Renegade Descent Page 2

  The lot of us gathered on the beach of an ocean, near an outcropping of sharp gray rocks. With a heavy, overcast sky above us, this seemed as fitting a place as any to grieve. Chairs covered the sand in neat rows, figures with somber faces in each one, many with tears running down their cheeks. Behind the chairs, a standing crowd had gathered, a lingering memory of the deceased likely still on their minds. I wasn’t one for formal pretense or posturing, so I instead leaned against a nearby boulder, the waves kicking mist and foam onto my boots as I listened with the rest of them.

  With my hands in my pockets, I tried to pay attention to Josef’s speech.

  To Leif’s.

  To Karin’s.

  But mostly, all I could hear was a ringing in my ear as I remembered what had happened on that damned metal planet; of the Celestial as it charged me and an injured Abby; of Lucia’s staff glowing as she initiated the self-destruct countdown; of the way the hangar shook when she selflessly gave her life to save ours.

  The whole thing had been surreal at the time, and the grief of the moment had escaped me, catching up in the coming days, a little at a time. My dreams played the memory on repeat, not letting me forget the horrible tragedy that had befallen all of us.

  “Captain?” asked Karin tentatively, jarring me from my thoughts.

  I looked up, almost annoyed and somewhat surprised to find everyone watching me expectantly. They were silently waiting, eyes wide with tears of anguish and distant thoughts, as if they wanted something I could give.

  As though I could somehow make it all go away and bring Lucia back to them.

  Oh, right, I thought. My speech.

  I cleared my throat and took Karin’s spot on the sand between the mourners and the sea. Silver clouds rolled through the heavy sky, casting a murky glow across the beach as a cold breeze clipped past us all. The day had been kind, providing enough coverage to shade the ceremony, but without the rain. I was glad for that, but not much else.

  I’d never been one for pretty words or even getting up in front of people and spouting out something I had prepared, even though I had prepared nothing, but this was Lucia, and I owed her some sort of gesture. Hell, I owed that woman a lot more than that, but in this moment, I had nothing more to give. I was leading these people, and I owed it to them, too, to help them mourn. And if a bunch of words would help the process along, who was I to deny them?

  How the hell did that happen, though? I thought, not for the first time.

  Me, a leader. Not all that long ago, I was a Renegade whose only worry was paying back the debt I owed. Now the lives of thousands of people—hell, maybe the galaxy itself—rested on my overloaded shoulders. And by the gods, did the burden feel heavy today with the task I had to complete now.

  As the crash of water on the sand filled the air, I wondered where to start. With her family, maybe. With all the people she left behind.

  I stole a quick peek at Karin, Lucia’s daughter. Karin stood before her father, Josef, stoic as ever, looking so much like her mother I half-expected her to insult me at any moment and tell me to get the hell on with it. She had even taken the news like Lucia would have. Her face had gone pale, and she hadn’t been able to speak except to ask to be alone. Her mother had been stoic as well, never one to show her grief. I didn’t know if that was a result of the place they had both come from or if she’d learned how to be that way by watching the old woman.

  But she couldn’t hide the truth from me. I heard it beneath her words—the agony. The torture. The loss. It was all right there, trying to claw its way to the surface. She held a world of pain in her today, and likely would for months to come.

  Josef set one hand on his daughter’s shoulder in support, the old man acting as the rock she was too proud to admit she needed right then. He hadn’t tried to hide his grief from me. Maybe it was because we could share the pain, man to man. Maybe he thought I would understand, because while she had been his wife, she was also my friend.

  Friend. I let the word linger in my mind, and it brought me back to the years I spent alone on my ship, with only myself and Sigmond to keep me company, when the only friend I had was Ollie, and now he was dead too.

  Still, I had spent most of my time on my own—the bulk of my life—until the day I found Abigail and Lex, and then everything changed. I was no longer an eternal loner. I had people under my command now, most of them depending on me. I had friends that were as good as family, maybe better, and I knew without having to ask that they trusted me. That commitment required that I take on the role of caregiver, and that I provided sustenance, shelter, protection, and in this case, comfort and support. In the face of this tragedy, I had to control my feelings to project an image of strength while the others took their time to get over the loss.

