The guards fled the stairwell and made a straight, head-on run for us. Mud took a shot to the leg and I almost lost a hand. They were playing for keeps and we were still playing nice. Killing people isn’t good for you. I didn’t like to do it if I could manage to avoid it, but they were making it hard to keep that idea in my head.
Shae poked her head out between Mud and I. “They had the plans just sitting in there. All but under a spotlight. Either they think we’re really bad at this or they’re convinced they’re really, really good.”
“The Hurkz are convinced that they’re superior to everyone else,” Mud said, “and don’t seem to learn fast enough.”
“Their loss.” Shae shoved the plans in tight against her GravPack, sealing them into a large pouch there. “Now, do we have time to find Slon?” she asked.
I considered it. I would love to get my hands on him personally. I know Shae did, too. But no, it would be a bad idea to stop and try to find him. We still had two days’ travel to get back, and fleets that didn’t want to wait. A full week of waiting might do bad things as it was.
“I wish,” I said, “but we need to get out of here and get back as fast as possible.”
“Are you going to tell Chellox that?” Mud asked, “Because I don’t know if I’ll survive his fastest.”
Chapter 40 - Meanwhile
KNOWN AS JONAH’S TEAM, the small ship had found itself primed to take messages from one fleet to the other. They flew between the rear of the Tsyfarian fleet and the start of the human fleet that had flown here after them from Trasker Four. For a while everything had been peaceful.
Where once their main job had been search and rescue, the small group found themselves acting, unofficially, as diplomats. It was a role that none of them, save the Seer, enjoyed. And yet they carried on because it was their job.
The space between fleets grew tenser the longer time dragged on. The human fleet changed shifts, which required it to send half of its ships through the Tsyfarian fleet. The first few times the maneuver was done, no one minded. Each passing attempt brought more resentment, however.
The human shifts flew closer and closer to the Tsyfarian, almost daring them to react. It was the sort of tactic one uses when trying to provoke shots being fired. On the other hand, each fleet - knowing the other would be listening - had recently started to openly gripe about the other.
A Tsyfarian flight commander tried to put a stop to the verbal volleys as best he could. He knew, of course, that humans did not speak Tsyfarian, but also felt that the tone could be understood. He was not wrong. The human pack leaders, on their side, were doing the same, for the same reasons. The human flight leader also threatened to dock shore leave for any pilot who flew too close to a Tsyfarian ship.
They tried to hold the peace together. They failed.
The third day after the mission to Hurkz had left, fighting broke out on the border of Tsyfarian and human fleet space. It started by accident, as these things often do. A Tsyfarian pilot made a course correction, through sheer exhaustion, that took him into what was considered human space at that moment. He did this at the same time as the human shift change.
His drift across the paths of the human ships, full of pilots tired and overworked, was seen by one of those pilots as an act of aggression. A shot was fired. The shot was returned. War blossomed.
And the little ship flew straight to the start of the aggression, hoping that sight of them would return a level of calmness to the fleets. It had worked before, barely. It might have worked again, except this time open fire was being exchanged. The ship took several hits. The cabin filled with smoke and screams. From the outside, the ship poured smoke and fluid. The volleys of shots ceased as both sides wondered who had shot down Jonah’s hand-picked team. No one wanted to be responsible for it. That was, they all felt, a ship of nonaggressors. The neutral party, tied to the man who would help.
Destroying it would serve no purpose, and that fact, as the ship spun out of control and drifted out of the field of danger, stopped a full-scale war from erupting. Instead, both fleets sent in help.
Inside the ship, no one knew that their work had been successful yet again. They were trying to stop the loss of air, and of fuel. They tried to clean the cabin air and regain a breathable atmosphere. They fought for their lives, those four people, inside a small metal box that spun silently in the vastness of space.
Steelbox put out the fires as fast as he could spot them. He moved to the engine compartment to make sure that it was not on fire as well. His left leg had sprouted a shaft of metal, thrown there by the ship when it had first been hit. He slipped on his own blood once, but he knew better than to take the shaft out. He carried on with his job, knowing that if the ship could be saved, he, too, had a chance - but if not, bleeding out would be the least of his problems.
Olivet tried to work both communication consoles, finding the backup one shorted out but the main one functioning. He called for help and was answered. Thankful, he listened to directions and went to prepare the airlock for docking.
Bee tried to regain control of the ship. She called out to Kem, asking for diagnostic readings so that she would know how badly they had been hit. Kem didn’t reply, and Bee called out to him again, growing frustrated. Without that information she would be flying the ship blind. Bad enough that they were damaged. Trying to get the ship under control while not even knowing what systems fully worked would be impossible. Bee decided right then that she never wanted to fly again, if it meant piloting. She loved tech work, not this.
She called to Kem a third time and when he didn’t answer, Bee shut down her controls and unstrapped to pull his chair around so she could get his attention. What she saw caused her to scream loud enough that everyone else on the ship came running.
