by L. E. Thomas
"Here we go," he said aloud as he lowered the shuttle.
The landing skids touched the pad, the engines sending swirls of dust off the surface. Still, nothing moved other than the wind.
He powered down the engines to standby, debating whether that was a good idea or not. On the one hand, the engines blasting would create such force on the pad that it would be noticed by the guards and make it difficult to cross the pad without being hurled off in a fatal fall to the ground.
On the other hand, keeping the engines running full would make for a quicker takeoff. He powered them down anyway and waited.
Minutes passed. He suddenly felt as if every surveillance camera within a hundred MUs were trained on his shuttlecraft. His mouth became dry. If any officer manning the towers happened to see his shuttle loitering on the pad for too long, he would soon be a prisoner.
The pad rumbled. Swirling red lights popped up around the shuttle, rimming the landing area in a blood-red hue. He swallowed, wondering in the back of his mind if this was the end.
Nat looked at the massive doors in the prison's surface as they parted, revealing a bright light beaming onto the pad. He expected a squad of heavily-armed Marines to charge through, surrounding the shuttle and barking orders for him to surrender. Instead, a figure emerged in shadow, wreathed in a smoky haze, and paused between the doors as they halted just far enough apart to allow the man to walk through. Two more people appeared, one nothing more than a skeletal frame supported by the other. The trio sprinted across the pad toward his shuttle.
Nat lowered the main ramp and unbuckled his harness. He sprinted aft as the door opened, allowing a rush of wind to howl through the shuttle's bay. The landing lights mixed with the red flashes on the pad.
"We don't have much time!" Jax barked as he appeared at the bottom of the ramp. He wore a filthy red coverall smeared with grease and smelled of rotten fruit. Spinning around to his two companions, he shouted, "Come on!"
"What happened?"
"Our diversion," Jax shot back. "Let's go!"
Nat gasped as the two other figures came into view. The man, stocky and round, was a stranger. But he carried the thin frame of Tressa, his sister.
"My stars," he said, reaching forward to embrace her. "Tress!"
Jax stepped in front of him. "They'll be time for reunions later, boy. We don't have long. We'll make sure she's secure while you get ready to fly out of here."
Nat studied Tressa. Her eyes were nearly closed, her skin pale as a white cloud. "What's wrong with her?" he asked.
"She's sick." Jax nodded toward the cockpit. "Go. I'll be up there to get the pilot."
"Wait—what?"
"The pilot. He'll cause complications."
"You never said anything about—"
"Nat!" Jax roared, bowing his chest and towering over him. "We only have seconds! The fire will only hold off the guards so long. You must be long gone before they regain control of the prison."
He recoiled, stepping back up the ramp as Jax's companion carried Tressa forward. Her arms flopped around like a doll's, her legs dragging across the surface in a lifeless fashion.
"Fine," Nat said, buckling his chinstrap as he hurried back to the cockpit. Fingers flying across the switches, he quickly had the cargo shuttle ready to fly to—
Where?
Just as he turned around, Jax stormed into the cockpit and scooped Thumux from his seat. He thrust the unconscious pilot over his shoulder and spun around. He jabbed a tablet into his Nat's face and tossed a satchel inside the cargo bay.
"You've got this, Nat," he said, sweat glistening from his face. "These are the coordinates Tressa gave us to give to you. They're encrypted for your eyes only. The key to our people's future is on the tablet." He nodded. "For Tarrafa!"
Before Nat could say anything, Jax marched toward the back of the shuttle.
"Wait!" he yelled. "What are you going to do?"
"Buy you more time," he said without turning around. "Go!"
Nat watched him for another second before turning back to his controls. He gripped the stick and—
"Oh, no," he breathed, watching as guards appeared through the door. "Jax!"
"We've got this!" Jax yelled. "Go!"
