Chapter 32
Juice, crouching on the roof of the west wing, leaned back against the outer wall of the lodge’s taller central structure. The slope of the roof caused her shoulder to press against the chimney—the modest barrier hiding her from the window she’d crawled through with Criss’s help.
I can’t go with them. She knew Criss and Cheryl were bound for the Kardish vessel and they’d expect her to follow. I don’t have it in me. She started to whimper.
Near the peak of the roof, Cheryl looked up the mountain face. Juice shuffled up close to her and rested a hand on her knee. Finding comfort in the physical contact, she closed her eyes and willed some of Cheryl’s courage to flow into her body.
Feeling a nudge, Juice opened her eyes to see Cheryl pointing up the mountain. Drones raced down the slope from the left and right, converging into a squadron of terrifying machines. They headed straight for the lodge, leaving no doubt about their target. Her fear swelled and her thoughts moved in a new direction. Survival.
Straining to see or hear any indication of the scout’s arrival, she willed Criss to hurry. C’mon, young man. Her heart pounding in her chest, she took solace in having Cheryl at her side. She’s been a Fleet captain, so she’s experienced in this sort of situation.
She heard a muffled, thin whine and first thought it was the drones. Swiveling her head, she recognized is as the sound of the scout. Thank you. Though clearly nearby, she couldn’t tell where it was and wished the situation had more clarity. “Should we go?”
“Hold, Jessica,” said Cheryl, using Juice’s given name. Shifting up into a crouch, Cheryl placed her hands on the roof tiles like a sprinter setting up in starting blocks. Juice followed Cheryl’s lead in preparing for the dash of her life.
A faint cloud of dust swirled at the far edge of the roof, and the whine of the scout’s power plant intensified at the same time the dust swirl disappeared.
“Now,” said Cheryl. She took off in a sprint. Juice let her get a few steps ahead, then took off in pursuit.
A Kardish soldier on the lodge grounds below saw them running, pointed, and began shouting. Juice didn’t look, choosing to keep her focus on Cheryl’s back. Like an image projection losing power, Cheryl flickered and disappeared.
Juice’s momentum carried her three more steps, and she caught up with Cheryl, who was clambering up the stepladder into the scout’s lower hatch. The scout’s cloak now hid them from view to those outside the zone of protection.
Stepping onto the ladder, Juice fought panic. This ride would end at the Kardish ship. The hatch shut as she stepped onto the deck.
“Lie down and hold on,” Criss announced from the bridge.
Cheryl rolled on her back, and Juice dropped next to her. The scout’s engines strained as they climbed the skies.
Fishing for Cheryl’s hand, Juice laced her fingers with those of the former Fleet officer as the scout’s acceleration pressed on their bodies. She snaked the fingers of her free hand into her breast pocket, fished out a little white anti-stress pill, and slipped it into her mouth.
* * *
Flying into the dreadnaught through the huge hangar door, Sid entered a cavernous world so large that the far wall of the alien ship faded in the horizon. He recalled his time on the Kardish vessel two years earlier and, as before, was captivated by the sheer size and variety of the landscape below.
He took a moment to confirm that he still followed Lenny’s drone, and then he looked down at the huge, open field deck unfolding beneath him. With a handful of Kardish ships scattered across the otherwise empty expanse, he recalled that this field served as a staging area for cargo, patrol, and other craft entering and exiting the vessel through the hangar door, now behind him.
Up ahead across the field deck, taking up more space than Criss’s huge farm, stood a drone parking garage. Constructed as row upon row of long, squat buildings, each structure contained a honeycomb of hexagonal cubicles nestled together in a beautiful pattern of strength and efficiency.
From his current vantage point of height, Sid could see most of the garage facility, and he tried to estimate the number of cubicles in the installation. To make it easy, he pretended the honeycomb pattern was a simple checkerboard arrangement. Scanning the scene, he gathered numbers. Call it columns of seven cubicles high, with two hundred columns along the length of each building, and about two hundred rows of buildings.
