Galaxy's End: Book One by LeRoy Clary (pdf ebook reader txt) 📕

our direction. The two others are still behind and have altered to follow. They are closing.”

Captain Stone said, “This is just an underpowered tramp ship. We can’t outrun them.”

“No. We will be in missile range in half a day if they choose to use them or threaten us.”

It was deadly quiet. Kat found she couldn’t breathe. Her heart pounded and her mind complained about how unfair it was that she finally had gotten into space, only to be chased by legendary pirates.

Stone spoke again. “Feel up to a little bluff?”

“A hundred percent chance we are captured if we do nothing, maybe ninety-five percent the other. Let’s try your bluff.”

“Ninety-five my butt. Where’d you come up with that? I think it’s more like eighty,” Captain Stone snarled with a hint of humor. She was a captain and used to making hard choices.

Fang snorted what may have been a laugh. I sprinkled more water on his head and neck. He shivered in delight. “Any chance at all is better than none.”

Captain Stone’s voice turned more formal. “There are armed private ships this size. Nobody knows which are and which are not.”

Fang said, “Agreed. But I do not understand your intent.”

“Rotate the ship and aim directly at a location between the two ships. Accelerate us at the maximum, which will slow us relative to them, so their approach will come quicker. Avoid any contact, verbal, visual, or other. Hold your course steady.”

“That’s it?” Fang skeptically asked. “That’s your plan?”

“Not all of it,” she said. “Kat, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever heard of the limit of distance your power will work?”

Kat’s eyes flashed to the screen and she tried to calculate the distance to the nearest ship. In the past, every time she’d nudged the mind of someone, they were close enough for her to see their responses. It might work further away. But from one spaceship to another?

“Have you?” Stone demanded.

“No.”

“Me neither,” she said. “I want you to sit down and concentrate.”

“On what?” Kat shouted, looking at the only other chair which had the dead captain in it. “What do you want me to concentrate on?”

“Fear. Nothing complicated. The distance may be increased if the message is simple and there are few minds near you. On Roma, there were thousands, maybe millions. Out here, there are few. If you can do it, increase the intensity to terror, and as you do, think of missiles being fired from this ship. Can you do that?”

“I can do it. I have no idea if it will work or not.”

“Kat, I don’t either, but try. That’s all I ask.”

Kat put the damp rag on the seat beside Fang so he could reach it and went to the other chair. The dead captain looked human, with skin whiter than most, or maybe that was because he was dead. Kat pulled him from the front of the chair. He bent forward and slid out, landing on the floor with a dull thud. She pulled on his feet and slid him to the same corner of the room where the water came from, the only empty floor space on the bridge.

She used more water to wash down his chair, she wanted to reach for Fang’s wet cloth to thoroughly wash before sitting down but held off. Her remaining sleeve was sacrificed to dry the chair. She braced herself. Her eyes closed.

Fang reached out with a flipper and dimmed the lights. That seemed to help.

Kat concentrated as Stone said, thinking of the other ships, and tried to send the image of her ship firing weapons. Attacking. Doing so with a fury. That was complicated, so she switched back to fear and anger.

Finding it hard to concentrate on that, she thought back to when she had stumbled into a pit of Schisms, which are a mobile colony of insects capable of stripping the flesh off a native Bandolier before it can leap free.

She had been terrified.

The Schism hoard awoke and erupted.

Bill was maybe ten at the time and screamed in terror as the first of them attacked. He was on the lip of the nest, unable to help.

Kat had been so scared her empathic mind took control and the vicious beasties hesitated at her mental emanations, then rushed back into their crevasses, giving the pair of human creatures time to escape. The instant the ground had given away and she fell had been scary enough, but when she’d seen them emerge from all around, mandibles snapping audibly, expecting an easy meal, her mind had taken itself to new heights of fear.

She fed on that memory.

Her mind remembered landing in the bottom of the pit and the tiny clicking of their thousands of mandibles and claws. That sound had haunted her for years. On bad nights, she still awoke covered in sweat and screaming in terror. Only Bill knew why. He was always there to comfort her.

Not now.

She recalled and enhanced the memory, adding bits and pieces until she trembled and sweat poured off her.

In the background, she heard Fang say, “Our forward momentum has ceased. We will accelerate in their direction beginning now. I am adjusting our course to aim at the nearest ship. We are on an attack approach.”

His voice sounded calm and under control. Kat took herself back to the gritty dirt at the bottom of the pit, which had been the bony remains of victims of the small savages. She felt the sweat on her forehead and wanted Fang to return the favor of wiping her down with cool water.

No, she didn’t want that. She needed the terror and fed it to her mind, suggesting to the minds on the other ships that it would be better for them to shear away than meet us head-on and be destroyed.

Only