Death Drop (43 page)

“Dimitri,” he ordered his pilot, “destroy the cargo inside the ship first, and if you kill The Ghost, you’ll get triple what I promised!”

Rational Dezmara had taken a back seat again and her battle instincts were in high gear as the kranos calculated distance, air speed, turbulence, and a myriad other variables. She pressed a button on the helmet and sprinted at full bore down the extended cargo ramp. The winch attached to her harness buzzed as the portmaster issued his final kill order. His smug taunts enraged her and she was going to give him what he expected—
something more.

Powerful eddies lashed at Dezmara’s body, and the folds of her flight jacket flowed behind her as she launched herself out of the cargo hold and into the air. The gunship’s cockpit bubble floated over the top edge of the container; but, instead of an easy target, the fighter pilot saw something he didn’t expect. A masked figure was flying through the air toward him, and even though the peculiar vision broke his concentration for only the merest second, it would prove to be a fatal mistake. Before he could tighten his finger around the trigger and reduce the body into slivers of pulverized meat, the glass around him shattered into millions of razor sharp crystals that slashed at the bare skin on his face. His body shook uncontrollably from the bullets that ripped through his chest and embedded themselves somewhere in the bowels of his ship behind him.

Dezmara stood on top of the cargo container with her autos still fully extended in each hand as wisps of smoke curled briefly from both barrels before they were licked away by the strong currents. The taut cable pulled slightly at her harness, and Dezmara breathed a sigh of thanks that the kranos and the mainframe had calculated the correct distance to the cargo box, stopping the winch at the right moment. She holstered her pistols and steadied herself as she turned back toward the ship and gripped the cable in front of her with one hand. She reached around and unclipped the cable from the back side of her harness and reattached it to a clip in the front.

Dezmara punched the controls to retract her cable at full speed and then slowly stop just short of the loading ramp’s lip so she could climb safely aboard. She engaged the device and jumped forward to minimize the whiplash effect. The top-mounted winch worked perfectly, stopping within arms’ length of the door, and she hoisted herself back into the hold. Dezmara rose to her feet and reached for her helmet so she could engage the floor winches and reel in the cargo, when three things happened almost simultaneously: the portmaster screamed in her ear, Dezmara crashed into one of the secured cargo containers, and the rear attack warning from the oculo sounded in the kranos.

“DIE, YOU BASTARD!” the portmaster’s voice erupted over the com. Dezmara desperately wanted to talk shit, to tell that smug asshole that it wasn’t over because his little pilots were all dead and she had her cargo, but she didn’t have any time to respond—she didn’t have time to do anything except gasp for precious air as her broken ribs exploded in burning pain from the impact.

“What the hell was that?”
asked a distant voice inside her head.

“GET YOUR ASS UP AND MOVE!”
another voice screamed from her primal, war-machine mind, the part of her that knew exactly what had happened. The portmaster, consumed by rage and hatred for Dezmara at killing the last fighter pilot, had unleashed a diabolical attack on the
Ghost’s
computer system and broken through its defenses again. He had engaged the air brake and the shipment that Dezmara had hoped to hoist smoothly aboard was now streaking toward the back of the Zebulon. The good news was that it was going to crash into the cargo bay without battering the outside of her ship. The bad news was that she was about to be flattened.

As Dezmara gripped the cable in front of her and engaged the winch, she knew something was wrong: the torque on her body was pulling her down. The cable was still looped under a D-ring on the floor, and she was about to be pinned and then crushed by a five wilek cargo crate speeding through the atmosphere. Dezmara could feel the rush of air pushed forward by the container fill the hold as the kranos sounded the final alarm. Her right hand dove to her hip and jerked the auto from its holster so fast that she would have given any pistolier in the universe a run for his money. The flat black barrel barked and the D-ring disintegrated as Dezmara, hoisted by the winch, lifted from the ground, legs kicking wildly through the air just centimeters above the top of the container racing beneath the tips of her boots. It landed on the deck first, tearing a huge gash through the floor. The metal buckled from the blunt impact and jagged edges of alloy curled up on both sides of the hole like the serrated lips of a disfigured mouth. The box slammed into the stacks of cargo already lashed to the deck with a heart-stopping boom. The force bent several of the reinforced collars and floor locks, shaking the ship from nose to tail.

