The Endless Sky

by Adam P. Knave

  He had no grenades. Except. He thanked his mom silently as he dismantled the blaster packs in the two low-yield energy pistols he’d stolen. Each pack held enough charge to fire a hundred or so blasts, each powerful enough to kill a person with no armor. So, cross wired together, with the leads in the wrong places to short them, Mud guessed a good building charge should do the trick.

  Patting the slender pockets on his thinsuit, Mud found a spool of tape and stuck the two guns together, barrels pointed at each other, saving some tape for a final loop to hold the triggers down on both guns. He tugged the tape tight and the guns started trying to build enough charge to fire, the packs unable to work as spec demanded. Instead they whined, the noise growing into a troubling buzz.

  Mud threw the mess right into the center of the scrum and turned his head away, hunkering down to shield himself. The explosion rattled his joints and made the ground under him bounce a little.

  Glancing over his shoulder, Mud saw four more of the people chasing him on the ground. He peered further out and saw the last two heading further into the trees ahead, down the same route Mud wanted, right to the compound. They’d decided, it seemed to Mud, that getting to base and standing nearby a fortress would be smarter. They weren’t wrong, but Mud also knew that if they got there before him, Bee wouldn’t be expecting them. She could handle herself, but Mud didn’t intend to give her a mean surprise of the shooting variety.

  Standing, stretching joints and muscles sore from sitting too close to an explosion, Mud started after them. Bruises from proximity detonations rated high on his list of annoying occupational hazards.

  Bee heard the explosion and hoped Mud had caused it instead of being on the receiving end. Only one way to find out, and that entailed getting the last two goons on her trail off it directly. She’d been through training, basic and advanced, and could hold her own in a fight, but self-doubt held her back. Worse yet, she knew it. She felt graceless, clumsy compared to her trainers and most of her teammates.

  Regardless, she thought, when needs must you show up. She skidded to a halt in the leaves, letting her knees buckle, and dropped suddenly to the ground. Two blasts burned the air above her, right through where she’d been standing.

  She lay, waiting for them to investigate. They did, as a matter of procedure, assuming they’d hit her. While they stood above her, checking for a wound, she kicked out, each foot going in a different direction, each one making contact with a knee and shoving the joint out of true. Her two pursuers screamed and fell, and Bee rolled so that they were in reach. Covering their mouths so they wouldn’t keep drawing attention, she hit them each with a low-level sonic blast to the temple, knocking them out.

  Standing, she took up a run toward the compound to meet Mud.

  Mud lined up his shot as carefully as he could while moving, and tagged both the Force Group C folk in front him with a wide-angle beam from his blaster. Kicking their helmeted heads hard to ensure they stayed down a while as he ran past, Mud got to the compound doors only a few seconds before Bee.

  “That blaster fire just now you, or we still have someone on us?” she asked.

  “We’re clean,” Mud said, “so now the hard part.”

  “We get in the front door and they’ll cut us down hard.”

  Mud ran a hand along the thick, imposing doors. They ran up roughly ten feet and stood eight feet wide. “We couldn’t get through anyway. Maybe you could get through the scanner, but—”

  “I couldn’t, dual biometrics, it’d take way more time than we could possibly have,” Bee said.

  “Right, so. How do we get in?”

  “Not how,” Bee said. “Where.”

  “Sure, if I had a GravPack I’d hit the roof, come in from above hard and fast, no problem. But this place...” Mud looked at the compound. A large, gray, featureless mound rising a good sixty feet into the sky. No telling from here how far down the structure went. Round, it seemed to his eye to sit at least seven thousand feet in diameter. No easy entry leapt out to him—windowless and apparently seamless, the walls looked designed to be exactly the impenetrable fortress he’d worried it might. Sure, they’d need air, he knew, but putting the vents on the roof along with a few gun turrets made life far simpler.

  Bee nudged the ground with the edge of her boot. “Walls will be too thick, up here...”

  “You’re thinking a dig?” Mud asked.

  “We don’t have long before they come looking for us, minutes most. Still, they’d expect us to come in from the front, so where do you keep things?” She knelt and stuck the business end of her sonic into the ground, gently pulling the trigger a few times.

