Escape

by Blaze Ward

  He cut the circuit before too many of the cheers came back to him from wherever. Addison knew his crew. Smuggling was profitable, but a passive way to undercut the overlords.

  Piracy was a whole different matter.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Lazarus

  The hatch closed, Lazarus raced across the deck to the ramp, getting to the top just as Aileen cleared the far end. He went through at a dead run, catching the lip at the far side and using that to pivot himself around without slowing.

  He also nearly kicked Addison in the head as he did, but the man managed to duck the acrobatics.

  Aileen followed Lazarus into the storage area, jumping up and grabbing components while he stripped his T-shirt and kicked his shoes into a corner.

  Time was going to be critical. How much did they have?

  Naked, he found a box to sit on as Aileen approached with the abdomen base unit with all the plumbing attachments. She slid it over his feet and then turned for the other parts while he stood and pulled it up and into place. Docking wasn’t painful, if you took the time, which he didn’t have, so Lazarus just grunted as the two plumbing pieces locked themselves into place and gripped for zero gravity and deep space.

  Aileen had been paying attention when he took it off. Boots were ready for him to stand into as soon as the pain of docking went away. Gauntlets next.

  She didn’t have the strength to lift the chest piece, so he did that while she held his helmet. Six latches down each side, and the various systems came alive.

  He had done diagnostics monthly, like you were supposed to, but not put it on since he boarded Shiva Zephyr Glaive a lifetime ago.

  Back out in the main cargo bay, Addison was arguing with Wybert.

  “He’ll need someone protecting him,” Wybert groused.

  “He’d be opening the outer hatch and probably voiding atmosphere,” Addison growled back. “Anyone in the bay at that moment risks being blown into deep space. I won’t stop to pick them up.”

  “But it’s not fair,” the voice got sharp and pained.

  “Besides,” Addison added. “We may need to blast our way out, so you might have to engage someone with the guns when they start chasing us.”

  Lazarus liked the way Wybert’s eyes lit up. He handed his spear to Eha without realizing it and rocketed off on all ten feet for the ramp that would take him to the turret underneath their deck.

  Lazarus locked his helmet into place but left the faceplate open as Addison turned to him.

  “That was fast,” Addison observed.

  “Designed for being put on quickly in an emergency,” Lazarus replied. “You really expecting combat?”

  “Not at all, but it keeps Wybert out of your way and the guns will remain locked from the bridge,” Addison said. “Now what?”

  “Now you take yourself to the bridge,” Lazarus said. “I go out there and open the bay to space with the manual overrides. You should probably expect the fines to be astronomical.”

  “The Rio Alliance can pay them for me when we return,” Addison laughed and grinned.

  Lazarus shook his head and turned to Aileen. He knelt down and got a hug and a kiss on the cheek that surprised him, tickling his skin with her whiskers.

  “Be right back,” he said heavily as he stood and raced for the hatch.

  Out in the bay, the ship closed up quickly as he watched. Lazarus crossed to the control board and studied it for a second before he found the set of controls he wanted.

  Why anyone would want to manually vent a bay like this made absolutely no sense, unless a ship sitting here suffered some sort of leak that poisoned the air, but Lazarus found the menu item he needed to start the process.

  The main hatch into the station beeped suddenly, as someone on the outside woke up to trouble and wanted in. Lazarus overrode those controls from here and locked it in place, but he had no idea how long it would take the Stationmaster to override him in turn.

  And no interest in finding out.

  Lazarus triggered the manual alarms that told everybody within earshot that Shiva Zephyr Glaive had just suffered a reactor leak that was going to kill everyone who breathed it if they didn’t seal themselves up onto bottled air immediately.

  On Ajax, that was a siren. Here it was more like a large duck choking on a piece of oversized feed that had gotten stuck in their throat. Not even a cat hacking up a hairball was as likely to get inside your head.

  Lazarus slammed his faceplate shut manually to cut the sound and told the bay doors to open, venting all the toxic air into space rather than drawing it into the station’s supplies and risking contamination there.

  He loved engineers. Give them a scenario and then get the hell out of their way as they solved it. The outer hatch didn’t creep open like normal. All six slabs pistoned themselves backwards into the bulkheads as fast as their engines would pull with a sound like a meteor hitting the ground. The resulting tornado of air would have sucked Lazarus out into the main bay hard enough that he would have slammed into something rigid and probably broken himself.

  Instead, he held tight to the bar that the engineers had designed exactly for someone standing here in a suit to hold onto when the air went away and wanted to take you with it.

  God bless paranoid engineers with a sufficient budget to do the job right.

  Shiva Zephyr Glaive came alive as the air vacated the room, marker lights on various surfaces and thrusters starting to lift the ship.

  Lazarus realized that shutting the bay down had also cut the artificial gravity in here, so he couldn’t run back over. Instead, he launched himself at the ship on strong legs.

  “Lazarus?” Kuei’s voice came over a line. “What is your status?”

  “About to grab onto the side of the ship,” he said. “Give me a few seconds before you move.”

  “Acknowledged,” she replied.

