Senescence (Jezebel's Ladder Book 5) (40 page)

Kaguya faded in and out of consciousness. Her pain only
lessened when she traveled Out-of-Body like a ghost.
Is this what life is
like now for Mo and Sif?
In this form, she discerned people as aural
patterns, like the false colors in infrared imaging. She knew the three-story
ship inside and out from twenty years of fine tuning. Perhaps this was only a
trance dream.

The NERO field hospital had a
handful of UN guards arguing to search the saucer, but the Chinese troops
refused to let them board through the first-floor airlock. This was not a UN
base, so they had no jurisdiction. After the mine scientists, Smokey, and Eowyn
disembarked, processing the refugees took several hours. Everyone entering the
Earth-facing NERO base had to go through additional decontamination and answer
questions about their whereabouts for the previous week. Infectious-disease
protocols had been activated.
The Seven Seals.

Then Stu requested that the crew
refuel and top off other supplies so the trip home would go smoothly. He was
stalling for some reason.

Her son-in-law sat in the ship’s second-floor
common area, below the bridge, trying to make her comfortable. Stu had dark
circles around his eyes and looked exhausted. As he mopped her brow with a damp
cloth, his bright aura swirled with grief. “You did a great job with this ship.
Everything is so efficient. Commander Zeiss is going to be so pleased with
everything you’ve done. I already radioed in a successful mission with a slight
delay.”

Across the common room, a man with
a commanding presence huddled with Yvette. From his voice, this had to be
Oleander’s brother, Colonel Johann Dahlstrom. “It’s been a day since the
incident. Wouldn’t she be better off at the hospital?”

“Stu won’t leave without her. The
doctor didn’t see any permanent damage, but Kaguya still can’t see. It may be
psychosomatic, a kind of self-punishment for the deaths of the others.” As they
chatted, Yvette practiced active-listening techniques on the colonel and
touched him frequently. She was flirting! Johann had to be in his early forties
and recently divorced.

I guess after a mind wipe and thirteen
years of recovery, she’s ready to try again.
Kaguya couldn’t blame the
nurse for wanting to be happy or for getting a jump on the competition. Being
the odd person out in a completely paired world would be very lonely.
As
lonely as waiting for your soul mate’s wife to die.

Kaguya wandered below decks to
avoid the echoes of intimacy. Half of the Chinese soldiers were clustered beside
the airlock connected to the NERO base. They were distrustful statues who spoke
in their native tongue. One of them was a low-grade Active. From his
vocabulary, the Active wasn’t a programmer or scientist. Given the context,
that meant he was most likely an Override, a knockoff from the breeding
program. The UN had outlawed experimentation with the dangerous Override genes,
but old-fashioned baby-making from raw components was considered a basic human
right.

The leader of the assault team,
Lieutenant Xiang, froze her blood with his first statement. “The bounty on the
Mori bitch has gone up to twenty million Yuan, but she has to be alive to lure
out the old man. Dead, she’s only worth five.”

The largest man asked, “Can we have
fun with her first?”

“Only if we make it the
proof-of-life video. She’ll need to hold a dated newspaper in her mouth like a
dog bone,” Xiang joked. After his men chuckled, he continued, “Right now, we
ask to accompany their team to the biosphere one more time. They owe us for our
assistance and the loss of our shuttle. We tell them the viruses are everywhere
now on Earth and beg asylum. That much is true. Officials have already begun
the first phases of quarantine.”

“The blonde in charge told us
Sanctuary
wouldn’t allow us entrance. There’s an upper limit to the supportable
population.”

“Then we shoot people until they
see it our way,” Xiang replied.

Startled, Kaguya hopped back to her
body. Eight heavily armed men against fourteen
Sanctuary
citizens—no,
twelve. Two of the crew members were still outside fueling, and she felt
useless.

If even one armed pirate reached
the interior of
Sanctuary
, where the Magi had banned weapons, they could
take over the entire biosphere. She had to stop them before that.

Oleander had the only gauss rifle.
Her brother might have a sidearm. Had the sneak suit been buried with Sif? From
the audible tower chatter, the reinforced cockpit door remained wide open. She
had to act quickly to keep the pirates from winning. She had to limit the
hostages and close that cockpit door.

Pulling Stu closer, she whispered
in his ear, “Collision drill, now!”

“What? You’re delirious. Relax.
We’re taking you home,” he replied gently.

