Traitor (Collaborator Book 1)

by Krista D. Ball

  “I just realized the little ensign I was using might actually be one of us.”

  “No wonder you never got caught.”

  They rounded the corner, ready to enter the main prison section. Katherine was unsure where the stairwell came out, which would disorient her for a few moments. With all of the explosions, she worried her cover was blown now, too, because no one had attempted to contact her once the trouble began.

  The wall in front of them exploded. Shrapnel filled the corridor. Katherine felt her feet come out from under her as the shock threw her on her back. She managed to land without wrenching anything, but she felt several hot stings in her legs.

  Rowe let out a pitiful sound, followed by a stream of curses that Katherine’s translator struggled to process, though it managed to get all of the genitalia comments. Katherine looked over at Rowe and saw bits of bloody bone all over her. Katherine rushed to her side, expecting an end-of-life situation, only to discover most of it wasn’t even Rowe’s.

  “Get this clitsucking bastard off me before I say something unkind,” Rowe demanded.

  Katherine was somewhere between gagging and laughing, but she managed to pull off part of a skull, a foot, a couple of long bones, and some hair still attached to a scalp. “Are you hurt?”

  “Rebar in my sisterfucking shin,” Rowe said.

  Katherine examined the bar and shook her head. “I don’t think I can pull it blind. Can you walk on it?”

  With substantial swearing and panting, Katherine helped Rowe to her feet. She was unsteady and more blood leaked from the wound, but she sucked in a deep breath and said, “Hand me your rifle.”

  Katherine pulled the rifle off her back and handed it over. Rowe put the barrel against the floor and used it as a crutch. Then she let out a pleased, contented sound. “All right, I have about ten minutes before I pass out and you’re going to fucking haul me out of here if I do. Let’s go.”

  The entrance security drones were in pieces, as were several guards. Damn, had Rebecca done all this? There were no security drones. Hell, some looked like they’d fired on each other until they’d exploded. The electronics were blown all to hell and there was only emergency lighting online now, and even that was flickering. There were small, localized fires and not nearly enough water suppression systems working, which was about to blow plenty more systems. Damn, she’d done her job all right.

  Katherine put several bullets into some guards with their backs turned, surveying the mess. Their suits were designed to take the hits, so Rowe followed up with a round of pulse energy. Doubtful they were dead, but at least they would be unconscious for a while.

  Rowe, however, made sure they were dead by ramming the butt of her crutch-rifle into their throats, crushing tracheas. Katherine let her do two until she noticed the spreading blood on her lower leg. She grabbed Rowe’s arm and said, “You’re bleeding. Let’s go.”

  To Rowe’s credit, she didn’t lash out and instead started ahead through the rubble and smoke.

  “Pain implant?” Katherine asked as they shot two more guards.

  “Mine pumps me full of chems and stims when I’m severely injured.” Rowe chuckled. “Guess the little ’bots think I’m severely injured.”

  Katherine glanced down at the eight-inch piece of rebar piercing Rowe’s leg and found herself very much in agreement with the nanobots in Rowe’s system.

  They turned the corner and found six half-naked people fighting hand-to-hand with two guards.

  *****

  Mav stared at the flashing lights with no small amount of alarm. He had prepared himself for execution, be it a beating, a needle, or pulse fire. He did not foresee being trapped on an exploding space station as a possibility.

  The sisterfuckers hadn’t even handed over clothes for them, even though they were given an order. Now, sure, she wasn’t a real captain, but they didn’t know that. Discipline was always the first to go when things were too cozy. His master corporal used to always say that. And he’d still be saying that, if Mav hadn’t killed him when he’d left the Corps.

  “Mav…” Patrice asked.

  “I really hope this is part of the plan,” Mic said.

  The lights flashed on and off, as the backup systems took over. And then the backup’s backup. And then the emergency generator. And then the security field collapsed with only the reflective tape on the floor to help guide them out.

  “Anyone feel like escaping before this base blows up?” Mav asked conversationally, ducking out of his cell.

