Adrift (11 page)

The drug's sedative affects seemed to be very short term and Jasmine worried that he'd be wide awake before she could execute the last part of her plan.
She hopped up and had to climb over him to get back to the inner door.
Her foot caught on something and she ended up sprawled across the deck.
She twisted around to find Norik had a grip on her ankle, using her to pull himself up.

"No!"
Jasmine cried and kicked out with her other foot.
She caught him in the shoulder and could swear she heard him scream out in agony.
It worked though and he released her.
She threw herself through the door, locked it behind her and spun around to make sure he was okay.

Norik was livid.
She had ruined his plan.
He shook his head in the helmet and climbed onto unsteady feet.
She had drugged him.
That kiss had been a distraction and he'd fallen for it.
For her.
He caught sight of her on the other side of the door.
"Don't do it," he warned her even though he knew she couldn't hear him.
"Don't!"

But she did.
"Goodbye Norik," she breathed as he was blown from the airlock and into space.

Norik roared.
He howled.
He vented his frustration.
It was no use though.
She was gone.

Long after Norik had become a speck on the starfield, Jasmine still watched.
The odds were good that she'd just sent another man to his death, but she always rooted for the underdog.
For the little guy that had been wronged.
Norik was far from little but he was her underdog.

She pried herself away from the door and prepared for the General's arrival.
She hid all signs of Norik and spaced the remaining bodies.
Of course she had no way to explain how she had managed to find the strength to decapitate his hired help.
It was a pity she didn't know how to blow the ship up.
That would have hidden all evidence and maybe attracted the attention of Norik's crew.
He had seemed so adamant that they would come looking for him but even he couldn't tell her if the transport was still on its original charted course.
It seemed navigation hadn't been an area of his expertise either.

* * *

The General found her in the lounge.
He was flanked by two men.
She nudged a plate of protein crackers in his direction and said, "They didn't have scones."

They regarded each other for what seemed like an eternity.
His top lip curled slightly before he struck her so hard across the face it knocked her out of the chair.
She clutched her left cheek and glared back at him.
"I really hate right-handed men," she spat.

"You have something of mine," he told her.

"It's mine now," she informed him.
"So you'll just have to kill me."

He hunkered down, grabbed her by the jaw and pulled her close.
"Oh, I will.
In nine months," he said and then shoved her away.
"Bring her," he ordered to his henchmen, "try not to damage her."

Jasmine hissed at the first one who came near her, "You heard him.
Don't damage her," she said and then flinched when he slapped her.

"He said to
try
not to.
I tried."

"Really hating right-handed men," she muttered under her breath as they led her off the transport and onto the General's much more modern vessel.

"The ship, General?"
another flunky asked.

"Blow it up," he said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

"Yes sir!"

* * *

Norik was going crazy.
It had been ten hours since Jasmine had jettisoned him from the transport.
While he had the benefit of stabilizing thrusters there was no way he could catch up, unless the transport came to a stop.
Why had she done that?
Jasmine should have been the one going slowly crazy, not him.

Norik had cursed her, cursed his crew, her employer, the corps and even his own parents.
He had cursed everyone he could think of, including the universe and himself.
Then he had stopped.
Reality settled in and he knew he had to conserve his air in case someone did find him.
If they found him dead, then he would be of no use to Jasmine.

Norik tried to doze but as the deadline approached he found himself becoming more anxious, which in turn ate up more oxygen.
What made him more annoyed was that there was something in the suit with him.
He could feel it, it felt familiar but he just didn't know what it was and had no way to find out.
Not while he was still in the suit.
He sighed and waited.
Until finally, he saw it.
The explosion.
It had to be the transport.
His heart stopped as he watched.
It was a very short lived explosion due to the lack of oxygen left for it to feed on.

Then something unexpected happened, he hit something.
Whatever it was the impact knocked him ass over end and he spent the next few kilometers spinning helplessly.
He used a few precious bursts from the thrusters and his continual forward momentum to eventually right himself.

He gained on another something and this time he was able to see what it was.
A body.
Further along there was another one.
Someone had deliberately spaced the bodies.
He was afraid that whoever had done it had just opened up the ship and spaced Jasmine, but there was no other debris.
Just bodies.
He hoped that meant that Jasmine had done it.
Perhaps to confuse this General.
Of course, she could still be dead.
Blown up in the explosion he had just witnessed.
Norik wasn't sure what was worse, not knowing she was dead, or imagining all the ways she could be dead.
Still he continued on, just in case.

The General's personal vessel was small and didn't have the luxuries of a brig.
He did have enough room for several crates in his cargo bay and Jasmine had been unceremoniously stuffed into one.
After of course, they had tried to 'not damage her' on at least four more occasions.
She however, had successfully damaged one man's ability to reproduce in the near future.
It wasn't a comforting thought, but Jasmine took what she could get.
She was still alive and would be for the next nine months, although that wasn't much of a consolation.
Norik could still be alive.
For another few hours or decades, she knew not.
Until she heard otherwise, she could kid herself into thinking she had done the right thing.
That he was alive.

