Assured (Envoys Book 2)

by Peter J Aldin

  Seconds later, she hit SEND, and kissed her St Mary tattoo, praying someone would read her message in time.

  Hecate came stumbling into the bridge at such a pace that Gregory had to dart aside. The woman stopped her momentum against the bridge rail with one hip. She held her left hand to her stomach. Her right hand was chained to her utility belt with a pair of handcuffs, effectively pinning it to her side. She sent a snarl over her shoulder at Westermann who’d sent her staggering through the door.

  Chinyama followed behind the Peacekeeper. His weapon was holstered, but he made no move to return it to its supply locker when he moved to one of the sensor stations.

  Spacer Esana had been given the first aid job. She began applying a gel-cast to Hecate’s wrist, as the Xerxian Tactical raised her chin, sneering. “Sevens Party survive! Sevens party thrive!”

  “Enough jingoism,” Gregory said, although she probably wouldn’t understand the word. “We want an explanation.”

  Hecate grinned, showing teeth bloodied by rough handling. Had Chinyama done that? Westermann?

  Buoun?!

  “That’s all the talk you’re gettin’ from me,” she said. “Probably don’t have time to explain, anyway.”

  “You have time,” Pan snarled. “So get on with it.”

  She shrugged and focused Esana’s ministrations.

  “Sir,” Ensign Sintopas called from his sensor station. All eyes were on Hecate now, so that only Gregory noticed him say it. Because Pan began making loud demands of Hecate, Sintopas was forced to yell. “Captain!”

  Pan stopped talking. Heads turned Sintopas’s way.

  “Text message from Enforcer Jogianto’s comms-tab,” the Ensign said, voice choked with strong emotion.

  Pan blinked at him. “Well, show us.”

  The room focused on the mainscreen as text appeared on it. A hurriedly-typed and error-ridden jumble of phrases. Gregory’s heartbeat stuttered as a terrifying message became clear.

  FOWLER PUT A BOM ON SHIP GET THE HELL OUT I DIDNT DO IT NOT MY FALT I PROMICE AND THIS IS NOT A TRICK! ABANDAN SHIP PLEASE!!

  Pan remained staring toward the mainscreen as every other head turned toward Hecate. Chief Lindberg—who’d rarely even spoken in Gregory’s presence—now took several steps toward Hecate, hissing, “What did you do?”

  “Sensors,” Pan called, his voice strangely calm and measured again. “Please check for chemical telltales. Full internal sweep.”

  “Aye, sir,” said the second sensor rating in a shaky voice. Finished with the gel-cast, Esana raced back to her workstation to help.

  Pan’s voice remained calm as he said, “Chief Lindberg, if there’s a device on this ship, why wouldn’t systems have detected anything?”

  Lindberg backpedaled to her station. “They would have.”

  “But if they hadn’t, why not?”

  “Not sure, sir. Unless …” Her hands flew across her screens, seeking data. “I’ll search for viruses.”

  “Not finding explosives, sir,” Esana reported from her sensor station, but her frantic activity—and that of her colleague—said they hadn’t stopped scanning.

  Hecate gave a girlish giggle, cut short when Westermann strode forward and slapped the back of her head. It was a breach of regulations. And no one seemed to mind.

  Gregory leaned close, catching Hecate’s attention. “There is a bomb, isn’t there?”

  She waggled her eyebrows. “Whatever we did, you Confeds were too dumb to stop us.”

  “What the hack are you looking so pleased about?” Grace spat. She hadn’t moved from the side of the door. “If we die, you die too.”

  “Everyone dies. But now I know there’s a place in the best hell for me.”

  “You want to go to hell?” Gregory said, his Catholic upbringing roiling at the idea.

  She winked. “Hell is what you make it. And mine will be fine.”

  Before Gregory could respond, Lindberg cried out.

  “Sir! I have a code-worm buried deep—Oh, shit.” An alarm chimed from her boards. “Feedback loop in the primary reactor!” The whole room stopped what they were doing, watching Lindberg as her head dropped over her station, as her hands danced across control boards, as she muttered the word “No” over and over. Her hands stopped moving. Her head came up, face contorted in terror. “I can’t access it. I’m locked out. I can’t … I can’t stop it.”

