by T. J. Quinn
Sahvin was no rooky. He was a trained, battle experienced soldier. We both knew what it meant to be rescued from a life of slavery. These people the mercenaries intended to recover were just as deserving as we were.
I finally had to convince myself to stop fearing and start believing that they would succeed in their mission and come back victorious.
Somewhere I had read that thought was a dominant force in the universe. If one believed strongly enough, it could affect the outcome of an event. I finally chose belief in success rather than fear failure. It was so not fair to punish Sahvin with my fear when all the man had ever done was love me---well and often.
CHAPTER TWELVE
SAHVIN
I learned from Pyrr Avantu that he and the Commander had experienced similar distress from their mates as I had with Nora. Pyrr probably understood better than either Commander Maktu and I because he had faced that fear on the Tegliar station mission. They weren’t taking any chances this time.
When we put into high orbit over Julconi, Commander Maktu and Admiral Degatu had all the non-com females shuttled over to the Kurellis to help document all the rescues as they boarded from the shuttles. We had also recruited three other teams from the civilians aboard to assist with the process of housing more than three thousand people.
I hated to part with my Nora the night before the mission, but I knew she would be safest on the Kurellis under the guard of three Dreads. Once we started sending up shuttles of people for them to process, she would be too busy to worry about me.
When I first started training for this mission, it seemed like a long time until it happened. Then suddenly, I was donning the armor to go down to Julconi. My company was going after the Uatu prisoners who had been marooned on the planet to fend for themselves. There were almost a thousand of them including various humanoid females who, eagerly accepted asylum with the Uatu for the chance of freedom.
Our job seemed simple enough. We were to secure the perimeter for the shuttle coming and going and while transports were being loaded. The night before Nora went to the Kurellis, we went to bed early to make love one more time before we separated for our assignments. We wanted plenty of time to savor our joining and still get enough rest for our jobs.
I knew she thought it might be the last time our bodies would be joined in the rapture of our love. But even when our bodies weren’t joined in pleasuring each other, I felt as though Nora was a part of me. Just a few months we were together I felt that my life was whole.
My people called it meomee. The Uatu called it solmatu. They were two different names for the same thing---soul mates. Until I met Nora, I never had any significant interest in mere consensual sex for its own sake. I only tried it just a few times in my early military days. But it was more to fit in with the sapiens than for my pleasure. There is nothing like meomee lovemaking. We gave each other everything.
When we were both sated, we slept spooned together with her wrapped in my arms.
Nora and I didn’t talk about it anymore because we had both faced our fear together then put it away so that its specter wouldn’t endanger us more than the actual event. We shared several passionate kisses before I accompanied her to the shuttle bay where she would leave for the Kurellis. The kiss we shared there was only a gentle caress of our lips together for a few seconds. Then she reluctantly pulled back and turned to walk up the loading ramp without looking back.
Even though it was morning for us, it was night time for the slave compound on the planet surface. The compound was on a relatively large island about four hundred kilometers from the shore nearest the prisoner’s conclave. Julconi was not like the prisons of Earth. People sent there were given the barest essentials and marooned there.
Before we even arrived in the system, two of the Dreads that arrived there ahead of us, took out the battle cruiser that patrolled the star system to make sure no one tried to rescue any of the prisoners as we were planning. Other than that, the inmates ran the prison as they saw fit, which was basically survival of the fittest.
Only the slave compound had overseers and military security. The Sargan battlecruiser only contacted them when the monthly supply freighter arrived. It had come and gone before our arrival. The rendezvous point for the prisoners we planned to liberate was a few kilometers away from the main conclave of inmates.
Those we were taking had been warned emphatically to keep the location secret, but we knew we couldn’t depend on that. There would be someone with a special friend they could not leave without saying goodbye. That was the reason we brought two companies down to the planet to protect the shuttles and the passengers we were loading.
Three more companies were on standby in orbit. We weren’t worried about the women and Uatu men the advance team had enlisted for evacuation. But if anyone had leaked the evacuation plan, we could be inundated with prisoners trying to get off the planet.
At the rate of one hundred people per shuttle, it would take about four hours for us to get over a thousand people off-world. Then we would be evacuated last.
My company consisted of twenty warriors, sixteen men, and four females. I was second in command. After Nora’s shuttle left, I went to the ship’s armory and got suited up in my armor with the others. All we wore under our armor was a pair of form-fitting shorts. As soon as we were suited and armed, we returned to the shuttle bay and boarded the shuttle down to the planet.
There was already a crowd of people waiting at the edge of the flat area of land the advance team had chosen. It was no starport and not even a real landing pad. It was an isolated plateau on the side of a mountain surrounded on three sides by sheer vertical rock faces. There was only one way to approach on foot. There were very few vehicles so all our evacuees would be arriving on foot.
It wasn’t the most accessible landing spot for the shuttle pilot, but our shuttles landed like helicopters rather than airplanes. The advance team picked the place for defense purposes, not for ease of landing.
