by Trevor Wyatt
Jeryl swallowed hard. “If I don’t report back in time, they’ll know something’s wrong. They’ll know you took me.”
“And do what?” Veld replied. “Violate the integrity of our space and take actions to start an interstellar war? How do you think the galaxy will respond to that aggression when we show them it was you who violated our space? Can your government so easily foot another war as it rebuilds from the last one?”
Veld let loose a terrifying laughter. “That would be giving us what we want on a platter of gold. Besides, how can you be so sure they would think we took you?”
Veld turned back to Jeryl and shook his head before continuing. “My, my. I thought you were deemed as some sort of a peacemaker, given that you set up that tradija of a Galactic Council. And now here you are, wanting the Armada to come crashing into Tyreesian space.”
Jeryl began to simmer with anger. Greer’s child was as much a complete tool as his father.
“You can’t win this,” Jeryl said. “I’ll find a way to stop this. I’ll always find a way.”
“No, you will not. You are stuck in this cell. All you will do is what I tell you to do.”
Jeryl gave off a laugh of his own. It sounded off, high-pitched and insincere—but it was enough to show his sarcasm.
“I won’t give you a thing,” Jeryl said. “If you think I’m afraid of you, think again. I’ve been tortured by the best of your people. You’re nothing.”
Veld nodded. “It is useless to resist, Captain Montgomery. Because I have no interest in torturing you.”
Then he smiled.
“You may have withstood a Tyreesian interrogation. But would the same go for Ashley?”
The words pouring from the Tyreesian’s lips struck a chord in Jeryl’s heart. Suddenly, his entire body was gripped with fear.
“You know, I listened to your logs,” Veld said. “And I listened to her logs. She misses you as badly as you miss her. You two have not had an intimate moment in what? Three months?”
Jeryl slowly stood to his feet, his palms balled into fists.
Veld was enjoying the show. He neither flinched nor withdrew from Jeryl, who towered over him.
“Ashley is the epitome of perfect beauty for you humans, is she not?” Veld asked. “I wonder why a man as aggressive as yourself would not copulate with her for three months running. Did you lose your drive on Perseus?”
Jeryl’s eyes widened.
“Yes, I know about Perseus,” he said. “I know you have our scientist. I know you have our device. You better start confessing your surrender otherwise your precious wife will suffer.”
Jeryl stepped back. “Go fuck yourself.”
Veld smiled.
“Oh, I prefer fucking Ashley,” he hissed, and then he went out of the room.
Jeryl was about to chase after Veld when he returned with Ashley. Three guards entered the cell and came directly for Jeryl; he tried to fight them off, but they pinned him down to the chair and restrained his hands and legs. Then, they retreated separately into the corners of the room and watched as Veld pinned Ashley to the bare ground.
She had her arms above her head and her legs were spread apart; manacles were used to pin her hands and legs to the ground. Ashley struggled against her bonds, sobbing gently as her tears went dripping down her eyes. She was wearing her jumpsuit pants, but her shirt had been stripped off, revealing a white vest that clung to her body.
Suddenly, she let out a deafening scream and spat on Veld’s face.
Veld was taken aback. He wiped the spit off his face and glared at Ashley.
Then, he smiled and knelt beside her and brought out all his torture devices one by one, laying them just by her head. Unable to do anything but watch him, her chest began to heave as her breathing went out of control.
Jeryl was overwhelmed with terror. He struggled against his bonds, but they were reinforced with laser polymer technology. There was no way he’d free himself.
“VELD!” Jeryl yelled just as Veld picked up a feet-long blade with a serrated edge.
He looked up at Jeryl as though the man had disturbed him from something important.
“Don’t do this,” Jeryl said, his voice pleading.
“I am not doing anything, Jeryl,” Veld said. “Just make this broadcast and she will not have to go through this.”
Jeryl shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Then you leave me with no choice.”
At that moment, Ashley turned and looked at him. For the first time since she was dragged into the cell, their eyes connected. Her eyes were filled with tears and her lips were tightened, but they quivered with a sob. Her face was clammy and her chest heaved erratically.
At that moment, Veld plunged the knife into her side and twisted it.
Ashley’s eyes widened and her mouth opened up. The pain was too much and her scream—or lack of it—reflected how she felt.
She held Jeryl’s gaze for a few more seconds before the pain knocked her unconscious.
Chapter 13
Coming out of seemingly nowhere, Sonali vessel impacted with the unnamed Tyreesian station. To an observer, the ship was not there…and then it was. There were no sounds in space, but an observer would nonetheless have covered their ears for the carnage they saw as the ship breached a hole in one of the four quadrants of the ring station. The superstructure absorbed the momentum of the vessel without even changing orbit. The front portion of the ship went in a few yards, and even though there was little space in the breach, it was enough for Adachi to maneuver the pod inside.
The alarms went off as that happened.
As beads of sweat formed on Adachi’s forehead, she managed to glide the pod into a small chamber inside the Tyreesian space station. The chamber looked like a series of rooms that had been converted into one big room—there were beds in each former section and the previous walls had been melted away, though at the edges you could still see some remaining pieces of the partitions.
