Hawk might have been younger than Crow, but this ship had been Hawk’s acquisition. Unlike his brother, Hawk was a team player and had managed to assemble a small but specialised crew to aid him in his pirating endeavours. Crow usually only returned to the Bil-me when he was hard up and in trouble with the authorities.
‘So what makes you think the new Governor of Kila is Lahmu?’ Crow asked, amused, until his two crewmates began looking at him like he had two heads.
‘Haven’t you heard?’ Hawk jeered in disbelief. ‘Before the last sitting of the Pantheon, in the Arena —’
‘The Governor of Kila tamed the Lahmuian?’ Crow whimpered in dread, for he had clung to the legend all his life, as had all mortals born under Nefilim rule.
‘And you just left his sister for dead!’ Hawk moved to have another swing at his brother, but Crow backed up and avoided him.
‘What else was I supposed to do? The bitch was throwing things at me!’
‘Oh, boo-hoo,’ Hawk scoffed.
‘She was unconscious,’ Crow added, and both Hawk and Seagull were stunned by this additional information. ‘And heavily sedated.’
Hawk held his head and slowly shook it. He considered how amazing this woman’s abilities would have been when conscious, and the benefit she could have been to the cause. ‘I want you gone,’ he decreed finally, looking to his brother in disgust.
‘How was I to know!’ Crow whined. He had nowhere else to go.
Hawk scowled at his kin, and as accommodating as Hawk usually was, Crow was not going to get around him this time. ‘You were doing the work of the Pantheon, so whatever you were doing was bound to be contrary to our interests. You have two hours,’ he warned. ‘If you’re not off this ship by then I’ll shoot you myself.’ Hawk backed up, turned and left.
‘He’s not serious,’ Crow advised Seagull, who didn’t seem to be so sure.
‘I hope you’re right, man.’ The cook went back to his food preparation. ‘I sure would hate to be scrubbing up your guts this evening.’
‘Any chance of a last feed?’ Seagull nodded, and Crow took a seat to consider the options he didn’t have. He resolved to try talking with Hawk in an hour or so when he had had a chance to cool down. Crow felt sure he could eventually convince his brother to change his ruling.
A small five-man team had been selected to accompany Brian to Nugia. Besides the Governor and Rhun, Rhun’s firstborn son, Cadwell — Head of Deep Space Exploration — had also been selected, along with Cadwell’s wife, Neriada, who was her husband’s 2IC. Talynn, being their foremost munitions expert, was an essential team member, along with Thais, the Centaur. Thais was Head of the Mind Sciences, a Shaman, and not Homo sapien, and so he was being taken along to act as mediator for the new Governor if need be.
Noah was catching a ride as far as Nugia’s moon, Caimah, and would be dropped off en route to pursue his own investigations. Although his wife would not be accompanying him as hoped, he figured her presence was by no means essential to his quest. What disappointed him most about her absence was that Rebecca refused to trust her own vision and inner voice, which had told her about this quest nearly a year ago now. He was with Brian as he said goodbye to his own wife, when one of the communications advisors approached the Governor to inform.
‘The slaughter of animals in the Great Northern Forest has slowed,’ he announced to Brian, ‘as it would seem the enemy’s stores of toxic gas have mysteriously disappeared.’
The news brought a smile to Brian’s face and Noah’s, too, as a round of applause broke out.
‘Rebecca,’ the scholar uttered, proud of his wife’s efforts. Perhaps she would be of greater good here on Kila after all.
‘There you are.’
Noah turned to find Rebecca suited up in space attire and lugging a case of equipment.
‘Thank goodness I caught you before you left,’ she said, smiling broadly as she walked towards him.
‘But …’ Noah grinned at her. He’d been so sure her decision not to come was irrevocable.
‘To protect our planet is one thing,’ she explained, ‘but you are my home.’ She dropped her luggage and embraced Noah, tears welling in her eyes. ‘You were right to be mad at me,’ she whispered as she clung to her husband.
‘I could never be mad at you for doing what you believe is best,’ Noah assured her, as he squeezed her tight, deeply relieved that she had changed her mind.
