by Alex Oliver
“How about I leave Morwen and Mikal with you. You know we wouldn't go without them.”
“Mikal?” she asked, meeting Lali's eyes and trying not to look hurt at the idea of being tactically left behind. Lali seemed to catch it anyway and colored.
“Iris's son,” she gestured, and a tiny boy knelt on the edge of the hole in the ceiling and waved down. He was five-ish, she thought. Very solemn and quiet with his other hand clamped around his mother’s knee.
“Mikal comes with me,” Iris bared her teeth at Lali. She was nothing but a pair of blazing blue eyes in a pillar of crimson, and it was a formidable look.
“Can two people carry Leibniz?” Morwen suggested. “I don't want to leave anyone behind to face the guards when they see this,” she nodded at the corpses on the floor, Nick and Junior and the others, who must have had friends among the other guards. Friends who would be angry. “Like a chair hold? Lali, I don't think it's safe to leave anyone. By the time you got back they'd be dead.”
Lali sighed, her shoulders falling. “The more people the less stealth. But I guess you're right. Come on then.”
She bent her knees and made a stirrup with her hands, and Morwen took the chance to press her face briefly into Lali's sticky hair while she was boosted up until she could catch on the edge of the floor above and haul herself out of her barracks-cum-cell. Here, they were in a corridor, and a sweep of her data-disc along the wall quickly revealed another hub. She crouched there, erasing each prisoner's tag as soon as they popped into view.
“Where's the Eagle?” Lali asked her once they were all up, the unfit catching their breath. “I expected to see it where Principality had been docked, but it wasn't.”
“No,” Morwen closed her eyes partly because it brought the HUD into better focus, partly to keep herself from being distracted by the curve of Lali's hips in those trousers. “There's an internal hangar, down by where the old engine used to be – under the citadel. It's there, but it's not linked to any of the station systems. I can't get into it.”
“We'll do it the hard way.” Lali grinned at her as though she was in her element, and perhaps she was. Perhaps this was what marine training was all about. “On your command, ma'am.”
Oh right, yes. Morwen was technically the officer here. “Yes,” she said, grinning back as she threw her consciousness once more into the station systems. “The first guards are on floor E. It's going to take them another ten to fifteen minutes to get up here, and then five? Ten? To open the section doors. The lift will take thirteen people and there are twenty two of us. We either split and take two lifts or we come down in two batches.”
“The closest lift to this one is eight minutes jog round the circumference,” Iris put in, glowering. “I'm taking this one.”
“But this is the one Control will expect us to use,” Lali mused. “If they can turn it off with us in it, game over. Suppose we all went for the second lift?”
“Then the second batch of us is going to be facing guards for sure.”
Almost as if it was taunting them, the lift chose that moment to arrive, its rusty, smelly doors grinding open reluctantly to offer entrance to its tiny metal maw. Lali shook her head like the odds didn't make that much difference. “Non-comms in first,” she said, waving Leibniz and her carriers through, filling most of the space with the old and tired. Putting Iris in with Mikal, and Ekibe with a stun baton in last as their first line of defense.
“When you get out, find cover, hide and wait for us.”
“Roger that.” Leibniz smirked and raised her hand to her temple in ironic salute.
They watched them go, then turned to glower at the locked door of the fire-escape beside the lift shaft. Already it felt like it was vibrating faintly from all those marching feet on the rungs of the ladder. Morwen held her breath and thought she could hear them talking as they came. She'd had enough of their talk to last her a lifetime. She tapped the unlit stun baton against her leg, feeling her reluctance to use it disappear. Us or them. If she had anything to do with it, it would be 'them' who suffered.
The lift pinged, a ridiculously cheerful, banal sound. The doors rolled open on the lower level, and Control instigated a purge and re-installation of the elevator's operating software, essentially jamming it, keeping it where it was. Meanwhile in the opposite wall, the door to the stair-well rattled as the vibration of the oncoming guards translated into a warning buzz.