That rough assessment yielded a staggering number. More than a quarter million cubicles. And each cubicle holds a drone.
Like the other Kardish vessel he’d been on, a box city consumed the area to his right. The box city was literally that—a massive labyrinth of roads and alleyways crisscrossing through tens of thousands of plain off-white box-like structures, some as small as shipping crates, and others filling an entire city block and rising several stories tall.
Cheryl had speculated that the box city provided the support system for the Kardish military infrastructure. The fantastic number of drones and craft on the vessel needed fuel, ammunition, repair, logistical support, and a myriad of other services to keep them operational.
Sid felt a sharp tug on his straps as his drone veered left. He shifted his attention ahead and again located Lenny. Both their drones had diverted from the pack and were headed toward a huge wall sectioning the ship. Stretching from top to bottom and side to side, Sid recalled that this was one of many such walls partitioning the vessel into a series of self-contained segments along its length.
Their drones descended as they drew closer to the wall. Sid studied Lenny to see if he was responsible for their flight path, but from what he could tell, Lenny wasn’t manipulating his com or taking any obvious actions. In fact, he appeared relaxed in his seat, gazing around like a sightseer. The meds solved one set of problems. I hope they haven’t created different ones.
Sid looked ahead and guessed their destination. Near the dividing wall, a queue of drones rested end to end in a neat row on what looked like an assembly-line conveyor. He couldn’t tell from this distance if the line moved, but the first drone was poised to feed into a hole at the front. As they drew closer, a drone swooped in from the side and parked at the tail end of the line. Moments later, Lenny’s drone flew in behind it, and Sid landed behind Lenny.
Working quickly, Sid lay back and unbuckled his cinch straps. The reclining position directed his eyes upward, and he saw the hangar door high above him sliding closed. He knew that after it shut, subsystems would restore air pressure to this section of the vessel, and Kardish would return soon after that to continue their work. We have maybe four minutes to hide.
He swung a leg over the top of his cubby seat so both hung down together, and as he pushed forward to dismount, he felt his body jerk sideways. Sliding off the cubby seat and onto a support beam, he squatted and studied the mechanism below the row of drones. Every few seconds, the entire line crept forward, feeding the hole at the front.
Using a conduit as a handhold, Sid shuffled sideways along the support beam until he stood next to Lenny. He nudged Lenny’s shoulder and waved his hand in a “hurry up” motion. Lenny turned his face toward Sid and, sporting a huge grin, said something. With their communicators disabled, Sid couldn’t hear him speak, but it didn’t take a lip-reader to tell that his last word was “fun.”
Sid unhooked Lenny’s straps. “Okay, cowboy. Let’s get out of here.” He helped Lenny sit up, then turned and jumped onto the deck. He scanned the area for cover, picked out a spot, and pointed. That’s when he realized Lenny wasn’t next to him. He looked back to see the young man pull the wire filament from his drone and then hold it over his head like he’d just won a trophy.
Lenny jumped down next to Sid and they scrambled to some broad pillars. Sid leaned around one, intent on finding a place to hide. As he searched the area, he felt a tap on his shoulder. Lenny, his pack on the ground, waved a small canister and nodded. Leaving Sid and his pack behind, he dashed back to the conveyor.
Cl
imbing up next to his drone, Lenny squatted down and squirted a puff from the canister in two spots beneath the cubby seat. He leaned over the top of the drone and sprayed twice more on the far side. Gripping the seat with both hands, he lifted it up and tossed it onto the deck.
Smart thinking, Len. Those seats would signal the certain presence of intruders, and Lenny had the foresight to bring a solvent for the adhesive holding them to the drone. Sid hustled back to help. He lifted the seat, tilted it sideways, and slid it into a recess under the conveyor. He did the same when the second seat plopped onto the deck next to him.
When Sid crawled out from beneath the conveyor, he saw Lenny trotting along the row of drones, headed toward the front of the line.
“Where are you going?” he shouted in frustration, knowing that with their communicators off, his voice just bounced around inside his own hood. He glanced up at the hangar door, estimated they had less than a minute, ran over and grabbed Lenny’s pack, and took off running.
