Ransom: Cross of Secrets (V)

Memory

The door slid shut behind Samantha. She stood still a moment, standing in a shaft of starlight in the combined sunroom and conservatory, and picked out the silhouette of Marc and Aiyra, seated on a garden bench halfway beneath the draping roses.

“You asked for me, sir?”

“I did,” Marc acknowledged, arising to greet her.

“Do you recall,” he said, moving around the bench, “how I said I might right the discrepancy of knowledge between us?”

Samantha dipped her head.

“I think it's best done now,” Marc said quietly. He was smiling. “Or a lot of people on this ship are going to remain confused.”

He motioned for her to sit down on a second bench. She did so. Marc sat down and put his arms around Aiyra. He looked into his daughter's smiling eyes.

“Let's start from the beginning, Princess.”

He turned with a flickering smile back to the engineer.

“You may know,” he said lightly, “that I was a supposed hero in the Battle of Maltara. But what no one likes to mention is that I was critically injured in said battle. Someone told me that there were healing waters on the planet of Cytha, so I decided to take his advice and made my way to the planet. Cytha, as is commonly known, is a planet of gardens, meadows, farmland, and seas. Having crash-landed due to my belief that I could still control a ship -”

He looked at his daughter who was laughing at him.

“I was discovered by a Cythian maiden, the most beautiful woman in all of the constellation of Cygnus, or even the entire world: and she wanted to take care of me.” He looked down into Aiyra's eyes and smoothed her hair.

“You're going to look just like your mother,” he murmured. Aiyra smiled and leaned her head on his shoulder. Samantha watched them both.

“Let me guess,” she murmured. “You fell in love with the maiden and married her.”

Marc smiled wryly.

“Some would say it was rash of me,” he admitted. “I was only seventeen. Yet the same people wouldn't have questioned my role in the war!”

Aiyra whispered tenderly to her father, bringing a smile back to his face.

“Yes, I married Talitha. We were happy together. Less than a year later we had Aiyra –” he hugged his daughter – “And I thought that everything was well in my world.”

A shadow flickered over his face as he gently touched his daughter's hair. There were a few moments of silence as Samantha waited patiently for him to continue.

“One ordinarily happy day, when my little Aiyra was only a few years old, I received a call from the fleet for a reunion of all the commanders from the Battle of Maltara, in the same system.”

“Pause, please!” Samantha interrupted. “Quick question: how did you wind up as a commander of a ship when you were only seventeen? I thought that the Galactic Alliance's specifications exclude anyone younger than twenty-one.”

“They do,” Marc replied. “It was only through a series of odd accidents that I became a Galactic Alliance commander.”

He explained that he had just finished his time at the Galactic Alliance academy a year before the battle occurred. At sixteen, he became a crew member aboard the Sunstar V, one of the older battlecruisers. It had seen a dozen wars throughout the galaxy.

“It was a no-nonsense ship, and the same attitude was expected of the crew,” Marc reminisced. “One had to be tough to serve aboard, and that was a quality I had to learn quickly.”

He had to put up with stern superiors, harsh orders, and detention if he failed in his duties.

The first “odd accident” occurred when a gaseous explosion in the control room when Marc happened to be carrying a message to the Chief Engineer. Because he was the only one standing in an open doorway, he was the only one who didn’t pass out from inhaling the toxic gas.

Marc briefly explained that he had grabbed a gas mask and spent the next twenty-five minutes calling a safety-team to rescue the rest of the fallen crew, discovering how to contain the fumes, and filtering them out of the engine room.

Those actions moved him into the field of the security team, and led him to his second “odd accident.” A few months into his new job, he joined a reconnaissance team sent to rescue the chief of security, Barto, who had been captured by a group of Maltaks, a group of space pirates. Without a doubt, Barto was being used to find a way to take down the Sunstar V.

“We spent twenty-four hours on the tropical moon of Yalar,” Marc told Samantha. “It was steaming, and more than one of our crew fainted. Moreover, the forests were teaming with toxic and aggressive creatures, not a few of which we encountered.”

Eventually only Marc and Lieutenant Ocura were left conscious. They finally discovered the Maltaks' base, a domed compound surrounded by laser cannons. These Marc found a way to disrupt the electrical components, thus rendering them useless for a time.

Once in the compound, though, Ocura was shot down and Marc was forced to sneak through the corridors. He located the security room and brought down the forcefields, releasing the locks on the prison compound as well. He managed to signal the Sunstar to fire upon the compound in five minutes, but realized that Barto was not with the rest of the prisoners.

The Maltaks were in the central tower of the compound, working on a disarming-beam which was focused upon the orbiting Sunstar V. Barto was being forced to help break through the computers of the ship.

Marc ripped out the main electrical router and flung it in the center of the room. The wildly wriggling wires shocked and stunned the majority of the Maltaks, while he and Barto took out the rest. They smashed the disarming-beam with less than a minute to spare, and leapt out the tower window. They barely made it out of the compound before the Sunstar blew it up.

