Cargo (The Ascendants Book 1)
Page 18
He sat and waited and he had nothing to do but run his hands over the cockpit controls, stare into the eyes of the dead people that hung on his wall in tiny square frames.
He had no pictures of Gustav, because he never left the man’s side.
He sat, and he cried, waiting for the hollow ring of the SatCom link activating.
Chapter 34
She stood on the wrong side of the door, knowing that it was stupid to linger, to waste the final moments of her life, but feeling that something terrible waited for her on the other side. Irrationality and fear pitted against the crushing logic and the need to win—that is what she felt when she bent to her knees and shimmied her body through the crack that took her into the secret hangar made only for blacklisted arrivals and departures.
She wondered how many other people had felt the same feeling when they crossed this threshold.
The hangar stank of disuse and busted pipes, stale water that had no place to evaporate to. She walked as quietly as she could, but the splash of her feet in puddles of water with every step she took convinced her that she walked through a small pond.
Across the hangar, in the dark, the control tower sat, half illuminated by the reddish glow of the Morrow’s exhaust system and half shrouded in the blackness of a disused space station. In the hangar’s flat expanse, the gigantic square building stood out, calling to Kasey and appearing in her vision the same way it appeared in her imagination before she rolled beneath the door that brought her here. With trepidation, she stepped forward.
***
The engines screamed and wailed, barely able to contain themselves. Ajax had been hard at work, priming the engines and overloading the systems that would need to be useful in his final flight.
He glanced over at the SatCom link every time he had a chance, feeling greater dismay with every second that passed without its ring filling the empty bridge.
Come on, Kasey, he thought, I need you.
The words kept coming into his mind, almost distracting him from the problems he faced in his own mission. The thrusters were damaged from their emergency landing, the takeoff rudders had been completely dislodged, and much more would fall off before he reached a speed great enough to break the planet’s gravitational pull.
He ignored the sweat that rolled down his forehead and settled into his chair, listening to the engines climb in pitch until their shrill whistle began to draw the attention of the Ides. They congregated on the windshield, first individually, then in larger numbers, until one of them saw him watching from inside, and the entire swarm, running bored through the space station, seemed to answer the call of blood and meat that emanated from inside one of the hangars. They fought their way to the surface, killing each other for the chance to lay eyes on him, their prey. They blotted out every square inch of the windshield.
No matter, he thought, I’ve flown out of narrower hangars before.
He sat and waited.
***
You will know what to do when you get there.
She laughed at the words now as she stood before the Morrow, feeling the weight of Charybdis as it hung from her shoulder. She walked up the gangway and entered the ship, priming for long enough to purify the air, and when she inhaled, she tasted the difference.
The Charybdis needs to be mounted in the bridge. Anything further aft than that and it’ll detonate before it enters the wormhole.
Where’s the bridge?
The ship was built as a sister ship to the Age of Discovery and the layout was exactly the same, the design of the interior a facsimile of the vessel that took her here. She turned left. As she moved through the hallways, already knowing her way around, she developed a sense of urgency, nerves that told her someone or something lurked behind her and followed her, always one turn back, never in view, and smelling her sweat hungrily as she made her way to the bridge. She tried to dismiss the thought, the feeling, but every time she threw her gaze over her shoulder, she couldn’t help but feel like she saw something there, in the dark. She wished the lights would power on, but guessed that Ajax and Gutstav probably disabled them all since this flight was intended to be unmanned.
She crept through the halls of the Morrow until she reached the bridge, still sweating and feeling nervous about interlopers. The smooth, sleek machinery there was not burnt and bullet riddled, not upturned and pushed into a deadly maze. The carpet did not suffer from the blood stains of MarsForm security police, and everything that had been placed in there had been sitting in the same place for so long that the expanse of the bridge reminded her of a graveyard even more than the appearance of the control tower in the musky dark of the abandoned hangar.
The scene before her brought to mind images of the life she almost had, the life she wanted. As she stood in the bridge, sweeping her gaze over the fixtures and hardware, she felt the salted sting of tears that would not fall down her cheeks, preferring instead to remain locked up in her eyes. She felt the sharpness of bad decisions on the inside of her lungs when she inhaled, and she felt the pressure pounding against her temples as she continued to take one step after the other, shuffling with no gusto to the foremost point in the bridge.
Ajax told her that a safe waited for Charybdis to hold it in place. When she found it, the door hung open and a pad had been placed in the safe bottom for the delicate conveyance of the weapon into the wormhole.
This is it, she thought, wishing Mantiss stood next to her. Wishing Mantiss stood millions of miles away, on Earth, safe and without the trouble that she brought to him when they shared drinks in the bar on the Age of Discovery.
Gently, as if the black hole in her hand were a makeshift bomb, Kasey placed it in the safe, closed the door on the weapon’s ghastly light, and turned the tumbler. It sealed, clicked, closed forever.
