Seeing Stars
Page 34
“Don’t panic,” she repeatedly told the struggling woman. “Stop struggling and conserve your air.”
It took some time for the younger woman to calm down, and even longer for her to start to make sense.
“Katie, are we going to die?”
“The harness has a locator chip in it. If someone passes within range they’ll spot us as long as I keep a hold of you and we do not get separated.”
The problem was that space was so big, and hangar thirteen was one of the more remote facilities, there was a distinct possibility that they would be missed and not located until they had run out of breathable air.
“How do you know stuff like that Kate?” Minou asked her. “Boss jokes that you must be some type of GEF agent.”
“No, no chance of that,” said Kate. “Boss should know better than to say something as stupid as that.”
The pair of them drifted for a while, slowly getting colder and colder as the vac suits had less and less heat to conserve. Minou’s teeth started chattering, but she still held on tightly to Kate’s arm.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be found,” Minou assured her.
“We will if someone really wants to find us,” Kate replied hesitantly, her first doubts about whether they would be picked up finally starting to set in after hours of reassuring her companion.
“Freddie will find me.” Minou shivered fiercely. “Freddie would move stars to find me.”
Freddie was Minou’s fiancé. Almost as broad as he was tall, a buff, handsome man of few words, but he was a man who obviously worshipped the ground her companion walked on.
“You are very lucky, Minou,” Kate told her, “to know he would be so determined to get you back.”
“Have you ever been in love, Kate?”
Kate paused, shrugged then nodded slowly.
“Didn’t work out?” Minou asked, her breath starting to frost the helmet so that Kate could scarcely see her face. “It was a secret?”
“No,” Kate said, too anxious about Minou not to answer. “Family just didn’t like me.”
Neither of them, she added silently.
They then both fell silent, and as her helmet iced up too, Kate became aware of drifting in and out of consciousness as her breathing became more laboured.
No regrets. It was a liberating last thought. I am not about to regret one thing that has happened, Kate decided hazily as she lingered on the thin line between consciousness and passing out.
Freddie did not let them down. It was a redirected freighter that found them drifting in space. Kate was dimly aware of the huge metal beast lumbering up beside them, and of them being hauled on board.
They were safe at last.
On their return to Port Luz there was something of a welcome committee.
Fully recovered from her ordeal, Minou threw herself into the arms of a waiting Freddie with a squeal of delight. Kate felt somewhat overwhelmed by the huge number of people trying to push close.
“Katie saved my life,” Minou shouted above the din. Katie found herself propelled forward. People were slapping her back. “I would have died without Katie Star. She was amazing—she dived out of the hangar door after me and told me not to panic.”
Kate rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I simply caught you as you sailed past,” she pointed out.
Without warning, a light flashed in her face, and she was momentarily blinded. She could not see a thing, it was so bright.
“So, how does it feel to be a hero, Katie?” The distinctive voice of a vidnews reporter asked her.
Kate was bruised and battered, but returned to work anyway. She had no wish to sit in her cabin and stare at the walls. The devoted Freddie was not about to let Minou from his sight, so Kate had been set to working with the rest of the team instead of in a pair. It was the same old, same old. Pushing and pulling priority cargoes from hangar to hangar.
Maybe now was the time to ask about transferring to freight flights, to tell people of her flight qualifications, Kate mused. Make the most of her brief celebrity on Port Luz to progress.
The vidscreens flickered on—blue dog recovered by woman on Siega 4—Intergalactic argument reignites—Rim Lord Danyeo accedes to head of Danyeo Collective after brief power struggle—Daring rescue on Port Luz…
Oh. My. God.
Filled with dread, Kate turned her gaze upwards to the massive vidscreen above her head. She watched as the screen was dominated by the dishevelled but still beautiful Minou saying, “Katie saved my life. She is a hero.”
Minou then pulled forward a pale, startled, thin-faced character she called Katie Star.
The white-faced ghost with straggly hair didn’t look much like her, Kate thought as she stared at her image, only just recognising herself as the woman next to Minou.
I look awful, she thought.
Kate became aware of her colleagues stopping behind her and one by one starting to look at the vidscreen as well.
“You are on the news, Katie,” one said. “Would you look at that.”
“Well I never,” said another.
“Get on with your work, you lot,” Boss called out.
“Katie’s on the vidscreen, Boss,” they told him.
Boss looked up at the screen and Kate’s giant image as she avoided answering the interviewer’s questions.
“You look knackered,” he said as he looked at her image.
“I do look terrible,” Kate said shortly, tugging her gloves back on and going back to pulling out crates.
It was better that way. No one would recognise her.
