Before she could look away Beth blurred into motion. Somehow she rose up from a kneeling position and dove at Pete, shouting “No!”
He fired.
She fell to the ground, curled up in a fetal position around her belly.
“Beth!” Charline shouted.
In the cockpit, Linda bit her knuckles to keep from crying out.
“Bitch,” Pete said. He spat at Beth’s body. “I was going to keep you alive. Now I have to deal with this hellion instead? Shit.”
“Ah, you see? Fate has intervened again. Now you’re mine to do what I want with,” Heimsman told Charline. “Tie her up.”
Two of the guards brought over zip ties and bound Charline by the wrists and ankles. She didn’t even struggle. Even through the cracked glass Linda could see that she was sobbing, crying. The guilt hit her like a mountain falling on her shoulders. She should have done something. Anything! She had a weapon, but not the will to use it. She was too weak to be any use here. Linda couldn’t imagine what had possessed her to insist they bring her along in the first place.
Nineteen
The men outside were speaking again. Linda forced herself to look at the scene once more. She swallowed hard when she saw the two still bodies laid out on the deck. Those were people she had just been speaking with, flying around with. Now they were gone. Linda could barely think through the crushing sense of guilt. But she had to keep listening. Charline was still alive, and maybe she could hear something that would help.
“You two, carry her inside. We’ll finish packing. The rest of you dump their bodies into the ocean,” Heimsman said.
“Our guys too? They deserve better,” Pete asked. He seemed hesitant.
“Yes. They’re dead. It won’t matter to them anymore. We need this place cleaned before anyone arrives to investigate it,” Heimsman replied. Then he turned and stalked into the building. Pete and one of the guards half-carried, half-dragged Charline along behind him.
The door closed behind them, cutting Charline off from view. Linda was covered in a cold sweat. She wanted to help Charline, to save her somehow. Whatever that guy planned for her wasn’t going to be pleasant. She’d seen Heimsman’s sort before. But running out there would just get her captured as well. Linda held her place, watching carefully.
The remaining two guards picked up Cory’s body by the legs and shoulders and hauled him toward the edge of the platform. Their path took them dangerously close to Linda’s hiding place, and she ducked down so they wouldn’t see her. They plodded on, walking past the air-car where she was hiding up to the very edge of the oil rig.
“Why do we get this shitty detail?” one asked.
“Shut up and dump the damned body,” the other replied.
There were a few grunts, and then a long pause. Linda thought she could hear the faint splash of Cory’s body entering the water. She shuddered. Then there was the sound of footsteps fading away, only to return a minute later. The men were grunting under the load of a second person. This time as they approached, Linda heard a woman groan. She froze, half afraid she’d made the sound herself.
“Shit, this one is still alive,” the complainer said.
“So? Order was to dump her. She’ll be dead soon enough.”
“I dunno, man. I don’t mind dumping a dead body, but killing her like this? Not cool.”
“Then put a bullet in her, if you feel so bad about it,” the other man said.
“Sure.”
That was Beth they were talking about. She was still alive! Linda’s thoughts raced. Was it possible to save her? Would she live, even if she could somehow rescue her from these men? Linda felt too scared to do anything before. She was still frightened now. But she wasn’t sure she could live with herself if she allowed her fear to dominate her another time. In another few seconds the decision would be made for her. They would shoot Beth and dump her body into the ocean. It would be too late to help. She had to act quickly.
Linda grabbed the rifle from where it rested beside her. The weight was unfamiliar and unwieldy in her hands, but she’d seen enough movies to know roughly how to work an assault rifle. She just had to hope that would be enough. Linda yanked hard on the release for the vehicle’s hatch.
The door of the flyer swung upward away from her.
Outside the door, both men looked up from Beth’s body. They had stunned expressions on their faces. One man’s mouth was formed in a round O shape. The other had a rifle in his hands, the muzzle aimed at Beth’s still form. As soon as he saw Linda he began shifting his aim point, turning the weapon toward her instead.
Linda had her rifle up against her hip. She aimed the thing as best she could and squeezed the trigger once, then again. The man’s body bucked twice as bullets hit it. He tumbled backward from the force of the impact, losing his balance and tripping over the edge of the platform. He let out only a short yelp as he fell toward the ocean.
The other man had a rifle on a sling. He scrambled to get the weapon up into his hands. Linda’s ears hurt from the gunshots. She felt dazed. Had she actually killed a man? Could she do it again? She saw the second man moving, saw him get his weapon under control. The muzzle rose toward her like it was in slow motion. He wasn’t going to give her any choice. If she froze, she died. Linda didn’t want to die.
She fired again. And again. His body shook with the impacts, but he didn’t go down. Linda stepped forward and fired another time. The guard fell to the ground, crawling away from her now. She was crying, barely able to see through her tears. This wasn’t what she wanted. This wasn’t who she was. But they’d given her no choice.
She shot the gun one more time. This time the man lay still after a final tremor. Linda collapsed to her knees beside Beth’s body, sobbing.
Twenty
Beth’s entire world felt like it was on fire. Her gut crawled - not just the pain from the wound. That she could bear, more or less. She’d been shot before. It sucked, but it was just pain. It was the itching sensation that was driving her mad right now. She also vaguely knew that was probably why she was still breathing.
