Chapter Twenty-Four
Jenavian told Thexyl everything. The truth about the crystal, the Widow, the Hierarchy…everything. And as she’d come to expect after so many years working with him, he absorbed each and every revelation with far more grace and aplomb than she ever could.
“I admit I feel a bit foolish not putting it all together before,” he said once she’d finished. “Many of the facts were right in front of us had we chosen to look for them.”
“Yeah, well, recriminations can wait,” she grumbled, pacing impatiently across the room. “Right now we have to figure out some way to get out of here.”
A series of mottled blue patches rippled across his neck. “So I take it you aren’t interested in the Widow’s plan for you, then.”
“Are you serious? She’s insane. This whole thing is insane.”
“I just wanted to be certain,” Thexyl said. “After our previous debates, I assumed—”
“You can rub it in my face later,” Jenavian cut him off. “Right now we need a plan. Do you have any ideas?”
“That depends. Where are we escaping to?”
She pressed her lips into a tight line. “We have to get back to New Keledon. We have to warn them about the attack and help them to evacuate. I doubt it will take the Drones long to upgrade that warship out there.”
“From what little I know about astral drive cores, installation is not a trivial task. At a minimum they’ll have to find a seat for the new engine and integrate it with the existing systems. They’ll also have to completely refit the sublight drive thrusters, assuming they want to be able to move once they shift over. For a ship that size, the process could take weeks.”
“The Drones are fast and efficient. I doubt it will take them more than a few days.”
“You’re probably right,” Thexyl agreed. He then paused and cocked his head to the side. “There is another concern, of course. What about Markus?”
Jenavian sighed and closed her eyes. Her pride was about to take the beating of a lifetime, but perhaps that was long overdue. “We have to get him out of here,” she whispered. “Based on what Ralon said before I don’t think the Drones have finished scrubbing him yet, but I’m sure it won’t be long before the Widow tries to stuff Foln inside his body. I just hope there’s still something left.”
“I’m glad we agree. Getting to him should be easy enough; freeing him and escaping the compound alive will be the real challenge.” He swiveled in his chair and keyed something into the computer terminal. “The shuttle we arrived on is still intact; the Drones haven’t dissected it just yet. That’s our only feasible escape route.”
“Assuming we can shift into astral space before the orbital tractor beams lock us in place or the Unifier blows us to pieces, anyway,” she muttered. “We’re also not going to have time to sit in the hangar bay and wait while the engines spin up—we’ll need to grab Markus and then get the hell out of here before any of the Spiders catch up to us.”
“Or the Widow,” he added grimly. “On that note, do you think it’s possible she’s already discerned your intentions? No offense to the potency of your mental barriers, but I’m not sure how well I’d trust them versus the might of a hundred something year-old Sarafan.”
“If so, I’m not sure why she’d let me leave her parlor. But either way, it doesn’t matter. There’s no point in worrying about something we can’t control. We need a plan.”
Thexyl turned back to the console as a ripple of thoughtful black crawled along his neck. “We do have options. We should be able to divert a few of the inactive repair mechs to begin powering up the shuttle without drawing undo attention. The Drones may be telepaths, but they’d have to physically access the repair logs like anyone else to notice that something was amiss with the repair schedule.”
“Good idea,” Jenavian said, tapping the console next to him and calling up a map of the compound’s floor plan. “I’d also see if you can dispatch a few others to run diagnostics near the doors. If we can seal off these three corridors, it would buy us more time before reinforcements show up to cut us off.”
“It will also increase the odds that someone notices the stray mechs, but it’s probably worth the risk. I’ll input the commands now.”
She nodded and strode over to her closet. None of the jumpsuits hanging inside were much different than the one she was currently wearing, but she wasn’t interested in a simple change of clothing. Instead her eyes fastened on the pristine suit of armor lurking in the back. It felt like ages since she’d been able to put it on, but now was as good a time as any.
