Page 27 of Narzek
“What did you say?” Cayla demanded; her hands fisted at her sides. She narrowed her eyes, daring him to repeat it.
“No.” This time it sounded like a request, not a command. He reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t want you to go anywhere you might get hurt. I’ve already lost too many people in my life. If I lost you, it would break me. I don’t scare easily, but this terrifies me.”
“Don’t you think I know that? I feel exactly the same when you go out there. Narzek, we’re soldiers, this is what we do. I owe these people for what they did to me, the same is you owe them.” Her voice got louder until she was shouting at him. She stopped as she realized and took a breath, letting it out in a deep sigh. “In a perfect universe, we would be back on Farseek planting crops and making babies.”
Narzek growled his frustration because he knew she was right. She was the love of his life, and she was now a Farseek Warrior, too. But he hated that he didn’t have the right to keep her out of this. She wasn’t even in his chain of command. Arguing the point was moot.
So instead of taking the argument further, he took two steps closer and hugged her to him, resting his cheek on the top of her head. “I just don’t want to lose you.”
Cayla couldn’t say anything past the lump in her throat. She just hugged him back.
Chapter Twenty
Three rotations later, the Farseek Dreadnaughts and the Alliance Raptors arrived in the Ryosan system, where two planets and a moon were habitable. The Pican slave ship was locked into orbit of Ryosa, the largest world. Dreads Five and Six moved in on the Pican ship. Each one sent shuttles with two units of warriors each to board the ship.
Dreadnaught Ten sent shuttles down to Ryosa with two teams each. That left two teams on standby. Narzek’s team was one of the teams making planetfall. He didn’t have to worry about Cayla going down on a run because delays at the Mecstar hadn’t given them time to send recon before they got into the system. Cayla was set to go on the runs to evacuate the freed slaves. The pickup sites would be secured before she ever left the Dread.
Trouble started before they even landed. The boarding teams faced powerful resistance from Sargan warriors on the Pican ship. Apparently, about a hundred slaves had been replaced by Sargans. As soon as the Farseek warriors relayed their findings back to the dreads, Dread Seven sent another boarding team to assist them. That meant they were only outnumbered three to one. Those were odds they were used to.
As soon as the first teams discovered the Pican slave ship was an ambush, Dread Ten notified the shuttles heading ground side. Before they landed, they were doing flyover scans for the highest density of humans and humanoids to estimate where they would find the slaves for evacuation. Just as they were getting in range to scan for heat signatures, an alarm sounded warning them of incoming missiles.
The pilot evaded one and the computer shot one down, but another hit the shuttle dead on. The shields kept the ship from being blown apart but left the pilot with only marginal control. The shuttle crashed, rolled and broke apart. The engine section burst into flames and exploded, and the strike teams were strewn over a crop field in full combat armor.
None were moving, and the pilot and copilot were still strapped into their seats in the front section, the only part of the craft that remained intact.
Cayla was in the shuttle bay on Dreadnaught Ten when a com officer reported that Narzek’s shuttle had been shot down and believed to have crashed. The shuttle com unit should have been working on battery power even if it was separated from the rest of it. But they weren’t getting a signal from the craft or any of the coms in the warrior’s armor.
After that announcement, Cayla didn’t hear anything else that was said. She even forgot to breathe for several micro-spans until she finally gasped, overwhelmed by the sudden realization that Narzek might not be coming back from this. She could barely face the possibility.
Now she understood his fear more thoroughly than ever before. She stood, staring into space, not seeing anything. She didn’t even notice that her instructor and team leader had come to stand in front of her.
“Cayla, I’m taking you off duty, effective immediately,” Hykara ordered. “Cayla!”
Cayla met her gaze, nodding vaguely.
“Pull yourself together! The odds are your mate, and the rest of the team survived because they were all in combat armor. They might have crashed in a dead com signal spot. We’re sending out two more shuttles with medic droids to search by air for them.”
Cayla nodded, “that makes me feel a little better.”
“Not good enough for you to remain on duty. Return to your quarters, and we’ll notify you---if--as soon as we locate them.”
“Can I go with one of them?”
“I can’t let you do that. We’re sending a ground unit to search for Narzek’s team as soon as we locate the wreckage. You can watch their progress on your com screen in your quarters.”
Cayla huffed in frustration.
“I am going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Hykara said.
“Yes, ma'am!” Cayla snapped to attention and ducked her head in salute, did an about-face, and strode from the pilot’s ready room.
Cayla entered their cabin two minutes later and flopped down in the chair at their dining table calling out the command to turn on the com screen. She was calmed by the fact that she was receiving direct feed from both shuttles on the display in a split frame with audio. It was better than the view she would get if she had accompanied them.
Only it didn’t allay her fears as to what they might find. She didn’t have too much time to fret about Narzek’s fate as the entire ship shook so hard it almost threw her from her chair. An alarm sounded almost immediately, with a computer-generated voice announcing they were under attack.
Cayla had already headed for their bunk to strap in while the order was recited by the AI computer voice in the next sentence. Sighing as she settled into the harness on the bunk, she thought,maybe we’re all going to die today.
If Narzek was gone, then it really didn’t matter. But she didn’t really believe he was dead. Cayla was almost sure that she would feel it in her soul if he died while she lived.
