Chapter 2

"Pirates?" Karath questioned.

"Yeah," Manne replied. "Get ready."

"Ready? Ready how?"

Manne was already in the pilot seat, starting the ship up.

"Ready how?" she repeated.

He spoke quickly, clearly. "Suit up, get to the gun crate and grab our energy pistols."

"Ok, suit up, get the pistols," she repeated, "suit up, get the pistols." She started to breathe heavily; her hands began to shake. These encounters were rare, and even though they did a lot of target practice, the real thing always tugged at her fear. It always felt like time moved faster than she wanted it to, like she was constantly playing catch up. She was snapping in the last buttons of her suit when she got to the gun crate. As she came running onto the bridge, Manne yelled back at her to remind her to check the guns. "Damn," she whispered. "Okay."

"Toss one to me and holster the other," he said. "Safety on, got it?"

"Here!" she said tossing it to him; he swiftly caught and holstered it in one move. She holstered her own and stood there, staring at the ships on the tracking screen, forgetting to breathe.

"Karath! Get to the turret and strap in so we can go!" he ordered.

"Oh! G-got it." she answered. When she got to the turret muscle memory took over and she strapped in and started the gun up. Immediately, she spun and searched the space around her, ready to fire, with her attention on her computer, her eyes out in space: She manned the turret like it was second nature. "Ready!" she stated.

The salvager immediately took off through the debris, pushing shards in every direction. Manne weaved in and around among the wreckage, making it harder for the pirates to track him.

"There are 2 of them, Kay, got it?"

"Got it." Their ship sported customizations from a shady space port to use six TR5 engines and a manned turret on its underside. They could get up to around five hundred meters per second, depending on their load, but they'd been scrapping in orbit for days, and were about to call it quits and head to Vega to cash in, so they weren't outrunning anybody, especially two medium fighters, pirate-customized.

"Just keep an eye on 'em, Kay."

"Got it."

"I'm going to find a path and decouple, don't fire yet."

Fire, she thought. She'd fired at pirates, but never hit one. They both knew she never killed anybody, but Manne wasn't going to talk about it now; she needed to focus. She'd need support after her first—there was no avoiding it—and in a way, he felt sorry for her: Maturing definitely wasn't easy for humans, and there was no way it was easy for tevarin, either.

"Talk to me, Kay."

"They're having trouble getting through the debris. One of them disengaged and is following us outside of the wreckage," she reported.

"Well we're about to run out of wreckage here soon, so I need you to get ready." Her hands were shaking, fingers twitching, her breathing stayed accelerated like she was sprinting. "After I decouple," Manne warned, "aim at the one that disengaged and fire, keep firing, and remember to lead him, Kay."

"Okay," she replied.

He decoupled and spun the ship around as the missile lock warning sounded. He glanced over at one of the screens to see a heatseeker coming in fast. "You ready, Kay?" he yelled.

"Ready!" Her hands shook as she tried as hard as she could to keep the ship in her crosshair. Manne released the flare and broke just in time for the bogey missile to switch direction, and as the tailing ship approached he locked onto him with a missile and fired, shooting his gatling simultaneously. It turned to evade and exposed a symbol on its side just before its shields flashed from the missile impact, and he was knocked off course towards a cloud of space debris and collided with everything in it. Karath was locked onto the remaining pirate but was hesitating.

"Karath, fire," Manne yelled. "Squeeze the trigger!"

Karath was shivering and hyperventilating: Fear had taken her over, now. She froze as bright flashes came out from the ship. She stayed leading him, crosshair dead on him, but couldn't fire. As the blasts from the ship sprayed right across her turret, exploding against the shields, almost blinding her, she screamed and finally squeezed the trigger.

When the flash dimmed, her eyes focused on the pirate, her hands still tight over the trigger, crosshair still right on top of him. She was yelling out her fears, her adrenaline, and as the ship's shields went down the first thing to go was its engine, and it spun off course into a large, abandoned freighter and exploded.

She kept firing and screaming as Manne spoke over the comm. "Karath, stop. Let go of the trigger." She fired until the blaster overheated. Manne shut the gun off remotely and ran over to her. He unlocked the turret and as it came up through the floor, he could see that Karath was still hyperventilating, eyes wide open and staring into nothingness, hands pasted over the control stick. Manne put his hand on her head, his eyes into her line of sight and whispered her name, over and over, waiting for her eyes to focus in on him. She finally came to and slowed her breathing.

"I killed him," she said.