  “Well, try!” barked Chinyama.

  Her hands fell to her side as she stepped back from her desk. “I’m totally locked out, sir.”

  “Try!”

  “Sir! We have four minutes. Five at most.”

  Everyone else on the bridge remained absolutely still while a growing number of alerts started up on other workstations. A creeping horror climbed its way into Gregory’s chest. Around the room, each face had drained of blood and every mouth was open in shock—except for Hecate’s. But no one shouted or sobbed or screamed. No one panicked.

  Pan slammed his hand down on the ship’s intercom control. “All hands, all hands, this is the Captain. Abandon ship. Condition Omega. Abandon ship. Condition Omega.”

  A klaxon started up overhead, a blend of long and rising notes, discordant.

  Pan released the control and straightened. “People …” He paused for a fraction of a second, voice faltering. “Everyone in this room, get into the bridge pod now. Dismissed.”

  The bridge crew burst into action, surging toward the wall behind the councillor chairs where a dark opening had already appeared. Beyond it, lights flickered to life, revealing a passageway. Both weapons operators tossed the row of Tluaan chairs aside.

  Grace put a hand on Gregory’s shoulder. He knew he should be moving. But he couldn’t stop staring at Pan who was again bent over the helmstations. There was something in the captain’s tone and demeanor.

  Chinyama obviously shared that intuition. “What are you doing, sir?”

  “Staying.”

  “Captain!” Gregory gasped. He tried shaking Grace’s hand off but couldn’t. Still, he resisted her as she pulled at him. “Captain, you can't.”

  “The pods will head toward the planet,” Pan said in a businesslike tone. “But someone has to steer Assured away to mitigate the effects of the blast on them.”

  “Surely the ship’s AI can do that.”

  Pan straightened and turned. Smiled. Just a little. “There’s upsides to ships’ systems having limited autonomy. This is one of the downsides. Now, get in the pod.”

  Gregory glanced to the new exit. Westermann had clamped a hand around Hecate’s neck, guiding the prisoner. The opening was wide enough for a single person, but most crewers were already through. Stepping out of Westermann’s way, Sintopas watched them pass, his face white as a sheet.

  “Sir, I'll stay,” said Chinyama.

  “Wasting time, XO.”

  Chinyama's shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. “Very well, sir. If we’re headed for the planet, we’ll need more weapons.” He nodded at the helmstation casing by the captain’s knee.

  Pan shifted aside. “Of course.”

  Chinyama stooped to open the compartment, revealing two PR19 pulse rifles. He tossed one to Grace, then moved into the space between the helm and the railing. He made an adjustment to his rifle, leveled it at Pan and fired point blank.

  Pan jerked, fell against the helms and slid to the floor in a heap.

  Buoun recovered consciousness to find himself on a stretcher on his way to the hangar lifts.

  “I can walk,” he insisted.

  The two crewers carrying him stared back, confused. He was speaking Space dialect, he realized. When he raised his head, he quickly decided that the wooziness he felt and the pain in his ear, his cheek, and his throat necessitated that he should be carried.

  A little later, he lay in the Assured’s medbay, strapped to monitors and sensors, allowing the Human medtechnician to mend his ear with a type of glue. The pain Buoun felt was minor—certainly nothing compared with the churning
anxiety he now experienced as he recalled what he had done.

  I am a prodigiously foolish Tlu. Tackling an armed Human warrior? I have lost what little was left of my sanity.

  The medtechnician had introduced herself first as a “nurse” and then as Ensign Moore. She was efficient as she completing gluing his ear then ran scans of his head and face.

  Two other Humans were present. A bearded male on another bed who clearly couldn’t resist staring at Buoun—Moore said the man had burned his chest during kitchen duties. Also Peacekeeper Bradstock, who was wholly incurious when it came to Buoun and focused entirely on ship updates scrolling across a wallscreen.

