“So what we doing?” Ijjy asked.
“Get the vacuum bags out.” Nashara looked angry, her eyes blank. “I’m sick of breathing this shit anyway.” She looked very, very angry.
“But what are we doing?” Sean asked.
“How’s that plastic coating?” Nashara walked over and poked Sean’s neck. “You safe to go back out?”
“We both good,” Ijjy said. “Couple minutes exposure.”
Nashara looked around. “They’ll be waiting for us just past the decompressed area.” She was obviously talking about the stratatoi.
“You got a big gun,” Ijjy said. “We armed.”
“To face tens, maybe.” Nashara looked down at the massive gun and rubbed her temple, then glanced over at Sean’s waist. She stopped rubbing her temple, stared at the loops of rope he carried. “Hundreds? No. You really want to walk over twenty miles of hostile terrain to get to the other end cap?”
“The Satrap will be watching,” Kara agreed.
Kara flinched as Nashara spun and walked over to her. “The center. The sunline. Is there a shaft that will take us up to the sunline? We’re deep on the cap on this end, we should be able to get to it, right?”
“Yes. There’s an elevator.” Kara closed her eyes, mapped out a location, and tried to pass it to Nashara, but nothing happened. “Um, you have access to lamina?”
Nashara shook her head and held out her wrist. “On here.”
How quaint. Kara sent it, and Nashara looked it over. “We’re going to seal you up for a few minutes in bags to protect you from the lack of air. We’ll carry you out. Once we’re in a safe area, we’ll open it. Okay?”
Kara nodded.
“Good.” Nashara caught a small, folded-up pack the size of her hand that Sean tossed at her. She unpuckered the top and shook it out into a four-foot-wide bag, then looked over at Jared. “Crawl on in, then.”
Jared looked at Kara. “Go ahead,” Kara said. “It’s our only way out.”
He stepped forward, still carrying the doll, and sat in the bag. Nashara pulled the edges back together, except for a last little bit for him to keep breathing.
Sean tossed another package at Nashara and she opened the vacuum bag. “You’re next.”
Kara looked at the filmy plastic and took a deep breath to steady herself. It was out of her control now. She had to relax and let these adults help the both of them.
She stepped forward into the bag, sat down, and drew the top over her head.
“Can you give the command to open the outer door from in there?” Nashara asked. Kara nodded. “Good.” Nashara looked around. “Then let’s roll. Open the door. Ijjy, Sean, keep back, don’t shoot unless shot at. Let me pick the fights, all right?”
They nodded.
Nashara sealed both bags, then stepped forward to pick up the massive gun. Ijjy awkwardly picked Kara up and slung her over his shoulder, holding onto the back of her legs with one arm while he held a pistol in his other hand.
The outer door rumbled open at Kara’s command, and she heard a brief rustle against the plastic as all the air escaped. Ijjy’s shoulder slammed against her stomach and the world lurched as they began to move, and quickly.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Takara Bune timidly approached Agathonosis, dropping drones and scattering them along its path. Only a few hundred thousand miles lay between the two wormholes here, both at the same orbital altitude above the planet Ys.
“They’re here,” Bahul said. “I can see the Queen Mohmbasa.”
“Good.” Etsudo closed his eyes as they approached. “Brandon?”
“Yes.” The other man’s voice sounded as hushed as Etsudo’s. The habitat looked wrecked. Old and wrecked.
“Are those holes in the skylights?” Etsudo asked.
“I think so.”
A ping alerted him to the presence of the Shengfen Hao, now just transiting the wormhole. Etsudo continued looking at visual updates of the habitat’s exterior, hardly able to believe what he was seeing. Neglect.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Brandon asked.
“No,” Etsudo said. “Not ever.”
The Shengfen Hao hailed. Jiang Deng popped up. “Moving for the attack, good job tracking them, Etsudo.”
Deng would certainly not try to capture them alive.
