by Tim Marquitz
“About time you relieved us,” a soldier complained, stepping out where she could see him. Another trailed behind, slow and sluggish. Lights flickered behind them, but Taj couldn’t tell see the source from where she crouched.
“Take that up with the captain,” the man who had knocked answered. “He’s got everyone working overtime on his little project out there, no exceptions. You’ve got about three hours of rack time before he drafts you, too.” The soldier waved a hand toward the distance, and instinctively, Taj’s gaze followed.
And for the first time, she realized there was a gathering out by the balboran pens she hadn’t noticed before. She had been so focused on the nearby barn to see it.
Small lights gleamed near the pens, and she could barely make out the haze of movement, even with the magnification of the gazefinders glued to her face. The shuttle that had escaped her destructive trick hovered in the sky above the area. Its lights dimmed and angled in a direction that limited her ability to see it. The engines engaged only to hold it in place, she hadn’t even heard them, amidst the constant chatter coming from the balborans.
Taj squinted, hoping to better see what was going on, but it did her little good. She could tell there was a congregation of machines and men there, but little to nothing else. Frustrated, she grunted and clambered over the side of the building. If she was going to get a better view, she would need to get closer.
She hit the ground with barely a tap of sound and shot off before she’d even settled her feet. The soldiers continued their conversation as she skirted the back edge of the nearest barn, staying out of the line of sight of the soldiers surrounding the next one over where her people were being held.
“I can’t believe we’re going to have to play in the dirt after sitting here all day,” the soldier from the barn mumbled. His partner shook his head in obvious agreement.
“Be grateful for this duty,” the other told him. “Most of the guys are being made to pull Vort’s pet project for twenty hours straight, starting immediately. No one’s going to get any rest until the captain’s happy. You know that.”
The first soldier grunted. “Happy? That’ll never happen.” All the men chuckled, but they kept their voices low, glancing around them as they did.
Taj grinned at their skittishness, thinking of ways it could be used against them. While the aliens were quick to follow their captain’s orders, it was clear it was out of fear not loyalty.
It was something she had to think about, but Taj was sure that if she could twist the men against their commander, she could take advantage of the situation. She just needed to figure out how.
Right then wasn’t the moment, however. She had a job to do so she filed that information away and crept closer to the soldiers, inching along the side of the barn and watching her every footfall to ensure she made no sound that would attract them.
The men clamored on for a few more minutes about nothing in particular, but Taj understood they weren’t stationed in an abandoned barn for nothing.
Maybe they are backup for the other soldiers, she thought, a trap within a trap should Taj and her people find a way into the other barn.
And while that made sense, she couldn’t help but wonder why there were only two soldiers there. If they wanted a substantive response to something happening, what good would two men do? As she contemplated their reasoning for such a small reactionary force, Taj heard something that chilled the blood in her veins.
“Scanners pick up anything?” the relieving soldier asked.
The other grunted. “Not a damn thing, not that I expected them to. With all the animal and troop movement nearby, the scanners are damn near useless this close to all that interference. We’d know if the locals came at us en masse, but there’s no real way to determine if one or two are creeping up on us.”
“So, you’re saying they could be out there right now?” The men shuffled, the conversation dropping off a cliff into silence.
Taj stiffened and sunk deeper into the shadows. Her hackles rose, trailing uncomfortably down her back, and she fought to keep her tail from poofing. Had she made a noise or done something to clue them in to her presence?
Then the men laughed. “Yeah, like those cowardly rats are creeping around in the dark with some great escape plan in mind. The captain is delusional if he thinks the locals are plotting something. They’re halfway across the planet by now, licking their wounds.”
The soldiers continued to laugh. “Yeah, no doubt,” one muttered. “Still, best not piss the captain off. We’re going to hit the rack while you two assume scanner duties. Guess we’ll see you in the morning.”
There were some mumbled goodbyes and jibes, then the sound of weary footsteps stomping away. Taj waited a couple of heartbeats to make sure the soldiers were walking away from her location, then she shot off down the side of the barn.
When she reached the corner, she cast a furtive glance around the corner to see the two relieved soldiers disappearing down the street. The other two had gone inside the barn, and one of them was closing the door.
Opportunity slipping away, Taj bolted toward the barn door, hoping the squeal of its hinges would cover any noise she made. Fortunately, it did just that.
She pressed her back against the barn wall right where the hinges were attached and peeked in through the narrowing crack. What she saw stilled her heart in her chest, freezing it in place.
The image of dark steel and muted lights was burned onto her retinas, and her mind danced as it corroborated the shape and design with what she unconsciously knew the shape to be. Her heart fluttered back to life.
In the barn was the damaged shuttle they’d knocked over with the Thorn. It sat in relative silence, its wounds becoming visible in Taj’s mind’s eye even though the barn door was now fully shut, blocking her view.
That was why they only needed two men. It didn’t take more than that to operate or keep track of the ship’s sensors on a full-time basis. They weren’t there to assist the trap, they were the trap.
