This Starry Deep

by Adam P. Knave

  What were my options, really? Sitting and waiting could work. I’d sent off family alerts after all, and though I didn’t know where either Mud or Jonah were, one of them (if not both) were bound to come get me. It made sense, just wait it out and stay alive.

  The other option, of course, was to escape again. No tools, they knew I would try it again, they were prepared for it, and, worse, they knew that I knew they were human now. They - and I still had no clue who they were - had every reason to have secured me properly this time. Which all, really, made it far more fun for me. I also don’t do damsel in distress really well.

  Never did, either. Back when Jonah and I first met, there were a few too many times his enemies used me against him. They all decided I must be helpless, an easy tool to use to stop him. It didn’t take long before I learned how to fight, found a love of explosives, and took to getting myself out of messes on my own. Why stop now? No reason I could think of.

  I listened, holding my breath while I did. Nothing to hear, outside of my own heartbeat, so I could assume there weren’t guards waiting just out of reach in the dark. Good. Next I flexed everything I could think of, and heard the straps creak softly. Not much, but it meant they weren’t made of metal and had give and flex. Good again. Well, good for me, bad for them.

  My captors were our own military, which meant everything would be milspec. I knew milspec possibly better than they did. The bolts securing the chair would be single thread and hardened, the chair itself a rigid, no-flex metal blend. The straps would be attached inside the chair with bolts and welding, so I couldn’t rip them out.

  The weak point would be the buckles themselves. Secure but designed for emergency release in case of depressurization: you didn’t leave captives to die, and if you had to free them in a large pressure suit, that’s what you did. It meant that if I could reach the buckles, chances were I could undo them eventually.

  That was why the wrist straps were tighter than the others. I couldn’t rotate my hands to get them palm up at all. Palm down, I could only grip the arms of the chair. With my elbows secured and pressed against the back of the chair, I couldn’t pull the same trick as last time; they’d learned that much.

  What I could count on them not learning was to do a dual-mix explosive search on me. No one ever did. Last time I escaped I hadn’t gone for it because it’s the sort of thing you save for the last minute, but now I couldn’t see an alternative. Also, this would hurt far worse than the thumb trick had.

  Against my collarbone, one on either side, were two tiny capsules that produced a nice bang when mixed. That’s the sort of thing you sometimes leave under your skin for later. Or maybe that’s just me. I’m perfectly all right with it just being me.

  By not securing my head they’d given me a tiny window of opportunity. I’d take it. I bent my head to the right and started to gnaw at my own skin. Hurts like the devil, biting through your own flesh. A few minutes and some careful work later, I had one capsule in my mouth.

  I spit it out and aimed for my hand. My fingers bent enough for me to catch it, just barely, except I missed. The capsule brushed my fingertips and dropped onto the floor, next to my right foot. I took a deep breath and lowered my head again, stretching to bite into my other collarbone. I wanted to scream, that or gag on the blood filling my mouth. Also, my head still hurt fiercely. I knew the headache had thrown my aim off last time, so I took a deep breath with the second capsule in my teeth and thought about this.

  The best I could hope for would be for the two capsules to hit on the floor. They would explode and, if they were close enough, blow one of the straps with little enough noise that I wouldn’t be noticed. If it had been at my wrist I could predict it, but the first capsule was lost in the darkness somewhere by my foot. I moved my boot around and felt it on the floor. Taking a second slow, deep breath, I spit the second capsule out toward the first and heard it plink delicately on the floor.

  I had to escape soon, now, or I would risk bleeding out. The ragged holes on my shoulders weren’t going to close by themselves. They at least needed bandages of some kind. Time would be short.

  Nudging first one capsule and then the other between my boots, I picked them up and rolled them onto the top of my right boot. It took every inch of painful extension I could manage to get my toes to touch that way, but I did it. In the process of getting them both on my foot I smashed them together, starting the reaction.

