by MB Panichi
She waited. Minutes passed. An hour. Another.
Finally, she heard the soft grating of the door opening and a muffled but familiar and irritating voice in mid-sentence. “—care about the details, Arrens. Are they dead?”
Shaine stilled.
Arrens’ reply came in a much deeper register, the sound moving past the closet, further into the room. “The captain said the lot of ’em were in the shuttle when they hit it—Maruchek, the Maruchek girl, and that bastard Rogan. I haven’t gotten the final report yet, but you know how reliable Thomas is. He said they breached the hull, saw debris spewing out.”
“I’d say it’s time for a drink, then!”
Charun’s high-pitched laugh enveloped Shaine in a suffocating blanket. Morgan! she screamed silently, biting her lip hard to hold in the agonizing sound. Her chest contracted painfully, cutting off her breath. Her eyes squeezed shut, leaving her in star-blasted blackness. Through the haze of loss, she felt her anger building. She reached desperately for the rage, wrapping it around her, immersing herself in hot fury, igniting the pain.
When she opened her eyes, she had buried the agony, leaving only the hard-core commando and the clarity of cold, deadly surety. You are a fucking dead man, Charun. She felt a slow, humorless grin twist her lips.
She shifted her position from slouched against the wall to poised on the balls of her feet. She heard a vague rustle of movement to her right, dulled by the carpet, and the squeaking sounds of someone settling against leather. Charun at his desk.
She eased the laser pistol from its holster and curled her fingers around the grip, clicking off the safety. She felt along the wall for the control pad to open the door.
Arrens said, “It’s about damned time we took Maruchek out. I’ve been telling you to do that for years, Tyr.”
“Don’t get smart with me,” Charun snapped, “or I’ll get rid of you, too.”
A shuffle of movement, more clinking of glass.
Shaine slowly let out a breath, envisioning the room in her head, placing the desk, the sound of the clinking and the second voice more toward the rear. She touched the indented metal on the wall, wincing at the barely audible click of the latch.
The closet door slid open.
She burst into the room and fired once. The dark-suited man—Arrens—standing at the bar slumped to the floor with a hole in his head. The bottle in his hand clunked heavily onto the edge of the granite countertop and tipped on top of him, dribbling liquid on his chest.
Shaine leveled her pistol at Tyr Charun’s head and pulled the trigger, putting a neat hole between his wide, surprised eyes. His body slumped sideways in the chair. She stared at him for a long moment.
The righteous fury disappeared, leaving nothing but cold emptiness. Morgan is dead.
Slowly, she stepped away from the desk. Morgan is dead.
She looked at the pistol in her hands. What was the point? Ending her life would be so easy. So quick. She’d screwed up. She was supposed to save Morgan. She was too late. So what was the point? I can’t live through this again. Just like when all the others died and she couldn’t save them. Morgan, I’m sorry.
In the back of her mind, she heard her platoon sergeant screaming in her ear. She remembered him leaning over her as she lay in sick bay. She remembered thinking his crewcut had grown out.
“Suck it up, Wendt!”
She had been immobilized, half her leg gone, broken ribs and arms, unable to discern between the pain of losing her friends and the physical pain of her injuries. She’d wanted to die.
Sarge dared her to live. “You gonna just give up like a fuckin’ loser? What are you? A fuckin’ grunt or a commando? You’re alive for a reason, girl. Don’t go throwing it away!”
She took a breath, and then another. Someone had to tell Morgan’s dad, and her friends, what had happened to her. That was her job now. Her reason to keep going. She forced herself to take another step toward the door. With one last look at Charun’s dead body, she turned away. She could destroy this place, destroy the pirates’ base…her thoughts were interrupted by beeping.
She spun around, pistol aimed at the body. What the hell? She moved closer, stepping around the desk. The beeping got louder and seemed to be coming from the dead man’s torso. The room lights flickered out and shifted to red emergency lighting. The beeping stopped.
