“I first heard them in the hangar,” Val said. “I even thought I heard something in the tunnel leading in, but at the time, I didn’t think much about it. I assumed the defense shields were up.”
The admiral cursed again and ran out the door, still holding his boots. He grabbed someone in the hallway, shouting, “Get a bomb team out. Search the hangar and then the rest of the base.”
“A bomb team? We don’t have a bomb team, sir.”
“Then get some of those geologists and science people. They must have equipment for searching for more than rocks.” Summers raised his voice. “Zimmerman, we have trouble.”
“No shit,” came the woman’s distant shout.
The admiral ran off, and Gregor didn’t hear any more of his orders. “Let’s check the hangar ourselves,” he said. “Maybe you can make suggestions based on where you heard the sound.”
Val was already running into the hallway.
“I’ll get Sparks and the others,” Jamie said.
Gregor gave her an affirmative wave—the more eyes out there searching the better—then raced after Val. He caught up and they ran side-by-side to the intersection—Zimmerman and Summers had already moved on.
“Any idea how much of an explosive they planted?” Val asked as they rounded the corner toward the hangar.
“Not from the smudge I found, but I deem it likely their goal is to bring down the mountain.”
“Wonderful.” The grim way she nodded made him think she had already guessed that. Maybe she had hoped he would provide a less ominous answer.
“We will find it before the explosive is detonated,” he said.
“I hope so.”
When they reached the hangar, Val ran straight for their shuttle, not for the ramp but for the far side of it.
“I was here,” she said, facing the hull, “and the sound seemed to come from…” She closed her eyes, groped in the air, then pointed. “Over there, yes.”
Gregor stepped out from behind the shuttle, trying to follow her pointing finger through the craft to see what might be the target. “The fighters?” They weren’t parked quite where Val was pointing, but he didn’t see much in the corner she had indicated.
Val’s head came up, her eyes meeting his. “That might be it.”
Other men and women were running into the hangar by the time Gregor ran to the fighters. A couple of people carried handheld element detectors, but most looked like they would be searching by sight alone. Gregor thought about calling them over—as depleted as the base’s resources were, there were still twenty aircraft parked in the hangar—but he didn’t know how much stock to put in a sound Val had heard. Better perhaps to let the others search more systematically. And they were doing that. Someone had turned the lighting up to full strength, and Zimmerman had appeared. She was pointing people in different directions and talking about establishing a search grid.
Gregor ran to the first fighter, but paused. Might he apply logic to the situation to eliminate some of the options? Would the intruders have chosen randomly or perhaps picked a craft positioned where it could do maximum damage?
Val caught up with him and looked like she was going to search the closest craft, but she paused. “You remember which fighter Summers was flying?”
“Twenty-four,” he replied before realizing why she would have asked. If the intruders were here to kill him, maybe they would have chosen his craft, to ensure that he would be blown up later even if they missed finding him or if they were captured. If that were the case, the explosive wouldn’t be on a countdown; it would be tied into the ignition system of his craft.
“Here’s twenty-four,” Val called from a fighter near the back.
She was shining a light and sliding her hand along the bottom of the hull. Gregor ran and jumped, catching the lip of the open cockpit. He pulled himself in headfirst so he could look at the ignition system. Was that a faint silvery smudge on the start button?
“Light,” he called, his head upside down under the controls. The guards had taken all of his weapons and tools from him, and he didn’t have so much as a tablet in his pocket.
“Here.” Val tossed her own tablet up, the illumination program already running.
Gregor caught it and shone it on the button. It might be dirt, but it might be more. The panel that held the button was secured and didn’t show any sign of tampering.
“Need a screwdriver,” he called, but he didn’t have the patience to wait. He dug into the first-aid kit fastened beside the seat, threw pain-relief tabs and wound sealant packages in the air, and finally found what he was looking for: a laser scalpel. Careful to keep the beam precise, so it wouldn’t slip through, he burned the screw holes and tugged off the panel.
