by C. F. Harris
She had to speak around the concept of a conscience for a moment. That was another one of those words that didn’t exist in the Klik language, which said a lot about our captors.
I slammed my hand down on the main release and looked down from the raised platform to all the many rooms holding prisoners. It amazed me that the Kliks would bother to construct something like this that allowed them to hold so many captives. It was such a waste of space on a ship that was supposed to travel between the stars.
As the doors opened most of the prisoners didn’t even so much as react. Which was understandable. The doors opened all the time in my cell, after all, and the only thing it ever meant was there was either food incoming or a trip to the arena.
The food was always bland and boring and clearly the product of a bunch of Klik researchers putting together the bare minimum to keep their prisoners alive, and the trips to the arena were definitely something I could do without. Not to mention I could totally understand some of the preoccupied people in their cells not wanting to come out because they were busy.
“Let’s see this gets their attention,” Dalia said, holding her weapon up and firing a few blasts.
Heads whipped around. Bodies sat up on their cots. She definitely had their attention now.
“Everybody out here now!” she said in the Klik language.
There was a reaction from a few, but not nearly enough. She looked to me. Everyone in those cells were from my species, after all. Clearly I was meant to translate.
“You need to get your asses out here now if you want to get out of here!” I shouted.
That resulted in some confused muttering from the gathered prisoners, but that also got all of them to step out. Even the ones who’d been in the middle of having a little bit of fun with each other, though I did note that a few of those took the time to finish what they were doing before they stepped out.
Priorities. I guess they had theirs, and it didn’t necessarily involve trying to get out of here.
“We’re running a jailbreak!” Dalia said, and I dutifully translated for her. “There’s a chance you might not make it if you decide to take on the Kliks, but the other choice is to stay here in captivity for the rest of your life, however long they decide to let you live that life, so you decide what you want to do. Oh, and there’s a not insignificant chance that if I escape you’re gonna die when I take the Kliks out.”
“That’s nice and hopeful,” I muttered.
“I want to make it clear they don’t have much of a choice,” Dalia muttered back. “Do you really think the Kliks are going to let any of them stay alive after what we’ve just pulled?”
“Good point,” I said.
I turned back to the gathered masses and sketched a brief picture of what was going on. That the arena had been destroyed, which got a few cheers, and the Kliks were going to be coming down here soon enough and things probably weren’t going to go well for anyone still hanging around the prison level when they got down here.
That sobered everyone up pretty quick. A few of them even looked like they were pissed off that we’d gone and messed things up, mostly the ones who’d been been enjoying each other’s company, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about that all that much.
If they were happy being prisoners then that was their business, but that wasn’t going to stop me from doing everything I could to get the fuck out of here.
When I’d finished Dalia nodded.
“So who’s with us?” she asked, and again I translated.
“You’re Kir, aren’t you?” a man in rags that looked like they’d been a ship captain’s uniform once upon a time said. He’d clearly been here for quite awhile, but he also hadn’t gone feral like that other officer.
“Maybe I am,” I said, exercising caution for all that I was the one holding the weapons here, so it’s not like there was much worry about this guy trying to overpower me or something.
I guess years of trying to avoid or bullshit my way through encounters with authorities like this guy had me acting cautious even now when we were both captives on an enemy ship and I was the one with the advantage considering I was two-fisting a couple of Klik plasma rifles.
The officer stared at me, then his face broke into a smile as he shook his head.
“You wily bastard,” he said. “I should’ve figured if any of us would pull something like this it’d be you.”
“What’s he saying?” Dalia asked.
“He’s saying that he figures if anyone could make an escape from the Kliks it’d be me,” I said with a grin. “My reputation is preceding me, I guess.”
“Now there’s some high praise,” Dalia muttered. “Especially since you managed to make that escape with my help.”
“Hey, I didn’t tell him I was the one doing the jailbreak,” I said.
“Ah, you speak Klik?” the officer said in the Klik language. “That makes this easier. If you have assisted this wily space pirate in our escape then you have my thanks as well.”
“Don’t mention it,” Dalia said. “But we really do need to get going if we’re going to make it out of here. I saw other ships from a species I didn’t recognize in their hangar bay. I’m assuming those are ships they captured from your people?”
“Most likely,” the officer said.
“So if I get you to those ships will you be able to fly them?” she asked.
“Of course!” the officer said, seeming mildly scandalized that she would ever doubt him.
“Good,” she said. “Now let’s get…”
Whatever she was about to say was interrupted as the doors opened and a Klik guard stepped in. I wheeled around at the same time as Dalia. It looked like the time for standing around chatting about escaping was over.
22
Dalia
I strode into the room like I owned the place. Which was sort of true. We’d managed to blow holes in every Klik guard who’d come at us. It turns out fighting in narrow corridors gave us a hell of an advantage.
