Chapter 14
Into the Dark
“Renegade, this is Risky Red, come in,” Gedeon said over the secure net as Cadence quickly throttled up off the asteroid. “Renegade, this is Risky Red, come in, over…”
“Risky Red, this Renegade, go with message,” a strained female voice replied back.
“Renegade, mission complete, we need your location ASAP.”
“Standby, Risky Red.”
The captain looked over to Cadence, confused by the strain in the woman’s voice. “Something’s going on,” he said to her.
“Whatever it is, it can’t be good,” Cadence confirmed.
“Captain Baas, this is Colonel Stoddard,” Stoddard announced over the net.
“Call signs are out?” Gedeon replied.
“I don’t have time to worry about them,” Stoddard said. “We’re in the middle of something big right now. I need you to keep Ben and Kara as far away from here as you can.”
“I don’t even know where ‘here’ is.”
“That’s the point. Go back to your hideout and wait for my call. I’ll get back to you within a…”
A loud acoustical static overtook the transmission, and Cadence screamed out a curse word as she banked hard left to evade a volley of fire.
“What the hell!” Gedeon shouted as he watched the laser blast past them.
Cadence pitched back to the right and started a barrel roll, but it was for naught as two shots nailed them on the stern of the ship, and then another volley took out their right engine.
The fight was over before it even began.
“Gedeon, we’re dead!” Cadence shouted back at him. “They got us by surprise – I didn’t see it coming!”
“How many ships?” he asked her.
“Only one!”
Captain Baas turned on the intercom and shouted, “ABANDON SHIP!” He turned back to face Cadence. “Can you still steer her?” he asked.
“Just barely.”
“Put her into that rock,” he said, deadly, referring to the Glaucus. She stared back at him with unblinking eyes, to which he responded, “Baby, I’m serious. Do it.”
Cadence turned back to her controls and did as instructed.
“Now let’s get out of here. This captain ain’t going down with his ship.”
They bolted down to the aft ports, where they found everyone else getting ready to board a shuttle. Rangi and Jedrek had the black case in their hands.
“No. Leave it,” Gedeon commanded.
“Are you crazy?” Cadence asked. “You’re not going to leave our destiny to be destroyed in this ship!”
Another volley of fire rocked their ship, and smoke started to billow around them.
“We have less than two minutes!” Gedeon shouted. “You two, drop it!”
“Don’t make me defy an order, captain!” Rangi shouted at him. But just as everyone’s tense emotions were about to boil over, Ben shocked them all.
“Captain Baas is right. Leave it. We can come back for it. We can’t risk that whoever’s attacking us will get it.”
“But this ship is going to crash into that rock!” Cadence said.
“So be it. That thing is virtually indestructible. We will come back for it. But we also can’t risk everyone being captured. We need to split up.”
“Agreed,” the captain said. “Rangi, Warrina, and I will go with Ben. Cadence, you and Jedrek take Kara in the recovery ship.”
Another shot rocked them.
“Not a chance in hell!” Cadence cursed him. “If you think for one second I’m leaving my nephew, you’re mad! You, Rangi, and Jedrek take the recovery ship and draw their attention. You guys are the better hand-to-hand fighters, and you can take them out if they try to board you. I’ll take these two and Warrina with me. I’m the better pilot; I can get them out of here!”
Gedeon was smart enough to know when not to argue with his wife, and this was one of those times. He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “You be careful, my love,” he said to her, and then he tapped the other two men on their arms, and they ran across to the other side of the ship.
Ben and Kara strapped into the small shuttle as Cadence and Warrina quickly powered the ship up. A woman’s voice came over the com and said, “Ship impact in thirty seconds.” Cadence slapped a few buttons, and then they were catapulted into space.
Ben and Kara looked out a port window and saw the recovery ship jettison out of the Zephyr moments before it collided with the Glaucus and erupted in a ball of flame.
“They made it out!” Ben shouted towards Cadence. He turned his head back to the port window as a Dagan Class Two ship came into view. “Cadence, a Dagan’s on us!”
The words barely left his lip when the Dagan landed an EMP blast on their ship, crippling it.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no…” Cadence panicked. “We’ve lost everything!” She looked out her own window and saw the recovery ship heading directly for them. “NO, NO, NO!” she shouted as if willing her thoughts towards her husband.
“They can’t fight them off!” Warrina said.
“Give me a flashlight! They wouldn’t hit us with an EMP if they wanted us dead!” Cadence shouted back to the teenagers. They both unbuckled themselves and floated around the ship in different directions, looking for a flashlight. “Back in that utility closet!”
Kara pushed herself over to it and opened its door. After grabbing the flashlight out of it, she pushed herself back over to Cadence and gave it to her. Cadence pointed its light end out of her window and flashed it on and off towards her husband’s ship. She saw a flash of the ship’s lights and then watched as it veered away, and then they felt a massive bang and then a vibration as the Dagan attached itself to their ship.
Cadence unbuckled herself and glided calmly over to the middle of the ship with Ben and Kara. Now that there was no fight left, there was no reason to be panicky.
