Garek stumbled to his feet and stood with one foot on the wall of the cargo bay and the other on the deck. “We’re balanced on the edge of the cliff! We’ve got to get out now!”
Lucien scrambled to his feet and gazed up at the distant airlock. The deck was smooth as ice, and tilted up at a forty-five degree angle. There was no time to climb back up. They had to fly.
“Use your grav boosters,” Garek said, and blasted off at an angle, heading straight for the open airlock.
It was bad timing. The ship shuddered briefly once more, and then fell. Lucien’s stomach leapt into his throat as weightlessness set in. They all floated a few inches above the deck—except for Garek. He sailed up to the airlock with the momentum imparted by his grav boosters at nearly the same speed as the airlock was now falling toward him. He put out his palms and fired his grav boosters for braking thrust, but it was too late to slow down. His head clipped the top of the inner door frame, and then he slammed into the outer airlock doors with a resounding thunk!
“Garek!” Addy screamed.
Lucien drifted in shock, his feet dangling bare inches above the rusted metal wall. The sound of air rushing past the ship’s hull was a constant roar in his ears.
Time seemed to slow, but Lucien’s thoughts were racing at a lightning pace. Katawa had said the pit that they were now falling into was seven kilometers straight down. Mokar’s gravity was a little less than a standard G, so maybe eight meters per second, per second, but it would take them just a few seconds to reach terminal velocity, at which point they’d no longer be accelerating, and the effects of the planet’s gravity would be restored.
Lucien’s feet touched down, his prediction fulfilled.
“What the...” Addy marveled at the sudden sensation of normalcy. “Did we stop falling?”
Outside, the air was still roaring past the Specter’s hull.
Garek came plummeting back down from the airlock, unconscious, and Addy screamed.
Lucien angled his body toward Garek and triggered a blast from his grav boosters.
They collided in midair, and Lucien got the wind knocked out of him, but he managed to slow Garek’s fall from a deadly tumult to a hard knock. Garek landed on top of him with a loud clatter of armor, plastering him to the cargo bay wall for the second time in the past few seconds.
“We have to get out of here!” Addy said.
“Yess,” Brak hissed. “This is a fool’s death. No honor in it, only shame.”
Lucien crawled out from under Garek and shook the veteran by his shoulders to wake him up, but he didn’t even stir. Lucien’s suit sensors reported Garek’s life signs were strong, but he was out cold.
“Get over here and help me!” Lucien said. He took one of Garek’s arms, and waited for Addy to take the other. As soon as she did so, he said, “On three! One, two, three!”
They boosted off at almost the same time, but almost wasn’t good enough. A fraction of a second’s difference in their timing sent them careening to one side of the open airlock. Lucien decreased power to his boosters and managed to correct their course just in time. They sailed into the airlock and landed on the inside wall of the door frame. Brak boosted in after them and landed on the other side of the door.
Lucien bent to reach the control panel at his feet and toggled the inner door shut. It irised closed, leaving them to figure out how to reach the panel for the outer door.
There were no zero-G rails in the airlock, just a few rusted out rivet holes to suggest where they used to be.
“How are we going to get out?” Addy asked, searching the airlock frantically. The outer door control panel was at least four meters above their heads.
Lucien scanned the walls, ceiling, and floor, but he couldn’t see any kind of handholds. “Let me try something,” Lucien said, and fired his boosters at ten percent thrust. He shot up faster than intended and had to put out his hands to cushion his impact with the door. Now he was pinned in place. He backed off his boosters to five percent and reached for the control panel with one hand...
But the movement threatened to overbalance him and send him spinning out of control. “Frek!” Lucien gritted out. He tried again, swiping desperately at the control panel. Again, he was forced to plant his hand against the door a split second later.
This was taking too long. Lucien couldn’t be sure what their terminal velocity was, but even with seven kilometers to fall they wouldn’t have more than a few minutes before the Specter hit the bottom. They needed some of that time to negate their momentum and to get to a safe distance from the Specter before it hit.
