“What? But? I don’t need a belt! I’m not going anywhere,” Alek protested.
Lukas ignored him, pushing an activation stud that set the belt humming and made Alek’s eyes bulge like a frog. “Power up,” he told Tris, pointing out the switch.
Tris pressed it — and the belt seemed to shrink onto him, tightening so suddenly it drove the air from his lungs. “Urgh!” he gasped. “Tight!”
Lukas knocked a knuckle against the belt. “Yup. Don’t want to be falling out of that thing.” He stooped to rummage around in a bag of bits, while above him Alek flapped his tablet for attention.
“It’s crushing me!” he moaned.
Lukas didn’t look up. “No it’s not.” He pulled a cuff from the bag, fastening it around Alek’s ankle, then reeled out a long line attached to it. This he clipped to the back of Alek’s tablet — eliciting a howl of dismay.
“What’s that? What have you done?”
“Relax, it’s just a leash.”
“I don’t need a leash,” Alek insisted, “because I’m not going out there. You can’t make me. I’m the crown prince of Epser!”
Lukas raised his hands in surrender. “Alright mate, whatever you say. Tris, are we good to go?”
“Um… yeah…” Tris panted, struggling to breath past the constriction of his waist. “But I need to pee first.”
“Should have gone before we left,” Kyra yelled back — over the noise of the side hatch opening. The rushing air grabbed at them; Tris braced himself against a bulkhead, whilst Alek wrapped himself around Lukas.
“I really do need to pee,” Tris shouted over the turbulence. “This thing is squeezing my bladder! I’m going to wet myself.”
Lukas flashed him a grin. “Don’t worry mate. You’ll need a change of pants after this anyway.”
Alek had stabilised himself enough to peel his limbs free. “Take this thing off right now,” he demanded. “Or I’ll take it off myself!”
Lukas shook his head slowly. “Nah, mate. You don’t want to do that.”
“And why shouldn’t I?”
“Because it’s a long way down.” He planted one meaty hand against the coder’s chest, and pushed.
A scream tore from Alek as he plunged out through the hatch.
“Tris, you’re up.”
Tris eyed the hatch, and tried to take a deep breath. He failed.
Join the Wardens, they said. Discover new and exotic ways to kill yourself…
In fairness, Kreon had never sugar-coated his odds of survival.
He crossed his fingers — and his legs — and threw himself out.
He instantly dropped a few metres, then found himself floating in mid-air. Lukas tumbled out after him. Kyra must have hit the brakes; the giant hover tank drifted lazily above them for a few more seconds, before roaring off on its own mission.
Alek had stopped screaming, but his arms continued to windmill frantically. “I dropped my tablet!” he wailed. The item in question was dangling below him on its leash. He strained to reach it, but the belts weren’t made for bending in. “Why did you fasten it to my ankle?”
Lukas was hovering motionless a short distance away. “That was the only part of you that wasn’t moving too fast,” he pointed out. “Now, these belts are pretty basic models. The ones I used to use could generate interference fields to confuse enemy sensors. We’re going to be relying on you hacking into that barge and disabling the sensors manually. Otherwise they’ll see us coming from a mile away.” He squinted at the blanket of green beneath his feet. Somewhere down there was Viktor’s barge. “Maybe half a mile,” he corrected.
Alek had calmed down a bit, now looking rather petulant. “I can’t do that without my tablet, can I?”
Lukas flipped down the little cover to expose his belt’s controls. Fiddling with them, he began to move; slowly, gracefully, he flipped over so that he was upside-down. He lowered himself until he could reach the tether, then hauled the tablet up hand over hand. He righted himself, then passed the precious device up to its owner. “We can’t go up,” he pointed out. “That’s not how these things work. See the little joystick? Push forward to go down. Pull back or let go to slow or stop. That’s it.”
Tris found the lever, but couldn’t quite bring himself to mess with it. “You couldn’t have shown us this while we were still inside?”
