Beyond the Veil

by Hamish Spiers

  Asten smiled at the selection. “Yeah. We can use this.”

  Then they heard the deep throbbing of a large engine.

  “What’s that?” Carla asked.

  “That atmospheric yacht,” Asten said. “I knew it. I knew that was going to be his getaway vehicle.” He passed everyone a pair of wrist-blades. “Come on. We’ve got him now.”

  He then rushed towards the window overlooking the valley, put on one of the wrist-blades, and, activating it, cut a neat line through the thick glass. The others caught on straightaway and helped him cut away more of the edges. Then he tried out a web-gun, adjusting a dial on the device to shoot out only a little bit. Just as he had hoped, it was enough to give him a handle by which he could pull the window in and with a heave, it came free of its housing and crashed on the floor.

  Not sure how to reset his web-gun, and not really interested in figuring it out right then, he threw it aside.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “They can tidy up afterwards.”

  As the others watched, he climbed out onto the ledge. Thankfully, it was nice and wide so it wouldn’t be as bad as that hair-raising climb he and Selina had made under the Phalamkian shield generator a year ago.

  He crouched down on the balcony, holding his wrist-guards against the masonry. “Yeah,” he said. “This should work. Are you girls coming?”

  “So we just activate the energy projectors and slide down as they cut away?” Alia asked.

  Asten smiled. “That’s it.”

  “But how do we stop?” Carla asked.

  “Switch them off,” Asten told her.

  “All right,” Selina said, climbing onto the ledge beside him, while Alia and Carla did the same. “If we’re going to do this, then let’s do it quickly. I don’t want to wait for my brain to catch up.”

  “I’ll go first,” Asten said. “And when I give you the heads up, the rest of you can come down.”

  He activated the energy projectors and his wrist-blades cut down through the solid surface beneath him. There seemed to be enough resistance to stop him from shooting down the wall like a falling meteorite so once he felt comfortable he climbed over the ledge and let his weight do the rest.

  It was fast but nowhere near as fast as he feared. He slid more than fell - about five levels, he judged - bringing himself to a halt on the same level as the hangar. It was a little rough, but his arms were still attached afterwards.

  He then adjusted his grip with one arm, reactivating the wrist-blade to cut a little deeper into the wall in order to anchor himself. Then he allowed himself to hang by one arm for a moment, while he cut away the edge of a window. With the noise of the atmospheric yacht preparing to launch, he doubted anyone would hear him breaking in so he kicked in the dislodged glass without any hint of finesse and dropped down onto the window ledge.

  After it was apparent no guards were rushing in to see what had happened, he nodded to the others and they slid down one by one. As each of them reached him, he helped them onto the ledge and through the window.

  “Come on,” he said, once they were all inside. “That ship sounds like it’s just about to take off.”

  They raced down the corridor they were in, took a few more turns and then they were in the hangar, coming out on a walkway that led to the upper levels of the ship

  “This is one huge hangar,” Alia exclaimed, looking over the side of the walkway at the deck a good three storeys down.

  “Well, it’s housing one huge ship,” Asten replied as they jogged.

  “It’s moving!” Carla shouted, and everyone picked up their pace. Asten reached the end of the walkway first, leaping onto the ship as it lifted off the deck. The nearest hatchway, that had been nicely lined up with the walkway when they had come into the hangar, was now twenty meters away. Running up to it, he activated his wrist-blades once more and sliced through the seals, releasing the hatch and letting everyone inside.

  “Well,” Selina stammered as she caught her breath, “we made it.”

  They left the area immediately behind the hatch and made their way into the ship proper. As they did, the engines grew louder for a little while, sounding almost strained, and then they quietened down to a background hum. Lady Valinski’s atmospheric pleasure yacht was under way.

  Just then, Asten’s comm beeped. “I thought you wanted comm silence,” he said, flicking it on.

  “That yacht’s taken off,” Ms. Tellashi told him. “And ten to one, Lord Ilian’s on board.”

  “That’s what we figured too,” Asten replied. “We’re on it as well.”

