Date point: 4y 11m 0w 4d AV
“Bilgrath, why didn’t we take the ship like the Captain said?” asked a Chehnasho sailor, hidden among the cramped crowd.
“We just managed to take a Deathworlder alive. I don’t give a shit what the Captain wants; we’re not risking all of our lives to take down three more humans who knew we were there! Does anyone want to go back and give it a shot?”
Silence met these words. Hardly any of them could believe that their plan had worked as well as it did. They didn’t want to risk getting torn apart by an enraged Deathworlder just so they could take the ship.
They’d come forward in three teams on the opposite side of where the humans had made camp. When the scout had looked over the ridge and seen three humans gathered around a fire, several of the pirates had nearly panicked. It was a good thing the Captain had sent Bilgrath after all.
After getting three teams to set up the heavy plate mounted pulse rifles, he’d ordered them to wait for a chance to get one of them alone. If they fired a blast at each of them, and if even one of them hadn’t stayed down, the casualties would have been catastrophic.
Caution had saved all their lives. The smallest of the humans, even shorter than the gray one, had taken four heavy shots to go down.
They hadn’t even bothered to pack up the pulse rifles. Leaving them where they sat, two sailors ran out to hook a line around the unconscious human, while the rest of them ran as fast as they could back to their ships.
Once on the ships, the largest of them, captained by Commander Bilgrath, flew to where the Deathworlder lay, next to the two Chehnasho and let down the winch operated hook to hoist the body inside.
As the body was being dragged inside by a whole team of men, one of the other Deathworlders ran out of its vessel shooting its weapon at the ship.
It hadn’t damaged the ship, even though it struck the hull, but one of the men had been hit. After the body stopped convulsing, another man had soiled himself when he saw that the victim’s eyes had burned out and turned to jelly.
As soon as the door was closed, Bilgrath screamed, “PUNCH IT!” and the three ships launched themselves into the atmosphere.
Glancing back at the slowly fading dot of a planet, he grabbed one of his subordinates.
“I want the Deathworlder restrained! Use the animal chains!”
“Yes, sir!”
I bet I’ll get my pick of cabin slaves for this, thought Bilgrath.
He grinned greedily.
Date point: 3y 11m 2w 5d AV
“Are you fucking kidding me, sir? A fucking simulator instructor?”
“Captain Nolan, you will not address me in that tone!” growled Colonel Brackenridge.
Outrage sparked in Nolan’s eyes.
“I’ll speak to you how I want when you take away something I’ve been working towards for years! Ever since Vancouver!”
“I’m the one who got you the job! I spent weeks writing letters to get you the position, even though you have no experience!”
Both men now had veins throbbing in their necks.
“I wanted to pilot a god damn space ship, not a computer game, sir!” he said, putting as much spite as he could on the word.
Deflating, the old Colonel said, all anger gone, “I know, son. I know.”
The pain in Nolan’s voice was thick. “Then why are you doing this to me?”
“Jason, you’re an F-22 pilot. You’ve never even been in a space ship. The people with the money want people with no experience with flying for the space program. They want to train tech kids, Jason. And you’re almost 28. They don’t want you, kid. I’m sorry.”
The Colonel looked away respectfully while Jason wiped his eyes.
“Then I’m done, sir.”
“What, Captain?”
“I’m done. I’m leaving the Air Force. I quit.”
“You can’t just quit, son. You have a contract.” The Colonel was looking at Jason as if he wasn’t thinking straight.
“I haven’t re-upped my contract this term. I can leave in seven months if I want. I’m done, sir.”
“I guess…I guess that’s your choice, Captain. But, just think about the job, ok?”
Numbly, Captain Nolan stood.
“Whatever you say, sir.”
Date point: 4y 11m 0w 4d AV
“Frank, don’t you fucking lose them!” screamed Jason.
Cold terror gripped the three men as they stood on the flight deck, watching the three ships outstrip their own.
“Doesn’t this fucking thing go any faster?!” screamed Ted.
“We didn’t have time to use the WiTChES! We were going to do it before we left! We’re almost out of power as it is!”
“God damn it!” groaned Jason.
“How the fuck did this happen?!”
“I don’t fucking know, Ted! I came outside to look for the kid, and I see this big goddamn ship hauling the kid’s body inside of it! We’re lucky Frank was on the deck, otherwise we’d never have even gotten off the ground before they got out of the system!”
“Guys.”
“This is what happens when we don’t have any fucking weapons! I told you this ship was a bad idea!”
“Guys…” Frank said, a bit louder this time.
“It’s not my fault they built it to have no teeth!”
“GUYS!”
“WHAT FRANK?!”
“…he’s gone. I lost them… he’s gone.”
He brought the ship slowly to a stop.
