by Drew Avera
“That’s strange, there’s a newsfeed available,” he said, shifting his hand across the console to pull up the feed.
Anki moved over next to Brendle and watched the console change to a monitor. It was an image of Luthia filling the screen. She recognized the umbilicals sticking through the cloudy atmosphere surrounding the planet. What she didn’t recognize was the source of the newsfeed. “What is this?” she asked. She couldn’t hide the sound of worry in her voice.
Brendle scratched his head nervously. “That is a video feed from the Telran, the ship that stranded me on the moon where you found me. You see these numbers along the bottom of the feed? That’s the ship of origin and the timestamp indicates it was sent several hours ago. I think jumping through Key Lourna may have affected our place in time. It’s an anomaly not unheard of, but I haven’t experienced it to this magnitude before,” he droned on, spitting out all kinds of information that didn’t pertain to the fact that she recognized the image being shown.
“That’s my world,” she said, the quivering of her lips making her voice sound weak.
“I’m sorry,” he said as the monitor lit up, showing the destruction of her world before her eyes.
Anki screamed, but hardly any sound came from her aching throat. She watched in horror as devastation erupted, setting Luthia ablaze in an inferno of Greshian design. Everything around her seemed to fade away as her heart felt like it was being torn from her chest. It was the death of everything she had ever known. The Greshians found Luthia unprotected. They killed my world, they killed my father, she thought as she collapsed to the deck. There was nothing left to protect.
Comfort was hard to come by on the Replicade. Everywhere you looked there was someone experiencing pain, either physical or emotionally. The hard truth was four people, from different worlds found themselves in an unlikely alliance, regardless of how temporary. This alliance forced them to see each other’s moments of weakness. Anki looked at the men in her company. The Greshian, the one with guilt so thick it almost defined who he was, yet without him they would be dead. The Lechun husbands, Deis and Malikea, two men lost in the dark who put themselves in harm’s way to protect strangers. And there she was, an orphan with no world left to protect. She had no tears left to shed as the Replicade drifted in the dark, the ship’s silence reflecting their own.
Anki broke the silence. “If I would have stayed and fought, then maybe I could have made a difference.”
Brendle looked up from his seat, his knees lifted to his chin and his arms wrapped around his legs making him look childlike. What he said was nothing like a child, though. “There is nothing anyone could have done to stop the Telran. The ship was designed to destroy planets and survive the attacks of a fleet of ships. Your ship, your navy, had no chance against a Greshian enemy.”
His words sounded stoic, candid, and she knew it was the truth. Luthia had flooded their navy with the most advanced weaponry they could acquire, yet the only planets to survive Greshia had been the ones who bowed before the enemy. Luthia had never had the intentions of surrender. Their pride had killed them just a surely as the Telran had. Perhaps the government of Luthia had intended that all along. The idea of such a thing made her sick to think about it.
“When Greshia destroyed Lechushe’ we thought our lives were over as well,” Deis said, breaking her train of thought. “We were lucky to have found this ship, to escape with our lives. But we have experienced guilt for surviving as well. It is not easy to live beyond the existence of your world, but we have found the means to cope with one another.”
Anki watched as Malikea grasped his husband’s hand, squeezing it gently as a way to assure they were still alive so long as they had each other. At any other time it would have felt like gloating, but with them it seemed perfectly natural. Perhaps I just rationalized it in order to cope with the severity of my loss, she thought as she rose to her feet. She didn’t know why she stood, because she had no intentions of going anywhere, but Anki felt like she had to do something or she might die.
Brendle stood next to her. When she looked at him, she could see words trying to form behind his lips, but they stood in silence, watching, waiting for the other to speak. When he finally spoke, Anki realized she had been holding her breath as she waited. “Will you come with me?”
“Where?” she asked.
“I don’t know, to talk,” he answered. He shuffled his feet in a nervous way as he waited for her to respond.
