How had she gotten it so wrong? And so right? “Please don’t go on that warship.”
“Gal!”
“What if the Poet isn’t working with the Speakers? What if he’s the rebel?” He licked his lips, stopping himself from saying more than he meant. “What if this mission doesn’t go well and they catch us? I don’t know what’s happening, but I don’t want you anywhere near it?”
“Gal?”
“Look. Hoepe says he can hide you, get you back into the Army, erase any evidence that you were on this ship or with me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s a way out, a way for you to be safe. Please!”
She stepped back, crossing her arms over her chest. “I don’t want a way out. I’m no coward. I will serve my Gods. The call has come, and I want to be someone who answers it. We will be safe, the Gods will protect us, so long as we stick to the Path.”
She stormed away.
He reached his hand after her, but his legs were jelly and he collapsed to the ground.
* * *
Sarrin blinked twice. Bile licked at the back of her throat. It was hard to focus. The last place she remembered being was the shuttle bay, but she couldn’t tell if she was still there now.
The electric field of the cloaking device thrummed around her. She’d used the device for things, not people.
She should have told them, told the engineer at least, but the words still were hard to come. The gamma gravitation field generated by the design needed to be offset with an inverse one, and the inverse wave would distort a bio-energetic field — the physical body was safe, but the etheric, the soul itself, would scatter.
She hadn’t wanted to go, her instinct telling her to stay as far away as possible, despite Hoepe’s assurances. If she’d told them about the inverse wave, maybe Hoepe could have found a solution. But the mission would still go ahead, and he would still send her in, the soldier she was. She had been trained for this, made for this.
Instead, she settled for disconnecting the wiring and disappearing. But the engineer was bright — brighter than she’d estimated. It had taken him almost no time to find the places deep in the wall where she had done her tampering.
The cloak, when it had turned on, had sent her to the ground, her soul exploding out from her in a million pieces. For this, the darkness had no solution. It threatened and clouded in, wanting to take control, but there it had no plan to offer. It was as scattered as she was.
Untold time passed while she pulled together enough of herself to form a rational thought. Her hand gripped the nearest bulkhead, steadying her against the dizzying waves. Her vision rolled black clouds over the grey haze that vaguely outlined the shuttle bay and the corridor beyond.
Her mind travelled in time, hearing the high pitched buzzing of clippers as clumps of her hair fell away.
But her hair hung there, in the present, long and matted in clumps. It was long, like her mothers spread around her serene face on her deathbed.
Sarrin’s hand fell away from her head, reaching for the next bulkhead before she let go of the first. The pulse in her veins trembled, thready and uncertain, like it had forgotten how to flow. All of her had forgotten how to work, her legs jerking as the electric field distorted her synapses, making her neurons fire disjointedly.
She rested, pushing the blackness away. She couldn’t let it take her. She had to find the others. Explain. Turn the ship around and power down the cloak.
The wall made a dull thunk as Sarrin tapped her knuckles against it. She pressed her ear to the cold, grey surface, but no answer came. Her skin buzzed against the remembered pressure of injections. Laz-beams seared the air next to her body.
The ship jarred, and she nearly tumbled over again. There were shouts and running the corridor, and she staggered forward. She needed to explain. They had to turn away.
Her heart stopped, ice creeping up her arm as she remembered the cold body of a friend. Friends.
She forced the rapid clicking sound of laz-guns being assembled and disassembled over and over out of her head.
“Sarrin. There you are. We’ve reached the ship. It’s time to go.” She recognized the engineer by his voice, her vision still too hazy.
The ship? Already? It had felt like minutes.
“You okay?” he asked.
She blinked again, forcing the world back into focus.
“I think that cloaking device is giving me a splitting headache,” he said, his pinched expression standing out against the foggy background behind him. “Others don’t seem too bothered, but it’s hard to think. You feel it too?”
So he understood, at least. She nodded.
