There was another burst of fire. And a scream of true terror. “What the hell is that?!”
Snow rose up at the sound and swung the axe in an arc. It slid from her hand towards the man, spinning in the air end over end.
The axe handle swung fast into the man's collarbone, driving him to his knees and knocking the rifle from his hands. Doozer was on him an instant later. The little blur thrashed and slashed at the man. He tried his best to bite the man's face off, but Doozer's space mask covered his eyes and mouth. The man tried to wail, but the sounds of terror from his mouth were choked off, the axe had driven the wind from his lungs.
“Back, Doozer,” Snow said. “Get behind me!”
Doozer reacted immediately and scooted around the benches to flicker angrily in the space behind her.
The man struggled to rise, but Snow put a stop to his struggles with a vicious fist to his temple. He thundered to the ground. Snow picked up the rifle and jammed it into the man’s neck, her finger on the trigger. She itched to squeeze a bolt of red light into the man. But she needed to know why he shot Max. She placed the rifle out of reach, on a bench behind her. A recyc bin nearby had metal wire in it, so she flipped the man on his chest and, pulling his arms behind him, she twisted the wire around his gloved wrists and forearms, tightly binding them together.
Snow turned back to Max. With a swipe of her arm she sent an array of tools to clatter off the floor. She scooped Max up, lay him on the bench, and twisted his helmet off.
An ugly red burn ran in a line from the middle of his forehead, stopping where his right eye used to be. The mostly empty socket was lined with gore. His eye had exploded from the socket. But he was still breathing. Suddenly his other eye opened. For a moment he looked frantic, but it passed when he saw her looking at him. He raised his new arm to clear away whatever was blocking his eye. Snow stopped him.
There was no bleeding. All the blood near the wound was dried and crusty, the beam did the indelicate work of cauterizing even as it destroyed.
“You're going to be okay Max,” Snow said. He's fine. Fine. “We need to carry on.”
She spotted a first aid kit on the wall and grabbed it. Returning to Max she opened the box and dumped the contents on his chest. She twisted her gloves off, then dug through the small pile of first aid gear, snatching up a pair of spray tubes. With the edge of the table, she knocked the cap off the first tube. Pointing the nozzle into Max's eye socket, she sprayed the contents of the tube into it. Foam overfilled the cavity of the eye socket and she leveled it off with her finger, wiping the excess on the edge of the table.
“Hey!” Max said, and tried to sit up.
Snow held him down with a palm on his forehead, waited another moment, then pulled on the foam in his socket. The foam blob popped out, soaked in gore. It was a sign of her serious state of mind, and intense concentration, that she did not pause to say 'barf.' She followed the same steps with the second tube, with the exception that this time the foam was left in his socket.
“Whoa,” Max said. The foam would kill the pain. It might even give him a slight boost of euphoria.
The foam from the second tube firmed up quickly in his eye socket, sealing it shut with a bond so close that Gustov would have to remove it surgically. The burn line ran from the circle of his eye socket up his forehead. With a little imagination it resembled the symbol of Mars, the god of war. Or the sign on the little boys’ room. She applied another spray to the surface of the burn. Finally, she grabbed a long bandage and wrapped it around his head, covering the burnt area and the socket, more so she didn't have to see it when she looked at him than anything.
“Feel better?” Snow said.
“Ah, ya,” Max said casually. Too casually, considering that damage he'd just sustained. “Strangely a lot better. But still like…I don't know…”
“Even though you don't feel the pain, your body is still in shock. Rest for a minute, I'm going to hurt this guy over here until he starts talking.”
As she approached the man, she saw on the ground the object he'd frozen Linda with. Snow scooped it up and reversed the action, releasing Linda.
“Still no network,” she said. “It can't be simple interference, not here…the feed is just dead.”
“I'm just going to ask this guy a few questions,” Snow said, “then we'll go turn your feed back on.”