“Chinese are Trojans. Pirates. One
is an Override. Trust—” Her watch beeped a warning. “Sneak suit!”

She hadn’t spotted the man while
she was Out-of-Body. The Chinese had crude, bulky sneak suits, too big for
urban usage, but their assassins wore mu shielding to be able to sneak up on
Actives. This one had been spying in the common area, probably waiting to make
his move on the bridge.

Stu didn’t turn or overreact in the
lunar gravity; rather, he unsheathed the family sword and braced himself
against the bed frame. Then he plunged the blade backward into the attacker’s
waist, using the pirate’s momentum to increase the damage.

Kaguya groped for the unseen
killer’s throat, hoping her talents could paralyze the spy’s vocal chords so he
couldn’t shout for help. When this failed, she released her watch’s electrical
charge against his throat. “Shock.”

Stu pulled the blade out and struck
again.
Good boy.

Hot blood poured everywhere,
covering her. Dizzy, she fell over. Every death ripped her open with fresh
guilt, but if she didn’t face it, paradise would be raped and pillaged by
pirates.

“Colonel Dahlstrom. Sound collision
drill,” Stu shouted.

Dahlstrom slammed the door between
the mid and lower levels before climbing up into the cockpit.

Yvette ran over with a blanket and
wrapped the bloody, dead man. “We’ll put him in the freezer.”

Kaguya covered the blood on her
chest by fumbling out an entire stack of blankets.

Alarms sounded. Though she couldn’t see them, she knew that
the lights flashed orange. Alcoves opened all over the outer ring of the ship.
She slipped out of her body to watch the drama.

Just as Stu shuffled into the
walk-in freezer with the evidence, several Chinese soldiers leapt into the
common room. “What is it?”

“I was stowing the last of the
beef,” he called through a crack in the door. That much blood couldn’t be wiped
off, so he was removing his suit. “Ask the colonel.”

Dahlstrom came over the
loudspeaker. “
Saint Bernard
has been sealed. Because of a health
concern, all Earth landings have been suspended. All crew at the base are
reassigned to the refugee ships coming in. We’ve been ordered to clear the pad
immediately. All personnel, strap in to the nearest open crash alcove. Prepare
for emergency liftoff.”

Use the plague story against
them, right.
Back in her body, Kaguya belted herself into the foldout bed
where she lay. That one act filled her with such nausea and self-revulsion that
she was forced out of her skin again.

Yvette turned up her suit heater
and hid in the freezer for another opportunity.

Stu came out of the freezer
unarmed. He helped the Chinese and several NERO crew members snap into safety
harnesses recessed into the walls around the rim of the craft. Once the
airtight door closed, each bay doubled as an escape pod that held up to three
people. Kaguya noted the bay numbers.

After two soft thumps on the hull,
Dahlstrom announced, “Decoupling complete. Launch in ten … nine …”

Stu climbed into a harness of his
own.

At “zero” the acceleration pushed
her down into the bed so hard Kaguya could barely breathe. With her arm
weighing as much as her entire body, she fumbled for the intercom. “Eject.
Pods. Six and seven.” Three enemies and one valued specialist occupied those
pods as they blasted away from the ship. That would improve the odds. This
close to the surface, the escape pods should survive … unless they hit the
power station.
I might have accidentally killed them or someone on the lunar
surface.

She would have searched the lower
escape pods for more pirates to eject, but the seizures from the Ethics feedback
felt like someone had turned on a blender inside her skull.

****

Yvette had vowed not to break her cover, but Kaguya’s
screams tore at her. When the ship slowed from three gravities to just over one,
she crawled to the locker door to peek out. Blood was seeping from Mori’s
mouth. She wasn’t going to make it unless someone intervened.
Damn Ethics
Page
. At two gravities, Yvette could crawl
. I could have saved
Sanctuary
.
Instead, I get to rescue the Devil’s daughter.

Nobody had locked the hatch between
levels or adequately mopped up the splatter from the sword fight. When Xiang
climbed out of the hatch, Yvette almost jumped.
I can’t lie, and he’s going
to ask me what happened.
She decided on taking the medical route. “You,
grab that med kit over there. Don’t slip on her blood. Don’t ask me what she
has because I’m not allowed to share her condition. I need sedative, sutures …
Hell, bring everything.”

