Realizing he was right, everyone who was standing hopped to. I was still too tired to move, and my gaze left Cora to scan the room.
“The only equipment that’s mobile are canister racks,” I gathered the energy to say. “But they’re wearing powered armor out there, so it’ll only stop them for a few seconds, and tire us out.”
“So what would you have us do, Drayton? We’ve got nothing to fight back with. Pervenio is our only shot at rescue.”
“I’m saying we figure out what they want. What if Cora can’t get a message out? They’re not killing us, so maybe we could just give it to them.”
John stormed toward me. Instinctually, I slid back along the floor until the wall stopped me. “The captain thanks you for getting him here, but right now I’m giving the orders,” he bristled. “If you got any actual ideas then by all means tell me. Otherwise, shut the fuck up and start emptying those racks so we can move them!”
Desmond appeared in front of me from out of nowhere. “Move the shit yourself,” he said to John. “We’re not wasting any more of our time listening to you.” He gestured for Yavik and together they helped me up. They walked me past the XO, to the area around the console where Cora was working. One by one all of the other Ringers stopped working on the racks and followed our lead.
John’s fists were clenched. Who knows what he would’ve done if he wasn’t injured and terrified, but his cheeks turned bright red before he rubbed the wound on his head and exhaled. “Captain’s gonna hear about this when he wakes up,” he growled. “You’ll all be scrubbing the engine for the rest of the shift!”
“Haven’t you heard?” Desmond said. “Shift’s over.”
—
Nearly a half hour passed in silence; I couldn’t be exactly sure without a hand-terminal and didn’t bother asking. Barely a soul had spoken since Desmond’s last words. All I could hear was the steady rattling of worn air recyclers, the heavy breathing of twenty or so frightened people, and the constant clicking of Cora’s busy fingers as she tried to save us.
So far, she was having no luck broadcasting our need for assistance. Sweat poured down her forehead and arms. I thought about walking over to encourage her a few times, but I didn’t want to distract her and my leg was too sore for me to get up. Watching her and wishing for her to succeed was the best I could offer.
John and the Earthers had emptied the canister racks and shoved them in front of the blast door, so they were drained as well—all to buy us maybe a minute if the attackers were able to slice through the blast doors. In the rare case of toxic gas leaks, the harvesting bay was able to be sealed from either side. We’d secured it on our end, which meant that only Captain Saunders’s override code was supposed to be able to open it from the corridor.
The captain was conscious again, but he hadn’t uttered a word since coming to. I caught him staring at me a few times, but every time I did he looked to the ground as if he were ashamed. I’m guessing one of the Earthers had informed him of who’d gone back to save him. It was the least I could do for the chance he’d given me, but I’m sure if I were a captain I’d want to be the one saving my crew and not the other way around.
Presently, he was as useless as any of us except for Cora, and likely suffering from a concussion like the hotheaded XO sitting beside him. They were the only two people on the ship with leadership experience, and the XO had already alienated half of the remaining crew.
“Who the hell raids a harvesting ship this old?” Doctor Varrick asked from across the room, breaking the unsettling silence. Everybody glared at him as if he’d just fired off a gun. Everybody except me. Hearing those words caused me to remember my initial thoughts upon receiving M’s message back on Titan.
My breathing hastened. It couldn’t be connected.
“For gas stores, I reckon,” another crew member responded, motioning to the dozens of canisters standing all around him.
“This early in the shift?” said another, echoing my sentiments exactly.
Desmond sat up and glanced in Captain Saunders’s direction. “You finally insult the wrong person, Cap?” he said.
“Shut it,” John growled so that the captain didn’t have to waste the energy projecting his voice across the harvester bay.
Desmond grinned, but didn’t respond.
“Maybe they got what they wanted and left,” Yavik said.
“Kindest pirates I’ve ever heard of if that’s the case,” someone else added.
“Enough,” Captain Saunders groaned. “You’re all giving me a headache. Let Cora keep working. Anything yet, girl?”
“Nothing,” she responded softly, too focused to worry about if anyone could hear her. “I’m locked out of everything. Every time I find a way through, they have a counter.”
They conversed back and forth with technobabble I couldn’t follow. M’s message repeated in my head. If this really was connected and I’d invited our invaders on board, what could they want?
“Hey, Kale,” Desmond said, snapping me out of it. He was slumped against the harvesting vats beside me. He had his eyes closed, but he wasn’t asleep. He was just resting, preparing for the fight we all knew might be imminent.
“What?” I asked.
He held out his palm. A G-pill lay in the center of it. “Here. I’m tired of listening to you wheeze.”
“Whe—” I lowered my voice. “Where’d you get that?”
He nodded toward Yavik. “He’s always got an extra stash to take the edge off. C’mon.”
I looked around as if it mattered we were breaking the captain’s rules, then grabbed the pill and forced it down without water. In seconds it felt as if there had been a belt wrapped around my lungs that was now loosening notch by notch.
“There you go.” He slapped me on the back and slid closer. “I saw you,” he whispered directly into my ear.
“Saw me?” My heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t have seen. Nobody saw. Was I about to be blamed for this?