The traitor was awake. Snow had placed him in a sitting position on the floor, uncomfortably against the lower shelves of a work bench, with a drone on his lap to keep him from squirming around. He didn't look crazy. Or even unreasonable. That stole from Snow some of the fire that had been a burning hatred moments ago.
“It's too late now,” the man said, a look of pity on his face. “We will all die.”
She wanted to hit him. Over and over. To smash his face in with the heel of her boot and to keep on smashing until someone, somewhere learned a lesson of some kind. Her hatred had apparently not been doused completely. “Too late for what?” Snow asked, in lieu of murder.
“To save us,” he said. “You're a Starborn.” He seemed to have only just noticed.
“What of it.”
“You know.” He seemed sure that she did.
But whatever it was, Snow was still in the dark. “Why don't you tell me anyway.”
“You were warned. Just like me. Just like the rest.”
“Warned of what?”
“You know.” He was annoyed with her now, certain that she did know. “What will happen to us. All of us—”
Snow shook her head. This was going nowhere. She needed to know if there were any others working with him and what had happened to the other earthlings.
“Unless we serve,” he said.
That was not what she was expecting to hear. “Well you've failed then. Both your people, and your new masters.”
His calmness was disturbed now. “No. You've come too late. Too late to stop us.” But his voice told her that he wasn't sure it was true.
“What have you done to the crew?”
“You'll get no help from them.” He was confident again. “They are out of the picture.”
“How about your friends? I guess they're too busy to help you.”
“You're so young. Is that why you don't know? About the pain? It's coming for you. Unless you serve. It's not too late to serve, of your own free will. One way or the other…you will serve.”
“And what do you think they will do to you? When they find you alive, having failed to serve them.”
“I won't have failed. You can't stop us alone. And your android can't do what needs to be done.” He was worried again.
“I'm not alone,” Snow said.
Max missed the timing, but the effect was enhanced by the delay. Doozer hopped off him, and Max stood up from the table. He walked slowly, but steadily towards the traitor. He pointed at his eye. “Oww,” he said.
The man looked up at Max. He thought he'd killed the big one. Then his eyes dropped and went wide. He struggled violently and uselessly against his bonds. “The demon is real!” he shouted once. And then he shouted once more.
“The demon is real hungry too,” Max said. “Doozer.”
It must have been the tone of his voice, because Doozer switched back to full aggro.
Snow smiled. She'd been so angry she'd forgotten about Doozer. She should have led with Doozer. But the puck was back in their possession. “If you don't stop screaming and start talking, Doozer the demon might just sate his hunger on your uncooperative leg—”
“Not the leg!” Linda said.
“Arm,” Snow said.
The traitor talked, but there was no time to celebrate. There were two more traitors to be dealt with. One was working to destroy the shipyard factory, essential to building more ships. Equally problematic was the other plan to destroy the ships that had already been built. They weren't much more than tugboats, designed to create a large jump sphere/bubble and transport whatever was within the sphere.
&
nbsp; In their favor was the fact that the traitors thought they had all the time in the world to accomplish their goals. Snow was confident the traitor hadn't warned the others of the Dee-Dub's arrival, perhaps because they'd taken the network offline. So rather than blow the ships one at a time, they were wiring them all to go in one big explosion.
Max took Doozer and a replacement helmet, and headed off to stop the factory from being destroyed. Snow took the rifle, nearly useless to Max with his primary eye out of operation, and moved to stop the destruction of the jump fleet.
Linda was sent back to see what could be done about the crew and to get the network up and running again.
That the two sites were spread apart from each other was no accident. The jumpships were moved, among other reasons, to keep the destruction of one site from automatically including the other, and to keep either from becoming too obvious. The factory was dug into the ice at the far side of the Longissima, opposite the Icarus landing site. But the hanger, Snow’s destination, was positioned on the other side of the ship, only as far from Icarus as it was from Longissima.