  “How did you - never mind. They must be trying some mid-air transfer. We’ll get back to you.” The comm went silent.

  “Um, thanks,” Asten said as he clipped it back on his belt.

  “Any idea what that meant?” Selina asked him.

  “Maybe they’ll try a little mid-air transfer of their own,” Asten said. “Anyway, let’s see if we can find Lord Ilian.”

  The next room they entered had large windows, allowing them to finally see the view outside. They were fairly high up but judging by the cloud formations in the distance, they were still well within the lower troposphere. Presumably, other sections of the ship allowed people to look at the landscape formations they were travelling over but at the moment, all they could see was more of the ship with its metal surface reflecting the light of the setting sun.

  Also, like the castle they had just left, the ship seemed very quiet as well.

  “This is like a ghost ship,” Asten muttered. “Who’s flying this thing?”

  Selina shrugged. “It’s probably running on auto-pilot. If we’re right, it only needs to cruise for a little while until this Aleida woman docks with it and picks Lord Ilian up.”

  “So Lord Ilian wouldn’t care if he crashed his mistress’s pleasure yacht?”

  “We don’t know if Lady Valinski’s his mistress,” Selina said. “But I think a man who’d start a civil war for his own ends wouldn’t have any qualms about trashing a ship.”

  “True,” Asten said, looking around while Carla and Alia walked behind them with their blasters at the ready. The ease in which a single guard had halted their progress back at the castle had them all a little on edge.

  “There’s another ship coming!” Carla called out.

  The others looked out the windows and sure enough, there was a small gray dot on the horizon.

  “Damn it!” Asten muttered, annoyed at the how the odds just kept stacking up against them. Throwing caution aside for urgency, they ran into the next compartment of the ship and Asten took an immediate step back as an ash-blonde haired man lashed out at him with an activated wrist-guard, almost slicing him in half.

  “Looking for me, are you?” the man asked, swinging wildly with the wrist-blade to stop them from moving any closer. He called out to three men who had entered the room behind him. “Guards. Remove these intruders and feel free to use any interpretation of the phrase.”

  Lord Ilian stepped back as his men moved toward the group. Asten and the others crept back the way they had come, then Alia leapt to his side and stunned one of the guards.

  One of the remaining guards then fired a familiar sticky webbing at the group but they managed to make it through the doorway before they were tangled.

  “I’m getting really sick of that webbing of theirs,” Selina said.

  “I don’t know,” Asten replied, looking around the room for another door and seeing some stairs leading down to the level below. “The fact they’ve tried it twice probably means they’re running out of tricks. Although Lord Ilian’s wrist-blade ambush was pretty scary.”

  “Yeah,” Selina agreed as they headed down stairs into what looked like an engine area. They jogged another ten meters down the corridor before Alia called out.

  “Guys!”

  They turned back in annoyance. Aleida’s ship was probably not even a minute away.

  “This has been tampered with,” Alia said, looking at one o
f the engine components.

  “What?” Asten asked, shaking his head as he tried to figure this one out. “Why would Lord Ilian sabotage his own ship?”

  “It’d take care of us,” Selina pointed out.

  Asten sighed. “I hate this guy. Is he going to blow this ship, Alia?”

  “Can’t tell,” she replied, looking at the messy wiring around whatever it was that had caught her attention. “Probably.”

  “All right, come on,” Asten muttered. “Remind me not to kill him when we catch him.”

  “Hey, where are we going?” Selina asked.

  “It’s just a hunch,” Asten said, “but if this is anything like atmospheric pleasure yachts back in the Federation, then any ships docking with it would probably dock underneath it. And we didn’t see any docking facilities on the top on the way in either.”

  “Right.”

  “But before we go, there’s just one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “These guards are firing that blasted webbing at us everywhere we go and they’re knowingly working for a traitor,” he replied, adjusting the settings on his blaster. “I say that makes them fair game.”

  “Good,” Alia concurred, happily changing the settings on her own. “Next one who so much as lifts one of those web guns is a dead man.”

