Calculated Risk

by Zen DiPietro

  Rigby coughed, grimaced, and added, “And my guess is that the PAC will blast this thing any minute to cut off any chance of escape.”

  “Let’s hope they’re occupied with more threatening targets first,” Cabot said. “Are we ready?”

  He had a stinger in one hand and a pry bar in the other. Nagali carried a pair of stingers, while Omar had one stinger and a maul that had an axe-head on one side and a sledgehammer on the other.

  Arpalo carried the tool kit Rigby had used to repair the van. He thought he could make it work, and Cabot really, really hoped he was right.

  “Okay,” Cabot said. “We can bluff our way as far as we can, but that’s not going to work for long. Be ready to fight.”

  “When am I ever not?” Omar quipped.

  Cabot didn’t answer him. “Hide your stingers but have them ready. Rigby, you lead. These workers might recognize you, or at least the fact that you’re Zankarti. Nagali, you’ll be right behind her, looking authoritative.”

  “My favorite.” Nagali pasted on a haughty, disapproving look that really just looked like her regular expression.

  “Let’s go,” he ordered. He felt a thrill of authority, like he was Fallon, leading some crazy black ops mission.

  He kind of was like her, at the moment, though their methods were worlds apart. He didn’t have her training, but he had his cunning, ability to adapt, and intolerance of missing a good deal.

  And this orbital elevator gig was the only deal that meant getting off the planet alive.

  Rigby waved at the entrance guards, flagging them down. “Do you have an emergency medkit? We hit a rut and turned over.”

  She turned her head, displaying the marks on her cheekbone, already turning purple and black. “Oh. Sorry.” She shook her head as if trying to clear it. “I forgot to show you my credential.”

  She reached into her jacket, pulled out a stinger, and squeezed off two quick shots, putting both of the men on the ground.

  “Should we bind them and take them with us?” she asked.

  “No time.” Nagali pushed forward, dragging Arpalo with her. “We’ll handle the left mechanism, you guys do the thing on the right.”

  “You’re good with the technical talk,” Cabot said, maintaining a serious expression.

  “Shut up.” She grinned.

  “You shut up.”

  Omar growled, “Both of you shut up!”

  He waved his maul menacingly.

  Cabot and Rigby followed him to the emergency shut-off box.

  “Are we sure we want to damage it before we go up?” Omar asked, hesitating before swinging the axe to bust open the locked cover.

  “There’s no way to do it once we get to the top,” Cabot said. “So it has to be now if we want to prevent anyone from following us up. Arpalo said that we can damage the descending mechanism without harming the ascending one. So we should make it to the top just fine, as long as you don’t screw this up. Just hit it the way he told you to.”

  “You do remember that I have a broken rib or two, right?” Omar asked.

  “I can do it.” Cabot held out a hand for the maul.

  Omar didn’t give it to him. “Nah. Even with broken ribs, I’ll do a better job than you. You’re too out of shape.”

  He wasn’t wrong about that, so Cabot could hardly argue. “Well, get to it, then. We don’t exactly have time to waste.”

  Rigby stood between them, trying to pretend she didn’t find it hard to breathe. He hoped she didn’t pass out on them, because hauling an inert body would add another degree of difficulty to this escape.

  They already had as much difficulty as Cabot cared to handle.

  Omar lifted the maul and brought it down hard, right at the stress point Arpalo had described. Two more blows cracked the closure and Cabot rushed forward to flip the box open.

  “Right. This is the ascending side, and this is the descending.” Cabot pointed. “Smash here. Not here.”

  Omar rolled his eyes. “Me smash good. Now get out of the way.”

  Cabot held his breath and Omar lifted the maul and brought it down right in the perfect spot.

  The cable didn’t break.

  Omar hit it again. The cable dented slightly, but remained intact.

  Cabot levered the pry bar under it and pushed, which bent it outward slightly but didn’t seem to truly damage it.

  “Aaaugh, why is nothing going right on this stupid trip?” Omar brought the maul up and smashed it down repeatedly, again and again, yelling incoherent things. Cabot was pretty sure he caught a reference to the designing engineer’s mother.