She looked at them both and said, “I’m sorry I failed you.”
Ben pulled her into a tight bear hug and kissed her cheek. “You didn’t fail me, Aunt Cadence, you’ve given me purpose.”
*************
The blue electric ripple of a new gate faded to black before a Hermes Grade I passed through it. Lieutenant Baxter flipped a switch to her com unit, opening the mic and said, “Captain Baas, we’re coming up on you port side.”
“Copy,” was the somber reply.
A few minutes later, Lieutenant Sands connected the two ships together, and Baxter made a vacuum seal.
Baxter opened her door moments before Jedrek opened theirs. The three downtrodden men glided through it quietly and took up residence in three seats that were seemingly in place for them.
“We’re sorry Colonel Stoddard couldn’t come himself,” Baxter told them gently. “We’re attacking a new Alliance base in the DL called Sanchu. He’s on the ground as we speak.”
Gedeon looked up at her, straight-faced, and nodded his head. He was a defeated man. “Where are you taking us then?” he asked her.
“To Sanchu, of course.”
“I thought you just said he was busy attacking it?”
“He is, which is why he couldn’t come here to greet you. That doesn’t mean you can’t go there to him now, given the circumstances.”
Gedeon put his hands to his face, rubbed it, and nodded his head. “Thank you,” he said.
“It’s our pleasure, Captain Baas,” Sands told him. “For what it’s worth, you did the right thing by not staying to fight. It’s hard to compete with an EMP blast.”
“Why didn’t they just shoot it at the Zephyr then?”
“It’s a bigger ship; it would have taken multiple EMP shots to disable it. Firing lasers first is more effective. You did it right, though, splitting up like that.”
“If I had done it right, we wouldn’t have been jumped in the first place.”
“Captain, I don’t know if this would mean anything to you or not, but I can tell you that Colonel Stoddard would disagree with you. There are simply too many variables at play to rely on hindsight as an effective gauge. The reality is that there is absolutely no way you could have known another ship with stealth technology was lurking in the dark.”
“How did they know we were there, though? That was the same ship that attacked us on Planet Hell!”
“Captain,” Jedrek said, but Gedeon didn’t seem to hear him.
“Nobody knew we were there…nobody!” Gedeon said in a mixed voice of strain and agitation. “Unless I had a traitor on my ship…”
“Captain,” Jedrek said a little louder in the middle of Gedeon’s sentence.
“…or unless Stoddard’s lines are tapped!”
“CAPTAIN!” Jedrek shouted. “SHUT UP FOR A MINUTE, WILL YOU!”
The captain turned and stared at him with daggers in his eyes. “WHAT!” he shouted back at Jedrek.
But Jedrek didn’t back down. “There’s no traitor, and Colonel Stoddard’s lines aren’t tapped.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Because I pay attention. I can’t believe you haven’t figured it out yet. The man whose always one step ahead of everyone else. You’re so busy poo-pooing what happened, you’re missing the obvious. Listen to what the LT said – there’s too many variables. Learn from it! The more you dwell on this, and the more time you spend kicking yourself in the ass, the less time we have to devote ourselves to getting them back!”
“What in the hell are you getting at?” Gedeon asked with clear frustration reverberating through his voice.
“Think back to the holograph of Boaz and Azaria. Boaz said that when the Alliance turned that missing ship on, a duress signal was sent back. I know it’s been more than a few years since we were in the military, but do you remember what that duress signal was?”
The captain’s cheeks slumped along with his shoulders. Jedrek was right; he should’ve already figured it out.
“All government and military ships automatically send a duress signal if their ships have been powered down for more than three months and powered back up again unless disabled prior,” Gedeon remembered out loud. “Recovery ships are immediately dispatched to make sure classified materials don’t fall into enemy hands.”
“Exactly, Captain. You know what that means, right?”
“I think you guys are mistaken,” Baxter said. “Federation ships don’t do that.”
“We’re not talking about Federation ships, LT,” Gedeon said to her gravely. “We need to see Colonel Stoddard, like, yesterday!”
************************
Ben tried feebly once again to wring his hands through the tight cuffs, and once again it didn’t do anything but cause him more pain and frustration. His feet were cuffed together, and his hands were cuffed to his feet, and both of them were cuffed to the floor, which under normal circumstances would mean that his butt would be on the floor. But that wasn’t the case. There was no artificial gravity on the Dagon, so he and his fellows were floating like balloons on a short line.
It hurt, really bad.
“Don’t keep fighting it, Ben,” Cadence told him. “The more you do, the more pain you’ll be in.”
“I’m in plenty of pain as it is,” Ben complained. “Do you have any idea who they are?”
“Not a clue. But I can tell you this much. They’re from Payra.”
“What?” Ben and Kara said at the same time as they kinked their heads to try to look at her.
“She’s right,” Warrina said. “This is one of their tactics. I should warn you that we’ll probably enter a planet’s atmosphere before too long.”
“Oh great!” Ben complained again. “Let me guess. They’ll fly down fast so that our bodies are pulled upwards, and then they’ll pull back hard so we slam against the floor.”
