Stuck right in the middle of the miner revolt.
Naero shook her head and muttered. “As if I needed another blasted mess to wind up in.”
She adjusted to the course the leader gave her, and squeezed every drop of speed out of the old bucket that she could manage.
37
Naero and her crew took refuge with the rebels inside a vast network of gigantic, pockmarked blue-green caves near the high sea cliffs.
Gallan rested securely in the miner’s makeshift field hospital. Ellis volunteered to stay with him.
As one might imagine, Tarim and his new girl went everywhere together, completely smitten with one another.
Good for them. Tarim held his head high for once.
Naero and Irith kept themselves busy tending to those who needed them most. There were plenty of wounded and sick to tend to after the raid.
At first the rebel miners showed an expected level of distrust. But then as Naero and Irith progressed from person to person with their medical skills, using up their supplies in medkit after medkit, attitudes among the miners softened.
One of the leader’s guards, wearing a red headband, came up to Naero and adhered some sticky patches to both shoulders of her jacket and on the back. They bore strange miner symbols that she couldn’t read.
There wasn’t any time to scan them into her comp for translation.
The bodyguard saluted and left her without any further explanation.
Yet when other miners spotted the patches, most of them wept. Others repeatedly thanked her. Some tried to kiss her hands, her feet.
They crowded around her. It was all she could do to keep going about her duties.
“No, please. Stop,” she said. “Thank you, but let me through. I can still help these others. Let me through. Let me help them. Can’t you understand?”
A female Besh medic came along with several orderlies and moved the wounded and the sick back away from her. Most Besh, like this woman, had gray-green skin tones, black-green hair, and small ears.
“Thanks,” Naero said.
The medic would have been very pretty, except for a nose that had been badly broken, many times over. She also carried terrible scars from wounds and burns on her arms and legs, visible through her ragged clothing.
“You’re doing good work here,” the medic said. “Are you a doctor or a healer among your people?”
“No. I just have some training.”
“That must be some training. Let’s talk over some chow. We can learn a lot from you two. But what we really need are supplies. We’re desperate.”
“Let’s take a walk back to my transport,” Naero said. She nodded her head to Irith, who nodded back.
“What’s in your ship?” the Besh asked.
“Your leader left the rest of our cargo intact. Didn’t even ask what we had in our holds.”
“What were you carrying?”
Naero flung the doors to the smaller inner holds open wide.
“Medical supplies and equipment bound for Triax. They won’t miss them. Distribute them all among your ships and your people.”
The medic gasped and hugged her. “This is…wonderful! I don’t know what to say.”
“‘Thanks is all right’. We’ll give you what medical files we have also, and if our small armory gets cleaned out, that’s okay, too. I’m sorry we can’t do more.”
“No, this is great. Give me a moment while I organize all this.”
The medic called teams over on her old radio to unload the medical supplies.
“My name’s Arana.”
Naero took her hand and used her cover name. “I’m Nari.”
“You’ve more than earned some chow with us. Don’t expect anything spectacular. Just stew, but it’s filling.”
“Stew sounds great. I am hungry. But can you explain something to me?”
“If I can.”
Naero pointed to the scarlet patches put on her.
“What do these say? Your people keep acting so grateful to me when they spot them.”
“Oh, that’s understandable. Those patches mark you to be an avenger. A great honor among the warriors and our people. You slew an Ejjai alpha, in single combat, no less. Not many could do that. They say many witnessed the act.”
“I’m sorry. I still don’t get it.”
“Nari. Our peoples have many reasons to despise the Ejjai overseers and guards. Many.”
The veins at the side of the medic’s neck pulsed. The muscles in her face strained.
“Be gracious. It is a sign of great honor and respect. Many of these people have never been able to strike back at their tormentors.”
She waved a hand back at the heaps of dead outside the field hospital. Stacked up in piles for burial. Corpses of all ages. “Many will never get the chance.”
“Suddenly I don’t feel very hungry,” Naero said.
Arana put an arm around her. “That’s the wrong attitude. We have to keep up our strength. Come. A bowl of stew as promised, and then it’s back to work. Tell me about your medical training.”
The stew tasted thin, bland, and slightly burned, but Naero ate it graciously.
When she and Arana talked, she kept to her cover story.
Each of them had about half a bowl due to rationing.
Thinking about the thousands of hungry faces huddle in the dank caves who had already had theirs for the day, Naero did not ask for more.
Some who saw her patches offered her their rations.
Naero declined, forcing tears back.
“That was good,” she said at last.
Arana rested a hand on her shoulder and then moved on. “There’s still so much to do. More coming in all the time. In a few days, we’ll make a run for it and you’ll be let go.”
Naero nodded.
“Let’s get back to work and spell your friends and some of the other medics before the chow runs out,” Arana said. “They’ll be ready for a break.”
Several hours later, there was still so much to do. The medical supplies helped immensely, but the medics were clearly overwhelmed by the immense task at hand.
Naero did all that she could, deploring the conditions Triax had put these people in. But there were limits even to her skills.