‘With you, I am at my best.’ She loosened herself from the hug to look Noah in the eye. ‘Never let me forget that.’
‘Ditto,’ he told her with all sincerity.
‘Let’s get this circus on the road,’ Brian advised one and all, having finished saying farewell to his better half.
The Governor’s team gathered in a circle to teleport themselves to Kila’s closest planet, from where they stood a good chance of launching their deep space vessel and escaping without being detected by the Pantheon. They could teleport themselves to the planned location safe in the knowledge that the way between Kila and its closest planet was free of anomaly.
The general rule of teleportation through space was that any location within the same star system was a safe destination. But if a traveller had to cross the anti-matter superhighway that existed between star systems, things got unpredictable. This was the reason why deep space travel was only truly safe via a wormhole, as it built a bridge of order through a region of chaos. These days, only etheric leakage into the wormholes caused a delay, but in the Nefilim’s pioneering days of space travel, expeditions beyond their own system had resulted in hundreds of years of lost transit time. Some star fleets had never returned home.
Nefilim who tried to physically teleport themselves to known destinations beyond their system that did not have wormhole access, like Gaia, also had problems. Some of these individuals had experienced loss of time, whilst others vanished completely and what had become of them could only be speculated upon. Like the Bermuda Triangle, or the Dragon’s Triangle, on Gaia, it was most likely that those who vanished attempting teleportation beyond their own system didn’t actually perish. It seemed likely that they might find themselves misplaced in time … in a past or future era so distant from home that they couldn’t hope to make contact with those they’d left behind. Marduk had solved the problem of getting to Gaia with the construction of the Aten — a whole city that defied time and space by taking a shortcut through the ethers. The Aten had passed into the possession of Lord Gibal upon Lord Marduk’s ascent back to the Logos, and it was now stationed on Gibal’s beloved water planet of Lura.
Raven, the systems analyst and pilot of the Bil-me, was manning the control panels when he noticed a most unusual reading on one of the exterior scanning monitors.
‘Hawk, I’m registering a life reading outside the ship,’ Raven advised the captain through the intercom. ‘I think you should get up here and take a look at this.’
It only took the captain moments to make an appearance on the flight deck. ‘Did I hear you right?’ He leant over his pilot’s shoulder to view the readouts himself.
‘Sure did.’ Raven nodded emphatically. ‘The database is telling me the life reading is human.’
Raven was some years older than Hawk and, apart from Crow, was the longest serving member of Hawk’s crew. For ten years they’d been raiding Pantheon storage depots and wreaking havoc where they could.
Raven treated Hawk with a fatherly manner, and Raven was, without question, the pirate captain’s most trusted friend.
‘Now how the hell could that be? Any human outside this ship would have to be dead, so why the hell are we registering a life reading?’ Hawk grabbed a headseat to speak with his technician. ‘Chook, are you spacewalking at present?’ Hawk thought he’d better check, because the lad was often outside for maintenance duties.
‘With all the activity out there this morning,’ Chook replied, tickled by the thought, ‘I don’t think so.’
‘How about Crow?’ Hawk didn’t bother
inquiring about Seagull, as he was too old for such endeavours and never left the ship. In fact, the cook rarely left his kitchen.
‘I haven’t seen him go past me,’ Chook told his captain. Anyone wanting to reach the dock, or either of the other two hatches to the exterior, would have to go through his engine room.
‘Oh my Goddess!’ Raven mumbled, zooming the exterior camera in on the life reading in question. ‘I’ve died and gone to heaven.’ He gave a mental command, via the PKA plate under his hand, to sharpen up the image on his soft-light monitor.
Hawk moved closer to view the naked human afloat in open space, curled up in the foetal position and obviously unconscious.
‘It’s a woman,’ he stated in amazement.
‘It is,’ Raven agreed, ‘but she ain’t one of ours.’
She had no tail, so she was not Leonine; no blowhole in her forehead meant she wasn’t Delphinus. Obviously she wasn’t a Centaur or one of the Nefilim either, which only left one other possibility.
