by R. A. Nargi
I conveyed the suggestion to Yates, but he replied that they had been scanning continuously since entering the complex. “We’re not getting any signal strong enough for a connection. It looks like these security controls are hardwired.”
The next part of the corridor was where it got a little dicey. Light tubes illuminated the space enough so that we could see that the corridor was flooded with disgusting-looking liquid—with large patches of slime floating on it.
“That doesn’t look good,” Chiraine said. She had her shoulders pulled tight and was rubbing her hands together.
“You okay?”
“Fine.” She took a deep breath. “This is just a bit stressful.”
“Report!” I told Ana-Zhi.
“Not much to report, Captain,” she said. “We’ve got some ancient pond scum. A third of a meter deep. No life forms. Moving on.”
The team sloshed its way through the corridor, hanging on the edge of the sled for balance. Soon they arrived at a three-way junction. Ana-Zhi consulted the tableau in her datapad and then chose the left corridor.
This hallway was quite a bit narrower—maybe three meters or so. There wasn’t much clearance on the sides of the sled, so the team had to change formation—with some in front of the sled and some in back.
“Getting close now,” Yates said. “Signals getting stronger.”
“That’s a relief.”
They passed through another sealed chamber lit by light tubes. And fortunately, it was dry. Beyond the chamber ran a short corridor which ended in a large pressure door.
“Dead end?”
“Looks that way,” said Yates.
“Hang on.” Ana-Zhi double-checked her datapad. “Just as I thought. This is a vertical shaft. Probably leads down to a lower level.”
“You’re talking about an elevator, right?” I asked.
Ana-Zhi didn’t answer. Instead she directed Xooth towards a wall-mounted panel. The Plargond worked his magic and the door slid open to reveal an empty shaft.
“No sign of an elevator car,” Ana-Zhi reported. “We’ll use the sled to go down.”
“Why not go around?” I asked. “One of those other branches will get you closer to the node.”
“Negative, Captain. We’re right on top of it. Signal’s still too weak, but we’re close.”
Chiraine turned to me, her face pale with worry. “You got anything to drink around here?”
“Like what?”
“Gin would do it.”
“Sorry, no drugs or alcohol on board. Company regs. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll buy you a drink once we get back to Tor-Betree.”
“Deal.”
With the sled in the shaft, it was hard to see what was going on. From the movement along the walls, I could see that they were descending—slowly. But everything was dark and shadowy, except for the little pinpricks of light from the micro drones.
Then I heard Murroux call out, “Quiet! I think I heard something.”
The sled stopped in place. The only sound coming through the feed was the faint hum of the sled’s z-field generators.
“Why don’t they just send the damn Raker down there by itself?” Chiraine asked. She had leaned close to me and I was pretty sure she wanted a reassuring hug.
“Did you hear it?” Murroux asked. “A creaking sound.”
“Settle down, ladies. In all likelihood it was just a light tube duct expanding,” Obarral said.
“He’s right,” Ana-Zhi said. “We need to press on.” She keyed the sled’s drive and it began to descend again.
They didn’t get a half dozen meters before the shaft erupted in chaos. The sled’s cameras spun wildly and the sounds of yelling and radiant blasters echoed throughout the shaft.
“Oh my god!” Chiraine screamed.
“Report! Report!”
A flash of light blinded the cameras and before the image could return another blast of light hit. A burst of static crackled over the audio feed. I could hear people shouting frantically, but the transmission was too distorted to make out what they were saying.
“Hap, get over here!” I yelled into the intercom. “We’ve got a problem!”
“I know,” he said. “I’m trying to switch to another camera.”
“I can’t believe this!” Chiraine’s nails dug into my arm.
“Oww!”
“Sorry!” She moved away, and took a deep breath—trying to regain her composure.
“Incursion team, come in!”
The camera was still lurching crazily, and I couldn’t hear anything besides static. I thought I caught a glimpse of a smooth rippling black shape. But it might have just been a shadow.
Suddenly the video changed to another angle. I saw Obarral’s face, splashed with something thick and dark. The audio cut in—
“—repeat, we got it.”
“Report!”
“Beck?” It was Ana-Zhi Agrada.
“Yes, what’s your status?”
“Two down.”
“What?”
“Xooth and Murroux are down. Possibly critical. But the threat is neutralized. I think.”
Spots danced before my eyes. I couldn’t believe what was happening.
“What the hell—”
“Something was down here. I couldn’t tell you what it was. Looked like a big manta ray.”
“A what?”
“Batoid. Never mind. It came out of nowhere. Slashed Xooth’s throat. We kept blasting at it. The fucker wouldn’t die.”
“What about Murroux?”
“It’s not looking good for him either.”
Shit, shit, shit!
“Get out of there!” I said.
“No.” It was Obarral. His voice was barely a whisper. “We’re too close.”
“Return to the ship,” I commanded. “That’s an order.”
“No can do, mon capitaine.”
Then both the video and audio feeds went dead.
9
“We need to go after them,” I said.
