Frost Station Alpha 1-6: The Complete Series

by Ruby Lionsdrake

She sighed and slumped back in her chair. He did not look back. He had removed her combat armor before depositing her there, but he hadn’t spoken a word since slinging her over his shoulder. Now, he sat in the pilot’s seat of the mining craft his people had arrived in, with displays of the front, side, and rear cameras hovering in the air above the console. Frost Station Alpha, its wheel and cylinder outlined against the swirling gasses of Mysterium, grew smaller as they flew away. Her vain hope that he didn’t know how to pilot a spaceship and would crash them and set them adrift for Fleet to pick up was diminishing. He turned the craft toward the white ice-smothered moon of Glaciem.

  Tamryn tried to glimpse the Fleet ships on one of the displays, but just because they had been picked up by the station’s sensors didn’t mean they were in visual range. She envisioned an armada swooping in to rescue her, but she realized they might shoot without communicating first and never know that a kidnapped soldier sat imprisoned in the mining vessel.

  Grumbling, she slumped back in the chair. She would have to figure out a way to rescue herself. Since Makkon was the only one here besides her, all that meant was overpowering him. Unfortunately, with the collar gone, she had no idea how she might do that.

  He set a course, heading them straight toward Glaciem, then turned in his seat to face her, propping his elbows on his thighs. She would have crossed her arms over her chest if the cuffs had allowed it. All she could do was glare.

  “You knew I couldn’t give up,” he said quietly, apologetically.

  Tamryn was in no mood for an apology. “You gave me your word that you wouldn’t try to escape.”

  “Until the spill had been dealt with.”

  “It’s hardly been dealt with. Just because the decon cubicle irradiated your foot doesn’t mean Porter will be able to apply that to the entire lab before it grows so big that it’s eating through the floors of the station all the way to the hull.”

  “The pirates were dead. I’d done what I promised to do. You know I didn’t give you my word to let you stick me back in that vault.”

  Tamryn gritted her teeth and looked away, though there wasn’t much to look at. The mining ship wasn’t much larger than a combat shuttle. It had seats for a small crew in the small bridge area, and most of the back, which she had been carried through on the way in, was a cargo area for housing machine parts and collected ore. Now, it was full of crates of food that Makkon’s people had found and stolen from the station sometime during their invasion. Given the story he had told her about starvation and cannibalism, she wouldn’t blame him for that. She couldn’t blame him for any of this. Wouldn’t she have kept trying to escape too? He had never blamed her for that or even been angry, not even when she had tried to drive a dagger into his groin.

  No, she understood his adherence to his mission perfectly well. Most of her anger was for herself. She should have known he would try to escape, and she should have been better prepared. Right away, she had been suspicious when he had started taking off his armor, and it had crossed her mind to shoot him before he finished. Then, too late, she had thought to check for the fob, only to find it missing. She should have been checking on that, making sure she still had it, all along. Instead, she had allowed the run-in with the sludge to distract her.

  “You left all of your people behind,” Tamryn said, looking at the cargo area instead of at him. “They’re going to be killed, and then Fleet is going to come to your moon and do again what it did a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “Brax and the others were prepared to die when they came on this mission, the same as I am,” Makkon said, his voice calm and reasonable. Wasn’t he afraid at all? “And it’s my hope that they won’t drop any more nukes on my world when you’re down there with me.”

  Tamryn snorted and met his eyes so he would see her disbelief. “You think they won’t sacrifice one junior officer to make sure your people are never a threat again?”

  “I think they won’t sacrifice the granddaughter of Pyotr Pavlenko, who apparently sits on the government council.”

  She looked away, her jaw clenching again. So, some time between capturing all of the scientists, fighting off a ship of pirates, and dealing with a mysterious metal- and flesh-eating organism, he had done some research. And now he meant to use her as a hostage, just as he’d planned to do with the scientists. She imagined him having a chat with the highest-ranking Fleet officer on those ships while holding a gun to her head. Even though she understood his motivations, his mission, she couldn’t help but feel hurt that he would use her like that. When had he found out who she was, anyway? All along, had he been trying to turn her into an ally in the hope that she would be close enough to kidnap when he got the chance? Or maybe he’d hoped she would talk to her grandfather on his behalf?

