But no; there was more to Odo’s cheery drawl and try as I might, I hadn’t been able to uncover it in the four years he’d been on board the Harpy.
The thought of the Harpy had me catching my breath from a sharp stab of pain that went right through me. I pushed the emotion away; we still had a battle on our hands.
“Who did you hire it from?” I asked as we peered around a corner and got an eyeful of a brawl the size of New Texas.
“Zyla’s cousins.”
“Her cousins? The ones back on Ceres A?”
“Yeah. Who would’ve thought they’d drive a hard bargain, eh?”
“Did they have it stashed somewhere the nukes missed?”
“Nah. Communications were reestablished after ’bout a week. It came in from Kappa Coronae on a cargo hauler.”
“Not Zenthia?”
Odo grimaced. “Lot’s happened since you got shafted.”
It was a typical Odo thing to say, but it soothed something thorny deep inside me. Odo’d had a special relationship with Cassi. They’d spent hours down in engineering together, whispering sweet mechanical nothings to each other. I’d thought he might have blamed me for her…
Yeah, well. I did order the self-destruct, so I was going to watch him warily.
“So, what do we owe Zyla’s cousins for this windfall?” I asked.
Odo snuck around the edge of the intersection we were on, avoiding most of the brawl, but offering a meaty fist up when required. I ducked in behind him; I was still seeing two of everything, and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself.
I didn’t think it was the beer anymore. I could assimilate alcohol quickly when needed. But I was beginning to think I might have a concussion.
And I was also pretty damn sure we were being followed.
I checked over my shoulder, but the shadows revealed nothing. A few bodies. A stoned prisoner or two. But nothing nefarious unless you counted their body odour.
“Not ‘we,’” Odo said. “You.”
“What do you mean ‘me?’”
“You now owe the Zarnissa twins a favour.”
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered.
“Could’ve been worse.”
“How could it be worse than owing a Zenith a favour?” They were scrupulous about settling debts in a timely fashion. They’d make up something worth the favour’s price just to see you pay it.
For two Zeniths living on a holiday planet, they were serious about life and all the intricacies thereof. Including debts owed them.
“They might have got nuked like the rest of the planet. You have no idea how hard it was to make my way back to them.”
Something dark and haunted skittered across his face. I’d never seen that look on Odo before. Whatever he’d had to do to get out of the Ceres A council room after I’d been arrested for mass murder had to have been gnarly.
I almost asked him if he was OK. But that would have been pouring salt on the wound and giving it a good rub afterwards. Of course, he wasn’t OK. Neither of us was.
The Harpy was dust.
Cass was gone.
Doc was dead.
And God alone knew what had happened to Zyla.
The words were on my lips; so close to tumbling off them. But I wasn’t ready for that reality yet.
I cleared my throat, which hurt like flux, and said, “It was a good deal, Odo.”
He flicked me a gaze and then grunted.
“It’s over there,” he said, pointing with the plasma rifle to an alley wider than those all around it.
I couldn’t see the little racing ship. The camouflage had to be top-tier Zenith tech. Which begged the question, how the hell did Zyla’s cousins get their hands on it?
I pushed that thought aside for now because we had bigger problems.
The intersection that led into the alley where the pinnace was stashed was crawling with Zenith troopers.
“You leave breadcrumbs in your wake or something?” I asked Odo.
“Nah, boss. They were here when I arrived on planet.”
Zeniths didn’t come to Delphini B. They didn’t even escort the prisoners here. That was done by drone ships. I hadn’t seen a Zenith in four weeks; until this evening.
I counted up the armoured goons and came to twenty. Plus one, wearing a hooded cape.
“That the prick who tried to hang you?” Odo asked.
“The one and only,” I murmured.
“How’d he know to meet us here?”
“He’s Zenith. He’s got the latest tech gear.”
“The ship’s still cloaked.”
“Doesn’t matter. He knows it’s there and he knows it’s our only way off this planet.”
“Shit, Cap’n. Thought it’d be a walk in the park rescuing you.”
I slapped him on the back. “You did good,” I said.
“Not good enough.”
I studied the scene. The huts surrounding the intersection and on either side of the alley our ship was in weren’t high enough to approach across their rooftops. Plus, they’d probably collapse beneath us. Beneath Odo anyway; I’d lost a bit too much weight in the past four weeks.
Cutting directly across the intersection was out. There were just too many of them, and we didn’t have any camo.
Which left going the long way around and approaching from the rear.
Or…
“Come on,” I said. “I know a shortcut.” And he wasn’t going to like it one little bit.
Delphini B was a small planet with limited natural resources. The population was controlled by a means of supply and demand. If you could demand it, you were supplied with it. Natural selection methods culled those who couldn’t hold their own in such a cutthroat arena.
But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a form of infrastructure on the prison planet. The Zeniths didn’t like coming here if they could help it. And it’s not like they had to answer to any humanitarian-type laws. But this was a Zenthian-controlled planet in a Zenthian-owned system. It was on the outer edge, but it was still theirs.
And Zeniths were proud bastards.
So as well as an orbital drone network that kept a watch on the situation dirtside from the skies, there was also a tunnel system beneath the ground which the Zeniths could use if they ever found themselves having to land on the planet and defend it.
