Jarred sat back on his stump, catching Sierra’s eye for a moment before she turned her attention back to observing their equally watchful hosts. Before, he had been quite content to let them have their secrets. He really wasn’t interested in their faction or its cause. Such groups came and went like the tide. What
was
beginning to annoy him was that he had aided them both in getting Orna out of harm’s way, taking a plasma blast to the chest for his trouble, and Sierra still treated him as though he was just some other untrustworthy gutter parasite. In a way, he admired her hardheadedness, but it still left him a gutter parasite.
* * *
A long, tedious hour had passed before Orna finally emerged from the cave dwelling she had entered with the village elders. The Toguai immediately began to come out of their own dwellings to watch the group of elders with interest as they and Orna approached Jarred and the others. By the time Orna had reached them, it appeared as though every Toguai in the village had gathered in a mass, forming up all around them.
“The elders,” Orna began finally, once everyone had settled, “have decided that they will lend us their aid. They welcome us into their village and offer their protection for as long as we should require it. As well, they will see to the repairs for your damaged vessel.”
The Toguai became excited by this, snorting and moving around with what seemed like enthusiasm. Jarred was intrigued by the reaction, as both Elora and Sierra seemed to be.
“Sorry,” Kern interrupted, not having seemed to notice. “How exactly are they going to see about our ship repairs?”
“The Toguai are quite mechanically inclined,” Orna answered. “They may seem primitive, but they are an exceptionally intelligent race, and far more civilized than most others that would be described as being so.”
“Orna,” Sierra began, her eyes scanning the large group of Toguai around them. “Can they . . .
understand
you?”
“Of course,” Orna replied, matter-of-factly. “They have an understanding of a great many dialects. Only an inability to speak them.”
They all glanced back and forth between one another at that point, equally stunned.
“Wait,” Kern stumbled. “So . . . they understood
everything
we’ve been saying?”
Though there was ever little to read in Orna’s facial gestures, Jarred thought he could see a glimmer of something akin to humor come into her eyes. “Yes,” she answered.
Kern let his gaze fall over the surrounding Toguai. “Well, that’s embarrassing.”
Sierra and Elora appeared to share his sentiment, but Jarred was more interested in Orna and what had been discussed for an hour in private with the elders.
“Why?” Jarred asked, gaining everyone’s attention. “Why have they decided to help us?”
Orna looked at him, in the curious way she always did. “Need there be a reason for one being to help another?”
“In my experience,” Jarred answered, “always.”
“Why did you help me?” she asked in return.
“We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about
them
. How did you convince them to help us? What did you tell them?”
Orna was silent for a long moment, Kern and Sierra appearing suddenly as interested in knowing the answer as Jarred was.
“The truth,” she answered simply.
Jarred opened his mouth to press her for more than just another of her usual cryptic answers, but said nothing. He had been down this skylane with her before, and right now, he didn’t have the energy for another round-about question and answer period that went nowhere. It didn’t keep his mind from wandering though. What was the truth? Had she simply explained their situation to the elders, who eventually decided to open their village to a bunch of strangers they were supposedly very weary of? Or was there something more? He suspected the latter. In fact, he knew it.
Orna had been keeping something from him and she wanted him to know it. She was dangling it before him, waiting for him to bite, but withdrawing whenever he did. He didn’t know what her secret was, or what it had to do with him or this place, but he was tired of playing games. He was going to learn the truth, whatever it was.
Chapter 19
SPACE, NEARING RYZA
Even before their father had been taken by the slavers, but especially in the years that followed, Ethan couldn’t remember a time when he had been apart from his sister. She had always been there, taking care of him, even if he thought he didn’t need her to be.
Moving from one refugee settlement to the next, life hadn’t been easy for either of them. The universe was a tough place and he had been forced to grow up in a hurry. He knew how to handle himself, how to navigate the dangers that all refugees faced. You wouldn’t last very long if you didn’t. As he had gotten older he’d grown somewhat annoyed with what he took to be his sister’s overprotectiveness of him, but he also understood where it came from. With both of their parents gone, they were all one another had. They were family and families had to look out for each other. In truth, Elora was the closest thing to a mother he had ever known. Now, packed tightly into the hold of this large bulk freight hauler, bound for a fate he had always feared, he found himself wondering if he would ever see her again.
Only a few short days ago they had been traveling to, what they hoped would have been, their new home aboard a vessel much like this one. Trycon was supposed to be a new beginning for them. The Sect raid on Solta had nearly dashed those hopes, except that by chance they had also met Jarred. Suddenly, Ethan was living the kind of adventure he had only dreamed about, evading the Dominion alongside a stellar bounty hunter, stealing transports, traveling the stars. Since meeting him, their lives had been in a state of constant peril and Ethan had enjoyed every moment of it, until now. The hopeless whimpering of distraught refugees around the hold was a constant reminder of just how serious a situation he was in.
Truly alone for the first time in his life, he was afraid. Afraid for his sister and what had become of her. Afraid of what fate awaited him. So much time spent wishing and dreaming for the day when he would be free to go off on his own and take on the universe without his big sister bossing him around, to make his own choices and find his own path, and here he was, finally on his own and wishing she were here to reassure him that everything would be alright. But she wasn’t here and everything wasn’t alright. If he was going to get through this he would have to do it himself.
The freighter shuddered as it passed through a pocket of air turbulence, one of many since recently reentering atmosphere. Pulling his knees in tight to his body, Ethan tried to tune out the fearful, desperate wails echoing through the hold. It helped that he couldn’t see their faces. The few red tinted overhead light fixtures allowed him a viewing radius of no more than a meter in any direction. They were packed in so tightly, the backs or shoulders of the refugees pressed up against him was probably all he would be able to see anyway.
