by Jenn Lyons
jumping from one side to the other as they climbed up the shaft. Had there been asteroid fragments in the shaft they’d have climbed using those too: I could vividly recall past occasions where I had made this ascent piggy-backing on a ladder of elevator lifts and floating debris, but this time the long tube was empty because of the rioting. There was no ore left. The spider-like aliens thus made longer, more dangerous jumps using the elevator supports.
When we reached the top, I took a second to catch my breath before I unhooked my harness and let myself float to one of the side walls of the central platform. Zaladin followed my lead and did the same.
One of the Meshikath used its back legs to support itself while it drummed out a tempo using the front. I couldn’t hear the noise, but I could feel the reverberation through the metal of the wall.
[What is it saying?] I could feel Zaladin’s voice inside my head.
[It said next time I should bring someone along who doesn’t scream the whole way.] I pulled myself over to the hatch we needed to gain entry to the monorail tracks.
[Very funny.]
[Uh huh. It’s adorable you think I’m joking.]
I opened the door separating the platform from the monolith tracks and ushered for him to go through.
ggg
Outside the airlock, one could look up (or down or across or through, depending on one’s preferences) and see the entirety of Deimos Station vanishing in the distance. It was better if you didn’t think of it as ‘looking down’—the abyss that stretched below me with that interpretation would have been enough to give anyone fits.
[We’re heading to the end?]
[Yeah,] I agreed. [The trick is making sure we don’t gain too much speed. There’s no friction slowing you down. If you pull yourself along as fast as you can, you won’t be able to slow yourself down before you splatter all over the central annex.]
[Why don’t I let you set the pace?]
That seemed like a plan, so I nodded at the man and started to haul myself down (up!) the monorail line. The monorail itself was theoretically functional, but the single car that existed was neatly parked on the other side where there was no chance of ever being used for any sort of strange break-in attempt or sabotage.
It gave me a lot of time to think, which I wasn’t counting under the plus column. I try not to play the fool too often. I knew Zaladin was using me to gain access to something he couldn’t (easily) break into himself. Did I think he would keep his word about killing Threllis? And why was he doing all of this in the first place? What did he hope to accomplish?
Then came time to slow down and I stopped thinking about High Guard ambitions in order to concentrate on braking. When we finally hit the annex wall, we were able to neatly stop ourselves without slamming into anything.
[Hook your rappelling harness here.] I patted a metal strut.
[What happens next?]
[We fall.]
I pried open the doorway to the secondary elevator conduit. It would be zero-gee for the first part, then partial gravity, and finally full gravity, hard enough to make for a lethal fall. The rappelling gear would keep it from turning lethal.
It was a quick, easy trip. Zaladin knew exactly what he was doing. We landed lightly, without incident. He unfastened his harness when we reached the bottom, as did I.
[I’ll take it from here,] I told him.
[Be safe.]
That was a riot, coming from him, but I doubted he could see me glare through the helmet. I unlocked the airlock hatch and went through, my hand instinctively reaching towards Medusa’s chest pectoral and closing on nothing. I sighed to myself and manually overrode the airlock security, which took longer, but what choice did I have?
When I’d exited the second airlock, I entered a mess. The haze of smoke tainted the recycled air and the corpses of two security guards lay on the floor just inside the entrance. I leaned over them. They’d been killed by masers: either prisoners had managed to gain access to both weapons lockers and the security annex or, more likely, they’d been killed by their own people.
I slipped out of the environment suit, tucked it back into the airlock, and looted the uniforms off the two dead bodies until I had something that fit me well enough if you didn’t look real close and notice I’d layered two shirts front to back to cover the burn holes. Someone had enough presence of mind to loot their shock sticks. That made me sad, but such is life.
I fixed that situation by coming around a corner from where a nervous guard was waiting, watching for any signs of trouble. The poor lamb never saw me coming. Actually, to be fair, I’m not sure he could see me. I’d felt his mind before I’d come around the corner and as an experiment, I locked out his visual sensors, making myself invisible to him. Maybe it worked and maybe it didn’t, but he didn’t see me even when I was right behind him, and a quick tap to the right nerve clusters made sure that he wasn’t going to wake up in time to protest when I took his weapons.
