Vicious Circle

by Elle E. Ire

  The sound of breaking glass drew my attention to the bar counter. Vargas used the arm not wrapped around Kila to swipe away bottles and glassware. Then he leveled his pistol on the counter’s surface and started his own barrage on my position. For him, I guess siding with Alek was the lesser of two evils. The Guild wouldn’t pay him what they owed him. I, on the other hand, planned to kill him slowly for his betrayal, and Vargas knew it.

  This plan was beginning to suck, and if my next move didn’t work, we were all going to die.

  I had the layout of the room memorized: four couches, the bar, two chairs, a pair of tables, the viewport, and the hatchway to the corridor. I leaned around the edge of the couch, aimed, and fired into the pile of broken liquor bottles on the floor.

  They ignited, trailing fire wherever the alcohol had spilled in vicious tendrils that snaked up the bar, behind it, and across the hard flooring of the lounge. I felt a pang of regret for the loss of good ale.

  “You’re insane!” Vargas shouted, fleeing the bar with Kila in tow. I shot a beam of energy directly in front of him, and he threw himself flat behind a table, dragging Kila down hard.

  Maybe I was crazy. Fire in space meant nowhere to go and posed just as much threat as the loss of atmosphere, because if it weren’t extinguished, the flames would consume the atmosphere, but the standoff was getting me nowhere, and the crew wouldn’t sleep forever.

  Alarms blared from overhead speakers. Suppression foam poured out of the ventilation system. It would suck the oxygen from the space, extinguishing the fire. It would also smother us if we didn’t get out of here.

  A computer-generated vocal countdown began, overlaying the alarms. “Thirty seconds to compartment seal-off, twenty-nine, twenty-eight….” An amber light above the hatch flashed its strobe across the room.

  I coughed, harsh and rasping, and heard the others doing the same. What is it with me and fire, anyway?

  The scenario trapped us in a fatal game of head-on. The question was, who would blink first? Anyone making for the door got shot. Anyone staying in the lounge burned or suffocated. Having done this before, and fairly recently, I had a good idea of how long I could remain conscious. I hoped the others had less experience.

  The air grew thinner. My lungs tightened.

  Vargas broke for the door first, the only one of us who could do so without serious risk as long as he had Kila. I couldn’t let him disappear with her, couldn’t let him reach the rest of the crew, who were no doubt on their way. Those alarms would wake the dead.

  Alek and I rose at the same moment, our weapons leveled at each other’s heads while the smoke flowed around us. My free hand palmed the blackout bomb. My gun arm trembled. I’d trained Alek, watched him grow from an orphaned teenager, not so different from myself, to this young man of twenty-two. We’d shared meals, a sleeping area, complaints, and conversation. I didn’t approve of his attitude or eagerness, but I’d already caused the death of one comrade and watched Micah kill himself. Dammit, I didn’t want more blood on my already stained conscience.

  Kila. I didn’t have time for this. I had to get to Kila. And take care of Vargas. No conscience problems there.

  I threw the blackout bomb, aiming it for the center of the lounge. It exploded against the floor, its automated internal signal activating and transmitting to switch off every light in the room and the adjacent corridor.

  Alek fired a split second before I did. I suspected he’d already moved by the time my shot crossed the space between us, and if he hadn’t, well, he should have. I dive-rolled for the corridor, pleased when I didn’t collide with the hatch rim instead of tumbling into the hall.

  Pain throbbed in my leg on impact, but I gained my feet and turned left, toward the crew quarters. Shouting echoed back to me, Vargas’s voice. Lights flared in open hatchways, casting pools of white into the hallway. The corridor would stay dark for another two to three minutes.

  I had no time but paused anyway, feeling in the dark beside the lounge entrance until my hand wrapped around the woven fabric of Kila’s bag. Maybe I had no use for religions, but the Generational held more meaning for her than anything I’d ever believed in. I’d dragged her into this particular mess. Saving the book was the least I could do. I threw it over my shoulder and ran down the hall into the shadows.

  The ship’s engineer staggered from his cabin, bleary-eyed and blinking. I caught him with a backhanded fist to the chin and sent him sprawling backward before he could block my path.

