by Jake Elwood
Alice touched the intercom switch. “Get that hatch open. We've got three more passengers.”
Grabbing the last three prisoners took two interminable minutes. Alice cursed each passing second, but she couldn't very well leave someone behind. So she watched the tactical display and fought to hide her impatience as the last few men clambered aboard.
“That's it!” Ham's shout echoed through the closed bridge hatch, almost drowned out by the roar of the ship's engines. The mesa and the distant jungle disappeared as the nose of the ship tilted up. Alice watched the sky darken as they climbed, until stars appeared and the vibration of atmosphere against the hull faded away.
The cruiser seemed to pop out of nowhere, a red icon appearing on her screen a scant thousand kilometers dead aft. “They just came out of a portal,” she said. “They're close.”
Bridger responded by adding some wobble to their flight path, making the Evening Breeze harder to hit. Tom stumbled, caught himself against a bulkhead, then dropped into the empty seat that had been Ham's.
There was no point in giving Bridger orders. He knew as well as she did that they needed a portal as soon as they were clear of the worst of the planet's gravity well. She rotated the gun turrets until they pointed aft and tried a few shots, entirely hopeless at that range. She let go of the gun controls and stared through the windows, searching for peace among the stars. She started counting stars, a completely pointless task that shifted her focus and gave her subconscious a chance to work on the thorny problem of how to stay alive.
The stars vanished as a portal opened dead ahead. The ship plunged through, and an energy storm buffeted them from every side, a maelstrom of red and black.
“Fishhook,” she said.
Bridger nodded and brought the ship around in a tight turn. The storm was so thick that for a moment she couldn’t see the portal. It brightened as they drew closer, then flashed as they darted through an instant before the portal closed.
She checked her tac display. The cruiser had made a tactical error, rushing into hyperspace the moment the Evening Breeze disappeared. It would have given them precious seconds to close with the freighter before they could vanish into the storm – if the Breeze had stayed in seventh-dimensional space.
“Get us back to Gamor,” she said, and the stars tilted until the glittering ball of the planet was dead ahead. The support ship would see them and inform the cruisier – but not until the cruiser came back into normal space. “Get the planet between us and that tub.”
“Right,” said Bridger. He sent the Evening Breeze blazing toward a spot near the horizon line, a few degrees up from the south pole.
She ran through scenarios in her mind as the planet grew and grew. The obvious thing to do was to return to hyperspace. It was the simplest way to gain distance. Could she hoodwink the cruiser by doing something less obvious?
Her console chimed and she swore. The cruiser was back. It was quite a ways aft, but it would spot them immediately, and it was the faster ship.
The stars jumped and the ship thumped against something below, the impact making Alice grunt. They'd bounced from the upper atmosphere, she realized, and watched as Bridger increased their altitude. They didn't need air slowing them down. He followed the curve of the planet, staying barely above the atmosphere, and she watched the support ship vanish from her display.
Thirty seconds later, the cruiser vanished as well.
Alice switched to the ventral camera. The ocean below was speckled with black, hundreds of tiny islands like dark holes in the blue of the ocean. “Take us down,” she barked. “Land us on one of those islands.”
Bridger gave her a single dubious glance, then put the ship into a steep dive. He chose a tiny island hardly bigger than the ship, a shallow hump of rock sticking up above the waves. The ship came in fast, but touched down with surprising delicacy. Alice didn't actually feel the landing. She only knew they were down when the hum of the engine disappeared.
“I want a complete shutdown,” she told Bridger. To Tom she said, “Rally your men. We've got camo netting, and I want us covered before that supply ship comes over the horizon.”
When the cruiser went into hyperspace she saw the white rectangle of the portal in the sky directly overhead in the last moment before camo netting slid down to cover the bridge windows. She sighed, relieved that at least one part of her plan was working.
“How long do we stay here?”
