“Get to the cabin, start taking off.”
Ayia got up and began running to the cabin.
“What are you going to do?” she shouted back behind her.
“To get my paycheck,” he said.
Ayia stopped and turned to look at him. He was smiling.
“Kale, no…” she began but he had already disappeared back down the staircase. She knew that smile and it was never good.
On the hull, Gheno continued to fire on the skiff until he emptied the rifle of its clip. He threw it down and shouted to the AI. He felt a vibration on the surface of the hull and saw a slight shimmer in the air above him. The second skiff came flying at them and began opening fire on the Lion, only to have the bullets crunch harmlessly into the invisible gravity shield Sentinel had brought up. Gheno cheered loudly then ducked back into the hatch. He dropped down to the floor and reached up and slammed the hatch shut. He tapped a button next to the hatch, sealing it. The he turned and headed to the cabin.
Gheno ducked under the small entrance to see only Ayia sitting in the Captain’s chair, typing furiously into the console.
“Um, where is Kale?” he asked.
“What do you think? He’s gone crazy again,” Ayia said, half crying, half shouting.
“Just drop the ship. We have to get out of here.”
“I'm trying. But the bottom hatch is still open. It's not letting me for some reason.”
Gheno shook his head. “Idiot,” then turned to run back out to Kale.
Kale had already strapped on the small gravity bubble device used for underwater diving. The small field created a bubble that kept the water out and allowed for normal pressure. There was also a secondary device which could pull oxygen from the water, but Kale didn’t attach it. He would go with whatever air was in the bubble. He jumped into the open hatch and reached down to turn it on. Gheno appeared down the staircase, splashing into the water.
“Just cut the thing.”
“I'm not missing out on my paycheck.”
“Really? We don’t even need the money.”
“That’s not what I'm looking for,” Kale said, turning on the device. Around him, the water visibly pushed away from him in a small cocoon around him. Kale took one look at Gheno, smiled, and vanished under the water.
“Gheno, we only have two minutes before I have to let the shield go. Otherwise we won’t have the power to do anything, least of all take off,” Sentinel pointed out.
Gheno scratched his head.
“Can I cut the thing from here?” he asked.
There was a manual release for the cable, but it involved recoiling the cable in a ways physically first. Gheno rushed over to a small compartment on the floor and popped off the top part of it. Inside was a large cable, coiled up. Part of it disappeared back into the ship while the other part went out of the ship into the water. There was a lever on the inside wall; Gheno reached in and pulled it out. It connected onto a small cog near the middle of the coil. Gheno hooked the lever on and turned it down. He then got on his knees and began slowly turning the cog. It barely moved.
Gheno began groaning as he pushed on the cog, slowly turning it.
“It’s time, Gheno. We have to leave,” Ayia’s voice chimed in over the com. Sentinel agreed with her. They would be sitting ducks if they didn’t.
“I'm cranking this thing as hard as I can. If you start going up with this thing attached there's no way I'm moving it,” Gheno began, then he stopped turning. “Better yet. Let’s get this thing in the air and I’ll shoot at the cable and cut it off.”
He waited for a response.
“Ayia?” he asked over the com.
“We can’t leave him,” she pleaded.
“He’s the only one that wants to die. I'm not in the mood for dying today,” he said.
He felt the vibrations of the Gora drive firing up deep within the ship. They were moving. As the ship started rising out of the ocean, the water began rushing out of the hatch. Gheno reached over to where he knew there was a crate of rifles. Thankfully, it had remained above the water. He opened the crate and took one out. One hundred percent Martian plasma. This would cut that cable easily.
He peered out of the hatch and pointed the rifle at the cable. He was in an awkward position and fired twice without hitting the cable. The ship continued to rise out of the water. The two gravity fields were playing against each other and the strain on the cable was noticeable. It was pulled taut and straight and he could hear the groan of the coil just a few feet away from him. He could also hear the pings of bullets hitting the hull of the ship. Their gravity shield was no longer existent. It would only be a matter of time before they blew a hole in the hull and they’d be stuck on this watery planet.
