The Crucible: Leap of Faith (12 page)

“For what?”

“For buying me some time,” he
answered as he pressed forward and pinched the bridge of his
nose.

“Time?”

“Lieutenant Williams can be kind
of intense sometimes. I don’t need intense right now,” his voice
dropped low, that sad quality returning to his gaze. Then he
blinked hard. “Which I should not have told you. That was
unprofessional. Please don’t share that with anyone else on the
ship.”

I shrugged. It was an oddly easy
move considering my usually tense body. “I don’t know anyone aboard
this ship, sir, so there is no one for me to tell.”

He managed a small smile. He
looked away, then back as he said, “you know me, don’t
you?”

“We have met,” I conceded as I
pretended to return my attention to the scanner.

He snorted. It was a brief moment
of levity considering his current somber mood. “What’s your story,
Ensign Jenks?”

I stiffened. Somehow his
conversation had lulled me, but the man who asked too many
questions was back.

His gaze flicked over my body, and
his brow compressed. “You get edgy when anyone asks you that, don’t
you?” He sat forward, dropping his hands between his knees. “It’s
okay. You’ve got a history, don’t you?”

I didn’t answer.

“I may not be the best commander,”
his voice dropped, “but I do care for my crew. I understand that
not everybody who joins the Star Forces comes from a place of
privilege like me.” He shot the window a bitter look before
softening his expression as he glanced at me once more. “Not
everybody grows up in the lap of luxury. Some people have to fight
to live. I understand that, Ensign. But know this – the Star Forces
protect its own. We’re here for you.”

He spoke with a genuine soft
smile, as if he truly believed his words.

The Star Forces were not here for
their own. They were here for themselves.

He was right. I did have to fight
to live. But the one force he assumed could protect me was the one
that hunted me.

“You don’t have to tell me what’s
going on with your life. But you can, if you want to. Or I can
arrange for a counsellor—“ he began.

“I don’t need to speak to a
counsellor,” I said so quickly my words ran together, “I don’t have
a problem.”

“We all need to speak to somebody
once in a while. Unload your burdens. It’s only human.” He brought
his hands up and his gaze locked on his thumbs once more. “If those
around us don’t know of our burdens, they can’t share them. And
some burdens are too large to carry on our own.”

“Then what are your burdens, sir?”
I asked before I could think of what I was doing. The question just
pushed itself from my mouth. It was a reaction to the palpable
sense of sadness radiating off him. A sadness that was enough to
push away my own fear, if only for a moment.

He slowly lifted his head. “A few
hours ago I found out my best friend died,” he answered as he
stared distractedly past me.

I felt the hair along the back of
my neck stand on end. “… I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, so am I.”

Silence spread between us. I
hadn’t glanced at my scanner for at least a minute.

For the briefest, craziest moment
I got the urge to tell him I was on the run from the Star Forces
itself. In a few short breaths I could dump my whole sorry
story.

But if I did that, I’d see another
side to the Lieutenant Commander.

He might have appeared pitiable
now. His interactions today may have made it seem as if he was a
good man with a good heart.

But he was still Star Forces
through and through. If I admitted what I was and who I had run
from, he would drag me back to Professor Axis.

So I turned away.

I could feel his eyes on the back
of my neck. “Do us a favor. Don’t tell anyone what I just told you.
My friend… his family don’t know yet.”

“I won’t tell anyone. Like I said,
I have no one to tell.”

“Yeah. Well, see you around,
Ensign Jenks. If you change your mind, and you decide you do need
someone to tell, you can make it me.” With that I heard him stand
and walk out.

I glanced around and saw a flash
of his face before he retreated into the corridor
beyond.

Though his features were marked
with sorrow, his brow was dented with determination.

My scanner suddenly beeped,
commanding me to continue my sensor sweeps.

I did so, but my mind drifted back
immediately to the man and his offer.

It seemed impossible that in a
galaxy as cruel as this there could be someone to confide
in.

…

Dig site, Mari Sector

The first indication of a problem
was a slight shudder that ran through the cavern floor and up into
the scaffolding around Amy Lee.

At first she thought it was
nothing more than a tremor. Moons like this were usually
geologically unstable.

She ignored it and got back to
work. Considering the rest of her crew were too agitated to do
their jobs, she had taken it upon herself to study the circle of
language, as she’d named it. Those three strange concentric circles
– the only decoration on this massive wall.

She was currently standing on the
top of her scaffolding. It really was a mess. Due to her
low-budget, she hadn’t been able to afford smart scaffolding, and
had to make do with what she’d been able to afford. The result was
a higgledy-piggledy mess that scrawled across the wall, different
kinds of scaffolding Jerry-rigged together.

Still, it was stable.

As soon as the tremor passed, she
pressed herself closer towards the wall. With one hand of her black
and gray mech suit pressed up against the smooth metal, she brought
her eyes as close to those three concentric circles as she
could.

The light reacted strangely around
them. Though her mech suit came with its own light source, one she
shone directly into the center of the circles, the light was
diverted by something, shooting off in shafts and illuminating
different sections of the wall around her.

Pressing her teeth into her lip,
she got a flurry of excitement.

