The elevator clunked to a halt, and the doors shuddered open, panels of rectangular metal squealing away from each other until they disappeared into the wall. The sound made Sanda’s small hairs raise all over. The fancy veneer of the Taso broke down in the worker levels, apparently.
Wing 3S was nearly big enough to be its own habitat dome back on Ada. The ceiling soared above, raw metal ductwork snaking across its surface in a myriad of patterns. Ships of various sizes speckled the cavernous space, docked to magnetic clamps. Directly across from the freight elevator, a massive external door loomed, three times the size of the largest ship on the dock. Someone had gone to the trouble of painting it red and the surrounding frame an eye-bashing neon yellow. There was no airlock capability to that door. Once it opened, nothing but raw space waited beyond.
“You ready for this?” Tomas asked. His voice sounded hollow in the massive cavern.
“Don’t think I ever will be. But let’s do it anyway.”
He squeezed her elbow, then struck out ahead, showing off the use of both legs as he activated his mag boots and searched for the Hermes-Class crafts. Three of them were clamped to docks in the center of the room, pushed up close to the massive red door. They were sleek little things, more like mosquitoes than spaceships. Each one was painted with a light-diffusing matte black, the paint impregnated with material designed to scatter detection attempts.
Each dock clamp sported an arm sticking up with a tablet embedded within, the vital statistics of each ship available at a glance. Tomas paused by the first, flicked through, then moved on. Sanda pushed out of the elevator and grabbed one of the handgrips on the railing. Mag boots didn’t work well with one foot, and she was happy to ditch the crutch.
“This one’s been maintenanced recently,” he said as she drew close enough to hear without shouting. “Fully charged, new filters, detailed. Looks solid.”
“Pop her open,” Sanda said.
Tomas dialed in the request to pop the top, but the tablet threw up a red screen demanding a security override. He scratched the back of his neck. “Not sure I can break this. I’ve got Biran’s dial-in but I bet that’s two-factor authentication with his wristpad. Soon as I punch it in, he knows where we are.”
“Never fear.” She shimmied him aside and punched in her own identification tag, then pressed her palm to the reader. The pad flashed green. “The major is here.”
“You did not just try to rhyme.”
“Hey, it’d flow better if I were a general, but I’m not getting that promotion anytime soon.”
The ship chirruped a greeting and the cockpit dome slid back, wafting up warm air with a slight tinge of faux-leather cleaner. Sanda took a big breath. “Gotta love that new spaceship smell.”
“Smells like grease.”
“Delicate sensibilities for a spy.”
He shrugged. “I have my standards. You flying or am I?”
She hung her head over the open four-seater, surveying the piloting equipment. It was a standard dash arrangement, nothing fancy. All the controls were within arm’s reach and allowed for little deviation from the autopilot. Nothing exciting was going on in that first seat, but the look of that joystick… She hadn’t seen one since she’d lost her leg in Dralee.
“Yeah. I got this.”
“Your chariot awaits.” He gestured grandly toward the pilot’s seat and helped her settle in. Once she was secure, he pulled in alongside her and they dropped the canopy. A few quick button presses, a couple of systems checks, and the engine power lights sang green across the dash. The soft hum of the engine warming up made her prickle with anticipation. She reached for the comm box, but Tomas put a hand over hers to stop her.
“Not exactly a good idea to call this flight into local control.”
“Right. Old habits.”
It felt like walking into a classroom without her pants on, but Sanda decoupled the cruiser without permission and brought it to a smooth neutral attitude about halfway up through the volume of the hanger.
“Moment of truth,” she said, and dialed in the permissions to open the hangar door. Yellow caution lights flashed around the perimeter of the hangar, golden glares against the ships left steady in their docks. Even through the seal of the cruiser she could feel the vibrations of the alarm, the ninety-second all-clear alert thrumming through to her bones, making her teeth vibrate. Her knuckles went white on the stick; her breathing deepened as she pushed to control the anxiety fluttering through her belly.