Under normal circumstances, parading around the ship in full combat gear would throw up plenty of red flags, but Jenavian didn’t plan on encountering anyone if she could help it…not until she was fighting her way out, anyway. She quickly slid into the form-fitting blue mesh and locked the silver armor plates into place, then took a few seconds to make sure the shielding and stealth systems were still charged and ready to go. Once everything was fitted and in place, she tossed together a small supply pouch with the essentials—extra energy cells, a flash grenade, a sonic charge, and a multi-tool kit—and then grabbed a pulse pistol and slid it into her hip holster. The only thing left was her rifle, which she took a minute to properly calibrate as Thexyl finished reprogramming the mechs.
“Everything is ready,” he said after a few minutes. “I don’t suppose you have a Kali version of that armor in the back of the closet for me.”
“We’ll have to swing by the wreckage of the Manticore sometime and see if we can salvage yours,” she replied dryly. “Anyway, with luck you shouldn’t need it. Go on ahead to the shuttle and make sure everything is ready.”
“You may need assistance in retrieving Markus,” Thexyl pointed out. “I doubt the Drones will simply let you take him.”
“I can handle them. Just focus on the shuttle. And if for some reason I don’t make it…” Jenavian shrugged. “Then just get the hell out of here. Warn the city about the attack.”
A faint speck of yellow materialized on the bottom of his chin. “I will do what I can.”
“Good, then let’s get this over with,” she said, stepping out into the hall.
“Jen.”
She stopped and glanced back over her shoulder. “What?”
He triggered his camouflage reflex, and he began to blend in with the room’s red backdrop. “For what it’s worth, I understand how difficult this must be for you. But the people of New Keledon don’t deserve death, and neither does Markus.”
“I’m the one who brought it down on them,” Jenavian reminded him. “This is my fault—all of it. I just hope it’s not too late to fix it. Now come on.”
They slipped out of her quarters and took off in opposite directions. Her target, the interrogation room, was only one deck down and three junctions away from her quarters, but it was easily the longest walk of her life. The corridors on the Nidus were never exactly flooded with people, but if she sparked the curiosity of even a single Drone or other Spider, they could alert the Widow and this would all be over before it even began…
But thankfully most of the corridors were empty, and her psychic web gave her plenty of advanced warning to avoid the ones that weren’t. All told it took her less than two minutes to reach her destination, and once she did she pulled the flash grenade off her belt and flicked on the timed detonator. It wouldn’t buy her much time—the moment anything happened to the Drones inside the Nidus’s mistress would know something was wrong—but at least without their visual data, the Widow wouldn’t know exactly what was wrong. In the end, that might buy Jenavian a few precious seconds. It wasn’t much, but with a few galaxies’ worth of luck it would be enough.
Her hand hovered over the door’s entry keypad and stopped. One way or another, she was about to make the biggest—and, in all likelihood, last—decision of her life. Dimly, she wondered if Markus had felt the same way when he’d defected back on Typhus…
Taking
in a final deep breath, Jenavian keyed the door open and flicked the grenade inside.
The charge went off almost immediately, and the trio of Drones all shrieked in surprise. Markus was there, clamped down to the med-table with various tubes pumping his body full of chemicals. The Drones surrounded him in a half-circle, their typical vacant, starry-eyed expressions replaced with shock and confusion.
Three clean shots later, they were all crumpled in smoking heaps on the floor, and Jenavian was already lunging towards the table.
“Can you hear me?” she asked as she tore off his restraints. Markus’s head bobbed to the side and he moaned something unintelligible. She’d seen enough of these interrogations over the years to know that without aid, he probably wouldn’t be able to form a complete sentence for hours, let alone walk. But she also knew that they had roughly a zero percent chance of getting out of here alive with her lugging around a hundred kilo man in her arms, and so once his restraints were off she reached over to one of the supply cases and grabbed ahold of the strongest stims she could find.
Jenavian injected three of them into his arm, enough to rupture a normal human heart in short order. His psychogenetically-enhanced organs would be able to handle it, though, and a few seconds later his eyes finally focused on her and lit up in some semblance of recognition.
“You were right,” she told him. “You can brag all you want about it later, but we need to get out of here.”
“Jen…?” he slurred.
“Just hold on.”
