Then the Luscious shook as the engine systems surged to life; the power converter was allowing the energy to flow across the system, finally. Parker smiled as Airin Flander took the fighter off the deck and held it suspended about waist high.
Parker raised his thumb in confirmation, signaling to him that the thrusters were functioning as anticipated.
Suddenly, the blaze from the thrusters dimmed, and the Luscious shifted fiercely, as if a clawed beast had swatted its wing, to the side. It shook violently in its last moments of suspended air before it dropped abruptly to the deck. The crash was so loud, Parker put his hands to his ears. He cursed even louder.
"Flander! Power it down!" Parker waved his arms franticly toward the young pilot.
POOF! With a flash of light, the engine panel beneath the hood sparked, and then a cloud of dark gray smoke consumed it. The grease burned, creating a sharp odor. It wasn’t the most spectacular flameout he had ever seen, but he knew what it was. The negative power had dumped into the positive power’s buffer and overloaded the system.
Parker shook his head and threw his arms up in disgust. "I told you to power it down."
Airin Flander popped his head out of the canopy a moment later. "I did. I did."
Parker waved his hand, not contesting further. "I know. You will have to get a new power buffer from the storage locker."
Airin Flander—all eighteen years, two meters, one hundred kilos of him—hustled down the ladder and dashed to the storage locker. Parker muttered about his luck. The storage locker was bare these days, and he doubted a useable power buffer was available. But if it took all night, they would fashion something to hold the energy systems together. They needed every ship they could salvage.
They had won the Battle of Phobos, but they had lost ninety percent of their fleet in it. Now, their fleet consisted mostly of Asterfighters and a half-dozen transport vessels. Although he kept it to himself, Parker wished they had met Hannah Rohen much earlier. His wife had done her best, but she wasn’t a military leader and she wasn’t much of a governing leader either. She was a diplomat, but her carefully chosen words were ineffective against the stiff hand of the MSA. Might, coercion, and deceit were traits she lacked but which Gwen and Hannah had in ample supply.
In the same vein, practicing as a mechanic was an ability he had little time for anymore. Over the last two years, leading the Alliance against the MSA had consumed his time. Repairing ships was a passion he had let lapse—because of the war.
The Alliance’s misallocation of resources would be discernible to the eyes of history, Parker thought.
Since the Protector was destroyed, he felt the urge to fix something again. He couldn’t repair his pride or Mars, but he could make the remaining twelve Asterfighters look like they belonged in the sky against the countless MSA fighters that remained.
He turned toward the break room as thirst interrupted his thoughts, and as he turned, he saw Shannon Buckley entering the room. She was in a hurry and was heading straight toward him.
"Parker," Shannon said, turning her brisk walk into a full jog. She came up to him. "I have news you will want to hear."
"I told Hannah that I don’t want any mission for a while," he replied harshly. It must have been harsher than he intended because her face instantly hardened.
"Just listen to me," she replied.
"I don’t want to hear about a mission," he said, turning his back to her and starting toward the break room.
"Chloe is alive."
He snapped his head back toward her. "She died over Mars only a month ago. Show some respect."
"I saw her with my own eyes. She was working in a tavern in old Zephyria. I know it is hard to believe, but I did see her."
"A tavern?" Parker chuckled nervously. "She would never work in such a place. They sell their bodies for credits and food."
Shannon grabbed him by the arms. "She is there, and she works there. She isn’t the cherub you think she is. I saw her parading around in scanty clothes with the scarlet fabric across her arms. Don’t you think I doubted myself a thousand times before coming to you with this information?"
"Prove it to me, then," Parker replied, harshly. He had had enough of everyone claiming they knew the truth. If Chloe was alive, he needed proof.
"Here. I didn’t want to show you this," she said, thrusting a datapad into his face.
He grabbed it. Chloe was definitely there, her stomach displayed for all to see, and her breasts heaved up, exaggerating their fullness for the salivating men. He didn’t even dare look down at her bare legs for long. He still respected her, but that respect was suddenly vanishing.
He handed the datapad back to Shannon and walked away. He came to a wall and dropped to the floor beside it. He could say or do nothing to change what he had seen. Chloe was a scarlet woman. The desecration of her body was one of the more heinous acts she could do to disrespect her family. If Jan were alive, she would disown Chloe on the spot, never speaking with her again.
Parker had no such luxury. He was her best friend in the solar system, and because of that, he was responsible for helping her find her way. He had to go to Zephyria, push the risks and fears out of his mind, allowing himself only to focus on his friend, and in the end, save her from herself. He felt nauseous.
"I must go to Zephyria to rescue her," he replied, feeling a tight knot in his throat.
"I am coming as well," she said. "I have unfinished business there."
"I can’t have you gallivanting around Zephyria with me. We are both too high profile."
"Eamonn’s life and mine were ruined by Samantha Burns and her bounty hunters. I have to go to Zephyria to kill her. If you want to save Chloe, you will need my help. Do you want your crew back or not?"
"Listen, I don’t need your thirst for vengeance to interfere with my legitimate business."
"What about explaining this to your wife?" Shannon replied. "She would be fascinated to learn the person she claimed to be dead is still alive."
