War for Orion: Ghosts from the Past

by Conner Walworth

  "Sounds simple enough," Kanti said. "We'll get more than a few leads from the locals, I'm sure of it. They're criminals and that means they don't know how to keep quiet."

  "I guess," Anlon shrugged. "When do we leave?"

  "End of the week," Moran answered, moving on to the next thing. "Did you get the clue for the Queen like you were supposed to?"

  "Yes. I'm going to call her when I get home."

  "Get home and tell her immediately. She needs to know as soon as possible."

  "We're leaving now," Anlon headed for the door. "See you tomorrow, Moran."

  Anlon drove back to his house and Kanti left for the prison as soon as they arrived. He went inside and sat in his dad's office, pulling out his comlink to call Adira.

  "I have something very important to tell you Anlon," Adira said, before Anlon could tell her about the clue he had recovered.

  "What is it?" Anlon asked.

  "Donnchadh told me the leader of the Deimos Brotherhood is Kirill."

  "Wasn't that your assassinated husband?"

  "Yes," she nodded. "But he wasn't assassinated. I had Armino kill him."

  "You had my father kill your husband?"

  "He was trying to kill me and take my spot on the Throne. I had someone trick him and I got it all recorded as evidence before I acted. If I hadn't had Armino kill him, he would've killed me and taken the Throne."

  "Why did he want the Throne so bad? He already had almost as much power as you. The power was split between the two of you. It's not like he was powerless to do anything."

  "He needed me gone because I was the one calling a majority of the shots. He had a plan to cleanse Orion of all races he didn't deem worthy. A pure Orion he called it. One consisting of only humans and he knew I'd never go along with it."

  "That's horrible! Does anyone else know about this?"

  "There are a few, but we decided to keep it quiet," she said. "It turns out that he wasn't killed though. It was him who created the Deimos Brotherhood after surviving and has been planning to take my spot on the Throne ever since."

  "Are you sure?" Anlon asked. "Could it be someone else who's claiming to be your husband?"

  "I'm positive. Donnchadh said he has seen DNA confirmation."

  "Are you sure that you can trust anything that Donnchadh says anymore?"

  She took in a deep breath. "I think so. He seems weak and broken. I believe Kirill saw the same weakness when he caught him and that's how he turned him against me. The truth is probably what finally broke him, along with some lies to make it seem like I was the bad one."

  "What does Kirill's continuing survival mean for Orion?"

  "It means my daughter is even more important because if he gets to the Throne, he'll carry out his plan of mass genocide. If he finds out she's alive before I find her, he may try to capture her and use her as leverage, or he may even kill her so nothing stands in his way of the Throne."

  "Well, luckily for Orion, I think I found the clue today. She's on Demeter with the Waldmunt's."

  "Waldmunt," Adira repeated. "Ex-GSOU. Armino picked a perfect place for her then. Thank you, Anlon. I am sending a team to retrieve her right away," She looked down at something. "Did you find what you needed in the database?"

  Anlon nodded. "They're somewhere on Erebos. That's all that I know right now."

  "You'll find them," she encouraged. "I'm afraid I must go though, I need to get the team ready to retrieve my daughter as soon as possible. I'll call you to let you know when we have retrieved her. Good bye, Anlon."

  The comlink hung up and Anlon took a deep breath. Things were definitely starting to heat up. The Queen's dead husband was trying to kill her to take her spot on the Throne and he just didn't want power to feel superior, he wanted to wipe out all races that he deemed inferior. Anlon had to find the Deimos Brotherhood's base on Erebos and stop his plan of mass genocide.

  Nimesha landed her small Falcon Stealth Fighter on Gaea. She never questioned Kirill's orders, but this mission was one that she definitely felt like questioning. Killing a young boy? How was that even right? She was used to killing politicians and fighters that were dangerous to Kirill's plans, but not kids. Questioning him wasn't an option, orders were orders and she had no choice but to follow them, unless she had a wish for an early death. He had been her boss since she was seventeen and was well aware of what happened to those who defied his orders.

  She moved her slender, flexible, body off of her glider. Her grey printed fur blew with the breeze as her golden eyes locked on to her prey. Instinct told her that this was wrong, but that was something she had stopped listening to long ago. The prey moved into the house and she knew his time was quickly coming to an end.

  "You all probably think I have called this meeting because of the recent attempt on my life," Adira spoke to the Council.

  There was whispering of approval around the table. She waited for them all to become silent before continuing.

  "That is not why I have called this Council."

  "Then why have you called this Council?" Aldrick asked. "We all came believing your daughter had been safely recovered."

  "I have found where my daughter is being hidden," She informed all of them. "This is not something I want to tell you all, but you still need to know how things are progressing."

  "Where is she?" Hildereth asked. "You must tell us, we are your advisers."

  Adira crossed her arms. "This is why I didn't want to tell any of you I knew her location. I knew I couldn't tell you where and that you would all want to know."

  "Why can you not tell us?" Abdul asked. "This is absurd! We are your Council after all."

  "Sadly, there is a traitor somewhere in this room who helped the Deimos Brotherhood with their most recent attempt on my life. There has been leaked information for years, that I have kept to myself, but now is not the time for leaked information. My daughter is too important for the Deimos Brotherhood to get a hold of."