She had nothing to say, and no motivation to form words to decline his invitation, if it could even be called that. She merely nodded, stood, and followed him from the bridge to the cargo bay as the numbing pain of emptiness gnawed at her heart.
Chapter 26: Brendle
Sometimes avoiding death relatively unscathed brought out the best in people. Other times it brought out the worst. For Brendle, he hoped his actions on the bridge of the Replicade were heroic enough to mask the severity and harshness of his words, though he had a feeling his words weren’t as loud as drawing his weapon on Malikea had been. The fact the other man had attacked him wasn’t as audacious as the fact Brendle was seconds from firing. He didn’t want to kill anyone. In fact, he hoped more than anything that his days of killing were behind him, but in the throes of trying to escape the snares of the Telran, he had been caught up in the moment, flinching from fear and needing to do something with the nervous energy. That moment of terror almost made him pull the trigger and it had nothing to do with the fact he had been attacked first. Everyone seemed to understand, but he still wasn’t ready to forgive himself. For Brendle, it didn’t matter that very few people could handle situations at that tempo, to know how the enemy would respond and be one step ahead of them. If not for Brendle’s effort, everyone on board would be dead, him included. But he took no solace in that fact. He was more afraid than ever because being so close to death showed him something he hadn’t known about himself. That something wasn’t tangible, but it felt real enough, at least to his heart. He could only hope to express what he felt in words that had meaning to Anki. She was from another world, and he could see in her eyes how much his presence scared her. Not for what he had done, but what his people had done to her world. The utter destruction of yet another world, another race, and his was the face that reminded her of that very fact.
The cargo bay was the only place of relative privacy. For Brendle, he felt as if his entire world had dissolved while bringing the truth into focus at the same time. It was an awkward feeling, one he couldn’t put into words, though he wanted to try. For Anki, he knew there was nothing left to go back to. Her world was destroyed, her people gone save for a few refugees scouring their way across the galaxy and hiding from the tyrannical Greshian Empire. The fact she sat next to one of their kind and didn’t slit his throat said just as much about his presence as it did her. Though he couldn’t help but wonder if her not killing him just for spite was a display of weakness in its own way. She owed him her life, but Brendle knew he owed her the same. If not for him, then she would not have crash landed on that lonesome moon, but she would have also been in the line of fire of the Telran, her transport would have been destroyed, and he would have died alone on that rock without ever having known her.
The more he thought about it, the more he realized he had much to be thankful for. He regretted that thankfulness in a small way, because he knew she was hurting, feeling guilty for surviving. He imagined Malikea’s words were reverberating in her mind as she struggled to come to terms with her new scope of reality. Brendle wished he could take it back, to rewind the clock and try to change things for the better, but those thoughts were useless. He needed to give her hope in some way, but he couldn’t find the words, so they sat there in silence. He had lost count of how many times he wanted to extend his hand to her, to comfort her. He didn’t even know where those thoughts were coming from, but he recognized the ache in his heart for her as something more than whatever he imagined she thought of him.
B
rendle was growing frustrated with himself. He needed to act or to say something. Otherwise it was pointless for him to have asked her to follow him. He could only imagine what was going through her mind at the moment. He knew what the cause of pain was, but how it manifested itself was anyone’s guess. When he finally spoke, it was with the only thing he could think of to say. “Do you believe in the gods, or a god?” Brendle asked. Their bodies were close enough to almost be touching, his words a delicate whisper as if he was trying to keep them secret.
“No,” she said flatly. “I don’t have much reason to believe, though. If any kind of god exists, then why wouldn’t they save my people?”
Brendle winced at the question, but fought the urge to answer it, not wanting to deviate from the questions burning in his heart. “What about love?” The question was only three words, but felt much heavier as they fell from his lips. “What about the concept of forever belonging to someone else?”