A surge of horror filled him at his first glance. The silvery residue was on everything, smeared across the wires and circuits and yes, there was a little device that would ignite it when the system sparked.
“Found the screwdriver,” Val called up.
“I don’t need it now,” Gregor said, his voice choked. He should have waited for it. By melting the screws, he could have ignited everything. He hadn’t expected such sloppy inelegance.
“What do you need?”
“A bomb expert.” Gregor forced himself to take a deep breath and calm down. The presence of so much Flash-5 was alarming, but, as far as he could tell, there wasn’t a countdown timer, so nothing should be in danger of exploding as long as nobody fired up the aircraft. And as long as he kept the laser scalpel away from the panel…
“We can find someone qualified,” came Summers’s voice from below. “Don’t touch anything else.”
Gregor had been hanging over the side, his feet up, his head below the seat, so he had to shift around to look down to the deck. The admiral and at least thirty other people had gathered around the craft. Val stood on a ladder, his screwdriver in hand.
“I believe that’s a good idea,” Gregor said.
Summers was looking at the fighter’s number near the nose of the craft, a disturbed expression on his face.
“Looks like your enemies don’t like you much, Admiral,” Val said.
“My friends don’t, either,” Summers said.
“I believe that.”
He grunted. “I—”
“Look out!” came a cry from one of the dark tunnels.
Two men in black burst out of the passage, laser rifles firing. Orange beams streaked across the hangar toward the fighters.
“Hit the deck,” someone in the crowd shouted at the same time as another yelled, “Protect the admiral!”
Gregor almost jumped out of the cockpit, wanting to make sure Val was safe, but she was still up on the ladder. Instead of leaping down into the crowd where she might be protected by the mass of people and the planes between them and the snipers, she scrambled up the last couple of steps and flung herself into the cockpit with Gregor. There was barely room for one person, much less two.
“What are you doing?” he blurted. They were only a foot away from enough explosives to blow up half of the mountain range—what was she thinking?
“Shooting those idiots,” she growled at the same time as she fired. At some point, she’d grabbed another laser pistol in addition to her stunner, and its red beam lanced toward the running men. The elevated position did allow her to see them better, but they dodged behind a shuttle, evading her attack. The kamikaze wildness in their eyes promised they wouldn’t stay put for long. Indeed, they leaned out on the far side of the shuttle, firing back. One of their beams struck the wing of Summers’s fighter, less than two feet to Gregor’s side. The craft was designed to withstand higher-powered weapons than those pistols, but if there was any of that Flash-5 on the exterior, the hull material wouldn’t matter an iota.
Gregor ducked low for cover, pulling Val down with him. He wouldn’t stop her from firing, but he wasn’t going to let her stand up and make a target of herself while she did it.
A couple of people in the crowd
returned fire, but a row of fighters blocked their view, and they were reduced to crouching, trying to find spots to shoot between the wheels of the planes in front of them. The intruders simply sprayed lasers everywhere, one aiming toward fighter twenty-four and one toward Summers. Several people were protecting the admiral and trying to drag him behind cover, but he kept resisting the help and yelling for someone to give him a gun.
“Almost got that one,” Val said, the whine of her laser pistol nearly drowning out her words.
She was crouching now at least, jammed in beside Gregor, their hips plastered together. She fired around the clear windshield of the cockpit—like the hull, the material would withstand laser blasts, but with so many obstacles in between the shooters and their targets, it probably didn’t matter. Still firing from behind the shuttle, the intruders were having trouble hitting anyone. But the base people were having trouble striking their targets, as well.
Gregor reached for the pistol in his holster, intending to help with the shootout, but he still had that laser knife in hand. He almost threw it aside in the same manner as he had ejected everything else from the first-aid kit, but he stopped himself before he let it go and peered at the controls. Maybe it had a delay option. Yes, there was a timer as part of the safety features. As long as he was going to throw things, he might as well make them do something useful.
