by Ashley West
Maybe once he caught them and had them tethered to his speeder, he’d take the long way back to Gathra. Who knew when the next time he’d be able to get in one of these would be, after all. The paperwork for this would take him weeks to complete, he was sure. So a little joy ride didn’t seem out of the question.
But first he had to catch the Fremeri.
For a race of creatures that was supposed to have been extinct for longer than Silas had been alive, they were distressingly well outfitted. Their shuttle was old, but definitely not old enough to have been made before they supposedly vanished and died off. Either someone had made them a new one, they’d somehow made it themselves, or it was stolen.
One of those options seemed the most likely, that they’d stolen it from someone and were using it now to cause chaos, but the real question was why.
As he chased down the Fremeri shuttle, he punched in the number for Cress’ personal tablet into the speeders comm system. The chiming noise that indicated it was connecting rang out cheerfully in the speeder for a bit before it was connected.
“Captain?”
“Cress,” Silas said. “Report.”
“Well. You’re not gonna like what I have to say,” he said. “In fact, could you tell the Empress so I don’t have to? Last thing I need is her yelling at me. Again.”
“The last time was completely your fault, and you know it,” Silas remarked. “Report, Cress.”
Cress sighed. “Fine. They all got away.”
“What do you mean they all got away?” he demanded. “What about the one Hamara shot twice?”
“Dead.”
“What?”
If Hamara had shot the Fremeri again after he’d explicitly told her to stand down—
“Some kind of poison, we think,” Cress was saying. “She pulled something out of her tunic, and then...yeah. Convulsions, some hissing, some really gross foaming at the mouth, and then she was dead.”
Silas swore harshly. Cress was right. The Empress was going to be furious with them for that. “I’ll just have to bring back these to get information from instead,” he said.
“There’s more, Silas,” Cress said.
Cress didn’t always use his title, mostly to make fun of it, but when they were on a mission like this, the use of Silas’ first name caught his attention, even as it opened a pit of dread in his stomach. “What is it?”
“We...we found that boy. The one they drained. He...well. He’s completely drained. We collected his...body to take to the clinic and see what Perse can make of it, but. It was horrible. And he wasn’t the only one.”
“How do you know that?”
“When we were leaving the area where the boy was, we heard a woman crying, so we went to investigate. She was holding her daughter's body. And it was in the same condition.”
Silas swore again. “What are they doing this for?” he demanded. “Is it sustenance? Are they...feeding off of people?”
“Couldn’t say, Captain. If we manage to pull some of them in for questioning, then maybe we can figure it out. Whatever it is, it doesn’t look good.”
“You can say that again,” Silas sighed. “Alright, thanks for the update, Cress. I’ll bring these back, and we’ll see what we can do from there. And yes,” he cut in before Cress could say anything else. “I’ll be the one to contact the Empress. She’ll be expecting to hear it from me, anyway. But do me a favor and make sure none of the others manage to kill themselves before we get answers out of them, alright?”
“You got it, Captain.”
Silas disconnected and continued to fly. He put on a burst of speed, teeth grated. Now he was even more determined to make sure that this scum didn’t get away. They had things to answer for.
All he needed to do was get close enough to hail them and then tether them, and—
And that was a huge fleet of ships.
There, in front of him, were no less than ten ships, all decked out in aging but functional weaponry. And all of it was pointed right at him. The ship he had been chasing joined the fleet, and all at once, they opened fire on him.
Jets of light streaked out of their cannons and guns, and Silas swore as he threw the switch to activate the shields on his speeder. This kind of ship wasn’t made to withstand that much fire, though, and it wasn’t long before the barrier began to weaken.
He needed to get out of there.
If his ship went down, then he was going down with it, and that would spell the end of him more than likely. He couldn’t even say where he was just yet, and he needed to make it back to Gathra to let them know that this was bigger than they knew.
But if he just let them get away, how would they find out their plans?
He was torn, and his barrier was weakening by the second. Silas had to do something, or it wouldn’t matter what he had seen because he’d likely be dead.
As the barrier around his ship shimmered and then died, Silas put on a burst of speed and wheeled the speeder around, racing away from their fire.
He knew the way back to Gathra, but before he could head in the direction he needed to go, a large blast knocked his tiny speeder askew, sending it careening out in the wrong direction.
Silas swore and held on, trying to get back on track.
“Oh no,” he whispered as he saw where he was heading.
A warp path.
Once a ship got caught on one of those, it was heading wherever the path led to. There was no turning around or getting off of a warp path until it ended.
He tried frantically to avoid it, but with a smoking tail and the momentum he already had, there was no way, and he was sucked right into the warp path. The emergency alarm was blaring in the cockpit, and he knew the ship was going to go down. The only question now was where he’d end up when it did.
Darkness.
So different from the blinding lights that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. His head ached, his body was sore, and his mouth was sand dry. When Silas opened it to try and say something, all that came out was a low rasp.
Whatever had happened, he’d over extended himself.