‘She must be one of the Chosen.’ Hawk was inspired by the idea of meeting a superhuman. ‘How the hell did she get out there?’ Hawk moved quickly to use the ship’s paging system. ‘Crow, get your worthless carcass to the flight deck.’
‘However she got there, she’s going to get pulverised if she stays out there much longer.’ Raven spotted a great hunk of rock and metal heading for the helpless female and raced to reprogram the forward half of the vessel’s firepower to protect her.
The exterior of the Bil-me was entirely surrounded by independently revolving panels which were either pulse lasers or detectors of approaching pieces of junk. They continually monitored the exterior of the craft and shot away approaching debris, or altered the vessel’s course to avoid it.
As the trajectory of the offending hunk of rock was altered by a blast from one of the lasers, Raven breathed a sigh of relief. ‘We’d better figure some way of getting her on board real quick.’
‘I knew you’d change your mind,’ Crow said cheerily as he joined his brother.
Hawk gripped Crow around his neck and shoved his face towards the soft-light screen that was monitoring the free-floating female. ‘Is that the woman you left for dead?’
Crow’s eyes opened wide in horror as he viewed the naked, bald version of the babe he’d kidnapped, but he recovered from his shock quickly. ‘Quite a looker, ain’t she?’
‘Is it her?’ Hawk gave his brother a shake, to get his answer.
‘No, it isn’t,’ he fibbed. ‘But that bitch is surely one of the Pantheon’s pets. Leave her to rot, I say.’
‘I will not leave her to rot.’ Hawk shoved Crow aside.
‘Are you demented?’ Crow flipped out. ‘You have to leave her. These beings can find each other with a thought! Any member of the Pantheon can do it too.’ Crow confronted his little brother, concerned for all the crew. ‘You take her on board and we’re all as good as fried.’
Hawk looked to Raven to get his opinion. The analyst looked back to the image on his screen. ‘If she is to be the agent of our demise, then … what a way to go.’ He looked back to the captain and gave him a grin.
Crow knew what this woman was capable of, having been fully briefed by Nergal, but Nergal had given Crow a couple of illegal control modules. If one of the Chosen was wearing one, they could not be detected by any other person. Negal had said the module also curtailed their use of telepathy and teleportation, although it did not drain the superhuman’s psychokinetic ability, as another version of this prototype had. When first invented, these modules had served to dominate the will of the wearer as well, but this function had not been built into this particular version of the device, as the Pantheon feared them being stolen and used against themselves.
Crow had secured one of the control modules on Tory when he’d kidnapped her, but it had obviously been destroyed in the explosion. But, he still had one in his possession.
‘You’re both nuts,’ Crow informed them, before giving them a smile. ‘Fortunately, I just may be of some assistance in this affair.’
As Tory stirred from her coma, the first thing she sensed was a huddle of men involved in a hushed, although heated conversation. She drew deeply her first conscious breaths of air and released a painful groan from the displeasure it gave her to be alive.
‘Shut up the lot of you, she’s coming around.’
As her eyes ventured to open, Tory beheld the face of the beautiful Deva. Her disenchantment melted away and she smiled warmly, overjoyed to see him.
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ Hawk ventured to say, mesmerised by the unusual colour of her soft, violet eyes.
Although Tory had no recollection of being part of one race or another, she recognised the tongue he spoke and understood every word.
‘Why should I be alarmed, when you are here?’ she asked him, and reaching up around the back of his neck, she drew his lips to hers and kissed him passionately.
‘Perhaps she’s some sort of space siren?’ Chook commented aside to Raven, who was looking on in envy.
‘Some sort of whore, more like,’ Crow said snidely, ‘floating around in space lookin’ like that.’
‘Does every man has this effect on her?’ Raven wondered out loud.
Hawk didn’t know what to say in the wake of his heated encounter. Although he had found her kiss very stirring, it didn’t feel right to take advantage of her bleary state. ‘I think, perhaps, that you might have me confused with someone else.’
‘Why so?’ Tory’s elated expression dissolved into a frown of curiosity, noting the long quills that sprouted from the Deva’s head. She ran her fingers through soft, black plumage and sighed with delight at the pleasing sensation.