On top of that, exhaustion staggered her. She’d hardly slept for nearly two days, and fatigue finally won out, even for a Spacer.
When the next shift of medics took over, Arana came along and brought them both to a quiet rest spot in a separate cave where those off duty could grab some sleep.
Naero mumbled her thanks, feeling a filthy, scratchy blanket gently settle over her.
She curled up and pulled it around her.
A small soft touch awoke her sometime later. A touch charged with energy.
Naero opened her eyes and sat up.
The leader’s psyon daughter knelt there in the darkness beside her, softly glowing blue-white.
Her azure eyes like bottomless, glittering stars.
“Did you rest well, spacechild?”
Naero nodded, staring at her.
“Good. You needed to. Come with me. My father wishes words with you.”
“Who are you? Where’s Tarim?”
“I am Shalaen. Tarim is resting with your friends. Will you come?”
“Of course.” Naero rose.
They picked their way quietly through the sleeping, the healing, and those still in the process of dying.
“Shalaen...” Naero whispered. “What are you? I’m very curious.”
The girl didn’t even glance back. “You are curious about me? How very strange. I have no idea what you are, and yet you want to know what I am?”
“You’re a natural psyon at the very least, and an extremely powerful one at that for one so young.”
“Telepathy is one of my talents, but only with surface thoughts. It is too exhausting to attempt to read anything deeper. But you and the Corps are wrong. I am not a psyon. I have had my awareness and my
powers as they are from the moment I was conceived. Psyon powers do not develop until after puberty.”
Shalaen went quiet for a while.
They passed several squads of heavily armed guards without challenge and went down a protected corridor hewn right through the rock. More guards, some of them in battered, mismatched suits of salvaged power armor, stood at attention to either side every ten meters. All of them wore red headbands.
Shalaen finally stopped in an open section and leaned back against the glass-smooth wall. Huge mining plasma borers made walls like that, fused them right together.
Finally, Shalaen stared up at Naero, her large blue-white eyes gleaming in the shadowlight. “I often ask myself what I am. It can almost lead to endless introspection if I do not desist at some point.” Shalaen intrigued Naero, almost as much as the many questions she had about herself.
“My father, who you have met, is human,” Shalaen said. “A simple man from Ramor, sentenced unjustly to a life in the mines. My mother, on the other hand, came from the Yattai. Do you know of them?”
Naero had heard the term, but it took a moment to remember. “Our Mystics know of them. Interdimensional beings from the astral and ethereal planes. They can take forms of pure energy to go about wherever and however they choose throughout several dimensions. Some call them spirits, angels, demons. Even gods.”
Shalaen look right through her. “And yet our abilities do not even begin to approach what lies deep within you, Naero. Until you can learn to use them.”
“I don’t understand.”
Shalaen shrugged. “Neither do I.” She went forward again. Naero followed at her side.
“The Yattai have been called many things,” Shalaen said. “At various times, many of those observations may have been correct. The Yattai are among the oldest remaining sentient entities in the universe who can still take and sustain physical forms. Even the Oden are not as advanced.”
“The who?”
“Another advanced race. If you ever study the Secrets with your Mystics, as I’m guessing you shall, you will meet some of them one day.”
“If you say so.”
“My mother’s chosen name was Jarluaena. I possess many of her memories and much of her knowledge and power. The Yattai are foremost explorers, but my mother chose a different path. The rise and fall cycles of the younger races in the universe grew precious to her.
“She expended much of her abilities to become human for a time. She felt strongly that the Yattai had gone too long without one of their number recalling what it was like to be young, and much more mortal than they. She especially liked humans and their capacity for love. Their capacities for hatred, greed, and violence also shocked and attracted her. Humanoids have so many ranges of extremes.”
“Why did she choose to be a miner? Wasn’t that stretching things a bit much?”
Shalaen stared at Naero in silence for a moment. “You ask most absorbing questions. I like you.” She cupped both hands over her temples for a brief instant.
“Jarluaena did not desire to become a miner. She devised a way to be born mortal, a simple child of two ordinary Ramorians, but with the knowledge and memories of her former existence as a Yattai. Her parents, whom she adored, were later slain during one of the local unrests.”
“Unrests? You mean wars?” Naero said.
“Yes, but there are and will be conflicts much larger in scale and scope than those yet to come.”
Naero sighed. “I suppose you’re right.” The galaxy rushed headlong toward another Spacer War.
“She’d known my father since they were children together, and loved him,” Shalaen continued. “It was as if they’d always loved one another. They married amid the upheavals around them. Somehow they found happiness. Then, while she was pregnant with me, my father’s political enemies framed him. Naming him a traitor to the Ramorian people, when his accusers were in fact the real traitors.
“They sentenced him to life in the Triaxian mines. A virtual death sentence. My mother chose to go with him into exile and imprisonment, rather than be parted from him. He begged her to stay behind, find another mate. She would not listen.
