Aberrant

Chapter 24

Kaplan braced an arm above the porthole in the Fire Witch's galley and sipped a cup of synthetic coffee. A massive space station hung in the darkness outside. Around it, ships drifted in and out of long rows as local traffic control shuffled landing slots. Beyond, half lit by its home star, a blue planet shone.

Feuria.

A welcome sight and a sign his team's tense limbo was over. Things would start moving again—fast. Debriefings, action plans. The deployed Gate Keeper battleships, with their hyperspace drives and coms, had already started delivering reports from Tirus 7: complete carnage. Hundreds of disabled and destroyed ships in local space. Blackened ruins on the surface.

The Xykeree were long gone.

Kaplan washed that unwelcome knowledge down with bad coffee. Diplomatic talks had been initiated. The Xykeree Imperial Hive blamed rogue ships for the attack, a disturbing notion, but one preferable to other possibilities. While humanity and its coalition partners were better prepared to defend themselves than they had been decades ago, billions would still die in a war against the Xykeree.

"We're landing in fifty." Sun strode into the galley, her light armour and weapons pristine, her dark hair in a tight bun. Ready to report—as she had been for days.

Long hours of inactivity hadn't sat well with any of the surviving members of Helios Seven. Complying, if somewhat loosely, with Captain Tras' order that they be confined to quarters—out of his way and business—hadn't helped morale either. But it had kept the peace and avoided the need to mentally subjugate the crew, though, Kaplan was currently reviewing his stance on that.

We going to get any voluntary form of cooperation? he 'pathed.

Sun's lips thinned as she jammed a cup under the galley's antiquated drinks dispenser. The captain has agreed to present himself and his crew for formal debriefing on the condition we double what we're paying him. Don't ask what his plans are for the money.

Given those plans festered at the forefront of the trader's mind, Kaplan didn't need details. He does more lucrative business in other systems. There was only one reason to visit that backworld port so often.

And that reason is probably bio-paste now. Sun leaned back against the galley counter and sipped her drink. The man's got a messy past, Reid. Subpar childhood, dishonourable discharge from the Space Corps, a long list of criminal offenses since.

And Soha Wilkirk, unknown to her, was tangled up in that past. It'd become clear in the aftermath of the attack the wep-tech trader's interest in the engineer went beyond warp maintenance and bedroom fantasies. Tras, it seemed, had served in the corps with her father. There was a debt owed. The kind that left one man standing and the other in a flag-draped box.

Sun shook her head. Tras had a lot of regrets and self-loathing before this, but now? If he goes back, it'll be for blood, not to recover the remains of loved ones. We should probably hold him a few days until we're sure he won't instigate another interspecies incident.

He's not going anywhere until his ship's repaired. Kaplan located Tras: a point of dark energy on the bridge. A few days in detention wouldn't settle the man down. Only one thing might put the pin back in that particular grenade: finding Soha Wilkirk alive.

Sun scowled over her coffee. What about our other reluctant witness? We drugging or just gagging and restraining her?

Kaplan glanced down the corridor that ran past the galley, sensing his team in their berths and a familiar, erratic hum of life in one of the aft cabins. I've talked to her.