Keryn stood up from the pilot’s chair and stretched as best she could in the low-ceilinged cockpit of the Cair Ilmun. Everything ached in her body and she knew that the one-piece flight suit she was wearing was far from clean. Reaching up in mid stretch, Keryn brushed some of her oily silver hair out of her face. Sighing in defeat, she pulled an elastic band free from one of the front pockets of her coveralls and used it to hold her thin hair back into a ponytail. During the month since their departure from the Revolution, she had worn her hair pulled back so many times that it was starting to form a natural crease from the tight elastic band. At this point in their trip, she would have gladly killed someone for a comfortable bed and a long, hot shower.
Setting the autopilot, Keryn turned away from the controls and opened the door that led into the modified crew quarters of the Cair transport ship. The normal interior for a Cair ship had been a long, open bay lined with trooper seats on either side, while still leaving plenty of space for excess equipment in the middle of the compartment. The Cair Ilmun, thanks to the foresight of the High Council, had been modified to appear almost like a civilian transport.
Stepping through the doorway, she entered a wide room filled with plush couches and reclining chairs. A series of tables were strewn about, most covered with consoles that would allow the team to play an assortment of games to pass the time. Even now, Keeling and Rombard were engaged in an intense game of Jach’tar. Similar to the three dimensional simulations that Keryn had gone through at the Fleet Academy, Jach’tar was an Avalon strategy game that pitted two opposing fleets against one another. The victor was decided by a series of rules determined at the beginning of play, many of which Keryn quickly forgot. After repeated losses at the game, she had forgone any further challenges from the team.
The Uligart and Oterian looked relaxed while they played, but Keryn could see the strain behind their eyes. She had seen the same strain on all of them. For a month, they had been traveling at faster than light speed. Though the Cair Ilmun had been retrofitted with inhibitors much like those found on a Cruiser, the inhibitors were still unable to compensate for all the excessive gravities that were created from such high speed travel. The crew was being exposed to nearly one and a half gravities, but it was punishment on bodies not used to the increased pressure on their systems. Only Penchant seemed unaffected, though Keryn wasn’t sure how much of that was due to his physiology and how much was just because she had no idea on how to read his different moods. She had never realized how much she relied on facial expressions to betray attitudes until she befriended someone without a face.
On top of the increased gravity, the Cair Ilmun just didn’t offer enough alternative escapes from one another. Though they all considered one another as friends, it was still difficult to be in such close confines with each other for such extended periods of time. Keryn found her escape in the cockpit, though even that was unnecessary. They were traveling between star systems, covering such an expansive area of open space that she could have left the pilot’s controls unattended for over a week and still not feared running into something. Still, it was time away from people, and she was coming to cherish her quiet time more and more.
As Keryn walked past the common room and entered the narrow hallway, a pair of doors split off to either side. To her right, Keryn looked into the medical bay. Sterilized instruments and state of the art treatment supplies lined the mirrored metallic shelves around the room. The room’s soft light left Keryn feeling relaxed as, she was sure, was the desired effect of the quiet room. The single bed in the center, however, was not unoccupied. Smiling gently to herself, Keryn stepped out of the doorway and let the door slide silently shut behind her. Of all of the crew, there were only two teammates who she swore would never tire of one another’s company. McLaughlin and Cerise, the Pilgrim and Avalon husband and wife, had grown withdrawn during the trip, choosing to spend the majority of their time searching out the private corners of the ship; at least searching out the minimal privacy that could exist with five other teammates on board.
Turning toward the left door which would lead to the crew quarters, Keryn smiled to herself. She had never been opposed to interspecies mating, but the sight of it had never been common place on her home world. Now, being exposed to it in such great quantities, she couldn’t help but try to suppress a childish glee at accidentally interrupting them time and time again.
The door opened to the crew quarters, exposing the brightly lit room. A series of bunk beds were stacked along the walls, with a number of wall lockers strewn intermittently between them. Most of the beds were unmade, a reflection on the relaxed attitude her team had toward their former military expectations. Within the Infantry or Fleet, beds were always made before first formation, often with folded creases along the edges so sharp that they appeared ironed in place. Keryn, however, treated her team differently. After dismissing their ranks in lieu of first names and the approval of civilian clothes, she also allowed everyone a level of home front comfort. Even on their lengthy, draining mission, it had helped to bolster the morale of her team.
