by J. S. Morin
Mort didn’t give two shakes of a tyrannosaur tail about the other animals. He wanted his dinosaurs. If he and Roddy weren’t going to wait for her here, they’d have gone back to the Mobius. A coldness rushed through Esper’s body. What if they didn’t wait for her? If they were in some sort of trouble—always a possibility with this crew of Carl’s—they might not have been able to wait.
Of course, waiting wasn’t going to do her any good, either. She swung the shuttle around and hit the throttle, blasting down the clear steel tunnel as fast as she dared. The jungle trees passed by outside in a blur, along with occasional glimpses of animals, though nothing on the scale Mort was hoping for. At one point she thought she saw a man in a blue uniform outside the tunnel, in the jungle with the dinosaurs. She glanced over her shoulder but couldn’t catch sight of him again. The tunnel was mostly straight, but there were enough twists and angles to require her eyes on her driving. She sped on.
When she reached the mountain facility, she slowed down and drove with one hand on the steering yoke as she referenced her map. She must have scared the willies out of several Gologlex employees as she blundered down corridors barely wide enough for people to dive out of her way. There were angry shouts and a few colorful swears left in her wake. It was only a matter of time before someone got security involved. Esper was willing to chance it though, lest she miss her ride.
The tunnels had a familiar look. They ought to have, since she had traipsed up and down most of them in her search. But these had a look from early in the day, when she had just arrived. She was on the right track—the map was guiding her true. She plowed onward, just slowly enough for people to get out of her way without injury.
Except one.
He stood in the middle of the tunnel and held his arms out. “Richelieu, what are you doing?” Chad asked. The expression on his face was worried, not angry. “Half the place is in an uproar. Comms are warning people we’ve got a brain-fry on the loose.”
“Move aside, Chad,” Esper said. “I’m in a hurry.”
“No shit,” said Chad. “But I’m not moving until I get an explanation.”
Who was he, to be demanding anything? Esper’s hand itched on the throttle. He’d move if he knew she was willing to run him down. The problem was that she wasn’t. He seemed to know that. “I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t explain.”
“Claustrophobia?” he asked, his arms dropping and his expression turning puzzled.
“Dear Lord, you’re dense,” Esper muttered. She took advantage of his confusion and yanked the yoke to one side. The shuttle veered and she feathered the throttle, edging past as Chad stumbled for cover. The shuttle scraped the rock with a cringe-inducing squeal until she straightened her path and followed the tunnel once more. “Sorry!” she shouted over her shoulder. To herself she muttered: “And to think, I would have had dinner with that neutron brain.”
It wasn’t far. The exit to the landing pads was half a kilometer ahead with just two turns remaining. A call echoed over a public address system. “Be on the lookout for a runaway shuttle. Pilot is inexperienced and possible intoxicated. Please clear the tunnels until further notice.”
It was a small blessing wrapped within a blanket of bad news. At least the tunnels ahead would be clear while security tried to round her up. She pushed the throttle and careened onward. Time was against her, but distance was in her favor. The shuttle sped toward the exit, the little green indicator triangle on her datapad showing she was almost home free.
That was when she noticed the forcefield. It hadn’t been active on the way in. She could see past to the landing pads, and even make out the shape of the Mobius in the distance. But a telltale sparkling shimmer in the air told her that there was no way between here and there. Esper slammed the thrust reversers for the shuttle and came to an abrupt halt that nearly ejected her from the craft. She hopped to the ground.
The controls for the forcefield were right in front of her. A console with a single seat stood right beside the entryway, displaying the field status, and a number of other bits of data that weren’t important just then. She pushed a button that looked like it ought to have released the field, but nothing happened. There wasn’t even an annoying little noise to accompany the machine’s refusal. It just did nothing. She tried again. She tried other buttons. Nothing. She noticed that there was a retina scanner set into the console, and that was when she knew she was going to get nowhere the easy way.
