War for Orion: Ghosts from the Past (30 page)

"You all probably think I have called this
meeting because of the recent attempt on my life," Adira spoke to
the Council.

There was whispering of approval around the
table. She waited for them all to become silent before
continuing.

"That is not why I have called this
Council."

"Then why have you called this Council?"
Aldrick asked. "We all came believing your daughter had been safely
recovered."

"I have found where my daughter is being
hidden," She informed all of them. "This is not something I want to
tell you all, but you still need to know how things are
progressing."

"Where is she?" Hildereth asked. "You must
tell us, we are your advisers."

Adira crossed her arms. "This is why I didn't
want to tell any of you I knew her location. I knew I couldn't tell
you
where
and that you would all want to know."

"Why can you not tell us?" Abdul asked. "This
is absurd! We are your Council after all."

"Sadly, there is a traitor somewhere in this
room who helped the Deimos Brotherhood with their most recent
attempt on my life. There has been leaked information for years,
that I have kept to myself, but now is not the time for leaked
information. My daughter is too important for the Deimos
Brotherhood to get a hold of."

"Who do you think this traitor may be?" Alura
asked. "You must have some idea as to who it is."

"I have not even the slightest clue," Adira
shrugged. "Whoever it is, knows how to stay in the top ranks
without slipping up in the slightest. There is nothing that I can
find that directly leads to any of you, but I know the traitor is
in this room."

"What are you going to do to find this
traitor?" Abdul asked. "You can't just let them stay here on this
Council! You shouldn't have waited this long to tell us!"

"There is nothing that I can do, Abdul. I can
point fingers, but I don't know who to point a finger at."

He clenched his fists. "You must be able to
do something! We can't have information being leaked to our
enemy."
"All we can do is hope that whoever this traitor is, slips up
soon," She put her hand on his shoulder.

"All we can do is hope," He bowed his head
slightly. "It is a wise decision to not reveal the location if
there is a traitor amongst us."

"I will tell you all when she has been
retrieved. A team is being sent out as we speak," She got up from
her seat. "I will call you all again when my daughter has arrived
on Hera and is safely in the Palace."

She pulled open the big wooden doors and left
the Council Chamber. The peace and quiet of the library was calling
for her. Her daughter was finally going to come home after twenty
long years of being hidden in isolation and she still didn't know
what she was going to say to her. The library is the only place she
could go to begin pouring over all of the stories she wanted to
tell her baby girl.

Kirill picked up his comlink. "What new intel
do you have for me?"
"The Queen has just sent out a search party for her daughter."

"Where is the search party going? I want to
take my daughter before they're able to leave the planet with her.
Adira will have no chance to see our daughter."

The blue figure shrugged. "I don't know. She
won't tell anyone where she sent the search team. She's sure that
the traitor is on her Council."

"I don't care if she knows that you're on the
Council! We need to get my daughter before she does!" Kirill
shouted. "Find out where she sent them and get my daughter!"

"I'll put a bug in her room. She will most
likely get a call from them once they have her. When they do, the
bug will intercept the call and I'll pay attention for a
location."

"Shouldn't there already be a bug in her
room? Why are you waiting until now to do it?"

"The Queen's guard performs regular sweeps,
it's a risky thing to do if it's not necessary. It won't matter if
they find it after we intercept her daughter. It'll be too late to
do anything at that point."

"Do whatever you have to do, but don't fail
me this time. Get my daughter to me at all costs," he demanded.

"I'll have men prepared on every planet to
intercept the ship once I have a location."

"Good. The Queen and Anlon will be dead very
soon. With my daughter in my possession and both of them out of the
way, there will be no question about my right to the Throne."

"No. There won't be," the figure grinned. "We
won't let you down."

Cearbhall landed his ship on Demeter near the
Waldmunt residence. He didn't care that the Demeter authorities
would be angry at him for not going through the spaceport as was
standard protocol. This was official Queen business, they could
complain to her if they had any problems with his decisions. The
faster that he grabbed the Queen's daughter and returned to Hera
the better.

He had heard whispers of a recent attempt on
the Queen's life and could only assume that her daughter's life
must be in danger too, though he wasn't sure how many races knew
the Queen had a daughter. If someone was able to slip into the
Palace and get that close to the Queen, there was no telling what
else they were capable of.

His holomap flickered to life and he made
sure that he had landed in the correct area before walking towards
the clay and straw house that was supposed to be the Waldmunt's
home. Several Kaneens waved to him from their fields as he passed
them. It was strange here, most of the places he went to were
teeming with life, but her was much different. Fields were filled
with crops and a majority of the roads were made of dirt and
traveled on lightly. Few advancements had been made over their
years, all in order to provide Orion with the essentials they
needed for living.

He walked up to the wooden door of the
Waldmunt home and knocked twice. The wooden door opened a couple of
seconds later an old, brown, male Kaneen answered the door.