Suddenly, a claxon sounded from the hallway, a disembodied female voice came from a hidden speaker. “Attention. Attention all personnel. The death-kill switch for the auto-destruct sequence has been activated. Auto-destruct will commence in T-minus twenty minutes. You have twenty minutes to clear the building.”
Shaine blinked rapidly as realization dawned. “You fucker,” she muttered. “You arrogant little bastard. You had the damned auto-destruct wired to your own bio-feedback monitor.”
Straightening her shoulders, she headed for the door.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Red emergency lights bathed the hallway. The warning siren rattled in Shaine’s ears. She headed quickly toward the compound’s center. When she approached the first junction in the corridor from Charun’s suite, a squad of guards carrying assault rifles ran around the corner.
Shaine fired four times before the guards had a chance to blink. Four bodies hit the floor. She holstered her pistol and grabbed an assault rifle out of a dead man’s hands as she passed.
Checking the corner, she moved to the next hallway. The corridor remained empty, but she heard yelling and clattering footsteps as she approached the compound’s central hub and the main stream of traffic. She strode purposefully into the main hallway, knowing if she believed she belonged, most people would just ignore her.
Smaller corridors crossed at regular intervals. Growing numbers of personnel paraded in an anxious flow toward the primary elevator banks. She jogged up behind a group of technicians in lab coats, hoping her black survival suit might blend in with facility operations and Security uniforms.
“Hope they figure how to turn that off,” a lab-coated man said.
“What’s going on, anyway?” asked another.
“Who knows? Probably a drill. Or someone set off a false alarm.”
“They said go up, so I’m going up.”
Armed guards raced into the hallway from a side entrance, nearly plowing into the group.
“Move, people!” one of the guards bellowed. “Evacuate! Now!”
The technicians slowed to look at the guards. Two security men shoved them down the hallway.
“Go!” The guard noticed Shaine. He shared a silent glance with another guard.
A person she assumed was the squad leader barked, “Who the fuck are you?”
She bluffed, “Wendt, external maintenance.” She started to move past them.
He grabbed her arm.
She twisted away, kicking out and slamming him against the far wall, using the butt end of her rifle to take out a second man before she turned and ran. Long, sprinting strides propelled her down the hall and around another corner.
She followed the red-lighted signage to the main elevators to the surface. More people crowded into the hallway from opening doors and side corridors, putting themselves conveniently between her and the guards caught in traffic behind her. She urged the civilians toward the exit as she ran. “Go! Go! Get out of the building!”
The claxon continued its deafening screech. “You now have fifteen minutes to evacuate the premises.” The announcement only caused more yelling, jostling and panicking.
Another group of guards joined the mêlée. “Move, move, move!”
Shaine kept up with the crowd, almost to the elevators.
Someone screamed, “Oh, my God! He’s dead! Charun’s been shot!”
A guard noticed her when she slipped past him in the middle of a larger group. “Hey!” He made a grab for her.
Two other guards shouldered toward them.
Shaine fired her rifle from the waist, dropping him as she darted ahead. Shots and screams soun
ded behind her. She felt the heat of a laser hiss past her ear.
The hallway opened into a circular lobby ringed with elevators up to the surface. She raced into the open area, closely followed by a growing group of guards. Personnel shoved desperately into the elevators, yelling and ordering each other around.
Noting an emergency stairwell to the side of the elevators, she made for the door, shoving a couple of people through and then plowing past them. She started up the stairs two at a time. The door slammed open again when she rounded the first flight. Laser blasts exploded into the wall behind her.
Go, go, go… Five flights to the surface. She sucked in air and pushed herself faster, dodging around a growing number of people entering the stairwell from other levels, tangling up the guards, keeping them from firing. Still a flight ahead of the pursuit, she was glad the guards had given up trying to shoot her.
“You now have ten minutes to clear the compound. Ten minutes.”
The stairwell ended at a final landing. Shaine took the last three stairs in a single bound.
The people in front of her joined the chaotic panic in the main entrance hall. Dusty air swirled through the open doors. People streamed out into the continuing sandstorm.
