GALAXY AT WAR: Three Space Opera Adventures for the Price of One! by Drew Avera

Author:Drew Avera
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Published: 2017-10-16T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26: Brendle

Sometimes avoiding death relatively unscathed brought out the best in people. Other times it brought out the worst. For Brendle, he hoped his actions on the bridge of the Replicade were heroic enough to mask the severity and harshness of his words, though he had a feeling his words weren’t as loud as drawing his weapon on Malikea had been. The fact the other man had attacked him wasn’t as audacious as the fact Brendle was seconds from firing. He didn’t want to kill anyone. In fact, he hoped more than anything that his days of killing were behind him, but in the throes of trying to escape the snares of the Telran, he had been caught up in the moment, flinching from fear and needing to do something with the nervous energy. That moment of terror almost made him pull the trigger and it had nothing to do with the fact he had been attacked first. Everyone seemed to understand, but he still wasn’t ready to forgive himself. For Brendle, it didn’t matter that very few people could handle situations at that tempo, to know how the enemy would respond and be one step ahead of them. If not for Brendle’s effort, everyone on board would be dead, him included. But he took no solace in that fact. He was more afraid than ever because being so close to death showed him something he hadn’t known about himself. That something wasn’t tangible, but it felt real enough, at least to his heart. He could only hope to express what he felt in words that had meaning to Anki. She was from another world, and he could see in her eyes how much his presence scared her. Not for what he had done, but what his people had done to her world. The utter destruction of yet another world, another race, and his was the face that reminded her of that very fact.

The cargo bay was the only place of relative privacy. For Brendle, he felt as if his entire world had dissolved while bringing the truth into focus at the same time. It was an awkward feeling, one he couldn’t put into words, though he wanted to try. For Anki, he knew there was nothing left to go back to. Her world was destroyed, her people gone save for a few refugees scouring their way across the galaxy and hiding from the tyrannical Greshian Empire. The fact she sat next to one of their kind and didn’t slit his throat said just as much about his presence as it did her. Though he couldn’t help but wonder if her not killing him just for spite was a display of weakness in its own way. She owed him her life, but Brendle knew he owed her the same. If not for him, then she would not have crash landed on that lonesome moon, but she would have also been in the line of fire of the Telran, her

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