The Jammer and the Blade

by Edwardson, DJ

  “We’re headed for the hangar?” she asked, stepping through.

  Brit nodded as he followed her inside. His eyes were dilated and his thoughts were clearly elsewhere. He’s calculating the odds of us getting out alive, she thought to herself.

  “I’ll move ahead and clear the area,” she told him. She hated the fact that she was helping this man after what he had just done, but throwing herself into action seemed like the only way to take her mind off it.

  She quickly outdistanced him. She tore down the rest of the ramp and shot out into the hangar, her two blades flying out to either side like the wings of a blue phoenix.

  The twelve automatons in the hangar were still there, but they were not inactive this time. They fired on her from either side, filling the space with pulser beams. Any other target would have been ripped to shreds, but the beams did not follow a straight trajectory, bending and twisting along their paths so that they fizzled into her blades like rain hitting the hot pavement.

  Sun li kept one blade extended towards the automatons on her left as she rushed towards the ones on her right. They made no move to flank her and so she made quick work of them. They just stood there, mindless machines that they were, as she ran along the line and turned them into so much scrap littering the hangar floor.

  She turned and did the same to the second line. She was just slicing through the last automaton when Brit came running into the chamber.

  “Nice,” he remarked, glancing over her handiwork as he passed her by. “More sushi. You might consider going into the restaurant business after this is over, Sunny.”

  She gave him a cutting look, but held her tongue. The faces of Math and Constance flashed into her mind and she wondered if they were still alive. Their child came to mind as well. She wondered what he would have looked like and whether or not he would have had Chayan eyes.

  “Are we going to use the altitude capsules to get down?” she asked. “We’ve got to be pretty high up by now.”

  Brit pulled up his sleeve and glanced at a small screen he had strapped to his wrist. “We just passed ten thousand feet, actually,” he informed her. “The capsules are only rated for five thousand so just engage it once you get close to the ground.”

  He pulled out his capsule and took off towards the hangar door which was now closed. He walked all the way up to it and pounded on it with his fist as if it would open simply by knocking.

  “Of course it won’t open when it’s in flight,” he remarked, slapping the metal with his hand. “How could I have missed that?”

  “I can cut us out an opening,” Sun li suggested.

  “No, it’s energy shielded; locus weapons won’t work. I’ll use a contingency trigger and blast through.”

  He pulled another of the black discs out of his satchel and placed it on the door. Seeing it reminded Sun li of Math and Constance and what she had just done, but there was no time to dwell on it as she and Brit ran back inside the exit ramp. Brit touched the screen on his wrist and an enormous boom echoed across the chamber.

  They rushed back into the hangar. A fifteen foot diameter hole had been blown through the door, the edges fused in a blackened ring.

  They stopped on the threshold of the gaping hole. Sun li could see the blackened Canyon rushing far below them. She pulled out her capsule.

  Brit pulled out another contingency trigger and placed it on one of the remaining panels of the door near the edge of the new opening.

  “What are you doing, Brit?” Sun li asked.

  Brit grabbed his altitude capsule from his satchel and gave her a twitching smile. “Just tying up loose ends,” he said as he pushed himself out through the hole and plummeted to the Canyon far below.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Last Wishes

  Sun li froze, staring at the contingency trigger on the door. She had no way of knowing whether it would be set off by motion or if Brit would trigger it from a distance once he had cleared the ship. But knowing him, she quickly decided she should get as far away as possible from the hangar doors.

  As she tore off towards the exit, her body trembled, a wave of fear and self loathing washing over her. She stumbled, half thinking maybe it would be best to run back and set of the trigger. If she couldn’t save her father, what point was there in going on?

  She was already sweating profusely and, at the recollection of her father, tears began to flow down her face as well, mixing with the sweat. The end of the hangar seemed a thousand miles away. Even if she made it she would be running to get free of this place for the rest of her life, she thought. Every time her feet hit the floor, the echoes pounded away in a single word: failure.

