by Greg Dragon
Cilas reached down and grabbed a rifle from one of the dead men at his feet. He checked it quickly, making sure that it was serviceable, and then threw its strap over his shoulder before rolling the corpse off the door. Once his makeshift barrier was clear, he hoisted it and walked back to the doorway. Placing it on its side, he slid it across the opening, making sure to do it in a way that didn’t expose his limbs.
He now had a barrier on the lower half of the doorway, and he spared no time in sliding behind it and coming up in a crouch. Instantly, shots came from the bridge, slamming into the door loud and frightening. Some shots flew over his head, striking the bulkhead behind him, and a number of these ricocheted and came dangerously close to where he crouched.
It was so loud that his ears began to ring again, but luckily none of them punched their way through the thick metal. When he finally got his bearings, he noticed that Helga was squatting next to him. She was bobbing back and forth, firing at the enemy, and it was a wonder she hadn’t been shot.
“These are amateurs, Lieutenant. They’re all exposed inside that space,” she said. Her voice was so confident, as if they’d already won.
“Stay down,” Cilas ordered. “We don’t know this ship or its people well enough to come to that conclusion. You’re exposing yourself firing, Ate. Stop being impatient. You’re our only pilot. As in, the most important person for getting these people home!”
The reminder of her role seemed to have worked on the Nighthawk, as she slid to the deck with her back to the door. Cilas saw Ina inching up and signaled for her to stop. It was at these critical moments that his leadership was needed, since impatience would lead to unnecessary casualties.
He thought about Cage Hem, his long lost Nighthawk brother. In situations like this they never needed to speak. They had been through so much together, they could practically read each other’s minds. Cage would’ve given him cover, and he would pop up and put a round in the captain’s chest.
It would have been an easy takeover, unlike this, which had become complicated after freeing Ina Reysor. This is who you have, Cilas, and you’re their leader. Tell them what to do, Nighthawk, he thought. Do your thyping job.
More shots punched the door, and it almost fell over, so he quickly removed the rifle and handed it to Helga Ate. “Do like you were doing before, but let your arms do the suppressing,” he said. “Remember your training foremost. Give me the time to clear that space.”
Helga seemed to inhale a prayer, then shifted her weight onto one knee. She then took an awkward seat and lifted the rifle above her head. With only her hands exposed, she fired off several shots. Cilas could hear the bullets ricocheting and the shouts of panic that it caused.
He got up on his knees, and several shots flew by his head. But he didn’t let this delay his actions as he looked to mark his targets. It was still smoky from the explosion, but he could see movement through the smoke. “Just like old times, brother,” he whispered, a quiet prayer to his friend, Cage Hem.
One by one he put bullets into these shadows, the same way he’d done on the numerous missions he’d survived. When three men went down, Helga stood up and started firing with precision. Cilas allowed the door to fall but hesitated to enter for fear of a tripwire. When all movement was stopped and the counter fire ceased, he touched the muzzle of Helga’s rifle and brought it slowly down.
The smoke was gone, though the bridge remained hazy, and he could smell the heated metal of their weapons. “Don’t shoot,” came a voice inside that Cilas recognized as the captain’s. “We’re standing down. Please … mercy … we’re standing down,” he said, and Cilas looked over at Helga Ate and exhaled a sigh of relief.
22
After taking the bridge, Helga saw another side of Cilas Mec that she hadn’t known existed. It was as if he’d stepped aside—the charismatic, caring Cilas that she knew—and let his evil twin take over. Now she stood near the doorway with Ina watching in horror as he tortured the ship’s captain for information.
He hadn’t given them any orders once the man surrendered, and with the things that he was doing, Helga wasn’t sure if she wanted him to. Do your job, she thought when the man’s screams rose an octave, and became enough to snap her out of her frozen state.
“Ina,” she said. “Ask your comrades to collect the bodies and place them near the airlock on every deck. We won’t be able to do much with the Inginus while they’re swapping blows with the Geralos. Can you imagine the smell in here if we leave it the way it is?”