Parker cocked his head to the side. "Are you saying she lied about it?"
"Yes. There was no evidence at the scene to show that Chloe was definitively dead. It was impossible to tell. Sarah fed you that story so you would no longer obsess about your crew. With her death, the crew was gone in your eyes. Seth and Gwen finally destroyed it."
Parker ran his fingers through his hair, then realized that he had been holding his breath, and he forced out a long exhale. "I guess I will need someone with connections to weapons and a hovercar."
Shannon smiled. "I have plenty of ammo and a few guns we ripped from an MSA patrol this morning that will get us by. It could take a long time to get to Chloe and Samantha."
"It won’t take that long to get to Chloe, but there is a good chance she has been traumatized into doing what she has been doing."
"Yes, and Samantha will be guarded."
Parker rubbed his hands together. "I suppose I have to help you with that to keep your mouth shut."
Shannon raised her index finger toward him. "Hey, I’m not blackmailing you," she replied. "I came to you with this so we could help each other."
Parker forced a smile. "Let’s go get the crew back for Eamonn."
Shannon smiled back at him from ear to ear. "Tell your wife your good-byes and meet me in hangar four in two hours."
She turned to leave, but Parker grabbed her by the arm. "She doesn’t need to know about this. I will come with you to hangar four, and we will leave immediately."
Chapter 34
Drawing a deep breath, Seth moved into the darkened tunnels of the Alliance’s underground base. After he took a few steps, the door to the docking bay boomed to a halt behind him, startling him. He held stiff, waiting for movement. Nothing happened.
He drew in another deep breath. The air was stale but breathable. He resisted the temptation to slip on his breathing mask. He would look too conspicuous with it on, and it would only hamper the vision of the ground in front of him.
>
Still, his lungs burned, seeking fresh air.
Shrugging the feeling off, he walked with a hurried step, attempting to spy out the end of the tunnel that sloped gradually downward as it stretched far into the distance. The lights—lining the sides of the tunnel—flickered as he moved farther down the tunnel.
After a while, he felt, and to an absurd degree heard, the silence of the tunnel. He tried to listen to the sound of his own boots down the dirt path to break the pain of it, and he also tried to come up with some clues about the length of this overgrown worm hole. He ran his fingers along the smooth and powdery walls, the result of buffing done by the boring machines.
The tunnel wasn’t much higher than he was tall, and he slouched to keep from hitting his head. It wasn’t comfortable, but what had he expected? He was inside the Alliance’s stronghold. The complex tunnel system had confused the MSA, which had become resigned to lying back and waiting for the Alliance to poke its head out.
He acknowledged the Alliance had been smart. Just when you thought you had a map of the tunnel system, the Alliance blasted the ceiling, crumbling the tunnel into a useless void, and dug a new connection tunnel from some other location. The MSA had lost too many soldiers to cave-ins to enter this facility again without a clear advantage.
That was where his skills came in on this mission. He was to penetrate the command center and open the main doorway on the southern side of the complex. The base was a dozen miles south of Castor colony and twenty miles from Pollux to the east. The hike was simple for Seth, but he found it tricky sneaking into the base from the loading docks. Granted, they weren’t in the most secure portion of the complex. He would have liked to enter with more shrewdness. In the end, it wasn’t his call. That call belonged to the mission commander assigned by Samantha Burns. He had managed—thanks to his abilities—to slip past the guards with his speed and hold onto his life from underneath the cargo hauler as it drove into the complex.
Then suddenly, as if someone had covered his head with a sack, the tunnel went completely black—
After the spots from the darkened lights subsided in front of him, the tunnel was a void. It was unlike any dark Seth had ever experienced—thicker than the darkness of outer space. His breathing quickened, and he tried to calm it as he dropped to his knees. He honed his other senses. Extending his arms, he felt the tunnel on either side of him, stabilizing his balance. The air picked up, and the faint smell of sulfur tightened the muscles in his nose; mostly, he was concentrating on the sound coming from the end of the tunnel.
Several minutes passed, and the sound intensified. An engine was approaching. The hairs on his neck stood up; something big and horrible was about to run him over.
Panic trickled its way into his mind. He tried to suppress it, but it coaxed him into moving away from the approaching sound. He scrambled down the tunnel back the way he had come, which wasn’t hard to navigate in the dark, since he knew it was a straight shot back to the other door.
The engine became louder and louder.
He looked toward the sound, but there was still darkness. There were no sparks, no feeler lights, and there was no way that anyone was going to see him.
He continued away from the sound. He estimated it was a hundred meters from him now. The sound of the engine consumed every sound around him, even his heaving breaths.
"Help!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. He waved his arms, hoping someone would notice him—
Out of the corner of his eye, he spied a streak of light the size of a pinhole zipping across his pants. He stopped and moved his hand back and forth to test himself. Am I seeing things?
No, I’m not. The light moved along his hand.
The noisy mechanical beast pressed on toward him.
Feeling the other side of the tunnel with his hands, he stepped back to it, heaved his shoulder toward the pinhole of light, and pushed his weight into the tunnel’s wall. To his surprise, the tunnel gave out. He spilled through a hoop-sized hole and into an adjacent tunnel.
