The First Covenant (Dark Universe Series Book 2)

by Alex Sheppard

  “Oh no, you don’t,” Ramya muttered angrily. Gritting her teeth and pulling her assault rifle close, she flicked a switch that turned the weapon to full auto mode. She pressed the trigger with all her might, spraying the two pirates with a shower of hot metal. She kept on pressing until both went down.

  Fenny crawled up next to her. “Well done, kid,” she said between heavy breaths.

  “Thanks,” Ross said. Blood was oozing out of his arm, but he managed a smile nonetheless. “That’s the last one I guess,” he said, thumbing at a pirate clad in dark-green armor who’d just dropped out of the hatch.

  “I’ll give him what he wants,” Fenny said. Snapping around, she fired her cannon, its earsplitting boom echoing across the hallway. The pirate returned fire and ducked behind the hatch.

  “Wait,” Ross raised his uninjured arm. He listened intently for a second. “Did you just hear shots?”

  “Of course I hear shots, Brainy,” Fenny snapped and loosed another round of cannon fire on the pirate who slipped behind a column. “We’re in the middle of a firefight. What do you expect to hear? Music?”

  “No . . . I meant shots fired far inside somewhere,” Ross explained, his face darkening immediately. Ramya didn’t want to think about it because it wasn’t a good thought. They had let three pirates escape into the ship, and if Ross heard gunfire elsewhere in the ship, it could only mean the thugs were rampantly killing the crew.

  Anger snipped at Ramya’s fingertips. She hunched over her rifle again. They were going to pay for this. The lone pirate opened fire. Ramya ducked and pressed the trigger, spewing another round of hot fire. The man fell back behind the hatch again. Ramya heaved.

  The ship groaned, then it moved. Ramya stumbled at the sudden movement, grabbing the rails in front of her to regain balance. She brought the stock of her rifle back to her shoulder and aimed at the hatch, waiting for him to emerge out of his shelter. Instead of charging, the pirate bolted back into the airlock. A loud clang sounded in the next moment.

  Grabbing his bleeding arm, Ross leaned forward to look. “They disengaged?” he asked in an incredulous voice.

  “What the iffin hell?” Fenny said. She darted to the porthole and immediately started yelling. “We’re moving.” There was a bright flash outside and Fenny yelled again. “Someone . . . we . . . just shot at one of the Scuttlers. The other one’s . . .” Another flash. “Oooh! The other one’s history, folks.”

  Ross gave out a loud chuckle and scrambled to his feet. “You know what this means? One of our crewmates has taken the COM back from Bo. Told you I heard shots.”

  “What are you waiting for then?” Fenny asked. “Let’s go find out.”

  They found their way down from their perch, their progress slow and cautious as they headed to the COM. At the final turn in the corridor, Fenny stopped suddenly. Her drained face made Ramya rush forward and peer. Bodies were strewn on the deck, and blood had turned the floor red. Ramya’s stomach turned at the sight—the three pirates were among the dead, but there were far more bodies.

  Ramya trudged forward, wincing at the sight of their fallen comrades. Four Mwandans—Ramya recognized Namaan, one of the engineers—had died. But their death wasn’t in vain. In the COM, gracing the captain’s seat, was its rightful owner—Captain Terenze Milos. He cradled the largest assault rifle there was, a PKM-44, in his arms and shouted orders at Merin and Azzi who steered the Endeavor away. Between the captain’s chair and an obviously dead Bo on the floor, Lefrasi stood with a blaster.

  As soon as Ramya entered with Fenny and Ross, the captain turned and nodded. “Good job out there. We shook the bastards off.” He’d obviously been watching the firefight at the hatch from the COM. The captain’s eyes narrowed as they fell on Ross’s bleeding arm. “Get that checked, Commander.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ross replied before nodding at Bo’s body. “Who were these guys?”

  The captain’s face turned grim. “Laurden’s thugs. Found this on our dead friend here.” The captain pulled out a silver hexagon emblazoned with Laurden’s sigil, a black spider. Everyone knew that hexagon—commonly called a mark—was exchanged when a death contract was signed. Bo had obviously accepted one from Nebeca’s overlord.

  “Why did Laurden want us?” Fenny said. “What the hell have we done to him?”

