by Justin Sloan
She tried grabbing the base and lifting it out of position, but no way was that happening, and as she pushed against it the turret started to rotate to take more shots. The Grandeur fired back, pelting the next turret over, and then Valerie’s turret let loose.
No way was she letting her turret be the one that took her ship down. With a shout and a burst of strength, she threw herself at the muzzles and slammed her forearms into them harder than she’d ever struck anything before. If it had been a skull it would have been obliterated, but as it was the metal simply bent.
It was enough, but it also meant the next shots couldn’t clear the barrel, and as she leaped out of the way the turret exploded.
Pieces of it came down nearby and she rolled, feeling a searing pain in her leg. When she looked, though, the armor was just dinged and pressing against her leg…another thing she would have to fix once she got out of this.
“Get out of here!” Arlay shouted, tearing at the insides of the last turret on this side of the deck. “I’ll catch up!”
The others ran for the edge again as the Grandeur made its pass and leaped toward it, floated upward and grabbing one of the arms of the space station as the ship came by. As it hovered the ramp opened, and Valerie helped push the others to safety within.
Arlay wasn’t with them, and a glance back showed her heading across the deck. Talrok’s army appeared behind her, robots and cyborgs buttressing his ranks.
If Valerie didn’t do something, the commander was doomed.
Her first move was to unsling her rifle and take aim, and two shots hit their marks. It would help, but not fast enough to get Arlay out of there.
“I’ll be a minute, gang,” Valerie said into her comm, then pushed off to get Arlay.
“What the hell are you doing?” Robin shot back, but Valerie didn’t have room for distractions, not now. She turned off her comm, thrusters sending her toward the commander.
Shots peppered the deck and air around Arlay, one of them going right past Valerie’s helmet, and then Valerie landed. She grabbed the commander and said, “You ready for this?”
“For wha— Ahhh!”
Valerie had thrust her into space, straight toward the open ramp of the Grandeur. The thrust has been made with vampire strength so Arlay was moving fast, and Valerie worried for a moment that she’d put too much energy into the throw.
She pushed off in pursuit, ignoring the gunshots behind her. To her relief, Arlay had managed to use her thrusters to slow and guide the approach, and a second later the commander was on the ship with Valerie following.
“Too close,” Garcia muttered, helping them through the hatch and getting their helmets off.
Arlay steadied herself as the ship shook. Flynn was likely taking them the hell out of there.
“It was too close,” Valerie agreed, “but totally necessary.”
Garcia raised an eyebrow, but didn’t argue.
“Flynn,” Valerie said as she strode over to him, “good flying. Now, where is he?”
With a gesture toward the Bandian he replied, “Sleeping again. We’re clearly not handing him over at this point, correct? I mean—”
“Hold on,” Arlay declared, glancing around at them and then fixing her eyes on the Bandian. “Back on the moon, Talrok didn’t blink twice at the sight of the Bandian, right? It was odd at the time, but that was my first clue something was off. Those two…they went way back. I thought maybe Talrok was mad, or just losing his mind even more than I’d thought…”
“Losing his mind?” Flynn asked.
“How else do you explain his weird behavior? Well, at the time, anyway.” She breathed out deeply. “Of course, now I realize it’s because he wasn’t the real Talrok after all. My people were never good at this sort of thing—spotting the subtleties—but that got me thinking. Why?”
“There’re a whole lot of whys going around my head right now,” Valerie admitted. “Which one are you referring to?”
“Why demand the Bandian?” Robin cut in, eyes narrowed with interest. “If he was behind this, if Talrok was the one who demanded the Bandian to begin with…then why not take him when he saw him on the moon?”
“Maybe it was a feint?” Garcia offered.
“Or this isn’t the Bandian he meant,” Valerie realized. She hit herself in the head. “Holy fuckturds, he’s not after our false Bandian at all. He wants the real one.”
“And he doesn’t know Kalan was at his table, sitting right beneath his nose.”
