Star Force: Lost Destiny (Wayward Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  The Protovic put the box and ambrosia back into his pack and set it beside his armor, which stood like a weird statue where he’d left it, splayed open and airing out as well. It didn’t come apart like hers and Rammak did and looked like one giant piece pulled apart in some mathematically brilliant way that made it beautiful and intimidating at the same time. Inside was the same thin padding that hers had, but it had a slightly different vibe. Probably a lot newer, considering hers and Rammak’s were antiques by now.

  “Rest,” Rammak said, walking to the edge of the overhang and putting himself between Javvin and the sunlight. “You too Esna. But keep your armor on.”

  “Let me guess. He puts it on way faster than me too?”

  A laugh came from the mass of cloth that eclipsed the light coming from the Protovic as Javvin laid down next to the wall and faced it, casting a small glow but otherwise hiding his bioluminosity from the pair of them and the outside world. “You’re observant, at least.”

  “Can’t they scan you if you’re outside your armor?”

  “If they know to focus scans on this location then they already know we’re here. A general scan won’t make it through the rock.”

  “I can see sky.”

  “A sliver. They’d have to have a craft in orbit on a line for that slice and know where to look.”

  “That’s why you’re wearing the robe?”

  “Yes. And because the ground is rough.”

  “Sleep, Esna,” Rammak said without turning around to look at her, for his eyes were focused outward as he took his standing watch seriously. “There’s no guarantee when you’ll get another chance.”

  “Happy to,” she said, curious to ask more questions but knowing better than to turn down extra hours of blissful regeneration. She walked a couple meters away from Javvin and laid down next to the wall as well, but kept her comm on so she could hear if they said anything else. As much as she wanted sleep, she wanted information about Javvin and his part in Star Force even more. He was beyond impressive, and his bodily glow made him look like something this planet could never hold. Something better than the wastelands. Something pure and hopeful.

  If that was what Star Force was like she wanted to get there even more now, and she began to realize just how much it had to have hurt Rammak to lose it all. He’d survived, but she’d probably been underestimating how much the loss still weighed on him. And from the way he was standing sentry just short of the sunlight/shadow line, she could tell he’d come more alive since Javvin had found them.

  And if ambrosia made you stronger and faster, that meant Rammak was an even bigger badass, crazy as that sounded, for she’d only seen him in his ‘weakened’ state.

  Geez, I am a newb, she thought as she closed her eyes and surrendered to the lingering fatigue that dragged her away to a happy warm place in her stillness.

  18

  When they finally arrived at the camp it wasn’t what Esna expected. They were traveling through a deep and narrow canyon with sheer walls when Rammak suddenly brought the speeder to a stop, then before Esna could ask him or Javvin…who was riding behind her on the equipment pack all but invisible…what was going on the speeder began to rise up along the rightside wall.

  “Where are we going? Can’t they see us up high?”

  “We’re not going all the way up,” Rammak said, pointing above them. “Look.”

  Esna craned her armored neck up and saw a little lip above that gradually resolved into a hole in the rock 10-15 meters ahead. When they got up even with it she saw that it wasn’t a hole, but rather a hollowed out cave with a flat and somewhat wide landing platform that Rammak eased the speeder into. There wasn’t a lot of extra room, but he set it down a couple meters from the edge and extended the physical landing struts, jostling them as they made contact with the rock as he powered down the engine.

  Javvin hopped off the back, materializing as he hit the ground in his red/black armor and stepping over to the edge as he looked out at the view of the opposite cliff wall and the route they’d come up. It was a decent view but restricted to the canyon to the east, for on the right there was a bit of an angle with the rock jutting out and giving Rammak’s camp cover from anyone approaching the other direction…if they bothered to look up this high at all.

  Esna slid off the speeder to the right and away from the exposed drop off as Rammak went the other way and walked around to the back where he began unpacking their gear.

  “Feel free to use the shower first,” he told her, with Esna perking up immediately.

  “You’ve got one here?” she asked, seeing only a small hole in the wall with some equipment on the other side.

  “There’s three more chambers I widened out beyond that doorway. Go straight through then hang a left. We’ll get to workouts after you’ve had a good sleep.”

  “What, up here?”

  “There’s plenty of room outside,” Javvin pointed out.

  “Is there a ladder or are we going to take the speeder up and down?”

  The Protovic answered her by jumping up slightly and touching the rough rock ceiling, sticking his hands there and pulling his feet up until he was hanging upside down.

  “Can my armor do that?”

  “There are grip pads at various points in the armor to let you climb,” Javvin said as he let go and lithely flipped over as he fell.

  “I deactivated them,” Rammak added, pulling out a sack of foodstuffs and tossing it near the doorway next to where Esna stood. “I don’t want you trying to climb down on your own. It takes some skill or the rock will pull away from the wall on your fingertips. And your armor won’t protect you from falls as much as you think.”

  Esna looked over the speeder at the drop off. “How bad will it hurt me if I fall from here?”

