Page 17 of Narzek
“Yeah, we are soul mates. They call itsolmatu.I didn’t quite believe it at first. I didn’t plan to stay, but I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing Narzek again,” Cayla told her. “Farseek is a beautiful world, at least it was before the Sargan’s ruined it. But a lot of it has been rebuilt. Did you see the pictures of their new family home?”
“I did. I’ve accepted Azur’s invitation to live there until I find a place to settle. We were told there would be refugee housing,” Luanne said. “I don’t see me going back to Earth. I don’t have any family, nobody waiting for me. Maybe I will find someone to settle with and make a family someday.”
“We plan to return to Farseek if all goes well,” Cayla said. “Narzek wants to keep looking for the rest of his family as long as the Brigade will keep at it.”
“But the war with the Sargans has started back up. The Sargan Starfleet refuses to recognize the authority of the Consortium or the Alliance. We’re still in a warzone.”
Cayla chuckled. “At least we are free. Anyway, there was no guarantee we would come back from that warzone back on Earth. We owe these Sargans for enslaving us in the first place. We weren’t the first or the last taken from Earth to become slaves.”
“You’re right. The Sargans need to be stopped. I kind of wish I’d ended up on one of the warships,” Luanne said.
“And I wish it would be this one. I’ve really missed you, Lu.”
“Me too, Cay.”
Chapter Twelve
Narzek’s relationship with Cayla continued to blossom. Cayla’s aptitude testing showed that she could make a good shuttle pilot with training, plus a talent for communications. Cayla would train as a pilot, but it could take half a sun rotation or more for her to be ready to pilot shuttles from orbit to the planet.
While she was studying the math and astrophysics, she would need to become a space shuttle pilot, the commander in charge assigned her to shuttle maintenance. Even though they used droids to do a lot of the scut work, they still use pilots and trainees to run system checks.
Cayla was happy to have the assignment. Having flown small planes on Earth, she knew how essential proper maintenance was. The technology of the basic transport shuttles was beyond anything they had on Earth. It made her feel useful and allowed her to make new friends.
She also got to participate in some sparring matches with Narzek’s team. He practiced with her at first to see how her martial arts training compared tofehiatu. Narzek determined that karate was indeed comparable tofehiatu.
Although Narzek was not unusually a jealous man, he requested that Cayla only sparred with the women on his team because they used a semi-contact technic. Cayla might have taken offense had he forbidden sparring with the other men. He asked her not to because he didn’t feel he could watch another man pretending to attack her. As a concession to fairness, Narzek didn’t spar with the women.
Both of the women had official bond mates who were in starship operations who weresolmatu.During off duty times, Narzek and Cayla socialized with them, among others.
Even with Cayla in training, most of what they did from one day to the next was to fill the time until the next mission. The best part of those days was when they were off duty in the privacy of their quarters. Aside from their passionate sexual relationship, their emotional connection grew as they shared their pasts and hopes for the future.
As far as Cayla could calculate in time, it would take them a month and a half to reach the Mecstar system. Several rotations before they blinked into that star system, the officers held briefing sessions for the landing teams and the shuttle pilots.
Reconnaissance showed minimal activity by the Sargans within the system, but they were mostly freighters hauling the crystals to distribute to their manufacturing facilities, spaceports and space stations where ships might stop to have their worn crystals replaced.
If they filled theKurellisas they hoped from this planet, they would need to find another transport for their next mission. Though the freighters weren’t ideal, they were the only other ships they might successfully seize for that purpose. A Sargan battleship would be large enough to carry a few thousand souls, but they didn’t have the manpower to subdue the thousands of crewmembers necessary to take control.
They were better equipped to destroy a battlecruiser than to commandeer one.
Both Narzek and Cayla were feeling the stress of the upcoming mission, but for different reasons. Narzek felt confident his team was ready for the planetfall. Even so, there could be surprises to muck things up.
Dreadnaught Six and Eight had jumped ahead of their tiny fleeted to land teams on Mecstar Prime to gather intel to work out the logistics of how many they needed to extract from the planet. Between the mine sites and the processing plants, there were more than four thousand Uatu to rescue. There were hundreds of other humans and humanoids that needed to be saved as well.
The recon teams were charged with recruiting the Uatu people to help organize their brethren and get them to the predetermined pickup sites. Even if all the evacuees were ready and waiting at the landing sites it could take each shuttle six to seven trips from ground to the Kurellis to evacuate everyone who wanted to leave.
They had learned how to streamline the processes during their first rescue mission. Rescuing three to four thousand people would still be a lengthy process. Two of the dreadnaughts put into orbit around Mecstar Prime. They sent six ground combat teams to the biggest mining operations to reconnoiter a few days before the rest of the dreadnaughts and theKurellisarrived.
Once the first teams landed, the Dreads Six and Eight pulled out of Mecstar Prime orbit and moved to Mecstar Tertiary to hide out in stealth mode while the ground teams did their work. More teams would land when the rest of the dreads arrived to neutralize the overseers and guards. Whether they lived or died depended on whether they surrendered or fought.
Not until the final days of Dreadnaught Ten’s approach to the Mecstar system did Cayla begin to fret about Narzek’s safety during his mission ground side on Prime. So many things could go wrong, and they could all be in danger if any Sargan battleships blinked in on patrol. The worst part is that Cayla knew she would be stuck on their ship doing scut work for the shuttle crews.
She didn’t mind the scut work; it was waiting for Narzek to complete his mission and return, so she knew he was safe. His team had trained daily in the holographic training compartment. He did this more for team building rather than just honing their skills.
Every member of the Farseek Brigade was the best of the best. Other Earthers called them Army Rangers, Navy Seals, Marines, and Black Ops rolled into one. The Farseek Brigade was known for its aggressive combat skills and raw courage throughout the Consortium. If anyone could do what they were planning, they could.
After the Sargan attack on Farseek, the Brigade had felt betrayed by the Consortium. They believed the Consortium orchestrated the attack, not just one man. Cayla learned from her studies that the Consortium High Council put their best investigator on the case to determine who was really behind the attack.
Evzen Guryon was a member of the high council at the time and voted for the investigation. That was how confident he was that his involvement would never be discovered. But in the trail of dead bodies his conspiracy left, there was someone important enough for their loved one to tenaciously follow that trail until they found the source. That person teamed up with the Consortium Investigator to bring Guryon down.
