“How did you do that?!” Crawley’s mouth yowled out in awe while his fingers got busy rubbing life into the raw wrists.
“Trade secret,” Isabel dropped a special pin back into the folds of her sleeve. “You’re welcome. Now get to that idea of yours. We’ve wasted precious time. Earth dogs will come baying for blood soon.”
Crawley swallowed hard and took one fearful step back. “Ummm, OK. Can somebody perhaps give me a boost?” He pointed to the ceiling. There was a lot of room left between his maximum stretch and the roof.
“Dredge fuzz,” Isabel volunteered the other guy.
Dreyfus shook his head twice but otherwise made a step ladder out of his hands. When Crawley climbed it, the Marine Captain groaned but held and even pushed the overweight Specialist to the rafters. “This better be worth it. You like to eat, don’t you?”
“Stress eating. It’s a real condition, certified and all. Anxiety nutrition disorder. I think I actually lost a few pounds this week. Prison diet is not your recommended ten a day-”
“Stop talking and do what you need to do before I drop you,” Dreyfus grumbled and jerked his steepled hands up and down to demonstrate his point.
Crawley grabbed a piece of metal jutting from the ceiling to stop himself from falling. “All right! I hear you! Sheesh! You’re the fussy type, ain’t you? A guy can’t talk.” He reached out to press against another section of the ceiling, and a segment came loose. An access hatch invited - if you could call a dark and dusty hole inviting. “Hey there, you pretty thing! As they say in Kingfisher’s Folly: bingo, bangers and mash! This beauty is the ticket. Your expressway out of here. Your emergency exit. Your escalator to- Whoa!” Crawley almost fell when Dreyfus shook him again but he reached out and managed to grab the edge of the chute. “I get it, grumpy one. Wait one moment.”
He scrambled up and wedged himself in the hole. His entire chubby body writhed and disappeared within. There were some banging and pinging paired with huffing and puffing, and then a pair of arms dropped out of the hole, with shoulders and face attached at the end.
“It’s a bit hidden, right? Good thing papa Crawley was right here to spot it,” Crawley gave a tight-lipped smile of self-satisfaction. “Why are you standing there like chickens waiting to be fed gazpacho? Climb on up!”
“Whatever your majesty Crawley commands,” Dreyfus went first, heaving himself barely into the tunnel. It looked like Crawley wasn’t much help, but the jarhead made it and assisted both Isabel and Nadie to climb inside. The tunnel was low, dark and hot. They had to crawl one by one. “I’m Rhys, by the way. This is Nadie, and the nasty hag there is Isabel.”
“Got it. Isabel, that thing you yelled about shooting me, you didn’t mean it, right?” Crawley addressed Nadie with the wrong name.
“I’m Isabel,” flicked a thumb at herself.
“Awkward... Pleased to meet you all. I’m Bernard. Bertie for short.” Crawley slithered through the tube with surprising speed.
“I guess it’s in the name. Crawley.”
“It’s in the joints, actually. You have to know how to push your body the right way. Use your elbows and knees for support and sliiiiiide through with your hips. Don’t lift your buttocks too high or you’ll get some nasty burns. Once you know how it’s really quite easy to do. I spent the last two years in maintenance. You pick up so much stuff, you wouldn’t imagine.”
“Crawley?” Dreyfus managed to get a word in what was otherwise to be an unending stream of the Specialist’s self-conscious dribble talk. “Do me a favour and shut up.”
For a moment, Crawley listened and there was silence apart from groaning and panting as they travelled forward. He couldn’t keep it up, though. “Sorry, I do stress talking.”
“You said something about a beacon, right?” Nadie sprang back to life. She was crawling at the very end.
Isabel would have worried about her friend if her own world wasn’t a blur of colourful dots dancing and skipping in front of her eyes. That meant she was getting better.
Nadie asked her question. “What exactly happened to you between there and here?”
When Crawley responded, it sounded unsure. “Earthers snatched me when I was doing some work. Shield generators are full of quirks, you know?”
Nadie stirred and made a lot of noise in the rear as she bumped into walls and low ceiling. “You were on the barrier when the attack happened? You saw the EEF fleet on approach?”
