by Drew Avera
Lieutenant Vesna walked back to him and said, “Everyone has been informed, sir.” He stood at attention, staring at Ilium with wide eyes.
“Thank you,” Ilium said. The man did not say anything, but a concerned look met Ilium’s gaze. “Is there something wrong?”
Lieutenant Vesna’s eyes darted left and right as he licked his lips. His eyes were moist as if he had wiped tears away before coming to Ilium. “Chief Harso received a message regarding his family,” Vesna said.
Ilium looked up at him. “What about them?”
A trembling hand wiped a tear from his cheek before he responded. “They have been abducted and threatened with death if he does not comply with some order by something called the Organization.”
Ilium gave a puzzled look to the younger man. “What Organization?”
“I’m not sure, sir.”
Ilium knew exactly what Organization, though, and the thought made his wicked heart warm. I wouldn’t have thought he’d have the balls to mention this, he thought, but I have to hand it to him that it takes a lot of guts to stand in defiance of Harager. “Have Chief Harso confined to his quarters until we have time to handle his situation properly, and alert his next in command” Ilium ordered. “In the meantime, we have the duty of our people to execute.”
“Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Vesna left the bridge to do as Ilium ordered, and the rest of the crew in the bridge carried on about their business, clueless about what was going on with Harso. In less than twenty minutes they would enter the Xie Du Sector. It was one of the outlying sectors who had not yet committed their allegiance to Greshia, but Ilium had no reason to assume they would be threatened by the small, non-relevant navy drifting through the sector. Besides, the Hamæråté is quick and agile; we can outrun them if we can’t outgun them, he thought. It was the kind of thinking that won wars of the mind if not the spirit.
“Captain, there is an incoming transmission on your secured line,” Ensign Tura said as she approached him. She was one of less than a dozen females on the Hamæråté, and she was the only female officer on board. Ilium had made a point to read up on her file, not wanting to be put in a precarious position by assuming he could get away with some of the things that tainted his career before he reported to the Telran. Luckily, Tura seemed to be a straight arrow and not one of the stubborn kind that took themselves too seriously. Those are the ones you can trust to do the right thing, even if it’s wrong. Those are my kind of people.
“Patch it through to my office,” Ilium said as he rose to leave the bridge. For any jump the commanding officer was expected to be on station, but a transmission from a secured line could mean anything. Better to err on the side of caution, especially if Harager is paying me another call. I wouldn’t want to disappoint him. Today is a big day, after all.
Ilium’s office was colder than usual when he arrived; and dark too, he noticed. He reached for the light switch, but nothing happened when he flipped it. He knew he should be afraid, but that was what whoever was responsible wanted. Instead, he smiled, and spoke. “How can I help you, Chief Harso?”
There was a sound from the corner of the room and a small lamp illuminated. “It’s funny that you assumed it was Chief Harso, sir.” Lieutenant Vesna turned to face him, his eyes narrow.
“What do you want, Vesna?”
The man sat in Ilium’s chair, kicking his feet up on the desk, which was completely out of character for him. “I want the ship, sir.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” He made no move, but Ilium felt as though there was a threat coming sooner or later.
“And you expect me to just hand it over, do you?” Ilium asked sardonically.
“Something like that.”
“Not going to happen, kid.”
“I don’t think you know who the fuck you’re talking to, Ilium. I’m not asking as Lieutenant Vesna. This order is coming from Harager.”
Ilium stared, eyes wide. He had the sinking feeling that Chief Harso wasn’t the man he was led to believe, that Vesna must have been Harager’s mole on the Hamæråté. “I see, well Harager isn’t here, and this is still my ship until I’m told otherwise.”
Vesna let his feet drop to the deck and he stood, leering at Ilium. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. This ship is not yours any longer.”
“I don’t think so, kid.”
“No? Maybe this will convince you.” Vesna lifted his weapon and leveled it at Ilium’s face. The cold steel stared back at him, reflecting the shocked look on his face as Vesna moved to take everything away from him that he had earned. Ilium swallowed hard. It wasn’t every day he was taken advantage of. Part of him wanted to revel in it. After all, it was new and refreshing. The other part of him wanted to tear Vesna’s eyeballs out of his face and feed them to him.
“What are you going to do, shoot me?”
Lieutenant Vesna smiled. “That’s all up to you, sir.” He looked behind Ilium and spoke to someone out of Ilium’s view. “Take him.”
Chapter Eleven: Deis
The bridge of the Replicade hummed as it bathed in a sea of blue luminosity. The air passing through the recyclers was chilly as Deis thought about all the strange things he had seen before this day, none of them compared to witnessing people appearing out of thin air. Even the horrors of being abducted by pirates to be sold into slavery paled in comparison to the otherworldly spectacle he had witnessed in the cargo bay less than an hour before. He could hardly wrap his head around what he saw, much less discern how it happened. In some cultures what he saw would be viewed as a miracle, but for Lechuns it was thought to be something much darker.