Addy hovered up beside him and mimicked his trick of holding himself in a powered handstand against the outer door. Luckily she’d managed to pin herself within closer reach of the control panel. She spared a hand to work the panel...
Come on... He thought, watching as her other arm trembled and her whole body arched against the forces now threatening to unbalance her.
They didn’t have time for another attempt.
“I got it!” Addy said. Lights flashed briefly inside the airlock; then the outer door irised open and out from under their hands. Both Lucien and Addy were thrown free of the airlock, tumbling and breathing hard. Air roared in Lucien’s ears. The black abyss below traded places with a bright circle of sky over and over again. This was the proverbial dark tunnel with a light at the end, except they were heading into the darkness—not the light.
Lucien threw out his arms and strategically fired the boosters in his palms to counter his downward spiral. After three more spins, he had his flight path under control and he fired his grav boosters at maximum thrust to climb back up.
“Addy!” he yelled, with his suit speakers at max volume to compete with the wind of his ascent. He desperately searched the hazy darkness for her as he shot straight up at high speed.
“Here!” she said, and came floating up beside him. She was barely visible in the dark. The only way he could see her at all was because of the dim blue glow of HUD displays radiating from her helmet.
Lucien breathed a sigh.
“Where’s Brak and Garek?” Addy asked.
Horror sliced through Lucien’s gut. He glanced down and saw the Specter vanish into darkness. “We have to go back!” Lucien yelled, already cutting the power to his grav boosters and orienting his body for a nosedive so he could chase after the Specter.
“There’s no time!” Addy called after him as he began falling once more.
She was right. From the now tiny, thumbnail-sized opening overhead and the sheer darkness all around them, it was obvious that they’d already fallen most of the way to the bottom of the pit.
Lucien gazed helplessly into the hazy black abyss where the Specter had vanished. It was gone. They were gone. Brak’s words echoed through Lucien’s head: This is a fool’s death. No honor in it, only shame. Shame on us, Lucien thought. His conscience screamed at him, telling him all the things he could have done differently: while Addy was busy trying to get the doors open, he could have dropped back down and helped Brak carry Garek out. He could have—
A flash of light lit up the bottom of the pit, and a split second later the thunderous boom of that explosion rattled through Lucien’s armor, shaking him down to his bones.
Fiery scraps of shrapnel streaked up like fireworks. Lucien re-oriented himself and fired his grav boosters once more to get some distance from the shrapnel.
As he rocketed up, his whole body felt cold and leaden with grief. He’d just lost his best and oldest friend, and it was all his fault.
Lucien glanced down to see a solitary speck of shrapnel sailing on toward him even as the glow from the others faded. That speck grew steadily larger, glinting with deadly promise.
Then came a soft ping from his sensors.
“They made it!” Addy said.
Lucien blinked in shock. That piece of shrapnel was Brak! Seconds later the Gor sailed up beside them, carrying Garek over one shoulder like a sack of taber roots.<
br />
“You ugly kakard!” Lucien roared. “What the frek took you so long?”
Brak grunted under the weight of Garek’s unconscious body. “You leave me to carry this one out alone.”
“We didn’t mean to leave you behind,” Addy said.
“Yess, I know. If you did, you would be sorry. We hunt the gray one now?” Brak asked.
“What for?” Addy asked. “His ship is gone!”
Lucien peered up at the growing circle of light overhead. They were rocketing back out of the pit at high speed. Their surroundings became progressively brighter, and sheer black cliffs snapped into focus all around them—as did the angry swarm of black specks circling the pale sky overhead.
“The Mokari are still there,” Lucien said.
“Good,” Brak said. “I break their wings, and then we see how they like being thrown off cliffs.”
“I don’t know...” Addy said. “There’s a lot of them. I’m reading hundreds of signatures. We won’t stand a chance against that many, not even in our armor. They’ll rip us apart.”