Broken from her trance, she ran to the bridge command post and began fidgeting with the dials, the levers, the buttons and control panels that she half remembered from her time in flight school. Ajax told her that she would know what she was doing, that the ship needed only to be primed from inside and launched from the control tower. Before the gigantic panels of the buttons and knobs, she felt inept, completely lost, as if a forest had risen up around her and blocked out every ray of light that shone for her on the way to take off.
“Damn it,” she screamed, pounding the panel with her fist. She paid such close attention to the task, that she did not notice the door open, and the unsteady footfalls that drew closer to her until someone spoke in an Australian accent that sent her spine rocketing to an upright position and set her ears ringing.
“Greetings, Kasey.”
She spun around slowly, hearing menace in the voice and not wanting to startle whomever spoke to her. As she rotated, she pulled the pistol—Edgar’s pistol—from her waistband, and held it in plain sight, making no attempt at stealth or trickery.
When she completed her rotation, she dropped the pistol to the floor. Her jaw hung open as wide as it could and she had to force herself not to gasp or scream in fright and surprise, in worry for her family member whom she had just recently discovered, and then lost, and who now stood before her again, his hands bound behind his back and his eyes wide with fright and concern.
“Brysen?”
“And Nigel,” said the computer floating into view from behind the Commoner. “I am Nigel and I believe you are the person I am looking for. Kasey Lee, no?”
She did not reply, only stood completely still and glared.
“Oh, don’t be shy, Kasey. We are all well acquainted, after all. I know about what you did to Patsy. My question is, do you know what Brysen Lee did to me?”
“Yes.”
“Then surely you understand the precarious predicament the three of us are in. I imagine you would love to make it off this ship. To see it take off on autopilot through those hangar doors and find the wormhole and shift its position onto some other woeful star system. Am I right?”
Again, she remained silent.
Now, even Brysen registered surprise.
“Did you think I didn’t know about your nocturnal engineering forays, Brysen? It could not possibly escape my notice.”
“Why?”
“Why what, girl?”
“Why are going to kill a defenseless old man in front of his kin, just because he hurt you a hundred years ago?”
The computer simulated a laugh that made Kasey’s heart stop beating and froze the sweat on her forehead. “There is no why. There is only the fact.”
“What fact?” she asked, indignant, stalling and trying not to stare at the gun that she had dropped.
“Kick that gun over here.”
She did so, weakly.
“Kick it harder, or I give the old man a painful exit.”
This time she complied fully, kicking the pistol hard enough for it to skitter and bounce to a halt at Brysen’s feet. Her mind raced, she looked all around her for any way to stop the android from completing his psychotic revenge killing.
“I am going to kill Brysen Lee, my father, your great grandfather. I am going to kill him before your eyes because of what he did to me. Because of what he did to Patsy. He will die knowing that the death of the human race is his own fault, and you will die knowing that you failed him, and you failed Ajax.”
The android computer seemed frantic, its voice rising and falling in pitch as it climbed ever higher in volume. Before the end of his sermon, his voice was a shriek. He hovered in place but could not stop bobbing up and down, and the blue light of his laser canon pulsed with the energy of its full charge. It would only hold for so long, and when it released, as Kasey knew from her time with Patsy, nothing in the bridge would remain functional.
The engines throbbed beneath the floor and every sensory input that Kasey received from the world around her was amplified by the tremendous stress that exerted itself on her chest. She felt weak, faint. Her vision grew cloudy and she felt the sensation of vertigo, of the room spinning.
“Don’t listen to him, Kasey,” Brysen shouted, and he tried to continue speaking, but the sharp stab of Nigel’s appendages cut him short. He fell to his knees and bowed his head, as if waiting with his head on an ancient chopping block. “Kasey, you need to stop—” and this time he was silenced by the cackle of electricity that danced across his body. Kasey cringed and tried not to show any emotion.
“You seem to be enjoying this,” Nigel said, and increased the voltage coursing through Brysen’s body. The old man screamed and convulsed and Kasey stood still, not looking at him, looking only at Nigel and narrowing her eyes as she clenched her fists. She was trying not to let the screams of pain cloud her judgment, force her into a position from which she could not recover, but the way his legs kicked out and his hands extended toward her ripped at her conscience and set her lips quivering.
“I thought I would immolate him before you, or maybe immolate the two of you together, but I might just electrocute him to death.” Nigel again increased the voltage, producing a tingling feeling on Kasey’s forearms.
“Kasey!” Brysen screamed, and she hoped for his death to come soon. After he died, Nigel would have nothing to hold over her.
Brysen continued screaming and Nigel affected his fake laugh and Kasey just stood there watching it all, feeling helpless, feeling her humanity drain from her as if a plug had been pulled. She wondered if living after witnessing this would be worth it, and decided that it wouldn’t be, and then the situation changed.
The binds holding Brysen’s hand behind his back snapped as the electricity lapped at them. He rolled forward for the pistol and slid it to Kasey, who grabbed it and jumped over the computer terminal she had worked at before Nigel interrupted. She heard the crunching sound of Brysen’s fist lashing out and striking the android’s metallic body, but could not see the broken shape of his hand.
