Death Drop (50 page)

She could see their dismal fate: endlessly twisting through the suffocating cloud, their emaciated corpses still at their posts. Dezmara could barely hold onto the control stick now. Her eyes, resigned to death, led the slow march into oblivion as they rolled into the back of her skull. Her eyelids resisted longer, fluttering open and shut in protest. She was losing the fight, and just as the last of her consciousness flickered through her mind, the
Ghost
ripped from the cloud, streaming purple-red gas from its body.

Dezmara’s screen was flashing wildly, announcing that the starboard engine was damaged, and the auxiliary stabilizers were engaging to level the ship. But her senses weren’t quite clear yet and she wouldn’t get to enjoy the good news. As the ship righted itself and Dezmara came to, she saw letters flash across the screen and then the holodex spoke. The
Lodestar
and the
Maelstrom
had tracked them through the cloud. They were already within cannon range. With one engine, Dezmara couldn’t maneuver and there was no hope of outrunning them. And then the impact warning wailed to life.

Chapter 35: The
Triton

T
he
Lodestar
materialized out of the mist with forward cannons blazing, followed quickly by the
Maelstrom
in its cover position just off the lead ship’s portside stern and slightly elevated.

“We’re in the shite, luv!” The com was working again and Simon was filling it with every curse he knew.

“I know, godammit!” Dezmara shouted as she waggled the ship back and forth in a random zigzag pattern, trying to avoid the shell that would send them into the dark forever. But it was only a matter of time. Of course, she could escape herself—Simon had seen to that just before the run started by getting
The
Firebug
online—but there were two attackers and no guarantee that she could draw them both away from the
Ghost
. The thought of leaving Simon and Diodojo in a wounded and defenseless ship made her sick to her stomach. There was also the Zebulon—her livelihood and the only home she had known for the past three long years—and she was surprised to find the thought of leaving it made her feel like she would be abandoning another friend.

“You’ll all die if you don’t go; you have a chance to save them—go, godammit!” she thought to herself.

“Sy, I’m coming for The Bug. Keep her headed for Clara until I get there.”

“Copy that, luv,” Simon said. His tone was grave and it pierced Dezmara’s heart like an icy blade.

She unbuckled her harness and turned in her chair to face Diodojo. He was staring at her with huge opaline eyes, and he let out several distressed grunts as if to say that he understood and he would miss her too. “I have to try and save us, Doj. If it doesn’t work out, I love you.” She bent down and kissed his wet nose and then got up from her captain’s chair for possibly the last time and stepped past him. Diodojo’s lips pulled back over his pearly incisors, and three short roars burst from his mouth in farewell. Dezmara dabbed at her tears with the back of her sleeve and ran for the door. She hung her head and reached for the controls to open the portal with a trembling hand.

BOOM! BOOM!

Suddenly, she was on her back as the ship quaked furiously. Spikes of pain drove deep into her head from where she had banged it on the floor, and it felt like something inside her was trying to crush the already broken pieces of her ribs into a fine powder.

“Goddam you, Rilek!” she wheezed. She rolled to her stomach and pushed herself up from the floor. She stood on wobbly legs and clutched her side as she stumbled toward the control panel, steadying herself on the back of her chair. The impact warning was a constant screeching cry, and the words flashing on the screen in front of her might as well have read:
You have seconds to live; you’ll never find out who you are, where you came from, or what happened to the rest of the Humans—sorry!
Technically, the damage report said that the main deck had several holes in it from cannon fire.

She couldn’t make it down to engineering now even if she wanted to. And if that dismal bit of news wasn’t bad enough, the words that followed it were the nail in the proverbial coffin:
Portside engine failure
.

Rilek and Saraunt had managed to shoot out both of her engines. The
Ghost
was adrift in space with no defenses. They would be on Dezmara and company at any second. A well-placed shot at the fuel tank and it would all be over.