“No,” Morwen breathed to herself, sinking to a crouch with her back against the lift pillars as if that would intensify her own commands. “Don't do that!” Someone down there knew the station's systems better than she did. They were slow and clumsy, but they were good at their job.
She tried to halt the reset process, but there wasn't a place to insert a command without breaking the process and keeping the lift down indefinitely. What else could she…?
She found the station’s communications array and used it to beam out a distress call to Cygnus Five. Charity had been captured with them and returned to her earlier master, the ex-Governor, but Aurora might by now have acquired other ships to send for them, if she only knew where they were.
In the short term, however, she paused all other processing on every station facility, devoting all non-comms capacity to the reboot of the lift software. As soon as the update completed, she grabbed control of the elevator back. Through the lift shaft, she felt the doors trundle closed and then the whir and shake as it began to rise.
The cover over the stairwell boomed and shuddered outward as something hit the hatch from within. Lali gestured at her, and after a moment's thought she passed her the stun baton she'd been holding lax in her hand. Dialing it up to maximum, Lali pressed the tip to the metal doors.
This time the bang was followed by a snapping discharge of electric current. Something clattered down the long fall, accompanied by a scream, and Immi bit through her lower lip and looked like she was going to cry.
At least there wasn't elevator music, just the continued rumbling from the lift shaft and a low growling behind the stairwell's locked doors.
“Give me your boots,” a man said, very low and definite, furious in a way that made every word sound like a sharpened stone. “And the angle grinder.”
The lift pinged again. Morwen jumped up from her crouch in time to catch Holptsmann's panicked look, even as the whir of a cutting disc turned into a bone shaking shriek behind the door. “They'll take that thing to us once they've finished with the walls,” Holptsmann hissed, and that was what it felt like. They were in a horror film. All restraints had dropped.
“Get in,” Morwen said, taking the stun-stick back as Lali retreated towards her, blaster aimed for the cherry red gouge where the saw had bitten through the wall.
Control, fucking Control tried to pull the same trick on her again, but Morwen had been waiting for them. She modified their code and sent it back to them, watched in satisfaction as Control's whole server shut itself down. They'd be panicking in the control room right now, with the systems that controlled all the locks offline. No one was being tracked now, guards were blinded, cameras turned off, and all the doors just waiting to be opened by a curious hand.
You want a horror movie? she thought. Okay, but we're the monster.
The doors of the lift closed, and they descended. Immi was shaking, Morwen rocking herself back and forth, back and forth. She hated being away from the wiring in the walls, felt stifled, numbed and blind. Lali wrinkling her nose placidly at the smell of her drying hair.
They could just cut the lift cables. Morwen thought, and her imagination gifted her with a vivid picture of the fall, of being crushed to the ceiling and then hammered into the floor.
But then they stopped, and the doors rolled open on utter darkness and a cleaner smell than Morwen had become used to – the burnt carbon smell of space, the hot metal smell of a nearby ship.
Iris followed the tip of her stun baton into the dull brown light of the lift. “You made it. Everything shut off
. I don't know what happened.”
“That was me,” Morwen didn't want to step out into the absolute dark, but that was where Lali was leading her, so she went. “I shut down Control and opened the doors.”
“It's going to be a bloodbath out there,” Lali shook her head, as if she refused to be responsible for it.
“Good,” Iris snarled. “Let's get out of here.”
Two of the stun batons held close together made an arc of electric current just bright enough to light the floor and a meter of the walls on either side of them. They followed that gleam through a corridor that also seemed cleaner than everywhere else. The walls were free of rust and even polished. Lockers for personal effects butted up against a still-warm coffee dispenser, and a vending machine with its internal light switched off.
It was basic, but Morwen had barely been on this scum-bucket a day and she already thought of it as luxury.
A lounge of slightly stained plastic chairs opened onto a sliding wall with a dead control panel. They had to inch it open one squeaking millimeter at a time by brute force before they could step through into the hangar.
