“Ow,” Ciangi groaned as they hit earth beside me with muffled thumps. “Remind me to recalibrate these later,” she said.
“If we get a later,” Bahn murmured. “We still have one more hurdle to pass just to get in.”
“True enough.”
Together we walked forward, shedding our dark outerwear and stuffing it into the compression half of my backpack so we looked less like thieves from some show on the net and more like peons hastily shuffling to complete their work before their shift ended. I clipped my badge to my pocket as we walked, and it helped me from catching the eyes of any random personnel that passed. The last thing I wanted to do was shoot one of them an accidentally guilty look and have them report us before we could get to where we needed to go.
I reached the final door that would let us inside the hangar we needed. Just like all the other ones, it had three scanners necessary to open it up—badge, finger, and eye
In a way, Earth’s massive reliance on automation was a godsend. If there was an in-person guard set to block the entrance, we might not have been able to con our way in. Or maybe we could. Either way, I was much happier fooling a predictable machine instead of a living, breathing, unpredictable human.
My hand trembled slightly as I slid the card through the slot. The door gave a beep, and then a panel slid out for me to press my thumb against. I almost didn’t dare to breathe as I pressed my thumb to it, but that beeped too and then last but not least, the eye scanner came out.
The seconds seemed to drag on forever until finally, that was an affirmative sound as well and the door slid open.
I heaved a sigh of relief and gave my companions a little wave before stepping through. The door closed quickly behind me, and I stood back to wait for each of them to go through the same process I had.
I couldn’t help but worry, my maintenance side quickly rattling off all the things that could go wrong and possible fixes for those eventualities.
Our entrance could cause the head of security to be paged, and before we knew it, a contingent of guards would be swarming us. Or, by sheer chance, whoever’s job it was to deactivate our clearance could do so any moment and one of us could end up locked out while the others were trapped inside. Perhaps even one of the generals would cross by and recognize us.
The possibilities went on and on until the door finally slid open and Ciangi emerged, looking relieved.
Just like before, it quickly shut behind her and then it was just Bahn.
The blond half of the twins and I didn’t say anything as we waited. As it was a government building, we were fairly certain that there were probably listening devices everywhere until we got into the sealed areas of the hangar. It was torture, just standing there in the quiet as we waited for something to go wrong, but a few seconds later, the entrance swung open once again and it was Bahn stepping through.
He nodded to us, an obvious look of relief across his face. I held up my hand for a high-five, and he slapped it with more enthusiasm than I had seen in him in quite a while.
We moved on down the hall after that, beelining for the hangar. We were practically there, and I could feel adrenaline pumping up in earnest.
Honestly, I wasn’t that worried about stealing the ship. Since it was so new, there were going to be almost zero security protocol fitted to the vehicle. No, the difficult part would be getting it past Earth’s outer defenses. Defense satellites, the space military posts, not to mention the outer stations that would all want to stop us from getting past their sphere of influence. It was going to be incredibly difficult, but we were game.
We had to be.
The final door to the actual hangar we wanted was just a simple, garage-like door held closed with an ionic lock. A quick placement of a mini-electrical discharger later, the lock popped open and we rolled the partition up and out of our way.
“Whoa,” Ciangi breathed, looking out at the vast allocation of government space.
“Whoa.” I couldn’t help but agree.
Stretching out before us was row after row after row of mint condition ships. I saw everything from tiny, single-pilot fighters, to a five-crew scouting ship, all the way up to a singular magnificent, gargantuan battle cruiser that would make even the most high-budget of net shows wet their pants.
“And to think they wanted to hold all of this back,” Bahn mused, anger dripping over his words like syrup drizzle.
“Honestly, I don’t know if they were ever planning on giving any of this up.”
“I’m beginning to think that they weren’t at all,” Ciangi said as we walked forward. “So, which ship are we talking, now that we are falling back into our old habits?”
“What ship do you think?” I asked, grinning wryly while walking straight toward the warship.
“Higgens, no! We can’t.”
“Higgens, yes,” I shot right back. “We definitely can.”
I could already see us riding up to Mimic’s planet in the cruiser’s full glory. The relief that she would feel would be massive and I would get the chance to be a hero again.
Maybe that was why I was so dissatisfied with my day-to-day existence. I had gotten used to every one of my actions being monumentally important and somehow managing to save the day with my friends that now, nothing really seemed to be a challenge anymore.
Well, stealing one of the newest, biggest, and brightest spacecraft from the government of Earth was plenty of challenge.
“This is crazy,” Bahn said, although he didn’t slow his step at all as we jogged toward our destination. I was tempted to sprint, but we didn’t want to move too quickly and fry out our shield-scramblers, which were the only things keeping us from setting off every alarm in the place.
“Does anyone else get the feeling that this is entirely too easy?”
I had finally reached the lowered walkway of the ship and I hesitated just a moment. “Not really, why—”
Suddenly someone, no…something punched me, and I went flying. I collapsed to the ground a few feet away, vaguely aware that Ciangi was screaming in alarm and all of my limbs seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.