No hiding what she was up to now. Every soul on board the deck of the Taso heard that alarm, panic flaring through the command deck as the crew realized this was unscheduled. Unauthorized. She flicked a glance to the silvery curve of the camera housings scattered around the room. Even though the visor screen was tinted, she offered a tight smile to those watching.
They wanted to craft a hero. They were going to get one whether they wanted it or not.
The all clear ended, and the door began to open. It slid outward like parting lips, slowly exhaling the atmo in the hangar out into space. Sanda thumbed the throttle, easing the ship toward the sliver of black appearing in the middle of the massive wall. The doors were slow, ponderous things. No one wanted to move that much metal quickly anywhere, especially in space.
The suck of pressure equalization buffeted the cruiser, rocking them slightly, and she eased back, holding steady though she wanted to dart forward. The gap wasn’t large enough yet. The ship’s dashboard displayed a digital version of the doors, numbers to either side shading from red to orange as they counted down the safety margins around the ship. Had to have enough room. Couldn’t risk squeezing out. She wanted to flee, but the slightest wobble during escape could easily clip the ship and kill them both.
Space wasn’t exactly kind to spongy human flesh.
A smartscreen descended from the ceiling on an articulated metal arm, Keeper Lavaux’s stern face filling the view with Singh and Biran just over his shoulders. He sat in the command chair, straps across his chest just in case the ship had to accelerate, and scowled. The windows on the cruiser were tinted, but they’d no doubt pulled up the camera feeds from the last few minutes.
“Major Greeve. You are executing an unauthorized maneuver.”
“That’s a real nice way to say ‘committing piracy,’ Keeper.”
Biran grimaced. Sanda made a point not to look at him. She focused all her attention on Lavaux, the man who had heavily hinted that this was exactly what he wanted Sanda to do, and tried to find a hint of sarcasm or satisfaction in his expression. It was no use. The Keeper was radiating fury so completely that Sanda wondered if she had misread his intentions and pissed him off in the process.
“I am being polite, and giving you a chance to abort this fiasco, because I’d really rather not order you shot down. That’s a nice cruiser. You picked my newest one. I’d hate to ruin it.”
“You will not harm her!” Biran shouted. Very un-Keeper-like.
Lavaux never took his gaze from the camera. “Thank you for that, Speaker. But this is my ship. Please keep your opinions to yourself. As for you, Major. You and the Nazca have”—he flicked his gaze down to his wristpad—“two minutes to guide that ship back into dock, buckle her up, and I’ll pretend this whole thing never happened. You fail to pull that off, and I’ll send in the big guns.”
Two minutes was a lot of time to make a decision. Sanda glanced at the readout on her dash. In two minutes, those safety parameters would shade from yellow into the barest tinges of spring green. Nothing that could get Lavaux accused of allowing her time to escape. Not the cleanest margin she’d like, but workable if she were very quick and very lucky, which Lavaux must believe she was.
Sanda knew she was quick, but she wasn’t so sure about lucky.
“No can do,” she said, flipping the safety cap off the button for the punch blast. Speed begot stability at a tight enough angle, she told herself, and tried to ignore the sweat building across her back. “Your Protectorate
made a mistake. I’m going to correct it.”
“Sanda—” Biran blurted, then stopped himself as Lavaux cut him a look so sharp Sanda was surprised to see he wasn’t bleeding. Sanda made a point of looking straight at him even though he couldn’t see her through the window tint.
“Don’t worry, Little B. I’ll see you again soon.”
She gunned it. The ship leapt to the power, dashed forward so hungry for the burn that the nose tipped up, threatening to spill them on a sideways slew. Sanda cursed and pushed the nose down to the faintest upward angle and rode the blast hard toward the door.
The caution lights came back on. The vibrations of the siren thrummed in her bones. The doors began to close.
“Shit, shit, shitshitshit.”
