“We would have made great kids, Pen,” he heard himself say when a momentary lull in the cacophony around them made normal speech possible. He hadn’t intended to say anything remotely like that, but he knew after he had said it that it was something he had wanted to say in some form for quite some time.
“We still might,” she retorted, briefly making eye contact with him before completing the cut through the bracket’s base and sending the lopsided chunk of metal to the deck beneath Pen’s feet.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” he grumped, pulling the red-hot piece of metal out by one of its cool corners. A loud groaning sound echoed through the ship as he flipped the bracket to the side, and he knew the ship was about to give up the proverbial ghost.
“I’ve got it!” he heard from the corridor which led to the ship’s machine shop, and Tiberius turned to see the Bastard’s top machinist, Michael Horgan, come down the corridor with a bulky transfer pump cradled in his burly, gnarled forearms which had handled more metal in their time than anyone else who had served aboard the dying warship.
Running to his side, Tiberius grabbed an end of the device and helped Horgan bring the pump to where Penelope was waiting anxiously with outstretched hands.
“Good work, Mike,” she said as the trio carefully maneuvered the pump into position. “Now get to the pod and get off this ship—that’s an order.”
“No can do, ma’am,” the burly machinist said with a smirk as he produced a pocket welder and began to tack the pump into place. “We go together or not at all—either way’s fine with me, but first we need to get this thing up and running.”
The ship lurched beneath them and the tack welds broke loose, sending the hundred kilo pump to the bottom of the access tube—with Tiberius’ hand beneath it!
After Tiberius’ vision cleared, he realized he was screaming like a madman and quickly clamped his teeth down—biting the edge of his tongue as he did so—and forced himself to stop screaming. The pain was tremendous, and rather than appraise the wound he looked away and tucked the certainly-mangled limb into his pocket while attempting to help as best he could with his one remaining good hand.
“That should do the trick,” Pen declared with muted enthusiasm after a few seconds of welding opposite the expert machinist. “How long will it last?” she asked, sparing a sympathetic glance at Tiberius’ bloody pocket as the XO leaned up against the bulkhead with increasingly unsteady feet. It only took her a few seconds to connect power and control lines to the pump, and when she was finished she slithered out of the tube, making good use of her diminutive frame as she squeezed through an opening so small that Tiberius would never have been able to do likewise.
“Long enough for us to go to the nearby junction and activate—“ Horgan began, only to be cut off when the pump fired up and began to transfer the coolant from the lone remaining heat sink to its counterpart’s reservoir. “Who in the Saint’s name did that?” the machinist asked, the color flushing from his face.
“The ship…” Tiberius said numbly, his mental faculties beginning to fail him for reasons he could not properly identify at that particular moment. “It’s gone sentient…I knew I shouldn’t have let Guo—“
The next thing he knew, he was propped up against the bulkhead and shaking his head lazily.
“He’s gone clammy and is losing a lot of blood,” Horgan said as Tiberius’ hand flared with pain. “We need to get to the pod—now!”
“Agreed, let’s carry him,” Pen affirmed.
“I’ll help,” a woman’s voice came from behind them as they helped Tiberius to his feet. The Lieutenant turned dumbly and saw Lieutenant Commander McKnight coming down the corridor, bracing herself against a nearby strut as the ship shook all around them. “We need to get out of here.”
“You activated the pump?” Horgan concluded with grudging respect. “I thought you’d fled with the rest of the bridge crew on your assigned escape pod.”
“Some rules are harder to break than others,” McKnight quipped. “I wasn’t about to abandon my ship while you three were working to save our shipmates. The com-links were down for some reason, so I waited at the junction to see the pump’s board light up. When it did, I threw the switch.”
“That was a lucky guess, ma’am,” Pen said as the two women helped Tiberius move down the corridor. “Are you going to puke again?” she asked, and Tiberius found himself looking at his commanding officer expectantly as he awaited a reply. It took him a few seconds to realize that Pen had been asking him if he was going to puke…but the ‘again’ part was confusing.
