Stars of Charon (Legacy of the Thar'esh Book 1) (26 page)

“To be
fair,” I said. “The Collegiate goons
were
on their way to throw me out
of an airlock when you guys found me. At least we’ll have suits on.”

“Good
point,” Ju-lin answered as she slipped her arms into the suit and zipped it up.
“It could be worse.”

“There
should be a magnetic grappler back there somewhere,” Cwaylyn answered. “Once
you hit open space, find the
Tons
, grapple her and reel yourself in. Like
playing darts at the bar, easy-peasy.”

Ju-lin
turned to me and helped me slip my arms into the suit and zipped it up. As the
zipper hit the top the suit made a hissing sound as the airtight seals engaged.
I caught Ju-lin’s eye and tried to smile reassuringly. I wasn’t sure how
reassuring it was since I was fairly certain we were about to die, but I gave
it my best effort.

“Helmets
on,” Cwaylyn said as he grabbed his own and popped it over his head.

I reached
down and slipped it on. Like the rest of the suit, as soon as the helmet
nestled into place, the automated seals engaged, clamping the helmet firmly in
place. Stale but breathable air began to circulate through my helmet.

“Almost
time,” I heard Cwaylyn’s voice over the helmet speakers. “I have a good twenty
second lead on these guys. Did you find the grappler?”

“Got it,”
Ju-lin answered through her helmet mic.

“Okay,
get in your seats and keep your arms in,” Cwaylyn continued. “You don’t want to
catch anything on the way out. It should launch you more or less straight out
the top here, and I’ll have you angled as close as I can to where I remember
where we left the
Tons
.”

His words
echoed in my head: More or less. Should. Close. I wasn’t feeling very
confident.

“What
about you?” I asked, trying to focus on anything except for being ejected out
of the top of a speeding spaceship with a dashing pilot who was flirting with
Ju-lin while on the edge of the remnants of a ruined moon full of hostile
aliens.

“Me? Oh,
I’ll be fine. The cabin will re-pressurize and I’ll just kick in the boosters.”
Cwaylyn answered easily. “They won’t have a chance to keep up with me, poor
devils.”

“Then why
are we bothering with this at all?” Ju-lin asked. “Why not just skip the whole,
ejection and fly through space thing and just skip the system?”

We were
reaching the edge of the debris field, the question sounded perfectly
reasonable to me.

“The
Celestrials will have an alert out for this ship,” Cwaylyn answered. “I’m going
to hightail it to the far end of this system and make the flux over to the
Collective and disappear. But from what Loid said, your colony’s in a bit of
trouble. If you come with me you will have to travel through a dozen or so
Collective systems before getting back to Protectorate territory, it will take
at least three days, and you may notice there’s not much room in here, no food
or supplies. But if I scuttle you two into the
Tons
, you can make a
straight shot through the Furies and make it back out to your little world.”

“So they
will just let us go?” Ju-lin asked.

“The
whole system is focused on me at the moment, they won’t be looking for you.
Look back there at the station, after the explosions half of the traders are
preparing to flux on out of here. Even a fake Draugari attack is enough to
spook em’. Your suits sealed?”

“Mine
is,” Ju-lin answered as she checked a display on her wrist.

“I am not
sure how to tell,” I answered as I tried to make sense of the little display on
my wrist.

“Now
where is that spot-oh hell,” Cwaylyn muttered. “Hands in!”

“What did you sa-” I didn’t get the
sentence out before the canopy above us slid open.

The
rockets in our seats ignited, firing us into space.

Chapter
26.

“The cadre is ready,” Tren said as he opened my cabin door.

“The Slires?” I asked.

“The Chieftain assigned two pilots. Kilan and Lertic,” Tren
responded. “Lertic has two kills, Kilan has one.”

“Fighters?”

“A convoy,” Tren answered shaking his head.

“I would have preferred pilots with more experience,” I
answered as I continued to sharpen my blade with my white whetstone. “But they
will do.”

“Did the Chieftain tell you anything about what we are
looking for?”

“No,” I answered. “But this is not an exploration or scanning
mission, we are going to hunt. The conclave believes that there may be ground-dwellers
coming into the system. I’ve been studying the route and the flight pattern. I
think we are being sent to watch over one little world.”

“One world? Three ships to attack a world?” Tren asked.

“You misunderstand, our mission is not to attack the world.
We are to protect it.”

“Protect a world? Like a common dirt-dweller?’” Tren turned
his head and spat.

“There is something more to this,” I kept my focus on my
knife. “Time will tell us what.”

“Good luck, don’t forget-” the radio faded to static as
Cwaylyn’s little ship disappeared in the distance, arching toward Kalaedia’s
silver ring.

“Don’t forget what?!” I shouted back fruitlessly as Cwaylyn
soared out of range of our helmet coms.

I turned
and watched as the four defense fighters flew after him.

“Over
here,” Ju-lin’s voice spoke into my coms. “To your left.”

I turned,
Ju-lin was floating next to me just a few feet off. I reached out but came up a
foot-and-a-half short of her outstretched hand.

