‘You know where he is?’ Sarah sounded doubtful.
‘Yeah. He’s in the Colonnade.’
Sarah stopped asking questions after that. She probably thought Joshua was out of his mind.
They reached the hangar and quickly found “Nicky”. She was one of only three of the orbital ships the Academy kept running. The other two had mechanics swarming all over them, even at this hour. They had seen some action in Europe, after running into a swarm of drones last week while investigating a possible Confederate leader sighting. It might be weeks before they were refitted for flight in sub-orbit. With only one active ship, the Academy would be hard pressed to chase after Joshua. Assuming he could convince Richard to help.
They passed under a catwalk the mechanics could use to quickly reach the top of the ships, and found Richard under Nicky’s port wing. He was adjusting a heat panel with the exact precision of an expert, when he saw them and immediately perked up.
‘Right lads, where are we off to?’ he said, putting away his tools.
Joshua glanced at Sarah. ‘Got him on our side easier than I expected.’
Dr. Prewett appeared at the foot of the ship’s boarding ramp. He stumbled forward a few steps as if shoved from behind, letting out a small whimper. Ryan appeared out of the shadows, a strange looking Stunner rifle trained on the doctor.
‘But I won’t be,’ he said, and shifted his aim over to Joshua.
He fired.
Chapter 16
Sarah leaped at Ryan, but she was tired, and her reactions were slow. She collided with the beam of energy that arced towards Joshua, and collapsed in a heap. Ryan’s gun fired a second shot almost instantly, singeing the ground at Joshua’s feet.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Richard stood rooted to the spot; unable to believe Ryan was capable of such an act.
Sarah had her full jumpsuit on, but the Stunner had cut her down like butter. The weapon looked different, not simply a re-tuned one for their exercises on the island. Sarah let out an intense groan of pain. Joshua thought fast. Normal Stunners merely locked up the target’s muscles, it was supposed to feel relatively pain-free, like a particularly bad shock of static electricity.
This was something new. Something not used by the Academy. In fact he hadn’t seen the Confederacy use anything like this either-
Ryan fired again. His gun spat out another double burst.
Joshua dived low, into the shadow of the catwalk behind them. Once concealed, he sprang back up and clung to the underside of the walkway, the sudden change in direction an attempt to confuse and distract.
Richard considered drawing his pistol, but Ryan was swinging his aim over him. He opted to antagonise Ryan instead.
‘Come off it mate, you’re no match for Joshua,’ he said. Ryan flicked his weapon towards him in warning. Before Richard could draw his six-shooter, Ryan reached an arm to Richard’s waist and disarmed him. Then he stomped off, Dr. Prewett in tow, searching for Joshua with the strange Stunner and Richard’s revolver.
‘Move a muscle and you’re dead,’ Ryan growled.
Joshua scuttled along the catwalk, putting some distance between himself and the last place Ryan had seen him.
He wants Richard to fly him out of here, Joshua thought. That’s why he’s not dead yet. But why kidnap the doctor? He tried to push aside the thought of what would have happened to Sarah if she hadn’t been wearing her suit.
He considered crawling all the way to the other end of the hangar; the mechanics on the far side would help. Ryan must have thought of the same thing. He aimed his gun up and shot at the rocks above the mechanics. Hundreds of tonnes of rock poured down onto them as they scrambled out of the way. Joshua saw a couple of them catch a few furniture-sized chunks with their skulls. At least it was over quick.
One gigantic rock landed on the catwalk, far away from Joshua. The impact sent the catwalk collapsing to the floor, his hiding place crashing down with it. At the last second he remembered the anti-gravity of his jumpsuit and switched it on with a swipe of his finger. He landed with a quiet thud on the ground away from the catwalk and rolled under the Nyctalopia moments before Ryan stormed around the corner.
Joshua waited, watching Ryan’s feet pace back and forth. It was only a matter of time before he thought to look under the ship; it was too obvious a hiding spot. When Ryan turned his back a second time, Joshua rolled out. He still had the anti-gravity activated on his suit, so without a moment to lose he put all his newly built strength into jumping straight up to the top of the ship’s hull. He seemed to float for a moment at the top of his leap, but he safely touched down as soft as a feather on all fours.