“How do you propose we do that?” Galish asked. He had been unable to activate any of the sled’s other cameras. Apparently the entire comm module had been shut down. The incursion team was completely on its own.
“We must have some more exosuits. We just follow their path. We saw where they went.”
“Yeah, we also saw those blast doors close behind them.”
“So, we open them?”
“You have a spare donokkal? I didn’t think so.”
“We can’t just do nothing. They could be in trouble.”
“We’re not going to be doing nothing. We’re going to be prepping the infirmary for seriously injured crew members. We only have one MedBed, so we’re going to need to do some improvising.”
“I don’t know anything about medical treatments.”
“I do,” Chiraine said. “Both my parents are surgeons. They forced a lot of first aid training on me and my brother.”
“You know how to operate a Medascap?” Galish asked her.
“Of course.”
“Great. You’re hired, sister. Meet me down in the infirmary.” He turned to me. “Captain, I suggest you stay at the comm station. Hopefully they’ll re-establish contact once they come to their senses.”
Waiting was killing me. And I was getting more and more pissed off.
I came to the bitter realization that Ana-Zhi, Obarral, and the rest of them weren’t professional crewers. Not at all. They were reckless. No better than a bunch of bounty hunters or Stygian rousters. Out for some thrills.
It was no wonder my dad got killed on one of these missions.
The thought burrowed deeply into me, and my thoughts darkened.
When we got back—if we got back—I was going to call Wallace on it. Demand an investigation. And if I found out that any of these dimbags were to blame, I’d—
“Hey,” Chiraine said.
I hadn’t noticed her come in. “I thought you were helping in the infirmar
y?”
“Everything’s set up. I can wait up here as good as down there.” She nodded towards the comm unit. “Anything?”
“Still dead.”
“How long has it been?” she asked.
I glanced down at my datapad. “Sixty-four minutes since we lost contact.”
“I’m sorry,” Chiraine said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“I kept pressing for us to find this node. I didn’t think this would happen.”
“Any time you go into a confined space, there are dangers,” I said. That was a little truism that had been implanted into my memory, but it made sense.
She sat down next to me. “Yeah, well, this is my first actual mission. And it’s pretty clear I shouldn’t have come.”
“What do you mean?”
“I pressed for it with the Shima. Demanded it, really.” She shifted her weight in the seat. “When I re-negotiated my employment contract last year, that was part of the deal. I was going to have a seat on the next mission to Yueld.”
“But they trained you for it, right?” You don’t send someone into an unpredictable and hostile environment without training.
“I was scheduled for training, but I kept putting it off. I thought I had plenty of time. The Fountain wasn’t supposed to open so soon.”
Chiraine looked down. In this light, she looked very young. Her eyes were soft and full of pain. And she was right, she didn’t belong on this mission. Neither did I.
At that moment, the comm unit sounded an alert.
“Open the goddamn door!” Ana-Zhi yelled. “We’re heading towards the ship!”
Chiraine and I raced to the launch bay. Galish was there by the air lock, peering through the portal.
“I have a visual on them!”
I looked out and saw the sled approaching the ship. Only three of the five members of the incursion team were upright on the sled.
The next several minutes were a chaotic blur. Once they arrived at the airlock, we ushered the team in. The ones who were still conscious were all bloodied and injured, and there were two unmoving bodies on the sled.
“Xooth didn’t make it,” Ana-Zhi said as she staggered into the launch bay.
“What about Murroux?” Galish asked.
“Alive,” she grunted. “Barely.”
Carefully Galish and I carried Murroux to the MedBed and Galish initiated the automated triage sequence. Then we attended to the others.
Yates was bleeding and looked like he was ten seconds away from passing out, but he lurched over to Chiraine. “We found the node.”
Ana-Zhi made her way over and slumped on to an equipment crate. “Get to work, princess. This better not have been for nothing.”
It took several hours to stabilize everyone. Murroux had to be placed in an induced coma, but the MedBed thought he might survive.
The crew members who were able to stood in silent remembrance of Xooth. His tiny broken body was wrapped in a sheet and placed in a storage tube in the hold. The company would return his remains to his family on Plargond.
Even though I had only known him for a short time, I was torn up about Xooth’s death. I kept asking Ana-Zhi questions but she was sullen and just wanted to retreat to her cabin.
“What are we supposed to do now?” I asked.
“You’re the captain. You figure it out.”
I returned to the engineering bay, where Chiraine was glued to her workstation. It was obvious that she had been crying.
“How are you holding up?” I asked.
“Not good. You?”
“Not good either.”
“I’m just going to keep working until I locate that fucking Kryrk.”
“But the node they found? That was the right one?”
She brushed a lock of hair away from her face. “Yes, A419.”
“And it’s not just going to lead us to another broken node, will it?”
“Hard to say. The Ambit is seriously fragmented. You know that.”
I didn’t know that, but I nodded like I did.
“It’s going to take a while to integrate A419.” She tapped at her biklode resonator. The little orb glowed faintly.
“You need some help? I can get Yates up here.”