Anki sat quietly for a moment, contemplating his words. He could see how uneasiness burned at her as she wrapped her arms around herself, a psychological need for shelter when she felt exposed. Brendle saw a look of contempt on her face, but he didn’t know if it was because of the line of questioning or if it was something else. Perhaps it was him. “I don’t know,” she answered, her words barely carried across the short distance from her lips to his ears before signs of her defensiveness built up. “Why do you ask me such things?” Her voice was louder now, more accusatory. Their eyes met; the hurt of his and the fragile stare of her own beating back at him for a burden she was obviously carrying beneath the surface. He watched her as her gaze softened and something like regret was etched upon her face, starting with her eyes and moving to her pouty lips. “I’m sorry,” she said. A collision of relief emanated from both of them and the tension seemed to die down a bit.
“No, I’m sorry,” Brendle said. “I―” His words were cut short by an explosion next to the cargo bay door. Anki stood quickly and moved towards the damage in hopes of repairing it. “I just wanted to tell you I want to be your forever,” he said, drawing her attention back to him instead of the danger piercing the hull of the Replicade. Her eyes were wide as she stared at him. She looked like she was holding back words, or tears, or something else. Before she could say anything the cargo bay door was ripped away and all of the air was sucked out of the room. The change in pressure yanked Anki from her feet and drove her into the dark expanse of vacuum, and Brendle watched in horror as the woman he was beginning to fall for was torn away from him.
Without a second thought, Brendle grabbed a tie-down strap and clipped it to his belt. It was designed to hold down crates as a ship accelerated and decelerated through space. Surly it would hold me and keep me from drifting too far away from the ship. He was about to execute the dumbest plan in his short life, but he hoped it would pay off. Running in vacuum was like sitting underwater and fighting the currents as they tried to drift you away. Muscular control was negligible and you couldn’t breathe. Luckily, there was an EVA floating nearby, he could only hope the thrusters worked and could propel him fast enough to catch Anki.
For Brendle, the lack of air evoked a feeling of panic, but he pressed on. He could still see Anki, her black hair floating around her face exaggerating the expression of a silent scream. She was running out of time, they both were, death was at the cusp of each second as it ticked past. Brendle leaped into the void, igniting the thruster and feeling the surge pushing him forward to where the woman who could have just as easily killed him when they first met, waited with open arms. The drift of falling up and into her arms seemed to take forever, but eventually their oxygen-deprived bodies touched. The tether holding them to the ship, attached to Brendle’s belt, ratcheted to a stop as he caught her in time for the auto-spool to engage and begin to drag them back inside.
Brendle pulled her close, noticing her body heat was already starting to drop even as the spool wound tighter, hauling them back towards the Replicade. He could feel the cold of space already attacking the exposed flesh of his body, the chill of it burning in a way he had not expected. Anki pulled her head away to look at him, the cloud of black hair wrapping around the lower half of her face. He looked into those eyes, the cold freezing her tears as they formed and breaking away with each blink. The look she gave him said a thousand things at once, none of them even having to be uttered by her tongue. He craved to hear those words, brought to life by her voice and the smooth soft texture of perfect lips. He knew then, more than at any other time, that he loved her. But even such love couldn’t keep his eyes open as his body faded and his heart stopped beating.
Chapter 27: Anki
The weight of losing her home world felt heavy on Anki’s chest. She had no more than succumbed to a ray of hope of saving Luthia before it was dashed away by the war the Telran carried with it. What made her think she had a chance to stop an empire? Her thoughts were all the more clouded by the fact an enemy of her people was seated next to her, so close their skin radiated heat off each other. The fact she hadn’t slit his throat and watched him bleed out before her eyes would be hard to explain to any superiors in the Luthian Navy. But alas, none of Luthia existed any more. Now the burden of her seeming betrayal was hers alone to carry and she was already weary of it. She didn’t have the heart to carry out such an act of violence, though. If anything, she was grateful for Brendle. He was an unlikely hero, as hard as it was to draw that conclusion knowing what little she knew of him. The fact he was a Greshian had been an enormous thing for her to overcome, yet it seemed that fact was what allowed them to survive. It was ironic when she thought about it, when thoughts of Luthia erupting in flames didn’t fill her mind with horror.
