by Greg Dragon
Drift too far out and there would be no rescue. Stay put and they risked being picked up by a Geralos tractor beam. After being a captive to the terrible lizards, she wasn’t looking forward to doing it again. She would rather die than be taken alive, and she knew that her fellow Nighthawks felt the same way.
“I’m going outside for a walk,” she announced, and the two men grunted their approval. She floated down to the door that separated them from the makeshift locker room.
She grabbed the wheel with both her hands and hooked her toes into the ladder on the bulkhead. Spinning it counter clockwise she pulled it open and caught a loose helmet as it tried to escape. “Brise, you’re such a slob,” she whined, but he didn’t seem to hear her. “Put schtill back where you got it from. Why is that so hard for you to do?”
“Did you say something, Ate?” he said after a while.
“Nope, go back to your games,” she said, rolling her eyes. She slipped into the compartment and resealed the door, then floated over to a locker and pulled out an EVA suit.
After getting dressed, she floated out of the door, used the wheel to lock it behind her. Cilas floated over to where she was and took her helmet, then got behind her back and screwed it on. Several checks and she was ready to go, and he manned the airlock as she stepped outside.
“How long do you think you’ll be this time?” he said, but it was almost impossible to hear without comms.
She held up two fingers to indicate two hours, and he nodded and made the signal for comms. Helga floated to the other end of the ship, near what would be considered the nose. She typed in the password on the panel and pulled open the heavy door.
Inside was a small compartment, immaculately white, with a circular blue door on the far end. Helga sealed the door that she had come through by punching in her code again.
“Can you hear me, Ate?” Cilas said through her comms.
“Loud and clear,” she said. “I have door one sealed, just need you to release door two.” The circular door began to spin and then finally opened out. Helga floated through this one and turned to watch it close automatically. “Attaching line,” she said, then hooked one end of a safety tether to her belt. She then wiped off a screen that had a lot of condensation, typed in the password, and waited. Another panel slid open to reveal a stack of equipment, and she grabbed a pair of magnetic soles and attached them to the bottom of her boots. “Ready to walk,” she said.
“Okay, Ate, be careful,” Cilas said. “Pressure door is now unlocked. Don’t forget yourself out there.”
“I won’t, Lieutenant. I’ll see you all in a couple of hours.”
15
The silent battle between Cilas and Brise continued for several days. Each of them stuck to their respective corners, working on ways to cure their boredom.
Cilas, the warrior, tried to keep himself in shape by eating the protein-heavy rations while finding ways to work out in the null gravity. Brise, the defiant, worked on schematics for the ship and shared with Helga his plans for making the interior more livable.
Helga wasn’t too thrilled with these plans since it involved stripping metal from the storage area, but Brise knew what he was doing, so she hesitantly gave her support. She pointed out problems that could occur if that area of the ship got ruptured, but Brise adjusted for it and came back with more ideas, and these new plans seemed feasible.
They had gone over the plans for hours the day before, and Helga showed them to Cilas to get his approval. By rank, he was the de facto captain on their little ship, and she wouldn’t want to be moving things without his blessing.
When she had finished with Brise, she went back to the pilot’s seat and fell asleep almost immediately. Her nightmares returned in remarkable detail, bringing her back to their captivity. She was hooked up against the wall but her consciousness stayed, and she was forced to watch the Geralos biting into the settlers. When it was her time to be bitten, she tried to scream, but she found that her mouth had been sealed shut.
A drilling sound came to her ears as they cut open her skull, and though it should have been painful, she couldn’t feel anything. But she knew what they were doing. A chill wind found her scalp and she knew that her brain was exposed. Then there was the hot breath, followed by the teeth, violating her brain as they began to sink in.
The thought of the Geralos eating her alive was too much for Helga to take. She forced open her lips, tearing the skin apart, and screamed so hard that it brought her out of the dream.