He squirmed lower into the cockpit, reaching for the open ignition system, but it was hard to maneuver with Val pinned against him. He held his breath to duck his head between his legs.
“What are you doing?” Val asked, still shooting. “And where’d they go? They’re hiding behind that fighter in the corner, damn it.”
“Please keep track of their positions for me.”
“Oh, I’m keeping track.”
Gregor could barely see what he was doing, but he carefully, so very carefully, scraped off the tiniest smidgen of the explosive. He wiped his fingers, lessening the amount on his nail even more. There, an infinitesimal amount. He scraped it on the top of the laser knife’s hilt, the part where the “blade” would be emitted when it was turned on.
“I’m going to assume you’re doing something crafty down there,” Val said, slumping low to change out charger packs, “and not simply cowering with your head between your legs.”
“Good,” Gregor said though he was concentrating and barely heard her. He lifted his head, his thumb on the switch for the knife. “Where are they? Still behind that fighter?”
More people in the crowd were firing back now and a couple of groups were trying to work their way around other planes, so they could reach the intruders. Maybe Gregor should wait and let them handle it. His plan could get a lot of people hurt, especially if he had miscalculated the amount of damage that tiny smudge of explosive could do.
“Look out,” someone yelled. “Grenade.”
A compact cylindrical object lofted through the air on a trajectory that would take it into the crowd. No, Gregor realized, it would sail over the crowd and toward the fighter he and Val were sitting in.
“If that gets close—” was all he had time to blurt, imagines of fiery shrapnel striking the open panel and igniting the Flash-5 on the wiring, the wiring he had exposed.
Val was already firing, not shooting at the hidden fighters this time, but at the grenade. Her beam sliced through the air, striking the explosive. It blew up at its zenith.
Gregor flung himself over the open circuits, terrified burning debris would find its way into the cockpit. A spark was all it would take to blow up the entire mountain.
But Val had caught the grenade far enough away. It exploded with a boom that rattled the fighters, and fiery orange lit the hangar like a sun, but only a few pieces of shrapnel reached their cockpit. They struck Gregor’s back, cutting through his shirt like steel thorns, but nothing got through him to touch the Flash-5.
If the intruders had more grenades, Gregor dared not hesitate again. There was no more time for second-guessing. He stood, aimed carefully, and thumbed the switch on the laser knife. He flung it toward the spot from which the grenade had been launched.
“Stop them before they throw any more bombs,” someone below yelled.
Gregor almost responded that he was trying, but the three seconds passed first. The laser must have ignited, for a second boom filled the hangar, this one doing more than rattling the fighter. A shockwave slammed into Gregor, hurling him out of the cockpit. As he fell, he glimpsed others being flung through the air like dolls too. With his ears stunned by the boom, he couldn’t hear people’s shouts; he could only see their wide-open mouths, their bulging eyes. Wreckage flew through the air was well, clanging into fighters all around him.
A mistake. He’d made a mistake. That was all Gregor could think as he slammed to the ground.
The fall knocked all of the air from his lungs, stunning him. He had the presence of mind to cover his face—the shrapnel raining down made that from the grenade seem pitiful—but nothing more. He couldn’t have said whether seconds or minutes passed as he waited for the inevitable, for the mountain to collapse atop him, atop them all.
But eventually, sound returned, muted sound. Things weren’t as clear as they should have been. He lowered his arm and blinked up toward the ceiling. It was still up there. He didn’t see any cracks, any sign of debris plummeting down to bury them. Dare he hope…?
A gray-haired figure stepped up to his side and scowled down at him. “Thatcher, you’re a loon. The military would have kicked you out if you hadn’t left.”
Huh. Admiral Summers. The man had more lives than a Modarian flying cat.
“That means you wouldn’t want him here to fly with your people, right, Admiral?” Val said, appearing at Summers’s side.
