Destiny Abounds (Starlight Saga Book 1) (8 page)

KABOOM.

Branwen's ears rang painfully from the sudden sound as something slammed into her with what felt like terrific force, worse than having your helm slammed by a mace. Time slowed, crawling like it always did when this kind of thing happened, allowing her ample opportunity to feel the searing in her flesh as something small and hot tore a bloody channel through her coat and her chest, then exited from somewhere in her back with a burst of adrenaline-dulled pain.

She’d never been shot before.

She stumbled back from the force, some small portion of her strength seeming to leave her immediately as she faltered. She tried to collapse to a knee, but didn’t have the luxury of choice and instead fell onto her back. A jutting piece of covered cargo stuck up at just the right angle to poke at the newfound territory of her wound, delivering a blaze of agony like the jab of a flaming spear. She knew she cried out through gritted teeth despite herself, slamming her arm down with defiance and trying to rise; she could feel the alarming contrast of cool liquid running down from the searing blaze of the wound.

She heard Merlo cry out what she supposed was her name, but found she couldn’t make sense of it, the sound coming to her distantly, as if from across a great, sudden void. She gripped the rough tarp covering their cargo as she bled into it, still stubbornly trying to rise, but could only curse herself both for foolishness and for abandoning her young friend as she started falling again, the blackness and cold of space seeming to draw her close.

4.1
- Branwen

Branwen drifted in that starless black, as if on a raft in a pitch-dark sea that occasionally deigned to float her closer to the dawn of consciousness. More often, it felt as though she drifted the other way instead; sometimes when that happened, she felt something inside her push back, as if to say:
Not here. Not now.
If she had been awake, she would likely have called that her warrior’s spirit, or perhaps simply stubbornness, but she wasn’t. So, except for those few times, she drifted.

She imagined at times she could hear voices; a light would start to grow above her and she could feel her body, heavy and hot. Those feelings gave way to concern for Merlo, and for dying so far from her home, and what that might mean for her soul, but spared little of that concern for fear. She had evaded death many times, so perhaps it was only right that now, it could finally catch up.

Eventually, she started to become aware of herself again; it had been long enough for some part of her to feel very tired of floating disembodied in darkness. Having a body again, however, also brought the pain back: a searing trauma seeded through her chest below her breast and spreading across a wide, aching patch on her back.

“I dunno. I think she’ll wake up soon, okay?” A higher-pitched, lilting voice drifted unbidden into the sanctity of Branwen’s encompassing darkness. She struggled with the heady weight of awareness, but her body seemed reluctant to respond.

“You said that yesterday!” That voice was familiar, and hearing it sent waves of relief through Branwen’s aching, worried mind. Merlo was okay? It sounded like it, and she’d have to hope so, since she couldn’t pry her eyes open at the moment.

“And I meant it, too! You can’t just say when a person’s gonna be okay, it don’t work like that! But never you mind, like I said; your Cap'n’s really strong, and she’s healing real quick as compared to normal. She’s gonna be fine. As fine as somebody who got shot bad like that can be.” Branwen didn’t know, and couldn’t make out, who this other person was, but she sounded youthful, with a melodic tone paired with an accent she couldn’t place. She also had to give them some credit for standing up to Mero’s ire.

“And what is that supposed to mean? Like you can’t fix someone who got shot properly? I thought you were supposed to be a doctor!” Yeah, that relief settled into Branwen’s bones. Merlo was fine. Branwen felt like she could rest, knowing that, but she also felt like she’d been resting too long as it was. She wanted to move, to be aware again. To check on the people that depended on her.

She thought she could hear an indignant sigh from somewhere overhead. “Well, like I tried to tell you, I ain’t no proper doctor, but—”

“Great. That’s just wonderful!” Merlo interrupted with the distinctive sound of a frustrated sigh. Branwen imagined her punctuating the statement by throwing her hands up in exasperation.

“But I’m the best you’re gonna get way out here in the middle o’ nowhere! And you’re pretty lucky to have me too, cause this village don’t normally even have a proper doctor!” Branwen thought she liked this person, whoever she was. Most people didn’t really know how to handle Merlo, falling either into the “intimidated” or “bewildered” camps. “But like I said, your Cap'n’s gonna be fine. She’s a tough one; I reckon all it took was for me to patch that bleedin’ hole proper to give her body the chance it needed to heal up on its own.”