Sitting on their individual bunks, Penchant and Adam had dismantled their rifles in order to clean the smaller internal components. Across Adam’s bed, dozens of small mechanisms were spread, each lying in a meticulously ordered series. Keryn had no doubt that, should he be required, Adam would be able to reassemble his weapon blindfolded. Adam noticed her at the doorway as he paused, rag in hand.
“Are we close?” Adam asked with a hopeful smile.
Keryn nodded. “A few more hours and we’ll be in the system. Thirty minutes after that we’ll be burning through Pteraxis’ atmosphere.”
Without looking down, Adam’s hands began picking up and reconnecting the pieces of his rifle. “Not that I haven’t enjoyed your company, but I’m ready to get off this ship.”
“You don’t have to convince me of that,” Keryn said with a laugh. Though there was a palpable nervousness in the air, she was amazed at their ability to seem so relaxed. None of the team seemed concerned that they were so close to their objective, which set Keryn’s mind quite a bit at ease.
Adam locked the last two parts of his rifle into place and pulled the bolt to the rear. He let it slide forward with a click before setting the completed weapon down on his bed. “I could use a break, if you have some time.”
“I could give you another flying lesson,” Keryn offered.
“Please do,” Penchant muttered from his bunk. “Adam has been complaining incessantly for the past few hours.”
Adam turned slowly and stared at the Lithid. “You know, I can never really tell when you’re joking.”
Penchant shrugged. “Neither can I.”
“Come on,” Keryn said, laughing again. “The cockpit awaits.”
Adam stood and walked toward the doorway. “Somehow, you make that sound dirty.”
For his humor, Keryn caught Adam in a surprisingly quick punch to his stomach. He coughed and doubled over, but continued following her into the hallway. Rombard and Keeling barely acknowledged the pair as they walked past and entered the cramped cockpit. Stepping to the side, Keryn let Adam slide past her and take his place in the pilot’s seat. Comparatively, Adam seemed greatly out of his element as the pilot. His muscular shoulders spilled over the sides of the chair and his thick fingers seemed nearly too large for the delicate controls. Still, his hands worked both quickly and efficiently as he ran through a series of checks. Adam had been learning quickly during their trip, spending an hour or more every day in the cockpit learning to fly. Though Keryn wasn’t eager to lose Adam as an infantryman, she couldn’t deny that Adam would make a good pilot if he was ever required. When he was satisfied that everything was working, Adam reached over to deactivate the autopilot.
“Are you going to let me fire a few rounds today?” he asked as he took manual control of the Cair Ilmun.
“I haven’t yet,” she replied. “Why ruin a good thing now.”
Though the normal Cair transport carried heavy machine guns and a minimal compliment of plasma rockets, the weapon system on the Cair Ilmun had been upgraded during the modifications to the ship’s interior. An upgraded targeting array had been programmed into the computer system and a Duun class compliment of plasma rockets had been attached under the wing. Their ammunition stores had also been greatly increased, turning the simple transport ship into a small warship. Though Keryn was sure that they wouldn’t be required to fire any of the shipboard weapons during their capture of Cardax, she wasn’t eager to let Adam begin wasting their offensive weapons on a curious whim.
“So where to?” Adam asked, obviously dejected over her rejection.
Keryn leaned forward, her lips hovering only a few inches away from his ear. She pointed out the front of the cockpit window toward a bright red star which glowed brighter than those around it. “That’s Pteraxis’ star. Just keep us on that heading. If you want, you can stay in the pilot’s seat all the way until we reach the system’s borders.”
“What else can we expect in the system? How many planets? Is there an asteroid belt?”
Keryn smiled at her eternal warrior. Reaching out, she pushed a series of buttons on the console. The screen in front of Adam shifted to show a representation of the star system ahead. The red sun glowed in the center of the picture, hanging bloated and swollen. Around it, only two planets rotated in their slightly erratic orbit.
“The system looks sickly,” Adam remarked. “I’m surprised it’s only got two planets.”
“You really don’t read the mission briefs, do you?” Keryn asked, surprised. She slid over and sat down in the co-pilot’s chair. “The sun is dying. Even swollen, it’s not putting off much more heat than the sun of Arcendor. The problem is that as the sun began to swell, it swallowed the closer planets. Apparently Pteraxis used to be a rather lush planet. But as it became the closest planet to the sun through attrition, the temperature on the planet heated up leaving a desert world. Give it a few more centuries and the planet won’t be inhabitable, if it’s even still there at all.”
“Oh boy,” Adam said flatly. “You really know how to sell a vacation spot, don’t you?”