When they saw what was left of Kem’s body, and the half a navigation console that sat where his chest cavity had been, they grew silent. No one could help him. All they could do was mourn. Steelbox demanded that they put even that off until they had assured their continued existence. That way, they would have time to mourn. Olivet took Kem out of the chair, carefully, and laid his body aside, under an emergency blanket.
He then sat in the chair, ignoring the condition of it, and asked Bee if they could still fly the ship without the navigation console. Bee just stared ahead. Olivet asked again, in a calm whisper. Bee blinked, nodding. Together they worked to bring a secondary, emergency navigation console online. Olivet didn’t understand the wiring, or what he was actually doing, but Bee’s cold calmness directed him well.
By the time the Tsyfarian and human ships sat outside, helping right the ship with brute force slams against its sides, they had stopped the fires and brought the ship under control. They took boarders, then. They also accepted assistance gratefully, though they refused to abandon their ship.
Steelbox explained: they had been given a job, and that job wasn’t done yet.
Both fleets went back to waiting – a little more patient for another day.
Chapter 41 - Jonah
WE CLEARED THE BUNKER by inches, Shae bringing another wall down behind us. Rubble and dust were everywhere, and we used the confusion to take off with the GravPacks. We went straight up like greasy rats squeezed in a fist. Shooting clear of the gravity well of the planet, we each hit a different direction and signaled Chellox.
He tossed back an encoded burst with his location. We each zeroed in on and boarded the ship, even as the Hurkz started to fire.
“Chellox, I think we might want to get out of here,” I said, reaching for the first aid kit.
“That was the general idea,” he said. “You three might want to strap yourselves down.”
We did what we could, passing the kit back and forth. We were running out of bandages. That was never something you wanted to realize. I ached, and I hated it. Shae looked tired, too. Mud, though also battered and shot once that I’d seen, looked like he was ready to go at least one more round in the breach.
At this point, anything in the sky that wasn’t Hurkz was being fired on. That really ended up meaning only us. Chellox had his hands full trying to keep from being shot down while still working a way out of the area.
He pulled a few turns that felt, even within the ship’s compensating gravity, like a broken rollercoaster about to go off the tracks. I tightened my straps and glanced at Shae. She shook her head, not enjoying Chellox’s flying either.
We leveled off and hit a clear patch. “I think they’re all behind us now,” Chellox said. “Which means they can’t hope to catch us if I do…this.”
The acceleration wasn’t something you could brace for. Not this hard a jump. It felt like we went from zero to infinity in one jolt. I’d assumed we’d come in as fast as the ship could go, but now I saw Chellox’s plan. Just in case the Hurkz had spotted us, he’d kept something back so our getaway would work.
The speed kept up, but we all got used to it by the middle of the first day. The three of us rested as much as we could, using the last of the first aid supplies to do the best we could. Our wounds would close and not get infected. Everything else got tossed into the ignorable clutter of details.
Around the middle of the second day, I reached out to Mills.
“Mills, we have the stuff. The Hurkz won’t be happy, but we’ve got it. Get everyone who might be able to help and keep them together. We’re gonna come in hot.”
“Jonah, there’s been—”
“Mills, has war broken out?”
“No, but—”
“Then right now we need to focus on making sure it won’t. Best way is to get this tech working.”
“All right, but Jonah—”
“Mills, I need you rounding people up. We’ll talk when I get back.” I cut off. I didn’t know what he wanted to tell me, but I knew it would be bad news. The problem was, from where I literally sat, I couldn’t do anything. If it had been something I could cleanly advise on, he wouldn’t have given me a bad-news lead-in.
Not being able to do anything would just make me focus on the problem and chew on it. No, I needed to focus on these plans and getting this hibernation tech running.
Assuming that the Hurkz had allowed the real plans to be stolen. The fact that Slon had actually agreed to this bothered me a bit. Mud knew them better than I did, and he was right - they were incredibly confident - but this was plain stupid. It might’ve been as simple as a hunger for power that made him think he could taunt me with the plans, take Mud, and then double-cross me by leaving fake, deadly, plans out for us.
Some belief like that sure could’ve led him to miss seeing my own double-cross, or at least to assume he could deal with it handily. But I could also explain it easily enough if he’d made the plans fake. Something that looked real enough to fool us but that would kill anyone it was used on.
We landed after too many more hours and were met by a whole crew. They took us straight to a briefing room while a team of medical personnel followed, treating us as best they could on the move.
Techs took the plans from Shae and the medical crew started to discuss them. We all did. Thankfully, everyone else landed at the problem of it potentially being fake as well. Tslakog sent over a few of his scientists to help us with their biology. Even if these plans were real, they would need adapting.
It became a race against time that I could do nothing to further along. This sort of thing isn’t in my skillset. I hung around to make sure everyone else stayed on track and because I felt possessive of the problem. If it blew up in our faces, I wanted to be there to pick up the blame myself.
Everyone was on edge. The scientists, human and Tsyfarian, worked around the clock, but time kept slipping right by. Tests were run and rerun. Models were made and discarded. The plans seemed close to real but there was a problem with them. Damn.