Gheno was taking careful aim at the cable, when something snapped. The Lion started shooting up into the air. Gheno didn’t feel anything within the ship's own internal field, but visually he knew something had happened. He looked down as the ship rose just in time to see Kale break through the water’s surface. He was holding onto the cable with his right hand and under his left arm was a mass of cables. Gheno chuckled a bit before he realized they were shooting up into the sky and Kale was just barely holding on the cable.
He rushed over to the coil and began turning the cog. This time, the cable recoiled easily. It wasn’t long before Gheno broke into a sweat. He cranked the cable as hard and as fast as he could, his biceps burning under the duress. He cranked until he felt something stop. He ran back to the hatch and ducked his head under it. Kale looked back at him. He was still barely holding on to the cable, now nearly fully retracted. Kale had wrapped the cable around his arm a few times but he was struggling to keep a hold of the mass of cables under his left arm.
Gheno reached out to him but he was too far out of the way. He went back to the coil and released some. Upon returning to the hatch, he saw there was now ten feet of drag on the cable.
“Sentinel, do we have enough energy to create an outer hull field?” Gheno shouted into the air.
Without answering, Gheno saw Kale suddenly fall up against the hull, hitting his head. Gheno reached out and grabbed his leg and began pulling him towards the hatch. Kale handed the mass of cables over and Gheno tossed it back into the room. He then reached and grabbed him by the waist and pulled him in all the way. Gheno pushed Kale aside, closed the hatch, and hit the command to seal it.
“We’re good,” he said out loud, knowing the AI would hear him.
Gheno sat down, exhausted. He was breathing heavily. He looked at Kale who appeared similarly out of breath. Gheno pointed at the mass Kale had surfaced with.
“And that is?”
“That’s the drone,” Kale replied.
Gheno raised his eyebrows.
“Or the part that matters, at least. Our paycheck.”
Gheno noticed the difference. Before he had said his paycheck, now it was ours. Kale hadn’t gotten what he had gone after.
***
Kale walked into the pilot’s cabin of the Lion ship he hated. He looked around at the uncomfortable cabin. He didn’t even enjoy sleeping on the Captain’s chair. Nothing was where he liked it. The controls were in unconventional locations and even after three years, it felt like a borrowed ship. Ayia was sitting in the Captain’s chair and spun it around when he came in. She stood up in a hurry with a look of shock on her face.
“Kale. Are you ok?” she asked, touching her own forehead.
Kale reached up and touched his own forehead, feeling the warm thick liquid just below his hairline. He brought the hand down and saw the familiar red ooze on his fingers.
“Well, look at that.”
Ayia walked quickly to a small first aid compartment next to the entranceway of the cabin. She opened it and took out a small pouch and walked back to Kale. The Captain had sat down on a small pull down chair on the wall. He had made it a habit of allowing Ayia to sit on the Captain’s chair when she was in there. As Ayia approached him, he reached
out his hand but she brushed it away. She bent her knees and opened the pouch. She reached in and took out a small white cloth and tried to wipe the blood from his head.
Kale jolted back.
“I can do that,” he said, trying to take the white cloth.
“Just sit still,” she said, trying to avoid his grasps.
“I'm fine. Just let me do it,” he repeated.
Ayia stood straight up and put her hands on her hips.
“What is wrong with you?”
“What? It’s just a little blood.”
Gheno entered the cabin to see the two staring at each other. He nodded his head and walked over to the small pile of cables Kale had dropped. He sat down in the copilot’s chair and turned away from them.
“It’s not just the blood. Why did you do that?”
“Hey, I didn’t mean to cut myself.”
“Why did you go after the drone like that?”
“We needed to get it. That’s our paycheck.”
“We don’t need money, Kale,” she spat, exasperated.