Lukas mugged a thoughtful face. “I find it’s better just to jump right in.”
Tris swallowed a few times while he built up the courage to try it. Skydiving was something he’d never done; he’d jumped down from a few rooftops in his parkour days, but this was something completely different.
Gritting his teeth, he pushed the lever.
The result was an instant, stomach-churning drop of about ten feet. “Shiiiiiit!!” The abrupt halt felt like a kick in the testicles. “Oof! It’s a bit touchy! You drop like a stone.”
Lukas dropped to match him in height — he didn’t move any more slowly, but he was clearly prepared for it. “Remember when I said I used to crash for a living?” He gave what was probably meant to be a reassuring smile. “Nothing to it. You’ve just got to make sure you have a damn good thigh workout in your routine.”
“I don’t even do a thigh workout.”
Lukas reached down and slapped his own meaty quads. “All good, mate. I’m strong enough for both of us.”
“Um, yeah… Lukas, that doesn’t really help. You can’t land for both of us.”
“Nope! But if you break both legs on touch down, I can carry you the rest of the way.”
And with a push of his lever, he plummeted.
They descended in bursts, because anything else was just too terrifying to contemplate.
After a couple of minutes the scenery below gained definition, and the hole in the forest made by the barge’s landing became visible. As they hung out above it, still hundreds or even thousands of feet up, Lukas gave Alek the nod. “Any lower than this and they’ll spot us. You said that thing is armed, right?”
Alek gave him a black look. “It’s a defence barge. It’s got nothing but guns.”
“Okay, so this is probably a good time to take those sensors out.”
The coder waggled his tablet. “I just did.”
Lukas gave him a thumbs-up. “Right. I’ll take over for the landing.” He pulled a credit card-sized panel from his belt and turned it over to show icons flashing on a miniature display. “So don’t touch your controls once we get close, and don’t freak out when you start moving on my signal.”
Tris glanced at Alek. He didn’t look convinced. “Fair enough.”
They dropped again, a longer push this time, and Tris was starting to develop enough fine control to stop without bone-jarring force. The rectangular barge had grown to thumbnail-size, its silver metal hull almost dazzlingly bright. The fearsome guns, designed to blast incoming ships to smithereens, were just tiny lines protruding in all different directions.
“Four, maybe five more stops,” Lukas told them, “then I’ll bring you in one at a time. We can afford to take it slowly, seeing as how no-one knows we’re here.”
“Then we’ve got to find a toilet,” Tris said.
And with a rumble that carried through the air beneath them, the turrets atop the grounded ship began to turn…
They came to rest pointing directly up.
Lukas frowned down at them. “That’s not supposed to happen.”
“I’ve lost control,” Alek wailed. He was bashing away at his tablet with his free hand. “Someone’s overriding me!”
A disturbing whine filled the air.
“Shit! They’re going to shoot!” Lukas grabbed for his belt and plunged downwards.
A second later, Tris dropped too — just as a massive beam of crimson energy sizzled through the sky above him. His heart pounded as wind tore at him; he picked up speed, faster than he’d dropped so far. He let go of his lever, desperate to brake the headlong plunge, but continued falling — Lukas had taken ove
r, and there was nothing he could do but scream.
The upper surface of the barge raced towards him, as a salvo of incandescent blasts superheated the air all around. It was like falling through a blast furnace, and as the deck raced towards him, he squeezed his eyes tight-shut.
He was stopped in a series of short, sharp jerks. Each one lasted only a fraction of a second — it was like the most violent case of hiccups imaginable. Tris opened his eyes to see Alek hovering right in front of him, close enough to touch.
Lukas had landed, his feet splayed, and his head was at roughly groin height. “Soft legs,” he cautioned them — before one last touch of his remote brought them crashing to earth.
Tris managed to absorb the force with his knees, while Lukas flung his arms around Alek and lowered him more gently. Finally, they were down; Tris scrabbled for his rifle, which he’d strapped tightly around himself for the jump, and dropped into a firing position.
