Time Bomb

by R. M. Olson

  But—

  But when Jez caught her eye, she raised one eyebrow and gave the faintest of nods.

  Jez almost swayed on her feet, dizzy in a way that had nothing at all to do with Masha’s sleeping gas.

  “So, you innocent, you’re going to damn well tell me why the government is willing to pay this much for you.” Lena was still talking. “Because if you don’t, you’re going to be damn well spitting out your teeth in about three minutes.”

  “I wasn’t. I really wasn’t,” she whispered. “Going to leave them, I mean.” She turned back to Masha. “Going to leave you. Any of you. Not like this. Not to get hurt.”

  “I know,” said Masha, quietly. “That was never once the thing I worried about.”

  For a moment, Jez was completely speechless.

  Lena was still talking, she was pretty sure, but then she’d had years of practice ignoring Lena.

  Someone grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, and she glanced up.

  Antoni.

  He was scowling into her face, and shouting something.

  She gave him a dreamy smile.

  It hadn’t been what Masha had been worried about, either.

  She’d always, deep down, been sure it was. She’d always, deep down, been sure that when Masha talked about keeping her in the ship, about not letting her go down planet-side, it had been because Masha had known how much of a coward, how much of a runner Jez was. That the woman had thought she’d get them all into trouble and take off and leave them, because that was who she was.

  But—

  But maybe, just maybe—it wasn’t.

  Antoni was still shouting at her. Again, something she was pretty good at ignoring.

  Then he slapped her hard across the face, and the jolt of pain through her freshly-broken jaw jerked her back into full consciousness.

  She’d always had a harder time ignoring his fists.

  “I said, you damn idiot—” he snarled, his face twisted with rage.

  “Jez,” came a voice from overhead, almost a whisper, really, and Jez glanced up reflexively. Then she blinked and stared.

  Tanya?

  The woman had somehow managed to balance herself on the wide support beams across the ceiling. She was smiling, that slight, wistful smile with the hint of steel behind it.

  She winked, and held up a small tube.

  A EMP blocker?

  She pointed it down and clicked it, and the cuffs on Jez’s wrist popped loose. Tanya tossed something lightly, and Jez put up a newly-freed hand instinctively to grab it as Antoni blinked in shock.

  A grin spread across her face as she recognized the familiar shape in her hand, even though she could hardly see through the tears in her eyes.

  She twisted the gas bomb, hauled back her arm, and threw it as hard as she could.

  It hit the back wall and exploded in a hissing cloud, and the smugglers nearest it dropped nervelessly to the ground.

  “Hold your breath, kids,” she called to the others. Her grin felt wider than her face, and she still, somehow, felt like she was floating.

  Because she’d been right. She had to face up to her past.

  The thing she hadn’t anticipated, though, was that she wouldn’t have to do it alone.

  Antoni still hadn’t recovered himself. She gave him her best grin, the one he absolutely hated. Then she brought her forehead down hard on the bridge of his nose. He staggered back, and she stepped in and dropped him with a sucker punch to the gut.

  “Guess I got a little better at that since four years ago,” she whispered as he lay doubled over on the ground, gasping for breath. She turned to Lena.

  “Jez—” the woman began, her face pale with fury. “I—” The cloud of gas was creeping towards them, and it wouldn’t be long before it reached where Lev and Ysbel were strapped to their chairs.

  “Know what else I’ve always wanted to do, Lena?” Jez said in a musing tone. She took a deep, satisfied breath, and closed her eyes for half a second, savouring the moment.

  “This.” She opened her eyes, drew back her fist, and hit Lena right in the middle of her damn face.

  She’d never had any idea that almost breaking your knuckles could feel that good.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Lena’s ship, Ysbel

  Ysbel felt faintly sick to her stomach as she watched Jez, head bowed, body tense, facing Lena.

  The look on the pilot’s face cut her, the scared, vulnerable expression, the way her body tightened like Lena was beating her with a whip, rather than simply with her words.

