Yet everything on Mars was so backward now. Who could she believe?
"You look quite exquisite tonight, my lady," a young man said. The starlight beamed through the glass roof across her upper torso, revealing the strapless brown dress that flowed to the floor. Her beautician had braided her hair around the back of her head, and it showed off her long neck.
She wondered who thought the job of a diplomat was pure enjoyment. Her hand and forearm were stretched from the handshaking, her jaw strained to keep the same cordial smile, and she hadn’t felt her feet—which were cramped inside a tight, high-heeled dress shoe—in almost thirty minutes. But she held her poise. She always could.
She felt at times that the number one priority of her father’s chancellorship was to cultivate her image. She hated having to maintain such a positive exterior just for his legacy. She didn’t like creating a false image of herself, and she definitely didn’t like coming to all these wonderful parties and being relegated to a glorified showpiece.
She wanted to leave and let the guests enjoy the grand mayors and the local celebrities. She moved one foot back, ready to walk away, but she didn’t have the nerve to move her body. Her father needed her to represent the family. The Arwells never placed themselves above the people. If the people demanded an Arwell, she needed to stand in until her father returned.
After several more handshakes and one rib-breaking hug from her old teacher, she heard a murmur from behind her and turned. A hand stroked her shoulder.
"I didn’t think you would ever return." She rubbed her forearm. "What was the big emergency?"
Her father smiled. "Nothing but excellent news concerning tonight’s events. Why don’t you take a break?"
"Gladly."
He comforted her with his cheerful demeanor, but she worried that he might have found out about her escapades a few hours earlier. However, he gave no outward indication that he knew. However, the techs would need all night to analyze the blood she had left on the floor and trace the DNA to her.
"Go enjoy the gala," he said, touching her gently on shoulder.
"I will." She turned and left the line.
The light sound of the orchestra jingled throughout the room, creating a dance in her step.
She walked through the ballroom, searching for any crew members. Of all the crew, Eamonn should have arrived by now. He had been invited to sit at the head table.
Plus, she wanted to discuss the information she had recovered from Zephyria and explain that her father had been set up by someone. The minister was her leading suspect. Thomas Cross and he would have the most to gain by pinning the entire incident on him.
In the meantime, she would try to pry further information from the minister. She worked her way over to the other side of the gala ballroom and spotted the Aethpisian delegation not far away: the minister, several of his aides, and the minister’s wife dressed in black beside him. In a similar situation as she had been in, they were greeting guests in a lineup that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see.
She moved toward the welcoming committee. The guards around the group let her by, since everyone on the planet knew her. She had known since she was a young girl that Damon Arwell’s daughter had special privileges, and a flick of the wrist and a soft smile meant unquestioned access.
"Princess Arwell," the minister boomed with his loose tongue.
To her, his exaggerated movements showed he had been drinking real champagne. She had known the minister since she was a little girl, and he always called her a princess, which was why she was known all over Mars by her nickname of Princess Arwell. She smiled. "I hate it when you say that, Kaelin."
"But your fair skin and beauty demand it," the minister replied. "How are you enjoying the day’s festivities so far?"
"Pleasant. Where is Sarah? I would like to talk with her. We have a lot of catching up to do."
"Sarah will be joining us shortly. She had last-minute business in Aethpis to attend to," the minister said. "Have you met my new wife before?"
"I don’t believe I have had the pleasure."
"This is a good time," the minister said. "This is my wife Erebria Cortez. Erebria, this is the chancellor’s daughter, Gwen Arwell." The two ladies exchanged bows.
"Have you been enjoying the evening, Mrs. Cortez?"
"Yes, it is quite adequate, but I am growing tired of this nonsense," she replied as she pointed to the reception line. "I think I shall retire before it finishes. There is nothing here but false smiles and wasted time."
"I understand." Gwen envied this woman who was saying what Gwen had thought her whole life. She turned to the minister. "Kaelin, have you been able to get communications up to Lunara yet? My crew members are anxiously awaiting word."
"No," he said. "Thomas Cross and his team are working tirelessly to fix the problem."
"Surely the damage should be repaired by now," she said with a bit more accusation in her tone than she wanted, but she needed to know.
"Delays," he said. "The gala is hogging most of the resources. You have worked in the bureaucracy of Mars for many years. Surely, you know how things go, but I am sure your crew will get safe passage to Lunara in no time."
He wasn’t going to say anything inflammatory, and Gwen didn’t want to push too hard. Her suspicions, added to her position on Mars, could ruin the relationship among the colonies. She had to verify it. She hoped that his ego would take hold of his tongue and blurt something out, but his lips tightened—even with the alcohol.
"I will tell the crew not to worry," she said.
"Are they concerned about their accommodations?"
Besides our invaders housing us, NO! "The days are long on Mars without purpose. They are antsy to return."
Murmurs from the crowd turned her head. From out of the crowd, Kyle Cortez raced up to the podium. His eyes focused on his father, ignoring all pleas from the young ladies clamoring for his attention. He mouthed "hello" to Gwen and his stepmother before pulling the minister aside. Mrs. Cortez saw the same concern on the face of her stepson as Gwen did, and Gwen walked over to hear the conversation.
