5028

Blackwater System: Furelle

Galactic Date 00:08:431 5028

The Sparrow sat above Furelle. The broken planet, people called it. Not hard to understand why. I looked out at my old home, held together by a machine at its core. The initial destruction of Furelle was the Soulless' handiwork. They'd cracked the planet into pieces to make an example, much as they'd done with Earth before it. Who would have expected the ever-mysterious Faraxians to step in and piece it back together? This had all been long before I'd been born. Now, you could barely see the cracks in the planet's crust. Most of what remained as a reminder were fragments of rock jutting from the ground as if it'd been struck by hundreds of meteors made of itself.

My eyes couldn't help but drift to the hundreds of ships dotting the skies. We'd dimmed the lights in the helm, and an eerie silence had befallen the ship. Engines off, core off. Quiet. The darkness of the helm only helped to exacerbate the uneasiness. My eyes drifted over Surillia Ra, my home. The Soulless had swarmed it. It'd be hard for us to get close enough to get into the temple. Sterling looked up at me.

"Hmm..." She hummed. Our next move was uncertain. We'd have to find the nearest outpost and move from there. Sterling sat forward, crossing her fingers together. She looked to Natasha.

"Ms. Krugoff. Open a secure channel with the SFS Vigilance." She turned back to the computers, rapidly typing in commands. A hologram of an Olari woman appeared in front of me and Sterling. She turned, looking at us.

"CNS Blue Sparrow. We're reading you."

"Reading you as well, SFS Vigilance." Sterling said.

"We don't have you on our arrivals, Sparrow. What's your business here?" The woman asked.

"We're on a new mission, not here for the siege. There's a temple on the Surillian Coast. It's a time sensitive matter." The woman on the other side pursed her lips.

"You picked quite a time to show up, Sparrow. Surillia's currently being heavily contested." She turned, typing something into a nearby console. "There should be an opening in one of the nearby camps for landing. I'd be careful, though. A Soulless Commander was spotted in the area." We looked between each other, that silence even more deafening than before. Sterling kept a calm, cool expression, scratching at her chin.

"Understood. Send us the coordinates and let them know of our arrival, if you will." The woman on the other end saluted, and Sterling swiped the hologram aside. We looked out over Surillia Coast, my eyes focusing on the small, yet unmistakable dot in the distance. It was the same Command Ship we'd seen on Xenova. Natasha leaned back, folding her arms over her chest, before looking over at the two of us.

"Our chances of success aren't looking too high here." She said. The crew was silent, deep in thought, as we waited for the orders to come in from the Federation. No one wanted to say it, but she was right. Tara eventually broke the silence.

"We still have the advantage." She said.

"Oh? How do you figure?" Iraka asked.

"Well, the Soulless know of the planet, sure, but they're going to have to scour the area to find that temple." She said, looking up to me. "We have a living, breathing map." Iraka raised his brow.

"You may just be right about that. Arneli, you're a strategic mind as well. Any thoughts?" Arneli leaned over her console, tapping her fingers together. When she turned, the whiskers on her face whipped along with her.

"That all depends. With a war waging for the past decade, who knows how much that forest has changed?" I pursed my lips as she said this.

"That's true." I said, "I might be able to get us directly there, or it might take some doing. Either way, we know we need to get there before the Soulless do." There was a quiet agreement among us. I wasn't a fan of all this waiting. I paced back and forth, tapping my finger on my chin. Every second we wasted up here was a second the Soulless were using to find that temple. I felt a small hand tug at my arm, looking down to see Gatha.