She looked at Bridger. “I don't know.” She was tempted to stay for a long time. Days. A week. Long enough for the cruiser to give up completely. But a close scan of the surface would reveal them, camouflage netting or no. Plus, there were hundreds more prisoners on Gamor. Possibly thousands. The Dawn Alliance would know their prison was no secret, was not secure. They might beef up their defenses, or move the prisoners. Even if they did nothing, the United Worlds Navy would worry about what they might do. The fresher the intel, the more likely they were to act.
“Maybe an hour,” she said. “Long enough for that cruiser to move away. Not long enough for it to give up and come back and look for us here.”
He nodded. “I've got the bridge if you want to take a break.”
“Thanks.” She opened the hatch and stepped through into the tool room.
A corpse lay along the bulkhead, a man wrapped in a bedsheet. Blood stained the cloth around his head. She spent a moment staring down at him, wondering if he was someone she'd known, and apologizing silently for arriving too late.
Three men sat in the galley looking weary and drained. She didn't recognize the man with the bandaged arm until he said, “Hello, Alice. Thanks for picking us up.”
“O'Reilly!” She looked at his bandage and decided not to ask. “Is there anyone else here from the Kestrel?”
“Just me and Lieutenant Thrush.” He looked around the galley. “Do you mind if we cook?”
“Help yourself.” She moved past him as he rose.
The island was covered in a mix of sand and rock. She descended the landing ramp and found half a dozen men sitting in the shadow of the netting. They looked terrible, dirty and thin, but every last one of them smiled as they looked at her. She smiled back. “Welcome aboard the Evening Breeze.” She jerked a thumb behind her. “I'm sorry about your friend who didn't make it.”
The smiles vanished. “Thanks for picking us up,” said one man.
“Do you have anything to eat?” said another.
“O'Reilly's cooking right now.”
“Uh-oh.” The man heaved himself to his feet. “He's the worst cook in the platoon. If he couldn't cook with two hands, what's he going to do with one?” He gave Alice a shy smile, stepped around her, and climbed the ramp.
“It's so … heavy here,” she said. “How did you stand it?”
The eyes that stared up at her were bleak and cold. “The gravity was the least of it,” a man said.
The little pocket under the netting felt suddenly claustrophobic. She had a mad urge to duck outside, run across the sand, and swim in the ocean. With the supply ship quite possibly scanning from above, that would be foolhardy. She turned instead and went back into the ship.
The Evening Breeze, designed for a crew of five or six, had seemed almost spookily empty with just the three of them on board. Now it felt positively cramped. Gaunt prisoners crowded every open space. Alice stood for a moment in the galley, watching O'Reilly and another man argue over the best way to prepare powdered eggs. Then she fled to the bridge.
They did passive scans, watching as the supply ship ran its engines to stay in position on their side of the planet. They suspected the truth, then. They might even have spotted the Evening Breeze already. Either way, waiting for the cruiser to return would be foolhardy.
“Pack up the net,” she told Bridger. “We're leaving.”
The storm was rough, but it hid them well. The ship shook and trembled, the bridge lights flickered, and Alice's console once again flared and died. In fifteen minutes or so, though,
Bridger found a pocket of quiet space with bands of furious energy on all sides. He followed a twisting path through the heart of the storm, never quite touching the worst of it, and eventually the Evening Breeze popped out into a gulf of clear space. There was no sign of the cruiser.
Alice tried to reset her console, watched a coil of pale smoke rise from a vent between the screens, and sighed. “Head for Garnet,” she told Bridger. “Quick as you can. I'll go get my tools.”
Chapter 22
Battor Ganbold was asleep, dreaming pleasantly of a girl he’d known at Military College, when the blare of a siren blasted him into consciousness. He was on his feet and buckling his trousers by the time his sleep-fuddled brain caught up. There was no sound of gunfire, so the prisoners were not in revolt. That just left one possibility, the event they’d been dreading and half-expecting ever since the escape.
The Dawn Alliance was in the system. Gamor was under attack.