“We took the shuttle back to the Sunstar,” Marc sighed, “and when Barto told the Captain Martel everything that I had done, Martel turned to me and said, 'Son, from now on I want you at my side.' He made me a Lt. Commander Bar Five on the spot, Bar Five meaning the very highest in that position,” he explained. “It meant that I served on the bridge, commanded every reconnaissance team, and received special training. And it's through that rank that I wound up as a commander.”

Samantha stared.

“Exactly . . . how?”

Marc laughed at the look on her face. “You're just like everyone else. You all seem to think that it's somehow amazing. It's not.”

He told her that when a red alert came through, bringing the entire fleet to fight off the Marauders at Maltara, he had, of course, been on the Sunstar V. It wasn't long into the battle that one of the Marauders' ships cloaked itself and blasted the bridge. The shields prevented the greatest damage, but there were plenty of casualties, including Captain Martel and his First Officer. With them both taken out of commission for the time being, only Marc could take the Captain's place.

“I had never imagined commanding a ship in my life,” he admitted. “And I discovered that it was even harder than I had expected, especially on a battle-cruiser. . .”

With explosions occurring all over the ship, Marc stared out the viewports as he watched the fleet being decimated. A shock had been delivered by the Marauders’ back-up of 200 cloaked battle ships. The fleet didn't stand a chance. Marc watched the flaming plasma of the wreckage being drawn in by the gravitational pull of the nearby planets. If the fleet lost, than every civilization on every one of the twenty-three planets would be enslaved.

“Father, help me!” he breathed involuntarily. He was too young to be in this. Taking a deep breath, he ordered the chief engineer to jury-rig the engines and the disabled weapons. There was only one chance to take.

He knew by the scans of the cloaked Marauder ships that they were the lightweight type-C battleships, only large enough for a few crewmen. Type-C ships could not rely on their fuel supply for more than a few hours, nor would the supply of energy for their plasma cannons remain constant. Thus, there had to be a sympathetic battle-station nearby, without which the Marauder's would be at the fleet's mercy.

Marc ordered the ship to fire the hyperdrive while remaining stationary. The energy waves diffused by the engines would create a spatial field around any object, cloaked or uncloaked, for 1,000 miles. This field would be visible on the Sunstar's scanners. Hopefully it would lead them to the battle-station. Marc watched the continuous scans with anxious eyes. He ordered that the battle-shuttles be manned and deployed to take down as many of the detected ships as possible. He turned his eyes back to the scanner.

There! That huge spatial field! It was definitely a battle-station! He ordered the navigational officer to set the Sunstar V in hyperdrive on a course directly for the battle-station.

“Long story short, we blew it up and the Marauders automatically lost,” Marc finished. “Which leads me back to Cytha. Fast forward back to the last scene, Talitha encouraged me to go and meet with the other commanders. I finally agreed . . . promising to bring her and Aiyra each a gift.”

“Unfortunately,” he continued through gritted teeth, “it was only after I reached Maltara that I discovered that the whole thing was a ruse. I flew back to Cytha only to find that my worst fears were confirmed: Cytha was in ashes, and a Marauder ship was just leaving the planet. I followed them. I was captured when they activated their tractor beam, was briefly reunited with Talitha and Aiyra, only to be ejected into the time-warp fields of Borania for attempting to take control of the ship.”

“Ergo, I attempted to follow them but was promptly drawn into one warp after another. I wound up in a time five years after the fact, but without realizing that, begged the Order to help me find my family. They did their best . . . and discovered that the Marauders who attacked Cytha were an ancient band from thousand years ago, in our time expressly to replenish the slave trade. And it was hopeless to find my family.”

“A'da,” Aiyra gently intervened, “there is something you need to know. It is not an unusual fact that the ancient Marauders came to our time. I tried to tell Captain Berron, but he would not believe me. There is no such thing as a modern Marauder. They are an extinct race, yet they show up in every time period, continuing their 'trade' throughout time. That is why the slave trade cannot be broken . . . because it lives a thousand years ago and every year since. If they are threatened in one time, they only return home, where they cannot be followed. A'da, A'ma and I were taken back a thousand years!”

Marc stared at her. Aiyra turned to Samantha.

“Sahma,” she said, “After A'ma and I were captured, we were sold, a thousand years ago, and taken forward a couple hundred years; to the now extinct civilization of the Boroks. Then we were sold again. After A'ma was killed I was sold time and time again, getting closer and closer to this year; at last I spent the last five years on Ela, an ancient jungle planet known for its stoneworks; the Order saved me there.”

Then, with a curious look, Aiyra turned back to her father.

“A'da,” she said, “We were on a desert planet of the Maeli people. I worked in the deadly mines of radioactive crystal. They made A'ma stay home and wait for me every day. The king, Daruth, tried to make her marry him; she would not dishonor you, A'da, and he tried to put the crown on her. She refused to let it touch her, and he killed her.” Her brow wrinkled.

“A'da,” she said. “You found us! Don't you remember being there? You tried to save me and A'ma . . . remember?”

Marc obviously had no idea what she was speaking of. Aiyra's lips parted as she studied his eyes.

“A'da,” she whispered, “you have to find us there. Or I died three hundred years ago!”

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Read the previous chapter here.

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