  Lazarus had misjudged his flight in his excitement. Station gravity even lower than the low setting on the ship, compared to the rest of his life. He was too high and would go right over the top of the ship if she didn’t move right now. And if Kuei did she would likely just bounce him off the ceiling as well as the far wall.

  Crap.

  At least the police were stuck outside right now, until they could come back with suits and a much better warrant to arrest him, but he might be in trouble.

  Every second counted, and he was too high to grab on to anything.

  Worse, Kuei must have thought he was on track, because she started her thrusters and the ship began to lift.

  Oh, this was going to hurt.

  Except she missed. Somehow.

  Lazarus watched only the starboard side of the ship come up as he went by, but not the port. Kuei riding it up on her tiptoes, maybe?

  Aileen suddenly appeared out of the airlock in her own suit and set her boots to the top of the ship with magnets as Lazarus flew over her head. Even the Yithadreph was too short to grab his leg as he flew, but she apparently wasn’t about to try mixing vectors and mass in here anyway.

  Instead, she raised what his mind saw as a crossbow and shot him with it.

  Hey, wait a minute!

  But it didn’t penetrate his armored lifesuit when it thumped.

  Lazarus felt a tug and looked down.

  She’d shot him with a clump of glue on the end of a line.

  Huh. Cargo harpoon. Okay, that was sneaky. And brilliant.

  Lazarus felt like a prize swordfish as she stopped his movement and anchored him to the ship. Shiva Zephyr Glaive moved then, lifting the rest of the way as he suddenly changed direction as the rope found a new hinge point and started downward.

  Crap, more pain. Going to slam into the hull at speed without the ability to get my legs out first.

  Except he saw the airlock opening. And Aileen had timed her shot and her length of rope just right.

  Loadmaster wasn’t just a title. It was apparently a calling. Lazarus went into the maw of the airlock like a guppy
being swallowed by a whale.

  But then, hadn’t God cast him in the role of Job?

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Addison

  “He’s secured,” Addison said, watching Aileen demonstrate to the whole galaxy why she was the best loadmaster he’d ever met.

  How many others could use a cargo harpoon, momentum, and a moving ship to put a spacer flying the wrong way into an airlock, on the move, on the first try?

  “Thrusters coming up,” Kuei said aloud, letting the intercom put the information wherever it was needed. “Everybody grab on to something secure.”

  Addison had his coil pod to sit on, so he just wrapped tighter around it as the ship began to wiggle like a bigger fish on a line than Lazarus had been. Eha was wrapped around a chair normally used by a biped, but she was fine as long as they didn’t have to go into combat maneuvers.

  He might yet have to actually unlock the guns that Wybert was so assiduously preparing to fire.

  Shiva Zephyr Glaive came alive, sliding like a Kdari on ice as Kuei fed power to various controls.

  You were supposed to move slowly in a prescribed minuet that opened the bay doors and cleared all space for you to navigate into the main courtyard outside, before turning to align with the tunnel headed into the open space where you could engage your engines.

  All very precise and organized.

  If you weren’t turning pirate.

  Kuei had probably been dreaming of this day for years, to watch her ears flicker back and forth with excitement. She certainly was pushing the edges of the flight envelope.

  Thankfully, there were no other ships in the station’s maw as they emerged. That would have been a recipe for disaster.

  “Ahead one quarter,” Kuei announced.

  Addison kept his snout shut and let the tip of his tail semaphore his nervousness. Normally, you transited this corridor at less than one-tenth. But the way was clear and every second of surprise was that much closer to getting away.

  Kuei turned to him with a smile Addison could only classify as malicious.

  “Chances someone will unlock the station guns before we can get a safe distance away?” she asked.

  Addison shrugged in return.

  The authorities, someone, had initiated a raid on the tea shop that was an underground front, so they were up to something, but he had not stopped moving long enough to determine if it was just a monumental misunderstanding.

  Getting executed was the outcome for guessing wrong right now.

  “Permission to get stupid?” Kuei asked with a crazy smile on her face.

  Addison thought about it, and decided that he was better off not knowing ahead of time what she had planned. His heart might just explode.

  “Do it,” he said, gripping his coil pod as tightly as he could.

  “All hands, grab on for your lives,” she announced with a grand, theatrical voice.

  The bow of the ship was in the tunnel now, having maneuvered through the interior courtyard. Addison could see stars and darkness out there, where he knew that Innruld security ships would be scrambling to intercept them at any moment.

  Wybert would be proving his mettle by fighting for his life. All of their lives.

  And then everything went white.

  Addison looked around in utter shock. Not white. Gray. Streaked with blue.

  The bridge had not changed, but the light in here had gone from overwhelmed by being inside a station, to the leaden tones of trans-space.

  “How is that even possible?” Addison shrieked in complete shock, uncaring what his voice sounded like right now.

  Kuei turned back and smiled.

  “I have always wanted to do that,” she laughed. “The gravity deflection of a station is nothing compared to even a small moon, let alone a planet, so you just have to be lined up clean when you accelerate to trans-space speeds.”

  “From inside a station?” Addison gasped angrily.

  “You wanted a fast, piratical getaway, Addison,” she grinned. “Top that.”

