Page 40 of Into The Rift

I raised one eyebrow and he frowned at me.

“I am. I told you, I’m of age now.”

“Yes, yes, I’ve heard that. Your dashall Rakkur said you were nineteen. Close to twenty.”

He shot me such a dirty look I had to smile and settle him down. “It doesn’t matter, princeling. Eat your bread and meat. You’re going to need your strength.”

“Why? What’s going to happen?”

He gave me a little smile. “That remains to be seen, and I know you’re nervous.” I held up a hand to forestall his protests. “Anyone would be, naturally, going to a planet in a different galaxy. This is your first time for intergalactic travel, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Try not to worry. Eat your fill and try to get a bit more rest until we arrive. I’ll wake you in plenty of time.”

Surprisingly, he obeyed me and after he ate, he lay back in his chair and closed his eyes. I felt a growing hunger for him as I watched him. One that food wouldn’t satisfy. Now that I’d tasted him, I’d crave more until I had the time and opportunity to have him again.

It was a few hours later that I saw a glow in the distance, and realized it was the star that was our sun. It had a pale-yellow light, softer than that of the surrounding stars. I sat gazing out the front screens as we entered my own planetary system.

It would be a while before Pton came into view, with its four moons ringed around it, two of them encircled by thin clouds of dust around their middles.

They were simply named by their closeness to Pton, ranked in order of distance. In our language, they were called Naha, Doco, Tri, and Mara, or Pton for “one, two, three and four.” As I said before, we were not a poetic people.

I had decided to stop there first and make some kind of plan for when I reached the surface of the planet. I’d had no time for anything like that yet, and I wanted to take a day or so to regroup and figure this out.

I sat back to wait, as we had hours yet to go before reaching the moons, and I engaged the cloaking devices on the ship and laid a course for the biggest of them, Mara. It would be a good place to hide until I could figure out exactly how to approach the planet.

I was too fatigued to think properly now, having had no sleep through the long night. I put my head back against the seat and closed my eyes for a moment. I think I may have still been shocked at the rapid turn of events and my fortunes, but I could only feel it in a dull, distracted way, the exhaustion laying over my emotions like a smothering blanket. The light in the cabin was dim, and I felt myself drifting.

Chapter Twelve

Jago

It was late afternoon on Mara by the time Niko said we were arriving. Sunset, as seen from a vantage point on one of the moons, came on suddenly. From a vantage point on Pton watching a sunrise or sunset, colored light would be seen in the sky, scattered by the planet’s atmosphere, much like it was on Tygeria or Earth. But Mara didn’t have an atmosphere, so there were no twilight colors, and sunset was sudden and abrupt. The moment after the sun set, it was as dark as midnight, with no lingering color at all. One side of the moon always faced the planet, from any given spot, because it spun along on its axis as the planet did.

Niko explained all of this on the way down to the moon’s surface. I think he did it mainly to fill the quiet, because I’d been giving him the silent treatment. He told me too, that the advantage to landing on Mara was that it was the farthest distance from Pton, and there were at least four abandoned outposts on the large moon. Back during the old emperor’s time, these outposts has been manned at all times. There were three other planets in our star system that were inhabited, and able to sustain life and all three were hostile to the Pton and far more democratic in their governing. These outposts on the farthest outlying moon thus served as “early warning systems” to the Pton populace, should one of the other planets decide to attack.

Once the old emperor, Kitannos, passed away, and Linnius took over, he declared brutal wars on all of these planets, one at a time, and conquered each of them in their turn. That was the beginning of his policy to destroy his enemies utterly and leave nothing behind and not many resources for them to rebuild. There were too few survivors anyway. After that, there was no real need to man the outposts, though they were still at least partially maintained.

A few people still lived on those planets, but they lived in small tribe-like groups. They despised the Pton and its emperor. With good reason, it seemed to me.

Niko said all the outposts were still regularly inspected and stocked, because that was part of the job he did for the council for years as one of a few in charge of planetary defenses. He said that none of the outposts were currently being used, however.

He’d lived in one of these outposts for almost six months during the time they were still being used regularly, so he was very familiar with them. That had been years ago, when he did his mandatory military training, but he still remembered them very well.

He told me all of this without my asking a single question, and I tried to pretend I wasn’t interested in the least. It didn’t stop him.

“In actuality,” he said, “when our government began their genocidal attacks on the other planets in our solar system, some soldiers rebelled and refused to follow Linnius’s orders. They were deemed outlaws and banished both from the army and the planet. The majority of them traveled to a solar system adjacent to ours, where my grandmother, Itaka’s planet Touzia was located, and they live there to this day. From time to time, there have been reports of small ships landing on Mara. Who mans these ships and for what purpose they come, no one knows. But I suspect that it may be these former Pton soldiers.”

So? Why was he concerning himself with all this? Just making conversation or still formulating some plan? I was dying to know but still too furious at him to ask.

We came in low over the moon only minutes from after sunset. Like most of the moons I’ve ever been on, Mara was desolate looking in the dark. There were no trees or lakes or any features whatsoever—just dirt and rocks.

“But why are we landing here instead of on the planet’s surface?” I asked.

“I had some time to think about it on the way, and I don’t think it would be a good idea for us to suddenly show up in Pton airspace in an alien craft, with no warning. Too many questions would be asked. Especially considering the fact that Itaka said Linnius contracted to kill me. This will give me some breathing room to figure out what my next move should be.”

“But didn’t they see us landing here?”

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