I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t gather my wits enough to do so. I did, however, manage to tilt my head enough to see what looked like a syringe sticking out of the left side of my chest.
“Ow,” I groaned before my head fell back.
Less than a second later, I felt both Bahn and Ciangi clatter to the floor a few feet away. I didn’t need to look around to guess that they had been tagged too. Footsteps sounded down the ramp, one right after another, until three soldiers were looking down at me curiously.
“Why did you shoot them?” one asked the other, although their voice rang hollowly in my ears. As if someone had put some sort of ancient auto-tune on their words.
“They were running for the ship. There’s no reason authorized personnel would do that.”
“I hope you’re right. Let’s get them to the infirmary to sleep off those darts.”
I tried to object, or to come up with some sort of con worthy of the situation, but my mouth wouldn’t move. The world grew dark at the edges and I spun away until finally, sleep claimed me just like any other.
7
IT GETS WORSE BEFORE IT GETS BETTER
I DIDN’T WANT to wake up.
That was the very first thing I was aware of as I hovered on the edge of my subconscious. Sleep was safe, and easy, and most of all, it felt good. The more awake I became, the more I was aware that something awful was awaiting me.
But eventually, I wouldn’t resist consciousness any longer. I rose up to the real world and opened my eyes to near blinding levels of illumination.
I tried to sit up with a jerk, but instead, my body moved in slow motion. When I finally did get upright, my head swam with some serious double vision.
I closed my eyes and took a long, deep breath. My fingers came up to massage my temples, and once I stopped feeling like I was caught in a whirlpool, I tried looking around
again.
I was in a small, bare, and brightly lit room. I saw a waste disposal device in the corner and a simple roll-up mattress in the other, and nothing else. Turning about, there was none other than a line of yellowish shielding for the fourth wall.
I was in a cell.
Bigger than the one Mimic had once been held in, but a cell nonetheless.
I stood there, in complete and utter shock. Slowly, the events that led up to that moment played out in my mind. There must have been guards on the ship. Of course! Why had I thought that they would be left unprotected? This wasn’t a mining ship with the bare essentials to function. This was an Earth Gov military building. Or at least it was… I wasn’t exactly sure where we had been taken to.
“What’s a pretty boy like you doing in a place like this?”
My eyes jerked in the direction of the voice, into a cell across the hall, where none other than Gonzales stared at him.
“Oh my gosh,” I gasped, rushing to the edge of my prison. “What are you doing here?!”
She stood and walked right up to the glowing barrier of her room as well. She looked tired, more tired than I had ever seen her, with deep purple circles under her eyes and I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like she had a split on her bottom lip.
“Same thing as you, I imagine,” she said, grinning broadly. “Getting betrayed.”
“I, wha…what happened?”
“You always did have a way with words, didn’t you?” she joked, winking broadly at me. It was then I noticed a strange discoloration around her eye. Had she been in a fight? Had someone struck her?! “But I was on contract, working out the kinks in those weapons we had that whole hoity toity meeting about, when I happened to overhear a couple of the honchos talking.”
“Really? You just happened to overhear?”
She rolled her eyes, but her mischievous grin didn’t dim. “Alright, so I may or may not have been satisfied with the answers I was getting from my liaison and I may or may not have broken into their place to get some answers when good ol’ General Santos—who is married by the way—and my liaison burst in and started…dancing. Horizontally.”
My eyes went wide at the revelation, but I didn’t quite understand. “What does that have to do with you ending up in prison?”
“Pillow talk, actually. It’ll do you in every time. Santos revealed that they didn’t intend on ever honoring the treaty and that they were using our team as an excuse to amass enough supplies for some sort of global cue. Can you believe that? We’re trying to save the galaxy and they’re busy with some planetary power play!
“Needless to say, I had to get to you guys and warn you, but unfortunately I got a little…intercepted on my way out of the building.” She smiled sheepishly and sent me a shrug. “I’ve been stuck here ever since.”
As happy as I was to see one of my best friends, my stomach sank at the thought. She had been so alone and had no one there to help her. “How long ago was that?”
“Uh, I don’t really know. There’s not a reliable way to keep time here, and I think they do it on purpose. But the last date I remembered was the twenty-seventh.”
“The…the twenty-seventh, are you absolutely sure?”
She squinted at me and now I was absolutely sure her eye was barely healed from a good punch. “Yeah, why?”
“Gonzales, it’s the twenty-first today.”
“Holy halibut,” she breathed, taking a step back. “And none of you thought to look for me?! I was gone almost a month.”
“I…I got a message from you. It said you were working on a super high-level project and would be out of touch for a bit.”
I heard the voice of Ciangi, but I couldn’t quite see her. By following Gonzales’s gaze, I surmised that she was in a cell next to me.
“Ah, it makes sense they would cover their tracks.” Gonzales sighed. “They were probably going to fake my death or something after a while and hope that you didn’t ask questions.”
“You think they would have done that?” I heard Ciangi ask weakly.
“Hon, this is politics with rich people. I think they’d do anything to get what they want.” She sighed and sat down. “Hey, Higgens, do you see Bahn in the cell next to me?”