  Finally, the cable broke, leaving two mangled ends.

  “Hah, see, I told you I’d smash it good!” Omar crowed, but his breathing had become labored.

  “You okay?” Cabot asked.

  Omar wheezed.

  “I think he’s punctured a lung.” Rigby grimaced. “We need to get him on the elevator before he passes out.”

  Cabot took the maul from him and wedged his shoulder into Omar’s armpit to support him. “Let’s move.”

  “I…never…pass…out,” Omar said with great effort.

  “Do as your sister says—shut up,” Rigby advised. “You need to save your breath. I’m in no shape to haul your sorry self around right now.”

  Her bad leg still dragged slightly with each step.

  Omar, amazingly, fell quiet, except for his wheezing.

  Just as they made it to the elevator and opened it, Nagali and Arpalo arrived.

  Nagali took one look at Omar and muttered something Cabot couldn’t quite catch, but he suspected it was absolutely filthy. “What happened?”

  Cabot pressed the button to close the elevator, then entered the ascent command.

  The elevator began moving upward, to his tremendous relief.

  “He got carried away, bashing that control box,” Rigby said.

  “Idiot.” Nagali said without heat. Her expression betrayed a hint of concern.

  “I take it you two were successful?” Cabot prompted.

  Arpalo nodded. “Just like I said. I reset the software to construction mode. That design used a lower power setting. Once we get to the top, we can send a power surge to that junction, which will cause it to short out. It won’t be dramatic looking or anything, but repairing the power load mismatch would take a couple of hours.”

  “Plus they’d have to repair the bit that Omar broke. Good. Hopefully by then, the PAC will have taken care of the elevator on their own.” Rigby sounded satisfied.

  “Now we just need to make it up top and call Ditnya,” Nagali said.

  “It might not be as easy as that,” Rigby reminded her. “If the people up there haven’t evacuated, we’ll have to fight our way to the voicecom and the docking bay.”

  While Nagali usually would have found that an exciting prospect, her eyes cut to Omar with unmistakable concern.

  The hour-long ride up would give them a chance to rest and relax before whatever came next.

  For forty minutes, Cabot rested, considering what might await them above and how they might deal with various situations.

  Then the elevator shook.

  “What was that?” Nagali asked, even as she leapt toward the controls.

  Since the elevator had no windows, they couldn’t see out.

  “I don’t think you’ll find any answers there,” Rigby said to Nagali. “This thing is pretty basic.”

  “She’s right,” Arpalo added. “Unless someone above wants to tell us what’s going on, we’re going to have to sit and wait.”

  “Call them,” Cabot decided. “If they’re up there, they already know someone’s coming. We can try bluffing about who we are.”

  “Me?” Arpalo asked.

  “Yes. You seem the best qualified to know how things work here. Pretend to be a worker escorting an inspector up to evacuate.”

  “Right.”

  “And if you do anything foolish,” Nagali began.

  Arpal
o cut her off. “I know, I know, you’ll shoot me. I’m getting really tired of hearing that.”

  He muttered as he tried to connect to the people up top, then fell silent waiting for an answer.

  They didn’t get one.

  “Good news,” Arpalo said, “it doesn’t seem we’ll have to fight our way to the shuttle. Bad news, we’re all alone in this metal box.”

  “A box with mechanisms that we’ve just broken,” added Rigby.

  The elevator shook again, more violently.

  “Do you think this is mechanical failure?” Cabot asked.

  “I don’t know. It could be.” Arpalo threw his hands in the air. “There’s no alarm code for ‘stupid people damaged their escape vehicle before getting in it.’”

  “It was your idea,” Nagali pointed out.

  “Yeah. Yeah, it was.” Arpalo folded his arms tightly across his chest and slouched in his seat.

  The elevator rocked again, this time a hard lurch followed by a long, jittering jiggle.

  The last five minutes of the ride took forever. Cabot counted down the seconds. The further they went, the more frequent the shaking was.