“That about sums it up, yep,” Warrina said.
“This is the same ship that attacked us on Planet Hell,” Cadence told them.
“So, these bastards have been on us for a wh…” Ben wasn’t able to finish his sentence. The ship bounced and banged, and then they felt the hard gravity of a planet below.
Kara began to scream in pain as the others winced from it. Reflexive tears streamed down all of their faces. The ship banked sharply left, bouncing them off the floor to their right, then banked sharply right, bouncing them again on the other side. It leveled out before nosediving, pulling them back. Eventually, it hit the brakes, and they slammed to the floor with a back-crunching thud.
Ben must have blacked out for a second, for when he opened his eyes, the ship was calm and still, and he could hear its engines powering down. “Is everyone okay?” he asked, but nobody answered.
He warily moved his battered body into a sitting position so that he could look around. He felt a warm liquid streaming down the left side of his face, and he could tell his left eye was beginning to swell shut. He looked down at the floor in time to see two drops of blood splatter against it.
The other three were still unconscious. There was a small pool of blood around Warrina coming from her nose. Cadence had a gash on her head and cheek, and it looked as though her arm was broken. Kara appeared to be unharmed, but she was out cold, so clearly, she wasn’t in too good a shape.
A door slid open, and a slender man in his late thirties or early forties wearing a long black leather coat came walking through it. He had long black hair and two earrings in his left ear. He was followed by a younger black man dressed in all black.
“Well, Ben Taylor,” the man in black said as he stepped over Cadence and made his way to him. “It looks like you’re quite the resilient one.” The man swung his right leg out and did a roundhouse kick to the left side of Ben’s head, knocking him out cold.
Ben! He thought he heard someone say in the blackness. Are you…ay…Be…Be…ou okay…Can you…me? A small dot of light appeared like the opening of a cave. He felt like he was moving through a tunnel as the light got closer and larger, and the words he thought he heard became clearer the closer he got to the light. Ben, can you hea…Are you okay? The light eventually enveloped him, and he soon began to make out shapes and colors.
“Oh, thank God, he’s coming around,” he distinctly heard Warrina say. “Ben, nod your head if you can hear me?” He tried his best to do as instructed.
It felt like he was sitting in a standard chair. His left eye was swollen shut, but he could still see out of his right eye. “That effing prick kicked me in the head,” he said faintly.
“What? We thought you just got banged up during reentry?” Kara told him. He looked over at her and was glad to see that she was relatively okay. She was sitting in a chair that was bolted to the ground, and her feet were shackled to it. Her hands were cuffed together behind the chair, but they were not connected to the chair or to the floor.
He looked over at Warrina and Cadence, who were on different sides of Kara, both cuffed the same way as she was. All three of them were facing him, but Cadence looked like she was reeling in pain. He could tell because tears were streaming down her face in agony. There was obvious blood in her hair and drying blood around the wound on her cheek.
“Is it broken – your arm?” Ben asked her. Her face was scrunched tightly, but she managed to nod her head yes.
“What do you mean he kicked you, Ben?” Kara demanded.
“I woke up after we landed, and I sat up to look at you guys. The guy with the leather coat came in and kicked me in the head. Must’ve been one heck of a kick.”
“Do I need to ask how your head is feeling?” Warrina asked anyway. The lower part of her face was smothered in drying blood.
“No, you can guess,” Ben replied, trying to keep it as still as he possibly could. “Do we know where we’re at?”
“Not a clue. And it’s a big universe.”
“Oh, great,” Ben demurred.
He turned his head slightly to the side to look at his surroundings. They weren’t the same. There were several bright lights above them, which made the cream-colored fabricated walls surrounding them practically shine. It was painful to look at. “We’re not on the ship anymore,” he observed.
“No, so far as we can tell anyway,” Kara confirmed.
“When did you guys wake up?”
“I was the first,” Kara explained, “but we were already in here when I did.”
“Cadence!” Warrina shouted. Her face was starting to turn white. “She’s going into shock! Cadence, breathe! You need to breathe deeply!”
Cadence tried, but it proved difficult.
“Come on, lady! You can do it…breathe…breathe deeply,” Warrina encouraged her.
Ben started to feel overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness. “Aunt Cadence, do as she says. Breathe deeply. This is your nephew Ben, Aunt Cadence. Fight this. Don’t let me lose my only family after I’ve finally got you back!”
Cadence forced her eyes open, and she looked pleadingly at him. “I can’t Ben, I can’t.”
“Yes, you can! You’re my aunt. You’re my family! You can do this!”
She began to take painfully deep breaths.
“There you go,” Ben said as he breathed deeply with her.
She took two more deep breaths…and then her body convulsed sharply.
“NO! NO!” Ben shouted repeatedly.
“Cadence! Breathe, Cadence, breathe!” Warrina shouted.
Cadence’s body convulsed two more times, and as it did, they could hear crunching sounds coming from her broken arm.
And then her head dropped, and she appeared lifeless.