  A roundhouse kick took out a second crewman. He fell against the bulkhead, skull connecting with the metal and knocking him cold prior to hitting the floor. I kept expecting a laser or ripper to pierce my back, ending this little flight, but none came. Where the hell was Alek?

  Where the hell was Kila?

  A fire team charged around the corner, carrying gear and heading for the lounge. I started to raise my weapon, but a wave from the second officer stopped me. They didn’t know. They didn’t know about Vargas’s betrayal. I waved back and ran on.

  A left turn brought me to the lifepod alcove, a short hall with four small hatches, each leading to an escape pod that would provide life support for three. Here, there were working lights, and I blinked to clear my vision. Derrick stood outside pod one, trying to push a struggling Kila ahead of him through the hatch. I raised my weapon. When he saw me, he yanked her out and pressed the barrel of his gun to her head. Her whimper carried the length of the corridor.

  “Let us go, Cor. I’ll release her on Lissex.”

  No, he wouldn’t. He’d keep her as insurance until he found a way to kill me. Otherwise, I’d hunt him until I found him.

  I strained my ears for any hint of Alek but heard nothing behind me. “You’d abandon your ship and crew?”

  The pirate smiled without humor. “If you don’t shoot me, the other assassin will.”

  Well, he had that right. Alek wouldn’t forgive him for this fiasco of a botched bounty collection.

  I eyed the pair of them. It was a very risky shot. Kila blocked a good portion of Vargas’s body with her own—everything except his massive, hairy head. Anything less than a fatal wound would give him the opportunity for retaliation.

  I calculated the odds. I weighed the consequences, fully aware Kila’s assessment of balance and counterbalance might not match my own.

  I fired.

  Chapter 10

  MY SHOT caught him just above the right eyebrow. Kila screamed as gore spattered her top and skirt, tangled in her hair with bits of bone, and ran down the bare skin of her arms. In shock, she touched the droplets with trembling fingers, smearing them across her paleness.

  Derrick’s body spasmed, jerking his wrist up and tightening his finger on the trigger of his own weapon. It fired. I’m certain Kila felt the searing heat of the laser as it passed centimeters in front of her face. She threw herself back, colliding with the lifepod hatch and slamming it against the wall with a resounding clang. The energy of the blast hit the interior of the hull, leaving a scorch mark and a neat round hole. A high-pitched whistling indicated the sound of escaping air.

  The corpse toppled at Kila’s feet, limbs jerking in a macabre rhythm. It blocked her path, and I thought she’d claw her way through the metal trying to escape it. Her screams died to a continual whimpering. Her breath came in hyperventilated gasps.

  I jogged to her, holstered my gun, and grabbed her shoulders. Hauling her bodily over the dead man at our feet, I thrust her through the open escape pod hatch. Her forehead caught the rim, and I winced in sympathy at her cry but didn’t let up until she disappeared inside. “Sit down!” I ordered, knowing she could hear me and hoping my words would register. I yanked her bag off my arm and tossed it in the pod after her.

  She must have managed to obey my command. An automatic countdown to hatch closure began, triggered by someone strapping into one of the three chairs. In thirty seconds, the pod would seal itself, and the tiny escape vessel would rocket away from the pirate cruiser
seeking the closest life-supporting world, which would be Lissex.

  Thirty seconds. I braced myself in front of the open hatch, feet apart for greater stability. The air continued to suck into space, in a narrow stream through the hole. Alarms blared, drowning out the hissing and whistling. I had to prevent anything from interfering with the launch for the next thirty seconds.

  Before I could draw my gun again, Alek stepped into view at the end of the short corridor.

  Why in all the worlds and fates is nothing ever easy?

  “Twenty-one, twenty, nineteen—”

  “Bitch,” my old comrade snarled. He gripped his upper right arm with his left hand, and I spotted the scorch mark between his fingers. I hit him with that wild shot-in-the-dark in the lounge. His right hand still clung to his pistol, but he couldn’t seem to raise it past my abdomen.

  No matter. A shot there would be lethal enough.

