by Joe Vasicek
“Then give me your wrist console. I’ll sync it to mine.”
He handed it over, and she took it with one hand while holding her rifle with the other. Lino stopped them at the next corner, and while Pallas got into position, Mara slung her rifle over her shoulder and made the change. She handed the console back to Aaron without a word.
Shots sounded in the distance, in a different part of the ship but not too far from them. Aaron’s hands went clammy as he tightened his grip on his rifle. Lino motioned for them to take positions, so Aaron followed Mara to the other side and peered down the corridor.
He heard Pallas fire before he saw what he was firing at. The laser bolt snapped with a loud noise and made the air sizzle. Down in the corridor, someone screamed. Aaron squinted his eyes and saw them—technicians, not soldiers, and evidently unarmed. They made no effort to fight back but ran away as fast as they could.
It wasn’t fast enough.
Pallas made quick work of them. With six shots, he downed at least five of them that Aaron could see. The last one had turned to them with his hands raised, but Pallas shot him all the same.
I guess we aren’t taking any prisoners. Then again, the same could probably be said of the Imperials.
“Move!” Lino ordered. Instantly, the squad was on their feet, running down the long corridor. The distance was much longer than Aaron had realized, and he soon fell behind the others.
As they passed a large door, Aaron had the strangest sense of déjà vu. He stopped for a moment to examine it while the others ran on ahead. After staring at it for a few seconds, he realized that it was the door to the hangar bay, the one that he and Isaac had escaped from the last time they were here.
The one with the cryotank and the henna girl.
He froze, chills running down the back of his neck all the way down his spine. As if in a trance, he watched himself palm the access panel for the door. It hissed and slid open slowly, revealing stacks of large crates and empty machinery. He stepped forward into the hangar.
The dream where he found the henna girl came flooding back to him. The dark gray walls, the heavy assault rifle in his hands, the impending sense of doom as the Imperial soldiers hunted him—every detail was exactly the same. He broke into a run, his heart pounding as hard as his feet.
He rounded a stack of crates to find a platform by the wall. The moment he saw it, his eyes went wide and his legs began to shake. Sitting alone on top of it was the cryotank.
Time seemed to stop. He stood dumbfounded, hardly daring to believe his eyes. A part of him wanted nothing more in the universe than to run up and see the girl, but the other part—the part that remembered the dream—feared to do so. For how long those two sides warred in him, he didn’t know. Eventually, though, he broke the paralysis freezing him in place and stepped forward.
The cryotank was empty. Where the girl had once slept, there was now nothing but an empty, white canister. He let out a breath that he didn’t know he’d been holding. No horrific visions of death where the girl melted before his eyes. She was just gone.
“Aaron?” Mara called. “Aaron, what are you—”
Suddenly, he remembered the next part of the dream, when the Imperial soldiers shot him to pieces.
“Mara! Get down!”
He ducked behind the cryotank not an instant too soon. Shots filled the air all around him, shattering the glass and ricocheting off the walls. He huddled in shock and panic behind the partial cover as all the terror came rushing back to him. Except this time, it was real. This time, he wouldn’t wake up.
Mara’s battle cry brought him back to his senses. He readied his rifle and rolled on his stomach over the broken glass until he had a clear view. She was firing back at the Imperials, pushing them back. He fired from his angle and brought down one of them, his face masked by a gray helmet.
As the Imperials fell back, he scrambled to his feet and ran to Mara’s position behind the crates. She’d emptied her rifle and was reloading another magazine.
“How many are there?”
“Hell if I know. What the fuck are you doing here?”
“It’s a long—”
Gunfire cut him short, coming behind them this time. He dropped to his stomach, fearing for a second that he was hit. Mara’s reflexes were faster. She shot their attacker and dragged Aaron to his feet.
“Come on, let’s move!”
He scrambled with her to new cover, this time with the wall against their backs. The bay that he and Isaac had escaped from last time wasn’t too far. The slots for the EVA suits were still there, though empty. Apparently, the Imperials hadn’t replaced the stolen suits.
“We’re cut off,” she yelled, firing back. As the Imperials returned fire, she ducked back down beneath the crate. “You okay?”
Aaron checked himself over for blood or any other sign of injury. Though the memory of the dream still filled his mind, he appeared to be in one piece.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Then I hope you can run, flyboy.”
She pulled out a grenade and hurled it over her head at the Imperials. The explosion stopped the enemy fire for a few seconds, and she took advantage of that to sprint for the next stack of crates. Aaron followed as quickly as he could behind her.
“What do we do?” he asked.
“We die,” she answered. “But not until we take those bastards with us. Here!”
She motioned for him to cover her as she reloaded again. Aaron peered around the corner and fired at the first sign of motion. Return fire zinged past his ear, narrowly missing his face. He ducked back around as Mara came back into action.
“Cover my rear,” she told him. “Don’t let them flank us.”
At that moment, an awful grinding noise filled the cargo hangar. Aaron’s stomach fell—he recognized it at once.
“The bay!” he said. “The bay doors are opening! They’re venting us into space!”
“What?”