Here the light of distant stars would normally pick out the vast emptiness in watered blue, to match the glimmer of the forcefield that capped the end and kept the air in. Morwen expected darkness in a hangar. She expected it to be a kind of liminal place between the quarters of the living and the uninhabitable vastness of the galaxy. But this was bright molten blue and gold, so overstimulating to her eyes after the journey down here that for a long moment she couldn't see at all.
She blinked and blinked until the afterimages blurred together and her eyes adapted. The intolerable blaze was spotlights – the spotlights of a cutter class ship, designed to guide the navigator through asteroid fields and gas clouds, not to be shone in their sun-like intensity into any small space inhabited by humans. She had to close her eyes again to stop the light from burning out the back of her retinas. But it wasn't fast enough to miss the round blue lights among the scorching gold. The round blue lights that were a dozen plasma cannons raked as far round as they would go and aiming straight at her.
“Hit the floor!” Lali yelled as the irises of the cannons dilated. To their credit, the entire score of them plummeted as if they had expected this. There was an oddly gentle sound, like the pmff of an air-gun and a single round of plasma sailed crackling over their heads, making Morwen's hair strain toward it and boiling the condensation off the walls. It hit the sliding doors and melted a great hole in them, leaving dripping hot metal and worms of electric current sizzling behind it.
“Find cover!” Lali yelled, already crawling on her elbows toward the repair station, where the lathes and welders and the spare sheets of hull plating gave her somewhere to hide.
“How did they know we were coming?” Leibniz demanded, as her two bearers hauled her behind the remnants of the door. “How are we going to get on board if they're shooting that stuff at us?”
Morwen slid herself forward until she could bunch up next to Lali in the same hiding place. After the lightning blaze of the shot, even the floodlights were a little darkened, but it was still difficult to track who had gone to ground where. A scurry of washed-out color around the edges of the dock and then everyone settled into waiting.
She felt more than saw Lali's turn of the head towards her, the minute break in the girl's confidence that said a lot of it had been put on for show all along. “I-- Morwen, I don't know what to do.”
“It was,” Morwen thought out loud, squeezing her eyes shut because this light was as bad as the darkness had been. She pictured the gentle flutter of the long green leaves of the trees on Cygnus Five and yearned for it with surprising vehemence. “It was a warning shot. I don't think they meant to kill us. Didn't someone say they'd been on high alert since their Captain was killed? They've probably been expecting an escape attempt ever since.”
“What's that noise?” Ekibe looked up at the underside of the level above. “It's not thunder.”
It couldn't be, but that was what it sounded like; it was a rolling, growling mutter that seemed to shake their world around them. A primal dread made it sound like warring gods to Morwen's overstrained mind. She calmed herself by finding a data socket next to the sheet metal cutter and querying the mainframe.
For some reason, it was still down. That didn't make sense. Her opponent in Control had ample time and skill to have got it back up again by now, so why hadn't they?
“That's the sound you get when several thousand angry women get out of their cells,” Iris noted with satisfaction. She had equipped herself with a blow-torch. The fuel tank was strapped to her back, the nozzle in one hand, the other hand holding tight to her son. He was black haired, brown eyed, but he had all Iris's skinny intensity… and her shiv. “Someone figured out the doors were unlocked. There'll be fighting on every level. I don't know why these buggers haven't left already.”
Now a new noise added itself to the clamor – one Morwen hoped never to hear again. The sound of feet clattering down the metal ladders in the walls. The angle grinder came back to her mind, slicing through metal and shrieking as it did. Where were the stairwell doors from here? What could she use to block them?
Desperately conscious that as she rose into sight, the cannons tracked and locked on to her, she reached along the rack of tools above her for a welding torch. Maybe she could melt the door shut, hold them back a few more moments?
With a snap, one of the Eagle's searchlights clicked off, lowering the intensity of the light in the hangar to something bearable. The sudden change blinded her yet again. Her head swam and her eyes ached with trying to keep up. In that swaying moment the Eagle's main hatch lowered into a gangplank, and four crewmen jumped out, arranging themselves into two lines, one kneeling, one standing, all aiming their blasters straight at her.