Alek wobbled two steps on legs turned to rubber, then bent over and sprayed the deck with his stomach contents.
“Y’see! It wan’t that bad,” Lukas told him.
The upper surface of the barge was fairly smooth, with few protrusions beyond the massive gun turrets. The guns had stopped firing, and so far no-one had emerged from the ship to challenge them. Tris figured they had two options; the obvious one was to head for the nearest airlock and try to force their way in.
But after that rude welcome, I think we’ll try door number two.
Letting his rifle hang, he pulled his staff free and connected the Kharash knife to the business end. As Lukas stood guard, turning in circles with his rifle up, Tris plunged his blade into the hull and traced a square. He didn’t know how thick it would be, but before he finished the cut a section of metal bowed inwards, dropping under its own weight.
A yawning gulf of darkness was revealed.
“No lights on,” Lukas observed. “It’s like they don’t want us here.”
“Can we drop in with the belts?” Tris asked him. “Maybe if you go first?”
“It’s a storage bay,” Alek said, brandishing a schematic on his tablet. “Ten metres high.”
“Well then.” Tris tried to hook a thumb into his belt, but couldn’t even get the tip in. “Let’s go see what they’ve got in store.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Kyra watched the others drift beneath the ship. She gave them a couple of seconds to get clear, then she opened the hover car’s throttle and roared off at top speed.
The mask of civility she’d been working so hard to maintain fell from her face. Cold fury welled up inside her, colliding with a crippling anxiety that she hadn’t felt since… since the last time she was here.
Coming home had been a mistake.
Sydon’s frikkin’ Name! What is wrong with these people? I’m gone one generation, and the whole world’s turned to shit? My people are fighting the Laugarrens, who are colluding with Viktor… resistance movements, secret bases, royal hostages… how the hell did they manage to screw things up so much?
Her thoughts were black, and getting darker by the minute. Tarri was bothering her most of all; a scrappy little girl, now paying the price for all this chaos. A princess of Esper, turned first into a target, and then into a casualty of war… to say nothing of her sister.
My blood. Those girls are my family.
Guilt nagged at her, and she thrust it away. There was no place for it in a combat mindset; it would only make her weaker, more likely to second-guess her actions. So what if I could have stopped this by coming back earlier? I’m not their private Warden. I can’t be on constant stand-by, watching out for the next sign of trouble. At some point, these people are going to have to grow up and start taking responsibility for their own mistakes!
God knows, she could teach them a thing or two about that.
And maybe she would. She just had to kill Viktor first.
And not just kill him. I’m going to make that bastard suffer. He’s going to regret everything he’s ever done to my people — and everything he’s done to me.
She poured on the speed, arcing out over the forest before swinging back towards the grounded barge. It was massive; the cannons that bristled from its upper deck were almost as big as the ones on the Ring. No wonder Tarri didn’t want to risk Nightshade coming in; two barges like this would have taken the Folly apart in short order.
I never realised just how powerful my people’s tech was. It’s only coming back here, after a lifetime out in the galaxy, that I can see the contrast. I guess that’s why everyone else left us alone all these years.
The barge filled her viewscreens now, as she made a high-speed pass directly above it. She was running cover for Tris and the others, but part of her was dying to know if Viktor would open fire on her. Would he dare? Would he gamble that he could blow her out of the sky, and then recover the Master Key from the wreckage? Not a chance. He was always smart. She’d underestimated him before, a long, long time ago, and it had cost her dearly. Viktor might seem like a barbarian, but he’d been a rich nobleman himself, once. She couldn’t quite remember the tale — didn’t care about it, to be honest — but she wasn’t going to underestimate him again.
No shots came as she spun the hover car around. She was in easy striking distance of her own weapons, but the barge was far to big for her to do significant damage to it.
