by Joe Canzano
Blurr seemed dumbfounded. Then his face grew dark like a thundercloud.
“Banks, you’re finished, do you hear me?”
“Am I? Or are you the one who’s finished?”
Blurr turned back to the guards. “Forget what I said. Take the prisoners back to their cells.” He looked at Banks and sneered. “I’ll be on the bridge, filling out a form.” Then he looked at Suzy. “It will take about three hours for the approval to come through. Enjoy it while it lasts.”
Blurr stormed out of the room.
The guards unstrapped Ricardo, handcuffed Suzy again, and started marching them back down the passageway.
Chapter 35
Suzy looked over at Ricardo, who looked limp like a wet towel.
“Are you okay?” she said.
He flashed her a weak grin. “I’m fine. I’ve been on scarier rides at the carnival—and I’ve seen way smarter clowns.”
“Shut-up,” one of the guards said. He gave Ricardo a shove.
Ricardo rolled his eyes. “Did you guys go to school for this stuff—or are you just natural born assholes?”
The guy smirked and pulled out his buzzing black tube. Ricardo tried to make a quick move but the guy jammed it into his ribs. Ricardo gave a shout and went down.
Suzy’s brain burst with rage.
She didn’t think. Instead, she let out a shout—and then lunged forward and kicked the guy hard. He let out a gasp as her foot slammed into his groin.
He screamed and dropped the tube. Then he doubled over and fell to the floor.
There were some shouts and the other guys swarmed around her. She was grabbed from behind, and there was an arm across her throat—but she was slippery and quick, and she turned her head and bit the guy’s hand. Someone threw a punch at her face that didn’t quite land, and she got off another solid kick into somebody’s balls—but she was hammered in the stomach. She was grabbed again and slammed against a wall. She was kicked and punched and fell to the floor.
She was flat on her back with a big thug on top of her. Her arms were still handcuffed behind her, and he was jamming his forearm under her jaw and punching her in the side of the head. Then someone barked, “Stop it! Get off her. Get her up.”
It was the first guy she’d kicked. He was red in the face and sucking in big gulps of air—but he was also back on his feet and holding his buzzing toy.
Ricardo was still convulsing on the floor. The guy took a break from barking orders and jammed the tube into Ricardo’s stomach. He held it there for a long few seconds.
Ricardo let out a shriek as the guy turned back to Suzy.
They had her on her feet now, holding her from behind with an arm under her jaw. They were pulling her backwards, stretching her spine. She was trying to kick but she couldn’t see anything except the ceiling. She was struggling to breathe.
The guy with the tube laughed. “What did I say would happen if you pulled any shit? Do you know where you’re getting it now? Lift her up!”
Suzy squirmed and writhed and tried to get free—no use. She tried to kick the guy’s shins, but he just tightened his arm around her throat and kept lifting her hips upward. She couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t see, and she heard that buzzing sound—no! Then she heard the sound of gunfire.
There were four quick shots and a scream, and the guy holding her relaxed his grip. Now Suzy saw Maria and a female soldier standing there with guns.
“Let her go,” the soldier said. She was wearing body armor and a helmet with a black visor that was obviously too big for her.
The other four guys were on the floor. They didn’t look damaged enough to be dead; they only looked stunned.
The guy behind Suzy released her and put up his hands.
The female soldier shot him in the neck. Then she raised the visor for just a second—and there was Kryl.
She looked at Suzy and said, “Are you okay?”
Suzy was coughing and gagging; her ears were ringing and she felt dizzy.
“I’m fine,” she said between gasps. She dropped down quick beside one of the unconscious goons. “Can you give me a hand? Or maybe a thumb.”
Kryl pressed the guy’s thumb against the handcuffs and they snapped open. Suzy ran to Ricardo, who was being attended to by Maria.
Suzy and Maria helped him to his feet. The shock tube was an excruciating experience, but Suzy knew its effect wore off quickly. He seemed to be okay.
“Forget about me,” he said. “Get the guns.”
