“You gonna be okay to pull yourself out?” Janix asked, finally turning to me now that I had myself under control.
I appreciated that they respected me enough not to baby me when I had these icky episodes. Nah, they saved that for when I did something stupid that resulted in multiple broken bones. “What, are you calling out my terrible lack of upper body strength?”
“Of course not.” A smooth smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth. “Although we’re both fairly aware that most of your power comes from your hamstrings.”
“Hey, my eyes are up here, not on my thighs.”
Angel cleared her throat. “You guys are real cute, but I’mma gonna climb up this vine and hope you guys come up after me.”
I flushed red, which only seemed to amuse the half-kin more before she scrambled up the lifeline. She got some impressive air for being a skinny, slight thing with her hair in French braids – did they even call them French braids in this universe? – and I was reminded that she had struck up her own revolution before I was even born.
Then, it was my turn. I was tempted to call upon whatever was mutating me to just leap over there in on effortless spring, but I needed to reserve my energy. I couldn’t afford to fizzle out before we all escaped with our heads attached. This was my grand finale of sticking it to our cloudy, malevolent friend, and I didn’t want a flop.
So, I climbed up clumsily. My feet slipped and I slammed into the uneven wall several times, but I made it high enough to extend a hand over the lip of the crevasse so both Angel and Viys’k could haul me up.
“You are a solid thing, aren’t you?” the tiny half-kin asked once I was safe on the surface with them.
“Yup. It takes a lot of matter to be this impressive.”
“I’d almost be jealous if I didn’t already like myself so much.”
I laughed weakly, but I didn’t have to think up a comeback because Janix was hoisting himself over the side, grunting rather melodramatically.
“Captain?”
Angel’s wrist beeped and she hit something on it to respond. Why didn’t I have one of those fancy gadgets? Seemed like it may be pretty useful. “Report.”
This time it was a different voice that answered.
“Scans show there is a chunk of an engine and thruster a quarter click away from you. The heat and electro-radiation should be enough to hide your vital signs from even the best scanners.”
“Any word on what they’re sending, or the origin of where our ride may be coming from? Is it the abandoned colony headquarters?”
“No. No activity for several clicks.”
“Well, that’s disappointing. Guess we don’t need to hurry.”
“Not necessarily, Captain. Our readings have not ruled out a subterranean system.”
“Really? And you lot think that our enemy might be an evil horde of krelach?”
“Hey,” Viys’k said coolly, “I object to that stereotype.”
“Improbable, but not impossible. All we’re saying is it wouldn’t hurt to shake a leg and get to cover before you run into another one of your explosively-inclined plot twists.”
“Can’t argue with that logic. Update me the moment you have more info.”
“Yes, Capt—”
But she was already turning it off and heading toward some sort of reading she had on her device. We followed along after, our eyes constantly on the horizon for a looming enemy vessel, or perhaps for virulent missiles.
“I still don’t get it,” Janix grumbled as we trudged along. “How did they know we were here?”
“There’s a chance they don’t know we’re us,” Angel said. “This is a registered livingsphere, it just happens to be documented as abandoned. There’s probably been a couple dozen of scavengers, smugglers, and thieves try to set down here every single year.”
“I guess that’s a relief then,” I murmured. But it didn’t feel like a relief. Not even in the slightest.
“There!” Angel said, pointing to a black pillar of smoke in the distance. I started at the sight of it, and I had to calm myself once my brain processed that it wasn’t Genesis come to turn the tables and devour us. “That’s our cover.”
“Is it safe to breathe all that stuff in?”
“About as safe as being ejected from your crashing vessel and slamming into the ground with only a coolant and some genetic flim-flammery to cushion your impact.”
I snorted most attractively. “Right. So, Bajol will definitely be treating us all for inhalation. Good to know.”
We closed in on the sight, and it was quite a bit more gnarly than our own impact zone. Instead of having large chunks of ship scattered throughout a small pit, there was a veritable crater of smoking black, covered in molten metal and mangled scraps of indistinguishable ship pieces. At the center of it all was a lumpy, smoking mess of wired, metal and what I assumed was engine, and a few feet off from that was a flattened thruster that was scorched to high heaven.
“Can we even hide here?” I asked, taking a step closer to the lip of the deep hole only to have heat practically punch me in the face with little remorse. “Ow. I’m gonna take that as a no, unless our supply packs have a heat-retardant spray that I’m not familiar with.”
“What, you can’t just make a forcefield to hover us over it?”
“Yeah, because that might be a bit noticeable if a manned ship comes to clean all this up.” I didn’t mention that I wasn’t sure I could control the ability within me for something so intricate. Every time I used my mutation, it was always a gamble, and I didn’t want to take any chances when it came to being around heats capable of incinerating both me and my friends.
“Good point.”
“Come on, I’m sure all this heat has caused the earth to crack nearby. And our supply packs do have deflector cloth in them. Scatter out.”
We did spread ourselves around the smoking crater. I didn’t know if the others were more used to the acrid smells and choking smoke, but my mouth was painfully dry and I was coughing in less than half a minute.
