jeriendhal | Returned to Life, Part Seventeen

“It did, didn’t it?” Rachael cried out. “You were the ones that killed those poor little Ferin!

“What are you babbling about, girl?” Nightwind asked.

“How could you shoot up those poor little babies?!”

.”What the fragg are you going on about?” the cyber-Vulpine demanded.

“Sergeant, I think you’d better tell us what you and your men were doing, and how you ended up here,” Lance said, looking grim. “Consider it an order.”

“Sir, you are not in my chain of command,” Nightwind said. “Hell, you aren’t even in uniform. I shouldn’t be telling you anything.”

“You weren’t exactly flying GSA colors when hit that freighter either, Sergeant,” Lance said. “We saw the whole thing on the ship’s flight recorder memory. Oh, and congratulations on a sloppy disengagement if that was supposed to be a covert op. Leaving a record of your attack behind was just stupid.”

Nightwind hmphed again. “Can’t blame me for that one, sir. The Major panicked after half our squad got wasted by those lizards. He told us to just grab the remaining pods with those monkeys in them and get back to our ship.”

Leeza looked from her work. “Did you know you were hitting a Galapados vessel?”

“Is that what they’re called? Lady, I didn’t know anything. The Major said we were quote, ‘Intercepting a craft transporting dangerous biological material,’ end quote. No info on who we were up against, how big the target was, what exactly we were supposed to be retrieving... nothing. Like I said, it was the most FUBAR’ed op I’d ever been on. We slammed straight into those lizards and afterward the only thing we found were those monkeys in the incubation pods.”

“Stop calling them monkeys!” Rachael demanded. “They’re Ferin. They’re living, thinking beings!”

“What are you talking about? All I saw were a bunch of animals in jars.”

“They weren’t animals, Sergeant,” Leeza told him. ‘The Ferin are sentients, just like those Galapados you ran into.”

“Back up! How can you be so sure of that?”

“Because I’m the legal guardian of Terinu, the only mature Ferin that’s ever been found. They’re a slave race genegineered by the Varn, a thousand or more years before the Rebellion. They were supposed to be extinct, but then Terinu appeared out of nowhere, and now it looks like the Gene Mage is making more of them.”

Nightwind’s working hand closed into a fist. “We shot up at least three of those incubation pods during the fight with those lizards...”

“Four actually,” Lance said.

“Fragg! Are you telling me I help kill four helpless, unarmed cubs?”

“I’m sorry, Sergeant but yes, you did.”

“FRAGG!” Leeza must have finished rewiring the cyber-Vulpine’s power unit, for his mechanical arm suddenly spasmed upward, and then he slammed his fist down on the deck, leaving a dent in the metal. “That damned...” Rachael’s translator earbug suddenly squealed in protest and refused to translate the Sergeant’s tirade. “...chickensh*t, Blake. I’m going wring his pinkskined neck!”

“You’ll have to take a number,” Leeza told him. “Trust me, not telling people everything they need to hear is what he’s best at.”

“Fragg!” Nightwind repeated, standing up to pace the room, his legs whirring. “Damn.”

“Sergeant, I’m sorry,” Rachael said, “sorry for blowing up at you.”

The cyber-Vulpine stopped to look her over, his eye narrowing as he examined her. “Not your fault, girl. How did you three end up in this mess anyway?”

“I managed to outmaneuver my father after Terinu was arrested and sold to Bio-Tech and got him free,” Leeza explained. “Since then the Admiral has been trying ever trick in thje book, legal and extra-legal, to get him back. So our friend Rufus borrowed his family’s yacht, and we’ve been cruising the edges of the GSA, trying to find some clues to Terinu’s origins.”

“Back up again. Did you say something about the Varn earlier?”

Leeza quickly brought him up to speed on the return of the Varn to the galactic scene, and the Gene Mage’s hunt for Terinu. “...so you see, there may be more Ferin out there.”

“There must be, since we found those cubs on the freighter,” Nightwind said.

“Yes, but there’s something wrong with the ones you found,” Rachael added. “They were all malformed. For what little it’s worth, Sergeant, I don’t think they were really alive, anymore than a... brain dead victim on life support.”

Nightwind looked thoughtful, glancing down at his cybernetic frame. “You’d be surprised, how alive you can be..”

TBC