Chapter Three: The Threat of Danger
“This is the third flyover this week!” Jonton said, standing and pacing in front of the rest of them. He walked the length of the circle and then around it, hands shaking as he talked. “We can’t just ignore it. It has to mean something.”
“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” Ashera argued, shaking her head. “They weren’t Imperial ships.”
“Do you think the Imperials don’t have plain ships?” Carro asked. “They don’t always do everything in the green and white.”
“This is getting us nowhere,” Donlan said, standing up himself. “We can sit here and bicker about it all day, and it won’t solve the problem.”
“What is the problem?” Cattilda asked, sounding bored. “That we’re seeing more traffic than usual? There’s a simple solution for that. Just shoot down the ships when we see them. Problem solved.”
Donlan rolled his eyes. “Yes, Cattilda, because that’s the answer to the problem. We just shoot down ships that might belong to the Imperials. That won’t bring them all down on us at all.”
“Well, I don’t hear anyone else perking up with any ideas.”
“Galen?”
Galen blinked and looked up. “What?”
“You’ve been surprisingly quiet for this whole meeting.”
“Is this a meeting?” Galen wanted to know. “I thought it was dinner.”
“Do you have an opinion or not?” Cattilda asked.
“What do you want me to say? That we should shoot them out of the sky when we see them? You know I think we should, but you also know that isn’t going to happen. We can’t afford to waste the ammo, and we don’t need to draw attention to ourselves. If they see that ships are going down over this supposedly abandoned moon, then yeah. They’re gonna get suspicious.”
“But?”
“But we can’t do nothing. We need to be alert. You think those Imperials won’t land here and kill all of us if they have the chance? They don’t like people falling by the wayside, and that’s what we’re doing. We can’t get complacent.”
“No one’s suggesting complacency,” Ashera said. “Just a little restraint.”
“I prefer survival to restraint,” Galen said, mimicking her proper tones.
She narrowed her eyes at him. Everyone knew that Ashera had been one of the best Healers in the Allied Planets before she’d been cast out. She’d worked in the main clinic, tending to some of the heads of state themselves. She had an excellent bedside manner, and she was always the one who wanted peace before violence. She preferred mercy to vengeance, and that had been her downfall.
The Imperials had wanted her to leave someone to die, and she’d refused to do so. They’d come after her, and she’d been forced to flee.
Now the Amakari benefitted from her expertise, but sometimes Galen thought she was more of a liability than a blessing. Even if they did end up shooting down someone, then Ashera would probably insist on taking them to the clinic and patching them up.
“Don’t you mock me, Galen,” Ashera snapped. “You haven’t seen half the things I have, and you can think me soft if you’d like, but it would be to your peril. I’m only speaking sense.”
“Your version of sense seems an awful lot like rolling over for them to kill us,” Galen quipped back.
“And if they kill us regardless?”
“Then at least we die fighting. We don’t submit to the likes of them. Have you forgotten who they are? What they’ve done?”
“Don’t you lecture me about what they’ve done. I was in the belly of it before you were old enough to lift a weapon, let alone fight the powers that be in the Allied Planets. I know what they’ve done. I’ve helped them do it.”
Galen sat back and lifted a hand as if to say ‘my point exactly’, and Donlan clapped his hands sharply.
“Enough,” he said. “Galen we all have noted your preference for action, and Ashera, you know we aren’t going to just take on the Imperials single handedly. It would be a massacre, and not one that we would walk away from.”
“Which brings us right back to what are we going to do?” Jonton said.
“For now? Nothing,” said Donlan. “We wait and we watch. It’s the safest bet.”
“Because that’s what we do. The safest thing,” Galen muttered, loud enough to be heard, of course.
“You were just arguing in favor of not shooting them down,” Donlan snapped.
“I don’t want to bring the whole Allied Planets down on us,” Galen said. “But I don’t think we should do nothing.”
“What do you suggest, then?”
“We could follow the ships. They’re going somewhere. We could take a shuttle and find out where they’re going. They don’t have to know where we’re coming from.”
“And if they lead us directly into a trap?”
“Then we fight.”
“Because that’s the answer to everything,” Ashera said.
“It’s the answer when it comes to the Imperials. You either fight or you submit. And submitting for us means death, Ashera.”
“Enough!” Donlan roared, and everyone fell silent. “For now we wait and we watch. That’s the end of it. Anyone who wants to go off on a suicide mission is welcome to, but we will not condone it. We will wait until there is a situation before we lose our heads.”
