Page 46 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded
“That’s why I want to go back to the base,” he said, lying down again and switching off the lamp. “I don’t know if I could deal with working for the military again. But I think I want to find out. I want to be in that space and see how it feels. I want to do something useful with my life, not just hang around at community centres watching fathers teach their kids how to hammer in a nail. But at the same time, I’ve spent the past year doing everything I can to hide from life. Suddenly wanting to dive back into it just feels… weird.”
That, at least, I could say something useful about. “You don’t have to decide overnight,” I cautioned him. “But you have a direction you want to explore now. That’s progress.”
“But what if I go there and have a panic attack? Or what if I hate all the options available?”
“I’ll go with you,” I told him firmly. “And if you have a panic attack, I’ll help you through it. And if you hate all the options, then you’re in no worse a position than you’re in now.”
He sighed. In response, I snuggled in against his side again. He seemed more relaxed when he could feel me beside him. “It’s only about a week since Aiden first came to see you,” I pointed out gently. “Fixing all the problems is going to take time.”
“I know, I just…” He made a grumbling sound. “I’ve always been something of an overachiever.”
I smiled. I could imagine that, my master as a younger man, wanting to outdo everyone else in his pilot training class, pushing himself harder, and thriving on the successes that came with that effort. Even in the past week, he’d made remarkable progress in his own recovery. But I knew that rushing in headlong could often lead to exhaustion further down the track.
“Perhaps it would be wise to take this one decision at a time,” I said, making sure I offered the words as a suggestion, rather than an order. “And then, if anything isn’t working well, we can reassess.”
My master slid his arm around my shoulder again and kissed the top of my head. “Thank you,” he muttered into my hair. “You’re the best.”
I fell asleep listening to his breathing, as it finally evened out, unable to keep the smile off my face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Zeke
“Would you like to go for a walk this morning?” Dax asked me, as I dithered over my second cup of coffee. We hadn’t gone yesterday, so I knew I was going to have a hard time saying no.
But on the other hand, I was still planning on visiting Henderson, and if we didn’t go for a walk, I could use that as motivation to get up and head to the base, guilting myself into it on the basis that I had to do some sort of excursion today.
But then again, if we did go for a walk, then I could take more time to brace myself not only for the train ride out to the base, but for the potentially overwhelming emotions of being back in a place that had torn my life apart so thoroughly.
That was a tricky one. The Hon base itself had done nothing to contribute to my injuries or trauma. That had been a decision from Alliance HQ, based in the Drazig system. Henderson had bent over backwards to get a lot of the paperwork squared away, after I got back from Ixralia, and had even come to visit me personally a couple of times. I knew a handful of the soldiers still working there, and they’d always been supportive, a few of thembeing very vocal about how badly the Alliance had screwed up with the whole Ixralia issue.
But even so, being around so many uniforms and ships was bound to shove some very unpleasant memories into my face.
Why was I even going back there?
“Yeah, let’s take a walk,” I said to Dax, breaking into the silence that had dragged on too long, at the same time as forcing my leg to stop bouncing up and down. “Hopefully it’ll help me clear my head a bit.”
He fetched shoes and socks for me and himself, checked that he’d turned the stove off after cooking breakfast, and closed the kitchen window. Fucking hell, he was a godsend. So many small tasks that for the average person would have been barely noticeable, but for me were an insurmountable challenge.
We headed out the front door, with Dax making sure it was locked behind us, and strolled up the road, a slow meander in the direction of the park. “Did you sleep okay?” Dax asked, a quiet, probing question that was designed to make sure I was all right today, without being too intrusive. After my outburst a couple of days ago, he was getting remarkably good at that. And I liked to think I was getting better at keeping my temper when he did small things that annoyed me.
“Not really,” I admitted, shoving my hands into my pockets. “I woke up at about one in the morning and stayed awake for over an hour. No particular reason. No nightmares, thankfully. I just… I was thinking about stuff.” A low rumbling sound filled the air, and I paused while I waited for it to fade away. Shuttles sometimes took a high flight path over the city to get to the military base, so a bit of noise every now and then wasn’t unusual.
But rather than fading out, the rumble got louder… and that’s when it occurred to me that it wasn’t the first time that day that I’d heard it. At least twice over breakfast… and was I imaginingthat I remembered that same rumble while I’d been lying awake in the night? What was going on? Some sort of military exercise? They usually gave us notice about those, so that people could keep their pets inside to prevent them getting scared and running off.
The sound got louder still, and I felt Dax’s hand on my shoulder. No doubt he was worrying about me having a panic attack, but I was too curious to be feeling overly anxious. This was my home – both my home planet and my home neighbourhood – and it felt too comfortable and familiar for there to be any real threat here.
A moment later, a shuttle came gliding into sight, appearing over the tops of the trees that lined the bushland surrounding the park. It was immediately clear that this wasn’t an Alliance vessel. It was a light blue colour, instead of dark green, and the wrong shape – wider and flatter than any of our ships. And right across the underside, in bright red, was an insignia of some sort.
I lifted my comm, scanning the symbol. It beeped a moment later, then a holographic page popped up, detailing what the symbol meant.
“They’re Halagals,” I told Dax, as the shuttle continued on, in the direction of the park we were heading for. I was confused about their presence, but not overly concerned. The Halagals had a peace treaty with the Alliance, and while they weren’t regular visitors to Rendol 4, there were small colonies of them on a couple of other Alliance planets.
“What are they doing here?” Dax asked. “I didn’t see anything in the news channels about visitors to Hon.”
As we watched, the shuttle dipped down, disappearing behind the trees as it went in to land. And judging by how close it was, it was landing in the park. What the hell? Any interplanetary visitors should have been docking either at the military base, or at the docking station to the west of the city.
Thinking fast, I pulled up the contact list in my comm, intending to make a call to someone who would firstly know what was going on, and secondly would answer my call. But before I could, an irate woman came bursting out of one of the nearby houses, waving a dishrag and cursing up a storm. “That was another one, wasn’t it! I heard it! Hey, you there! Did you see that?” she screeched, her ire clearly directed at the shuttle, rather than at us. “More of them! Bloody vermin! They’ve been doing that all morning. They’ve taken over the park. Have you been down there? Have you seen it? Whole hordes of them! They’ve set up tents everywhere, and before you know it, they’ll be shitting in the lake and trampling all the grass. No consideration for the local residents. I don’t know who authorised this, but I’m going to be making an official complaint!”