“Can someone sit beneath someone’s nose?” Flynn asked.
“Focus.” Valerie ran a hand through her sweat-soaked hair, staring at the display as if it would give her the answers. “Thing I don’t get with all this, though, is what good having the real Bandian, Kalan, on his side would do.”
“I might have an idea,” Arlay offered.
The others turned to her, waiting.
“The Bandians—the real ones, I mean, the legend—they were this race of powerful warriors, honorable and fighting for justice. Now they serve as a symbol, and I imagine anyone with a Bandian on their side would have no problem winning over the other colonies, the warlords on distant planets, maybe even the Lost Fleet.”
“You’ll have to explain that last one,” Valerie said.
“The Lost Fleet?” Arlay licked her lips and glanced around nervously. “It’s complicated, and maybe just a rumor. They were the allies of the Bandian people and their leaders swore to protect each other, to never let the other fall. When the last Bandian supposedly died the fleet sailed off, their leader unable to forgive himself. They had defeated the enemy, but in his eyes he had personally lost.”
“So that’s it?” Robin asked. “They just…sailed off?”
“No. He swore to fight evil in the darkest corners of the universe and flew off to lead the fleet against any enemy he could find, any group he saw as doing injustice.”
“Sounds like our kind of alien,” Robin replied, giving Valerie a smile.
Valerie nodded, then chewed her lip as she considered it all. “So that’s it, huh? The reason fake-Talrok is doing all this? He wants the fleet, and thinks he can somehow manipulate them to fight for him? Talk about hubris!”
“Can we just call him Talrok?” Flynn asked. “This ‘fake’ thing before his name will get old fast.”
Arlay frowned but said, “Fine, ‘Talrok,’ but not the real one. Why he is doing all this? Because he wants to find the fleet, and he believes the AI is the only way to do so. If he can control it and access its intel—its far-reaching network of cyborgs and whatnot—the fleet might be at his disposal, but he’d likely need a Bandian to win them over.”
“That’s what he came here for!” Arlay exclaimed, furious at herself. “He already had control of the AI, right? Or at least he had already hacked into it. That was why we didn’t meet any resistance here. He’s using them to tear down the troops on the moon—those he doesn’t see as loyal, no doubt. But here… Here he’s hoping to find the information, something like a digital map.”
“So we go back, save your people, and go on the attack.” Valerie rubbed her chin, considering the plan. “But what I’m thinking is, first we need to make sure he doesn’t get his hands on Kalan. Second, we need to get that map or whatever from him and find the Lost Fleet, then unite them with a real Bandian, and set up one of the greatest allies I imagine the Etheric Federation could have.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Garcia replied, and gulped. “If that doesn’t sound like an exciting mission, I don’t know what does.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Tol’s Moon: Nim 47
“How is it our group keeps getting larger but our ship stays the same size?” Bob shifted on the metal deck, trying to get comfortable.
Jilla chuckled. “Come on, guy, you haven’t lived until you’ve traveled through space sitting on the deck of the spaceship.”
Kalan glanced over at her. “Oh really? I seem to remember you always taking a prime seat on the Nim back
on SEDE.”
“I’ve lived a lot of life since then. You don’t even want to know the half of it.”
Kalan had to agree that he didn’t. Seeing Jilla again was amazing, and they’d easily fallen back into their old banter. Talking to her was as comfortable and fun as it had ever been, but he had to admit that they hadn’t broached any of the serious topics. She’d left SEDE a year before him, and yet she hadn’t asked about a single person still in prison—not even her own parents. Every time he tried to talk about something more serious, she cut him off with a joke or quickly changed the topic.
That was fine with Kalan. He understood her not wanting to dig into old wounds, but he had to wonder about her state of mind. She’d spent over a year as a slave, and who knew what had happened to her before that?
