Krylltic 2- The Vexti Alliance

By Robin Flett

A collection of three stories in the Krylltic and Loran series.
WATERFALL
THE TRALLAX AFFAIR
THE VEXTI ALLIANCE

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robin Flett
• Release date: Apr 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005467319

Robin Flett

Robin Flett was born in Scotland more years ago than he cares to remember. Early retirement released him from the daily drudgery and sent him on the path to becoming an author. A rocky and painful path, as many will know!His first love has always been science fiction, but now he has embarked on new voyages with a contemporary thriller entitled The Purple Contract. Other projects are pending.Robin resides in northern Scotland with his two cats.

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Copyright © 2022 Robin Flett

Smashwords Edition

The right of Robin Flett to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidences are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

THE VEXTI

ALLIANCE

Robin Flett

Krylltic Book 2

Waterfall

The Trallax Affair

The Vexti Alliance

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WATERFALL

Robin Flett

One of Loran's contacts, a human with a background in organised crime, has called in a debt. His daughter attends an academy on the planet Waterfall, studying languages. But civil war had broken out there and she is stranded under seige in the Academy building.

Krylltic and Loran need to get her out unharmed - or end up with a war of their own on their hands.

Waterfall

When the proximity alarm went off, I was dozing. Nearly fell out of the chair.

I had taken the Drakken through the glorious outskirts of a gaseous nebula on autopilot. It was slightly out of our way, but not much. We couldn’t do this part of the trip in hyperspace anyway. Outside, the normally black sky was heavily tinted; greens, reds and yellows in swirling patterns, frozen in place by untold light-years of distance. Very pretty. There were in fact some shifting patterns of colour, as elementary particles collided, merged, releasing all sorts of energy, some of it in the visible spectrum, as the effects rippled through the interstellar vacuum. The nebula was beautiful and I was entranced – and eventually, I fell asleep.

I had no idea what the nebula was called, and couldn’t be bothered to look it up or ask Loran, even supposing he knew. Stars were being created in there, although I had taken care to avoid the denser areas where star formation and the swirling clouds of dust and other matter made navigation hazardous in the extreme. It could be millions of years before the next one ignited – or it could be seconds from now. This was the universe in all its active glory, right in front of my eyes.

Since meeting Loran in that sauropod-infested forest, many months of ship-time ago, I was learning something of the lonely life he led. Shisella, his previous companion, had understood him better than he knew, or wanted to admit. A rebel, she had called him, and it was true enough. Loran was indeed a rebel, individualistic to a fault. But a good friend to have beside you when it mattered.

Loran is not human. He looks like a tall and spindly teddy bear. He tells me his people are generally antagonistic towards humans; apparently, there was a war long ago – and they lost. But Loran and I get along fine. Perhaps my being female helps, not so threatening perhaps. It’s not something we talk about. Getting him to speak about his past at all is difficult. And there aren’t many of his kind in this region of space anyway.

We weren’t really playing tourist, we were on our way to the Parkis system. A few ship-days ago, we had stopped near a deep-space research station. A gigantic double-wheel-shaped thing, with multicoloured lights shining from hundreds of windows. It was literally in the middle of nowhere. You can imagine the construction costs. Loran had no idea what they were doing over there on the structure, and didn’t really care. But he had somehow appropriated illicit messaging relay facilities within their hyperspace comms system. He used it (and other, similar piracy) for his nefarious ‘business’ dealings.

A single message had been waiting, and it had sent us across the galactic arm on course for Parkis and a planet called Waterfall.

I hit the stud and cut the alarm, leaving a green light blinking at me. I checked the coordinates on the screen and then looked out at the awesome sky around me. I needed the scope to find it – just a sliver against the nebula background. At full mag, it became a flattish triangle that grew in size but didn’t show lateral movement. Coming down our throats, then. Other readouts gave me its speed relative to us; it was decelerating. Without taking my eyes off of it, I reached out to the panel and pressed a key.

'Loran, get up here. We’ve got company.'

'Where, Krylltic?'

I pointed to the scope screen. He was chewing on some sort of reconstituted meat bar. It looked disgusting. He sat in the second bridge seat, scanning the panel with his furry, pointed ears flicking back and forth. I knew now that this indicated extreme agitation – not something that happened very often; you don’t scare Loran very easily. But this wasn’t fear. He read the displays, fiddled a little, and got the same result, and then looked out the window just as I had done minutes before. The approaching spacecraft was just becoming visible.

I watched him flicking through the instrumentation, using settings and screens I had not seen before. I recognised a spectrum analyzer at one point, but the rest was obscure: the Draaken was still