Right—of course. Really, what was wrong with her? She must like this guy if he was cutting into her gun-grabbing time. She snatched two pistols. She turned up the power on one and pointed it at “tube guy.”
“No!” Kryl said. “No killing.”
Suzy hesitated. Maybe Kryl was right. After all, he hadn’t been planning to kill her—no, he’d just wanted to shove a sparking hot death-tube into her vagina.
Suzy shook her head in disgust and turned away from the guy. I’m going to regret this, she thought. Then she heard a shot and whirled around.
The guy’s head was splattered all over the floor. Maria had killed him with a full-power blast. Her dark eyes were filled with fiery anger. “I’ve seen his kind before,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Kryl’s mouth dropped open while Ricardo just shrugged and checked the pistol in his hand. For some reason, Suzy wasn’t surprised. Maria was a hard one to figure; obviously, vindictive sexual torture was one of her flashpoints.
“We’ve got to get to the hangar,” Ricardo said. “But how the hell will we get the ship out?”
“I have a way,” Kryl said. “But we need to be quick.”
“I’m not going,” Suzy said.
Three voices said, “What?”
An alarm started to ring.
“I’m not leaving here until I get Blurr.”
“Suzy, that’s crazy!” Ricardo said. “You’ll get killed—or worse.”
“There’s nothing worse than leaving here with that fucker alive. You three go.”
Ricardo grabbed her shoulders. “Suzy, you have to come! You can get Blurr later. Don’t throw away your life on a crazy revenge quest.”
“There’s nothing crazy about killing that piece of shit! And there’s no time to argue—go! I’ll try and meet you there. If I don’t, I’ll get off another way.”
She turned to go but now Kryl reached out and seized her wrist.
“No!” Kryl said. “This is the only way, Suzy. Trust me.”
Suzy didn’t trust her. But then again, Ricardo and Maria were both looking at Suzy like she had a grenade stuck in her mouth, and she’d seen this sort of look over the years—and it usually meant she was about to do something stupid.
“Suzy, please,” Ricardo said.
It’s all about the math, Suzy.
“Dammit—all right!” she said. “Let’s go.”
They bolted fast down the passageway. As they ran, Kryl pointed at one of the many small orbs built into a bulkhead. Suzy knew these were surveillance cameras; the station had lots of them.
“The cameras are off,” Kryl said. “But they won’t be that way for long. That’s why we need to be fast.”
She rounded a corner and jumped into a ladder tube. Everyone followed as they slid down three decks. Kryl surveyed the area quick, saw no one, and used an eye scanner to open a door.
“Hurry,” she said as the door slid shut. The lights came on and Suzy looked around.
They were standing in a storeroom filled with shelves. The shelves were stocked with containers of soap and detergent. There were also machines for cleaning floors, bulkheads, and portholes, as well as several mops and a bin filled with rags.
Kryl pulled off her helmet. “We’ll be safe here for a few minutes.”
“Yeah, and clean,” Suzy muttered.
Kryl was wearing a backpack. She took it off and removed a canister from one of its compartments. “Black paint,” she said. “It’s primitive, but it works.” S
he handed it to Ricardo and pointed at an orb near the ceiling. “Quick! Spray the surveillance orb.”
Ricardo reached up and blasted it. “I thought you said the cameras were off.”
“They are,” Kryl replied. “It’s just a precaution in case they come back on sooner than expected. All the surveillance systems on the station have been disabled; there’s no way to escape from this station with them operating—but unfortunately, knocking them out will let everyone know that someone is helping you. Hopefully, we’ll be gone by the time they figure out it was me.”
Kryl ran to a corner where there was something concealed beneath a tarp. It was about the size of a small, rectangular table, and when Kryl yanked off the covering there was a mobile console underneath. When Kryl touched a button, the area under the console swung open, revealing a space big enough to hold a bunch of supplies—or maybe two people.
Kryl looked at Ricardo and Maria. “This is your way out,” she said. “So get in.”
Ricardo glanced at Maria, and they both shrugged. Ricardo said, “Hey, I guess it’s better than a body bag.”
Suzy said, “Kryl, you’ve gone through a lot of trouble for us—and you’re taking a lot of risks.”