In the corner of her eye, Tomas gripped the side of his seat with his good hand so hard the foam pushed up between his fingers. Fat lot of faith he had in her, but her cursing probably didn’t help his confidence.
The safety clearance numbers on the dash drifted back toward yellow. Teetered on orange.
“Hold on,” she hissed between clenched teeth.
Turbulence rocked the ship. They were blowing atmo back into the hangar, trying to destabilize her. Trying to make her abort. Lavaux wasn’t going to give her any breaks.
The viewscreen filled with nothing but the star-speckled black of space, the doors a thin red halo above and below. No stopping now.
Metal screamed as she blasted through the opening. The ship’s controls jerked under her hands, threatening complete loss of control. She gritted her teeth and held on, ignoring the deluge of information the HUD spit at her. Just kept her gaze locked on the soft, red curve of Kalcus and willed the shuttle to neutral.
They were through. The ship steadied, the blaring of the proximity alarms stopped. All that was left was a subtle red flicker on the dash and a soft voice repeating, “O2 recycler filter damaged, O2 recycler filter damaged…”
Sanda groaned and thumped the back of her head against the chair.
CHAPTER 60
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
TOOLS CAN BREAK
Sanda dropped them below the Taso’s gunline, making the bigger ship take time to reorient if Lavaux decided to send off a salvo, then pointed the girl at the current dark side of Kalcus and hit auto.
“Maybe I should have flown,” Tomas said.
She glared at him. “One leg is better than one arm in the command chair. Anyway, we’re not dead yet.”
“Yet.”
“Keep talking, might speed things up.”
She unhooked the g-harness and shoved the back of her seat as close to horizontal as it would go, then climbed between her and Tomas’s seats to the back row of bench seats. They built the Hermes-Class for speed, with only an afterthought to comfort and the faintest of nods toward maintenance. These shuttles were meant to be used between the bigger ships, their systems so foolproof that the possibility of emergency repairs was thin and, even if something were to go wrong, the distance to a friendly port little more than a short, speedy hop.
What they weren’t meant for was being scraped along hangar doors at full speed while blasting to an uncertain location.
“You know, for only having one leg, you sure take up a lot of space.” Tomas grabbed her ankle and nudged her to the side.
“Is that a comment about my weight?”
“More correctly, your mass.”
“Ha-ha-ha.” She ran her thumb along the faux-leather padding of the rear bulkhead until she felt a slight give, then pressed down and popped the magnetic closure open.
“Shouldn’t we be in enviro suits for this? Wearing lifepacks, at least?”
“Probably. If you can find one, feel free to throw it on.” The interior of the craft’s mechanisms were just as streamlined as its decor. She squinted at the serial numbers carved into the tops of the modules and shrugged. She didn’t recognize any of them, so she started yanking on handles. One refused to budge.
“Found the problem.”
She heard his suit squeak against the chair as he twisted around to get a look. “Great. Could be nothing but raw vacuum on the other side of that.”
“I know they trained you for comms, but come on.” She braced her arm and gave the cartridge a tug. No luck. “It’s a filter, not an engine panel. These things are internal.”
“Hope you’re right. And you got an incoming communications request from the Taso.”
She cringed and gave the filter another yank. “If you want to have a chat with Biran, go ahead. I’ve got a filter to fix.”
“Sanda… You have to talk to him eventually.”
She gritted her teeth. “When I’m ready. Right now, being pissed off is helping me focus.”
The filter frame squealed as she braced herself and gave it one last, anger-fueled yank. What was meant to be a simple rectangular frame filled in with micro mesh was, instead, a twisted lump of metal with a burnt smell at its deepest end. Sanda cringed and flicked the light of her wristpad on, peering into the dark cavity from which she’d pulled the frame. Char marks striated the otherwise shiny aluminum at the end of the chute. At least no alarms blared at her.