  She’d never seen Jez look like this before. And for the first time, she saw the frightened kid who’d been thrown out by her family, tossed onto the mercy of a smuggler crew, trying just to survive, rather than the cocky, irritating, supremely self-confident pilot she’d thought she knew.

  She glanced over at Lev, and the look on his face told him he was having similar thoughts.

  She tightened her lips.

  “Shhh,” came a small voice from behind her, and she glanced quickly over her shoulder.

  Olya stood there, crouching against the cold steel wall, a self-satisfied smile on her face. “These smugglers are pretty stupid,” she whispered, cutting efficiently through the cords on Ysbel’s wrists. She caught the sliced cords as they fell and placed them gently on the ground. “They didn’t even see me sneak in.”

  Ysbel stared. “Where’s—”

  Olya pointed at the ceiling, and Ysbel glanced up. Then, slowly, she smiled.

  Of course.

  “Alright, my love,” she whispered. “Thank you. Now, get back to your brother, OK? I don’t want the smugglers to see you.”

  “They won’t,” Olya whispered back. Ysbel glanced to her side. Lev was carefully rubbing feeling back into his wrists. He caught Ysbel’s gaze, then glanced up at the ceiling, half-way across the deck, to where Tanya was perched gracefully in the rafters. He raised an eyebrow at her.

  “Tanya will be fine,” she mouthed.

  His expression changed to one of slight confusion, but he shrugged and nodded. His posture, though, as he glanced back up at Tanya, did not look as though he’d taken her advice.

  But Ysbel felt like a weight had been taken off her shoulders.

  An attack, or a heat-gun blast—something she couldn’t control, like the fire in their cabin—hurting Tanya or the children terrified her, with a fear that stopped her heart and thickened the blood in her veins.

  But this? She was no more worried about Tanya now than Tanya would be worried about her testing explosives.

  They all had things they were good at. And Tanya had always been good.

  And, it appeared, Olya was taking in her mamochka’s footsteps.

  “Did you bring any weapons, my love?” she whispered over her shoulder to her daughter. Olya gave her a long-suffering look.

  “Yes, Mama.” She dropped a small modded heat-pistol into Ysbel’s hands. “And masks. Mamochka said you’ll need one in a minute. I already gave one to Uncle Lev.”

  Ysbel glanced up at her wife, just in time to see the tiny cylinder fall from her hands into Jez’s suddenly-unbound ones.

  Jez, she realized, was grinning now, even through tears running down her cheeks. She twisted the gas cylinder and tossed it, with perfect aim, to hit the wall of the deck to Ysbel’s left, behind the largest cluster of smugglers. Ysbel jumped to her feet and slapped the mask over her face as Jez, with a beatific smile, dropped the muscular man in front of her and turned towards Lena. Masha had already grabbed the stunned Tae and shoved a heat-pistol into his hand, turning him around and shoving him towards the door.

  Ysbel raised her eyebrows. Masha’s ability to hide weaponry would never completely cease to surprise her.

  Smugglers were falling to the ground behind them as the gas caught them, and others were running for their lives. One of them seemed to remember the prisoners, and turned towards them. His face was frantic, but he was holding his gun on them in a bus
inesslike way. “Come with me,” he shouted. “I’m not damn well losing this—”

  She could kill him. But—she glanced at Olya, who was watching in wide-eyed admiration, and cracked off a shot at his feet. The blast shimmered in the air, and then he was staring at a ragged hole in the deck, dripping molten metal into the level below them.

  He met Ysbel’s eyes. She lifted her weapon slightly.

  He turned, and ran for his life.

  “Go, Olya!” she hissed. “I will meet you back at the ship. Keep Misko safe, OK? We’ll be there in a moment.”

  Olya nodded and disappeared, and Ysbel glanced around the room quickly. The gas was rapidly filling the room, but Masha had grabbed Jez by the sleeve and was pulling her towards the door. Tae was already in the hallway, and from the crackling sound of heat-blasts and the muffled shouts, there were things outside the room that would require her attention in a moment.

