by T. J. Quinn
In addition to the guard's barracks we learned that each unit of the slave barracks had guards in each of four corners of them sleeping in small rooms. The slaves slept in rows of bunks three high with men on one side of the room and women on the other. We determined there twice as many men as women.
After the guard was secured, one of my people switched on the overhead lights and were rewarded with a chorus of moans and groans. I entered at that point, “I am Commander General Maktu of Farseek. We are here to liberate you. How many of you are from Farseek?” I said through the speaker in my helmet. Tens of them sat up in their bunks and waved their hands in the air. Most of them were ours. “We will take those of you not from Farseek with us as well. Do any of you wish to remain here?”
No one answered that question. I didn’t expect it.
“All of you, get up, get dressed and gather any possessions you wish to take. We have shuttle arriving soon to take you to our ships you have about ten minutes to prepare.” As they got out of their beds and gathered a few meager possessions, my helmet com beeped.
“We’ve got trouble Commander,” Gerj Victu related in a calm even tone. “A battle cruiser just came around from the back side of the sun shooting at us and a troop carrier is headed ground side. There could be anywhere from twenty to a hundred hostiles aboard. We’ve deflected their torpedoes and are returning fire… and we have a direct hit! Eight hit them too, but they sent a second shuttle heading for the planet.”
“Received, Corporal, they’ve got troops ground side here. They are armed but no armor. We’re rousting out the recues. Send the shuttles in and have them set down by the main gate.”
“Affirmative Commander…. Commander, Eight took out one of the hostile carriers, only one is heading your way now. It’s out of our range and we can’t get to it before it lands.”
“Excellent, received. Thank you, corporal. Maktu out,” I replied. “Maktu to Shuttle Alpha…”
“Alpha here, sir…”
“Did you get that from Victu?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. Do you want me to take ‘em out?
“Affirmative, Alpha.” I returned. I went to the entrance of the barracks and saw the lights of the incoming enemy shuttle. There was a weapons flash from Shuttle Alpha then the whine of the damaged engines as it dropped like a rock. I sent two soldiers to clean up in case there were any survivors.
I was on my way back into the barracks when I took a hit in the lower right back with an armor piercing shell that came out of nowhere. Fuck! I stumbled into the barracks before I went down, thinking, Harper was going to kill me if this didn’t. Obviously, one of the hostiles slipped my people.
The readout in my suit indicated that only the tip had pierced my flesh, but it still hurt like hell. Soon as my armor was pierced, nanites mobilized to repair the breech in my armor and my flesh and clean up the blood spill inside my suit.
“Commander, you okay?” questioned Avantu as he came over and offered me a hand up.
“I’ll live,” I gritted, and took his offered hand and used the suit to lever myself up.
“I got him, Commander,” cried Ahlia Rejtu. “Are you still functional?”
“Still functional,” I muttered waiting for the pain killer to kick in. Moments later we were herding the captives into two awaiting transport carriers. Eight’s first shuttle picked up less than forty and the other sixty from the mines. We got eighty and polled them to see if any were missing.
While that was in progress Victu commed that the Empire ship was crippled but they still had life support. Degatu had the AI launch torpedoes to finish them. If I felt a hint of guilt at the number of kills that night, it went away when I learned what happened to the twenty that were missing from the rescued slaves.
Fifteen females and five males had been sexually abused and raped then eventually killed by the guards for their amusement. The majority of those bastards were dead when we lifted off from Breskaa. The others were helplessly tied with no one to free them. It was no less than they deserved.
The ship’s AI tapped into the mining company computer and gleaned the identities of those missing as well as information of other Farseekans taken as slaves by the Sargus Empire.
Once the slaves were safely loaded on the Dreadnaughts, we sent teams back down to the planet to collect food, supplies and bedding for them. They also liberated a small transport shuttle laden with ore ready for shipment in hopes we could sell it and reap the profits. They also pulled bunks out of the barracks to set up in the cargo bay for the rescued slaves. They would be more comfortable that way than just sleeping on the floor on blankets for the four-week trip back to Farseek.
We hoped by the time we arrived, the modular housing the Consortium promised would be in place there for them to re-settle.
We were fortunate that none of my forces were killed and the injuries sustained were no worse than mine. The nanites had stopped the bleeding and repaired the damage to my suit. The pain was gone as well.
But I knew Harper had been monitoring our communications from our quarters, so she would know about the hit I took. She would also know I was back in action in about ten minutes. It was my own fault. I knew better than to assume we’d got them all, but I wanted to see the enemy shuttle go down. I was lucky.
I would get to make love to my solmatu at least one more time. I smiled to myself at the thought.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Harper
The waiting seemed endless even though we could hear the com chatter from the conference room where we sat around the table together
There was nothing Zared could say to calm my worry for him. I could barely contain the rising panic I felt when he went down. Tears spilled down my cheeks and I was hyperventilating. I was that scared---especially when he didn’t answer for a minute or two after one of the guys asked if he was okay.
It was barely minutes before he replied, but it seemed like hours that I could hardly breathe. When he finally answered in the affirmative, I cried out, “Oh, my God, Oh my God.”