"Miss Arwell," said a voice from her other side. She moved her focus away from Kyle and the minister but kept her ears listening.
"Yes."
"My name is Madelyn White. I am an acquaintance of your friend Eamonn Dalton. I’ve been looking for him, and I can’t find him anywhere. You are a crew member of the Protector?"
"Yes," she said, hardly hearing what the woman had said as her attention remained on the more important conversation.
"Shouldn’t you be elsewhere, preparing for the unveiling?" the minister said.
Kyle spoke next. "I came to tell you that the engineers were unable to complete it in time. We discovered a problem with the propulsion system—delaying us three or four months."
"No, we will go ahead as planned tonight. I will adjust our timetable accordingly." The minister held his arms down, not wanting to flail them in frustration in front of the crowd. Tight-lipped he said, "They told me the ship was space worthy, so it will fly tonight. I don’t want any of their excuses."
"No, your engineers . . ."
"Miss Arwell," Madelyn said over the voices of the minister and his son.
Gwen bristled but gained her composure. "I am sorry, Madelyn was it? My ear had been caught in another conversation when you arrived, terribly rude of me." She hadn’t been able to overhear all the conversation and was trying to imagine what the minister was so upset about. "I haven’t seen Eamonn or any of the crew tonight. Walk with me, and we can use our four eyes to search for him."
Ushering Madelyn toward the center of the room, she turned in the direction of the minister and Kyle, but they had moved farther down the hallway. From a fair distance, she caught a glimpse of the minister’s reddened face and Kyle’s drooping shoulders.
Something was up. Her suspicions were right.
She turned back to Madelyn. "In the meantime, you can tell me all about E
amonn. He has always kept to himself when it concerns his personal life, and I would be interested to learn more about him."
"I would like that," Madelyn said. The two ladies started walking around the room looking for their companions. "It all started about fifteen years ago, when we were both in the Martian Flight Academy together . . ."
Chapter 30
Visible from the sky, Zephyrian troops were already moving toward Trivium Port, and judging by the companies’ movements along the Mars surface, Eamonn had no doubt they were coming from both Zephyrian and Aethpisian facilities. He hoped Sarah Cortez had come to the same conclusion when she and her four light cruisers broke orbit only a quarter of an hour ago.
The Protector shook as it left the atmosphere of Mars, causing him to clutch the handholds above his cabin door. As he looked out of the curved porthole at the fleet in front of him, four light cruisers and twenty attack fighters—the frightful few Sarah and her loyal supporters could secure—blazed a path toward Lunara.
He scoffed under his breath. The newly formed Alliance was no match for the invasion forces’ three cruisers, countless fighters, and the Lunara defense perimeter. Not to mention any other surprises they had secured since the invasion. The Alliance’s pitiful fleet would be hard pressed to beat the three larger cruisers, but taking on a stationary target dug into the lunar surface would take a plan unlike any ever conceived.
Eamonn’s command experience during the Revolutionary War and his familiarity with Lunara put him in charge of creating the battle plan.
To his benefit, his fleet was agile; the bulky cruisers around Lunara had weak acceleration, and he doubted their fighters had the maneuverability of an Aethpisian Asterfighter—they certainly hadn’t shown it when they tried to stop the Protector from coming to Mars.
Examining the Asterfighter closest to his porthole, he knew that the agility of the six-winged fighter—a single-manned cockpit with an upper and lower tail fin running vertically through the hull, all flanked by crossed wings—would give it an advantage over the speedier invasion force fighters in a dogfight.
The enemy fighter’s sleek design was more conducive to catch and shoot attacks than to dogfights in confined space. For Eamonn, the ship’s awkward design wasn’t surprising; since the revolution, there had been a shift from combat fighters to cargo policing fighters. The raiders’ illegal cargo runners had continually beaten the more agile Asterfighters. Agility was not needed in the open expanse of deep space because straight line speed overwhelmed any fancy flying.
The Protector provided the best of both worlds for him, agility and pure unbridled speed. And with Parker’s quick thinking on Mars, he had more weapons to fend off any attacks this time around. By design, mounted sonic cannons on the front of the ship would weaken the plasma shielding around the cruisers’ hulls, and a swiveling sonic gun, filled to capacity with sonic rounds and installed on the top of the Protector between the two starwings, would pierce any type of hull.
He looked back at Mars again and saw no sign of pursuit. In the next few seconds, the quickdrives would activate, propelling them on their way to Lunara.
A rap echoed from the cabin door, and he spun around. Only one person knocked and didn’t use the buzzer. He activated the door, and as expected, Jan stood in front of him.
"Are there any problems?" he asked.
"No," she said, walking past him into the cabin without a command to do so.
She had acquired that right as his top advisor, but it irked him today. "Come in," he said.
Jan paused for a moment before she took her usual seat beside his desk. "I didn’t think you would mind if we talked."
"No, I guess not," he said, trying to hold back the irritation in his tone. The battle plan weighed on his mind, and he needed time to figure it out entirely. Too many variables skittered about. "Is the bridge squared away?"