She was strapped in the pilot’s seat with her head resting on her arm, and she could feel her heart beating as she tried to get her bearings. That was a bad one, she thought, as she wiped her mouth with the back of her arm. Did I scream out for real? No, if I did, one of them would be over here.
In front of her loomed Dyn, magnified several times to show the Geralos destroyer. There were a number of dropships leaving it now, but nothing to cause her concern. The nightmare was still vivid in her memory, and the appearance of the moon did not help her to forget. Helga closed her eyes and focused on their space. That was when she heard the commotion behind her.
Cilas and Brise were in the middle of a stiff conversation, with the latter seeming to have forgotten all protocol in lieu of an emotional outburst. Cilas remained as calm as humanly possible, but Helga could tell he was on the verge of losing his temper.
She sat still and listened, pretending to still be asleep. She wanted to see what they were arguing about before deciding whether or not to step in.
“You let us still come out here without questioning it, and that’s why I’m upset,” Brise was saying. “We should have smelled a rat the moment we were sent out to AO-9, but nobody said anything and look what it got us.”
“This is hardly the time for conspiracy theories,” Cilas said. “Not to mention your accusations are against the captain of our ship. You know the price for treason is the airlock.”
“Then airlock me now and get it over with,” Brise said. “It would be leagues better than rotting away in this schtill hole. We were dead the moment you sent us off to Dyn.”
“That’s not fair,” Cilas said, “but you’re allowed an opinion. Just don’t expect me to be sold by it. When you got out of BLAST, your life belonged to the Alliance. This was what you agreed to when you became a Nighthawk. I’m just sick of your negativity; you’re only making things worse. You’ve gone from blaming Ate to blaming me, and now you’ve upgraded to Captain Retzo Sho. Who will you be blaming once we get back on the Rendron? The Galactic Alliance? Are we that important, Brise?”
Helga waited for a retort, expecting an explosion from Brise, who seemed to be seething from something Cilas had said. No response came, and she hoped that it was over, but something told her that it was about to get worse. She opened her eyes and touched the controls gently, darkening the monitor to see their reflection.
Cilas was at his station, strapped in with his legs kicking. She assumed that this odd bit of movement was a form of exercise. Brise was near the other end, looking through of one of the windows. He was holding onto a ladder with one of his hands, but the other was balled up into a fist.
“How do you feel about what Brise said, Ate?” Cilas said suddenly, and Helga was surprised that he had known she was awake.
“This is my first mission,” she said. “That doesn’t give me enough experience to have an opinion, Lieutenant. I know that Kyden Ahmad died—that was how I got this slot—but no one has told me his cause of death. I find the silence odd, considering the closeness that I saw with this squad. Did he do something disgraceful, or was it just something that you agreed to keep from me?”
“Nighthawk missions are classified. We try not to bring up the past. Talking and reminiscing invites loose tongues, and the wrong person hearing something can get us into trouble,” Cilas said. “But we’ve been out here a long time, Ate, and the future is uncertain.” She waited for him to say more, but it was as if he was still considering it.
/> “Did Ahmad get corrupted the way Lamia Brafa did?” Helga said.
“No,” Brise said quickly. “He lost his life in an ambush. We flew into a trap, but he was one hell of a pilot. He got us to the LZ, but when we exited the Britz, he was shot in the throat and died. A Geralos sniper hit him in the one area where his armor wasn’t sealed. How’s that for coincidence? The lizards knowing where to shoot us. He died and we didn’t even know he was shot until Wyatt pointed out that his vitals were red.”
“Only the best shooters tend to become snipers,” Cilas said. “Spotting a vulnerability doesn’t mean there’s foul play.”
“Yeah, but him being sniped on that sort of mission does,” Brise mumbled.
“What sort of mission?” Helga said. “Everyone keeps talking in riddles. I know you’re upset, and being trapped here doesn’t help, but could you tell me about it in detail? What I know so far is that it was a bit of a messy mission, and that none of you were exactly thrilled to do it. Outside of those points, I have no clue what it was about, or who Ahmad was, and why he had to die.”