Despite my chest wracking, I kept my watering eyes peeled for a place that we could tuck ourselves into. What an interesting shift in our mission plan, from scouting and storming the castle, to hiding in the earth like some sort of grub.
“Got it!”
I looked up to see Viys’k waving a bit away from me, and I jogged over. Thankfully, she was on the side where the wind was blowing the filth of the crash away from us, and my face started to ease off on its various forms of leaking while we all slid into the crack.
The one thing I didn’t think about, however, was that there certainly wasn’t going to be a breeze within the warm earth. And hiding in a gully next to a smelting crash site with four bodies of various species and temperatures crammed together was a prime recipe for torrents and torrents of sweat. I was going to get some serious chubrub on this rescue.
Angel’s gizmo beeped again. “Captain!”
“Please tell me you have a reading on what’s coming.” Her tone sounded miserable, and I couldn’t entirely blame her.
“Yes. According to our scans, a scrapper did issues from the colony just a few minutes. Eta to you is about a half hour, and we only read two life signs manning the vessel. As usual, there’s always the potential for more that just weren’t picked up by our systems since we have to be careful of not raising their sensor alarms, but that is unlikely.”
“Thank you again for the reminder that this all could go terribly wrong. Keep what measures you can on it without tripping its security system.”
“Of course, Captain.”
Angel looked to us and gave a small nod. After our rather slap-dash arrival it seemed now all we could do was wait.
…I wish I had some baby powder.
Chapter Two: One Man’s Scrap is Another Man’s Trojan Horse
I hadn’t had a half hour drag like that in ages. It was like I was in training at the Serkasis laboratories all over again, or even back in the prison I h
ad first slept in when I had arrived. It didn’t help that every possible inch of my body was covered in a generous slick of sweat and grime.
My companions looked just as worse for wear. Even Janix’s normally gravity-defying, coarse hair was weighed down with the sheer amount of perspiration that was pouring out of us. At least we all had a battle of some sort of nutrient drink to make sure we didn’t bake ourselves into raisins. It was some space-age version of whatever electrolyte-heavy beverage was popular back home, but it tasted just like water. Good thing I didn’t have to worry about having some sort of radioactively bright-colored sweat like in the commercials.
The hum of engines reached us before we turned into jerky, and we all tensed. We had discussed how we were going to get onboard without tripping any sort of alarms that would be sent back to the base, but it was all very tricky. One slip up and we were sure the facility we were trying to get into was going to clamp shut like a vice.
Naturally, my stomach, my nerves, and just about every other vital organ was on edge. I was reminded how stressed out when my QA score at the call center dropped below a ninety-five, and that seemed so laughable now. Who could have known that my life would have gone from customer service through a headset, to universe-saving service while dodging blaster files and a couple of near death experiences a week.
The scrapper approached, the sun glinting off its overly shining sides and six legs providing stark shadows. It looked quite a bit like a chrome egg on jilted stilts with knees pointing in the wrong direction. It would have been a bit intimidating, if not for its almost comical sort of jerking about. I supposed that a trash collector didn’t need to be fancy, but I didn’t imagine it would look like some sort of transformer reject.
“Ready?” Angel hissed as the scrapper slowly circled around the edge of the crater, looking for the best entry into the mess.
I could sort of feel us all hold our breath. If it didn’t at one point cross over us, we would have to fall onto our backup plan, and that was even shakier than our already tremulous Plan A.
But then a shadow loomed above and we let out a collective sigh. Angel didn’t take much time to celebrate, however, and pulled a blade-like thing from her belt.
With uncanny accuracy, she let it fly toward the closest leg, and it buried itself into the metal before glowing a bright blue. There came another moment of trepidation as the vessel tried to continue its journey, but stopped short when the targeted leg didn’t move.
Here was the real gamble. One of two things was going to happen. Either one of the crew was going to come out to fix what was supposed to pop up on their readings as a simple technical short, or they were going to somehow sense our ruse and warn their headquarters. There was simply no way of knowing until either one of them came out, or we were descended upon by the forces of evil.
So, you know, no pressure.
Then, finally, there was the sound of pressurized hinges releasing, and a door opened on the side of the egg. An unnecessarily shiny ladder descended, followed by a man in a rather drab looking jumpsuit. It reminded me eerily of my attendance uniform from the labs, and if there was one experience I didn’t want to repeat, it was that one.
It would only be a few more steps until he was going to be practically on top of us, and no amount of deflection material was going to keep us out of his sight. But we certainly couldn’t outright attack him, as his elevated heartrate and vital reading would tip off whoever was inside that something was going on – assuming he had such monitors on him, which we had to do. If there was a precaution to take, we had to do it or risk ruining everything. I had been so spoiled by all of Angel’s recon before that I felt more than a bit unsettled at flying so blindly.
“I think it’s in his helmet,” Viys’k whispered, voice almost completely inaudible above the bubbling, popping and cracking of the wreck just beside us. Angel nodded, and pulled out an even tinier circle, barely bigger than her thumbnail, and loading it into a firearm hardly bigger than the finger-gun I used to play cops and robbers with as a child. Popping over the ledge, she pulled the trigger before the man could even let out a shot.
