by Arthur Byrne
Holly asked, “Is Billy working today?”
“Yes.”
“Can we see him on his lunch break?”
The woman thought about it for a while and then hit a button on her headset and said, “Jim, is Billy on his lunch right now?”
Nash looked at Holly and shrugged.
The woman said, “He’s coming up now.”
Holly said, “Thanks so much.”
A moment later, a man who was about the same age as Holly came through the security door. “Hey, Holly, what’s up?”
“Nash has a question. We were wondering if you could help us out?”
“A gardening question?” Billy asked suspiciously.
Nash was nothing if not quick on his feet, and it was obvious they took their food production jobs seriously.
“Billy, here’s the thing. I’m a mapper...”
“I know who you are.”
“Oh, well, anyway, I just got back from seven days in the wild. I was up mapping an area next to this scavenger camp and almost got jumped.”
Billy’s eyes went wide. It was obvious he was digging the story.
“I ran down this hall and turned the corner to find a dead end. There was only one door, and I took it. The room was some sort of office storage place. I thought I was trapped, so I hunkered down for a fight. We traded fire for a while, and then they must have been low on ammo or air because they left.”
Billy was hanging on every word.
“So, I was about to leave, too, when I noticed all the glass on the floor. A huge box of light tubes had been shot up. They were completely destroyed, which was a shame, but I kept thinking they looked like the kind we installed when we built this place. I figured, if I found anything like that in the wild, it would be more valuable than gold.”
“The lights are everything. These ones will last 25 years, but what do we do then? We have some extras for replacement, but not enough for everything. If you could find more, we would be grateful.”
“That’s the problem. I need a bit of a refresher course on which are the right type. I don’t want to hike back two days with a box of worthless tubes.”
“Here, come with me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Why don’t they give up? Sasha thought, but she knew the answer. They had plans for her that weren’t very romantic. She had killed two of the five and frozen each of them at least once, but they kept coming. The gap between them was four hundred meters at least. She was faster, but without her air tanks, she had to keep running in a straight line; she knew any turn off the path could be a dead end...literally.
They had been chasing her for thirty minutes, and she was almost back to the gate to Cargo Bay 37. She had two options: turn right and head into areas she hadn’t been to in a long time, where she couldn’t remember which ones were safe, or turn left and beg the guards to let her in.
Sasha saw the T intersection up ahead and had to make the call. She went left. The door was heavy, and she couldn’t hear anything on the other side. She pounded with the butt of her sword. She guessed she had widened the gap, but it was probably less than a minute before they would be on top of her.
She pounded again and yelled, “I have a message for Fristion Nash. Can someone let me in, please?” Did she hear a faint sound on the other side? She pounded one more time. “Tell Nash that Jeff sealed the duck hole, and there are scavengers after me.” She could hear the scavengers coming through the last door before reaching her intersection. It wouldn’t be long now.
***
“Mister Tong, there’s someone at the door asking for Nash,” said a guard who had poked his head into the master-at-arms’s office.
“What?”
“It sounded like a woman. She said she needed to talk to Nash and give him a message.”
“It could be a trick.”
“That’s why I didn’t open the door.”
“What’s the message?”
“The duck hole is closed, no wait, it was the duck hole has been sealed. That’s it.”
Tong got out of his chair and walked around to the gate wall. He stood and listened. “I don’t hear anything now.”
“Maybe she left?”
“You better go find Nash and give him the message,” the master-at-arms said and went back to his desk.
***
Sasha held her breath. Her arms ached and her legs were wobbly. She really wished she hadn’t run so hard back to the duck hole. The sound of scavenger feet came to a halt. She heard them panting.
“Damn, she’s fast.”
“Let’s get that bitch.”
They started running again. Sasha waited until she couldn’t hear them before she dropped from the ceiling. The area outside the gate was slightly raised. She wasn’t completely hidden, but it had been enough that they hadn’t noticed her. She started back down the hall to the duck hole.
This trip was slower than the initial love-fueled and the subsequent fear-fueled trips. When she reached the first headless scavenger, she said a tiny “thank you.” He had two water bottles strapped to his belt.
She drank the first one completely, and then poured the other into her bottle. He also had a small pack with some food, extra ammo, and some smokes. The gun was a machine pistol and had half the clip left. She rolled his body onto its side and found three more clips on his belt. She put them in the bag, got up, and continued running.
There was one more scavenger she could scavenge.
***
PJ said, “I’m getting a little worried.”
“What about?” Ronnie asked.
“Sasha’s been gone a long time.”
“She’s fine. She’s a freaking ninja.”
“Yes, but what if she and Nash ran into trouble?”
“Then I feel sorry for the poor bastards she’s probably killed.”
“Ronnie, she didn’t take her helmet.”
“Really?”
“How long has it been?” PJ asked.
“I don’t know, maybe three, three-and-a-half hours.”
“I think we should go check things out.”