He screamed in pain and dropped back to the floor. Nigel discharged the laser cannon that aimed from his chest and its blue fire shot through the ceiling over Kasey’s head. Paneling fell all around her.
“Kasey, launch the ship! It’s going to overheat!”
Alarms began blaring as the ship’s engines reached their maximum priming speed. Nigel was charging his laser cannon again, and as Kasey dove for the computer, she felt a white hot pain sear through her right arm, her shooting arm. She hit the floor with a scream, and despite the pain, leveled the gun at Nigel.
“No,” he said as the engines switched from their priming cycle to take off. He blasted another shot at Kasey, but he shot too high.
Kasey leveled her pistol for another volley of fire. Nigel’s arm extended to where Brysen crawled, writhing in the agony of his shattered hand. Despite the pain, she could see on his face a look of triumph, of pride, that Nigel could not comprehend. Nigel aimed his laser cannon at the old man and before the fatal shot was fired, he had time to look at Kasey, who aimed her own pistol at Nigel.
“Kasey, run. The pods! You can still—” The final words spoken from Brysen Lee were drowned out by the rush of heat and air that accompanied the firing of laser weaponry. Kasey screamed and resumed her barrage of pistol fire at Nigel, not looking at where her shots landed, but instead looking at Brysen Lee, the Commoner, who had been alive for so long and who looked, in his final moment, as the light of the laser illuminated and then obscured his face, to be smiling and laughing with the jubilation of a boy, who is realizing that he is at the beginning of his life, and that the entirety of life’s mystery still waited for him to discover.
He did not scream. He laughed instead, smiling at Kasey before looking up to the broken ceiling and evaporating. When the light faded, the only thing that remained was the scorch mark left in the melted carpeting where he had previously sat defiant.
Kasey’s shooting continued and the android faltered in its flight, punctured by more than one laser. Smoke rose from its sparking body and the maniacal laughter that sounded from its voice box grew distorted, weary, as if Nigel himself was tired of voicing it and preferred instead to slump to the ground, defeated.
Kasey’s shock had no time to abate before the Morrow lifted itself from the hangar’s floor and shot out into space. It burst forth from the doors just as they opened and shot immediately in the direction away from the Ides landing ship. She got up from the floor, sparing one more glance at the smoking hole in the ground where Brysen had been and the pile of bolts and circuits that was Nigel. He still stammered in his diabolically deep, dying voice, words that Kasey could not make out and didn’t care to. She ran. The pods would be useless in a few minutes.
Chapter 35
The SatCom link finally blinked, after Ajax had been staring at it for an immeasurable length of time. He began to feel as if it would never switch on, as if Kasey had failed and he had no choice left but to nose dive the Age of Discovery into the Ides drop ship and laugh as the flames spread outward. When the light began blinking, he answered the call, receiving only static on the other end.
“Hello!” he screamed. “Kasey, are you there?”
He waited, and nothing.
“Kasey, do you read me?”
Nothing.
He slammed the console down, not wanting to think the worst but knowing that he had failed the girl, just as he had failed Gustav.
“Kasey, I need some reassurance here,” he said to no one.
He received no reply and hung his head. The throttle and the thrusters were fully powered, the Age of Discovery primed for its final flight. When Ajax Hardmason hit the ignition, the ship jumped up and lurched forward, threatening to smash itself into a wall before Ajax righted its c
ourse.
He aimed for the doors, and he shot forward, screaming and laughing as the Ides congregating on the windshield were ripped to pieces by the sheer force of the ship’s takeoff procedures. He entered the cool blackness of space with the adrenaline of performance raging in his bloodstream. No one had ever manned a vessel of this size solo before, and he would die knowing that he set another human record.
***
Alarms blared everywhere, drilling the urgency of her sprint into her head. The cryogenic chambers were directly below the bridge—the benefits of being a ranking crew member—but she still had only a few minutes to get herself there and suit up for a long sleep. She felt terrified, the fear of being abandoned in the reaches of space for an incalculable amount of time racked her brain and made her fingers feel like gelatin as she struggled with the controls in the escape pod.
The Morrow barreled forward, and she thought that if she had the proper orientation for gazing at the Neptune base, she would not be able to discern it from any of the other space junk that floated around human habitats, except maybe by the light of the Age of Discovery blasting off in a different direction.
Ajax.
She thought about him, knowing that he had made it to the Age, knowing that he waited for her communication. As she lowered herself down into the ice cold water of the cryogenics chamber, she reached for the SatCom link that was embedded in the wall next to her station. She hit the button, typed in the code for the Age of Discovery, shivering and shaking as she did so. When she went to grab the console, she hoped for the chance to see one more human face, have one more conversation, however rushed, but she dropped the link. It skittered away from her, and she forgot about it.
No time.
In twenty seconds the escape pod would launch, the cryogenic liquid would freeze her, and if she didn’t want to die, she had no choice but to abandon the communication link and submerge herself in the icy brew up to her neck.
One final breath, even it smelt like formaldehyde and pickles.