“Ummm, yeah,” Crawley admitted and sounded like he was a kid caught in the area of the kitchen near the cookie jar, after bedtime, with smudges of dough on his chin and fingertips.
Nadie didn’t pick that up. She showered him with questions: “How did it happen? Where did the barrier break first? Do you know who took it down? Was it sabotage? Can you prove it?”
“I would rather not talk about it if you don’t mind,” Crawley said slowly.
Isabel sensed a tension brewing in Nadie. This wasn’t a place for any dust-ups. First of all, she didn’t want her crawling over her so she could strangle the Specialist for not giving her the answers she wanted. “How long were you locked up for?” she took over the reins of questioning.
“Couple of days. Or maybe four? Five? I dunno. Time gets strange when you sit in a cell for days. Very little changes.”
“EEF crossed the barrier four days ago,” Dreyfus informed him.
“Did they? Four days then. You know what? I’m really quite hungry. All this talking and crawling boosts my appetite. Can we make an emergency stop by the cantina? I could die for a goat’s cheese fondue right now.”
“You can eat your fondue on the Anvil,” Isabel said firmly. “Unless you wanna get caught again?”
“No. No. I really don’t want that. I can wait.” His stomach rumbled loudly in direct opposition to the statement.
Isabel ignored Crawley’s embarrassment. “Good choice. We’re in the bowels. How do we get all the way up to the hangar bay?”
“No way we can climb up that far. We need to find a lift,” Dreyfus said.
“You’re in luck. There’s one right around the corner.” Crawley pushed himself into a ninety-degree turn. After some wriggling, they all navigated through it and he pushed a panel down with his feet. The section fell down to the passageway's floor and Crawley stuck out his head. “Clear.”
They exited the dank crawl space with sighs of relief and a session of limb-stretching. The corridor looked similar to the other one, but the sirens were almost out of earshot here. They had covered more ground than Isabel expected.
“Where to now?”
“Just over there.” Crawley led them to the elevators. They were close by, just as he predicted. The Specialist pressed a call button and the new team huddled in awkward silence, waiting for their ride. Their eyes kept creeping to sides, looking for the sign of soldiers coming to get them. Ears scanned the silence, keen to pick up any and all threatening sounds. No one wanted to say what everyone was thinking: maybe the elevators were disabled; perhaps they were just delaying the moment they got caught in a net.
Crawley broke into a hum with his bumblebee-like droning of ‘The Girl From Ipanema’. Dreyfus joined in, out of tune or sync. Isabel exchanged glances with Nadie. Men, Isabel communicated. I know, Nadie said with an eye roll. I will take down Dreyfus, Isabel indicated with an air chop behind the marine’s back. OK, Nadie nodded. They were ready to move in against the guys, no lethal force, just a friendly rub-a-dub. Isabel knew the perfect move for the purpose: a rib jab, mighty painful. She never got to use it.
The elevator door chimed open. It was occupied. Nadie broke in a frenzy at the sight of blue-ish tunics of the three men inside. It was a kind of pleasure to watch her at work when she whirled in, punched one EEF sailor on the nose, kicked another in the groin, pushed the third violently against the elevator’s side. By the time Isabel and Dreyfus moved in to help, it was job done and dusted. The EEFers lay sleeping on the floor. Nadie panted, Isabel admired the work, and Dreyfus...
Dreyfus sulked.
Crawley hesitated in the hallway. His jaw dropped to the floor level. His eyes threatened to pop.
“Get in here!” Nadie grabbed the Specialist by the collar so torn it was barely there and pulled him in the car. He tiptoed between the bodies, trying his best not to step on anyone. “Sorry, sorry”, he kept uttering every time his shoe landed on a soldier.
“Hangar deck,” Isabel ordered the elevator. It was a tense moment, checking if the elevator would work for her. It started moving with a low hum. Relief washed over her like a warm shower. The EEF was so convinced of the impending victory, even their alerts were sloppy.