“Uh, right – let me go talk to them,” the tall woman said, and it took some effort for her to turn away from Cilas’s interrogation. The lieutenant had the man tied to a chair and was punching him repeatedly. He would stop once in a while to ask a question, and then punch him again if he didn’t like the answer.
Helga walked over to the cockpit area where the dead pilot was slumped in his seat. She pushed him off, where Ina’s men could see him, and sat down in his place. Her throat constricted; it had been so long since she’d been at the helm of an actual ship.
During those long hours of staring at a monitor, inside of their escape pod … she had wondered if that was it, if she would die in the tube with Cilas and Brise. Now she was here, and though it was an alien ship, it was a ship, and as she wiped her hand across the console, she recognized the controls.
“Definitely Louine,” she said to herself, as she took in the complex layout. She placed the pilot’s communication device on her ear, opened up comms, and synched communication to the ship’s radar. After locating the tiny dot that was their cloaked escape ship, she sent a signal to its radio and waited for it to be received.
All of a sudden, she remembered what they had done: crippled the ship and maxed the shields at the cost of everything. This bird is going to be stuck in recharge mode for several Vestalian days, she thought.
“Lieutenant?” came a familiar voice in her ear, and she knew that it was Brise.
“Sol, this is Helga Ate. How’re you holding up?” she said.
“Ate! I’m here, alive, but worried out of my mind. Are you and the lieutenant okay?”
“We have the bridge, and we will be pulling you in, but we have a few technical items to take care of first. Hold tight for a few hours and then wait for my hail. I’ll work as fast as I can, alright?” Helga said.
“As long as it takes, Ate. I’m just glad to hear your voice. Were you able to shunt power to the shields? You never called me back, and I thought … Oh, never mind.” He laughed. “I’ll get all the details when you have me on board.”
“I will, and I’m sorry for not calling you back,” she said. “That had to be terrifying, but we have the ship. Anyway, let’s talk when you’re on board. I’ll call you when we’re ready to bring you in.”
She rose from the chair and looked over at Cilas, who was wiping his knuckles on the unconscious man’s shirt. “What did you find out?” she said, and he shot her a look of annoyance, causing her to flinch and avert her gaze. “Are you alright, Lieutenant?” she said, hoping that the real Cilas would return.
“I’m alright now,” he said, still looking at the captain. “Got a lot of information that I have to work out. Either way, it can wait. Our first priority is to get this ship back to working form. Then we need to collect our man and dispose of the deceased through the airlocks.”
“I’ve already spoken to Sol, Lieutenant. We need to pull him onboard, and then with your permission, I’ll put the crew to cleaning up the place,” Helga said.
“The ship is yours, Ate. You should use Ensign Reysor to help you with the bridge. As to the cleanup and what we do with the dead, let me worry about that. Get Brise here so that he can right the damage we did in engineering. Then I need to hail Inginus and convince them that we are who we say we are. Once we’ve done all of those things, we need to be off this ship.”
“Can you tell me why, Lieutenant?” Helga said, confused as to why they’d do all this work just to ditch the shi
p.
“This vessel is a slave galley, just like The San, and I’m guessing several others all over Anstractor. They are unified, Ate, and comprise crews with people from all over the galaxy. Meluvians, Casanians, Vestalians, and Louines are capturing our people and forcing them into labor. There’s a chance that through a corrupted source, they are selling us to the lizards.”
Helga couldn’t believe her ears. It was the most absurd thing that she’d ever heard. How was it that they were communicating with the lizards, let alone selling humans to them? “I don’t get it, Lieutenant. Wouldn’t the lizards capture the pirates themselves? What could they possibly gain by playing nice with people like that?” she said.
“We were all on Dyn, Ate. We saw enough to corroborate what I’m telling you. There is a language barrier with the lizards, and to them we’re nothing but food. But what if a select group of food can open a pipeline to human resources? They have spies in our Alliance, Ate. Spies that are helping to feed their camps.”