Not to mention I got the feeling the Kliks simply weren’t ready for their prisoners to break free. The practical upshot was I had quite the little guerrilla force moving through the ship with me now, and this stop in the hangar bay control room was the last step in what’d turned out to be an escape that was a hell of a lot easier than I’d expected.
“Excuse me?”
The Kliks manning the controls looked up. Both of their triple eyestalks waggled in surprise.
“I was hoping you could help me with something?”
Before either of them had a chance to raise their weapons I raised my own. Two blasts later there were two Kliks hanging out in front of the control panel with holes in their sides.
“Vicious,” Kir said, stepping into the room beside me.
“And the least they deserve,” I said. “Can you work this stuff?”
“Pretty sure I can,” he said, then frowned. “At least if they use the same control scheme on this stuff as they do on the stuff I’ve requisitioned from them in the past.”
“Get on it,” I said.
Kir moved over to the control panel and shoved the Kliks aside. Which was no small feat considering how big they were.
“Yeah, this is going to be easy enough,” Kir said once he got a good look at their controls. “Give me a minute.”
I grinned. I couldn’t believe how well this was going.
I’d expected alarms to be sounding after we fried all those Kliks who flooded the prison level, but there was nothing of the sort. The doors didn’t even bother to double check that we were actually Kliks before opening with a friendly whoosh. Talk about a prison level that didn’t have any of the security measures I’d expected.
Sloppy security. Not something I would’ve ever allowed on my own ship.
The whole experience of running and gunning through a Klik ship reminded me of nothing more than one of those total immersion games I’d played back in my teen years. The kind that connected directly to y
our brain and put you into a scenario where you were shooting at the enemy, usually Kliks.
They’d been the favorite subject in that sort of game, an ancient art form at this point, since we first discovered them. Well, since they discovered us and started causing trouble.
I’d like to say I felt some sense of regret. Some sense of horror at what I was doing moving through a ship killing aliens left and right like a vengeful goddess. Only I had trouble dredging up any sympathy. Especially now that I knew about the experiments they’d been running on the thinking creatures they took captive.
No, as far as I was concerned the only good Klik was a dead Klik. And now that I had this useful bit of information about their capabilities regarding faster than light travel and important info about that weird power draining beam, well I intended to come to their home world at the head of one hell of an invasion fleet and make sure there were a lot of good Kliks on their homeworld.
Not to mention I owed Kir. His world was still very much in danger.
Now here we were in the hangar control with a massive window looking out over the place. I suddenly felt like I was in one of those ancient movies about heroes making their way out of an impossible situation by sneaking into a hangar bay trying to get away from the enemy force that had overwhelmingly superior numbers.
I smiled. This was going to be nothing like those ancient movies. No, we were the superior force. The Kliks out there just didn’t know it yet, judging by the way they were going about business as usual.
Maybe they hadn’t gotten warning. Maybe they didn’t think it concerned them since it was something happening down on the prison level.
They were about to learn how wrong they were the hard way.
“Here we go,” Kir said, looking out that same window.
He pressed a series of commands on the control panel and the massive forcefield holding the atmosphere and Kliks inside winked out of existence.
The unfortunate side effect was all the Kliks who were out there in a hangar bay that still had atmosphere was that atmosphere was quickly vented into the vacuum of space, taking them right along with.
Not a good way to go, though again I couldn’t bring myself to work up much sympathy for the bastards considering what they’d been doing to me, Kir, and every other unfortunate creature they’d captured.
“Brutal,” I said.
“Maybe, but they deserve it,” he said. “If you’d seen the destruction they wrought on our worlds they conquered, well…”
He trailed off, but there was true pain in his voice. For all that he was a pirate, it was clear he was suffering from whatever the hell it was he’d seen the Kliks doing. I thought back to that strange moment when I’d somehow connected with him across the stars.
I hadn’t thought about it much while we were together. Almost as though being together was good enough for that connection so it didn’t feel the need to connect us across the light years. Weird.
I could feel his pain now, though, and that pain filled me with a white hot rage. It was a pity there were no more Kliks down there for me to take out, but I guess it was appropriate that Kir would be the one taking them out considering he was the one who’d suffered most at their hands.
“Care to close the field and give us some atmosphere to work with?” I asked.
“Working on it now,” Kir said, grabbing a small tablet off the control panel. “Transferring controls to remote and…”
He held up one of his plasma rifles, one of many we’d “borrowed” from the Kliks since this started, and fired until the control panel he’d been working on was a sparking melting hunk of slag.
“That should make sure they won’t be able to access the controls from here, but we still want to hurry. They can still get in from other control centers if they try hard enough. Not sure how long changing the password is going to hold,” he said.
“Changing the password?” I said, my voice flat.