  She had failed her father she knew, but it hadn’t happened when Brit jumped off the ship. No, it had been when she had chosen to leave Math and Constance to die. She had thought by leaving them she would save her father, but in the end she hadn’t been able to do even that.

  Words from the Code came back to her now: sometimes the right choice is the most difficult one to make.

  Why hadn’t she remembered them before?

  “I’m sorry, father,” she said out loud.

  As the words left her lips, a deafening roar echoed down the ramp up ahead. The walls around the exit shuddered slightly. The trigger must have gone off in Math’s chamber.

  Sun li kept on running, harder now, and she practically flew up the ramp.

  She may have failed her father, but something inside her told her that there was a chance Math and Constance had somehow figured a way out before the blast hit. If there was any chance at all that either of them had survived, she had to know.

  A wind blew down the hallway as she emerged onto the ruins of the top floor. Almost all of the windows along the passage had been blown out and the air was filled with swirling debris. Wisps of cloud flew by out beyond the ship. She leaned against the opposite wall for support. It was pocked with holes but mostly still intact. She put her head down, shielding her eyes from the debris. A few powerful gusts threatened to knock her off balance, but she steadied herself and pressed ahead until she reached what remained of Math’s room.

  A thirty foot gap dominated the wall where the doorway had been. The shredded components of automatons and furniture littered the floor. Nothing was left standing, not even the walls of the inner rooms. All that was left of them were their exposed metal frames. Math and Constance were nowhere to be seen and she could only hope that they had somehow escaped before the blast hit.

  She thought about jumping through one of the blasted out windows and plummeting to safety, but knew that she would not be able to rest until she found out whether or not the young couple had escaped.

  She ventured across the room, overturning the largest piles of debris, but all she uncovered was more wreckage. When she arrived at Math’s shelled out room, however, she thought she heard a cough.

  “Math? Constance?” she called out. But there was no answer.

  Pushing through the debris towards the sound, she shoved aside several uneven sections of the wall. It was cracked and broken and fell apart even further as she pushed it away. Underneath one of them was what looked like the battered remains of a table. It was crumpled and bent, but not entirely destroyed. She pulled it towards her and a large pile of debris fell away revealing the bodies of Math and Constance. His arms were wrapped around her from behind and the clothes on Math’s back were torn to shreds. He wasn’t moving. Sun li reached down and pulled at his shoulder. His body rolled away revealing the form of his wife. He had died shielding Constance with his body.

  At the sudden movement, Constance moaned and rolled onto her back. Flecks of blood covered her lips and the front of her dress. Her eyes fluttered open and her head turned so that she saw the body of her husband.

  She wailed, but there was little force to her cry. Her chin buckled with emotion and tears streaked down her dust coated face.

  “Constance. It’s me, Sun li—the blade.” She stepped over Math and knelt down be
side her body. Sun li could see that there was shrapnel embedded in her right leg, tearing through her beautiful dress which was soaked in blood. Whether it was hers or Math’s Sun li couldn’t tell.

  Constance’s eyes had the look of a small child who was lost, or looking for something terribly important. “Math,” she mumbled. “He’s gone.”

  “Yes,” Sun li said. “But I’m here to help. Are you able to move?”

  Constance did not reply, her eyes drifted away and began to shut.

  “Constance,” Sun li shouted. “You’ve got to stay awake.”

  The woman’s eyes opened wide and her gaze once again turned to Sun li.

  “You…you came back,” she whispered, the lids of her eyes as heavy as her breathing.

  “I’m sorry,” Sun li told her. “I should not have left you.”

  Constance looked past her towards Math and her body shook with terrible sobs.

  “I want to get you out of here,” Sun li moved to shield her from the sight of her husband. “Can you move?”

  Constance stared at the ceiling in shock as if she didn’t hear the question.