It was as if all the life had been drained from her face, as the weight of the flesh pushed Helga down to the deck. She remembered Lamia, how he’d turned on them so quickly, and she remembered how good of a person he was before he became corrupt. Couldn’t the Geralos do the same to people in power on the Alliance council?
Warship commanders, operators on the ground. Why were they even fighting when the enemy’s advantage was so thorough? She hadn’t realized that she was now seated on the deck, too weak to move and too proud to admit that she was frightened. “Were we sent here as lizard food, Cilas?” she said, knowing the answer already.
“That’s what I aim to find out, now that I understand this whole pirate network,” he said. “I have no proof that the Rendron has a lizard onboard, but I’ll know sooner or later. The San is the main contact for the network, and Amatu is a dangerous traitor to our cause. Those ruins you saw on Dyn were old settlements, ones he liberated the way he did ours. See, he has a conscience, and he’s playing the Geralos for whatever profit they’re giving him. He steals their prisoners from their camps and then sells them to ships like this.”
“No wonder he could play the nice, caring liberator. His hands aren’t directly linked to the Geralos,” Helga said. “He figures we’re dead anyway once we’re captured by the lizards, and so we become goods to trade, with traitorous pieces of schtill like him!” She spat at the captain’s unconscious body. “Now I want to give him some blows of my own. I want to punch him so hard that he’ll never wake up and then find Amatu and—”
“Go easy, Ate,” Cilas said, offering her a hand and helping her to her feet. “I shared this with you because you’re my only friend in this thing. Do not say anything to Brise or anyone on the Alliance ships. You and I can look into things until we’re sure who we can trust. Do you understand me, and are you willing to do it?”
“You can rely on me, Lieutenant,” she said, and saluted awkwardly. As soon as she touched her chest, she was confused as to why she was saluting. She had called him Cilas, he had shared an intimate secret, and he was actually addressing her now the way he would a peer. She expected him to roll his eyes, shake his head, or something else negative, but he smiled reassuringly and returned her salute.
“Had I known that I was taking you into a mess, I would have delayed your joining another year, Helga,” he said. “I never thought that things would get this thyped up, let alone lose the friends that have been with me my entire career.”
She wondered if that was the reason for the brutality that he’d unleashed on the captain. Maybe it was the pent-up anger over the betrayal that he was hearing caused them to be where they were now. How could she blame him when she felt the same? At least Cilas had enough self-control to stop.
Were it her or Brise administering the torture, they would have definitely killed him, knowing that the orgasm of hurt was only able to come when the pain you caused robbed the target of its life.
“I don’t think you should regret me being here, Lieutenant,” she said. “I knew what I was getting into even as far back as when I was just a teenage cadet. If I wanted it easy, I would have stayed on the Rendron.”
It took a lot of time but when the ship was in order, it was hard to believe that it was once owned by pirates. Ina stepped up in an impressive way and led her fellow ex-captives to clean and scour the decks.
When all hope had been lost for the ship’s captain, he had ordered that the slaves be put to death. One by one the chips inside their flesh corrupted, causing their bodies to be wracked with pain until it found their hearts.
The five people who survived had cut theirs out as soon as they were rescued. Seeing the bodies of the pirates gave them hope, and they had considered themselves liberated. There were others who weren’t so sure, and chose to leave their chips in longer. They hedged their bets because they knew, that the penalty of removing one’s chip was the airlock.
Had the Nighthawks failed to take the ship, they would have been recaptured and made to answer. It was an intelligent choice, to hold on to it till the end, but they gambled wrong on the captain’s cruelty, and for that they ended up dead.
Two of the surviving five were on the bridge now, a former Marine named Noli Dawn, and a Phantom pilot named Pavlid Rif. The former being a Meluvian, served on the battleship, Uman Roo, and the latter came from Helysian, another floating city like the Rendron.