  When they opened the next hatch, they came out onto the forward observation deck and, by the look of all the lounges and tables around the place, the main entertainment area. Judging by the layout of the ship, they were probably right under the bridge. To their right were some stairs to the deck below, and to their left were stairs from the deck where they just were. And coming down those stairs were Lord Ilian and his men.

  Alia shot one of the guards through the chest, while Asten decided to save them all a whole lot of trouble and fired a well-aimed shot straight through Lord Ilian’s right thigh. The haughty lord collapsed with a groan, falling forward as he did. The remaining guard however caught him before he hit the deck and pulled him bodily back up the stairs, keeping him in front since he now knew Asten and the others wanted the lord alive.

  Alia lunged forward but Asten put out a warning hand. “Steady. We pop our heads upstairs right now and they’ll blow them off.”

  Then Selina rushed past him.

  “Honey, what are -?”

  Before he got the question out, Selina grabbed the web gun off the guard that Alia had got and fired it at the top of the stairway, sealing it off. Then she slung the weapon onto the deck and headed for the corridor they had come down. “We’ve got him now.”

  Just then, there was the loud clunk of several metallic components latching together.

  “That’ll be Aleida,” Alia said, glancing at the stairs to the next deck down. “Hey, why don’t you two go on ahead? Carla and I can head down and make sure there aren’t any other ways Lord Ilian can get down.”

  “All right,” Asten said. “But be very careful.”

  “You too,” Alia told him. “Leave your comms on. Come on, Carla.”

  “Hey look,” Carla said as they came out onto the lower deck. “There’s another stairway at the aft end of this deck.”

  “There are a few of them,” Alia replied, looking around.

  There were also a number of doorways, which seemed odd as well. They couldn’t all lead to the docking tube under the yacht. That would be ridiculous. Then she saw a large hatchway in the middle of the deck so that eliminated that possibility right away. Then she remembered the large entertainment area on the deck above and she got it.

  “This is where all the escape pods are,” she said, glancing around.

  The whole area was far too open for her liking, especially since Alia was waiting in a ship just underneath them. And if she got tired of waiting and came up to see what the delay was...

  “Carla. Keep a look out down here. I’m going back upstairs to get that web gun.” She nodded to the hatchway that led to the docking tube. “If I can seal that hatchway, that’d solve all our problems right there.”

  “All right,” Carla replied, eyeing the hatchway. “Make it quick though.”

  Before Alia could reach the stairs though, the ship shook and with a massive crash, part of the deck above collapsed, bringing the stairs down with it.

  For a moment, Alia just stood where she was, looking at the gaping hole and the debris under it. “Of all the crazy...” She trailed off.

  Carla looked towards the stairs at the far end of the deck. “They’d better get a move on.”

  Alia shook her head. “They should just leave Lord Ilian to blow up with the rest of this ship.”

  “We need him alive.”

  “We want him alive,” Alia corrected, scowling. “There’s a big difference.”

  As they came out onto the top deck, Asten and Selina felt the ship rock too.

  Selina glanced at the shaking walls. “I don’t think we should hang around too long, Asten. If we can’t catch Lord Ilian in another minute, we should find the escape pods and get out of here.”

  “No argument from me,” Asten replied. He hit the release for the hatch to the next room and there was Lord Ilian, leaning on his guard for support. The guard tried to lower him and free his weapon hand, but Asten wasn’t going to give him the time. Switching his weapon to stun, he shot Ilian in the chest and lunged at the guard.

  The guard was too fast though, kicking Asten’s gun out of his hand and activating his wrist-blades.

  “Selina!” Asten shouted. “Get Ilian out of here. Don’t wait for me!”

  Selina ran over to drag the unconscious lord out of the room. Just as she left, Asten realized that his gun was out of reach and the guard was coming straight at him with his wrist-blades at the ready and murder in his eyes.

