The Beacon, page 14
He groaned harder, the pain icy and clear in his voice. His hand clutched his side. His whole body seemed to clench with tension.
Arke offered her comfort. “We’ll save her. She’s our dear friend and crewmate.”
His breaths were growing shallow and haggard, but Mel could hear the smile in his voice when he spoke. “I’m… I’m glad she was able to make some reliable friends. She didn’t…have too many people close…close to her…before.”
“We’ll do all we can for her,” Melias confirmed. “But what can we do for you?”
“Nothing. I’m afraid my time is spent. This malfunction, this damage. There was never coming back from it. I only wish…”
He never finished the sentence. He coughed and convulsed, writhing in pain. Melias felt tempted to put him out of his misery and give him as painless of an end as could be had in his condition. His hand drifted to his rifle, and Ossen seemed to sense the thought in his mind. He held out a hand to stay him.
“Wait, there is more. We… We took and hid one of the Lightbringers’ devices, the di’farro, on a small backwater system. If it is still there, there…might also be a comrade left in cryo. But not…a guarantee.”
He shakily reached to his left wrist and began to move his finger over the surface. He placed his palm facing the sky and a pale green light shone from the center. It showed a craggy world dotted with canyons and craters and deserts. There was something oddly familiar about it to Melias.
Arke took Ossen’s hand, accepted the coordinates, and stored it on her person. “We’ll go there and make sure the Lightbringers don’t get it.”
“And we’ll take Red—I mean Tasnim—back from those evil buggers,” Aaron said.
Ossen coughed again, and it was obvious he was holding in his agony for one last moment. “Thank you all, for your kindness and patience, and for loving my dear Tasnim. I hope you… I wish that… I could… You prevail… In our great fight…”
He drew in a long breath, and Melias thought he might utter one more word, but he went still instead.
They weren’t sure what to do at first. Should they take his body with them for Tasnim when they got her back? But then, would a ghost’s body decay? They didn’t know. After some discussion, they decided it was better to put his body back in the cryopod and rebury him. They would save these coordinates so they could come back to pay their respects, if possible, with or without Tasnim…though without wasn’t really an option.
With heavy hearts, but ones also filled with renewed hope, they returned to the Goose—to Tomi and Ixion, Siobhan and the droid—and left this world and the Colossi Mecha and the echo of the past that portended a future Melias didn’t want to imagine. An all-out war that would tear the galaxy apart, that ended their time as a galactic civilization.
They would not be eradicated like the Prime Ones were—though they deserved it, if all accounts could be trusted.
As they rose from the planet, the ship moving away from the grave and the message and the wreckage of the Colossi Mecha, Melias felt a surge of something in his chest that he hadn’t felt in a while. Or at least since the whole Red incident and the assault of the device had happened.
Excitement. Hope. Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and knowing that victory was not only possible but even in their grasp and achievable.
They were going back to Waystation to talk to Thandriel, regroup, have a funeral for the fallen, and then it was on to this next world, this other device, and hopefully another one of Red’s people that might be able to save her from the Lightbringers.
And then they would win, and he and his friends would buy a bar on some world and enjoy their lives for the first time in a long, long while.
Thank You For Reading
Thanks for reading The Beacon, the fourth book in the Sentinels series. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I really have a lot of fun writing about the amazing technology the future holds for us, and all the possible chaos :)
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