Amara snatched the data-pad away from him and slipped it back into her pack. “That will do. Thank you.”
Well, we got what we wanted. It was still possible that we wouldn’t find Jax at this other base, but it was a lead, and it was better than nothing.
We were ready to leave, but Amara wasn’t. She clenched her hands into fists.
“What happened down there?” she asked, her voice hitching. “What happened to the base, to everyone?”
Fallan gulped hard and looked away from her. The pain was clear in his eyes. I didn’t know what sort of past these two had, but it was obvious that they’d been close, that these people and their cause had meant something to Amara at one time.
Finally, Fallan found the words as he twiddled his fingers together, trying to keep his composure.
“Let’s just say that mistakes were made. We put our trust in people we shouldn’t have.”
Amara pursed her lips and nodded. “Hm, that’s something we have in common then.” She whirled around and started past me, but paused. “Take care of yourself, Fallan. You’re better than this.”
Without letting him respond, she strode away without another word or glance back. The Elarri and I followed her.
We were silent for a good while before I deemed it appropriate to break it with a less than appropriate observation.
“It seems that a lot of people from your past have it really rough once you leave them.” Probably not the smartest thing to say, but I had a habit of putting my foot in my mouth. And I wasn’t wrong. First Amara’s Zarthian friend Zemi on Praeoria, now Fallan. Neither had been too enthused to see her.
But Amara didn’t blast me, she just sighed. “Life’s interesting like that, isn’t it?”
Yes… Yes, it is.
“Let’s get back to the ship. Hopefully, we’ll find Jinx at the end of this trail.”
9
Jinx
I was against it, but Jax insisted that I see how our people lived. Not as if me and him and countless others in the resistance were former slaves and knew firsthand how terrible our people could have it. But he wanted me to see how even the non-enslaved lived. So here I was, on a resistance craft, wedged behind Jax and his copilot Caveen, a boy younger than even me.
Caveen was nice, but he looked at me with the type of reverence that should be reserved for people in authority that actually earned their authority and respect. I hadn’t earned anything. And he wasn’t the only one to look at me like that. My speech dissuading this behavior did not, in fact, dissuade this behavior.
Still, he was nice.
I would have liked him a lot more if we weren’t crammed inside a tiny fighter. Unfortunately, we couldn’t requisition anything bigger since the freighters and cruisers were all being sent out for patrol. And the general didn’t deem this a priority mission, so a fighter would do. Of course, I supposed I could have asked for something more comfortable, me being their queen and all, but that would only reinforce their image of me, and that wasn’t something I wanted.
So, here we were, boom tubing from system to system, me practically in Caveen’s lap. The poor boy hadn’t the faintest clue where to put his hands. I took it he didn’t get very close to girls often, which was a shame, since he was a handsome enough lad. His hair was darker than most Torgoran hair, oily red like blood. His eyes were deeply brown. Cute small nose and little cheeks to die for. If he was older and I didn’t have Yan, I’d find him appealing.
“We’re almost there,” Jax announced. On a bigger ship, we could have just jumped straight from Halyon to our destination, but fighters couldn’t handle that since they didn’t have jump drives. So, we had to use the system’s boom tube to bounce to the next system and the next. It was always bumpy, and the initial jolt always made my stomach lurch. Plus, boom tubes were for public use, so there was always the possibility of running into trouble.
That didn’t happen for us this time, thankfully.
We came out of the last one and the ship slowed as we neared a rusty orange planet. Jax sighed. “Welcome to Raxima.”
Even as far removed from Torgoran space and affairs as I’d been most of my life, I knew enough to know that Raxima was a dump. Famously so. Air choked by smog, oceans poisoned by toxins, it was a dumping ground for corporations throughout the galaxy. It had been bad even under my parents, but they hadn’t allowed too many people to live there at least. But as Jax explained, Tarvath sent a lot of the destitute here to live in squalor.