“Getting up out of her bed,” he clarified. “Thought you’d be able to hide it from me in the chaos, but I think I have a knack for catching you.” He turned to face me, and smirked.
“Oh, that,” I replied, trying not to let my relief show.
“Lester will shit himself if he ever finds out. I never thought it’d actually happen. Never thought I’d be jealous of you, either.”
“Why? You’ve got a girl back on Titan, don’t you?”
He hesitated, and his lips twisted. “Yeah…sure I do…but not one like her. You’re braver than I thought.”
I peered over at Cora. Even considering the circumstances, she was as stunning as ever. Watching the way the muscles on her slender forearms tightened and untightened as her fingers flew across the console’s controls quieted my mind for a few much-needed seconds.
“At least one of us had a last night to remember,” Desmond said.
“We’re not going to die,” I retorted, mostly to reassure myself. “She’ll find help. They don’t even want us de—”
“Trass!” Cora exclaimed. Everyone’s attention fell on her. In two years of knowing her, I’d never heard her raise her voice so high.
“What?” more than a few members of the crew, including myself, asked in unison.
“They’re diverting power from the ship’s systems. They’re…” She backed away from the console, her eyes gaping in horror as if she was about to faint. I used Desmond’s shoulder to get to my feet and limped over to her. The screen was blinking and cluttered with indecipherable strings of code.
“What is it?” I asked.
The Piccolo answered me before she could. The room’s air recyclers hummed loudly for a few seconds and then clicked. The attackers had reversed the harvester bay’s oxygen supply, sucking it out of the room. It was an emergency protocol to be used in the event of a fire.
“What’s happening?” voices questioned.
“Cora, stop this!” Captain Saunders ordered.
She threw hersel
f back toward the console, carrying me with her. I could feel her arms trembling as I held them, or maybe it was my hands. Probably both. Everything she tried was received with an error message.
My body started to feel warmer. The current of air flowing through the ship had never been noticeable to me until then, when so much of it had been sucked away that it was absent.
“C’mon,” Cora said to herself. “Work!” She banged on the keys, and the screen went black. The air recyclers rattled to a stop, and the sound of the rest of the room’s machinery losing power hung on the stale air. Even the red emergency lights finally switched off, drowning us in complete blackness.
“Was that you?” I asked.
“No…” Cora whimpered. I felt her head fall against my chest. Gentle arms squeezed my back. “I couldn’t stop them…I couldn’t…” She sobbed, and we fell to our knees together. I withheld my tears. We needed to control our breathing or we’d all suffocate even more quickly.
It was hard to hear what anybody else was saying. Curses and frightened shouts echoed. Crew members ran for the blast door, the thinning air causing them to forget that they weren’t safe on the other side of it either.
“It’s sealed!” they shouted.
Of course it was. Without power, there was no way to get it open.
I wrapped my arm around Cora’s head and held her close. I’d have given anything to look upon her face again. It was too dark to even see her nose as it grazed mine. I could only feel her tears on my cheeks.
“Just breathe slowly,” I said.
“I wish I’d been with you sooner,” she sniveled.
“Me too,” I answered. The words slipped through my lips as little more than a whisper. My head was getting lighter and lighter every second.
“I don’t want to die…Kale.”
For two years I’d dreamed of hugging her. I’d dreamed of kissing her and lying by her side. Now I’d done all of that, and it’d be the last thing I ever did. We were all going to die.
Chapter 12
A flicker of light. The thrum and ticks of power being restored. At first I thought that I was dead, that those Earthers who clung to the religions of the old world were right and there really was a realm my spirit went to after death. Personally, I’d always believed that when I was cremated and my ashes were released into the winds of Titan, as was Ringer custom, I’d become a part of our moon’s icy winds. Drifting for all eternity and watching over my people.
I was doing neither. Breathable air rushed down my throat, inflated my lungs, and I gasped. In my arms I felt Cora do the same, her chest lifting my hand as I squeezed her tight. The room was filled with the sounds of others having the same reaction. We were alive…at least for the time being.
The lights in the harvesting bay grew brighter, and I realized that the blast door was wide open. The canister racks stacked in front of it had all been shoved to the side, except for the one currently being moved by an attacker. John’s great wall, brushed aside like a cloth tarp.
I wanted to grab Cora and run for cover behind anything I could find, but I couldn’t convince my legs to cooperate. My body was still too fatigued from oxygen deprivation to speak comprehensibly, let alone move. The rest of the crew was in the same position. Reversing the air recyclers was a perfect way for whoever the attackers were to avoid a fight. I just couldn’t understand what they wanted.
And then I saw it.
The attacker finished sliding the last rack out of the way and turned to face us just as two others entered the room. My vision was getting less blurry, and under the blooming light I could better see the details of their armor. All three suits were identical, and bulky enough to make it impossible to tell where their wearers might’ve originated from. They were entirely white except for their tinted visors and one other feature: a pale orange circle in the center of their chest plates.
