by Scott Lucas
Fletch’s head lolled to the side, and his gaze slid away from Tem and fixed itself indifferently on the floor of the airlock. His face had not changed at all, but Tem knew the look of a dead man.
Chapter Sixteen: Pirates
While Tem waited for Garrow, he slowly removed his armor and inspected the damage. He had fractured and bruised from when the armor plates had cracked and burned from Fletch’s first shot. He took some fabric from Fletch’s uniform and used it tie a makeshift splint from another piece of Feltch’s armor. Both his hands shook as he returned to his side of the chamber.
Tem checked the time readout on the wrist of his suit. It had been almost an hour since Garrow left. What had taken him so long?
Tem donned his damaged armor, slipping his injured arm in first. Once he had donned his helmet, he realized that someone was trying to talk to him.
“Come in, Tem.”
It was Garrow’s voice, accompanied by more knocking on the door.
“Tem, here.”
“Sorry for the delay, but I found something better than the shuttle.”
“What?”
“I’ll show you.”
Garrow entered the cybernetics lab. He looked at Tem, then at Fletch where he lay against the wall. Garrow pointed to Fletch. “How did he die?”
“Zealotry.”
“Aren’t we taking him with us?”
“No. You said you have something for me.”
“Follow me.”
Tem looked at Garrow’s stricken face and recognized that Fletch had been a good friend of his. He said nothing.
Garrow led him to the waiting Wyvern Star.
Garrow looked at Tem’s arm that hung at the side. “Get in the ship. There’s a med kit. I’ll fix you up.”
“Thank you.”
Tem trudged into the Wyvern Star without question. Garrow slung Fletch’s spent blaster over his shoulder.
As the doors shut on the Wyvern Star, and the ship lurched and began to rise out of the crevice, Tem held onto one loop hanging from the ceiling.
Garrow set the Wyvern Star on an automated course to the asteroid where the colony settled.
“Wyv,” Tem said. “Keep an eye out for pirates.”
“Acknowledged.”
Garrow left the cockpit, opened one of the overhead storage compartments and swung down a med kit.
“The pirates were in the landing bay when I passed. I had to make a wide arc to avoid them.” He caught Tem’s fierce expression. “Nothing we can do. The colony’s lost.” He pulled another crate across and sat almost knee-to-knee with Tem. He popped the clasps on the med kit and opened it up. “Let’s see that.”
Garrow was older than Tem suspected. If he had not shaved his head, Garrow probably would have had white, receding hair. Tem wondered what other notable figures this man had managed security for over the years.
“You know what you’re doing?” Tem asked.
“Field medic for decades.” Garrow slid the bone mender around Tem’s broken arm. “Here, take this for the pain.” Garrow shot Tem with a trak-hypo spray. “Take that. I’ll wager it smarts something fierce.”
Strangely, there had been no pain until that moment.
“Okay, kid. Say something.” Garrow shook Tem’s shoulder. “If you don’t, I’ll have to hit you.”
A beep from Tem’s helmet. Ahmad calling. Tem hit the button on his shoulder. “I’m alive.”
“I hadn’t seen a body yet, so I assumed as much.”
Garrow chuckled and began to put away the medical kit.
“Temirlan, listen to me. We picked up another ghost transmission. It was a deactivation order for the androids. We can only assume the traitor was making way for the pirates to seize the ore.” Ahmad hesitated. “We traced it before they destroyed the transmitter.”
Tem exchanged a glance with Garrow. “Who sent it?”
There was a pause. “Do nothing stupid, Tem.”
Tem picked up the helmet with his free hand. “Who sent it?”
“The transmission came from the Wyvern Star.”
Tem looked up at Garrow.
“You’re one of the pirates. You’re the traitor.”
Garrow grinned. “Security doesn’t pay all that well.”
He picked up the med kit and swung it at Tem’s face. The durable plastic smashed the hearing out of one ear and threw his jaw out of alignment as he toppled onto the floor.
Through the helmet, Ahmad’s voice was still audible. “What was that?”
