The Lost Voyager: A Space Opera Novel (14 page)

Even when she was contracted to kill him as part of her previous career, he still couldn’t resist her. His body responded to her movements, his muscles tensing. He reached out for her when she was close. She lay down beside him and propped her head up on her hand. Her left leg entwined with his. Her sweet musky scent made his heart rate increase.
 

“What now?” Adira asked, looking up at him with those gorgeous, unreadable green eyes of hers. That was one of the things that had stopped him from committing more to her; he just couldn’t tell what she was thinking. When she wanted to present an opaque barrier, no one could read her.
 

He leaned back and relaxed, enjoying the stillness of the moment, the light pressure of her body against his. He reached his left hand down and draped it over her shoulder, resting his hand on her back. Her muscles shifted beneath her skin, firm and trained to perfection.
 

“Well? What now?” she asked.
 

“We rest for a moment,” Mach said. “Let the drone get to the location.”

“Is that all you want to do?”

“Want doesn’t come into it,” he said, running his hand to her lower back. “I can’t… not now; it’s not the right time. I’m worried about Sanchez and the others. This mission has gone to shit… and then there’s you.”

“What do you mean?”
 

“I’m… afraid of losing you. If we complete this mission, you’re not going to stay with us on the
Intrepid
, are you?”

Adira’s face changed, her lips softening and her eyes growing slightly wider. She focused on him intently, saying, “I truly don’t know what I’m going to do if we succeed. The thing with Sanchez… and… well.” She trailed off and looked away into the cold gloom of the small room.
 

“You want to go back to your previous career, don’t you? You still have contracts you want to complete, is that it?”

She shrugged and sighed. “It’s not as binary as that.”

“I can’t lose you,” Mach said, quickly adding, “If I do lose Sanchez, I need another good fighter on my crew.” Although it was quite clear it wasn’t just her skills he would miss.
 

“I offer more than that,” she added, sitting up now.

“Listen,” Mach said, reaching for the words that he had struggled to find since he accepted the mission. “I’m sorry I got you and the crew roped into this. I didn’t mean to lie to you. It’s just… it felt… important.”

Adira pulled her knees up to her chest and languidly placed her forearms over her knees, letting her hands dangle freely.
 

“I’m not judging you,” Adira said, waving her hand nonchalantly. “I mean, our lives, they don’t mean a great deal in the scheme of things. We’re all just a collection of particles, after all, just stardust, nothing more, and nothing less. If our lives help keep the status quo of the Salus Sphere, who are we to say no to that? But it would have been nice to have had the option.”
 

“I’m sorry,” Mach said, dropping his head and taking a deep breath. “Really. It wasn’t a decision I made lightly. But I needed you and the rest of the crew on side. I couldn’t just go out and find another team that I could trust to do the job. And it’s not a done deal here. We can still find the bomb and get off the planet safely.”

“What will be, will be,” Adira said. “There’s nothing to be gained by going over this again and again. My feelings for you haven’t changed one way or another.”

She stared at Mach now, an intensity he hadn’t seen since… well, since they were together years ago, since before she had a contract on him, since before she had willingly accepted a life sentence of solitary confinement on the Summanus prison planet. His thoughts wandered back to those days, of who Adira was—what she was. Not just an assassin, but also one of the most efficient killers in the whole Sphere. Did she really have much of a heart beneath that beautiful, deadly exterior of hers, or were her words just rote, an illusion?

Adira’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Are you listening to me? I have a stim shot if you need it,” she repeated, nudging him in the shoulder.
 

“Oh, sorry, I was just… it doesn’t matter. No, you keep the stim for yourself. I’m okay, really.”
 

“You look like hammered shit.”

“This is no time for sweet talk,” Mach said.

“I’m serious,” Adira said, leaning closer to him. “I’m worried about you. You don’t seem yourself lately.”

