CHAPTER TWELVE
SAHVIN
I learned from Pyrr Avantu that he and the Commander had experienced similar distress from their mates as I had with Nora. Pyrr probably understood better than either Commander Maktu and I because he had faced that fear on the Tegliar station mission. They weren’t taking any chances this time.
When we put into high orbit over Julconi, Commander Maktu and Admiral Degatu had all the non-com females shuttled over to the Kurellis to help document all the rescues as they boarded from the shuttles. We had also recruited three other teams from the civilians aboard to assist with the process of housing more than three thousand people.
I hated to part with my Nora the night before the mission, but I knew she would be safest on the Kurellis under the guard of three Dreads. Once we started sending up shuttles of people for them to process, she would be too busy to worry about me.
When I first started training for this mission, it seemed like a long time until it happened. Then suddenly, I was donning the armor to go down to Julconi. My company was going after the Uatu prisoners who had been marooned on the planet to fend for themselves. There were almost a thousand of them including various humanoid females who, eagerly accepted asylum with the Uatu for the chance of freedom.
Our job seemed simple enough. We were to secure the perimeter for the shuttle coming and going and while transports were being loaded. The night before Nora went to the Kurellis, we went to bed early to make love one more time before we separated for our assignments. We wanted plenty of time to savor our joining and still get enough rest for our jobs.
I knew she thought it might be the last time our bodies would be joined in the rapture of our love. But even when our bodies weren’t joined in pleasuring each other, I felt as though Nora was a part of me. Just a few months we were together I felt that my life was whole.
My people called it meomee. The Uatu called it solmatu. They were two different names for the same thing---soul mates. Until I met Nora, I never had any significant interest in mere consensual sex for its own sake. I only tried it just a few times in my early military days. But it was more to fit in with the sapiens than for my pleasure. There is nothing like meomee lovemaking. We gave each other everything.
When we were both sated, we slept spooned together with her wrapped in my arms.
Nora and I didn’t talk about it anymore because we had both faced our fear together then put it away so that its specter wouldn’t endanger us more than the actual event. We shared several passionate kisses before I accompanied her to the shuttle bay where she would leave for the Kurellis. The kiss we shared there was only a gentle caress of our lips together for a few seconds. Then she reluctantly pulled back and turned to walk up the loading ramp without looking back.
Even though it was morning for us, it was night time for the slave compound on the planet surface. The compound was on a relatively large island about four hundred kilometers from the shore nearest the prisoner’s conclave. Julconi was not like the prisons of Earth. People sent there were given the barest essentials and marooned there.
Before we even arrived in the system, two of the Dreads that arrived there ahead of us, took out the battle cruiser that patrolled the star system to make sure no one tried to rescue any of the prisoners as we were planning. Other than that, the inmates ran the prison as they saw fit, which was basically survival of the fittest.
Only the slave compound had overseers and military security. The Sargan battlecruiser only contacted them when the monthly supply freighter arrived. It had come and gone before our arrival. The rendezvous point for the prisoners we planned to liberate was a few kilometers away from the main conclave of inmates.
Those we were taking had been warned emphatically to keep the location secret, but we knew we couldn’t depend on that. There would be someone with a special friend they could not leave without saying goodbye. That was the reason we brought two companies down to the planet to protect the shuttles and the passengers we were loading.
Three more companies were on standby in orbit. We weren’t worried about the women and Uatu men the advance team had enlisted for evacuation. But if anyone had leaked the evacuation plan, we could be inundated with prisoners trying to get off the planet.
At the rate of one hundred people per shuttle, it would take about four hours for us to get over a thousand people off-world. Then we would be evacuated last.
My company consisted of twenty warriors, sixteen men, and four females. I was second in command. After Nora’s shuttle left, I went to the ship’s armory and got suited up in my armor with the others. All we wore under our armor was a pair of form-fitting shorts. As soon as we were suited and armed, we returned to the shuttle bay and boarded the shuttle down to the planet.
There was already a crowd of people waiting at the edge of the flat area of land the advance team had chosen. It was no starport and not even a real landing pad. It was an isolated plateau on the side of a mountain surrounded on three sides by sheer vertical rock faces. There was only one way to approach on foot. There were very few vehicles so all our evacuees would be arriving on foot.
It wasn’t the most accessible landing spot for the shuttle pilot, but our shuttles landed like helicopters rather than airplanes. The advance team picked the place for defense purposes, not for ease of landing.
Things were going fairly smoothly, except that we were expecting one thousand people and over fifteen hundred people arrived. Some were children who had been born on Julconi. Most of the extra people were friends of those who were on the list. Since many were unmated females, Farseek Command directed us to allow them to evacuate with the others because we needed the 0women and we had room for them. That added another two and a half hours to our evacuation schedule.
That was enough time for a violent contingent of inmates to arrive intent on being evacuated, i.e., escaping prison. That they would try to force us to take them off planet was reason enough reason to deny them passage.
Had they been slaves instead of prisoners, we would likely have taken some of them, but they came in like thugs bent on taking over and not refugees trying to escape unjust prosecution.
There were hundreds of them and only sixty of us. We had nowhere to go, so we had to stand our ground and fight. Our advantage was the armor suits and superior weapons. The thugs were supposed to only have knives and crossbows, but a few had armor piercing guns.
I took a hit on my left shoulder blade. Even though I knew the nanites would fix it, the pain was searing. What was worse was that the impact sent me past the big rock where I was going to take cover. I went over a small drop to a steep hill covered with loose shale and nothing to grab to stop my descent of about forty meters until I came to an abrupt stop against another rock. My injured shoulder took the brunt of the impact, and the pain was so excruciating I passed out.