Defender of the Empire: Cadet #1 (4 page)

As I
steadied her I said “I guess you could say the best school in existence.” Not wanting to reveal where I came from.

She raised a steel gray brow at that. “Oh? And what would that be, lassie?”

“Life.” I replied. Once sure that she could stand on her own I began gathering up her belongings and putting them back in her bag. “I’m sorry I didn’t arrive sooner.” I said.

She smiled. “Lass, you came. That is all that matters.”

I met her gaze for a moment before nodding and handing her her bag. “Do you want me to escort you to wherever it is you are going?”

“That’s fine, dear. I can find my way. T’is not far.”

I looked about the empty hall under construction and wondered where the woman could possibly be going. “Are you sure?” I asked. Because I wasn’t.

She smiled knowingly. “I’m sure. I don’t want to keep you from where you are going. Thank you again, lass.”  She said before turning and walking down the hall back the way I had come. I watched her go. I knew that she would reach the more populated sections within a couple
minutes. If she headed any other way I would have followed anyway. I started to turn when I had a horrible thought. The thugs had gone that way, too. What if they were lying in wait?
Ah, what the hell. It isn’t as if anyone is expecting me.
I thought picking up Bertha the Crowbar and followed after her. I kept a wary eye from a distance on her progress. Within a few minutes she made it to the busier sections without incident. Assured that she hadn’t been mugged again, I turned around and continued on my way. 

I began to wonder
if I should turn around myself as the halls were getting darker. My only light soon came from dim console lights. My grip tightened on Bertha. My goal was to be as silent as possible, but the LF boots I had been issued were defeating it. I stopped and slipped them off. My ears tickled from straining to hear any possible sound because I doubt that I would ever see it coming. I clipped the boots together and held them in one hand. I wished I could just leave them behind, but there was some ‘civilized’ policy that stated ‘no shoes, no service.” And I need to at least
enter
the Academy Branch. Another thing that I wish I could have done was make my white clothing darker to match my surroundings. But like leaving the boots I couldn’t do that either.

Grasping Bertha in one hand and my boots in the other I continued. My feet padded softly making next to no noise. Just when I considered that I made a wrong move in continuing down this creepy dark hallway I found the main corridor that lead toward the central section of
the station. At least I assumed it was because it was bigger than the corridor I had just left. What made me hesitate was the fact that it was dark.
Why is there a whole section dark like this?
I wondered looking up and down the hall. It just didn’t make
any
sense. Yet this main hall remained, dark as the little corridor.

Sighing silently I turned to the left
which was the direction I hoped would meet up with Ring One. There was no sound, next to no light, and the metal floor was cold through my sock covered feet.

A sudden lance of pain made me gasp. Through the sensation of trembling nerves I heard a voice. Not a woman’s voice, but a male’s call out.
NOT AGAIN! NO! DON’T! LEAVE HER ALONE. SOMEONE! ANYONE! HEAR ME! HELP ME! It was both a plea and a command.

What was the coincidence that one person, in an
abandoned section of a space station, would hear not one, but
two
cries for help? And by the sound of it, there were at least two people who needed help. But that wasn’t the only difference from last time this time they were in a different hall. By the sound of it they were in a smaller corridor. I set the boots down in a little nook behind a counter of some abandoned store front. I then padded into the side corridor with my trusty crowbar. I wondered down its length following the pleading male voice. I began to hear another male voice, it was less clear than the first. I could also make out a woman’s murmur.  I had no chance of understanding her.

Why could I only make out the one voice? It didn’t make any sense.
As I got closer I realized that there was light up ahead. If the corridor had been lit normally, the light would have been negligible. As it was, one was very much aware of it without it hurting. I came to the corner and couched down before peering around. I froze as what I was seeing sank in. A woman with short brown hair was bound wrist to ankle on her knees before some figure in the deeper shadows. By how this figure moved, I was fairly sure that it was male, human, and rather large. Though that that last could have been because he was in the shadows. His voice was deep and patronizing when he spoke again. “Stupid Shade, you think a mouse can sneak up on a serpent?”

SERPENT? The male voice that had drawn me here in the first place snorted. YOU ARE NEITHER CUNNING NOR GRACEFUL NOR FAST ENOUGH TO APPLY THAT TITLE TO YOUR MISRABLE PINK HIDE. The voice continued scathingly. NO
, THE ONLY TITLE THAT FITS YOU IS ‘
LEECH’.
The shrouded man stepped forward into the light revealing that he really was large in stature and wore a mask that fitted over his entire face. I flinched thinking that the male prisoner certainly had guts but no brains. But to my surprise, the masked man didn’t act as if he had been insulted… or even that he had heard the voice. Neither did the woman. She eyed the masked wonder and laughed

             
“Has something I said amused you?” The man asked.

             
The woman smiled grimly. “Kill me and the Emperor will still know everything that I do.” Two words of that sentence fought for dominance on the attention stage of my mind. And those were ‘emperor’ and ‘kill’. The emperor because he was the guy in charge. Yeah, there was the Council, that was scary on its own, but the word ‘emperor’ just echoed with power that frankly ‘council’ didn’t. As a mere colonist, the chances that I would ever see the emperor was the same as seeing the center of a star without being vaporized. That’s right, pretty low.

             
The other word was something I was far more familiar with. It was something that I had rolled around with in the destruction of my home. Words like ‘kill’ and ‘death’ were something that I could understand. They were dirty, gritty, and common. Something that no one could avoid forever. But to see it being forced before its time was terrifying. I had to do something. Anything.

