The Corrupted Star

by Martin HC

  He heard his name and his fallen eyes snapped back up to her own once more, he knew he'd been caught, the expression he wore said as much.

  “We stopped them but had to help the Mergence admiral, she got hurt so Tira saved her, that's why it took us so long.”

  “A fight to stop the Darkspace terrors from entering populated space and saving a Mergence admiral's life, you do get all the fun,” she told him, standing up as she did and allowing her dress to cover her upper legs once more, to both Haydn's relief and disappointment. “From what I hear, Babaidou's patience has worn very thin and he hasn't been very gentle with my sister.”

  “Is this one of those sisters that wants to screw you over?” Haydn asked, and she laughed.

  “Yes, she was gifted onto him to pry more time from his cold fingers,” her eyes were alight with excitement.

  “Well, at least you're not upset by it,” Tira told the crime boss.

  “Now don't get me wrong, what that man is known for I wouldn't wish onto any woman.”

  “Then why laugh about it?”

  “I spent weeks preparing to take her out, instead my elder sisters in their panic do it for me, the irony is they were the ones who set the fool up to take my place,” she told them all. “Only the moron on the frigate I came here in is left and she is terrified of me now.”

  “Why?” Jill asked her.

  “She thinks I'm the one responsible for the others current dilemma, she really isn't the brightest light,” Feissa answered. “I mean here I've been on the Ophelia since we arrived, at no point has she even come across to check on me.”

  “Not entirely true is it?” Serena asked her, cutting in.

  “That was no lie,” she defended.

  “Then what would you call that stunt outside the core room?”

  “Oh that, well, she did send over two of her best to demand I return and report,” the sarcasm in her tone was clear.

  “Aaaaand?”

  “And, I sent back their heads,” Haydn's shocked look encouraged a little more of an explanation, so with an innocent flick of her open palm she continued. “She was trying to exert her dominance upon me, by forcing me to answer to her goons. I don't answer to goons.”

  “Did you have to decapitate them though?” he asked incredulously.

  “Sadly sweetheart, yes I did, they were very bad men who've done some nasty things to others. I had to send back the right message, but despite it being outside the core room, the child saw nothing.”

  No one answered her, they looked on in silence, hoping none of the others would speak and betray the kid's hideaway, if it was a bluff.

  “... Yes, I know there is a small child on board this ship living in the core room, we've spoken a little in fact, and I'm also more than aware of the AI's... odd attitude.”

  “What do you know of the kid?” Jill asked as she tensed. “If you've touched her...”

  “Relax please, I haven't harmed her and she's still hiding in this ship somewhere,” she reassured them, Jill looked to Serena who nodded her confirmation. “As to what I know, she's an orphan but sees you all as her family and is incredibly bright.”

  “How did you get her to talk to you?” Jill enquired further, a little more deflated now, “she never talks to anyone.”

  “It took some time, I noticed some food had gone missing and so I waited for her to show up. I wasn't expecting to find a child mind you, but I did,” Feissa stopped now, her pleasant expression dropped away as her eyes focussed on something, a memory far beyond what they could see. “It wasn't all that hard to connect, to get her to speak. I looked into her sad eyes and saw my own at that age, like me, she's seen the worst in people.”

  The group remained silent, they waited almost painfully for her to come back to them, the blonde beauty's focus returned and her composure picked up once more.

  “With you though and unlike me, she's also experienced life with a real family, but best not to dwell on the past, there's nothing there but pain for some of us.”

  “Well, at least she's talking more,” Haydn spoke. “Maybe soon she'll tell everyone her name.”

  “Her name's Kaell Silsu-Harean, she prefers just Kaell though,” Tiralyn told them.

  “How could you possibly know that?” Jill asked her. “I've never even seen you talk to her.”

  “I was the first person she seen after waking from our initial encounter. I spoke to her then, and we occasionally chat using the communications booth I built.”

  “Really... about what?” Haydn asked.

  “Mostly the physics and chemistry surrounding antimatter energy generation, she's learning at an impressive rate.”

  “You're teaching a child the most advanced form of energy physics in your spare time?” Jill asked, rebounding off of the answer.

  “It's not the most advanced, there is also dark matter manipulation, star compression, and super dense energy harvesting.”

  “Star compression, don't we use stars to power our carrier?” Haydn asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You mean that small ship you run around in is powered by star material?” Feissa asked, stunned.

  “No that's not our carrier, that's more of a shuttle and it uses dark matter.”

  “You're telling me you have a bigger more advanced ship than the one everybody is after.”

  “Yes.”

  “The surprises with you two, they just keep falling out the bag don't they,” she looked to Jill. “You'll have to tell me all about it during our trip.”