I closed my eyes and rested my elbows on the table holding my forehead in my hands and forced myself to take slow deep breaths and let them out the same way. I kept telling myself silently he was coming back to me. When I finally raise my head, I could see that my friends were as scared as I was. They were afraid for me to lose Zared and afraid to lose their own lovers as well.
“We better get used to this,” said Scarlet. “They’ve got a whole lot more people to find and liberate. This is what it takes when you love a warrior.”
“At least, someday you might be right there with them,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. Everyone is as risk on these missions,” Scarlet said, looking at each of us in turn. “We could have been blown out of the sky while they were down there. I’m sure they were just a worried about us and we are about them.”
“We are all going to have plenty to do when we get back with our new passengers,” Nora said.
“Yes, we should get down to the landing bay and help compile the information on the rescues,” I agreed. “The first shuttle up should be launching any time now.”
Nobody got up for a few moments. I sat there shaking my head, “What the hell have we gotten into?”
“Farseek mercs,” said Scarlet. “Pyrr says that’s what they call themselves now.”
”Some might call them pirates,” Zoe said. “They’re taking everything they can haul out from that mining colony.”
“They’re just taking reparations for what the Empire did to their home world,” I said. “There are going to be a lot more missions before they find what happened to half a million people and eight more Dreadnaught warrior ships.”
“Every one of the warriors on this ship lost family and friends in that attack on Farseek.” Scarlet said. “We had our choice back on Halor. We could have stayed there and had a nice safe, boring life. But we didn’t.”
“No, we didn’t,” I agreed. “It was too late way before
we got to Halor to take that option.”
“Ha,” Scarlet laughed. “It was too late for you, Harper, the minute the Commander walked into that holding room on Ursaga and pinned you with a look. You were his from that moment on.”
I felt my face warm as I remembered. At that point, I was thinking with my female parts, which wasn’t like me at all. Zared told me later that was how solmatu manifested. My female parts still thought quite highly of him, but my heart was fully engaged, too. And it hurt just thinking I could still lose him sometime in the future before we had a chance to make a family and settle on Farseek.
I silently apologized to Mom and Dad for the heartache they were surely going through, not knowing what happened to me. Even if we found Earth, there was no going back. I couldn’t imagine Zared living there. I could barely imagine me living there anymore or anywhere else without him. I didn’t choose this life I now had. It was chosen for me the day I was kidnapped by aliens. That single event set us on the course that brought us to that place and time.
Even after I knew he was safe, the hours dragged by before I saw Zared again, even though I was busy with the influx of Farseek abductees. Even those who weren’t awakened in the middle of their night seemed tired and broken. This was because they had been enslaved months ago and worked daily shifts without a single day off since they started. The overseers took all the best food for themselves, feeding the slaves two meals a day. One was a watery gruel and the second was a thin vegetable soup with the merest amount of protein.
Not all the rescues were from Farseek. One of the men I interviewed had pale blue hair and unusual yellow-green cat eyes. For whatever reason, his translator chip didn’t seem to work properly because he could hardly understand anything I said. Then he said something that totally shocked me.
“Are you from Earth?” he asked in accented English.
“Yes,” I said, shakily. “How do you know about Earth?”
“I was stationed at our base there,” he said.
Even in the din of voices in that cargo bay, my fellow Earther’s picked up on the sound of our native language being spoken by this alien man.
“Do you know where Earth is?” I asked urgently. “Do you even know where here is?”
By then, Scarlet, Zoe, and Nora surrounded us to hear what he had to say.
“I can only approximate our location,” he admitted. “We have not left our galaxy, but we are a few arms away on the rim from our worlds. I know the coordinates of Narova, the world I am from, in relation to Wagh-tan Galaxy. I think you call it Andromeda, but I haven’t seen it since I was taken from Earth.”
“Then, how do you know we are still in our galaxy?” Nora asked.
“One of the slavers told me. They travel up and down the rim stealing people to sell to the Sargan Empire,” he said. “He showed me a star map once. I think he was bored and I interested him.”
“Could you draw the map from memory,” I asked.
“Not with accuracy,” he said. “I am not an astronomer. If I could look at some holographic maps, I might be able to recognize some stars that would help me pinpoint the location. The coordinates would be useless without the reference points in space. Unlike road maps, star maps are three dimensional.”
“What is your name?” Nora asked.
“Sahvin Kazza,” he said. Then he looked up at Nora and sniffed, then gasped in wonder. He stood abruptly and backed away.
“Is something wrong,” I asked he as looked at Nora and sniffed.
“Nora from Earth, you are meomee! My soul mate,” he said, looking directly at her
“What does that mean?” she asked.
He looked at her, his feline eyes filled with longing. “Can’t you feel it? It means you are my fated mate.
“It sounds like solmatu,” I told her. His eyes took a little getting used to, but he was otherwise gorgeous with a muscular build and pale golden skin.
“Oh, my!?” Nora gasped.
I had a pretty good idea what was happening, but from the look on her face, it seemed a bit more intense.