  “Constance,” Sun li spoke forcefully. “I need to get you out of here. Can you move?”

  At last the question finally seemed to register. Then she shook her head. “I can’t feel my leg and…I think something’s broken inside of me.”

  Sun li tried to move aside the ripped fabric from her legs, but it was caught up in the shrapnel and she didn’t think she could get it all cleared without risking further injury.

  Constance reached out and grabbed Sun li’s hand.

  “But he’s still alive,” she said. “My son is alive. I can feel him moving.” Her eyes locked with Sun li’s. “You have to save him.”

  “What do you mean?” Sun li asked, but then kept on without waiting for a reply. “Let me get you out of here first.”

  Constance shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m dying. I won’t last much longer. But you can save my son.”

  Sun li’s mind raced, trying to find some way to save both Constance and her child. “You, you can’t—” she started to say, but then realized she didn’t have any idea of how she meant to finish the sentence.

  Constance was panting, her breath coming in agonized gasps. With one hand she motioned off behind her.

  “There’s an optic swatch in the artifice kit,” she said, her voice fading further. “We used it to watch the baby and track his progress.”

  Sun li looked in the direction Constance had been pointing and saw the case she was talking about poking out from underneath some rubble.

  “Get the swatch,” she muttered.

  “Why? What good will that do?”

  “So you can see where to cut him out. I’m too weak to give birth.”

  Sun li pulled back, shaking her head emphatically back and forth. “You’re not thinking straight, Constance. You’re delirious. You don’t know what you’re asking,” she implored her.

  “There is some novum paste in there as well. It will dull the pain. I won’t feel anything,” Constance told her.

  Sun li scrambled over to the kit she had pointed to. It was battered and broken and practically fell apart in her hands, spilling its contents into the surrounding debris. Rifling through the mess, she soon found a yellow tube marked ‘novum’. She flipped off the lid and began smearing its contents onto Constance’s arms and shoulders.

  “There are escape pods on the floor below this one,” Constance told her, sighing in relief as the pain drained from her body. “You can use them to get yourselves safely off the ship.”

  “I won’t leave you—not again,” Sun li promised her, “I’m going to find a way to save you. I’m going to save you both.”

  “I have a brother in Shoal,” Constance babbled on. “If you need anything, seek him out. His name is Gareth. He’s a mechanic. You can’t miss him. He’s Chayan, like me…like us.”

  Constance’s words were barely audible. She seemed to be in a daze. Sun li realized that despite dulling her pain, or perhaps because of it, she was losing this woman.

  “Constance, you’re not going to die,” Sun li stated. But saying things wouldn’t make them come true and she realized that Constance was the one who was thinking clearly.

  Sun li bit down on her lower lip so hard it hurt. She had no medical training, no experience with anything like this. She might kill the baby as easily as save him. But she had already failed this family once and there was no time left. She had to deliver the baby now or she would lose both of them.

  “All right, Constance,” Sun li said at last. “I’ll do what you say.”

  “Bless you,” Constance whispered, “Care for him. Love him. Tell him about me when he is older…and tell him about his father.” She closed her eyes and her breathing grew shallower.

  Sun li wanted to cry, to scream, but there was no time for grief or anger at the cruel way in which both she and Brit had destroyed the life of this beautiful woman and her husband.

  She scrambled back over to where she had dumped the contents of the artificer case. The optic swatch was easy enough to spot. It was a two foot square piece of nearly translucent fabric with edges that glowed with a white light.

  Sun li draped the cloth over Constance’s midsection and it was as if her dress and skin disappeared. She could see the baby lying curled up inside his mother’s womb as clearly as if he were lying in a crib. He had little tufts of curly black hair that clearly showed he was his father’s son. And though it was a little hard to tell with his eyes closed, Sun li thought they looked Chayan. The little boy’s head wriggled slightly as if he were somehow aware that he was being watched.

