Page 131 of Star Claimed Omega
Santi worked side-by-side with him on hull seals a few cycles back.
He opened the zipper halfway, just enough to confirm.
Marko’s face was bloodless, frozen in that final, breathless second prior to the explosive breach taking him.
‘They were working,’ Boaz whispered hoarsely from a stretcher nearby. ‘They were just fixing afokkin’ panel, Santi.’
‘Fokk,’ Santi growled, his body shaking from fury and the withdrawal of adrenaline as the body bags were carted away.
Hover ambulances arrived in pairs, lights strobing.
The med bots swarmed over the wounded, lifting them with padded harnesses.
Boaz winced in pain as his hover cot floated by.
‘I’m with you, brother,’ Kaal grunted, nodding with grim solemnity at Santi before joining Boaz’s escort detail.
Santi stayed, crouched eyes staring at the breach through which Soleil disappeared.
Wondering what the fokk had gone so wrong.
Later, when the immediate carnage had been triaged and the cleanup units had begun sealing the gash in the hull, he visited the families of the fallen.
He met with two spouses and consoled them.
When Marko’s young daughter asked him if her dad was going to wake up soon, it almost broke him.
Santi knelt in front of her and said nothing, because no words could explain away their grief.
He just wrapped his arms around the pair as her mother wept.
The news holos ran the footage in loops:‘Saboteur Red Queen Breaks Varnok Gage Out of Sombra Prison Confirmed.’
Others speculated:‘Signet Security Breach? High-Profile Prisoner Aided by an Inside Job?’
He didn’t care about the conjecture and theorizing.
He cared that they were right.
Soleil,under the influence of a mighty overlord,had destroyed everything he gave her: his trust, his passion, his damned heart, and access to his files.
She’dused him to spring the most dangerous terrorist in the quadrant.
His mind looped around the thought, as he moved between repairs, the ship hospital, and the family visitation quarters with the hollow relentlessness of a war machine.
He didn’t sleep and scarcely ate.
He just worked, because rage like this didn’t rest.
A night after she vanished, Santi sat at the lake’s edge, the water a cold mirror of the darkening sky.
‘Mi sol, what did they do to you? Why?’
His voice was a wounded rasp, but only silence answered him.
The fury came slow, controlled, and deadly.
It coiled through his chest like smoke before it burned.