“How can this be happening?” she murmured uncertainly. “I just met him for ten minutes and I feel like I want to push him down and have my way with him.”
I chuckled as I stole a glance at our new feline acquaintance. “He’s kind of looking at you the same way,” I whispered.
“I have a feeling you aren’t going to have much choice in the matter. You might as well go talk to him. He seems very nice,” I encouraged her. “This fated mate thing hasn’t turned out so bad for Zared and me.”
She glanced briefly at Sahvin, and sighed. “He is pretty, isn’t he?” she smiled wryly.
“He is.” I laughed softly.
In my peripheral vision, I caught a movement that drew my attention. Zared strode into the cargo bay. “Zared’s back,” I told Norma. “Talk to you in a bit.
I was so glad to see him alive and walking, I wanted to run to him and fling my arms around him and cling to him---to wrap myself around him and kiss him until we were both breathless with desire. But I didn’t.
I strolled out of the crowd and walked up to him and smiled up at him, reaching for his hand. “You scared the crap out of me,” I said quietly.
“I know,” he said softly. “But, I’m fine.” His hand closed around mine and he brought up his other hand caressed my cheek with the back of his fingers.
“You sure look fine.” I grinned at him and winked.
He gave me that familiar smirk that told me I would probably be getting some personal attention from him a bit later when we were alone.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ZARED
Harper spotted me about the same time as I picked out her shapely form in the group across from the entrance to the cargo bay. As she walked toward me I wasn’t sure whether she would be upset at what might have happened and didn’t or so glad to see me that she would just be grateful it wasn’t worse. I was relieved that it was the latter. I also sensed something else.
I was intrigued to learn about the Narovian male we had rescued with our people. It had seemed unlikely that Earth was in another galaxy from this one. Now we had possible confirmation that it was so. Though the exact location was unclear, it seemed that it was likely farther away from Consortium territories than our people had ever ventured.
I wanted to talk to him, but he had slipped away.
“Nora’s missing, too,” Harper said. “He said that she was his fated mate. He called her meomee. It sounded a lot like solmatu.”
“But you finished interviewing everyone?”
She nodded.
She learned there had been a few from Earth, three women. They had been killed. She was not merely upset that they had been sexually assaulted and murdered. She was angry. Considering how many we took out, those murderers were probably dead. A quick death was probably more than they deserved.
Harper was equally distressed at the number of Farseekans were also killed. That was in addition to the estimated half million on Farseek.
I could see that Harper was tired. She hadn’t slept well the night before the mission and it had been almost twenty hours since we left our bed. I was still filled with energy from the stimulant injected when I was injured.
I was actually just there to collect Harper and return to our quarters. It was clear that she was trying to slip away unnoticed but she is so attractive that she is hard not to notice. When I looked up across the cargo bay it seems like everyone was looking at us expectantly. They needed reassurance and encouragement after everything they had been through. Senior staff thought it would be useful for the Earth women to check in and interview the people we rescued.
They recorded information about their origins and family lines through their microlink to the ship’s AI. Although it could have been done by the AI alone, we thought it would be helpful to their morale to be attended by sympathetic and compassionate people who understood their plight. It was good for the women’s morale as well.
With the planet secure, Admiral Degatu sent down teams to scavenge material and supplies from the mining operation. In our haste to get to Breskaa, we didn’t take time to prepare accommodations for the people we were rescuing for the journey back to Farseek. Dread Eight also sent a team. While we would never appropriate goods from our own citizens or the Consortium, we had no qualms about taking everything we might find useful from the Sargan Empire. The ten million credits from Guryon wouldn’t go far for what lay ahead of us.
Therefore, we decided we would appropriate what we needed from the Empire whenever possible. We had not only become mercenaries, but pirates as well. Despite our doubts and suspicion that some in the Consortium had betrayed us, we remained loyal to the Consortium. As a Farseek Warrior, I still held fast to my honor and loyalty. Our first loyalty was to Farseek and our people. We owed nothing to the Sargus Empire. They would never give us what we were owed for what they did to our world, so we would simply take it whenever the opportunity arose.
Guryon was investigating the events that led to the destruction of Farseek. He was a powerful man, and he owed us far more than the aurinium he paid us. I felt certain that he was a man who paid his debts.
I kept Harper’s hand in mine and we walked over to the rescued people, drawing their full attention immediately. I wasn’t even sure what I was going to say to them until I started speaking.
“Welcome, to the Dreadnaught Seeker. My apologies for our lack of accommodations for you. I’m afraid they will not be much improved from what you had on Breskaa. This is a war ship, not a passenger transport, but we will make you as comfortable as possible for the journey to Farseek. The good news is you don’t have to work in the mine anymore.”
“What is left for us to go back to on Farseek?” someone asked.
“The first shipments of modular housing should arrive on Farseek before we do,” I told them. “It’s going to take years to rebuild Farseek into the world we knew. No one will be forced to return there. We will pass by many Consortium protected worlds on our way there. Many will offer basic food and shelter for those who lost everything on Farseek.