Page 89 of Across The Stars
“It’ll happen.”
I thought about it for a while, closing my book of gibberish. Flying was the dream I didn’t know I had. Now that it was attainable, I was little confused because it wasn’t entirely satisfying without a certain color-changing jerk in my life.
“So,” I said, clearing my throat.Does he ever talk about me?“You up to anything new?”
“Sure. Vahko and I are going on assignment soon. Looking for gek activity on some of the deep space stations at the edge of the quadrant.”
“Sounds fun.”
Sounds exciting… and productive.
My Buddydingedand next to Solukh’s face appeared a little notification on the Nexus News Network.
Omar Paks awake and recovering from induced coma after severe head injury.
I smiled, unable to contain myself, and Solukh noticed.
“Good news?” he asked.
“Omar’s awake,” I said.
“Who’s that?”
“He was injured on the Sagittarius.”
“Well, that’s good news. You need to go?”
I was about to open the full article when another figure entered the background of Solukh’s live feed. His deep, familiar voice spoke some urgent words in valerian and after all my lessons, I was able to pick up, “we need to go.”
Vahko was pacing busily behind Solukh in an pressing manner, dressed in his uniform. The same uniform I first met him in. I froze, but just as he was about to turn and look at me, Solukh rushed to kill the connection.
And just like that, I was a mess all over again.
41: Vahko
(Three Months Later)
Ranath was a cesspit of criminals, drifters, and traitors and it was also the place where all the information in the quadrant eventually led us. So it was no surprise we found ourselves there after weeks of searching for clues.
Salukh and I had managed to get partial signatures from the ship that attacked Innifer and her friends the day the freighter was destroyed. After weeks of piecing things together and cross-referencing signals we were picking up, we’d found a trail obvious enough to follow and it led us to Ranath.
The station was a mosaic of ships from different fleets, races, and colonies all stuck together in a sloppy puzzle. Over so many cycles, instead of a diplomatic center, it became a station catering to deep space travelers, those who didn’t want to be noticed, and outcasts, but it was filled with other things, too. Rare materials, ship parts, drugs, and slaves.
The Irlos was shrouded some ways away while Salukh and I took a drop ship to the station. Solukh especially didn’t trust the Irlos on Ranath, so we left it in the care of the rest of the crew.
Stripped of my military uniform, I looked like any other criminal in the galaxy. I wore a brown jumpsuit and a hooded scarf while Salukh went the simpler route and just wore a vest and trousers. On that particular trip, we were a couple of valerian runaways looking for a gek ship to harvest precious metal. If we’d said we were hunting down criminals, our passage would not have been so easy to obtain. Criminals were protected on Ranath.
Once on the station, the noise was deafening. Shouting, booming music, and metal clanking in the dozens of scrap shops filled my ears. I was already irritated when we started walking the rusted metal walkways behind our contact, a filthy nozun rogue. The species was gray and always had a dry skin texture on the four limbs they used to walk. They had sparse hair on their heads and a face only a mother could love. And that wasn’t even that believable.
In his native tongue, the nozun told us to tail him and led us to a garage where a triangular ship sat suspended in an anti-gravity port. Solukh and I recognized it immediately and as I walked around to inspect the ruined craft, Solukh distracted our ugly friend with aggressive bartering.
If Solukh was good at anything, it was talking.
Pulling a small device from my suit, I checked my surroundings to see if I had an audience. Everyone in the garageseemed preoccupied, so I slipped around to the rear of the ship where a metal ladder was propped underneath leading up into a maintenance hatch. I quickly snuck inside, crawling through a duct first to get to what I assumed was a mess hall, but the interior of the ship was a tangle of tubing, pipes, wires, and wreckage. If Innifer’s friend had been inside when it was destroyed like it was, I had slim hope that she was alive, but I was going to find out as much as I could.
I navigated my way through doors that no longer functioned one by one, prying them open until I reached the bridge. Nothing seemed to work and I wasn’t about to risk turning it on, so I slid the device under the round control table in the middle of the chamber and turned it on. Immediately, I could hear data being downloaded from the ship’s internal storage.
“Atom, access escape pod records,” I said.
