Souvenirs From Dead Worlds | ✓

Chapter 23

It was two days later and way too early in the morning when the call finally came in.

Sam twisted in the grip Kias had around his waist and reached for his communicator where it was buzzing noisily on the bedside table. The polite greeting he'd intended ended up being more incoherent mumble than words as he held the device to his ear.

"Good morning, Sam," the Marshal said, a hint of amusement in his voice. "Are you awake?"

"Mmm." Sam struggled to sit up, detaching a sleepy eyed and very much naked Kias from his torso. Sam was just as lacking in clothes and still a little sticky from their fun last night, which made talking to his superior more than a little awkward. "Yeah, sorry, sir. Awake now."

"The issue at hand has been thoroughly discussed with the council," the Marshal told him. "Though there was much division on the topic, in the end it was agreed that there was little to be lost in trialling the idea with a single individual."

Sam shot Kias a grin before realising that even if he had overheard the Marshal's side of the conversation, he wouldn't have understood a word of it. Still, Kias returned it with a tentative, sleepy one of his own.

"We have approval to return and collect Seba, then?" Sam asked.

When the Marshal spoke, Sam could hear the smile in his voice. "Go get your kid."

#

The moment the shuttle slipped through the other end of the portal and into Seba's world, alarms started going off and Sam's ring began zapping his finger insistently.

"Well, shit," Sam said, and began working on shutting the alarms off. Shit indeed. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

"They're here?" Kias asked breathlessly, still coming down from the panic of going through the portal and not at all reassured by the sudden chaos. "We're too late?"

Sam silenced the last alarm and turned his attention to getting his ring to stop alerting him to things he was already well aware of. "They're here, but whether we're too late or not..." He shook his head. "I told him somewhere safe to go. He's a smart kid and I'm sure that'll work in his favour as much as it can, but mostly it's going to depend on whether he was lucky or not and how far along the attack is. Nobody survives these things, but some live longer than others."

Once everything was under control again, Sam brought up the direct transport controls. He selected the closest coordinates to the city and shot Kias an apologetic look. "Here we go."

#

Something very, very bad was happening, and Seba still had no idea what it actually was. People were dying, being killed by... well, Seba wasn't sure what they were. They were made of metal, moved as though they were alive, and shot fire. It was absurd.

At the first signs of anything strange, though, Seba had remembered Sam's words and ran to the tower near the shrines. He could hear screaming and chaos below, but he'd been up in the tower for a while and nothing had disturbed him yet. Would they go away once they were done? Once there was nobody left to slaughter?

Had Sam known this would happen? Seba was convinced he must have. His advice catered too neatly to the present situation for any other explanation to be particularly compelling. But if he had known, why had he just left Seba with nothing more than a tip for a good hiding spot? Seba had hoped Sam had cared about him a little more than that, but it seemed there was much more to Sam than he had realised.

What if Sam had had something to do with the whole thing? What if he had been the cause of it? Sam was certainly strange, and he had certainly been hiding things from Seba. What if all of this was his big secret?