She draped him over her right side and shifted the rifle to her left. The first alarm klaxons started wailing the moment they reached the doorway, and at that point she knew the race was on. She just had to hope that Thexyl’s repair mechs were doing their job…
Gritting her teeth, Jenavian set off towards the hangar. Three turns and four bizarrely-empty corridors later they were hobbling down the final stretch, and she actually started to believe that this suicidal plan of theirs was going to work. But then the hangar doors abruptly whooshed open before she even hit the panel, and a warning flashed in her mind that they were about to be ambushed—
Too late. The fist of telekinetic force slammed into her chest and sent her hurling backwards into the opposite wall. Markus’s mostly insensate body tumbled to the side and flopped hard against the metal floor.
“From the first moment you found him I knew this would happen,” Ralon Sisk said, his head shaking in contempt as he stepped forward to block the doorway. “I knew he would get to you. I knew he would twist you around his finger just like he always has.”
Jenavian reached out for her rifle, but it skittered out of her reach as Sisk gave it another quick telekinetic push. Instinctively, her hand flicked down to her hip holster, but her pistol was nowhere to be found.
“I could see it again when I looked into his memories,” Sisk went on, stopping and looming over Markus’s body. “I could see the doubt on your face and hear the hesitation in your voice. I warned the Widow that you would betray us, that no matter how much you’d tried to convince yourself otherwise, you regretted not leaving with him on Typhus.” He grunted derisively. “But she refused to believe me. She insisted the fact you delivered him to us was proof of your loyalty…but I know you better than she ever could.”
“Ralon, you have no idea what’s going on here,” she said, vaulting back to her feet. “If you did, you’d—”
“I know exactly what is going on,” he growled. “Unlike with you and Markus, the Widow has never doubted my loyalty. She told me the truth after Mirador. She saw how the two of you were wavering, but she knew that I would understand.”
“Understand what? That we’re serving a megalomaniac who committed genocide against her own people?”
“She culled the weak, nothing more,” Sisk said. “And now our race is stronger for it.”
“Maybe you haven’t checked up on our race recently, but it isn’t doing too well,” Jenavian bit out, inspecting the area as casually as she could in search of an advantage. She could already feel more psychic minds approaching. They had another minute, perhaps two, before this was all over, and she needed to figure something out fast. “Do you really think you’re going to rebuild some grand order by harvesting adepts off destitute colony worlds?”
“It ensures that those who reach us are strong.”
She scoffed and took a small step forward. Sisk’s pistol was still in its holster, but hers was lying on the ground just a few meters from Markus. If she could just shift a little closer, she might be able to get a mental grip on it and yank it back into her hand…
“Don’t tell me you believe that,” Jenavian said. “All the Widow really cares about is staying in power, just like the rest of the Sarafan did. They were a blight on the galaxy the first time, and I doubt the encore would be any different.”
“The Sarafan were the stewards of the galaxy, the keepers of the peace,” Sisk replied mechanically. “They were all that stood between order and chaos.”
“And Markus thought I was the one who’d been brainwashed,” she murmured. “Listen to yourself. The Widow is about to send a cruiser to exterminate fifty-thousand innocent people, a significant chunk of whom are human. Mirador will look like an afterthought by comparison!”
His eyes briefly flicked down to Markus’s gasping form, and he kicked the pistol halfway down the hall before looking back up at her. “It doesn’t matter. I will find any Flies worth saving and discard the rest. Perhaps one of them will even be able to replace you.”
Biting down on her lip, Jenavian reluctantly settled into a combat stance. She had no interest in fighting him; he was every bit her equal, and she simply didn’t have the time for a drawn-out pummeling match. Unfortunately, she seemed to have run out of alternatives. She just had to hope she could overcome him quickly before the Widow—
She caught the faintest flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye, and it took all of her self-control not to gawk at the familiar quasi-invisible blur skulking around the corner and creeping up behind the other Spider. If she could just hold Sisk’s attention for another few seconds…
“Maybe,” she said, shifting her weight and adopting a more threatening pose. “But I’m really not interested in arguing right now. Either get out of my way or end up dead on the floor. It’s your choice.”