Chapter Fifteen
Port Luz was a warehouse hub on the boundary of the outer Rim. It was an anonymous place, run by a commercial organisation rather than a military one. Anyone could dock there if they had the money to pay.
It was particularly expensive to dock large military vessels, mainly due to the associated administrative work that went with their presence.
But they still appeared over the next twenty-four standard hours.
Battle cruiser class ships entered Port Luz space at what seemed to be almost set intervals. Elegant, sleek and deadly, they were docking right the way across the hub. It was not uncommon to see one or two on the odd occasion. What was uncommon was to see in number what amounted to a private fleet of such deadly craft in one place.
Minou was sitting with Kate in one of the more respectable bars on Luz, looking at the spectacle from one of the gallery windows.
“What do you think, Katie?” Minou asked her.
“I don’t recognise them,” Kate replied honestly. “Not Rim as far as I know, definitely not GEF. But there are a lot of them.”
“Freddie thinks it is an invasion force of some type.”
“That is ridiculous. Who are they going to invade? Luz is a long way from anywhere, and the administration would hardly let them restock if they were a threat to supply relations with either the GEF or the Rim authorities.
“No. I think it’s a show of strength for some reason. Either they are on their way to impress someone or coming back from doing so.”
Kate’s commlink crackled into life.
“Have you finished your break, Star?” Boss’s words were to the point. “Being late back is a piss poor way of showing me your leadership potential.”
The ex-GEF commander, hotly tipped at one time to become the youngest sector leader ever in fleet history, managed to bite back the overwhelming urge to laugh.
She had changed.
“We’re on our way.” Kate followed Minou to her feet. The pilot in Kate could not resist one last long look at the sleek battleships.
They were beautiful. Deadly craft, but at the same time magnificent. Clear of distinguishing colours, the form, elegance, grace and symmetry of the craft’s lines were all the more apparent to the experienced eye.
Kate sighed, turned on her heel and returned to pushing cargo.
Working to negotiate a particularly awkward pallet down the far aisle of hang
ar thirteen, Kate became aware of an uneasy feeling. She shook it off, as she had been feeling uncomfortable in this particular hangar ever since the accident. She found that she simply did not trust the door engineering anymore.
It was a quite reasonable reaction, she told herself.
Then she realised that the overhead vidscreen had been switched off without her even noticing it. During her time on Port Luz the vidscreens had not been off once, not even for maintenance. The silence was deafening, so used was she to the constant background noise of the thing.
Her commlink suddenly buzzed to life, its crackling sound startlingly loud.
“Kate.” Boss’s voice sounded strained. “Can you come to the front of the bay?” There followed an odd pause until he said, “Please?”
Boss never said please. Kate had for some time believed he simply did not have it in his vocabulary. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled upright as she started to move warily to the location he had specified.
Kate paced down the central aisle of the hangar. The central was a long, straight approach that bisected the massive hangar in two and could take as long as five to ten minutes to travel on foot.
Ahead under the bright spotlight that illuminated the exit to hangar thirteen she could clearly see a group of some twenty people standing there watching her approach.
Kate kept walking, watching the group ahead as she stowed her work gloves in the back pockets of her overall and hung her cable cutters within easy reach on her utility belt in case things took a turn for the worse. She made a note to put an extra hole in her belt as it was hanging too low to pull the cable cutters out to use as a weapon if need be. As she drew closer, she started to think she was finally seeing things.
Slowing, she asked, “Boss, did you want to see me?”
After all that had happened, it was hardly surprising if a few hallucinations had started to creep into her waking hours. And it would appear that today was the day.
The group surrounding Boss included a formidable contingent of Rim paratroopers clad in the distinctive black and grey of the Danyeo collective.
At the head of the group were Dom and Ren, armed to the teeth in full combat dress, their faces so stern that Kate almost did not recognise them.
Kate felt faint as she took in the vision before her. It was very realistic.
“Are you expecting trouble?” she asked, blinking rapidly in an effort to allow reality to reassert itself.
Her disbelief at the meeting seemed mirrored in the face of the two men dressed as if ready for a war.
In her hallucination, Dom stepped forward and swept her into his arms, burying his face in her neck as he did so. He held her there, quite still, for several minutes as if he was attempting to master his reaction to her appearance before he moved.
Her knees seemed to lose some of their bounce and she sagged as she continued to step forward, stumbling slightly into Dom as if she had not expected to encounter anything solid at all.
He’s really here, Kate suddenly realised, numb. He’s real.
“Kate.” He held her so tight she could scarcely move. When Ren joined to embrace the pair of them, she was in danger of being spectacularly crushed by some serious body armour.