"You saved us," he replied. "You saved us, Kay."

He slowly pried her fingers off the controls, and led her out of the turret chair to sit down with her on the cold steel floor. He hugged her head against his chest, and before long, she began convulsing, shoulders shaking, crying into his suit and dropping tears into his ammo pockets.

"It's okay," he reassured her. "It's okay, you did well." He held her tight, and she held him harder than she ever had, and couldn't notice that he, too, had tears sliding down his cheeks. Some naive part of him hoped she'd never have to do what she just did, but he knew because he lived it, that eventually kids have to grow up.

They sat there until she calmed down, and he led her to bed. She looked around and protested.

"I don't want to go to sleep," she said. "Can I just hang out on the bridge with you?"

"Of course you can. I think it's about time we head back to Vega, don't you?"

She nodded in agreement. "Absolutely," she said. He tried to help her out of bed, but she found her legs on her own. She was strong, adapting. She knew that doing something as simple as standing up and putting one foot in front of the other kept time moving forward, kept your mind from falling back and getting stuck in the mud of the past. She wasn't the kind to back down: Maybe it was a tevarin instinct.

They got to the bridge and she sat in the co-pilot seat. Manne did some hull testing and prepped the ship for travel. They were to hop over to the Oberon-Vega jump-point and come out the other side not too far from Selene, a populated planet where they could get great prices for their findings. It was also a good place to lay low for a while after some maintenance.

When they got going, Karath's attention would drift off into the passing stars, and fear and anxiety would start to creep back and she'd focus on the ship's controls, needlessly doing scans or ship tests. She tried her best to keep busy, never noticing Manne keeping her in the corner of his own eye, partly to monitor her behavior, but mostly so that she couldn't see him falter. He was stone-faced on the outside, but on the inside he was falling apart. He'd had this darkness looming over him ever since the ship he shot down revealed the pirate mark on its side: A curved sword, pointing downward, forming a lowercase "t".

They warped to the jump-point, and as they approached it he slowed the ship down. Karath turned, confused. She finally figured out that something was wrong, that Manne was hiding something.

I guess it's time, he thought. It's time for Karath to know where she comes from, who she comes from. It was time for her journey to begin, and a piece of him hoped that she wouldn't let revenge poison her or nest inside of her only to claw its way out, slowly destroying her from her singed interior. Finally, it was time to stop keeping her in the dark.

"I'm going to tell you how I found you," he said.

Karath didn't believe it. How could this be, she thought. Even though this was what she had always wanted, she questioned herself if she was ready. She knew this was coming eventually, but even expected events had a way of sneaking up on her. Ready or not, her life was about to undergo a drastic change.

"Okay."

"Are you ready?" he asked.

She nodded.

"When the war ended, I couldn't stay in Bremen: Too many memories. So I left my home to scrap the stars. Over the next 3 years I worked in a half a dozen systems, and I met a lot of people: shady people; good people; pirates. I did all sorts of work—some I'm really not proud of—but most of my work involved scrapping around, repairing things I found, selling them at space stations, cities, anywhere I could.

"The pirates paid the most for a lot of items: They had money and were constantly building ships. I've been to Ruin Station in Pyro, The Coil in Odin, I've seen the Olympus in Nul, Tohil Belt Alpha. I worked with and for all different types, but most of the time the work, the work was great to me. I spent 3 years floating around the stars, repairing things, building things, always alone until I found you."

Karath's feathers stood on end at the statement. She was close, she was excited, scared; she had no idea what she was going to find out. She trusted Manne, she cared for him; he'd always been there for her ever since she could remember. He taught her everything she knew about anything, cared for her like a daughter. In some twisted way, she saw him as her father, but there was so much she didn't know about him. How could she possibly know who he was before she knew him? How could she trust anything he said about his past life, his past dealings and works with pirates and lowlives and scum of the galaxy? She listened, frightened, questions flooding her mind in the anticipation of his confessions.

"I met some good people too, though, Kay. The folks on Delamar, in Nyx, were strict about their people's security. Though I've seen a lot of bad in the galaxy, I know that there are good folks everywhere, if you look hard enough.

"After the war, some of your kind went back to live on Kabal III, an ancient tevarin planet abandoned after the First Tevarin War. Many of your people turned to piracy back then, and those, like your mother, who were just looking for peace, fled to Kabal to search for it.