  Masha seemed to come to the same conclusion, because she gave a final jerk on Jez’s sleeve and hissed something to the half-dazed pilot. Jez blinked. Masha handed her a pistol, and the two women sprinted for the door. Ysbel grabbed her own pistol and turned.

  Lev.

  She hadn’t seen him.

  She glanced back over her shoulder.

  He was sitting where she’d left him, head lolling back. The mask over his face—she went suddenly cold.

  It was a child-sized mask. And there was a split seam on one side.

  He must have noticed, and talked Olya into trading with him.

  Knowing he’d be knocked out the moment the gas hit him, but she’d be safe.

  And there it was—the contradiction that had almost killed her over the past two days.

  This man, who’d been willing to risk his own life to save her family from a fate worse than death, and who had been the one to send them there in the first place. The boy who little Olya had wrapped around her finger, who would do anything for her, including giving her the last working mask—and who’d been the reason she’d grown up in hell. The man who had asked her about Tanya when she hadn’t realized talking about Tanya was the one thing, the only thing, she needed to keep her sane, listened to her memories and her horrors—and who had been the author of those horrors himself.

  She’d blown up a whole shuttle site to avenge her family, to kill the people who’d taken them from her. She’d been willing to bring down an entire government building and kill this whole team of idiots for the chance to get revenge on a couple more of them. And this time, she wouldn’t need to do anything. All she’d have to do was leave.

  And—

  And after all that, she’d still wake at nights to nightmares of a burning cottage. The hardness behind Tanya’s expression would still be there when she wasn’t thinking of it, the unnatural quiet of their children, who she’d never seen grow up, hadn’t been there when they’d lost their first tooth or learned to speak without a lisp. All of those things were gone forever.

  And—Lev would be gone too. Their easy camaraderie, his dry sense of humour, the quiet, thoughtful look in his eyes. They way Olya stared up at him, half challenging, half adoring, and the doting look on his face whenever he caught sight of her.

  His absence, too, would ache. Ache more than she’d ever let herself admit.

  She shook her head slightly at herself. Then she bent, hoisted the unconscious Lev onto her shoulders, shifted her grip on her heat-pistol, and headed out into the hallway.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Lena’s ship, Jez

  Jez still felt a little like her feet weren’t touching the floor as she followed Masha at a sprint out the door. But when she broke through into the corridor, with heat-blasts searing the walls on either side and Tae locked into a fist-fight with two smugglers she recognized by name, the world settled once more into it’s delightful, familiar, comfortable form. She jumped forward, yanked Tae out of the way of a fist, and grabbed the fist’s owner by the collar.

  “Miss me?” she smirked. Then she kneed him in the groin, and as he folded in on himself, felled him with a pistol-butt to the temple. A fist caught her in the side of the head and she staggered backward, vaguely grateful the blow had missed any broken bones. She caught herself against the corridor wall and braced for the next blow, but Tae, scowling, stepped past her and dropped the man with one well-placed punch to the throat. Then he grabbed her by the arm and hauled her upright.

  “Come on, Jez!”

  For a moment, she almost hesitated. He rolled his eyes, and they ducked instinctively as a heat-blast blistered the air over their heads.

  “If you want to fix your ship, we don’t have time for this,” he said through his teeth.

  Her ship.

  Something warm and effervescent bubbled up in her chest.

  For the first time since that horrible, awful, hopeless moment when she’d pulled the Ungovernable out of hyperdrive—there was a chance they could fix her ship.

  She swallowed back tears, vision soft with a rosy glow.

  “Come on!” He grabbed her by the arm, and she followed him at a gasping run down the sterile corridors of Lena’s ship.

  “The others—” she started.

  “They’re fine,” he said over his shoulder. “Ysbel’s there, and Tanya, and they’ve got Lev, and I get the feeling that Masha knows her way around a fight.”

  “Masha knows her damn way around basically everything,” Jez muttered, but for the first time in a long time, she didn’t actually hate the woman nearly as much as she probably still should.