My jaw dropped. Doctor Varrick regained his strength quicker than the rest and scrambled for cover. One of the attackers promptly shot him down. The flat-head round didn’t kill him, but getting hit that hard in the gut at close quarters had him curled up on the ground desperate for the air he’d only just regained.
“Fuckers!” another Earther yelled. Not only were the Earthers closer to the door, but their stronger muscles allowed them to recover faster. Four of them pounced at the attackers. What proceeded happened so fast that it was hard to tell who was who, but I was sure that while John’s two-person security team joined the defense, he stayed put and hid. The captain struggled to rise, but wasn’t able to move quickly enough.
Two of the Earthers were taken out at the legs. Another landed a punch against one of the attackers, but probably broke his hand against the armor before being smacked into the canister racks. The fourth was grabbed by the throat and slammed to the ground so hard the metal floor caved.
Before anybody else could move, the captain was heaved to his feet and placed at gunpoint. The attacker holding the rifle switched out the clip on his or her pulse-rifle for another. John was next to them, crouched like he was finally preparing himself to join the fray, but remaining still.
“The next rounds are live,” the attacker by the captain said. A distortion device rendered the voice too deep to be natural or infer gender. It resonated over the cavernous silence of a crew too tired and terrified to move.
“Do it,” Desmond said after the longest seconds of quiet in my life. “See if we care.”
The other two attackers switched their clips as well, each taking aim at one side of the room. I positioned my body in front of Cora, and then all of my muscles tensed. Nobody fired, but the message was clear enough for even Desmond to hold his tongue.
“What do you want, gas?” Captain Saunders rasped, the gun barrel pressed against his bloody hair. “We have nothing else of value here.”
“Value is a relative term,” the attacker replied.
“We’ll give you whatever it is.”
“What we want, you cannot give.”
“Then just leave!” John yelled. “Whoever you are.”
The attacker doing all the talking turned his or her attention away from the captain and stepped toward the center of the room. It was impossible to see any eyes through the visor; however, I couldn’t help but feel that he or she was staring directly at me.
“We are the will of Titan. Comply with our demands, and you may survive this.”
The speaker exchanged a series of calculated hand gestures with the other attackers. It wasn’t just military signals, either. I could tell from experience that they were communicating in sign language. That had me believing they might be Ringers.
Deafness had essentially been eliminated on Earth, with its advancements in the areas of genetics and affordable surgical options, so it was a dead language for Earthers. But signing had been a huge part of how we communicated in the early days of the Ring, when we were founding our colonies from the inside of protective suits. Having an entire construction crew chattering over in-helmet com-links could be confusing. Most Ringers weren’t fluent anymore, and I basically knew only the few words and phrases I used as a thief to remain as discreet as possible. The attackers were so fluid with it that the only word I recognized was live.
“Who are they?” Cora whispered. The terror in her voice was palpable.
I don’t know, but I think I invited them here was what I wanted to say. I settled on simply “I don’t know,” which was still the honest truth. Them being Ringers was really just an educated guess. Any Earther could learn sign language if they had the time or the desire to put on a mask and make my kind appear culpable. The only thing I could be sure about was that they were professionals, and they weren’t messing around.
“Stand,” one of the other attackers said to all of the Ringers in the harvesting bay as he or she approached us. Another said the same to the Earthers across the way.
We all listened.
The attacker’s head rotated so that his or her visor aimed directly at C
ora and me. My stomach turned. Her fingers dug into my side and mine into hers.
“Apart,” the distorted voice ordered. “Show your hands.” We hesitated. “Now.”
“It’s okay,” I whispered to Cora. “It’s okay.” It took all of my willpower to pry my hands off her, but I did so and made sure to position myself in front of her as I raised them. I couldn’t even feel if they were quaking anymore, they’d been doing it for so long.
“Form a line at the door,” the attacker said. “The order is irrelevant.”
“For what?” Desmond questioned. “I’m sick of this. I won’t be marched away to be used like a sack of meat willingly, if that’s what this is!”
“Me…me neither,” Yavik nervously agreed.
Again, I wished Desmond could just keep his mouth shut. The attacker promptly stormed over to him and raised his or her pulse-rifle so that the barrel was pressing into the center of his forehead.
“Failure to comply won’t be tolerated,” he or she threatened.
The attacker’s finger squeezed the trigger halfway, and Desmond’s expression was ripe with a level of apprehension I didn’t know he was capable of. I could see the lump in his throat bob.
I willed him with my thoughts to stay quiet. It was better to be a slave, if that’s what was coming, than a stain on the floor. Ringers were no good in underground brothels, considering our immune systems, so if we were being acquired for work the worst place I could conceive of that we’d be placed was some hollowed-out asteroid mine. The Lowers weren’t much different.
“Listen to them,” I said. “If they wanted us dead, they’d have kept the air off.” I limped toward the blast door, checking to make sure that Cora followed. She did. I held her gaze as we walked.
“Back to your old self, are you, Kale?” Desmond said through clenched teeth.
I wasn’t foolish enough to respond. Cora and I found a spot behind the Earthers, who reluctantly formed a line at gunpoint. I made sure she was in front of me.
From Ice to Ashes Page 13
