Read Lacuna: The Sands of Karathi Online
Authors: David Adams
“That’s funny, I thought I was a little more senior than
that
.”
Liao’s heart stopped, her head snapping around as though she’d been punched in the face. The voice was deep, male, lightly accented and familiar. Standing in the threshold between the corridor and Operations, clad only in rags and covered in bruises, was a face she’d thought she’d lost forever.
Captain James William Grégoire.
Immediately behind him, Yanmei Cheung stepped through, grinning like a jackal. “Surprise, Captain. Our squad, by sheer dumb luck, were dropped in right next to their infirmary. With all the forcefields down, guess who we saw wandering around like a lost little…”
Liao wasn’t listening.
Her eyes were locked on James’s. Time seemed to slow down as they stared at one
another, Liao’s mouth agape. She had written him off as dead, a marker on the growing list of casualties the conflict with the Toralii Alliance had produced, but here he stood. Battered, weary, wounded, and with half his previously observed muscle mass, but alive.
Before she knew what she was doing, her feet were pounding on the deck, her hat flying from her head as she drove headlong towards the man, grabbing him roughly under his arms and drawing him into a crushing embrace. Her hands gripped him as though she feared he would slip away and vanish again. She felt his hands around her shoulders, holding her in a similar fashion, and for a brief moment there was nothing but silence as the ship’s computers counted down towards the jump.
And she wept, openly and unabashedly. She wept with relief, with joy, with giddy disbelief, her chest heaving as she emitted a weird, half-strangled noise that alternated between jerking sobs and joyous laughter. She pressed her face against his shoulder and poured it all out. The stress of living in space on a warship, the weight of having the fate of Humankind resting on her shoulders, the terrible emptiness that had gripped her every second that James had been absent from her life, the shock of finding out she was with child, the agony of losing Velsharn, the terror of her near miscarriage. Those emotions, bottled and contained for too long, poured out in an tide of feelings that not even Liao's considerable mental discipline could contain.
It wasn't Commander Liao, Captain of the TFR
Beijing
, decorated war hero and savior of humanity who stood in full view of the women and men she commanded in battle, crying shamelessly into the tattered rags that served as James’s clothing, but a woman named Melissa;
a Chinese woman with a Greek name who had finally earned a chance to hold the man she loved.
She felt herself being lifted up–the gravity was switched off in preparation for their jump–and the two floated away from the deck. She didn't look at anyone, didn't try to justify or excuse herself, or hold anything back. She merely buried her face into James's shoulder and sobbed. Her mind spun, flailing uselessly as it tried to process what had happened. Surely it was impossible, surely it was all just a dream.
For the first time since she had come into space and experienced weightlessness, there was absolutely no nausea or sickness or discomfort as gravity loosened its grip and the two of them–arms gripping each other as though they would never let go–floated gently in the air. With a tear-stained sideways glance, Liao saw Summer taking the captain’s place at the jump console, the redhead seemingly pleased to be finally be able to use the technology she had helped build.
Summer nodded energetically to Iraj, and the two of them turned their keys. The barrage on the hull of the
Beijing
disappeared with a silence so abrupt it seemed impossible, quieted by the disappearance of the
Beijing
as it leapt away from Cenar and back to Earth.
She knew her work was not yet done, and their arrival back on Earth would be anything but peaceful and relaxing, but she didn't care. With her child's safety secured, all she cared about was that after enduring
countless trials and suffering terribly, James was home, and she was in the arms of the man she loved.
Epilogue
“Survival”
Near the wreck of the Giralan
Karathi
Ben was rarely surprised, but he was not expecting the two-metre drop through the atmosphere of Karathi–a short amount of time for a Human, but an eternity to a synthetic mind–to be over so quickly.
All that time spent living with biologicals had taught him to occasionally think
like one, he mused, as his drone body crashed into the unyielding desert sands, his datacore thumping into the ground just beside him, the spherical jump drive landing nearby and beginning to roll down the side of the dune.
“Oh, no, you bloody don’t!” he shouted, reaching out with a clamp to grasp hold of the device, pulling it back towards him. His articulators strained with the effort, claws digging into the sand for purchase and scrabbling as he tried to avoid being pulled along with it.
Fortunately, the device stopped rolling and Ben, slowly and carefully, began dragging it towards the ruined Telvan ship that had been his home for decades.
Although he had previously told Liao that nothing could possibly bring him back to Karathi, the situation had now changed. The
Giralan
was in terrible repair, and most of the systems required to support life had been removed–artificial gravity, atmospheric processors, sublight engines. The ship couldn’t move nor sustain anyone aboard it, so it was stationary, to be slowly buried in sand over the years. It was, for all intents and purposes, useless to everyone.
But for a life form that didn’t breathe or suffer in zero gravity, a spaceship only needed to be able to keep out solar radiation–which his datacore was hardened against anyway–and to function as a platform for weapons.
The ship would need weapons, but he knew where he could trade for them and get more material for repairs. His artificial mind began working through an inventory of the ship’s contents, auditing them and collecting a tabulated list ordered by value.
The jump drive that could move outside of voidwarp points, however, was the most valuable thing that he could add to a ship that couldn't move. After all, who needed sublight drives when a ship could just jump wherever it wanted to, unimpeded? Who needed armour when one could just disappear before the missiles arrived?
He could see it in his mind; a perfect simulation of his ship appearing above the Telvan worlds, immediately dispensing worldshatter barrages and then vanishing as quickly as it had arrived. He would be undetectable, unstoppable, and invincible. And he would never tire. He would never rest. He would never sleep. He would never grow bored, old, or remorseful.
Liao believed Ben had drank his fill of revenge, but now that the construct had the jump drive and a new plan, his work had barely begun.
Now it was Ben’s time, and the
Giralan
would sail again.
To Be Continued in “Lacuna: Spectre of Oblivion”!
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