“I didn’t pu—“ he began to protest before doubling over and doing precisely as she had suggested he had done. His stomach was thankfully empty, but in that moment he found little solace in that fact since it meant he had almost certainly emptied it during his previous blackout.
“Here we are,” Horgan declared. “Let’s get in and blast off; I don’t know how long that pump will hold—“
A loud bang echoed through the corridor, and it was followed by a profoundly insidious hissing noise which sounded like nothing so much as a horde of snakes assessing a potential meal. Tiberius quickly realized that the pump had indeed failed and that coolant was now leaking into the main compartment of the ship—which was a death sentence for anyone caught in the cloud of superheated liquid.
“Speak of the Demon,” Pen muttered frantically, “move!”
They lurched forward as the ship rocked beneath them yet again—likely from yet another in a long sequence of explosive decompressions—and quickly found themselves in the cramped escape pod where one person was already waiting.
“Helena?” McKnight asked after they had entered the pod and Pen had initiated the detachment sequence. “What are you doing here?” the ship’s commanding officer asked as they strapped into their respective harnesses, with Horgan helping secure Tiberius before seeing to himself.
“I will not abandon my comrades,” Helena, the Bastard’s Tracto-an medical technician said, eyeing Tiberius’ mangled hand and producing a handful of implements from a nearby med-kit. “I suspected there would be burns or other injuries, so I waited for you to arrive.”
“I appreciate the thought,” Tiberius said weakly, his mouth drawn into a tight line as he leaned back in his seat.
As soon as they were all strapped in, Pen reached over and activated the ejection sequence. The pod lurched away from the hull of the Freedom’s Bastard, snapping Tiberius’ head back hard enough to give him a brief blackout. When his vision returned, he felt himself floating in his harness as the ship’s gravity was no longer extended to the escape pod.
Unstrapping herself, Helena pushed across the open, circular chamber and floated toward Tiberius. Tiberius’ wits were slowly returning, and the pace at which they did so hastened significantly after the ship’s medic injected a cocktail of some kind into his neck.
“Let me see it,” she urged with the calm, yet commanding tone he had come to expect of lifelong health care providers, and Tiberius grudgingly put his mangled hand forward for her to inspect. She gave him another injection, this one near his elbow, and the pain in his hand seemed to vanish a few seconds later. “This is not so bad,” she said as she began to remove the blood with a sonic tool, which sent the partially congealed tissue splattering against the nearby bulkhead.
For a moment, Tiberius focused on his memory of the pod’s technical specifications—noting with particularly morbid interest that this particular pod’s outer shell was less than a centimeter thick.
Pain flared in his hand, and he looked down to see that his third and fourth fingers were missing. “Where are they?” he asked in confusion.
“Two fingers is a small price to pay,” Helena quipped. “I have seen warriors lose the use of their legs…and I have even seen them regain use of them when doing so should have been impossible. You will survive,” she said, placing a hand firmly on his chest, and in that moment he actually came to terms with the fact that h
e had lost his fingers. “Now hold still while I cauterize your blood vessels.”
Tiberius leaned his head back, opting not to watch the rest of the procedure as he did his best to keep from retching a third time.
“I guess you’re not as bad as they say, Captain,” Pen said with some small fraction of her usual, spunky cheer. “Thanks for sticking around; we wouldn’t have made it out of there if you hadn’t activated the pump for us.”
“I wasn’t about to abandon you,” McKnight said stiffly, before adding in a slightly less confident tone, “but I’m as glad as you are that we got off in one piece.”
“How long do you figure it will take before the reactor loses containment?” Horgan asked, bluntly addressing the metaphorical Stone Rhino in the room.
“About twenty three minutes,” Pen replied immediately. “I was ticking off the seconds in my head, and if that pump was running at rated capacity for every second between its activation and its failure, it exchanged enough heat to keep the fusion core from losing thermal containment for twenty three minutes—starting at the failure, of course.”