  “Don’t find out,” Javvin said as he walked back to the edge. “I’m going to have a look around.”

  Without waiting for a reply he sprinted a step and a half, jumping off the edge and flying across to the far wall as he fell down several meters, sticking to the rock then climbing towards the top and disappearing a few meters from the summit. Where he went after that Esna didn’t know, but having him prowling around out there made her feel better about any potential pursuit.

  The next day Esna was at the bottom of the canyon in one of the flatter spots going through sparring drills with Rammak when Javvin suddenly came into view beside them, startling her enough to make her jump, but this time she kept her mouth shut.

  “Get into cover. There’s someone coming.”

  “Who?” Esna asked as Rammak suddenly wrapped an arm around her and picked her up.

  “What are you doing?” she protested as he ran over to the wall, then began climbing with his other three hands.

  Esna didn’t say anything else, realizing that he wanted to get her up top as fast as possible and not offering any resistance as she became a piece of cargo. When he got to the lip of the cave entrance she found herself thrown up over his shoulder and onto the flat, then Esna scrambled out of the way as his big Calavari bulk climbed up. Javvin appeared beside him a moment later and stayed on the edge, going invisible as his helmet cam suddenly transmitted into Esna’s. She could see from his point of view in a small popup window that she had to move into an upper corner so she didn’t trip on anything with it blocking her view, and that took her several seconds working the HUD controls.

  “Is your mic off?” Rammak asked through the comm.

  Esna did a quick check. “Yes.”

  “They aren’t Viks.”

  “Who then?”

  “Cargo haulers,” Javvin answered.

  “This is a sparsely used trade route,” Rammak pointed out, “but there is traffic on occasion.”

  “I checked their minds. They’re not looking for us. Just stay out of sight and I’ll make sure they don’t see the cave. The less I have to hide from them the better, but given this height I don’t think they’ll notice. They’re tired and bored, barely st
aying awake enough to navigate the turns.”

  “Tired from what?” Esna asked, still amazed at the information he could pull from people’s minds without them even knowing it.

  “Long trips, and they’re behind schedule now,” he said as Esna caught her first glimpse of their vehicle. It was wheeled and moving slowly, and she could tell from the visible bumps how much of a pain a long ride in that thing through this terrain had to be.

  It took forever for it to get close to them, creeping forward methodically as Esna kept reminding herself not to hold her breath. She was out of view and they couldn’t hear it anyway, with her standing next to the wall and well back from the edge as she watched on her helmet’s HUD, seeing a large tank on the back of the sled-like vehicle that had 8 wheels and two drivers.

  “What are they hauling?” she asked, seeing a seeping leak along one of the tank seams.

  “Bioslurry,” Javvin said with a tightness to his voice.

  “What’s that?”

  “Liquefied internal organs,” Rammak answered.

  Esna gulped with a wash of guilt flowing over her as she suddenly understood. “Oh…”

  “I’d like to take them out,” Javvin said, still invisible on the ledge, “but I don’t want to give away our position with their absence.”

  “Take them out?”

  “They killed and cut up hundreds of living beings to fill that tank and they’re off to sell their produce further north as food, then they’ll head back and slaughter more that friends of theirs are rounding up on hunting missions. They capture them and bring them back to camp so they can secure all the necessary fluids in the most efficient method,” Javvin all but spat. “I hate letting bastards like that go.”

  “You’d kill them?”

  “Yes,” Javvin said sternly. “You have a problem with that?”

  “I grew up on a farm,” she said hesitantly, wondering how he’d react. “I killed some livestock too.”

  “And now?” Rammak asked.

  “I know better now, but I still did it.”

  “You’re not a threat then,” Javvin said neutrally as the vehicle passed beneath them and began making the turn around the outcropping and into the western half of the canyon out of view. “These two will do it again, for they do not respect life. They’re not misguided, they’re evil. Some people are drawn into situations not of their own making and go along with it. That is despicable, but there is a difference between those that do so because they are leveraged to and those that choose to freely. Which is she?”

  “The former,” Rammak answered as the vehicle slid out of view, but neither of the two warriors moved, knowing they had to let it get further ahead before they relaxed.

  “And that makes it ok?” Esna asked, conflicted over being happy that Javvin didn’t punch her and yet still feeling responsible.

  “Never,” the Protovic said, with his point of view cutting out now that there wasn’t anything to see besides empty canyon. He shimmered into view and walked a few steps towards her, hopping over the parked speeder opposite from where Rammak was standing.

  “So what does that make me?”

  “Have you learned?”

  “I know what I did was wrong, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Will you do it again, perhaps if you run out of other…food?”

  “No. I don’t think I could now, even if it meant starving. Someone else shouldn’t have to die so I can eat their body.”

  “Then I have no quarrel with you, youngling,” Javvin said, his voice easing a bit but it wasn’t exactly warm.

  “How can you just let it go at that? I mean, I don’t want you to kick my ass or kill me, but just letting it go doesn’t feel right.”