“She told us to stay, PJ.”
“I think they’re in trouble.”
“Okay, I’ll get my gear.”
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
The guard first checked with Commander Block to see if he knew where Nash might be, and Frank said he couldn’t care less. He ran into Fiel in the hall and asked her. She mentioned the Lunch Box, so he headed over, and the owner said he had just missed him. It seemed logical after a long week in the wild that Nash was probably at Hal’s, so he headed to the bar. Nash was nowhere to be found.
It had been thirty minutes, and he was sure the master-at-arms wouldn’t want him wasting any more time, so he started back to the gate. He nearly ran into Nash and Holly as he left Hal’s.
Nash said, “Sorry about that.”
“I’ve been looking for you.”
“Really? What’s up?”
“Someone came to the gate asking for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a knocking, and a woman said she needed to get a message to Fristion Nash.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t let her in.”
Nash grabbed the man by the chest and said, “What was the message?”
“Geez, relax.”
“Spit it out!”
“Okay, okay...she said tell Nash that Jeff sealed up the duck hole, and she said something about scavengers. Who’s Jeff?”
Nash took off running. Holly followed right on his heels. He said, “Go get me an M-415 from the armory and four clips.”
Holly said, “Got it.”
Nash made it to his locker, put on his suit and attached two tanks, then he thought better of it and went with one to save weight. He wouldn’t need the air between the gate and the duck hole. He would only need it once he found her. He could imagine her out there and knew she didn’t have any air
. She was wearing her suit, but hadn’t bothered with the helmet. He could remember she had her sword, but did she have her pistol?
The more he thought about her up against heavily armed scavengers, the more panic set in.
Holly ran in and said, “They wouldn’t give it to me, said it needed to be authorized.”
“Here, take this,” Nash said and handed her the helmet. He ran to the armory and burst through the door. “Give me a damn M-514 right now, or I’ll reach down your throat, rip out your lungs, and shove them up your ass.”
“I can’t, Nash.”
Frank appeared in the doorway and asked, “What’s this about?”
“I need a five one four, and this pencil pusher won’t give it to me.”
“Do you mind explaining to me why you need a...”
Nash grabbed Frank and punched him in the gut. He never saw it coming and folded over. Nash brought a left hook up and sent Frank to the ground. He was on top of him in a second, blood pouring out of Frank’s nose. With each punch he said, “Give. Me. The. God. Damn. Weapon.”
Holly tried to pull Nash off, but she couldn’t, and screamed, “He’s killing him.”
The guy in the cage said, “Stop, I’ll get it. Just stop.”
Nash hit Frank one more time and stood up, his fist covered in blood. When the guy behind the cage opened the door, Nash pushed past him, grabbed some grenades and extra clips and shoved them into his bag.
He came out of the cage loaded for bear just as Fiel came into the room. She saw her brother and went for her side arm, but Nash dropped her with one punch.
He rushed down the stairs and out into the courtyard.
“Open the gate!”
The master-at-arms came out and asked, “What’s this about?”
“Seaghán, I need to go help my friend, the one you wouldn’t let in. Now open the damn gate.”
The magnet lock turned off, and Nash was off like a shot.
***
Sasha found the body of the first guy she had killed. He was big and ugly, but that might have been because she had shot him in the face. He had two side arms, a hunting rifle, and a couple of bottles of water. She didn’t bother looking through his pack. There would be time for that later, she hoped.
Through the door and down the hall, she could see all the way up to another open door. Her biggest concern was the three scavengers realizing she had doubled back and returning. Her second biggest concern was more scavengers coming up from behind.
Sasha closed the door at the end of the hall, grabbed the dead man’s arms, and dragged him toward the repaired duck hole. She positioned the body across the hall between the patch over the duck hole and the still open door she had come through. With the rifle across his chest, she lined up the first shot. The other weapons would be better if the scavengers got close, so she laid them on the floor in order of how she would use them and put the extra ammo next to each gun.
One front down, one to go. She didn’t have anything to hide behind if anyone came up from the rear, but the air tanks might give her one option. She pulled the tanks off the dead guy and pulled them down towards the closed door. She set both tanks along the wall on the opposite side of the hall where she could use them for cover if anyone came through the closed door.
It seemed like hell was about to break loose all around her, and she had never had so few options. Being cornered like a rat was something she had avoided through cunning and guile, but this time there wasn’t anything she could do about it.
Sasha took both packs and set them up by her feet. She didn’t think they would stop a bullet or even slow it down much, but maybe they would make it harder for scavengers coming through the doors to notice her right off.
My suit! she thought, How could I forget? Sasha dialed up the blend with surroundings mode, which would have completely hidden her had she remembered the damn helmet.
Using the knife she’d taken from the headless scavenger, she cut a strip of cloth from the shirt of the corpse and used it to tie up her hair in a ponytail.