A week previously, I probably wouldn’t have been able to more than have a vague read on anxiety and fear coming from the man, let alone the sharp visual images and tightly wound emotions that allowed me to pinpoint his location so exactly. Being able to actually control what he saw would have been completely out of the question. I wasn’t quite sure if I should be scared, grateful, or nonplussed at how quickly my mental powers were expanding now that the blocks were all coming down.
Being able to feel where the rest of the guards were made it easy to evade them, and I quickly worked my way to the main computer control room. Unfortunately, as soon as I was outside that door I knew I was in trouble. I could feel at least a dozen minds inside and not all of them were human.
One had the unique signature of someone who could protect their minds from telepathic intrusion. That was either Kaj-Shae Threllis or...
Oh, I didn’t want to have to deal with the ‘or.’
I wished I had all my toys. I wished I had Medusa. I wished Zach hadn’t turned out to be a Sarcodinay assassin and I wished I‘d had one more cup of coffee.
I slammed my shock stick into the hallway walls and screamed as loud as I could while I ran. “Oh keepers! KEEPERS! Fuck, they’re coming!” I scrambled for the door entrance, pulling open the hatch and pushing myself inside. Tears were streaming down my cheeks and I looked wild and panicked. “Help me! HELP ME!”
Some of the guards rushed to do so, two helping me inside while the others ran past me in the hopes of getting a jump on the invaders.
The High Guard was not impressed.
I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know anything about him except that his hair looked golden red, shorn close to the scalp, and he was dressed in traditional High Guard black. He barely glanced at me. I wasn’t Zaladin, and therefore I was not his problem.
He wasn’t really paying attention, which meant his reaction was a few seconds off when I slammed my shock stick into the stomach of one of the security guards, pulled a knee up into the groin of the second man, and then slammed an elbow across his chin to knock him into oblivion. I slammed shut the door and spun the lock behind me.
The High Guard’s head snapped up and his eyes nearly glowed with pleasure. [I’d heard Zaladin had brought a student with him.]
[Don’t sound so happy about it. We don’t have to fight.]
The High Guard stepped into the middle of the room and gestured for me to approach. “Yes, we do.”
Then he attacked me, physically and mentally at the same time.
He was faster than Seris-Karat Valanat, but thankfully not stronger, and speed wasn’t nearly as much of an advantage as he was likely used to. Also, I was much better at blocking out his attack this time: it only hurt like someone pouring gasoline over my skin and lighting a match.
I ducked under his swing and managed to pull up a shock stick into his chest, causing him to back up as he fought off the impulse to vomit. He kicked up, forcing me back into a brace of computer hologram feeds, so I had to jump up and grab at wires to keep from being co
rnered. That gave me leverage to kick his jaw, but he took it like a champ and just grinned at me.
He was starting to get on my nerves.
During the whole fight I became aware that we weren’t alone in the room. There was a woman present, who had been standing off to the sides when the fighting had begun and had ducked behind cover at the first available opportunity. She wasn’t dressed in a security uniform, but in an embroidered white khani that didn’t fit with any ranks on the station I was familiar with. The feelings I could sense cascading off her were fear and worry, hatred for the Sarcodinay and concern for me. She didn’t seem to be interested in attacking and she didn’t seem to be any kind of threat, so I mentally classified her as a civilian and vowed to keep her from becoming collateral damage.
I kicked the High Guard in the head again, a feint so he’d duck while I somersaulted over him and landed on the far side of the room. The room itself was something of a mess. Cabling and decorations had been stripped from the walls, important equipment had been removed, possibly looted. There was a lot of bad wiring.
I waited for him, and to his credit, he didn’t blindly charge me. The High Guard relented with the mental assault, evidently growing a bit tired, before attacking my head. I brought around the shock stick, and he grinned again: he was wearing web gloves, which meant he could block that easily.
Which also meant I knew where his hands were. I dragged with the stick,