Floating in the vacuum, they all looked out the glass of the observation window.
“The kid’s gone…” whispered Frank.
Jason sat down heavily in his chair, with his head in his hands.
“It’s my fault…”
Date point: 4y 11m 0w 5d AV
“…uhrg…”
It was all Robert could manage.
He’d woken on his back, with his whole torso feeling like he’d been hit by a train. Upon trying to turn over, he felt searing pain in his chest, and felt the tug of chains on his wrists.
The chain was short, no longer than six inches, and bolted into the floor, making it impossible for him to stand.
He began to examine his surroundings through bleary eyes. Steel walls, metal flooring, no windows. I must be on a ship, he thought.
Trying to remember what had happened, Robert focused what little awareness he had at his command and tried to recall the last thing he remembered. He thought it might have had something to do with breathing.
Suddenly, the door on the left side of the room opened and six amphibious aliens filed slowly into the room, all with weapons trained on his face.
“You’re…you’re Chehnasho…right?”
Another Chehnasho, this one entering after all of the others said, “Correct human. My name is Commander Bilgrath. Welcome to my ship. You will never see it again, so make sure you remember it.”
He trusted his ship’s translator to get the message across, because the human didn’t seem to have one.
“I-I don’t understand. Who are you? How did I get here?” This wasn’t making any sense. Where were Jason, Frank and Ted?
“Allow me to spell it out for you. You have been kidnapped. I am the one who kidnapped you. You are now the property of Captain Kingruta and the Rising Plague. We are now returning to your new home.”
“K-kidnapped? Why!? I didn’t do anything to you. None of us did! Where are my friends?!” he yelled, jerking against his chains, suddenly scared even more than he had been.
“Don’t worry about your crew, human. You will never see them again either.”
And with that he walked out of the room, followed by his six guards, as Robert shouted at him to explain.
“Captain, we captured one of them alive.”
Kingruta broke into a wide grin. “Good. I want to see it. Did you get the ship?”
“Unfortunately no, sir. It was too heavily defended. We wouldn’t have even been able to bring back the one human if we had attempted it.”
“Hmmmm, disappointing. But, I can forgive that. I want to see my prize. I’ll be at the hangar in a minute.”
Closing the comm-link Kingruta grabbed his engraved pulse pistol and holstered it as he walked out of his study.
The Chehnasho walked slowly, savoring the meeting to come.
Crossing walkways and through several captured space stations that had been cannibalized to make his city grow, he mused on his accomplishments, admiring the sight of his city.
It was a sprawling mishmash of cannibalized star ships, captured stations and slaves to keep building it larger at all hours of the day. He watched several of his men walking along catwalks above the workers heads, looking for any sign of slacking or rebellion. They had authority to kill any slave if they deemed it prudent. There were always more bodies for work.
The mines were in the center; always in the center. All pathways led to the mines. Lines of his property could be seen, pushing carts laden with platinum ore, moving towards the smelters.
He’d been here when they’d first captured the mine. It had been run by some idiot Gaoians who hadn’t been using the mine to its full potential. It wasn’t important anymore; he’d shown them the error of their ways first-hand.
After taking it, he’d begun to build upon it. Using ships that had been towed back to this moon, and then later captured space stations, he’d begun to build his empire. His city was home to two thousand men, and nearly five thousand slaves.
Coming to the hangars at last, Kingruta opened a double door that led into an empty hangar. In the center of the floor, surrounded by six heavy pulse rifles and chained to the floor with restraints made for Vulza, was his human prize.
“Human,” he said savagely. “It’s nice to make your acquaintance. Do you know who I am?”
“No.”
The croaky voice sounded weak.
“What’s wrong with him? Did you do too much damage to him?”
“Sir, it took four shots with large animal class weaponry to bring him down. Damage may have been unavoidable.”
“I…understand. You humans are tough.” He said, looking at Robert again with a kind of savage smile. “I like that. It means you’ll be satisfying to break. I am Captain Kingruta, your new master. I own you, human.”
He turned back to the one who had spoken to Robert on the ship.
“After we’re done here I want him checked out. If he’s fit for work I want him whipped so that I can begin to break him. If not, get him patched up; then whip him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“As for the other humans, did they follow you, or see you enough to get a description? I don’t want any loose ends coming looking for him. A human military raid would be the death of us.”
Bilgrath now had to skirt between truth and fabrication. The smaller ships used by the Rising Plague had no markings on them, but his own ship did. Usually when his presence was necessary, no survivors would be left to identify any ship that had attacked them. Humans were different. The human who’d shot at his ship might have seen the crest of his crew on the front of the ship.
“I don’t think we need to worry about humans finding us, sir. We lost them quickly.”
“Good.”
And with that he left, Robert staring after the amphibian as he walked through the doors.