Ryan kept his gun trained on Richard as he snapped his head around, searching for any sign of Joshua. He flicked a hand at the ship.
‘Get on board and get her ready to move,’ he said. Richard just stood there, arms held up. Ryan walked over and hit him in the gut with the butt of his rifle. ‘I said get moving!’
He smacked Richard over the head, nearly knocking him unconscious. Richard finally complied, and staggered up the boarding ramp. Ryan pushed the doctor up too.
‘Don’t fret doc, you’re going right back where I found you. You’re more valuable than I gave you credit for,’ he said with a smirk.
Joshua crawled on his belly to the edge of the ship’s roof. Sarah still lay in a heap a few metres from Ryan.
‘Don’t even think about following me!’ Ryan called out. ‘One shot to the head will finish her off.’ He fired his weapon on the ground in a pattern around Sarah’s exposed face, making a point of how easy it would be. Joshua gritted his teeth. He couldn’t reach her.
Ryan punched a fist into the boarding ramp’s control switch and the ramp closed up after him.
The floor around the Nyctalopia shuddered. The take off sequence had begun. Joshua’s mind raced as he lay on top of the ship. The launch sequence couldn’t be activated from the ship itself, which meant Ryan had an accomplice over in air traffic control.
How many people in this place could he really trust? It was a terrifying thought.
The walls around him began to drop away as the platform the ship rested on surged upward. Joshua jumped down off the ship and ran over to Sarah. At this range she’d be sucked into the jets the ship used for take off. Joshua picked her up, and frantically searched for somewhere to keep her safe. The vertical tunnel to the island surface the ships used had no connecting passages anywhere. As soon as they reached the top, Ryan was sure to have Richard take off immediately. Too risky to run for it on the surface.
Joshua looked down at Sarah in his arms. She was still breathing, just barely. He shifted her weight, freeing his arm to take hold of her hand. He bent her middle finger down to her palm then slid it upwards, activating her suit’s micro hooks for surface adhesion.
The platform reached the surface and they burst out into daylight on the tropical island. The light was blinding and the ship’s jets were deafening.
Joshua dashed for the ship and heaved Sarah up on to the hull. Her suit stuck her body on the side like a magnet. The Nyctalopia left the ground, tearing away Joshua’s hold on Sarah. But then it stopped and hovered for several seconds a few metres above the ground.
Thanks Richard, hopefully that didn’t cost you too much, thought Joshua. He activated his own suit’s adhesion and jumped up to the ship, sticking on the outer hull next to Sarah, as the ship zoomed off over the open ocean.
They had maybe fifteen minutes before the Nyctalopia entered a low orbit around the planet. But they would suffocate to death before then. Joshua looked down at the quickly receding ocean below. That was a mistake. He clung to the side of the ship, petrified. He’d never been more than twenty metres or so in the air, apart from the few trips he’d made on the Nyctalopia. But those trips had been inside the ship. Now he was looking out into the vast empty sky with nothing between him and a long drop to a watery grave.
Plans flitted through his mind and were discarde
d just as fast. The boarding ramp was shut tight and couldn’t be opened from the outside. He couldn’t crawl inside a jet intake and survive. He didn’t have anything with which to break the cockpit windshield. There were no air vents or ducts to crawl through. He was finished.
The air started to get thin as they gained altitude, and Joshua fought for oxygen. His vision became dim.
Sarah’s breath came in ragged gasps. They had to be at least four kilometres up by now. The ship’s speed kept increasing, the wind ripped at their bodies trying to peel them off and fling them far away. It would be over in a few seconds.
A rumble in the belly of the ship caught Joshua’s attention. Was the ship getting ready for the final push out into the stratosphere? he wondered, on the edge of consciousness. No, it was too soon.
Suddenly a panel on the hull to Joshua’s right popped up and slid away. Another pushed up into its place, and the original lowered into the new gap created. The new section of hull that existed next to Joshua was shiny and smooth, whereas the rest of the ship was still covered in a material similar to their jumpsuits.
Joshua gasped on thin air as he realised the ship was switching to the hull needed for a trip in low orbit. All around him now other sections were popping up and sliding away to be replaced with the one underneath.
