Spectra Arise Trilogy

by Tammy Salyer

  Zabriskie responds, “On it,” and we hear him speaking into his VDU: “Medina and Steward, this is Jono Zabriskie. I’m stuck on the landing field with Quantum’s supplies. The loader can’t get to us, so we’re bringing the truck to you. Do you read? Over.”

  “That’s a negative, Zabriskie. It’s too hot out there. Stand fast until we give you the all clear.”

  “Dammit,” we hear him growl under his breath, then: “No can do, Steward. We’re not going to sit here and wait to get shot. Out.”

  Fuck me, he’s quite the gambler.

  Karl says, “We’ll give them cover fire from the Nebula. Stay low and get up beneath the ramp. That fugee may have a good position from the rear of the ship, so make sure the ramp is between you and him. Zeta, you follow me. Head straight for the cockpit. Venus will need your help. Let’s move.”

  As I get into position to run, he steps in front of me, forcing me to stop. “Except you, Aly.”

  “Karl—”

  “We have this covered. Stay here and watch our backs. Once we’re all in the Nebula, you get on Medina’s ship.” He leans forward and kisses me on the lips quickly, before I can argue, then straightens. “I’ll see you, lover—soon.”

  David wraps me in a brief side hug. “Good luck, Twig. Give that bitch my regards when you see her.”

  Then Mason squeezes my shoulder: “You got this,” and Hoogs says, “We’ll be there when you need us.” La Mer: “Luck, Aly.” Zeta says nothing, just gives me a long, hard hug, and even Ryan says: “Thanks for what you did for me. Good luck.”

  I don’t know what to say, suddenly realizing I couldn’t say it even if I did, the way my throat suddenly feels gummy and stuck fast. Finally I squeak out, “Go get back our crew.”

  I take a knee and get a bead on the direction Blondie had run. The crew rushes past me, and I watch enrapt as they make a few feints up the ramp. No shots are fired, and soon they’ve all disappeared into the shadows inside the hull.

  I hear Zabriskie behind me: “Time to move, Erikson.”

  Standing, I’m about to make my way to the truck’s cargo bed, but suddenly my legs feel weak, wobbly. I lean against the side of it for a second, fighting back dread, struggling not to believe that I’ve just said goodbye forever to the people I love, forcing my goddamn game face back on. Remembering the pills Vitruzzi had asked Quantum to get me, I reach into my pocket and dig them out, quickly popping all three in my mouth and dry-swallowing them. It’s the only way I’m going to find the will to get inside that box.

  A second later, I shamble to the rear. Zabriskie sees me and leans out with a hand extended, ready to help me up. I reach out to take it—

  —and he points a pistol straight into my face and fires.

  The thunder, so close to my head, nearly blows my eardrum out and I fall backward onto the ground, landing on my ass, reflexively trying to scoot away, wondering why I’m not dead. My hand hits meat and I jerk my eyes down, realizing that I can’t push any farther away from the truck because there’s a body behind me.

  Blondie?

  “Erikson, come on!” Zabriskie yelling at me just adds to the confusion, and I turn my stare back to him dazedly. “He must have snuck by them. Your friends are in the clear, but we’ve got to go!”

  I push myself up and stand and shake my head to clear the ringing in my left ear, then turn around to glance back at the very dead fugee. Zabriskie hit him neatly in the temple, leaving a slightly gray, perfectly round, upraised ring around the hole in his head. His eyes are open, the moisture already being sucked away by the dry wind.

  Zabriskie has the lid to the cargo box open and waits for me impatiently. Looking into it, I feel like I’m looking into an abyss. But even an eternal plunge into emptiness would be better than a second stuck inside this casket. I can’t look Zabriskie in the face, too hard to yank my stare away from that box waiting to swallow me whole. The Nebula’s engines begin to whine louder, their departure now only seconds away.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  His words float to my ears from far away. I try to swallow, but my throat sticks. I pass him the carbine, put my hands on the cold metal side of the bin, stand still for a few breaths, then swing a leg over. Once I’m lying flat inside, a sudden and incredibly welcome rush of calm tingles out from my midsection, like a wisp of pure oxygen flowing through me. Either the sedatives or wishful thinking kicking in.