Sitting wrapped in chains, he whispered, too quietly for anyone to hear, “They’re alive.”
“Guys, I think I found something on our video feeds.”
As one they all converged in front of the monitor. It showed the largest of the three ships, from the front, just before take-off. Under the front window, down on the left side, was what looked like a shape that had been hand painted on.
“Do we have enough resolution to make it larger, Frank?” asked Ted.
“A bit, but I don’t know if it’s gonna help. The actual thing itself isn’t very clear.”
Zooming in on the image, they studied what it might be.
“It looks like…a lizard.”
“Hold on,” said Frank, “I’m gonna check something in the computer.”
Typing slowly, he entered in the information they had.
“Look.” Turning the second monitor towards the other two, he showed them a much clearer symbol of what they had first been looking at.
“What did you do to find this?”
“I did the space version of googling it. I told the computer I needed to find the relation between Chehnasho, abductions and a lizard crest. That’s not a lizard, it’s a Vulza; a dead Vulza actually. It says here that the crest belongs to the Rising Plague pirates.”
“Are they a large group? Can we find them?”
“We can’t find them. They use hit and run tactics and then disappear. They’re massive, Jason. They used to be larger too, preying on the Dominion and Alliance shipping lanes, but it says here that they were muscled out by a human and some Gaoians. They’re slavers now.”
“Slavers?! Robert was taken by fucking slavers?!”
Frank looked at Jason, his expression heavy. “It looks that way.”
“What are we going to do?” asked Ted.
“Well we’re fucking going after them, aren’t we?”
Speaking slowly, and deliberately Ted said, “…I don’t want to abandon him Jason, but we have a mission to think about. Thirty-six other people are depending on us too.”
“The mission? That kid has just been kidnapped to become a slave and you’re worried about the mission?”
“Hold on.” said Frank, as Ted began to splutter guiltily.
“I think for both Robert and the mission we should find these bastards. These have got to be the same guys who were after the other human ships. So if we find them, we find Robert, and if we’re lucky, they have our crew as well, or at least know where to find them.”
Absorbing this information, they sat, pondering their options. There weren’t really any.
“Let’s do it.” murmured Jason. “Let’s find the kid. I won’t let him spend the rest of his life in some shithole.”
“You’re right Frank. I’m in.”
“How the fuck are we gonna do it though?” the Captain asked. “We lost their trail right after they took him.”
“I have an idea. I’m sorry to be cliché at a time like this, but, you’re not gonna fuckin like it.”
“Tell me, Frank.”
Turning to the screen again, he pointed at a smaller paragraph than the one describing the Rising Plague.
“They have a rival faction, The Dying Light. They’ve been beaten pretty badly apparently. They were here first and were driven out, and whatever is left of them is just being left alone now, now that the Plague controls the Far Reaches. If anyone has any reason to help us find them, it would be them. Our database says they have a space station maybe two days from here.”
“What kind of criminals are they?”
“They’re pirates and slavers as well. They’re not going to be a pleasant bunch to deal with.”
“That’s fine.” said the Captain, a blazing look in his eyes, “Neither are we.”
He was being dragged.
Dragged by what looked like ten people.
He couldn’t stand. His legs were too weak.
The back of his body was burning; scorched where the plasma had touched him.
His heart was beating hard; too hard.
Blood was rushing through his brain. It was beating a tattoo through his head.
The dragging stopped, the world stopped spinning, and then he was falling.
Robert Frost didn’t feel the ground when he hit it. He fell with a dull ‘thud’ among the mine’s other occupants.
Using the last of his strength to open his eyes, he saw what looked absurdly like a raccoon, shining a light into his eyes.
The darkness fell, and he knew no more.
“It’s a damn human!” said Tricko.
“Get the hell away from him! He’s injured! They turn into wild animals when they’re hurt. He’ll tear you apart if he gets hold of you!” squeaked Bierst.
Drawing himself up to his full height, the would-be leader said, “No, he’s unconscious. All of you help me get him somewhere where we can look at his whip marks. This is the thing we’ve been waiting for. They must be insane to bring a human here, and we’re going to make them regret it.”
Four Gaoians tried to pull the human’s body to a small illuminated alcove along one of the dimly lit rock walls, but the human was far too dense to be pulled by only four of them.
“Grab the winch. We’ll slide him there.” said Tricko.
Using a cart mounted winch, they cranked his body slowly over to the alcove and turned him onto his stomach.
“They got him with the plasma whip. It looks like it was at full power too. He’ll have those scars forever. Get our medical supplies.”
A meager amount of rubbing alcohol, anti-biotics, and a needle and thread were brought out of a small bag.
The Gaoians went about tending his wounds, cleaning them with the cleanest cloth they had and some of the alcohol.
