(Photo by Pixabay)

“Chester, wake up.”

It was his mother’s voice. They’d survived another bombardment, it seemed. Besides his ears still ringing and a slight headache he felt fine. That was incredibly lucky. Usually he had at least a few cuts and bruises. All the same, he didn’t want to open his eyes. Sleep was the only solace he ever had, when he didn’t have to worry about a bomb falling on his head or the building they were sheltering in collapsing. Sleep was the only safe place left for him.

Any moment now and she’d begin to gently prod his ribs, tickling him and teasing him until he’d get up. It was their usual morning routine.

He waited, but no pokes or prodding came. Maybe they weren’t as safe as he’d thought. If there were soldiers nearby then his mom wouldn’t want him making noise and risk bringing the soldiers attention to them.

“Mom?” Chester asked quietly.

There was no response.

That wasn’t like her at all. His mom was always quick to reply, even if only with a simple touch. If that wasn’t his mom talking to him, then who was it? There wasn’t anyone else who knew his name. They’d all been killed in the first few bombardments.

There was nothing else he could do but open his eyes and surrender his sleep for another day.

Nothing looked familiar. Where he expected to see rubble, a makeshift structure, or possibly even a cooking fire, he instead saw clean walls, steady lights, and a dozen or so unfamiliar faces looking at him.

“Who are you?” he cried out in fear, trying to scurry away only to find that there were straps crossing his chest and holding him down.

He’d been captured. He’d heard terrifying stories about what happened to those who were captured. Shambling soldiers who weren’t themselves anymore. Some said they’d had their brains eaten away by strange insects. Others said they’d been tortured into insanity. Regardless of the truth, Chester didn’t want it to be done to him.

“MOM!” he shouted, although he hoped she wasn’t anywhere near this place. “HELP! PLEASE!”

The people in the room around him reacted at once, withdrawing weapons and moving to…to what? They were guarding him? But their movements weren’t quite right. They didn’t walk, instead they floated, pushing off the walls with their hands and feet.

“Where am I?” Chester asked. “Where’s my mom?”

A woman who looked close to his mother’s age bent down over him and laid a comforting hand on his head.

“We’re on our way to the moon, Chester,” she said. “We’ll arrive there tomorrow.”

The moon? Was there anyone still on the moon? Maybe a settlement had survived and escaped notice.

“Where’s my mom?” Chester asked again. “Is she here?”

“No,” came the reply. “I don’t know where your mom is. Would you like to sit up?”

Chester nodded as everything else in his mind froze. Where was his mom? His head felt so fuzzy and he had trouble remembering what had happened.

“How’d I get here?” he asked as the straps holding him down were released and he became fully aware of the weightlessness associated with space travel. He’d heard of it before but had never done any such traveling himself. Before the war, travel was too expensive, and ever since the war broke out it was too dangerous.

“We helped you get on board,” the woman who’d been answering his questions said.

Something in the back of his mind nagged at him. Memories from the day before floated in and out of focus as he tried to recall what had happened. He didn’t want to remember it, though. His mom wasn’t with him and these people didn’t seem to know who she was. That meant…

Chester turned away from the woman as he fought back tears. It couldn’t be true, but what else could explain why he wasn’t with his mom? She’d never leave him! But that meant, if she wasn’t here, that she was…

He couldn’t say it, couldn’t even bring himself to think it, but that didn’t stop the tears from flowing. They rolled down his cheeks in defiance of his efforts to keep them from coming. Then, against his will, he remembered her as he’d last seen her. There was no look of pain or fear on her face, and yet there was no recognition either. Just a blank stare, forever looking upward into the sky that had rained death and destruction on them. The same blast that had killed her had brought the whole building down around them and trapped Chester for…well, for a while. Several days at least. But then he’d managed to squirm his way out, surviving off the rations his mom had saved up for them while he crawled through the maze of rubble until he found solid ground once more.

“The war,” he muttered as more memories came back to him.

He remembered the research facility he stumbled upon, mostly ruined, where the shambling soldiers use to come from before it was bombed by the resistance fighters. There were still plenty of supplies inside the building, enough that he stayed there for almost a full year before the food and water ran out. It was during that time that he learned about necrology. He was too young to really understand it but he kept a few of the data cards he found there and as he grew older he understood more and more of what they contained.

“Chester?”

He looked up and saw the woman he’d been speaking with. There was a hollowness to the way she looked at him, as though she wasn’t really there, and that was when the final piece slotted into place. He remembered the Solar King, H’lay, the botched escape attempt, and the bombing of the rapid transit lines and space port.

The woman was a drone, he remembered. One of his own. One of eighteen now. The others hadn’t made it, either dying to the port security or the explosions. Of the eighteen survivors, H’lay and two of his original security drones were among them. That was something at least since the security drones knew how to actually fight and H’lay was at least useful for the information she knew, even if she couldn’t act autonomously.

“Have there been any transmissions?” Chester asked.