  Feelings had never really been my thing, and I reckoned it wasn’t right to shine the spotlight on them yet, especially not in front of all of these people that counted on me for succor. I’d carry the weight of this loss and bottle it, at least in this moment, and maybe in the weeks to come, for as long as these people needed me to. A bit of peace in all this madness. I would be the rock.

  “When I first met Lucia, I thought she was about to kill me,” I admitted instead, blurting out my first memory of my friend.

  A few loose chuckles rippled through the crowd, and even Karin grinned. Just a little.

  “This was back on that ice world Abby, Dressler, Freddie, and I ended up on,” I said, trying to set the stage a bit. “We were underground, and we ran into someone wearing an animal skull on her face, and I had no idea what was going on with that. Truth be told, I thought she was some kind of monster. Gods know we’d seen enough of those, so another wouldn’t surprise me. On a world like that, filled with things like Boneclaws, it wasn’t such a stretch.” I rubbed my jaw, lost in the memory and going on with my speech almost without thinking about it. “But she risked her life to save us. Strangers. Foreigners. She had no idea if we were friend or foe either, but she took the chance because that’s the kind of woman she is.” I paused. “Was.”

  With a heavy sigh, I cracked a few knuckles and briefly stared out at the water, lost in my memories of the deceased. “Lucia was a stubborn old shrew. And, I’ll add, a bit too comfortable telling me what I ought to do.” I smirked and paused for effect, and a few more quiet laughs cut through the assembled crowd, breaking the tense mourning atmosphere just a bit. “But she and I had a sort of—well, I suppose you can call it an understanding. I came to know her not just as a fellow leader, but as a friend. That woman was a warrior, and before her daughter Karin had come of age, I’m told she was a queen.” I paused, my shoulders uncomfortably tense, fighting the surge of grief as it burned in my chest. I fought it down the best I could. “A warrior queen,” I added again, a little softer this time, “through and through.”

  I cleared my throat abruptly, stamping down the feelings that threatened to spill out. “I’m honored to have fought at such a fierce and honorable woman’s side. She died exactly the way she wanted to,” I finished, looking at Karin and Josef to underscore my point. “In battle, protecting her family.”

  Karin’s lip trembled, and she quickly turned her head toward her father, pushing her face into his chest. Josef wrapped his gnarled fingers through hers and squeezed, his pale cheeks inflamed from days of weeping.

  In the silence that followed, I didn’t know what else to say. The speech felt finished to me, but no one moved. They watched me, still silently waiting, as if they wanted more.

  But I didn’t have anything left except the anger bubbling and lurking beneath what I had told them. I had a thirst for revenge, a need to shoot something and cause some damage.

  And I would be damned if I told them that. There was no sense in delivering hate in a place like this, when the memories of the dead were still fresh. It was better for these people to focus on their love, their loss, and their grief, and they wouldn’t do that with anger.

  Me, on the other hand—I was never so noble. I’d find and burn every last Celestial in the entire galaxy, and I’d do whatever it took to prevent another loss like the one I had just experienced. The revenge would be all mine.

  Karin stepped forward again, taking my place in the silence, honoring six of Leif’s brave soldiers who had also fallen in the battle on that planet. They also had friends, associates, maybe even loved ones who mourned them, and they deserved their moment of respect. I admired Karin for her poise; however, even as she spoke, many in the crowd watched me, their curious expressions a little foggy and dazed, as if they waited to get their cue from me. Blue tattoos peeked through gaps in everyone’s clothing, and with a hint of relief, I noticed that even Leif’s people had them now.