  The captain slipped the mark back into his pocket and shrugged. “Don’t know. The Octus are hard to read.”

  “How did you get out of your room? Didn’t they lock you in?”

  “Blasted the door off,” Captain Milos said, brandishing the PKM. “No one locks Terenze Milos in. And no one steals my ship while I’m watching.”

  Ross smiled and nodded wisely. He turned to leave, then shot a quick look backward. “Where’s Wiz?”

  “He’s badly hurt, but he’ll survive,” Lefrasi replied. “I lost four of my people though.”

  The captain placed an arm on Lefrasi’s shoulder and shook his head morosely. “We lost four of our own, Lefrasi,” he said gravely.

  A thick silence crept into the room. It would’ve lingered longer had it not been for Merin. She turned around to look at the captain.

  “The SLH’s coming up, Captain,” she announced.

  “Take us in, Merin.

  A slight shake later, the Endeavor cruised into the Super Luminal Highway.

  20

  THE FIGHT with Octus Laurden’s goons had taken a hefty toll. Broken limbs, wounds, and other trauma were matters people could take in stride, but casualty was not. Death of the four Mwandans weighed heavily on everyone’s hearts. It was hard to keep in mind that the count of deceased among the Endeavor’s crew was exceptionally low, especially considering most of them were rookies facing a seasoned bunch of killers.

  The Endeavor’s interior, particularly the main level, bore marks—broken, bullet-ridden walls, blood-spattered decks, the acrid smell of blood hanging in the air—that kept reminding everyone of the bloody battle. Ramya and Fenny, as well as every Mwandan who was relatively uninjured in the battle, had taken up mops and brooms to clean up evidence of the firefight.

  The captain and Ross—his arm decorated by a gaudy orange bandage—barged out of the elevator when they were halfway done with the task.

  “Damn it! We’re late,” the captain’s growl reverberated across the corridors. It made Ramya stop sweeping a large and stubborn patch of blood off the deck and turn around to look curiously. She had not seen Captain Milos so grouchy in all the time she’d been on the ship. Seeing that crack, however thin, in his calm façade was weird. And unsettling to some extent.

  Fenny propped her mop against the wall and strode up to him. “It’s just a few hours, Captain,” she said reassuringly.

  The captain’s brows arched immediately. “Why aren’t you at the COM?”

  Fenny eyed the freshly scrubbed deck and scratched her arm. “Merin and Azzi wanted to help. Since we’re on autoflight inside the SLH anyway, I thought they could take over for a bit while I help Rami out here. Trust me, Captain, Merin and Azzi are good at the controls.”

  The captain gave her a stern look. “That’s heartening to know. But they’re new at this, and this meeting at Posci is important. I want at least one experienced hand at the COM, Fenny. Others can take care of scrubbing the deck, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, Captain, sir,” Fenny said. Clicking her heels, she touched her forehead with her fingertips in a hasty, rather artless, salute at the captain and dashed away.

  Captain Milos fixed a frown on Ramya next. “Do you want to be at the meeting?”

  She did not. Seeing her father was not on the agenda. No matter how much she had steeled herself—and she had, no doubt—she wasn’t looking to facing Trysten Kiroff anytime soon, and certainly not now.

  “No, I don’t,” she said.

  The captain nodded and left without another word, Ross in tow. Ramya scoured the marks on the deck with extra vigor while pondering about the meeting with her father. There was a chance—a
big fat chance—that she’d have to face him regardless of her refusal. If he asked for her, that is.

  A bright blink on her wrist pulled Ramya out of her thoughts. From the flashing ID code, she realized it was Sosa calling.

  “Yes, Domina Sosa,” Ramya said, tapping the device on. “You need me?”

  “Come to med-bay, please,” Sosa said. “I need more hands.”

  The comm. clicked off. There was no mistaking the urgency in Sosa’s request. Ramya dropped her mop and announced her departure to the rest of the provisional cleaning crew, and rushed to the med-bay.

  As expected, the med-bay was full of people, mostly wounded Mwandans. Wiz was sporting a huge bandage around his head. Sosa was hunkered in one corner applying swaths of bandage around a Mwandan’s arm. Ramya looked around the room and spotted Ahool in the far corner of the room riffling through a cabinet.

  “Hey, Rami,” Wiz said groggily, waving.