The stairwell door opened just to the right of a security desk manned by three very nervous-looking men. When she ran past, one of the men vaulted over the desk, brandishing a pistol and heading toward her. “Hey! Stop! She’s a spy!”
Shaine made for the exit, pushing through the crowd. Hands grabbed at her. She twisted away. Someone grabbed her backpack and jerked her backward. Without thinking, she unclipped the strap lock and slid out, losing the pack and the collapsed helmet tucked into the straps.
Wind whipped around her when she cleared the doors. She squinted through the flying dust and sand, unable to see more than two or three meters in front of her. She dodged the workers dashing away from the building.
Laser blasts whizzed past. She heard shouting behind her.
White-hot pain suddenly stabbed through the back of her right thigh. She stumbled to her knees. Someone kicked her in the ribs when they tripped over her fallen body. She scrambled up, falling again when her leg collapsed under her in a shock of pain.
People pounded past her. A stray boot planted her face in the rough sand. Gritting her teeth, she struggled to her feet and stumbled forward in a limping run. Someone shoved her roughly aside and she lost her footing and fell again. A boot connected with her head and her vision went black with the explosion of pain. She tried to push to her feet, but the world tunneled gray and she collapsed onto the sand.
She could hear, but everything was muffled and distant, as though she were underwater—the wind, the yelling and the footsteps running past her. She knew she needed to get up and run, too, but when she lifted her head and opened her eyes, everything spun crazily and she nearly threw up. She closed her eyes and let her head fall back to the sand.
When she opened her eyes again, she wasn’t sure if it was a minute later, or five. A few workers ran past her, but she could no longer see the crowd of panicked evacuees. She pushed to her knees and looked behind her. Through the blowing sand, she could make out the compound, which remained intact with the doors open, but people no longer streamed out.
Blinking, she looked at the chron on her wrist. Did the self-destruct fail? She hadn’t been down more than three or four minutes, but it appeared most everyone had evacuated. No one else was coming out. She got to her feet.
Suddenly, she felt the low thundering of buried explosions rumbling under the sand. The ground shook. A second later, a deafening shock wave slammed into her, picking her up like a rag doll and flinging her into the storm among shards of debris. She tumbled in midair, smashing into something solid that drove the breath from her lungs.
She caught a fleeting glimpse of charred gray plastic and concrete flying at her before her world went black.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Consciousness returned with sharp, breath-stealing agony. As the waves of pain subsided, Shaine tried to remember what she’d been doing. Short scenes flashed behind her eyes—the sandstorm, the sickening sensation of being thrown through the air, Charun’s dead body in the leopard skin executive chair. Oh, Morgan.
A different kind of pain squeezed her chest and twisted her stomach. Morgan, I’m sorry. For a long time she lay still, just breathing and remembering.
She blinked dry, gritty eyes. The night sky came into focus, scattered with pinpricks of stars and the glare of the white-yellow moon. Okay, so I’ve been out a while. A day? Longer? It had been daylight when she left the compound. At least the storm had passed.
Her head pounded. A coating of sand covered her whole body. She realized she lay against something solid. Gingerly, she turned her head to see a broken off, jagged chunk of concrete half-buried in the sand. Had the debris been there before the explosion, or had she come that close to being crushed? She vaguely remembered impacting something in the air.
She shifted her muscles, sorting out the damage. Searing pain sliced through her right shoulder blade. Her vision tunneled. She forced herself to breathe through the agony. After the initial spasm passed, a steady, sharp throbbing continued. Another experimental twitch of the muscle caused the knife-like stabbing to return. Something was lodged in the back of her shoulder blade. She sighed. Not much she could do about it, even if she could manage to reach it.
She stretched her legs. Pain lanced through her right thigh. Gritting her teeth on a groan, she remembered being hit by a laser shot. She lifted her left hand to her head, exploring her scalp with careful fingers. She noted a nice lump behind her ear and a bigger lump on the back of her head. Her hair was matted, sand coated and sticky around a gash that felt like it might be scabbing over. So she probably had a concussion on top of everything else.