“Come on. The others are already waiting at the airlock. Sooner we get in, sooner we get out and away from here and can turn this thing off.”
Her feet slipped across the carpet of their own volition, following him down the corridor.
“Ugh,” he groaned. “I feel like I’m falling apart, like half of me isn’t here and is just floating away.”
She nodded in agreement, even though he was ahead of her.
The door opened in front of them. The small auxiliary airlock had only a single-person-sized hatch set into the ceiling.
Hoepe’s men repeatedly checked their laz-guns. The sound of their fast-beating hearts reached her ears, a cacophony of thumps and clunks mixed with nervous laughter. Weapons: twelve. Lethal objects: thirty-seven.
She gasped and pushed it out of her head. The darkness pulled a little stronger, trying to formulate a plan. Her muscles tensed and loosed repeatedly.
Kieran climbed a short ladder, sealing the hatch to the other ship. The door swung open and he started to work on bypassing the airlock on the opposite hull.
Beside her, Halud fidgeted nervously, emotions rolling off of him in waves, crashing into her.
Kieran stepped down from the controls, announcing everything was set. There was no turning back now.
An easy mission, stealth only, she reminded herself, forcing her mind to stay calm and her breathing even. Slip into the access tubes and walls, navigate to the mainframe terminal, download. They wouldn’t even come close to the guards. As long as her mental map didn’t fail; as long as it didn’t scatter like the rest of her.
Kieran leaned over, speaking into her ear, “Are you okay? Your job is a lot harder than mine. You’re about to go onto a warship. You shouldn’t go if you’re not feeling well.”
A warship? She stared at him with eyes wide, his green ones meeting her own through the swirling background.
“Sarrin, are you ready?” Hoepe called her from next to the open airlock. “Time to go.”
She stepped back.
Kieran said, “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
Could she truly say no? She looked from him to Hoepe. Kieran was trying to help her.
“Sarrin, we don’t know how much time we have.”
Halud stood next to Hoepe, fidgeting.
She stepped around Kieran.
“Be careful, yeah,” he whispered as she passed. Hoepe noted friends often sought to protect each other from dangerous situations.
She stepped up the ladder, gripping the edge of the airlock and pulled herself through. Halud followed close behind.
* * *
Rayne double checked the weapons tucked into the holsters around her legs as Sarrin and the Poet disappeared up the ladder and through the hatch. Looking over her shoulder, she exchanged nods with each member of her team. “Ready?”
They gripped their rifles, and she tried to think of it as any other training drill. This wouldn’t be any different. If all went according to plan, they wouldn’t see another person — sneak on, sneak off, as Hoepe had said repeatedly. But a part of her — a shameful part — anticipated a fight.
Her father had pushed her into tactician training, and yet, she suspected, he’d arranged for any of her platoons to be as far from battle as possible. She suspected she would be
good in combat; she wanted to be, at least. This was her chance to prove it.
She climbed the ladder, poking her head through the joined airlocks and into the warship. “Clear,” she called down to the others and pulled herself through, adjusting to the perpendicular shift in artificial gravities from one ship to the next.
The men assembled themselves in the airlock, taking a haphazard formation behind her. Satisfied, she gripped her rifle and scanned the corridor. “Clear.”
A loud thump sounded in the airlock followed by a groan. The men shifted to the side, and Gal staggered to his feet, finding his legs in the new gravity.
“Gal, what are you doing?” she hissed.
“Helping,” he huffed.
“You’re drunk. Go back.”
“No.” He slurred his speech, and she bit back her groan of disappointment. “If you won’t stay where it’s safe, then I’m coming with you.”
She clenched her jaw. “You’re a liability.”
“And you don't understand what kind of danger you’re in.”
“Miss?” The men pointed to the corridor, others already setting up a defensive position. She knew what he meant: time ticked away.
