by Ashanti Luke
“We are set to go,” chorused over the ringing in his ears as Cyrus regained his equilibrium and looked to see who was left. Cyrus turned slowly and saw the unmasked man gagging in the thickening methane. But there were at least two men still active in this room.
Cyrus pulled the slide back on the Spellcaster, and he heard a muffled thump, but before the gun began to whine he was blindsided. The leader had reactivated his boots, and Cyrus hadn’t seen him until his own body had twisted and smashed into the bulkhead. The metal of the bulkhead felt like it caved in slightly, and for a moment, Cyrus thought he had imagined it. He then realized the fissure in the door was nearly complete and had caved in under the force.
The leader had somehow retrieved his knife and the other man brandished his pistol like a cudgel, and they both advanced on Cyrus from either flank. The burning on both sides of his body, despite the chill in the jetway, made clear what would happen if he spent any more time in this jetway. He was sure he had been stabbed, and even if he made it out of this passage, he might not make it back planetside. But he was damned if he was going to lay down arms here for these Fringe monkeys. Cyrus grit his teeth, and as he heard the crescendo of the Spellcaster, and he felt the vibrations in his hand, he turned his back to the two advancing men and told Jang to open the airlock.
Jang and Six could not believe the macabre scene playing before them on the holomonitor. Cyrus’s instincts in zero-G were good, but they were no match for these trained men with mag-clamps. He fought valiantly, never failing to catch his opponents off-guard, but they had hurt Cyrus almost as much as he had hurt them, and now, there were two of them left, and three more about to break through the bulkhead. And it didn’t help that Cyrus’s blood was trailing around the hall like Uni Day streamers. Worse yet, Cyrus was on the wrong side of the jetway.
When Cyrus had sent the order to open the airlock, Jang didn’t know what to think. There was no way Cyrus could get to the door in time enough to stop the Echelon, and even if he could, if they set that laser-bit on the airlock door, they could forget about using the Paracelsus as anything except a glorified mausoleum.
But as much as he feared the outcome, Jang gave the command to open the door anyway, and when he did, he was even more shocked when he realized what was coming. “On my mark, fire the boosters,” Jang said to Six calmly, an awkward delivery given his facial expression.
With his back to the men advancing on him, Cyrus raised the automatic pistol in his right hand and the Spellcaster in his left. Then, he tucked his knees to his chest and fired the Spellcaster against the bulkhead.
The loud clap should have been deafening, but he heard the airlock open as he flew straight back like he was launched from a slug cannon. Cyrus smashed into the leader, knocking him backward and spinning him off his mag-clamps. Cyrus’s right elbow collided with the mask of the other soldier as he passed, and then his right hand was firing wildly, sending bullets tearing through the thick gas in the jetway. Several of the rounds hit the bulkhead, sparking and igniting the noxious air in the jetway as the flash from the muzzle simultaneously ignited the air around him.
“Now!” Jang yelled as he himself pressed the button to close the airlock. In the time it took for the word to travel from his mouth to Six’s ear, they watched on the holomonitor as Cyrus flew through the threshold of the ship with a ball of flame washing mercilessly from the conflagrated jetway after him. And then it billowed around him, filling the airlock chamber.
Jang fought back the swelling behind his eyes as he watched the flames engulf Cyrus. The airlock door slammed shut, the Paracelsus tore away from its mooring, and the J.L. Orbital spun away from them into a deeper orbit, emptying the bodies from the jetway into atmosphere too thin for them to survive. Watching all this in the holographic imager, Jang barely noticed the flames in the holomonitor twisting and spinning in a turbulent but awkward swirl as they funneled into the gun between Cyrus’s hands.
When Six got to him, Cyrus was still shivering on the floor in a swelling pool of his own blood. Both hands were locked around the Spellcaster and covered in a sheath of ice crystals. The gun was also covered in flakes of ice and was still whining its aria. Six checked Cyrus frantically. The ends of his hair were singed, and the tips of his beard hairs had been grayed, but there were no signs of burns. “Are you okay?” Six asked without subvocalizing. There was no sound at first, and it worried him, but then there was a slight crackle over the whining of the Spellcaster as Cyrus’s thumb stood erect from the encasement of ice.
