This Starry Deep (22 page)

Chapter 39 - Jonah

THE DOOR KEPT COMING. I could feel it before I saw it. My eyes caught up and I realized there was no way we’d get clear. So I reversed my ground tether. Instantly I started to move toward the door.

I jacked my shield up to a good ten feet and braced myself to meet the door anyway. I slammed into it and Shae hit it not long after. The door slowed, our combined gravpush making sure we weren’t pancaked by it.

The door hit the ground hard, toppling away from us, and we turned off our packs. We dropped the two or three feet to the ground. My knee gave and I hit, sitting. Shae grabbed my hand and yanked me back up. I increased the pressure on my brace and tested my leg. It’d hold.

Mud came over, shaking his head. “You guys could’ve told me about the alternate plan.”

“We made that up,” Shae admitted. “Never tried that before.”

“Worked though,” I said with a nod. “Good idea to remember it. Now let’s go find this hibernation tech.”

I selected a five-foot distance from the ground. Shae and Mud started running on foot and I kept up with them in the air. My knee would hold me but I couldn’t run, not now. I felt every one of my years just then. Watching my son run was fine - watching Shae, still fully able-bodied, hurt a bit, I admit.

My body wouldn’t keep up with my needs anymore. Not always. I didn’t want to adjust to that, but again and again, I had no choice. Not the problem that second, though: we were in the base but had no idea where we were going.

“Has to be down,” Mud said, pointing to a stairwell. “Why build an underground bunker and keep something precious in the lobby?”

We hit the stairwell and I took point, partly out of stubbornness. My blaster found its way to my hand - I didn’t remember drawing it, but that was fine. Guards started to floor the area; we could hear their boots above and blow us. I set my blaster for range, not power. It’d take a man down but not blow a hole clean through him.

We kept going down, watching the level doors get thicker. Boots above got closer and I glanced back to see Mud draw both sonic pistols. He sent a volley of shots bouncing up the stairwell. Screams replied.

Ahead of me, a batch of guards turned the corner and spotted us. They opened fire and I flattened against the wall. My blaster answered them and I heard two go down. There were still five down there, though, already calling for reinforcements. We were on a clock. Once we took out that door, any idea that we were playing fair had vanished.

Slon probably already knew, regardless. That decoy ship had landed and purposefully botched the landing, turning into a skidding ball of fire on the landing pad. Between those two events, Slon must have been making sure the tech we needed was being moved and put under extreme guard.

Something small and dark flew forward over my head and I turned away just before the grenade went off. Shae, helping clear a path. We kept going. I fired a few shots randomly through the smoke, just to add to the confusion below.

We left the stairway and hit the larger passageways. No way to know if we were on the right level, but I figured a change of scenery might be nice, and might confuse them some. A shot came out of nowhere and hit me in the arm. I cursed and fired back, lucky it hadn’t gotten my gun arm. We were being swarmed. Shae dove in front of me and threw herself at the guards. Mud wasn’t far behind her, the two of them going hand-to-hand out of sheer anger.

It was like watching a dance. A violent, brutal dance. I was never much of a technical fighter. I could take a person down easy enough, but I didn’t bother with grace. A fist was good enough for me. Shae and Mud though, they both loved to get their hands dirty. Limbs went everywhere and guards fell. Mud punctuated a few kicks with a sonic blast, just to make a point.

A guard got a shot in and hit Shae in the shoulder, right over her injury. She made a noise, a half-bitten scream, and said something to Mud. He came running back to where I was.

“Mom says duck and cover,” he told me, and he looked at me for an explanation. I shook my head.

“Anchor yourself to the floor and wall and ceiling. Just solidify yourself in place with the pack,” I told him, “and hang on.” Shae went down, curling into a ball on the floor. Guards piled on her.

The first few did it by choice. The rest found themselves flying at her uncontrollably, slamming into their comrades. We stayed silent as bits of loose debris from the hall added itself to the pile Shae was making. Seconds passed, feeling like they were creeping by. Then, suddenly, everything and everyone exploded outward, hitting walls and ceiling and floor with enough force that I was sure bones broke. I know I heard a few, through the din.

Shae stood and glared at her shoulder. She took a pill from an arm pouch and swallowed it. The pain pill would kick in fast, but wouldn’t be enough to dull her senses at that dosage. I popped one myself and bandaged my arm.