“Hold
on,” I said, remembering that I had seen a length of cable wrapped around the
right thigh of my suit. I reached out and unhooked a latch the end and started
to unwind it. I was halfway through unwrapping it when I became fully aware
that I was actually floating out in space.

I froze,
staring out into the vast expanse of nothing below me, above me, all around.
The black was lit up with specks of stars, each with their own worlds. A flash
of Lor’ten’s memories flooded my mind, images of stars, worlds, huge ships,
blazing lights, explosions, and death. I shook off the images.

“Eli,”
Ju-lin’s voice was calm and reassuring. “I know. Amazing isn’t it?”

I didn’t
answer.

“My dad
first took me out on a space-walk when I was nine. He said I’d been begging him
to take me out since I was four. I floated out there with him for an hour
before he dragged me back to the airlock.”

I stayed
silently transfixed as I looked out at the stars. Any one of the stars could
have been dead for a few hundred years, and the light would still be shining
bright. I wondered if one of the distant twinkles held the world that my people
had come from. I wondered if one of the bright stars was really the last
gasping light of the long-dead star Vasudeva. I shivered.

“Eli, we
don’t have all evening,” Ju-lin continued. “So unwrap that damned cord and toss
it over here.”

Roused, I
looked over at her, through her thin visor I could see the intensity and
urgency in her eyes. I finished unwrapping the cord, then wrapped one end
around my wrist, and flung the other end toward her. After swatting at it
wildly, she finally grabbed it, wrapped it around her own wrist, and reeled
herself in toward me.

“Good,”
Ju-lin smiled. “Now, I don’t mean to freak you out, because I know it feels
like we’re just floating here, but we’re not.”

She looked
over my left shoulder, I shifted to follow her eyes and saw the debris field.
We were heading toward it. Fast. Far faster than I thought possible.

“Holy
hell!” I gasped.

“Don’t
panic,” she said. “The first thing dad taught me about space is that all motion
is relative. Relative to you, I am not moving. Relative to the rest of the
universe, we’re flying about one hun
dred meters
per second. The second thing was to never panic.”

“Okay, a hundred meters per second. Not panicking,” I tried
to sound as convincing as possible as I latched on to her. “What do we do?”

“Find
Tons
,” she said. “Cway said he would fire us
toward her, she should be around there.”

I turned
to follow her gesture, scanning the rocky field of debris that was steadily
growing closer.

“I don’t
see it,” she whispered, her voice starting to shake.

Sweat
from my forehead stung my eyes, instinctively I reached up to clear it and
ended up clumsily tapping the side of my helmet. I blinked three times in rapid
succession and squinted into the darkness. I saw a flash of steel, and then it
was gone. I waited a breath, blinked, and looked again, it was there. I saw a
faint streak of red among the lumps of grey.

“There,”
I pointed. “Right there, on the underside of the crescent shaped stone.”

Ju-lin
followed my finger, searching.

“Damn,”
Ju-lin said with a wry smile. “How did you see that?”

“Now what
do we do?” I asked. Although we were angled close to where
Tons
was
drifting, if we didn’t adjust our trajectory we would soon be slamming into the
broad side of the asteroid instead.

“I don’t
know if I can hit it from here,” Ju-lin said, pulling the magnetic grappler out
of the holster on her belt.

“If you
miss, I won’t tell,” I said as I tried to force a laugh.

“I’d
appreciate that,” she made an equally pathetic attempt to laugh. “Hold on to
me.”

We spun
and I swung around behind her, wrapping my arms around her shoulders and chest
as she held the grappler with both hands. I watched over her shoulder as Ju-lin
took careful aim at
Tons-o-Fun
’s hull, aiming at the buxom w
oman with the bright red hair painted on the
Tons’
bow.

I felt Ju-lin take a deep breath in, and as she exhaled, she
fired.

We both watched as the grappler flew through the void. Behind
the magnetic grappler trailed a microfiber string that fed out the barrel of
the g
un. At first, it
looked like it was going to miss, but then, like the sticky-bomb that Loid had
used against the Alonso’s Starchaser, at the last minute the grappler began to
arch toward the ship as the magnet found steel, striking home square on the
bow.

Ju-lin
laughed sharply.

We were
closing fast, within seconds we would crash into the side of the asteroid.

“Hold
on!” Ju-lin called as she flipped a switch and the grappler began to retract.

With a
snap the grappler picked up the slack in the line and shifted our path, pulling
us toward the
Tons
. I held my breath as it swung is in just enough to
narrowly miss the edge of the asteroid.

“I can’t
believe that worked!” Ju-lin shouted as we swung in toward
Tons-o-Fun
.

We had
avoided the asteroid, but we were still coming in fast. Too fast I thought.

“What
about the landing?” I asked as we rushed in toward the hull.

“Umm,
yeah,” was all Ju-lin could say before we slammed, side first, against the
hull.