Things were going fairly smoothly, except that we were expecting one thousand people and over fifteen hundred people arrived. Some were children who had been born on Julconi. Most of the extra people were friends of those who were on the list. Since many were unmated females, Farseek Command directed us to allow them to evacuate with the others because we needed the 0women and we had room for them. That added another two and a half hours to our evacuation schedule.
That was enough time for a violent contingent of inmates to arrive intent on being evacuated, i.e., escaping prison. That they would try to force us to take them off planet was reason enough reason to deny them passage.
Had they been slaves instead of prisoners, we would likely have taken some of them, but they came in like thugs bent on taking over and not refugees trying to escape unjust prosecution.
There were hundreds of them and only sixty of us. We had nowhere to go, so we had to stand our ground and fight. Our advantage was the armor suits and superior weapons. The thugs were supposed to only have knives and crossbows, but a few had armor piercing guns.
I took a hit on my left shoulder blade. Even though I knew the nanites would fix it, the pain was searing. What was worse was that the impact sent me past the big rock where I was going to take cover. I went over a small drop to a steep hill covered with loose shale and nothing to grab to stop my descent of about forty meters until I came to an abrupt stop against another rock. My injured shoulder took the brunt of the impact, and the pain was so excruciating I passed out.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NORA
It was so hard to walk up that shuttle ramp and leave Sahvin behind. I didn’t dare look back, or I wouldn’t go at all, and I didn’t want him to see my tears. Once inside the shuttle I brushed them away and forced back the sob that was stuck in my throat. This was the best way I could help the brigade and Sahvin.
As I took my seat on the shuttle with Harper, Scarlet, and Zoe, they looked as anguished as I felt.
“Okay, ladies,” Ha
rper said. “We can do this. There is no sense getting all glum about being sent to the Kurellis while they are doing their jobs. It’s not like we can go down there and help.”
“They’re going to make it,” Scarlet said. “They might come back a little worse for wear, but they will come back. Zared took a direct hit with an armor piercing round on Breskaa. It just pierced his armor, but it stopped before it did major damage.”
“Yes, and you took a direct hit on Tegliar Station,” Zoe, said and those nanite things fixed you up.”
“I know,” I said. “Seals, Rangers and Special Forces rolled into one. But raiding a prison planet. That just seems so outrageously foolhardy.”
“They are just the ones who can pull it off,” Harper asserted.
“I have to believe that, because I can’t let myself think otherwise,” I sighed.
Momentarily, the shuttle hatched closed with a whoosh and lurched just slightly as it lifted off the deck and slowly left the bay. We could see the planet below before we turned for toward the Kurellis in high orbit. It looked a lot like Earth but with smaller continents that looked like big islands in with vast ocean space between them.
While I was possible for the inmates to travel between them, it seemed unlikely because they didn’t have reliable transportation. From what Sahvin told me, the inmates were divided among the continents, supposedly depending on their crimes. But each continent was run by gangs except for the slaves’ island.
About two hours after we arrived on the Kurellis, the first shuttle came. We were better organized and had more help registering our new rescues than at Tegliar station. We had four check-in teams and four teams to guide the incoming to their quarters or sickbay as needed.
The slave compound was not a labor camp as Breskaa. But we didn’t know how well they had been cared for. Those from the prison were probably in worse shape. Although the Sargus Empire made regular supply drops on the all the continents, they were probably not distributed evenly among the inmates.
I couldn’t imagine what life must be like in a lawless anarchy. I sure didn’t want to find out.
Unlike the Breskaa mission, we didn’t have a feed on the communication among the ground teams. But we did get updates on what was happening in space. It got a little scary for a while because two Sargan battle cruisers showed up out of nowhere it seemed. One apparently was hovering on the back side of Julconi’s single moon and the other behind a smaller planet closer to the Julconi sun.
They had come for the Kurellis which we stole. One ship wasn’t nearly enough in reparations for what they did to Farseek and the Uatu people. They didn’t attack the Kurellis, though because they wanted the massive passenger freighter intact. They went after the Dreadnaughts guarding it. That’s why our men sent us to the Kurellis to keep us safe. The Sargan’s were outnumbered and outgunned.
The Dreadnaughts were more heavily armed and armored. The mercenaries offered to let them leave unharmed if they would allow them to retrieve their people. Their answer was to fire on the dreads. So, the dreads took them out before they had a chance to send reinforcements down to the planet.
Even though the teams took the slave island by surprise, they met more massive resistance than they had hoped. They sustained some serious but not life-threatening injuries and no fatalities before they were able to get control of the facility.
We heard that the teams on the primary prison continent where Sahvin’s team was working had met armed resistance. So far there were no reports of casualties. I knew nothing until much later. It’s probably a good thing because I would never have been able to finish my job. The Farseek Mercenaries had planned for around 4500, and we took on closer to 6000 combined from the slave island and the prison.
That brought the Kurellis population up to about 9700. After sixteen hours, we needed a break. I was so tired by the time I fell into my bunk, I had little time to pine for Sahvin before I fell into an exhausted sleep whispering, “Sahvin, you have to be all right. You have to.”
