Chapter 7 #2
“From your lips to the Goddess’s ears,” Venya replied.
As soon as she finished speaking those words, I instinctively readjusted the ship’s flight path.
“What are you doing?” Khel asked, reaching over his pilot’s shoulder to type something on the navigation board. “You’re steering away from the base!”
I assumed he had calculated my flight path.
“Zhara calls to me. This is the direction I must go,” I replied with a calm conviction. “You stay on your path but be ready for us.”
“Is what you’re feeling like the rescue mission on Haven?” Ghan asked, his voice thick with tension.
I nodded. “But this time, it’s even stronger.”
The vulnerable expression that flitted over the fearsome male struck me hard.
“Bring our children home, son,” Ghan said in a slightly pleading tone.
In that instant, I got a flashback of Magnar Ravik telling my Grappa Krygor to bring his son back to him as we were heading off to the Haven rescue mission.
“I will, Uncle Ghan. On my life, I will,” I pledged. “Gavin out.”
I terminated the communication and began putting on the suit that Vintor had brought to me from the armory.
That male had come a long way from his former obnoxious ways.
He could still be annoying at times, but once you understood it was his way of hiding his insecurities, it made it a lot more tolerable, even endearing.
We dropped out of warp speed about thirty minutes later.
The pulling sensation cranked up another notch.
Time was ticking against us. At least, we were headed in the right direction, and I could feel us getting closer.
It took nearly ten more minutes before the secret base finally appeared in the distance.
My stomach dropped at the sight of the extensive external damage visible.
Something truly terrible had happened. However, zooming in didn’t show an external attack.
Whatever destruction took place occurred inside.
This baffled me as our scanners indicated that the asteroid wasn’t just drifting away from its previous position, but propellers were deliberately moving it.
Long range scans didn’t reveal any other ship or planet they could be heading for.
Obviously, that didn’t mean anything. Maybe they were merely headed to a rendezvous point where the other party would join them once they dropped out of warp.
But I doubted this was the case. My gut told me that the entire base would undergo critical failure or flat out explode within the hour.
There was no doubt in my mind that whoever had orchestrated this had intentionally moved the base away from its original location so that any rescue attempt would arrive too late to save anyone.
“Curok, complete our approach,” I ordered while reaching for the com.
I attempted to hail the General’s ship only to find our signals blocked.
“Something is disrupting our coms,” I mused aloud, a frown creasing my brow.
Curok ran another scan before giving me a confused look.
“I don’t know where the disruption is coming from. It could be the base. But there could be something else out there that’s fooling our scanners. But this is deliberate. We’re not just in a dead zone.”
I muttered a few choice curse words under my breath. “Hopefully, the General will figure it out and not assume our demise.”
Moments later, we spotted the shield sticks the Titans had used to open a doorway into the base. I pointed at the one on the left side.
“There. Bring us close enough,” I commended.
“You want us to dock?” Curok asked even as he complied.
“No. This place is about to blow. We will use our jet suits to go in.”
To my pleasant surprise, despite their unease, no one protested.
“And me?” Curok asked, standing from the pilot chair.
We should leave someone with the ship, ready to fly us to safety the minute we escaped.
I didn’t have to ask to know that no one wanted to be left behind.
Braxians thrived in battle and dangerous missions.
As my closest ally here, Curok would be deeply hurt not to be by my side in the field.
However, personal feelings wouldn’t dictate my decisions.
“Come,” I said before turning to leave the bridge.
“No one stays with the ship?” Nolar argued, his confusion reflected on every other face.
“No. We will not return to it,” I replied, my chest constricting as that deep conviction settled in my heart.
I had saved a long time to buy this ship, custom made to my specific tastes. I had dreamt of trips through space in it with my mate. But material things could be replaced.
My companions’ sense of unease significantly increased, but once again, they didn’t argue.
It did something strange to me knowing they would take such a leap of faith in me.
After all, I was asking them to follow me into a half-destroyed base which I believed would soon explode while telling them we would not return to our only way back to civilization.
We opened the hatch and jumped out into the void of space.
We were close enough that it only took us a few minutes with our jetpacks to land by the stick shields the Titans previously erected.
My heart soared at finding the breach in the asteroid’s outer wall still present.
Better yet, my scanner indicated that, despite the external damage, the integrity of the base was sufficient to sustain life.
Oxygen levels remained adequate, and it didn’t detect the presence of lethal toxins in the air.
We exited into a hallway. I couldn’t see the holographic device they used to camouflage the breach on this side, but all such thoughts fled right out of my mind.
The muffled sound of a woman’s scream reached my ears, followed by Vahl shouting Zhara’s name with something akin to fear and borderline panic. I darted forward, my blood turning to ice when a pile of fallen rocks and debris blocked our path.
“Laser rams!” I shouted.
Vintor and Brenor rushed forward, brandishing the devices, double the size of a standard blaster.
They strategically aimed at weak spots and fired, loosening the bigger boulders, fracturing some of them, and knocking many of the smaller ones out of the way.
They fired a couple more times before the rest of us rushed in to remove some of the rocks to create a wider opening to allow us through.
It took only a few minutes that felt like an eternity as the distressed voices on the other side shouting my mate’s name further fueled the sense of dread choking me. Heedless of the stability of the hole we carved, I crawled through it, my companions following without hesitation.