  With both on top of my right boot, fizzing audibly, I flicked my foot up as best I could and felt the mashed-up capsules roll down my leg and hitch against the strap across my right ankle. This wouldn’t be pleasant - all I could hope for would be that it wouldn’t take my foot off when it blew.

  My boot and the strap took the brunt of the small explosion, but I knew that my right ankle wouldn’t be a happy place to visit, either. I bled freely from three points now, and my time ticked away. Then again, my right leg could move freely. The strap broke nicely. I wormed out of my boot and moved my right leg over to my left. The straps, like I thought, were designed to be worked by a thick-gloved hand, which meant my toes would do fine.

  Except they were also slippery with blood, so it took a few seconds longer than I would’ve liked, but then both legs were free. Now it came down to a question of flexibility. Yoga, stretching - I might have gotten older as the years went by, but that was no reason to slack off. Taking a deep breath, I slowly moved my right leg up until it could work on the strap holding down my left wrist.

  With a hand free, the rest proved easy enough. I sat there, in the chair, and thought for a second or two longer than necessary. The blood loss wasn’t trivial. Nothing for it, though. A few strips of outfit here and there and I stopped most of it, enough to count, at any rate. Then I managed to get my mangled boot back on my torn-up foot without screaming.

  On the bright side, I really didn’t notice the headache anymore.

  Now I just needed to get out of this room, off this ship, and work out what the hell was going on. Not necessarily in that order, mind. Except the room should come first. Moving in the dark meant going slow and searching for light. The door sealed fully, so I wouldn’t have to worry about light showing from under it - none showed from outside, and I could bet they hadn’t darkened a whole lot of the ship just for me.

  Of course they could still have windows into the room, one-way jobs that wouldn’t show light from the outside. I had no way of knowing how observed I was except for the fact that no one had come in to get me yet. I limped around the room twice, memorizing it, and decided to not bother with finding a light after all. I found the door, and a dark open room would be far better to fight from than a well-lit one.

  Assuming I could get the door open. The trick I’d used last time wouldn’t work twice, I had to assume that they’d be looking for it. Then again, I also knew whose doors stood in my way this time. Advantage about even, really. I didn’t have any more implanted explosives, either, or any good way to keep bandaging myself even if I had. No, I’d have to pick the lock.

  Not easy to do when the lock in question is a biometric scanner. My prints wouldn’t work on it, and I didn’t have anyone else’s hand lying around to try. Instead I took my left boot off (the boot still in one piece) and used it to beat the casing off the door scanner. Wires I could deal with.

  With access to the system, I could get the door open easy enough. I could also, I realized with a muffled laugh, short half the ship’s systems. The leftover remains of an old design flaw in the doors, one Jonah and I had pointed out to them years before. Why they wouldn’t have fixed it I could imagine all too well. They took the problem to committee and review, realized we were right, and pushed out the fix to all new designs, planning to implement it in the older systems when they got their standard upgrades. Those upgrades could be decades between installations for things like this and, it seemed, in this case literally had been.

  One wire over here, another over there, and a few quick twists. That’s it. Now the
next time anyone opened a door on this side of the level I was on, the whole system would unlock, switch states, and then lock down until they worked out what had happened. That would give me practically no time at all to slip through the door.

  About two seconds later, the door opened. On any big ship there’s always someone going somewhere. Perfect. I slid through the door as it opened, getting clear before everything clanged shut and locked.

  Of course, that meant I stood in a brightly lit hallway, ragged and bleeding, bandages made from bits of my own clothes wound around me, and a right boot that flapped because half of it wasn’t there anymore. I stood there in the middle of a ship that seemed to want me locked up, weaponless, alone, a bit woozy, and in pain. I smiled.

  There’d been worse. Now for the next step.

  Chapter 18 - Jonah

  MY NEWFOUND MINIONS scurried around, trying to do the impossible. The problem was, I knew there couldn’t be a way to find a ship, convince the ruling council, gather the population, and evacuate a planet in the time left. I knew it. I just didn’t want to believe it.