  “How you feeling, Wiz?” Ramya asked the pilot. They had all been worried seeing the wound on the back of his head. Sosa had later declared that it was lucky that the blow hadn’t killed him on the spot.

  “They were real mad at me,” Wiz explained his encounter with the mercenaries. “They wanted me to follow their orders and get them out at the next system. I told them they could go to hell. That’s when that hairless wrestler type crashed his cannon’s butt on me.”

  “Wiz, stop talking. Rest,” Sosa yelled, gesturing at Ramya to leave the pilot alone. “Rami, we need help,” she said, and pointed at a Mwandan female hunched in a chair. “Her right foot needs to be looked at.”

  Never in her life had Ramya shown any interest in the medical sciences. When she was hired on the Endeavor as the medic’s assistant, it was a temporary solution, a means to an end. Mercifully so far, she hadn’t been asked to perform a task that needed medical skills or understanding. But now faced the Mwandan and her foot, Ramya gritted her teeth. What was she doing here? What if she hurt the patient while trying to help? This was a person, not a piece of equipment she could tinker with.

  Sosa must’ve sensed Ramya’s hesitation because she yelled, “There was a piece of shrapnel stuck on her foot. Gave her a nasty gash.”

  Shrapnel? Did Sosa expect her to perform surgery on this poor Mwandan? Did she realize Ramya could kill the patient?

  “Sosa, I can’t—”

  “I took the piece out, Rami. And I also put a small dressing on,” Sosa said, and Ramya sighed in relief. “All I need you for is to put a sturdier bandage over it. Can you do that?”

  That she could do. “All right. Yes, I can do that,” she shouted back.

  “Rami can do anything,” Ahool declared. He was busily tending to Wiz but took a second to flash an adoring smile at her.

  “To you, I can do no wrong,” Ramya muttered with an indulging shake of her head.

  She completed the first task Sosa had assigned soon after, but there was no dearth of work in the med-bay. After escorting Wiz back to his quarters, Ramya assisted Sosa some more until all of the injured crew had been tended to. Then, together with Ahool, she tidied up the med-bay. Sosa retired into making some fresh Pax for the trio, an incentive that drove both Ramya and Ahool to work as fast as they could.

  They had finally made it around the table in Sosa’s alcove when Ramya felt the telltale shake of the Endeavor leaving the SLH.

  “What’s going on?” she asked to no one in particular. Had they come near Posci already? So soon?

  “We’ve arrived,” Sosa said, nonchalantly pouring the shiny globule-filled mixture into three goblets. “Terenze is going to meet with that . . .” Sosa let the rest of her words trail off, and Ramya had no trouble imagining the colorful adjectives that had halted at the tip of Sosa’s tongue.

  Ahool, however, was uninformed about the situation. “Meet with the leader of House Kiroff, you mean. He is much powerful man.”

  Sosa started inspecting the rafters all of a sudden. Ramya nodded but Ahool wasn’t satisfied with just a nod. “Why speak of him badly?”

  Sosa might’ve realized there was no skirting the issue, so she finished her inspection of the rafters and crinkled a nose at Ahool. “You’ll find out soon enough. Now, would you like some Pax?”

  Ramya’s arm shot forward. She needed the drink. Tired, aching all over, and heart heavy with dread at the upcoming meeting with her father, she was desperate for a diversion.

  Sosa pulled out a black box from underneath her table and placed it at the center. Ramya recognized the box; it was the eavesdropping device she had seen Sosa use before.

  “Have to keep up with the latest news,” Sosa said, smiling at a curious Ahool. “This is how we do it, young apprentice.”

  She flicked a switch and a dull humming noise trickled out.

  “Captain,” Fenny’s sharp voice drifted out a moment later. “There’s a ship approaching us. I can’t read its creds. Should we get back in the SLH?”

  The captain’s voice was steady. “No, hold course. Merin, slow down.” Ramya set the goblet down on the table and sat up. What ship could it be? After a devastating encounter with Laurden’s mercenaries that they barely scraped through, the Endeavor and its crew didn’t have the energy to fight another battle so soon. “I see it. Zoom on the hull, Fenny.”

  Ramya held her breath. Let it not be a Confederacy ship, she prayed silently.

