Fallen from Grace

by Merry Farmer

  The women at the entrance jumped aside as Kutrosky ducked into the hut without acknowledging them. Danny squinted while his eyes adjusted to the dark interior, but he could make out rough furniture, furs lining the walls and floor, a round hearth in the center of the room and a pedestal of some sort. The hut was large but not large enough for all of them to squeeze into.

  “Come in, come in,” Kutrosky urged them to try anyhow, a mockery of a host inviting company in for a drink. “Don’t be shy.”

  When his men hesitated, no one quite knowing where to stand, Kutrosky lost his playful spirit and shoved past them to drag Grace deeper into the room. Danny and Kinn both strained against the men holding them. Danny shifted his focus from Kutrosky to Kinn. The bastard had no right to act like he cared for Grace’s safety when he kept her a prisoner himself. Kinn returned his stare with a smoldering fury. Kutrosky revealing Danny and Grace’s past relationship hadn’t done Danny any favors.

  “Get them in here,” Kutrosky barked at his men. “I definitely want them all to see this.”

  The guards manhandled Stacey, Heather, and Jonah, jostling them deep into the room toward the hearth. The room was overly hot and stuffy within seconds. Danny went from being near freezing to sweating like mad.

  “Here.” Kutrosky grabbed his arm, dragging him across the space, hands still tight behind his back, to a small, high table like a pedestal. “Still don’t believe in anything, geneticist?”

  It had been seasons since Danny had seen functioning computer equipment. The device sitting on the pedestal surrounded by odds and ends sent a surge of memories from another lifetime through him. It was a larger variation of a handheld. A cord ran from the device up through the hole in the ceiling to what Danny presumed was a solar panel of some sort on the roof. Dave would have given his eye teeth to learn how they had kept it working. So would he, for that matter.

  The handheld’s screen was roughly one foot squared and held a generic rendering of a star system. If memory served, it was the Ovid system. This system. Brian tapped the screen and Chronis grew larger. It stood out in orange with its rings and moons circling it. Their moon was marked in green. They were an inconsequential dot in a mass of swirling space debris.

  The dot of their moon wasn’t what caught his attention. A brighter blue arrow blinked on the screen. It was within Chronis’s orbit. A faint line trailing it wrapped around the planet, but as he traced the trajectory of that path, Danny knew it wasn’t a moon. It was a ship. It was Vengeance. Kutrosky wasn’t wrong about his rescue ship after all.

  “Do you believe now?” Kutrosky grabbed the hood of Danny’s parka and yanked him away from the pedestal.

  Danny fumbled to keep his balance. Carrie had been wrong. Her ravings had been nothing more than a dying woman in pain. Bitterness twisted his stomach as though he’d been punched. He’d staked this entire mission, gotten Grace and his friends caught, risked their lives, over a misunderstanding.

  “There is indeed a ship,” he forced himself to confess to his friends as they looked to him for answers. “It’s on the other side of Chronis, but…it looks like it’s heading our way.”

  Grace, Stacey, and the others who couldn’t see what was on the screen writhed in helpless panic. Heather in particular looked as though she would burst into terrified tears. It would have been easier for Danny to take a crossbow bolt to the heart. Kutrosky grabbed Grace next and shoved her toward the beacon. She stared at the image with wide eyes. Danny watched the light go out of those eyes and his soul crumbled.

  “How long do we have?” Her voice faltered.

  Rather than answering, Kutrosky’s face filled with rage. “What do you mean, how long do we have? You would know, wouldn’t you?” He lunged toward her.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Grace leapt back, stumbling into Danny. Danny jerked instinctively to put his arms around her, causing another stab of pain from his hands behind his back. Grace stayed pressed against him.

  “Where is the transmitter unit?”

  “The what?”

  Kutrosky snarled in rage. Danny’s gaze darted back to the beacon. It was nothing more than a large handheld, but the side closest to them had been gutted. It was missing a component. His eyes had adjusted enough for him to see that the other pieces on the pedestal were hardware, odd bits of wire and metal gleaned from the emergency ship’s ruins. The socket was scraped as though ill-fitting pieces had been shoved into it. Someone had been trying to recreate a missing piece.

