by Chris Reher
Her eyes shifted to Tychon. "I'm sorry," she said, offering her apology to everyone and no one. "I have no choice." She dropped her gun. "Take the Eagle. It'll outrun Carras. Go!"
"Why are you doing this?" Kiran whispered.
"I am doing this for him!"
Something moved across Kiran’s face and shifted into the sum of the elements that made up the Tughan Wai now. It was ancient and in motion and still incomplete, but it was no longer a boy. "Maybe that is what makes you human, Human."
He looked at the man who had given him life and had nearly taken it away. Greah now hovered beside Tychon, struck speechless in wide-eyed bewilderment. "Would you have done the same for her, Father?" Kira said. "She can keep teaching you if you let her."
"Kira..." Tychon rasped.
Kiran cocked his head, listening for something that was noiselessly approaching. He moved toward the Eagle. "I'm still here, somewhere. Please know that I loved you and that I wanted to be like you. I won't get that chance now, but for a little while it was a good dream." He looked up at Nova. "Look after Tychon. You are worthy of each other, I think. He needs you."
"None of this is your fault, Kiran," she said. "We won't blame you, ever."
He took her hand. "Don't let them hunt me, for their sake. Tell them I've left Trans-Targon. And tell them I shot Dadda." For a moment, Kiran mischievous grin reappeared. "That way you'll dodge the court martial."
"Where will you go?"
"Shaddallam, at the moment. Your Colonel's planes are losing their fight. There are still people dying because of me. It's got to stop."
She touched his cheek. "You are not a monster."
"Not all of us are evil," he said, an echo of Pe Khoja. "I won't be back, don't worry. I need time to find out who I am, perhaps work on my survival instinct. You won't have a second chance to point a gun at me." He stood on his toes to kiss her, then paused for a brief moment. A smile lit his tired face. She gasped when he raised his small hands and pressed them to her belly. For an instant, she felt every cell in her body react to his touch. "You can give him a daughter, if you wish," he whispered.
Nova watched him climb into the Eagle and then hurried to where Tychon was struggling to get up. Greah did his best to help when they hauled him up and maneuvered him into the landing bay's control room. They waited silently for the bay to depressurize.
From inside Eagle Five, Kiran relinquished his mental control of the battleship's functions and allowed her to drift. Watching through the control room's window, they saw the Eagle lift off and out of Erato, leaving the bay doors open. It moved only a short distance away before it vanished as if it had taken only a second for Kira to open a keyhole and slip into the reach.
"Woah!" Greah shouted. "What was that?"
"What have I done?" Nova said tonelessly.
Tychon leaned heavily on the edge of a control panel, suspecting that a few days in a clinic lay in his future. "No regrets now," he said. "You promised him as much."
"You agree with what I did?"
He thought a moment. "No," he said. He pulled her close to himself and she moved into his embrace, hiding her face in the warm curve of his neck, wishing to stay there for a very long time. He held her tightly. "But I am grateful that you did it."
"He may never forgive me for letting him go," she said. "But I have to believe that he won't make me regret this." She reached up to trace the lines etched into the handsome face where he should not have had any for years. A sickle-shaped scar below his eye would always remind him of this day. "You've lost so much, Ty."
He kissed her softly. "But not everything. And he's alive because of you." He smiled but she saw the pain behind the Delphian facade and the grief that he would not examine until there was time and space for these things.
"Look, look, look!" Greah shouted. Unable to stand still in his excitement, he was bobbing up and down in front of the observation window. "Look at this!"
Teti had come into panoramic view outside the bay door, the hundreds of lights from her windows shining in the cold dark like a distant city. The mammoth ship slowed to approach the Erato with caution. The maw of her launch issued a few fighter planes.
They became aware of voices bursting through the open communicator, wanting to know. Tychon peered at the unfamiliar controls around them and then poked experimentally at a likely one. Several of the overhead screens came to life, among them a view of Teti's crowded control room. Greah waved eagerly.
Carras' face loomed over them. "What is going on over there? Where is… where is the boy?"
Although Nova tensed when she saw the Colonel appear on the screen, Tychon did not let her pull out of his embrace. "At ease, soldier," he said mildly.
She turned her head to look at Greah. The Shaddallama answered her unspoken question by nodding. She looked into the camera. "I'm sorry, sir. He is gone. We do have Tharron and Pe Khoja. They're dead, sir.”
Carras’ eyes narrowed even as some of the people on his bridge broke into a cheer. He glanced at nearby officers before he replied. “Stay where you are. I’m coming over there.” He shut the com link down.