And my niece is somewhere inside that thing… I probably shouldn’t start shoving missiles up its ass. Not yet, anyway.
Dealing with the barge itself was up to Tris. As was finding the girl… she’d delegated an awful lot of jobs to that young man. But he’d proved himself plenty of times, and whilst she’d never say it to his face, she considered him almost her equal in many regards. His psychic ability already surpassed hers, and he had the kind of blind optimism and trust that had long since been burned out of her. All he really lacked was the cold-hearted, ruthless capacity to flat-out murder his enemies in cold blood.
Maybe that was a good thing? She couldn’t decide.
With no obvious movement from those impressive gun turrets, she eased off on the throttle and drifted between them. As she came around the back of the ship, movement spiked her sensors; she glanced around the viewscreens, and discovered that the door to what must be the main hangar bay was grinding slowly open. At first, only a gulf of shadows was revealed; then internal lighting kicked on, leaving the bay as welcoming as any giant steel death-trap.
What the hell. I didn’t come all this way just to blow raspberries.
She guided the fearsome hover car in through the opening — a ridiculously easy feat, even in atmosphere, as the door was wide enough for ships ten times her size. The hangar bay was vast too, probably taking up a quarter of the entire ship. She flew down it right to the far end, figuring she might as well save herself the walk. Still, the deeper she got inside the barge, the more enclosing it felt. It would be a hell of a place to bust out of, if the shit hit the fan.
She treated herself to a grin. And that almost never happens…
Spying a human-sized door, she landed the car next to it. Might as well plan for a quick getaway.
But all the banter in the world didn’t disguise the fact that she was here on Viktor’s terms. Whatever surprises he had in store for her, she would have to face them armed only with her trusty Arranozapar. She had to assume he’d taken the swords into account — she’d come pretty close to killing him with them the last time they’d met. From here on she was playing Viktor’s game, and she knew him well enough to know that he’d stack the odds in his favour.
She didn’t have much of a plan. He wanted the Master Key, and she didn’t have it. That was bound to piss him off. That was the best she could do, really — piss him off, and keep pissing him off until he revealed whatever the hell he was up to. At which point, all things being equal, she would pin him to the deck and dissect him one piece at a time. A brutal end for a brutal man… I wonder if I should scalp him? She toyed with that idea,
as she dropped the car’s systems to idle and made her way to the hatch.
There was no welcoming committee waiting outside for her. That was a surprise; Viktor had always been the bully-type, surrounding himself with lesser thugs who laughed at his jokes and made him feel important. But as she reached out with the Gift, she found only cold, empty corridors ahead of her.
Very strange.
The door slid aside as she approached, and once more the lights came on at her presence.
Still no-one around! This is getting creepy.
She glanced up reflexively, before stepping through the door. The ceiling of the hangar bay looked impossibly far above her. A latticework of rails ran across it in all directions, with giant cranes nestled amidst them; designed for unloading containers from the Ring, of course. According to Alek’s diagram, a sizeable chunk of the barge was devoted to ammunition storage. It also had limited manufacturing abilities of its own, but it was a safe bet that most supplies would be shipped in from the Ring.
She stepped into the corridor, which ran straight ahead for a short distance. Another door stood at the far end; this slid open too, as the door to the hangar bay hissed shut behind her.
Okay. I guess I’m going that way.
She still couldn’t sense Viktor, or the girl he’d taken prisoner, but that didn’t mean anything. The ship was huge; Tris might have been able to scan the whole thing, but not until he got his scrawny ass down here…
As if on cue, she felt tremors run through the superstructure, and a second later the unmistakeable roar of a turbolaser firing.
Shit! Viktor must have spotted them!
More guns fired, some near, some far, and Kyra wished x-ray vision was amongst her powers. There was no way to know what was happening in the skies above, but there was a strong possibility that her friends were being vaporised.
Embers of Esper: A Sci Fi Adventure (Warden's Legacy Book 1) Page 19