  “I haven't seen it, I heard them mention it but didn't know what it was until now.”

  “Speaking of trips,” Haydn spoke. “What are we doing from here?”

  “Ah, good, back from our little digression,” she thought silently for a few seconds before continuing, looking at Jill she answered. “You my pretty picture, will go with me to my ship. Damon, Arlan and... the new guy will return here to pilot the Ophelia, although I don't believe it is necessary with Serena here, but we can keep that between us, like we will the communications device.”

  “Where do we go from there?”

  “Back to a new rendezvous point, from there we'll find out where the Ferren's will want us all to meet, and then we send these two the details,” she answered Jill. “In the meantime, I'll find out which ship your friend is being held in, so that when you arrive he can be extracted, with me too of course, before they're all destroyed preferably.”

  “What makes you think we'll destroy everyone?” Haydn asked her.

  “This Ferren commander, Babaidou, is as cunning as he is nasty, he will leave you no choice. If you want to save everyone he'll make you kill everyone else to do it, or do it himself, so let's hope you have a winning card up your sleeve.”

  It was a stark situation to be in, not a surprising one though with the game of life and death that was regularly played around them. Haydn wondered, how did he go from being lost and looking for a home he had no idea how to find, to getting caught up in events leading up to a galactic war.

  “Jill will go back with you, tell them you found her hiding in the belly of the ship,” Haydn told her.

  “So you're accepting my offer?” Feissa asked. “If so, may I please also be involved in the plan to get us all out?”

  “We have no choice but to accept and as to the plan, no, the less you know the safer we'll all feel.”

  “Fair, but I'll trust you, so shall we go my love, sorry for my impatience but I've been bored long enough,”

  Haydn looked to Jill, who nodded and spoke to him softly. “I'll be fine.”

  Jill and Feissa left, leaving him alone with Tiralyn and Serena. “Tiralyn, did she lie at all? Did you pick up on anything suspicious?”.

  “No lies and nothing suspicious, except she did seem to smile at you more than the rest of us.”

  “Awesome.”

  Arlanaway

  In Feissa's shuttle and making their way to the cartel Frigate, the two women sat quietly. The occa
sional glance from the beautiful woman Jill sat next to, begged an end to the silence. A regular beep was all that interrupted the awkwardness. They still had a little way to go yet, and Jill racked her brains looking for something to say, anything to end the conversation vacuum. Silence was usually fine by Jill, she revelled in it mostly, but something in her just needed to speak. In the end it was Feissa who spoke first.

  “I'm very glad you'll be with me, I'm just not confident I'd survive the ordeal alone.”

  “Do you think they'll kill you if you return alone?”

  “What?” she asked. “...Oh, no, that's not what I meant, my people I can handle. I meant the engineer.”

  “Was it that bad?” Jill asked, putting her hand on top of hers.

  “It was worse, my love.” she answered.

  Jill had personally been at the receiving end of the ranting Arlan once before. The crew slept, the computer reported a blown drive converter and so she decided to replace it alone. She thought there was no need to wake Arlan, not for something as silly as a converter. In her attempt to be helpful, she was responsible for stranding them in a very dangerous sector and almost blowing up the star drive. The damage was great, but repairable. How was she to know their was a difference between a 60TerraSel and 600TerraSel converter. This single attempt to be nice, set about a tirade lasting three days solid. Towards the end she thought of how good it would be to tear his tongue out, and finish his fifth rant so far about velcro. It was at this stage a realisation struck her, just as she began to break. He was giving her the answer all along, she just couldn't see it through the exhaustion.

  Understanding her pain and taking pity on the woman, Jill turned out her jacket pocket.

  “You should get one of these,” she said.

  “I don't understand, what is it?”

  “It's just velcro, I sowed a strip of it into my pocket.”

  “But he hates the stuff, surely the noise would just make him worse.”

  “Not if he doesn't know where it's coming from,” she answered her, a sly grin on her face. “When he starts off on one of his little rants anywhere near me, I just put my hand in my pocket and slowly tear the strips apart, over and over. Eventually he just goes into a rage and storms away.”

  “That really works?”

  “I once managed to convince him the noise was coming from a maintenance duct beside the common area, he spent seven hours inside the wall just hunting for the source.”

  “You beautiful thing, you're... ingenious.” Feissa said, staring into Jill's eyes.

  “Well, it's nothing really, just a strip of velcro.” she answered, maintaining the beautiful woman's gaze. “I call it the Arlanaway.”

  Feissa's gaze cracked into a smile, then she laughed for a while, Jill with her. Eventually they calmed down

  “I heard a rumour, one that no one can corroborate,” Feissa said, her face now relaxing again. “Or not so much that they couldn't, but more refused to. So it must be true.”