Sisk grunted. “The Widow always believed you were the best of us. That’s why she could never accept that you were as lost as Markus.” He drew his pulse pistol with a flick of his wrist. “I think I’ll enjoy proving her wrong.”
In that moment, Thexyl struck. He crouched down by the doorway and fired—
But Sisk was no longer there. With preternatural grace the man whirled clear of the blast, flipped up his pistol, and shot Thexyl squarely in the chest. The Kali screeched and collapsed backwards, his camouflage fading into bright yellow terror as he twitched on the floor.
Jenavian screamed. It wasn’t a sound she had made before. It might not have been a sound any human had made before. It echoed through the corridor and across the hangar bay, a shrill, visceral cry that would have curdled the blood of the most voracious predator. And then she was moving.
She pounced forward and swept the pistol from Sisk’s grip, and in nearly the same motion she drove her elbow into his chin to stagger him in place. Before he could recover, she dropped into a crouch and kicked out the back of his knee. His armor smacked against the metal floor with a reverberating clank, and she threw herself on top of him, sliding her electro-knife from its sheath on her wrist and lunging straight for his unprotected face.
He caught her forearm with both hands just as the blade dipped within a centimeter of his flesh, and for a long, agonizing moment they engaged in a primal contest of raw strength. But even as Jenavian’s rage and adrenaline-fueled grip overpowered him, Sisk still managed to divert the blow into his shoulder armor. The blade bounced harmlessly away, and he drove his knee up into her flank hard enough to send her tumb
ling off of him.
She was back on her feet in an instant, snarling and lunging for his throat like a cornered beast…but she never made it. Another telekinetic fist slammed into her stomach, knocking the wind from her lungs and hurling her backwards into the wall. Her vision blurred as her head smacked hard against the metal, and the invisible pressure locked her in place. Reflexively, she summoned her own powers and tried to break free, but it was all she could do to keep him from crushing her into a fine paste…
“The Widow is coming, can you feel it?” Sisk said, his now bloodshot eyes fastened wide. “She knows that you’re willing to refuse her gifts. She knows of your betrayal.”
Roaring again, Jenavian pushed back with everything she could muster. Slowly but surely she was gaining ground, but slowly but surely wasn’t going to cut it. Sisk was right: she could feel the Widow and the Drones closing in, and they were already attempting to assault her mind, battering against her mental barriers to force her to divide her attention…
“She will break you, just as I broke him,” Sisk said, a dark smile forming on his lips. “And then you will die.”
He growled and redoubled his efforts, and it felt like the weight of the entire compound was pressing down against her—
A pulse blast lit up the corridor, and suddenly the pressure released. Sisk swiveled around in shock as the shielding in the back of his armor crackled. Markus was lying there in a half-crouch, clutching at his chest with his left hand and holding Sisk’s dropped pistol in his right. He fired a second time and then a third before Sisk finally spun and swatted the weapon out of the other man’s grip. A wisp of smoke puffed up from the back of his armor; the shielding was designed to withstand small arms fire, even from point-blank range. But while Sisk might not have been hurt, the attack had bought Jenavian a few precious seconds. And they were more than enough.
With a final guttural howl she leapt forward, telekinetically sucked her electro-knife back into her hand, and drove it cleanly through the back of Sisk’s neck.
A geyser of warm blood erupted in her face, and she shoved Sisk forward into the wall even as he gurgled out an incomprehensible stream of anguished babble. She then crouched over Markus and helped lift his head.
“Can you move?” she asked between labored breaths as she tried to hoist him back up.
“Well enough,” he replied, pushing her hands away. “Just check on Thexyl—we don’t have much time.”
Jenavian nodded and dove over to the Kali’s body. He wasn’t moving, but he did have a faint pulse. She swept him up in her arms, immediately thankful for his people’s light, flexible frames, and dashed towards the shuttle even as Markus limped along behind her. The instant she made it up the ramp she curled into the small infirmary and laid Thexyl down on the med-table. He was badly wounded, and there was a very real chance he wouldn’t survive the trip into orbit…but as desperately as she wanted to stop and try to stabilize him, she knew they were out of time. If they couldn’t lift off in the next few seconds, they were all dead anyway.