I gasped
for breath, my right arm and leg throbbed. I couldn’t breathe. For a few
seconds, I thought that my suit had ruptured. I imagined the vacuum of space
devouring the precious oxygen in my suit. My lungs started to burn and my ears
were screaming. Slowly, I opened my eyes. I took a shallow breath. There was
still air. My suit hadn’t ruptured. There was still screaming though.

“Did you
see that?!” Ju-lin whooped. “That was incredible! I’ve never seen anything like
that even on the vids on the nets back home! Eli? Eli are you okay?”

“I think
so,” I answered, still gasping for breath. We were nestled against the large
bust painted on the nose of the ship. I looked up to find that I was
face-to-face with the buxom red-head’s sly and seductive smile.

“Whew,”
Ju-lin pulled off her helmet and tossed it casually on a rack in the
Tons’
main hold. “You good?”

“Yeah,” I
pulled off my helmet, trying to sound much more relaxed than I felt.  I sat
down to hide my quivering legs. After being shot out of Cwaylyn’s fighter and
repelling onto the bow of the
Tons
, scaling across the outside of the
ship from the bow to the stern air-lock had more or less shot what was left of
my nerves.

I pulled
off the suit and tossed it into the corner. Aside from our breathing and the
soft hum of the lights and the air scrubbers, the ship was silent.

“It’s
eerie in here,” Ju-lin said as she stood in the middle of the empty hold.

“It’s
quiet,” I stood up, rubbing my shoulder that had taken the brunt of our impact
against the hull. I saw a cloud of my breath as I exhaled softly. “And it’s
cold.  Can we turn on the heat?”

“Yeah,”
she answered. “Loid probably left her on standby mode with just critical power
systems going. Let’s get to the cockpit.”

“I hope
he’s alright,” I said as I followed Ju-lin across the empty hold.

“Well he
did
get us into that mess in the first place,” the harshness in her tone sounded
forced. “Maybe he deserves to spend some time with his friend’s in the
Collegiate.”

“I don’t
think it was the Collegiate that got him,” I replied. “They couldn’t get past
the pool of Jantar goop on the flight deck. I saw the guys who shot him, they
were the same ones who were following us back at the Hub outside of Joof’s
shop.”

“You’re
sure?” Ju-lin turned around, her eyebrows raised.

“Pretty
sure,” I said as we passed into the secondary hold. “One of them was Earthborn,
well maybe from somewhere in the Collective, either way he had a beard so he
wasn’t a Celestrial. I don’t get the impression that the Collegiate work
closely with the other races.”

“Maybe
they were hired?”

“Or maybe
they work for MineWorks and were the ones who put the hit out on your life,” I
suggested. “Who knows, maybe they were the ones who killed Joof too, to try to
frame us for murder to get the Celestrials to lock us down and keep us quiet.”

“You’re
full of theories today,” Ju-lin responded as she opened the hatch into the
living quarters, I ducked through the doorway and followed her in.

“It was
something that Alume said right before the Draugari, ’er I mean Loid, attacked
the station. He sounded surprised that his pilots destroyed the cave. Maybe
they didn’t, maybe it was—”

“It was
nothing, really,” I jumped as I heard Loid’s voice behind me. “Nothing at all,
don’t mention it.”

I spun
around to see Loid’s torso hovering above the dining table.

“Clearly,
something didn’t go as planned,” he continued. “If you are seeing this then for
one reason or another, one or both of you made it off of that rock, but I
didn’t.”

“A
hologram,” Ju-lin’s voice was soft behind me. “He must have set it up to automatically
trigger when we came through.”

“First,
you should know that the
Tons
is on lockdown for another twelve hours,”
the hologram continued. “Standard Celestrial protocol dictates that they will
maintain a heightened security posture for 12 hours after a security breach.
So, I hope you don’t mind that I took the liberty of hard-wiring the ship to
keep you two locked down here for your own safety, so have a drink and get
comfortable. Once the time is up you should be able to fire up and slip on out
to the nearest flux point without a problem.

“Second,
you should probably want to know why I went back for you in the first place. I
didn’t know what the Matron had planned. We’ve been friends for a long time,
and I’ve never known her to make a move like that. She would only do it if
there was a gun to her head. Whoever these Collegiate guys are, they’re
powerful and have a long reach. She must have felt as if she hadn’t had a
choice. I’m going to guess that, because at least one of you was here to
trigger this message, they didn’t kill you. So that’s the good news. The bad
news is that if the Matron was scared of these bastards, they are more than
capable of some serious violence, which brings me to my next point-”

Loid
stepped out of view, the empty air above the table crackled. A moment later he
reappeared.

“Eli, you
did a pretty good job of stashing this thing on the ship, but, she’s my ship. I
know every corner and crevice,” he held up the memory card from the survey
scanner that we had used in the cave. “Really, I told you two you needed to
stop keeping secrets from me. But, you never listened. Fair enough I suppose, I
doubt I would have trusted me either in your shoes. However, you should have.”

He took
the memory card and pushed it forward out of view, a moment later his image was
replaced by the holographic image of the cave from the point of view of the
camera I had setup. The scanner had done its job well, we were looking at a
detailed three dimensional digital mockup of the entire cave.