Of course, nothing happened to him, and he seemed a bit shocked that he wasn’t dead. But we didn’t want him to join the ranks of the dearly departed, instead, we listened for the telltale sound of electrical thingamabobs shortening before surging out of our little hidey hole.
The worker had absolutely no idea what was going on, and held his hands up in surrender. From there it was a piece of cake to strip him of his uniform, tie him up and go about explaining the situation to him.
“Listen, I know this might be hard to understand, but we have absolutely zero desire to kill you,” I said, kneeling in front of him. “And the fact that you’re not screaming your head off seems to indicate that you kind of understand that. Am I right?”
He nodded slowly, his eyes caution and afraid, but there was a glimmer of hope in their hazel depths. He was just a worker, after all. While there was a chance that he was another Maven, lured by the corrupting power of our dark and cumulous friend, I was willing to bet he was a Joe on the wrong side of the law who was trying to make ends meet with a fairly undemanding job that paid way more than he could possibly earn anywhere else.
“We’re going to fix the leg there, and then we’re going to go up into the ship and get your friend out here, too. What we need from you is to tell him you’ve fixed it and you’re on your way up when we tell you to, and well as any passcodes that might be vital for us to know.”
“How do you know I’m not lying?” he asked, dark eyebrows knitted together over his well-worn face.
“I suppose we don’t,” I said, tilting my head to the side. “This probably won’t matter to you, but I’m just here to save my friend. She’s being held against her will and I’ve come a very long way to find her. I don’t know how much you know, or don’t know of the people running this place, but they are very, very bad folks and you’re absolutely mad if you think I’m going to let her stay in their clutches a moment longer.
“I’ve infiltrated a prison, ripped a kodadt’s limbs from its body, and just survived a crash that would have killed anyone else. If you want to cross me, that’s your choice. But I can’t say a lot of people have survived that.”
He swallowed, seeming to digest my words. “I think I may have heard of you.”
“Oh, really? I hope it was lovely.”
“It was on the news aggregate. You’re the most wanted criminal across entire Council space. You sabotaged the lab that was researching a cute for the kodadt!”
“Actually, I freed prisoners who were being held by a corrupted system meant to exploit them rather than save everyone.” I shrugged. “But that’s all semantics.”
“All finished here,” Angel said, tucking the electro-dagger-whatever-it-was back into her belt. What else did she have tucked in there?
“So, what’s it gonna be, friend? When we reset your system, are you going to play along?”
Silence for another beat while his eyes searched my face. I couldn’t blame him. I’m sure propaganda painted me as a heartless murderer and thief intent on bringing ruin to the entire galaxy. And maybe I was. I would rip anyone apart who stood in the way of me rescuing the only person who knew the hell I had survived.
Hopefully it didn’t come to that.
“I’m game.”
“Perfect. Angel? A reset please.”
The half-kin captain came over and removed the circle after pressing the tiny panels in a very specific combination that I would never have been able to remember. There was an almost imperceptible whirr as whatever was monitoring his signed rebooted, and we heard a voice crackle over his earpiece almost immediately.
“Ey, what’s going on down there? Got a slight blip in your readings for a beep.”
Our eyes locked, and this was the moment of truth. Or rather, a bold-faced lie, hopefully. “Sorry there, bit of a shock from the leggy. It should be all good now if you wanna
run a test.”
The leg lifted slightly, its knee turning in several directions, before setting down.
“Seems all good. Nice work, Poitre.”
“No problem. Coming up now. Let me just stop smoking a bit.”
“Right? Those zaps will getcha one of these days.”
“Yeah, won’t it, though.”
I quickly donned his suit and crammed his helmet onto my head. I shoved as much of my wild, red hair as I could into it before shimmying up the ladder. It had worked out fairly well that the one who came down wasn’t a nesr-roona, as that was the only species not represented in our party and would have had quite a difficult time squeezing into their uniform. Granted, we had to hope the pilot of the egg didn’t turn around too soon and notice I had a few, uh… additions that filled out the jumpsuit quite differently than their previous partner.
I arrived at the top of the ladder and took a quick glance inside. Surely enough, there was a mooreerie pilot who was facing away from me. Not wasting a second, I hauled myself up and got myself on my feet.
“You ready to have a hack at this then?” They said, starting up the legs again.
I didn’t answer. Instead, I walked directly for him, an injector already in my hand. He sensed something was amiss and turned, but I was already on him. I jammed the tip into his neck and less than a heartbeat later, he slumped forward.
Quickly, I dashed back over to the open door. “I got ‘em! Come on up!” I paused a second. “Hey Poitre, you got anything that could let me lower him down gently?”
“There’s a harness you can hook up to some of the belting,” he called back.
“Alrighty then, he’ll be down in a jiffy.”
Angel, Viys’k and Janix all scrambled up, piling into the already fairly cramped cabin of the scrapper. Angel made a beeline for the cockpit while my alien friends started routing around for the supplies our bound-up capture-ee mentioned. I mostly just stood to the side, out of the way while they did their thing. Sometimes, it was awesome being the risk-taking earthener who didn’t understand the rules enough to be terrified by how I was breaking them, sometimes it sucked.
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