Nonetheless, the atmosphere sizzled and cracked. The hum of the elevator engine was a deafening statement of a mood slump. Specialist Crawley was definitely scared of what he got himself into, but he defied the sentence by saying:
“Oh wow. I sure am glad that I am on your side. I mean, look at this.” He very carefully prodded one of the unconscious EEFers with a foot and retracted immediately, in fear that the bloke might wake up. “That’s stone cold. Congratulations. You’re... eh... really... proficient?” His attempt to compliment Nadie backfired. She looked at him with a Chromium-like hardness and an undertone of hostility almost buzzing into the audible spectrum. “Um... err... Yeah. Oh, look! We’re here!”
Crawley was right. The lift arrived, and the Specialist burst out from the cramped vehicle without looking out for trouble. Luck was on his side. The hallway was empty. No bristling firepower waited to incinerate him and the rest of the group on arrival.
“I don’t like this silence,” Isabel spoke plainly the extent of her thoughts. She was getting over the neural paralysis. With every passing second, she gained more insight into the fact their enemy had done a woeful job of following up a weapons’ discharge in the decks below. Where were the troops? Where was the lockdown? Shouldn’t they be taking this more seriously?
“Let’s hurry. Every second that we stay, we press our luck.” Nadie sailed past Crawley and led the retreat. They all knew where they were now: back on the hangar deck.
Isabel could feel in her bones the call of her ship. She sped according to markings on the walls. The Higher Power’s paths were empty. So was the landing deck of the hangar bay when they flew in. The vastness of cleared space was like a blow to their faces. The ground troops were all gone. The transport ships had taken them to join the fight against Rockwall.
The only ship that remained in place was the Anvil; the humble little freighter, a small unflattering block of slightly rusted steel and iron, dwarfed by its better-maintained surroundings. She did not fit in there, like a coal miner strutting in his full work outfit across a glitzy gala of men in tuxedos and women in sequinned gowns attending a political fundraiser, or like a Spanish Inquisitor popping into a fish-and-chips shop for a helping of haddock with fried potatoes dripping in fat.
Isabel’s heart rose. She doubled the speed of her run, ignoring a disappointed shout at her back.
“That’s your ship?” Crawley moaned.
“Yes. You’re welcome to stay here if you don’t like it.” She sprinted without a care for the ungrateful ex-prisoner’s thinking. She knew the value of her old lady. The Anvil was capable of great things if she flew in the right hands. She didn’t have to look pretty. Each and every dent on her hull told a story of a daring escape. Isabel knew them all by heart.
The access ramp was still wide open just the way she’d left it. She climbed it in record time and slapped the door shutter while everyone else was still on it. Crawley, who lagged behind with his bobbing gait, stretched his arms to the sides for balance but wobbled anyway and nearly fell off. Dreyfus reached out at the last moment and pulled him into the ship.
“Thanks!”
“Don’t mention it.”
Dreyfus rubbed his hand against the yellow part on the front of the uniform. The Specialist was sticky with sweat. Even though he was beaming and dancing with relief that he wasn’t treading the Higher Power’s floor anymore, Crawley looked even worse in the Anvil’s lights than he did when they first met him hiding behind that stocky vending machine. As the excitement subsided, everyone became aware of the everlasting stench he spread around.
Isabel refused to be dragged down by it. “Home, sweet home. But we haven’t made it yet. Dredge fuzz, take our guest to the room upstairs.”
“Can he have a wash first?”
“Good idea. Take him to the washroom. Then upstairs.”
“Stupendous. Come on, Crawley. You have a date with the hose.”
“Can I eat something first? How about that cheese? And do you have a change of clothes for me? I look good in midnight blue...” Crawley’s voice trailed into the distance as he followed the ex-Space Marine to the inner section of the ship. That left Isabel and Nadie to speak just between themselves.
“Finally alone. Shall we get this girl up and flying again?”
“Let me get more snug first,” Nadie started pulling the EEF uniform off her back. She yanked the jacket off and stomped on it like she’d discovered it was a lair of fleas. “Never, ever, ever gonna wear you again, you gobsmacker!” She repeated the same mantra several times with slight differences, changing the last word into variations like twonk, shnitzer, shonker and gumbnod, and one especially saucy version that’s unworthy of repeating here. In the end, she said: “Shooting myself in the face would give me more pleasure than touching you.”