The compound outside was a scene of controlled chaos. Amar stood in the middle of it all, giving calm instructions as officers approached him, listened for a moment, and hurried away. “Unit Leader,” he said as Ganbold reached his side. “There are enemy ships inbound. I believe it is a rescue mission. Take some men in there.” He waved toward the prisoners’ compound. “Kill the prisoners.”
Ganbold flinched in spite of himself. “Sir?”
“Kill them,” Amar said, a trace of impatience in his voice. “Kill them all. Then take your men to the landing field and wait for a shuttle. We will try to evacuate you.”
Ganbold looked past him at the two squat shuttles just outside the compound. How many trips would it take to ferry all the soldiers up to the orbiting supply ship? Would there by time for everyone to leave?
“Duty first,” Amar snapped. “Escape later.”
“Yes, Sir!” Ganbold spun and plunged into the surrounding chaos. Half the men he encountered hadn’t even grabbed their weapons. Some were barefoot, or shirtless. Well, clothing hardly mattered under the circumstances. He sent the unarmed men running for their rifles. Those with guns he gathered around him in a squad that grew as he trotted toward the gate.
A soldier got the gate unlocked and Ganbold shoved it open, leading his men into the prisoners’ compound. He was horrified at what he was about to do, yet strangely excited. He was about to strike a real blow for his country. The rescuers would arrive to find a wasteland of corpses, with no one left to liberate.
“Kill them!” he bawled. “Kill them all!”
A few soldiers gaped at him. Others headed for the prisoner huts, spreading out as they advanced. The door of a hut swung open and a prisoner peered out, lifting a hand to shield his eyes from the lights that lined the fence. The nearest soldier stopped and lifted his rifle to his shoulder.
Light flashed in the darkness outside the wire, and the soldier pitched sideways, his rifle tumbling in the dirt. One arm landed beside the body, detached at the shoulder. The soldier’s chest was a gory mess.
Ganbold stood frozen, a corner of his mind screaming at him to move, to give orders, to do something as light flashed three more times and three more soldiers fell. Shock held him frozen, and God only knew how long he might have stood there, rigid and unmoving, if the tower behind him hadn’t exploded.
The blast snapped him out of his paralysis, and he dove onto his chest, feeling warm air wash across his back. The ground was cool against his stomach, and he realized for the first time that he’d run outside without his shirt on. I’m going to die half-dressed. I always thought I’d die in my uniform.
The light around him dimmed, then dimmed more. They’re shooting the lights, he realized. Will that make it easier to escape?
Probably not. Lying on the ground wouldn’t help either. He sprang to his feet, running forward, changing speed and direction to make himself a harder target to hit. His men were dark outlines around him, milling around like alarmed sheep. A soldier not three steps away gave a grunt and fell, and Ganbold smelled blood and offal.
“Back to the compound,” he shouted. “Take cover, and prepare to defend yourselves.” There was nothing they could do out here, not against an enemy sniping from the dark.
Sniping from outside the fence, he realized. He changed direction, running between huts. They’ll hold their fire. They won’t want to hit the prisoners.
For a long moment he stood with his back pressed against the wall of a hut, panting and staring into the darkness. The last electric light was gone, shot out or extinguished. The only source of illumination was starlight and the burning remnants of the tower. No one came out of the huts, but men murmured to one another on the other side of the wall.
Why am I still alive? Why aren’t they storming the camp and finishing us all off? They must have come in overwhelming force. He looked up. Ships should be dropping from the sky. They should be touching down inside the compound itself. It’s the quickest way to keep us from killing the prisoners.
A flash of light in the corner of his eye made him turn his head, just in time to see a soldier die, his demolished body briefly outlined by the energy pulse that killed him. The same flash showed Ganbold another knot of soldiers huddling just beyond the unlucky soldier. They had no cover, and yet, so far, they were unharmed.
This isn’t the attack. Those ships are still up there. He squinted up at the stars, looking for the flare of braking thrusters. These are commandoes. They came in first, in a stealth ship. To keep us from massacring the prisoners when we spotted the main attack force.