  "Who do you think this traitor may be?" Alura asked. "You must have some idea as to who it is."

  "I have not even the slightest clue," Adira shrugged. "Whoever it is, knows how to stay in the top ranks without slipping up in the slightest. There is nothing that I can find that directly leads to any of you, but I know the traitor is in this room."

  "What are you going to do to find this traitor?" Abdul asked. "You can't just let them stay here on this Council! You shouldn't have waited this long to tell us!"

  "There is nothing that I can do, Abdul. I can point fingers, but I don't know who to point a finger at."

  He clenched his fists. "You must be able to do something! We can't have information being leaked to our enemy."

  "All we can do is hope that whoever this traitor is, slips up soon," She put her hand on his shoulder.

  "All we can do is hope," He bowed his head slightly. "It is a wise decision to not reveal the location if there is a traitor amongst us."

  "I will tell you all when she has been retrieved. A team is being sent out as we speak," She got up from her seat. "I will call you all again when my daughter has arrived on Hera and is safely in the Palace."

  She pulled open the big wooden doors and left the Council Chamber. The peace and quiet of the library was calling for her. Her daughter was finally going to come home after twenty long years of being hidden in isolation and she still didn't know what she was going to say to her. The library is the only place she could go to begin pouring over all of the stories she wanted to tell her baby girl.

  Chapter 19

  Kirill picked up his comlink. "What new intel do you have for me?"

  "The Queen has just sent out a search party for her daughter."

  "Where is the search party going? I want to take my daughter before they're able to leave the planet with her. Adira will have no chance to see our daughter."

  The blue figure shrugged. "I don't know. She won't tell anyone where she sent the search team. She's sure that the traitor is on her Council."


  "I don't care if she knows that you're on the Council! We need to get my daughter before she does!" Kirill shouted. "Find out where she sent them and get my daughter!"

  "I'll put a bug in her room. She will most likely get a call from them once they have her. When they do, the bug will intercept the call and I'll pay attention for a location."

  "Shouldn't there already be a bug in her room? Why are you waiting until now to do it?"

  "The Queen's guard performs regular sweeps, it's a risky thing to do if it's not necessary. It won't matter if they find it after we intercept her daughter. It'll be too late to do anything at that point."

  "Do whatever you have to do, but don't fail me this time. Get my daughter to me at all costs," he demanded.

  "I'll have men prepared on every planet to intercept the ship once I have a location."

  "Good. The Queen and Anlon will be dead very soon. With my daughter in my possession and both of them out of the way, there will be no question about my right to the Throne."

  "No. There won't be," the figure grinned. "We won't let you down."

  Cearbhall landed his ship on Demeter near the Waldmunt residence. He didn't care that the Demeter authorities would be angry at him for not going through the spaceport as was standard protocol. This was official Queen business, they could complain to her if they had any problems with his decisions. The faster that he grabbed the Queen's daughter and returned to Hera the better.

  He had heard whispers of a recent attempt on the Queen's life and could only assume that her daughter's life must be in danger too, though he wasn't sure how many races knew the Queen had a daughter. If someone was able to slip into the Palace and get that close to the Queen, there was no telling what else they were capable of.

  His holomap flickered to life and he made sure that he had landed in the correct area before walking towards the clay and straw house that was supposed to be the Waldmunt's home. Several Kaneens waved to him from their fields as he passed them. It was strange here, most of the places he went to were teeming with life, but her was much different. Fields were filled with crops and a majority of the roads were made of dirt and traveled on lightly. Few advancements had been made over their years, all in order to provide Orion with the essentials they needed for living.

  He walked up to the wooden door of the Waldmunt home and knocked twice. The wooden door opened a couple of seconds later an old, brown, male Kaneen answered the door.

  "What can I do for you?" Obviously not used to visitors coming to his home.

  "Are you Mr. Waldmunt?" Cearbhall asked.

  "Why are you asking?" His ears perked. "Who are you?"

  "I'm Cearbhall, of the Queen's Galactic Special Operations Unit, and I have come here for something very important."

  "The GSOU. Come in," he motioned. "I think I know why you may be here, but you're not going to like the news I have for you."

  Cearbhall walked into the house. It was a simple house with an old wooden table for supper and some handmade furniture around a fireplace. There were rugs on the floor and family pictures on the plaster walls, but other than that, the house was empty.

  "Adira sent you here for her daughter?" Waldmunt asked.

  Cearbhall shook his head, surprised he didn't address her as Queen. "She did. She said it is urgent and that her daughter must return to Hera immediately."

  "I'm afraid that I can no longer help you on your mission. If you had made it a couple of months earlier, I would have been able to hand her right over to you, but I'm afraid you've arrived too late for that."

  "What do you mean? Why can't you give her to me now?"

  "She's no longer living here with my family."

  "Where has she gone?" Cearbhall asked. "It is urgent that we take her to the Queen this is a matter of life and death."

  "I don't know where she has gone," Mr. Waldmunt apologized. "I really do wish I could help you, but I can't."