“You and your blasted numbers, Pen; you don’t always have to be right,” Tiberius facetiously chided as he felt a wave of vertigo which caused him to close his eyes and briefly fear he was about to lose consciousness.
“Aww, c’mon,” she said mischievously, “you know you like it…sir.”
He chuckled at that, and they shared a meaningful look before their three companions joined in the momentarily lighthearted mood with nervous laughter of their own.
Just as Pen had predicted, twenty three minutes after the pump had failed there was a flash of light with a faint rocking of the escape pod a few seconds after that, signaling that the Freedom’s Bastard had been destroyed by failure in its fusion core’s containment.
More surprising, however, was the fact that a proximity alarm went off only a few minutes after that. But by then Tiberius’ system was filled with painkillers which overpowered his desire to remain conscious, and he slowly drifted to sleep.
Chapter XXXI: A Vow Unbroken
“Hold up,” Lynch directed after the tunnel’s upward grade had leveled off. They had jogged for nearly twenty minutes with the Core Fragment floating silently behind them, casting an invisible shadow so thick that Lu Bu actually felt shivers run down her spine on several occasions. She was far from superstitious, but the idea that buried within the impregnable globe of unnatural material was an intelligence, or portion of intelligence, which had once enslaved nearly all of humanity was worse than riding an armed warhead into a live fire zone.
If there truly was a Demon in the cosmos, as many of her shipmates believed, she presently stood less than five paces from it—and nothing in her life had unnerved her so much as that chilling thought.
“All right, we’re here,” the arms dealer explained, tapping out a series of commands on his wrist-link. The same hologram representing the base sprang into the air above his arm, and Lu Bu could see that of the original horde of Tracto-an signals, scarcely a dozen remained. “They did better than I thought,” he said grimly, “but Jimmy shut the gate behind ‘em. Looks like the only way outta here is the spider tunnel, and that’s exactly where the Senator’s holed up.”
“Spider tunnel?” Lu Bu repeated.
“It’s the last escape path outta here,” he said, tapping a few inputs on his link and prompting a flashing red line to appear within the hologram. It ran several meters below the surface of the planet in the opposite direction from the facility’s main gate—which the Tracto-ans had breached, but now appeared to be sealed off on Lynch’s virtual display. “The only people that know about it are Jimmy, Jimmy Three, and me.”
“If it’s such a secret, how do you know about it?” Hutch asked pointedly.
“I built the place,” Lynch quipped, reaching down and drawing his vibro-knife from his belt. “Now what we’re gonna need from you, Fledgling Phoenix,” he said, turning to Shiyuan, “is a crack of the central data processors. The local ComStat hub is down because I wanted it down, but that won’t last for too much longer. I need you to get into the comm. system, purge the outgoing queue, and nuke the system registry before slippin’ out sideways and catchin’ a ride off this rock with us. Savvy?”
“You are talking about cracking into an Imperial mainframe with no prep time or job-specific hardware. How am I supposed to—“ Jarrett objected, only to be cut off when Lynch produced a hexagonal crystal two inches across and five inches long from within his wrist-link.
“This’ll get you front door access to the whole system; make your way up to here,” he indicated a flashing zone on the hologram, “do your work, and then follow us out the spider tunnel.”
Shiyuan accepted the crystal with narrowed eyes. “This is a—“
“I know what it is, son,” Lynch interrupted coolly, jerking his thumb over his shoulder toward the end of the tunnel—where a massive, vault-like door which appeared only barely large enough for the Core Fragment to fit through was embedded in the solid stone of the tunnel’s end. “Once we’re through that door, take Hutch for protection and make your way to the comm. room. If a few of them Tracto boys are still able to fight, have ‘em join you. I’d hate to lose you on this miserable lump of rock; you’ve been solid in my book, and that’s no small feat.”
