Spacer Clans Adventure 1: Naero's Run (32 page)

One by one, each missile barrage
either exploded or dropped out of the sky, well short of them.

The gunships
swept in at maximum attack speed.

A strang
e energy field enveloped the four fleeing craft full of rebels.

The readings
on Naero’s sensors went wild.

S
ome weird kind of electromagnetic force.

Any gunship that came within four kilometers of them lost all power and dropped ou
t of the sky. Their crews screamed over the comlinks.

But the same force at work caught them before they smashed into the trees and rocks, and set them down
safely.

One remaining gunship broke off,
unaffected, returning to the mining facility to strafe the grounds.

The
girl suddenly collapsed, toppling sideways out of her seat.

Tarim caught her, gasping as he suddenly stared into her veiled blue eyes, cradling her in his arms.

The girl reached up with a slender hand and touched his face. Tarim shuddered. He gasped for breath once more and smiled back at her, completely enthralled.

She laughed softly and seemed to regain a portion of her strength

Was she an empath? Did she somehow use Tarim to recharge her energies, or was she actually flirting with him?

“Father,” she said, “my talents are spent for the moment. I have done all that I can. The rest is up to you and our new friends.”

Tarim held her hand in his for a moment, then folded it back over her.
She leaned into him, resting her head on his chest and nestling in as if she had known him for years.

“You have done enough, daughter,” the rebel leader said. “
Rest now. We will have much need of your abilities later, I am certain.”

He looked Tarim over. “This miner boy is acceptable to you?” he asked her.

“Very much so, father. I knew from the moment I sensed his presence. This one will never harm me. Not on purpose, at least.”

The leader nodded, smiled sadly, and turned away.

The young girl continued to stare into Tarim’s brown eyes until her strength left her. “If only you could see what I see in him. Then you would know.”

She started to drift off again.

“Hold me while I rest,” she whispered to Tarim. “Your touch helps me somehow, in ways even I cannot understand.”

Tarim finally found his voice. “It’s all right. Rest all you want. I’ll protect you.”

Naero stared at them, her mouth gaping.

Major points for Tarim.

Dozens of
new questions and problems arose.

Irith snapped at her. “Stay with me, co-pilot. This is tight flying.”

“Sorry. I’m with you.” She focused all of her attention on maintaining their heading, skimming the surface. And not slamming into mountains.

The leader
studied their efforts and smiled. “You’ve kept your word. Good. I would have hated to shoot you all.”

“We
wouldn’t have enjoyed that either,” Irith said flatly.

“
Where are we headed?” Naero asked.

“
I’ll input the coordinates. More pursuit will come, but they won’t find us now. We’ll be here for a few days until the others can be collected and brought to bulk ships by our people in the wilds. You will need to be our guests until then, I’m afraid.”

“
Of course,” Naero said. “Under the circumstances, I understand.”

The leader looked at her
. “Do you?”

He
stared off into the brightening sky. “I find that surprising. I don’t understand very much anymore. Now we are hunted animals. We only do what we can, what we must to survive and help our people.”

Stuck right in the middle of the miner revolt.

Naero shook her head and muttered. “As if I needed another blasted mess to wind up in.”

She adjusted to the course the leader gave her, and squeezed every drop of speed out of the old bucket that she could
manage.

37

Naero and her crew took refuge with the rebels
inside a vast network of gigantic, pockmarked blue-green caves near the high sea cliffs.

Gallan
rested securely in the miner’s makeshift field hospital. Ellis volunteered to stay with him.

As one might imagine, Tarim and his new girl went everywhere together, completely smitten with one another.

Good for them. Tarim held his head high for once.

Naero and Irith kept
themselves busy tending to those who needed them most. There were plenty of wounded and sick to tend to after the raid.

At first the
rebel miners showed an expected level of distrust. But then as Naero and Irith progressed from person to person with their medical skills, using up their supplies in medkit after medkit, attitudes among the miners softened.

One of the leader
’s guards, wearing a red headband, came up to Naero and adhered some sticky patches to both shoulders of her jacket and on the back. They bore strange miner symbols that she couldn’t read.

There wasn’t any time to
scan them into her comp for translation.

The
bodyguard saluted and left her without any further explanation.

Yet w
hen other miners spotted the patches, most of them wept. Others repeatedly thanked her. Some tried to kiss her hands, her feet.

They crowded around her.
It was all she could do to keep going about her duties.

“
No, please. Stop,” she said. “Thank you, but let me through. I can still help these others. Let me through. Let me help them. Can’t you understand?”

