by A B Lucian
The tremor ruined Mikail’s balance, shifting both his position and Yosh’s in that most crucial of moments just before the blade struck. Yosh’s sword crashed against Mikail’s shoulder guard and skittered away, sparks flying in all directions. Yosh collapsed on all fours. He couldn’t believe it. He had been so close.
The weapons fire in the corridor subsided. The combatants stumbled into one another, trying to grab on to anything within reach to steady themselves. Only a handful of Kagos’s Enforcers still stood. The violent shaking had given them a reprieve, but they were still exposed and more and more of Mikail’s Enforcers poured into the corridor.
Mikail recovered his balance significantly faster than Yosh and his retribution was swift. He kicked the sword out of Yosh’s hand, grabbed him by the back of his neck and flung small punches at his face. They didn’t hurt as much as they disoriented Yosh.
Another boom rocked the corridor. It seemed like the entire ship would fall apart. Yosh tried to use the opportunity to slip away from Mikail, but his grip was firm. A solid fist to the solar plexus stilled Yosh. His breath left him and he struggled to understand what Mikail said through the ringing in his ears.
“Bridge! I said report,” Mikail yelled into his communicator, his fingers digging into the back of Yosh’s neck. “What happened?”
The corridor and the ship shuddered again before someone answered. “Lord Munov, a vessel has opened fire on us.”
“Another one? What vessel? Raise the blasted shields, you imbeciles! Why haven’t you blown it out of the sky?”
The communicator crackled and stuttered. “Beg your pardon, Lord Munov. We were more concerned with the current situation on board the ship. It’s only a small cargo vessel, but seems to have been modified to carry high-yield torpedoes. By the time we spotted it, it was too close for our main guns to take out and they damaged our shield generators.”
“Blasted idiots, use our defense lasers. Do I have to tell you what to do? Defend my damned ship!”
“Yosh?” Captain Dupont’s voice buzzed through the communicator on his chest. “Yosh, I’m ready. Run through the doors, Yosh. Now!”
A clamor coming from Yosh’s left covered the screaming and gunfire in the corridor. Through the corner of his eye he spotted the vast wave of fur and teeth charging into the corridor, barking and snarling. Yosh breathed in stinging air and tried to straighten himself against Mikail’s unrelenting hold. Something sharp flashed through the air an inch from Yosh’s face, cutting away a black lock of his dangling hair. It should have hit Mikail, but he caught it on a greave. The huge arkanian hunting knife dug into the dense plate on his forearm, the impact seeming to push Mikail into the corridor wall. By the time Mikail looked around to find the source, the killer horde of dogs reached him.
A small yet firm hand grabbed Yosh by the shoulder and pulled him away as Mikail struggled with two giant dogs. Countless hounds bypassed Yosh and Sabina and charged the arkanians. They were everywhere, jumping, biting, and trampling the Enforcers indiscriminately.
“No,” Yosh said to Sabina and wrenched his arm away. “This is our chance to stop him.” He turned and marched toward Mikail who still wrestled with the two huge dogs. Yosh didn’t know what to do when he reached him. His chest burned with pain and he had no weapons, but he had to try.
Mikail yanked the arkanian knife out of his greave and slashed at the dogs with all his fury. He screamed and the desperation and savagery in the metallic voice made Yosh freeze. After cutting two hounds almost in half, Mikail activated the Protector suit’s cloaking device before more dogs could jump him. The air shimmered and crackled, and Mikail turned transparent, then vanished. A two hundred-pound dog impaled on an arkanian knife hung in the air six feet above the floor. The other dogs backed away, whimpering. Mikail held the dog there until it stopped squirming, then hurled the carcass toward Yosh with brutal force.
◆◆◆
The dead flying dog hit Yosh in the chest and crushed him against the wall behind. Indistinguishable shapes, figures, and flashing lights went by him for several moments. After a while, he became vaguely aware of Sabina dragging him inside the engineering bay. She slapped him hard across the face.
“Come on, Yosh,” she said and shook him by the shoulders. “No time for sleep. Next time do what I say, blast you.”
