The change in the patrolman’s expression was almost comical. On a station this small, he was bound to know everybody who belonged. He knew these were intruders and his eyes widened as he noticed the weapons. As he took in Kale’s size, his eyes grew round, his mouth moving soundlessly as his mind made the connection between the legendary gods of destruction and the armed intruders in front of him. His right hand drifted towards his sidearm.
Tommy squeezed off a burst, hitting the guard in the chest with three rounds. The unfortunate Bolshari staggered as they impacted and he fell back against the outer wall. Poor sod. Tommy thought. Bet he has children.
More feet were dropping onto the deck plating behind him. Kobrak put a hand on his shoulder. “No time to waste,” he said. “We have to reach the drop ship while the station crew is tied up with the hull breaches.”
They took a curving corridor that ran between the inner and outer rooms of the small station, coming to a pair of guards standing beside a closed door. Caught unawares by the intruders, they reached for weapons before their brains had a chance to advise a more prudent course. They pitched backwards as the rounds from the human weapons punched into their torsos.
Tommy put a hand to the door controls. He looked at Kale on the far side of the door – a nod. The door slid open.
Five Bolsharii and one Kholari were struggling into their EVA suits and in the center of the floor was an open hatch. They all froze as the two large intruders entered the room. “All of you, against the wall!” Tommy shouted, pointing to the left side of the room.
The prisoners moved out of the way as Kobrak’s crew filed into the room. The lighter pilot headed straight for the hatch and climbed down. His report was less than inspiring. “No, no, nooo!” His voice drifted up through the hole in the floor. “Crabs take me! This is such a piece of shit, it may actually fall upwards instead of downwards.”
“Dammit, man,” Kobrak shouted down the hole. “Do the systems work or not?”
“They’re running right now, but who can say what they might be doing once we detach. We only have enough fuel for an emergency drop; if the thrusters kick in too soon, we accelerate again and pancake into whatever’s down there. If they kick in too late…”
“Hah! If life were easy,” Kobrak shouted back, “it wouldn’t be worth living!” He looked around at his assembled team and grinned. “Only way we can leave this shit-heap with a chance of living out the year is down there.” He nodded at the hatch. “Get in there, boys! I’ll transfer control from up here.”
After the Bolsharii climbed down, Gelna, Kale and Tommy followed. The ceiling was too low for the humans to stand upright. Tommy, crouching, looked around at the rows of reclined seats. Of course they’re all too bloody small. He looked down at one of the Bolsharii who was strapping into a seat that faced towards the cockpit. “Would you mind shifting over? I need the leg room…”
A sudden burst of automatic weapons fire caused them all to look up towards the docking hatch. Tommy raced over to the ladder as Kobrak fell through the hatch. The miner slammed into him, rolling them both onto the floor in a slick pool of blood.
Tommy rolled Kobrak off his chest and saw the entry wound in the miner’s abdomen. So this is shit creek…
Kale grabbed his shoulder and pulled him up. “C’mon,” he yelled. “You stun; I’ll frag.” He looked around the small compartment. “Helmets fastly.”
The crewmen looked at each other, exchanging blank expressions until Kale closed his own helmet. Chuckling, they followed suit.
Tommy fired a few rounds up through the open hatch. “The shrapnel will likely go through their hull and ours.”
“And anyone who gets in its way down here,” Kale agreed slinging his weapon around his neck as he pulled out the pin. “We need to drop the instant I throw the frag. Tell the pilot.”
The pilot, briefed on the importance of the timing, watched over his shoulder. His hand held the release lever for the docking clamps.
Tommy pulled a flash-bang from the front of his load-bearing harness and threw it up through the hatch. Kale threw his grenade and, instantly, the two humans and Kobrak slammed against the ceiling of the small drop ship as it accepted the embrace of gravity.
They remained pinned to the ceiling as the small ship accelerated, completely unable to move. After what seemed an eternity, Tommy could feel the force lessening. He struggled to his knees and took a look at their wounded friend. Buggeration.