  “Did we just lose Lazarus or Aileen with that stunt?”

  He was angry now. Everything would probably come to nothing without the human. And he had known Aileen longer than anybody on this ship.

  Except Eha.

  “Negative, Addison,” Aileen’s voice came out of the air. “I knew it was coming. We’re both fine.”

  “Could someone explain to me what just happened?” Eha asked.

  Her voice almost sounded normal. Addison took a moment to get his at least as close as hers.

  “We just…Kuei just jumped the ship into trans-space from inside the entry corridor of the station,” he offered, like it was something they did every day. “It was certainly a novel way to escape police vessels attempting to engage us.”

  “But I never got to fire at anyone!” Wybert whined like a tired child who has just been told it was bedtime.

  Addison laughed, feeling his hysteria fuel it, but he couldn’t help himself.

  “Next time, Wybert,” he half-promised, pretty sure that there would come a time when the Ilount had to shoot something in anger, rather than panic.

  “Where are we going?” Eha asked.

  “Away,” Kuei said. “Not a lot of options in this direction, but it will take them a while to calculate our destination and I don’t plan to land anywhere longer than necessary to plot the next course.”

  “And where’s that?” Eha pressed.

  “That is up to Lazarus,” Addison said, feeling calm finally descend on him like a burial shroud.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Lazarus

  After Aileen had joined him in the airlock, laughing quietly to herself at his ongoing shock, Lazarus stripped back down to nothing and waited for the inner airlock hatch to open. Aileen joined him.

  It wasn’t like they hadn’t seen each other nude before.

  “You’re insane,” Lazarus glanced over as her chuckles threatened to get out of hand. “And you get to clean that goop off my suit.”

  “Easy enough,” she grinned up at him. “Thadrakho has the right solvent. Seriously? You thought you were on your own back there?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” he replied.

  “Never,” she turned serious. “You’re crew. Remember that. We take care of our own.”

  Crew. Yeah. Cargo assistant on an alien freighter some twelve hundred light-years away from home, surrounded by species I never knew existed.

  So this is what home felt like?

  The hatch opened and the two of them stowed suits and got dressed, the beer logo on his shirt mocking him.

  He was going to need to get more of them printed after all, beyond the practical joke Aileen had played on that one tailor. Maybe he should start an import business for the humans that came this direction, and whatever other species could handle beer with a four percent ABV. Buy a tanker and haul beer between the stars?

  As long as his sainted mother never found out. Better to play piano in a bordello than make beer runs, as far as she was concerned.

  Aileen was at his side as they entered the bridge.

  All eyes turned this direction, including Cormac, in some bizarre way Lazarus couldn’t explain. The NavCrawler had cameras on all sides, but Lazarus felt like those two were looking this way.

  “We’re away safely,” Addison said as Lazarus and Aileen came to something approximating parade rest. “Now what?”

  “How crazy do you want to get, Addison?” Lazarus asked.

  He noted the way the Director’s eyes glanced quickly over at Eha before coming back.

  “What are my options?” the Churquen asked as a deflection.

  “Sell the ship and try to vanish into the background population,” Lazarus offered, just to see the way those eyes got huge for a second as his slits opened like curtains.

  They squeezed shut a moment later.

  “Not funny, human,” Addison growled, but there was laughter under it. And coming from Kuei a
nd Cormac both.

  And Aileen. Eha sat frozen, or rapt. Something. Prey look, rather than striking predator.

  What did she see when she looked at a human?

  “Listing them all,” Lazarus chuckled. “Gotta be complete. Second, we can lay in supplies and make the long run to one of the worlds of the Rio Alliance. That will take a while because I have to do a lot of cartography in reverse to find them. Third, you can go pirate. Declare full-on war on the Innruld and see where that takes you.”

  “We have shields barely better than navigational deflectors, Lazarus,” Addison replied. “Wybert’s gun was fine against your escape pod, but won’t do much against a capital warship. Shiva Zephyr Glaive would last about as long as a bushtit against a hawk if we tried it.”

  “I didn’t say anything about Shiva, Addison,” Lazarus corrected him.

  The others missed the significance, but Lazarus had studied the Churquen closely for several months now. Like his life depended on it, which it had.

  He saw the realization dance at the back of those hazel eyes before his face squinted hard.

  “You’re insane, Lazarus,” Addison managed to choke out, like he was talking around a rabbit he had just eaten.

  “That’s always a possibility, Addison,” he replied. “But I’m also angry. And tired of walking on eggshells around Innruld who think they are God’s Chosen People. If I have to break the Innruld to make the galaxy a better place, so be it. But I can’t do that today, so we’ll need help.”

  “What kind of help?” Eha Dunham finally spoke up.

  As Lazarus watched, she untangled herself from the chair he had used and slithered closer, forming something of a square with him, Addison, and Aileen.

  “He means human help, Eha,” Addison spoke before anyone else could. “We’ll need to transit to human space and recruit a crew.”

  “What do you mean, crew?” Eha asked. “What about this crew?”

  “It won’t be nearly sufficient.” Addison looked up at him and Lazarus nodded silently. “Even Wybert’s heart isn’t big enough to handle what might have to come next.”