Opening Gambit by MJ Blehart

Author:MJ Blehart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sci-fi, science fiction, alien invasion, space opera, adventure, sci-fantasy
Publisher: Argent Hedgehog Press
Published: 2024-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

This was not what he had in mind when he wanted to leave home.

How long had he been here? How many days had passed? Where exactly was here, anyhow?

Alvon Gargarm had been all set to change his life. He was taking control, he was making an enormous change that would lead to an impressive future with Vector Corp. He was resolved to do things he had only dreamed of before.

Then the raiders knocked their ship out of hyperspace and captured them.

At first, Alvon and the other passengers from the Vector Corp. transport had been kept together. But when one of his fellow associates had tried to escape and was bloodily cut down with an energized sword, their captors had decided to separate and seclude them.

Alvon had had no contact since that time. Twice a day, a tasteless ration bar of some sort was tossed into his cell, as well as a bottle of water.

The dimly lit cell featured a cot, a hole that smelled exactly how one would expect a latrine to smell, and nothing more. The cot had no mattress; it was a hard plastic surface.

Alvon had no timepiece, no change of light to tell him day or night, and no schedule to know time. His meals were always distributed between eight and twelve hours apart, but never precisely at the same time.

Alvon slept fitfully. His sleep was full of nightmares. He was a long way from home, he was lost, and he was constantly terrified. He’d seen his captors kill mercilessly twice, and he had no doubt they’d eliminate him at the slightest provocation as well.

He waited. Having no idea what was coming, Alvon simply waited. Unfortunately, waiting did nothing to calm him. Alvon hoped that maybe his captors intended to ransom him. Of course, he had no idea if Vector Corp. would even consider paying for him.

Time passed. That’s what it did. Alvon Gargarm eventually fell into a pattern of spending the time between two meals awake, then sleeping sometime after the second. In this way, he began to count days, and he had just reached the eighth. He could not calculate how many prior there had been, but he guessed it was maybe another four or so.

Alvon spent much of his awake time on memories. He spent some times after his first meal thinking about home, his family, his friends, and ghis life. He would focus on at least one memory that was incomplete or partially lost and try to reconstruct it.

When he tired of this, Alvon would focus on his plans. Uprooting the family from Tertopolis to Jadorn - from the known life on Tetran Centauri to the new life on Cordian Terrera. The new and larger home they could buy on Alvon’s much more impressive salary. Because the kids were older, he was going to buy his wife the sporty aerocar she’d wanted since her teens. Alvon had intended to learn all he could, so that he would continue his rise up the Vector Corp ladder.

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