Nat pulled back on the stick. The landing pad erupted into a flurry of yellow and red laser fire. As he turned the shuttle skyward, he took one last look at the landing pad just as Jax tossed Thumux's body over the edge and it tumbled into the darkness.
Jax's companion fired from a crouch, dropping two guards at the door. The retaliation fire hit him in the head, and he fell to the deck.
Holding his hand over his head, Jax waved once and yanked a pistol from a holster tied to his thigh. He fired back toward the door as Nat slammed the throttle forward, launching the shuttle out of sight as it screamed toward the gate.
Checking his rear cameras, he watched the firefight continuing on the pad. A moment later, the entire pad exploded in a brilliant cloud of fire and smoke. Debris tumbled toward the surface, leaving trails of burning wreckage.
The whole city saw that explosion, he thought as he eased more power into the shuttle.
Wiping the sweat from his eyes, he focused on the dome city's gate and hoped the counterfeit flight tablet would work. To his surprise, the gate opened as he approached. How deep did the resistance contacts go?
He shook his head. Tox thought the Zahl had nearly defeated the people of Tarrafa, but it seemed the apparent defeat of the resistance had been a ruse. Jax and Kad had people everywhere. Well, only Kad did now.
Frowning, he thought of Jax giving his last full measure of devotion to the cause on the prison landing pad. He had bought time to allow Nat to escape with his sister. Why had he done that? What could she possibly know about to enable the resistance to prevail? For some reason, the resistance fighters on Atheron believed Tressa's knowledge was worth dying for.
As the outer gate opened, he passed through and put all the power he could muster into the engines. The G-forces pressed him into his seat.
"Natty!" a weak voice cried from the cargo bay.
"Hang on, sis! I'm getting you out of here!"
He passed by the patrol of Interceptors, their attention on the explosion on the planet's prison. The two magnificent craft shot toward the dome, ignoring his cargo shuttle squawking the appropriate transponders.
Jax had been right.
The shuttle left the Atheron orbit, the craft's artificial gravity taking over. He exhaled, falling back into the pilot's seat.
Shaking his head, Nat focused on Tressa's tablet and pressed his thumb on the cold surface.
The coordinates appeared on the screen, but Nat just stared at them in disbelief.
"That can't be right."
Chapter Twenty-Two
Despite his misgivings about setting a course for Sapphire, the most distant planet in their system from the sun, Nat punched in the coordinates and fired off his primary engines for an extended blast. He spooled the Lutimite Drive, but it would take time to warm from a cold start. At least, that was what he knew from Captain Thumux and his training. He'd never actually used the Lutimite Drive in a solo flight. He shut down the shuttlecraft to low power and headed back to the dimly-lit cargo bay.
His stomach turned. Thumux hadn't deserved to die. No matter what Nat did, Thumux had only tried to be a good mentor and superior officer. And now he was dead because of Nat.
"I always knew I'd see you again even after Kad and Viper kept telling me it was impossible,” Tressa breathed as she lay across the simple cot Jax and his comrade had created for her. Her eyes were closed to slits as she stared back at him. "We proved them all wrong. Thank you, brother."
He knelt next to her, unbuckling his helmet as he did so. Words escaped him. He reached out and clasped her hand. It felt cold.
"Are you okay, Tress?" he asked.
She smiled and nodded. Her once lush hair had been cut short, matted against her skull from sweat and grime. The round
cheeks he used to see widening whenever they were kids had grown slender and tight across the bone.
He pursed his lips. "I've laid in a course for Sapphire, just like the coordinates said. I'll activate the Lutimite Drive shortly."
"What about Jax? Gilla?"
He squeezed her hand. "Both died getting you out."
Tressa winced and closed her eyes. "Okay."
Nat leaned closer to her. "What are we doing out here? I don't understand any of this. You went to such trouble to get a hold of me. Why?"
She held up one bony finger with her free hand. "Give me ... a second."