As we went over to her, I noticed one of the guards was in far more armor than the others. I reached down and grabbed him up. It took a few shakes to wake him up and his left arm dangled brokenly, but I didn’t care.

“Where were you coming from?” I demanded. More armor meant bigger thing to watch. Where he came from, we wanted to be.

The guard opened his big eyes and stared at me, uncomprehending. He said something in Hurkz and started to pass out again.

“Mud?” I asked.

“I don’t speak it much or well, but I’ll try.” He came over and I shook the guard awake again, adding a slap. Mud asked him something in Hurkz and made him repeat the answer, slower. “One level up, other side of the compound,” Mud said.

“Think it’s where they took the tech?” Shae asked.

“I don’t have a better idea,” I said, “either of you?”

They didn’t, so we set off. I took point again, by virtue of not being on my feet. We hit the stairwell door hard, Mud coming up and letting a few volleys of sonic shots go ricocheting up and down the stairs before we entered. We went up a level and left the stairway as fast as we had entered it. Guards were everywhere, all of them wearing thicker armor, same as the one we’d questioned.

Shae and I opened fire before ducking into the doorway to avoid the return volley. She held up a hand and nudged me aside. The hand she’d used had grenades in it. I watched them fly: one, two, three, and four, sent off in different directions. The hallway shook as they all went off at once.

“Baby,” I said gently.

“They’re down, aren’t they?” she replied before I could even finish my thought.

“Yeah, but we need the hallway still standing.”

She rolled her eyes in response and ducked out of the stairwell, crouched low. I followed, on foot now since we weren’t running, and Mud came out with me, facing the other direction, sonic pistols at the ready.

He fired two shots in quick succession and said “This way.” Shae and I came over and followed him. A thick security door stood there, glaring at us. “Door knocker?” he asked.

Shae shook her head and stood in front of the panel. “I’ll get it.” She pried the panel off and started to look around for her tools, patting her pockets down.

“I packed them. Left thigh, pockets three and four.” The thinsuit pockets were blended into the light armor in each, so they didn’t stand out unless you knew where they were. She dug into them and came out with a handful of tools.

The panel popped off the wall and Shae went to work. The door beeped once and she stuffed the tools away. “They really think people are stupid,” she said, sounding annoyed that it wasn’t harder. I reached for the door to help open it, forgetting for a second I’d been shot in that arm. I winced and dropped my arm to my side.

The room past the door contained nothing but another door. The lock looked far more complicated. Shae started working on it while Mud and I took up positions at the first door to watch her back.

A few shots came zinging out of nowhere and Mud and I returned fire toward the point of origin. The guards had taken up the same stairwell we’d used as protection. Mud slid a grenade down the hall toward them and started to shoot after it, confusing everything with noise and smoke and fire.

The guards fled the stairwell and made a straight, head-on run for us. Mud took a shot to the leg and I almost lost a hand. They were playing for keeps and we were still playing nice. Killing people isn’t good for you. I didn’t like to do it if I could manage to avoid it, but they were making it hard to keep that idea in my head.

Shae poked her head out between Mud and I. “They had the plans just sitting in there. All but under a spotlight. Either they think we’re really bad at this or they’re convinced they’re really, really good.”

“The Hurkz are convinced that they’re superior to everyone else,” Mud said, “and don’t seem to learn fast enough.”

“Their loss.” Shae shoved the plans in tight against her GravPack, sealing them into a large pouch there. “Now, do we have time to find Slon?” she asked.

I considered it. I would love to get my hands on him personally. I know Shae did, too. But no, it would be a bad idea to stop and try to find him. We still had two days’ travel to get back, and fleets that didn’t want to wait. A full week of waiting might do bad things as it was.

“I wish,” I said, “but we need to get out of here and get back as fast as possible.”

“Are you going to tell Chellox that?” Mud asked, “Because I don’t know if I’ll survive his fastest.”

Chapter 40 - Meanwhile

KNOWN AS JONAH’S TEAM, the small ship had found itself primed to take messages from one fleet to the other. They flew between the rear of the Tsyfarian fleet and the start of the human fleet that had flown here after them from Trasker Four. For a while everything had been peaceful.

Where once their main job had been search and rescue, the small group found themselves acting, unofficially, as diplomats. It was a role that none of them, save the Seer, enjoyed. And yet they carried on because it was their job.