“So you mean she’ll be… she’ll recover fully?” Branwen would have smiled if she could have, touched as she was by Merlo’s concern.

“Oh, near as I can tell, she’ll be right as rain soon enough, she’ll just have to give her body enough time to bounce back,” the disembodied voice reassured. “Few weeks maybe. Why, look at that, now she’s a smilin’!”

With a weighty solemness, a fissure snaked its way across the infinite black and let searing light back into Branwen’s world. Her eyes fluttered, heavy at first, as if made of lead. In an instant, she felt her palm grasped tightly by a smaller pair of disproportionately strong hands. The flawless sleekness of the suit Merlo always wore was unmistakable. “Captain! Captain! Captain Branwen, can you hear me?”

The light voice from the other side of her body tried to reassert control of the situation with a firm but polite tone. “Now, you can’t just rush in on her like that and crowd her! I know you’re all upset, but let her come ‘round on her own. It’s a wonder she didn’t go into shock before.”

Branwen couldn’t help but wonder what had been going on while she was out, and how long it’d been. Merlo seemed to back off as Branwen fluttered her eyes, struggling to combat the searing light and make sense of the shapes slowly resolving into identifiable objects around her. The pilot still kept a tight grip on Branwen’s hand, however, as everyone seemed to wait patiently for her to recover enough to interpret her surroundings.

“Where… what happened—” She tried to croak out her first two intermingled questions, but Fade be damned if her throat didn’t feel like the sands of Koltan.

“Aww, I bet she’s all hoarse from everything that went on. You keep her company for a minute, an’ I’ll run her down some water; she needs it. Don’t let her try to get up,” a voice, now seeming to belong to a young woman’s shape, cautioned as it disappeared out a nearby door.

“Merlo…”

“Shh. Hush, Captain, everything’s fine.” Branwen could see a blurry, worried-looking Merlo slowly but steadily coming into focus above her. She seemed to be awakening in a small, sparsely furnished grey room in a building of poured concrete, since it was obviously not metal and looked too seamless to be the piece-by-piece stone construction she was more familiar with. They didn’t seem to be prisoners; she felt no bonds and Merlo looked likewise as unfettered as ever. A decently sized window framed by thick curtains high on one side of the room let in the fitful, indirect red of what could only be Pireida’s large, baleful star.

She took a closer look up at Merlo, deciding to wait for water before trying to seek more answers, since they didn’t seem to be in immediate danger. The girl’s eyes weren’t red, as if she’d been crying, but they were rimmed thick with worry nonetheless. Their ardent, silver sheen peered down anxiously at Branwen, her fair skin lit by an odd mingling of reddish solar light and pale fluorescent overheads.

Despite the odd timing, she noted again that Merlo was, to her, on the pretty side of plain; she had a simple, if youthful, attractiveness that Branwen could appreciate. Her silver-blue hair, cropped short and now tucked behind one ear, dangled down toward the bed as she leaned over the Captain. She smiled down at her again, a thin white impression of her even teeth showing through past the concerned quirk of her thin lips. Tension was discernible in her small figure, compact, lean muscle taut with the energy of it, silhouetted handily by the skin-tight nature of the electric blue and charcoal black bodysuit she never took off.

Branwen looked over the girl’s arm, as the memory of Merlo taking several inches of steel for her came back abruptly, accompanied by a sudden pang of guilt. But she couldn’t see any markings or even a bandage, just smooth, unmarred… whatever her suit was.

Merlo glanced toward the door, leaning a little closer to where the Captain rested on a sturdy rectangular cot, suspended a few feet off of the floor. She lowered her voice a little, but no so much that Branwen suspected she was trying to keep information from an enemy. “Everything’s okay, Captain. Turns out it was all a big misunderstanding.”

Both women took a long glance down at thick, rough cloth bandaging, slightly tinted with a robust crimson from Branwen’s chest wound. From what she could tell, Merlo seemed be thinking thoughts not so dissimilar to the Captain’s:
That was
some
misunderstanding.

“Well, I mean…” Merlo squeezed Branwen’s hand a little tighter as she huffed a sigh and searched for the start to her explanation. She met the Captain’s eyes and started over. “Obviously, they needed the medicine.”