Looking under the console, where the operator’s legs would tuck beneath it in his or her chair, she found an access panel. She tried to pry it loose, but it held on stubbornly. She could get her fingernails into the groove where the panel and console met, but she had no leverage. With a sigh of frustration, she realized it made sense. This wasn’t the motor of a repulsor cart, this was a security station. It wasn’t meant to grant easy access. Only someone with proper maintenance clearance would have the tools to get inside.
Chad. He worked in maintenance. He would have the tools she needed.
“Oh hell no,” said Esper. She wasn’t about to go back and attempt to smooth over those ruffled feathers. She needed another plan. She didn’t have a comm with her, but the console would have access to the … no, that had the same problem. If she could get a message to Roddy, maybe he could talk her through it. Of course, if she had Mort along, any old magic of his would befuddle the tech making the forcefield work.
“Any old magic?” Esper asked herself. She glanced to the platter of pastries in the shuttle. They’d had a rough ride, but she was willing to overlook some smooshed cupcakes and frosting on the wrong treat. She had no time to lose. Rushing over to the shuttle, she tore the cover off the platter and began stuffing herself. Chocolate cupcakes, cinnamon danishes, jelly donuts, she wolfed them down with wanton disregard for propriety, wiping her hands on her pants and her mouth on a sleeve as she plowed through the platter until she was stuffed.
Hobbling from the onset of an upset stomach, she made her way to the forcefield. To the best of her knowledge, she was in fine health. But her trick of metabolic healing magic didn’t technically require her to be injured. She calmed her thoughts and pumped her heart faster. Blood rushed through her veins in a torrent. Her adrenal glands emptied. Her whole body warmed and sweat. The food in her stomach was digested at a phenomenal rate to fuel her metabolic riot.
The forcefield wobbled and spluttered out. With a victorious grin, Esper turned to get back onto the shuttle, but its repulsors had failed along with the shield. It crashed to the floor and Esper winced. There was nothing to do but run.
She had not been much of an athlete as a girl. Nice girls—pretty, delicate girls—didn’t run track or play sports. Her mother would have forbade it if she had ever wanted to. At Harmony Bay, she worked on her feet much of the day, but it hardly counted as exercise. But now, with a kilometer or more of ground to cover and who knew how many security guards en route to apprehend her, Esper ran. She ran like her life depended on it, because it very likely did.
Her eyes went wide when she saw the Mobius lift off. They were leaving without her! Or were they? The ship stopped climbing just above the height of the environmental walls. It turned and headed her way, drifting backward and angled nose-up. The turret turned and pointed in her direction—well, her general direction. It was pointed past her, toward the entrance to the mountain. The Mobius opened fire, and Esper didn’t look back to see what damage they had wrought.
The cargo bay door opened as the Mobius closed in. Roddy and Mriy were there. Roddy at the winch controls, Mriy ready to throw her a line. Esper caught hold, finding a looped end and putting her arms through. It tightened around her chest, just beneath her arms, and when the line pulled taut she was snatched from her feet.
She screamed, but it was surprise, relief, and the terror of a rather precarious flight all rolled into one. The Mobius was over a hundred meters up by the time she was pulled inside. There was a strange moment when the ship’s gravity took c
ustody of her from the planet, and the world turned. As she climbed to her feet in the open cargo bay, the direction of the planet below was sideways, even though it quite clearly looked to be down.
“They’ve got sentients down there in that zoo,” she said as she tried to catch her breath.
“We saw,” said Mriy. “The egg was in-Tik.”
Esper untangled herself from the makeshift harness and stumbled for the stairs.
“Where you off to in such a rush?” asked Roddy. “You about to lose your lunch? Sorry about the ride.”
“Gotta get to Carl,” Esper said. “We’ve got to go back. We can’t just leave them.”
# # #
Mort was already in the center of the common room, staff in hand, when Esper arrived. Any minute, Carl would give the order to drop into the astral plane. She didn’t have much time.
The wizard gave her a tight smile. “Good to see you made it. Find what you were looking for?”
“Yes,” Esper replied. “No time to explain though. I’ve got to talk to Carl.”