As if in confirmation, a loud whoosh of rapidly escaping air filled the room. It started as a hiss but soon grew to a whirlwind, tugging at Aaron’s clothes and whipping his hair back toward the doors. He looked over his shoulder and saw the stars, with nothing between him and the void. The gunfire had stopped now, replaced by screams and roaring wind. He dropped his gun and grabbed hold of the nearest crate as the whirlwind threatened to suck him out into the infinite blackness.
“Here!” Mara screamed, grabbing his arm. She pulled him toward a large storage container with a partially open hatch. He grabbed it as tight as he could and pulled himself inside. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a body fly past him—a soldier sucked out into a cold, dark grave. He turned back to help Mara, but she handed him an oxygen tank and pulled herself in after him.
“Close the door!” she screamed, her breath coming short. Aaron’s own breath was failing, and a wave of dizziness threatened to overwhelm him. With the last of his strength, he pulled on the hatch until it swung shut, sealing them both inside.
A moment later, he passed out.
* * * * *
He came to coughing, with a mask over his face. He pushed it away, only to have his breath come short. After coughing a couple more times to clear his throat, he grasped at the mask and pulled it back to his mouth, breathing the sweet, sweet oxygen.
“Take a deep breath,” said Mara. Aaron complied, and she pulled the mask away. Even though he couldn’t see her in the darkness, he could hear her breathing. The mask returned a second later.
“We have to share until they rescue us,” she said. “Or until the oxygen runs out.”
“What happened?” Aaron asked as she took the mask to breathe. A second later, she handed it to him, along with the oxygen tank itself.
“Here, take this. I need my hands free.”
Aaron took it and breathed deeply, all too aware that Mara would need to breathe soon, too. The light of her wrist console illuminated the darkness, showing that they were locked inside a deep space storage container. The w
alls were cool and surprisingly wet. Aaron guessed that the tank had carried water at some point. Before he forgot, he held the mask up to Mara’s face, allowing her to breathe.
“Jason took a computer terminal,” she reported as he took the mask back. “He’s controlling the doors. Vented the whole damn ship.”
“The whole ship? Is everyone dead then?”
She took a deep breath as he pressed the mask back up to her. “Not everyone, but a lot of enemy soldiers. Pockets of fighting going on right now.”
“Did he get them all? How many are left?”
“Impossible to say. First Platoon has the bridge, though. Fighting’s worst there.”
“Did our people make it to safety in time?”
“Most of them, those who weren’t wounded. The others …”
She didn’t finish the thought. Aaron held up the oxygen mask, and she took it gratefully. The conversation was getting hard on both of them anyway, so it was best to take a break for a while.
In the silence of the storage container, Aaron had his first real chance to think since the start of the battle. The Aegis was down, and the platoons that had made it to the Starfire were fighting for their lives. But they had control of the bridge and the door systems, which gave them an advantage. Perhaps there was a chance they’d get out of this. Perhaps they would survive.
But that opened the door to a whole host of other questions. The henna girl—where was she? On the ship somewhere? If she was, had she survived the decompression, or had she been sucked out of the ship? Aaron’s hands twitched. In that moment, he wanted to be free to search for her more than anything. There in the storage container, he felt as if he were sealed alive in his final tomb.
And what had happened to Isaac? Was he all right? When would Aaron see him again?
The whole situation was a mess. Everything had gone completely and totally wrong. It seemed less like an adventure now and more like his own personal hell. He didn’t care whether he lived or died anymore—he just wished that it were all over.
“Jason’s going to kill the gravity,” Mara announced. “Hang on.”
Aaron drifted slowly off of the floor, losing all sense of direction. He flailed about, nearly letting go of the precious oxygen mask, but he kept enough presence of mind to hold onto it. Mara grabbed onto him and reached for it, so he handed it to her.
“How bad’s the fighting?”
“Bad. Heavy losses. Half of First Platoon is dead.”
“And Fourth?”
“Not as many. Still a lot, though. Tzaf, Lino, Hektor.”
“Hektor,” Aaron said, musing. “Poor guy. I’ll miss him.”
“So will I.”
They said nothing for a little while, instead just floating weightless in the dark. The lack of handholds on the inside walls of the storage container made it impossible to keep from drifting. Aaron had already lost sense of which way was supposed to be up or down. He and Mara held onto each other—she was his only orientation, her wrist console the only light. If he had to endure this Hell, he was glad at least to be enduring it with her.
“Mara?” he asked.
“Yeah?”
“What will happen to us when the battle’s over?”
She didn’t reply to him right away. They exchanged the mask a couple of times before she answered.
“I have no idea. I honestly didn’t think we would make it.”
“Then why did you save me back there?”
“Because you sure as hell weren’t going to save yourself.”
They both laughed. Aaron realized that this was the first time he’d heard Mara laugh since the battle at Bacca.
“Do you think we’ll actually pull off a victory?”
“Of course not. Even if we take the Starfire, there’s still the rest of the Imperial fleet at Colkhia.”
“But what if the Flotilla beats them? The Starfire was their flagship.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“Why not?” Aaron asked. “Is it too much to ask for a little hope?”