“Addy’s right,” Lucien said. “We need to go back down.”
“Into the underworld?” Brak asked.
“Yes,” Lucien replied, backing off with his grav boosters until he started falling back down.
“And then what?” Addy asked.
“Find the gateway,” Lucien said.
“That’s what Katawa wants us to do!” Addy objected. “He got the Mokari to push us off the cliff knowing full well that we’d find a way to escape before we hit the bottom. With no ship, there’s no point in us going after him for the override code. He pushed us into this corner, and now he’s waiting to follow us when we find a way out.”
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Lucien replied. “Even if we find another exit to the underworld that isn’t guarded by Mokari, there’s no other ships on the planet. We’re stranded unless we find the key and the gateway. So we do that, but first we find whatever Katawa’s using to track us and we disable it. If it’s something we ate, then it’s only a matter of time before we pass the tracking devices in our stool.”
“Uck,” Addy said.
“We’re going to krak out the trackers?” Brak asked.
“Hopefully,” Lucien replied. “If not... maybe our suit sensors can find them for us.”
“We’re going to make Katawa pay for this,” Addy said.
“The best payback will be to deny him his prize and make sure he can’t follow us. Then he’ll be the one stranded on Mokar.”
“Something tells me Abaddon will come pick him up before long,” Addy replied.
“Probably,” Lucien admitted. “But he’ll have to find a new group of suckers to go looking for his fleet. On the bright side, if Abaddon went to all this trouble, it means we’re probably on the right track.”
Their conversation lapsed into silence, and Lucien gazed down between his feet to watch as they slowly sank back down. The darkness swirled below them like a raging sea, ready to suck them under. Smoke from the Specter? Lucien wondered.
“What do you think is down there?” Addy asked, her voice barely audible above the muted roar of air rushing by them as they fell.
“Death,” Brak said before Lucien could reply. “There will be much honor in it. A fitting end to Brak, son of Karva.”
Lucien glanced at him, but it was too dark to see now. He turned on his helmet lamps, and the others followed suit. Six bright white beams of light appeared, sweeping through a glittering mist.
A panicked yelp came from Brak’s direction.
“Motherfrekker!” Garek roared.
“Stop moving or I drop you,” Brak said.
“What happened?” Garek demanded.
“The ship crashed,” Lucien said. “We barely made it out in time.”
“Krak... the last thing I remember was making a break for the airlock. Hold up, why are we going down?”
Lucien explained their reasoning.
Garek’s headlamps joined theirs and swept down to pierce the black. “So our best bet to escape is to walk straight into a trap. How does that not make sense?”
“That depends whether or not we can find whatever Katawa plans to use to track us,” Lucien said.
“And if we can’t? Or if it’s inside of us and can’t be removed?” Garek asked.
Lucien had no answer for that. He cast his headlamps back and forth, searching the impenetrable darkness at his feet, but there was still no sign of the bottom.
“We don’t have a choice,” Addy said. “We have to find that gateway, or we’re going to be stuck on Mokar waiting for Abaddon to come get Katawa—and then us.”
“Yeah,” Garek growled. “So we’re frekked if we do, and frekked if we don’t.”
Lucien nodded slowly. “Exactly.”
Chapter 29
Astralis
A pair of Marine bots scanned Lucien at the door to the meeting room. As soon as they finished, the door slid open and he walked in. Admiral Stavos was seated at the head of a long, glossy black table.
“Welcome, Mr. Ortane,” Stavos said.
All eyes followed Lucien as he approached the table and sat down in an empty chair beside Brak—
Only to do a double take as his wife’s blue eyes met his across the table. Shock coursed through him, and he faltered for words. “Tyra...?” She hadn’t mentioned that she would be attending this meeting.
Then he noticed the white Navy uniform and the Captain’s insignia on her sleeves and shoulders.
This was her clone, Captain Forster.
“Hello, Lieutenant Commander Ortane.”