Of course, send the worst of the worst criminals to a place, and they’ll pick it apart and find out how to exploit it. The underground tunnel system had long ago been discovered, converted — or subverted — and now was the proud domain of a criminal mastermind who liked to eat little children for dinner.
I’d steered clear of the Claxian everyone called Clux the Crazy. He was definitely not as hospitable as the Claxian who took my chits and gave me piss-poor beer.
But not all Claxians were hatched alike. And the one who ruled the tunnels was pure evil.
Even I shuddered thinking about where we were going. But the path would be short and hopefully free of Clux’s roaming and feral guards. It just had to get us to the exit beside the pinnace and then we’d be out of here.
Home free.
I led the way back from the intersection teeming with Zeniths and located the nearest access hatch to the tunnels. A spray-painted sign adorned the rusted door. Not so much a skull and crossbones, but the message I assumed was the same — a feather broken in half and bleeding.
I was pretty sure that was the Claxian way of saying, ‘Flux off, or we’ll kill you!’
I turned the handle and slowly opened the hatch, peering into darkness.
“Did you bring a torch?” I asked Odo.
“Don’t need a torch,” he drawled, “when you’ve got this.” He patted the side of his plasma rifle and powered it up, so it glowed threateningly.
It’d run out of power faster using it like that, but we’d only be in the tunnel a short while. And he still had the railgun.
I’d considered asking him for the rifle earlier, but my aim would have bee
n off by a mile what with the way my eyes kept crossing, and everything had a permanent blur.
I’d decided to stick with my shank, which Odo had approved of, all the while wondering why he hadn’t brought more of an arsenal with him.
Knowing the size of most racing pinnaces, I was pretty sure space was limited.
Knowing the Delph as I did, I was doubly certain he’d misjudged the situation gravely.
I wasn’t going to tell my one and only friend on this entire planet that. Plus, you know, he had the keys to the pinnace.
Odo led the way into the dank tunnel, the glow of his plasma rifle filtering out a metre or so before him. It wasn’t good. We were lit up like a pharma-den to a desperate junkie. They could see us, but we wouldn’t be able to see them.
“Switch it off,” I ordered.
“You sure, Cap?”
We didn’t have much choice. “Just do it; our eyes will adjust.”
It took a torturous minute or more for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. There was some ambient light from holes in the hatches; the tunnels weren’t sealed from the outside air. It wasn’t enough to see very far, but we were now just another dark blob in the darkness.
I took the lead this time. There was no point making Odo do all the work now his plasma rifle was off. If anyone shot at us, I’d hit the deck, Odo would hit a knee and fire the railgun over my prone body.
We’d done something like this a time or two in the past.
It was eerie down here. I could hear a little of life returning to normal topside. The clink of a mug. The slosh of ale. The murmur of someone passing overhead.
By now, we were running parallel to the intersection where all the Zeniths had parked themselves. And we were making good progress.
Of course, the moment I had that thought, a shadowed hand reached out of an unseen until that moment hole in the tunnel wall and pulled me into it.
I let out a little yelp. Odo shouted something after me. And then my head was shoved into a rank smelling sack, and my stomach received a series of punches that had me doubling over.
Odo roared, but not being able to see where I was, he didn’t fire the railgun. Not to be outdone by the darkness, however, he powered up the plasma instead.
It didn’t blind me, I had the hood on, but it did make the chattering Claxian who had a feathered hand wrapped around my upper arm screech.
And then the plasma rifle fired, and all hell broke loose.
I don’t know if they’d been waiting for us exactly. Or if this was their station and they waited for any idiot stupid enough to venture down into the tunnels voluntarily. But this was clearly an ambush site, and we’d carelessly walked right into it.
So, there was more than the one Claxian who had been restraining me and was now gasping his last breath in a pool of blood on the tunnel floor. I tore off the sack, took in the scene in a glance, and came up with a rough count of five in total.
Two against five. I liked those odds.
Then I dove into the melee, shouting a war cry worthy of any Mutt, and bashed a Claxian over the head with my elbow, followed it up with a kick to his stomach, then stabbed him through his beady little eye with my shank.
Shoulda disarmed me, moron.
It was a bit brutal after that. Odo tore through the lot of them and then returned for seconds. I managed to get a decent punch in the side of the head to one and a kick between its chicken-thigh legs on another. I was not above fighting dirty.
And then I was down and being pummelled with bats, and cut up by clawed feet, and torn to bits by the odd razor-sharp beak as the world grew hazy all around me.
It lasted a minute. Maybe two. But Odo had a lot of pent up anger inside him, and I was fighting for my life like a cornered animal, so eventually, we came out the winners.
But not before we could hear the thundering footsteps of an approaching horde of Claxians. Well, it was more a clicking sound that grew louder and more ominous as they approached than a thunderous roar. But it did the trick.
I grasped Odo around his arm and started hauling him toward the hatch that I hoped would let us out beside the pinnace. But I could still hear them coming. They were gaining on us, probably sweeping low along the ground with the help of their vestigial wings. They could only manage a metre or so at a time and only ten or twenty centimetres off the ground at that, but it was enough to make them faster than we were on two feet.