On the other hand, they’d just reconnected. Maybe she didn’t feel like spilling her guts to a guy she hadn’t seen in six years, or maybe she didn’t want to do it in an overly-stuffed ship with near-strangers.
“Everyone greatly appreciates your sacrifice, Bob,” Wearl said dryly. “If it makes you feel better, I can tell you about how Shimmers travel. Let’s just say there’s not a lot of legroom. Or arm room. Or room to turn your head.”
They were racing toward a spot on the moon of Tol. Daschle had given them the coordinates, and the nav computer was taking care of the rest.
Jilla looked up at the seemingly empty seat where Wearl was sitting. “So tell us, how did a Shimmer wind up locked in SEDE?”
It was an interesting question, one Kalan had never gotten a straight answer to. Every time he’d asked her about it over the last month she had tried to explain through Bob, but she’d never given an explanation more elaborate than that she’d killed someone. Maybe now that he could hear her it would be easier to communicate the tale.
After a long moment Wearl answered, “It started when my parent enrolled me in the SEDE Prison Guard Training Program against my will.”
“Parent?” Bob asked. “Your mom or your dad?”
Wearl let out a lilting burst of laughter. “Shimmers do not have two parents. I mean, in the biological sense we do, but we never meet these beings. At birth, we are appointed a single parent randomly selected from the available pool of unassigned adults. Mine was a male. He had not requested a child, and he was always a bit annoyed by me. He taught me to fight, though, I’ll give him that.”
Daschle glanced nervously at Wearl's seat, unable to hear her side of the conversation. He clearly hadn’t yet gotten used to traveling with an invisible companion, and Kalan couldn’t blame him. He’d been traveling with Wearl for over a month and he was still getting used to it, and now actually hearing her voice brought a whole new level of weirdness, though it certainly did make things more convenient.
Wearl continued, “I wanted to guard the Shimmer home city, not be assigned to some prison outpost. My parent had other ideas, though, and he didn’t even tell me he was enlisting me. I woke up one morning to find my bag packed and a sergeant there to collect me.”
“So I take it the training program didn’t go well?” Kalan asked.
“It went better than well. They said I was one of the most promising recruits they’d ever seen, and after a month they fast-tracked me into the strike-force program. We’d be specially trained to deal with putting down riots and taking out the most combative prisoners. I didn’t especially like the training. My instructor was so cruel he made my parent look cuddly by comparison. He injured many of my fellow students, and mentally broke many more. He even caused the death of a male a year older than me, but still, I did well.”
“Huh,” Bob mused. “So how’d you go from training to be an elite guard to being a prisoner?”
Wearl’s voice was thick with contempt when she spoke again. “Simple. I took them at their word.”
Even Daschle was getting drawn into the story now. “What happened?”
“They told me I had to complete one last task before graduation. To prove my loyalty, I had to kill someone.”
“Geez,” Kalan exclaimed. In all the time he’d spent hating and fearing the Shimmer guards on SEDE, he’d never given much thought to what their lives were like before they came to work at the prison or how they’d ended up in that job.
“They also said I’d be judged on difficulty. I could pick anyone I wanted outside my actual chain of command. I would face no legal consequences, and the more creative I got with my target, the better.”
“Who’d you choose?” Daschle asked.
“My instructor.”
Bob let out a whistle.
“He wasn’t technically in my chain of command,” Wearl pointed out, “and I figured if he wanted someone murdered so badly, that was the best way to oblige him. Needless to say, my superiors quickly decided to go back on the whole ‘no legal consequences’ thing, and I got to see SEDE a little sooner than planned.”
Silence hung in the air for a long moment, then Jilla spoke.
“That’s a pretty messed-up story. I haven’t known you long, Wearl, but that’s the most words I’ve ever heard you say at one time.”
“I know. It wore me out, too. I feel like I just ran five miles. Kalan, want to give me a massage?”
Kalan shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “Let’s focus on the task at hand.” He turned to the Skulla, eager to change the subject. “So, Daschle, anything we should know going into this?”
