Grand Cross

by Merethe Walther

  But the only sound was the click of the trigger. As he blinked stupidly and tried to reach to turn off the safety, Apollo, moving almost faster than Aralyn could keep up with, stepped under his extended arm, batted the gun aside, brought his palm firmly into the mercenary’s chest, drawing a surprised gasp out of him; he kicked his knee, sending the bodyguard stumbling toward the ground. Apollo, one palm resting in front of his chest and the other leaning toward his opponent, lashed out two more times, striking Nialls in the face.

  The bigger man’s head bounced twice against the back of his neck and he swayed unsteadily before completing his tumble to the floor, his heart stopped dead in his chest.

  “What the actual hell was that?!” Kita demanded. “Was that fighting, or a freaking magic dance ritual?”

  Apollo turned to answer, but the sudden sharp ring of an overhead alarm sent them all scurrying to their knees, hands over their ears. Aralyn’s brain immediately filled with the sight of the turret guns posted in Tartarys, and panic invaded her as she trembled, terror and instinct telling her to find a place to hide. She had to force herself to calm down as she looked back toward the large desk and the old man behind it, glaring at them with hatred, his hand pressed to an alarm just out of sight under the top.

  “Fuck!” Aralyn yelled, the sirens overriding sense in her head. “We have to get to Kragg, now!” She headed toward the door to the right, presumably the one they would have left through if they hadn’t broken into Eladia’s room first.

  She reached for the electronic keypad on the wall to force it open manually, but an error code popped up instead, advising them to end the lockdown before trying to circumvent the door. Frantically, Aralyn tried to jimmy the panel off, and then to pry the doors open, but nothing worked. She grabbed Kita and pulled her over.

  “Fix this. Please,” she said, practically in tears. To have Kragg so close but out of reach… she couldn’t handle it.

  Kita eyed her uncertainly and then nodded, trying to get the door open while Apollo searched the desk over to shut out the alarm. The old man was out cold on the floor next to the Madame, and although his chest rising and falling told Aralyn that he was still alive, the bloody streak above his eye said that wouldn’t be a guarantee for much longer.

  Again, she had to wonder just what kind of man Apollo was. He’d killed the three people in the room without batting an eye. But although it alarmed her, he had warned them going into this what would happen if they failed.

  They’re slavers, Aralyn reminded herself. They’re scum. You watched them hawk people like fucking pieces of meat at the butcher’s. She wanted to not feel guilt over the blood on their hands but settled for pushing it from her thoughts and focusing elsewhere for the time being.

  “Get that door, Aralyn,” he said, running his hands over the corners of the wooden desk. “It’s probably locked down, but try and secure it or block it if you can. Those two knobs will be here soon.”

  Aralyn cursed. The bouncers that had scanned their guns. “Dammit,” she muttered, hurrying over to the door.

  As Apollo had suggested, it was locked, but through the porthole, Aralyn spied the two men who’d checked them in when they first came downstairs as they stalked their way over to the door, guns drawn, faces enraged.

  She looked around for something to bar the entryway and settled for yanking a couch over instead. Then, after thinking for a moment, grabbed Nialls under the armpits, dragged his body over, and dumped that on the couch, too. One of the guards had his face pressed against the porthole, watching her, screaming unintelligible words through the glass. Aralyn just shrugged and went about throwing more furniture in front of the door and literally anything else that wasn’t bolted down.

  “Kita, how’s that lock coming?” she called.

  The continual, blaring overhead screech told her all she needed to know about Apollo’s progress on turning off the alarm.

  Kita shook her head, pressing the tablet frantically. “I need a little more time. It’s complex; Rio’s walking me through it.”

  “—coming out there to get you—”

  Aralyn realized for the first time that Caden was shouting into her ear, but the piece had slipped somewhat in the turbulence and only partial sentences were coming through. She knew he was probably feeling hopeless at being stuck inside of the ship while they were trapped, but there was no solace she could offer right now. They had to survive first. She let out a sigh and pressed her fingers against her forehead, desperately trying to think. She renegotiated the earpiece inside of her ear.