Nat waited, listening as his sister wept over the loss of her comrades. It was then he realized he would probably never fully understand what she had been through, fighting with a hopeless resistance against incredible odds. While his time with the Empire hadn't been easy, his life was never at risk on a daily basis. It had been a different story for Tressa ... and his father.
When his family had split apart during the invasion, all three had gone their separate ways. His father led the rebellion while his sister became an active agent. All the while, he trained to become an Interceptor pilot, believing his superiors when he heard the resistance had been crushed. Now, he wondered about the truth. Would the government lie to him to create a false sense of security?
"They would have done anything for me," she said, her eyes clamped shut. "So many of us are gone now."
Nat remained quiet, allowing her a moment to grieve.
Tressa's bloodshot eyes opened. "But I have you now. After all this time, we're together again." She clasped his hand between hers. "Once I verified you were alive at the Academy, I knew you'd come for me, ol' Natty-nat. I just knew it. You wouldn't leave me in there."
He leaned over and kissed her forehead. "What did they do to you?"
She frowned. "They've done much worse to others who defied them. I got the basic treatment of sleep deprivation and little food or water."
"Why?"
"Because I was part of the resistance. They wanted to know everything I knew. They asked questions about the rumored exodus, Da, Ma, and you."
"Me?"
She nodded. "I didn't tell them anything. I didn't tell them we've been in contact with Legion agents and other factions joining together to fight from the Frontier. These other rebels told us of a weapon that could incapacitate a capital ship—really all the ships in a system."
Nat shook his head, remembering the power of the Justice in orbit. "That's impossible."
She smiled. "It's not. We told everyone else I was hacking into the database to find information about you, but that was only part of the mission. I was searching for the location of a weapon like this, and I found it. But I couldn't trust that information to just anyone."
"So you contacted me?"
"Yes. We had found out you were part of the first class in the Academy. I knew if I could get a hold of you, we could get this weapon and knock out the ARC long enough to allow our people to leave Tarrafa and start anew."
Nat shook his head. "But your coordinates are taking us to Sapphire. That's nothing but a lifeless moon."
"That's what they want you to believe." She swallowed, her face contorting as if she was in pain. Nat reached forward, but she waved him off. "The Zahl have sprinkled out across our entire system, establishing mining outposts on asteroids and moons. They have converted all of our worlds to serve their purposes—including Tarrafa. How much did Da tell you?"
He looked away. "Not much. We didn't really speak."
She studied him. "He didn't mean to leave you, Nat."
“I know.”
"He thought you were dead before we found out you might be in the Academy, but there was no way to get word to you without jeopardizing all of our efforts. I watched him fall apart, becoming consumed with finding a way to get you out while trying to still give hope to the others. It tore him in two, Nat, but he had to choose his people over his son."
Looking away and releasing her hands, Nat wiped his face. "Okay."
She took a deep breath. "The Zahl have plans to utilize our world as a springboard for a new expansion effort into the Frontier. I've seen the logistics. I know what's coming. We have to get as many of our people off the planet as possible before the Empire truly tightens its grip on Tarrafa. We have to fight back to save our way of life."
Nat turned around. "Then why exactly are we going to Sapphire?"
"The Zahl have an auxiliary depot there. With your pilot status and a falsified order from ... Jax…we should be able to land and get our hands on a modified system disruptor. It's similar to an EMP."
He blinked. "A what?"
"An electromagnetic pulse." She propped herself up on her elbows. "It's a weapon that could render the ARC and other craft on board unable to detect our escape from Tarrafa. For the past two years, we've been preparing to break people out of the reservations and re-education camps to get them safely into the mountains and onto our ships. We have four cruisers hidden there on our world, just waiting for the opportunity to flee."
Nat snorted. "Cruisers? On the planet? They would be detected."
"That's what we thought, too, until they arrived." She shook her head and grimaced. "Don't ask me to explain it. It's some kind of cloaking technology that makes the ships undetectable by the Zahl. Another present from our rebel friends and the Legion agents. They call it a shroud. And it’s incredible."