The hopeless cries had begun during their departure from Trycon and through the choppy flight off world, dying down once they had reached the silent and still vacuum of space. Within two standard hours the cries had recommenced as they entered atmosphere again. The short journey meant they were still within Turaus’ immense lunar system. He had stopped expecting Jarred to suddenly blast through a door at any moment and come to his rescue shortly after the freighter had departed Solta, but the thought that he and his sister were still close by brought him at least a partial feeling of comfort. He just hoped they were both all right.
The vibrations in the hull increased to a constant steady rumble and Ethan heard the distinct sound of the repulsers kicking in, groaning with the effort of steadying the mass of the ship through its descent. They were landing. Feeling a rush of anxiety building up from the pit of his stomach, he took a deep breath and tried to calm his nerves. Panicking wasn’t going to do him any good. If there was anything he had learned, it was that keeping your wits about you in a crisis was the best way to get through it and he was going to need all of them if he planned on making it through this one.
The freighter touched down heavily, jostling a few more fearful yelps from some of the passengers as it settled. The turbulence seemed to intensify, rattling the hull violently, the grounded landing struts acting as a conduit for the tension between the deck and the freighter, Ethan knew. It was a normal occurrence, especially with a ship this size, but he had to admit the experience wasn’t at all pleasant while sitting on the cold hard deck of the vessel as it shook you to your bones. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before the hull vibrations began to dissipate, the engines letting out a final rumble before powering down and leaving the hold in relative silence.
It stayed that way for nearly half an hour. Ethan hadn’t noticed on the journey here, maybe because his mind had been preoccupied with other things, but without the constant hum and vibration of the engines to hear and feel, and with nothing to see, his one remaining sense had been left to take in the result of a cargo hold filled to the brim with hundreds of terrified, mixed species refugees. The strange aromatic concoction of body odor, strong alien pheromones and fear made for a stench so potent he could almost taste it. Unsure if he could continue to stave off the urge to gag any longer, he was almost relieved to hear the cargo hold door’s pressure seal finally release.
Across the hold, white cracks began to appear from out of the darkness, luminous fissures in the near black hull that formed an outline of the cargo bay door as it slowly lowered open. Blinding light poured inside like water rushing through a flood gate, filling every corner of the hold with its cold, artificial brilliance. The bluish hue and lack of radiant heat told him it was not sunlight, meaning either it was night here or they had docked in some kind of enclosed hangar. Even so, after two hours in near complete darkness, Ethan had to shield his eyes against the harshness of it, struggling to see the dark hazy figures moving in through the bright opening. He didn’t need to see them to know what they were once one of them began issuing commands. He had been around enough security mechs to instantly recognize the distinct, synthesized sound and dialect of their vocabulators when he heard it. Following the mechanical blur’s stern directive, he got to his feet with the rest of the disoriented passengers, who began to shuffle towards the cargo bay door.
Outside, it took a few more moments for Ethan’s eyes to adjust to the spotlights shining down on, what he was beginning to distinguish as being, some kind of lowered docking area. Similar to Wasteland Station, which he had so recently fled, the docking area was likewise sunken with a raised circular wall around it, though only a fraction the size, and in this case, an artificial structure as opposed to a naturally formed crater as before. The sealed bay door covering the top of the docking silo, as it were, led him to conclude that much like Wasteland, this facility was being purposely concealed, whether it be to shield it from a possibly harsh environment outside or simply to keep whatever transpired within hidden.
Ethan continued moving with the rest of the refugees as they were herded by additional security mechs down the cargo ramp and across the floor of the dock towards a large open hatchway. Numerous other utility mechs of varying models and sizes moved about the bay, paying him and the others no mind as they tended to the newly docked freighter. The short but slow march across the bay allowed him to complete a fairly thorough visual sweep of the dock and in that time he had noted no living personnel whatsoever. The bay appeared to be fully automated, its operation and maintenance handled solely by mechanicals. This struck him as odd and a bit disconcerting. Though many installations were run predominantly with the use of mechanical labor, sentient organic supervision was always present. Mechs, for the most part, weren’t designed to make their own decisions. They were programmed to serve specific purposes, like vacsweeping the floors or refueling transports. They needed people to direct and oversee their work.
He assumed he would find those people inside the facility, away from the arduous labor of the dock that was better left to mechanical workers, but as he passed through the open hatchway, into what appeared to be some kind of large gated holding cell, he found none. The room was dark, but for the light coming through from the dock silo, barely allowing him to make out its circular shape and the barred divider that created a meter wide perimeter inside its outer wall.
As the last of the refugees; Ethan estimating their numbers at close to five hundred; filtered into the cell, the gate and outer hatchway door closed shut behind them, leaving the large group in total darkness again. A moment later, numerous overhead lights snapped to life, fully illuminating the room around them. Able to view the entire cell now with clarity, he saw that the room was not actually a perfect circle, as the holding area was, but extended at one end where it eventually narrowed into a bottleneck. In the extended area, spaced out across the face of the cell wall, were a half dozen scanning booths of some kind, open at both ends to allow a person to pass through, though the cell bars blocked the side they were all on. A tall, sleek computer terminal stood at the end of each booth. Continuing to survey the room, he noted that the security-mechs had taken up positions all along the perimeter walkway outside of the holding area, including six that were positioned next to the scanning booths, across from each the computer terminals.