“Can you blame me, after what I’ve got us into? What we’ve seen? There’s something bad about this whole setup, and I’ve got you lot stuck right in the middle of it. Not much of a captain of a freelance outfit, am I? The first code of a freelancer is supposed to be one has to look out for one’s crew at all times. And yet, I’ve gambled with all of our lives.”

Adira’s eyes blinked slowly, her long lashes closing like two combs before opening again. “You did the right thing. I would have done the same—this is bigger than all of us. Besides,” she added with a hint of a sigh in her voice, “what else would we do? It’s not like any of us has families waiting at home for us. Neither do we have a company or colleagues to get back to. We’re all orphans; did you realize that?”

Mach, of course, did realize that. He had thought on it a number of times during the nights of long L-jumps. Every one of them had no parents left alive. Most of them were killed in the Century War, of course, along with some fifty percent of the CW’s population. There were entire planets colonized and used for raising orphans into the rank and file of the CWDF.
 

There were some hotshot psycho-behavioral specialists who used this as a way of enhancing the young soldiers’ training. It also knitted them together more tightly in their respective companies. Mach supposed his crew were the same in a similar regard, even if they didn’t have a quack to soften their brains with dogma.

“Does it bother you that there’s no loved one waiting for you?” Mach said. He had always avoided these kinds of conversations with Adira, even during the warm, tender moments after sex. She just wasn’t the kind of creature who seemed receptive to that sort of enquiry, but it seemed appropriate now, stuck on a distant planet, waiting for the whole system to burn into a singularity.
 

“Who said there isn’t someone waiting for me?” Adira replied.
 

Mach fidgeted and turned his body toward her. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his crossed legs. “You mean there is… someone?” He had to fight the urge to say “someone else,” not wanting to presume that he and she might be an actual thing. For all he knew, she only slept with him so she had a warm place to sleep at night. She’d never shared any feelings as such with him.
 

“Yes,” she said blankly before turning her gaze away from him to inspect some invisible detail on the opposite wall.
 

That one single word stabbed into his chest, weighed down on him like a personal singularity, and pulled his unspoken emotions down into in an inescapable gravity well. He opened his mouth to say something—anything, but nothing came.

“You want to know who, don’t you?”
 

Of course he did; how could he not? “Why are you telling me this now?”

“It’s as good a time as any. We might not make it off this place alive; I’d rather you know now.”

A mix of emotions flooded his consciousness. Anger, disappointment, even shame for the way he had let her get into his life, into his mind; the way he had grown to care about her far more than just a bed partner. “So, who is it, then?” he asked.
 

His smart-screen vibrated on his left forearm before the holographic image of Babcock appeared on the display. “Mach, the drone’s arrived at the site of the signal. I’m patching video through to you now.”

Mach bit his tongue in order to avoid lambasting Babcock for the interruption. In truth, he could have done with the distraction. Adira leaned over him to watch the video playback on his smart-screen. He held the sleeve up in front of them so they could get the best view.
 

The drone’s video feed was crisp and vivid, the high-definition 8k signal reaching them with its full bandwidth of data. They had Tulula to thank for that; she had upgraded some of Babcock’s encryption and streaming protocols.
 

“Look there,” Adira said, pointing to a densely forested area below the drone’s flight path. Mach issued commands to the drone to slow almost to a hover so that they could get a better look, and to magnify in closer.
 

“There’s damage to the trees,” he said over the wider channel. “Are you seeing this, Sanchez?”

“Yeah,” the hunter replied from his berth, his voice sounding as though he had recovered well. “Looks like an emergency landing pattern to me.”

“I think he’s right,” Babcock agreed. “Given the width of the damage, I would say it matches closely to the dimensions of
Voyager
.”

The trees weren’t just damaged; they were collapsed and flattened the farther the drone flew in an easterly direction toward the afternoon sun. The farther it went, the flatter the foliage, to the point where Mach saw scorch marks on the sides—these matched the landing thruster layout of
Voyager
perfectly.
 

“This is definitely it,” he said.