  While the system outage took out the door locks, the door itself was a heavy bastard to move. It took all six of them, grunting and panting, to pry it open enough to all squeeze through.

  A tiny guard, most likely a woman, came through the haze of smoke, caught one look at Mav, and raised her pistol. She snapped off three panic shots, all going wide, before Mav could crash his fist against the guard’s shaking forearm. The pistol fell from her grip and she bent over with a gasp of pain. Mav hit her on the back and grabbed her pistol. He fired one shot into the back of her neck, point blank, and then nodded to the smallest of their little gang.

  “Cidney, she’s your size thereabouts. Get her helmet and tell me what the fuck is going on. The rest of us? Let’s find some fucking clothes.”

  Cidney wrestled the clothes off the guard, who was groaning from pain. Cidney ripped the guard’s helmet off and slammed her face into the floor three times until the groaning stopped. She rolled around on the floor, trying to get the guard out of her protective layers and on herself, cursing and swearing that the guard had narrower hips than she possessed.

  He stood watch, waiting for Cidney to kit up. She had to hit the guard a couple more times, who damn her thick skull, kept waking up. Cidney managed to get the core protective vest on and passed Mic the jacket. “This’ll fit you. My tits are too big for this.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Mic said, but he managed to squeeze into the protective jacket, even though the sleeves were too short.

  Cidney slipped the helmet on and said, her voice muffled, “There’s been several bombs. Lots of terrorist…wait…there’s four guards heading this way to check on us.”

  “They’d better be tall,” Mav said.

  *****

  Rebecca waited a few seconds to ensure nothing else would explode before grabbing the fire extinguisher from the wall. She pulled her fire-retardant sleeves over her hands, and using both feet, she pushed the door open on its warped hinges. Her balance was off from having hit her head and she stumbled several times. Rebecca’s stomach sloshed and dizziness made crawling through the smoky tunnels difficult to manage.

  Foul-smelling water began raining down on her, evidence that some of the fire suppression systems hadn’t been destroyed. Some of the stench got through the filters and she gagged into her helmet. Thankfully, though, she didn’t vomit inside it.

  Rebecca wandered away from the explosion site, away from what was probably bodies of the guards sent to arrest her. She tried not to think about them, but her brain created images of smoldering bodies anyway. She hadn’t set off that bomb. There were several minutes of memory missing, where the explosion rocked her brains.

  “Nate?” Rebecca said into her helmet. “Are you there?”

  No answer. She didn’t want to risk changing the channel in case of…she couldn’t remember. Nate had been telling her to run. Why? Shouldn’t he have been trying to get her to stay, to surrender to the guards? Shouldn’t he have tried to distract her to let the guards get into place better?

  Rebecca continued to crawl toward the corridor thinking about it. However, thinking physically hurt and made her stomach heave. So she concentrated on crawling out of the tunnel. She’d come up with a new plan once she was in the corridor.

  Weapons fire sounded from beyond her tunnel system, and she worried that she was going into a more dangerous place than where she already was. But she didn’t know where Kat was. She didn’t even know where she was supposed to be. So all s
he did was try to get away from the charred and dismembered bodies that were behind her.

  Did Nate set off the explosion? Nate was one of them. If he’d been a rebel, Kat would have said. Didn’t all rebels know each other? Of course not, she thought. That would be stupid. Didn’t the movies always talk about cells and anonymous contacts to protect them all from the police? That could explain Nate helping her. Then again, so could Nate just reacting to a friend being hunted.

  The weapons fire was just ahead. She could see the silhouette of someone through the smoke. Rebecca retreated a few steps to the first aid kit that had fallen off its hinges. It was full of helpful things to repair people, but not to hurt them. She took the surgery sealer anyway, the one used in case of deep cuts. It would stop a person from bleeding to death before help arrived to properly stitch someone back up.

  She palmed it anyway. She could put someone’s eye out with it and, if nothing else, she could stop herself from bleeding to death if she got shot.