“Obviously.” Branwen croaked out the word with hoarse sarcasm and immediately regretted it. Her voice struggled, burdened with the sting of discomfort that only accompanied the truly parched. She smiled through it, if weakly, drawing a similarly weak smile from Merlo, who still hovered concernedly above her.

The speaker from before bustled back in, the echo of a door closing elsewhere, heralding the arrival of a tall glass of sweet, sweet water. She offered it to Branwen, and Merlo hurried to help her keep the injured woman from moving too much in an attempt to drink for herself. After a moment, they adjusted her position enough for Branwen to stay mostly still, but be able to gulp down what felt like a whole canteen’s worth of the welcome, refreshing liquid. “You tellin’ her about what happened?” The girl guessed with a critical eye toward Merlo. “You were s’posed to keep her quiet till she got somethin’ to drink.”

“Sorry.” They likewise managed a firm, oblong pillow under her head to incline it, which gave Branwen a better view of the room and her medic. The other girl looked of a similar age to Merlo; they could have both been about seventeen winters or so to Branwen, though the stranger looked a little younger, if anything.

The medic’s face was friendly and heart-shaped with bright, emerald green eyes and a happy expression, and her frame was small without the compact muscle of Merlo’s to contrast. She was still a couple inches taller than the diminutive pilot sitting next to her, though. She had sun-tanned skin and an active, perhaps athletic build, if not the appearance of much raw strength. She didn’t look like a native to Pireida to Branwen; she didn’t have dark enough skin, or the slight slant to her features.

“Yeah, I’m awful sorry about what happened,” she said in a voice heavy with sympathy and apology. “If I’d known what was goin’ on, I would’ve tried to stop ‘em, but a group of ‘em just got that stupid notion into their heads and ran off without thinkin’ it through good.”

The water felt so good going down Branwen’s aching throat, but soon she felt she couldn’t drink any more, at least for the moment. “So, what exactly… happened, then?” Except for having to pause halfway through, she almost felt like she could talk like a normal person.

“Well, you see, there’s been a big ol’ problem here in the village,” the girl began, pulling her medium length brown hair back into a loose ponytail. “It starts like this, you see... The Legion sends a good amount of medical supplies to Pireida as a donation, you know, helpin’ those that ain’t so well off.” She moved off a bit as she spoke, her cheery voice dimming with a slight edge of sadness. She started tidying up what looked like basic medical supplies: a tray of things not so advanced that the Captain would have been surprised to see them on her homeworld. “Problem is, they don’t always get where they’re s’posed to be goin.’ Sometimes, people in the bigger cities what’s s’posed to distribute them… Well, they think they might be better off if they just kept them.”

The girl frowned, an expression that didn’t seem to fit her face well, and, indeed, slid right off after a few moments. “Now, I ain’t sayin’ that they do stuff like steal them, or sell them or anything… Maybe they just think that they need ‘em more than others do. Some of the harsher worlds and places like out here on th’ edge of Pireida… well, sometimes there ain’t enough to go around, y’know?”

She looked up at Branwen, hands full of rough cloth probably intended to replace some of her bandaging. “Awful sorry, this is prolly gonna hurt a bit…” She trailed off, biting her lower lip in concentration as she began to work. Branwen had to give her credit, she worked with efficiency and skill beyond her years, and Branwen wondered how much practice she had, and what had caused her to gain it.

It did hurt, of course, but many things can hurt. Branwen ignored it as a plug of gauzy material pulled free, sticking from where it was redder on the inside than it appeared from without. She looked down at it as best she could without moving, and gave it a mental shrug. She’d looked worse.

Merlo, however, winced a bit at the lurid sound of the cloth pulling free, giving Branwen a sympathetic grimace. “So, essentially, the cargo we were hauling was medical supplies, intended for the city a few klicks off over that way.” She gestured in a vague way that told Branwen that she was probably lost. “But, they’d been pretty reticent about forwarding supplies that were supposed to be coming here instead, and for a while, as I understand it.” Merlo glanced towards the brown-haired girl for confirmation, but she was deep enough in concentration that she didn’t reply. Branwen could appreciate her devotion to her craft, watching her slender hands work deftly, professionally. “They’ve got some people that really needed some of the supplies, so they finally got agitated enough that they formed a mob and decided to run off whoever was carrying the next shipment and just take them.”