Were Taj and the others to sneak up on the barn in an effort to free their people, the shuttles scanners would pick them up and give the enemy real-time positioning and a tactical advantage the crew couldn’t overcome.
And even though the soldiers had admitted the scanners were weak—distorted by the surrounding noise because they were meant for the wilds of open space and not the confines of a city—she knew well enough there was no way she or the others could sneak up on the barn in ones or twos and accomplish anything. It seemed the enemy knew it, too, or at least their commander did if the soldiers weren’t so clued in.
Taj sighed and felt her fangs biting into her lower lip. Again, the enemy’s tactical experience had thrown a wrench in the gears of her hopes, and once more, she felt the guilt washing over.
They wouldn’t have gone to these lengths if she hadn’t sicced the Thorn on them without a follow up plan. Unfortunately, there was nothing she could do about that now.
Her breath held tight, she slipped back the way she’d come. There were simply too many soldiers between her and the commotion she’d spotted near the pens, and she didn’t think she could make her way closer without being seen, even if the shuttle scanners couldn’t pick her up.
Her chest tight and with the sound of her heartbeat thundering in her ears, she made her way back toward the tunnel entrance. She was too tired to keep sneaking around, and she felt defeated on top of it all.
The aliens had countered her every plan before they’d even fully formed, and Taj couldn’t keep her head on straight enough to think her way out of the labyrinth of things piling up against her and her people. She needed sleep, a little bit of a break to get her head and heart in order.
Too bad she wouldn’t get it.
While she crept through the waning darkness, dawn on its way as she slipped into the desert, Lina bolted from the dunes and ran up to her. Taj didn’t need to see the wrinkled lines of her face or the glistening of her eyes to kno
w something was wrong. She could see it in the engineer’s posture and in the quiet, shuddering sobs she fought to withhold.
“What is it?” Taj asked, really not wanting to hear the answer., She knew it would only bring more grief to her world.
And she was right.
“It’s Mama. She’s dying,” Lina managed to sputter. “She’s asking for you.”
Chapter Seventeen
Captain Vort drew in a deep breath, the coppery scent of blood filling his nose and setting it to tingling. He grinned, savoring the scent and staring down at the wreckage of the Furlorian his torturer, Kabal, left wriggling in the chair. Blood pooled around the captive, the puddle growing ever larger by the moment as the captive’s movement slowed and faded.
“How much longer does he have?” Vort asked.
Kabal shrugged his lanky shoulders. “A minute, maybe two if I stanch some of the blood flow and patch the wounds. Hard to tell with these Furlorians, though. They’re a hardy breed, despite their diminutive stature.”
The captain waved the suggestion off. “Has it told you anything useful?”
The torturer shook his head. “No, and I don’t believe it will. This one in particular is a stubborn beast, much the same as the others.”
The captain stared at the torturer a moment, assessing the man and his answer, finding both distasteful. Kabal was an abomination of a Wyyvan, which is what led Vort to believe it was why the man had chosen his profession to begin with. It seemed to fit him.
Tall and thin, easily looming a half-meter or more above Vort’s height, Kabal was stringy muscle welded onto a scarecrow’s frame. Thick green scars drew across his face and body, as though it were art and he the canvas.
Vort wondered how the man managed to even lift some of the heavier tools of his trade or how he was so successful at restraining his subjects, yet he always made do. He wore a leather apron and thick gloves, all of which glistened with the life of those who’d crossed the torturer’s path.
Today, the stains were Furlorian blood and viscera, and much of it dripped from the treated leather as if it were rain off a tarp. Red dots spotted Kabal’s face and upper chest, running like rivers through the stringy lines of muscle before dripping away.
Vort peeled his gaze from the torturer and walked over and seized the creature’s chin, lifting it so they were eye to eye. Kabal drew back, out of his way. “Where are the rest of your people? Tell me, and I’ll spare what’s left of your life.”
The Furlorian gurgled, crimson sputtering from its mouth and trailing down its furred chin, but there were no words mixed in. Its eyes rolled in its sockets, little more than brown dots in a sea of veiny red. Vort could tell it struggled to focus on him. There was nothing behind its empty stare. He sighed.
“This one is clearly broken beyond repair. You did your work too well, Torturer.” Vort stepped back, allowing Kabal to return to his post. “End it and bring out another. One of them must give up what we need eventually.”
“Perhaps,” Kabal said, whipping out a long-bladed knife and drawing a line across the Furlorian’s neck.
The creature gasped, its voice turning into a wet, bubbling sound as it twitched against its restraints. Then, not more than a moment later, its chin dropped to its chest, blood gurgling from its wound like a broken fountain.
“But not all creatures warm to the knife.”
“Or perhaps it’s because this one was captured early and doesn’t know where its brethren secreted themselves away. It might simply know nothing to tell us, as it might have been with the others laid fleshless in your domain.”
Kabal conceded to the captain’s logic with a nod.
“Pull one from the latest group captured. Maybe we’ll have better results.”
“Of course.” Kabal waved to his assistant, and the man unshackled the corpse from the chair and dragged the body out of the room to dispose of it. “We will start immediately, Captain.”