  “It took me weeks to realize that the transmitter had been removed and replaced with junk. It was a good fake, programed to make it look normal, but when Vengeance repeatedly failed to respond to my hails in spite of being in Chronis’s orbit, I knew it was a trick. Did one of your spies take it while you were pretending to play nice on one of your visits?” Kutrosky pursued Grace.

  His eyes glowed with maniacal intensity and his chest heaved as he came close to hyperventilating. The man definitely wasn’t sane anymore. If he ever had been in the first place.

  “Of course you would,” he went on. “What better way to take your revenge out on me for not playing nice than by showing me where my ship is but taking away my ability to communicate with it?”

  The pieces clicked into place in Danny’s mind. Somebody had stolen the component when Kutrosky wasn’t looking. Somebody who had been close to him for months, but whose loyalties had shifted to Grace. Somebody who had tried to tell him where it was before she died.

  “If you let Grace and the others go I’ll tell you where it is,” he said. It was the biggest gamble of his life.

  The air seemed to suck out of the room. All eyes rushed to him, none of them understanding what he’d just said. Grace twisted to look up at him, still pressed against him for protection. He met her eyes, desperate to be able to hold her, desperate for her to trust him the way she used to.

  Kutrosky pushed her aside, throwing her to the floor, and thrust his hand out to clamp around Danny’s throat.

  “You’ll tell me or you’ll watch your precious little Grace die.”

  “You touch her and I’ll kill you with my bare hands,” Kinn roared. He broke free of his bonds, rushing forward and slamming a shoulder into Kutrosky.

  They pounded to the ground, knocking the pedestal over. Kinn slammed Kutrosky across the face as his men erupted into action in the cramped room. Three of them jumped on Kinn, pulling him off of Kutrosky as he twisted to fight them. The space was too small to use their whips and too crowded to fire the crossbow, so they were left with nothing but fists to harm or defend with.

  Danny tried to stand over Grace to protect her but two of the men grabbed him and threw him against the wall. His breath was knocked out and he sagged to his knees. Stacey had managed to wriggle out of her bonds as well but could only throw a few punches before being knocked out cold. She was dragged out of the hut along with a screaming Heather and Jonah.

  Grace was yanked up from the floor and pushed toward the doorway. Danny struggled to his feet but was held down, punched across the face. The blow sent a ringing through his ears and pain tearing through his whole body.

  “Danny!”

  He heard Grace’s muffled cry as she was pulled out into the snow.

  “Grace!” he called after her, still struggling, voice thick with blood.

  He was wrenched to his feet and slammed against the wall, his vision going black as his head hit the stones.

  “Tell me where it is,” Kutrosky demanded, grabbing Danny’s shoulders and shaking him as two of his own men held him back from outright murder.

  “Let them go,” Danny’s voice cracked, but he held his ground. He was dead whether Kutrosky got his transmitter or not. He refused to let it be in vain.

  “Tell him, you fucking scientist,” Kinn raged. “Tell him or I’ll kill you myself.”

  Kutrosky’s men took it as a threat to them and heaved Kinn to his feet. He was smashed across the face before being thrown against th
e wall beside Danny. It took three men to hold him there as he growled and struggled to break free.

  Kutrosky took a step back and grinned at the bloody, sweaty pair they made.

  “Well isn’t this a marriage of convenience.” He laughed, surging forward to hold Danny by the throat once more. “I’ve changed my mind. If you don’t tell me where the transmitter is, I’ll let Jarhead do whatever he wants to you, kill you as slowly as he pleases. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he smiled at Kinn. “I bet he’d like to know all about how you and Grace practically set up house on the Argo, how you pulled so many strings to keep her for yourself that you unraveled the whole fabric of The Terra Project, huh? I can just imagine how hot and heavy things got between the two of you. I bet you went at it like rabbits, even on the Argo when that sort of thing was discouraged. Can’t you see it, Kinn?”