Greah stood on a chair for a better view of Teti. “So what are you gonna tell him?”
“Depends on what he asks us,” Tychon said.
They watched silently from the control room while a runabout entered Erato’s landing area and settled to the floor. Nova found the controls for the massive door and the mechanism to re-pressurize the bay. Red lights overhead dimmed and the shuttle’s doors opened. Tychon leaned heavily on Nova when they left the control room to meet Colonel Carras.
Two others had arrived with the Colonel, one of them in plain clothes. He immediately entered the disabled rebel ship while the officer went into the control room, leaving Carras alone with his pilots and the Shaddallama.
The Colonel looked around the hall, then beyond the transparent walls into the adjoining space. “All dead?”
“I assume so, sir,” Tychon said.
Carras regarded them for a long, silent moment. Tychon’s arm was around Nova’s shoulder and both looked drained, disheveled and strangely reserved. His eyes travelled down to the diminutive Shaddallama who returned his gaze with a broad smile. “The Tughan escaped?”
“Yessir,” Nova said. “With the Eagle. We saw him open a keyhole just outside. At least I think that’s what it was.”
“There are no breaches anywhere near here.”
“None that we can detect, sir. He could be anywhere now."
Carras gazed at the corpses littering the passage around the launch. "I'm sorry about your son, Tychon," he said finally.
Tychon took a deep and not quite steady breath. "He's alive, Tal. Somewhere."
“Did he… harm you?” Carras asked. "You look terrible."
“No, sir. I was shot. It’s not serious.”
The Colonel nodded slowly. “We have a Shantir aboard Teti, if you prefer that to our medics.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“He will not want to discuss the Tughan with you. No one on Delphi does. Ever.”
“Understood, sir.”
The engineer returned from the control room to join them by the shuttle. "No life signs aboard, sir," she said.
Carras stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the bay. He pursed his lips and pondered for a while. “Clearly, Tharron was experimenting with some sort of radiation, maybe even something similar to our Challenger. No doubt he then got in his own way. He was not a cautious man.”
“No doubt, sir,” Nova said.
“You three are very fortunate to have arrived here after the initial blast. Too bad that you were overwhelmed by one of the surviving rebels and lost the Eagle during his escape.”
“Indeed, an expensive loss.”
Carras gestured at the overhead surveillance system. "That kind of radiation can wipe out entire recording systems. Isn't that so, Captain Taha?"
"That is correct, sir. I will take a look." She walked back throu
gh the control room and into the hallway beyond.
The Colonel searched their faces. “Is there anything else that we need to discuss before we bring in a crew?”
“Tamotsu Comori is also in Shad Areen,” Nova said, her eyes still following the engineer, once again amazed by the efficiency in which the Union's military dealt with inconveniences. “Along with several other high-ranking rebels. The native population will cooperate if we extract and remove them.” She gestured at Greah. “I’d like to request compensation for this man and his people. They sustained some losses.”
Tychon winked at Nova. “And I’d like to request a leave of absence, sir. To recuperate. From being shot. It’s very painful.”
"I got shot, too," Nova protested.
If it had been in the Colonel’s nature to roll his eyes heavenward, he would have done so now. “You three get into that shuttle before you fall down. I recommend isolation until we determine the nature of this… radiation. And until everything has been... sanitized. A month at most. Am I clear?”
“May we be isolated on Delphi, sir?” Nova inquired blithely.
"Delphi! The base?"
"No," Tychon said. He pressed his lips to Nova's cheek before turning them both toward the shuttle. "Home."
-END-
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Dear Reader:
I hope you enjoyed this story. If you did, perhaps you will return to the place where you downloaded it and leave a short review so that others can also find it, too. If you did not, then I thank you for making it all the way to the end!
There will be a prequel to this story about the earlier adventures of Nova Whiteside, entitled The Catalyst, available in January 2013. It has pirates!
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Also available by Chris Reher:
The Gods of Chenoweth, available at Amazon, Kobo, Sony, B&N and Apple
In the distant future and on a distant planet, two brothers are sent to a nearby moon to rescue a woman whose mental abilities, still untrained and untried, must stand in the way of an advancing enemy. There they are hunted as demons, fall in with pirates, and are ensnared in a violent passion that threatens to destroy everything it touches.
As they learn the truths about events that brought them to this place, the brothers must decide between the future of one world and the destruction of another.
Two women hold the keys - one can save their planet, the other can save their lives.
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