Lucky 13 (NaNoWriMo 2017)

Chapter 7: From Stardust to...

After the mission on Saul, everyone is quiet. We had kept up hope about chatters survival, our armor is tough and he's tougher, but when we finally pry his helmet off we don't even need to check for a pulse. He's dead.

Metzger wants to turn the landing craft around and fight a one man war and Adrien ends up having to drug him to keep him calm. The mayor is curled up in a jump seat, whimpering. I walk to the cockpit, and sitt down in the copilots seat.

"How'd it go?" the pilot asks.

"Chatter's dead." That shuts him up.

We fly in complete silence on our intercept course for the Griffon's Shadow. The ship has stopped spinning, allowing us to approach it slowly and cautiously. The airlocks armored exterior slides away and the magnetic clasps engage. The airlock cycles and slides open.

Waiting for us is the the ship's doctor, Rachel. We float the body out to her, the emergency blanket we had placed over his head floats free. She gasps. "What happened?"

"Truck," Adrien tells her, not elaborating further.

"What..."

Metzger throws his helmet against the wall and starts stripping off his gear. "They're dead," he tells her before storming off.

"He's taking it a bit hard," Star Scar tells her. He unlatches his helmet's seal and places it gently on the ground.

"The killers?" Rachel asks.

"As I said, he's taking it a bit hard."

Adrien takes off her helmet and sets it next to Star Scar's. "They're dead," she elaborates. "But I'm certain Metzger still wants to nuke them."

I walk away from the conversation, making my way to C&C one story up. The ship is accelerating at the classical one G. The artificial gravity is off down here in the lower decks, and in the upper deck it's cranked up to 200% power to counter the acceleration. The ship was built for 10% G acceleration and the engineers had to get creative in the refitting to make it compatible with the hyper Ion engines.

For this reason we try to only keep the non essentials in the nose of the ship, such as crew quarters. If the artificial gravity ever goes out during an acceleration everything up there's going to quickly find that up is now down.

The captain, Andrew R. Henderson, is surveying our current trajectory. We have already gotten out of orbit and are now hurtling towards the inky blackness of deep space.

"I heard about Chatter," says the captain. "It's always difficult to lose someone, and it's only worse when they die under your command, but you have to remember, it's not your fault."

"Why?" I ask.

"Being the good guy doesn't make you immortal," he tells me. "People die, that parts of life. All we can do is keep on moving forward."

"That isn't what I meant. Why were the five of us dropped into the middle of a warzone and told to arrest an innocent?"

"We didn't know," he tells me. "Ground control thought the mayor was the center of the organization, pull him out and everything else collapses. We never thought that the civilians would be intelligent enough to stage a rebellion on their own."

My tail lashes about in anger. "So this is on there hands? Not mine?" I find myself almost shouting. "Because someone else gave the orders I'm not to blame."

He pins me with a look. "Daniel, calm down. This was never your fault. Not because it was someone else's fault, but because we didn't know everything."