I glanced over, where I thought I saw a figure sprawled out on the floor in the very back of the room. Heaven forbid that they could have set us down on the mattresses. “I think so. But he’s still out.”
“Eh, the boy never could hold his liquor. I’m not surprised sedatives are just as effective on him.”
“How do you know they used sedatives on us?”
“Because y’all came in completely unconscious. It would have been funny if it wasn’t awful.”
“Ah, right. That would make sense.” I tried to push through my guilt, but I felt utterly terrible at the thought that she had been stuck in this tiny box for nearly a month, fearing the worst. “I’m sorry, I really am.”
She waved her hand. “What were you gonna do? They played us all real good.” She rubbed her face and when she looked to me again, her smile was definitely wavering. “So, how’d you lovely folks end up here? I’m guessing not by eavesdropping on some post-adulterous shenanigans.”
“Mimic sent me a message.”
“Oh, dude, really, she did?!”
I nodded. “The alien’s friends arrived at the edge of the sensor’s readings. They’re moving much faster and much closer than we thought. We have maybe a month or two now instead of a year or two.”
Gonzales’s face went ashen. “You have to be kidding me.”
I shook my head, mood sinking even further. “I’m afraid not. We went to warn the generals and they said that they wouldn’t fulfill the treaty any earlier than what was dictated in our exact missive.”
“Wow… I just…even when you know that they’re terrible people, it really just takes the legs out from under you. They really don’t care what happens to the first alien species we’ve ever been in contact with.”
“They really don’t,” I murmured.
“Gonzales,” Ciangi whispered, voice so quiet and shaking that it wasn’t audible. “Please tell me that you have some sort of plan to get out of here, something you couldn’t do with just you but will work now that the four of us are all together again?”
Gonzales dropped her head and shrugged. “Sorry, furiendo. I’ve been over my cell a dozen times over. We’re locked in here until someone decides to let us out. And I have a feeling that won’t be until we’re useful to the very people who put us here.”
“Well, what about food? Or exercise? Or bathing?”
“Food comes once a day. Exercise is whatever you can think of to do in your seven-by-seven space and once in a while, they’ll toss sani-packs in here for us so we don’t get a raging infection.” She trailed off and I thought she was done, but after a moment, she kept going. “Uh, Ciangi?”
“Yeah?”
“Try to keep your face to the wall, and curl up small, if you can. At least around feeding time.”
“Why?”
“It, uh, it just might work a bit better that way.”
I wanted to ask more, I wanted to try to plot out our miraculous escape. I wanted to do so many things, but I was completely and entirely stuck.
Gonzales yawned and leaned back. “I hope you guys don’t mind, but I’ve been up for what feels like forever, waiting for you guys to wake up. I think it’s time I had a nap. Try not to throw yourselves at the walls. All you’ll end up with is a busted shoulder.”
She crawled forward on her hands and knees until she was on her thin mattress, then practically collapsed. For a moment, I thought she might just be fooling around, but then I heard her deep and heavy breathing even from across the hall.
“What now?” Ciangi breathed, her voice barely getting around the wall between us.
“Now we collect data,” I said, determination going through me like a fire. “And then we use that to make a plan. And then our plan will get us out.�
�
“I…I think I’m scared, Higgens.”
My chest squeezed painfully at that. No matter how one phrased it, my rushing forward had gotten my friends into possibly the worst situation they had ever been in.
And I swore that I would get them out of it, if it was the last thing I did.
BAHN DID WAKE UP EVENTUALLY, and I quickly explained to him what the situation was. The optimistic, hopeful side of my mind hoped that somehow, they might have left some of his many gadgets on him, considering he liked to hide them in plain sight, but the enterprising engineer searched and found not a single one.
I didn’t let that discourage me too much, and began to try to formulate ideas in my head. They weren’t very good ideas considering I didn’t really have enough data to go off of yet, but they were the foundation which I told myself I could build off of later.
Hours passed and I couldn’t sleep, so my thoughts were all I had to keep me company. Entirely too much time went by while Mimic was waiting for us. Would she think we abandoned her? That we had just abandoned her to her fate? I hoped not. I didn’t want to think about her having to experience that feeling in the pit of her stomach. It was terrible and heart-wrenching, and I was sure she had far too much on her plate to have to deal with that too.
Our first round of food came before my first sleep. A single guard came in, rolling a cart with four trays. I plopped myself right in the center of my cell and watched, content to learn everything I could before trying something rash that would end up with us having even tighter security.
He approached Bahn’s cell first. Putting his cart to the side, he grabbed one of the trays and walked toward the barrier. I watched intently, waiting for the shield to drop, but instead, the guard pushed the tray through.
My breath hitched with excitement while Bahn tentatively stepped forward to take it. Once both of his hands were on it, the guard stepped away. Bahn pulled the tray to himself then crossed to the back of his cell and began to eat.
The rest of the interaction went quickly, and I tried not to wiggle with excitement as it came my turn. Sure enough, I got a tray just like everyone else, and it slid through the barrier without a single bit of resistance.
Mimic and the Space Engineer Boxed Set, Books 1 - 3 Page 19