She crept forward, rifle held at the ready. “Wait here,” she told Gal before advancing into the corridor. Her eyes scanned the hall until they settled on an access screen several metres away. Having never served a warship, she had no idea where to find the store rooms or the supplies Hoepe sent them to retrieve. She moved towards the screen, hoping to find a map.
“It’s this way,” Gal slurred behind her. He stood in the corridor with his thumb jerked over his shoulder, pointing in the opposite direction.
She glared at him. “What are you doing?”
He sighed, the flask in his hand reflecting the harsh overhead lighting. “The sooner you help these boys steal the supplies, the sooner you’ll get off the ship.”
“We don’t know where the store room is.” She pointed to the panel in the opposite direction.
“Don’t touch the access panel. You’ll set off a host of alarms. It’s this way, trust me.”
She frowned. “How do you know?”
He paused a minute, his belly sticking out as he leaned back and stared at the ceiling. She’d only seen him this drunk a few times. Assuming he had forgotten the question, she turned back to the access panel, about to tap on the screen when he answered quietly: “I was on one once.”
“What? When?” He was a freightship captain. Before that he’d been in Exploration. And a ground forces captain before that. There would be no reason for him to be on a warship.
“Don’t touch the panel, Rayne.” He sighed again, turning to walk down the corridor in the opposite direction.
Uncertain and confused, she retracted her hand and followed him.
The men shuffled loudly behind them, but there was no sign of the warship’s crew. A good thing, because Rayne had no idea what she would do. She carried the rifle, but her palms sweated uncontrollably and she had to keep readjusting her grip as the rifle slipped.
They were UEC soldiers on a UEC ship — they were all on the same side. But a warship patrol wouldn’t know the difference between them and rogue invaders. They might shoot on sight, UEC uniform or not.
“Gal, what’s going on?”
He ignored her, his gaze fixed on the hallway ahead. She had never seen this expression in his eyes before: intense, calculating.
A shudder ran up her spine.
“This is it,” he slurred, stopping at a door.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” His voice came out cold and expressionless. He took a drink from his flask. “Who has the decryptor?”
One of the men stepped forward, pulling the panel off the door lock and attaching a small machine.
“Be careful. Their security algorithms are easy to trip, you’ll have to use a rotating code instead of linear.”
Rayne stared at Gal wide-eyed, a cold feeling starting to sink in her gut. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Why are you here?”
He ignored this question too, watching the man with his device at the panel. He stepped forward just as the panel flashed red. “Five Gods,” he muttered.
“Oh no,” said the man. “The alarm’s gone off.” He started pressing buttons rapidly.
Gal pushed the man away from the device. “Set up a perimeter,” he ordered the rest in the same cold, horribly unlike-Gal voice. “If I can’t stop it before it relays to the bridge, they’ll have a security team down here in under sixty seconds. Shoot on sight.”
She gasped. “Gal, we can’t —.”
“Shoot on sight, Rayne.”
“They’re UEC soldiers, doing their jobs. I won’t shoot them.”
His hands flew over the controls on the machine and the door computer itself. “Then why bring the rifles?”
She stared at the rifle in her hands. Comfort. Habit.
“We’re defectors, trespassing on the most fortified Army ship in existence,” he said.
“We’re not defectors. We’re working for the Gods.” But the uncomfortable feeling in her gut had turned to full on ice.
Gal grunted. The data on the screens in front of him whizzed by at a nearly unreadable speed. He pressed a final button, fingers pausing as he stared at the screen intently. The screen turned back to its standard grey-blue. He leaned his head on the wall. “The alarm’s disabled. I don’t know if I caught it in time. They might still be coming.”
“Then we’ll just explain why we’re here,” she decided. “I know the Poet wants it kept secret, but there’s no reason not to tell another law-abiding citizen about our mission if we have to.”
He glanced warily at the ceiling. “Set up a perimeter. Move the containers as fast as you can — one carrying, one defending. Shoot on sight; they’re not going to listen long enough for us to explain.”