“We could just charge them,” Lali suggested. “Sometimes surprise will take the day.”
“No,” Iris and Liebniz said together.
“I'm not getting Mikal killed.”
“I'm not getting my girls killed by those cannons. Maybe the pretty ones can charm their way on board?”
Lali snorted. “Yeah, we look so seductive covered in their captain's blood.”
The mainframe was silent and useless under Morwen's hand, and it was too late for the welder. They'd all heard the scrape of the stairwell doors opening and the fast clip of booted feet drumming on the polished luxury lounge floor. Morwen didn't want to be cut up by a saw. She thought it would be easier just to run out, run straight toward the cannon. Surely a plasma bolt to the chest wouldn't have time to hurt. If she went first, she wouldn't have to watch it happen to Lali. She could pretend Lali could shelter in her shadow, get on board that way, get away.
She tried to take a step forward, and Lali's hand closed around her ankle and stopped her. “Those aren't the same boots,” she said, looking up with those eyes that sometimes seemed to contain the whole galaxy, dark enough for stars. “Listen. They're lighter, harder soled. It's not guards, it's--”
They came through the melted doors at a run – the pencil-skirted staff of Control, hair still tightly bound up in regulation buns, uniform caps on, officer's pistols in their hands. Morwen's nemesis who had almost bested her over the elevator was in the pack of them somewhere. She liked to think it was the middle aged black lady who had thrown a hand knitted shawl over her head and face. A woman with the foresight not to allow herself to be seen by those she had conspired to exploit.
“We've got to get on that ship!” Lali gritted out. “We can get close to them – use them as meat shields until we can grapple with the four at the door. Iris, you're handy in a fight. Morwen. Where the hell is O'Donnell?”
“I'm not getting shot.” Iris pulled Mikal to her and curved a hand around his hollowed cheek.
“Fine, I'll just go myself,” Lali bunched from her prone position as if preparing to leap up and run.
Morwen couldn't let that happen. Sh
e grabbed Lali by the collar, her mind whirring. Think of something! Think! She got enough control of herself to relax for a moment, to stop distracting herself with emotions and demands, and in that tiny pause her subconscious dutifully dumped inspiration on her.
“Wait! Wait,” she said. “Lali – the command staff have pistols. We'd be walking into a firestorm.”
Lali's expression reminded her that she could do the math too, that she'd realized it was no more than a choice between which type of death she would prefer, and this – in battle – was her response. “We have to do this. It's the only way out of this crap-hole before it falls apart. No one's going to come for us. This is the only--”
Morwen shook her a little, though she'd just been thinking the same thing. “The place has got an engine, Lali. If I can repair it we can turn this whole station into our rescue ship.”
“If?!” Lali was marine enough not to let her fear show in her face. It reverberated up Morwen's fingers instead where they touched her neck. “What if you can't repair it?”
“It's still better odds than running out into blaster fire.”
Lali looked from Morwen's earnest gaze to Leibniz's. As the old lady nodded, gravely, the last of the retreating office workers reached the Eagle's ramp, their kitten-heeled shoes ticking on the plate metal as they disappeared into safety. Any moment now and the Eagles would be shutting the hatch for good.
“Besides,” Leibniz slurred. She looked gray with all the physical activity but robustly unafraid. “My girls go first, of course, but it wouldn't sit right with me to take the ship and leave the rest of them to die. A plan where we rescue everyone is a better plan.”
The Eagle's hatch began to rise as the four riflemen hopped back on board. The cannon mouths dimmed but the engines glowed red, then white, then black, as the radiation passed into the ultraviolet spectrum. Their conformation shifted as three rotated towards station 'down.' As they shook with an invisible plume of power, the ship rose, the maneuvering thrusters fired and the Eagle swam slowly down the hangar, through the forcefield and away.