  “Prisoners down a level, everything else up. So we have to backtrack and cut ourselves off. So if we go in low—”

  “And no one fortifies underground walls the same,” Bee said, standing. “Sonic bounces funny, so the walls go down straight. Dig?” They moved to the relative back of the compound to avoid anyone using the doors.

  Mud took out his blaster and fiddled with it a bit. “Stand back, this’ll be fast and messy.” Bee came around to stand behind him. An arc of energy shot free of the gun and blasted dirt up and elsewhere. Whipping the beam back and forth, Mud dug a hole deeper and deeper. Bee glanced around nervously as he did. Not noisy work, but certainly visible—and taking far too long, she felt.

  The digging ceased. “I think I have enough charge left,” Mud said, starting to cut into the wall while standing in the large, boxy hole he’d dug. The ground level sat above his head, and Bee crouched at the edge, still keeping a lookout as the Acadian blaster sliced through the much thinner walls with a tight, focused beam.

  Bee dropped down into the hole and nodded at Mud. Leaning back, he braced and kicked the cut section of wall in, the two of them diving into the hole after the slice of metal, not giving anyone inside time to react.

  CHAPTER 3

  Blaster fire cut across the air. Between reports of intruders, silence from Force Group C, and then watching a cutting arc slice through their wall, the people in the fortress were far from surprised as Mud and Bee jumped through. They were, instead, frankly pissed. Mud and Bee shot back, going for wide blasts, trying to clear a path forward.

  A searing bolt sliced along Mud’s leg, cutting his thinsuit and charring some of the skin under it. Stumbling, Mud bit back a scream and shot wildly twice. Bee helped him up, pinging sonic blasts off the walls to send people sprawling.

  “Bee, find the cells, I’ll cover.”

  “That blaster won’t hold out!” Bee insisted.

  “I’ll borrow one. Go. Order.” Mud grinned at her and ran a hand over his smooth head, knowing as he did it that his father’s example rose high in his own muscle memory.

  Bee took off with a frown, and Mud unleashed wide-angle blasts to either side of her, clearing a path. Running for one of the downed soldiers, he grabbed a blaster free and then sought another, and one after that. Five blasters in his belt and one in each hand later, he still fired, ducking behind any random object he could. More and more people came down a wide staircase along one wall, creating a choke point that Mud kept firing at to discourage them. The level they were on was mostly wide space, with a few hallways spun off. Bee’d run down one of those, and Mud made sure no one tried to follow her. Damn but his leg hurt. The burn ached, stabbily, making Mud want to hit someone. So he did. Grabbing the nearest mook by the shoulders, Mud smacked him hard with a headbutt, feeling the guy’s nose flatten.

  Kicking him away, Mud looked around the room. They were cringing at the top of the stairs, unsure of the full situation, knowing only that blaster fire greeted anyone who tried to go downstairs. Three guards still stood in the space, looking for backup. Mud wanted to sneer, to say something big and heroic and badass, but his damned leg hurt. It distracted him, preoccupied his brain just long enough for the mass of people along the stairs to let someone through. And she had grenades.

  Mud cursed, taking a few shots at her. One of them hit he
r arm, but not soon enough. Three grenades lazily flew through the open space toward him. He watched their arcs and tried to work out which way to go to get clear. Except the spread widened as they arced, cutting him off completely.

  Taking the only option he could think of, Mud shot at one of the grenades. Missing twice, he nailed it on the third try, blowing it before it reached him. The explosion still hurt, ringing his ears and vision, but it did the same to the people who were coming down the stairs freely now.

  Having a safe-ish space to run, Mud took it, limping in a wobbly line as his inner ear caught up to a post-explosion world once more. Unfortunately his path intersected with the mass of people coming down the stairway. Nothing for it, he thought—they needed to eventually get upstairs regardless. Someone had to clear the way. Somehow.

  Mud had started shooting, trying to hold them back, when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Before he could fully react, a voice said, “These guns for us?” and took one of the pistols from the back of Mud’s belt.