  There’s losing and then there’s never having a chance. We were deep into the no-chance zone and spiraling down. I was playing King of the Hill without a real point. At best I could save myself and a few of the folks closest here. That would be it. But how could I explain that to them? The answer to that escaped me, and always had. I didn’t like to lose. I liked this even less.

  I stood up and kicked over the makeshift throne I’d inherited. Time to cut loses. Damn it. How could an entire operation go this far south this fast? Something didn’t gel right in my mind. I’d have to work it out along the way.

  I stood there, feeling every inch of my age. I was a stupid old man who had gotten in the way of something far bigger than he’d suspected. I still had no idea where Shae was, I stood on a planet with a timer running down quickly, and something about the entire thing didn’t add up. I’m sure it could’ve looked worse to me, but I couldn’t see how.

  “Hey, you two!” I called out, stopping a few of the Stone Hammer kids who were milling around trying to work out how to do anything I’d asked for. “Let’s focus on the ship, all right, what’ve you got for me?”

  I leapt down off the little stage and smiled a false smile at them. They smiled back nervously and just as falsely. Great.

  “Nothing, Boss. Off-planet is forbidden, there are no ships,” a kid told me, his shiny shaved head glinting a bit in the flickering light of the hall.

  “Not good enough, since when do Stone Hammers listen to the cops? To the Council? No, someone here has a ship and we need to find it.”

  Baldy nodded, his face grim, and ran off to talk to a few other people. As he did, a shy girl inched around, her feet shuffling and nervous. She wore a torn-up jumpsuit and had a rag tied around her head. She looked, honestly, like half the nerve-wracked techs I’d worked with. The ones who had answers but didn’t want to tell you because they weren’t the right answers.

  “Tell me,” I said, moving to stand directly in front of her.

  “Oh, Boss,” a tall, reedy guy interrupted, “you don’t want to listen to Bee. She’s not right, you know?”

  “Thanks for that,” I told him, “but I’ll take my chances.” I smiled at the woman, “Bee?”

  She looked at me and nodded. I could see courage deep in her eyes, but around here, around here she was the kook. No matter how good her info might be, it wouldn’t improve her standing with the group. She knew it as well as I did.

  “Bee, if you got something,” I said, “open your mouth and get it out. If you don’t, stop staring and keep moving.”

  “The junkyard,” she managed to get out, “might have something we can use.”

  A bunch of people nearby laughed and started to repeat what she said, causing ripples of startled laughter. Me and Bee weren’t joining in. “Might? What kind of might are we talking here, kid?”

  “There’s an old hull and some engines out there,” she said, staring at me hard, trying to will me to believe her, not knowing I already did. “We can maybe make them work if we had enough people who tinker…”

  I sprang to life. “You heard her, people! We’re headed to the junkyard.” I thought about it a second. “Bee, how big is the hull?”

  “Could hold ten or so, probably.”

  Ten. Maybe ten people would be all that I could save. Ten people out of an entire planet. Though if I got off with them, once I was back in contact with the rest of the fleet there stood a slim chance of a miracle. Ten it would have to be.

  “You find eight people, Bee,” I told her, “folks who can lift this stuff and folks who can fix it, along with you. You can fix it, can’t you?”

  She smiled at that and nodded. “We’ve been keeping the rust out of all the best pieces. I once got all the lights to turn on in the hull,” she whispered like it was a great source of pride for her and a secret she wanted to keep.

  “Go find us a crew, Bee,” I told her, and I turned to address everyone else. “You will all listen to Bee. I don’t care what you think, but she’s deciding a crew right now to head out to the junkyard and get us off this rock. Disobeying her is like disobeying me, and you saw what happened to your old leader, right?”

  Actually I’d had to stun him again when no one was looking, just to make sure they continued thinking he was dead. I might be sentencing him to death anyway with this plan, but hopefully he’d wake up, take control again, and have a long life of being a miserable, tiny gang leader to look forward to.