“I’m a little busy right now.”
Tem got to his feet, but the hypo-spray made him drowsy.
Garrow kicked the crate toward Tem’s knees before making a frantic rush for him.
Tem stepped over the crate and landed on the ground in the middle of the ship.
He aimed Fletch’s pistol at Tem dead to rights. Garrow smiled and pressed the trigger, but unbeknownst to him they spent every charge.
Tem raced toward him. Garrow swung the blaster like a club at Tem’s head as Tem rammed into him with his shoulder.
Garrow’s back hit the wall and the blaster cracked against Tem’s skull.
Tem shoved away from Garrow, pulled his baton, and swung it backhanded at Garrow’s knees.
Garrow bellowed, doubling over. Tem sidestepped him and dealt another blow across his broad shoulders. Garrow sprang at Tem faster than expected from someone that size. He held Fletch’s stun-club, lunged, and caught Tem in the chest with one full charge.
The entire cabin sprang into a blur, went pink at the edges, and Tem reeled back in a haze of nausea and a blistering pain across his chest. Before Tem could react, Garrow sent another charge from the stun-club fired into his neck.
Tem went blind, but he still held the baton in his hand, and lunged wildly and it caught flesh and bone. Garrow bellowed a scream.
Garrow jabbed with the stun club again, but it was out of charges, and he threw it aside swearing. He dragged Tem away from the wall, grabbed the Paladin by the head, and smashed his face into his raised knee.
Tem dropped the beat-stick as another ringing pain throbbed through his head. Garrow grabbed Tem by the shoulders and flung him across the cabin into the opposite bulkhead. He raced after Tem, caught the Paladin as he started to topple away from the wall, and slammed his broken arm three times against the bulkhead.
Tem screamed. White streaks of pain flashed before his eyes and he fought to stay conscious.
In the corner of his eye, Tem saw the diamond blade Ahmad handed him at Terradol Starport. He reached out for it. His fingertips inched the handle towards him until he could grab the handle and stab Garrow through his suit and into his chest and then yanked it out.
The lights in the cabin flashed red. At first Tem thought it was the effects of being hit on the head so many times, but Garrow had noticed it, too. The ships’ sirens blared, too.
“Sir, are you okay?”
“Wyv, where have you been?”
“Operating the ship and repairing myself. How are you, sir?”
“Taking a beating.”
“It’s about to get worse. Look, sir!”
Through the cockpit window, something gigantic loomed and soared overhead. Another Ler pirate dreadnaught appeared. More ships soared past, in every direction. Pirate Hammerhead fighters surrounded the dreadnaught. They were under attack by Empire Redbirds. Vosper had convinced the colony heads to fight for the colony.
Shots fired in every direction, and it was a miracle that none of them had hit the Wyvern Star yet. They had flown into a firefight without even noticing it.
Following a moment’s hesitation. Garrow glanced toward the cockpit, and in that moment Tem pulled his uninjured arm free and punched Garrow across the mouth. As the man flinched, his grip of Tem’s other arm released instinctively. Tem dove for his baton. A blast from one fighter hit the Wyvern Star. Neither men inside paid it any mind.
Tem sank deep into what the Order called battle calm. It did not matter
a larger battle raged outside. The immediate and important battle was before him, and the calm intensified his focus.
Garrow wielded the dead blaster like a club. They waited, expecting the other’s first move. Then, as though they were part of a dance that they had made together, both sprang into motion in the same moment.
“Wyv!”
“Yes, sir?”
“Event 10!”
“Understood.”
Wyv increased the gravity in the ship, and magnetized the floor. Tem magnetized his boots and his baton pulled him to the nearest wall, becoming a handle.
The mortally wounded Garrow looked confused and scared.
Lights dimmed. Emergency lights flashed. Tem inhaled a deep breath and held it in his meditative calm.
“What’s happening?” Garrow shouted.
Wyv sucked the air out of the ship into space. Garrow gasped for breath and fell to his knees. Wyv opened the bay doors and Garrow fired out of the Osprey Class ship similar to a missile. The Wyvern Star shut the doors and restored life support systems.