  Bradstock had not armed himself with a rifle, but kept a pistol sheathed in front of the combat vest he wore.

  Is he expecting further trouble? Buoun wondered. Am I safe here? Where are the rest of the Xerxians? Why did they attack their own people? Are Human factions as treacherous and malicious as ours toward each other?

  He sighed as Ensign Moore applied a soothing gel to his bruised cheek and then to the flesh around the base of the damaged ear.

  “You don’t appear too banged up, sir,” she said, “but we’ll keep you a while longer for observation. Your unconscious spell is a concern. You may have a concussion.”

  “I am happy to rest,” he said.

  In response, she showed her teeth in friendly Human fashion. Perhaps she’d thought him being humorous.

  After that, she went across to check the kitchen worker’s bandages and attempt conversation with Bradstock. Bradstock did not attempt it back. Moore was leaning a hip on a countertop and enjoying a break from her duties when the medical center’s lights faltered. A moment later, they switched over to a red color. Simultaneously, an alarm began clamoring overhead.

  Captain Pan’s voice cut through the noise of the klaxon. “All hands, all hands, this is the Captain. Abandon ship. Code Omega. Abandon ship. Code Omega.”

  Immediately, Moore was helping Buoun to his feet, and not gently. The burned patient was getting himself up, wincing and swearing. Bradstock had one half of his body out in the hall, peering both ways.

  “What is this?” Buoun yelled above the noise as Moore ushered him into a chair that had emerged automatically from one of the walls. A chair with harness straps hanging from its sides, a chair that looked a lot like the chairs inside a Human shuttle.

  “Evacuation,” she said in his ear, and started getting his buckles on. Though her expression remained calm—or what Buoun took for calm—tears brimmed in both eyes. This he knew to be a sign of strong emotion.

  Evacuation. The meaning of the English word came to him. He gasped.

  “We are leaving the ship?”

  She did not reply as she continued harnessing him. Six of these chairs had emerged from this wall, the only bare wall in the room. Moore got his last buckle in place and secured it. All of the compartments and trays and shelves that had been open to the air had sealed themselves, Buoun realized, locking down their contents.

  He said, “This room is leaving the ship?”

  “Stay calm,” she told him and moved to help the burned man beside him, wrestling some kind of gel inside the man’s half-secured harness. Perhaps it was to offset the pressure against his burned areas.

  Bradstock shouted into the hallway, the sentence laced with Human expletives. He stepped back, allowing another female with shoulder-length yellow hair to race inside. The woman crashed immediately into the cot that Buoun had been on. She stifled a sob and blundered her way around to the seat beside Buoun’s without acknowledging him.

  Bradstock did something to the forward wall and two sets of heavy doors jerked to life, one outer one inner. The inner hissed down from the roof across the hatchway, sealing it with a clunk Buoun felt through the walls and floor. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the hard-glass cabinet opposite him: his eyes were wide, his neck fur purple with alarm.

  “I’m Evans,” the new woman shouted at Bradstock over the noise. “Able Spacer, logistics clerk.”

  “Don’t care who you are,” Bradstock replied as he headed for one of the other chairs.

  “Procedure is to register names and positions of everyone who—”

  “Shut up and get those straps on.” The Peacekeeper pulled the top section of his harness over his shoulders, then checked his watch. “You too, Ensign. Sixteen seconds.”

  The burned man pushed the nurse away, fitting his last buckle and clasp himself. Ensign Moore dropped into the chair beside him, wrestling with her harness.

  “Brace,” Bradstock told them. “This is gonna hurt.”

  As the final seconds ticked down, Buoun had time to wonder three things.

  How was a room going to jettison from a ship?

  What had caused the Captain to evacuate everyone off Assured?

  And where would they go once they’d left?

  Westermann and Gregory both swore as the captain slid to the floor.

  “Stun setting,” Chinyama told them, as if that explained what he’d just done. “Ms. Renny, perhaps you can take over the prisoner. Corporal Westermann, Ensign Sintopas, I need you both to carry the captain into the pod.”