“Katie,” Ren whispered into her hair.
“It’s you,” Kate gasped. “It’s really you!”
She didn’t care if they crushed her—at least she’d die happy.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Minou had just returned with a fresh set of pallets. “Let Katie go.”
“Kate?” Dom’s voice was softer than she remembered. “Do you want us to let you go?”
“Say now, Katie,” agreed Ren, but they both released her from their close embrace immediately, not even retaining their hold on her arms. Ren stepped behind her to stand at Dom’s shoulder as they both faced the suspicious crowd of warehouse personnel with their platoon of Rim Troopers at their backs.
“Are you okay, Katie?” Ren whispered. His face was as shadowed and stern as she had ever seen it. He seemed unable to not reach out and touch her hand, then her arm as if he found it hard to believe she was real. Gone was the happy-go-lucky individual she was so used to. “We thought they’d had you killed.”
“Killed dead?”
“The GEF implied as much, Katie.” Ren raised a hand to his face and rubbed it hard. “I cannot believe that I am standing here talking to you!” With a sudden whoop he grabbed her and spun her round and round until she was laughing, shouting she was going to be sick.
When Ren returned her to her feet the assembled warehouse crews had visibly relaxed. Kate felt touched at the crew’s protective stance.
“Then how did you find me?” Kate asked them.
“The GEF and the ISS were posturing. In truth they were not sure where you were.”
“They changed their story, just like that?”
“It was in their interests to.” Ren grinned. “We informed them that if it was indeed the case, that they had somehow condoned the assassination of the betrothed of the two first leaders of the Rim. Then that’s war, as it’s a contravention of…”
“Assassination of the betrothed?” Kate asked. Surely she must have misheard the word, betrothed. Then her face must have indicated she also registered war.
“It was a serious threat. But don’t worry. They saw the error of their ways and have been really helpful in helping to locate you.”
“You did a bloody excellent job of covering your tracks,” Dom growled. “Now we are here it seems obvious that this is one of the first places we should have looked. We looked everywhere else with no luck. Until the vidcast.” Dom shook his head. “A vidcast. And it had to be that vidcast, some daring life or death rescue on Port Luz. Once we had recovered from the shock of almost losing you twice…” Dom seemed to be warming to his theme until he was interrupted by a cough from Ren.
“Ah, Dom, we still need to ask.” Ren shook his head at Dom and held up Kate’s hand in his.
“Hell.” Dom took her other hand. “Well, Kate? Are you prepared to accept our offer?”
Kate could only stare at them open mouthed.
“Omigod!” Minou started to laugh. “Omigod, Kate…is this your secret?”
“A betrothal?” she asked, her jaw feeling worryingly loose. “To both of you?”
“Marriage. That’s how it works on the Rim,” Ren told her gently. “You know, when people love each other and can’t seem to live without them.”
“Will it not put you both in danger?” she asked them. “Because I am not about to run the risk of losing either of you to a civil war or an assassin’s knife because you chose me.”
“While we have been looking for you, Kate, Ren and myself have worked hard to consolidate our positions within the Rim political arena. If you agree to join with us, you will not regret it,” Dom told her, a wry twist to his mouth…
The battleships currently docked at Luz were theirs, she suddenly realised.
“You make it sound like a mutually beneficial alliance,” Kate observed drily, starting to feel reluctantly overwhelmed.
“It is,” Dom told her. “And its bedrock is the fact we can’t seem to live without you.”
“Do you accept then, Kate?” Ren asked her.
Kate looked from one to the other. Could she do this?
She desperately wanted to. She’d never wanted anything as much as this.
“Oh yes. Okay then, let’s do it,” Kate capitulated, aware of suffocating warmth in the region of her heart. “Just don’t make me regret this, you two. I would very much like to be the betrothed of the first leaders of the Rim, or was it the two first leaders of the Rim?” She took a breath, “My, what a mouthful.”
“We have that reputation,” advised Dom.
About the Author
I’m British and live by the sea just outside Brighton in West Sussex. I’ve been lucky enough to have a huge range of occupations ranging from being a top European IT consultant through to mother of
three. My jobs in the past have invariably involved a lot of travel and thinking up long involved plots, along with feisty heroines and controlling heroes, has always been a favourite way of mine to make time pass when I have been sitting at the wheel of a car or on a train.
I’ve a soft spot for happy endings, with characters who get what they deserve and with lots of sauciness on the way.
Hopefully you’ll enjoy the same things I do.
Email: SophieAngmering@gmail.com
Sophie loves to hear from readers. You can find her contact information, website and author biography at http://www.total-e-bound.com.
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