  I prodded Bee to round up folks faster and we were off to the junkyard. She led the way, still not used to being in charge of anything at all. We grabbed a few of their vehicles to get there - old, beaten-down things with four huge tires to get over obstacles. There were, of course, plenty of those, but we arrived at the junkyard fast enough, I suppose, considering we didn’t have any time at all.

  The place looked like any junkyard I’d ever seen. Piles and piles of rusting metal and despair, lumped together to make a monument to waste. Bee and two others leapt from the transport and ran off, shouting at each other to keep up and giving directions to the rest. I told the convoy to follow them as best we could. Chances were, the parts of our vehicles would be needed. It wasn’t like we were coming back for them.

  The techs - well, at least the folks Bee felt were techs - crawled over an old hull that had a small, reverent, junk-free area cleared around it. A quick glance at it didn’t fill me with confidence. The metal tube didn’t look like something that could be made airtight with a month’s worth of work, much less a few hours.

  “Are you sure this’ll work?” I asked Bee, nodding at the wreck.

  “No,” she said, “but it’s the only hull I’ve ever found around here.” Honesty. It’d have to do.

  “Right then!” I yelled. “We don’t have much time so let’s get to work! Bee’s in charge.”

  “Uhm,” she said low, “wouldn’t you rather be in charge? You’ve been in these before.”

  “In them, yeah, built them from the ground up? Not so often. Just do your best, I’ll be right alongside.”

  And I was. I used my Acadian blaster at mid-power, close range, to spot-weld the hull together and repair breaks. We pulled engines from the wheeled transports and mounted them to the inside of the hull. They would power life support and electrics inside.

  Bee and her crew split off to find the larger engines they’d toyed with when they were pretty sure no one was watching. I got called over to help drag them back to the hull and mount them. We test fired them, one after the other, more to check whether the batteries worked and make sure the hookups weren’t backward than to see if they would generate enough lift. One of the hookups was reversed, actually, and it almost cost us the engine. We also lost one of our heavy lifting crew in the explosion. We didn’t, thankfully, lose the engine itself.

  They were smart kids, all mechanics and tech-heads with obvious affection for what they kept calling
antiques, which was fair enough. Soon, the crap old hull started to look like a very old, run-down ship of sorts. The transport engines gave us lights and heat and worked at filling the air tanks. The batteries on the lifting engines had enough charge to get us up with (hopefully) enough left over to move us around decently. My own suit could handle radio communications.

  I ran down a mental checklist and it ended up not bad. We might even get to win this one. Spot welds were almost finished and we were loading some cargo, extra bits of machinery just in case, when the screaming began. I stopped work and looked around.

  People were pointing up and my heart sank. I followed their points into the sky, where everything flashed red and yellow and white. The invasion had started while we sat on the ground helpless. It also meant that even if we launched, we’d have to go through an invasion fleet that could out-turn and out-pace cutting-edge ships. That cut launch time from somewhere in the next few hours to somewhere in the next five minutes, max.

  “Guys, we gotta go!” I yelled, zipping down with my GravPack to find Bee. “They’re here. We gotta go and go now, or we won’t make it.”

  “We might not make it anyway, Boss,” she said, full of fear.

  “Call me Jonah,” I said without thinking, and added, “We’ll make it.”

  “How can we? The ship isn’t ready, we aren’t ready, how can we possibly—”

  “Bee, we’ll make it because if we don’t, a lot more planets are going to die this way. We’ll make it because my wife is out there and…you know what, this isn’t the time for speeches. Get everyone on board, I’ll do an outside check and we’re taking off!”

  Bee grabbed her tool bag and ran for the hatch, stopping long enough to physically shove each crew member toward the opening as well. I flew around the hull and realized the ready lines hadn’t been disconnected. I started to grab them and rip them free, getting bucked off the hull intermittently by Bee starting a full systems check and launch sequence. Good. She was smart. Even if I didn’t make it inside, she knew enough to take off without me.