“Yes, just not sure how to respond, I mean it was a lot of reasons, so all of them I guess.”
“I'll ask.”
More seconds passed as Haydn responded to Tira's choice of card with one of his own on top of hers, she smiled mischievously as he placed his card down for her to see. It was never a good sign, instead of making her move she answered him first, dragging out his impending defeat.
“He said, 'to be honest, none of them, I made the decision to help you and I know how the syndicates operate, so it was my own decisions that led us here. What I'm not happy about is you disappearing off with Jill, into a forbidden territory and then starting fights with random evil ships.'”
“Come on that's unfair, he can't be upset at me for that, you put us on autopilot and it was you that fought them,” he answered, trying to shift the blame a little. “It's not like we asked the hunters to follow us and Jill stayed by herself, tell him you put us on an autopilot.”
“No, I'm not going to do that, he also wants to know what they should do if questioned?”
“You're going to let me take the fall for this?”
“Yes.”
She lay down her final card, it was as the smile intended and he knew as much, she'd won again.
“That's cold.”
“Letting you take the fall with Damon or wiping you out for the ninth time at this game?”
“Both, and tell them to be as honest as they need to be,” he answered her gloating features. “It's just I didn't mean for them to get caught up in anything. I didn't even see us getting caught up in issues like this and it makes me sad to think they hate me for it all.”
“You can relax, they don't hate you. Jill actually has a thing for you, and I've no idea why, but most importantly you missed the point in his answer.”
“I did, what point?”
“He's worried for Jill, he's annoyed that you ran off with her,” she explained. “He doesn't look at his crew like they're ordinary people, he sees them all as family, he looks at her like she's a daughter.”
They sat in silence for a while, he seemed to think things over as she watched until eventually his eyes lit up, seemingly having a small epiphany moment.
“Ah, I understand, Is that why you've been upset recently too, because I'm like a father and Jill is on the scene now?”
Her eyes narrowed and she became a little more tense, it was the wrong conclusion he'd guessed and he could feel the dog house coming on again.
“You know your brain must be as good as new.”
“Why?”
“Well you've never used it, have you.”
It was a typical response for her of late, he knew it was to divert their conversation and would use such an answer when things became uncomfortable. This time though he wasn't going to let her get away with it, so he pressed her further.
“And the sarcasm again, you're clearly upset with me for some reason, every time I try to bring it up you shoot me down, help me understand what's wrong.”
“I don't see you as a father Haydn, I'm more the parent you are as I've spent more time pulling you out of trouble than any parent ever should.”
“Hahaha oh how I laugh, fair point but that wasn't the answer.”
“It was an answer.”
“Come on Tira, please, tell me what's upsetting you?”
“It's nothing,” she answered quietly but her narrowed eyes and the tense body language told him otherwise.
“It's something, and don't dare do that disappearing thing and leave me with Tiralyn, please, tell me what's wrong.”
“I said it's nothing,” she was louder this time, anger seeped through in the background of her tone.
“Why is it bothering you so much then, if it's nothing?”
“It's not bothering me right now but you are,” she answered him sternly. “And it won't be an issue when you leave, so drop it.”
He stopped his pursuit of the truth here, unsure how to continue or what to say. Any reply he could think up, lumped in the back of his throat as she stood and walked away from him.
“They're arriving at the meet point now, we need to see where things go from here.”
Haydn never answered her, instead he watched as the display in front threw up an overlay of the conditions at the rendezvous area, there was much more red than should have been visible.
“The situation has changed, the Ferrens are at the meet point, but they're sitting separate from the cartel frigate group.”
She pointed to the display, indicating to the small red cluster on the overlay, then to the second larger red cluster.
Haydn walked up beside her, placing a hand between her shoulder blades as he stopped, he could feel her tense slightly under his touch.
“Tira, I don't intend to go anywhere. We've always been honest with each other,” he told her softly. “I can't help if you won't talk to me.”
He could feel her relax again under his touch.
“Why is it so terrible for you to be here with me?” her softened tone surprised him, it resembled her youth which she would always hide.
“It's not, why would you think that?”
“It's what you told Jill,” she answered, still not looking back at him. “All I hear is you telling people that you want to go home, that you're lonely, if that's what you truly want, then like I said, all of this won't be an issue when we find it and you're gone, so drop it please.”
He could hear the carelessness of his own words replay in his head and could have kicked himself, of course she was upset.