Isabel watched Nadie with legs apart, hands on her hips. She was first mildly amused, then bored, concerned, at last concerned. “Are you finished with your alterations now?”
“Finished? Not quite. I should go back and drop some explosives in their engine room. It’s the least what they deserve.”
“Stop it. Are you going through your second puberty or something?”
“You’re not my guardian, Isa.” Nadie unzipped the trousers, jumped out of them so fast she very nearly tripped on their snags. She was still wearing her black ops outfit underneath.
“Thank goodness for that. You’re acting like a spoiled brat,” Isabel chuckled somewhat, but the humour wasn’t there. “No wonder you’re so cranky. You’re overheating from wearing so much stuff on you.”
“I am cranky because of what I lost. My parents are missing. My surrogate parent is dead. My adoptive family cast me out. I’m stuck with one friend, a guy who’s one half a kid, one half a lecturer about turning the other cheek and loving your Earthen neighbour.”
“That’s not true. You’ve got me.”
“I thought about your offer, Isa. I can’t do it. We’re too much alike. We’d be scratching at each other’s throats in a month.”
“I agree. Plus, you’re obviously going through a difficult phase.” Isabel regretted having to admit it. Nadie was a talented girl with a good head on her shoulders, but she was too young, too susceptible. Isabel saw herself in her, thirty years ago, thinking she had it all under control. In reality, she didn’t want to go back to how she was at 23. That's when her life was one constant fight to keep alive in the ruthless slums of Steel City.
She’d left that volatile time behind her and didn’t look back. Nadie was still going through hers. She needed time and a patient mentor, another Augusta Remorra to guide her on her path. Isabel Rocarion wasn’t that person.
“Can we go now?” she simply asked.
“Sure. I’m ready. We gotta tell Pace to hurry up.”
And just like that, they buried the subject and agreed never to come back to it again. After finding Libertalia, Isabel would go her own way, separate from Nadie’s.
The gunrunner’s thought turned to the Jacob Pace dilemma. She was kind of hoping the Arbiter would get shot in the face or, failing that, he’d get himself arrested by the EEF and that would forever solve the issue of her having to look at him again. “Do we have to call him?”
“Yeah. We do. Let’s not dangle here like a bucket on a rope. We’re still caught in the bull’s mouth. Chop chop, Isa. Lead
the way.”
Isabel hastened from the generously-sized and well-lit cargo bay to a side corridor with half as much light. The Anvil’s engine was sleeping and the reactor core was only working at half whistle. There wasn’t enough juice to keep unimportant stuff like the lights glowing at full lumens.
“Time for a shortcut,” Isabel took Nadie on a tour of the Anvil’s twisting maintenance rooms. In comparison with these small, sometimes downright claustrophobic spaces, the corridor had been like the Broadway street illuminated by big lights and flashing theatre fronts. Her and Nadie’s boots clanged on the bare metal floors. Despite the hurry they were in, they needed to be careful not to trip at every high threshold explicitly designed to prevent running.
They jumped inside a larger room with thick metal doors and walls covered with tiles which were faded throughout.
“What is this place?” Nadie asked. Her face and whole body contorted from a sense of disgust at a lingering chemical stench.
“Was a freezer room, for cargo that needs low temperatures in transit.”
“Looks run down. Holy shonk, what is that thing!?”
The next room was the nesting ground for a robust scuffed metal container in the hue of ordinary cinderblocks. It hoarded two-thirds of the space for itself, leaving a narrow path to trail through. A jungle of thick and thin pipes and attachments made of plastic, brass and copper branched out of the tank and snaked into the walls. Some of the relays rocked from side to side under immense pressure from the liquid jetting within them. Steam vapours whistled different tunes as they escaped via multiple places in the system, marking leaks. There was rhythmic noise of a pump working in the background. Despite the considerable volume of all those distractions, an incessant dripping similar to a clumsily closed tap managed to drift into the ears of anyone watching.
“It’s a water boiler,” Isabel explained. “Clean water doesn’t come from shooting stars and wishful thinking.”
Her Last Run Page 15