by Dan Oakley
Trella and I exchanged a look, but I decided not to get into a conversation with Kira about this right now. She glared at me in silence for a moment. The only sound in the room was the hum of the cooling unit.
After a long pause, Trella spoke quietly. “I need to leave, Kira. I have to find out what happened to my sister. She was still aboard the KSS Morellic and has been accused of conspiring against the Kingdoms and working for the resistance.”
Kira pushed back her spiky hair and looked at Trella with compassion. “I’m sorry. You must worry about her.”
Trella swallowed hard, “I do. Mages accused of working with the resistance do not get a fair trial. I’m scared with no one to advocate for her, she’ll end up on bysandown.”
I put my arm around Trella’s shoulder. “We’ll get off this planet, and we will find a way to help her.”
Bysandown sounded horrific to me. Trella had explained it was a drug that blocked a mage’s magical abilities. Robbing them of their magic and their sense of identity.
Trella pulled away. “She’s not your responsibility.”
“She’s your sister.” I frowned. “I want to help.”
“You don’t understand. Associating with someone who’s been accused of belonging to the resistance would tarnish your reputation and risk your whole future. I can’t ask you to do that.”
Without waiting for an answer, Trella strode away, leaving the communication suite.
“I was right,” Kira said with her hands on her hips as we both watched Trella leave. “Civilisation sounds even worse than planet Tor.”
Chapter 5
After we’d showered, eaten supper and both Kira and Trella had gone to bed, I returned to the communication suite alone. We hadn’t dared to turn on the broadcast signal again yet. We didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves while the pirates were close by.
I sat down behind the main console and watched the scanner display. The dark green screen was blank. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed. The swell of excitement I’d felt when I realised there was a ship in range had long since faded and had been replaced by a burning need to get off this planet soon. I was more desperate than ever to get away from Tor. I sat there, staring at a blank screen, helpless while Zarak lived his life unpunished for what he’d done to me. And Maureena… I had no idea how she was coping. She’d been driven away from her home by stupid, ignorant villagers.
Gritting my teeth, I leaned forward, resting my forearms on the edge of the console, feeling the cold, moulded plastic hard against my skin. Due to the number of processors and computers in the suite, we kept the temperature a little lower in this room so there was no danger of anything overheating.
I pressed the display button and tapped the thin, glass touchscreen that emerged from the centre of the console. Using the controls, I navigated to the camera feeds monitoring the outside of our compound.
After I’d switched over to night view, an eerie image of the fence line at the edge of the jungle appeared on the screen.
I stood up so I could reach all four corners of the touchscreen and flicked through the individual feeds. All was quiet in the first five feeds, but when I reached the sixth, I paused. There on the screen, seemingly looking directly at the camera, were two reflective eyes.
A lizard.
Fortunately, it wasn’t on our side of the fence, but the way it stared directly at the compound made me uneasy.
The lizard hadn’t forgotten where it’d found easy meals in the past.
I forced myself to carry on flicking through the screens. So far there were no signs of other tunnels, which was a good thing, but before we ventured outside again, we would have to go through the camera feeds carefully.
Tomorrow after breakfast we could start concreting the perimeter. That would be a long, tiring job, even with magic. Trella was confident she could use replication spells to help, but we still needed to find the raw ingredients for that to work.
Satisfied there were no fresh tunnels beneath the fence, I turned back to the scanner.
Though we’d kept the communication signal off just in case the pirates returned, I didn’t know how long we needed to maintain radio silence. Already, I was itching to turn the broadcasting signal back on. I didn’t want to miss a chance of getting off this planet.
Back on Terrano, Maureena was probably still on the run. Homeless and vulnerable. Though she was a mage herself, she mostly used her magic for healing. Despite all the good she’d done in our village and all the help she’d offered the villagers over the years, they’d always treated us with disgust and distrust because Terrano was one of the lower planets where magic was outlawed.
I wondered if it would ever be possible to transport Maureena away from Terrano to one of the seven main Kingdoms. Life would be easier there, but would she be eligible for a residence permit?
If I’d worked for the Kingdoms for a few years, maybe they would have allowed me to bring Maureena to one of the higher planets as my dependent, but I’d only been in service for a matter of days before I was stranded on this isolated planet.
I hated to think of the woman who had guided me and cared for me being in danger. Somehow, I would get back to Terrano to help her. Even if I could only send her money at first, as soon as I got off this planet, I’d find a way to get in touch.
Trella had been quiet over dinner. I knew she’d been thinking about her sister. Like me, she’d managed to push her worries to one side while we were busy making the complex a comfortable place to live. But now we were safe and had more free time, our worries haunted us. Kira found that hard to understand because she had no one waiting for her. Even though her parents were probably still alive and she had a sister out there somewhere, it was as if they no longer existed to Kira. She wasn’t interested in a reunion. Perhaps that was because she felt they had abandoned her when they left her behind.
Soon we would broadcast the communication signal again. It might take years, but eventually a Kingdoms ship would pass in range.