  Since their arrival, and after our time in Celestial space, I knew I could trust them to join in our cause. With the added threat of the Celestials at our doorstep, we were going to need as many allies as possible to operate the ancient ships from Titan. That also meant having people on Earth to operate the day-to-day technology that kept us functioning as the colony we were becoming. They couldn’t do most of that without the tattoos, so I’d given the authorization to provide them. It had proven the right decision, and Leif was grateful for the trust I had placed in him. We were friends, the lot of us, but soon we would become a single people.

  As my gaze roamed over those gathered, I caught Abigail’s eye. She and Lex sat in the third row, both dressed in white to signify the light of the gods, a long standing ritual for funerals. Abigail’s piercing eyes focused on me as she listened with the others. It was always like that now. Abigail and I often knew what the other was thinking, and she nodded at me and then glanced at Lex.

  It hit me, then, in that moment.

  A revelation.

 
The resolve.

  Lucia’s tragic death was going to count for something. She had saved my and Abigail’s lives back there, given us both the chance to live, and I wasn’t about to squander that second chance at fighting my way through another day.

  Come hell or high water, I was going to live and fight for these women and find a way to make the galaxy a better place for them, especially Lex. After all the hell she’d endured, the girl deserved a real life, with a real family and a decent home.

  A safe one.

  You told me to watch over them, Lucia, I thought, my eyes unconsciously gazing into the sky, as if I were channeling my thoughts to the heavens, wishing she could hear it. I won’t let you down, you grumpy old hag.

  As Karin finished her final words, she lifted a white funeral urn toward me. It was simple and smaller than I imagined might possibly hold an entire person. I took it from her and opened the cap, turning toward the surging ocean as I pulled back my arm, and with a quick thrust, hurled the black soot into the sea.

  It was more a symbolic gesture than anything, since we had no means of recovering Lucia’s body. Still, it felt wholesome, in some raw and primal way.

  A few sobs filtered through the crowd behind me, and I couldn’t deny the gaping hole I felt in my own chest. But Lucia wouldn’t have wanted a bunch of drawn out tears, I knew.

  “Take your time,” I said to the crowd, hoping they would disperse soon so this sadness could end. I knew that getting back to business would be beneficial to many of those mourning. “Make your peace, and when you’re ready, there’s still a war waiting for us. We have work to do, just as Lucia did. We have to honor her memory by moving forward.” I patted Karin on the shoulder as I passed, leaving the funeral to those who needed time. I had to set an example and move on to our collective concern, which was the difficult battle ahead.

  “Sir,” said Sigmond suddenly through the comm in my ear, startling me out of my pensiveness. “Today’s test has concluded.”

  “And?” I prodded, unable to quell the rise of foolish optimism that perhaps, this time, Athena had actually responded to our encrypted signal; that maybe, finally, our daily message through the slip tunnel at the earth’s core wouldn’t go ignored.

  “No response, sir,” said Sigmond, bursting my bubble.

  I sighed, annoyed at myself for expecting a different response than the previous dozen times. “Alright,” I muttered, still trudging through the sand as I made my way to the edge of the beach, finally able to stare into the horizon without any wailing moans to fill my ears. My progress was slow due to the sand filling my boots, made worse by the sea water that had sloshed into them, essentially creating mud inside. My boots had become uncomfortably tight, and I couldn’t wait to dump them out and clean off my feet. Funny the things we focus on at the most inappropriate times.

  “I did, however, detect Titan’s signature,” added Sigmond.

  I perked up at the name of Athena’s ship and my former base of operations. Hope rose in my chest. “What do you mean? You told me last time that it wasn’t transmitting.”

  “It seems the signal is new, sir,” Sigmond informed me. “This implies that the ship itself is intact and partially operational, despite the devastating crash into the planet and the aftermath of—”

  “I know what happened, Siggy,” I interjected testily.

  “Apologies, sir,” he replied with what passed for contrition in an AI.

  I chewed the inside of my lip, thoughtfully. Athena was probably dead. If her systems hadn’t been damaged in the crash, the enemy had probably found and taken her by now.

  No, I couldn’t think like that. If she was gone, then who was sending the signal? What had initiated it? There had to be something else going on.