Without warning the panel he and Sarah were attached to pushed out away from the ship, leaving them hanging even further out from the ship. The panel slid over, dragging them with it, as the inner hull plugged the gap it left behind. Their panel retracted, and Joshua found himself being pulled back to the ship, then suddenly he was inside, between the hulls.
He couldn’t see a thing, and the smell of engine grease and recycled air filled his nose, making him gag. One of the inner panels shuffled around as it prepared to move itself to the outer hull, and Joshua saw a gap down into the cargo hold. He grabbed Sarah’s hand and rolled over her, not pausing to enjoy the sensation, and dropped down through the gap, pulling her with him.
She collapsed onto him in a pile, safely inside.
Chapter 17
The fall knocked Sarah awake. She had landed on Joshua, who didn’t look like he wanted to move in a hurry. They were inside the Nyctalopia, at the top of the boarding ramp in the cargo hold, on the very same raft they had first come aboard.
‘Are you enjoying this?’ she asked.
He blushed and opened his mouth but no sound came out.
Sarah rolled off him before things got any more awkward. She felt groggy, but managed to take in the surroundings with a glance.
'How did we-?' A beam of light reflected off a wall into her eyes. ‘Ooh my head,' she winced. 'Never mind. We need backup, have you contacted Casey?’
Joshua stared. ‘I was planning to steal this ship myself, remember?’
‘That’s not important now,’ Sarah rebuffed him. She fired up her iPC and opened a channel to the Academy. She was rewarded with a high-pitched screech in her head.
‘Argh! Dammit!’ She quickly shut her iPC down and the noise subsided. ‘Ohh my head...’
‘You okay? Joshua asked. Sarah shook her head to clear it. He wasn’t sure if that was a yes or no.
‘So, Ryan is a Confederate spy,’ Sarah said. ‘And he knows how to access our iPC network to overload it with junk noise,’ she tapped her head. ‘More importantly he’s got Dr. Prewett hostage. I shouldn’t need to tell you how valuable that man is.’
‘Okay so what’s the plan?’ Joshua said.
Sarah stopped and thought for a minute. ‘Our first priority should be the doctor and Richard’s safety, but I want to know just what Ryan is up to. He doesn’t know we’re on board, probably assumes we died outside during take off. We can use that to our advantage. Let’s snoop around, see if we can find some useful intel.’
Joshua nodded in agreement, but added, ‘Maybe Ryan is taking Dr. Prewett so he can get access to the bio-ID for himself?’
‘It’s possible,’ Sarah conceded, ‘But we need more to go on.’ She pointed at a malfunctioning panel on the wall. ‘See if you can slip back between the hulls...’ Joshua groaned as Sarah continued, ‘...and work your way around to the cockpit, you should be able to hear anything they say from there. Ryan won’t leave Richard alone in there for a second.’
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
Sarah was already halfway down the corridor as she said, ‘I’m going to find out where we’re headed.’
Sarah pulled her suit’s hood down over her face. Two beady eyes peeped out from under the cloth. She swiped her right middle finger, and the active camouflage engaged. If someone unfamiliar with the jumpsuits saw her now, it would seem as though there were two eyes bobbing up and down in mid air, peeking around every corner. Even her sword was neatly covered with a helpful strap of the camouflaged cloth.
She tip toed through the narrow corridors, swaying only slightly as the fog in her head cleared. She advanced slowly nonetheless, checking each room for any surprises Ryan may have left. He may be a Confederate scumbag, but he had trained alongside her at the Academy for over a year. All the tricks they’d been taught to counter the Confederacy, Ryan knew them by heart. He wouldn’t take any chances there might be any stowaways. He had already proven his paranoia by scrambling any local iPCs. At least they’d be on equal footing; his iPC would be just as useless.
Sarah stuck her head around the last corner before the ladder up to the cockpit. The ship had checked out so far, no traps. Ryan must have been in a hurry. It wasn’t like him.
She eyed the ladder warily, not trusting it. This was far too easy. Without her iPC, she had to rely on her normal vision to identify any pitfalls. She crept closer to the ladder. Sure enough, there was the first and only trap Ryan had bothered to place, most likely to keep Richard and the doctor from leaving the cockpit where he could see them.