  Asten circled away from the guard warily, activating his own wrist-blades. He weighed up his options. He didn’t have a lot of them but he wasn’t going to try his hand at close quarters wrist-blade fighting. Instead, he moved towards the large window on the side of the room. If he was going to pull off the stupid stunt he had in mind, then he had to do it quickly.

  Swallowing and realizing that in all likelihood, he was about to kill himself, he dug one wrist-blade into the wall and put the other through the window. Instantly, the rest of the reinforced plexiglass was sucked from its housing and a terrible howl filled the room as the air rushed out, taking the guard with it, his scream fading as he disappeared in the red and violet hues of the fading light.

  Despite the firm anchor he had placed in the wall, Asten was dragged out as well and in a rather more terrifying replay of his descent down the curtain wall of Lady Valinski’s castle, his wrist-blades tore through the ship’s hull, dragging him to a screeching halt near the bottom as he de-activated them.

  As he billowed about, he had no idea how he was going to get out of the mess he was in now. With the wind screaming over him as the ship rattled on, creaking and swaying, he hung his head and waited for the end. If Selina got Lord Ilian back to Minstrah, maybe the collapse of the Minstrahn Empire could be averted and at least she would be all right. However, he was sure going to miss her. Sudden tears welled in his eyes as he thought of the woman he loved. Then he heaved a deep sigh, releasing the last vestiges of his strength.

  Another shock rocked the ship and Selina scowled at the unconscious prisoner she was lugging down the stairs. Not caring whether she injured him or not, she pushed him down the remaining steps to give herself a break.

  “Carla! Alia!” she called out. “Are you down there?”

  “Selina?” one of the sisters called back.

  “I’ve got Ilian. Come and give me a hand!”

  Both sisters emerged and took part of the load. It was awkward, carrying an unconscious prisoner, and Selina decided she wasn’t going to make a habit of it if she could help it.

  “Easy does it,” she muttered, still straining under the weight. “Just get him down the stairs. Then we’ll dump him in an escape pod and get out of
here. The escape pods are downstairs, right?”

  “Yeah,” Alia groaned, pulling one of Ilian’s arms over her shoulder. “How did you know?”

  “They generally are in this type of ship back home,” Selina replied. “I figured this one looked fairly similar.”

  “What a shocking lack of imagination,” Alia said. “These people live in isolation for centuries and then just do everything the same way as us.”

  “Yeah,” Selina muttered but she wasn’t in the mood for jokes.

  They then stepped onto the deck below and stopped. A young woman stood in their way, a blaster in her hand. She was wearing a skin-tight black jumpsuit with an open mauve vest and since it wasn’t exactly cold here, it seemed likely she had some nasty surprises hidden under it. She was somewhere in her mid to late thirties and quite attractive but there was no mistaking the cold edge of her stare. This was a woman who meant business.

  “Aleida,” Alia murmured. It was the mercenary from the Federation after all. She’d seen her face on several wanted posters.

  “I have no idea who you are,” the woman said, “and I don’t care. Hand him over or I’ll kill all three of you.”

  “Are you insane?” Alia exploded, aware of the looks of total horror Selina and Carla were giving her but unable to stop herself. “This idiot has scuttled the ship and it’s going to blow any moment. If you don’t get out of our way, we’ll all die!”

  “Then hand him over quickly,” the woman replied.

  “Look,” Alia started. She was cut off by a loud crash as a heavy girder and a large chunk of the deck above collapsed between them and the mercenary in their way.

  “Quick!” Selina shouted, coughing in the smoke of burned out electrical components that had come down in the fall.

  Alia and Carla didn’t need any prompting. With double speed, the three of them dragged Lord Ilian to the nearest escape pod hatch and threw him in. Then Selina hit the release switch that would shut the doors and shoot them from the stricken ship.

  With a rapid series of electronic beeps, the pod came to life, but just before the door slid shut, a hand shot through it. The others had no time to react. Carla let out a startled scream as her head snapped back, a slender fist gripping thick strands of her red hair and another hand grabbing her shoulder. Then as Selina and Alia were just registering what was happening, she disappeared back into the haze that covered the deck of the ship as the doors slammed shut.