  “Caden, don’t you dare fucking leave the ship,” Aralyn said, hoping it came out more concerned than angry. “Be there and be ready when we get back. Stay off the comms.”

  She pulled the earpiece from her head and tucked it into her pocket as the porthole they’d entered from exploded open into a spray of energy bolts. Aralyn dove for cover behind the furniture as Kita dropped to the ground, pressing her back against the wall.

  “We’re almost in, you pieces of shit,” called one of the muscle heads through the broken glass.

  Aralyn pulled her sidearm, released the safety, and fired back. But as her trigger clicked, she stared at the goon’s smiling face in confusion.

  “There’s no way those guns are turning on without our permission,” called the guard, smiling as he shot several more rounds into the room. Luckily, his aim was bad, either from the narrow view or just in general, and so the bolts sprayed ineffectively into the walls and furniture instead.

  Aralyn cursed and holstered her gun. Dampener? She couldn’t tell if it was the field or the scan that had locked her weapon, but it should have fired. She banged her head against the wooden frame of the couch, fury building. Several more energy bolts whizzed past her and she ducked back down.

  The one damn time I didn’t bring the shotgun.

  Though she longed for a gun unaffected by a dampening field, she was glad she hadn’t needed to resort to the shotgun; it was too dangerous. One wrong blast could wind up spacing them all. Hurriedly, she snuck a glance above the sofa at the door.

  Before the idiot could fire his gun again, she leapt up and pulled his arm through the porthole, gritting her teeth as he screamed from the pain of broken glass digging deep into his flesh. The sharp smell of copper punctured the air, and Aralyn tried desperately to pull the gun from his hands, but he kept a stranglehold on it despite the painful position. Given that it was one of the only weapons in the entire area that could even fire at the moment, it was more precious than gold.

  With a final curse, the guard pulled his arm back and slapped the gun against Aralyn’s head, stinging her face and sending her toppling down on top of Nialls’s corpse. Ear ringing from both the blow and the overhead alarm, she fought to regain her senses, but the door began rising upward.

  The alarms overhead became mercifully quiet, cutting out in mid-screech and leaving a strange, hollow ringing in their wake.

  “I found the alarm!” Apollo said, holding up several pieces of multi-colored wires. “Try your gun—that might have done something to the dampener.”

  The door was almost open when Aralyn pulled her own gun and tried to fire a shot, but again, the weapon did nothing but click. She searched for anything else to use and eyed Nialls’s gun on the ground in front of the desk. She scrambled off of the dead body and clambered over to the gun on all fours, snapping the safety off as she spun around to face the two guards who’d just climbed over both couch and body. She pulled the trigger, but again, with maddening results, the shot refused to leave the gun.

  “The dampener’s not tied to the alarm then,” Aralyn muttered, tossing the gun aside and pulling her knife from her boot, holding the small switchblade like a prayer.

  “Hands where we can see them,” demanded the guard on the right.

  Kita looked up, and although she seemed hesitant to continue, hadn’t actually let go of the tablet yet.

  Aralyn wondered why they hadn’t just killed them alr
eady, but she guessed it was so they could hand them over to Eladia herself. It wouldn’t come as a surprise if she found out that Eladia paid well for her employees to turn in the big-time troublemakers instead of just finishing them off. Getting sent down the river to their biggest, most murderous enemy definitely couldn’t happen.

  Without a sound, Apollo appeared beside her, his bloody knife back in his hand and wiped mostly clear of DeMarch’s viscera. “Keep going, Kita,” he instructed, his voice severe.

  “Hands, now!” screamed the guard on the left, who was still dripping blood from where Aralyn had impaled his arm on the porthole glass.

  Apollo turned to look at Aralyn, and with a nod, she understood what he was intending to do. “Divide and conquer?” she whispered.

  Apollo’s grin answered, and as he launched forward, she crouched down low to the floor on one knee. Confused, the bloody guard went to target Apollo, but Aralyn kicked off of the ground and rammed her shoulder into his steadying arm as the other guard screamed in pain thanks to the knife Apollo had embedded deep in his shoulder. The other guard Aralyn hit tried to squeeze his trigger, but it was too late. The shot went wide and they both fell backward onto the floor.