This really would be the biggest
discovery of her career, wouldn’t it?

She’d done a brief literature
search, and there wasn’t anything like this anywhere
else.

She simply couldn’t wait to find
out what was on the other side of this wall.

People had accused her of being
too driven by her job before. To her naysayers, she lacked the
empathy to deal with people, and rather preferred the dead
civilizations of the past.

They were wrong.

And to prove they were wrong, she
broke away from the wall and twisted around to check on the main
camp again.

She’d tried to give her staff a
pep talk, but it hadn’t worked. So she’d let them rest.

With two fingers pressing into the
wall she turned around, and she scanned across the room until she
locked onto the camp.

That’s when she saw something
odd.

Her mech suit had once belonged to
a mining operation. It was one of the most expensive pieces of
equipment she owned. Still, like everything else she’d managed to
source, it was always breaking down.

The once perfect targeting sensors
were now shot to pieces.

Still, there was just enough
computational power to pick up something strange.

She stared out across that massive
cavern to the opposite wall. All on their own, the hover lifts were
ascending to the surface.

Nobody was on them.

They were simply being called back
to their various stations.

“Shit, it’s a glitch,” she
realized, getting ready to call her engineer.

The last thing you wanted was for
all of your hover lifts to be stuck on the surface. She would have
to call Hargrove and get his men to fix them, otherwise her entire
crew would be stuck down here in this cavern. And Hargrove would
hate being called out for a simple engineering task.

She fumbled inside her suit,
thumbing on the controls that would contact her chief
engineer.

Then she stopped.

She saw black shapes rapidly
descending the walls of the cavern.

No larger than people, they were
unsupported by any hover lifts, and simply sailed down to the
bottom of the cavern.

Her heart leaped into her throat
and she threw herself forward until the hands of her mech suit
locked on the railing of the scaffolding. “What the
hell?”

The shapes landed. They weren’t
crushed against the bottom of the cavern – instead she saw them
slowly pull up and land gently.

That’s when she realized they
weren’t objects, but people. Dressed in jet black armor.

Her heart beat louder and louder,
harder and harder, her hands wrapping so tightly around the
railings she dented the cheap reinforced metal.

She watched as a few of her staff
popped their heads around from the main camp to see what was going
on.

And that’s when the firing
began.

The black shapes brought out guns,
and began to kill her crew.

Amy Lee screamed. She pushed
herself backwards, her mech suit slamming against the smooth wall,
the sound echoing all around the cavern.

The black shapes kept shooting.
She could hear her crew screaming, hear they’re terrified shouts
cut out as one by one they were mowed down.

Nobody had a chance.

Nobody had a goddamn
chance.

She fell to her knees, shivering
and shaking inside her suit. Sweat poured off her brow, blanketing
her face until it was hard to blink.

But with a shaking hand she
acted.

She punched in the coordinates to
put out a distress call. “This is research manager Amy Lee, we are
under attack—“ she began.

Then she stared in horror at the
inside of her visor as it told her her message could not be
sent.

There was a dampening field in
place.

Whoever those black shapes were,
they had made short work of her team.

At first her crazed mind thought
it must be Hargrove. Maybe he’d snapped and sought
revenge.

But she saw those black figures
mow down several Star Forces personnel who’d been at the camp.
Though they tried to fight back, the black figures were simply too
powerful.

Hargrove wouldn’t sacrifice his
own people.

She shook so badly that her
fingers kept inadvertently pressing against the controls of her
suit.

Once the black figures had
murdered everybody in the camp, she saw them turn towards her. Or
maybe they didn’t lock on her – maybe they all stared as one at the
massive alien wall.

She stared at them.

Soon, she would die. She realized
this.

But she was determined not to die
in vain.

During her years as a student of
the Alliance Archaeology Society, she’d forayed into signal
studies.

She’d once come across an old
civilization who’d found a unique way to propagate messages through
space.

She’d written a paper on it, or at
least she’d tried to. It had never been published. It had been
suppressed by the Star Forces. Apparently they were worried that
such a method could be used by the rebellion to hide messages and
avoid signal jammers.

She tore her eyes off those black
figures, even though she saw one break off from the group and head
towards the scaffolding.

She extended her fingers and
started to type on the controls housed within her gloves. She moved
feverishly, not caring that her knuckles burnt from her efforts.
She didn’t have to worry about injuries – she would die
soon.

This mech suit wouldn’t be able to
protect her from those black figures, but it did have enough
on-board equipment to propagate her signal. All she had to do was
access certain sub-space frequencies. Then she could send her
message, and though it would be dampened by the jamming field, the
jamming field wouldn’t be on forever.

The old civilization she’d written
her paper on had found a way to propagate messages using naturally
amplifying spatial phenomenon. Your message bounced back and forth
between these phenomena until it could spread further and
further.

It was her only hope.

She worked as quickly as she
could.

She did not put any personal
information in that message. She had a husband and a nine-year-old
child, but none of that mattered.

She took rudimentary scans of the
area with her suit, and waited.

She could feel somebody climbing
the scaffolding.

She ground her teeth together,
locking them so hard the tension referred right down her neck and
deep into her chest.