Dezmara landed face down on top of the container, and the
Ghost
was still shaking from the collision as she rolled over and engaged the closest overhead winch with a collar. The wayward load had ripped one of the floor winches from its mount and sandwiched several crumpled plates of decking between itself and the secured cargo that had stopped its momentum. Three quarters of its body was sitting on heavily scratched but otherwise structurally intact flooring. In fact, considering its rather fantastic journey from dock six to its current position aboard the star freighter, the crate’s crooked alignment and the gaping tear in the deck leading up to its outer edge were manageable.

Dezmara lowered the collar and guided it over the box as quickly as she could. Luckily, the grid pattern of the floor locks that made it possible to anchor containers of various shapes and sizes made it easy to batten down a cargo collar at an angle. The locks clicked loudly as the ratcheting mechanisms tightened the beam around the crate and secured it to the deck. She slid down one of the uprights on the collar and landed on the floor as gently as she could. She tapped the kranos and then clutched her aching side and stared numbly out onto the dockyard as the cargo ramp crept upward. Dezmara watched the streams of pale yellow light from outside the ship slowly fade as the bay door inched closer to its frame. She stood completely motionless and waited for the next surprise from the portmaster—the next attack in retaliation for dodging his murderous implements—but none came. And then she realized that he didn’t know that she was still alive.

Dezmara wanted very badly to announce her status as ‘still breathing’ and taunt the portmaster some more, but she didn’t. If he thought she was dead, it might buy Dezmara some time to figure out if they had the slightest chance of getting out of Luxon. She worked her way past the rows of containers and across the main deck. Dezmara was panting and wincing in pain as she stepped inside the cockpit door and put both hands on her knees. Simon was still slapping furiously at the keyboards, and curses were flowing freely from his mouth. Things didn’t look promising.

“How we doin’, Sy?” Dezmara could tell he was more than a little frazzled, and she made an effort to soften her tone. The clicks and taps that had pelted the space like a torrent just moments before faded to a trickle and then stopped completely as Simon slowly spun his chair around to face her. An audible gasp escaped her lips beneath the kranos as she looked as his face. She was wrong: Simon wasn’t frazzled, stressed out, annoyed, or irritated—he was terrified.

“Got ‘im off the brakes an’ out of the flight controls. You prob’ly noticed that since we’re not smashin’ to the bottom of this pit…” Simon said as he looked at Dezmara through forlorn eyes. His shoulders sagged and his arms hung at his sides and he looked like he could break down at any moment. “Sorry, luv, I don’t want to die, but I can’t crack the gate…too bloody encrypted. I tried
ev’rything
.” Simon lifted his hands in a hopeless gesture and then they fell back to the sides of his chair with a hollow clap that matched the breaking sound in Dezmara’s heart. He had given up.

Dezmara studied him for a moment. There was no sign of his spry wit, and the determined glimmer that once burned in his big, yellow eyes had gone out, replaced by the lifeless haze of fear. He really was defeated.

“If we’re going to die,” she said calmly, “then we’re going to die fighting. Do you understand?”

Simon’s face soured and his hands lifted from his sides again with palms turned out. “I tol’ ya, tried everything I know. I can’t hack”

“I’m not talkin’ about the gate,” Dezmara said firmly. “I’m talkin’ you and me behind the guns and every round we got until it’s over. You up for that?”

“R-r-right, luv,” Simon said as a measure of courage rekindled in his eyes. “I’ll be in the turret ‘bove engineerin’.” He got to his feet and slid past Dezmara as she peeled the kranos off of her head and tossed it into the empty copilot’s chair. She thought she saw him hesitate at the door for an instant, but when she turned to see if he was all right, he was gone. She dismissed it as a figment of her imagination or perhaps the ‘I know we’re going to die soon’ jitters and left it at that. She gave Simon ample time to get into position and strapped in—or perhaps not buckled in, depending on how reckless and cavalier he wanted to be in the last moments of his life—before making sure the com was still tuned to Luxon’s frequency and the voice-veil was engaged for familiarity’s sake.