  Apollo ran forward, pummeling the palm of his hand into the big man’s chest over and over again, sending shudders through his entire body. He ripped the knife from the man’s shoulder and slashed it neatly along his neck. The guard dropped to the floor, eyes wide, hands clawing at his own throat in abject horror.

  Aralyn brought her knife up toward the first guard’s throat, but he caught the side of her wrist and slammed it into the floor, trying to force her to let go of the blade. Stubbornly, Aralyn held on, gritting her teeth against the jarring pain as he slammed her hand into the metal floor beneath the posh carpet, again and again. Apollo joined them and sent a booted foot alongside the guard’s head, dazing him enough that his hand loosened and Aralyn could yank her wrist back.

  She sent a wide left hook reeling toward his face, landing it with a crunch that sent a thud reverberating through her entire body. With his left hand, the guard grabbed Apollo’s leg and sent him hard to the floor. He thrashed for a moment as the air left his lungs in one short gasp before he sucked in a shaky breath.

  “I think I’ve got it!” Kita exclaimed. “I just have to―”

  The lights dimmed and the gravity in the holo-field blinked off as Aralyn, Apollo, and the guard began to rise from the floor.

  “What the hell?” Kita shouted, grabbing for the edge of the desk as she lifted through the air. “Rio, that was the gravity!”

  All around the room, corpses began to float past them, droplets of blood pooling in mid-air from the dead guard’s still bleeding neck. The guard used the distraction to the best of his ability, kicking Aralyn off of him so hard that she reeled into the ceiling with a grunt.

  Apollo, having regained his breath, sent another kick to the remaining guard, landing it hard along the man’s ribs. Fury entered his eyes and he raised his gun, but another kick sent the weapon spinning from his hand.

  “Just give up already!” Apollo screamed. “Eladia doesn’t care if you live or die.”

  The guard smirked, revealing bloodstained teeth. “This isn’t for Eladia,” he said. “I’ve always hated you, you sneaky little asshole.”

  He kicked off of the wall behind him and landed with his shoulder squarely in Apollo’s gut while he sent wild swings with both arms. Aralyn got her legs above her and kicked off the ceiling, knocking aside DeMarch’s eyeless corpse and lunging forward to ram her skull into the side of the guard’s head.

  The big man hardly blinked. He shoved away from Apollo, who was bleeding from several cuts to his face and breathing heavily, touched the knife in his neck, and turned to Aralyn.

  “You bitch,” he said. “You bitch!” With a scream that was far more a bear’s bellow than the cry of a human in pain, he launched forward, his face a mess of feral rage, spittle flying from his lips.

  An explosion along the right side of his head sent his eyes wide, shaking and convulsing, and then he went silent. He continued floating toward Aralyn, but the tight rage around his eyes had been erased. Aralyn looked over to Kita with shock, where the girl was holding a gun as she floated by the open doorway, staring at the pink and red bits floating out of the guard’s head.

  “I got the dampening field off,” she said, her voice soft. “And the door’s open.”

  Aralyn nodded, mute.

  “We need to go,” Apollo said. “Now. They’re probably going to be sending reinforcements soon.”

  ****

  The doorway opened on a set of stairs that led further down into a wide hallway that extended to either end of the ship in both sides. All of the lights were out apart from the auxiliary runway lights along the bottom of the passageway, so the hall was bathed in the dim purple glow of holo-fields as far as Aralyn could see. With a sinking feeling in her stomach as they pulled themselves along the handrails, she realized that these were the pens where DeMarch and her people kept the orachal slaves. There had to be fifty or more individual holding cells lining either side of the walkway, some empty, but most still glowing with holo-fields that said they held prisoners inside.

  “What the actual…” She shook her head. “How are we going to find Kragg?”

  “This way,” Apollo said, waving them toward the stern to their right, grabbing at the wall to pull himself forward. “The slaves are grouped by those lots in the way they’re kept down here. Skilled lots will be in another area.”