  “Which was.”

  “That you and the mute were raised by the Fallen Faction.”

  Jill's face maintained it's relaxed state, but she answered with sincerity in her tone.

  “The Fallen Faction doesn't exist, and you shouldn't ask about it.”

  “So I've been told,” Feissa answered, recalling the pleasantly dressed man who after appearing out of a crowd, handed her a rolled up note wrapped in a lock of her own golden hair. She looked down, opened the note and read it's words 'the Fallen Faction does not exist'. He half bowed to her and smiled politely before melting back into the crowd. She continued. “But that was just the first part of the rumour.”

  “What was the second part.”

  “That you were the Whisper child.”

  Jill still maintained her relaxed state and considered the various warnings to give if she continued to ask around, about the possibility of people wrapped in black knocking on her door at night, or perhaps how the ship she travelled in one day might unexpectedly disappear, but Jill suspected the cartel woman already knew these possible outcomes.

  “I've never understood where that name came from, there was nothing quiet about my youth. All I ever knew was screaming and pain.”

  Feissa understood the very pain she spoke, she saw something in her that had touched so many children in the lawless fringes of known space, even herself. Reaching a hand up to Jill's face, she gently ran her fingers around the other woman's cheek, then slowly across her lips, before leaning over and kissing her.

  “Tell me about it, everything.”

  A Girl's Fear

  The wait had been excruciating, naturally they were following the Ophelia and Feissa back to the rendezvous point. Being able to track ships in the blaze was something no one else could do, and only Jill knew they could.

  Arlan refused to leave Feissa's ship, he was happy where he was and in protest to being moved back to the work-less ship, he'd locked down the reactor and drive centres. It took hours to cut through the doors, and Feissa was at the point of accepting defeat, if anything just to get moving again.

  The watching sister responsible for overseeing everything disappeared after Jill arrived on board, which was understandable. Feissa may have whispered the rumour to her sister before they reached rendezvous with the Ophelia, and there was no ball and chain around Jill's neck as she walked out onto the hanger deck, instead she held herself more like a bodyguard.

  Guards were stationed inside the Ophelia to watch the crew, this prevented anyone but Serena from communicating. She had little to report anyway, only that Damon was unhappy about not knowing the plan but ultimately understood. He only knew there was a plan as Jill spoke to him quietly before he left the frigate, he trusted her and agreed that the less people knew about it, the better a chance their plan would have.

  The display in Tira's command room was alive with colour, showing the brilliant blue and purple streaks of the outside view as they hurtled through space behind the Ophelia. The blaze for them instead of being a fiery inferno, appeared more like a submerged run through brightly lit water.

  “Why does Damon's ship look like it's on fire when they go faster than light?” Haydn asked his younger accomplice, adding another card to the pile for her to see.

  “They're not going faster than light, think of it as more like bending time.”

  “Time travel, cool, but why does it look different to what we see?”

  “The star drive technology manipulates gravity waves, these waves can cross the dimension of time, instead of riding up and down on the waves of time, the star drive tears them open and rides the gravity currents through. The fiery view is the light from the destructive tearing of the waves,” she stopped to let him mull over what she said.

  “So, if their drive surfs them through the waves using gravity, what does ours do?”

  He was keeping up, this was a good sign as in the past, his eyes would have glazed over by now, she learned long ago that bite sized chunks were the best way to go.

  “Pretty much the same, only it's a lot smoother, weaving us through like a needle instead of crashing through like a brick,” she answered him, before speaking her own thoughts aloud. “The technology itself is very advanced for where these people are on the technological ladders. Suggesting they've found and reverse engineered it, then learned how to build it for themselves, only they have no idea of the fundamental sciences which allows it to work, like the antimatter power core, I would say they even had help on that.”

  They fell back into silence and continued their card game, the silence didn't last long though, “Is Damon still upset?”

  “Probably, it's only been half an hour since you last asked.”

  “Ask him if it's because of something I done?”

  Seconds ticked passed as Tira sent the question to Serena, who in turn quietly asked Damon the question, who tried to answer Serena without gaining the attention of the guard, Serena then returned the answer to Tira, who answered him.
<
br />   “He answered with 'be specific.'”

  “What does he mean be specific?”

  Again the seconds passed, some more seconds, then a minute and just as Haydn was giving up on his wait for an answer, Tira responded.

  “He says, 'am I upset that since meeting you I've been blown up? Or that I have to work for the Mergence? Because if not they'll track me down and take my ship, or is it because I've been hunted and captured by a cartel that you stole from? Or are you asking if it's because they intend to give me over to the damned Ferrens?'”