Getting up on all fours, she pushed on the dead guy’s chest, and blood oozed from his wounds. Sasha covered her face with it and then grabbed both of the pistols. For fifteen meters on either side of her, she shot out all the lights. It cost her some ammo, but the darkness was much more valuable.
It was time to wait.
***
PJ and Ronnie made their way back down the halls. Neither one expected trouble, but they weren’t going to do something stupid either.
PJ saw it the moment they walked in and said, “Oh no, someone fixed the hole.”
“What? Why would anyone be doing repairs?”
“I don’t know, but that’s why Sasha isn’t back.”
“How do you know it happened after they went through?”
“Because we’ve got this whole section locked down. It’s the only way in or out, and if it had been fixed before they went though, they would have been back to the control room by now.”
Ronnie yelled, “Sasha, you there?”
“That’s not going to work!”
They heard three quick knocks and a muffled voice, “Yes, I’m trapped.”
PJ said, “We need to blow open the hole.”
Ronnie yelled, “We’re going to go get something to blow the hole back open.”
They both sprinted back to base. Once inside the armory, neither of them could find any explosives. “What do we do, mate?” Ronnie asked, starting to panic.
“I don’t know, but she’s in trouble. We need to do something.”
“Do you know anything about explosives?”
PJ shook his head.
“Me neither, but...wait a minute, I think I saw...”
Ronnie took off down the stairs all the way to the first floor. PJ was right behind him. In the back there was a cabinet, and Ronnie opened it up and said, “Do you think we could figure out how to use this?”
***
His lungs were burning. Nash kept going. All along the hall were signs of a fight. Pockmarks in the walls and shells on the floor told a story, and it looked bleak.
Nash came across the headless body. “That’s my girl,” he said as he ran past.
***
The remaining scavengers lumbered through the door, and Sasha heard one of them say, “Too bad about Sal and Joe.”
Another said, “I give that bitch credit. The shot that took off Joe’s head was from a long way down there.”
“She was fast, too.”
“Like a freaking puma.”
Sasha knew from their tone they didn’t see her. She let them come a little further and lined up her shot. Her finger eased down on the trigger, and the shot rang out.
Another scavenger took a bullet to the face and went down. The other two drew and fired in her general direction, but they had no idea where she was and retreated back through the door.
Sasha fired five more times, but the men made it through unscathed, and the door closed. She waited and then heard the ping of shots hitting the other side of the door.
The door opened, and Nash yelled, “Sasha!”
“Nash, thank God,” she said, jumping over the headless body and turning her rifle on the other door. One dumb mistake was all she was going to make today. She could just imagine running toward Nash and getting shot in the back.
Nash ran up the hall and asked, “Are you hit?”
“No, I’m fine, but they came from that way.”
Nash took a knee next to her, gasping for breath.
“Soldier, you need to get to the gym.”
“I really do. Damn.”
They both heard a muffled voice say, “We found a torch. We’re cutting the hole back open.”
Sasha gave a nod back down the hall and said, “Be a dear and go fetch me some more bodies for cover.”
Nash took a deep breath, handed her his M-514 and said, “Here, this has a bit more punch.”
She looked up and said, “Thanks.”
“You’re bleeding!”
“No, I’m not; it’s his blood,” she said with a nod to the body in front of her.
Nash smiled and then ran down to retrieve the bodies.
Ten minutes later, they had all their weapons arranged on the floor behind the stack of four scavengers, two by two.
PJ and Ronnie had only managed to cut through about ten centimeters of the duck hole at that point, and Nash said, “This is going to take a while.”
An hour passed, and then another. It took four hours to cut through the repair work Jeff had done. No more scavengers came along, and when they all made it back to camp, they were a tired but happy bunch.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
At one and three quarters meter tall with a lean build, Di’Tang Bhat was used to being underestimated, and that had served him well. A month before the attack, at age 25, he had been kicked out of the Magellan Security forces assigned to Jade City. When he told his father, one of the wealthiest men on the Magellan, there was a tense discussion that had ended with Di’Tang stabbing his father in the throat.
He had left the room calmly, told the head of his father’s security team that there was a new boss, and then pulled a gun and shot his mother in the back of the head. He instantly had a small army, and it served him well over the next ten years. He controlled more than five thousand scavengers, and now he stood by a pile of four of his soldiers. He preferred to be called General.
General Bhat said, “Take the bodies back to where they had camped. Send out the word that this section is now our top priority.”
The general’s right-hand man, Omar Stone, said, “Shall I pull everyone in?”
“Just those in the adjacent sectors.”
“I will see that it is done.”
“Your best estimate?”
“Three days to get them all here.”
General Bhat turned and left while his men gathered the dead.
***
Holly asked if she could have a minute alone with the commander. Frank gave a nod to Fiel, and she left but didn’t look happy about it.
Holly looked at Frank’s face, beaten to a pulp, one eye completely swollen shut and the other little more than a slit. His lips were cracked with bits of blood. He looked at his water bottle.