“He’s flying right now,” Mort said.
“Figured,” said Esper. She paused a moment and put her hands on her knees to catch her breath. “Crazy plan like that, it had to be.” She gave Mort a nod as she passed, not wanting to spare breath that could be used to get to Carl in time.
She found him in the cockpit, the front windows filled with stars. They were heading for orbit and beyond. He turned at the sound of her footsteps. “Welcome aboard. Don’t say we never did anything for you.” He winked.
“We’ve got to go back,” said Esper. “And thanks.”
“This is the part where we take the money and run,” said Carl. “Once we’re deep, I don’t plan on coming up out of a bottle until I don’t remember where this money came from.”
“Can you forget the money for ONE. BLESSED. MOMENT?” Esper asked. Her fingers dug into the headrest of the copilot’s seat and she shook it with each word.
Carl locked their heading and twisted in his seat to face her, meeting Esper eye to eye. “Fine. You’ve got my attention.”
“They’re slavers!” said Esper. “It’s a zoo for sentients. Sure, they’ve got exotics from half the galaxy, too, but those are thinking, feeling beings locked up in there who know what’s happening to them.”
Carl’s eyes slid away, toward one of the cockpit displays. “It was just an egg. Maybe there was something wrong with it, and it was never going to hatch anyway. You can never be sure.”
“They had a whole wing of sentients. Half the exhibits were full,” said Esper. She grabbed hold of her translator-charmed earring. “I could hear them through the glass, pleading for help. It broke my heart.”
Carl reached out a hand. “I know it’s hard, sometimes—”
Esper slapped the hand away. “Can the fake sympathy. I don’t want to feel better about what I saw down there. I expect us to do something about it.”
“Not much we can do,” Carl said. “We call the authorities and this gets big. The kind of big that puts a few clues together and notices little old us. Gologlex knew he had us before he let us go. Once we were down there, it was either play ball or get buried. We played ball, and now if anyone gets caught, we all do.”
“Well, then we’re just going to have to do it ourselves,” said Esper. She crossed her arms and fixed Carl with a you-just-cheated-on-a-test glare.
Carl chuckled uneasily under Esper’s scrutiny. “Brave idea, kid, but I’d think you had your fill of brave for the day. That shit’s addictive as any alkaloid, and just as likely to kill you. Besides, they’ve got a lot more firepower than we do.”
“Oh, really?” Esper asked. She reached down and keyed the ship-wide. “Roddy, mind coming up to the cockpit?”
“Just whose ship is this, anyway?” Carl smirked, but it vanished under Esper’s glare.
“Near as I can figure, everyone’s.”
Roddy came in on all fours, which was a quicker mode of travel for laaku. Esper had known other laaku to use the technique, but it was the first time she had witnessed the mechanic use it. “What’s up?”
“What if I said we needed to go back and free those slaved sentients in the Gologlex zoo?” Esper asked.
Roddy cupped a hand to his ear. “I hear you right? You wanna go back?” When there was no sign of Esper wavering, he shrugged and continued. “Be crowded as hell in here. I don’t know how many we could even fit. I mean, even with just us, it’s—”
“Forget getting them out for now,” said Esper. “What can you do to help us break in?”
“Don’t know where I’d even start,” said Roddy. “We don’t know anything about their numbers or equipment. What sort of power they’re running on. The sensors and scanners they’ve got.”
Esper reached into the pocket of her coveralls—her illusory uniform having faded when she wasn’t watching—and drew out the datapad. It clattered to the cockpit console, Gologlex Menagerie logo proudly displayed at the edge. “It’s missing stuff, but I think you’ll find most of it on here.”
Carl’s eyes drifted to the window. “You know … that fucked up magnetosphere must work both ways. They didn’t know we were up here until we called them. They probably already lost track of us.”
“You two willing to hear me out?” Esper asked.
“Sure,” said Roddy. Carl nodded.