Need to get up. Need to get moving. She gathered her strength and started to sit up. She didn’t get very far before dizziness and pain swamped her and she fell on her back. She bit off a scream when whatever was stuck in her shoulder cut deeper and grated sickeningly on bone. Somehow she managed not to pass out, forcing herself to breathe. It’s just pain, she told herself. Been there, done that.
After a bit, she eased her body upright more slowly, taking a few seconds to look around. She was able to see more than she expected in the moon’s bright illumination.
She lay at the far edge of the debris field. All that remained of Charun’s compound was a three-hundred-meter crater in the sand. She saw the shadows of two heli-jets with Charun’s silver company logo on their tails perched beside the crater. Several people wandered around the edge. Between her and the crater, she made out scattered chunks of concrete, metal, plastic and a few bodies. She saw no movement. She wondered where the others who’d escaped before her had gone. Maybe they’d been picked up. Maybe they’d gotten lost in the storm.
How did I manage to be a live body? If they did a sweep, they must’ve assumed I was dead. I sure as hell won’t stay alive if they happen to notice me. For the moment, discovery seemed unlikely, since she was several hundred meters away. Eventually, the group would start searching for survivors. She wondered how many people got out before the compound blew. Certainly there were many who’d been with her when she’d left, and before she passed out. She sighed. She needed to get away from the area.
She looked down at her injured leg. There was a neatly singed exit hole in the thick fabric of her survival suit. The laser blast had gone right through the side of her leg. She could twist just enough to see the entry hole. No wonder her thigh hurt like a bitch.
Lower down, her suit was ripped open from her knee down. Aw, fuck. Debris had ripped into her prosthetic leg and torn away a fist-sized chunk. She saw an open gash of wrecked bio-mechanics and damaged synth-flesh. She could actually see through to the inner titanium core. Broken wires and synthetic nerves hung limply from the electronics that controlled movement. She was glad the nerve clusters had been damaged so s
he couldn’t feel anything below her knee.
She dug for the comp pad in the pouch at her waist, relieved to find it still functioning. She needed to get to the homing beacon she’d planted and initiate a call for pickup.
The GPS software tracked her current position and the position of the homing beacon, just shy of twenty kilometers away. It would be a long slog, she thought, remembering she didn’t have her backpack anymore. No water and no energy bars. Damn. Not good. She had a small cache of liquid remaining in the suit’s internal water pouch, which would have to do. At least starting out at night, she would stay cool a while.
She managed to get to her feet using the concrete behind her to haul herself upright with her good arm, groaning when the jostling shot knives of pain into her shoulder blade. Carefully, she shifted her weight onto her injured leg and took a careful step. Her thigh hurt like hell. She couldn’t feel the surface underfoot, but she remained standing. She couldn’t feel or move the bio-mech ankle joint, but at least the tight fit of her boot acted as a brace to keep her foot flat. One step at a time.
She took her direction from the pad and limped slowly through the heavy sand, hoping the darkness would hide her motion from the investigators still poking around by the crater.
* * *
The noon sun hung above her like an incandescent heat lamp, pouring fire onto her head, sapping the little remaining moisture and energy from her battered body. Shaine stumbled over another sand ridge on another dune. Her injured leg collapsed under her. She tumbled down the slope, her body rolling to the bottom. Unable to stop the moan escaping her cracked lips, she lay curled on her side, her eyes squeezed shut, waiting for the pain to pass.
Stabbing agony radiated through her shoulder and down her arm. She felt blood seeping across her back under the tight-fitting survival suit. At some point, a fall had broken off some of the debris lodged in her shoulder, but the remaining fragment continued to tear her skin and muscle and scrape against her shoulder blade.
She dragged herself to her knees and staggered to her feet. She trudged forward, fighting exhaustion. She needed to sleep, but didn’t dare stop moving. She wondered over and over why the hell she bothered pushing herself. Morgan was dead. What was the point of enduring such agony?