  “That’s the Kiroff colors,” the captain announced, and Ramya finally let go of the breath she’d be refusing to slip out of her. She took a long sip of the Pax and leaned back into her chair.

  “There, I see their sigil too,” Ross added.

  “I see it now,” Fenny said, then chuckled loudly. “I love their sigil. It perfectly suits Trysten Kiroff’s sunny personality.”

  Ramya felt a flush creep up her cheek. The Kiroff sigil was a spiral of thorns meant to signify the plights the house had to survive over the ages. Now it was a butt of joke. Only no one dared say it out loud in front of her father.

  “What kind of a ship is this anyway? Looks like a Cutlass but . . . look at those cannons up top.”

  He had brought the Kinvari. Of course. It was a ship custom designed for Trysten Kiroff, armed like a Drednot but nimble like a Cutlass.

  “The ship’s the least of our worries, Ross,” the captain said. “The bigger question is: Why is it here? We were supposed to meet on Posci.”

  “I think you’ll get an answer soon, Captain,” Fenny said. “They’re hailing us.”

  A clicking sound that meant Fenny enabling the communication channel was followed by a familiar voice.

  “Captain Milos, we meet again,” her father sounded positively gleeful. Ramya felt sick to her stomach.

  “Yes, we do,” the captain’s voice was guarded. “I thought we were meeting at Posci. This isn’t Posci.”

  Her father chuckled. “I thought we were meeting two hours ago,” he said, not holding off the mockery in his words.

  “We got held up,” the captain said.

  “So I heard,” her father replied. “Laurden has sent note to the Confederacy. They’re on their way to Posci already.”

  The captain let out a guttural sigh. “That Laurden is—”

  “Despicable, I know,” her father remarked. “But very effective. I’d suggest you get out of here before Admiral Kanaa arrives.”

  A faint metallic creak drifted out. The captain must’ve got off his chair.

  “We need to talk, Lord Paramount Kiroff. We can’t put this off. Time is running out.” It was not just the slight rush behind the captain’s words or the terse tone of his voice, but the fact that he addressed her father as Lord Paramount clearly showed the urgency of the situation. The captain was showing his hands to her father and that wasn’t a good thing.

  “We’ll talk,” her father said calmly. “I’ll come to your ship. And we’ll talk.”

  There was a moment’s silence before Captain Milos spoke again. “All right, come aboard my ship.”

  Sosa sat u
p like a whip had been flicked at her. “No, no, no, Terenze. You do not invite a snake into your home. No!”

  Captain Terenze Milos wasn’t listening. “Lower the shields, Fenny,” he said.

  “Why in the stars is he lowering the shields?” Sosa said, breathing heavily.

  “To allow him to teleport,” Ramya said, remembering how the GSO had tried to use that outlawed technology to break into the Endeavor. It was strange how lucid her brain was at the moment. She could hardly find a shred of fear in her bones. Her father didn’t scare her anymore. Well, almost.

  Sosa cradled her head, shaking it from time to time, muttering, “No, Terenze! This is a mistake.”

  Ramya didn’t think it was a mistake. She understood—the captain was risking it all to find a chance to save the galaxy. To him, it was a gamble worth risking his life and his home.

  “Commander,” the captain’s voice boomed. “I’ll meet Lord Paramount Kiroff in the War Room. Other than emergencies, I do not wish to be disturbed.”

  “Oh no, not that room,” Sosa said, falling back into her chair with a loud sigh.

  “What’s problem?” Ahool asked.

  Sosa confirmed what Ramya suspected already. “I don’t have eavesdropping arrangements in every room of the ship. Although, I should have considered wiring the War Room, but it is rarely used under normal circumstances,” she said. Obviously. The room was so seldom used that Ramya did not even know where it was. Sosa grunted. “Now we won’t know what that snake has to say.”

  While Ahool nodded in understanding, Ramya took a long sip of her Pax and slid out of her chair. Ahool gave her a questioning look, but Sosa didn’t stay silent. “Where are you off to?”

  She didn’t know where exactly, but staying at the med-bay was not of much use.

  “I’ll go to my room,” she said. “I’m tired.” It wasn’t a lie. She did want to lie down and rest a bit.

  She had just crashed into her bed when her wrist comm lit up. Ramya sat up in a hurry and turned the device on.