by Isaac Asimov
He frowned.
“No,” she said, “you stay up here and cover me.”
She found a ladder down to the lower level. As she descended, she worked through her reasoning. She needed evidence to break into that locker officially. She needed something she could accuse Reen of smuggling in that would draw enough attention to effect appropriate action. If she was correct in what she believed was in those packages, no amount of bribery would keep an inquiry from falling on Reen like a rock.
And she wanted to justify her own mounting rage.
Mia kept to the walls and shadows as she worked her way close to the trucks. She could hear the two men within the locker, talking in reasoned, calm voices. They did not seem to be in a hurry.
She wished she could get to the other side of the train, use it as cover, but that might be too risky. She came as close to the open locker door as she dared and waited. The sergeant and his assistant came out, gathered a load of the packages, and reentered the locker.
Mia stepped up to the truck. She glanced back quickly. She saw neither man.
She reached into the truck and grabbed one of the packages. Her hand closed around a familiar shape within the loose blue wrapping, and she knew at once what it contained.
Her body seized as if waves of electricity had been suddenly poured over her. She could not move. Her jaw ached from clenching. She felt simultaneously weightless, her feet barely touching the deck, and enormously heavy.
After what seemed like minutes, the current stopped. Her head lolled back on her shoulders, her vision danced with sparks, and she never felt the impact as she hit the floor.
She opened her eyes to darkness and rumbling. It took seconds for her to identify her surroundings, for her mind to confirm what her senses already knew.
I never expected death to be so loud, she thought.
Then she was fully conscious, and she knew. She groped in her jacket for a hand light, felt the ominous shape of her blaster—cocky bastards, leaving her armed, but what difference would it make on impact?—and then found the little flashlight. She thumbed it on.
The light scattered over a jumble of shapes that refused to make immediate sense. Gradually, she recognized them as shipping webs, containing cargo nacelles.
She reached out in the near weightless space and grabbed one of the straps. She pulled herself forward—at least, toward the direction she faced—until she got to the end of the row of cargo.
Yalor floated in the harsh beam of her light, tied loosely to another web. The side of his head looked swollen, dark.
“Shit,” she hissed.
She probed the nacelles within the webbing. Hard casing, no telling what was within them unless she could get one loose and open it. Mia began pulling herself frantically through the hold of the drone. Somewhere, on board all these boats, there ought to have been crash couches, “just in case,” as the tradition of using anything and everything as a life raft dictated.
Near the aft engine housing she found them. But cargo had been lashed to the bulkheads all around. Even strapped into the couches, if the boat slammed into the ground they would be crushed by the cargo that would no doubt pull free.
She took out her blaster and set the beam for a narrow, low intensity burn, and cut through webbing. One nacelle floated out. She wrestled into onto one of the couches and cut the seals.
It was filled with bubblepacks containing, as best she could see, pharmaceuticals. She checked the ‘packs—impact resistant, unbreakable, opened only by a molecular key.
Mia managed to secure the nacelle to the couch, then wrestled another one into the next couch. She emptied out several of the bubblepacks to make room, then towed Yalor’s limp body over. She got him inside the nacelle and shoved ‘packs around him as best she could, then resealed the nacelle. It was a risk, she knew, unsure how long they still had in the descent—average for a drone was half an hour, but she had no idea how long she had been unconscious—and they might suffocate before hitting the ground. Either way, they would be dead, but there might be a chance inside the well-packed confines of the nacelle—
She heard a high keening sound, at first distant, but growing. Atmosphere raking the hull.
She climbed into her own coffin and jerked the lid to. She groped through the ‘packs until her hand brushed the inner surface of the lid and found a molded form. She took hold of it with both hands, held tight, and waited.
A few minutes later, the first impact yanked the lid from her fingers. Somehow she stayed inside, even while all the bubblepacks spilled through the air above her.
The lid slammed back down, and the boat began its skipping and plowing crash into the dirt of Nova Levis.
... Continued in Volume 10
Sources of Dates
(For Volume 9)
AD = Anno Domini
GE = Galactic Era
FE = Foundational Era
Chimera Takes place one year after Mirage.
Aurora Takes place a few months after Chimera
Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Chimera
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Epilogue
Aurora
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Sources of Dates
