Chapter 8
The Vezulian Armada sat in silence on the far side of Terranias, the occasional starfighter patrols providing the only activity within the fleet. Why they'd returned was hard to determine, though Kindel Thorus' reasons for any of his actions were questionable. The only certainty was that he was not visiting the planet on vacation. If Thorus had set his eyes on Terranias as he had Belvidia, then no good could come from it. The problem came in trying to track his movements as his ability to teleport from place to place made him nearly impossible to find until it was too late.
And that was just a fraction of troubles facing the universe.
Kitreena let out a long breath as she shifted her eyes from the Armada to the glowing blue planet. Arus was down there, somewhere. Whether he was alive or dead was impossible to know. Either way, Truce and the kyrosen had developed a weapon of unlimited potential. Machines had been trusted for manufacturing, calculating, measuring, and a myriad of other tasks for thousands of years. Lives depended on their proper operation day in and day out across the universe, and as technology progressed, machines only became more precise and efficient. Humanity, in contrast, was the epitome of imperfection. The same could be said of any sentient life form across the cosmos, for that matter. Machines lacked the consciousness and intelligent decision-making abilities of humans. Imagine the unlimited potential and creativity that could be gained from merging the two together!
Precisely what Sartan Truce had done.
Shaking her head, she turned away from the viewport and flopped onto her bed. Damien's starship was the closest thing she had to a home, and though she'd never admit it to him, she always felt safe when she was onboard. He'd been given command of the Refuge only a year ago, after their raid on the Deltorian Pirates brought in Dexter Amaroth and freed nearly four hundred prisoners. Damien had allowed her to choose the name of the vessel, and she selected Refuge in honor of those they'd liberated from their enslavement to the pirates. Since then, the ship had become their base of operations, and the only place where Kitreena could feel at home.
Her room was the first of the living quarters, located on the starboard side of the ship near the forward decks. The craft was shaped like two cylinders conjoined side-by-side with a long nosepiece where the bridge was housed. Small fins protruded from either side of the grey-plated hull at the rear. It was one of the more majestic starships used by the Aeden Alliance, acquired as a gift from the Blumosian council for the Alliance's assistance in ending a centuries-old civil war that had wracked their world. Kitreena remembered the day they'd first boarded; she'd chosen this room as her own because it had the largest viewport of all the living quarters and she loved staring at the stars. It brought peace when there was none, which was frequently the case.
She'd done very little to personalize it, aside from changing the glowing window border from a white light to a vivid pink and lining up her collection of flowers from distant planets on the wooden bureau beneath it. Her bed sheets were pink as well, a tone so light that they may as well have been white. The colors, combined with the deep brown wood of the wardrobe on the left and the bookshelf beside it, created a warm atmosphere that reminded her of home—her real home—where she could curl up with some hot tea and a good book for hours on end. Perhaps more personalization had gone into it than she'd realized.
There would be no such relaxation today, though, as a knock on her door sent her scrambling for her covers. She hated being seen in her nightgown. "Just a minute!" she called, shoving her feet under the blanket and pulling it up to her chin. "Come in!"
The door beside the bookcase cracked open, and Damien poked his head through. "Morning, Kit. How are you today?"
"I'm here," she responded in a bland voice. "Isn't that enough?"
"I have something here that may lift your spirits," Damien said, shaking what sounded like a bundle of papers on the other side of the door. "May I come in?"
"Of course," Kitreena nodded. "What is it?"
He entered slowly, sliding the door closed behind him. The thick stack of papers in his hand seemed tattered and worn with abuse; someone had certainly studied each page extensively. Damien dropped it on the bed beside her and grinned. "Lueille managed to link our systems with Truce's long enough to strip half of his database. It took a bit of decoding, but we finally have an in-depth technical schematic of the implant prototype."
Her eyes widened as she sat up—it wasn't as though the nightgown wasn't decent—and grabbed the papers. "I thought recon said they couldn't get into his database unless it was powered up."
"All of his systems are salvaged parts from old starships," Damien said with a grin, "and every starship terminal has remote access capabilities, meaning—"
"Meaning there had to be a remote power-on command as well?" Kitreena looked up at him.
"Exactly. They just had to figure out how to activate it."
"So what does this stuff say?" She flipped through the pages, hoping to find something that wasn't written in scientific technobabble. "Is there a weakness? Can it be removed without killing the patient?"
"We don't know yet," Damien admitted. "Recon is still analyzing everything. They expect to report their conclusions to me by the end of the day."
Kitreena groaned and dropped back to her pillow. "You mean this is going to be another day wasted? How many days has it been now?"
"Just because there's nothing you can do at the moment doesn't mean it's a day wasted," he told her, taking the paperwork. "Relax. Enjoy the break while we have it."
She gave him a sour look. "How can I enjoy it when I'm confined to my room? I can't go to the simulator, I can't go to the training room, I can't go to the lounge, I can't do anything!"
Damien's snow-white eyebrows rose over his grin. "Perhaps you should've have considered that before chasing after F'Ledro and nearly killing us all in the process." He sounded as though he was holding back laughter.
Kitreena's face darkened. "I won't stop until he's kissing my feet, Damien. You know that."
"Yes, I do." He turned and headed for the door. "But that reckless attitude and thirst for vengeance is going to lead you down a dark, dark path. Trust what I teach you, Kit. I've seen it happen to people . . . very close to me."
She couldn't help but roll her eyes. "I'm not going to turn out like him, Damien."
He stopped in the doorway for a moment. She almost thought he might turn and shout reprimands at her, but that had never been Damien's way. It was hard for him to discipline her, she knew, not being her biological father, but he'd never once given any sign of giving up, no matter how difficult she made the job. "What frightens me," he began, not looking back, "is that he didn't realize it until his brother pointed it out. And even then, he didn't believe."
With that, he was gone, and the silence of Kitreena's room seemed to scream at her. Deep down, she knew he was right, but her stubborn streak was not willing to relinquish its hold on her anger just yet. All that aside, the paperwork on Truce's implant was a great leap forward for their mission. Once deciphered, the information would certainly lead them to some kind of weakness in the machine's design. It could be deactivated without losing the victim. It had to be! I won't let them use Arus as their killing machine!
But how do you know he's even alive? How do you know their experiment was a success?
She'd found herself having this internal argument countless times over the past several days, and though she knew logically that there was almost no chance Arus had survived, she couldn't quite seem to shake the voice that assumed he lived. How can you be so sure he's alive?
Because he is. I can't explain it, he just is.
She let out a long breath as she stood and opened her wardrobe. "Stupid" Imagine! Arguing with oneself over something so stupid! Even if the boy was alive, it only meant that Truce had likely enslaved him, and that he was being used as the ultimate weapon against the peop
le of Terranias. And if Thorus manages to get his hands on it . . . She glanced back at the Armada through the viewport. No, better for the galaxy to hope that he's dead.
But he isn't.