His head throbbed and his ears rang. He shook his head to get rid of the dizziness, but the red alarm lights flashing from nooks high along the walls weren’t helping. Everything took on a crimson tinge that made Yosh’s eyes smart. He sat propped against a metal crate and Sabina kneeled in front of him, explaining something. Too bad Yosh didn’t understand her very well with the alarms blaring in his ears.
“Can you walk?” Sabina said, enunciating every word. “We need to get out of here. Can you walk?”
Yosh ran a hand along his numb cheek and through his hair, expecting to find blood or bone breaking through his skin. “I’m fine, I guess. What happened? What’s with the lights?” He pushed himself to his feet and staggered. “Where’s Mikail?”
“Easy. There you go,” Sabina said, holding him by the arm. “That dog must have been at least two hundred pounds. Quite a blow.”
He nodded and stepped forward. “Where’s Mikail?”
“He cloaked and got away. The dogs took care of those filthy arkanians and even attacked Mikail, but they couldn’t do much against him. That Protector suit is really something. The dogs still seemed to smell him after he cloaked, but it just confused them not to see anything so they ran after more obvious targets. They’re running amuck through the ship right now.”
“What about the tremors? I heard someone telling Mikail it was another ship.”
Captain Dupont approached from behind, his injured arm limp and pressed to his body. “It was the good old Archibald. Seems Assai is awake, and she did not take kindly to being ordered to run away while you were in danger.” The Captain smiled and clapped Yosh’s shoulder. “She nearly broke Miles’s arm when he refused to take the Archibald into battle.” Captain Dupont reached into his pocket, removed his communicator and gave it to Yosh.
Yosh nodded and gingerly brought the communicator to his mouth. “Assai?”
A few excruciatingly long seconds passed without an answer. Sabina took cover near the bay doors, gun ready. She kept watch over the bodies littering the floor.
“Assai?”
No answer.
The captain kneeled next to one of the arkanian bodies and searched it until he found a pulse gun.
“Assai?”
Only three dogs remained in the engineering bay with them, snarling and clawing at a crate, then another crate, and another. Yosh wondered why they hadn’t joined the others in their rampage through the arkanian ship. They skittered to one of the steel walls and scratched and barked like something angered them, but there was nothing there. Afterward, they whimpered and sniffed the air grudgingly. Had they gone mad? Growth hormones had side effects on dogs’ minds and the ones in this batch had lived entire days past their allotted growth span.
“Yosh?” a tiny voice crackled through the communicator. “Yosh, are you there?”
“Assai, It’s so good to hear your voice.” A boom and the sound of electric cackling came through the communicator. Yosh’s heart jumped. “Assai? What’s going on? Are you okay?”
“We’re okay. Shields are nearly drained, but we’re holding together,” Assai answered. “Get yourselves to the cruiser’s landing bay. I can blow the doors open and scoop you away, but you have to hurry. We only had four torpedoes and the cruiser’s defense lasers are tearing us to shreds.”
Yosh cursed, mumbling to himself. If the Black Silence had more energy, they could escape faster. As it was, he had used almost all its reserves to get them to the cruiser undetected. Without enough power, the ship would be useless in a matter of minutes and Yosh had no desire to burn up in Mandessa’s atmosphere, or freeze to death without life support. “We can’t leave yet, Assai.”
She growled over the communicator—the same low, threatening growl she used when they fought. Anyone else would be intimidated, but it made Yosh want to see her and hold her tight and kiss her even more.
“Why?”
“Mikail’s still alive and the arkanians can resume bombarding Mandessa whenever they want. We can’t leave.” Yosh dashed across the engineering bay to the console he used earlier. He sighed with relief. The arkanians hadn’t locked out his superuser. With the dogs loose on the ship and Assai keeping them busy, they must have overlooked Yosh’s meddling. He had to thank Marge if they made it out alive.
“You found Olexander?”
Yosh stopped tapping on the console, the burn returning to his eyes. He gazed at his sister. She glanced back at him, her jaw clenched and her face set in stone. “Yes…” He swallowed to get rid of the knot. “He—He’s gone.”
Another hit to the Archibald scrambled their frequency for a moment. “Oh, Yosh. I’m so sorry.”