  Kinn surged toward Danny, against the men holding him, with a guttural roar and was slammed back.

  “Of course this is all irrelevant,” Kutrosky went on. He squeezed Danny’s throat harder. Danny’s vision went black at the edges and his lungs burned. “I mean, you’ve admitted you know where the transmitter is. It’s not as though there are many places it could be. It should be a matter of hours to cut our way through your settlement to find it. If we have to burn the whole place down and kill everyone who resists us, so be it.”

  He gave Danny’s throat one final squeeze before stepping away and glancing between his two prisoners with undisguised malice. Danny coughed and sagged forward, gasping for breath.

  Kutrosky took another step back, cold calculation in his eyes. “Tie them up in the granary,” he ordered. “Assemble the men. Bring every weapon we have. Traveling at night will get us there faster, without being seen.”

  “Where are we going?” one of the men dared to ask.

  Kutrosky split into a grin, staring Danny down. “To slaughter the weak and take what belongs to us.”

  Chapter Eight – Darkness

  Danny awoke with a start in a dark, musty room. A pile of dying embers was the only source of light. Every part of his body ached, from his bruised face to his swollen toes. His parka was gone, but his hands were still tied tight behind his back. He’d been secured with thick ropes around his torso to something solid and warm. He rolled his drooping head straight—blinking in a vain attempt to bring the dark room into focus—and bumped into whatever he was tied to. It moved, straining against him with a deep groan.

  He’d been tied back-to-back with Kinn.

  Danny sagged forward against his bonds with a bitter sigh. He squeezed his eyes shut and willed his head to stop spinning as he racked his brain for a way out of the mess. Thought came slowly through the pain that enveloped every part of him.

  Grace and the others had been nowhere in sight when he and Kinn were dragged out of Kutrosky’s hut and shoved down the hill to the camp of mounds. Pandemonium had ruled. Men were running in every direction and shouting. Women with wailing babies were being herded from one spot to another, shouted at and shoved. Supplies and crude weapons were tossed around as groups were formed and reformed and ordered around by other groups. Danny had had only a bleary glimpse of it before he and Kinn were towed across the camp and thrust into one of the dank holes.

  He’d been hit on the head and knocked out almost as soon as they were thrown in the pit. He had no idea where his parka had gone. He still had his boots. His glasses were gone, probably forever. The thought of being nearsighted for the rest of his life bubbled dull panic in his gut. He was the moon’s first cripple. What an honor. He cut off the hopelessness of the thought by focusing on the situation before him.

  Kinn’s men had been much better at taking prisoners than Kutrosky’s. If there had been any sort of forethought in the actions of Kutrosky’s men, Danny couldn’t tell. By the haphazard construction of the dying fire in the room and the chaos that had reigned, he guessed there hadn’t been.

  He could still feel the pouch of bullets in his pocket. Thank heaven for small miracles.

  Kinn groaned and flexed against the bonds holding them back-to-back hard enough to push the air out of Danny’s lungs. Danny grunted at the pain Kinn’s struggle caused, but refused to let himself cry out.

  “Stop,” he gritted through clenched teeth instead.

  Kinn gave up his vain struggle, but roared “Kutrosky!” when he realized the predicament they were in. “Kutrosky, you motherfucker! I am going to fuck you up!”

  Danny winced. “Shut up.”

  “Don’t you tell me what to do, you fucking cock-sucker. The second I get out of here, you’re dead.”

  Kinn flexed against the bonds with a rumble of rage. Danny couldn’t breathe until he stopped.

  “Kutrosky!” Kinn shouted anew. “Come back here and face me, you son-of-a-bitch.”

  “Save your breath,” Danny yelled over top of him. “There’s no point wasting your energy.”

  “Yeah, you would say that, you fucking murderer. I had buddies that didn’t make it off that ship.”

  “What, like your commanding officer, Private McKinnon?”

  Kinn was instantly still. “You wanna say that again, you Project reject?”

  Danny’s pulse raced, attention more on the leather bonds around his wrists than the insult. Kinn may have actually loosened them with his flexing.