The others murmured a combination of excitement and trepidation. Babcock was talking to Squid Two and Tulula about vectors and mass displacement. Mach tuned out of the ongoing conversation and watched the video, keeping his eyes peeled for any sign of the actual ship. The drone continued in a slow sweep, beaming back the images. The golden light of the sun bathed the area in a yellow-orange wash, bringing out the saturation of the forest greens and blues of the dense trees.

“There!” Adira said, jumping to her feet and bending over so her face was just inches from the holodisplay. The image before them froze before turning to black.
 

“We’ve lost contact with the drone,” Babcock said. “It’s completely offline.”

“Seems like someone—or something—doesn’t appreciate being spied on,” Sanchez said. “I thought this planet was supposed to be completely deserted?”

“It is… or was,” Mach said. “Could be the
Voyager
crew, I suppose, perhaps thinking it was a threat to them.”

“Bring up the last frame,” Adira said.
 

Mach did as she suggested. She pointed to the far bottom left corner of the video frame. “That, to me, looks like the rear corner of a cargo ship.”

“You’re right,” Mach said, knowing almost definitely now that they had found
Voyager
. “We need more video,” he said to the crew on the
Intrepid
. “But don’t bother sending another drone; it’ll likely just get shot down again. Send one of the unmanned fighters.”

Sanchez spoke over the ship’s peer-to-peer communication channel, “Did you see it, Mach?”

“The ship? Yeah, just a tiny fragment of it.”

“No,” Sanchez said. “Not the ship… something else, on the right side of the horizon between the tree lines.”

Mach rewound the video and looked closely at the area Sanchez described. “Oh shit,” he said as he watched a number of shadows, far larger than a human, moving with unnatural speed between the trees. One of the shadows stopped just before the drone’s signal cut out.
 

“Oh, how nice,” Adira said. “A welcoming committee.” She briefly kissed Mach on the cheek before giving him a playful, though stinging slap as she leapt over him and dashed out of his room, leaving her scent wafting behind her, making Mach want to call out to her, ask her to come back, but it was too late. She was gone, leaving a ghost of her being behind to haunt him further while he decided the next course of action.

Chapter Fourteen
 

The
Intrepid
hummed with a low-frequency hum generated by the gamma drives. The ship hovered ten thousand feet above the planet’s surface. Mach and the rest of the crew were present in the bridge, waiting on the data from the fighter drone they had sent down to
Voyager
’s location.
 

Lassea, in charge of controlling the unmanned fighter, manipulated the controls on her holodisplay. The image was beamed onto the large viewscreen at the front of the bridge. Everyone’s attention was on it; the video showed the fighter’s quick, sweeping descent. It arced low toward the tree line, following the landing skid they had spotted earlier.
 

The fighter flew over the signs of wreckage. Mach leaned closer to the viewscreen, watching intently. The feed dropped frames, creating a flickering motion, and then snow-static filled the screen from top to bottom until the whole thing was obscured.
 

“Come on, resolve!” Sanchez mumbled from his weapons station to the left side of the bridge. His hands were clenched together, his attention fully on the video. His complexion had improved since he came back on the ship, Tulula having given him some herbal vestan remedy. Whatever was in it seemed to have done the trick.

The video continued to cut in and out.
 

“We’re getting bad interference from something,” Tulula said. She dashed across to her station to the right of Lassea and manipulated its controls. “I think the signal’s being actively jammed!”

“Increase the gain and narrow the band,” Mach ordered.
 

Tulula nodded before briefly glancing a look to Sanchez.
 

Mach wondered how long she had known about the hunter’s condition, and whether she had been treating him. He would have to make time to speak with her, find out if she knew more about this parasite than Sanchez in his ridiculous stubborn prideful way was willing to share. She remained by her station, her body language difficult to analyze, given her alien ways. The CW did train the humans and fidesians in Axis Combine alien cultures—horan, vestan and lactern—but there was a limit to how closely you could truly come to know a species, much less an individual of the species, just by watching video gathered by spies.