She turned to Shannon, sensing the other woman running up to her. "Anything?"
"They know where we are. I hear them," Shannon said. "We need to get out of here."
"I don’t sense anyone down this tube," Chloe said, pointing to the tube in front of her.
Shannon grabbed her arm. "No, it’ll be useless. They aren’t coming down there because it leads to nowhere."
Chloe tilted her head in agreement.
"Find me a tube with a single guard," Shannon said. "We can catch him by surprise, and if he is alone, chances are he came from a less traveled area."
Chloe swept her eyes along the tubes, trying to sense the minds around her. Dozens of them scurried about, from each direction, converging on them. Then a single thought sprang from the access tube only paces from them. The guard was too terrified to continue.
"Over there," she said, reluctantly, not wanting to subject this person to their wrath—a necessity for survival.
Shannon dashed to the indicated tube, pistol in her good hand. Then she stopped abruptly. She looked back at Chloe, her face awash with helplessness. At that moment, Chloe knew she had to kill the MSA guardsman. Shannon, her arm wounded, couldn’t support her weight and shoot at the same time.
Chloe heard the clanking of guards scuttling down the access tubes. She didn’t hesitate any longer, dashed several paces, and dove head first down the tube in front of Shannon.
This particular access tube was uncomfortable. It wasn’t the joyride she had experienced coming down the last access tube. It was cramped and slippery from the dust inside it, but mostly, because of the weak air current, breathing became difficult. She suppressed a cough. Pointing the flashlight forward, she found nothing ahead of her. She turned the light off, and slowly, consciously staying quiet, pulled herself along the tube, with Shannon following closely behind.
The security guard she had felt before was closing in on them, and Chloe’s survival instincts told her this was good. She wanted to get it over. She crept along, unwaveringly thinking about the kill.
Chloe heard thumps in front of her. Pausing, she saw she was only meters from a bend in the access tube. Something inside of her locked; she couldn’t do it. To kill in cold blood was not something she thought she would ever do. Another way had to exist, but as the tube tightened around her, going forward was her only option.
She had killed the man on the landing pad with ease. She could do this, too—for a better Mars and her daughter.
Chloe raised her pistol, steadying it for the shot. The man—the evil MSA guard—was closing in, a faceless automaton of the MSA. Her breathing tightened, her skin boiled the sweat tickling the back of her neck, and her mind focused unwaveringly on the guard’s approach…no escape. "It’s kill or be killed," she muttered. She extended her arms, careful to avoid making a sound. Shannon was deathly silent behind her.
There he was.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! The guard jumped back, and Chloe no longer saw him. Blood speckled the tube. She knew she had shot him, but she also knew it was only a glancing blow. She lunged forward, twisted her body around the corner, and extended her arms. She expected the guard to slither down, but it was much worse. He was staring at her. His pitiful eyes begged her to hold fire. His hand slipped to his side, reaching for his pistol. He would not fool her.
Bang! Bang!
The guard slumped over…dead. His face was a mangled mess.
Panic trickled its way into her mind, and overwhelming grief soon followed. She was wrestling with the conflict between the morality she had believed in her entire life and the here and now of the situation. Her father once told her mother that he would do anything for his family to lead them to safety and freedom from the Raiders. Now, this was her quest, the one he had never undertaken—the fight against oppression and tyranny. Something—the memory of him, perhaps—quieted the hysteria her mind wanted to unleash.
With more room as the pipes turned the corner, she grabbed the dead guard by the shoulders and pulled him toward the corner of the tube. Slipping and sliding, she squirmed around the guard. He already stank. The soil in his pants barely overshadowed the blood soaking into the clothes. She gagged.
Sucking in her stomach, she managed to get by the guard. Shannon followed closely behind, without saying a word. But by her subtle grunts breaking the silence they were trying to maintain, Shannon showed she was struggling with the burden of her wounded arm.