  “Pyotr Pavlenko and the council are a long way from here,” Tamryn said. “Whoever’s in charge of that fleet probably doesn’t even know I’m here or who I am.”

  “I plan to make them aware of both facts.”

  “What makes you so sure it will matter?” She glared at him again. “Fleet doesn’t make deals with terrorists. They’re not real flexible on that policy. And it’s not like I’m the heir to some throne or something. Even if they did comm back home and talk to my grandfather, what exactly do you think would happen? He has ten grandkids. I’m sure he’d be disappointed to lose one, but he knew that would be a possibility when my brothers and I signed up to serve.”

  “Did all of his ten grandkids go on hunting trips with him growing up?” Makkon spun back toward the console, tapping a few buttons. “They’ll barter to get you back.”

  Tamryn couldn’t tell if he truly believed that or if he was trying to talk himself into believing it. She honestly wasn’t sure whether her name would matter as much as he thought. Fleet had sacrificed entire ships full of people if it was deemed for a greater good. It had destroyed worlds. Maintaining law and order over a system with this many planets, moons, and stations required ruling with an iron fist. The military was not known for giving in to demands from rebels, radicals, or terrorists.

  “They brought ten ships,” Makkon muttered, watching the sensor display. “None of them look like freighters full of terraforming equipment.” He sighed. He did not sound surprised. “Eight are heading straight for the station. Two are breaking away. It’s impossible to tell yet, but I’m guessing they were sent to chase us.”

  “Will they catch us before we reach the moon?” Tamryn asked.

  “No.”

  “Do they have enough armament to blow up the moon?”

  Makkon frowned back at her. “Blow up, no. Damage, I have no doubt. We won’t feel it down in our base. Those tunnels survived a nuclear holocaust.” He pressed a few more buttons on the communications console. “I intend to give them a reason to talk rather than use force.”

  After a moment, he got a response to his hail.

  “This is the flagship Marathon,” a young-sounding voice said over the comm. “Please identify yourself, mining craft Nebula Seven.”

  Makkon glanced back at Tamryn. “It sounds like they know our identity.”

  Tamryn thought about warning him that making snarky comments wouldn’t endear him to whoever was commanding that ship, but she kept her mouth shut. She wasn’t going to help him along with his kidnapping endeavor.

  “This is hunt leader Makkon from Glaciem,” he said. “I hope you aren’t planning on attacking us. I have Lieutenant Tamryn Pavlenko with me. I understand her grandfather would be displeased if someone blew her up.”

  Tamryn’s glare found its way back to her face.

  He didn’t look back at her. He was studying the communications console with the intentness of a man watching the barnyard and hoping he had, indeed, purchased the goose that laid the golden eggs. The young officer from the Marathon had not responded yet.

  “My comrade Brax already sent a list of demands to your government,” Makkon said. “If Pyotr Pavlenko wants to see his granddaughter alive again
, he’ll make sure our equipment is sent and also that Glaciem is left in peace in the future.”

  Tamryn shifted toward the edge of her seat, as much as her cuffed wrists would allow. She was tempted to shout that Makkon wouldn’t kill her, that they shouldn’t deal with him, but the slightest hint of uncertainty stilled her tongue. Did she truly know that he wouldn’t kill her? The feelings he had professed and his interest in her could have all been an act. Even if they had been true, he might still choose to kill her over failing his people. And then there was the niggling part of her that wanted to find a way to keep Makkon and his people from being obliterated by GalCon. As much as she hated the idea of being someone’s hostage—the implication that she hadn’t been a competent enough soldier to keep herself out of this situation—if her life could be traded for the lives of an entire people, wouldn’t that be more than a fair trade?

  She reminded herself that she hadn’t met any of these people yet and had no idea how much truth Makkon had told her. For all she knew, the rest of the Glacians were even bigger assholes than Brax.