  “It shouldn’t feel right,” Javvin said, sitting back on the side of the speeder.

  “Then what should I be feeling?”

  “You need to self-analyze.”

  “About why I did it? I lived on a farm. That’s what they did and sometimes I had to. I didn’t kill very many of them, but I did help deliver them to people that would kill them.”

  “And you don’t like that now?”

  “I hate it now.”

  “That’s why I don’t have an issue with you, other than your questionable judgement. But you’re a newb anyway, so that’s not really anything unexpected.”

  “But you would kill them if we didn’t have to hide?”

  “In order to prevent them from killing more in a few weeks from now, yes.”

  “Just like that?”

  “If I don’t, others will die. And those two aren’t going to have a change of heart.”

  “But I’ve got blood on my hands too. How am I different from them?”

  “Because you are.”

  “How?”

  “Why did I bring you with me?” Rammak asked her as the cargo hauler continued to get further and further away.

  “Because I was Human.”

  “That’s the first reason, but after I learned you lived on a farm with livestock why didn’t I do anything?”

  “I honestly don’t know. If I could go back in time and stop myself I would, but there’s nothing I can do to undo it now. I’m tainted, just like those two,” she said, pointing out of the cave. “And I can’t ever not be again.”

  “But you want to be untainted?” Javvin asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why you’re different,” Rammak said with finality. “You’ve changed.”

  “But I still did it.”

  “And you’re not letting yourself forget it?”

  “How can I? If I do it’s like…it didn’t really matter.”

  “Do you know what your mistake was?”

  “No. I don’t know what I was thinking back then. You’ve shown me so much I can’t understand how I was that ignorant. I keep asking myself why I did it, but I don’t know. I should have realized it was wrong, but I didn’t. Not enough to stop, at least.”

  “But you did sense something was wrong?”

  “Maybe a little, but that’s no excuse.”

  “There are no such thing as excuses, Esna,” Javvin said. “But there are explanations. Which version of you is the true you. The now or the then?”

  “I want to say now, but if that was how I react without someone telling me it’s wrong I don’t know.”

  “This has been bothering you for a while?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The fact that it does is a good sign. You are trying to right yourself but don’t see how. Remember that you do not live in the past or future, you live in the present. So if there is any taint remaining in you now, then remove it. Once you make sure that it won’t happen again, you can let your past actions go. You don’t forget them, they just become irrelevant.”

  “How? I’ll never have a clean slate again.”

  “A clean slate?” Rammak asked.

  “I did something wrong, and more than once. I can’t bring them back to life, and if I can’t change what I’ve done I can never have a clean slate. I feel like I need one. I want one, but I don’t deserve one. My head is bouncing all over the place.”

  “Obviously,” Javvin agreed, “but you’re trying to sort things out. The issue here isn’t what you did, it’s that you don’t trust yourself. If I fire a weapon and hit a target I didn’t intend and kill a friend, I am not going to be happy about that. It will be my fault because I pulled the trigger, because I missed my intended target. I screwed up, and I can’t undo what I did. Should I punish myself for that for the rest of my life?”

  “But that would be an accident. What I did was intentional.”

  “Someone dies either way, and when you’re young you don’t always understand what you are doing. That doesn’t excuse it, but in your case I’m guessing that your previous actions don’t attest to your true colors. If they did Rammak would have left you behind at minimum, and I trust his judgement. You should have known what you were doing was wrong, but for some reason you did
not. You are feeling guilty now because you are correcting the error in your senses. Guilt is an emotional red flag that tells you something is wrong but you don’t understand what. Once you figure out where the error lies and correct it the guilt will go away.”

  “But that’s like them being dead doesn’t matter. If I just go on without some punishment or something…”

  “Will that bring them back? Will that undo what you’ve done? No. If you could help them you would now, but you can’t. Do not confuse them and you. They are beyond help now, you are not. Are you still their enemy? If they were before you now, would you kill them again?”

  “No.”

  “You have corrected the error even if you don’t fully understand why it happened.”

  “Don’t I need to know why?”

  “You don’t always get to know, Esna,” Rammak added. “The past gets washed away in the present, and some things you just have to accept not knowing about. But the present you is here in full and you can analyze yourself. If you would not do those things now, then the problem has been eliminated. If you are still feeling guilty that is because you are holding onto the emotion. Let it go.”

  “They’re dead and I’m alive. That’s not right.”

  “No, it’s not,” Javvin said. “But you dying isn’t going to help. That would be another loss. This entire planet is an abomination. You didn’t make it that way, the V’kit’no’sat did when they destroyed it and those that remained created this place out of a combination of ignorance and ill will. You came to live here without knowing what we know, and while what you did was wrong, it happened. Not because you are a bad person but because you didn’t know yourself. You were living as other people directed, not charting your own course. Star Force is based on the individual, and while we have a lot to offer we never force it on anyone. Truth cannot be shoved into, it has to be discovered. You are learning now and seeing your past actions in a new light, and it disgusts you. That is good. Now understand why it disgusts you.”