Chloe shone the flashlight down the tube. There was nothing. She crawled down the tube, and after about twenty-five meters, the tunnel stopped and shot upward. Chloe looked up and was relieved the ladder was only about ten meters high. She adjusted her body, slinked her hips around the bend in the tube, and grabbed the rungs of the ladder. She pulled herself up to leave room for Shannon. With difficultly, nursing her wounded arm, Shannon hopped up the ladder.
"We should be close to the exit," Chloe whispered down to her. "I sense several people close."
Shannon’s face turned ashen.
"Don’t worry. They’re pedestrians."
When they reached the exit grate, it was ajar. No doubt opened by the guard Chloe had killed. Chloe slipped through and helped Shannon out and to her feet.
Venders and customers packed the large corridor. Several people were haggling for better prices while others browsed in their own little world. Chloe scanned the entire area, looking for MSA soldiers or security personnel. There were none. The crowd gave no indication that anyone had taken any interest in the arrival of the two women.
Quickly, realizing she was soaked in blood, Chloe tore off her outer sweater, leaving herself in only her bra and undershirt. Shannon removed her jacket and used the inside layer to wipe down both of their pants. The blood made their pants look wet, but they were already dark enough to fool a casual glance.
"Hardly noticeable," Chloe muttered to reassure herself.
After stuffing their clothes in the grate, Shannon secured and closed it. Chloe looked over the crowd again. Still, no one seemed to have noticed their arrival or the blood smeared across them.
Chloe looked back at Shannon and nodded. Shannon’s initial suspicions were correct; the guard had entered from a remote location on Trivium Port to the security stations. She marveled at their luck, as they had entered a perfect place for them to slip away into oblivion.
When they moved into the flow of the crowd, Shannon tucked her arm between her body and her sweater, making sure no prying eyes noticed. They walked for several hundred meters until they saw a set of elevators leading to the top of the port. Chloe, pulling Shannon along, slipped into a crowd of people, bumping her elbows against some of them to move them away. They arrived at a set of elevators as it opened, allowing people to exit. Then they entered the elevator alone and punched the "close door" button.
Shannon and Chloe relaxed as the elevator moved upward.
A quietness soothed Chloe for a few seconds. After several seconds of moving through a darkened tunnel, the elevator emerged from below the surface, and the window displayed the entire port.
Below, with emergency spotlights flooding the area, the rescue crew removed the damaged hovercar from the tunnel. Faintly against the rock face, the zip line strung out across the port, from the museum down to the nook in the port’s cliffs. The evidence of their escape was displayed for the entire port to see.
"Don’t worry," Shannon said. "They won’t be able to see us through the glass. It’s tinted to block the sun."
"Yes," Chloe said. "I wasn’t too concerned with that. We have escaped."
"Our escape hasn’t been completed yet."
"We’ll be fine," Chloe said. "I don’t sense danger for us."
Shannon shook her head. "Somehow I don’t think you are that powerful."
"You can think all you want," she replied.
Shannon put her good hand up. "Okay, we’re safe for now."
Chloe’s face drooped. "But we failed in our mission, so what does it matter?"
/> "We didn’t fail. We were highly successful," Shannon replied. Chloe’s face twisted. Shannon continued her thought, "We are stealing a drone ship—"
"Were stealing—"
"Are stealing a drone ship."
"You said to me: ‘We need to come during the day so we can rappel the cliff. It was too dangerous at night.’"
"Yes, it is too dangerous to rappel down the cliff’s face at night," Shannon said. "Just as it is too dangerous to steal a spaceship in daylight."
Chloe threw her hands up. "So we were caught between the sun and Mercury. I don’t see how this makes our mission successful. Stop speaking in riddles. Why didn’t you tell me this?"
"I told you to come to the final briefing, but you had other things to do."
"I had to give my daughter away. It was kind of an important moment."
"Trust me," said Shannon. "I know the pain. Don’t get upset with me if you don’t know what is happening. You missed the meeting."
"Why didn’t you mention something on the hovercar ride in? I’m here now, so tell me how we were successful in stealing a ship that is still in the same location but with five times the security around it."