Still, no one gave up. New models were made. It came down a question of time. The Tsyfarians didn’t have much left. As it was, another incredibly large shipment of food was on its way to them from our stores; even if the hibernation tech worked, we’d cost them too much time to make it without an influx of sustenance, and the size of it would be the last we could possibly do. Without the tech, they were finished.
Mills cornered me somewhere around hour twenty.
“Jonah. We need to talk.”
“Now, Mills?” I asked. “We’re right in the middle of this.”
“Jonah, you’re pacing. That’s all you’re doing. Let these people work and talk to me. You need to hear this.” He sounded insistent enough that I followed him out of the lab and into the hall.
“All right, Mills, what is it? I know it’s bad, just come out with it.”
“Fighting broke out while you were gone. It was stopped, but not cleanly. Shots were fired from both sides.”
“But it was stopped.”
“Yes. But one of your crew, that ship you had doing rescue duty? With the refugees?”
“Bee and them?”
“Yes. One of them didn’t make it. Kem, I think his name was.”
That hurt. They’d agreed to help out because they didn’t know what they were getting into. By the time they realized, they’d kept helping anyway. I wanted to race out, to do something, anything, be the leader they’d needed me to be while I wasn’t around, but I knew nothing would do. They were all good people - some of the best, given what they’d tossed themselves into to help others. And now one of them had died because my plans ran into a snag. “The others?” I asked, looking for a small bit of light.
“They’re all fine. The ship is limping along, and they’ve been insisting on staying where they are, patrolling the empty space between fleets as a showing of the cost of a breakdown in peace.”
“Call them in,” I said thickly.
“Jonah, they refuse.”
“They refuse you. Tell them I’m back and they need to come in now.” I turned away from Mills and walked down the hallway by myself for a while. This was part of why I’d retired in the first place. Losing team members cost my soul, every time it happened. I was sick of it, physically sick.
I met them down on the hanger deck about an hour later, and greeted them each warmly, even Olivet. I told them, in quiet words, how amazing they each were and how much two entire species owed them. They swelled at my pride in them, and that hurt like a dagger to the chest. That desire to please me that they now wore as a badge had cost Kem his life, and far too soon.
But I didn’t say anything. I smiled at them and made sure they got the medical attention they needed and told them again how proud I was of them. My pain at their pride would only serve to hurt them when they needed only to know that the cost had been worth it. And it had been - if not to me, but to them. They needed that reassurance, and though it hurt me to do so, I wouldn’t deny them that. Ever.
Leaving them and finding my way back to the labs, I ran into Mud. He entered with me, and I asked where we were in this whole problem. He shook his head. It didn’t look great. They’d been using blood samples from Mud, trying to get his cells to go into hibernation and come back out. They’d managed it once, and then twice, but there was something still not quite right.
Until they fixed that, there wasn’t a good way to go forward. Mud stepped to the lab bench and rested a hand on it heavily. “What we need to do,” he said slowly, “is test it on me. Not some blood, but me.”
“Mud, that’s crazy. They’ve gotten this to work, but only mostly. It could kill you,” Shae said, coming around to our end of the room.
“Sure, Mom, but we’ve all made incredible progress. And this is the final test we need. We all know it, including you and me and Dad.”
“He’s right, baby,” I said. I didn’t want to put our kid at risk, but like
before, I had no choice.
Shae shot a look of hatred at me but then turned away with a brief nod. She knew it, too.
Mud hopped up onto a test bed and rolled up one sleeve slowly. He relaxed back, staring at the ceiling.
“So let’s do this thing so we can adapt it for the Tsyfarians,” he said to the techs in the room. “We don’t have all day.”
Chapter 42 - Mud
THE TABLE WAS COLD, and the lights too bright. A needle pierced my skin and I wanted to laugh when they said it might sting. If they knew how many needles and how much stinging I dealt with…but of course they didn’t. So I nodded at the med tech and closed my eyes.
The medical guys felt sure the formula would work. It had managed to work on my cells fine, in multiple trials. The problem was, no one was sure how it would work on organs, much less my brain. So they would drop me into hibernation for twelve hours and see what happened when they tried to wake me up.
The serum started to take hold and my eyelids grew too heavy to open. They fit a mask over my nose and mouth and flooded it with the gas they’d prepared. I breathed deeply and started to drift away. I had a moment of panic as I grew convinced I could feel my heart stopping and my life draining away. I fought back the urge to struggle, to strike back against the darkness. I gave in to it and hoped I would live to see the other end of the experiment.
My eyes opened slowly and I cursed under my breath. The serum hadn’t taken. This was going to be a problem. Or so I thought until I caught sight of a clock. Twelve hours had passed. They’d done it.
Mom and Dad helped me off the table and both gave me hugs. I returned them, once my brain processed what I’d just done. The science techs smiled at me and drew some more blood to see how the hibernation had affected my system. A short test, but still one that would be telling.
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