  “Quantum says he’ll come get you as soon as it’s clear. It’ll take about ten hours to get to the Celestial, so you’re looking at about twelve hours in there. There’s a bottle of water and another empty one if you need to piss. Just stay calm, take it easy.” Can he see the fear in my face? He passes me the carbine, which I lay beside me. He stares at me for several seconds, his face moving through a range of expressions I previously wouldn’t have believed he was capable of. Finally he lands on what I take to be confidence, his brow knit sternly and a twist at the side of his mouth that’s part smile, part scowl. “Make your people proud, Erikson. Bogotan’s too. We’re counting on you.”

  The nod I give him is abrupt and short, all I can manage in my state of approaching paralysis.

  The lid closes, and I have the scope light of the carbine switched on before I even realize I’m doing it. Sound from outside is severely muted, but the truck is already moving forward past the subdued roar of the Nebula’s engines, then it hits the base of the Kǒngjù’s ramp and starts to tilt.

  My heart is trying to explode through my chest. “Count,” I whisper to myself, “one hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven…”—breathe, breathe, breathe—“fucking ninety. Eighty-nine, eighty-eight, eighty-seven…”—just fucking breathe—“eighty…”

  We’ve stopped, but at this point, counting aloud to myself is my only conscious awareness. I block it out, everything, crushing the worries—that the Nebula will never get off the ground, that Vitruzzi, Brady, and Desto won’t be able to get to the scout, that the mission will fail and Keum Libre will become the killing field of a tyrant, that I’ll die in this box—into a dark corner where I can’t think about them, can’t think about anything except: “Sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven…”

  When my brain finally fuzzes out completely, I don’t know if it’s from panic overload or sedation, but I don’t care. The relief is all that matters.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Is it perverse to have grown bored after being trapped for hours in the dark, just waiting for Medina’s crew to either find me and put an end to this slow descent into panic-slash-death or run down the Nebula and unleash all hell on them? The crushing terror that gripped me at first once the lid closed dulled to unconsciousness soon, then became a sort of malaise when I awoke that I thought only people who’d consumed horse tranquilizers could feel. Now, after the past ten hours and forty-six minutes in this sarcophagus-sized crate, I can’t seem to get worked up by the very real possibility they are going to be my last.

  I have Vitruzzi’s magic anticlaustrophobia pills to thank for that, which have left me adrift inside my drug-induced subterranean mental maze, and surfacing only brings awareness of one simple thing: my muscles are beginning to feel a little cramped. My hidey-hole is only about 2 x .5 x .5 meters in area, so moving around isn’t exactly easy. Other than the capped bottle I’d managed to use as a latrine, the only things in here with me are a bottle of water, the energy bars I still had in my equipment vest, and my AK-80. Plus the last four remaining sanity-saving pills.

  I’ve popped two every three hours, and they’ve magically transformed the anxiety and panic that would ordinarily have sent me clawing through the steel lid with my fingernails into a blunt-tipped afterthought. The aftereffect has been, besides cramps, flat indifference. And I’ll take it. Knowing I only have a few pills left, though, turns the dial on my anxiety meter up enough that I’ve reinitiated the countdown from a hundred in round after round just to keep my mind off it and…other things. Like memories.

  Some migh
t call this brief calm before chaos an optimal time for introspection, but I try to keep my stampeding-rabbit thoughts in a white-noise cloud, or on things like the bruise on my left big toe that will probably make running a lot harder—if I get a chance—and the way my lips are starting to feel a little like sandpaper. But when the panic starts to creep in and I pop the pills, their power sends acid tendrils through my brain that eat away the barriers between my life now and my life as a child, letting memories I wish I didn’t have spill into the present. It’s a side effect I find much more unpleasant than stiff muscles.

