by Trisha Telep
He ate at her mouth, let his hands roam to touch her silky skin. Arm, stomach, soft breast. There was no hope of sex, of course. There simply wasn’t enough room to move. All he wanted to do was break down her barriers. Just a little.
They both came up gasping for air. The chill in the main bay actually felt good against his superheated skin. He grinned at her. “Now maybe we can both get some sleep.”
He closed his eyes, but before they were fully shut he saw the surprise on her face.
Five
How was she supposed to sleep? Her entire body was aching, wanting more than her mind was willing to do. And Miflin was just snoring away.
Why had he kissed her? Worse, why had she let him?
Because you wanted him to, stupid. Since the first day you met him. There had been something about him, even then. A ne’er-do-well rake; that’s what he would have been called in an earlier age. He smiled and women melted. Except her. She was the tough one. The perfect cop who had no emotions. More like the perfect patsy for a brutal overlord.
Miflin had managed to charm her, despite her carefully constructed walls – his black sense of humor, the fire in his eyes when he talked about getting the “product” to its destination. And then she’d found out he was smuggling kids, getting them out of town before the Stovians arrived. She’d been shocked by the stories she’d heard, watched the terrified looks on the kids’ faces when she’d sworn she’d get them back to their families. But they hadn’t wanted to go home. Everybody there was already dead.
That was when she’d made her decision. The world didn’t need more orphans. Order at the cost of lives wasn’t what she wanted for her career.
So, really, it was Miflin who had caused her to defect, to change sides and join the resistance. But he hadn’t followed. He’d stayed a freelance smuggler. And that had annoyed the hell out of her.
It wasn’t easy to get out of the sleep sack without waking him. But the timer in the cockpit had gone off. It was time to start getting the ship ready to launch. She was sleepy when she slipped into what passed for a bathroom. There was no standing up straight and barely enough room to extend one arm. But at least she could clean off, brush her teeth and relieve herself.
Then it was to the cockpit to start the engines. The planet was massive in the view port. It looked similar to Earth but with rings of thick, dark clouds and far more land mass. It was surrounded by satellites bearing weaponry she didn’t recognize. Damn. How are we going to pull this off?
It was when she was powering up the port thruster that the alarm sounded on the overhead panel. The passive sensor had come in contact with an active scanner.
Damn it. She couldn’t decide whether to fire everything up and risk them showing up on scanners but in position to slip away, or shut everything down and try to pass by unnoticed. The problem was if they went much farther with the asteroid, they’d be right back at square one – waiting until the rock passed by the planet again on the next orbit. Except they didn’t have that much food or water. It had to be now.
“Miflin!” She shouted the words and pressed a button that sounded an alarm in the back. She heard a thumping and then a body fall out onto the floor of the bay.
“What the hell! What’s going on?” His voice was thick with sleep.
She already had her helmet on, so her voice came out deep. “Get suited up. We’ve been noticed.”
She heard him utter several swear words, in interesting combinations, but at least he began to scramble around the bay, swearing more as he cracked his head on the ceiling while getting to the clothing storage. She turned to see him hopping to get into his suit. He called through the doorway. “How long?”
“The first scan was random. It’ll take a little bit for them to hone in on us. I want to be gone by the time they do. I’m firing everything up, but it’ll take a second to get to full charge. Five minutes to anchor release.”
“Great. I have time to pee.”
She rolled her eyes. Just like a man. She busied herself flicking on switches and pushing buttons, getting green lights all the way. At least the time in cold storage on the asteroid hadn’t hurt any of their instruments. She was just about to release the anchor when a red light outside the view port caught her eye.
It was the last thing she remembered . . . other than the pain.
Red light filled the front cabin, spilling under the door to the bathroom. He was just zipping up when he noticed it, and then the scream came. Even with the voice modulator in the helmet, it was high and tortured. He bolted into the cockpit.
El’s helmet was off and her face was . . . smoking under her hands. “Oh, God! It hurts. Oh my God!”
“What happened? Did something explode up here?”