The next morning the last of the rescues arrived. The shuttles have been transporting through the night, eight hours longer than was planned. The most prominent worry was that more Sargan warships would come before we got out of the Julconi system. The empire had far more resources than we did.
Farseek Dreadnaughts could handle a few at a time, but if they came en masse, the odds were not as good. As soon as the last shuttle was locked into our shuttle bay, the Kurellis jumped out of the system to rendezvous with four of the dreads three days later. The other dreads would go on to scout the other systems where our intel said more of the Uatu people had been taken.
We still had space for another thousand people, and each of the dreads could make room for at least a hundred people. Our dread still had the bunks installed in the cargo bay. They decided to keep them there indefinitely.
Even though we had pulled out of the Julconi system, there were still a couple hundred people left to process in the morning. Harper accosted me when I got to my workstation.
“You will never guess what happened,” she told me in a conspiratorial whisper.
“What?”
“Zoe found her man!” Harper gushed. “He was a Uatu thrown into the prison colony for trying to start an uprising.”
“Is she okay with it?” I asked. “Is he somatu?”
“That’s what he told her when she checked him in. He looked like hell, tired, dirty, dressed in rags, I could see that he would clean up gorgeous just like all the other Uatu.”
“How is that going to work? We have to go back to Dread One in a couple days. We’re all recruits.”
“Zoe’s not ready to commit, but Argen Trametu is a Farseek warrior. So he can declare solmatu and come to our ship to court her.” Harper explained. “I’m sure he will, he looked totally smitten when he discovered her.”
“Does Zoe at least find him attractive and likable?” I wondered.
“She’s not saying, but she did look interested when they were talking. They were going meet for a meal in the mess hall after we finish here. This group is all of them.”
“Good, I’m still tired,” I sighed. “Have all the landing teams gotten picked up? Have you heard anything.”
“Zared said they were still rounding everyone up from the prison colony. His team went to the island,” Harper said. “Don’t worry, Nora, they won’t leave anyone behind. Anyway, there are no reports of fatalities. Sahvin will be back before long.”
“Not until we rendezvous now,” I murmured.
“I know, Nora. I miss Zared just as much as you miss Sahvin.”
I nodded. “Just a few more days, and we have plenty to do.”
“We sure do, so let’s get to it,” Harper said. “These people have been up all night. “We need to get them logged and into quarters so they can get some rest.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SAHVIN
“Hey, Kazza! Lieutenant Kazza, please respond,” Dexel Flatu’s urgent request came through my helmet com. “Kazza, are you, all right?”
I groaned in reply. “Not exactly. I got hit… Fell off the plateau.”
“Where?”
“The east face near the trail. Hit a rock. I can feel the nanites working… will try to get up,” I groaned. I was leaning against the rock, laying on my injured shoulder. Any movement made me want to scream in pain. But I had to move.
I stayed still for half a minute and just breathed waiting for the pain to recede. Then I pushed off the rock and rolled on to my back. “Fuuuck!” I yelled. “Damn that hurts!”
On my back, I was laying on an angle against the hill. I bent my left leg so I could push off with my foot and turn to I could use my uninjured arm to get up off the ground. It was a struggle, with a lot of pain, but once I got my feet under me, I could use the augmentations of the suit to stand.
I locked the left arm of the suit to immobilize my arm and left shoulder, then I looked around for my ion rifle. An inmate who found that could do a lot of
damage with that. I saw it by the rock, bent down to pick it u, and slung it over my right shoulder. I flexed a thigh muscle to get the suit moving and started walking up the steep trail back to the plateau.
“Hey, Dexel! Is anyone else hurt or worse?” I asked.
“Jegtu took a minor hit in his butt. Apparently only a couple of those criminals had armor-piercing weapons,” he said. “We took ‘em out and collected the weapons. We captured one, and he told us they were trying to steal the shuttle to get off this purgatory.”
“Then they would be dead anyway. There are no other habitable worlds in this system, and the shuttles don’t have the range to go interstellar,” I muttered as I trudged up the hill putting one foot in front of the other thanks to the suit. Otherwise, it was all I could do to stay on my feet. It was hard to breathe, and I felt nauseous, but I was getting off this miserable planet and back to meomee.
“I told the guy, we probably would have taken them with us had they asked instead of attacking us,” Dexel went on. “We took a whole bunch of people who weren’t on our list. Most of these people are political prisoners of the Empire.”
“What was he in for?” I asked.
“He was a member of a resistance movement and actively recruiting antigovernment conspirators.”
“What did you do with him?” I asked.
“We cuffed him and sat him down by a rock…Figured we’d let him loose just before we lift off, but we had you and Jegtu to locate first.”
“Did he shoot anybody?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t matter if he did, the pistol he had would not have pierced our suits.”
I walked several steps while I thought about it. Finally, I said, “Check him for weapons. If he’s clean, put him on the shuttle with the others. If causes any trouble, tell him we’ll leave him someplace worse than this.”