"This is crazy."
"I know," she said, her face brightening for the first time since she had been brought on board. "There are a handful of people on the cruisers now just waiting for the exodus. Once the word is given, the people in the re-education centers and elsewhere will rise up. They'll fight their way to the cruisers, and we'll get away. But none of that works unless we knock out the Justice."
Nat took a deep breath as he tried to reconcile the rumors he'd heard about a rebel leader promising an exodus with what Tressa was telling him. "There's no way to get everyone. Some will be left behind."
She lowered her brow and looked at her hands. "I know. What else could we do? We have to try to save our people before the Zahl erase everything Tarrafa once was."
"How long is this ... thing supposed to incapacitate the Justice?"
She shrugged. "We're not really sure. The attacks on the ground will have to move fast, so will the cruisers when they launch from the far side of the planet. The ships have been equipped with something called a curvature drive that we've smuggled onto the planet."
"A curvature drive?"
She nodded. "You know of it?"
He murmured an affirmative as he stared at the wall. "Something in the history lessons about a war with the Legion. The curvature drives allowed the Legion to resist an invasion, but they are too unstable to be used and have been outlawed."
She laughed. "You believe that, then you're dumber than I thought."
"What do you mean?"
Cocking her head to the side, she looked at him like she did when they were children, and she knew something he didn't. "Don't tell me you've believed everything they've told you?"
He frowned.
She slapped his knee. "You have? You gullible little feline. You just believe every little laser light they shine on the floor, don't you? Doesn't matter—you'll chase it around."
"But why would they say that if it wasn't true?" He shook his head. "Those curvature drives are dangerous."
Her face hardened. "So is staying on Tarrafa. We have no future there. If we are to survive, fleeing is the only way, but we can't do that without getting swatted back down. If the ARC is knocked out—even for the briefest of moments—our cruisers could light a curve to get away and join the other rebel factions."
He lowered his shoulders and sighed. "This is a suicide mission, Tressa. You're going to get yourself killed."
She paused and looked at the deck. "You remember when we were kids and you always wanted to quit a game you were losing?"
"I gue
ss."
"I always convinced you it was worth it to keep going, right?" She gripped his hand again and squeezed hard. "This is worth it! Trust me. Firing off this weapon will get us away from the Zahl and to a place where we could strike back. I know you can't possibly believe in the doctrine you've been taught. The Zahl destroy cultures and people. Their invasion killed Ma."
“They're so strong, though.” He winced and shook his head as he looked back at his weary sister. “But I’ll never leave you again, Tress—ever. I’m making my choice, and it’s by your side. I’m with you all the way. No matter the cost. So, if we manage to get a hold of this disruptor you're talking about, what then?"
Her eyes twinkled. "Then we take the fight to the Zahl, little brother. We return and save our people."
Chapter Twenty-Three
"Buckle up." Nat adjusted his harness, watching as the colorful spectacle of Lutimite Space flickered outside his cockpit. "Almost there."
Tressa followed his lead, fiddling with the straps and adjusting the flight suit she had taken from the satchel Jax had tossed inside the ship right before he died. From the flight tablet to organizing the prison break, the so-called dead resistance had seemed to think of everything. Nat wondered how long it had taken to plan the entire operation.
"I've never seen anything like it," she breathed, staring at the blurred stars as the rainbow of colors washed over her face. "It's amazing."
"Yeah," he said, a hard knot forming in the pit of his stomach. "I had only seen a video of it once during my first week of training. Allows the Empire to cover long distances in a matter of hours."
"I know, but I wasn't talking about the Lutimite Space. I was talking about space in general."
Nat smiled. "You mean the stars?"
She nodded. "I never in my wildest dreams thought we'd get the chance to fly amongst them. I thought I'd just be an artist and worry about things like clothes and fighting with our parents."