“Kale, give me a hand.” Tommy was dragging Kobrak across the ceiling. He tripped over a conduit tray as Kale picked up the miner’s legs.
“Skinny bastard weighs a ton!” Kale grunted. “They must have some real shit-kicking rockets if they can beat this kind of acceleration.”
“Yeah, well, we’re all getting lighter, and pretty damned fast.” Tommy resumed dragging the wounded miner to a spot above an empty seat. “The atmosphere gets denser as we drop, more than enough to slow us down and put us back on the real floor so let’s get this done while we still can.”
They both heaved Kobrak up to the seat and Kale braced him with a shoulder while Tommy activated the restraints and slapped a patch over the hole in his suit. “Right,” he panted, “now for us.” He looked at the open seats; the crewman with the leg-room hadn’t had the time to move. Bugger. I suppose I can just put my feet up.
Tommy selected a seat and stood above it, reaching up to hold the sides of the headrest. He could feel his weight shifting direction and he rotated from standing on the ceiling to a seated position with relative ease as his UMP clattered to the floor. Turning to look for the restraint controls on his armrest, he noticed the crewman to his left nodding approval at his effortless transition between the two gravity points.
Tommy grinned back and looked down at the restraint controls, but his hands were growing heavy. He snapped his head back up as the rate of deceleration continued to increase. If I can’t see the chuffing controls, how am I supposed to close the restraint? He realised it was a useless question as his hands were now so heavy that he couldn’t move them anyway. We might need rockets just to get deep enough to find the ship. Even this pig will become buoyant soon enough.
The pig squealed.
As the pressure rapidly increased, the hull began to lose integrity. A drop ship was intended for emergency escape to the habitable planet below. At best, it was designed to handle an atmospheric pressure range from plus to minus one. No drop ship was ever intended for insertion into the atmosphere of a gas giant. There was no habitable surface below them, only a gradual transition from gases to a super-dense, liquid core.
If there was no ship waiting below them, they would be crushed long before reaching the liquid hydrogen and helium that formed the planet’s center.
Tommy was surprised to find himself at peace with his options. Nothing for it. He almost laughed out loud, but he wasn’t sure he would be able to close his mouth again. I was ten minutes away from being beaten to death in that meth lab when dad showed up with his men. If I had to choose between that and being crushed to death by the atmosphere of a gas giant during a daring raid…
He heard a groaning noise that he assumed to be a harbinger of structural failure until he realized it was Kale’s voice. The rows of seats were arranged down the center of the small craft, back to back. Tommy couldn’t see his companion. “All right, Kale?”
“Hnghh, gun… nads…”
The last time Tommy had noticed Kale’s gun was when he had hung the sling around his neck, freeing his hands to prep a grenade. Assuming the weapon was still around the mercenary’s neck, it would be hanging somewhere between his legs. Though it weighed just over five pounds, the submachine gun was rapidly becoming heavier as they decelerated.
And he couldn’t even lift his arms to move it.
Tommy shuddered. “Hang in there,” he offered, “can’t get much worse now, can it?”
“Reading a reactive shield generator,” the pilot shouted into the intercom. “Twenty-five hu
ndred units below us. Starting the burn for a low-speed pass-through in five, four, three…”
“Huhnnn… What’s he… hrgh… counting for?”
“Just close your eyes and think of the king…” Tommy suggested helpfully.
The burn was brutal, even without a weapon crushing him. Tommy’s jaw dropped open as the huge rockets kicked in. Some of Kobrak’s blood had pooled in one of the structural channels in the ceiling and now it had found a small gap in one of the welds. A thin stream of the red liquid was forced through the small opening, misting Tommy’s helmet.
With the added strain coming from the rocket sponsons, the pig’s squeals took on a new urgency. Finally, the aging airframe began to show her limitations. A frame rib flexed too far and blew out on the starboard side. Needle sharp shards flew from the fracture, killing one of the ship’s occupants. The small craft began to buck as one of the two aft sponsons began to work itself loose.