Disappointing. But safe. Nashara was probably aboard that ship; picking her up was too dangerous. He’d instilled some of the same loyalty into her when patching her mind back together that his crew had. Enough so that if he ever ran into her again, he had some sort of fighting chance. But he hoped not to meet her face-to-face again; the last encounter had shaken him.
The Queen Mohmbasa accelerated hard out, curving away from the habitat. Etsudo watched the Shengfen Hao match it, then fire a dozen missiles.
Even the nimble Queen couldn’t outrun the sharp sparks racing toward a point ahead of her. The Ragamuffin ship jinked hard, several missiles miscalculated and passed above her, but debris rained off the ship.
“No one is on that ship,” Brandon said. He glanced over.
“Why do you say that?”
“That maneuver. Too many g’s for a human to suffer, particularly at a right angle like that.”
Etsudo snapped himself in. “Scan for any broadcasting. We’re looking for a pod, or a shuttle, something that they’re hiding in to control the ship.”
The Queen spiraled, elaborate dodges, avoiding more missiles, and Etsudo smiled. He would love to meet the man piloting that ship.
Was it worth risking a meeting with Nashara? Sadly, no.
One missile finally struck the Queen. A geyser of hot metal, air, and water spewed from the side of the ship. No more shaking the missiles, something had been damaged, the Queen accelerated along a straight line.
A long line of laser fire faintly visible in the interstellar dust stabbed out from the Shengfen Hao. It razed the side of the ship, and the Queen began to spin slowly. The ship vented air and more debris.
“Deng has her,” Bahul noted. “Quick dancing, but she’s done.”
Etsudo waved aside the virtual window showing the destruction of the Queen and looked at Brandon. “Anything?”
“Yes.” Brandon displayed a small spot of dark moving slowly toward the hull of the habitat.
“Well done, Brandon.” Etsudo strained against the straps. “He’s headed to the other side of the habitat. I wonder why?”
Brandon shrugged. Etsudo changed course to follow the small craft. “Bahul, forward this all to Deng.”
Then he sat back and waited.
“Incoming,” Brandon muttered.
Missiles. From the Shengfen Hao. If Deng doubted Etsudo’s commitment, he’d have to change his mind now. Or maybe Etsudo needed to invite Jiang Deng aboard his ship for some tea.
The missiles shot past the Takara Bune and on toward the pod.
They found their target and lit up the space outside the habitat in a brilliant explosion. Etsudo flinched and zoomed in on the mess to see debris slap against the side of the habitat.
A ship and its crew, all dead. Did that make him no better than his crew had been?
Everything fell back into the dark again.
Etsudo shook his head and turned the ship’s external cameras away from the wreckage. Such a waste. They would have made good Hongguo, he would have made sure of it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The elevator shot toward the center of the habitat, and Nashara could feel that the minigun now weighed a fraction of what it had when she’d picked it up. She bled from her arm, a chance shot when she’d turned a corner.
Several of Kara’s stratatoi had done their best to slow them down, but it had been easy enough to disable them. The Satrap had not been expecting them to head this way but either back toward the docks or toward the inside of the habitat.
It had been expecting an all-out firefight as they tried to force their way through the habitat.
“You sure the Satra
p can’t shut this down?” Nashara asked. She stood face-to-face with Sean in the corner.
“Pretty sure,” Kara said.
“Pretty?” Nashara twisted to look at her. How old was this girl? Late teens? Their lives rode on her ability to manipulate the lamina the way the Satrap had and she was pretty sure?
“It can cut the power, but then how does it send the stratatoi after us?” Kara said.
She was right. The elevator shuddered after several more minutes, slowing down, then gently slid to a stop. Nashara pushed everyone aside and braced her now weightless self in front of the doors. She aimed the minigun ahead, just in case, and flicked the box of ammunition free so that the long belt floated free in the air.
Nothing waited for them out there.
She coiled the ammunition feed into a large spiral and let it float off the forearm holding the gun.