My eyelids felt heavy as I smothered a yawn. I leaned forward and rested my head on my arms. I didn’t mean to drift off, but the dull hum of the machinery in the communication suite lulled me to sleep.
Despite the uncomfortable position, I didn’t wake until hours later. After I rubbed my bleary eyes, I checked my wrist device and saw that it was already breakfast time. I left the communication suite and headed back down to the basement, where we all had individual rooms.
I met Trella and Kira walking in the opposite direction.
Trella raised an eyebrow at my haggard appearance. “Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”
“Thanks,” I said with a wry smile. “I spent the night in the communication suite.”
Kira looked alarmed. “Why? Was there another ship alarm?”
I shook my head. “No, nothing like that. I just wanted to check the security feeds and must have fallen asleep.”
“We’re going to the kitchens to get some breakfast. Want some?” Trella asked. She seemed a little brighter this morning and not quite so preoccupied with her sister’s fate, although I was sure it was still on her mind.
“Sure. Give me a couple of minutes to wash up, and I’ll join you.”
I’d only taken two steps when a piercing alarm sounded on all of our wrist devices.
“A27,” Trella said and then glanced up, looking me directly in the eye.
What were the chances this was a different visitor to the one on the scanner last night? Unlikely.
I supposed there was a slim possibility it could be a different ship, a Kingdoms vessel rather than a pirate ship, but I didn’t like our chances.
Rather than head to the communication suite, we ducked inside Kira’s room. She had a console in her room that was perfectly functional for what we needed, and we wanted answers.
Trella took charge, her hands moving over the console with lightning speed.
She brought up the touchscreen, which di
splayed a mirror image of the scanner from the communication suite. The green screen showed a cartoon like image of a ship on the left side of the screen.
“They’ve come back,” Kira said in a voice barely above a whisper.
Trella raised another touchscreen and began scrolling through lines of code. I couldn’t make sense of it.
I put a hand on Kira’s shoulder. “It’s going to be all right.”
She looked up at me, and I could tell by her expression that she didn’t believe me.
“I’m scanning their ship,” Trella said, her left hand firmly on top of the console and her right scrolling through the symbols on the screen. “I’ve put up a shield so they can’t detect me hacking into their systems and…” She trailed off, and her face paled.
“What is it?” Kira asked urgently, her voice trembling.
“They’ve initiated a landing protocol.”
“Where are they going to land?” I asked, trying desperately to make sense of the data on the screens.
Trella shook her head, her red hair hitting her cheeks. “I’m not sure yet… Give me a minute.”
We all stared at the ship on screen.
They wouldn’t be friendly, but they wouldn’t necessarily want to take the time to hunt us down and kill us. They were here to find something they could take off the planet and sell. Pirates were all about profit.
“What type of vessel is it?” I asked, wishing I could do something more than just stand there and wait for Trella to get all the answers.
“It looks like a mid-sized freighter ship,” Trella’s face tightened and she gritted her teeth. “It’s been modified, mainly weapons added, which you’d expect with a pirate ship. It’s old. Not in the best shape.”
“Can you tell how many pirates are on board?”
Trella shook her head. “I am checking the ship’s manifesto, but it’s not filled in correctly. I suppose that’s not a surprise for a pirate ship and…”
She stopped and snatched her hand off the console with a yelp of pain.
“What’s wrong?” I asked urgently.
Trella looked down at the palm of her left hand. She’d been burned.
“We should get some ice on that,” Kira said.
Trella shook her head. “There’s no time. They detected me and sent a surge of energy. It’s a security block. They have a mage on board.”
I swallowed hard. Though the fact the pirates had a mage shouldn’t really have come as a surprise. Any ship travelling a fair distance would need a jump mage. I only hoped they were less powerful than Trella.
“Right. Then let’s get moving,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. “We should be safe barricaded in Kira’s room.”
I glanced around the room. It would be uncomfortable for a few days, but we could wait things out until the pirates left. We would need to bring more water and fresh supplies down here, but we could last for weeks or even months locked away in Kira’s basement room. They would probably ransack our living quarters and take everything valuable they could get their hands on, but at least we would escape with our lives.
“They won’t be able to get through the reinforced door,” Kira said. “I agree with Tomas. Hiding out here is the best idea.”
Trella shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. I’ve been detected. They knew I was hacking into the system, which means they know we are here. The mage is powerful. He blasted me out of the system, and he will currently be scanning everything we have here.”
I glanced at the stockpile of weapons Kira still kept in her room. “Then we fight.”
Trella turned to me and I saw the fear in her face. “We are overpowered, Tomas. We can’t fight them.”
“We have no choice,” I said. There was no way I was going to roll over in surrender to pirates.
“There is another option,” Trella said.
“What?” I asked, mentally planning our best defensive position. Time was of the essence. We needed to get moving, find our fighting positions and charge as many weapons as we could before they landed and attacked.
