Chapter Ten
“I throw wishes into the night and wait for the stars to catch them.”
~Christy Ann Martine
Davos
I had been shaken to my core by the idea that someone could board my ship—one of the royal cruisers—and take my mate right out from under my nose.
It infuriated me, but I had been trained to put my feelings aside, pull myself together and act quickly to discover what the problem was in any given situation and that training helped me now.
Though I was worried sick about him, I immediately put a price on the heads of the ones who had taken him that was so astronomically high, that almost none of our allies had been able to resist. Every ship in this part of the galaxy from here to Earth was on high alert and actively searching for them.
Earth was where the bastards had originated from, of course.
And I was determined to track them down.
Though their ship was equipped with stealth technology and might be invisible to most scans, it was still possible to track its heat signature.
The only problem was that in the vastness of space, it was only a small speck and would be nearly impossible to find.
Nearly impossible being the operative words, however.
As long as any slight chance existed, I was never going to stop going after Blake.
Even if I had to follow him to Earth’s surface, I would find him and get him back.
Since I was willing to go to the depths of hell after him if I had to, Earth would be, as the humans said, a piece of cake.
Even though one ship in the vastness of space would be hard to find, a spacecraft's signature could be revealed by the heat of its engines, the heat from its life support, and even its electrical equipment, but any stealth ship would attempt to minimize all of those by cooling its engines, directing heat away from the body of the ship, or by using other countermeasures. There were still things, however, that could be done to detect a ship. Active sensors like radar could search space for it and passive sensors that detected its electromagnetic (EM) or infrared (IR) signatures could also be used. We could look for anomalies or signs of its presence in the background. We could bounce radiation around space to see the ship’s reflection, all while passively searching for any heat, light, or radiation the ship was unintentionally emitting.
It might still be only a speck, but with enough people looking for it, and knowledge of where it was headed, there was a good chance we could come across it.
The Nilanium captain had confirmed the information about where it was heading for me.
I put out another extravagant bounty on Atlanthium Rabb right away, and since there was no honor among thieves, the bounty had brought about his arrest almost immediately.
After a bit of “persuasion” at my hands Rabb had told me everything I needed to know.
“Why was my Consort taken?” I had shouted at Rabb, who had been cowering on the floor at my feet.
“I-I don’t know all of it, Your Majesty. No, please! Please listen to me. I’m telling you the truth! I swear it! Some of the Veranon priests were actually Alliance operatives, disguised and sent to Tygeria to rescue your consort.”
“What? To ‘rescue’ him?”
“That was my understanding. They were Alliance spies who had infiltrated the priesthood of the Veranon.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Please, Your Majesty! It’s common knowledge among my people that there are spies on Tygeria.”
“Common knowledge?” I was incensed and close to killing him. “You better start making sense, Rabb,” I said, looming over him. “Because my patience is wearing thin.”
“It began after your King Horlokk died, sir, some twenty years ago. That’s when they first began to come here.
You would have been an infant at the time, and men like your father were off planet and fully engaged in fighting the war.
These spies who came to Tygeria either killed or paid off some of the top hierarchy of the Veranon church—which was only in its beginning stages then—to allow them to slip in and assume control.
All of the legitimate higher-ranking priests were eliminated in one way or another.
By the time the religion had been fully infiltrated by Alliance operatives, it had been too late.
The majority of young priests who were still loyal to Tygeria and the Axis were eliminated one by one until none were left except Alliance operatives and the Tygerians who had turned traitor.
“The priest known as Evoq is actually an Alliance operative from Earth. He only arrived a few years ago, sent to Tygeria in disguise to take over as High Priest.”
“Why did he blow his cover now, after all this time?”
“Lately, some of the other survivors of your consort’s captured ship have petitioned their Congress to launch a rescue or begin a trade for him.
It was becoming a real problem. They felt that Lt.
Cameron had been abandoned by his government, and that they owed him their lives.
They were demanding an attempt be made to rescue him. ”
“My consort has no need of ‘rescue.’ That’s ridiculous.”
“Of course, Your Majesty. But they told Evoq to make it his priority to get him off the planet and return him to Earth.”
“And you knew this how?”
“I…uh, well, many Nilaniums know about it, sire. We were all paid well to keep our mouths shut.”
“To become traitors, you mean?”
The man was a treacherous bastard, but he was brave enough to answer me. “Yes, Your Majesty. You might say so.”
“Have you ever seen a traitor die, Rabb?”
“No, sir. And I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.”
I huffed out a short, harsh laugh, but I wasn’t really amused.
Far from it. Part of me wanted to kill him right away, but another part wondered if I might find some use for him in retrieving my mate.
I had to think about the best course of action, and I couldn’t afford to dwell on what I’d lost today.
Not yet. Among the first things I had to do was to find out if what Rabb had told me was true, and if it was, then I needed to clean out the nest of vipers back home.
But first things first. I set a course for the planetary system known to the inhabitants of Earth as their Solar System in a spiral galaxy known as the Milky Way to its inhabitants.
We called it by a number, as it was an insignificant thing to us, and mostly unknown until the Earth Alliance contacted us many cycles ago about purchasing the diamonds on our planet.
They had wanted to buy them or trade for them, and we declined.
That hadn’t been acceptable to them, and they had decided to attack us and take our diamonds for themselves by force.
There was probably more to it than that, but basically, that’s what had happened.
Our people wanted only to be left alone.
And Earth wouldn’t agree to do that. It had been the beginning of this interminable war.
Their solar system had a star at its center that Earthans called the sun, and Earth was the third planet away from this sun.
It was a part of a group of inner, rocky planets, along with Mercury, Venus, and Mars.
In addition, there were the outer planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, along with one outlying dwarf planet they called Pluto.
None of these other planets except for Earth had autochthonous or original life—or at least not humanoid life.
Some of the planets had moons that were more conducive to sustaining life than the planets themselves.
It was one such moon that I set a course for—one of the moons of Jupiter, called Europa by the Earthans.
Europa was one of six moons of the planet and was covered in a thick layer of ice, but years ago, it had been colonized by the Alliance and underneath the ice they had found liquid oceans, full of oxygen.
Alliance scientists were fascinated by the amount of life they found in the oceans and built science stations beneath the ice, where they explored the oceans for many cycles.
The huge underwater complex had been abandoned after a while and for almost a hundred cycles it lay empty, until an enterprising group of businessmen purchased it from the Alliance and made it into a recreational destination.
It was crowded now and a busy place. Bars, hotels, clubs and brothels soon sprang up, free of the much tighter restrictions on Earth, which had a reputation for being repressive.
Europa was rough and dangerous, a place where anything went.
It was also a place I thought I could dock without a great deal of notice or comment, particularly, if we called ourselves Nilanium traders. This was where Rabb would come in handy. I monitored him while he negotiated a place for us to dock.
Nilaniums were known to travel in various types of ships—whatever they could trade or bargain for, really. Even pirate ships were not uncommon among the Nilaniums.
This ship, the one I was currently traveling on, and that I frequently used as my primary transport, had very few markings.
And that was on purpose. It was much more prudent for me to travel in a ship that was unidentified.
To a casual observer, the ship would appear as a solid gray vessel, nothing remarkable, though obviously in good repair and well-armed.
Still, with nothing too extraordinary about it.
Officials on Europa didn’t ask a lot of questions, or any, really, so long as enough gold was laid across their palms, so it would be a perfect place for me to observe what was happening in this planetary system.
We could easily tap into Earthan broadcasts and media reports from this vantage point.