“What’s the O2 readout say?” She poked at the filter, trying and failing to straighten the damaged mesh. That stuff was fine-woven enough that it dissolved into mush once crushed, like an over-aerated cake.
“Two and a half hours before things get dire.”
“That’s… not good.”
“Indeed. What’s the damage?”
She twisted around to hold up the filter so he could see it. “Can’t force it back together.”
“Don’t suppose Lavaux will send us a replacement?”
“I’d guess he’s a little tied up making it look like he’s trying to gun us out of the sky. Or actually gunning us out of the sky. Keep an eye on that lock-in warning system, will you?”
“Doesn’t look damaged.”
“Hurrah. Now give me your sling.”
“What?” He instinctively reached to guard the twice-damaged arm. She felt for him, she really did, but him suffering a bit of ache was a lot better than them suffocating in this tin can before they ever got within shouting distance of Bero.
“Unless you can find another slightly porous material in this ship, then I’m going to need your sling if you plan to keep on breathing.”
“You realize I’m going to be pretty useless without this,” he said, but he slipped the strap over his head. She wiggled her foot at him.
“My heart bleeds for you.”
“Uh. Sorry.”
She snatched the proffered sling and stretched the blue medical canvas over the twisted frame. With the help of the sling strap, she cinched it in place and tore out the glob of clean gauze used in the sling’s elbow as padding and stuffed that into whatever gaps remained. It took all her upper body strength to shove the twisted, bloated filter back in the slot, but she got it flush.
“Calibrate O2 estimations, if you please.”
A pause. “Four hours.”
“Long enough to get to Bero.”
“If he’s exactly where you think he’ll be.”
She sighed as she pulled herself back into the command seat and relatched her harness. “He is, because he knows that’s where I’d look for him.”
Tomas turned to her and raised both brows pointedly. “Can you really trust anything you learned about him?”
She grasped the stick and took the ship out of auto, putting a little more heat into its engines even as she kicked on the stealth. “I can trust the things he didn’t intend for me to learn. That boy’s afraid of being alone, more than anything in the ’verse. He’s waiting for contact. He knows there’s only one sure spot I’ll look for him.”
“Not that I doubt you, Major, but where is that, exactly?”
“Dark side of Kalcus, stealthed out to hide from Ada and Icarion both, and getting into position for a grav assist.”
“You think he still wan
ts to go for Atrux? He’d never make it with just Grippy’s help.”
“Atrux? Maybe. For all his talk, there’s a lot of places one could go after a loop around Kalcus, and we’d never know the difference until it was too late. I believe that captain’s recording. Bero found something. I thought he was running from it. Now, I think he might have been running to it.”
CHAPTER 61
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
OLD TRICKS
Lavaux had locked himself in his office. Biran pounded on the door until his knuckles ached, but the bastard didn’t answer. “Taso,” he demanded of the ship’s AI. “Report on the location of Keeper Lavaux.”
“He is in his office, room A-23, on the upper deck.”
“You hear that? I know you’re in there, and you can’t hide from me forever. Open the damned door.”
Silence. Biran closed his eyes and rested his head against the camera-shutter folds of the door’s orifice, willing them to part and let him through. He needed answers, desperately. He’d won the fight. He’d gotten Sanda bound to the Taso, unable to pursue her damned idiotic idea of chasing down The Light and asking it to come back, please. But then she’d run off with Cepko—and wasn’t Biran paying Cepko? Shouldn’t Cepko be on his side?—to get herself killed anyway.
Something she should not have been able to do, on a properly secured ship. And Biran would bet whatever meager funds he had left that Lavaux, for all his faults, ran his ship very, very tight. He’d been able to stop Anaia from fleeing, but he hadn’t even been able to get the hangar doors closed in time to keep Sanda here.
Oh, he’d made a good show of trying, but every time Biran rewatched that footage—a number he’d lost track of—the truth became clearer and clearer. Lavaux had been in on her escape. She couldn’t have succeeded without his help.
Velocity Weapon Page 40