Daschle thought for a moment before answering, “First you have to understand that I wasn’t with Talrok long before this all went down, and mostly I wasn’t in the position I am today. I was brought aboard to run logistics for Outpost Echo. That was the furthest station out, and Talrok and Willom rarely made it there.”
“You said Willom and Talrok were equal partners?” Kalan asked.
Daschle nodded. “But even from my outsider's perspective I could tell things were getting tense between them. The first year of my employment they took turns visiting the outer stations, like mine, but by the third year they came to see me together. It was like they wanted to watch each other.”
“They no longer trusted one another,” Wearl offered.
“Yes, that was the feeling I got. There was a hint of tension between them on those trips. Don’t get me wrong, they were professionals. They weren’t going to argue in front of their employees, but you could still feel something wasn’t right between them. By the fourth year, Willom stopped coming at all. I never saw him again, and when I asked about him Talrok didn’t give any details. He said they’d parted ways and that he was the sole commander now. I didn’t press, and soon I began getting promoted.”
“So how’d you find out where Willom ended up?” Jilla asked.
Daschle smiled sheepishly. “I did a little digging. I wasn’t purposely trying to snoop, but one of my engineers asked me about the private plot of land that had been allotted to a citizen north of Outpost Bravo and I started looking into it. It seems Talrok had personally approved the allotment about two years after his split with Willom. With a little more research, it wasn’t difficult to figure out who was living there.”
Kalan considered that. A Grayhewn who has advanced in the business to the point where he oversees the operations of an entire moon suddenly decides to live like a hermit? Something didn’t add up. “What was Willom like? It sounds like you must have known him at least a little bit.”
“Good question,” Jilla said. “Are we going to end up with another Kalan on our hands?”
“No, Willom was far less serious than Kalan.” He quickly added, “No offense. All I mean was, Willom was always quick with a laugh. Every time he visited Outpost Echo he spent a lot of time talking to the workers, and he remembered little details about each of them—sometimes things even I didn’t know after years of working with them.”
“Yep, definitely not Kalan,” Jilla agreed. She swatted Kalan’s arm. “What do you say, big guy? You ready to meet another Grayhewn?”
Kalan nodded out the window toward
the area ahead of them. “I guess I’d better be, because I think this is it.”
***
Nim 47 hovered over the domed structure, lowering slowly to make it clear they wanted to be seen. Even though Kalan had never met Willom, he’d had dealings over the years with people who wanted to isolate themselves from society. In his experience, those people tended to be a little bit paranoid about the intentions of visitors.
As they descended Jilla attempted to hail Willom on the communicator, but either he didn’t receive their signal or he didn’t care to answer.
Either way, it wasn’t the warmest of welcomes.
Still, Kalan wasn’t about to turn back because of a little cold shoulder. He set the Nim down outside the airlock on the south side of the dome.
“According to the records,” Daschle said, “this place requisitioned the equipment necessary to create atmosphere inside a biodome, so once we get inside we should be able to breath. He should have air, artificially enhanced gravity—the whole deal.”
The crew donned their helmets and headed out onto the surface of the moon. Bob carried the massive rifle he’d taken from the robot on Outpost Alpha.
It was a short walk to the airlock, and Kalan used the time to prepare himself mentally. He’d spent so much time searching for another Grayhewn that he’d neglected to figure out what he’d actually say when he found one. His ultimate goal was to unite his people, to bring them together so they could defend themselves against the Pallicon cult that was supposedly hunting for Grayhewns, and to help them reclaim their place as the legendary warrior race, the Bandians.
Seemed like a tough sell to a guy who’d built a dome on the moon to live in isolation.
When they reached the airlock, Bob spoke into his helmet headset. “What do we do now, knock?”
Kalan reached out and tried the handle on the door. To his surprise, it turned easily and the airlock door opened.
“Huh,” Jilla said. “Maybe he’s not against having visitors after all.”