  “Ten, nine—”

  Alek showed no sign of hearing the countdown. His focus was all on me, not the soft voice coming from within the pod. He edged closer, probably wanting to be sure of his aim. A faint popping noise carried to me over the wailing of klaxons. An emergency bulkhead, basically a large slab of metal, dropped from the ceiling and sealed off the escape pod access corridor from the rest of the ship. It effectively cut off the crew from half their means of survival if they needed to abandon the Regiment 1. In order for the ship’s computer to take such a drastic precaution and trap us, things had to be about to get very, very bad.

  I risked a quick look. Hairline fractures appeared in the metal around the hole from Derrick’s shot. They spread out like earthquake fissures. An indentation formed, the plating sucked outward.

  Oh shit.

  I wondered why the auto-sealant didn’t pour from the overhead vents and plug the hole while it was still small. Maybe with the fire suppression system operating, it couldn’t handle both at the same time. Or maybe this was one more of the Regiment 1’s damaged systems Vargas hadn’t had credits to repair. Regardless of the reason, I was in serious trouble.

  At least Kila was safe within the pod. I didn’t give a damn about Alek.

  Using my own body to cover my actions, I snaked my left hand back and wrapped my fingers around the pod hatch’s handle. My grip tightened until my knuckles cracked.

  Alek took another step toward me. At this distance, I could see his arm trembling violently. He’d miss me if he weren’t standing within a meter.

  He struggled to raise the gun higher, to my chest. His finger on the trigger twitched.

  “Four, three—”

  Everything happened at once. The panel blew out, creating a gaping hole, and anything not bolted down went flying. Derrick’s body began a gradual slide over the floor, his immense dead weight preventing faster suction. Alek slid toward the opening, boot soles squeaking on the deck. He fired. The shot passed so close I smelled the odor of burned human hair. Then his gun slipped from his grasp, whirled end over end, and disappeared into the blackness of space.

  “One, zero.” The hatch moved, and I moved with it, still gripping the interior handle. Motors and gears shrieked, trying to close the door against the sucking of the vacuum. Muscles strained to draw myself inside before the sealing hatch crushed my arm between the door and the bulkhead.

  I wasn’t going to make it. I didn’t have the strength to pull my weight into the escape pod. My arm stretched to its fullest extension and beyond. I felt a tearing pain in my shoulder, but I somehow retained my grip on the metal handlebar.

  Alek slammed into the bulkhead, his torso blocking the opening where the panel ruptured. He splayed out his arms and legs flat against the wall, desperately holding himself in place. The tendons in his neck and arms stood out under the pale skin. He screamed.

  The force of the vortex sucked the assassin, a man of almost two meters in height, through a hole half that size. The sound of his spine and neck snapping as his body bent into unnatural and impossible angles carried over the howling of the atmospheric loss and the wailing of alarms. Making use of the obstruction, I gained some ground, managing to get half of my body inside the escape pod before the gale returned to full strength.

  Derrick Vargas’s body completed its journey across the hall, then up the metal wall. His muscular form blocked the opening for a few vital seconds, again cutting down on the sucking force.

  I moved.

  Taking full advantage, I dove into the escape pod, banging my shin on the base of one of the three seats and my head on the opposite side of the egg-shaped emergency vessel. The hatch clanged shut, and air hissed through overhead vents as the pod’s own systems provided oxygen from its separate, onboard storage tanks.

  I snaked my hand up and over the rim of the forward control panel, feeling for the transparent plastic covering I knew would be there. After flipping it up, I pressed my palm down on the launch button—incredibly dangerous in my position, but we’d run out of time. The entire section of hull on the starboard side of the Regiment 1 was at risk. If the crew didn’t arrive with a patching system, more panels would blow out. And the repair team would have to get through the emergency seal-offs first.

  My stomach wrenched inside out as we dropped away from the Regiment 1, driven by miniature thrusters designed to get us far from a damaged ship as quickly as possible. I left the deck, and my spine connected with the ceiling. Below, Kila stared up at me, pale and shaking, her frail figure pressing against the restraining straps of her seat.

