Guarding an Angel

by Caleb Wachter

  The duffel bag, which Jericho had slung over his shoulder and thought little of to that point, had become a burden he couldn’t afford to bear. But he also couldn’t take it into harm’s way, since it was essentially Eve’s helpless ‘body.’

  He tied it to a nearby hook on a support beam and peered inside the Control Nexus once again. Jericho reached to his tool belt and pulled out the multi-tool, cycling through its settings until it telescoped to its maximum length and girth. He then disengaged his mag boots, tossed the multi-tool through the door, and dove through the portal in the same motion causing his body to trail the multi-tool by only a couple of meters.

  An expertly placed shot hammered into one end of the multi-tool just as Jericho’s head cleared the doorway and he quickly sighted in on the gunman’s location. He brought his plasma pistol around and fired once he was confident he wouldn’t hit any of the surrounding equipment.

  The plasma bolt missed his target, but it did buy Jericho enough time to reach some measure of concealment behind a large, box-shaped structure which, judging from the radiant heat, Jericho guessed housed some kind of cogitating equipment.

  He brought his feet down to the floor and re-engaged the mag boots, causing his feet to clamp down on the deck plates once more — deck plates which were vibrating far more violently than they should have been at this stage in the E.E.V.’s death plunge toward Virgin.

  “You can still get back to your ship,” Jericho called out through his suit’s external speakers. “I won’t kill you if you leave now, but if you stay I won’t have any choice.”

  A pair of pistol rounds snapped off and ricocheted near Jericho’s position, but he didn’t flinch. “You terrorists will never get these weapons,” he heard a woman’s voice say. “I’ll die before I let them fall into your hands!” She snapped off another pair of rounds and Jericho rolled his eyes.

  “I assure you, I want nothing more than the complete destruction of this platform and everything in it,” Jericho said sternly before adding, “along with the other ones positioned around Virgin.”

  “You’re lying!” the operative snapped. “There are no other E.E.V.’s; this is the only one that survived the Great Collapse.”

  Jericho placed his pistol in his left hand and drew Captain Sasaki’s tanto with his right. It wasn’t ideally suited for the task he had in mind for it, but it was the best thing he had at hand. “Either you know the truth and are lying in order to buy yourself time,” Jericho said evenly as gently gripped the knife between his fingers at the tip of the blade, “or you don’t know the truth and are acting on the orders of the people who killed a very good friend of mine. Either way, I’m willing to let you leave if you do so in the next five seconds — otherwise you’re dead.” Jericho spoke with no bravado or malice; he merely said the words with a kind of certainty which very few people could possibly possess when making such a claim.

  “In thirty seconds my friends will—“ the operative began defiantly, but Jericho spun around the corner and fired his plasma pistol gripped in his reconstructed left hand just above her position, causing the operative to duck instinctively. In a move that gave him no pleasure, Jericho threw Sasaki’s tanto in a perfectly-practiced, zero-gee technique which saw the blade bite deeply into the woman’s throat just as she popped out of hiding to land a kill shot of her own.

  Blood sprayed from her neck and she fired off a trio of wild, aimless rounds into the ceiling as Jericho closed the distance between them. Before he could take her weapon from her, it slipped from her fingers as she attempted to stem the flow of blood spraying out from her throat.

  Jericho holstered his pistol and took her in his arms as he gently lowered the woman to the increasingly unsteady deck. The station’s deceleration against Virgin’s atmosphere had begun to generate enough apparent gravity that the woman’s body remained in place in spite of the shaking deck plates. The E.E.V. had begun to vibrate so badly that he doubted it would survive another ten minutes of the increasingly violent deceleration.

  “I didn’t want this,” he said in a conciliatory voice as he pulled the knife from her neck, and for a moment he could see panic in her eyes as she struggled to breathe through the choking flow of blood the knife wound had created. He took her helmeted head in his hands and snapped her neck before laying her body down and sheathing Sasaki’s tanto in his belt. He then quickly made his way to the far side of the room.