“It was my first mission with this squad,” Brise said reflectively. His carrot-colored hair was a stark contrast against the off white bulkhead. “An Alliance vessel had gone dark somewhere in Seryac space, and just like this trip, everything came off the rails. Now that I’m talking about it, there’s been a lot of similarities. From the ambush on approach, to our pilot getting sniped.” He looked over at Cilas, but the lieutenant didn’t seem to be listening.
“I met the new team, got the treatment, same as you, and we were on the Britz flying out when the rest of the Rendron was asleep. This was exciting stuff. An elite team, and I was one of them. I wanted nothing else but to prove myself, to get past the treatment to call myself a Nighthawk. So we drop out of FTL, and Ahmad isn’t seeing schtill on the radar. We’re all confused, but the Rendron confirmed the dead ship’s location, so we stay for weeks … scanning and looking. Some of us began to think that the intel we got was bad.
“Then a warbird uncloaks and we’re in a fight for our lives, but Ahmad knew how to fly so we didn’t go down like we were supposed to. No disrespect to you or Cruser, Ate, because you were both pretty good, but the things Ahmad did – man, it was impressive, and the warbird had to run. Eventually it jumped away, and we were left with the Britz in poor shape. We should have gone home then, but we had a mission to complete, so we continued searching for our target.”
Helga didn’t know what to think. Everything she was hearing sounded like a setup. Coordinates were given to Seryac space, and there just happened to be a warbird waiting for them? The Geralos warbird was a sleek fighter, built to slip in and assassinate targets. It had an FTL drive, but rarely was it ever seen without a destroyer or fleet in tow.
If there was a warbird, it wasn’t accidental. It was there to kill a target, which meant that it had been sent. Helga’s mind was racing. Had she joined a squad that was marked for death? It made no sense; they were at war with the Geralos. What human in his right mind would be in league with those planet-stealing aliens?
“When did you find the target?” she said finally, wanting him to continue.
“A few days later Cruser spotted an anomaly, and Ahmad takes us over to investigate. There, floating as if it had been dead for ages, is an old busted up destroyer. None of us could tell if it was Alliance or Geralos. So I did some digging in the records to see which of our destroyers were missing. Turned out this ship was neither Alliance nor Louine. It was something else, alien, a model we hadn’t seen before.
“Ahmad took a shot in the throat as soon as we were off the Britz. It was … thyping awful, Ate. Next thing you know, we were on our guns, shooting it out with the lizards. Turns out they had beat us there and were stripping this thing for parts. Lamia Brafa found their sniper and cut off his head.” This memory seemed to please Brise as he stopped to grin, remembering it.
An alien ship that they didn’t recognize, Helga thought. But there are records of every sentient being within the Anstractor galaxy. Is there another alien race that we haven’t heard about? The thought of aliens made the hairs on her arms stand up. What if they were discovered by these visitors, and imprisoned anew? At least they understood the Geralos, but what would this new race want with them?
“I swear it was beautiful,” Brise said after a pause. “He took off that lizard’s head and started cutting the rest to threads. You would have thought that Ahmad was his family the way he went off. Varnes pulled me back to the Britz to help, but Ahmad was gone … there was nothing we could do to save him. That was the day when I felt really lucky to be a part of the Nighthawks. We’d lost a brother, but the way those men answered, it showed me just how much they cared. This was the type of unit I wanted to be in since cadet academy—”
“Who didn’t want to be a Nighthawk?” Helga said. “If you didn’t want to be a Nighthawk, then you wanted to be a Ranger. Just listening to your story reminds me of the cadet academy. Graduating wasn’t enough; we wanted to get invited to the BLAST tryouts. It wasn’t just you, it was every cadet. We’re both very lucky to be here.”
