Defender of the Empire: Cadet #1 Read Online Free PDF

was the fact that it was dark. Why is there a whole section dark like this? I wondered looking up and down the hall. It just didn’t make any sense. Yet this main hall remained, dark as the little corridor.
    Sighing silently I turned to the left which was the direction I hoped would meet up with Ring One. There was no sound, next to no light, and the metal floor was cold through my sock covered feet.
    A sudden lance of pain made me gasp. Through the sensation of trembling nerves I heard a voice. Not a woman’s voice, but a male’s call out. NOT AGAIN! NO! DON’T! LEAVE HER ALONE. SOMEONE! ANYONE! HEAR ME! HELP ME! It was both a plea and a command.
    What was the coincidence that one person, in an abandoned section of a space station, would hear not one, but two cries for help? And by the sound of it, there were at least two people who needed help. But that wasn’t the only difference from last time this time they were in a different hall. By the sound of it they were in a smaller corridor. I set the boots down in a little nook behind a counter of some abandoned store front. I then padded into the side corridor with my trusty crowbar. I wondered down its length following the pleading male voice. I began to hear another male voice, it was less clear than the first. I could also make out a woman’s murmur.  I had no chance of understanding her.
    Why could I only make out the one voice? It didn’t make any sense. As I got closer I realized that there was light up ahead. If the corridor had been lit normally, the light would have been negligible. As it was, one was very much aware of it without it hurting. I came to the corner and couched down before peering around. I froze as what I was seeing sank in. A woman with short brown hair was bound wrist to ankle on her knees before some figure in the deeper shadows. By how this figure moved, I was fairly sure that it was male, human, and rather large. Though that that last could have been because he was in the shadows. His voice was deep and patronizing when he spoke again. “Stupid Shade, you think a mouse can sneak up on a serpent?”
    SERPENT? The male voice that had drawn me here in the first place snorted. YOU ARE NEITHER CUNNING NOR GRACEFUL NOR FAST ENOUGH TO APPLY THAT TITLE TO YOUR MISRABLE PINK HIDE. The voice continued scathingly. NO , THE ONLY TITLE THAT FITS YOU IS ‘ LEECH’. The shrouded man stepped forward into the light revealing that he really was large in stature and wore a mask that fitted over his entire face. I flinched thinking that the male prisoner certainly had guts but no brains. But to my surprise, the masked man didn’t act as if he had been insulted… or even that he had heard the voice. Neither did the woman. She eyed the masked wonder and laughed
                  “Has something I said amused you?” The man asked.
                  The woman smiled grimly. “Kill me and the Emperor will still know everything that I do.” Two words of that sentence fought for dominance on the attention stage of my mind. And those were ‘emperor’ and ‘kill’. The emperor because he was the guy in charge. Yeah, there was the Council, that was scary on its own, but the word ‘emperor’ just echoed with power that frankly ‘council’ didn’t. As a mere colonist, the chances that I would ever see the emperor was the same as seeing the center of a star without being vaporized. That’s right, pretty low.
                  The other word was something I was far more familiar with. It was something that I had rolled around with in the destruction of my home. Words like ‘kill’ and ‘death’ were something that I could understand. They were dirty, gritty, and common. Something that no one could avoid forever. But to see it being forced before its time was terrifying. I had to do something. Anything.
    As I searched for a plan, the masked man crouched before the woman. A smile colored his words “That would be true,”