“It’s the weapon. It came from the surface, a red beam. Not diron or laser. Something else. It blinded me.” She turned and grabbed at his flight suit. He finally saw her face. Her eyes were milky white, the lashes and eyebrows charred and falling in ashes onto her seat. “I’m blind, Rand!”
He pulled her out of her seat, supported her as he got her back into the sleep sack to examine her. His hands shook as he got out the med kit and used his teeth to open the package for a shot of morphine that included a high-strength antibiotic. He pressed the pressure needle against El’s suit and heard her gasp as it injected into her arm. “Okay, just stay there for a second. I’m going to go shut down the ship except for the heat back here. The asteroid should mask the signature of this small ship.”
She was crying when he got back. He hated it when women cried, because it made him want to as well. The rough part was . . . she had reason. A pilot without eyes? What the hell were they going to do? His stomach threatened to expel what little he’d had to eat. “Hey,” he said softly, as he approached, touching her hair lightly. “How you doing?”
“We can’t go back, we can’t go forward. How do you think I am? We’re going to die out here.”
He pulled a chair over from the wall. The sound made her jump and look around uselessly. He touched her again as he sat down. “We’ll figure this out, El. We’ve passed the planet now. No ships have launched and no chatter has been picked up by the scanners. We have some time to think before the asteroid comes around again. Tell me what happened.”
She did. There wasn’t much to tell. He ran fingers through his hair. How could this happen? “So you think it was random? Just a test fire or something?”
She shook her head, her senses seeming to come back to her as the painkiller kicked in. “No, I think they know we’re coming. It was targeted across the asteroid ring. They wouldn’t risk blinding their own pilots or the transport ships—” She muttered a string of curse words. “The transport driver. He was a counteragent. But they don’t know which rock we’re on. They’re probably just waiting until we’re out of shipping lanes before they come and destroy the ship.”
“Son of a bitch.” She was right. That was the only way. “So what do you think this weapon is meant to do?”
“Exactly what it did. It blinds people. Even through blast shields. Think about it, Rand. How would we fight back if everyone . . . everyone on the whole planet, was blind?”
Shit. Earthlings would be easy pickings, easily sold as slaves for sex or hard labor where sight wasn’t really required. Maybe the coal mines of Rigel or the diron mines on Pluto. “Why bother with underground lighting if everyone’s blind? Damn.”
“We have to take it out. I don’t know how, but they can’t be allowed to get this weapon onto an interstellar ship. You’ll need to be the pilot. We don’t have a choice.”
He started shaking his head even though she couldn’t see it. He stood up and walked to the bathroom and wet a strip of cloth to put on her forehead. Better not to let her get too overheated in the sleep sack. “You don’t understand. I can’t fly. It’s not a question of confidence, or knowledge. My brain doesn’t work that way. Not everybody has the skill to fly a ship like El Tyler. It’s rare, like it’s part of your genes or somethi
ng.”
She laughed, a little high. But not hysterical. More drugged. “Genes. I guess you might say that. Granddad, Mom and me. The famous Tyler genes.”
“Come again?” He put the cool cloth on her forehead and she calmed down.
“Granddad was E.L. Tyler. He was a pilot. Could fly anything . . . prop planes, jets, helicopters, even gliders. He spent his life in the sky. Until the Parkinson’s set in. The stick started shaking, jerking. When he was called up for duty when the Stovians attacked, he couldn’t do it.”
It all finally made sense. “So you took his place?”
She waved a hand in the air wildly. Definitely feeling no pain now. “Pfft! I was ten when that happened. No, Mom was the next Tyler to pick up the stick. She insisted on going in his place. He said no. But she was stubborn. She challenged him to a race. Whoever won would go. She picked the planes, he set up the course.” She paused, smiled, remembering. “She won. I was so proud of her. Granddad wasn’t upset. She’d proved herself, and she was good. Damned good. He raised me while she flew. She was Lauren Tyler – still an ‘L’. Only a very few in the upper hierarchy knew. She flew for the next decade. It broke her heart when I became a cop for the Stovians. She tried to convince me to resist, but I couldn’t. It was all about order, y’know?” Now her voice was starting to slur. “All order, until I met you.”