"The tevarin were broken at that point, didn't have too much, which meant that they didn't have a whole lot to protect themselves from pirates, either. In the time I was there, I'd seen a few raids, and it was a shame, I really felt sorry for them."

Karath glanced out the bridge window at the stars and wondered at the empathy Manne seemed to feel about the different races in the galaxy. It didn't seem to matter who you were, he always found a way to feel for those who fell on tough times, even the tevarin. It's how he taught her to be too: Be smart to figure out the real story, then have a heart for those who had lost hope.

"I had heard of a raid on Kabal III, when I was out there scrappin' up some tevarin artifacts—ancient equipment left after the First War. They were slave traders, scooping up tevarin and taking advantage of the low presence of security in the system. I thought maybe I could find some things left behind among the smoke and rubble, but I couldn't have guessed that I'd end up finding survivors.

"When I got to the camp, I found your mother, huddled around a bundle of blankets, barely alive. She stirred when I approached her, and those tired, forest green eyes I saw when she looked up at me, well, she didn't need to say anything. I was changed at that moment, Kay. She unraveled the blankets to show me a small tevarin child, a 3 year old with bluish-silver feathers on her head, purple eyes, starving, looking up at me in fear. The mother told me her own name: Thela."

"Thela," Karath repeated.

"That's right, Thela was your mother."

"Was?" she replied.

"Thela had protected you, kept you out of harm's way, kept you fed and safe, for 3 years before ending up on Kabal. She told me your name, but she was in a bad way at that point: Nothing could have saved her." He looked solemnly over to her, eyebrows furrowed. "I'm sorry."

Karath was concentrating on remembering her mother's name, trying to imagine who she was, what she'd gone through to keep her safe as she was a defenseless child. She wondered about her father. "Was she able to tell you who my father was, what his name was? What happened to him?" she inquired.

"I don't know," he slowly and sorrowfully replied. "She never had a chance to mention him."

Manne paused for a while to let the silence comfort and support Karath as she tried to soak it all in, as she tried to remember the name he had given her and imagine who her parents were, now that she could fill in the blankness of her past with some color. After a while, he stared out into the stars and took a deep breath. "She did tell me something else, though, Karath."

She snapped out of her mind and looked up at him, prepared to hear more.

"Your mother said she was attacked by a band of pirates led by a tevarin, an ex-pilot who had abandoned his people towards the end of the war."

"Were there such tevarin?" Karath asked. "I thought they were honorable, that the Rijoran way held them to standards." She remembered some of the exhausting stories Manne told her, history lessons she managed to keep awake for.

"There will always be a few in any group, tevarin included, that, for better or for worse, abandon their own," he said. "This particular one didn't want to follow Corath'Thal to his death, didn't want to be immortalized in the pages of tevarin history, and I guess I can't blame him."

Karath became pensive, now theorizing about her own people. She thought that regardless of race, people who supported and cared for each other did exactly that, and she couldn't understand how some could abandon each other, leave each other at the end when they may need each other the most. She'd learned words like selfishness, hatred, and the like, and knew what they meant, but to know the definitions and truly understand the people those words described were two different stories.

"Kay," Manne whispered. She snapped out of it again and took a breath, looking up at him. It was by far, the heaviest day of her entire life, and she wasn't sure exactly how much more she could take. "What is it?" she replied.

"Your mother told me something about the pirates who attacked them, specifically, about how to identify them."

A dark anticipation started to wash over her as the feathers on her neck stood out; it was like her body knew what was coming before she did, like her soul was preparing her for a truth that would change her life and set her on an unfaltering course down a path she always knew she was going to take—that she had to take—but just knew not when.

"All the ships that the pirates flew sported an emblem, a big one, and easily recognizable: it's a curved tevarin short-blade, one with the hilt of the handle forming the cross of a lowercase 't'."

Her breathing became short, her eyes slowly widened. "No," she whispered.

"It was the image I caught a glimpse of today, on the side of the ship I shot down." He looked over at her and watched as Karath's eyes slowly made their way to the bridge window; her jaw, her shoulders, her hands, her feet, all tensed up. Manne closed his eyes and regretted ever telling her anything, though he knew it had to be done. By not telling her the story of her past, he inadvertently built an unlit torch inside of her, one that when lit, when he exposed the truth, would explode like a firecracker in her heart, leaving the door to her soul scorched. Everything he ever taught her would now become tools for her to use to achieve revenge. He had set her on a course that she couldn't turn back from, that she wouldn't turn back from, and now he wondered what part it was that he would play in the redemption.