Exactly what kind of strange power was capable of transporting three people onto the Replicade, he was unsure. He just hoped it wasn’t malevolent. There were stories in the Lechun culture that spoke of devils traversing the dark, feeding on the souls of the innocent. He could see evidence of such demonic activity in the way Brendle described the girl, but he had the feeling that Carista herself was not a demon. Still, knowing that kind of power was more than a mere myth shook him to his core. He was just glad that Anki and Brendle were two-thirds of the people who appeared. That at least made the experience somewhat less frightening.
“Where could she have come from?” Malikea asked as he turned to walk back towards Deis. Malikea wasn’t watching where he was going, just taking the ten or so steps in one direction before turning and coming back. Deis thought Malikea had turned more than a hundred times since their conversation started and he still hadn’t holstered his weapon; Malikea simply let it hang next to his leg as he held it in a loose grip, which made Deis a little nervous. Deis imagined it would get heavy eventually and remind Malikea it was there. Until then, he simply watched his husband pace around the bridge, hoping Malikea would not drop his gun while he tried to come up with theory after theory as to how Brendle, Anki, and the child suddenly teleported onto the Replicade. “I think she was part of a government testing facility,” he added.
“I think that is the obvious part,” Deis said, trying to not come across too harsh. It was difficult considering how freaked out he felt at the moment. “The real question, though, is what were they using her to test.” He could just imagine the girl in a cage with tubes running into her body filled with some unknown chemicals. She looked frail when he saw her, perhaps ill or sickly.
Malikea nodded, almost as if the mystery of the girl’s past was the most exciting thing to happen to him in his entire life. Deis knew Malikea was protective of children, and that was probably why Malikea felt it necessary to figure this situation out, but Deis was terrified by what they could now have on board. After being held captive for a few months, and with their own experiences in torture, Deis felt he knew what Carista may have been going through. What kind of monsters does these evil things to children?
“I agree with Malikea, it was certainly some form of government testing based on the guys in suits chasing her down. They could have been from a
private organization, but something tells me this girl is part of a secret government project, and to answer your question, I think they wanted to use her as a weapon,” Brendle said, breaking his silence. Deis had almost forgotten he was even in the room. Almost.
“To what effect?” Malikea asked.
“To have her infiltrate enemy facilities?” Deis said. What other reason would you want someone to teleport to other locations?
All three men stood in silence as the Replicade flew farther away from Karanta, leaving behind the men desperately trying to track down the strange girl and her frightening ability. Those men probably knew more about the girl and how to manipulate her powers than the girl did, and that thought made Deis feel sick as he thought of all the ways they probably controlled her. It made him think about his own stint in captivity at the hands of Crase Tuin—not just once, but twice.
“I think it’s more than that,” Brendle added.
“How so?” Malikea asked. He looked down at the dead weight in his hand and holstered his gun. The act caught Deis’ attention and made him smile despite the dark situation they were in and the thoughts lurking in his mind.
Brendle leaned against the console and looked down at the screen depicting the Replicade’s trajectory. Deis watched as he made a few adjustments to the flight data, running his fingers along the screen before speaking again. “Anki and I had strange feelings when she looked at us. On more than one occasion I would look into her eyes and they would shift in color. Once, I could have sworn I was looking at my own eyes staring back at me,” Brendle said. “I think she has an ability to get into people’s heads and control them. I remember holding my weapon up at one of the men, wanting with every fiber of my being to pull the trigger while not wanting to do so at all. It was like two minds were inside my head, but I couldn’t distinguish between the two.”
“So she has mind control powers too?” Deis asked, but he said it more like a statement.
“I don’t know. Maybe? But there was something else too. I kept seeing this mental image of something called CERCO. It was written on everything in these vivid flashes, but I only saw it when we were cocooned in the light and transported here. Between those flashes, I would look at her and see what looked like my own eyes looking back at me.”
“I know what you mean by the eye thing,” Deis said. “I saw it too in my brief interaction with her in the cargo bay. What about this CERCO thing? Maybe there is something to that. It may be an angle worth pursuing.”
“Yeah, but how do you research something like this? It’s pretty unprecedented, to say the least.” Brendle crossed his arms and frowned.
“Finding CERCO shouldn’t be too hard with a basic search on the computer,” Deis said as he sat at the navigation console and brought the monitor online. “As far as the changing eye situation is concerned, that’s something very peculiar.”
“This is unbelievable,” Malikea said. “We had stories about people with these powers on our home world, but it was all fantasy. No one was ever really able to do any of those things.”
“We also grew up on a world that sought seclusion from the rest of the Alorian Galaxy, even after the Service Stations were constructed to unite us. It was that closed-minded isolationism that kept us in the dark as the Greshian Empire expanded into our sector and eventually destroyed us. I think it is fair to say we were not in the loop for most things that were possible or plausible within the realm of science. Besides, we had no historical reason to believe any of those acts were truly possible. Maybe it is, but no one was able to tap into that kind of power on our world,” Deis suggested. He scrolled through several pages, but came up with very little in regards to CERCO. “The best I can tell about this organization is that it is a multi-planet technology conglomerate. There are a few short articles about military technologies, but very little about the people in charge. Maybe this organization is hiding what they are doing and are using her power to turn her into a weapon.”