Wait. Huh?
“Remember those kids when we caught you? I broke them out of quarantine, flew them to safety, to the mountain base in Colorado. Then I went home and burned my black uniform. I asked my Mom where to sign up to fly. She was tired. Venus had taken a lot out of her. She couldn’t use one foot anymore. But she challenged me to the course – a rite of passage.”
He felt a smile come on, just a little one. “You beat her.”
She nodded. “I was born Elle, E-L-L-E, not Ellen, and Mom gave me Tyler as a middle name. So still not a lie. El Tyler is a . . . a legend . . . you know.” Her lids drifted closed over the ruined eyeballs. The muscles under the burned skin relaxed as she slept.
He reached down and pressed a gentle kiss against her temple, near the red, blistered skin of her forehead.
He moved the chair to a spot where he couldn’t be seen from the front. More important, where he couldn’t see out, in case they had a mobile version of the weapon. He started to go over the maps on Elle’s reader. He hadn’t really bothered much before, since it was pretty obvious they were going to have to wing it. But she was right. They had to take out the weapon.
When she woke up, four hours later, ready for another morphine shot, he had a plan. It was reckless, insane – complete suicide.
In other words, the perfect fit for a legendary smuggler and a legendary hero.
Six
“Okay, explain that to me again?” She thought she must have heard wrong, because the idea was insanity.
“We’re going forward with the mission. You’ll fly and I’ll navigate. Then we’ll land, hijack a ship capable of handling the wormhole, and go home. Easy-peasy.”
She took the cloth off her forehead and flicked her eyelids over the milky orbs. It made her wince. “Somehow in that plan did you think how to get around the fact that I’m blind?! Are you insane, Miflin?”
“Not insane at all. In fact, it’s the perfect defense.” He pushed back the chair, scraping it across the patterned metal. “They’ve thrown all their eggs into one basket. They’re planning that this weapon is the be-all and end-all. Don’t you see, Elle? They’re presuming that the beam was all they needed. They didn’t send any follow-up ships because they didn’t think they had to.” He wished she could see his excitement. “That’s our in. They presume a blind pilot can’t fly.”
“And they’d be right, Rand. I can’t fly.”
He nodded his head and took her hand in a tight grip. “No, but see – you can. Maybe only you. It’s paint-by-numbers, all over again. I’ll give you the numbers, you paint the picture. Like an instrument landing.”
She held up a hand, trying to raise her body to a sitting position. Confusion was mixed with alarm on her face. “Wait. You want me to pilot the ship by listening to your navigation commands?”
“Why not? You said yourself . . . you think in numbers. The commands go from your eyes to your hands. Why not from your ears to your hands? But you’ll have to trust me. Have to trust that I’ll give you good data. I will. I swear I will, on the blood of everyone on Earth who’s fought and died.”
She mulled it over for long minutes and then finally responded. “Blind precision flying through surface defenses, and in dogfights? You’re crazy.”
“Yeah. I am. So are you. Smuggling kids through a blockade, fire fights in an asteroid field. We’re both certifiable.” She tipped her head, acknowledging the truth, so he pressed on. “Face facts, Tyler. We’re dead anyway. The oxygen scrubbers will only last a week without servicing. We have food and water for two days, three with recycling. There’s no way back if the transport captain is one of the bad guys. But if we pull it off – wow. We save the planet. We buy time for the resistence to prepare.”
“And we send a message,” she said after a pause, her neck muscles tightening, her face focused as though she could see him through the fog. “We can bring the war to you. We can find you, attack you. Maybe they even think we have a countermeasure to their superweapon. They probably don’t have enough data on Earthlings anyway.”
Rand found himself smiling when she smiled. Reckless, talented, gorgeous – with or without blue eyes. “I could fall in love with you, you know.”
She reached out a hand. He took it. “If we survive this, I just may let you.”