“Once subjected to the very real horrors of the mines, they could not believe the way the Corps treated the miners and their families. The open atrocities, abuse, privation, and summary execution. They helped organize the mining revolt. With the remnants of her discarded powers, my mother managed to keep them alive. Despite many attempts to eliminate them.”
They approached a small shielded and well-lit area deep in the bedrock. Shalaen stopped in the hallway. “My father does not like it when I tell this part of the story–about my mother’s death. Let me speak of it out here, before we go in with him.”
“I can understand,” Naero said.
“My mother’s powers lapsed at the critical time of my birth. Some of them failed or vanished completely, only to reappear later in me. Others were weakened, and not as effective. Some vital part of her abilities poured out of her like water, and into me. But one thing became clear to her: She became trapped in her chosen form. When it died, so would she, and all her knowledge. She would never rejoin the Yattai as she had originally planned.”
“That must have been terrible.”
“Her grief at such a sundering was very great indeed, even as her joy at my birth. She could no longer contact the other Yattai for aid.
“She made her peace with her choice. My sentience existed even in her womb. She shared much of her fading knowledge with me. I spoke as soon as I emerged, and my abilities increased as I grew rapidly. How old do you say I am?”
“Oh, maybe fifteen or sixteen standard years.”
She lowered her gaze. “I am three. When I was a year old, the revolt began in a small, isolated region, and then spread across several systems over time. Triax’s reaction increased with the revolt, becoming swift, massive...astonishingly brutal. The miners were no match for the advanced Corps military. Still they resisted. What more could they do?
“When they came for my father, we fled, in the few ships left to us. When escape looked impossible, my mother remained behind and held them off. An entire fleet. She held them off, for four days. She gave us time to flee and continue the struggle the best we could. Through me, she would always be with us somehow. I remember my father holding me in his arms and weeping when we fled. She waved back at us, smiling on the viewscreen of her crippled ship, even as the battleships poured volley after volley of fire at her.
“They tried to capture her. They wanted to understand her power, use it if they could, but she would not surrender. In the end, they wore her down and destroyed her. Even her powers had limits, as do mine.” Shalaen stared through her again.
“Your powers frighten me, Naero. Because I see no limit to them. I find that extremely dangerous.”
Naero shook her head. “But whatever you see in me, they don’t do me any good, because I can’t use them. You know how to use yours,” Naero said. She waved her arms around her in desperation. “Why don’t you help all of these people of yours more? They could use a few miracles. Why can’t you heal them? Feed them?”
“Trust me, I fully understand your frustration and share it,” Shalaen said. “But the gift of healing that was my mother’s did not pass to me. I cannot heal, only protect. Neither can I change inanimate matter into food or water or medical supplies. In many ways my powers grew even stronger, but they are also more limited than those of my mother. Yet somehow we have survived–for how much longer I cannot say. We need to flee this world. We’ve taken on as many refugees as we can carry. We hate to leave the others behind under these conditions; it is a betrayal that breaks our hearts, but escape will be difficult as it is.”
“I know some people,” Naero said. “Friends of mine who might help you.”
“Shalaen,” her father called out. “Bring the spacechild in here. Don’t keep whispering to her in the hallway.”
“Yes, father,” she said. The
y strode into the shielded area, into the light. Into a base station cobbled together, easily set up and taken down.
38
The rebel leader sat there alone, surrounded by rigged console stations, gathering and looking at information as it flashed by.
He rose up and walked over to them calmly, both hands outstretched in Ramorian fashion to show he held no weapons. Naero smiled. Most greeting customs started that way.
Naero took both of his ruddy hands for a moment and felt the strength in his arms and hands. What else might she expect from a miner? She studied his plain face and thought he looked impossibly weary.
“I hope Shalaen hasn’t bothered you,” he said.
“Not in the least. We find each other very intriguing.”
“I have the misfortune of being Nevano Kinmal, leader of the mining revolt, by default. No one else really wants the job.” He laughed, but Naero could sense the pain in it.
“You know I’m a Spacer. I’m fleeing from the Corps, also.” No matter what lies the Corps Media spread about her and Spacers, she would never be ashamed of her family’s name...or her own.
She lifted her head high.
“I am Naero Amashin Maeris, of Clan Maeris.”
Nevano grinned. “The renegade Spacer terrorist? Glad to meet you. I’m a genocidal maniac myself; I guess there’s enough bad press from INS to go around for both of us. Triax has an even larger bounty on your head than mine currently, but from what Shalaen has told me about you, the Corps must be shivering in their shit.”
That alarmed her a little. Did he know about the Kexxian Data Matrix?
“What has she told you? I’d like to know.” She concealed her anxiety, suddenly wondering what she could and could not hide from Shalaen.
Nevano Kinmal waved her to a chair. “Come, let us sit down and talk. Two interstellar menaces to decent civilization such as we should take time to relax.”
She did so. Naero looked at Shalaen once more, standing impassively beside her father.
“I don’t want you to worry,” Nevano said, “but Shalaen has in fact told me about the half of the Kexxian Data Matrix that you carry, imprinted on your genetic code.”
Spacer Clans Adventure 1: Naero's Run Page 28