Galen made a frustrated noise, and Cattilda stroked his arm soothingly.
The rest of the meal was strained and quiet, and when the circle broke up, everyone went their separate ways. Galen usually followed Carro to her workshop, but he was worked up, and he could tell from the look in Carro’s eyes as she went, that she didn’t want company.
“Spar with me,” Cattilda said as she got up from her seat. “I need a distraction.”
“Not tonight,” Galen said. He was too restless for that, and he was worried he’d end up hurting her or fighting too hard.
Alinsoth was located in a place that was a dead zone as far as civilization was concerned. It had been a scrap heap before they’d found it, and it was still a scrap heap now, albeit a more organized one.
It wasn’t on the way to anywhere, not really, and so there were only two options as Galen saw it. Either people who were looking to hide from something were the ones doing the flyovers, or the Imperials were on the hunt.
He didn’t think they could know that all the Amakari were there on Alinsoth, living outside the law, but Carro’s words from before came back to him. Someone could have sold him out. He remembered those farmers, those merchants, those traders that they had done jobs for. Most of them were just trying to survive, and if the price was right, then…
Galen shook his head.
He was on watch, something that they only did when they were worried about what might happen. Sometimes their little moon got raided by those looking for their own places to hide, and they had to defend their territory. A lot of the people who lived on the outskirts wanted to help each other, but of course there were those who just wanted to survive themselves and would do whatever it took to make sure they could.
If it was just raiders who were closing in on them, then it would be fine. They had dealt with raiders time and time again, and they'd never had to give up their land and their lives. They could defend themselves against the scrap who came looking for trouble.
Galen hoped it was just raiders. He was spoiling for a fight, and he didn't want to deal with the Imperials. It would be a double win, as far as he was concerned.
It was dark out, the sky deep and dark, studded with stars. He liked to lean back in his seat and watch the sky, remembering his mother's soft voice as she'd taught him about the stars and planets far from them, telling him the stories her mother had told her when she was young.
He remembered the story as Jilari, the princess who'd been captured by a three eyed beast and chained to a tree in the woods. Jilari had cried out over and over again for help, looking for someone to come for her.
No one did, though, and she'd cried and cried until her tears had formed a spring in the middle of the forest she was lost in.
The monster never came back for her, and no one came to her rescue, and in the end, she'd wasted away. The spring had listened to her cries though, and somehow her sadness had given it life, and when she'd died, the spring had washed her body gently and sucked it down to the sandy bottom, keeping her safe.
Galen lifted his hand to the sky and used his thumb and pointed finger to map the streak of brightness that was supposed to be the spring's presence in the sky. There was one bright star in the middle of it, and his mother had told him that it was Jilari's soul, still in the spring, waiting for someone to come for her.
He remembered being a child and looking to his mother in confusion. "But why didn't anyone come for her?" he'd asked. "If she was their princess, and she was lost, why didn't they save her?"
And his mother had smiled sadly and said "Sometimes people don't know how to take action. Everyone mourned for their princess and wanted her to come back, but no one knew how to go into that forest and get her. What if the monster was there? How would they fight it?"
"Didn't she have guards? Soldiers? Knights?"
His mother had shaken her head. "Hers was a peaceful kingdom with only a handful of warriors to protect it. Either way, no one would have been a match for the three eyed monster."
Thinking back on that story, Galen remembered why it had bothered him. Had no one loved the princess enough to face their fears? They’d just let her die there, alone and abandoned. It was clear that Jilari had expected someone to come for her up until the end, and Galen clenched his hands into fists just thinking about it.
He never wanted to fail anyone the way her people had failed the princess.
That was why he fought.
Of course, he didn’t tell anyone that. No one would understand.
The bright star twinkled at him, and he closed his raised hand into a fist and then pressed it to his chest with a sigh.
And then the star got brighter.
Galen sat up and squinted at the sky.
It wasn’t a star. It was….something on fire?
He swore under his breath and dove for the alarm button. Whoever was on watch in the tower had a button to press to sound the alarm and let people know that something was coming. Then they could go for their weapons and hide anything important.
The siren squealed to life, echoing over the area, and whatever it was that was falling from the sky like that started falling faster, coming in hot.
It was going to crash right on the face of their little moon, and Galen thought for a moment about running for the rockets to shoot it down before it even got that close, but it would just be a waste probably.
