Star Dragon 13: Introductory Novella

Part 2

"What the frakkin' hell?" Bubby asked as he forced his way in through the broken hatch door. His helmet light must have found all the blood.

"Shhhh," Kadri said, hushing him. He acknowledged her warning and moved around the half-blocked door to better see the captain's corpse.

"He started to blow us up, but then he saved us when he realized our stealth hadn't been compromised," Adrianna explained. She was still in shock over seeing sixty people die while they hid helplessly.

"Why didn't you tell us to fire?" Davrial asked. He stepped around Bubby, took off his helmet, and winced when he saw the body. He pushed his brown bangs out of his blue-eyed face. He was the thicker and more fit of the two, but tall, thin, dark-haired Bubby was an abstract genius with eyes as amber-brown as syrup.

"They'd see us if we did," Kadri said. "But they are leaving. They scanned our area and missed us completely. We still haven't been detected."

That wasn't true, Adrianna knew. A careful review of the recorded data would probably reveal a flash of light out through 13's flight deck glaz from the captain's explosion, but she doubted the Floskian Command would be reviewing the data that closely. Only a stealth specialist like her would think to do such a thing.

Again, the question of how the Floskian battleship came so close to MD3 without being detected tickled her mind.

Do the Floskians have the same tech?

"Mark it," Adrianna ordered.

Davrial hurried to his non-combat station and, after flipping a switch that lit up his area with the softest illumination a human could see by, he put a virtual tracking tag on the alien craft. "Now we can follow it and—"

"We can track it as we settle into orbit and stay undetected," Adrianna was surprised at the conviction of her tone. "We have repairs to make before we do anything else."

She was surprised when both of the gunners gave her a salute, showing they now accepted her as 13's commanding officer. Davrial's look was begrudging, as if he didn't like the lack of retaliation. In the light from Davrial's station, Bubby looked as sincere, as he was pale.

"After you have it locked in, Dav." She used his light to navigate the deck while she went on. "Can you help Bubby bag the captain's body."

Once they were all busy, she let out a long sigh and sat in the captain's chair. She had no idea what to do, but she was glad the flight deck wasn't tightly quartered.

MD3's jump location was a mystery, but they would probably come looking for 13 unless they sensed the captain's explosion and figured the ship derelict. Even then, there would be an attempt at salvaging the antimatter drive and the stealth tech. There was a whole engineering team on MD3 dedicated solely to SD13.

They would search.

She also figured that only a female could manage the rest of the captain's gory mess so she added. "I'll clean up the blood."

The idea of it disgusted her, but one of the few things she remembered of her mother was her saying that, "Men can't clean messes, but they sure can make them."

That was back when her life was wonderful. Those early years full of hope and dreams were something that she sometimes cherished. Looking back was bittersweet, though. Once she turned eight, her parents quickly shattered all her illusions.

She found the absorbent talc, and the power vac and, after the guys had both parts of the captain's body in the black bag and zipped up, she told them to go vacuum seal it and put it in cold storage.

While she sprinkled absorbing powder over all the blood, she thought about her childhood. It was better than thinking about seeing half a hundred people you respected killed before your eyes.

A few days after her eighth birthday party—and it was literally the birthday party to end all birthday parties—her parents sold her to the Legion for credits. There she joined a few hundred other eight, nine, and ten year olds and began prepping for deep space travel.

It took six years to make the full trip out, and like Kadri, Adrianna had arrived in the deep, a scared fourteen year-old girl with six years of rigorous training under her belt.

They were the lucky ones.

The girls who didn't excel in one needed skill or another were eventually culled and would become what they all called breeders. There were colonies to be filled, economies to build, and trade routes to be established, after all. Babies were a much needed commodity, and with the adaption gene implant now available, hybrids better suited to low gravity were being birthed left and right.

Hybrids didn't need nearly as much oxygen and, since their muscles had never known true gravity, the gene implant strengthened them in the places most needed. But to what end, Adrianna hadn't decided yet. The hybrids were the preferred laborers of the deep, nothing more. She'd long since decided that the Legion, with all its spread life propaganda was really something darker and not so wholesome. It was a great and powerful machine and it needed lives, who needed things, so that it could gather the resources needed to deliver them.

Some of the gore wasn't just blood, and Adrianna nearly vomited when she had to stuff the more solid parts and pieces into a vac-sac. The rest was absorbed and vacuumed or scrubbed clean when she made a few passes the old fashioned way, using a hand brush and a rag.

"That's odd," Bubby said from his non-com station. He didn't wait for anyone to ask him what he was talking about before elaborating. "There was no chatter. Not between the SDs"

"What about between the SDs and Mother?"

"Nothing but a single 'Go' command at the beginning." He gave Kadri a questioning look.

The younger crew member had gotten ahold of herself. She glanced at her screens and gave him a nod. Adrianna had noticed that the two of them often communicated like that, as if they could either project their thoughts or read the other's. It made her shiver. One thing was clear, when Bubby was in her proximity, Kadri felt safer. Adrianna doubted she'd ever feel comfortable around an older female ever again.

Once your mother sells you, trusting another woman was iffy at best.

When she finished cleaning up the blood, she excused herself to go get cleaned up. "Start diagnostics and get out the tool kit," she said after checking to see that they were gliding around the Resource Planet within the debris ring.

She knew that here they were undetectable even without their stealth tech. Here they were just another chunk of ore in the ring.