He sniffed. “I have access to their systems,” Yosh said as he resumed fiddling with the console. “Their shield generators are still offline. I can keep them that way, and I’ll try to disable their defense lasers. Keep hitting them.”
The dogs yowled again, louder than ever. Combined with the flashing crimson lights and all the tension, the sound tore Yosh’s brain to shreds. He couldn’t think. He turned, angry at the dogs, wanting to slap them on the head until they were quiet. “Can someone please make those blasted dogs—” The words froze in Yosh’s throat. One of dogs was floating three five in the air near the Black Silence’s airlock. It opened its jaws wide as if gasping for air and wobbled from left to right.
Yosh’s cheek twitched at the realization. “Mikail! Mikail is here,” he said toward Sabina and Captain Dupont, and searched around for a weapon, any weapon.
Sabina and the captain turned and opened fire without hesitation. The blue bolts darted through the shimmering air around the levitating dog. Some hummed passed and struck the wall behind, but some halted and flashed a violent yellow. Yosh could swear he heard a plate of reactive armor cracking and a man grunting.
“Blast you, vermin,” Mikail said just before the dog flew toward Captain Dupont.
The Captain ducked and rolled away in time to avoid the bulky projectile. Sabina fired in the general direction the dog had come from, but the shots crackled against the far wall. Yosh strained his eyes trying to cover as much of the engineering bay as possible. The bastard could be anywhere. If they were lucky, they would spot a slight distortion or hear a footstep. Sabina shut the engineering bay doors with a loud bang. Now Mikail was trapped and Yosh wouldn’t let him escape this time.
The remaining dogs ran around the engineering bay, squealing and barking in disarray. “The dogs will find him,” Sabina said as she pulled out her kohiri sword and ran toward them. “Get ready to shoot.”
Captain Dupont had gotten to his feet and Yosh found and aimed a pulse gun too large for his hand. They were ready. With the dogs on their side they’d get Mikail this time. He watched them, the sights of his gun tracking their movements and his finger tight against the trigger. Give me a hint, Yosh thought toward the dogs. Just show me where the bastard is. The dogs snapped their heads around, rushed across the open space in the middle of the engineering bay, and darted through the open airlock inside the Black Silence.
Yosh felt the pit of his stomach tumble. If the dogs had run inside the ship, Mikail could only be ahead of them. “No. Blast it, no!”
Sabina vaulted for the airlock, sword in hand and ready to slash, but the doors slid closed, sealing off the Black Silence from the cruiser’s engineering bay. She pounded the doors with fist and foot and sword hilt. The feeling in the pit of Yosh’s stomach deepened. Mikail had tricked them yet again. He stole the Black Silence, just as he stole his grandfather’s suit and would use it against them. “Sabina, get away from there,” he said, his voice creaky. “It’s going to undock!”
A hollow thud echoed from behind the doors and Sabina stepped back. Something on the other side hissed louder and louder every second, culminating with a loud suction sound and a clank as the Black Silence unclasped itself from the cruiser’s hull, leaving the engineering bay exposed to the black emptiness of space.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The air thrummed out of the engineering bay. The mangled bodies of arkanians and limp dogs were dragged past Yosh toward the gaping hole leading to the cold darkness. He was far enough away not to feel the pull at first, just a slight pressure in his lungs as the air was drawn out of them. Yosh kneeled in front of the console and hugged it with both hands, trying not to get pulled away by the moaning air. Pressure loss countermeasures automatically kicked in. A heavy bulkhead dropped in front of the engineering bay doors, sealing them inside. The system sealed the doors on the upper levels and the ventilation shafts. If they managed to not get sucked into space, their air would deplete in less than a minute.
Yosh dug his fingers into the console and pushed himself to his feet. He braced with his knees and hunched above the panel to access the controls. Bright lights flickered between yellow and red at the edge of his vision. He spared a hurried look toward Sabina and Captain Dupont. His sister had dropped her weapons and stuck flat against the wall, a foot to the left of the man-sized breach in the hull. Her face turned a steaming red and her chest heaved as she dragged herself against the wall, farther and farther from the gap.