In the cargo bay, where Brendle had brought her to talk, she sat expressionless. She knew something was on his mind; perhaps his own betrayal was heavy on his mind. There was a lot of that going around lately. She assumed it might be an apology for how he reacted on the bridge, ordering the others around, ordering her around in order to gain access to the ship. She could hardly blame him for wanting to take control of the situation, to save his own life. The fact he saved her and the rest of the ragtag crew of the Replicade might have been a happy accident, but she knew looking into his eyes that it was more than that. It was that knowledge that scared her.
Trapped in her own thoughts, a misery of sorts, Brendle interrupted with a hushed question. “Do you believe in the gods, or a god?” she was put off slightly by how he could think of a deity at a time like this. She felt indignation well up inside of her before she even answered.
“No, I don’t have much reason to believe, though. If any kind of god exists, then why wouldn’t they save my people?” it was a simple enough explanation for the tears she fought to hide. She didn’t wish to share her emotional turmoil with someone who knew who killed her world. Every time she thought of her world she saw only her father’s face. It wasn’t that Luthia died, it was that she would never see him again or hear his voice. If there was a god, then she knew whose fault it was that Luthia was no more. The Greshian Empire was a good scapegoat for the blame, but whatever sentient being allowed that empire to rise was also to blame.
“What about love?” He asked. She felt him looking at her expectantly. The pause lasted a moment longer before he rephrased the question. “What about the concept of forever belonging to someone else?”
Suddenly more uncomfortable with where the conversation was going she wrapped her arms around herself. She wanted to be somewhere safe, not from the war, but from the feeling welling up inside her chest. It was fear and sadness, but it was also something else. “I don’t know,” she answered, frustration filling the space between the two of them. “Why do you ask me such things?” she asked, her voice rising. She wanted nothing more than to blame everything on the man sitting next to her. It would be so easy to take all of her anger and pain out on him, but each time the thought crossed her mind she could see something in his eyes, something that drew
her towards being compassionate. She hated it. “I’m sorry,” she said. Regret painted her voice in a way she didn’t like, but it was appropriate, she thought.
“No, I’m sorry,” Brendle said. “I―” An explosion behind her cut him off. Anki turned and ran towards the damaged hull next to the cargo bay door. She didn’t know what to do, but knew something, anything had to be done to save the ship. “I just wanted to tell you I want to be your forever,” he finished. His words were unsettling in a way that made her think they were the ones she had wanted to hear all along. Anki looked at Brendle, the rush of atmosphere escaping the Replicade behind her. She watched the movement of his throat as he swallowed hard, nervous that he said the wrong thing when it had been the right thing all along. She wanted to respond, to give into the moment and disregard the danger lurking behind her. Her eyes widened as they met his again. She licked her lips as she prepared her response. And then she was ripped out of the cargo bay and thrust into the dark, her eyes watching Brendle as he looked at her in horror.
The involuntary muscles in her body caused Anki to try to breathe, but there was no oxygen to be savored by her lungs. Each attempt exhaled more stale air from her lungs until the pain in her chest rose, forcing her to gasp harder. The frigid vacuum of space engulfed her, and every part of her body reacted to it in kind. She tried to cry out from the pain, but with no air and nowhere for the sound to travel, she was met with only the silent scream of desperation. Ice began to form over her eyes as tears forced their way from her tear ducts. Each blink broke off more bits of ice and she watched as the tiny flecks of frozen tears departed her bodily vessel and reached out towards unknown places. Her eyes also saw Brendle jumping out for her. She would have thought he was an idiot, but the desperation of being starved of oxygen wasn’t letting her think clearly. Instead, she watched him descend on her like a silent predator as the Replicade faded behind him, her vision narrowing on his eyes.