Snow made her way quickly towards Icarus. They might not be expecting anyone to show up, but if they were being cautious, they were more likely to watch the front doors. The sun shone in the pale blue sky of the planet’s thin atmosphere, and its blinding rays reflected from frigid icy terrain. Snow's helmet filtered the worst of it, but she found herself squinting anyway. She passed around the back of Icarus and paused in the shadows under its red stabilizer wings to get her bearings. The HUD in her helmet showed her destination. She mentally picked her path through the occasionally rough terrain of fractured ice, then set off.
She approached the ice hanger from behind. A large aperture had been carved through the ice, and a domed cave below. Off the large dome cave were many smaller bays, each containing a jumpship, or nothing at all. There were smaller entrances on four sides of the ice complex, but Snow crept towards the center hole in the dome of the hanger. She cursed their lack of drones which could have recced the cave without needing full line of sight and so without alerting the traitor inside. She'd just have to do it herself. For the last few meters, she moved with extreme caution, step by step until she could just peer into the hanger. She then traveled in a wide circle around the hole checking her angles.
On her second loop she saw him and froze. Slowly, she crouched and crawled to the edge of the hole where she lay prone. The man, it did seem to be a man, though it was difficult to be sure with the suit on, was placing a device under one of the jumpships. Snow tried to get Max on the radio, but there was no response. With Longissima between them, and without its network to assist with the transmission, she wasn't surprised. But it unnerved her nonetheless.
He stood back up and stepped away from the ship. “Finished,” he said, presumably to the other traitor. His voice echoed in the ice cavern.
Snow lifted the rifle scope to her helmet and took careful aim. She was about to shoot another human being. And she had better do it right. If she missed, he might trigger the bombs right away, destroying the jumpship’s essential to the evacuation, and likely taking her with them. She considered moving, taking him where she might get a second chance if she missed.
“No, I'm not going to wait,” he said, “I don't care if you’re not ready. This isn't an art project.” He paused listening to the other traitor. “No, they don't, you idiot. I'm going. Bye.”
Snow White pulled the trigger.
Chapter 29
Max continued to watch the traitor from the cover of a pile of sleep pods, which had been placed there to be recycled by the ship factory as needed. Traitor Three, with a rifle slung on his back, stood atop a half-built jumpship tugboat, framed in the center of the factory's assembly ring. It looked pretty much like the Dee-Dub's tiny factory, but much larger and with an extensive network of support struts required to battle the force of gravity. Traitor Three was placing explosives in an elaborate pattern, and far in excess of the number required to get the job done.
There was no way to get across the gap without being noticed. Traitor Three looked about frequently enough that sneaking up on him was a nonstarter. Max kept waiting for the man to move behind the half-built ship. Traitor Three must have already finished there though because each new placement brought him further from the factory ring. The ring was placed at the far end of a domed ice cavern with a large hopper of materials beside it, the half ship in front of it, and nothing else between the sleep pods and the fifty-yard stretch to Traitor Three. There was nothing at all on the ground. High in the dome was a frame supporting a network of lines and cables like those holding the ship under construction. The half-built ship, though near the floor of the cavern, did not sit on the floor of the cavern. A line dangled above Max, just barely within reach. He looked at Doozer.
“You stay here.”
Doozer blinked.