“This isn’t a vacation for you?” Keryn teased. “You seem like the type that always carries a rifle when he goes on a trip.”
“Funny you should say that,” Adam replied, laughing at distant memories. “I usually do carry a weapon, but it always ends bad for me. I remember this one time Yen and I took a trip to Dunbar to meet an informant…”
Adam let the sentence die as he saw Keryn’s expression drop at the mention of Yen’s name.
“I’m sorry, Keryn. I didn’t mean…”
“Don’t worry about it,” Keryn interrupted.
Adam looked out the window, ensuring they were still on course. “Do you still miss him?”
Keryn shrugged. “A little bit. I haven’t really thought a lot about him recently.”
“That’s a little surprising. You two were damn near inseparable when we were on Farimas. They way you two were heading, I wouldn’t have felt off base if I had put money on the two of you having a surprise wedding just before we stepped through the airlock.”
“A wedding?” Keryn asked, surprised. “Me?”
“You two seemed pretty happy together,” Adam explained.
“We were,” Keryn said softly, her eyes slipping out of focus. Less than a second later, she shook her head and went back to running a diagnostic on the Cair Ilmun’s engine. “I wouldn’t have done something that rash, though. If we had more time together, things might have been different. If we weren’t at war… well, who knows what would have happened. As it was, though, we were moving in two different directions with our lives. The military isn’t conducive to long-term relationships.”
Adam spun his chair so he was facing Keryn from across the center console. “So it’s over, just like that? That seems a little harsh, don’t you think?”
“It’s not harsh, it’s realistic,” she replied, turning to face him. “Do you know how long it’s going to take for us to get back to the Revolution? Do you know if the Revolution is even going to make it through the Earth invasion? Do you know if we are going to make it through our own mission?” When Adam shook his head, Keryn continued. “That’s exactly my point. The future is too uncertain to lock myself into only one plan for my future. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future… or who I’m going to meet.”
She left her comment hanging as she turned around and began working on the console again. Adam, to her relief, didn’t reply, but instead continued piloting the Cair Ilmun toward Pteraxis.
After the silence had stretched for a while, Keryn politely cleared her throat and spoke. “So what happened on Dunbar?”
“Excuse me?” Adam said, snapping out of his own daydream.
“What happened after you two found your informant on Dunbar?”
Adam laughed heartily into the cramped cabin. “Well, our informant’s name was Darran. You can imagine my surprise when Darran wound up being a woman. That took both Yen and me by surprise. To make matters worse, she wasn’t just any woman. She was a surgically augmented Uligart woman. And I don’t think I need to tell you which parts of her had been surgically augmented.” Adam sighed, but smiled mischievously. “She had a phenomenal set of…”
“How about we skip that part,” Keryn urged.
For hours, the pair sat in the cockpit, telling stories and laughing at one another’s growing list of misfortunes. By the time the warning light began blinking, warning the pair that they had entered into the star system, Keryn felt incredibly relaxed, regardless of the pending threat on Pteraxis. Adam stood and moved out of the way, letting Keryn slip into the pilot’s chair. Compared to Adam, she was dwarfed by the high-backed chair. Keryn angled the Cair Ilmun toward the closest planet to the sun, a dirty brown planet accentuated with only a few meager splotches of blue water.
“We’ll be hitting the atmosphere in less than ten minutes,” Keryn said, her mirth replaced by driven focus. “Go let the others know to get everything ready and get strapped in.”
Keryn didn’t look behind her as Adam left, letting the door slide closed behind him. A few minutes later, she slammed into the atmosphere of Pteraxis. Dipping the nose of the Cair Ilmun and raising the darkening heat shields around the windows of the cockpit, Keryn flew using only the console’s display as they passed quickly through the upper atmosphere and into the hot air of the desert planet. Within moments, the violent shaking of the ship subsided and she lessened the angle of their decent, directing the ship toward the coordinates they had been given for the Terran rendezvous with Cardax. Lowering the heat shields, the red sunlight flooded into the cockpit. Keryn squinted, surprised at how intense the sunlight appeared from the ship. Checking the gauges, she quickly noted that the external temperature was nearly one hundred and thirty degrees. Frowning, Keryn accelerated, eager to reach the coordinates.
Keryn’s flight through the atmosphere was indicative of her attitude toward this entire mission. She intended to make a quick entrance, take Cardax into custody whether willingly or by force, and leave Pteraxis as quickly as possible. If all went well, they’d be off the desert planet and on their way home within the hour.