  “Governor King gave it to you good, didn’t he?” Kinn dredged up ancient history. “I bet he gave you a lot more than that, right up the ass.”

  Danny twisted his wrists, wincing at the pain. The leather straps had far more give after hours of being warm and moist, but they still held. With a little effort he might be able to tug free.

  “You hear me, cock-sucker?” Kinn rumbled.

  “Thanks, but I’m straight,” he answered. “As Grace well knows.”

  It was a childish answer and earned him an attempted jab from Kinn’s elbow. The blow glanced off his side.

  “Grace is mine. Mine!”

  “Grace belongs to no one,” Danny sighed.

  “What did you say?” Kinn twisted, tightening the ropes around both of them.

  Danny ignored him. He shifted focus from his hands to his legs, moving his feet as best he could to test the straps tying his ankles. Escape was possible, it was just a matter of patience.

  “Kutrosky! You sick bastard!” Kinn went back to bellowing at the ceiling.

  “Give it up,” Danny growled. “Can’t you hear? There’s nobody out there. They’re long gone.”

  It was true. The darkness outside of the pit was silent.

  Kinn growled and flexed against the ropes tying them together again.

  “Will you stop?” Danny growled.

  “You are a dead man,” Kinn snapped over his shoulder. “As soon as we get out of here I am gonna fuck you up.”

  “You’re good at that, aren’t you,” Danny responded with cold fury. “You’re an expert at fucking things up, if what Governor King said was true.” He squinted and scanned the room for anything at all that could free them.

  Kinn responded by jerking against their ropes. “I was set up.”

  “Sure you were. Just like everyone in your village keeps setting you up to look like an incompetent ass.”

  “Hey! You try leading a bunch of idiots who won’t listen.”

  “They don’t listen because you have shit for brains. Now stop trying to muscle your way out and look for something we can use to cut the ropes,” Danny ordered.

  “I am through listening to you.” Kinn tried again to jab Danny with his elbow. “You led us into a trap. No weapons, no reconnaissance. You let us walk blindly into this shit-hole ambush. Who’s got shit for brains now?”

  “We didn’t have time for reconnaissance. The only way to be taken straight to Kutrosky was to be captured.” He didn’t believe it himself but he would be damned if he let Kinn think he’d screwed up.

  “Like hell it was.” Kinn was nowhere near calming down.

  “And how would you
know, Private? You ever planned a mission before?”

  “I planned the motherfucking mission that brought half the women from Kutrosky’s camp to mine.”

  “Did you?” Danny twisted to look over his shoulder. “Or did Grace?”

  Kinn tensed and then drooped.

  Danny arched an eyebrow. He’d hit a nerve. Why stop with one?

  “Grace is the real leader in your village,” he said, even though it wounded him. “She’s what keeps your people together.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “I could see it from the minute she showed up in the longhouse. Those people don’t look to you for anything, they look to Grace. You’re nothing but a rapist with a loud voice.”

  “I swear to God, I am going to rip your throat out,” Kinn growled.

  Adrenaline shot through Danny’s system, but more from triumph than fear.

  “You know I’m right,” he said, figuring it out himself. He wanted to laugh. “You’re nothing, Private McKinnon, you never were. You’ll never amount to anything more than cannon fodder. Your own people helped Stacey and I escape. They wouldn’t come with you to bring Grace back.”

  Kinn jerked against him, but said nothing.

  “If it wasn’t for Grace, someone else from your emergency ship would have taken over the second your people felt secure.” Danny’s breath caught as all the bits and pieces of his and Stacey’s and Heather’s observations struck him with brutal force. “You didn’t keep her locked up and knocked up all winter because you love her, you did it because as long as you control Grace, you control the rest of your people.”

  Kinn remained still, silent.

  “But she was undermining your authority even before we showed up. She was making you look like an even bigger fool than you are, wasn’t she?”

  “She should do as she’s told,” Kinn roared. His body sagged. “If she’d just fucking done as she was told there wouldn’t be any problems and I woulda taken good care of her.”