A Way of Honor (Champions of the Crystal Book 2)

Chapter 13.2

They made planetfall at Allyria several agonizing hours later, ship's time, to discover that they had missed Mara by only moments. Rayland sent a coded transmission to Praxatillus Control while Tirqwin met with the Serene Thinker to see if there had been any unusual traffic in the system lately.

"No one on Allyria knows anything," he said when he returned. "Mara appeared briefly; she was seen by some students meditating in a field. Then she left again, without contacting anyone."

"Can't you sense her?" Scotty asked.

"She has blocked her end of the link," Tirqwin scowled.

"Man, I wish she'd taken me with her!" Scotty burst out in frustration.

"I wish she had too!" Tirqwin retorted. "We had better all get to work scanning the charts for likely repair stations while Khediva begins her search pattern."

"Where's Shahina?" Scotty asked. "I thought they were going to try to beat us here."

"Perhaps they did, and went on ahead," Leran suggested. "Could we try looking for Wayship Shahina?"

"I will add that to my search parameters," Khediva said.

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"What was this place, do you think?" Sabrina whispered, glancing around the echoing darkness with the tiny lamp she had taken from the ship's airlock.

"Does it matter? We should get as far from the ship as possible before Malvarak discovers us gone," Usharn replied, glancing back at the airlock.

"All right. Come on." Sabrina led the way into the frozen, still darkness. She had a sense of their surroundings being very old and long abandoned, yet the life support was still working, to a degree. There was thin air, and minimum heating against the vacuum outside. It wouldn't be a place to stay for any extended period, but maybe they could hide from Malvarak long enough for help to arrive.

If help arrived. Sabrina's head ached again as she remembered her inability to decipher the ship's controls even enough to send a distress signal. Or perhaps Malvarak had just locked her out of the controls somehow, in case she got to the control deck. She and Usharn had abandoned the attempt when it began to take too long and instead went in search of a hiding place. They had luckily spotted the airlock cycling and managed to hide until Malvarak was through, then had ducked into the airlock themselves when he was out of sight. He would be after them in a minute.

"If this place has some kind of control center, maybe we can send a distress call from there," Sabrina said.

"If it still operates," Usharn said. There wasn't much aboard the abandoned space station that looked as if it still worked. "And if we can find it."

"Maybe there's a directory around somewhere," Sabrina said. "If this place was a transit center or way station or something, they'd make it easy to navigate."

"It might have been a war base, or a smugglers' hideout, or any number of things that would not be made easy to navigate," Usharn pointed out.

Sabrina sighed. "You're such a comfort, Usharn."

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Mara stifled a weary yawn, tucking a strand of her hair, long escaped from its elaborate coiffure, behind her ear. She had lost track of the time she'd been here, deep in the private, soundproofed rooms in the Lthosyenne Central Data Archives. After her failure to sense anything at Allyria, she had blipped briefly to various other worlds she knew of in the sector, but she quickly realized that her random search was unlikely to be successful. So she went to the most comprehensive records of star charts in the Realm, on Lthos, the homeworld of a race as old as the Wayfarers and a staunch ally of the Miahns.