They floated out onto a large half circle of a floor that hung out over this side’s end cap. Ten-foot-tall windows curved around the edge, and a large set of oak doors with hand-carved images of triangular gliders flitting about in the air led out into the air above the sunline. The world of Agathonosis lay in dark night all around them. Shadows curving up on all sides and stretching off into the distance. A dark, menacing blackness broken only by random patches of lights and orange fires raging throughout the habitat’s interior.
“People used to use the balconies to launch their flyers from, until a month ago they were banned.” Kara twisted in the air, unused to weightlessness. Clumsy.
“Time till the sunline comes on?” Nashara asked.
“Not for another hour,” Kara said. “The windows will turn dark and the doors will shut ten minutes before. You’re not allowed to try and fly when the sun’s on. You have to be out there and away from it already.”
The elevator chimed. Another car coming their way. Filled with stratatoi, no doubt.
“Sean, your rope.”
He tossed it to her, and Nashara began to create loops. They stared at her, still not catching on.
“We’re going to cross to the other side.” She threw the end at Sean. “Start strapping in.”
They looked at her as if she were insane. “Nashara,” Ijjy said, but she cut him off.
“We have a minigun and enough ammunition to fire it for maybe thirty seconds. It’s not much use in an actual battle. We’re outnumbered. This is no different than flying a ship. It’s basic physics.”
“Basic physics?” Sean yelled.
Nashara tapped the ammunition box. “Each bullet has mass. Every time you fire one off, there is recoil. How many bullets do you think are in this box, Sean?”
“Couple thousand,” he whispered. Nine or ten grams each exiting the gun at a thousand meters per second. Nashara eyed the group and guessed they massed four hundred kilograms total.
“A thousand-shot burst from this gun would leave us going ninety kilometers per hour,” Nashara said. “We get to the other side of this habitat in just under thirty minutes. Unless the gun jams. In which case . . .” She shrugged.
They were spacers who flew from world to world, but Sean looked out toward the darkness. “I am no ship. No gun my rocket.”
“The only difference is the method of propulsion and the surroundings. We’re in zero gravity just the same. Just don’t look . . . anywhere.”
Kara walked over to her brother. “Jared.”
His face had gone white. “I can’t.”
Nashara continued roping herself up, then tightened the knot so that it zipped Sean right up to her hip. “Move yourself so you’re sitting on my back,” she told him. She wobbled as he did so, then spun in the air until Ijjy, his dreadlocks floating up around him like some wild Medusa, grabbed them and pulled them to a filigreed pillar.
“Ijjy, strap yourself to my back, but facing Sean,” Nashara said, and then waved Kara and Jared over.
Sean and Ijjy lashed the rope over Nashara’s midsection in a crosswise pattern, lashing their folded legs to her. “This go hurt,” Ijjy said.
“Kara, Jared, sit with your legs wrapped around each other on their legs, but like you’re in a circle. Hold Ijjy and Sean’s shoulders while they lash you all in and each other around your waists and shoulders.”
“Barely got enough rope,” Sean reported from over her shoulder.
“Make it work.”
Nashara held on to the pillar with one hand, the other holding the minigun, as the acrobatic structure of the five of them wobbled.
It was madness. She was faking her cool. The sunline still glowed with enough ambient heat from its fusion-powered light to scorch their skin if they bumped it, and controlling their flight would be a bitch.
“Elevator’s almost here,” Kara called out.
“Everyone strapped in?”
“Best we can,” Ijjy said.
Nashara kicked off from the pillar toward the nearest window. They all wobbled and started to spin.
“This is not going to work.” Sean shook the group as he shifted.
“Don’t move,” Nashara snapped as they gently struck the window. The minigun smacked the window hard enough to cause a crack. The ropes pulled at her stomach and, even more uncomfortably, rode right up under breasts and pulled at them.
She swore and kicked them toward the doors.
They struck those with more tumbling, and Nashara grabbed the handles of the doors and threw them open.