“I’m full of joy,” came over the network in Cyrus’s voice, obviously manufactured by the computer, “but I’ll be better if you get my black and green ass home.”
When the flatdeck moved up to the front of the Echelon lev, Toutopolus felt as if the floor had dropped from beneath him. Milliken had looked dazed, but had snapped to full awareness as a figure drove a dark object that could only have been a knife into his gut. He had kicked the man with the knife away from him, and then there had been a blinding flash. That was when Toutopolus had shielded his face and jumped through the windshield of the craft. He had stumbled across what must have been the console, and across something that felt like a body, and when his pupils had finally dilated, he found himself next to a man holding Milliken in a chokehold. The man’s own eyes must have been still adjusting to the flash, because as Toutopolus raised his own gun to the man’s head, the man seemed to pay him no mind. The interior of the ship was dark, and even the flashing orange of the emergency lighting was flickering to a halt, but Toutopolus could still make out the shape of the man’s head as he fired. Before he could turn to fire at the other figures, someone grabbed his gun arm and twisted it. Toutopolus heard a resounding snap, like someone throwing a towel against the wall, and as a blistering cold shot from his elbow to his shoulder, he found himself yanked toward the gaping hole that had been excised from the side of the fighter by the Valois. He leaned away from his unseen attacker’s grasp to yank his arm loose, but the pressure in his arm, as the man countered and pressed against the inside of his shoulder blade, sent a wave of pain through his body that weakened every muscle he was aware of. As Toutopolous’s momentum carried him toward the hole in the wall, he wondered, even amidst the pain that made consciousness seem like background noise, what falling from so high would feel like. Then something stubborn caught under foot, and Toutopolus saw the stars of the night sky spreading out before him. The Miasmic air entering through the hole felt much colder than the air he had left on the flatdeck.
Milliken had found himself on the floor in the twitching grasp of a body in the last of its death throes. The back of his own head was covered in muck that he did not want to contemplate, and something rocklike, probably the knee of a spasmodic leg, fluttered painfully against the small of his back. And then, as his vision adjusted to the slowing of the metronomic orange light, Milliken heard a pop that sounded like someone opening a champagne bottle in another room.
But there was no other room. And as he saw Toutopolus’s body, his arm bent in a place it should not have bent, hurled toward the opening that had been left by the Valois blast, he pushed himself off the twitching body beneath him and extended both legs into the outside of the knee of the soldier hurling Toutopolus toward the hole in the side of the fighter. There was another snap, like the final snap just before timber collapsed under its own weight, and the man did just the same as the timber would have, slowly collapsing on his own knee, which was now folded in the wrong direction itself. As the man tumbled over, Milliken found a knife that was beneath him on the floor, and even as the man hit the floor, Milliken brought it down onto his torso, digging through Comptex and breastbone alike. A fount of blood issued from the man’s writhing body and subsided as his lung collapsed. Milliken stood, snatching the knife from the man’s body, but Toutopolus, who must have been dizzy and shaken by the damage to his arm, stumbled out of the hole on his own accord.
Uzziah had managed to keep the craft level with the front end of the oth
er damaged fighter resting on the back of it, but the other fighter was losing power rapidly, and Uzziah could not hold both of them steady for long. Aerik moved quickly toward the flatdeck as he saw Stavros of Five stumble out of a hole in the side of the fighter and Paulice of Swords catch him by his ankle. “Devil’s in the house of the rising sun,” in the voice of Taewook of Cups filled his earwig, which meant two things; the Knight of Swords’s computer had secured the codes for the docking doors that led beneath the pyramid, and that scrambled fighters, which had made it possible for Taewook to steal the codes, had used those codes to open the doors and were now speeding toward them.
And then, as Paulice pulled Stavros’s limp body back into the craft, one of the figures rose up into a sitting position from the dark mass of bodies on the floor of the fighter, and a sparkle of light glimmered across the muzzle of a gun in his hand—and it was pointed at Paulice.