  When they reached the airlock that led to the Ungovernable, a handful of smugglers were already pushing their way down the corridor back towards Lena’s ship. When they saw Tae and Jez—specifically, when they saw their modded heat guns—they froze. Jez grinned.

  They grabbed for their own weapons, but she’d already lunged for them, and the four of them went down in a heap on the floor. Above her, Tae sighed with exasperation as he brought his weapon up. She grabbed his ankle and yanked hard, and he went down as a laser blast burned a long line in the wall behind where his head had just been.

  “That’s my ship you’re wrecking, you bastards,” she growled, turning back to the smugglers. A fist hit her in the ribs, and for a moment her vision turned to white stars at the pain. Then Tae was hauling her to her feet again.

  “Consort’s bloody blue balls, Jez,” he said through his teeth. “You’ve got four damn—”

  “Broken ribs, I remember,” she gasped. She kicked out, hitting a smuggler in the stomach, then caught herself against the wall as black spots danced across her vision. Tae grabbed a woman who’d staggered to her feet, turned her around, and shoved her face-first into the corner of the doorframe. She dropped, momentarily stunned, and Jez pushed herself off the wall and followed Tae at a painful sprint down the corridor.

  “You know how to fix the thrusters?” he panted. She nodded.

  “Alright. You do that, I’ll deal with the power core. They probably have it pretty well powered up by now anyways, with the size of cable they’re using.”

  They’d reached the corner where they’d been caught by Lena’s people, and Tae yanked open the small first-aid cupboard. She reached in, almost holding her breath.

  It had to be there. If the guards who’d grabbed them had noticed Tae slamming the door shut as they rounded the corner—

  There it was.

  She breathed out in relief and pulled out two sacks. She shoved the smaller one at Tae, hoisted the larger one over her shoulder, and ran for the engine room.

  When she reached it, she slid inside, and gently, almost reverently, lowered the sack of parts to the floor. She ran her hands over the damaged thrusters, fingers catching gently on the melted bits, the charred, burned, scabbed chunks of metal. It felt a little like examining a heat-blast victim, wondering if there was a hint of life inside the charred flesh.

  But this was her angel. This was her sweet, sweet ship, and it knew her. It could hear her.

>   And she was one hundred percent sure it would listen.

  “It’s alright, baby,” she whispered. “You’re going to be alright. You kept us alive out here, and now Tae and me, we’re going to put you back together.”

  She could have sworn she felt the ship, the faint hum that was the heart of it powering up, answer her through her fingers and through her feet and through her whole body.

  A frantic smuggler burst through the engine room door, heat gun raised. She stepped forward, raised her wrench, and brought it down hard across the base of his skull. He staggered, and she wrenched the pistol from his grip.

  “Keep your damn weapons away from my thrusters,” she growled, and shoved him back through the door.

  Outside, there were shouts and screams, the hiss and crackle of heat-guns and lasers.

  Jez took a long, deep breath, a soft smile on her face.

  It was good to be home.

  She tightened her grip on her wrench and set to work.

  She wasn’t entirely sure how much time had passed when a voice in her earpiece jolted her from her reverie.

  “Jez.” It was Masha, and her voice was tight with strain. “How close are you?”

  Jez blinked, and glanced at the jumble of broken pieces scattered on the floor around her. “Almost there. How’s Tae doing?”

  “He informed me he’s just about finished as well.”

  “Good. We should be able to power up in a minute or so then. What’s happening?”

  “We all got back here and managed to herd the rest of the smugglers onto their own ship. The gas should have taken care of them for the moment,” said Masha. “We don’t have long, though. Ysbel went back to unclip the power cable from their ship, and she’s going to seal off the airlock on her way back through. She said we have maybe another five, ten standard minutes before they start to wake up.”

  “I’ll be done before then,” said Tae. “I have one more part to replace.”

  “Well,” Jez drawled into the com, “I just finished. Guess I’m better at tech after all.”