“Gal, we won’t kill UEC soldiers. We’re on the same side!”
“We’re not. You’re going to have to decide, us or them.”
“You’re being ridiculous. This is the Path of the Gods. Surely they’ll understand that.”
Gal sighed. He didn’t answer, his hands slowly disconnecting the device. “You don’t deserve any of this. It will be okay, I promise.”
She readjusted her laz-rifle, sweaty hands slick on the barrel. The men rushed by, already starting to retrieve cargo containers filled with supplies, but she couldn’t pull her gaze away from Gal and the growing suspicion that something had gone very, very wrong.
* * *
The scattering energy field relieved its grip and Sarrin’s senses came back to her as they moved down the corridor.
The ship she recognized immediately: UECAS Comrade. Insignia Class warship, the Central Army’s flagship. Class 8 laz-cannons, electro- and photo- torpedoes, reinforced con-plas construction, multiple sections able to be individually sealed. Crew of 156, Lieutenant grade or higher. Crew roster: classified. Missions: classified. It was a hunter, sleek and deadly as anything Sarrin had ever known. This same ship had brought her to Selousa four years ago. The same ship orbited over Selousa a week ago.
Halud followed her to an access port, grunting as he pulled himself into the narrow tube behind her.
Darkness crowded the edges of her vision, but she told herself to keep moving. From the access tube, she pulled a panel from the wall, slipping into the space behind it.
“So this is what Hoepe meant when he said you were likely hiding in the walls,” Halud said, but his attempt at humour was marred by his shaking voice. Sarrin continued forward along the twisting path up and around rooms and corridors.
The warship was nearly a kilometre in length, the mainframe access buried deep in the beast. Twice on their journey she paused, waiting for the blanks in her memory to fill in. Once, the blackness clouded so far in she had to move by feel.
Almost by surprise, she emerged in a small room, lit only by the eerie-red glow of a computer tower.
&n
bsp; Halud fell out of the open wall panel behind her, whining and groaning as he pushed himself to his feet.
Her eyes scanned the room automatically. Weapons: zero. Objects that could be used as deadly weapons: zero. A thick round column with dozens of lights blinking on and off at random took up most of the 2-metre by 2-metre space. The central nervous system for a ship this large was five times bigger than she was, and likely five times as intelligent.
Soldiers on the other side of the single door shifted on their feet — thirteen, she counted.
Halud stepped up to the single access screen, a glowing blue panel amidst the sea of red, and entered his personal code with shaking hands. If Halud’s code didn’t work, the alarm would sound and the guards would be through the door in an instant.
Time slowed, and the darkness reached it’s gnarled tendrils around her. A movement diagram painted itself in her head, and the darkness showed her exactly how to hit and twist the men’s necks to still them forever.
Halud swallowed dryly, the light from the screen casting an eerie-glow across his face. He pressed his lips tight and finalized the code.
Hoepe said it was an easy mission, that a ship running drills in the Deep wouldn’t hear about the Poet’s defection for weeks — communications taking weeks to get back to Etar. He promised the codes would still be good. But Hoepe waited safely on the freightship, not standing in the little, trapped chamber. He wasn’t the one with a monster in his head, and Sarrin could do nothing but pray he was right.
Pain burst inside her head.
* * *
Gal sat on a cargo container and threw back another slug of Jin-Jiu. Shaking hands should have sloshed the liquid all over him, and probably would have if the flask wasn’t already so close to empty.
The men moved the containers quickly, running back and forth, constantly on alert for signs of a UEC contingent. Rayne crouched in the corridor, watching.
It had been far more than sixty seconds, but instead of feeling relief he found it all left a bitter taste in his dry mouth.
“Where do you think they are?”
Startled, Gal looked up as Aaron sat down beside him. But it could not be Aaron; Aaron had died years before. This was a demon. He reached for more Jin-Jiu, taking the very last of the flask he had brought with him.
Augment Page 14