In the beginning it was all he could think about, the loneliness of those first few months driving his will to get home deep into his ambitions, so deep that he never cared to question it again.
In truth, if she told him that she had the answer, that she knew where to go, he would not leave her. They'd grown to know and look out for each other, in their journey together his eyes had been opened to a populated and magnificent galaxy.
She was alone when he found her and in a constant battle with an unseen force for control of her own mind, so it was only natural she would fear him leaving.
“I'm sorry, I didn't think how it would make you feel, I'm honestly not sure I want to go back, there was nothing for me there anyway. I guess I just say it for the same reason you do.”
“Haydn, I have no interest in leaving to find a place to live, I like my life here between the stars. I say it because I want to know who I am and where I came from, because I want to remember, not because I want to go away and leave all this behind.”
Tira looked at him now and softened all over as she finished talking. She always tried to look so steadfast and confident, now though all he could see was a girl, afraid of being abandoned. He stepped to her and hugged her tight.
“I'm sorry, we don't have to find my home, I'm happy here.”
She clutched tightly at him back, then pushing him away, Tira punched his chest. He tried to pretend it didn't hurt, he didn't do a very good job of it.
“Stop getting soppy on me,” she smiled. “We're good, really we are, and I'll find it all the same. At least you'll have the choice.”
Separation and Isolation
“I don't understand what's going on here, no-one told us this was going to happen,” Damon told the large heavy set Ferren marine.
“That problam, you problam,” he answered in his misspoken and heavily accented dialect. “You kam wit us, othas stay here.”
The Ferrens boarded the Ophelia as soon as they arrived. Babaidou once again changing his plan, ordered Feissa to transmit their location, they would be waiting here for his quarry.
Although they were between stellar systems, the location wasn't entirely empty, they were on the outside of an enormous asteroid field located in a cul-de-sac of gas clouds.
Serena herself was in a state of distress, unlike with the Mergence intrusion, they weren't being gentle and she didn't dare resist in-case they retaliated. Instead she had built a complete and false data network, for precisely this purpose, it was real enough to fool them it seemed as they continued to download the entirety of the fake data from her systems.
They entered with armour breaching equipment and industrial explosives. After rounding up the crew to the bridge room, they began by destroying every piece of external and internal sensor or camera, making their way progressively to the engineering bay.
Bulkhead doors which couldn't be opened or overridden easily were destroyed utterly, they couldn't see this happening but could feel the heavy blasts vibrating and rumbling around them.
The heavily armoured boarding marines and technicians in their haste to open every door within the command deck, accidentally destroyed the communications device which Tira built for them, at least keeping that secret safe but cutting Serena of from her help.
“You want me to go with you? Where?”
“You muss be verra high, antteematta core on shiep, big boss man see you now, Babaidou.”
Arlan skipped forward at this, his suddenness putting the other boarders on edge.
“Now hold on, we didn't even ask for that contra...”
His sentence was cut off as an armoured glove smashed his mouth, sending the old nuclear engineer sprawling to the floor. The metallic taste of blood was fresh in his mouth as he spat it onto the floor.
The boarders raised their weapons at the others as the leader grabbed Damon by the neck, a massive black gauntlet gripping him tight.
“You kam, no trubble or we kill all,” he snarled, his face now close enough that Damon could smell the stench of the man's sweat from under his armour.
“I'll come and we'll offer no resistance,” he answered the nasty looking large man, in a confident and fearless tone, years of practice masking his true emotions. He looked around and so far the kid, Kaell, hadn't been found. “You lot will stay here, in the bridge, keep quiet, don't resist and we'll be fine, it's not us they're after remember.”
With that last instruction, the heavy boarder grabbed his shoulder and pushed him to the door, the remaining boarders followed them out including the technicians who seemed content with their data.
As the doors to the bridge room closed, they could hear heavy armour plates being lifted, bolted and welded to the outside of the doors. They wouldn't be leaving, they were trapped.
“What are we going to do?” Kas asked them. “They're sealing us in here.”
“We should stay calm,” Serena answered the new recruit, not really feeling as calm as she sounded.
At first the explosion of raw and unprocessed feelings to her updated self were wondrous. She spent days trying to understand them, bringing them under control but now she was struggling to keep that control. New and untrained feelings of potential loss and pain were becoming a burden, she could turn them off if desired, she did after all exist digitally, but she felt like that would be a betrayal to her human family, who couldn't.
