Chapter 6
The Mission
Darren was delighted that Pilot Joel seemed to know all about the mission. His confidence was contagious, and he hoped his brothers shared the pilot’s enthusiasm.
Joel moved the A stand out of the way. “I have prepared a presentation,” he informed them when they were seated round the table. The walls were painted white, so it was no problem to project images onto them.
The pilot tapped commands onto his wrist device and a beam fired from the opposite wall to the one behind where the A stand had been. The title image came up.
OHIRIN brEEDING PROGRAM
“What has that got do with us?” Blayze asked, frowning at it. “We’re not even the same species.”
“I’m coming to that,” Joel said patiently.
Lero glared at Blayze. “Shut your mouth and open your ears. You’ve got one speaking device and two listening ones. Use them accordingly.”
Darren was about to protest Lero’s heavy-handed response, but Joel took control.
“If I may continue.”
An image of a beautiful blue and white planet popped up first. It was so much like Dhelta — the Dhelta that no longer existed — that it brought tears to Darren’s eyes. His throat swelled up and suddenly he couldn’t seem to breathe.
“This is Planet Earth in the Solar System,” Joel intoned. He changed the slide to the next one. “You can see the sun, as they call it, and eight planets, or satellites, revolve around it. Earth is the third satellite from the sun and it’s the only one with life on it in the group.”
He changed to the next slide. Ten beings stood formally in a group staring at the camera as if their lives depended on it.
They were like Dheltans; they had bodies like Dheltans, two legs, two arms. They were female.
They were young. And they were the most beautiful females Darren had seen in a long time.
“These are humans, the dominant species on Earth. Ohirins put out a call for mates and Earth responded. The program is experimental for us and for them and I’ve orders to collect them, with yourselves, and bring them to Ohiri. From here we’ll go on to Drypso.”
While the pilot briefed them, Darren’s eyes were plastered to the image on the wall.
There was one female that spoke to him with her eyes.
He couldn’t see what color they were; the image wasn’t detailed enough for that, but her hair was long and red; the tint of Yithir, the red orange of their star when it was muted by cloud — had been muted — on their home planet.
Of all the lovely females in the group, she was the loveliest.
“My ship’s the Pioneer, a Dheltan ship, by the way, and the journey to Earth takes seven days, using wormholes,” Joel added.
One of their ships had survived, then. Darren was pleased to hear it.
Dheltans had lost so much. The downside of the close orbit to their sun, was that Yithir occasionally flared, and just once the flare had been so large and fierce, it engulfed their planet in flames.
He wondered what the priests would have said about that, but there were no priests around.
Dhelta had gone up in a puff of smoke, and all his family and friends with it.
Luckily or unluckily, depending on your point of view, he and his brothers had been on Ohiri doing military training when the disaster happened, and they’d decided to stay on Ohiri and joined the empire’s military full time instead of going back.
They had no choice; there was nothing to go back to.
The planet that held their hearts and lives was a burnt-out shell in blind and numb orbit around the star.
But surviving Dheltans must look to the future; you couldn’t change the past.
“When do we leave?” asked Darren.
The pilot met Darren’s gaze with his level one. “We can take off as soon as you warriors are ready, within the next twenty-four hours.”