Stu was out of his straps, already
moving toward the first-aid gear.

While Xiang was distracted, Yvette
tucked the sword under her patient.

“Where are my men from this level?”
asked Xiang, sliding his weapon into position.

“We told you we couldn’t lift that
much mass.” Stu shouldered Xiang aside to deliver the supplies to his
mother-in-law. “We had to leave three of our own behind, too. That’s as fair as
we could make it in under a minute.”

Xiang couldn’t ask about his
invisible man without tipping his hand. “Why such a hurry?”

“Someone kicked a hornet’s nest on
Earth. We need to be clear of the area before we get sucked into the next war.”
Stu reached out for the intercom, and his hand paused briefly at the blood
there before he tapped the button. “Colonel Dahlstrom, proceed on approach
vector …”

The numbers were meaningless to
Yvette. She tranquilized Kaguya. As Mori had helped to design the med kit,
there were specially labeled drugs for talents with allergies. One of interest
was labeled “for Berserk Overrides.” She palmed that particular syringe for
later and prepared for minor surgery to repair Kaguya’s acidic tongue.

Dahlstrom ordered, “All hands,
rebalance the middle level unless you want to shake to pieces.”

“I suggest we start by jettisoning
the meat locker,” Stu said over the intercom.

“Roger. That will get us over
halfway. Proceed immediately.”

Yvette nudged Xiang. “Secure that
weapon, and haul a few kilos worth of gear over to the bay next to the missing
ones. The colonel will tell you when to stop.”
We have to give them a chance
to comply before using force.

Xiang appropriated the weapons from
two of his men and ordered them to help. He stashed all three rifles by the
airlock but kept his pistol, a close-range slug thrower with frangible rounds
that could shatter on impact to avoid damaging the hull. The rounds did nasty
things to internal organs. The final pirate stood beside the arsenal safe, his
gauss gun at the ready. “Just in case the UN ship catches up to us.”

Stu cleaned up evidence of the
bloody scuffle. Then he put on a sterile mask and held Kaguya’s hand. Casually,
he tucked the bottom sheet around the sword.

When Yvette finished with the
patient, she took names and medical information from the pirates, trying to
detect if any of them could be the Override, who would be just as deadly as a
gun in enclosed spaces. Evidence of steroids perhaps, but she didn’t find the
tell-tale No Limits tattoo. Any one of them could still have the capability to
trigger adrenaline surges and ignore pain. Watching the grace they moved with,
they certainly knew more martial arts than she did.

She asked the three
English-speaking pirates if each would be remaining on the
Saint Bernard
until it departed
Sanctuary
. They all grunted a “Sure” or “Yeah.” As an
empath, she knew they were lying.

On a medical pad, she typed her
summary in German and emailed it to Oleander. Even if it were captured, only
the colonel had the authority to read her message buffers. The reply came back,
“Tell Stu, no adventures until we have atmosphere.” The rendezvous with
Sanctuary
would take hours. They were effectively hostages. She gripped the syringe in
her pocket the whole trip.

The
Saint Bernard
floated in zero g at the rendezvous
coordinates, waiting to be scooped. All drives and Icarus generators were shut
down. “So we can’t be spotted from Earth or tracked by other ships,” Stu
explained to Yvette, where the pirates could overhear.

Colonel Dahlstrom ordered, “Wait in
the crash position until
Sanctuary
arrives.”

Stu and Yvette took positions on
either side of the unconscious Kaguya, ready to intervene if her monitors
dipped or a pirate took an interest in her.

The Chinese soldiers refused to
strap in, roaming the ship instead.
When gravity kicks in, they’re in for a
surprise.

When the adrenaline wore off, Stu
drifted off into an unintentional nap.

Xiang shook him awake. “You are one
of their pilots. What is taking so long?”

How long have I been out?
Feeling guilty, Stu checked to make sure the women were safe. “Above my pay
grade, sir. Commander Zeiss has a reason for everything.”

“Call them on the radio,” Xiang
suggested.

“They won’t let me onto the bridge.
That level is on lockdown.”

Xiang called for his men, and two
of them showed up glowering. The threat was clear as he motioned Stu toward the
cockpit door. “Have them patch you through to
Sanctuary
and tell us
what’s happening.”

Stu complied.