  Or was it a trap? A ploy to get us to come back through the tunnel?

  I shook my head, trying to derail the track my mind was taking. I couldn’t get my thoughts straight right now, not with everything else going on. I also couldn’t dwell on the maybes when I had plenty of better things I could spend my admittedly sometimes limited brainpower on.

  I had to focus on what I could do. What I could control. What was possible in the here and now.

  “Mr. Hughes?” asked a familiar little voice. One of my favorites, snapping me from my thoughts. She almost always brought a smile to my face, although I sometimes had to hide it when she was doing something that could have the potential to place her in danger. Sometimes, though, that was hard to anticipate, as the child was lightyears ahead of me in intelligence.

  I spun on my heel to find Lex standing behind me with her hands behind her back, swaying side to side as she waited to be acknowledged. Abigail was only a short way off, calmly walking toward us as her boots sank into the sand with every step. What had made me look like a clumsy fool made Abigail appear graceful. Maybe she didn’t have solid mud in her shoes, though.

  “Hey, kid,” I said, kneeling until I was eye to eye with her. “You holding up okay?”

  “Mm-hmm,” said the girl with a small nod, looking briefly away as she lied to me. Death wasn’t new to her, but I imagined it was still scary to think that people had gone into that slip tunnel, never to return. Lucia was someone she had seen on an almost daily basis for months. Someone who’d been kind to her, so the loss might have been different from others she had suffered previously.

  She always tried to look tough, but she was still just a kid and I usually tried to treat her as such.

  “Will you play with me, Mr. Hughes?” asked Lex.

  “Soon,” I said, ruffling her hair. “As much as I want to abandon all responsibility and goof around, duty calls.” I would rather have been playing, I wanted to tell her. But I had to be a leader, I knew, and set the standard for things getting back to normal.

  The pale girl with the blue eyes frowned, breaking my heart a little more than I expected, but she nodded in a way that said she understood. “Okay, Mr. Hughes.”

  Abigail reached us then and set a comforting hand on Lex’s shoulder. Tenderly, the woman I loved smoothed the loose blonde curls I had messed up.

  “Later, though,” I added. “I promise.” I would make time for her, I vowed to myself.

  “Okay,” said Lex, smiling once again. She knew I almost always kept my promises, unless circumstances beyond my control intervened, and I reckoned that was good enough for her to take comfort in. “I’m going to go play with my goat.”

  “You have fun with that,” I muttered as she ran off merrily. It was good to see someone being lighthearted again after the sadness of the last few days.

  Abigail chuckled as her eyes trailed after Lex, and the former nun tucked her arms tightly around herself as the wind picked up.

  The comm in my ear clicked, startling me. “Captain Hughes,” said a familiar voice. “It’s Lieutenant Rackham. I understand you’re engaged at the moment with a memorial service, but the Vice Admiral requests your immediate presence. He wants to discuss—”

  “Tell him I’m busy,” I said, attempting to pre-empt whatever he had to say.

  “I already did,” said Rackham. “He said to call you anyway. I’m so sorry to interrupt.”

  I turned the comm off and sighed heavily.

  Abigail’s gaze shifted toward me, however, and her smile changed into a knowing look. “Vick?”

  “Vick,” I confirmed. “He wants a meeting. I can’t imagine why.”

  “Your favorite person,” she added with a playful smirk.

  “My absolute favorite,” I said with a sarcastic laugh. “After Brigham, and gunshot wounds, and hunger pains, and—”

  “You’re an idiot,” said Abigail, laughing. “So are you going?”

  I made an audible groan, adding emphasis for some dramatic effect, which caused Abigail to giggle. “I guess,” I told her with a shrug as I curled my arm around her shoulder and dragged her closer.

  We started walking toward my ship, which was parked in the field near the beach with a few others. “Try to play nice,” Abigail cautioned me. “If you can manage it.”

  “No promises,” I said, and then I gave her a kiss on the top of her head.