  My father’s face—his thick, manicured, rust-colored beard, which always smelled of the acrid tonic he used and always made my eyes water; his murky blue stare, which would land on me with an almost physical thud when he was angry; and his ladder of wrinkles, which grew as deep as caverns at times, cascading from his hairline to his brows—loomed out from the well I’d sunk it in as I’d emerged from the first pill-induced fog. I hadn’t thought of him in years, since before I’d even graduated from the Academy and been sent to my first duty station on Obal 8. He’d come to David’s ceremony but skipped mine two years later. I hadn’t been disappointed. We hadn’t spoken since I’d joined.

  As I cross my legs and press the back of my head and shoulders against the cargo box to try and sit up some, that phantom smell of beard tonic hits my nostrils out of nowhere, jolting me. The memory trailing along behind it is so vivid, it seems like it is happening again. I’d been eight years old and had just been picked up by my father from a neighbor’s house. I don’t remember her name, but she’d been the single woman living a few blocks away, just leaving for work, and had found me crying on the street after wrecking my magbike. Harald—the only name I ever used for my father—had been forced to turn around from his own work commute and come get me.

  In our kitchen, he’d bent down and put his big, heavy hands on my shoulders and shaken me once, twice, three times, hard enough to make my head snap on my neck—despite the fact that I’d been cradling my broken arm since I’d fallen, gamely holding in the tears that I hadn’t been afraid to shed until he came home.

  “I told you to take the city trans to your summer classes, and what did you do?” Shake one. “You go chasing after David, trying to follow him to Preflight Club. Again!” Shake two. His muddy eyes stared into mine. “When are you going to learn how to at least act like a good daughter?” Shake three. And finally I’d begun to wail, each shake making the greenstick-fractured bones crunch in exquisite, sparking pain.

  “What?!” he’d yelled. “Now you’re crying because you know what a useless little girl you are?” He’d shoved me into a chair. “Jesus Christ. You’ll never know how badly I wish your mother had taken you with her when she split.” He leaned down again, and I could smell the beard tonic even through my sniffling nose, almost strong enough to gag me. “If you’re ever going to be any good to anyone, you’re just going to have to get tougher. You stay home by yourself today until I get back from work. Then I’ll have time to take you to get that arm looked at. Unless you’re just faking it.” He’d risen, put his jacket back on, and warned me as he walked out the door, “Stay out of trouble, or that arm is going to feel like a love tap if I have to knock off work early.”

  It had been David, home within a few hours after his Academy-sponsored Preflight Club, that had called a friend’s mother to take me to the neighborhood medical clinic. Of course, I hadn’t said my father had left me home with a broken arm; I’d made up a story about skipping summer school and breaking it while riding my magbike. In reality, I’d just been grateful David got me sorted out so I didn’t have to spend any more time in Harald’s presence than necessary.

  Memories like this one push me fighting and clawing back to consciousness. I don’t want to think of my childhood. That’s long over and long forgotten. Or I thought it had been. I’d risked a lot, taken more chances than a reasonable person should, to get as far away from it as I could. Now, sitting in the dark and still smelling the smoke in my clothes and hair from the brief firefight in the landing field, I’m beginning to wonder if my recklessness hadn’t just been about escaping, but had also been a lack of a reason to live. Survival instinct, yeah, I definitely have that. How many times have I shot someone faster than they could shoot me just so they’d fall and I’d still be standing? But what was that for? What had I had to live for that made my trigger finger faster and my aim straighter than all those others?

  The answer to that question was never more clear to me than after I’d met Karl and the rest of the Beachers, my new crew. I’ve always had David to look out for and to look out for me, but back in the Corps and when we worked for Rajcik, he was it, the only thing that mattered. Now I have family—something I’ve never had before—people and a life and home of my own on KL, even if it is a spider-infested jungle with a downed fleet cruiser for its hub.

  And there’s more. That instinct to survive hasn’t gone anywhere, but it has changed. The addendum “at all costs” that used to apply is gone, just like my fears of being betrayed or hurt—the only “gifts” my father ever gave me. I still want to survive, of course, but when I look inside myself—and where else have I had to look in these last few hours?—I realize that I’ll do whatever I have to now to protect those who matter to me. My crew. My family. Even if it means I’m stuck on this ship and going down with it. I’ll do it. I’ll do it for them.