A few moments later, Zeiss spoke
over the intercom. “Mr. Llewellyn, we’re a little busy with a medical
emergency. To clear the medical stasis bay for you, we started Herk’s surgery.
We have over a dozen medical professionals trying to save him. Even Laura and
Kelley are doing lab work and blood draws. Joan says she only saw two of the
heavy new suits left in the landing bay for unloading.”

She only saw two ranged weapons
on her scouting run to the
Saint Bernard
.
“I think I saw two other
lighter models that could do the job in a pinch. Have her look again.”

Zeiss replied, “I’ll call her, but
she’s all alone at that end of the biosphere. It’s likely to be a few more
hours until the rest of us are ready.”

When Stu removed his finger from
the intercom Send button, Xiang asked the pirate next to him, “Who is Joan?”

“Thirteen-year-old girl. She fell
in a swimming pool on her first mission and almost died. It’s where we got that
helmet to analyze.”

Xiang smiled. “That works for us.
Tell your Zeiss we have an urgent medical issue of our own and need to land so
you can use the regeneration pods.”

“No,” Stu said, stalling. “Z would
need to hear the medical emergency declaration from the nurse, and she can’t
lie.”

Xiang pulled out his pistol and
fired point-blank into Yvette stomach. “She won’t be lying now.” Clutching her
midriff, Yvette wailed and tried to hold the vital fluids in. “It’s a slow,
painful death. She should last hours, but I’ll pick another victim in sixty
minutes if my demands are not met or if you tell your people what has happened.
If you persuade the colonel to open the door to the cockpit, however, I will
let you patch her wound and administer pain killers.”

In moments,
Sanctuary
signaled their approach. “Forty minutes. Brace for impact.”

The crew on the bridge abandoned
their posts to save Yvette. While Lieutenant Xiang took possession of
Saint
Bernard’s
upper deck, Stu and the Dahlstroms cut open the nurse’s suit and
sedated her. Oleander, the one with the most experience at rescue triage, glued
and sprayed the area. “God, there’s no exit wound. I’m sealing this all inside
her.”

Before the medicine kicked in,
Yvette passed the huge syringe of knockout drugs to Oleander.

Stu blocked the pirates’ view of
the handoff as he collected bloody garments. “A pod will save her, or the surgeons
will. Either way, we need to strip her down to her skivvies carefully. Put her
on a stretcher so she’s ready to go.”

Colonel Dahlstrom climbed back into
the cockpit to argue with Xiang. “Impact means I need my landing gear deployed.
I can’t do that unless all the hatches between levels are locked.”

“Very well. I will remain here on
the bridge with two members of your crew. My men hold the only airlock. The rest
of the crew will be confined to the center level. Confiscate all communication
devices. Will that be secure?”

A pirate next to Xiang replied,
“That is how NERO transports prisoners. The inner doors to the missing escape
pods won’t open unless we flush all the air into space to equalize the pressure.
No one on the center floor is going anywhere.”

“Once we overwhelm the two people who
come to assist us from
Sanctuary
, the alien ship will be ours. Just to
be sure there are no problems, confiscate Llewellyn’s spacesuit. I’ve heard he
fancies himself a hero.”

****

Being swallowed by the mother ship was now old hat for Stu.
When Mira broadcast the two-minute warning, he knew two things. First, the
impact would happen early. Mira always did that sort of thing in her tests to
throw people off. Second, Joan was making her final sweep Out-of-Body. Stu spoke
to the air. “Tell your mom to hit Xiang during the bounce and kill the lights.
I’ll distract the others.” He shoved the Mori family sword through the bridge
hatch’s wheel so that his enemy couldn’t surprise him from behind.

Stu watched the ship’s docking through
the clear wall panel of a missing escape pod.

With admirable skill, Colonel
Dahlstrom rotated the airlock door to line up with the large, gold hangar doors
on the interior of the landing bay.
Saint Bernard
had perhaps a meter of
clearance on all sides as it lowered through the lens. Stu had never brushed
this close to the hull before. He grabbed the release handle and braced.

As expected, Mira goosed the
velocity at the last instant, jarring teeth and knocking over everyone who
wasn’t strapped in. The NERO lights went out at the same time as the landing
bay’s illumination.
But Gravity Boy was never afraid of the dark.

Because the bay was pressurized, Stu
was able to pop the escape pod panel and dive outside. A security alarm sounded
inside the NERO vessel. The two-story drop didn’t hurt in the landing bay’s microgravity,
but he bounced twice before collapsing in a heap.
No one saw that.