I skidded to a stop beside a hatch which I calculated a little too groggily was the right one and started to turn it, while Odo pulled something off his belt which I hadn’t noticed right until then.
“You have a grenade?” I screamed.
“I have two,” he said proudly.
“Throw it! Throw it!”
“It’ll collapse the tunnel.”
“I don’t give a flux about the fluxing tunnel, throw the fluxing grenade at them!”
“No need to shout, Cap’n.”
He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade.
The hatch swung open, and I clambered up, Odo right behind me.
I had a second to register several plasma rifles pointed at my head, inky black overlarge eyes behind HUD helmets. And then the ground rose up beneath us as the grenade exploded in the tunnel.
Maybe the enclosed space made the explosion more impressive than it should have been. Or maybe Odo had modified the grenade in some fashion; I wouldn’t have put it past him. But whatever the reason, the Zeniths went flying in every direction. And Odo landed on top of me.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. Odo was a dead weight and try as I might, I couldn’t shove him off me. My head spun. My chest felt too compressed. My ears were ringing.
And then Odo rolled over, coughing and spluttering and swearing up a storm, and released me from my temporary prison right back into the real one.
Bodies lay every which way, but they were still all in one piece, so they started rising and bringing their guns to bear. I struggled to my feet, swaying, the world spinning, my body battered and bruised and my vision a blur.
And then Odo beeped the locks on the pinnace like you would a hovercar; the sweetest sound to my abused ears. The sleek racing machine shed its camo like a coat of water; shiny gel coating like twinkling silver stars awaited.
And then the hooded Zenith who had tried to hang me stepped out from behind the vessel.
Odo roared and fired his plasma. The Zenith dodged and threw a drone at us. One of those palm-sized ones you can keep in your pockets for emergencies. It fired up like a nuke propelled missile and then started shooting plasma bolts at our head.
The troopers joined in, but we’d got close enough to the pinnace to be protected by its shields; clearly, the machine had been synchronised with our biosignatures. This kit was the real Zenthian deal. The plasma bounced off, lighting up the Delphini night sky, as Odo clambered up into the pilot’s seat.
I turned to follow him, but the hooded Zenith reached through the shield with some sort of shield modulator, and clamped a long-fingered hand on my shoulder, spinning me toward him.
I’d had enough. I’d had a shit night and a shittier week. And don’t even get me started on the month I’d just suffered.
I was done. Done with prison planets on backwater rocks. And done with Zenith goons in high tech space armour. And done feeling sorry for myself although that last one was harder to acknowledge.
But I wanted to live.
Zyla was still out there. And someone had nuked Ceres A. And if it was a Zenith firing on their own planet, then the universe was bum-flux crazy.
Which meant, Zyla was in deep trouble.
I had guilt enough to last a lifetime embedded in me. I would always wear Doc’s death like a storm cloud hanging over my head.
I would not abandon Zyla.
I let an inhuman cry out and thrust both hands towards the Zenith’s face, fingers outstretched, shank forgotten on the ground somewhere after the explosion.
But I didn’t need a mak
eshift knife. I had two inky black orbs guiding me. And anger that rivalled Odo’s to make me land the hits.
My fingers connected with the Zenith’s too-big eyes and he went ballistic. But by the time he’d recovered, Odo had reached down the side of the pinnace and grasped my collar, hauling me back up and into the cramped cockpit.
I landed hard on my shoulder. My head was lower than my arse, and I couldn’t turn myself around to buckle in safely. But none of that mattered because Odo managed to close the cockpit hood over us, sealing us inside for space flight. And the engines roared to life like a herald of angels, and then we were up and off the desolate planet designated Delphini B; the arsehole end of the known systems.
I panted and squirmed and muttered a few choice swearwords, but by the time we’d exited atmo, I was head the right way up, arms safely tucked behind restraints, and staring at the afro-covered head of my engineer and saviour.
“Thank you,” I said, the words hardly sounding enough.
“Don’t mention it,” he offered, not in his usual devil-may-care drawl.
He was still mad. Righteously so. And it dawned on me then, that Odo was mad at me.
He’d struck a deal with Zeniths for a ship to come save me. He’d landed on a prison planet with no backup and only two weapons for protection against the nasties. He’d arrived in the nick of time and not once led me to believe he hadn’t planned it that way; that he didn’t want to be there.
And now, I realised, he’d done it because he wanted to look me in the face when he accused me of murder.
Murdering Doc.
Murdering Cassi.
Breathing was difficult. A lot of that was to do with the injuries I’d sustained. But most of it, I had to admit even if just to myself, was heartache.
I’d deserved to be on Delphini.
I didn’t deserve the second chance Odo had gifted me.
And then as we entered FTL flight, and the stars started to streak past the windows, I swallowed it all down. Shoved it all away.
I had to think of Zyla now. Zyla who might be alive and need rescuing.
So, I ignored the guilt and self-condemnation, and I said to the man who had saved me, “Tell me what I’ve missed.”
Absolute Zero (The Sector Wars, Book 1) Page 6