  "How do you not know?" Cearbhall demanded. "You were supposed to be protecting her! That was your assignment."

  "And I did until she disappeared a couple of months ago," he defended himself. "There was no stopping her this time."

  "Did you try to track her? She must be here somewhere! She's the Queen's daughter!"

  "We tried to track her, like all of the other times she left our care, but this time she just disappeared. She grew impatient living with us and finally found a way to disappear without us being able to find her."

  "How could someone just disappear?"

  "We have searched Demeter as much as possibly, and she is nowhere to be found. If she is still on this planet, then she has a new identity."

  "Do you think she is still on this planet? I can surely track her down if she is, with or without a new identity."

  He shook his head. "I do not. I believe it was the planet that she was trying to leave, not us. She has undoubtedly left Demeter to find a new life someplace else where she fit in better. We couldn't afford to check for her off planet, and now that's she's twenty, it would've raised too many questions since she is not the same race as my family, so we had to let her go."

  Cearbhall sighed and thought a moment. "What name did you give her? It may raise questions if you're looking for her, but no one will care if the Queen is looking for her."

  "Kanti Cordula."

  Nimesha followed Anlon from his house to an abandoned apartment building. He seemed like he was in a hurry to get to the place, not noticing the glider following above him the entire way there. She waited outside of the building for the boy and girl to come back out and was starting to doze off when the two emerged a little over an hour later. It puzzled her what they could be doing in that building, but that wasn't a concern of hers. She had only one thing to worry about and that was to kill the boy. What he chose to do in his personal life was irrelevant to her unless it interfered with his elimination and she concluded there was nothing that would make his death difficult to carry out. Anlon was just another kid, oblivious to what was about to happen to him within the next day.

  The boy was predictable. He didn't try to hide what he was doing and walked around like nothing could harm him, which she couldn't blame him for doing. He was just a normal boy trying to cope with the murder of his family; watching his back for an assassin wasn't something that he should be doing after going through that. The friend really bothered her, she had yet to determine if it would be necessary to take the girl out too. Killing targets this young gnawed at her because they reminded her so much of herself, but if she deliberately ignored orders, she too would end up dead.

  Anlon and Kanti left the building when she stopped contemplating when to take him out. Time was out for the boy, his death would happen tomorrow and so would the nightmares that would come with it. Someone this innocent shouldn't be killed in this way. All of the others she had killed deserved what they got, but this boy obviously didn't. Orders where orders though, it was after all her job as the most lethal assassin in the Deimos Brotherhood to kill whoever she was ordered to take out. That is, after all, what made her one of the most feared assassins in Orion.

  Chapter 20

  "Did you find my daughter Cearbhall?" the Queen asked.

  "Not exactly, your majesty," he answered. "It's nothing we can't handle though. I will get this taken care of as quickly as possible."

  "What do you mean, not exactly? Did you, or did you not, find my daughter?"

  Cearbhall cleared his throat. "The Waldmunt's say that she ran away a couple of months ago. They tried to find her on Demeter without any luck. Apparently, it wasn't the first time she has run away. This was just the first time she was smart about it, leaving no traces for her caretakers to follow. He told me that she has gone off-planet for sure, so we have a lot of searching to do before we locate her, but it can be done."

  "Do whatever you need to do to find her, but keep it as quiet as you can. You have access to any, and all, resources available," she ordered. "Do you have any leads yet to as where she may be?"r />
  "I have not the slightest idea where she may be, but I do have one promising lead that may lead us directly to her," he said. "They gave her the name Kanti Cordula. If she just left the planet without changing her identity, we should find her without too much trouble and very little questions will be raised in the process."

  "I will have my people search for the name and see where they find her," she told him. "Thank you. You may come back to Hera to plan out your search, or you may do it all from your ship. Just make it quick. The sooner she's here the better."

  Adira hung up her comlink and made a call to a friend who would be able to find her daughter quicker than Cearbhall, if her daughter was still going by the same name. When he answered, she told him to find her quick and send her on the first ship back. He understood the importance and urgency and went straight to work and had yet to fail her in countless years of selfless service. Adira just hoped he still had one more mission in him for her daughter's sake.

  Jahdiel's patience was growing thin in waiting to leave this battle-torn Galaxy for Orion. Merikh had made it seem like they were leaving quick, but he was taking his time, making sure every minute thing was ready to go before they launched. Excitement hadn't been the first feeling she had felt, but as time went by, that's what was gnawing away at her. Things obviously wouldn't be the same as when she had left, she was well aware of that, but it was still her home. Deep down she knew that's where she belonged, no matter what others thought of her.

  She walked up to Merikh who was staring out of the window at his organizing fleet, arms crossed behind his back.

  "Are we almost ready to leave through the Black Hole?" she asked.

  He slowly turned around to face her. "We are readying our remaining fleets to leave. We need all of them to come along with us on this journey back to Orion."

  "All of them?" she asked surprised. "You aren't going to leave any fleets here?"

  "We are bringing every Crodillian along on this journey," he replied coldly. "I don't wish to ever return to this Galaxy. Let the surviving rebels live in the death and destruction they have created. I will not."