“You don’t need money, Ayia. I'm still broke,” Kale said, reaching for another cloth from within the first aid kit.
“So, you're going to get yourself killed for your own money?”
“I was just doing my job.”
“You're just trying to kill yourself. What on earth did we do to you?”
Kale didn’t answer.
“You're purposely reckless, even more than usual. These extreme risks, you're going too far. One of these times…” she paused for a moment, “you're going to die.”
Kale looked up at her. “So? What does it matter?”
Ayia looked right back down at him. She nodded her head just slightly then closed her mouth. She dropped the white cloth on his lap and began walking out of the cabin. She stopped at the entrance and looked around.
“It matters. And you're an idiot.”
She walked out of sight and down a small hallway to the left to her own quarters.
Kale looked over at Gheno. His back was still turned to him.
“What’s wrong with her?” Kale asked.
He could hear Gheno chuckle. He spun the chair.
“You really are an idiot sometimes,” he said laughing.
“Apparently,” Kale said without laughing.
“Am I missing something?”
“You know you're not,” Gheno said, looking the Captain straight in the eyes.
Kale stood up and looked around. “I hate this ship,” he said while exiting the cabin, going straight into the main room that served as the kitchen and dining area.
Gheno turned back to the mass of cables in front of him and began sorting through them. He dug in deeper until he discovered the small metallic node in the middle he was looking for. He looked back down the hall way after Kale.
The Captain had certainly grown sour in the past three years. He had on two occasions tried to talk to him about it, but he was just too young, and Kale had no interest in talking to him or about whatever it was that was ailing him. Instead, he grew darker and quieter. Whenever he did talk, it was dripping in sarcasm and harshness. Whatever humor he still had was dark.
Gheno knew that his time recuperating from the attack on Oxaoca had been devastating to him. Gheno could not get Kale to admit it, but he could see it in his eyes. Kale felt like he had failed Ayia in not saving her that day. Instead, a small girl on the edge of godhood had rode in on her metal steed and saved the day. To make matters worse, Kale liked this little girl and felt like he had saved her to begin with. There was something deeper within Kale, something he was hiding from them. Something from his past haunted him, but Gheno couldn’t get that out of him, either.
Instead, he watched his older brother and ship’s Captain slowly wither away in his own darkness. He felt sad for him and even more so for Ayia. She had become the backbone of this crew, but was growing desperate in her own way. She had worshipped Kale for his rescue, even if the Captain thought of it as his failure. She had given him everything she had, and that included a vast wealth she inherited from her father. He repaid her with sulkiness and ignorance.
Despite all his attempts of dramatic suicide, somehow the Captain always succeeded. Gheno began to wonder if that was making matters even worse.
“Gheno?” Sentinel’s voice chimed in over the speaker nearest to him.
The AI on the other hand, had grown leaps and bounds in the three years since its birth. He had quickly turned into an integral, if not critical, part of their team. They had kept him a secret from everyone they knew, except for Oganno, their adopted father and an incredibly intelligent scientist. It had been nearly eight hundred years since the man vs machine wars, but the laws against any form of sentient software were still rigidly enforced. It was also clear that Sentinel was something even more than just a complex machine. He was becoming terrifyingly human.
“Yeah, Sentinel,” Gheno said, picking up the drone, “I’ll go ask.”
Gheno walked down the short hall way and found Kale sitting down on the middle table. He had a small mirror in hand and a bowl of water in front of him. He was dabbing the cloth in the bowl and washing the blood from his forehead. Blood mixed with water was splashed along the table. Kale looked tired.
Gheno set the mass on the edge of the table and many of the wires and cables fell over the edge. A small shiny sphere, with a deep golden hue to hit, held everything on the table.
“We're headed into orbit and can make a jump once we sling out of the system,” Gheno informed Kale.
Kale didn’t answer.
“How would pirates know what we were doing?” Gheno asked.