Seeing her alive made Gregor’s soul soar. Her hair was sticking out in a dozen directions, and her shirt had been torn, but she was standing and giving the admiral her sarcastic smile. Delightful.
“What’s there left to fly? Those two fighters were utterly destroyed and more are damaged.” Summers flung his hand toward something Gregor couldn’t see from his spot flat on his back. “I see your shuttles weren’t touched.”
“Have all of the intruders been nullified?” Gregor couldn’t tell if the admiral was sarcastic-angry or sarcastic-exasperated, but he definitely understood that the man wasn’t pleased with him. Did that mean he would be thrust back into his room with a guard on the door? For two years?
“The two that were lofting grenades have been obliterated,” Val said.
“A professional should attend to the explosive material, so it can be disposed of promptly and is no longer a threat.”
“Thank you for the advice, mercenary, but we’ll figure things out on our own from here on out. I want you and your team out of my mountain and off my planet as soon as your rust buckets are able to fly.” Summers stalked away. His tone had been so irritated that it took a moment for his words to sink in. Had he… just been released?
Gregor struggled to push himself into a sitting position, wincing at the pain and stiffness in his back. He had landed a half dozen meters from the fighter. Val knelt beside him, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. The crowd was departing along with Summers, but Pilot Zimmerman gave him a salute before following the others.
“We appreciate the help, Thatcher,” she said. “And if I were you, I’d leave first thing in the morning, before he changes his mind.”
“I understand, yes.”
“I will talk to the repair crew,” Gregor told Val after Zimmerman walked away. “If they work through the rest of the night, the shuttles may be ready for a morning departure. They can sleep on the way back to the ship.” Wherever the ship was. He would have to check in with the captain soon and let him know he was no longer a prisoner.
“But as the pilots, we should sleep for a few hours, right? To ensure we’re rested enough to fly?” The corner of her mouth crooked up.
“That might be wise.”
“W
ould you mind sharing your room with me? Mine is, uh…” She grimaced, and he remembered the dead guard was on the floor in her quarters. It was likely someone would remove him, but she might object to sleeping in a room where a man had been slain. It wouldn’t bother him, but she might be more superstitious.
Val lifted her brows, and it dawned on him that she was asking to share his room. His bed, presumably, since there was only the one in there.
“Is sleep all you have in mind?” Gregor did not think his injuries would preclude a night of amorous coupling. He could probably find one of those wound-relief tabs to be certain, in case Val preferred vigorous lovemaking.
“After all this, it would be difficult to quiet the mind for sleep right away. Perhaps we can find a way to distract our brains together.” She cocked an eyebrow as she considered. “But, hm. Are you prepared for distractions? After all, you were already distracting yourself earlier when I walked in.”
Gregor flushed. Even though masturbation was a perfectly normal human activity—the physiology and psychology journal he had consulted around age thirteen had assured him of that—it was, nonetheless, one he usually engaged in only in private. Val’s twinkling eyes were promising—at least she didn’t think him some kind of aberration—but did not entirely alleviate his embarrassment. Still, he mustered admirable dignity when he said, “Surviving assassins, laser fire, and explosions has a way of reinvigorating a man. I assure you I’m very prepared.”
* * *
Val followed Gregor into his room, closing the door behind them, scarcely believing they might have a few hours of privacy. With the base personnel handling cleanup and getting their shields back online and the rest of the mercenaries handling the final repairs of the shuttle, everyone should be too busy to bother them. She was tempted to fling herself at Gregor—she had been rerunning those last kisses in her mind as they walked back to his room together—but she wanted to make sure those pain meds he had taken had kicked in before jumping into his arms and wrapping her legs around him. He had been thrown out of the fighter hard. She had been lucky that she had still been ducking after the grenade exploded. The force of the shockwave had made the fighter skid several inches, but it hadn’t hurled her from the craft.
Mandrake Company- The Complete Series Page 48