“Well yeah,” he said. “Simple, but they clearly didn’t expect a non-Klik to get into their systems or know what they were doing. They’re not all that great at security once you get past the guards with nasty weapons.”
“So I’ve noticed,” I muttered. “Let’s go.”
We met the rest of our small escape force out in the hall. Most of them had weapons at this point since we’d been borrowing more and more every time we killed a Klik in the corridors.
“There are ships down there in the hangar,” Kir told the one who’d been talking with us on the prison level. “You should be able to make good on an escape.”
The man nodded and motioned for the others to follow. Unfortunately there were already new Kliks waiting for us by the time we got down to the hangar bay floor. Even more unfortunately, it turns out fighting them in a wide open area with plenty of ships for them to take cover behind was a little more difficult than trying to take them on in narrow corridors where it was easy to mount an ambush.
“This is going to be a little more difficult!” I said, peering out of the hallway we were about to stream out of. Leave it to the Kliks to decide to make everything a hell of a lot more difficult than it should’ve been.
“You sure about that?” Kir asked, a smile on his face.
He hit a button and the door hissed shut in front of us. Then he pulled up the tablet he’d stolen from the hangar control room. He hit a couple of buttons and I heard a sound like a storm happening in the middle of the ship.
Which, typically speaking, wasn’t the kind of sound you wanted to hear while you were on a ship. Any sort of windstorm on a ship meant that the shit was about to hit the fan and you were losing atmosphere. It was a sound that chilled me to the bone.
Though this time around I couldn’t help but grin even as I heard that familiar and pants-shittingly terrifying sound. Because it meant the Kliks on the other side were the ones suffering from a sudden rapid and explosive decompression as he brought the forcefield down again.
“That should be enough time,” he said as he tapped a few more buttons on the tablet and grinned at me.
“You’re ruthless,” I said as the door hissed up once more and I found myself staring at a hangar bay that was completely devoid of Klik life. Though I imagined there were more than a few Kliks on the other side of that door probably thinking about all the poor decisions they’d made in their lives that brought them to a point where they were floating in the void.
If they were in power armor they might even have a self sustaining system that allowed them to float in the void until their power went out, thinking the entire time about what a bad idea it was to go the sadistic extra step of holding a bunch of prisoners in an arena where they made them fight it out while offering other prisoners as sexual favors for prizes.
Maybe they’d think about the error of their ways, but then again maybe not.
Whatever. We had an escape to make. So we streamed into the hangar. The various members of Kir’s species held their weapons up and were staring around the room with intent, but all the other blast doors leading into the hangar were closed and it would appear that the Kliks were thinking better of attacking us.
For the moment. I knew that probably wasn’t going to last long.
“Can you fly these ships?” I asked the one who seemed to speak the Klik language.
“Yes,” he said. “But I don’t know that we’ll be able to hold up against the Klik cruiser once we get out into the void.”
My jaw set and I frowned. “You let me worry about what the fuck is happening with the Kliks. Come on Kir.”
Kir paused. He looked at his people streaming into the ships that were of a design I didn’t recognize, which was saying something about how far out his people were or how separated they’d been from the rest of the galaxy by the Klik invasion considering I was familiar with several different alien species and their stuff.
Though mostly we knew about those species from the wreckage we’d found on other worlds, which was another ominous testament to the
Kliks being the kind of predator civilization that scifi authors had been screaming about for centuries.
I worried for a moment that he might decide to go with his people and leave me alone. I knew I shouldn’t have been this put out that he was thinking about leaving me, but what can I say? I’d gotten used to having him around in the short time we were together, and I couldn’t stop thinking about those strange dreams I’d had featuring him before we found each other.
It was like we were meant to be together, or something, and the universe was doing its best to throw us together.
“We could use someone like you,” the alien said to Kir. “I don’t know what happened to you before you arrived here, but I do know we could use a mind like yours.”
Kir’s face hardened. He looked at me and that look was intense. I wasn’t sure what’d happened to him before he wound up here, but he didn’t look like he had any love for the idea of joining his people’s military, for all that he’d spoken of the horrors the Kliks had visited upon his people with clear pain in his voice.
“My path lies elsewhere,” he said. “But I believe we can guarantee you safe passage out of here, correct?”
I nodded. I was pretty sure I could get around the Kliks now that I knew what their little trick was.
“Let’s head over to my ship then,” I said. “I’ve got some surprises I want to try on those bastards, and I’m going to make the crab sons of bitches regret the day they ever decided to take me captive!”
Kir grinned. He gave the alien who’d offered him some sort of military appointment one last look, there was clearly no love there for his people’s military, and then he turned to follow me.
23
Dalia
I let out a contented sigh as I settled into my seat and started powering up all the systems. The computer came to life after I gave it my password, and I put my hands on the controls and lifted off.