  Rebecca kept herself low and as quiet as possible, but there was so much shouting and weapons fire that she could have screamed and remained anonymous. Guards were up against the repair corridor’s entrance with rubble around them. She couldn’t see the others, but she could hear the weapons and the ricochets. Her helmet helped protect her from the pulse blasts, but they still shook her already addled brain.

  Then she heard Kat’s voice in the distance.

  Rebecca gritted her teeth and belly crawled to the entrance. She grabbed the one guard not wearing a helmet by the throat, keeping her head low to protect herself from the actual bullets coming for her.

  “Kat!” Rebecca screamed as she hauled the guard up and into the corridor with a strength she didn’t know she possessed.

  The weapons fire on the other side ceased, with the choking guard kicking for all he was worth. One of the other guards aimed and tried shooting her, but didn’t pull the trigger, afraid to hit their companion. Helpfully, the choking guard, now flailing, kicked one of his companions square in the nose.

  Then Kat cleared the smoke.

  Chapter 20

  It was bad enough that Mav was fighting with his family inheritance dangling precariously in the breeze, but now Katherine’s old girlfriend was in the mix. He rushed forward, chasing a charging Katherine, with Tobi Rowe hot on his steps. He had a fleeting thought about how it was unfair that a woman pushing her nineties with a stick of metal in her leg could run as fast as him. Damn low rent implants.

  Rowe jabbed an electroshock pen into the shoulder of one the combatants, and she went down in a puddle of seizing limbs. Mav clocked the guard that was fighting Katherine and he went down.

  The guard held by Rebecca was half-choked out already, and exhausted from the struggle of breaking free. Katherine and Mav hauled him out of the corridor and tossed him to one side. Behind him, he heard Patrice put a bullet in him.

  “For the love of…what is going on here?” Mav complained, looking down at the guards’ bodies. “Is there anyone my size in this damn place? I’m freezing my dangles off.”

  Rowe stood guard while the others stripped the bodies for kit. Mav eyed Rebecca, who’d taken off her helmet, and said, “Earth.”

  “Maverick,” she said casually. The woman’s hands were shaking and she looked as pale as the man she’d been choking out. “Kat…what…what happened?”

  “You didn’t set this off?” Katherine asked. She pulled a black undershirt off the guard and shoved it at him. “Make a skirt out of it.”

  Mav muttered under his breath, but handed his rifle to Mic. He ripped the neckline until he could pull the small shirt up to his waist. Then he used some of Rowe’s electrical tape to make a belt. “This is bullshit. I’m not fighting my way out of here wearing a tape belt.”

  “I’ll be sure to kill the first big fucker I can find,” Katherine said. “Okay, folks. We gotta move to the…Rowe? Rowe, you okay?”

  Mav looked at Rowe, who had sweat pouring down the sides of her face. Her leg had a length of rebar in it, for fuck’s sake. How was she even standing?

  “So that timid Earther was really working for you?” Mav asked as Patrice offered a shoulder for Rowe to lean again. “I mean I thought maybe, but I can’t believe it.”

  “I knew her from the time before,” Kat said.

  “Katherine used to fuck her,” Rowe supplied. She pointed her pistol ahead of her and fired three rounds into the smoke. “My stims ran out five minutes ago. I need this bar out of me now.”

  “Are you cheating on Abby?” Patrice asked.

  “Oh, shut up,” Katherine replied.

  Mav half-listened to the gossip and chatter about Katherine’s former girlfriend—who was still in the tunnel wide-eyed and terror-struck. He’d seen it often enough. Then he noticed what was on Katherine’s back.

  “Where the hell did you get a plasma pistol?” Mav demanded.

  “I asked Rowe for a distraction,” Katherine said.

  “I assassinated the station’s acting commander and shot Katherine here in the neck,” Rowe said through gritted teeth. Mic was pulling the bar out of her leg, with Ray crouched down, ready with the sealant. “Then I robbed the pharmacy warehouse and stole it off the guards.”

  “Then I framed a Blackout that was on to me,” Katherine added.

  “That’s a distraction all right,” Patrice said. She motioned back to the quivering mess in the tunnel. “What about her?”