“Life support systems restored,” Wyv said.
Tem took a deep breath and panted until he filled his lungs with air again. He let go of the baton. Wyv de-magnetized the floor and Tem returned to the cockpit.
A Hammerhead exploded directly overhead, and Tem fell into the cockpit. “Blast it.”
He pulled himself to his feet and struggled into his Paladin armor. Fortunately, he did not need his hands. The ship and he were one again.
He plugged into the interface and shook his head sharply to remain conscious. “Let’s give ‘em hell, Wyv.”
The Wyvern Star responded to Tem’s mental commands and made straight for the battle. His plan at present was to confuse the enemy forces and draw fire. As he approached, surprised to note that none of the dreadnaughts nor Hammerheads attempted to shoot at him. It took a moment for him to realize why.
From their perspective, this is Garrow’s ship.
The pirates fled. Having taken the ore from the colony, they had little reason to stay and fight. The Imperial Firebirds struggled to keep up, believing this was now their territory. The dreadnaught was putting more distance between itself and the colony fleet. However, its course brought it almost straight toward Tem. Nothing but a few asteroids stood between them. Tem had done many foolhardy things during his time with the Order, but he had never stood down a dreadnaught single-handed before.
Don’t go trigger-happy. Think.
He knew that if he fired on the dreadnaught now, he would blow his cover and the ship would respond in kind. He stood little chance against dreadnaught weaponry. However, it he did nothing and allowed the ship to pass, there was no chance of the colony fleet catching up.
Tem targeted two of the larger asteroids between himself and the Ler ship. The asteroids exploded into a scattering of rocks and craters that swept toward the Ler ship. While it minored damage to the Ler ship, it blinded its sensors, hopefully long enough for the Firebirds to cut off its escape.
Tem dropped the Wyvern Star on the Z-axis, a gut-churning descent out of the asteroid cloud. As the debris cleared, from the dreadnaught’s perspective the Wyvern Star had disappeared. Tem hauled the nose of the ship upward ninety degrees and fired at the keel of the ship.
Something hit the Wyvern Star’s wing, a larger mass than a plasma beam. Something solid. The ship flipped end over end, shortly entangled with the Hammerhead ship that had emerged from the drifting debris field. Neither pilot had seen the other coming.
The Wyvern Star shuddered. Something had come loose in its inner workings. Wyv read the damage reports. Many of them related to damages that Tem had only superficially repaired after the last battle.
“This is what I get for making you play hurt,” Tem muttered. A throbbing in his arm reminded him that he was hardly in better condition than his ship. “How much time do we have, Wyv?”
“To escape?”
“To fight.”
There was a momentary pause as Wyv calculated. “None.”
“Set a course for the new colony,” Tem said. He could just make out the force field of the hangar bay. “If we can’t land, maybe we can drift into the hangar.”
“Plotting.”
The interface shorted out. The cabin went dark and the emergency power strips lit up around the upper edges of the bulkheads.
“Wyv?” Tem said. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here.” It was quiet for a moment before Wyv returned. “I’ve taken readings from your suit. You are in a worse state than I am. Multiple lacerations and contusions, three bruised ribs, left arm broken in two places, concussion…”
Strangely, as he drifted without control in the darkened cabin, Tem found the litany of injuries to be as soothing as a lullaby.
Chapter Seventeen: Fringes of the Universe
The Wyvern Star crashed on an abandoned runway alongside several other smoking Firebirds. Tem slept through the crash, something he had not done since he contracted Verulian Fever during a voyage as a young novice and had awoken confused in a scrap-salesman’s back room on Jessapuk.
“Welcome back to the living, Master Paladin.”
“What happened?”
Ahmad informed him that he had crashed into the shuttle bay.
“I don’t remember that,” he said to Ahmad.
“I’m not surprised,” Ahmad said. “You were heavily drugged.”
“It’s not our way.” Tem spoke more and glanced toward the doorway where his security detail stood. “The Order, I mean. We were taught to defend, not destroy.”