Dezmara stumbled around her captain’s chair and flopped dejectedly backward into it with no regard for her injuries. She let out a pained breath as she slammed against the back of the seat and stared, bleary eyed, past a craggy gray moon to port and on to Clara 591. Looking at the planet and knowing she would never get there was like looking at the gates of some utopian paradise forbidden to her by the cruel gods of fate. Swirls of white clouds floated lazily above a deep blue as the land, in vast shapes of dark brown and fertile black in their life-sustaining richness, taunted her. The ship was entirely dark save for the red light of the impact warning pulsing through the viewing panes of the cockpit like fleeting heartbeats. With its engines dead, the
Ghost
glided past Clara’s moon, as silent and dark as the tomb it was.

“Hostile ship approaching,”
the holodex announced casually,
“one kilometer.”

This was it. Rilek was moving in for the kill.

CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!

The
Maelstrom
was adding insult to injury by peppering the
Ghost
with machine gun fire from bow to stern for its part in the final coup de grace. Dezmara could hear the bullets rattling up the ship: if a single one pierced the armor covering engineering, Simon would be sucked through the hole and strained into space like a meat milkshake. The same went for her and Diodojo if one of the rounds found its way into the cockpit.

“Hostile ship approaching—three hundred meters.”

Besides Simon, Rilek’s gunner was the best Dezmara had seen, and she knew he wouldn’t miss now that they were so close. But the admiral must have realized that the
Ghost
was no longer a threat, and the
Lodestar
inched even closer to make certain he destroyed her completely.

A CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK announced that Saraunt was still blasting away.
“Hostile ship—fifty meters.”

The
Lodestar
pulled alongside and Dezmara could see Rilek’s big deck guns swing to starboard and take aim at the fuel tanks located belowdecks under engineering. “Sy…” she said.

“I know, luv, seen ‘em on my screen. Feel like we’ve been doin’ too much of this lately.”

“There’s nothing left to say—this one’s the real deal.”

“Right, luv…like I said, some things I wish I’d toldya”

“Save it,” she said bluntly. “You’ve been my friend, Sy, and I’m gonna miss you. Dezmara out.”

“So long, luv,” he said into the disconnected com. “I’m sorry.”

Dezmara stood up. The thick material of her flight suit was made to keep out the cold and didn’t absorb moisture by design, but she dragged her sleeve across her face anyway, adding to the collection of damp streaks she had deposited there earlier. She sniffed heavily and then let out a steadying breath before tugging at the bottom of her flight jacket to straighten it. Dezmara was ready to die. She patted Diodojo on the head one last time, to which he purred loudly, and then she leaned over the console and put her middle finger to the viewing pane as her final goodbye to Admiral Rilek.

Dezmara glared at the conning tower of the
Lodestar
—it was so close she could see the shapes of the crew at their posts and one dark figure standing in the center of the deck—but something moved into her peripheral vision. She fully intended to scowl at them until they blasted her to pieces—a last act of defiance and the only ammunition she had left—but she couldn’t fight her instincts, and her head drifted reluctantly upward followed by her eyes.

This time, Dezmara wasn’t confused, and she wasn’t spinning out of control through the blinding haze of
The Cloud of Lost Kings
. All the instruments were working properly and her senses were heightened by her coming death. She was in clear space and there, on the port side of Rilek, appearing out of the center of Clara’s moon, was the gleaming silver bow of a ship, turning quickly to draw parallel with their course. Strange bolts of blue current danced wildly around the hull of the mystery craft, inching backward to reveal more and more of the strange vessel. As she drifted past, Dezmara could see that the ship wasn’t appearing from nowhere, but had been lying in wait; hovering close to the moon, its smooth skin appearing gray and cracked, marred with craters—a perfect reflection of the surface—and the crackling electric fire was erasing the flawless camouflage like millions of writhing, magical lights.

