Revenant Slaves Chapter 49: Chapter 48: Luna

Read chapter 49 of Revenant Slaves by Zee on NovelPedia.

Chapter 48: Luna To Luna, it had only been a few seconds between going under and waking up again. The life-saving chemicals being injected into her body had stabilized her through the ship’s violent maneuvers, but they had not made the transition feel like real sleep; it felt more like the vague middleground between consciousness. As soon as Luna woke, she quickly took in her surroundings. The bridge was already active again. Avraham, Niko, and Brandon were all at work, bringing up terminals and shifting through feeds. Acting on instinct from the military training she had been undergoing for the past thirteen days, Luna brought up her own terminal as well. She switched between Niko’s and Avraham’s feeds. Avraham had taken over piloting the ship, with the onboard computer assisting him. They had been surrounded by thousands of hostile civilian ships on the other side of the Gate. That alone had been eerie enough, but the system they had arrived in was somehow even more unusual. Initial scans showed that there was not a single ship orbiting the Gate. The entire Gate space was empty for millions of kilometers. Of course, there were still the dead patrol ships and frigates of the Temple, the vessels meant to guard the system and the Gate. The hulking iron corpses of those ships had been marked all over Luna’s map as grey debris fields. Soon, they would start receiving more information from all across the system at the speed of light. But at the speed of light, even a relatively small system was still vast. This system stretched about four to five light hours across. It was a small star system by imperial standards, with key mining worlds scattered throughout it. Their destination, Mortrum, was now only 1.95 light hours away. At their current trajectory, it would still take them seven more days to reach it. Luna waited with the others as the system readings came in. Without meaning to, she kept glancing toward the dead pilot still strapped into his couch. Or rather, what remained of him. The upper half of both the couch and Parker’s body was gone. Luna was disturbed by how quickly the sight had stopped feeling disturbing. She had never thought she would become so used to death, so quickly and so coldly. She looked away and opened the system repair logs instead. The ship’s computer had already directed the self-repair systems to shift one of the outer hull layers over the breach left by whatever had pierced their ship. At least the bridge was no longer depressurized, venting into the vacuum of space. Luna, Niko, and Brandon still hadn’t removed their helmets, even though there no longer seemed to be any immediate danger inside the bridge. Avraham, of course, did not share in their caution. His helmet was already off. As more information came in, the situation inside this star system became even more confusing. There were far too many civilian ships inside the system. What was stranger was that all of them had their transponders on. They were legal, licensed, and registered ships. But more than seventy percent of them were not supposed to be in this system at all. Around Mortrum and its moons alone, the scans picked up more than 10,000 civilian vessels. Whatever the rebellion was planning here, it was different from what had happened in the previous systems. A summons soon appeared across Luna’s terminal. Lady Azarea was calling a meeting of all Inquisitors aboard the two Inquisitorial ships as they pushed deeper into the system. Soon, the two ships would split, with Avraham’s ship heading for Mortrum while Adran’s made its run toward the two remaining planets in the system. Luna was surprised at her own invitation; she wasn’t an inquisitor after all. She joined the call and found Zuri there as well. Lady Azarea’s voice boomed through Luna’s helmet almost at once. “Well, Avraham, it seems you have casualties on your hands.” Avraham answered calmly. “Yes. We were hit by a rogue railgun shot. Three people have died, including our pilot