The space between fleets grew tenser the longer time dragged on. The human fleet changed shifts, which required it to send half of its ships through the Tsyfarian fleet. The first few times the maneuver was done, no one minded. Each passing attempt brought more resentment, however.

The human shifts flew closer and closer to the Tsyfarian, almost daring them to react. It was the sort of tactic one uses when trying to provoke shots being fired. On the other hand, each fleet - knowing the other would be listening - had recently started to openly gripe about the other.

A Tsyfarian flight commander tried to put a stop to the verbal volleys as best he could. He knew, of course, that humans did not speak Tsyfarian, but also felt that the tone could be understood. He was not wrong. The human pack leaders, on their side, were doing the same, for the same reasons. The human flight leader also threatened to dock shore leave for any pilot who flew too close to a Tsyfarian ship.

They tried to hold the peace together. They failed.

The third day after the mission to Hurkz had left, fighting broke out on the border of Tsyfarian and human fleet space. It started by accident, as these things often do. A Tsyfarian pilot made a course correction, through sheer exhaustion, that took him into what was considered human space at that moment. He did this at the same time as the human shift change.

His drift across the paths of the human ships, full of pilots tired and overworked, was seen by one of those pilots as an act of aggression. A shot was fired. The shot was returned. War blossomed.

And the little ship flew straight to the start of the aggression, hoping that sight of them would return a level of calmness to the fleets. It had worked before, barely. It might have worked again, except this time open fire was being exchanged. The ship took several hits. The cabin filled with smoke and screams. From the outside, the ship poured smoke and fluid. The volleys of shots ceased as both sides wondered who had shot down Jonah’s hand-picked team. No one wanted to be responsible for it. That was, they all felt, a ship of nonaggressors. The neutral party, tied to the man who would help.

Destroying it would serve no purpose, and that fact, as the ship spun out of control and drifted out of the field of danger, stopped a full-scale war from erupting. Instead, both fleets sent in help.

Inside the ship, no one knew that their work had been successful yet again. They were trying to stop the loss of air, and of fuel. They tried to clean the cabin air and regain a breathable atmosphere. They fought for their lives, those four people, inside a small metal box that spun silently in the vastness of space.

Steelbox put out the fires as fast as he could spot them. He moved to the engine compartment to make sure that it was not on fire as well. His left leg had sprouted a shaft of metal, thrown there by the ship when it had first been hit. He slipped on his own blood once, but he knew better than to take the shaft out. He carried on with his job, knowing that if the ship could be saved, he, too, had a chance - but if not, bleeding out would be the least of his problems.

Olivet tried to work both communication consoles, finding the backup one shorted out but the main one functioning. He called for help and was answered. Thankful, he listened to directions and went to prepare the airlock for docking.

Bee tried to regain control of the ship. She called out to Kem, asking for diagnostic readings so that she would know how badly they had been hit. Kem didn’t reply, and Bee called out to him again, growing frustrated. Without that information she would be flying the ship blind. Bad enough that they were damaged. Trying to get the ship under control while not even knowing what systems fully worked would be impossible. Bee decided right then that she never wanted to fly again, if it meant piloting. She loved tech work, not this.

She called to Kem a third time and when he didn’t answer, Bee shut down her controls and unstrapped to pull his chair around so she could get his attention. What she saw caused her to scream loud enough that everyone else on the ship came running.

When they saw what was left of Kem’s body, and the half a navigation console that sat where his chest cavity had been, they grew silent. No one could help him. All they could do was mourn. Steelbox demanded that they put even that off until they had assured their continued existence. That way, they would have time to mourn. Olivet took Kem out of the chair, carefully, and laid his body aside, under an emergency blanket.

He then sat in the chair, ignoring the condition of it, and asked Bee if they could still fly the ship without the navigation console. Bee just stared ahead. Olivet asked again, in a calm whisper. Bee blinked, nodding. Together they worked to bring a secondary, emergency navigation console online. Olivet didn’t understand the wiring, or what he was actually doing, but Bee’s cold calmness directed him well.

By the time the Tsyfarian and human ships sat outside, helping right the ship with brute force slams against its sides, they had stopped the fires and brought the ship under control. They took boarders, then. They also accepted assistance gratefully, though they refused to abandon their ship.

Steelbox explained: they had been given a job, and that job wasn’t done yet.

Both fleets went back to waiting – a little more patient for another day.