Kryl ripped off her soldier uniform and started handing it to Suzy. Kryl said, “I told you, Aiko was my friend, and I’ve been here long enough… So put on this soldier outfit with the helmet and visor. Hurry!”
Underneath her solder uniform, Kryl was wearing the uniform of the ship’s Chief Surgeon. Kryl said, “Suzy, there’s a link chip in the helmet. It’s set to the ship’s standard open line, so monitor it for the latest news; you should hear a lot from people trying to capture us.”
Suzy started stripping off her clothes and pulling on the new ones. She briefly regretted not following her original plan of just shooting her way into Blurr’s cabin and then into his head. But at least with this plan she’d get to wear body armor.
“How are we going to open the hangar?” Suzy said.
She knew the hangar was sealed by an energy field.
“I’ll be able to control all that from inside the ship,” Kryl said.
Suzy was impressed. “Are you a doctor of sabotage?”
“No,” Kryl said with a smile. “But my undergraduate degree is in computer engineering. Let’s go!”
Suzy wondered why Kryl had chosen Ricardo and Maria to be stuffed under the console. Well, maybe she knows I’m just not meant to be packaged goods. Maria scrunched herself into the cramped space, and Ricardo was about to do the same—but then he leaped forward to give Suzy a hug.
“For luck,” he said.
She hugged him back, and it was hard to pull away. “We really need to stop doing this,” she said.
He grinned. “When the stars are in line we’ll swing on a vine—right into a bed of begonias. I wrote that while they had me strapped to that table. No kidding.”
Suzy almost laughed. Then Ricardo flashed one last smile and got into the cabinet. Suzy’s heart pounded like a hammer as Kryl closed it up. Kryl initiated the auto-follow and the console trailed her toward the door. She peeked out and motioned for Suzy—and then suddenly whipped her head around.
“My knapsack!” she said. “Where is it?”
“It’s right here,” Suzy said, pointing. She started to pick it up but Kryl grabbed her hand. “That’s okay,” she said. There was a look of relief on her face. “I’ve got it. I have some personal things in there.”
Kryl strapped the knapsack on her back and Suzy just nodded with a blank face.
What was in the knapsack? Obviously, something Kryl didn’t want her to see. Of course, this didn’t necessarily mean it was filled with something incriminating. Maybe Kryl was just a shy girl with a bag full of sex toys—but it was unlikely. Suzy had a hunch there was something going on here more dangerous than the average dildo. She planned to sneak a look, assuming they lived long enough.
Out in the passageway an alarm was still ringing. Suzy and Kryl walked fast as the console followed. Kryl motioned at the helmet and Suzy remembered it was equipped with a headset. She snapped it on and immediately heard the friendly voice of Captain Banks.
“All squads, continue a deck by deck sweep. Surveillance equipment is still non-operational. Check the images…The targets are two females, one male—and possibly an unknown accomplice. They’re armed and dangerous but must be taken alive.”
“That’s good to know,” Kryl said.
Suzy gave a snort. “They just want to give us a worse kind of death.”
Kryl stopped talking as a group of five soldiers in black battle gear rounded a corner.
One of the soldiers snapped off a salute and Kryl returned it. Suzy didn’t—it hadn’t occurred to her. She wasn’t the saluting kind.
The lead soldier nodded at Kryl while Suzy’s hand made a movement toward her pistol. Suzy didn’t look into his eyes—no, she watched his body and his hands, waiting for an angry shout and a frantic scream and the start of the shooting—and then she watched him walk past. The rest of the group gave them a glance but did the same.
Suzy let out a deep breath. “I thought we were sunk.”
“You’re a lieutenant,” Kryl said. “That guy was a sergeant. This is a huge station so soldiers come and go all the time and nobody knows everyone. There’s no reason for them to think an escaped prisoner would be disguised as a soldier, walking with me.”
At the end of the long gray hall, they reached the elevator. Suzy hated elevators; they were like mobile coffins for gunfighters. But then she realized Blurr could be travelling between decks, and she felt better as they walked inside.
