Spineward Sectors 6: Admiral's Spine by Luke Sky Wachter

Author:Luke Sky Wachter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Pacific Crest Publishing
Published: 2014-08-03T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25: The Lost, the Forgotten, and the Lame

Akantha was spending her last few hours in the Tracto Star system on Tracto. More specifically, she was in Argos and out among the people of her birth-polis. She didn’t know when she would have the chance to come visit the mother-polis again, now that her religious duties at the conclave were over and her Protector had set a firm date for the start of the next campaign.

That was why she had spontaneously decided to take a trip down to the surface. Because she knew it could be years before her next visit to the home of her girlhood and she wanted one last chance to see her people…well, her former people. Messene was now her proper home but with all the time she had spent away, when she had felt the need to make a big decision in her life she had come home to make it.

Like all daughters eventually do, she had grown up. And while Argos would always have a special place inside her, Messene was now her home when she wasn’t sailing through the river of stars on a starship. But while Messene was now home, her mother was in Argos and Akantha felt the need to speak with her for advice.

But she had taken a few hours to escape the palace while the opportunity was available. Stepping around a cart with a broken wheel taking up part of the road, she approached a food vendor. The victuals onboard the flying citadels were filling, but there was nothing quite like real food the likes of which she had grown up eating. When a grimy figure in worn and filthy clothing detached itself from a wall and stepped toward her, she became immediately wary.

Akantha drew herself up as the person—a man, as far as she could gauge from his height and general size—drew to a stop in front of her.

He was quite obviously missing his right arm, and his left arm was held close to his body as though it was crippled, and he came to a stop in front of her. He walked a touch stiffly, and she could see that the right side of his face was scarred, as if by fire or acid. Between his attire and his appearance, he looked disreputable in the extreme.

Akantha’s whole body tensed, preparing for whatever might come next.

“Greetings, First Daughter,” came a once-familiar voice that almost blew her away.

“Persus?” she whispered in absolute shock.

“I apologize for my appearance,” he said wryly, and then haltingly gestured down to the rest of his body with a slow movement of his left arm, “I would have cleaned up into something better, but the simple truth is that I no longer possess such.”

Akantha was thunderstruck. The crippled, almost beggar-like person before her was her old bodyguard, Persus; a man who had all but raised her. He had dutifully guarded the heir to Argos throughout her youth, and he had followed her into the disastrous campaign against the Sky Demons which had ended with him crippled, and her captured by the Demons.

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