The bulkhead from the Sonali ship was filling a large part of the chamber, and the pod landed close to one of the corners, where the three of them stepped out into. Adachi led, Sef followed, and Mahesh brought up the rear.
Against Adachi’s better judgment, Mahesh had given Sef a rifle from the pod.
The Sonali are our friends, Mahesh thought, But I guess Adachi is still adamant that some Sonali still hate Terrans for what we did to them during the war.
Mahesh decided that it didn’t matter. They were in a Tyreesian space station, and they needed all the hands and help they could get. Sef had to be armed.
The chamber was lit up so they didn’t need to use the lights from their suits; it was packed with crates and boxes—apparently the Tyreesians had converted it into a makeshift storage compartment. That had Mahesh confused. A space station as big as this should have a cargo bay. Why did they have to create one?
“It seems new,” Sef said. He was off to the corner, staring at the wall where the partition should have been.
“What?” asked Mahesh.
“They removed these portions recently,” Sef said, waving his hand at the walls around them.
At that moment, the main entrance slid open and five guards burst into the room. Sef’s gun came up without a moment’s hesitation. He fired off three rounds while Adachi fired off four. Three of the guards fell to the ground while two shot back at them.
Mahesh dived into the midst of a stack of crates and hid himself, his heart pounding. He could feel the rush of blood through his ears. He tried to concentrate and hold his gun, but the repetitive automated firing in the closed space kept him spaced out.
Soon, the firefight was over. His hands still shook terribly.
A figure came to stand over him. Mahesh looked up and saw Adachi with a concerned expression on her face.
“Are you okay, sir?” she asked, looking up and down at him.
Mahesh got up to his feet. He raised his palms up with his rifle resting gently on them. The rif
le vibrated as his palms trembled.
“I’m not a soldier, Adachi,” he confessed. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to help.”
Adachi patted him on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Doc. You’ll do fine. This space station may be big, but it has closed spaces. If we play our part well, we can get to the crew before any major engagement. If not, we have the element of surprise on our part. We can easily take them down.”
She motioned towards Sef, who knelt over the guards, picking up useful things like their weapons, keycards, and communicators.
“And he’s a decent shot, too,” Adachi said. “We’ll do well. Okay?”
Mahesh looked back at Adachi and, for the first time from the whole time he had known the chief tactical officer of the Seeker, he realized that she had deep blue eyes. He also noticed how tender and soft her facial features were. Even more impressive was her blonde hair and kickass fighting style. Mahesh began to feel drawn to her.
“Thanks,” he said, trying hard not to blush.
“No problem, sir,” Adachi replied. “Come on, we have to get into the ventilation shaft and find the crew.”
“I think I may have found them,” Sef said. He came over to them with a handheld device.
“I do not know exactly how it works,” he said, “but it is some sort of device that is hooked up to the station’s computer. It shows where everyone is in real time. Every Tyreesian guard has it.”
Peering over Sef’s shoulder, Mahesh saw a dense concentration of people in a corner of the screen. He pointed at it, his finger hovering over the device. “Where’s that?”
Sef tapped a few buttons on the screen and brought up that particular area.
“It is the ship’s cargo hold,” he replied. “Luckily, it is not too far from here.”
Mahesh looked around them and then something made sense to him. The Tyreesians didn’t really have a facility on this space station to keep an entire ship’s crew. So, they turned their cargo hold into one. And then, they moved what little cargo they had into the quarters, where they merged five rooms together.
“We can’t be seen moving around the cargo hold,” Adachi said. “We need to take the ventilation shaft. Where’s the nearest one that could lead us to the cargo hold?”
Sef tapped a few buttons. He traced a ventilation shaft from the cargo hold right to the fourth room in their line of five rooms. He led them back into the way they had come. They found the shaft at the ceiling of the room, where the Sonali ship had lodged its head in.
Adachi climbed up at that portion of the ship in the room and was able to get to its top. There wasn’t a lot of headroom for her to get in.
“Is it accessible?” Mahesh asked her, even though he could see her work well from where he stood.
“Barely,” she replied between labored breaths.
She yanked open the panel, revealing a hole in the ceiling that they could slither into. She made her way back down.
“We’re good to go,” she said, “but not in these suits.”
“Computer, is this air breathable?” Mahesh asked the pod’s computer. He was worried about the breach they had made, but emergency metallic partitions were already pressing down on the Sonali ship, which had now taken an irregular form, sealing off the room they were in and stabilizing the atmosphere.
“Positive,” the computer replied.
“Then let’s strip,” Mahesh said to Adachi.
Surprisingly, she blushed at that.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” Mahesh said with an apologetic tone. Adachi only smiled and walked to one corner to get out of her suit.
Mahesh stripped to his immaculate white medical jumpsuit. He grabbed his rifle back. It was odd—he never thought the white jumpsuit the medical corps in the Armada wore could go with assault rifles. There was irony on that, but these were desperate times. He was sure that after today, if he made it out alive, he would never speak to anyone about his actions.
Adachi came to stand beside him, her black jumpsuit gleaming in the low lighting. He searched her face only to find an impassive expression. She was back to being all professional. Maybe that was the reason he hadn’t ever noticed her before.