The captain was fifty feet away from the gaping maw sucking away their air. He shoved his bulk against a metal crate like the one he had used for cover. The crate weighed less than ten pounds when empty, but this one seemed full. The captain struggled against it, his face growing darker and darker and his brow growing slick and wet. It barely moved an inch at first, but the closer it got to the hull breach, the easier it became for the captain to push. With a final heave, the captain groaned and slammed his good shoulder into the side of the crate. The metal screeched against the floor and smashed against the opening. Its square shape didn’t fit well against the round hole and air still flowed past its edges into space, squealing and whistling through the narrow openings.
The air deprivation subsided once Yosh overrode the controls to open the bay doors and re-enable the ventilation system. He sighed with relief. Sabina rose from the floor, normal color returning to her cheeks, and steadied herself against the wall. The captain sprawled on the floor and rolled on his back as he took greedy gasps of air.
Yosh had had enough. His hesitation had ruined their plans and almost gotten them killed too many times. Sabina and Captain Dupont almost died in front of his eyes. If he didn’t act now, who knew what else would happen? He thought hard about what he was doing as he tapped the commands. Becoming a mass murderer wasn’t what he planned when setting off to save his grandfather and Mandessa. He couldn’t believe the idea had actually occurred to him. Was this the kind of person he had become? He shook his head. No, he wouldn’t have resorted to this if their situation wasn’t dire. The Archibald couldn’t keep exchanging blows with Mikail’s flagship. If Yosh waited any longer, the arkanians would blow the ship out of the sky, along with Assai and his friends, old and new. He would not allow them to die and he would not let everyone on Mandessa, human or otherwise, die in a nuclear hell—which would happen as soon as Mikail got the opportunity.
The idea had hovered at the edge of his mind ever since he found the Builder codes for this class of cruiser in the Black Silence’s database. At first, it horrified him; it was monstrous, but… But I won’t allow eight hundred million people and my friends to die because I hesitated.
Yosh pressed his lips together and locked out the command consoles from the ship’s bridge. Without Mikail on board, Yosh was sure no one had the Builder’s code to undo what he changed in the ship’s systems. He didn’t need to be careful and stealthy anymore.
Yosh had entertained the idea before, in secret. How could he not? Once Sabina rescued their grandfather,
they would take control of the ship’s systems. But even then, there was the danger Mikail would use the Builder’s code to stop them. However, now, there was nothing stopping him. Not Mikail, not his grandfather... only the terrifying thought of himself becoming a monster. So was he capable of it? Would he murder hundreds of people to save millions? In theory yes, it sounded like a great bargain, but what would it mean to him? What would he turn into? A trickle of cold sweat snaked down his spine.
Yosh’s fingers hovered over the final command. His hands had never trembled so savagely. Not when arkanians chased him; Not when he witnessed innocent people executed; Not even when he charged Mikail with only the slimmest chance of surviving. But they shook now, inches above the command that would decide the fate of the hundreds of arkanians on the ship and the lives of hundreds of millions of slaves on Mandessa.
“Resuming countdown,” the robotic voice rang throughout the engineering bay. “Nuclear warheads will launch in ten seconds.”
“Ten.”
His hand decided for him. He tapped the command to vent the atmosphere from the entire ship, except engineering. His hand grew steady afterward. He inserted a long, convoluted series of commands into the console and used the Builder’s code to authorize it. He did it like a machine, with calm, sure hands. The countdown stopped at four seconds.
“Four. Nuclear launch aborted. Sealing arming tubes. Nuclear arsenal disarmed.”
Yosh leaned against the console, sliding to the floor and cradling his head in both hands. Over four hundred crew, he thought. Kagos said there were over four hundred on board. Yosh listened to the air hissing as it squeezed between the metal crate and the mauled steel of the engineering bay’s wall. He saw arkanians panting for air and clutching their throats. If he concentrated hard enough, he could hear them over the hissing air. Yosh had sentenced them to death—those loyal to Mikail and those like Kagos—without discrimination, with a simple tap. Some might have fought free of Mikail’s control, they might have had good lives, they had families waiting for them. Too late now. Again, hot tears gnawed at the back of his eyes. He blinked to keep them at bay.