  He was more than slightly relieved to find that the console Benton had indicated was still intact and online, so he rushed to it and connected his wrist link via the fiber-optic wire just as he had done with Eve’s tertiary cache.

  It took a few seconds more than he would have liked, during which time several consoles began to wink off throughout the Control Nexus, but Jericho managed to upload Benton’s virus before his console became one of them.

  Benton’s voice came over the platform’s intercom and the big guy’s recording said, “Upload complete…and this is me dropping the mic.”

  The console flashed before dying completely, and Jericho heard Eve’s barely-distinguishable voice over his earpiece, “Whatever you did, I think it’s working; I’m reading a whole slew of new communications coming over the secure channels which the other E.E.V.’s monitor for updates.”

  “We need to get out of here,” he said as he moved toward the door.

  “Sounds good to me,” Eve agreed, “but that’s easier said than done. Since we destroyed the docking arm I can’t just lock onto the station and have you step back into the Tyson.”

  “Doesn’t this thing have escape pods?” Jericho pressed as he deactivated the magnetic boots so he could move more quickly. There was enough apparent gravity that he could take long, loping strides. He did so until he had reached the duffle containing Eve’s components, and after he had untied it from its perch, he began to carry the heavy bag of metallic objects down the corridor.

  “Why would it have escape pods?” Eve asked with open curiosity. “It’s an unmanned station; the only reason there’s amenities for organics is so that they could service it when they were needed.”

  Jericho lurched sideways as there was a loud, groaning sound followed by a pinging sound from somewhere on the opposite side of the E.E.V. When the deck plates settled, he found that the station was vibrating significantly less than it had been. “I’m not sure I like the way you put that just now,” Jericho mumbled.

  “Aww, that’s so sweet,” Eve said, as though commenting on the actions of a stray puppy, “you think I might try to achieve world domination. I’m touched, Jericho. The E.E.V. just lost its detached fuel tanks; looks to me like you’ve got about three minutes to get off that thing without burning up.”

  “What’s the plan?” he asked tensely as he came to a porthole which showed a roaring fireball forming on a telescoping frame of some kind, which had what appeared to be a high-powered transmitter built into it. The boom began to vibrate slowly, with ever-increasing speed even as he watched, and those vibrations caused the deck plates beneath his feet to shake even more violently than they had done a few minutes earlier.

  “You’re…not going to like it,” Eve said hesitantly. But before Jericho could reprimand her for wasting time, she said, “There’s an access port at the end of the path I’m highlighting. Go to it as quickly as you can; the sooner you jump, the better our chances.”

  “Our chances?” Jericho repeated incredulously as the path appeared on his wrist link. He immediately set off along the route as quickly as he could.

  “Yes,” she replied promptly, “even though I’m relatively safe here in the Tyson, my program will degrade in something like seventeen hours. We’re in this together.”

  “What about that ship out there?” Jericho asked as he rounded the final corner of his journey through the straightforward access tunnels built into the E.E.V.

  “You worry about your sled; I’ll worry about the ship,” Eve replied smartly.

  “My sled?” Jericho said, his brow
furrowing in confusion.

  “Hang on,” she said, and the link went dead for a few seconds. When her voice returned, she was all business, “Detach the nearby panel marked ‘X-3.’ Quickly, Jericho—I think our window is even smaller than I thought it would be.”

  Jericho located the panel — which was a solid piece of metal placed over a ninety degree angled corner section of corridor — and grasped it with his hands, but it was firmly lodged in place. He tried to strain against it, but it simply would not budge.

  A porthole built into the hull of the station flashed with light, and he looked outside to see the Neil deGrasse Tyson bank hard as a stream of plasma fire followed the sleek, agile craft. The author of the plasma streams — a large, bulbous vessel easily fifty times the size of the Tyson — ponderously came into view and Jericho knew Eve was fighting for both of their lives out there.

  He returned his attention to the panel and, gripping it with everything he had, he grunted as he put as much power into the effort as he could muster.