As I searched
for a plan, the masked man crouched before the woman. A smile colored his words “That would be true,” NO! The other voice became panicked, distracting me. The masked man continued unaware of the other voice. “…if your Spectral could escape.”

“What?!” The woman gasped, her fa
ce paled in the faint light. I could see the man’s hand reaching into his vest. I knew that could only mean a weapon.
I need a distraction… distraction, distraction
. I thought over and over again looking around.

The voice that only I seemed to be aware of inhaled
sharply in shock. THE LIGHT! He said just as I saw it.  A single faint purple orb light was suspended from the ceiling. It was the main source of light in the room. I glanced down at the crowbar in my hands and decided that wouldn’t be a good thing to throw. What if I missed? The only good thing could be hitting the man in the head. But then, I could just as easily hit the woman. Suddenly my muscles holding Bertha went slack for one terrible second. I caught hold of Bertha before she slipped entirely out of my hands. But an end clattered on the ground just as the man pulled out a black blade of some creepy make. I dodged behind some crates just inside the door. Hopefully before he saw me. I heard him curse and knew that one of two things would happen. He would kill the woman before looking for me. Or he would come find me, try to kill me, then kill the woman. My fingers tightened reflexively on Bertha.

Ah hell,
I thought upon realizing that I didn’t have time to find something else.

In that split second I stepped back from behind the crates and hurled the crowbar toward the light.
That is when time decided to slow down. Bertha the Crowbar summersaulted end over end. The man had the blade back. He started to look in my direction. Bertha shattered the orb, throwing everything into darkness and time back to normal. But at the same moment I heard the horrible sound of flesh parting before a blade and the woman’s scream. The barest of moments later, blinding pain brought me to my knees. GET UP! The male only I could hear demanded. GET UP AND RUN LIKE HELL! YOU NEED TO GET THE TWO OF YOU OUT OF HERE!

RUN, LITTLE BIG ONE! A new, small sounding voice said. And I felt the pain
vanish before a flood of energy. I regained my feet and ran like mad through the corridor back to the main hall. I could hear steps behind me and knew that I didn’t have time to fetch my boots. All I could do was run. And so, for the second time in a week, I was running… but this time for my life.

I couldn’t understand what I had seen or what I had heard. I just knew that it had been very bad. Not only because the woman had died but because of something more sinister. Something I couldn’t really understand. It just felt wrong. Like that weapon the man had. I had only a glimpse of it, but it looked like a single piece of black granite carved into a dagger with
decorative protrusions coming off its hilt. It had ‘bad news’ written all over it in big bold font. I kept racing down the corridor.

             
I didn’t know why the corridor was dark, but I became glad of it. That and the fact it seemed to have been simply abandoned with all the stalls and random things about it that I wove around. It made it so that I wasn’t the only thing visible in this huge hallway. What would make me happier would be finding the more populated sections of the station. That way I could blend into the masses. Oh… and not be wearing white.

             
Hopefully that would be enough.

             
I listened to everything coming from behind me. The heavy footsteps were much farther back. I smiled grimly. The man was tiring and here I still had my first wind. I heard a crash that I assumed to be the stack of crates I had passed forty seconds ago. Curses became fainter as I kept running. I ran through an open security gate and stumbled to a halt.

             
It was, literally, like stepping from night into day. And just as blinding. After a moment I closed my eyes and ducked my head. I forced myself to step to the side out of the doorway so that I wouldn’t cast a silhouette. Then I focused on trying to keep tears of pain from falling due to the brightness. Gradually my eyes got use to the suddenly abundant illumination. Which was a relief because that made it easier to avoid stepping on tails and wings and other people’s feet. It also helped keep my own feet from getting stepped on. A painful prospect on a normal occasion. It would hurt much more as I was bootless.

             
I hunched my shoulders briefly before forcing myself to look around. But to be honest? All I saw were the boots I had been lent sitting in a little nook in an empty store front. In the dark. Near where a woman had been killed. And a crowbar surrounded by shattered glass or whatever they made light orbs out of in the same room as the dead woman. A crowbar with my fingerprints and DNA all over it. I didn’t know if the man would find them or if he would just leave them and clean up his own mess and let the authorities find it. Then I
would
be blamed.

             
All of which made me more determined to tell someone who had the power to find the killer before he could do it again. Because if the voice I heard was real and not my imagination, this sort of thing had happened before and was likely to continue. But what Citizen would listen to a colonist? I wondered really starting to notice the hall I was in.

             
I blinked several times. To my right was a sign that said ‘Ring One, Corridor C.’ I glanced around before following the sign. Not too long after entering Corridor C, I saw an old space age decorated restaurant. The sign was a cartoon crescent moon sitting at a small table with a coffee mug in its hand, a satisfied smile on its face. Floating around the happy moon were the stylized words ‘The Moon Café’. I tilted my head in wonder before shaking it slightly and convincing my feet it was time to walk again. What were the chances that Westley’s directions had always been intended for that detour? And if so,
why
? Then there was another thought, though not as relevant. H
ow could they make a cartoon moon look so creepy? Was that how they drew in business? Make people so freaked out that they couldn’t sleep and so went to that café to sip coffee and eat cinnamon rolls in the wee hours of the night? Was that the conniving plan? Did any of that make sense?

             
Probably not.

             
Another slight head shake and I was able to think about more important things, like remembering Westley’s directions. The Legion Fleet Academy Branch was located fifty feet past the Moon Café and near a transport rental place. My thought was to show up there as I had originally planned and give them not only Captain Wingstar’s letter but also a report on the murder of the woman. They might not
believe
me, but they would know who to have check it out. Or they would hopefully remember it when the body was found or someone filed a missing person’s report.