"Appears so," Jan said, shifting her legs and crossing one over the other. "Don’t get me wrong; they are fine crewmen. I just wish our crew was back together."
"So do I, but this is what it is. They are some of the best the Aethpisians have to offer, and Sarah was generous in giving them to us."
"Are you sure they aren’t here to baby-sit us?"
"Most likely . . . I am not naive. Sarah doesn’t trust us yet." He moved over to his seat and opened his terminal, which displayed the face of his new tactical officer. "Ripley is a little older than what we are used to aboard starships, but he is an excellent combat officer from the revolutionary wars." He paged to the next face, a young man in his late twenties, well groomed with an elongated face. "Fenor Davis is the best communications officer in the Aethpisian Air Command. Although he is ground-based, he will be invaluable in getting any transmissions from Lunara."
He tapped his finger, and his screen flipped to a young woman. "Shannon Buckley is one of the top pilots in the Air Command. She’s in her midtwenties and doesn’t have any combat experience, but Ripley assures me she is the best pilot he has ever known."
"Obviously, he has never met Seth," Jan said, smirking.
He smiled back.
"I knew I would cheer you up."
"So you came to cheer me up? I could never have guessed." He turned his terminal off and sighed. "Already, this Alliance will be the death of me."
"Why?"
"Back on Lunara, all we had to worry about was meteors. Now I have to worry about who is trying to betray us and how in the solar system will I ever get the crew back. I let them all down, abandoned three of them on Mars, and allowed Roche to die."
"I want us back together, too . . . but to the far side of the sun with the crew," Jan said firmly. "You are the captain and you make the decisions for good or bad. Seth and Chloe knew the risks when they left for Memnonia Sulci. And Gwen, you can’t be sure what to think about her anymore. Undoubtedly, she betrayed us all on Lunara by feeding Zephyria information." Jan sighed. "And Roche was my fault. I sent him to Zephyria."
"No. Seth was right, and I should have believed him," he said. "It is—"
"Damn Seth. He is always making up ways for things to be wrong. You were under no obligation to believe him. He’s the boy who cried wolf."
"But he was right this time, and as a captain I should have listened, even with a loose ear." He stood and moved toward the porthole to the front of the cabin. "From when I was a child, I wanted to be a starship captain, but I didn’t realize the baggage that came with command—all these complications."
"You are in a special situation," Jan said, moving over to him and placing her hand on his shoulder. "You have been commendable through this. No other person in the solar system could have convinced Sarah Cortez to take back Lunara and shown her how important the meteor stones are."
"I’m shocked she agreed to come to Lunara."
"What do you mean? Lunara must be controlled for the good of this alliance."
"You don’t need to convince me." He rubbed his finger into the scar on his forehead. "I thought she would want to save her family."
"She realizes we could do nothing for anyone at Trivium Port. After she decoded the FSTAT message, Hans Bauer’s intentions were clear. Metalor is the key. And witnessing the force converging on Trivium . . . Mars is doomed."
"Not completely," he said. "Sarah left her most trusted and loyal officers to form the resistance group, the Alliance. She instructed them to defend Aethpis to their death. They will comply. She also left a stirring message for the Martian Council, delayed of course, in which she outlined the issues and the evidence against Zephyria and asked them for support. She actually begged them to help her." He hesitated and then turned around to face Jan. "She is with us, Jan. If I am wrong, I will never captain another ship as long as I live. She will not stop until the Zephyrian treachery is obliterated."
Jan shook her head. "She doesn’t believe we are with them yet. Again, I don’t like how the three officers on board are planting bugs and communications piggybacks in our systems."
"Yo
u noticed," Eamonn said, the corners of his mouth smirking slightly. "I let them."
"Why?" She exclaimed. "We gave them all the information we know."
"If it makes them comfortable, then we can afford a little discomfort in knowing we are bugged. Parker, you, or I will not betray them."
She nodded.
The Protector rocked gently back and forth, and then suddenly there was a boom, and it came to a jerking halt.
"Don’t worry," he said. "We’re attaching to the Unity for the voyage."
"I guess I better get going," she said. "I can help with the connection hatchway." She opened the doorway and then stopped, turned around, and looked toward Eamonn. "Don’t worry about your crew."
Parker walked the halls of the Unity spying out any innovations, trying to find ways to improve the Protector for the battle to come. But that was not the sole purpose of his journey. He was looking for the quarters of Sarah Cortez. They had four days to spend together—at least on the same ship—and he hoped to apologize. He was unsure if she would even hear him out.
A few corridors farther, he came to the door of her cabin. He rubbed his damp palms on the back of his pants.
The buzzer stared back at him, and he couldn’t think of what he would say. He had no excuses for what he did. Entering his mind were only words that would infuriate her, but he had to see her again. However, he couldn’t find the courage to knock. He was turning to leave when the door snapped open, and Sarah stood before him.
"It is about . . . time." Her face hardened almost instantly and she glowered.
"Can I come in? I want to apologize. You have had time to calm down."
"Time to calm down?"
He winced—definitely the wrong thing to say.
"I don’t think my quarters will be calm for you," Sarah hissed. "I don’t have time for your nonsense."
Lunara: The Original Trilogy Page 27