Dezmara stood at the viewing panes of the cockpit with her crude gesturing finger frozen against the panel, but she had forgotten about Rilek completely and her eyes, bursting with amazement, were fixed on the new spectator at her execution. She had never seen anything like it before. The prow of the ship was pulled forward, converging to a point that was purposefully squared off at its end and capped by columns of arched blades that glimmered silver-blue in the glow of Clara 591’s indigo reflection. The underside of the battering ram flared abruptly downward for some distance and then curved slightly forward to form the tip of the vessel’s razor sharp keel. The bottom edge of the ship swept back, bowing thickly outward for three quarters of the craft’s length and then narrowing more quickly at the rear. The tail section of the ship consisted of two parts: the lower half was a spike that jutted wickedly down on a diagonal and looked like the tail fin of a menacing sea beast from some prehistoric world; the top half curved upward in a sweeping arch that curled over itself and ended in an elegant flourish.

The hull shape was unique and would have been enough to capture Dezmara’s imagination, but it was the top half of the ship that left her awestruck. There was a dark line that would have clearly marked two weather decks—one at the bow and another at the stern—separated by what would have been a waist deck if the the top of the ship had been open to the elements. But it wasn’t. A shimmering dome, like the chambered shell of a giant Wadiian Nautilus made of liquid metal, arched from bow to stern and seamed perfectly with the gunwale.

The
Ghost
was slightly ahead of the the
Lodestar
and the
Maelstrom
—leading its own funeral procession toward the blue planet in the distance—and as the mystery craft turned hard to port, Dezmara caught a quick glimpse down its long flank. Its side was lined with three rows of round doors. Each portal was a perfect circle that spiraled out from the center in overlapping sections: miniature replicas of the half-shell dome immediately above and concealing what Dezmara was certain was an exotic, alien interior. The ornately decorative shapes were strangely beautiful, but as captivating as they were, she knew they had a deadly purpose; and, as if her very thought triggered the action, that purpose cracked the shell coverings and hatched with awful fury.

The captain of the vessel was good and as he made his turn, the spiraling portals opened, each section peeling back into the next, just enough to allow the cannon barrels hidden beneath the metameric doors to extend through the diameter. Each glinting tube coughed orange in quick succession, so the aftmost gun fired just as the arching tail of the ship swung parallel to its prey.

Jets of fire erupted from the
Lodestar
and then were gone, quenched by the sterile emptiness outside its breached hull. Glossy oil paintings; vases with colorful patterns in blue, green and gold; antique furniture with intricately carved legs and arms of exotic dark wood; and locked trunks with unknown contents hemorrhaged from the gaping wounds and tumbled on every axis into the ether.

Dezmara watched. Without control of her ship and with no weapons, she was a captive to the unfolding melee, and disbelief numbed her from head to toe as she took in the scene. She was watching a conflict that, no matter the outcome, would change her life forever, but she wasn’t sure if that change would be for good or ill. She crinkled her brow and snapped a look at the com before being pulled back to the action outside the window. Her nervous mind craved the battle—or more accurately, the outcome of the battle—but a thought from a more reasonable place took over. “Sy, are you there?”

“Luv…I can’t…I can’t believe this is happenin’.” Simon sounded more entranced than she did.

“I need you to focus,” Dezmara said sharply. Pangs of guilt bored into her stomach for telling Simon to do something she was having a hard time doing herself, but she pressed on. “The engines. Any chance we can get’em back?”

“The starry is shot, luv, but I think I might be able to work a little magic with the porter—think it’s jammed with shrapnel. If I can clear it out, she might turn over.”

“Do it as quick as you can. I need at least one engine and flight controls to keep us from becoming a pile of scrap on Clara’s surface.”

“Right, luv!”

She had never felt so helpless before. Dezmara was torn between the possibility of living and having to prepare for her death again. The previous, which she preferred, required a miracle with a huge side order of luck as well as flight controls and an engine.
“Was that it? Can you think of anything else?”
It occurred to her that if Simon couldn’t get the main engine back on line, she might be able to work with the auxiliary stabilizers and she blinked from her trance and reached for the console, but before she could hail the engine room, she was wrenched back to the window by movement.