In his younger days, it had been nothing for him to go two or three days without sleep or to push himself to his absolute limit time and time again. He’d been used to it, then spending his days out making Gathra a safer, better place.
But now he was more used to being inside the fortress than being out in the field, and he felt like he’d been worked over with a mallet.
To make matters worse, when he blinked his eyes open, he had no idea where he was. It wasn’t the clinic in the fortress, that was for sure. It wasn’t even the infirmary in the pleasure district where he’d had to get patched up once or twice in his career. This place was infinitely more...what color even was that? It was purple-ish and light, and the window was open, letting in a light breeze. His back was resting on something soft and too short for him, so his feet hung off the edge. Bizarre.
He felt heavy and achy, and so very confused.
As he laid there, waiting to see if someone would come into whatever this room was, he cast his mind back over what had happened.
The Fremeri, the little boy who’d gotten drained, the chase. He’d been in his speeder, and then…
Oh.
Oh.
And then he’d been attacked. An ambush most likely. He needed to get back to the ship. He needed to get a message to the Empress. If the Fremeri had enough numbers to ambush him, to bait them and have him follow them right into a trap, then it was clear that they were underestimating what they were capable of and probably the size of their force as well.
But then he remembered. He’d crashed. He was...on Earth.
Yes. Now he recalled the woman, the one who’d screamed and then let him into her home. That had to be where he was now.
If his speeder had crashed, then most likely the comm system was destroyed. There was no way to get a message to the Empress or to the rest of HIMA letting them know that they could be
dealing with a full scale invasion possibly.
Silas found voice to swear.
“Oh,” a soft voice squeaked, and he turned his head to see a woman watching him.
It was the same woman from the night before, the one who had let him into what he assumed was her home. Her green eyes were wide, and she was wringing her hands together as she looked at him.
Silas narrowed his eyes at her, wincing as he tried to sit up.
“What have you done to me?” he managed.
Confusion and then indignation flared in her eyes. “I didn’t do anything to you!” she snapped. “Except give you a convenient place to pass out after you scared the actual crap out of me.”
Now he was frowning again, confused once more. He supposed that if he were really on Earth, then humans wouldn’t have much knowledge about the life that existed outside of their atmosphere. What he knew about humans was very small, just that they were self-centered, crude, and always in the middle of killing each other.
This one, though. If she was to be believed, and judging from the look on her face, Silas believed her, she had helped him. She was also beautiful. Her hair was in a braid that was falling over one shoulder, and there were sun spots all over her face, making her look almost ethereal.
His head was fuzzy, and it was hard to focus, but he knew well enough to know that he owed this woman something for helping him. For, at the very least, giving him somewhere to stay while he was passed out.
“Apologies,” he said, struggling again to sit up and coming out more successful this time. He managed to push himself up onto his elbows, though the movement left him light headed.
“You shouldn’t be moving around,” the woman said, taking a step towards him. “I think you’ve lost a lot of blood. I patched you up as best I could, but...well, I’m not a nurse or a doctor, so.”
It was only then that Silas noticed he’d been bandaged up. The gauze and tape were archaic compared to where he came from, but he supposed he couldn’t expect humans to have laser healing tech here. They were still using crude weapons, after all, of course they hadn’t caught up with the latest in healing technology yet.
“Thank you,” Silas said sincerely. “I might have died without your assistance.”
She flushed slightly and waved that away. “How did you get so hurt, anyway?”
Silas considered for a moment, wondering if there was harm in telling her what had happened to him. It was not very likely that the Fremeri would have reached out to the humans and made some sort of alliance with them, so he deemed it acceptable to tell her. “My speeder crashed here,” Silas said.
“Your…oh.” Something seemed to dawn on her. “That was the thing that went streaking across the sky yesterday. You were on that thing? It looked like it was on fire.”
He nodded. “I was, and it was. I was shot down.”
“Holy crap. And you survived?”
“Apparently,” Silas replied, a hint of a smile playing around his mouth. “If I hadn’t I doubt we’d be having this conversation. Unless this is some elaborate after death vision or something. The Void is a strange place.”
“The Void?”
Silas shook his head. “We haven’t even been introduced. It’s not the time to start talking about the Void.”
“Oh,” she said again. “Right, of course. I’m Katia.”
“Katia.” Silas turned the name over in his mouth like he could taste it. It wasn’t a name he would have heard where he came from, but lovely all the same. “My name is Silas.”
“Silas,” she repeated. “That’s...well, to be honest it’s an oddly normal name for an alien. That’s what you are, right? You’re from another planet.”
She seemed remarkably calm about it, and Silas supposed she would have had time to come to terms with it while she was patching him up. Blue skin was obviously not something that humans had in common with his people, after all.
“Yes,” he replied simply. There was no use in pretending otherwise. “I am Silas Kerandron, Captain of the Left Arm of HIMA, Champion of the Battle of Fells Deep, and I hail from Gathra.”
“That’s a fancy bunch of titles,” she said. “You must be important on Gathra.”