He caught up with Lenny, who was fumbling to open a door about a dozen steps past the front of the line of drones. Sid nudged him aside, lifted the door latch, and led them into a tiny room with another door leading ahead. Dammit, Len. This better be a good idea. The door closed behind them and the second door opened. A tiny light inside Sid’s hood turned green, signaling this was a pressurized room with breathable air.
The room had diffuse background lighting, and when Sid stepped out of what he now recognized as an airlock, he paused for a moment, waiting for the brightness in the room to increase. When nothing happened, he decided bright lights would draw unwanted attention to them anyway. Works for me, he thought as his eyes adjusted to the dim setting.
Sid and Lenny walked in opposite directions around the perimeter of the small room. It was unoccupied and, from the uniform film of dust on everything, appeared as if no one had been there for some time. The back walls were lined with taller cabinets and equipment that ran from floor to ceiling. A table with seating for six occupied the center of the room.
The front walls held a scatter of stations where workers might sit and do whatever it was they did in this place. Above the workstations were two narrow observation windows. One window faced down the conveyor with its line of drones. The other looked out onto the open field deck.
Standing at the front corner, Sid lowered the packs to the floor and unfastened his hood. Lenny watched him for a moment, perhaps checking to see if Sid would survive the exposure, and then he also unfastened his hood.
“Nice find,” said Sid, looking through the window down the row of drones. “How’d you pick this place?” He stepped to the other window and took in the sights on the field deck.
“Saw it on the way in. My brain pegged it as a good possibility for surveillance.” He ran a suited finger across the top of a cabinet and held it up to look at the dust. “The appears-abandoned part was pure luck.”
Sid glanced over his shoulder, gave the room a quick scan, and returned his attention to the field deck. “Any guesses what it’s for?”
Lenny pointed out the window facing the row of drones. “My guess is that this is a salvage or repair line, and workers used to run it from here. Maybe automation put them out of work when the job got centralized somewhere else on the ship.” He loosened the top of his coveralls as he studied the equipment. “Or maybe the workers got replaced by a crystal.”
Sid bent toward the window facing the field deck and craned his neck upward. “We can see the hangar door from here.” He reached out and, with his index finger, wrote three symbols, each as tall as his hand, in the dust at the corner of the window facing the field deck.
Lenny furrowed his brow. “Why 2-0-2?”
Sid answered with a silent expression conveying disappointment.
Lenny looked back at the symbols, then nodded. “From the outside, it reads S-O-S.”
“Cheryl knows to look for a signal from us. It’s standard ops when hunting for one of your own behind enemy lines. My job is to give her something to find.”
“Did you talk about this in advance?”
“Didn’t have to. I trained with her years ago. She won’t know exactly what she’s looking for, but she’ll know it when she sees it. In truth, I could’ve sketched the Union of Nations flag, or even written ‘look in here,’ and she’d figure it out.” I hope I made them big enough, Sid thought, studying his artwork. “I picked S-O-S because it sort of looks like a plausible smudge.”
Sid leaned toward the window and, looking up at the overhead hangar door, noticed movement to his left. “Stay low.”
“What’s going on?” The bravado was fading, and Sid detected a hint of fear.
“A van carrying Kardish is on the move.” Sid lifted his head and took a quick peek. The van wasn’t headed toward them. Instead, it drove straight onto the field deck. As time passed with no additional activity, he sat on top of a workstation and watched through the window.
Minutes turned into hours, and the Kardish workers that came and went on the field deck never approached their hideout. While Sid spent his time spying on the Kardish, Lenny explored the equipment in the room.
“This is the main panel for this operation,” Lenny said. Sid turned from the window to see him standing in front of a dark display. “Want me to fire it up and see what I can learn?”
Sid got down from his perch, stretched limbs that hadn’t moved in hours, and walked over to Lenny. They considered the panel together.
“My guess is that this runs the drone recycle operation,” said Lenny. “Or used to, anyway. The real question is if it’ll give us access into the main Kardish subsystems.”