The nanites she’d been implanted with at the hospital were still in her bloodstream. Military grade nanites that were designed to help a body recover after traumatic wounds like the one she’d sustained.
She pushed herself up on one hand, lifting her head free from the deck. A wave of dizziness and nausea hit her like a club, and she almost sank back down. Her body was crying out for rest. That would be lethal, though. It wouldn’t take long for someone to come investigate those shots.
Beth looked up at Linda, standing there shaking with the rifle in her hands. She’d just gunned down two armed men. Frankly, Beth was impressed. She didn’t think Linda would have had it in her. It hadn’t surprised her when Linda had stayed in the flyer, and it hadn’t bothered her either. An untrained person out there during the raid would’ve just died quickly. Or gotten one of them killed. Killed sooner. Whatever.
Her head was fuzzy, her thinking not flowing as smoothly as it ought. Shock, and maybe something the nanites were doing to combat the shock. Linda was sobbing, fast turning into a wreck. Beth needed her to hang in a little longer than that if either of them were going to survive this.
“Linda,” she said. It was alarming how weak her voice sounded, and how much it hurt to speak.
“You’re awake!” Linda exclaimed. She dropped the rifle and rushed to Beth’s side. “You were shot…”
“I’ll heal,” Beth said. “The guards will be coming.”
“Shit. What do we do?”
“Hand me that guy’s rifle.”
Linda grabbed the weapon and gave it to Beth. She checked the magazine. Still half full. “Take your weapon and hide in the flyer again. When I start shooting, help.”
Linda paled, but nodded. “I will.”
Once she had slipped back inside the flyer and shut the door again, Beth curled up in a way that was only excruciating, instead of agonizing. The rifle was hidden mos
tly beneath her body. No one ought to be able to see it until they were very close.
Just in time. She heard shouts from the building. Then the footsteps of multiple men rushing over.
“I don’t get it, where did they go?”
“I tell you, I heard shots,” another man said.
“Keep looking,” a third replied. This one was very close to her, his voice coming from only a foot or two away. He closed the gap and reached out with a foot, hooking her arm to turn her over.
She rolled with his pull, the rifle coming up in her hands as she turned. She wasn’t even sure the guy saw her weapon before she fired. He definitely didn’t see it afterward - or anything else.
The flyer hatch flew open again, and Linda was firing from the doorway. She wasn’t a good shot - but she’d learned what the ‘auto’ setting did on the selector. Linda was spraying rounds across the deck as fast as they could come out of the barrel.
Her ammunition wouldn’t last long that way, but Beth only needed a few seconds. The other two men, thinking that it was Linda who had shot their friend, didn’t even bother looking at the ‘dead’ woman laying on the deck. Beth wasn’t a great shot, but she didn’t need to be at this range.
“Help me up,” Beth called, when it was over. There were still more bad guys inside the building. Beth did a quick headcount and figured there were about five goons left, plus Pete. They had Charline, too.
Linda ran over and gingerly helped her to a standing position. With her help Beth staggered over and leaned against the flyer.
“Well, I’m not running any marathons today,” Beth said. She was gasping from taking just the few steps, and her gut was burning again. She looked down to examine the wound for the first time, pulling up her shirt so she could see it. The bullet entered her belly from the front. As near as she could tell there was no exit hole. The small hole in the front was already clotted over. The nanites had worked at cutting off the bleeding first.
She was shaken, dizzy, sick, and hurting. There wasn’t any way she could assess how badly hurt she was inside. The bullet had messed things up in there for sure, but how much?
“You’re hurt,” Linda said. “We should go get you help. Get out of here while we can.”
“Not without Charline,” Beth said, gritting her teeth. For a moment she imagined herself back on the Naga starship. She’d been shot. She was dying. John and Andy were pinned down, and there was no way anyone was going to get to her in time to save her. Then there had been Charline, stepping out of the smoke after gunning her way through the enemy. She’d never given up on Beth. There was no way Beth was going to leave without her.
But a straight up gunfight wasn’t the answer. They’d lose. Luck had been with them so far, but you couldn’t count on that lasting. Beth cast about, looking for possible solutions. Nothing around but ancient machinery, an old loading crane. the gutted remnants of the oil piping…
She looked at the crane again. That was odd. Unlike the rest of this place, the crane wasn’t a rusted pile of junk. Why was it cleaned up? A long cable draped from the crane downward toward the water. At the bottom of the cable was a motorboat, still grappled firmly to the cable line. Probably what they used to ferry supplies back and forth. The air-car stuck out like a sore thumb, they couldn’t risk flying it out here too often. And of course they needed the crane to lift things from the boat up onto the platform.
“That might work,” Beth muttered.
“What?” Linda asked, confused.
“Help me get over there,” Beth said, pointing at the crane.
Twenty-One
Charline was tossed unceremoniously into a corner once the door closed behind them. That was fine with her. If she was out of the way, a little out of sight, maybe she could do something about the ties binding her hands and feet. She curled around herself, moving her body into a fetal position and faked a few sobs. Not that she didn’t honestly feel like crying, but shaking shoulders would mask her other movements.