  They passed by a cell that held a child in it who couldn’t have been more than six. His dark hair had been shaved almost completely off, and his pale skin said he hadn’t seen any UV light in some time. He was dressed in rags, floating in the zero-g; he stared past them as though they weren’t there at all.

  “Hold on,” Aralyn said, reaching for the holo-field release along the side of the room. “We have to get the others out.”

  Apollo spun to face her, his eyes frantic. “No, we don’t. We need to get your guy out. If they find us down here, we’re toast.”

  “How can you be so heartless?” Kita insisted, pointing at the child. “Can you really just sit here and do nothing?”

  Apollo’s jaw twinged as he stared at the women, dark eyes narrow. “And do what with them, precisely?” he asked in clipped tones. “Your ship was designed to hold ten people, at most, sleeping in rotations. We are five. With her father, six. We cannot corral thirty or more people onto the ship.”

  “I can’t just walk away from this,” Aralyn insisted. “We have to help them.”

  “One thing at a time, jameela,” Apollo said, though now he had the decency to look sad. “Getting to Eladia will save all of these people. Remember the bigger picture.”

  “Fuck your big picture,” Kita said, pressing the release button and holstering her gun. The holo-field shut off with a quiet snap. “We might not be able to take everyone, but I’m taking him.” She reached into the room and grabbed hold of the boy’s hand, but other than flinching slightly at the contact, he floated passively as she pulled him to her, stiff as a statue, then wrapped his thin arms and legs around her shoulders and waist.

  Apollo sighed. “Fine. It looks like he’s the only child left in here anyway. Let’s go.”

  They pulled themselves down the corridor, passing by pens full of people, floating silent, unmoving, completely docile. They didn’t call out for help as the three interlopers passed; they didn’t so much as acknowledge them at all. Their glassy eyes just kept staring onward without interruption.

  “This is like walking through a morgue,” Kita said.

  “Yeah, except all the corpses are still breathing,” Aralyn replied.

  Apollo led them up ahead to a turn in the hall that branched off to the right. Behind them, distant shouts sounded from the sale room, and he cursed.

  “Down there!” screamed a guard as he ducked his way through the doorway into the dark passageway.r />
  “Ya ibn l kalb. We need to go, now!” Apollo hissed before muttering to himself, “Yikhrib baytak. Yikhrib baytak!”

  The auxiliary lights along the walls flickered as they pushed through the doorway and Kita pulled out her tablet, one handed, and set it against the electronic keypad. The tablet gave a gentle beep and then the locking mechanism on the door kicked in, securing it.

  “This will buy us a little time, but not much. It’s a weak override Rio cooked up,” Kita explained. “Oh, and everyone is going to want to―”

  Before she could finish speaking, the overhead lights flashed on and with alarming quickness, the artificial gravity kicked back in and sent everyone plummeting to the floor. Aralyn was able to get one knee under herself, but Apollo landed with a belly flop and a groan that reassured them he was still alive.

  The “skilled” slave area was smaller than the general area they’d just left, but with the exact same glow of purple holo-fields lining the room. There was a door at the other end, and Apollo dusted himself off and pointed to it.

  “That’s our only way out,” he said. “Find him.”

  Aralyn stared into the first cell and the second, panning back and forth on both sides, trying not to think of all of the people whose lives she was potentially helping ruin by not pulling them out of the cells. Soon, confusion set in. Every holding area she’d passed was empty. Six cells down and she still hadn’t spotted Kragg. Eight. Ten.

  He wasn’t there. No one was.

  Frantic, desperate terror began to claw at her throat. Not now. She couldn’t have messed it up when she was already so close. She’d seen him. He was alive! All she’d had to do was get to him. That was all! Kita, who was still holding the limp boy in her arms, placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “Ari,” she began, but Aralyn shook her hand off.

  She couldn’t stand the look of sympathy in the younger woman’s eyes. It made her feel weak. It made her feel like a failure. Behind them, furious pounding on the locked door seemed to give her the last burst to shake her from the stupor.