“If you light up this panel, don’t you think we’d have soldiers or techs showing up pretty soon after to see who’s doing what?”
“Maybe.” Eyes glued to the panel, Lenny unfastened his coveralls down to his waist and pulled his arms free of the suit. He sat down in front of the equipment.
Sid shook his head. “Don’t, Len. It’s too early. The hangar door needs to open and close a couple of times before I can say either Cheryl’s on board or won’t be coming. If she doesn’t find us after a couple of cycles, then we’ll start freelancing.” He lingered for a few minutes to be sure Lenny behaved, then returned to his vigil.
After watching out the window for a while, he looked at the panel. “Why don’t you build a light barricade around it. Shift a cabinet over or shroud it with wall plates or something. If we do turn it on, at least it won’t be the light that gives us away.”
Chapter 33
Goljat, gulping from his pleasure feed, floated in a euphoric daze. One after another, dreamlike visions flashed through his tendrils. Some were exciting, others inspiring, a few hypnotic, all fleeting.
The next vision started—a Kardish chamber servant was trying to squash an insect, and somehow, the bug with its tiny brain eluded the stomp of her foot. It dashed for the shadows, scurried around objects, and slipped through tiny nooks. She hopped around the room, just missing the creature as it ran for its life.
Her stomping became more frenetic, and she looked like she was dancing! The scene delighted him with its silliness. Then the insect squeezed through a crack, disappeared inside the walls, and escaped.
Something about this particular vision troubled Goljat. Groggy and puzzled, he fought his way out of his stupor. And then he did something he’d never done before. He falsified a directive ordering the ops tech to slow his pleasure feed. He ordered a small decrease—just enough to clear his thoughts.
As his haze lifted, Goljat acknowledged that the symbolism wasn’t nuanced or subtle. I’m dancing like a clown while this crystal bug eludes me.
He rechecked his snag traps to ensure they would alert him of any activity by Criss or his accomplices. The fact that they’d all avoided linking to the web or transmitting a signal that would spring a trap flummoxed him. He tried to imagine life without access and communication. How are you doing it?
Goljat’s
leadership had commanded him to deliver Criss. The king made no secret of his impatience and grumbled openly to his advisors about the lack of progress. Goljat knew he must find and capture the Earth crystal soon. The king brought me a great distance for this very purpose.
He admitted to himself that he’d stopped paying attention after he traced Juice and the humanoid running through the woods. Juice was a central character in Criss’s life—he knew that from his study of Earth’s record—and the humanoid claimed to have information about Criss’s location.
He’d delegated the cleanup task to Kardish soldiers trained in target retrieval, and they had proceeded to botch the job. Goljat considered them to be effective warriors. To their credit, they trailed the two fugitives to a lodge, and a few even lost their lives in a rather dramatic encounter. Perhaps it isn’t incompetence that led to their failure. Yet their quarry escaped.
I’ll do it myself. With the crystal equivalent of a sigh, he accepted his fate. It shouldn’t take long.
He seized control of every device on the planet that offered a visual, acoustic, thermal, chemical, or other signal he could exploit. Analyzing this data, he correlated and connected incidents and locations. After most of a second, he completed his analysis.
His composite picture of events revealed, at least in part, why the soldiers failed. In several instances, he found he could recreate the movements of the humans and humanoid for a period of time, and then some or all of them would vanish. Other times, one or more materialized somewhere else. The manner and varying location of this disappearance and reappearance suggested the use of both a cloaking device and a means of transport.
The incident where the human females—Juice and Cheryl—ran out onto the rooftop of the lodge provided Goljat the richest data record. His soldiers and drones were onsite for that event, and they gathered intelligence data directly into the Kardish subsystems.
He watched the women’s disappearance many times using different filters and algorithms. No trees or branches obscured the incident, so he was able to study the phenomenon in detail. They vanished from a rooftop, which suggested that the means of transport was a flying craft. He presumed it was a ship capable of space travel.
Crystal Conquest Page 25