“I’m sorry that we let you down, Brise,” Cilas said, and they both turned to face him, shocked that he had been listening. “Before losing Ahmad we did a lot of good work. Not a day goes by that I don’t feel guilty. He was a busy guy, that one. Had children on several ships. Three on Meluvia, I think, where two of his wives lived, and one on Geral, if Wyatt was to be believed,” he said, laughing somewhat hysterically. Helga wondered what had gotten into him.
“Get off it, Lieutenant,” she said. “That’s physically impossible, not to mention gross. If the guy was that hard up, I doubt that he would go so far as to sleep with a lizard. Then again, you mentioned Wyatt … the biggest fibber in the known galaxy. So I’ll settle on the fact that Ahmad may have children on Meluvia.”
Cilas kept on laughing, and she saw that she had been set up. It made her feel naïve, and she gave him a look of impatience. It was an odd time to joke when the mood was one of dark remembrance. But maybe that was the point. Cilas’s motivations weren’t always clear.
Brise, on the other hand, seemed undeterred by Cilas’s joke. He waited for his superior to stop laughing, and then continued talking about the mission. “You are right about us being lucky to be here, Ate. My recommendation came from Ahmad. I know his family well.
“I joined this team under the assumption that I’d be making a difference. That’s why we all tried out for BLAST, right? To do great things for the Alliance? All the ads they show on our vids, about ‘the chosen’ being the tip of the spear,” he scoffed. “I thought that I’d be blowing up starships and killing lizard commanders, not being hung out to dry by the very council that created us.”
“That’s enough, Brise,” Cilas said, and the ship grew deathly quiet. Helga could hear the hum of the reactor pumping oxygen into the air. There was a clanging sound that occurred every few seconds, and she hadn’t noticed it before. Something was loose, or in need of replacing, and she wondered if Brise had noticed it too.
She tried to meet his eyes but he was in another zone, his blue eyes staring forward as if they could see through the hull. When Cilas shut the conversation down, it was in a tone that Helga hadn’t heard before. It had a finality in it that sent shivers down her spine.
What the heck just happened? she wondered as she looked at them both, but Brise was no longer willing to talk. She found this dynamic between the two men to be so interesting, though she sided with Cilas more than Brise.
“Sol, how about you blow off some steam by starting those enhancements we spoke about?” she said.
The engineer looked up at her. “You mean the plans from earlier?”
“Yeah. No time like the present to get started on it, I think,” she said. “This way we can have a bit more privacy. Even more, it will be good to get us working again.”
16
Being the captain of a starship as large and im
portant as the Rendron meant that above all else, trust was the most important asset that Retzo Sho could rely on. Retzo trusted his officers implicitly. This trust having come from decades of issuing commands, seeing them carried out, staying on top of all aspects of the ship, and making sure that the right people were assigned whenever there was a replacement needed.
It was this trust that had the young captain confused when he received word that a distress signal had been sent from the Nighthawks several Vestalian days ago.
Standing at the head of the large octagonal table that dominated his cabin, he moved the reports around, reading and rereading them. His disbelief turned to anger when he read the time and date they had been received. Why had he not been told immediately, and why had his CAG, Adan Viles, not bothered to bring it up the numerous times he’d seen him since?
He picked up his comms and called the operator, leaning into it as if it could support his 80kg frame. “Tell Mr. Viles that I need to see him in my cabin, immediately,” he said as soon as there was an answer. The operator, a fresh-faced ensign named Cyulan Ore, confirmed quickly, but Retzo had already disconnected the channel.
It took Adan Viles less than ten minutes to get to the cavernous compartment, which was impressive considering the Rendron’s enormous size. His punctuality didn’t serve to belay Retzo’s anger, however, as he stood in front of the giant table, watching him as he walked in and saluted.
Retzo didn’t return the salute. He knew that his anger was obfuscating any chance at reason, but it was too far gone to check. He couldn’t imagine Viles saying anything that would make the situation excusable. What could he say? Eight highly trained Rendron servicemen were missing in action. This did not happen on Retzo Sho’s watch, not when it was the Nighthawks.