  She fired up one of her blades knowing that if she thought about it for much longer, she would lose her nerve. She pulled the cloth to the side so that it was at the edge of where it would be safe to make the incision. Taking a deep breath, she inserted the tip of her blade delicately into Constance’s skin.

  Moving the cloth around the edge of the womb as she went, her mind quickly became consumed with the urgency of her task. Her thoughts shifted from her doubts that she would be able to complete it to the anticipation of seeing the child free. The baby shifted twice, but not enough to interrupt her work. And then, just like that, she finished the final cut and pulled away Constance’s skin and there he was, a miracle of life snatched from the midst of death.

  Constance’s eyes opened once again. She took one look at him, smiled through her tears, and then closed her eyes forever.

  * * *

  Having no further use for it, Sun li used the optic swatch to clean the baby off. It was odd wiping the fabric across his body and seeing inside his tiny little frame. His delicately formed bones and organs looked absolutely perfect. She could not believe that she was actually holding him in her hands.

  Once he was clean, she tore off the bottom of Constance’s dress, wrapped him up and pulled him close. For the first time he let out a stifled little cry. He looked up at her and for a moment their eyes met and then he grew quiet.

  “My name is Sun li,” she told him, “Your mother asked me to look after you.” He blinked and let out another whimper as if he somehow understood. Sun li wished she had Math’s rubricon so that she could know what he was really thinking.

  She stared at him for several moments, alternating between wonder and terror at this precious life she was holding in her hands. But then she recovered enough of her wits to remember that they still had to get off the ship.

  “I will take care of him,” she promised. Then she turned and glanced at Constance one last time, her face peaceful at last in death.

  “Come on, little Matthew,” she whispered in the child’s ear. “Let’s get off this ship.”

  She picked her way through the rubble and out into the hallway, holding the little child close. The air was freezing and had grown terribly thin. She fought through the gusts until she made it back to the ramp.

  Shifting the baby so
that she could hold him with one hand, she fired up the blade on her free hand and descended as fast as she dared. When she arrived at the smooth metal door leading onto the floor below, she cut an opening with her glaive and slipped through.

  The moment she stepped inside the room beyond pulser beams blazed all around her. Leading with her blade, the beams fizzled into the blade as she advanced towards the two automatons firing on her. Their bodies were short and cylindrical. They skidded across the floor on an array of large balls, trying to find an angle where they could shoot past her blades. They only had a single pulser mounted on the top of a rounded cylinder but it laid down a surprising amount of fire.

  Sun li maneuvered herself around the edge of the room towards them until she could get close enough to strike one of them. With a sweep of her arm, she cut off its rounded head and headed towards the remaining one.

  The walls of the oval shaped room were filled with a half dozen thick glass doors. Inside she could clearly see the escape pod cockpits. Since she had no other means of getting in, she cut her way around the edges and ducked into the cramped space.

  She had never flown or driven a vehicle before, but once she had ridden in the cockpit of a hover taxi when it was too overloaded to fit any more people in the back. The pilot had used voice and gesture controls to activate and maneuver it and so she tried some of the ones she could remember.

  “Start.” “Fly.” “Engage.” “Launch.” She repeated these and a dozen other words accompanied by as many gestures as she could think of until she moved her arm in a circle and rows of lights lit up all around the spherical pod. The curved wall in front of her dissolved into a screen depicting the cloud filled atmosphere above Kess.

  “Destination?” came an automated voice.

  “Bracken city limits,” Sun li replied.

  A belt snaked out from the chair and wrapped itself around her waist. A hiss sounded and the pod jerked and began to slide down. Sun li worried about the opening in the hatch door, but there was no time to turn back now. The pod jettisoned into the atmosphere. Frigid winds whipped about the cabin, but after a few tense moments she realized that the belt would keep them inside. Nor did the cold air bother her after a while. She held the little boy tightly in her arms and together they kept each other warm as the pod plummeted through the clouds on their way back to the city of Bracken.