The guard watching her chuckled a little under his breath and then she heard him move away. That was her cue. She’d learned how to break zip-ties by accident. Back on the alien world, they had used similar ties to bind Paul, but he’d gotten free. When she asked Andy how the heck that had happened, he explained. Zip-ties were pretty secure, but they were just strips of plastic. Heat the plastic a little and it would weaken enough to snap. Almost any rough surface would do. Paul had used a rough patch of the bulkhead on the Satori, but Andy told her that even a shoelace would work.
Charline’s shoes had laces.
She untied one and ran it through the ties binding her ankles. Feet first, she reasoned. Better to be able to run if she could, although she wasn’t sure where she could go. There was still one ace in the hole. She hadn’t seen them capture or kill Linda, which meant the xenobiologist was probably still out there somewhere, free. Charline wasn’t sure how much she could count on the other woman for help, but just having her nearby might be enough to be useful.
If only Beth were still there. Charline stifled a real sob at the thought of her friend. Beth had literally taken a bullet for her. She couldn’t believe it, even having seen it herself. She wondered if she would have had the courage to do something like that. It took an effort to block the images from her mind, but she had to focus. If Beth’s sacrifice was to mean anything at all, she had to get out of there alive.
“How’s my new toy doing?” Heimsman called from across the room. Charline heard his footsteps coming closer and flinched. The ankle ties weren’t completely broken yet. She kept working, making her body shake even more than before to hide the motion.
“Scared? You should be. By the time I’m through with you, you’ll wish you had just taken that bullet instead,” Heimsman said. “Look at me when I speak to you!”
He was standing over her now. He leaned forward, reaching down to her and yanking her hair back so that she was forced to stare into his livid face. Charline had never seen someone so furious and out of control. She pulled hard on the zip-tie, and it finally snapped.
Charline twisted to get her feet beneath her and lunged upward. Her forehead smashed into Heimsman’s nose, shattering it and sending blood splashing across his face. He cried out with pain. Her hands were still bound, but her feet were free. Heimsman brought both hands up to his face, covering his nose. That left her a lot of openings. Charline fired off a front snap kick that nailed him right in the groin.
“Didn’t get the message the first time?” she taunted. “Here’s the repeat lesson!”
Heimsman sank to his knees with a groan. Charline could see the guards coming at her in her peripheral vision, but she still had time for one more kick and she wanted to make it count. Her foot shot forward, taking Heimsman in the face. His head snapped back hard, and then he tumbled over backwards to fall flat against the floor. He was out cold, his face a mess, blood everywhere. Charline couldn’t remember feeling more satisfied.
Two of the guards grabbed her, one by each arm. With a rough shove they forced her back down to her knees. Charline glanced to her left, ready to try to take one of them down. They knew her legs were free, but maybe she could still take at least one more of them out of action. Then she heard a pistol being cocked, and looked straight ahead again.
Pete was there, weapon in hand. It was aimed at her head. Charline held very still. She didn’t want to die, and he seemed very willing to kill her.
“I told that asshole it was a mistake to leave you alive. He should have listened,” Pete said, chuckling. “You can handle yourself, that’s for sure. If we weren’t on opposite sides in this I’d offer you a job. Sadly, I don’t think that’s going to work, is it?”
“Not likely,” Charline said.
“Didn’t think so. But I need to keep you around anyway, as a hostage. Really, you did me a favor. He was annoying as hell. Now I can run the operation the way I want, and maybe we can all get out of here safe after all. You play along without any more fuss, and
I’ll see if I can release you once we land in Mexico. How’s that for a deal?”
Charline didn’t answer, setting her lips in a hard line.
“Or I can just shoot you now and trust my luck without a hostage,” Pete said, waving the pistol at her.
Charline sagged. “Fine. I’ll behave.”
And she would, at least until she had even the slightest chance of getting out of there on her own. If he gave her even a small window to get away, she was going to take it. But she could tell he already knew that. It was there in his eyes. She was going to have a hard time slipping anything past this man.
Gunshots rang out from somewhere outside. Not just one shot, but several in rapid succession.
“Now what the hell is going on?” Pete snarled. “You two, hold her. I’m going to go check that out.”
Charline tried to hide a worried frown. There was only one ally left out there. That had to be Linda. Had they found her and killed her? Or was that her doing the shooting? She didn’t think Linda had it in her to start a firefight, so the likely answer was that the scientist was dead. Which meant she was just about out of possible avenues for escape.
Twenty-Two
Beth grabbed her rifle and staggered her way to the controls, leaning on Linda more steps than not. She’d never felt so damned weak. The nanites must be grabbing everything they could get their hands on to rebuild her damaged body.
They reached the controls. Pretty basic. She’d handled much more complex control systems. Beth hadn’t always been a lead engineer. She’d done a lot of scut work along the way.
“Cover me,” Beth said. “This is going to be loud.”
She started up the crane and threw the hydraulics into motion, the powerful engine churning as it began to lift the boat clear of the water. She had the machine reel the line back in as quickly as it could, the boat soaring up toward them.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 33