The whip marks had been cauterized at their deepest points. But, near the edges of the marks, at his shoulder blades and near his waist, blood was flowing freely.
As Ryst began to stitch his wounds closed, they heard a small groan come from the human. They froze; ready to jump back if it looked like he was going to become violent.
“M-…my name…is Robert. Who are you?”
It seemed important to the human that he say his name, as well as ask for his.
Nervously, they all looked at Tricko. This had been his idea after all.
“I’m Tricko, Robert. We’re cleaning your injuries. Will you allow us to do that, and promise not to harm us?”
“Do it…”
The human fell back into unconsciousness.
“Any of us would have died from a whipping like this.” said Bierst, in a tone of shocked wonder.
It was true. The stories seemed to have real merit, thought Tricko. Humans were tough.
“That’s not important right now. We just need to make sure he stays alive long enough to help us. Ryst, get those wounds closed.”
As the Gaoians got back to work, closing the human’s wounds, a guard standing on one of the catwalks spoke into his communicator, too far away to be heard by the Gaoians.
“Commander Bilgrath, the human has made some friends already.”
“Good, he’ll be that much easier to break. Make a note as to who each of them are. I want their tag numbers so that they can be used for leverage later.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Reclamation was silent.
None of the occupants had spoken since they had set out.
Frank sat at the table, eating his dinner of sloppy joe mix out of one of the small plastic bags from his MRE, as Ted walked into the room, apparently intent on eating too.
He hesitated as he saw Frank, not sure if he wanted to be near anyone right now.
“Sit down, Ted. I won’t bite you.”
Ted considered the old man for a moment.
Deciding that his hunger was more important than being moody, he grabbed a meal from the open box and sat down.
“I got Reese’s Pieces in mine. I can’t eat them. Would you like them?”
Looking up, Ted saw Frank holding out the package of candy.
Suddenly, Ted wasn’t hungry anymore.
“No, Frank, thank you though.”
Standing up to leave, he stopped as Frank said, “Don’t let your feelings make you forget to live Ted. I’ve been down that road. It doesn’t end well.”
Looking at the aged man, Ted said, “What are you talking about? I’m just not hungry.”
“It’s been over twenty-four hours since they took the kid. You haven’t eaten since. I know you haven’t.”
Wondering whether or not to tell the old man to mind his own business, Frank again cut across his thoughts.
“Why do you think the kid came on this mission?”
“What?”
“The kid. Why do you think he was here? I never asked him. Did you?”
Surprised at the question, and that he wasn’t sure if he knew the answer, Ted sat back down.
“I’m not sure. We never spoke about it. I assume the kid needed a job, and Byron pays really well.”
“See, I’m not sure about that. Maybe he did need the money, but I think he had another reason.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I never asked him.” he said again.
They sat in silence again, both regretting not speaking to the kid more often. Frank, Jason and Ted got along just fine, but the kid had always seemed to hang just outside of the group whenever they were all together, not daring to venture into their midst.
“Why did you join, Ted?”
Startled out of his musings, Ted jerked his head up.
“Why did I?” Ted hesitated. “I joined for my kids. I want them back. Byron has the best lawyers. He offered to make it all go away; the restraining order, the child support, all the slander making it so I couldn’t get a job.”
“What happened to make you lose your kids?”
“My ex-wife was having an affair. I found out, and she went to the police saying I’d abused her and my son. She had no evidence, but she took it to court anyways. The courts are biased when it comes to fathers. They couldn’t put me in jail, but they made it so I wasn’t allowed to see my kids, had to start paying child support and alimony after me and Charlotte got divorced, and I was blacklisted from my field when news got around.”
Frank leaned back from the table, meal forgotten.
“Jesus. I’m sorry, Ted. How long ago was that?”
“God; I think that was nearly five years ago. It’s been a long five years.”
Stunned at his own revelation, Ted lapsed into silence.
After a minute or so, Ted asked, “What about you Frank?”
“Me? I joined because I was tired of being useless. I’d been in a bad way since my wife passed, and was just kind of wasting away, not taking care of myself, letting the diabetes slowly kill me. My daughter saved me; brought me back to myself. Then, Byron gave me a purpose.”
Feeling hungry again, Ted picked his meal back up; beef brisket. Tearing open the package and finding the bag labeled ‘beef brisket in mushroom sauce’ he tore it open and began eating it cold.
“I’m gonna go up front and take the wheel from Jason. He needs to eat too. He’d drive himself into the ground if I let him.”
“Alright; I’ll save a seat for him.”
Giving a half-hearted laugh, Frank said, “You do that.” Then he departed.
Sitting alone at the table now, Ted tried to get hold of the maelstrom of emotion boiling in his stomach.
How was he supposed to have told Frank that his wife had been telling the truth?