“No, that’s okay.” She glanced towards the hall behind me, then lowered her voice. “Between you and me, he’d only slow things down.”
“Oh?” I had thought that Yates knew his stuff. He’d been a data jockey for a long time and everyone at Beck Salvage seemed to have a high opinion of him.
“He’s kind of old school,” Chiraine said. “Not that his approach is wrong or anything. It’s just that we use more imperative slicing these days. I get the impression that Yates is more of a field operator.”
I shrugged diplomatically, and didn’t respond.
“Anyway,” she said. “I better get back to it.”
“Hang in there. And let me know if you need anything. Better yet, try to get some sleep.”
“Sleep?” She smiled at me. “What’s that?”
The next morning, I woke up early and checked on Ana-Zhi. She was sleeping like the dead on one of the flight seats in the main hold. I let her sleep and went to see how Chiraine was doing.
I found her also asleep, slumped over her workstation—just where I had left her six hours before.
Great.
I didn’t disturb her. Instead I headed to the bridge. Hap Galish was dozing in the pilot’s chair. Was the whole crew asleep?
“You didn’t sleep there all night, did you?”
He started awake. “No. Just needed to run some diagnostics.”
“Good. Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“Oh yeah? Where to?” He sat up and flicked some switches on the console.
“Any place but here.”
“Did the professor finish crunching the data?”
“Not sure, but I doubt it. I don’t think we should hang around here. Maybe just return to Yueld’s orbit, okay?”
He hesitated.
“What?” I asked.
“You run this by Ana-Zhi?”
I felt my blood begin to simmer. Not quite a boil, but I was getting there.
“She’s sleeping. Now just get us moving.”
There was something in my tone that convinced Galish, but before he was even able to start up the thrusters, the proximity alarms started sounding.
What the hell?
“Looks like we’ve got company.” Galish pointed at the bridge’s main display screen.
It showed a Lamprey-class ship coming towards us. From its crimson color, sharp angles and distinctive bat-like stabilizers, I recognized it immediately.
“The Mayir,” I said. “What the hell are they up to?”
“Nothing good, I’m sure.” He engaged our defensive systems and broadcast an alert to the crew.
“You still want me to get out of here?” Galish asked.
“What’s standard procedure for a situation like this?”
He snorted. “Standard procedure is to let the real captain deal with it.”
That was bullshit, but he was right. Beyond some theoretical knowledge that had been implanted in me, I had no clue what to do when a potentially hostile competitor got in your face without warning.
The Mayir ship landed a hundred meters away and just sat there. It didn’t try to hail us or anything.
“What the hell is going on now?” Ana-Zhi stormed onto the bridge. “I was trying to get some shut-eye.” She glared at me sitting in the captain’s chair. “You mind?”
As we exchanged positions, I caught a strong whiff of whiskey. It appeared that my first mate had been self-medicating with a little contraband alcohol. I didn’t really give a crap one way or the other, but I needed her to be sharp and to deal with this.
“They just plopped down about four minutes ago,” Galish said. “Just parked there.”
“Arrogant pricks,” she muttered, leaning back into the chair I had jus
t vacated.
Then I remembered something. Yesterday, when Hap Galish had mentioned that both the Mayir and the Faiurae were also here to find the Kryrk, I was taken by surprise. Then when I tried to recall the mission’s competitive analysis, I came up blank. It was like there had been a glitch in my AL procedure.
I had asked Ana-Zhi to fill me in on the briefing, but she put me off because we were about to try to get into Roan Andessa.
But now was as good a time as any. I needed to know what we were up against.
“Brief me on the Mayir,” I said.
“Piss off.” She shut her eyes and leaned even further back in the chair. “Hap, let me know if they make a move.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “I need to know why they want the Kryrk.”
“Gods,” she said, eyes still closed.
“What?”
“It always comes down to gods. My gods are better than yours. I’m right and you’re wrong. You don’t deserve to live. Blah, blah, blah. The opiate of the masses.”
I turned to Galish. “What is she saying?”
“It’s a religious conflict. They hate each other. And both sides believe that the Kryrk will give them legitimacy. The Scepter of the Gods.”
“I thought it was supposed to be the Crescent of the Stars.”
“I was speaking metaphorically, dumbass.”
I stared at the screen, watching the Mayir’s crimson ship. I guessed what Ana-Zhi and Galish were telling me made sense. But that didn’t explain the Faiurae’s interest in the Kryrk. I asked Galish about it.
“Did you bump your head or something? The Faiurae want the Kryrk because they know it’s extremely valuable to both the Shima and the Mayir. They’ll play one off the other.”
“Mercenary bastards,” Ana-Zhi commented. Her eyes were still closed.
“I still don’t get why the Mayir are here, though,” I said. “Shouldn’t they be off looking for the Kryrk? Chasing down their own clues?”
“Maybe they hit a dead end,” Galish said. “Kind of like us.”
“What? So they’re tracking down that broken node too? Are they going to go down into the zoo?”
“That, I’d like to see,” Ana-Zhi said.
At that moment, the bridge comm unit came to life. “Hello? Anyone home over there?”