“They've gained entry to the core room now and cut all my feeds, I'm as blind as you are, inside and outside, we have to just wait this out now and hope the others come through for us.”
The trip to the Ferren flagship was nerve racking and the journey through her wide corridors even more so, he noticed that the corridors were far more heavily patrolled than the Mergence warship which he'd also been a guest on.
They stopped outside a set of heavily built and armoured doors, at least fifteen metres high by five wide. Four just as heavily armoured guards sat on a balcony above the doors, large mounted weapons trained on the approaching group, making him feel more than helpless with his wrists shackled together.
There was a shout in a language Damon did not understand and his escort approached the four guards. After an exchange of short statements, the escort produced a data pad which a guard scanned, he hadn't noticed him before to the side of the doors, given his fixed stare at the weapons above.
The doors opened and he was led through into another guarded corridor until finally, through a smaller door at the end and onto the command ship's flag deck. Up three levels of steps and to the rear of the deck a man sat straight in his chair, overlooking everyone in the large and busy room.
Damon felt the grip of a large gauntlet on the back of his shoulder again, directing him towards the steps leading to the man in the chair, and so moved as directed. The man's dark eyes made him feel like hot knifes were slowly piercing him all over.
“You are Damon Osthorpe, captain of the Ophelia?” the man asked, and unlike the boarder, in an almost perfect common tongue.
“Yes I am,” he answered, looking directly at the man, his eyes weren't so much that of a killer, they suggested he would be neither pleased nor displeased with the act of killing. “And you would be Babaidou?”
Babaidou nodded slowly, looked to a guard and barked an order which Damon could not understand. The guard approached and reach out a hand, he chastised himself mentally for asking and tensed for the strike which surprisingly did not come, instead the guard removed his shackles and stepped away.
“My technicians have informed me that to try removing your antimatter core would destroy it.”
“I can't confirm or deny that, I have no idea what would happen.”
“Your ship design is old, the core is too large to have been inserted from the outside.”
Lying now would not end well, if he didn't respond appropriately, they would use other methods to get him talking and he was more than aware of this. He would be as Haydn instructed, as honest as he needed to be.
“The people you are after, they built it inside the ship.”
“Why?”
“We had a run in, it was accidental and our old core was destroyed, along with most of the ship internals.”
“They rebuilt the internals also, did they use ship construction facilities of any kind?”
“None that I saw.”
“Then how?”
“I don't know, I didn't see and it was never explained.”
“You saw nothing of how it was achieved?”
“Correct.”
“What can you tell me about them?”
“Their names are Haydn and Tiralyn, they are the only two on the ship you hunt.”
“Continue.”
“They're lost,” he answered. “They're alone, and trying to find their way home.”
“So they are truly alone then, which makes the next stages less risky,” Babaidou thought aloud.
“What of their weapons and armour?”
“Beyond ours, but I don't know to what extent, other than that, I have no information.”
“Tell me Captain, will they come for you?”
“Yes.”
“Very good,” Babaidou's slow answer frightened the captain, they were coming and he knew it but instead of fear, there was only opportunity in his look. Whatever the Ferren commander had planned, it was not going to be good.
“Sadly we can't capture them, as you're no doubt aware, therefore destruction is the only plausible outcome,” he told the captain. “Which is upsetting in itself, as we could have used the advances for the war effort.”
“So it's true, you've declared war.”
“Not as yet, the official declaration will be given several hours from now.”
Damon had no answer for the Ferren commander, so remained quiet.
“Despite being detained here, you still hold the rank of Captain and on this occasion, regardless of you being non fleet, you will be hosted as if you were,” he told him, as if being hosted as an enemy ship captain on board a Ferren flagship were something to be relished. “You will remain on board my ship as my guest. You will be shown to a guest suite just off my flag deck. You will eat at my table within the command mess. You will be treated well and shown respect by all those under my command. If you require anyt
hing at all, you will find an aid outside your quarters, if the item you require is on board any ship in my fleet, it will be found and delivered to you within ten minutes.”
“What of my crew?”
“Your crew are so far unharmed and sealed within the Ophelia's bridge room, for the time being, which is currently mixed amongst the cartel ships. The two other prisoners are still untouched on the cartel frigates, where they will stay, do you understand?”
“Yes sir, I do.”