Whirling about, she sprinted to the cockpit and checked to see how far the repair mechs had gotten on the pre-flight sequences. Mercifully, it appeared that Sisk had been more worried about stopping her than powering down the shuttle, and all systems were already in the green.
“I hope you have a plan for getting out of here,” Markus said as he collapsed into the chair behind her. “Aside from blasting the doors open and praying our shields hold against the defensive emplacements, I mean.”
“Just strap in,” Jenavian told him, bringing up the weapons and shields.
“I’ll take that as a ‘no,’” he muttered. “We’re not getting through that door with the pitiful cannons on this thing, you realize.”
“I don’t plan on using the cannons. Now seriously, strap yourself in.”
His eyes widened as he realized what she was about to do. “You can’t seriously be considering missiles in this close. The explosion might—”
Jenavian pulled the trigger. The shuttle rumbled as the underbelly missile launcher fired, and a millisecond later the universe exploded. She gripped onto the seat restraints and pressed her eyes shut against the brilliant flash of light, praying to whatever god might be listening that their shields would hold against the impending shockwave. Her thoughts flicked back to that similar moment on the Manticore just before a rupturing bulkhead had nearly crushed her skull…
But this time the shields held, and once the worst of the tremors subsided she mashed the throttle forward. The shuttle shot out of the hangar bay like a high-powered flechette round, and soon they were tearing through the atmosphere and climbing desperately for deep space.
“I’m not picking up any turrets,” Jenavian commented as she glanced down to the status board. This shuttle was definitely on the rustic side, but hopefully the sensors weren’t lying to her.
“I guess you surprised them,” Markus said hoarsely as he finally took her advice and slapped on the restraints.
“Or they’re just waiting for the Unifier to finish the job,” she murmured. “It’s waiting out there in low orbit.”
He grimaced when the antiquated tac-holo finally rendered a projection of the battleship. “What the hell is that thing doing here?”
“I can explain later. We need to shift into astral space the moment we clear the atmosphere. Is there anything special we need to do to prep the engine?”
“Not really, assuming the capacitor is still charged.” Markus leaned over and squinted down at the engineering console. “It looks like we still have about thirty percent power. That should be enough for another quick shift.”
“Good. Then let’s just hope they don’t have a fighter screen already waiting for us.”
They continued their rapid ascent, and by the time the stars became visible Jenavian could also make out the giant, beetle-shaped mass of the Unifier hanging in low orbit. A full squadron of fighters was already pouring out of its underside docking bay.
“Looks like we caught them napping, too,” Markus said. “Other than the patrol fighters, there’s nothing close enough to threaten us. The cruiser isn’t even moving.”
“Because their engines have already been taken offline to install an astral drive,” she reasoned, an uncomfortable tightness settling into her chest. “They’ll be coming for New Keledon soon.”
“I see,” he said solemnly. “Then we have to warn them.”
“We will. Just hang on.”
Jenavian wrenched the shuttle into the tightest roll it could manage, then keyed for the astral drive. A pair of patrol fighters streaked past, their forward pulse cannons spitting fire as they did so, but even weakened by the blast in the hangar bay the shuttle’s shields were up to the challenge. The status board started a short countdown, and she watched the sensors just in case there were any last-second surprises…
The engine board pinged, and with another rumble that was more felt than heard, the astral drive fired. The black starscape was replaced by a crimson smear, and they were free.
For the moment.
Jenavian closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. Every muscle in her body was quivering, but the mental pressure had released. Even the Widow couldn’t reach her in astral space. Not yet, anyway.
“It looks like the trip will take us about ten hours, assuming one of us recharges the core on the way,” she said after a moment of silence. “But first I need to check on Thexyl.”
Jenavian started to stand up, but then she felt the warm barrel of a freshly-discharged pulse pistol pressing against the back of her neck.
“He can wait,” Markus said coldly from behind her. “First, I think it’s time we had a nice little chat.”
The Spider and the Fly Page 47