“We go out into the jungle,” Trella said, her voice calm and her expression blank.
“But what about the lizards?” Kira said, staring at Trella as though the mage had lost her mind.
Trella nodded. “I think we’re better off taking our chances against the lizards than these pirates. Believe me, Kira, I’ve heard tales of pirates and scavengers, and they will not show us mercy.”
I hated the idea of going into the jungle and facing those creatures again, but Trella had a point. At least with the lizards we knew what we were up against. We knew how to fight them, and we knew how they hunted.
The jungle would offer us camouflage and a small amount of protection from the pirates. They may have heard tales of the lizards of Tor, but they had no experience of how bloodthirsty and lethal the creatures really were.
After months of hiding from the lizards and doing our best to avoid them, we would now purposely be venturing into their territory.
In a twisted way, the lizards would form part of our defence.
Chapter 6
I figured we would have at least an hour before we had to evacuate the building. We selected our best weapons, which unfortunately weren’t as good as I would have liked.
Trella studied one of the old-fashioned plasma guns, turning it over in her hands, and gave a heavy sigh. “From what I could tell from the ship’s age and repair logs, they probably won’t have top of the range technology, but their weapons are going to be better than ours,”
When Kira asked again why we couldn’t stay barricaded inside the building, Trella replied matter-of-factly, “It’s just not safe. We’d be cornered.”
I knew Kira felt an affinity with this place. It had been her sanctuary, where she’d hidden safely from the marauding lizards for the past decade. The trouble was, the pirates were going to be a deadlier foe than the vicious overgrown geckos.
They could do all sorts of things to force us out from behind the reinforced steel door. If they were able to take control of the mainframe computer, they could make the temperature unbearable in the room, turn the fire prevention equipment on and fill the room with fire retardant foam… Basically they could make our life a complete misery until it got too much and we surrendered.
As much as I loathed the idea of going back out into the jungle to face the lizards, I knew Trella was right. We couldn’t just wait around here to be attacked by the pirates.
I slid one of the laser knives into the holster I’d hooked on my belt and then picked up one of the archaic plasma weapons. They were bulky and heavy and not ideal for trekking through the jungle, but they were reliable, and we still hadn’t worked out what was wrong with the original weapons we’d been given on our mission to the planet Tor.
We knew they’d been tampered with somehow because they were ineffective against the predators. Perhaps I should have spent more time looking at the weapons and trying to figure out what was wrong with them instead of focusing on building a safe place to shelter.
But I hadn’t expected pirates…
There was no point worrying about it now. The plasma weapons were all we had, and so we would have to make the best of things.
Frowning, Kira attached straps to the large plasma weapons, so we could loop them over our backs as we trekked through the jungle.
In the kitchen, I put as many water containers as I thought we could carry into our travel sacks, and bundled up some of the unappetising dry packaged meals. Kira came to help but dropped one of the packages on the floor. When she kneeled down to pick it up, I could see her hands were shaking.
“We’ll be back here before you know it,” I said, trying to reassure her.
“They’ll ruin everything. We’ve worked so hard on this place.”
I suspected she was right. When or if we returned to the complex, it would probably be ransacked.
“We can fix any damage to the compound. The
most important thing is that we stay safe, okay?”
Kira hesitated before nodding and then stuffed a box of dried potato flakes into her sack.
We left the kitchen, met up with Trella and headed for the main exit.
Trella and I could access all the major controls using our wrist devices now that we had paired up with the main system, but we didn’t know how long that link would work. Our security system would probably be the first thing the pirates destroyed. Kira didn’t have a wrist device. I’d wanted to give her one, but she’d refused to accept a wrist device that had been worn by one of the fallen crew. We’d argued about it. I’d said it was sensible. She said it was bad luck.
We trudged towards the perimeter fence in silence, knowing that just ahead of us there were lizards lurking in the jungle, waiting for an easy meal.
I was glad we had Trella with us, but in the dark, tangled forest, it would be easy for the lizards to hide in the shadows and creep up on us.
I tapped my wrist device, bringing up the control screen, and accessed the security page. With a couple of swipes, I reached the power setting control menu for the electric fence.
I took a deep breath. “Ready?”
Both women nodded, so I flicked off the power and grabbed hold of a fence post, moving it out a couple of feet. We easily slipped through the gap, and then I relinked the fence panel before turning the power back on. The fence wouldn’t put off the pirates for long, but there was no point making their rampage easier. I was going to make it as hard as possible for the thugs to ransack our temporary home.
Sweat trickled down my back as we entered the jungle. Droplets of water clung to the shiny leaves, and the humidity seemed even higher than yesterday.
I took the three headsets from my travel sack and handed one to Trella and to Kira, then looped the wire of my headset over my ear.
“Why are we wearing these?” Kira asked. “We’re sticking together, aren’t we?”
“Yes. These are just in case we get separated.”
Kira’s eyes widened and she looked terrified. I didn’t feel so confident myself. “It’s just a precaution.”