With the help of his strong artificial grip, and Mega's lower gravity, Max dead-lifted himself far enough up the line that his legs could assist, where things became easier. Another half body length up the line and he reached a point where the cover he had from the sleep pods would disappear, giving way to unobstructed lines of sight. He made sure Traitor Three was looking away before climbing the rest of the way to the girder on the strong line. He reached the top of the line and pulled himself onto the girder where he took a moment to get his bearings. There was a route to the space above Traitor Three, but it was not without difficulties. The ends of the girders were placed deep into the walls of ice on either side of the dome. Max was forced to crawl a short distance before the dome rose high enough to allow him to walk upright. Even upright though, it wasn't easy to hustle, even on the wide beam. Care had to be taken with each step to ensure he didn't scrape his boots, or send vibrations through the support system. When he reached the center, he turned to step down onto the narrower cross beam, which would bring him more or less above Traitor Three. The first step was easy, supported as he was by the larger beam beside him. The on the next step he lost his balance and nearly fell, but he recovered and carried on more slowly. Step by step he made his way, until at last he was approaching Traitor Three. He crouched low and grabbed at the beam, but slipped again and fell from the side of the beam. Only his trusty mechanical arm held tight onto the cold metal support. He looked awkwardly down, to see if he'd been given away by his unplanned for acrobatics. To his dismay he saw hanging lines and support cables jiggling ever so slightly. Thankfully, too slightly for the traitor to notice.
Except the traitor did notice and suddenly he was glancing cautiously about instead of placing charges with a song in his step. Max stayed as still as possible, though given his predicament, dangling by one arm from the support beam, complete stillness was not achieved. The traitor whipped his head back and forth looking for the source of the disturbance. But seeing nothing, he carried on laying his charges, though with more haste than before. He'd now stepped away from the ship, laying the tiny packet charges as he went and making a pattern with them on the surface of the ice.
Max started moving again, arm by arm, dangling from the beam like an earth ape, until he was over Traitor Three. Or rather, until he was occasionally over Traitor Three since the traitor moved hastily about as he worked. From Max's view of the ship, it looked as though it had been cut clean in half by a powerful laser rather than being halfway through the build process.
His radio crackled. Max thought he could hear Snow's voice mixed with the nonsense noise from the radio. But he couldn't make her out, and was in any case afraid to make any sounds.
Max bobbed his head back to locate his axe, happily finding it in place on his back, and prepared to drop onto Traitor Three.
“What? Already?” Traitor Three said.
Max tensed and nearly lost his grip. He tried to crane his neck down at the man talking to him, but with very limited success.
“No wait! I'm not done yet,” Traitor Three said. “It will all the more glorious i
f they go off together.”
Twisting and angling his whole body, Max found Traitor Three, right below him. He let go of the beam and plummeted.
“But the masters want this…” Traitor Three said. “Bah! Old people.”
Max cursed his missing eye and resultant poor depth perception as he landed on the ice just to the side Traitor Three.
Traitor Three stumbled back. “Who? Where did you come from?”
“You have failed us!” Max said. He'd tried for a deep and evil voice, but what came out instead was a croak.
The effect was the same. A brief moment of distraction as Max struggled to his feet and reached for his axe.
Traitor Three didn't reach for his rifle. “See me!” he shouted. Not to Max but to the sky, as though there were no dome, and someone were watching from above. “Witness the spectacle!” Then he ran. Away from the arrangement of explosives. Max ran too.
Traitor Three raised one hand. In it was a small device. A detonator. “Wit-nesss me!” he shouted.
Max heaved the axe and let it fly at the crazy person, but he slipped in the process, landing hard and sliding on the ice. The axe sailed towards Traitor Three, spinning end over end. The handle just nicked the man’s ankle and it was enough to trip him to the ground as well. But he held fast to the detonator in his hand. Sliding on the ice floor he rolled onto his back. Again, he ignored Max and looked to the sky. “Witness,” he said, in an almost whisper that was just loud enough for Max to hear. The traitor pressed the button.
Chapter 30
The burst from Snow's weapon issued a 'zip, zip, zip' as though a series of zippers had closed in rapid succession. The beams landed true to her aim and hit the man in the back of his torso. He flopped to the ground. Snow raised herself to a crouch and slipped down through the hole in the ground, into the domed hanger below. It was a long fall, but she managed her landing velocity with a small roll, coming to her feet and sprinting to the man who lay prone. He struggled feebly to close his hand on a small data pad. Snow stepped on his wrist and plucked the pad up and away from him.
Starship Invasion (Lost Colony Uprising Book 2) Page 23