  The panel suddenly gave way, and he barely managed to avoid being crushed by it as the panel clanged against the deck plates. “Ok, it’s free,” Jericho said quickly. “Now what?”

  “Duck,” Eve said simply.

  A terrible thought came into Jericho’s mind and he did precisely as Eve suggested. A few seconds later, the hull of the station was hammered by a series of impacts from the Tyson’s light cannons. Thankfully the hull wasn’t armored, and the shots carved a nearly-perfect, ovular pattern nearly three meters wide and two meters tall.

  “That’s all I can do,” she said tensely as Jericho saw another stream of plasma fire erupt from the massive, lumbering vessel — around which the Tyson was running literal circles.

  “That’s enough,” Jericho growled as he drew the monomolecular blade and, after identifying the weakest points along the hull metal, began slicing through them carefully. After he had sawn through the majority of them — a process which took at least a minute — he kicked out against the center section of metal several times until it bend outward enough to allow him to lever the rest out of the way.

  Just as he did so, the Tyson came streaming back into view trailing a thin line of what looked to be engine coolant. “Hold onto the backside of the panel, point it toward the planet, breathe the air out of your lungs, and jump,” Eve said as the Tyson banked hard away from the station just in time to avoid another deadly blast of incoming fire.

  Jericho finally knew what she intended for him to do and, while he would have liked to argue, he knew that every second he waited did in fact decrease his chances of survival. A massive piece of the station snapped off and went sailing past his position just then, and Jericho recognized it as the same transmitter array he had seen vibrating through the porthole.

  So he slung the duffle over his shoulders like a backpack, drug the panel of metal over to the newly-made hole, and took a deep breath.

  “Don’t worry,” Eve said in an assuring tone, “I’ll catch you.”

  Jericho took another deep breath, which he exhaled and pushed off from the rapidly disintegrating station. His makeshift ‘sled’ tumbled end-over-end several times, and Jericho’s suit became increasingly hot as he struggled to keep a grip on the handles inside the piece of angular metal.

  His vision began to narrow and he lost all sense of time; it was all he could do just to keep his fingers gripped as tightly around the handles as possible.

  Then, in the span of just a few seconds, the panel of metal stabilized and he felt himself pressed down against its inverse, ninety degree surface. “Eve,” he said hoarsely, realizing he could still breathe, which meant his suit hadn’t ruptured — yet.

  He could barely hear himself speak, and all around him heated particles from the sled streamed past his re-entry sled in an orange inferno. That inferno suddenly ceased, and before he could figure out what had happened the sled clanged against something hard. “Jump!” Eve said, her amplified voice clear in his earpiece.

  He saw that the Tyson had been the object which the sled had impacted against, and he felt the sled tip over to the side as it began to skitter off the side of the shuttle.

  Jericho dove in the direction he thought the door was located and found that, while his aim had been correct, he had misjudged the distance and the fingers of his left hand barely gripped the edge of the open hatch.

  He flailed wildly with his right hand and felt the shuttle tilt beneath him briefly before, for all intents and purposes, he ‘fell’ into the shuttle’s open door.

  His body crashed front-first into the panel opposite the hatch, and the duffle with Eve’s components slammed into his back with enough force to knock the air out of his lungs.

  “Hang on,” Eve said, and he felt the gravity inside the shuttle normalize just as the outer hull began to crackle audible. “I could use a hand if you’re up to it,” she said fiercely.

  Scarcely able to stand, Jericho literally crawled several steps before regaining enough composure to stagger into the co-pilot’s seat — the seat he had come to think of as his own — and strap himself in.

  “Glad you could make it,” Eve quipped, “my cogitators aren’t operating at peak output; I’ll handle the gunning if you do the running.”

  “Sounds good,” Jericho wheezed as he gripped the controls of the craft and got his bearings. The truth, in spite of what he had said to Masozi during the Keno Adjustment, was that Jericho was an accomplished small craft pilot. He would never consider himself a fighter ace, but he had spent hundreds of hours working with the Tyson’s systems in the VR trainers. It was a small matter for him to locate their pursuers and strike a course that would take him as far afield of their firing arcs as possible.