The tiny device was stuck to the wall, just left of the ladder. It looked like a harmless black plastic protrusion. Sarah reached down to her waist where there was a small pocket fitted snugly on her hip. She produced a small marble-sized ball and threw it down at the base of the ladder. Clean white smoke billowed up around the device, revealing a laser beaming across the passageway.
One small step further and she’d have lost a limb. She had no more time to waste. Turning off her camouflage and switching to anti-grav, she leaped two metres straight up and grabbed onto the ladder above the laser. She scrambled up the rest of the way, switched back to active camouflage, and entered the cockpit.
The doctor, sitting at the navigation console, saw her straight away. He almost jumped out of his skin when two eyes floated over to him. Sarah squatted down behind his chair and waited patiently.
The doctor quickly realised it was someone in a camouflaged jumpsuit, and got himself under control before Ryan turned around from the copilot’s chair.
‘Calm down doc,’ he said. ‘Don’t do anything stupid and you’ll be fine. I need you alive, but you don’t need your kneecaps for your research, you get me?’
Dr. Prewett forced himself to look at Ryan, and nodded dumbly.
They were in the mesosphere now, around 60 kilometres up. Sarah could see the curvature of the earth falling away into space. She held on to the back of Dr. Prewett’s chair as Richard flipped a few switches from the pilot’s seat. He was making it look more difficult than it really was in the hopes that Ryan would think he was still indispensable. The ship levelled off, and began to fall back down again for the first skip off the stratosphere.
Sarah felt a moment of zero gravity, and gripped the seat tighter. Everyone else was already strapped in their seats.
There was a thud in the wall. Then a soft, muffled curse. Sarah caught her breath. She could hear Joshua in the walls. Why didn’t anyone else? She floated up to the ceiling, trying to find where he was. Dr. Prewett started coughing loudly in a poor attempt to mask the noise. Ryan was still as stone, his weapon held steady on Richard. Sarah tapped softly on the ceiling, and Joshua tapped
back seconds later. She floated around, homing in on the taps.
Fortunately Ryan hadn’t noticed for now. As soon as they had flown outside the Academy’s signal blackout zone he had opened a private comm channel from the Nyctalopia.
‘This is Fletcher A04, I’m on my way back now.... around 80 minutes... on a hypersonic jet, that’s how... yes Mr. Meyrick, uh I mean, yes sir. I understand... no sir, it was otherwise a clean getaway... the pilot and the scientist who invented the bio-ID... is Brock really that necessary any more? I see, uh huh, yes sir...’
Sarah pondered his words. Fletcher A04? Was that the Confederate faction Casey had warned them of? Were they working together or was it a splinter group? She didn’t like it either way.
While Ryan was busy with the ship’s comm, Sarah heard a whisper from inside the walls. Joshua.
‘Get out of there,’ she whispered as low as possible, still unable to use her iPC comm. Besides Joshua didn’t have one anyway. ‘You’ll be heard. Fall back to the cargo bay.’
Joshua’s voice filtered through the wall. ‘No. I’ve got an idea.’ He lowered his voice further to a hoarse whisper. ‘On my signal, just undo Ryan’s seat belt.’
‘What? How will-’
Ryan turned around, as though he heard a noise.
Sarah had to float back down to her position behind the doctor’s chair before the ship levelled out and gravity returned. She sat there for the next hour, waiting for Joshua’s signal, and trying not to let her muscles cramp up. She’d been unable to confirm the plan with Joshua, since Ryan had Richard’s six-shooter out and was waving it around at shadows. He had become spooked after he’d spoken on the comm.
Sarah had caught the name “Mr. Meyrick”, and Ryan seemed to be daunted by whoever it was on the other end. He had ended the call with repeated promises to “secure the package” and “secure Brock”. He seemed a bit shaken as he terminated the connection. Sarah had little sympathy. Ryan had had friends, fans and followers in the Academy. It was a home. He’d said so himself on occasion. But he had been playing them for fools the whole time. Sarah felt betrayed, she didn’t know who she could trust any more.
The Covert Academy Page 9