“Yeah, pirates.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those weren’t pirates,” Kale replied. He didn’t elaborate.
“The museum wants the drone. I don’t think they wanted the whole ship anyways,” Gheno pointed out.
“I know,” Kale said.
Gheno sat down on a chair and edge up to the table.
“This drone, it’s one of the first ones,” Gheno said, touching the smooth sphere.
“I know,” Kale continued to clean his wound.
“Well, Sentinel and I were digging around and…” Gheno began.
“Get it plugged in and save it,” Kale cut him off.
Gheno was caught off guard.
“Seriously?”
“Do you know who is one of the biggest monetary donors for the museum that hired us?” Kale asked.
Gheno nodded.
“That damn Church of God is Near, is who,” Kale replied, anger apparent in his voice. “There is no way I'm letting them get their hands on that drone. You plug it in and see if there is anything or anyone in there and save it if you can. We will give the museum an empty drone. Have Sentinel make sure it looks right, on the inside, empty and all.”
Gheno stood up, overjoyed. He began to wrap up the cables and wires in his arm. Once he had them all gathered up, he started walking back towards the pilot’s cabin when he stopped.
“You dove under there, the water, with just a gravity bubble. You did that to rescue that drone,” Gheno said, “to actually rescue it.”
Kale set the mirror down and looked up towards the rear of the ship, not looking at anything specific.
“Everyone deserves a life.”
Gheno didn’t reply and walked out of the room. Kale stood up and took the bowl over to the small sink. He dumped the blood stained water in and watched it flow down into the drain.
“Everyone but you?”
Sentinel’s voice piped in over a pair of speakers above Kale. The Captain didn’t answer.
“All I have thought about for these years since I came to be was how to stay alive,” the AI stated. “Why do you not?”
“Just go help Gheno rescue your ancestor, if there is anyone left in there,” Kale said.
The AI remained silent, not insisting on the conversation. Kale knew his three crew-members were ti
red of him. Even the AI, who couldn’t tire, was giving up on the issue. Kale walked back over to a small wooden chair, a gift from Oganno. It wasn’t the most comfortable item in the world to sit in, but he enjoyed its hardness at times. He sat into it and took a deep breath. He nearly gasped as his thoughts caught up to him. He was so tired. Breathing was painful. Only sleep, the kind without any dreams, was of any consolation to him every day.
He had failed three years ago and that had left him completely exhausted.
He had failed nearly fifteen years ago, and had never recovered.
He buried his face in his hands and a few small tears came through his hands.
3127 – Valhalla Station, in orbit around Earth
“Lion transport GHV-789, you are clear for docking. Bay 567 is clear. Please allow slave control for automatic docking.”
Gheno sat back in the chair and tapped the screen to allow the station to project its own gravity lasso onto their ship and move it into the bay automatically. It was the only logical way for docking to work in the Galaxy’s largest and busiest space station. All docking procedures were controlled by nearly five hundred men and women with the help of advanced computers. These all routed nearly a thousand ships an hour into the nearly ten thousand internal and external docking bays. They also coordinated all of the far larger vessels that docked in orbit around the station itself and allowed smaller crafts to go in between them.
Valhalla was mankind’s largest space station on either land or vacuum and man’s largest man-made space-borne construction. It began its historic place in orbit around Earth nearly seven hundred years in the past and had survived catastrophe and war and had actually grown since then. It had been designed to be added on to easily over the years and had thus evolved into the portal to the paradise of Earth. One of the galaxy’s largest gravity drives sat right in the middle of a sphere at the center of the station. From there, rings spun around the sphere, each layer larger than the one inside. Over the decades, and then centuries, larger and more advanced rings were added on, continuously spinning around the sphere in the middle. Currently, Valhalla consisted of seventeen rings, with its largest, and most modern section, a vast two hundred and seventeen miles in diameter.
The Lost Tribe (Sentinel Series Book 2) Page 3