"What can I do for you?" Obviously not used
to visitors coming to his home.

"Are you Mr. Waldmunt?" Cearbhall asked.

"Why are you asking?" His ears perked. "Who
are you?"

"I'm Cearbhall, of the Queen's Galactic
Special Operations Unit, and I have come here for something very
important."

"The GSOU. Come in," he motioned. "I think I
know why you may be here, but you're not going to like the news I
have for you."

Cearbhall walked into the house. It was a
simple house with an old wooden table for supper and some handmade
furniture around a fireplace. There were rugs on the floor and
family pictures on the plaster walls, but other than that, the
house was empty.

"Adira sent you here for her daughter?"
Waldmunt asked.

Cearbhall shook his head, surprised he didn't
address her as Queen. "She did. She said it is urgent and that her
daughter must return to Hera immediately."

"I'm afraid that I can no longer help you on
your mission. If you had made it a couple of months earlier, I
would have been able to hand her right over to you, but I'm afraid
you've arrived too late for that."

"What do you mean? Why can't you give her to
me now?"
"She's no longer living here with my family."

"Where has she gone?" Cearbhall asked. "It is
urgent that we take her to the Queen this is a matter of life and
death."

"I don't know where she has gone," Mr.
Waldmunt apologized. "I really do wish I could help you, but I
can't."

"How do you not know?" Cearbhall demanded.
"You were supposed to be protecting her! That was your
assignment."

"And I did until she disappeared a couple of
months ago," he defended himself. "There was no stopping her this
time."

"Did you try to track her? She must be here
somewhere! She's the Queen's daughter!"

"We tried to track her, like all of the other
times she left our care, but this time she just disappeared. She
grew impatient living with us and finally found a way to disappear
without us being able to find her."

"How could someone just disappear?"

"We have searched Demeter as much as
possibly, and she is nowhere to be found. If she is still on this
planet, then she has a new identity."

"Do you think she is still on this planet? I
can surely track her down if she is, with or without a new
identity."

He shook his head. "I do not. I believe it
was the planet that she was trying to leave, not us. She has
undoubtedly left Demeter to find a new life someplace else where
she fit in better. We couldn't afford to check for her off planet,
and now that's she's twenty, it would've raised too many questions
since she is not the same race as my family, so we had to let her
go."

Cearbhall sighed and thought a moment. "What
name did you give her? It may raise questions if you're looking for
her, but no one will care if the Queen is looking for her."

"Kanti Cordula."

Nimesha followed Anlon from his house to an
abandoned apartment building. He seemed like he was in a hurry to
get to the place, not noticing the glider following above him the
entire way there. She waited outside of the building for the boy
and girl to come back out and was starting to doze off when the two
emerged a little over an hour later. It puzzled her what they could
be doing in that building, but that wasn't a concern of hers. She
had only one thing to worry about and that was to kill the boy.
What he chose to do in his personal life was irrelevant to her
unless it interfered with his elimination and she concluded there
was nothing that would make his death difficult to carry out. Anlon
was just another kid, oblivious to what was about to happen to him
within the next day.

The boy was predictable. He didn't try to
hide what he was doing and walked around like nothing could harm
him, which she couldn't blame him for doing. He was just a normal
boy trying to cope with the murder of his family; watching his back
for an assassin wasn't something that he should be doing after
going through that. The friend really bothered her, she had yet to
determine if it would be necessary to take the girl out too.
Killing targets this young gnawed at her because they reminded her
so much of herself, but if she deliberately ignored orders, she too
would end up dead.

Anlon and Kanti left the building when she
stopped contemplating when to take him out. Time was out for the
boy, his death would happen tomorrow and so would the nightmares
that would come with it. Someone this innocent shouldn't be killed
in this way. All of the others she had killed deserved what they
got, but this boy obviously didn't. Orders where orders though, it
was after all her job as the most lethal assassin in the Deimos
Brotherhood to kill whoever she was ordered to take out. That is,
after all, what made her one of the most feared assassins in
Orion.

"Did you find my daughter Cearbhall?" the
Queen asked.

"Not exactly, your majesty," he answered.
"It's nothing we can't handle though. I will get this taken care of
as quickly as possible."

"What do you mean, not exactly? Did you, or
did you not, find my daughter?"

Cearbhall cleared his throat. "The Waldmunt's
say that she ran away a couple of months ago. They tried to find
her on Demeter without any luck. Apparently, it wasn't the first
time she has run away. This was just the first time she was smart
about it, leaving no traces for her caretakers to follow. He told
me that she has gone off-planet for sure, so we have a lot of
searching to do before we locate her, but it can be done."

"Do whatever you need to do to find her, but
keep it as quiet as you can. You have access to any, and all,
resources available," she ordered. "Do you have any leads yet to as
where she may be?"