Then, with a final, triumphant shriek, the sponson tore loose and spiraled off into the dense atmosphere on its own.
“Dammit all to hells,” the pilot yelled as the bucking increased. “We’re right on top of it.”
The three remaining rockets went to full power, angling to compensate for the loss of the fourth. Tommy felt as though his seat would fall straight out the bottom of the vehicle.
Suddenly, they stabilized. The motors shut down and a semblance of normal gravity returned.
“This is not my doing,” the pilot insisted. “Something has us in its grip; it shut down our engines. Holy patrons! There it is! I can see the ship – it’s bigger than the entire city of Khulmet!”
“Kale?” Tommy clambered out of his seat, looking over at the figure seated behind him. He wasn’t moving. I’d black out too. Climbing up on the back of his own seat, he reached over and slid the dangling UMP to the left, wedging it between Kale’s leg and the armrest.
He jumped in surprise as Kale suddenly lurched out of his seat and fell to the floor, his weapon bouncing down to dangle from his neck. He deactivated his helmet and retched for a good twenty seconds. Finally, he curled up in a ball and moaned. “We’re not dead.”
Tommy wasn’t quite sure whether that was meant as a good thing. “It looks like the ancestor’s ship has taken over our little coffin.”
“If we ever get through this alive…”
Tommy didn’t get to hear the rest of Kale’s sentence. The agonized mercenary simply wasn’t there anymore. He turned his head, wondering if the rest of their group had disappeared, but they were still there.
Except for Kobrak.
Ghela
The Dark Defiance
The floor lurched beneath Tommy.
“We’re moving!” the pilot announced. Then, as if to make up for his blatantly obvious announcement, he amended his statement. “Something is pulling us in.”
Tommy tore his eyes away from the empty seats and looked towards the front of the small craft. He clambered over the legs of the others, pushing forward to kneel between the two control seats in the cockpit. Bugger me! That’s bigger than London.
They were approaching a large, cylindrical ship. The hull was built in five long, curving sections. Each hull segment was roughly ten kilometers wide by forty long. Between each of the five segments was a ten-kilometer gap. Causeways connected the hull sections at five-kilometer intervals, making the ship look like a long barrel with missing staves.
The drop ship floated down between two of the hull segments, heading towards a section on the far side. They joined into a stream of other small ships that flowed down a central thoroughfare. On either side stood a forty-kilometer-long row of massive gray high-rises. Though the ship was lit by a means they couldn’t identify, the gas outside the shields gave the city a sepia tone.
“Do you think anyone is alive on those vehicles?” The pilot turned to Tommy, a raised eyebrow.
Tommy looked back out at the press of small ships that flew around them. Finally, he shook his head. “No windows, not even for a pilot. I think they might be automated.” He looked back at his pilot and shrugged. “Most likely under central control – maintenance supplies and equipment, I would think.”
The drop ship turned to port and flowed down a quieter side street. Gelna climbed over Tommy’s shoulder and dropped into the co-pilot’s chair. “I managed to get a half-assed glimpse of the ship from over your shoulder, but if you can’t fit in this chair, I might as well call shotgun.”
The pilot frowned over at the Dactari. “Half-assed?”
Gelna sighed. “Sometimes I forget how corrupted my language has become.” He pointed a thumb at Tommy. “Hang about with this lot for long enough, and you’ll find yourself explaining every second sentence that comes out of your mouth.”
The pilot looked as though he was about to ask for another clarification, but then he shook his head in amusement, turning back to look out the window. “Wherever we’re headed, I think we’re almost there.”
They had drifted out of the flow of small ships and climbed several levels to where a broad platform extended out from a gleaming, silver tower. Large red dots adorned the sides of the building with glyphs beneath. The drop ship settled on the platform and its systems shut down.
Tommy looked through one of the ceiling windows at the gap between the two far segments of the massive hull, more than thirty kilometers away. “Just for the fun of it,” he began, loudly enough for the crew in the back to hear, “let’s wear helmets until we know if this place has an atmosphere.”