The motion pushed them back away from the opening doors, slowly. Nashara reached for the small machine gun with her free hand and fired three single shots to rotate herself to face the interior of the balcony.
Three shots to stop the rotation. The shots buried themselves in the floor nearby, kicking up plastic shavings.
Then she aimed the machine gun at the wall and fired for a full three seconds. The oak doors slowly slid past them on either side, and Sean swore.
“Don’t look around,” Kara said. “She told you that.”
“Damn, that chafes,” Ijjy said as the ropes shifted with another burst of machine-gun fire. Twenty feet lay between them and the lip of the balcony. Nashara glanced “up” to the slightly glowing sunline, then back at the balcony.
An excruciatingly slow departure. But controlled.
She let the machine gun drift on its strap and held the minigun against her stomach.
The elevator opened and ten stratatoi flew out in a star pattern. They spotted Nashara, and the star pattern shifted as they spread out for windows.
“Oh, fuck.” Nashara tensed and pulled the trigger on the minigun. The barrel spun up, then the howling scream of the minigun deafened them.
Glass exploded from the stratatoi firing at them, but Nashara wiggled the minigun and the stratatoi bounced off each other to duck for cover. The entire space of the balcony became a flensing cloud of glass flechettes from exploding windows, and Nashara’s stomach strained against the damaging recoil. Tracers lit the end cap up, exposing balconies and windows.
Bullets winged by, cracking the air. But none hit.
The balcony dropped away and a spin began. Nashara let go of the trigger, and the group tumbled on, ropes chafing and cutting skin. The sunline and the dark curves of the habitat spun around them in a dizzying whirl. For a second it felt as if they were falling away from the underside of a giant mountain. But then as Nashara was spun around, they hung at the bottom of a giant vortex of darkness. Tiny specks next to a spire reaching up through the eyewall of darkness into a foggy night, where it disappeared.
She’d felt like this in night parachute jumps, the look of the land as she broke out of the clouds and looked down at the patchwork of land and civilization. People as tiny specks on the landscape she looked down upon them like a god.
A raging forest fire lit up one side of the habitat in odd orange hues. Dried-up lakes looked like gouged-out craters. Empty rivers could be glimpsed at the center of the conflagration. And then hints of towns and cities lurking in the reflection of the fire cast from the unders
ides of dirty black smoke clouds that drifted up and out over the land, starting to spiral down the length of the habitat due to Coriolis forces.
“Just close your eyes, Jared, keep them closed,” Kara whispered. “Just keep them closed.”
Nashara closed her own as well for a second after sizing up the rate of rotation. She could see a cloud of spent casings slowly dispersing on her left, falling away from them.
Then she opened her eyes again and pulled out the small machine gun and began firing. Shots to her left, then down, then down again, right slightly, all timed to the sunline’s flashing by her field of vision.
It all slowed down, each flip coming gently, until finally she righted them, then used another few shots to orient herself back down the sunline.
She estimated that she’d gotten them up to seventy kilometers an hour, but from their perspective it felt as if the group fell slowly down the giant spire toward an inky bottom.
Stratatoi followed them, a perfect circle of figures in the air, their backs to her, firing their machine guns to chase them.
“Think they go catch up?” Ijjy asked. They had pulled well away from the balcony in the last couple minutes; it dwindled into a morass of other smaller windows that clustered around the sunline. Farther out, as the apparent gravity increased, ruined gardens on careful slopes dotted the outer rims, along with walkways. Four minutes down, twenty or so to go, Nashara thought.
“I don’t see any other miniguns, they’re using light machine guns.” Nashara slitted her eyes. “Carrying clips, so maybe five hundred rounds max. Lighter caliber, lighter bullet speed. I’d say they could get going just a little bit faster than fifty or sixty kilometers an hour if they save ammo to stop.”
“The Satrap doesn’t care about their lives,” Kara said.
“If they use up all their ammo they could catch up, yes,” Nashara said.
“So how you go solve that?”
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