Page 16 of Shavin's Mate
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NORA
It was so hard to walk up that shuttle ramp and leave Sahvin behind. I didn’t dare look back, or I wouldn’t go at all, and I didn’t want him to see my tears. Once inside the shuttle I brushed them away and forced back the sob that was stuck in my throat. This was the best way I could help the brigade and Sahvin.
As I took my seat on the shuttle with Harper, Scarlet, and Zoe, they looked as anguished as I felt.
“Okay, ladies,” Harper said. “We can do this. There is no sense getting all glum about being sent to theKurelliswhile they are doing their jobs. It’s not like we can go down there and help.”
“They’re going to make it,” Scarlet said. “They might come back a little worse for wear, but they will come back. Zared took a direct hit with an armor piercing round on Breskaa. It just pierced his armor, but it stopped before it did major damage.”
“Yes, and you took a direct hit on Tegliar Station,” Zoe, said and those nanite things fixed you up.”
“I know,” I said. “Seals, Rangers and Special Forces rolled into one. But raiding a prison planet. That just seems so outrageously foolhardy.”
“They are just the ones who can pull it off,” Harper asserted.
“I have to believe that, because I can’t let myself think otherwise,” I sighed.
Momentarily, the shuttle hatched closed with a whoosh and lurched just slightly as it lifted off the deck and slowly left the bay. We could see the planet below before we turned for toward theKurellisin high orbit. It looked a lot like Earth but with smaller continents that looked like big islands in with vast ocean space between them.
While I was possible for the inmates to travel between them, it seemed unlikely because they didn’t have reliable transportation. From what Sahvin told me, the inmates were divided among the continents, supposedly depending on their crimes. But each continent was run by gangs except for the slaves’ island.
About two hours after we arrived on the Kurellis, the first shuttle came. We were better organized and had more help registering our new rescues than at Tegliar station. We had four check-in teams and four teams to guide the incoming to their quarters or sickbay as needed.
The slave compound was not a labor camp as Breskaa. But we didn’t know how well they had been cared for. Those from the prison were probably in worse shape. Although the Sargus Empire made regular supply drops on the all the continents, they were probably not distributed evenly among the inmates.
I couldn’t imagine what life must be like in a lawless anarchy. I sure didn’t want to find out.
Unlike the Breskaa mission, we didn’t have a feed on the communication among the ground teams. But we did get updates on what was happening in space. It got a little scary for a while because two Sargan battle cruisers showed up out of nowhere it seemed. One apparently was hovering on the back side of Julconi’s single moon and the other behind a smaller planet closer to the Julconi sun.
They had come for theKurelliswhich we stole. One ship wasn’t nearly enough in reparations for what they did to Farseek and the Uatu people. They didn’t attack theKurellis, though because they wanted the massive passenger freighter intact. They went after the Dreadnaughts guarding it. That’s why our men sent us to theKurellisto keep us safe. The Sargan’s were outnumbered and outgunned.
The Dreadnaughts were more heavily armed and armored. The mercenaries offered to let them leave unharmed if they would allow them to retrieve their people. Their answer was to fire on the dreads. So, the dreads took them out before they had a chance to send reinforcements down to the planet.
Even though the teams took the slave island by surprise, they met more massive resistance than they had hoped. They sustained some serious but not life-threatening injuries and no fatalities before they were able to get control of the facility.
We heard that the teams on the primary prison continent where Sahvin’s team was working had met armed resistance. So far there were no reports of casualties. I knew nothing until much later. It’s probably a good thing because I would never have been able to finish my job. The Farseek Mercenaries had planned for around 4500, and we took on closer to 6000 combined from the slave island and the prison.
That brought theKurellispopulation up to about 9700. After sixteen hours, we needed a break. I was so tired by the time I fell into my bunk, I had little time to pine for Sahvin before I fell into an exhausted sleep whispering, “Sahvin, you have to be all right. You have to.”
The next morning the last of the rescues arrived. The shuttles have been transporting through the night, eight hours longer than was planned. The most prominent worry was that more Sargan warships would come before we got out of the Julconi system. The empire had far more resources than we did.
Farseek Dreadnaughts could handle a few at a time, but if they came en masse, the odds were not as good. As soon as the last shuttle was locked into our shuttle bay, theKurellisjumped out of the system to rendezvous with four of the dreads three days later. The other dreads would go on to scout the other systems where our intel said more of the Uatu people had been taken.
We still had space for another thousand people, and each of the dreads could make room for at least a hundred people. Our dread still had the bunks installed in the cargo bay. They decided to keep them there indefinitely.
Even though we had pulled out of the Julconi system, there were still a couple hundred people left to process in the morning. Harper accosted me when I got to my workstation.
“You will never guess what happened,” she told me in a conspiratorial whisper.
“What?”
“Zoe found her man!” Harper gushed. “He was a Uatu thrown into the prison colony for trying to start an uprising.”
“Is she okay with it?” I asked. “Is hesomatu?”
“That’s what he told her when she checked him in. He looked like hell, tired, dirty, dressed in rags, I could see that he would clean up gorgeous just like all the other Uatu.”