Every last one of these spacers were hard, which made Helga wonder how they wound up on the pirate ship. She couldn’t stop thinking about betrayal, and the leaders that could be corrupted by the Geralos. What if Pavlid had been given a special mission, one in which the pirates were waiting to capture him?
It wasn’t dissimilar to what she and Cilas had gone through. Why did it have to be spacers? Did they need naval experts to man their stolen ship? Cilas had mentioned ransom; were civilian hostages worth too little? Ina had told her that every captive she’d talk to on the ship was a former Alliance spacer. Were there more ships like this floating around the worlds, looking for warriors to fall into their web?
Helga touched the interface and thrummed her fingers on several icons, which told the ship to close a rather large hatch. Once it complied, she increased their shields a hair and then set the rest of the focus on the internal power supply.
“Lieutenant, Petty Officer Brise Sol has come aboard successfully,” she said.
It seemed like ages since she had spoken to Brise, and even longer since they had become friends. He had been so nasty to her when they were captured, but she had learned that it was his defense mechanism, to lash out when he felt helpless. But she had forgiven him on The San, and over their month in the escape pod, she had learned to like him.
He was a brilliant engineer and a bad ESO, but she knew that the reason he was bad was because he cared too much. This made him the antithesis of everything that Cilas was, which forced her to be the shield between them. She didn’t agree much with Brise, but she felt drawn to him regardless. This was due to the fact that she couldn’t see that he was everything her brother Rolph was.
She watched the monitor showing the Inginus, still locked in a fight with the Geralos destroyer. Though she wanted to help, it wasn’t possible, not in this old ship whose weapons hadn’t been fired in several years.
The Inginus was strong, but it needed time against a ship of its size, and there was nothing that an old pirate ship could do to assist them.
Even if she turned them around to approach the Geralos destroyer, their own Inginus would see it as a sign of aggression. They were in an old Louine ship, whose model was a relative unknown for any Alliance spacer. The Inginus could assume that they were Geralos and cut them in half with a trace laser.
If this happened, then everything they had done to take the ship would have been for nothing—since they would be dead and forgotten.
Helga felt a presence behind her and the hairs on her neck stood erect. Deep down she knew it had to be Cilas or one of the former captives, but
that did nothing for her nerves, which were still on edge in this strange new ship.
It was Ina, who looked as if she had spent some time going through the captain’s wardrobe. She had changed into the clothes and leathers of a pirate, and somehow it worked with her fiery hair and muscular frame.
Cilas was in charge, but Ina looked the part, and Helga caught herself staring as the tall woman came up and placed her hands on the back of the chair. “You seem worried. Isn’t that ship one of ours?” she said, pointing to the Inginus.
She said ours. Welcome back to the Alliance, Ensign Reysor, Helga thought. “It is, but we’ve been gone so long, I dare not hope that we will be rescued,” Helga said. “Every time we catch a break, things only seem to get worse. And though I recognize that ship, it doesn’t mean they’re ready to take us in.”
Ina sat in the chair next to hers and placed her feet up on the console. She still wore the bloody bandage around her neck, but it too complemented her ensemble.
“Just imagine how we feel. We, the forgotten children of the Alliance. Most of us abandoned hope until we saw you and the lieutenant killing Rax’s men,” she said. “Now he’s in the brig, unconscious, and probably dying, and I’m on his bridge, sitting in his chair… free. Think this is real life for me, Helga? I’m still struggling with believing it.”
Helga smiled. Ina had a point. There was no use complaining to someone who had it just as bad as she did. Yes, the Geralos were much worse, but they had survived them and had wound up with their own ship. So she decided to change the subject to something more positive.
“What will be the first thing you do when you’re back on Aqnaqak, Ina?” she said.
Ina looked lost, but Helga could tell that she was giving her question some serious thought. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Helga. And after what we’ve done today, I’m done being an ESO. I’ve seen enough blood to convince me of that. Plus, I’m disappointed in our Alliance. Look how many spacers were held captive on this ship. Am I to believe that they came looking for us, or did they just sign us off as missing in action?