  I was bruised and nauseated, my shoulder likely dislocated, and it wasn’t over yet. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe despite the compression of my lungs. The seconds ticked off in my head, and I listened to each of the pod’s systems initiating.

  Several blips and bleeps sounded from the control panel, which lit up in an array of telltale greens and a couple of flashing reds. Sensors scanned the surrounding solar system for habitable planets. This part wouldn’t take long. Judging from travel time, we emerged from Weiss-space close to Lissex. I couldn’t see the beautiful, mostly aqua-blue world. Engineers built escape vessels with practicality in mind, not aesthetics, so we didn’t have the luxury of a viewport, but I cringed in anticipation.

  The pod’s engines ignited. Their rumble shuddered through the vessel’s frame. I tried to brace myself, but there was nothing to grab on to, and my left arm was useless.

  “Cor?” Kila’s voice wavered. Her breath came in short gasps. I recognized the symptoms of panic and hyperventilation, but I had my own problems.

  The engines flared to full power. Acceleration kicked in a heartbeat later, flinging me into the rear of the compartment and landing me in a heap against the built-in storage lockers, my face plastered to the floor.

  I tried to push myself up to a seated position and failed, my arm buckling at the elbow and dropping me again. Could the universe conspire to batter me any further today? There was, I supposed, a slight chance the Regiment 1 would pursue and shoot us down, but with their captain dead and repairs to make, it seemed unlikely.

  A groan escaped my throat before I could swallow it. I let my cheek press against the cold metal flooring and closed my eyes. The ship rumbled around me, vibrating through my skin in unpleasant waves. I endured several minutes before concluding it wasn’t the ship but me, shaking with the aftershock and adrenaline depletion. With the pod’s tiny engines, it would be hours, perhaps eight or nine, before we reached Lissex’s surface. Another attempt to rise failed, and I decided spending the trip there on the floor wasn’t such a bad idea.

  Kila had other thoughts. A cabinet opened to my right. I heard shuffling and the slap of fabric being shaken out. Then a warm blanket dropped over me. I cracked open an eye to watch her slide down the bulkhead and seat herself on the deck. She looked awful, pale and shaky. Reaching, she popped open another storage compartment and dragged out the med-kit. The injection of painkillers elicited a sigh, and the fogginess that settled in my brain suggested a sedative as well.

  D
rawing me closer with one arm, she let my head rest on her thigh—a far cry more comfortable than the floor. She stroked my hair, paused at the singed bits, and continued following the strands down my back, her fingers working out the knots and tangles. Her attempt at humming failed, her voice too tremulous to carry the tune with any success.

  “You could use a sleep aid too,” I murmured, my words almost unintelligible with my mouth pressed to the material of her skirt. “Everything’s automated from here down.” The sensation of floating wrapped itself around me. My body felt weightless, though I knew the gravity functioned fine. Exhaustion pulled at my eyelids, sealing them shut.

  “What if we hit the ocean?”

  A fair question. Lissex consisted of mostly water and scattered islands. “We won’t. It’s programmed to find a landmass, no matter how small, and it prioritizes by population—” My words drifted off. I couldn’t think of what I wanted to say next. “—size.”

  “Let yourself rest, Cor.” Her hand rubbed my back, careful to avoid the injured shoulder.

  I didn’t have much choice. The drugs sent me into a deeper sleep than I’d had in days.

  I ROSE naked from the sleeping pallets Micah and I had hidden in an access tunnel. He’d appropriated a spare holograph projector from the Guild’s stores. To anyone passing along the cross corridor, the entrance to this side cave looked like a solid rock wall. No one would discover our secret. That is, unless our moans and cries of pleasure gave us away. Silently, I donned my clothing.

  Watching him continue to sleep, his chest rising and falling steadily, I smirked. Last night we’d made considerable noise and hadn’t concerned ourselves. The apprentices roamed the surface in teams, foraging for food, avoiding the sand lizards, and constructing shelters from native materials in one of Micah’s survival exercises. The other masters busied themselves with loud practice drills or were off Sardonen on assignment per Micah’s orders. As Guild Leader, he had the authority to make sure no one would hear us.