Nothing would survive the impact, and they would be able to get a good look at whatever and whoever had been aiming for them.
“Galen!” He looked down to see Donlan standing there. “What’s the threat?”
Galen jabbed his finger up towards the sky where whatever it was that was falling towards them was getting closer.
“Is it a ship?” Donlan wanted to know.
“How should I know?” Galen snapped. “We’ll have to wait until it crashes.”
“Clear the area!” Donlan shouted, which was a good idea. Galen clambered down from the tower and they all ran for cover.
Despite how fast the thing was falling, it still took several minutes for it to get close enough for them to see that yes, it was a ship. It landed in the middle of an already existing crater with a resounding crash that shook everything in range. They waited for a while before they approached, trying to see if it was going to explode, but the flames just flickered and then died to a smolder before seeming to go out altogether.
Carro approached first.
Everyone held their breath as they waited for her to identify the ship. Or at least for her to tell them if it was Imperial or not.
"It's unmarked," she finally called.
"And the make?" someone asked. Of all of them, Carro was the best at spotting Imperial ships, even when they were unmarked with the Imperial seal. They had a type that they preferred to use, and Carro could always tell. She hadn't been wrong yet.
So it wasn't very comforting when her face was so bleak as she looked up. "I'm not sure."
Unrest rippled through them like a stone dropped into a pond. If Carro didn't know then none of them would, and it was impossible to tell. "I can do some research," she said quickly, and Galen knew it was less about saving face and more about making sure that they were going to be safe. "It's definitely one of the older spirit speeders, but I don't think the Imperials ever used them. They were too small and not flashy enough for them."
"Maybe they finally learned how to do their dirty work in a less flamboyant way," Cattilda said.
"Maybe," Carro replied, shaking her head. "I don't know."
"It's okay, Carro," Galen said, stepping forward. "There's another way to figure out what's going on here."
"What?"
"We open it up and see who is inside."
"Whoever was in there is probably dead by now," Ashera pointed out. "The crash and the fire would have killed them."
"Doesn't mean we can't see what they had on them. Maybe they have instructions, coordinates to where they were heading, identification. Something. Anything that would give us a clue."
Donlan sighed and inclined his head. He wasn't really their leader, but he was one of the oldest of them, and they tended to do as he said. "Very well," he said. "Go on, Galen."
He was more than happy to oblige. Galen went to the door of the ship, noting that it was a small carrier. The most it would have seated comfortably was two, with maybe some supplies and provisions thrown in. It wasn't meant for long treks, and the Allied Planets were at least a system away.
He found a spot where the hull was weakest and kicked it in, making himself a hole big enough to squeeze through.
The scent of burning plastics and metal was strong inside the ship, and he made a face as he stepped over wreckage and debris, making his way for the cockpit.
There was only one body inside of it. A... Galen tilted his head. She looked like a human. But what in the seven gates was a human doing here?
He would have said that she had been piloting the ship herself, but her hands were bound behind her back with strong cable, and she was slumped in the passenger seat.
She was also breathing.
Galen swore loudly.
"What is it?"
Ashera had come in behind him, and he jumped a bit, turning to look at her. "It's..." He sighed and gestured for her to see for herself.
"She's alive!" Ashera said. "Donlan prep the clinic! We have someone alive."
"You're going to save her?" Galen demanded. "We don't know why she's here."
"She is clearly a prisoner, Galen," Ashera said back, her voice gone to steel. "And she's injured. I'm not going to let her die here in this rubble because you don't trust her."
"She'll have to be questioned," Galen was saying, but Ashera wasn't listening to him anymore. She had stepped past him and was lifting the girl up and into her arms. She looked smaller there than she had even in the seat, slumped and nearly dead.
Galen shot her a dark look. This was trouble, and he knew it.
Once Ashera and Donlan had gone with the human woman, Galen and Carro combed the ship for anything that would help them understand what was happening.
They climbed back out again, mostly empty handed. Carro had at least managed to salvage the ship's chip, and she said that she was pretty sure she could run it through her system and figure out where the ship had been headed.
"There was more fuel than necessary to get here," she said. "I don't think Alinsoth was the final destination."
It didn't sit right with Galen either way. Something odd was happening here, and he wanted answers. Of course, every time he tried to go to the clinic to get those answers, Ashera turned him away, saying that the girl was still unconscious.
"If she's going to die anyway, then you're just wasting our supplies," he said bitterly, only to have the door summarily shut in his face.