Hawk gently took her hand from his head and placed it upon her own bare crown that was nearly bald, although it had sprouted a fuzzy blonde shadow of hair while she’d slept.
Tory was alarmed, amazed and disappointed. ‘It’s different,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ nodded Hawk, feeling as thwarted by the fact as she appeared to be. ‘Very different.’
Tory looked around her, finding her environment unfamiliar, but she could not recall in what surroundings she might feel more comfortable.
‘You are on board my vessel, the Bil-me,’ Hawk informed her. ‘We found you adrift in space and so brought you on board.’
‘A castaway in a sea of stars,’ she uttered slowly. She looked through the porthole by her bed and noted the rocky debris outside. She looked down at herself to find she was wearing a large, man’s shirt. ‘A naked castaway?’ She was a little concerned by her lack of attire.
Raven spoke up to draw her attention ‘We didn’t look as we dressed you. We had our eyes closed the entire time,’ he added in a jovial fashion, trying to ease her embarrassment.
Tory did feel a little self-conscious and vulnerable suddenly, but the young lad beside Raven appeared to be far more flushed than she was.
As Chook had drawn their guest’s attention, Hawk thought to introduce him. ‘That’s Chook in the space suit … he’s the one who went out in the meteor storm to fetch you in.’
‘You are very brave.’ Tory raised herself to a seated position to thank her young saviour.
Chook was very fair-skinned and looked to be younger than his companions. He had a smaller frame than his crewmates, who were all rather warrior-like in form — none so much so as the captain, however. The white feathers on Chook’s head were shorn nearly as short as Tory’s hair was, and the wings he sported were the same snowy white colour. His eyes were pale blue and twinkled with mischief.
‘It was nothing.’ He waved off her praise, becoming even more flushed. ‘I do it every day.’
‘What Chook didn’t mention was that he enjoyed every minute of today’s jaunt in space.’ Raven ribbed the lad and riffled his feathers.
‘I didn’t look either. I swear,’ Chook assured her, with a completely red face.
‘I am Raven, by the way.’ The cheerful fellow tipped his
head to her in a charming fashion. ‘I just fended off all the flying space debris whilst superboy here went out and got you.’
Raven was an attractive middle-aged man, quite obviously intelligent and good-natured to boot. His mottled light and dark tan quills fell to shoulder length and he had eyes of steel blue.
Tory was deeply amused by the men’s antics. They were obviously excited by her presence and she felt safe and at ease in their company. ‘It seems I owe you all for my life.’
‘Don’t thank me.’ Crow drew her attention to himself, to see what kind of a reaction he’d fetch. ‘A head job will suffice nicely.’
This birdman had identical colouring to the capttain. He was fair-skinned, though his quills were long and dark, and his eyes were deep brown. Unlike her charming host, however, this fellow seemed unfriendly, and a man to be avoided.
‘Ignore my brother,’ Hawk urged her. ‘He’s leaving anyway.’ He rose from the bed and hustled Crow out the door. ‘All of you back to your stations. Our guest needs to rest. Right, Doc?’ Hawk looked at Seagull, who nodded in confirmation.
‘And something to eat probably wouldn’t go astray either.’ The old Delphinus giant gave Tory a look of reassurance as he left. ‘I’ll fix something up.’
Tory smiled to show that she appreciated his thought, despite the fact she didn’t feel in the least bit hungry.
‘I’m really not tired,’ Tory informed the captain as he closed the door behind the rest of his crew. ‘I feel as if I’ve been asleep for ages.’
‘Well, maybe you have been,’ he said, pouring her a glass of water.
Tory cast her sights about the cosy cabin, finding it homely and appealing. ‘These are your quarters, I presume.’
‘It’s about the best accommodation on the ship, I’m afraid.’ Hawk was conscious that someone of her breeding was probably used to more luxurious surroundings.
‘No, I like it,’ she told him honestly. ‘But I didn’t catch your name? Or do I call you captain, too?’
Hawk was surprised at himself. ‘I am sorry, my name is Hawk.’ He walked over and handed the drink to her. ‘And you are?’