  He counted down the last seconds until arrival, willing the elevator to survive that long.

  The doors finally opened, and he took a long inhale of relief, even as he prepared for the possibility that people remained on the station.

  Omar refused his help with a growl and a mutter, so Cabot moved to the front of the group.

  The station was deserted. No sounds except for faint alarms. No voices, nothing.

  As they rushed across the station to the control room, a feeling of dread settled over him. The closer they got, the more oppressive the feeling became.

  Finally, they arrived, and he used a terminal to see PAC ships raining down hell on the planet. But there were no shuttles and no ships in the direct vicinity.

  They had no way off the station, and no way to escape the siege.

  Nagali let out a shout of outrage. “They stole all the ships and abandoned their posts!”

  Cabot put his back to the bulkhead, sagging against it. “We’d have done the same thing.”

  “Of course we would,” she snapped. “But in this case, we’re the ones left stranded.”

  Cabot straightened. “We’re only stranded if we have no friends out there. Let’s contact the Bona Fide.”

  Arpalo recoiled. “Overseer Caine’s ship? Why would it be here?”

  Nagali turned to look at him.

  “I know,” Arpalo muttered. “Shut up.”

  Cabot found the control room and accessed the voicecom.

  The Bona Fide was gone.

  “She left us.” He didn’t feel disbelief, but he did feel pretty angry. A sense of isolation swept over him, knowing they had no exit vehicle and no one to come to their rescue.

  Nagali grabbed an infoboard and threw it across the room, where it slammed into the wall and dropped to the floor. “Oh, this just gets worse and worse!”

  The floor gently swayed beneath his feet.

  “Are you kidding me?” Nagali shouted, outraged.

  Cabot closed his eyes for a moment. They were tethered to a planet undergoing a massive onslaught. They had no way off, and no way down.

  Okay. Time to get to work.

  “Omar, get on the other terminal over there and see how many ships are out there. Arpalo, monitor the surface. Get me as much information about the kind of strikes that are happening, and what locations appear to have been affected.”

  Cabot looked away from the voicecom to fix the man with a stare. “And if you use communications to do something, I swear to Prelin I will smear your atoms all the way to the next galaxy.”

  “What could I possibly do to make this worse?” Arpalo asked as he went to an auxiliary voicecom display.

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure there’s something. Don’t communicate with anyone, or it will be the last thing you do.”

  “Cabot,” Nagali cut in.

  He looked to her. She stood next to Omar, who sat on the floor, looking pasty, his back against a bulkhead.

  “Right. Rigby, you count ships for me. I want to know how many Barony, PAC, and Zankarti ships are out there.”

  She nodded, hurrying to the terminal.

  Meanwhile, Cabot looked for friendlies. They didn’t even have to be super friendly—they just needed to be someone he could convince of his relationship with Fallon and PAC command, to get them to come to their rescue.

  He’d never seen so many big PAC ships in one place. Dozens of warships encircled the system. Those ships were either engaged in active combat or attacking the surface of Mayani Minor. Those attacks weren’t meant to damage the planet, though. They were calculated strikes, aimed at ships and installations. Including their shuttle.

  Soon, they’d get to the elevator. Maybe they hadn’t considered it a primary target since it had no ships attached.

  He needed to get them all out of here before that assessment changed.

  His breath caught. There it was.

  On the other side of the planet, he found their way out.

  The Nefarious. But why was it on the opposite side of Mayani Minor? There was nothing over there but craters too deep and treacherous to cross.

  Unless Barony had created some installations the Zankarti hadn’t been aware of.

  Well, of course they had. It was Barony, after all.

  Cabot opened a channel and sent a signal to the Nefarious, identifying himself.

  If they received it, they’d be able to pinpoint his location.

  He set the signal to repeat every thirty seconds with an emergency priority. No, hang on. He changed it to a distress call.

  The floor moved again.

  Rigby spoke, her voice reciting numbers in rapid fire. “Sixteen Barony Coalition ships, eighteen PAC ships, four ships of unknown registry, which seem to be protectively flanking the PAC ships. Two Zankarti ships are just outside the action, declining to enter the fray.”