"You still don’t realize what we’re stealing, do you?"
"A drone ship," said Chloe.
"Yes…a remote-controlled drone ship. And while you were creating the distraction, I set the ship to take off in twelve hours’ time. Around four in the morning."
Chloe’s mouth dropped. "I assumed we were taking the ship and running."
"As I said, that is foolish in broad daylight. They would spot it for miles."
"I think I see your point now."
They didn’t speak for a moment, and only the hum of the elevator’s motor cut the silence.
Sensing the end of their ride, Chloe spoke: "So what now? Where do we go to retrieve it?"
"I haven’t had time to program the beacon yet. The drone ship will fly to its location."
"And where is this beacon?"
"Right here, in my pocket." Shannon put her hand in her pocket and pulled out a small device. "Oh no."
"Oh no?" Chloe said. "Is it broken?"
"This isn’t the beacon. It is the locator for the beacon and the drone ship."
"A third device?"
"You can’t have a drone ship if you have to carry the beacon around with you. They invented drone ships so people wouldn’t have to be at the ship’s destination. Therefore we have a locator for both the beacon and the drone ship," she explained. She held up the locator. "This allows you to find both the drone ship and the beacon. The beacon, which I lost, draws the drone ship to it. And the drone ship takes orders from only the beacon, which I didn’t have time to program in. I was relying on having the beacon."
Chloe shifted her body, placing her hands on her hips. "Where did you drop it?"
"I don’t know. Could have been when I was hanging off the back of that loadcart. I didn’t care about anything but survival at that point. Or when the metal pipe slammed against my arm. I was a little dazed at that moment. Or it could have been when you hurled me down a ventilation pipe into an oven. I was a little more concerned about not cooking."
"I didn’t have time to baby-sit something I didn’t know about." Chloe shook her head. "We’ll have to go back and get it."
"With the MSA sprawled over the port, no way."
"Look, we have less than two days to get a drone ship for Eamonn. This is still our best alternative. We’ll get your arm bandaged up, and we’ll start again."
"The MSA will be crawling around the port."
"But they’ll never suspect us back at the scene of the crime."
Shannon cocked her eye. "Eamonn is right…putting yourself in the belly of the beast really doesn’t make sense."
Chloe shrugged. "At least with the locator, we know where it is—"
Suddenly, Chloe’s legs went weak, and she fell to one knee. The flash of another’s mind stung the nerves in her body. A mind she hadn’t felt in two years…
"What is it?" Shannon grabbed under her arm to keep her up.
"Gwen Arwell is here," she muttered, louder than she wanted.
Shannon didn’t reply. They both fell silent, terrifyingly silent.
Chapter 14
Phobos spun around its axis on the far side of Mars.
Inside the shipyard, Parker took in the corridor junction as he and Eamonn stepped through the hangar doorway. It spread wide and low, perhaps ten meters square, and the ceiling loomed no more than two and a half meters high. In the center, the DNA strand of the MSA sprawled along the floor, a reminder of the danger they were in. In the corridor in front of them, four MSA technicians sauntered in their direction, wearing tight-fitting green jumpsuits. They were dressed similarly, but unlike Parker and Eamonn, each of the technicians wore the same smug smile that every MSA member did. Behind the technicians, a dolly trailed, carrying what looked to be an engine mount frame for an MSA fighter.
As Parker heard voices from his side, he jumped. Another group of technicians, the ones in yellow, walked toward them and continued down the hall that extended in front of the doorway.
Parker loosened his clenched fists, cursing himself on the inside for jumping. In space, sight was the primary cue to anything’s existence, whether it was through the visual, infrared, or ultraviolet spectrum. Ninety-nine percent of the sensors on a ship were cued for visual stimuli. Other senses—smell, sound, and taste—were suspended, as if they didn’t even exist. Within this station, Parker’s innate senses changed from those of a spaceman on a technologically marvelous spaceship to the those of a primitive man inside the tiger’s den. He heard every sound and assessed it for danger; every smell cued his mind to recall a familiar source or catalog a new find; and every taste of bitterness in his drying mouth reminded him of peril and revulsion. He had voluntarily walked into the heart of the MSA shipbuilding facility—the most heavily guarded building in the solar system.