  “Well,” Makkon said after muting the comm. “I got their attention. Four ships are now after us.”

  Before Tamryn could comment, the Marathon responded. It wasn’t the young comm officer this time.

  “Let’s see your hostage, hunt leader,” an older man’s cold voice said, a voice full of disdain, and... a voice Tamryn recognized. Granted, she’d rarely heard it sound so icy and threatening, but she would have known it anywhere. But what was her father doing here? He’d resigned his commission five years earlier; he was running businesses now, not starships. She gaped at the viewing screen, even though no visuals had been sent back and forth between the two ships.

  “Who’s speaking?” Makkon asked.

  “Admiral Tomas Pavlenko.”

  Apparently, Makkon’s research had involved looking up her father, too, because he blinked a few times, then turned toward her. He raised his eyebrows.

  Tamryn nodded. “Sounds like him.”

  In order to make it out here with the Fleet, he must have jumped on a ship as soon as he had heard the news.

  Makkon tapped the console to establish a video feed. One of the holo displays showing a view out the portside minimized and was replaced by an image of the bridge of the Marathon. Several officers at stations were visible, including the captain in the command chair in the center, but Tamryn’s gaze went straight to the tall, rangy man in the pressed black dress uniform standing beside the captain’s chair. His collar gleamed with the fistful of stars and arches denoting admiral’s rank, and all manner of medals and awards lined the breast of his jacket. His gray hair had been cut recently, his mustache shaved off since the last time she had seen him, and he looked exactly as he had five years ago at his retirement ceremony.

  Tamryn’s throat tightened, both because she hadn’t realized how much she missed home and her family until seeing him, and because he looked fierce and deadly, like the man who had inspired her to join the military and want to follow in his footsteps, to make a name for herself, as he had done, that had nothing to do with the family money.

  Their eyes met, and she thought she saw relief in his, but he had his poker face on, and it was hard to tell what he was thinking. Tamryn swallowed and vowed to keep emotion out of her voice. Besides, she had no idea how he felt about all of this. Was he irritated that she had gotten herself into trouble by choosing this station? Was he disappointed in her for not doing a better job? For allowing herself to be captured and used in this manner? She was disappointed in herself.

  “What’s your status, Lieutenant?” her father asked.

  Tamryn lifted a hand as much as she could, so he could see the cuff. “It’s been a rough week at Frost Station Alpha, sir. We shot the guts out of some pirates that took the Felling Axe, but we’re having an ongoing problem with some Glacians.”

  “Glacians.” His gaze flicked toward Makkon.

  Tamryn had gotten used to Makkon’s long black hair, powerful muscles, and that fierce tattoo covering half his face, but she could only guess at what her father thought, looking at him. He definitely wasn’t someone her mother would have approved of if she had brought him home for dinner.

  “Apparently, they’re not as extinct as the universe thought,” Tamryn said. “A number of them are locked up on the station,” she added, wanting her father to know that she and the others had accomplished something, “but—”

  “Enough,” Makkon said, climbing to his feet. He stepped behind Tamryn’s chair and rested his hand on the back of her neck as he stared at her father. “I hope you brought the terraforming equipment with you, because you have twenty-four hours to deliver it to the surface of Glaciem.”

  “Or what?” Her father’s voice was even colder than it had been before. Some of the bridge crew cringed at his tone. Tamryn might have cringed, too, if she hadn’t grown up riding on his shoulders and having water fights against him in the lake behind the house.

  “Either she dies, or we keep her.” Makkon smiled, though it was a cold and unfriendly smile, and it made her squirm in her seat. He looked down at her, his face like that of a stranger, then back to the video pickup. “As you might guess, our civilization is on the brink of extinction. We can use more young fertile females.”

  Fertile females? What the—

  Tamryn tried to punch him before remembering that cuffs held her wrists near the chair. Her father looked livid, even more livid than at the suggestion of her death.

  “You don’t have a civilization,” he snarled. “Glaciem was a damned penal colony.”