Elle sat in the cockpit, face shield down, meaningless. It hurt like fire, but she’d felt worse. She closed her eyes, which was redundant, but it helped her focus. She imagined the panel in front of her. She reached out and toggled a switch. The left thruster fired up on low. Damn. It should have been the right one, on high. She concentrated, tried to dredge up the flight here, through the asteroids – concentrating on the numbers on the display while her hands went to practiced spots.
“Give me coordinates, Rand. Any coordinates.”
“It might help if we weren’t still attached to the asteroid.”
She let out a harsh breath, tried not to swear like her grandfather. “Just do it, please. I need to see if we can do this before I discover I can’t get back here.”
“Okay, then. Good point. Let’s go with . . .” He started typing hard. “197.824, left pitch 8.7, arc length 14.3.”
“Skip the pitch and arc. The order of the numbers will tell me what they are. Just stick with initials for direction: 197.824, L 8.7, A 14.3. So . . . let’s try this.” She let the numbers fill her mind, let them flow through her to, as Miflin said, “paint the picture”. The stick moved without her meaning to. The ship lurched, strained against the anchor. “Was that a real coordinate?”
“Yep, our first one,” he said with far too much satisfaction in his voice. “Give ’er hell, Captain Tyler. Sir.”
She smiled and pulled the anchor release. It didn’t retract the anchor. It severed the connection at the ship. She felt the shudder as the ship eased away from the asteroid. She answered Rand’s question before he asked it. “Less weight. We’ll be able to maneuver quicker without it.”
He tapped her shoulder lightly and she turned her head. “The rock’s spinning again. We should probably get out of here.”
One nod and she felt her hands dance over the controls. The thrusters reversed and she pulled up on the stick sharply. They tumbled and she felt the ship respond to the outcropping passing by the hull. “Tell me where to go next.”
He did. Coordinate after coordinate, she stared where the screen would be and the numbers appeared in her mind as though her eyes were seeing them. He abbreviated easily after a few minutes. “184.2, L 87, A 14.2; 184, L 6, A. 9; 1922, L 13.3, A 12.” She let her hands move, and soon it was as though she could see – at least as well as she normall
y could through the blast shield.
“Entering the planet’s atmosphere. Remain on this course. Keep the nose steady. I’ll let you know when you can let go.”
She hated atmospheres. The stick vibrated wildly. Heat began to radiate through the cockpit. It would pass, but it made the blisters on her face sting, burn, made her skin melt and crackle even through the shields. “Damn it, Miflin. It hurts. I can’t concentrate.”
Rand reached back and put a hand on her shoulder. “Keep it steady, Elle. Just a few more minutes. We’re nearly through. Don’t let go. I can’t do this for you. This is yours.”
She wanted to let go. To put her hand to her face to shield her wounds from the heat. “I can’t keep this up.”
“You can. Trust me. Just another minute.”
Did she trust him? Could she? “What’s in this for you?” The drugs were wearing off and her eyeballs were swelling again. Her lids wouldn’t close over them. She feared if she forced them, they wouldn’t go up again. She needed distraction. “Tell me.”
There was a long pause. It felt like forever as her face and hands crackled and crisped. “At first, it was the rush. I’ve always been an adrenaline junkie. Then it was the money. People who want to move things without suspicion will pay nearly anything. I tried the ‘straight and narrow’ route. Had a steady job with low pay and no future. Drove me nuts. So, you’re right. I was for sale to the highest bidder.”
Close now. She could feel the shaking lessen, but now was the most dangerous part. If they hit the stratosphere wrong, or the concentration of gases was too different from Earth, she could ricochet off, and they’d tumble and break up. Rand tightened his hand on her shoulder. His wrist was probably cramping from the angle. She asked him. “What changed?”
“There’s always a line. A line you can’t cross. To me, the line was kids. Who knew? Someone paid me to drive a freighter. I was told to ignore noises in the back. But I couldn’t. They’d sealed them in without enough air holes. I broke it open. Not a one was more than ten. I didn’t know where they were supposed to end up, and I didn’t care. I dropped off the grid with them. Took them to the Mars colony’s orphanage. I knew a group of nuns there who would care for them. A day later I joined the resistance.”
