Page 27 of Star Mates

CHAPTER NINE

Logan stared at a transcript in front of him, his mind far from trying to figure out the algorithm of the code. The language had long been cracked but the codes were harder, especially since the Kexians kept changing them.

He never thought he’d be a code breaker in space. He wasn’t sure if he really wanted to be doing it. All he wanted to do was get him and Emmarie home, back to Earth, away from this…reality. Nightmare? He wasn’t quite sure what to think anymore.

He pushed away from the table and stood, stretching out his cramped muscles. The room was closing in on him, stifling, so he walked out. Once in the hallway he wasn’t sure where to go. It was all the same yet different, an alternate reality to the life he’d had and lost. People walked by him, smiling. Never mind the fact that they were on an alien moon, across the galaxy. It was crazy, he felt crazy.

Not sure where to go, only knowing he needed to move, Logan retraced the way he remembered to the ship hangar. People bustled to and fro, from bay to bay. He stood in front of ships that looked like something out of a science fiction movie. The wonderment was almost overwhelming. His heart ached over the loss of his life on Earth.

As he wandered through the hangar, resentment flared to life. He felt…abandoned. And he knew it was ridiculous, feeling so heavy and disjointed from everyone else, but he was having a hard time reconciling the past forty-eight hours. Or had it even been two days? How long had he and Emmarie been frozen? How long had they been on that ship? Had they been declared missing? Dead?

Another depressing thought ran through his head…no one would miss him. The only people in his life had been his colleagues, the academic community. The only thing in his life had been the pursuit of learning because there hadn’t been anyone else who had cared. No family, no lover, no…one. Just books, lectures, and the pursuit of knowledge.

“Hey, watch out!” an angry female voice called out to him.

Logan glanced up and saw he was about to walk into a low metal beam being transported with a crane over to a ship. He ducked at the last second.

“What the hell?” he snapped and looked to where the warning had come from and saw a tall, thin woman dressed in greasy overalls, hands on her hips, glaring at him.

“Get out of the hanger, computer boy,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” She turned her back on him, walking back into the ship that was obviously under repair.

Logan stood there, gapping at where she used to be. She’d almost hit him with a beam, and she expected him to feel sorry?

“Logan?”

Logan’s gaze flashed around to land on Pikon Brant.

“What are you doing here?”

“I, ah…well,” Logan started to answer and then fell silent when his brain couldn’t think of an answer. Once again, he looked over to where the rude woman had been, but she had disappeared.

“You okay?”

He nodded at first, then shook his head. “No, not really.”

“You look like you could use a drink. Come on.”

Pikon gave a jerk with his head and Logan climbed the stairs, following him. They walked over to the Sunray and Pikon led him up the ramp and into the ship’s interior. In the galley he grabbed two glasses and a decanter, pouring the pink alcohol into the glasses. Logan took it, eyeing the liquid warily.

“I don’t know if I should drink this,” he murmured. “It did a number on Emmarie.”

Pikon smiled. “I think you can handle it. You need it if nothing more than for fortification.”

“Ah, yes, the crux of the matter,” Logan muttered and then downed half the glass.

Pikon raised his eyebrows. “Well, you keep that up and you’ll be hitting the floor fast.”

Logan saluted him with the glass but then carefully set it down on the small table to his left. “I was staring at gibberish, trying to find the link in breaking the code, which, I might add is not easy. I’m working as a damn Code Talker.”

“What’s that?”

“On Earth, during the second World War, the Allies needed an unbreakable code so one man had the brilliant idea to use the Navajo language. It’s an extremely difficult language and best of all, at the time, it was unwritten. The language had been passed down orally from generation to generation. The Kexian language is kind of like that, I’m discovering. Unbreakable.”

“We weren’t the first slaves, you know,” Pikon mused as he took a drink. “There are two planets on this side of the belt. Before the Merloni perfected Slip Gate technology, they used the inhabitants on the last planet as non-paid residents.”

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