“Sef, keep your breather on,” Mahesh said. “Sonali air and Earth air don’t mix. Apparently, the Tyreesians can breathe oxygen and this station is filled with it. Lead the way.”
Sef climbed into the shaft and Mahesh followed. Adachi brought up the rear.
Sef led them through a series of turns until they came to their exit point, which wasn’t in a ceiling but in a wall.
“Can you scan the room for guards?” asked Adachi.
“Let me try,” Sef said. “I think I can.”
Sef scanned the room.
“There is one guard in the cargo bay,” Sef said after a while. “But he is marked…red. It is unlike the other green dots.”
“Maybe he’s down,” Mahesh said. “It would mean that…”
“The crew is planning to break out,” Adachi continued. “Keep moving, Sef.”
Sef punched the panel, opening it. Then he crawled out, followed by Mahesh and then Adachi. They got out of the ventilation shaft to see a few hundreds of angry faces looking at them. At the head were about six officers, all armed with whips, blades, a rifle, and a pistol.
It took seconds for everyone to work through their tension and realize that the ones who had just stepped into the cargo hold were the away team.
“Doctor Mahesh?” Tira Avae said, lowering her Tyreesian weapon. “Commander Adachi? How did you—” continued the second science officer until they drawled off.
“It’s a long story, but we managed to make it here thanks to Sef’s plan. We used the Sonali vessel’s LPS to get here.”
“Sef?” asked Tira, looking at the Sonali.
“He’s the only survivor from the Sonali vessel,” Mahesh said, leading his away team into their midst. “It was disabled by what we think is an EMP ray used by the Tyreesians – some new weapon that they have. We were able to maintain some power and used his ship to breach the station.”
“So that’s why the alarms went off? When you breached into the station?” Ensign Adewale asked.
“Yes, exactly,” Adachi replied.
After some handshakes and pats on the back, Mahesh spun on his heels to face the officers. “We don’t have a lot of time. We need to find Jeryl and the other crew members. Any ideas?”
Tira Avae was the one who spoke up—she was seemingly the crew’s designated leader.
“We don’t know, sir,” she said. She motioned to the guard who was lying unconscious on the floor. “We took him out a minute or two ago,” she said. “We’ve armed ourselves. We are ready to burst out of here, before they open the airlocks and send all of us out to our deaths.”
“Shit,” Adachi uttered.
“Yeah, no kidding,” Mahesh said, glancing through the sea of heads at the huge bay doors behind.
“We need to find the captain and the ship, and get out of here,” Tira said.
“We need to secure this quadrant first,” Mahesh replied. “We need to take all the guards down. We need to make sure that, when we get off the space station, we have enough time to make it back to Terran Union space.”
Tira nodded. “What do you propose, sir?”
“Proceed with your plans,” Mahesh said. “We’ll go to the other end of the quadrant and try to get as many weapons as we can. We’ll also try to find a safe path for you guys to the Seeker. We’ll meet you halfway?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Tira said. “We’ll draw them away from you so you’ll just attack from their flank.”
“Look who’s been studying battle strategy in their spare time,” Adachi told Tira with a kind smile.
Tira blushed terribly.
“Alright,” Mahesh said. “Let’s do this.”
“Where to?” Sef asked.
“Take us to the main entrance of this quadrant,” Mahesh said.
With
a nod, Sef led them back into the ventilation shaft.
Mahesh followed. It was time to hunt these four foot tall Tyreesian bastards. Show them the savagery of humanity.
Chapter 14
Tira watched Adachi disappear through the open ventilation shaft panel. Adewale, who followed them there, locked the panel behind her and returned to the crew. Tira was extremely happy to see that the away team survived the Sonali vessel. Leaving them back there was a bad idea—at least that was what she thought. But then again, she wanted to trust the decisions of her captain. More often than not, Jeryl was the kind of man who knew what he was doing.
Tira looked around one last time as the crew gathered together. They were mostly unarmed. Only Tira and five other officers had weapons. Tira held a pistol, someone else held a rifle, and then there were two blades and one whip. That was it. They were going up against Tyreesians with guns and rifles.
Tira knew they wouldn’t stand a chance if they went up against the Tyreesians directly. That was why they had to strategize. They had to figure out a way to escape this ship. They suspected that the Captain, the Commander, and the rest of the crew were all in this quadrant.
Tira remembered how the surviving Sonali, Sef, had been carrying some sort of a handheld device that told him where the others were. They could have given Jeryl’s present location to her group before they left; now, though, there was nothing she could do about it.
Tira sighed, gripping her gun tightly. All around her, she could smell and feel the heightened sense of dread. She could smell her crewmates ooze anxiety out of their pores.
It was palpable. This wasn’t some simulation. This wasn’t even a fair fight.
People were going to die. They were actually going to die. Just like Vu Le, the science officer.
Tira hadn’t brought it up, but neither had the away team. She wasn’t sure it was conspicuous to the rest of the crew how three officers went to the Sonali vessel and only two returned with a Sonali. Vu died out there, Tira was sure of that.