They didn’t meet Blurr. In fact, they didn’t meet anyone. The elevator whooshed upward, carrying Suzy and Kryl and the console stuffed full of fugitives. Then the doors slid open and they were standing on the edge of the vast hangar bay.
Suzy recalled the basic layout from their arrival. The hangar was like a slice cut from the central hub of the station. The slice was an opening to outer space that was sealed with a glimmering energy field. When the field was activated, it kept the atmosphere inside and allowed people to load and unload cargo ships or other spacecraft. When a ship was launched, the hangar was cleared of personnel and depressurized before the field was deactivated.
Right now, there were several ships docked in the hangar. There were crews of people scurrying around, unloading supplies or doing maintenance on the vessels. Hover-trucks and other vehicles were crawling around like oversized turtles. There were a few groups of soldiers, too. They seemed to be patrolling.
High above, Suzy saw a row of windows looking down on the action. She wondered if someone up there was scanning the hangar below. She wondered if Ricardo and Maria could breathe inside their box.
Kryl tapped her arm. “There’s the ship.”
Suzy turned her head and saw a welcome sight. The Correcaminos Rojo looked bright and crimson like a good glass of wine. Suzy also realized it was the only ship in the hangar they could take and hope to escape. These other ships were just too damn slow. She was no physicist or engineer, but she knew the basics of speed—and wherever a fast ship goes, it gets there faster than a slow ship.
They started making their way across the broad floor while the console followed dutifully behind.
Suzy’s heart was pounding, and her pulse was fast, and she couldn’t deny it was a bit of a thrill. Maybe it was something she’d tell her grandkids one day, if she lived long enough to have any.
There was no way they would make it to the ship. There was no way they would reach that ramp. But they did.
There was a soldier standing guard beside the gangway.
“Hello, soldier,” Kryl said.
“Hello, Doctor Kryl.”
“I have to do an investigation on board this ship. I know we’re on alert, but I put the order through yesterday, and I believe this vessel might be carrying a vibrio cholera contamination.”
“I know all about it, sir. I
received the order before my watch. You can proceed.”
“Okay. The lieutenant is with me.”
The soldier nodded and saluted as Kryl headed up the ramp and into the ship. Suzy and the console were close behind.
Once they were inside, Kryl opened the console and Ricardo and Maria tumbled out. They looked fine—great. Suzy ran to the cockpit with Ricardo close behind.
“Wait!” Kryl called. “Don’t do anything yet.”
Suzy wasn’t listening. Was someone telling her not to fly this ship the fuck out of here?
Her fingers flew over the controls, checking the readouts. Ricardo was doing the same. And then Kryl was right there, shouting about something.
“Do not power up the engines until we know we can leave! Do you hear me? The hangar is closed!”
Ricardo looked at Kryl and said, “Suzy, she’s right.”
Suzy stopped moving. Right—of course, the hangar. She cursed at herself for being so dumb. But she did like the readouts in front of her. “Hey, it looks like the engines are back at full power,” she said. “And look—they even reloaded the missile tubes. Now why would they do that?”
Kryl said, “I guess Blurr was planning to use this ship for something.”
“Well, it would be good if I returned it the way I got it,” Ricardo said with a laugh. “But really, as long as Pablo gets Maria back, we’ll be fine. ¡Él ama Maria!”
Maria just frowned—while Suzy stared at Maria, Ricardo, and Kryl. And then Suzy felt like a bomb had gone off in her head.
Did ‘Pablo love Maria’? Suzy understood Spanish. Did Kryl understand it, too? Of course she did.
“How well do you three know each other?” Suzy said.
They all stared back at her. It was a nice collection of blank eyes.
Maria shrugged. “I didn’t meet Kryl until I came to this place—but I’m glad I did.”
“Me too,” Ricardo chimed in. “I just met her, and it’s been good.”
Suzy’s mind was whirling. “Kryl, do you know Pablo?”
Kryl looked at some readouts. “Suzy, we don’t have time for this now. We can talk about it later, all right? In fact, we might have a problem.”
