Sithe by Starla Night

Author:Starla Night [Night, Starla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wendy Lynn Clark Publishing

Fifteen

Catarine

Atana looks down on my prone form with a cruel gleam. “Hey, little human.” He squats down to my level. “Remember me?”

I hold my breath.

“Oh, you do remember. Your blade insulted me in front of my crew. It’s bad enough that he doesn’t respect my territory but then he tries to get the captain to order me?”

Atana flips his wrist up. His blade extends.

The tip is on a diagonal, with the high side by his thumb and the low side by his pinky. The high side is thicker but still sharp; it tapers to the low side, which gleams with a woodgrain pattern.

“He might as well cut out a piece of my chest. So I’m going to cut out a piece of him. But he’s not here. You are. And the way he’s acting, hurting you is a good place to start.” Atana waves the blade in front of my face. “Want to run?”

Crates line the engineering office’s walls, forming a fortress, a maze.

If I run into the maze, he’ll chase me.

And it’s his maze.

So I won’t win.

Stare death in the face. You’ll gain their respect.

I’ve been terrified so long, I almost feel numb. My mind isn’t quick. It’s like the beginning of the fog rolling in again. My own stupidity will get me killed.

Don’t cry.

But if I cannot cry, cannot run, and cannot see a way out of this trap, what can I do?

My silent terror seems to feed him.

He laughs, a great gusty sound from his belly as he stands and turns back to his panel.

Everything trembles. My neck aches from strain.

Oh.

I reach up and press Sithe’s button.

Ding.

Atana glances up at a notification on the wall overhead, then smirks. “So, Sithe gave you the tracker from his skinsuit? Creative, and in the cargo bay it would work. But we have to test emergency equipment in this office, the kind that would cause a panic if it went off, and nothing penetrates these walls.”

If he’s lying, Sithe will come and get me, and if he’s telling the truth, I’m at the same place I was before.

I rest my forehead on the hard floor.

This is how the rest of the empire sees Humana. Easily bruised, easily defeated, a means to an end for someone else. No one sees us as our own people. That’s why Captain Zeerah made us get into the escape pods. How could we argue to the pirates that we were living, breathing, hoping, feeling creatures who deserved to live? They’d already cracked our hull. There was no way.

It’s not only a problem for us in space, but also on Humana. There will always be vulnerable people in the wrong place, crossing the wrong aggressor. No matter who you are, there’s someone who wishes you harm or doesn’t care. Old science fiction stories suggested that when something larger like deadly aliens attacked, fighting back would unite us against a common enemy and toward a common survival goal, but reality has shown the lie. We ought to unite against the Arrisans.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.