  Looking back over his shoulder quickly, Mud saw Steelbox, the Insertion Team’s navigator, grinning. “Pass them around, we have to get upstairs and then find the Arrow.” Steelbox, still using the gang name he grew up with, hailed from the same settlement planet as Bee and looked up to her.

  “The Arrow’s on the upper level, it’s a top hangar,” said Chellox, the lizard-looking Tsyfarian pilot. Mud didn’t reply, trying to work out how to get to his team’s ship. He kept firing, Steelbox joining his side.

  “Look, Cap—” Steelbox started.

  “Mud. Just...Mud.”

  “Sure, Cap. Look, we’re in good shape. They didn’t know what to do with us when we didn’t have the—”

  “You don’t have it?!” Mud said. His head hurt, now. All this trouble, all this bullshit, and they didn’t have even the cargo. Now they’d have to start again.

  “Before you work on a stress headache, Cap, we stashed it. They just don’t know where. So they had to keep us here, hoping to bargain with you. Same with the Arrow. Now. Olivet has an idea.”

  Olivet, their human science officer from the settlement world of Bercuser—the strangest planet in the system in that it changed what sun it orbited, changed the very solar system it inhabited, and no one why or how. One of the only people from his world to leave, Olivet’s work sometimes involved inhaling from jars of vapors brought from his home world, mists that allowed him to see limited and strange visions of the future.

  “Olivet? Ideas welcome,” Mud said. They weren’t gaining ground and wouldn’t be able to even hold firm for long.

  “I made these from scraps as we got here,” Olivet said, pressing two shapes into Mud’s free hand. They felt, and looked, mostly like grenades. Enough to fool these guys? Mud decided to try it.

  “Fire in the hole,” he said, loud enough for the enemy to hear him, and lobbed both spheres toward the stairs. People scattered, backing up and making a path. Mud waved his team forward, gaining the ground quickly. “Good call. Now sound off, everyone in good shape back there?”

  Everyone, including Bee, sounded off, and the crew, now all armed, took the stairs, fanning out onto the upper landing. They fought hard, Mud’s limp slowing them down more than anything, and focused only on getting to the top hangar.

  They gained ground inch by inch and foot by foot, using everything possible as cover and watching each other’s backs. Mud watched his team, proud of them all. They’d come together haphazardly, helping his father. With time and effort, though, they’d grown into a team. A team that seemed to be figuring out how to work together. Mostly, Mud mentally amended, as he watched Steelbox and Olivet narrowly avoid catching each other in their own crossfire. They were exchanging words that didn’t seem friendly, but Mud couldn’t make out specifics.

  He also couldn’t get to them to break it up and set them back on mission. Sighing, he shot the foot of another guard, working out a path to his crew. Bee got there first and shoved them apart. The three of them turned back toward fighting the actual enemy, and this time actually remembered how to stagger defense so each of them could hopscotch forward behind various boxes and pillars, making their winding way up to the hangar.

  Mud took the rear position as they gained the final level, inching up the stairs backward, keeping suppressing fire going. His Acadian blaster sat in the holster, out of energy. He relied instead on a standard-issue blaster, annoyed at its limited use. His heel hit air instead of another step and Mud turned, seeing the Arrow sitting there, shining with a slight shimmer around it.

  “They put a shield around it?” he asked Chellox.

  “We did,” the Tsyfarian replied. “Bee set a safety before you left us.”

  “Bee,” Mud said loudly, raising his voice so she could hear him further toward the ship, “you can turn that thing off, right?”

  “You can,” she replied, waving him over. “Got your blaster?”

  Mud handed her his blaster and waited. She sighed at him and dropped the gun to the floor dismissively. “No, the Acadian.”

  “Sure, but it’s out of juice. Couldn’t cut through a shield anyway, though.”

  “Of course not,” Bee said. She popped the energy cartridge out of the gun and reached into the cavity with a finger, wiggling it around, searching for something.

  “Please don’t break—”

  “Mud,” Bee said. Her tone filled in the rest of the sentence.

  He looked behind them, then back at her. “Fine, but quickly? They’re right behind us.”

