AllFreeNovel
Share Us
In another few hours, it came. He turned the engines on to the lowest settings they’d go and inched along over the moon’s surface, sticking to valleys and gullies and the edges of small mountains for as long as he could.
As soon as he had a straight shot down to the planet, he stopped and waited until he saw the guard ship he was waiting for cruise close. It would be the last one to cross this flight path for two hours, and for one of those hours, all other ships were heading in a different direction. There would be no eyes on this little patch of space.
Sebastian let the ship get far enough away that he could no longer make out the T in Turner Corporation with his naked eye and then gunned the engines at full throttle. The fancy sport ship commandeered from some klah’eel bigwig and given a lick of black paint shot forward and slammed Sebastian back into his seat.
He whooped delightedly at the rush a fast ship always gave him. He kept the throttle forward and an eye on his gravity meter until he had cleared the moon and then killed the engines dead.
The sudden silence made Sebastian’s breath and heartbeat sound deafening, and the darkness made his eyes ache with the sudden need to adjust. But he coasted down to Orin on his momentum and then Orin’s gravity as silent and invisible as a ghost.
The planet was far from the system’s sun, plagued by cold and dark and a thin atmosphere. Its only sentient habitation was the factory Sebastian was here to sabotage and the sad little company town that had sprouted around it to support the workers. Orin’s only saving grace was its tidally locked moon that provided Orin with reflected light and some semblance of a day-night cycle.
Of course, it was also that moon that had given Sebastian the cover he needed to slip onto the planet. So geography giveth and geography taketh away.
Entry into Orin’s atmosphere, such as it was, wasn’t tough, and Sebastian rode it out until the last minute, turning on the engines with just enough time and force to keep him from smashing into the planet’s surface without alerting anyone to his presence.
He maneuvered the ship through the icy wasteland, around the craggy tips of bergs, and through the occasional massive crevasse until his instruments started picking up the radio buzz of a nearby settlement. It would be mostly humans out here, working for a human corporation, but not entirely. The Turner Corporation was very much a multi-species conglomeration these days.
And now he had a decision to make. Namely, how far in to take his ship and thus how long to go on foot. There wasn’t enough atmosphere on Orin to breathe, so he was limited by the capacity of his oxygen tank.
Leave his ship too soon and he’d be cutting it close with his supply, or possibly miss it altogether and die of asphyxiation right outside the borders of the town. Leave his ship too late and he drastically increased his chances of being spotted and the alarm being raised—higher likelihood he made it out alive, but lower likelihood his mission succeeded.
Sebastian sighed, nestled his ship against a shadowed snowbank, and turned off the engines. Mission came first.
He double-checked his gear and supplies to ensure he wasn’t leaving anything behind—he likely wouldn’t be returning to this ship. And then, with a bout of sentimentality, he flipped open the vanity mirror next to the cockpit and glanced at himself. This body probably wouldn’t make it off this planet either.
Every time I look at you, I want this.
Sebastian always looked different, so maybe Hess had meant every time he looked at this body with its pretty contrast of dark hair and pale skin. That would explain why Hess had brought this particular body from headquarters when they took the capital. And his comment about Sebastian being willing to risk this body when he’d met him at the war table.
Sebastian tightened the straps of his oxygen tank with enough force that they bit into his skin uncomfortably. That was probably it. Hess just liked this body and hated that it was Sebastian inside it.
Sebastian pulled on a heavy mask and goggles and some thick gloves, covering every inch of skin from the biting cold that waited for him just outside the ship’s door.
But then, Hess had treated Sebastian with the same active disdain and arm’s length distance for years, ever since they’d met. Surely it wasn’t just the body he was wearing that got to Hess.
No, of course it wasn’t; it was that he was a torvar. It all came back to that. It was very simple, and Sebastian couldn’t reason his way out of that no matter how intent his brain seemed to be on it. Like Hess had said, whatever had happened between them in the hangar meant nothing.
All thoughts of Hess finally cleared from his brain when the door of the ship slid open and a fierce cold flooded over him.
“Fuck.” He pulled his limbs in close and ducked his head. “Fuck. That’s cold.”
He felt like he wasn’t even wearing the thickest synthetic wool outerwear he’d ever lain eyes on. The thin, dry air seeped into every crack in his armor he hadn’t realized was there. The nice, thick warmth of the ship dissipated into the cold without a trace.
At least there wasn’t any snow.
Sebastian tucked his hands into his armpits and trudged down the small gangway and out into the cold. At least there wasn’t any wind either. No snow, and no wind, so really, what did he have to complain about?
Other than the cold that was already forming ice crystals around the edges of his goggles.
He hoped he was going in the right direction.
After a couple more hours of plodding in the dim twilight that passed for day on this sad planet, Sebastian caught sight of the towering, black, windowless building that housed the chemical plant. A series of smokestacks lined one side of it, billowing innocuously colored white gas—that Sebastian assumed was pure poison because wouldn’t that be just like the Turners—out into the thin atmosphere where it dissipated almost instantly.
As Sebastian wound around some icy foothills, the blocky low maze of buildings surrounding the factory came into view. That would be where the workers and their families lived and Sebastian’s best bet at making it into the facility.
Oliver Turner had detailed maps of the facility itself, but it was doubtful that maps of the ramshackle, piecemeal, build-it-as-you-need-it company town even existed. Sebastian would have to find his own way in there. Or find someone willing to show it to him.
He crouched behind a rock and observed the windowless little town. There were not a lot of entrances, which wasn’t surprising. They wouldn’t need to travel out into the cold nothingness very often. They needed to travel into the factory and send and receive goods from the couple of large hangars that Sebastian could identify from their distinctive roofs, but none of that helped him.