# # #
“First off,” said Esper, “how many of you think you’re going to hell if the Mobius were to be blasted to bits right this instant?” The crew was gathered around her in the common room, with Esper leaning against the holo-viewer’s emitter. She looked to Carl and Roddy lounging on the couch with beers, to Mriy squatting on her haunches with the refrigerator door open, to Tanny leaning at the forward corridor entrance with her arms crossed, to Mort sitting with his head down at the kitchen table. Through the domed glassteel above, the color distortion of astral space rendered Hadrian IV in greyscale.
Esper waited. “None of you? You all feel righteous after what we just did? You think this all gets overlooked because you can convince yourselves that there’s nothing you can do, that you were all victims of circumstance?”
Tanny broke the uncomfortable silence that followed. “I know it was bad, but … well, no one but you is a member of the One Church.”
Roddy cleared his throat. “Well … technically …”
Carl gave the laaku a puzzled look. “Really? You never mentioned it.”
“’Til the kid showed up, it wasn’t exactly a topic we got into around here,” Roddy replied.
“And what would your priest say, if he knew what you’d done here?” Esper asked. “You’re unrepentant. Would he take your confession?”
Roddy held up his beer can and waggled it, sloshing the contents. “Him and me aren’t on speaking terms these days.”
“And you, Carl,” Esper said, turning. “You told me that you were a believer, but you figured you had squared your ledger. This isn’t a balance sheet; these are real people suffering because of your inaction, and ones that will suffer their fate because of your actions.”
Before Carl could answer, Mort let out a single, bitter chuckle. “You know … you use the One Church’s words, but that’s a Seeker’s attitude. You should be praying and confessing. We should turn ourselves in and let the authorities clean up this mess. That’s what you should be telling us. Never heard a priest or priestess advocating an armed rescue.”
“I’m not saying we need to use force,” said Esper. “We can find a way to bypass their systems and sneak into—”
“Never happen,” said Tanny. “You caught those second-rate shopping plaza patrolmen with their pants around their ankles. Place like that usually has someone ex-special forces as security head. You can bet that he’s having a parade right about now, marching up and down those guys with his boot up one ass after the next.”
“They can’t keep their eyes stapled open forever,” said Carl. “Maybe we wait ‘em out. Let thin
gs die down, then try in a week or two. We can run a job or two out this part of ARGO space, maybe a few quick terra. Maybe we can just find a place to spend the terras we just—”
“No,” said Esper. “Carl, don’t take this wrong, but the minute we leave this place, we forsake it. You won’t come back. I can’t let you weasel out of this, for your good as well as those poor creatures down there.”
“She’s gotcha there,” Roddy agreed.
Tanny held up the stolen Gologlex Menagerie datapad. “You’re overlooking the fact that we’re outnumbered, outgunned, and we’d need to get into the bowels of that mountain and out again with we don’t even know how many sentients. Different languages. Different foods. Some might even need different atmospheres. We can’t just run out of there with everyone.”
“We have Mort,” said Esper.
“I’m sure Mort’s flattered,” said Carl, “but they’ve got a wizard of their own. Probably more than one. That’s heaping a lot on Mort’s shoulders. Even if he—”
“I’ll do it.”
They all looked to Mort. The wizard stood from the table and cracked his neck. “I have been responsible for some awful things in the past, but this one I have a chance to set right. The rest of you don’t need to come. Set me down in the jungle near that misbegotten zoo, and I’ll make my way inside. Just pick me up when you see the mountain collapse.”
Tanny’s lip curled in a lopsided grin. “I see what you’re doing, Mort. Shame us into coming along to help. You’re not a one-man orbital bombardment.”
Mort straightened and held his chin high. He appeared haughty, if one could overlook the stained sweatshirt and the spot of ketchup at the corner of his mouth. “I most certainly am!”
“We’re not bombing anything from orbit!” Esper shouted. “And we’re not having Mort simulate bombing things from orbit. We’re not blowing up a mountain. By all that’s holy, people, this is a rescue mission. Haven’t any of you rescued hostages or … I don’t know, pulled off a jailbreak or something?”