  “Are we to be condemned because of the actions of our ancestors?” Makkon didn’t mention that he had been alive during the Glacian uprising, or that Brax had been among those trying to take over the system back then.

  “Yes,” her father said.

  Makkon released Tamryn and walked back to the console. “Twenty-four hours.” He shut down the channel.

  “Fertile females?” Tamryn stared at him, wondering if she knew him at all, thinking that more and more, everything he had told her had been a ruse. “What was that?”

  Makkon sat down. “I think it might make him more inclined to agree to our demands than a simple death threat. You’re right; you signed on to be a soldier and that comes with the possibility of death. He’s probably braced himself for that. But other unpleasant possibilities... perhaps he would find himself less hardened to. Besides, if he called my bluff, I couldn’t kill you.”

  “But you think you could force me to breed?”

  “Well. I’d not want force to be involved...”

  “You can take a rocket into the sun and die, hunt leader Makkon. You’re not seeing any of my fertile parts. Ever.”

  He smiled sadly, then shifted his attention back to the moon, its icy contours filling the display now. She slumped at the knowledge that the fleet was too far behind to catch them before they landed down there, where she would likely go from being Makkon’s prisoner to being his government’s prisoner. She had no idea how she would be treated then. Makkon might be fond of his people, but her father was right. Whatever the Glacians had been when they’d first been dropped off to colonize the moon, they had become a people willing to send out vengeful conquerors to try and take over the entire system.

  Chapter 22

  Makkon turned off the engines after guiding the ship into the giant cargo elevator that would take them into the bowels of the moon. He had entered through a cave in the side of a glacier, one impossible to see from the air. The ship’s lights played across the striated white, blue, and gray layers of ice that made up the wall behind the elevator.

  “Hunt leader Makkon here,” he said, the comm set to the home channel. “I need a ride down.”

  “Welcome back, Makkon,” came a woman’s familiar voice. President Shenta. Makkon wouldn’t have expected her to operate the elevator or answer his hail. There must have been a meeting going on in headquarters—probably to discuss t
he four Fleet ships now entering orbit around the moon. “Do you have Brax and the others with you?”

  Makkon grimaced. He dreaded explaining that the others had been locked up and awaited the military’s arrival. Even though he had a hostage, he felt that he had failed. It almost would have been better to have been locked up with the others—or killed in battle—than to be the lone man to return home in their only ship. By taking the craft, he had denied the others a way off the station, should they somehow manage an escape.

  “No, ma’am. It’s a long story, but not, I think, a hopeless one.” Makkon risked looking back at Tamryn.

  She had been glaring spear-sized icicles at him the entire flight to Glaciem, and he didn’t expect to find a kinder expression on her face now, especially not after he had implied that she might be mauled by people desperate enough to become rapists. His people were desperate for food, not brood stock, but he doubted she would believe anything he said right now. He would bluff any way he could to salvage this mission, but she had no way of knowing it was all a bluff. And he wasn’t sure he should admit to that, in case she had the opportunity to talk to her father again.

  Her father. That had been surprising, especially since the article on him had said he was retired. Makkon didn’t know anything about the man, other than that he had not gone weak-kneed at the sight of his daughter with an enemy hand wrapped around her neck. Still, his presence here should mean that Tamryn wouldn’t be dismissed as just another junior officer. He would fight for her life, to have her returned safely. Makkon only hoped that he would deal for that too.

  Tamryn rubbed her eyes and yawned. She had dozed off toward the end of the flight. Now, she avoided his gaze and looked past him to the wall of ice. Makkon wanted to say something encouraging, tell her not to worry, that she would see her home again, but nothing about her expression said she was open to hearing anything from him.

  With a grind-thunk that emanated through the walls of the ship, the elevator descended. Makkon turned back to the controls. Outside, the layers of ice were replaced with rock and crystal, the ancient silicate that made up the crust of the moon. After descending hundreds of meters, the elevator landed with a soft thump as the rock wall was replaced by a wide, high tunnel that he could have flown through to an underground hangar. But this was their only ship these days, so there was no need to move it out of the elevator.