  Fully awake for the first time in hours, I notice the way the stale air inside my storage box suddenly assaults my nose much more strongly than before. The pills are wearing off, and my heart does an uncomfortable somersault-y bap-bap in my chest. Involuntarily, I rattle my hand, which is closed in a protective cocoon around the last four tranqs. The tiny tick sound they make is only minimally reassuring. Almost before I think about it, I pop two in my mouth—then I spit them back out into my open fist, still dry, thanks to sedative- and fear-induced cotton mouth. It’s almost time. I have to get my head straight, can’t be wandering around out there with only half my faculties activated. I have no alternative than to try and deal with the claustrophobic panic currently trying to rip open my chest wall like a glass-clawed parasite.

  A quick glance at the counter on my VDU tells me the length of my captivity: eleven hours, two minutes now. I’d felt us dock with the Celestial about forty-five minutes ago. Even in my haze, I think I would have known if the Kǒngjù had pursued the Nebula, but the flight had been smooth. A ship this size can’t make the type of aggressive, split-angle course changes that Venus and the nimbler Nebula could have, so maybe they’d seen no reason to give chase. If they had, and Venus was forced to switch to an evasive flight pattern, she’d have used up so much power at once that she’d have had to scale back on output for several hours after the initial evasive burst. Then Medina would merely have had to stay on course and once again close the gap while they were vulnerable. But there’s been no change in the regular hum of the ship’s engines until the Kǒngjù docked and shut down, so I believe—pray, more like—that the plan is progressing as hoped. Maybe miracles are real.

  I guess I’ll find out when it’s time to take the bridge.

  * * *

  Clammy sweat oozes from my forehead and the palms of my hands, and I can almost feel the air pressure increase as the walls and floor of my box collapse in on me too slowly for the eyes to see. Whether it’s time or not, I’m putting the next mission phase into action—before I go batshit psycho.

  I’ve spent the last hour stretching and tightening all my muscles, limbering and waking them up in preparation for moving through the ship. I’m done waiting for Quantum. Rolling to my side, I turn on the VDU glowscreen for some light, put my hand on the latch, suck in a slow, deep breath, adjust my ’80 for fast deployment, and press the inner release.

  It doesn’t move.

  Okay, a little stuck, so I push a fraction harder, imagining the relief I’m going to feel when it depresses. But there’s no give. Was it…is it possi
ble…it’s been locked? Why would Zabriskie lock it?

  I freeze, trying to get a grip on the situation before torrents of adrenaline block my ability to think clearly. A drop of sweat slides down my temple and along my ear and plops onto the floor of the crate, looking through my hyperfocused vision like a bottomless pool; then another falls, and a jolt of electricitylike pinpricks dance up my spine and flush across my back, forcing an involuntary shiver to rip through me. When my hand slides through the cold pool of sweat in front of me, the dike gives out.

  I slam my palm against the latch as hard as I can, not feeling the shock run up my arm, then flip my carbine around and hit the latch with the stock—again and again, not hearing the clang, not feeling the vibration, not caring that my breath is coming in loud, raging gasps that surely must be audible, even over the polymer-on-metal noise of the weapon and lid. Suddenly, I’m six again and my father has locked me in the trunk at the foot of my bed as punishment for running off to look for my mother. Terror so extreme and so clear it could almost be mistaken for rhapsody explodes from the center of my body, turning every sense and every perception into a singular desire for escape.

  Heaving over onto my back, I bend my knees into my ribs and wedge my feet and hands against the cover, preparing to press as hard as humanly possible against it until either it breaks away or my hips and arms splinter into a million shards. Just as my shoulders begin to scream in protest—it opens! My father’s face appears in the space over the rectangle of light above me, and my first instinct is to let a kick fly, then I realize—

  “Quah-Quantum?” He barely has time to get out of my way before I propel through the opening and thud to the floor, wheezing in great, rasping breaths.