  *****

  Rebecca closed her eyes when the steel bar was pulled from the wounded woman’s leg. To her surprise, the woman didn’t cry out or even black out. She opened her eyes when she heard the spray of the sealant foam, though she felt a little sick when she saw the pink-stained foam oozing out of the other side of the wound and trickling down the woman’s dark skin.

  “That feel better?” the man on the floor asked. He’d been doing most of the proper first aid.

  The woman they all called Rowe didn’t answer. She just continued to shake and sweat.

  “Rowe?” Kat asked.

  “Yeah. I got this. Just...this shit stings.” Rowe let out a long breath. “Okay, there it goes. It’s kicking in. Oh, fuck, that hurt.”

  Kat turned to her and said, “Rebecca, it’s okay. You can come out now.”

  Rebecca stared at her. Kat was covered in soot and blood. The people she was with were the same, only in various forms of undress. She stared down at the bodies of the guards on the floor and gasped. She tried not to cry. She didn’t want to cry. They were trying to kill Kat, and then they were trying to kill her.

  She didn’t want to die. Well, she did want to die, but only sometimes and she didn’t want these people making the decision for her. She didn’t want anyone but herself making the decision. And there were people everywhere making decisions about who lived or died all around her.

  Rebecca let out a sob, just a little break from the silence she was trying to hold together. Her heart raced. Vision blurred. Sound drowned out by the roar in her ears. Throat constricting. She tried focusing on her hands, but the shaking made her vision worse, not better. So she clenched her hands into fists and closed her eyes, thinking of grassy meadows.

  Black-clad monsters with rifles appeared in the field, shooting everything that moved.

  Another sob escaped her. She was going to die here. This was not the life she wanted. She wanted a quiet, easy life of work and television and doing crossword puzzles. She did not want this life. She didn’t want this. She never chose this. This wasn’t her choice. Why was this happening to her? Why couldn’t they see this was killing her? Why didn’t God care about her? Why was everything she loved gone? Oh, God, why why why why?

  “Rebecca, breathe,” came Kat’s voice in her ear. “You have to breathe and keep moving, or we’re not going to get out of here. Take my hand. Come on. Take it.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” came Patrice’s voice.

  “Shut up, Patrice,” Kat said sternly. Then, in a softer voice, sh
e said, “Take my hand, Rebecca.”

  Rebecca opened her eyes and put her hand into Kat’s. It was cold and sent a chill through her spine.

  “I needed the rest anyway,” Rowe said. “Come on, kid. You’re doing fine. I’m Tobi.”

  Rebecca looked at her wide-eyed, but nodded. She couldn’t speak. Her throat was still too tight for words. She also had a fear that the tears would flow if she spoke and it was easier to keep control of them if she just stayed quiet.

  Then, she forced herself to say, “Hi, Tobi. I’m Rebecca.”

  “Good to meet you, kid.”

  “Okay. Now come out here with us,” Kat said, and she helped Rebecca down out of the tunnel. “There, now you’re out here with us. You’re safe now.”

  Rebecca looked around tentatively, but shrank from their cold glares. She handed Tobi the sealant foam canister she was still carrying. “Tobi…do…do…you need…more?”

  Tobi barked out a laugh, but quickly clamped her jaw shut. Still, the smile remained and it seemed to Rebecca it was genuine. “You keep hold of that, kid. We might need it before this is over. Want a grenade?”

  Rebecca stared at the black cylinder with its silver markings on it. Her heart began racing again and she could feel the sweat forming along her spine.

  “Okay, we’re not ready for grenades yet,” Tobi said, seemingly unbothered by Rebecca’s entire meltdown.

  “We know there’s limited security down here. The fire’s making it difficult to get down here, and that last explosion probably took out the stairs,” Kat said. She was readjusting her rifle’s shoulder strap. “We just have to make it back to the entrance, through hopefully giant holes made by Rowe’s handiwork.”

  Tobi inclined her head graciously. Rebecca noticed Tobi’s hairline was soaked with sweat and her hands were shaking again, though not as bad before they sealed her leg up.