Star Wolves - The Tribes of Yggdrasil: Book 1

Chapter 23

Planet: Orbiting Turi Naari / Star: Earendil

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One-hundred and thirty light-years from New Midgard, at the star Earendil, which Humans would later designate Svartalfheim Trading Post-2, a 100 tonne scout ship dropped out of hyperspace. The ship flew to a large orbital station around the planet Turi Naari and proceeded to dock.

A dark haired woman passed through the station's airlock and down one of the many corridors where she arrived at a vast room with a high ceiling and walls, each wall lined with tanks. Each tank was filled with a yellow translucent liquid and contained a specimen-Alfar specimens.

She passed through the warehouse and walked briskly down another corridor leading to a large wooden double door. She opened one side of the door with a tug. Too damn heavy, she thought.

On the left side of the room was a small desk, behind which Cate Fisel was sitting, and behind a mammoth desk at the far end of the room sat Ben Gridrmann.

"Jasmine, darling! So good to see you!" he said, and stood to greet her.

Jasmine Gridrmann, also known as Nila Johar, strode up to him briskly and slapped him hard across the face; so hard he shook his head and put his hand on a very, red mark welling up on his left cheek.

"What the hell, Jasmine?"

"You filthy bastard! There was no mention of bombing New Midgard! How could you allow that to happen!"

"Jasmine, please, I had no idea it would go that far," her father pleaded.

She just shook her head at him, filled with disgust and rage in equal measures..

"It seems when Governor Zelinski set off the stellarcom self-destruct, the Hrymar considered that some kind of offensive action, and so they bombed the city in retaliation. I'm sorry, darling, I didn't want that to happen."

Jasmine slumped down in the chair in front of Gridrmann's desk. Her head hanging low.

"Darling, it's over now. No more cloak and dagger, no more pretending to be this Nila Johar person. You're home now."

She looked up at him and scowled. "Home? Home? This is a bloody space station orbiting some alien planet! I can never go home, thanks to you."

"Jasmine, home is where your family is, and since your mother died, I am your family, so this can be our home now," Gridrmann said.

"Father, I can never go back to Earth. I can never see India again, or visit my cousins in America. That is not much of a life. I'm consigned to live on alien stations and planets, and for what? So maybe, just maybe, you can live a few years longer? That is too high a price." There were tears in her eyes as she looked at her father.

"Come with me," Gridrmann said.

He tenderly plucked his daughter's hand off the chair and pulled her up, then led her down the hall, back toward the warehouse.

He stopped her in front of one of the tanks, a blue light glowing from the top, suffusing the yellow liquid with subtle green rays, like sunshine viewed from underwater.

"This is our future Jasmine," Gridrmann said, looking in to the slumbering face of an Alfar woman, naked except for the wires and cables attached to her body in the tank.

Planet: Earth

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One-hundred and thirty kilometers west of Dublin, on a picturesque peninsula called Yew Point, Hal was burying his family, if not physically, then emotionally at least.