The escape hatch refused to blow out. One charge out of sixteen managed to fire but it only served to twist the door half open. The crew was forced to climb out the entry port and slide down the side of the hull from the top. As soon as his feet hit the landing platform, Tommy activated his wrist pad and checked the telemetry.
“We have air,” he announced as his helmet retracted.
Gelna stepped in front of him, nodding over his shoulder. “That kind of looks like the red sunburst we use for our hospitals.” He turned to look up at the huge red dot that spread across the width of the building. “No clue what the writing says, but the color of blood is pretty much universal in identifying medical facilities.”
“Our wounded disappear,” Tommy thought out loud, “and here we are at what seems to be a hospital.” He looked up. “Looks like plenty of other parking areas on this building, but we’re on one of the small ones.”
“Emergency pad!” Gelna slapped Tommy on the shoulder. “Curses be upon me! We’ve been brought here to see our missing friends!”
Tommy sighed. “Are you trying to say ‘I’ll be damned’? Really, you need to get a better grip on our idioms if you’re going to start teaching them to the locals.”
“Ah, no…” Gelna looked away as he scratched the back of his neck. “That’s just an old saying from the… Dactarii Republic. I’ve never even heard of…”
A loud, warbling alarm sounded from behind the drop ship. As all eyes turned that way, a thirty-foot-long ship clad in matte-orange plates rose from behind the rusty little vessel. Orange lights were pulsing along every surface. A loud voice emitted from the ship. Though no one could understand the words, there was no mistaking the imperative tone of the voice.
As they all stared, a small turret dropped down from the craft’s belly and fired a burst into the platform.
It was like breaking a hypnotist’s trance. “Run, you silly bastards! Get inside the building.” Without waiting to see who had taken his advice, Tommy went pelting for the door, hearing feet behind him and more shots being fired.
The hum of the orange craft’s engines passed over him and he suddenly found himself cut off from the door. A pair of spheres dropped to the platform and erupted into small, bipedal robots with what appeared to be weapons protruding over their shoulders.
Tommy and the rest stopped, raising their hands in the universal gesture of surrender.
As the robots advanced, the orange ship moved back to cover
them from the rear. Two more spheres thudded to the platform behind them as the doors of the hospital slid open.
Looking as though they hadn’t sustained any injuries at all, Kobrak and Kale walked out and stood beside the first two robots. They both grinned at their trapped comrades. “Trust me on this,” Kobrak said. “On the count of two, everyone starts running for the doors.”
Tommy looked to Kale. Seeing the reassuring nod, he put his doubts aside and prepared for the sprint to come. As Kobrak reached two, everyone started to run.
And the bullets began to fly.
Tommy went down with hits to both legs and he roared abuse at Kobrak as the miner continued to grin down at him.
Kale looked down at Tommy with an air of strained tolerance. “Don’t be such a pansy, it’s only a flesh wound and it’s worth it.”
Before Tommy had any time to search for meaning in Kale’s words, the hospital doors swung open and a stream of flat-topped platforms flew out to hover over each wounded individual. Dropping to press Tommy flat, a series of arms slid out from the sides of the platform and enveloped him. As it rotated to put him on top, he lost consciousness.
The Völund
On parabolic course for Earth
Keira reached out to steady herself, realizing just in time that her hand was about to grasp a high-temperature conduit. She pulled her hand back and fell to the floor. Better a bruised shoulder than a burnt palm. She focused on the broken broom stick that had been mostly concealed under a bank of electrical conduits. Her eyes had missed it but her left foot had been far more observant, catching on a protruding end.
She reached out and grasped the longer piece of the handle. If you’re here, she said to the mischievous length of wood, Hal must have come down here to look for the leak. Keira had come here looking for both the leak and her absent crewman.
She had thrown herself into work. It was hard to grieve the loss of a spouse at the best of times, but when you lived on a ship, there were few places you could go where you could have peace. Someone was always dropping by to ‘see how she was doing’ and it was maddening. She could only say that she was fine so many times before she started hitting people.
The Dark Defiance Page 23