“You are the last one,” said Ahmad. “The Order is whatever you are, Tem.”
Tem said nothing. That was a chilling thought. The Order had never condoned brutality. In his early days at Baldock’s Academy, his Elders had cautioned him about unnecessary violence. Only a person of true gentleness could be trusted to protect the Realm.
Tem wondered if he was unlearning what they had instilled in him by the constant presence of people who believed the same. He had been alone for too long. He needed his brothers, but there was nothing left of them but their names.
“My weapon,” he blurted. “Where is it?”
Ahmad patted Tem’s arm. “Safe. I have it. It’s charging.”
There was a pause.
“You did well,” Ahmad said.
“I don’t think it matters what I do. What people believe is more important. I saved Fletch’s life, and he still tried to kill me. He said that orders were orders.”
Tem fell asleep. Again, he dreamed of the moon on the fringes of the galaxy. A thin crystalline blade crossed the surface of the moon and cut it in two.
Dr. Ford permitted him to leave the medical bay mender tank the next day.
The colony heads met that afternoon to debrief and make a plan of action. They had already taken steps to reanimate the androids with much better oversight. This had involved dropping a payload of charges from overhead and detonating the rest of the colony. Much of the asteroid remained, and it was probable that a smaller, makeshift mining facility could harvest what remained of the ore. It was a massive loss of time, credits and equipment, but the Z-ore must flow.
The conference rooms on the old mining station were smaller than that on Mollastian Fields. Although his body was still sore, Tem waited beside the door as he always did. Ahmad had stored his armor in his quarters along with his stun baton and needed repair. He knew that it would be a tedious operation to find the resources to repair it. He needed a good amount of plexi-carbon, and in the days when the Order was thriving, forged by the Order’s smiths on Fable. Tem was ready to resign to the fact that whatever repairs he made, the armor would not be the same.
“Now that we are all assembled,” DeWilda said with a glance in Ahmad’s direction as he slipped into his seat. “It is crucial to know that we cannot assume the threat of Ler pirates has ended. However, I must thank our…” She paused as she looked at Tem, who had taken his
customary place beside the door. “Security consultant for his efforts in wiping out the immediate threat.”
Tem could not find a suitable place to look.
“Re-starting production is our chief concern.” Vosper Chu tugged on his goatee as he stood to speak. “Arno has contacted the manufacturers for new androids, but it will take a long while to get them off the assembly line. There’s also the matter of the malignant subroutine. We still suspect that they tampered the androids with on a pre-assembly level.”
“We asked security at the manufacturers to trace back their staff’s correspondence, and it seems there was one technician working on the android control center who received a few cloaked transmissions. They took him into custody earlier today.”
Garrow had laced his transmissions over the years with cloaked messages over many suspicious channels, and his place as security chief allowed him to scrub most of these from the visible record.
“He also falsified his credentials,” Ahmad said. “During the war he was part of a rebel militia that fought the theocratic confederation, mostly through smuggling supplies and sabotaging Star Chamber operations. He… piloted many groups of refugees out of hostile territory.”
Tem noticed Ahmad’s discomfort and shared it. It made sense that he and the man they had been hunting had been on the same side and performed the same job during the Clement Wars. That was what happened when you worked for the enemy.
Tem noticed that all three, Arno Wurth, Vosper Chu and Orba DeWilda, avoided looking at him. It didn’t matter that he had helped them unearth a conspiracy and had taken down the chief operative himself. What mattered was that ten years ago, he had fought against the Empire.
Vosper stated, “It will take many months to get this operation running at its former capacity. There are more pirates out there who have already taken the place of those we captured and killed. We harvest a thing of great power here, the thing of great power in this current age. There will always be those who fear it and seek to sow discord. All I know is that because of the work we do here, new worlds are being colonized every day. Soon the Empire will spread to the very fringes of the galaxy, challenging the hegemony of the theocratic confederation, which is systematically losing control. War is inevitable. Z-ore will be vital component of the war as our ancestors needed oil and then fusion.”