  “Their deal with Barony isn’t incentive enough for them to engage in a war,” Cabot mused. “Interesting.”

  “Not surprising,” Rigby said. “My government won’t risk our people and resources to get involved in someone else’s problems.”

  “And this is why they have no allies,” Nagali snorted.

  “Yes. That, and many other reasons,” Rigby said. “My government has gone in wrong directions for too long. But my hope is that all of this, and their brush with an interstellar war, will be enough to force some reform.”

  “Sounds like someone’s planning some civil disobedience.” Arpalo grinned, then, remembering himself, he stopped and looked at the ground.

  “Maybe,” Rigby allowed. “But I’d have to make it out of here, first.”

  “Doing my best,” Cabot said. “Far be it from me to stand in the way of civil disobedience.”

  “It is one of the best kinds of disobedience,” Nagali agreed.

  Instead of looking at them like they were all unhinged, Rigby reluctantly smiled. Cabot had hope for her.

  “Cabot?” A familiar voice came over the voicecom. Turning, he saw Fallon on the screen.

  He’d never been so glad to see her. Or possibly anyone.

  “Here I am,” he said. “At the top of a tower that I fear is about to fall down. Any chance you can help us out of here?”

  “I’ll ask how you got there later.” She frowned. “Do you have access to pressure suits?”

  Were conditions on the station about to get very, very bad? He looked to Arpalo, who shrugged.

  “Yes,” Rigby said. “They should be here, in the docking ring. Zankarti law requires them, and inspections happen frequently.”

  Fallon’s eyebrow rose at the unfamiliar voice, but she held her questions in check. “Get them on immediately. Transmit a signal from a docking bay and wait there. I’m not eager to attach my ship to something also attached to the planet, and we’ll be a sitting target while we do, so
we’re not going to pressurize the airlock. Just come through, lock down, and we’ll depart. We’ll start pressurizing as we move away from the station.”

  “Understood,” Cabot said. “There are five of us. One is most definitely not trustworthy.”

  “Good to know. I’ll see you in approximately eight minutes.” Fallon’s image disappeared.

  “Why did you tell her I’m untrustworthy?” Arpalo complained. “Have I not done the best I can in this situation, with no tricks?”

  “What makes you think I was talking about you?” Cabot asked, pointing to the docking ring and helping Omar up.

  Arpalo looked uncertain, his eyes darting from Rigby to Nagali.

  “Come help me with him,” Cabot ordered.

  Omar was barely conscious, and unlikely to be much help walking or getting his pressure suit on.

  Rigby wouldn’t have a good time getting into a suit, either, though she tried to hide her pain.

  They’d do what they had to do, though, because this was their last chance.

  They struggled into their pressure suits, taking up all of the eight allotted minutes.

  They stood huddled together in the docking bay, staring out through the starport at nothing but empty space.

  No ships. No Fallon. No rescue.

  Another breathless minute went by, feeling like infinitely longer. Were they doomed to die like this? Blown up on a bloody orbital elevator?

  Another minute. They were now two minutes past Fallon’s promised arrival. Nagali’s hand reached for Cabot’s, and he folded his fingers around hers, hoping they felt warm and reassuring.

  Had Fallon’s ship been attacked? Suffered a mechanical failure? He didn’t know what shape the Nefarious had been in when Fallon had called.

  Had his last-ditch escape route just exploded, along with people he’d come to consider his friends? If so, he and Nagali, along with Omar, Rigby, and Arpalo, were doomed.

  Rigby’s and Omar’s labored breathing filled the silence as the seconds ticked by.

  Then he saw it. A glimpse of the Nefarious. It was in one piece and moving fast.

  Wait. The ship appeared larger far sooner than it should have. Then its size increased again a second later.

  The Nefarious was on a direct collision course with them, and blasting through space like hell was on its tail. It loomed large and soon it was almost all they could see, and still moving far, far too fast.