  Westermann and Sintopas hurried forward. Grace released Gregory’s shoulder and moved over to grab Hecate’s, driving the woman into the passage to the pod. “Hurry up, Chris,” she called back to Gregory and vanished.

  Gregory stayed where he was. “What are you doing, XO?”

  Chinyama stepped forward and handed him the second rifle. “The captain has always been a terrible pilot.” His eyes crinkled in a mild smile. “Look after him and yourselves. Godspeed.”

  Gregory stared at him a moment and then down at the rifle. He still couldn't move.

  To leave now? To leave Chinyama here to die?

  It was the XO who moved him, coming around the railing and spinning him towards the pod entry with a hard push. Gregory went. At the door, he called back, “Get out if you can, XO!”

  “Of course,” Chinyama replied. He was at the helmpanel now.

  Westermann and Sintopas approached, lugging Pan’s dead weight between them, and blocking Gregory’s view of the XO. He forced himself through the opening ahead of them, stumbling down the slight incline of a service passageway. Next moment, he had entered an oval-shaped compartment a little larger than the Ready Room. The walls were lined with cubby doors and monitor screens, the floor choked with twelve crash chairs arranged in four rows. Two more sat up front where the helmsmen had positioned themselves, as busy with their new controls as Chinyama had been with their old ones.

  Someone snatched the rifle from Gregory’s hands. Grace. She stowed his and hers into a cubby then pushed him into the middle of the back row. He fumbled with his harness. She settled beside him. Westermann got Pan into the last seat in that row to Gregory’s left, buckling the unconscious man in while cursing under her breath. Sintopas took the chair in front of Grace. Hecate already sat in the row behind the helmsmen, a weapons operator on either side of her.

  “Sealing hatch,” called Yassim.

  Gregory heard the hiss and clunk behind him, felt the change in air pressure in his ears. With the closed hatch cutting off the klaxon’s caterwauling, the pod would have been silent if it weren’t for the ragged sawing of his own breath, Westermann’s swearing, and the helmsmen’s rapid-fire exchange of data.

  “Launch in five!” announced helmsman Toller.

  “I’m not in my rack!” Westermann shot back.

  She was still fitting Pan’s harness. With his left arm, Gregory helped her guide the final buckle in place.

  “Then hold on!” the helmsman replied.

  The pod lurched into motion.

  Gregory had been on many a fun park ride, first with Tabitha before they’d married, and then with their daughter, Belle. The ones he’d ridden with Belle were tame; the ones with Tabitha not so much.

  The pod launch was harsher than all of them combined.

  G-force crushed
him into his seat. Westermann was snatched away and out of view behind him. Someone up front screeched. Grace grated expletives at his side. Moments later, the pod jerked to starboard, prompting Gregory to press a knee against the frame of his chair and lock onto its armrests in a vain attempt at stability. Momentum shifted again, this time toward the ceiling. As his shoulders strained at his harness straps, he willed his earlier meal to stay down. Westermann yelped from behind him.

  There was nothing on any of the ceiling-mounted display screens to tell him how far they’d flown from Assured already—or if it had exploded yet, if the pod was about to be evaporated. He flashed back to the destruction of Fireteam Charlie one month earlier, the sphere of blue-white nuclear death blooming from the edge of the Pollyanna asteroid field to gobble up everything in its reach including the ill-fated transport.

  His parents had been religious, as had theirs. Chris Gregory had never seen the point.

  But right then, he began to pray.

  19

  Human-sized, bronze-shelled insectoid bodies carpeted the corridor floor with little space between them. Some still twitched. Wide, overlapping scorch marks indicated the area where Chipper and Stines had let loose a mininade each.

  Chipper let his rifle hang from its sling and flexed his right hand to stave off a cramp. They’d stopped them all, but only just.

  “All are died!” Vazak commed.

  “All these ones are,” Stines replied from his position the other side of the Lioness. “You don’t think there’ll be more? Pilot, how’s our ride outta here looking?”

  “Godhackit, I’m shut out of the entire system. I even can’t see what the issue is.”