And shockingly, they had made it inside.
On the far wall to his left, Parker spotted a directory. He glanced at it and caught the information he was looking for. The main supply depot was straight ahead. Then there was a turn down a long corridor, followed by a short elevator platform lift down into the basement of the facility.
After waiting for the group in front of them to walk past, Parker and Eamonn walked down the empty corridor, with Eamonn pulling a dolly of his own.
"Seems quiet," Eamonn whispered.
"Everything will be okay."
"Somehow, I think you are as nervous as I am."
"No doubt," Parker said. "Possible death does that to a person."
"So do you think Sarah will be able to convince Terry to come back to Mars?"
"Terry is coming back to Mars." Parker looked around. "Sarah has to convince him to attack with a purpose."
"You think he’ll do something foolish?"
"He is paranoid. The double agents and infiltrators within the organization have finally sent him over the edge. Sarah will bring him back."
"I wonder if she can."
"Unlike Seth, Terry is still on our side. He just thinks we aren’t."
Eamonn’s face soured. "Your conversation with Seth went that bad. I still can’t believe he left Chloe in the lurch."
"His fears—you know," Parker said, looking at Eamonn’s weary eyes, "have finally caught up with him, and using the MSA principles, he has manipulated himself into thinking he can create the world he always imagined. Just as Gwen is trying to create her father’s world. The Principles of Man are no more to them."
"We all have our own fears to overcome."
"But they do not control me or you."
"Don’t speak so quickly," Eamonn said. "Fear had driven me to despair. I can’t fight any longer."
"You are here. That is what counts. Do you think I want to be here?"
"You fight for Mars and for purpose. I only fought this war for vengeance, which has never been a noble
cause. It has made me hollow."
"No, it hasn’t," Parker said, wanting to shout, but he kept his voice down. "You fight for what they want you to fight for. Nothing is nobler than continuing someone’s quest. Madelyn confronted the chancellor first. Roche fought so we would learn the truth about the MSA plot. Jan sacrificed for the crew’s freedom. Ty surrendered so you could live a happier life. You do it for them."
Eamonn fretted. "Ty was…He wanted me to…Ty showed me a little of what I was rejecting with my submission to the MSA. The MSA defeated me."
"Ty did everything for us, especially after Jan’s death."
"Without Jan, Lunara was an empty place for Ty."
"He always had a place on Mars. I told him Aethpis colony was a sanctuary for him."
"Returning to Mars would have torn him apart further."
Parker nodded, solemnly. "It ripped my heart in two, seeing everything so changed."
Eamonn nodded and continued down the corridor. Several paces later, he said, "When this is over, I am moving to a secluded algae farm, and I will never leave it."
"Sounds like a good idea to me," Parker said, smiling.
The corridor turned, and they walked toward the elevator platform in the distance. The dolly moved at pace behind them. The motors hummed a constant tune.
Parker’s heart beat violently against his rib cage, and he found it difficult to keep his breathing at an even tempo. Eamonn remained unphased. Even though for two years, the MSA had chased his former captain, Parker realized that Eamonn’s nerves were calloused and prevented him from experiencing any anxiety. No such luck for him though. He balled his fists together, letting the anxiety flow from him. He was ready. He was a rock.
They arrived at the elevator. The platform elevator was a large square, and red painted stripes bordered it, marking the outside boundaries along with yellow stripes—butting up against the red—to mark the edges of the platform. Parker made sure the dolly stopped in the center of the square, safely away from the side. He made his best effort to mimic an MSA automaton.
"Where to?" a voice called from beside them.
Parker started. He turned toward the platform controller, who sat behind a glass partition and was stationed about two meters above them. Parker hadn’t seen him, he had been so focused on the dolly.
Lunara: The Original Trilogy Page 78