Aerik instinctively raised his rifle and fired, but the bullets dissolved on the still functioning astrapi shield of his own fighter. He screamed both in frustration and in hope that the sound waves would penetrate the barrier his bullets could not.
Milliken thought he heard something over the howling of the wind and sputtering of the damaged craft. He wasn’t sure, but he flipped the knife in his hand anyway and instinctively dropped as bullets rang out around the hole in the wall. Milliken heard Toutopolus groan and saw him fall to the floor of the fighter just at the edge of his vision. Milliken loosed the knife in his hand, and it flew with an accuracy that surprised even him. But it only thudded, handle-first against the soldier’s face. The soldier fell backward from his sitting position, but caught himself. Milliken snatched Toutopolus’s gun from the floor, and as the soldier sat up, he fired, snapping the soldier’s head back violently as something unseen in the darkness splattered against the opposite wall.
Milliken stood, tucking the handgun into the belt of his suit, and he hoisted the moaning Toutopolus onto his shoulder. Toutopolus was going into shock and would need attention that he could only get on the other fighter, assuming they could make it there. Milliken saw Aerik standing at the end of the flatdeck, one foot on the nose of the wrecked fighter, extending his hand. The ship shuddered as Milliken shuffled toward the front. It was not as hard to carry Toutopolus as it would have been on Earth, but moving through the unstable fighter with a grown man on his shoulder drew sweat from his brow. As he stepped onto the console, which was now showering sparks in intermittent bursts, Milliken heard another indecipherable yell, but this time, his foot slipped, and in the instinctive struggle to hold Toutopolus and not lose his balance, he was unable to move.
Toutopolus’s whole body was cold except his arm, which was now completely consumed by hot, stinging needles and was dangling helplessly in the air. As he tried to steady himself, someone yelled, and he looked up. It was hard for him to breathe in this position. It would not have mattered normally, but in the thick of the Miasma, the lack of oxygen, in addition to the pain, distorted the reality around him into an impressionistic blur. As he raised his head, he saw what must have been one man blurred into two, rearing his arm back to throw another Squib.
Unsure if the tips of his fingers, even on his good arm, would even be able to feel the metal of the pistol, Toutopolus snatched the gun from Milliken’s belt expecting it to drop to the floor. But his hand obeyed the commands from his brain, and the gun fired a burst, sending the figure to the floor.
But only one of the double images fell, and Toutopolus realized, as the adrenalin now rushing through his body afforded his vision a moment of clarity, that they had not been a double image at all, and the other, very real image, was training Milliken’s own assault rifle on them.
Milliken felt his own body shake as Toutopolus had fired the gun from his belt at something behind them. Aerik urgently reached out his hand, but then collapsed back onto the flatdeck as a fan of blood sprayed out of the back of his leg with the sound of gunfire. Milliken had reached for Aerik’s hand, but when it fell back through the astrapi shield, Milliken’s own footing faltered again. But this time, as Toutopolus muttered a more disturbing “Uhh,” Milliken lunged with the leg he still had beneath him, and dove through the astrapi toward the flatdeck.
Toutopolus cursed his vision for becoming clear just long enough for him to have front-row seats at his own death. But then, suddenly, just as the muzzle aimed at him spat flames, he found the macabre image receding. And as the darkening fighter moved outside his vision, he swore he could see the actual bullet just before it sparked out of existence against the astrapi no more than two centimeters in front of his left eye. He, Milliken, and Aerik plummeted to the flatdeck as a barrage of blue sparks showered around them. And then, as a Cyclopean jolt of pain ripped through his body when he attempted to steady himself with his shattered arm, Toutopolus saw a bright flash in his darkening vision as the Squib exploded, splitting the fighter they had fallen from in half as it spiraled away into the darkness of the Miasma. And then his vision faded, and he himself spiraled away, flailing into his own personal Miasmic gloom.