“Lieutenant...?” Lucien trailed off, shaking his head.
“Trust me this is stranger for me than it is for any of you,” she said, glancing around the table at each of them in turn. “None of you remember me—with the exception of Lucien here—who recognizes me as his wife, of all things.” Tyra’s mouth curved wryly at that. “But let me assure you, I know all of you very well already.”
“We had a lill’ somethin’ goin’ on, didn’t we?” one of the men at the table said, flashing a lopsided grin at her.
“No, Tinker, we didn’t. In fact you were killed by the Faros within days of leaving Astralis.”
“Damn,” Tinker replied.
A striking blond-haired woman glanced at him and smirked.
“Perhaps you should make the introductions before we start, Captain Forster,” Admiral Stavos said. He leaned forward and folded his hands on the table in front of him.
“It would be my pleasure.” Tyra turned to the man sitting to her right.
He had thick, angry scars running all the way down one side of his face. His head was shaved, with a faint black shadow where his hair was supposed to be, and a matching shadow of stubble on his lower jaw.
“This is Garek Helios, who I’m told is the father of Director Helios from the Resurrection Center. We called him The Veteran, and he served as our medic on the Inquisitor.”
Garek grunted at his introduction, looking like he wanted to add something, but he settled for a scowl instead.
“Sitting next to him is Jalisa, our gunnery chief and demolitions expert, as well as our second-best shuttle pilot.”
Lucien studied her: dark skin and intense violet eyes with long black hair wound into dreadlocks. She certainly looked like someone who knew her way around a weapons locker.
“Jalisa and Garek were something of an item on the ship,” Captain Forster added.
Jalisa glanced at Garek in disbelief, and he winked at her. “Heya, sweetheart.”
She rolled her eyes. “Another example of my poor taste in men.”
Garek snorted, and Tinker chuckled.
Captain Forster went on, “Sitting on the other side of Jalisa we have Troo, a Fosak. She was our comms operator.”
“I is being therapist now,” Troo said.
“That only adds to your qualifications,” Captain Forster replied, nodding. “Troo’s tel
epathic abilities make her a unique asset to any mission, especially during first contact.
“On the other side of the table we have Teelo Ferakis, a.k.a Tinker, our chief engineer.”
He raised his hand and waved dramatically to everyone at the table as if he might be about to get up and take a bow.
“He’s also our resident comedian,” Tyra added, frowning. “Tickets to his show are free, but nobody wants them.”
“Ouch,” Tinker said, holding a hand to his chest. “That stings, Cap’n.”
Tyra nodded to Addy next. “Next up is Adalyn Gallia, or Triple S, our scout and sniper.”
“Triple S?” Addy asked.
“Sexy sniper scout. You can blame Lucien for that. Feel free to come up with a new nickname. I believe it was Lucien’s misguided idea of flirting.”
Addy turned to Lucien with a disgusted look. “He’s a married man.”
“Indeed. Now he is, and with two young daughters, but he wasn’t married when you met him.”
Addy nodded slowly, her disgust fading to a furrowed brow.
Lucien’s mind reeled. Addy was beautiful, no question there, but it was strange to be told that he’d been in a relationship with someone that he couldn’t even remember having met.
“Sitting beside Addy is Brak, the Gor: violent, impulsive, and unpredictable to the point that I question the wisdom of asking him to join us again.”
Brak hissed and bared his teeth at her.
“Nevertheless, Brak is a specialist in melee combat, which turned out to be extremely useful against the Faros, whose personal shields rendered all of our ranged weapons useless.”
“Yeah, he’ll definitely be an asset,” Lucien agreed.
“And finally, there’s Lucien Ortane, executive officer aboard the Inquisitor, commander of flight ops, and our best pilot.”
Lucien shook his head, his jaw set and eyes thoughtfully narrowed.
“Is there something wrong, Commander Ortane?” Captain Forster asked.
Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies) Page 46