A female Besh medic came along with several orderlies and moved the wounded and the sick back away from her.
Most Besh, like this woman, had gray-green skin tones, black-green hair, and small ears.

“
Thanks,” Naero said.

The medic would have been very pretty
, except for a nose that had been badly broken, many times over. She also carried terrible scars from wounds and burns on her arms and legs, visible through her ragged clothing.

“
You’re doing good work here,” the medic said. “Are you a doctor or a healer among your people?”

“
No. I just have some training.”

“That must be some training.
Let’s talk over some chow. We can learn a lot from you two. But what we really need are supplies. We’re desperate.”

“Let’s take a walk back to my transport,” Naero said. She nodded her head to Irith, who nodded back.

“What’s in your ship?” the Besh asked.

“Your leader left the rest of our cargo intact. Didn’t even ask what we had in our holds.”

“What were you carrying?”

Naero flung the doors to the smaller inner holds open wide.

“Medical supplies and equipment bound for Triax. They won’t miss them. Distribute them all among your ships and your people.”

The medic gasped and hugged her. “This is…wonderful! I don’t know what to say.”

“‘Thanks is all right’. We’ll give you what medical files we have also, and if our small armory gets cleaned out, that’s okay, too. I’m sorry we can’t do more.”

“No, this is great. Give me a moment while I organize all this.”

The medic called teams over on her old radio to unload the medical supplies.

“My name’s Arana.”

Naero took her hand and used her cover name. “I’m Nari.”

“You’ve more than earned some chow with us. Don’t expect anything spectacular. Just stew, but it’s filling.”

“Stew sounds great. I am hungry. But can you explain something to me?”

“If I can.”

Naero pointed to the scarlet patches put on her.

“What do these
say? Your people keep acting so grateful to me when they spot them.”

“Oh, that’s understandable. Those patches mark you to be
an avenger. A great honor among the warriors and our people. You slew an Ejjai alpha, in single combat, no less. Not many could do that. They say many witnessed the act.”

“I’m sorry. I still don’t get it.”

“Nari. Our peoples have many reasons to despise the Ejjai overseers and guards. Many.”

The veins at the side of th
e medic’s neck pulsed. The muscles in her face strained.

“
Be gracious. It is a sign of great honor and respect. Many of these people have never been able to strike back at their tormentors.”

She
waved a hand back at the heaps of dead outside the field hospital. Stacked up in piles for burial. Corpses of all ages. “Many will never get the chance.”

“Suddenly I don’t feel very hungry,” Naero said.

Arana put an arm around her. “That’s the wrong attitude. We have to keep up our strength. Come. A bowl of stew as promised, and then it’s back to work. Tell me about your medical training.”

The stew tasted thin, bland, and slightly burned, but Naero ate it graciously.

When she and Arana talked, she kept to her cover story.

Each of them had about half a bowl due to rationing.

Thinking about the thousands of hungry faces huddle in the dank caves who had already had theirs for the day, Naero did not ask for more.

Some who saw her patches offered her their rations.

Naero declined, forcing tears back.

“That was good,” she said at last.

Arana rested a hand on her shoulder and then moved on. “There’s still so much to do. More coming in all the time. In a few days, we’ll make a run for it and you’ll be let go.”

Naero nodded.

“Let’s get back to work and spell your friends and some of the other medics before the chow runs out,” Arana said. “They’ll be ready for a break.”

Several h
ours later, there was still so much to do. The medical supplies helped immensely, but the medics were clearly overwhelmed by the immense task at hand.

Naero
did all that she could, deploring the conditions Triax had put these people in. But there were limits even to her skills.

On top of that, exhaustion staggered her. She’d hardly slept for
nearly two days, and fatigue finally won out, even for a Spacer.

When the next shift of medics took over, Arana came a
long and brought them both to a quiet rest spot in a separate cave where those off duty could grab some sleep.

Naero mumbled her thanks
, feeling a filthy, scratchy blanket gently settle over her.

She curled up
and pulled it around her.

A small soft touch awoke her sometime later
. A touch charged with energy.

Naero
opened her eyes and sat up.

The
leader’s psyon daughter knelt there in the darkness beside her, softly glowing blue-white.

Her azure eyes like bottomless, glittering stars.

“Did you rest well, spacechild?”

Naero nodded, staring at her.

“Good. You needed to. Come with me. My father wishes words with you.”

“
Who are you? Where’s Tarim?”