The mechanical noise was on top of him.
He spun around and got a faint glimpse of a dirt borer zoom past the tunnel. Dirt and dust billowed through the hole. He shielded his eyes with his forearm, and when everything had settled down, he exhaled a long breath.
As he got to his feet, he rubbed his shoulder; even for him, slamming into a rock wall was a painful thing. He dusted himself off and settled his nerves before he proceeded.
The tunnel ran parallel to the other tunnel. It was about the same size, but the lighting was poorer than it had been when the lights lit the other tunnel. They must have shifted the tunnel. Doubling back was no longer an option. He was trapped in the base until he found another way out. And that probably meant he would do something aggressive. He drew his gun, checked it for dirt, and holstered it when he was satisfied it wasn’t damaged.
As he looked down both of the tunnels, he was relieved that both ends were visible. The first end was meters away and was the source of the light he had seen from the other tunnel. The light flickered over a doorway, which had no markings to tell him where it led. It could lead into the dock control office or the barracks, where a hundred soldiers were waiting for him, or somewhere else.
Unsure what to do, he looked over his shoulder toward the other end several hundred meters away. The tunnel was dark, but he made out a faint light and the metal reflection of a doorway. He shrugged. There weren’t many options. He could either enter the doorway closest to him and head into a section of the base that he knew wasn’t even close to the command center, or traipse down the tunnel to the other end and maybe get attacked by another borer. Since he didn’t like the idea of meeting another borer, he decided the door closest to him was a better option.
Moments later, he passed through the doorway. It led to a large common area. Several people scurried about, paying no attention to him. They were too busy moving crates, building beds, and looking for food. He moved into the crowd swiftly to avoid anyone who might have been watching the doorway in which he had entered.
There wasn’t much to the common area. Beds and blankets were scattered along the floor, grouped family by family. Cargo bales lined the walls. It reminded Seth of Lunara after he and Chloe returned from their ill-fated meeting with Hans Bauer and his torture.
A man bumped into him, and instantly Seth’s muscles flexed, anticipating a fight. But it never materialized.
"Sorry, sir," the small man said to him.
Seth found himself staring at the thin and pale man. He forced his eyes to shift past the man toward the doorway. The man followed Seth’s gaze.
"I am new here," Seth said. "I just escaped the mines of Gorp. The MSA overran the place looking for sympathizers."
"Gorp, you say?" The man turned and shouted across the room, "Hey, Sid! This guy escaped Gorp as well."
Seth grabbed the man hard by the arm, shifting the man’s attention back toward him. "Listen, I don’t need your announcing my presence to everyone. I was hiding in the mines of Gorp for a reason. I have three ration packets if you tell me where I can find the command center."
The small man grimaced as Seth tightened his grip on his arm. Not allowing his nerves to undermine his determination, Seth trained his emerald eyes on the man. The man seemed terrified.
Seth reached into his jacket, pulled out a handful of ration packets, and stuffed them into the man’s reluctant hands. "Now, where is the command center?"
The man’s voice quivered. "The east doorway, but they won’t let you in without a…"
"Without a…what?"
"A pass."
"See how easy that was. Say anything about me, even in passing, and I will kill you," Seth said, and pushed the man away from him. "Loose lips decompress ships. Remember that."
"I won’t say anything to the MSA," the man whimpered. "Everyone is Alliance here."
"I’m not so sure about that. They are everywhere."
Seth left to find the east doorway.
After over an hour of waiting at the east doorway, studying the soldiers walking to and from it, Seth decided it wasn’t appropriate to enter. They were military, and in his dusty tunic, old pants, and worn boots, he would stand out like a sore thumb.
He gave up staring at the problem and decided to head along the gangway above him.
He scaled a metal ladder to the gangway. His boots clanked as he hurried along it. After looping around the common room, he entered several short tunnels that led into other common rooms within the facility. The gangway was a way to courier people from one common room to the next in case of an MSA invasion. Seth had too much on his mind to appreciate the planning behind these tunnel systems, but his glimpses so far left an impression that the system was formidable, one that his mind and his nerves were having a difficult time overcoming.
There was so much here for him to do. All the people and all the manpower here had gone into destroying the MSA. He wanted to go berserk on these people, tell them what they had done wrong and discipline them for their insolence. But he couldn’t just yet; the command center was the key to it. It meant help.
He stopped at a fork in the gangway. Several mechanics passed by him, and then a duty officer from behind. The officer traveled down the forked tunnel to his right. Seth decided to follow the duty officer’s direction. He looked important enough.
Keeping several meters behind the man, Seth crept along. The officer was reading a report in his hand and wasn’t paying attention to him. A short walk later, the officer stopped, entered a code to a doorway, and slipped into a room that Seth only glanced at from his position. He couldn’t discern anything concretely, although he did see several display monitors.
The command center, he thought as he moved toward the door. He heard security cameras swivel above him. He looked up and was satisfied he was still out of view.
He lowered the hood from his head and trained his eyes on the doorway. He stared at it, thinking about what to do. Entering by force served little purpose if this wasn’t the command center.
Lunara: The Original Trilogy Page 96