“Good,” Vort replied. “Cut them all up if need be, Torturer, and let me know the moment you learn anything. We need to quell this malignant defiance before it takes root and spreads.”
Kabal bowed at the waist, turning back to his tools and wiping the blood from his blade. Vort swallowed his disappointment and left the room, following in the trail of blood left by the dead Furlorian that had been dragged away. He made it a short way down the hall when Commander Dard caught up to him.
“Sir!”
“What is it, Commander?” Vort asked, not even bothering to slow. He had no more room in his head for disappointments.
“Sir, the amount of Toradium-42 on this planet is even more substantial than I’d first suspected.”
That brought the captain up short. He turned to stare at Dard, one eyebrow raised. “Is it now?”
“Much more so.” Dard nodded. “We’ve harvested twelve metric tons of Toradium-42 already, and that’s mostly from scraping the surface. We’ve the shuttle ferrying as much of the mineral as it can haul back to the Monger as we speak.”
The captain grinned, unable to restrain the mirth building inside him despite realizing they could have hauled so much more had the other shuttles not been laid low.
He leaned in close to Dard, though he was certain there was no one near enough to hear their conversation. “Be sure to stockpile a reasonable, personal cache of the mineral, should our efforts for the empire not be as…commensurate as befitting our efforts, Commander.” He cast another furtive glance about. “I would hate for our achievements here to be mistakenly overlooked by Command.”
“Indeed, Captain,” Dard agreed. “That would be most…unfortunate.”
“That it would.” Vort offered his second a broad grin and went to walk away, only then realizing the commander had held his ground. “Is there anything else, Commander?”
Dard nodded. “The men have detected a rich vein running under the pens of those strange creatures the locals call balborans. The vein runs deep. It’s cluttered and would nearly double their current excavation within the same time frame. They are asking permission to mine it.”
“Would it now?” Vort sucked in a deep breath and let the thought bounce about inside his skull. “Tell them they have the go ahead, but I don’t want the animals slaughtered or set free. They might be useful should we run low on supplies before Command sends a crew to replace us. No point in wasting resources given we have no idea how long we’ll be on this forsaken, backwater planet.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Have the men herd the creatures into one of the other nearby pens. We might well lose a few to overcrowding, but I’d rather have the mass of the beasts available should we be forced to search for alternate food sources. I’d rather not have to hunt the creatures down should our circumstances become difficult.”
“I’ll pass the order along, Captain.”
Vort patted the man on his shoulder. “We’ve come far together, Commander. Once Command sees the hoard we’ve amassed here, I can see us traveling much farther. Politics maybe?”
Dard chuckled and conceded with a quick nod. “That is something I would like to see, Senator Vort.”
The captain smiled. “The title has a pleasant ring to it, does it not?”
“It does indeed, sir.”
“Then let us be certain nothing stands in our way, Commander.” He gave the man’s shoulder a squeeze and started off down the hallway.
Despite the unfortunate circumstances that had befallen the mission—the failed efforts to corral the local population, as well as the disappointing situation with the shuttles—Vort felt confident he had headed off further incidents with his demonstration in town and his redistribution of his assets. He needed only to concentrate on mining the planet dry of Toradium-42 and fending off the occasional desperate guerilla assault upon his soldiers.
And that was only if his torturer failed him, and for all the things Kabal was guilty of, failure was never one of them. He would ferret out the hiding places of the local rats, and
Vort would rain fire down upon them. It was only a matter of time.
Soon, he could turn his back on Command and Grand Admiral Galforin once and for all.
The thought brought a smile to his face, and the captain made his way toward his cabin. Given his mood, a good, stout shot of Wyyvan Valmuth Rum would be the perfect end to the day.
Maybe two shots.
Chapter Eighteen
Taj ran through the tunnels, kicking up dust and gasping to catch her breath. The tiredness of the last few hours was gone, burned away by an all-new adrenaline rush of terror ignited by the idea of losing Mama Merr.
No, not so soon after Beaux, she kept thinking, over and over again, the thought a thick mire filling her skull and making her ears ring. It’s too soon.
Still, Lina had been adamant as to Mama’s condition. She’d gone downhill since Taj had left her side, and there was no one around, no one left, to nurse her back to health.
Lina chattered the entire way, filling Taj’s head with the horrible truth of it all: Mama was old and frail, belying the fierceness of her attitude. She’d survived far longer than anyone could have imagined, and there was simply no coming back from a broken spine at her age, and who knew what else had been injured that they were unable to diagnose.
Taj had known it was only a matter of time before she heard someone tell her of Mama’s passing, but she’d put it out of her mind, unwilling to even contemplate the possibility. Even now, she argued with herself, lying and telling herself that Mama would be fine, that the old queen would make it through this like she had everything else the universe had thrown at her over the course of her life.
But when Taj dropped to her knees beside the old Gran, she could no longer deny the direness of Mama’s situation. It was written plainly in the trembling furrows that lined her face, the droop of her cheeks, her whiskers hanging like browning leaves after the first freeze.