Norik couldn't believe his eyes.
There in front of him, was a ship.
A sleek yet small Cutter class.
One of the smaller, but still very capable military vessels in the Space Corps.
Not just any ship though.
It was his ship, the Callisto.
His crew had found him, now all he had to do was find Jasmine.

Norik's Second-in-Command and his Chief Engineer helped him with the EV suit.
As soon as his helmet was off he gasped in the fresh oxygen from his ship's air recyclers and said, "I want a scan of the area around the explosion, primarily for any other Humanoids, secondly for engine signatures."

"Why hello Colonel," his Second said chirpily, "you're welcome, Colonel.
It wasn't any trouble really, saving you.
All in a day's work.
No need to thank us."

Norik raised an unimpressed eyebrow at the Duarr and said, "Thank you Xon, now follow my orders."

Xon snapped off a mock salute and sauntered off to do as his commanding Officer bid.
It left Peter to help Norik with the rest of the suit.
When the dark skinned man caught sight of blood though he pulled out his radio and contacted the medbay, "Doctor, we-" he started but was cut off when Norik snatched the radio from him.

"Doctor, bring your medkit with you to the briefing room," he said and then cut the transmission before the woman could protest.
He reactivated the radio again and called for shipwide.
"This is your Colonel, I want all senior staff to my office, ASAP."
He paused and added a, "Thank you all."

"So you wanna hand to your office then?"
Peter asked.

"I think I can walk," Norik told him but even one step made him wobble.
"Let me amend that to, I do not need to be carried."

Peter chuckled as he helped his Colonel step out of the EV suit.
"What's that?"
he asked.

Norik turned to investigate and smiled.
"My bow," he said quietly, unable to believe he had been sharing the suit with it this whole time.
"She saved my bow."

Peter just shrugged and pulled his Colonel's arm across his shoulders to help him get the two decks to his office.
"Well this is a change," Peter said to him while they waited for the lift.

"Hmm?"
Norik asked.
He was preoccupied with studying the situation at hand.
If there was a body in the debris, then Jasmine was dead.
If there wasn't, then the General had taken her.
Where he had taken her was a question he couldn't answer, unless they could trace an engine signature and hopefully it hadn't degraded too much in the few hours since the explosion.

"I don't think you've even shaken my hand and now you've got your arm around me," Peter said with a grin.
"This ain't like you."

"No, it is not," Norik admitted.
Nothing he had done in the past few days had been like him and he blamed her.
"I wanted to thank you.
For what you do, as an engineer.
It is a necessary skill that I do not have the mind or patience for.
So thank you."

Peter blinked and then blushed at the compliment, "Thank you sir.
Just doing me job."

"You do it well," Norik told him.

The lift arrived and they made the rest of their way to his office in silence.
A few members of his crew greeted him but he paid them very little notice.
He waved aside the worried looks on the command deck and waited for an update from his Second.

"No Humanoids in the immediate area, dead or otherwise," Xon explained.
"We have the engine signature of a transport vessel although there's nothing left of it now.
There is another signature, looks like a Vernon cruiser and they doubled back the way they came."

Norik nodded and said, "Set pursuit course and then join us."

Xon gave Peter a questioning look but the engineer could only shrug.
"Aye sir," he finally said and turned to yell out orders.
"We've a chase on our hands, ladies.
Let's not let the Colonel down."

Norik felt the slight lurch as the ship jumped to faster than light.
It helped relieve some of the anxiety he felt on the inside, but not enough.

The three of them entered his office.
Norik had shrugged Peter off so he could make a show of being fine.
It was a front of course but only one person would notice and his eyes locked onto those of his Medical Chief who immediately clucked her disapproval at him and pointed him to his usual chair.
She pulled out her scanner and focused on his shoulder.

"What did you do to yourself?"
Nancy asked.
She ripped his shirt open to get to the bloodied bandages.
"You let someone stab you with a knife, well that was smart."

"I was distracted," he told her quietly while he watched the rest of his senior staff march in.
It wasn't often that they saw what made him alien.
He usually hid his ridges under his shaggy haircut and long sleeved clothing.
Now he sat there half naked before them, ridges exposed and orange stained bandages on display.
He wasn't surprised when a couple of them gawked, others looked away and some just didn't seem to care.

"You were distracted," she said and smiled.
The Doctor looked up at him from where she knelt and said so only he could hear her, "She looks like she was a lovely distraction."

Norik glared at her but refused to rise to the bait.
Nancy was reading his surface thoughts and if he thought about Jasmine then she would know everything.

"I hate that song," she scowled and returned her attention to his wound now that it was free of bandages.

"I know," he told her and suppressed a smirk as she started to hum the dreaded song that he had just been singing to himself.
He almost smacked her though when she prodded his shoulder.