“Only a general broadcast, instructing all vessels to continue on their predetermined courses. Any deviations will result in their destruction.”

Chester nodded. That made sense. In the mad dash at the port it would have been impossible to know who was on what ship, so all Dawnstar had to do was wait for each ship to reach its destination. He could have security forces there, waiting for each ship to scan the passengers. It would be simple. With nowhere to run and hide, Chester could only sit and wait for the ship to reach the space port on the moon and then, well, that would be that.

“Well,” Chester sighed, rubbing at his ears that hadn’t stopped ringing ever since he was a small boy, “that’s it then. No escape. No more scrambling for survival. Just a quiet ride to the moon and then death, I expect. Good job, everyone. Thank you for everything, and sorry for everything I did to you.”

There wasn’t really much else he could say, and besides, what was the point since he was really just talking to himself, so he went and found a large viewing window that looked back towards his home. It was the only world he’d ever known. In all of the solar system, he’d never actually left it. He was an oddity, among the higher ranking officials within the Solar King’s government, but somehow he’d never gotten around to traveling. He’d meant to, someday, but work had always gotten priority, and then when the Solar King found out about his secrets, his personal discoveries that he refused to share, well, then he wasn’t allowed to leave the planet.

“It’s so big and so small at the same time,” he whispered as he watched the world beneath him.

It was night over the capitol but he could still pick it out by the countless lights. He wondered if the Solar King’s sons were still there or if they’d gone to intercept any of the ships that had managed to launch. Could they even get off world with the space port damaged as it was? Of course, there were other ports, but Chester’s drones held the opinion that other groups had been sent to similarly sabotage the ports across the planet. If that was the case, then perhaps Dawnstar and the others would be planet bound for some time until repairs could be made.

In the end it wouldn’t matter. It was the moon’s security that would arrest them, possibly even execute them, and there was nothing Chester could do about that.

Nothing at all.

He just had to accept it.

“We could still fight,” a voice said from behind him. The voice he’d mistaken for his mother.

Chester turned to find the young woman hovering in the passageway behind him. He could feel her mind in the back of his own and he double checked the connection to make sure he wasn’t mistaken. Drones didn’t normally have the autonomy to do more than they were instructed to do, but what had he told these drones to do? What were his last instructions to them? He couldn’t remember exactly, but it was likely a subconscious instruction given while the port was exploding.

“We still have our weapons, our body armor, even a few other bits of tech,” she added. “Moon security has always been low and we have some contacts on the ground there. We don’t have to lie down without a fight.”

There was something wrong with the way she said that last part, something in her eyes that glinted with more than just the usual awareness of Chester’s drones. He checked their connection a third time. It seemed normal, and yet this woman was too aware, too…

“Alive” she finished his thought for him and Chester started, trying to back away. She shouldn’t have been able to tell what he was thinking.

Chester sent the command for her to be silent and still. She obeyed at once. Chester sighed in relief.

“I know, right?” she asked and Chester cried out in shock as the woman pulled herself closer to him.

He resent the command to be still and silent and, again, she complied, but only for a few moments.

“Please stop doing that,” she said, “It’s really annoy-

She froze in place again and this time Chester monitored their connection. After a few seconds, his instructions to her stopped sending and the woman relaxed.

“How are you doing this?” he asked.

“Smythe,” she said, “he managed to get a warning out to me. I didn’t have enough time to warn the others before we were all taken but it was enough that I could activate my second implant. It’s not as good as the main one that you had removed, but it does what it can. I can’t, for example, do anything too contrary to what you tell me to do, but I can ignore or break free of the minor things.”

“So you’ll still obey me?” Chester asked.

“I do everything I can to resist,” she said, “but I know enough to see that you’re more on my side than not, so we might as well work together where we can.”

“I just want peace,” Chester said.

“Yeah, I know, and look where that’s gotten you,” she said with obvious disdain. “The Solar King isn’t interested in peace. Violence is all he understands, so that’s what we’re giving him. Death and destruction on his own world until none of his advisors are willing to go along with his plans to subjugate our worlds.”

“The Solar King is dead,” Chester said.

“Right, right, because you control him.”

“No, he’s dead. I’m not controlling him anymore. Dawnstar did something, shut off the Solar King’s armor, and he died.”

The woman was quiet after that. Chester couldn’t tell if she was relieved or upset by this news.

“I’m sorry, I don’t even know your name,” Chester said to break the uncomfortable silence.

“Jezah,” she replied. “Jezah Hark.”

The look she gave him was answer enough to the question that hung in his throat. Looking at her more closely now, he could see the resemblance. Smythe’s sister, most likely, though ages were difficult to tell for certain. He hoped she wasn’t Smythe’s mother.

“I’m going to go get some breakfast,” she finally said. “When you’re ready, I think we’d all like to discuss our future plans with you.”

With that she pulled herself up the passageway and into another section of the ship, leaving him alone at the window and a hollow feeling in his gut that had nothing to do with being hungry.