“Yes,” she answered simply. There was no other reply.
“Look, I know this campaign was hard on you, but you’ve got to have hope—at least for yourself.”
“For myself?” she said softly. “Don’t count on it. But I can hope for you.”
Her answer confused him, until he realized that he’d been doing the same thing. It wasn’t himself he’d been fighting for—it was the henna girl, and the hope that he could rescue her. Did Mara feel the same way about him? He didn’t know, but they were the only Deltans in the whole company, and that gave them a connection the others couldn’t share. His language struggles meant that he’d had to rely on her—at least until the neural stimulator had sped up his learning. But still she’d clung to him, not because he needed her but because she needed him. The battle at Bacca had sucked almost all the humanity out of her. Helping him was one of the last ways she had of getting it back.
“We’ll get through this,” he said. “I know we will.”
“Just like you knew your brother would pull through?”
“That’s different. I don’t know what he’s up against, but I do know what’s up against us. We’ll make it.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
He grinned. “But I would.”
At Hope’s End
Aaron was right, at least in the short term. With most of the Starfire vented and the artificial gravity turned off, the platoons managed to defeat the Imperial soldiers fighting them room to room. In a little over an hour, the last few stragglers surrendered, giving the outworlders complete control of the ship. Gravity and oxygen were quickly restored, and it didn’t take long for someone to rescue Aaron and Mara from the storage tank.
“How are you?” Phoebe asked in her accented Gaian as she opened the hatch. Aaron climbed out and took a deep breath of the refreshingly cool air.
“Well enough, considering,” said Mara. “What’s the situation?”
Phoebe explained it to them, speaking too quickly for Aaron to catch it all. From what he could pick out, it seemed that the outworlders had been decimated by the fighting. In Fourth Platoon, Hektor, Tzaf, Lino, and Talya were all dead, and Castor was seriously wounded. Phoebe was needed at the medical bay, which the soldiers were using as a field hospital. Everything was in disarray and no one knew how to pilot the battleship they’d managed to capture, but several of the Aegis’s crew had managed to evacuate in escape pods, which they were now in the process of recovering.
As Phoebe hurried off to the medical bay, Mara filled in the gaps for the parts that Aaron had missed. The Imperials were no longer a threat. Only twenty enemy soldiers had survived, along with half a dozen technicians, and they were all prisoners now in their own brig.
“That’s great,” said Aaron, his hands twitching. After everything that they’d just been through, he felt as shaky as if he’d survived a violent planetfall.
“It would appear so,” said Mara. “Now let’s find Lieutenant Castor and report.”
“Wait!”
She turned and gave him a puzzled look. “What?”
“There’s … there’s someone I need to find,” he said. “Someone I came here to rescue.”
“Who?”
He walked over to the empty cryotank. It was riddled with bullet holes and plasma scorches, now. The glass was shattered, the machinery unusable. He picked up a shard of glass and dropped it absent-mindedly.
“What’s this?” Mara asked, walking up beside him.
“It’s what I came for,” he explained. “The reason I joined up to fight the Imperials in the first place. I never had a chance to tell you, but …”
“Go on.”
Aaron swallowed. “Well, a few standard months ago, my brother and I were on a trade run in the Far Outworlds when we came across an abandoned space station. Everyone inside was dead—the place was a real derelict—but there was one survivor, frozen in a cryotank. She was a girl, covered from
head to foot with henna tattoos, and not much older than me. It didn’t seem right to leave her there, so we loaded her on our ship and set out to find someone who could thaw her.”
Mara nodded, listening intently. Her expression didn’t seem so cold anymore. In fact, it seemed like she actually cared.
“We went from star to star until we came here, to Colkhia. The Imperials took her from us as contraband, and would have taken us prisoner, but we managed to escape. I vowed that I would find this girl and rescue her from the Imperials. I’m the reason she’s out here—I’m the one who found her. And because of that, I’m going to fight as hard as I can to get her back.”
“I see,” said Mara, her arms folded and her brow furrowed. “And now that you’ve found her cryotank, you want to find her—is that it?”
Aaron nodded.
“Is this the whole reason you joined the Resistance? Why you wanted to fight back against the Imperials?”
“Well, not exactly,” he said sheepishly. “There were other reasons, but—”
“But that one was the biggest.”
“Yeah.”
She grinned. “Well, I don’t see anyone stopping us. Let’s go find her.”
Aaron’s face lit up, and a rush of giddy excitement took hold of him. “You want to help me?”
“Isn’t that what I just said?”
“Right. Then let’s go!”
* * * * *
The first place they searched was the brig. A dozen soldiers from First and Second Platoon were stationed there, along with Jason. He greeted them both with a warm embrace.
“Ah, my friends, it is good for to see you alive,” he said. “It seems we have cheating death, yes?”
“It certainly does,” Mara answered in Gaian. She explained what they’d come for.
“Very well, very well, I see,” said Jason. “Come. I check for you in database.”
He led them to a computer terminal with multiple holoscreens, no doubt for keeping an eye on the prisoners. Most of them rotated between views of the cells where the Imperial soldiers were being held. He sat down and cracked his knuckles.