“This is The Ghost calling the shit-ass that tried to kill me with my cargo—nice try, dickface, but I’m still waitin’ for you to show me something. So far it looks like you’re just another guy who can’t finish the job!”

The line buzzed and hummed in response and Dezmara opened her mouth to start into another, more insulting, taunt when the cameras on the
Ghost
picked up massive amounts of movement and she stopped to investigate. The holodex flashed and diagrammed more fighters of the same make and model as the five that Dezmara worked so hard, and had been so lucky, to destroy. The pale yellow light was blotted out and the dockyard darkened as squadrons of the little attack ships poured from every hangar door around the mountain.

“That’s more like it,” Dezmara said stoically as she buckled her harness and tightened the belts around her. She tried to pretend that it didn’t bother her, that she was ready to die, but it wouldn’t take. Dezmara wanted nothing else but to uncover her past and remember who she was, where she came from and if there were other Humans in the universe somewhere. She couldn’t think of a worse fate than dying without knowing, dying without peace. “Goddamit!” she shouted in absolute frustration, then she realized that a related, but more recent mystery was eating away at her. “Who in the hell told these bastards I was Human?” The answer was somewhere back inside Luxon with the two sailors in Buego’s bar, and Dezmara had half a mind to storm back inside through the impenetrable, two meters thick doors and get her bloody satisfaction, when the ship’s screen displayed a new move by the portmaster at the end of the game. Dezmara raised an eyebrow as the data showed the tube of the great gate begin to rise in the bore ahead of them to the right.

Dezmara wasted no time as she yanked the control stick toward the opening and gave more power to the engines.

“Oi! You know it’s a bloody trap, don’cha?!” Simon’s frantic voice bellowed through the com and into the cockpit.

“Yes, Simon, I know.”

“Then why in the hell are we doin’ it, eh? I thought the ‘ole point of goin’ out with guns blazin’ was to die on your own terms.”

“It is,” Dezmara said flatly.

“And how is
this
your own terms if the portmaster is springin’ a trap an’ you’re goin’ along for the ride?”

“Look, Simon, all I know is we’re going to die either way. He’s not going to open the gate, and we can’t fight through fifty ships in the dockyard; but I, for one, would rather die within inches of freedom with my back against the wall than in the dockyard. I dunno, it’s hard to explain…” She broke off prematurely. She didn’t want Simon to know she still had a sliver of hope that the portmaster would screw up and underestimate them somehow. After what had happened in The Boneyard and with the cargo container, there was a chance, and she didn’t want Simon’s negative vibes screwing up the last good feeling she would ever have. She wanted it to last as long as it could. “Besides, we’ve seen what’s inside the bore, right?—a whole lotta nuthin’—and if we get to the end and the gate’s not open and you still miss your fifty buddies in the fighters, I promise we’ll turn around.”

There was a pause and the static of the com gave Dezmara an aching, lonely feeling. Simon broke the sad reverie with an earnest chuckle, and her spirits lifted as high as they could under the circumstances. “That’s a deal, luv.”

“Sy, do me a favor, will ya? Doj is back there in the pipes to the right of the bulkhead as you face the doorway. Will you turn up the volume on the com for a sec?”

“Right, luv.” There was a moment of silence and then Simon’s voice came back. “It’s done.”

“Doj, I don’t know how to say this, but if we don’t make it out of here—you were a good friend and I’ll miss you.” Dezmara took a deep breath and tried to fight off the emotion welling up inside her and the storms brewing in her green eyes. “Not yet, girl. Not yet.” She dabbed the beginnings of tears away from her face with the furry cuffs of her jacket and tried to distract herself by staring at the display in front of her.

“Luv?”

“Yeah, Sy?”

“There’s somethin’ I been meanin’ to tell you,” Simon said nervously, “an’ I don’t…well…I don’t really know how. I mean, I figure if this is it, then you should know, right?”

Dezmara assumed that this was an addendum to the ‘we’re going to die soon’ speech, and she didn’t want to make a bigger deal out of it than she already had, so she jumped in. “I know, Simon. I’m not good at this crap either, but I care about you too. You and Doj have been the only friends I’ve known, and if this is the end, then I’m happy to die by your side. Thanks for flyin’ with me, Sy.”