Six had bandaged Cyrus’s wounds and had propped him up in one of the passenger seats on the bridge. Cyrus’s wounds were superficial, and he would be fine so long as he sat still, which might be a little difficult in the next few minutes, but Six had made sure he was securely buckled in the five-point harness on the chair. Cyrus had been groggy, which was probably less due to loss of blood and more due to the blast shock of being too close to not one, but two Spellcaster discharges, but he was not so bleary he couldn’t function. Above all else, he seemed tired. His body was still adjusting to the Eos, and this was the longest time he had been out of the sun. Six had set him as close to the windshield as he could, and perhaps the sunlight would help him regain his wits.
Jang had patched the earwig network into the hailing system of the bridge. “Sensors say we’re starting to heat up, what do I do about that?” Jang yelled at the holomonitor, no longer bothering to subvocalize.
“When you hit the atmospheric threshold, the HUD pipe should pop up on the windshield,” Uzziah’s voice came back filtered, but quick enough to sound preoccupied.
The ship began to vibrate around them, but the compensators did their job to keep the floor and consoles steady. The vibrations became more and more apparent, and the temperature gauge on the holomonitor was rising at a rate that made it unreadable. Jang was sure something was wrong. If this wasn’t the atmospheric barrier, what was?
And then, the dark rings of the re-entry pipe appeared on the screen, and a warning about reentry calmly filled the comm system. And then a jolt too violent for the compensators to adjust sent a ripple throughout the ship. Jang felt his seat leave his body and then rise suddenly back into his tailbone. The surface of Asha in the windshield began to spin with an obvious wobble. The rings of the pipe began to rotate on the windshield in sync with the rotation of the planet’s surface. Jang grabbed the controls and tried to manually adjust to the pipe. The ship began to slow its spin, but in correcting the spin, Jang overcompensated, and the ship veered too much to the right.
“Whatever you do, make sure you don’t go out of the pipe or lose your x-axis,” Uzziah’s words were more like a condemnation than a warning. Just as the words entered Jang’s ears, the pipe moved to the edge of the windshield, and the side of the Paracelsus collided with the inside of the imaginary pipe with enough force to send another unmitigated shockwave through the ship.
And then the ship began to spin again, and this time, the x-axis lost stability, and the entire visible surface of Asha smeared in the windshield. Then they saw space, and then the fierce orange Set, and then Asha again mixed in a blur. The gravity drive kept Jang in his seat, but the image through the windshield made him dizzy.
“What in Miasmic death are you doing?” Six yelled as Jang closed his eyes to keep his head from reeling.
“Stop whining and hit the thruster kill!” Jang could have reduced thrust himself, but in his
daze, his feet could not find the proper pedal.
“Which one is that?” Six yelled back.
“The bright red one flashing beneath the warning light on the holomonitor!” Jang’s ankles were numb and his feet were unsure. The whirr from the thrusters died down, and the litany of warning beacons dropped two alarms from their chorus. Jang threw his body over the controller and wrenched at it. The spinning slowed steadily, and the view from the windshield settled with half a starscape on the left and the Ashan plain on the right. Dark bands on the HUD display sped from right to left across the Ashan backdrop and registered fluorescent yellow and green against the desolate black of space.
The vibration became too much for the balancing systems to adjust to, and the metal rims around the windshield began to glow until they spawned wispy flames.
“Our situation is not improving!” Six belted at Jang.
“You’re coming in sideways!” Uzziah’s voice spread over the intercom.
Jang sat up firmly in his chair, threw his hair from his face, and gripped the control wheel again, “Will everyone shut the hell up and let me fly!”
The nose was pitched more toward space than Asha, and as Jang tried to correct right, he feared another bout of overcorrection. He whipped the stick to the left, the direction the ship wanted to spin in, and as it spun back around, he corrected back to the right. The ship spun 270 degrees and settled back into the pipe, spinning at a slight, manageable rate.
Uzziah’s voice came back over the loudspeakers, “Good, you’re back straight. As long as the ship is still in good shape, the three of you should be able to guide the ship back to the original LZ.” His filtered voice was calm, but it still had the hurried sound of preoccupation.
Jang looked over his shoulder. Six was there, but Cyrus was gone. “You think two of us can do it with a ship that’s on fire?” Jang asked, not bothering to subvoc.
“The fire will go away as soon as you get out of the buffer zone,” Uzziah reported.