“Maybe,” Malikea agreed. “But even so, how was she able to transport to this ship?”
That is the biggest question, Deis thought as he spun around in his seat to face Malikea and Brendle. “Brendle, you said it felt like she was in your head. Do you think it is possible that it was her ability to tap into things in your mind that allowed her to connect to where we were, to this ship?”
Brendle jumped up, startled by something, a realization Deis presumed. “Holy shit, if that’s the case, then we might be in more danger than I thought,” he said.
“Why is that?”
“Because the Replicade was not the first place we went, and we aren’t the only people who she came into contact with.”
“What?” Deis asked.
Brendle took a deep breath. “I can only see bits and pieces of what happened after Anki and I came into contact with Carista. We were in a standoff with two men who were after her. We had our guns drawn and so did they. Somewhere in that moment I tried to lower my gun, but I couldn’t. It was as if I was being controlled by someone else, and I presume it was Carista. One of the men caught on to what was happening and he pressed his weapon against her head, execution style.”
“Oh my,” Malikea gasped.
“Yeah, so as I’m standing there with my gun pointed at him at pointblank range, some weird shit started happening. It felt like the world was folding onto itself and tearing itself apart. I remember closing my eyes and feeling nauseated. When I opened my eyes again, we were on a ship, but not this one.”
“Do you have any idea where you were?” Deis asked, his eyes wide with confusion.
“I honestly have no idea. It felt like we were there for only a few minutes, but not really there at all. I just remember people running over to her and seeing badges on their coats that said “CERCO”. The problem is I don’t know if these visions were real or her memories.”
“If they were real, then I’m assuming she came into contact with them?”
“Yes, but only for a second or two. I was too busy trying to keep from throwing up to really pay close attention.”
“What do you think this means?” Deis asked.
“That’s a good question, and not one I’m very enthusiastic about finding out.”
“When they came into contact with her, what happened?” Malikea asked.
Brendle shook his head. “I don’t know, but I felt some pain at that moment, but it wasn’t my pain. Maybe they did something to her.”
“Maybe that is why she is unconscious,” Malikea suggested.
“Maybe,” Brendle said. “Look, do you mind if I go try and sleep for a bit? I’m really tired and my brain feels like it is on fire.”
“Sure, we can handle everything,” Deis said, standing as Brendle rose from his seat.
“Thank you, guys.”
Deis watched as Brendle walked out of the bridge, his shoulders slumped.
“What an amazing story,” Malikea said.
“Yes it is, but I’m worried that whatever they encountered during that brief period of time might come back to haunt us.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s just a feeling,” Deis said. “Just a feeling.”
Chapter Twelve: Brendle
The room he shared with Anki felt cold and empty without her in it. He wanted to catch up on sleep, but instead he lay wide awake, staring at the dark overhead of the dimly lit room. The theories brought forward about the girl named Carista and the power she wielded spun through his mind. Malikea, Deis, and Brendle were all of the same mind, that the girl was being used, perhaps even harmed in whatever experiments were being performed on her. That didn’t sir right with Brendle, and his heart beat rapidly as he thought about what he wanted to do to the people who could bring harm to a little girl like that.
She was a stranger, but she was also an innocent victim, no different than any victim of the Greshian Navy. He carried the burden of guilt for all the times he was the oppressor, and he refused to accept that there was no com
ing back from the person he used to be. Regardless of his reasoning, Brendle felt he needed to protect her, to avenge her for what she had gone through, but exactly what that was he was unsure. The only information he had to go on was his own experiences and visions he saw while they traversed the system cocooned in her “bubble”—or whatever it was—that transported them away from the dark-clad men who were chasing her. His mind was jumbled even trying to remember what happened with those men. It almost felt as if none of it happened at all, which cast further doubts on the legitimacy of what little information they had to go on. All he had was a name and a strange girl unconscious in his medical bay. Both of them had secrets not easily revealed, but it was all he had at the moment.
Somehow knowing CERCO existed, but having minimal information about them did little to make Brendle feel comfortable in his skin. Speculation was a fool’s science, but everything he had experienced with Carista, the strange powers and the linking of their minds, seemed to persuade him of how dark a corporation CERCO could be. In some of the glimpses into Carista’s mind, Brendle saw the horror that she experienced. That alone should have been all the proof he needed to know they were bad people.
Then why am I so conflicted right now?
It wasn’t that he wanted to defend CERCO, but he thought the girl could have manipulated him, toyed with his emotions, and fed her fears and hatred into him to illicit a response. That kind of power terrified him just as much as the idea of some corporation’s use of children to create a weapon.
Frustrated, Brendle rose from his bed and paced through the small room. He could take only a few steps in each direction before he ran out of space in the cramped quarters, but he did his best thinking on his feet. At least I used to, he thought as the same cyclic thoughts stormed in his mind. Questions without answers were maddening.