When he heard someone rattling at
the hatch behind him, he sprinted for the hangar door on impulse and promptly
tripped over the NERO landing gear. He slid into the gold foil face first.
“Open,” he said, gripping his nose.

The Magi door folded aside, and he
attached two sets of sticky straps in the darkness, just like he did when he
was supposed to be sleeping in Olympus when Dad was working a shift.

As he leapt into the
downward-spiraling hallway, the overhead light came on, spotlighting him for
the Chinese pirates. Enemy helmet lights peered in his direction. Their eyes
met through the glass beside the NERO airlock door. He braced himself against
the outer curve of the hall. His record was eighteen seconds to the
decontamination door. “Zero g,” he ordered. The minimal weight eased.

Stu waited until the airlock light
turned green before he launched. The stutter of a gauss rifle on full automatic
rattled behind him, firing through the open airlock door. The overhead light
continued to follow him, as did the sparks of the ricochets.
Ouch. Didn’t
think about that
. He pushed harder off the wall at the next landing. This
run wouldn’t break his record, but hopefully it would be fast enough to evade
the rifle’s targeting computers.

The three armed men leapfrogged
after him at an even pace with practiced skill.

A high-pitched whine filled the air
before him, and not a healthy one. The machine in question sounded sick, out of
phase, and on the verge of blowing every fuse it had.

Panting hard, Stu waited at the
decontamination door until he heard the overhead speakers. “Warning: no weapons
are permitted beyond this point.” The alert repeated in three languages as Stu
pried open the secret passage to the elevator shaft. There was no elevator car
present, so he grabbed one of the superconductor panels instead.

A head poked around the curve.

A little closer. Stand in front
of that lead backstop.
“Hasta la vista!” Stu shouted as he jumped down the
shaft to safety. In freefall, he gripped the meter-long panel in front of him
like a surfboard.

He heard the decontamination room’s
door slide open and the chatter of multiple gauss guns. Then the hall above him
lit up like a flash bulb as the synchrotron generator fired
.
The hard
part had been to arrange the ambush so the focused radiation blast wouldn’t
harm anything vital in
Sanctuary
or on the NERO ship.
It just gets
rid of visitors who don’t follow the charter.

Against all odds, someone staggered
through the shaft entrance with a roar. He must have been crouched behind the
other two.

Stu did not want to meet someone
who only got pissed off by that much radiation. “I think we found the Override guy.”
He pushed off from the shaft wall again.

Tracking the sound, the berserk
pirate launched himself downward. “I kill you with my bare hands.”

Holy crap! He could catch me.
Stu increased the pace until he knew the speed could break bones. Then he saw
the twinkle of stars from the biosphere. The command saucer was gone from the
end of the shaft. On the bright side, crew and the surgeons were completely
safe. On the downside, there was no way to brake in time. He could only adjust
his angle slightly to clear the edge of the water tower’s pipe.

Predictably, the pirate followed
soon after. The Override gloated for a few moments before they both hit apogee.

Stu mentally ordered the local
gravity to increase to five gs. He fell fast and barely clicked the On button
for his hover board in time. The pirate didn’t have such a parachute and hit
the brick road at a third of the speed of sound.

“Featherfall,” Stu ordered just
before he splashed down into the swamp water.

Fortunately, Monty and nine other
toughs rose out of the water around him, offering a hand.

“Why did you stop firing the laser
cannon?” Stu asked.

“He dropped his weapon,” Snowflake
replied.

Accepting a towel, Stu wiped mud
from his face. “One pirate survived. He’s with Oleander in the cockpit.”

Monty shook his head. “Naw. Joan
waltzed into
Saint Bernard
invisible as soon as they left the airlock
door open. She’s a good fighter. At worst, he surrenders, and we have to offer
him asylum.”

Stu hobbled over to the Override,
just to make sure he was dead. When he saw the face, all trace of victory
drained out of him. From his features, the man on the bricks wasn’t ethnic
Chinese. The Override could have been Apelu’s knockoff son, Mo’s half-brother.
With that speculation, his best friend died all over again. Stu no longer
wanted to be a superhero when he grew up. He just wanted to stop the killing.
“Mom, please use the robots to haul Yvette to a pod soonest.”

“Go home and shower, dear. We’ll
tie up the loose ends.”