As we entered the atmosphere, I could already smell the place through the visor. Given it was pressurized and shouldn’t have allowed for that, it said something to the disgusting nature of the planet. When we broke through the clouds, which were a puke green, I found literal mountains of garbage making up the horizon.
“Materelle give me strength,” I said.
“Not so pretty, is it.”
I gulped. No, it was not. This was terrible. And we were at a distance. I couldn’t begin to image how bad it was on the ground. Looked like I was going to find out.
We flew over a decrepit city scape that was very much alive with activity, ships and speeders and the like zipping around, but the buildings all looked dirty and broken and like they would fall over with the slightest of breezes. Jax took us beyond the skyscrapers through fields of refineries before we finally came to a long valley of trash.
A voice buzzed over the fighter’s comm. “Fighter LG-4497, please input clearance codes.”
“Stand by,” Jax replied. He flipped a red switch and input a code. There was silence, then the man’s voice from the other side returned.
“You’re cleared for landing. Hope you had an easy trip.”
“It’s never easy coming by fighter.”
The comm went dark. I looked at him. “Where are we landing?”
He smirked. “You’ll see”
Jax promptly took us into a nosedive at the trash. It made my stomach drop out of my body. I clung to Caveen, which made his face go red.
“Jax! What are you doing?” I shrieked, but he just smiled wickedly.
As we rapidly approached the trash-covered ground, I clung tighter and tighter to Caveen.
He gulped. “Uh, Y-Your Majesty? C-could you p-please not hold onto me s-so tight?”
My gaze snapped to him. “Don’t you ever call me ‘your majesty’ again! Got it?”
He gulped again. His face was so red I thought he was on fire.
“Y-yes, ma’am.”
And still we plummeted. The earth rose to greet us. “Jax!”
At the last moment, he whooped loudly and pulled back on the stick, jerking the fighter up, but it wasn’t enough to halt our momentum. I screamed as we crashed into the trashy ground…and then nothing. We went through the ground, as if we’d passed through the cloud.
I suddenly found that we were in a large warehouse—no, a hangar. Outfitted with dozens of fighters. It was a resistance base. It took me a moment to calm myself and catch my breath, though my heart refused to slow one bit. I detached myself from Caveen and patted him on the head.
“Thanks for that, love.”
That just made his face go even more crimson.
I whipped around to fully face Jax and shoved a finger in his face. “You devil-loving…erthket udu!”
He laughed at that. “Hey, language, Your Maj—”
“Finish that word and I’ll crash this ship for real.”
Jax obliged, though he didn’t stop his snickering.
“I just wanted to have some fun with you.” He focused on his flying as he put us down next to the rows of fighters. Mechanics in bright yellow suits came to run diagnostics on our ship. The Sanara didn’t require such things because she could handle jumps just fine, but going through a lot of boom tubes took its toll on small ships like this.
The cockpit flew open. Jax stood up in his seat and threw his arms out wide. “Welcome to Raxima, the toxic jewel of the Kingdom of Torgor.”
I looked up at the ceil
ing. The warehouse roof was open to the dim orange sky, and there didn’t seem to be land there, but I knew what I saw. Suddenly, the sky flickered over the open space, and I caught a glimpse of the trashy ground that I thought we’d crash into.
“A holo-projection?”
Jax nodded, sporting a proud smile. “Yep. Not cheap, but it’s untraceable and near impossible for the naked eye to look past. Helps us stay low when royal patrols fly by, though that’s rare anyway. There’s not a lot of life out past the cities, so the patrols don’t usually bother coming this far out in the wastes.”
“Huh.” I turned my gaze to him, pursed my lips, and punched him in the arm.
“Ow!”
“Don’t scare me like that again!”
He laughed. “I won’t make any promises. Come on.”
Jax exited the cockpit and I followed, Caveen on my heels. The mechanics swarmed around us and didn’t even bother to ask who we were, though I wasn’t going to complain about that. With all the attention I’d gotten at the Halyon base, I was looking forward to staying under the radar.