Brief visions flitted through his head, of leading a counter-attack and wiping out the commando team before the rest of the enemy could land. He dismissed the idea. The entire camp held only two or three helmets with night-vision lenses. The soldiers had light weapons and no armor, and all they knew about the enemy was a vague direction. Trying to hit back would be suicidal.
Then I must escape.
He moved deeper into the prisoner compound, then hesitated when he came to the open space separating the officers’ huts from the enlisted men. I’m just a warm outline to the commandoes out there. They don’t know I’m a soldier. I might be a prisoner.
Before he could lose his nerve he flung himself forward, sprinted across the open ground, and flattened himself against the wall of a hut. A door creaked somewhere nearby, and he heard voices that rose in volume as prisoners came outside. His hand went to his hip, searching for the reassuring bulk of his pistol.
It wasn’t there.
Ganbold cursed himself silently, then turned and jogged for the end of the hut. He circled around a knot of prisoners, suddenly glad for the concealing darkness. He was just another anonymous prisoner.
A voice behind him said, “I think that was a guard.”
“What, him? That’s nuts.”
“I’m serious! He ditched half his uniform so we wouldn’t spot him. You should have seen how fat he was.”
Ganbold, jogging briskly away, ran a hand over his flat stomach. Fat?
A quick glance over his shoulder revealed nothing but darkness. The suspicious prisoner, if he tried to follow, would never find him. Ganbold pushed it from his mind as he passed the last line of huts and jogged across a stretch of open ground before the fence. He slowed his pace, a hand stretched out, feeling for the barbed wire.
He found the ankle-high wire that marked the kill zone instead. He found it by tripping over it and landing on his chest on the damp ground. He took a moment to recover and orient himself, and then he wriggled forward on his stomach, imagining a sentry firing into his body. That was absurd. The soldiers, the ones who hadn’t been killed yet, had bigger fish to fry.
The top of his head bumped a wire, invisible in the darkness. Ganbold examined it by touch, wincing when a barb pricked his finger. The strands were too close together, the barbs too big and too tightly spaced. There was no way he would make it through. He cursed under his breath, wondering if he could climb the fence, or find a tool to cut the wire.
Light
, white and searing, filled the compound, and Ganbold squeezed his eyes shut. The ground trembled against his breastbone, and a terrible roar made his skull vibrate. He forced his eyes open, gave them a moment to adjust, then rolled onto his back and stared up at the sky.
Assault ships dropped from the heavens, lights blazing from their undersides, braking thrusters searing the night air. The attack force was here.
A barb tore a bloody furrow down his back, from his shoulder to his hip, but the blood made his skin slick and sped him up. The barb sank into his trousers and gouged his left buttock. He flailed and squirmed until the fabric finally ripped. A moment later he was through the wire. He ran, squinting into the darkness, his night vision completely ruined by the lights behind him, and cried out when his foot struck something. He fell full-length on the ground, grass cool against his skin, and scrambled into the rectangular shadow of a stump. Common sense told him to get up and run for the jungle, but a deeper instinct demanded that he hug this scrap of cover and cower.
Lifting his head above the stump took all of Ganbold’s courage. Assault ships squatted like fat insects in the open ground between the two groups of prisoner huts. The long tables and rain shelters were gone, crushed to kindling by the ships. Troops in bulky armor milled around, while prisoners stood in nervous clumps against the walls of the huts and watched.
A mech, twice the height of a man, strode regally through the chaos, heading for the guards’ compound. Ganbold’s head turned. More UW troops surrounded a ragged line of Dawn Alliance soldiers, defeated men with hanging heads, hands clasped behind their necks.
Beyond them the shuttles burned. No one had managed to evacuate.
I should surrender. Give myself up before somebody shoots me. Get this cut treated. He knew he wouldn’t do it, though. The invaders wouldn’t stay. They would take their liberated prisoners and flee. The Dawn Alliance would be back. And Ganbold couldn’t bear the thought of joining that line of humiliated, beaten men.