  “Bring us around, sugar,” Eve said hungrily, “let’s give these bad boys a hot dose.”

  Jericho checked his instruments and, satisfied that enough of the craft’s motive power remained to enable the maneuver he had in mind, he cut the engines briefly. Using his attitude adjusters, he deftly spun the craft a hundred and fifty degrees and then poured everything the Tyson’s engines had into an approach vector. The acceleration was tremendous and, were it not for the specially designed seats of the shuttle’s cockpit, he was fairly certain that he would have lost consciousness during the burn.

  A jet of blue-white plasma fire splashed over the shuttle’s bow, but the Tyson’s shields kept the worst of it from damaging the relatively frail vessel’s hull.

  “My turn,” Eve snarled, and Jericho brought the nose of the craft around a few degrees more than it had been and Eve unleashed the shuttle’s four, fire-linked cannons. Streams of energy peppered the bulbous, converted freighter’s hull, sending geysers of atmospheric venting in a long, vicious line which extended from nearly bow to stern. She kept the fire coming and, just as the Tyson was about to swing past the ship, Jericho executed another hard turn which brought the enemy ship’s trio of engines into plain view.

  Eve needed only a pair of seconds on target before her sustained fire caused the first engine to violently explode, sending the vessel careening toward the planet. She kept pouring on the fire as Jericho fought to keep the other engines within the craft’s firing arc. He succeeded in doing so long enough for Eve to render the second of the three engines inoperable, and Jericho quickly turned the craft so they could make their escape.

  Even as he did so, the enemy ship opened fire with a hail of weaponry similar to the Tyson’s. But he quickly left those weapons’ fields of fire, and after just a few more seconds he concluded that the other ship would be unable to pursue them.

  “Nicely done, old man,” Eve said approvingly. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  “A sexbot and a geezer,” he grunted as he attempted to hail the Zhuge Liang on a secure channel, “what a pair we make.”

  “Touché,” she said, and her image appeared on a nearby display. She actually looked beat up, with a black eye and a trail of virtual blood streaming down from h
er left nostril. But she gave him a hard, meaningful look as she said, “All jokes aside…thank you, Jericho. Even if the techs on the Kongming can’t put humpty-dumpty back together again, I’ll never forget what you did for me just now.”

  “Don’t mention it again and we’ll be even,” Jericho said awkwardly. “I didn’t know what you really were, Eve, but I can see why you were important to Benton. I promised him that I’d take care of you, and that’s what I did.”

  Eve nodded slowly. “It doesn’t make any sense to me why you risked your life just for a chance to save mine,” she said with a sigh, “but a debt’s a debt. If there’s anything I can do for you, I’m your bitch.”

  “Then the first thing is,” Jericho quipped as he finally established contact with the Zhuge Liang, “you can stow as much of that archeo-slang as physically possible.”

  Eve looked genuinely offended. “Well that wouldn’t be any fun, now would it?”

  “There’s more to life than fun, Eve,” Jericho muttered.

  “Could have fooled me,” she retorted, and a lopsided grin spread across his lips as the channel finally clarified and Captain Charles’ image appeared on the comm. display.

  “Good news?” Jericho said darkly.

  Captain Jeffrey Charles nodded. “We achieved firing solutions on all sixteen of the errant platform’s crust-busters before they could arm — they’ve all been destroyed,” he replied with obvious relief. “Our scans show that the rest of them are falling into the atmosphere in what looks to be an auto-scuttling protocol. The warheads the others are armed with won’t detonate when they impact, but they will scatter quite a bit of radioactive material. Still, the damage will be negligible according to our projections.”

  Jericho breathed a sigh of relief. “Good work, Jeff,” he said as he sank back into his chair. “Give me a rendezvous so we can link up and get out of this System.”

  “You’ve got a destination in mind?” Captain Charles asked with narrowed eyes.