Caveen and I fell into step alongside Jax.
“The resistance has several bases throughout Raxima,” he said. “This place is a cesspit, and Tarvath lets some of his most corrupt supporters run the show and do whatever they want here. They can be as cruel and vicious as they want to the citizenry. As if it’s not bad enough that the people have to live here in these conditions.”
“That’s horrible,” I replied.
“The planet is too large and too populated for us to mount a full-scale invasion, and Tarvath’s supporters value their sandbox too much. Tarvath’s wrath would be great if we took it.”
“So…you what? Settle for guerilla tactics?”
He frowned at me. “It’s all we can do for now. Here at least. When we take out Tarvath, things will fall apart, and we’ll be able to take this planet in full.”
I couldn’t argue that. I didn’t have the military knowledge to know the pros and cons of occupying one planet over another.
Jax brought us over to a speeder. A soldier in a red uniform stood by it. When he saw us coming, he stood at attention and saluted Jax. I wouldn’t get used to that. Though I also wouldn’t get used to being a queen, so…
“Lieutenant Navari! We heard— We heard you were dead…”
He patted the soldier on their shoulder. “Nope, very much alive, Sabonis. Mind if we borrow this speeder and the blaster rifles that I’m sure are packed away?”
The soldier—Sabonis—stammered, “W-well, I-I don’t know… I really should report your a-arrival with Colonel Shevva.”
Jax flashed a grin and waved that off as he pushed past Sabonis and sat in the driver’s seat of the speeder.
“Don’t worry about the colonel. She’ll be so happy I’m alive that any anger will go right out the window.”
Sabonis frowned. “You really don’t know the colonel that well if you think she’ll let you break protocol so cavalierly.”
“She’ll make an exception for me.” He locked eyes with me and Caveen and jerked his head for us to hop in.
I did so, as did our shy little friend. I shrugged and gave Sabonis a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry.”
He waved that off. “Be careful out there. We’ve seen increased inquisitor activity lately, and soldier patrols have doubled in the last month.”
“We’ll be cautious. Thanks, Sabonis.”
Sabonis saluted. “Good hunting, Lieutenant.”
Sabonis left us. Jax turned on the speeder, then opened a compartment and retrieved a trio of gas masks. He passed them to me and Caveen.
“Here, put these on. The air in the city is damn near toxic. It isn’t necessarily lethal, but it isn’t healthy.”
That didn’t bode well for what we would see, but I nodded and put the mask on. It fit snug against my cheeks and chin, and when I breathed in, the air tasted somehow sweet and musty at the same time. Jax noticed my reaction.
“The filters are old and dusty, but they’ll work. Once you break them in, it’ll get better.”
“It better.”
He smiled, pulled back on the stick, and we shot forward through a tunnel that went out of the base and under the fields of trash and refineries. It was a very elaborate network, and again I had to wonder how the resistance came by a place like this.
“So, what are we doing?” I asked.
Jax didn’t look back at me. “As I said, you need to see how our people live. I don’t want to upset you, but you need to realize the reality that our people face.”
I leaned back and crossed my arms. I didn’t like his tone all that much. Very patronizing.
The tunnel sloped up and into the open air. Refineries rose all around us, spewing black clouds of toxins into the atmosphere. Right then, I was glad for the masks. For several minutes, Jax navigated us through the maze of corridors and roads that made up the refinery fields. There must have been miles of it. But finally, we came out of it onto a long open stretch of road that led to the city proper.
Being on the ground didn’t help my view of the city, in fact, it made it worse. The skyscrapers were crumbling messes and many buildings looked to be made of the same garbage heaps that dotted the horizon. In a sense, the city looked like it had been through a war, like it was a bombed-out shell of its former self. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if that was the case.
As we approached, I could see taller, elevated roadways leading to and from the city, nothing like the patch of dirt we hovered over now.