He inclined his head. “Important enough that I should be there instead of here,” Silas told her. “I have to figure out how to get a message to my Empress. There are things she needs to know.” But how he was going to do that was anyone’s guess. It wasn’t like human technology was made to broadcast into space. Most humans didn’t even believe that there was anything to broadcast to beyond their planet. But if he didn’t tell someone what he had seen, then Gathra or some other unsuspecting planet was going to be invaded by a race of creatures that were definitely not dead.
Chapter Four: Quite a Disaster
"What do you mean you don't know where he is?"
Cress fought the urge to shrink back from the Empress' anger. He'd always known that getting on her bad side was a terrible idea. She was a strong willed woman, a descendant from the tribes who had first come along and settled on Gathra. Her people didn't shy away from hard work or from their anger, and right now Cress knew that he had to tread carefully to avoid invoking something he wasn't going to be able to handle.
There was a reason he had never angled for a promotion. Even after Silas had been promoted to Captain, essentially leaving him behind in the lower ranks, he hadn't tried for more. Because it was a terrible idea, fraught with responsibility and meetings like this.
The most he ever saw of the Empress ordinarily was the back of her head or he saw her from afar when she was giving some manner of speech to her troops. He had never been on the other side of her desk like this before, and there was a reason he had never wanted to.
"I...um." Cress cleared his throat. Just tell her the facts. That was what Hamara had insisted was the best way to go about this. And he could do that. He could. "We don't know where he is," he repeated. "He left in pursuit of the Fremeri, I received a transmission from him, and then nothing. I've tried calling him, but there's no response, and there's no sight of his speeder on any of the radars. For all intents and purposes, Silas--I mean, the Captain--has disappeared."
Cress swallowed hard when he finished. His voice hadn't shook once, thank the stars for that. His hands were clenched into fists at his side, and he forced himself to take deep, even breaths.
"And you have no idea where he might be?" Ammaline asked.
"No, Your Imperial Majesty. We can't find him on any of the radars or scanners, and the tracer on his ship is either down or damaged."
"What about the locator on his personal device?" she wanted to know.
"Tech is having a hard time locking onto the signal."
The Empress said nothing for a long moment and then let out a rough exhale. Her fingers were pressed flat on the top of her desk, and she looked like she was trying very hard not to explode. Cress appreciated the effort.
He understood how she felt, though. Silas was one of their best. For all he'd been surprised when the Empress had promoted him to Captain, it hadn't come as a surprise to anyone else. Silas was a natural leader. The kind of man who inspired loyalty in his people without trying very hard. He made people want to follow him, and honestly, not that much had changed when Silas was promoted. The Empress relied on him to solve problems like this, and with him gone, finding someone else to lead was going to be difficult. Especially since the first thing they were going to have to lead would be Silas' rescue mission of all things.
"We will have to assume the worst," the Empress was saying, jarring him out of his thoughts.
"The worst, Majesty?"
Ammaline inclined her head. "Yes. That he has been taken by the Fremeri."
Cress' eyes widened. He hadn't even considered that. Silas and prisoner didn't go together unless he was the one bringing prisoners in. For him to be one...
"You think that's what happened?"
She shot him a sharp look. "I have no way of knowing
what happened, Corporal. As such, we will assume the worst. If they have one of ours, then that is as good as a declaration of war."
Well. That seemed rather...sudden. Cress had never seen a war before. Not a real one, anyway. He'd grown up the same as the other children, learning about the wars and battles that had shaped Gathra and the other planets nearby into the places they were now. He'd learned all about how the strong had prevailed and the weak had been all but annihilated. It was daunting to say the least to think about participating in something like that.
"What if..." he began, eyes widening in horror as he realized he was about to contradict the Empress of Gathra.
"What if?" Ammaline repeated, eyes on him.
"What if it's not that bad?" Cress asked. "What if he just...ran out of fuel on some other planet or something? Should we really declare all-out war for that?"
The eyes that hadn't looked away from his face from the moment he started speaking hardened. "You think I am being too rash." It wasn't a question, and Cress wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear.
"That isn't what I said, Majesty."
"No, but I can see that it's true all the same. You think I am jumping to conclusions and using that as an excuse. But consider what the Fremeri have already done here. There are people who have been hurt and killed by them already. Is that not cause?"
Cress...couldn't really argue with that. "Yes, Your Imperial Majesty," he said. "It's cause."
"That was my thought as well," Ammaline replied. "I need to speak to the other captains. And I will need some of the left arm to volunteer to look for Silas."
"I'll uh. I'll facilitate that."
"Lovely. I trust that I don’t have to tell you to keep me informed. You are dismissed."
Cress had never been so pleased to be dismissed before, and he just nodded, saluted, and then nearly stumbled out of the office and then out of the fortress itself, head spinning. He'd seen a lot in the last few hours, and though it was very late at night, nearly morning, actually, he didn't want to go home and try to sleep. He knew that as soon as he laid his head down, it would be filled with images of children, pale as the grave, still and bloodless.