“
I am Shalaen. Tarim is resting with your friends. Will you come?”

“
Of course.” Naero rose.

They
picked their way quietly through the sleeping, the healing, and those still in the process of dying.

“
Shalaen...” Naero whispered. “What are you? I’m very curious.”

The girl didn’t even glance back. “You are curious about me? How very strange. I have no idea what you are, and yet you want to know w
hat I am?”

“You’re a
natural psyon at the very least, and an extremely powerful one at that for one so young.”

“
Telepathy is one of my talents, but only with surface thoughts. It is too exhausting to attempt to read anything deeper. But you and the Corps are wrong. I am not a psyon. I have had my awareness and my powers as they are from the moment I was conceived. Psyon powers do not develop until after puberty.”

Shalaen w
ent quiet for a while.

They passed several squads of heavily armed guards without challenge and went down a protected corridor hewn right through the rock. More guards, some of them in
battered, mismatched suits of salvaged power armor, stood at attention to either side every ten meters. All of them wore red headbands.

Shalaen finally stopped in an open section and leaned back against the glass-smooth wall.
Huge mining plasma borers made walls like that, fused them right together.

Finally,
Shalaen stared up at Naero, her large blue-white eyes gleaming in the shadowlight. “I often ask myself what I am. It can almost lead to endless introspection if I do not desist at some point.” Shalaen intrigued Naero, almost as much as the many questions she had about herself.

“
My father, who you have met, is human,” Shalaen said. “A simple man from Ramor, sentenced unjustly to a life in the mines. My mother, on the other hand, came from the Yattai. Do you know of them?”

Naero had heard the term, but it t
ook a moment to remember. “Our Mystics know of them. Interdimensional beings from the astral and ethereal planes. They can take forms of pure energy to go about wherever and however they choose throughout several dimensions. Some call them spirits, angels, demons. Even gods.”

Shalaen
look right through her. “And yet our abilities do not even begin to approach what lies deep within you, Naero. Until you can learn to use them.”

“I don’t understand.”

Shalaen shrugged. “Neither do I.” She went forward again. Naero followed at her side.

“The Yattai have been called many things,” Shalaen said. “
At various times, many of those observations may have been correct. The Yattai are among the oldest remaining sentient entities in the universe who can still take and sustain physical forms. Even the Oden are not as advanced.”

“
The who?”

“Another advanced race. If you ever study the Secrets with your Mystics, as I’m guessing you shall, y
ou will meet some of them one day.”

“
If you say so.”

“
My mother’s chosen name was Jarluaena. I possess many of her memories and much of her knowledge and power. The Yattai are foremost explorers, but my mother chose a different path. The rise and fall cycles of the younger races in the universe grew precious to her.

“
She expended much of her abilities to become human for a time. She felt strongly that the Yattai had gone too long without one of their number recalling what it was like to be young, and much more mortal than they. She especially liked humans and their capacity for love. Their capacities for hatred, greed, and violence also shocked and attracted her. Humanoids have so many ranges of extremes.”

“
Why did she choose to be a miner? Wasn’t that stretching things a bit much?”

Shalaen stared at Naero in silence for a moment
. “You ask most absorbing questions. I like you.” She cupped both hands over her temples for a brief instant.

“
Jarluaena did not desire to become a miner. She devised a way to be born mortal, a simple child of two ordinary Ramorians, but with the knowledge and memories of her former existence as a Yattai. Her parents, whom she adored, were later slain during one of the local unrests.”

“
Unrests? You mean wars?” Naero said.

“
Yes, but there are and will be conflicts much larger in scale and scope than those yet to come.”

Naero sighed. “
I suppose you’re right.” The galaxy rushed headlong toward another Spacer War.

“
She’d known my father since they were children together, and loved him,” Shalaen continued. “It was as if they’d always loved one another. They married amid the upheavals around them. Somehow they found happiness. Then, while she was pregnant with me, my father’s political enemies framed him. Naming him a traitor to the Ramorian people, when his accusers were in fact the real traitors.

“They
sentenced him to life in the Triaxian mines. A virtual death sentence. My mother chose to go with him into exile and imprisonment, rather than be parted from him. He begged her to stay behind, find another mate. She would not listen.

“Once subjected to the very real horrors of the mines, t
hey could not believe the way the Corps treated the miners and their families. The open atrocities, abuse, privation, and summary execution. They helped organize the mining revolt. With the remnants of her discarded powers, my mother managed to keep them alive. Despite many attempts to eliminate them.”