“Soldiers keep tabs on the main roads,” Jax said, as if reading my thoughts. “But these back roads are good for getting in and out of the city.”
“Really? I feel very exposed out here.”
He flashed a grin. “Better than being caught sneaking in amongst the shadows. This way, we look rather innocuous, like we’re just trying to beat the tolls.”
“But what if you do need to sneak in unseen?”
“We have tunnels and secret entrances all over the city,” Caveen answered. He cleared his throat. “We have safehouses throughout too.”
“Good to know. Seems like the resistance is really committed to Raxima.”
Jax nodded, his gaze forward, turning determined. “Raxima is ground zero. This is where the suffering of our people is at its highest, slaves notwithstanding. If we’re going to take the resistance to the next level and blossom hope and a willingness to fight, this is where it happens.”
I nodded. He sounded so inspired, so passionate. It was nice to see. He had such clear goals, and I longed for that kind of purpose. Of course, a goal like that existed in my heart, but I didn’t know how to obtain it yet.
We entered the city.
The outer districts were widely abandoned and rundown. I didn’t know why, nor did I want to know. We found a well-hidden little alley and exited the speeder. Jax pulled out a dirty tarp from the storage compartment in the back and covered the speeder. It wasn’t a lot, as anyone stumbling across it would know what it was, but it was better than nothing.
I followed the boys as they led me deeper into the dilapidated cityscape. It didn’t take long for people to come out of the metalwork.
It was a hellhole of the highest order. Garbage everywhere. Excrement everywhere. No plumbing from what I could see. Beggars at every corner. The ones that weren’t begging were just has haggard and dirty and miserable looking as those that were.
Everyone had soulless stares. Hopeless gazes. There was no joy here, just survival. And only barely. It made my chest ache.
Torgoran soldiers in black-and-gold armor patrolled the streets in groups of three. Everyone usually cleared a path for them. The fear they inspired was quite palpable, and their sneers were wicked, as if they were scanning the crowds for any little thing so that they could flaunt their authority. Why was it that power and authority always attracted the absolute worst people?
Jax and Caveen were both on edge. Both had one hand on
the blasters at their hips. We were in enemy territory, so we couldn’t be too careful. We didn’t know who could be watching. And now that Tarvath knew who I was and that I was alive? It was probably doubly dangerous for me to be here.
But Jax just had to make a point.
I stayed close to him as we walked. The air tasted stale, but I couldn’t image what it was like without the gas mask. Most of the people we saw didn’t have the luxury of one.
“Do you see what they live in, the conditions Tarvath puts regular citizens through?” Jax said in a low but tense voice.
Words didn’t come from me. I had nothing to say. I had a feeling that things were bad throughout the kingdom, but I didn’t imagine it was this bad. Of course, these people weren’t enslaved, so their lot could get much worse, but as far as everyday living went, this was about as bad as it could get.
We passed through the ratty market and came to a crowded square, and I mean crowded. Like a thousand people all crowded around something. Absolutely silent. There was a sense of fear and dread running through the assembled, and it made my stomach grumble and my arms pebble.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Caveen said.
“We should head back,” Jax replied.
“No.”
They looked at me. but I didn’t answer them. I pushed through the crowd. Jax cursed and said my name and tried to bring me back, but he failed to catch me before I pushed through the outer layer of people. It was a struggle to get to the front, just because there were so many people and I wasn’t particularly big or strong enough to really push, but people began to let me through. They weren’t eager to see what was going on. But I was.
I really wish I wasn’t.
Before long, I came to the front. And froze. In the plaza before me was a raised circular dais where a fountain or a statue of sorts had probably once been, but now it was gone, replaced by a long iron spike with loops throughout for chains.
Chained to it was a man, shirtless, his back to me, his exposed muscles glistening with sweat. Soldiers stood all around him, nonchalant, almost bored. All except one. One with a steel-tipped whip in their hand.
The Torgoran Revolt (Plundering the Stars Book 3) Page 8