Without waiting for Shiyuan to reply, Lynch turned and made his way toward the vault-like door. Set chest-high was an access panel, which Lynch placed his hand against. The panel lit up immediately, and after a brief retinal scan conducted by a mesh of criss-crossing lasers, the locks disengaged loudly and the door hissed as it slid forward before swinging open to reveal the massive, dome-shaped compound which Lu Bu had only seen in Lynch’s holographic projection.
The chamber was enormous, spanning several kilometers across and standing half a kilometer high at the center. A giant spire supported the massive roof at the center, and the sounds of pitched battle could be heard just a few dozen meters away.
“You’ve got your job, Shiyuan,” Lynch said, meeting Lu Bu’s gaze and holding it as she nodded consentingly. “We’ll keep the engine runnin’ for you.”
Hutch unslung his plasma shotgun and laid it down on the ground, then drew a vibro-knife and nodded as he passed Lu Bu, “I’ll get him there in one piece.”
“I know you will,” she acknowledged, returning his nod in kind as she followed Lynch on a divergent path which quickly separated the two pairs.
The ground level was situated much as any small, cheaply-built city might be. There were blocks arranged by concentric circles which were intersected by streets radiating outward from the central spire, and each of those blocks held massive structures of different types.
Clearly evident among them were giant storage tanks where Lu Bu surmised the dangerous chemicals which Lynch spoke of earlier were stored, and it seemed as though half of the structures were of this variety. The other structures were a mixture of automated factories, like those she had seen in her mission briefings for some of the colony worlds where she had been deployed since joining the MSP. Only the occasional structure seemed to be residential, or in any other way designed for human occupancy, which struck her as exceedingly odd.
But before they got to this supposed ‘spider tunnel,’ Lu Bu needed to make something abundantly clear to Mr. Lynch. “We will not abandon them,” she said severely.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he replied more seriously than she had come to expect from the flippant, arrogant man. “I’m a man of my word, Lu, and I take care of those who help me.”
She reluctantly accepted him at his word, knowing that while he had withheld plenty of information during the lead-up to this mission, he had not explicitly lied to her or to her people. She knew that the distinction between lies of omission and the active spreading of untruths was a dangerous one, but she also knew that for a mission of this importance there were certain facts which needed to remain hidden until their exposure was necessary.
She gripped Glacier Splitter in her hands and moved down the street in the direction Lynch had indicated would lead them to the spider tunnel, when suddenly a flash of movement caught her eye and she dove to the side of the street as a hail of impacts ripped through the hewn stone street where she had been standing. Shards of stone went flying through the air as the enemy’s weapon quickly tracked her evasive movements.
Lu Bu sprinted forward as quickly as she could, knowing from the weapon impacts that the enemy Marine was airborne and that he was well above her melee weapon range. She had three sonic grenades on her belt, and briefly considered using them, but another thought turned to action even before she realized she had even devised a plan to bring him to the ground.
As she sprinted toward her quarry, her fingers uncoiled the end loop of the wire she had used to retrieve Hutch during their boarding of the freighter and wrapped it around the hilt of Glacier Splitter. A quick glance confirmed that he would be within her throwing range after just a few more steps, so after the wire was securely fastened around the flared knob of the warhammer’s haft, she gripped it with both hands, spun her body once, and hurled the hammer above the Marine’s head like she was participating in a hammer-hurling competition.
The stream of fire ceased briefly when it seemed he had realized her plan, but by then it was too late as the hammer had already passed over him. She slammed her hand down on the miniature winch affixed to her belt and the wire snagged, causing the hammer to fall behind the Marine as he attempted to steer himself clear of the wire which quickly snagged on his shoulder.
She twisted her arm around the wire several times and yanked back as hard as she could, noting with no small measure of satisfaction that her foe’s levitation was significantly less stable than it first appeared. His body seemed to spin sideways, and she moved with him in order to keep the wire from sliding off his smooth, relatively lightweight armor. She succeeded and was able to give another hard yank, with this one causing him to overbalance forward and crash head-first into the stone street.
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