  “Sorry, your mom mentioned this old trick,” Bee said. She pulled a small cylinder out of the gun and pressed it against the shield, squeezing the cylinder hard. The shimmer vanished with a pop and Bee smiled, shoving the gun back together quickly and handing it over to Mud. “Acadians have unique energy translators. I keyed the ship’s shield to it. Simple.”

  “Unless I didn’t make it,” Mud said. He wasn’t sure he liked this plan. Too easy to strand everyone else.

  “I would’ve made sure the gun, at least, made it.”

  “And if we both died?”

  Steelbox up-nodded at Mud as the Arrow’s hatch opened. “Bicker on board? Let’s get moving, right?”

  Mud shook his head and started onto the ship. “Bee, we have to—”

  “If we both died, the mission would’ve been so off map it wouldn’t matter.”

  “Nope. Have to make sure everyone has an out, no matter what. Don’t do it again.” Mud strapped in, his seat against a side bank of computers. Chellox and Steelbox took their front positions as pilot and navigator, respectively, Chellox putting on a large, hard-sided bird helmet, the fighting gear of his culture, and Steelbox grinned at it. “One day I gotta get me one of those,” he said, with the feeling of an old well-worn conversation starting up.

  “One day you shall earn one,” Chellox replied, checking out the ship and prepping it for takeoff.

  Bee strapped in near Mud, in front of her engineering consoles, and glanced back to make sure Olivet had settled into his science station. “I had to secure the ship,” Bee said to Mud, quietly.

  “Ship second. Crew first. You know that,” Mud said. They were still new, no matter how well they could fight out of a base camp together. Edges like that were what got people killed. It kept Mud up at night, even if, when his father asked whether that specific issue ever wore him down, he would certainly lie.

  “Shooting through hangar,” Chellox said, making sure everyone could hear him, “and going for hard burn in three...two...”

  Mud braced and didn’t catch the end of the countdown. An explosion rattled him as Steelbox fired the ship’s guns, and before that bone rattle could die the Arrow’s strange Tsyfarian engines came to life, pressing Mud deeply into his seat.

  Once more into the black.

  They hit orbit and slowed, drifting lightly while Chellox teased them to a full stop.

  The Arrow sat just outside the tug of the gravity well, pointed down at the planet. The cr
ew waited, knowing. “Crew of the Arrow,” the transmission began, they always started this way, “stand down. We have you locked on. We can blow you from the sky.”

  Mud clapped his hands once, getting ready. Flipping switches in front of him, he set his seat’s mic to live. “Hey down there. We’re fully armed and a mile or so above you. This quickly looks like mutual destruction, right? Only problem is we can dodge. Buildings can’t. But I’ll be honest with you. We don’t have the canister, either. Neither side has it, right now. So let’s go our separate ways and no one has to die today. Deal? Arrow out.”

  The crew waited. No one on board wanted to kill anyone. They tried to avoid it, outside of raw self-preservation. At first some among them had fought against that aim, thinking Mud to be soft. He swore though, with examples to back him up, that on a long time frame, enemies you left alive with dignity could become allies at the strangest times. Mercy had saved members of Mud’s family more times than he could list.

  Chellox, one of those who could have been an enemy at one point, as well as Steelbox, backed Mud’s theory up. So the crew waited, and hoped.

  “Crew of the Arrow, we will launch missiles in five minutes. Stand down,” came their reply.

  Mud smiled, leaving his mic off. “You heard them, guys. We’re fine.”

  “Cap?” Steelbox asked. “They said they’d fire.”

  “Five minutes is a long time,” Chellox said, before Mud could respond. “They save face, we go grab the canister—”

  “Which we totally don’t have right now, but will soon,” Mud put in.

  “—and everyone is happy,” Chellox finished. “Well, for now.”

  “By the time they find out and get angry, they’ll be grateful to be alive,” Mud said. He flipped his mic to live again. “Five minutes. We copy. Arrow out,” he said, flipping the mic off quickly. “Chellox, take us to where you stashed this dumb thing.” Pleased with himself—and his crew, for the most part—Mud sat back and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the pain in his leg.