by James Axler
Jak and Krysty both let loose with their blasters, spraying the main hallway with lead for a couple seconds. Then they pulled back and followed J.B. down the side corridor. Sure enough, after several paces, it intersected with another hallway that paralleled the main one.
J.B. poked his head out to check, and turned left when he saw it was clear. “Come on, the reactor was this way, so the turbines should be, as well.”
As they went, the ship lurched even harder, the entire vessel shaking as large waves slammed against the hull. “It’s a miracle this thing’s hung together this long,” J.B. muttered.
“Yeah, but it sounds like it won’t for too much longer if this keeps up,” Krysty replied. “Come on, let’s keep moving.”
They trotted down the smaller hallway, J.B. on point, Krysty, still weak from using her Gaia power, in the middle, and Jak watching their backs. Apparently their reverse flanking maneuver had taken the main group by surprise, as there were no immediate signs of pursuit. “Could sneak up, chill them before chill us,” Jak suggested.
“Tempting as that may be, they’re not truly our enemy,” J.B. replied. “We’re just trying to get out of here. ’Course, that doesn’t mean I won’t chill anyone who gets in my way, either.”
After going about a hundred more feet with no sign of anyone around them, J.B. called a brief halt.
“We should be close by now, righ—” His words were cut off as a wiry Downrunner with a knife in her hand leaped on him from her hiding place above a row of pipes running parallel to the ceiling. The impact drove him to the ground, his Uzi flying from his hands.
Screeching in rage, the woman, who looked as if she had been badly burned across much of her face and arms, raised the blade to stab J.B. in the back. Grabbing her arm, which was around his neck, he flipped her over to land with a breath-stealing thud on the metal floor. He trapped her wrist and forced her to drop the knife. Krysty retrieved his machine blaster and handed it to J.B., who put the muzzle right between the woman’s eyes.
“Take us to the engine room right now!” he ordered.
As thoroughly cowed now as she had been ferocious a few moments ago, the woman nodded. J.B. let her up, but kept a hand on the back of her neck and the barrel of the Uzi in her back. “Go. Now!”
It turned out they were close. The woman led them a few more steps down the corridor, then pointed at a door that had the symbol for electricity on it, a jagged bolt of black lightning with an arrow at the bottom of it.
“All right.” J.B. took his hand from the woman’s neck. “Go tell your Chif Engner that we control the turbines. If he doesn’t want them blown up, he’s going to figure out a way to get us out of here. He has five minutes to return with his offer. You got that?”
She nodded again.
“Then go!”
They watched the woman tear off down the corridor. “I sure hope she can talk,” Krysty said. “We never checked.”
J.B. stared at her in disbelief. “Now you bring that up?” He shook his head. “Come on, let’s get in here and set the charge. I’m half tempted to let the damn thing go off anyway, regardless of what the Chief says.”
* * *
WITH THE ELEMENT of surprise blown, Ryan, Ricky, Mildred and Doc didn’t waste time trying to sneak around. Since the majority of the Downrunners didn’t have firearms, they were easy pickings, or at least they could be forced to retreat with a judicious application of firepower.
The encounters settled into an odd kind of rhythm; Ryan and the others would advance until they spotted someone, then shoot until their opponents either fled or were chilled. After the third such skirmish, in which they’d downed one and sent two more running for their lives, a white flag was waved from behind a barrel.
“Recovered, can we speak? No blasters, no shooting?”
“We can hear you just fine,” Ryan answered. “What do you want?”
“For all of you to get the hell out of here!” the Downrunner replied. “Chif Engner said the rest of your group is holed up in turbine room, and to come to you with a truce flag. We take you there, you take them and we let you go, okay?”
“No bullshit, or I swear we’ll kill every last one of you!” Ryan shouted. “Take us to them right now!”
The skinny man with smears of grease on his face and only three fingers on his hand emerged, holding the flag in front of him as if it might stop any incoming bullets. “Yes, yes, I take you there right away. Follow me.”
“Finally,” Ryan said. “First sign of a double-cross, and you get a bullet in the back.”
“No, no, we just want you to get your people and go!” he said over his shoulder as he scurried down the hallway.
“Ricky, watch our six,” Ryan said as he strode after the little man.
Without having to blast their way through knots of resistance, the group made its way through the ship much more quickly. Soon they were at the door to the turbine room.
“Here, they’re in here,” the man said as he backed away.
Ryan hammered on the door with his fist. “Krysty? J.B.? Jak? You in there?”
“Ryan, is that you?” Krysty shouted back.
“Yeah, come on. We’re getting out of here!”
He heard steps approaching, and a moment later, the door opened and Krysty was in his arms. “Good to see you, lover,” she said.
“You, too,” he replied. “J.B., Jak. Come on, we’re getting out right now.”
“Sounds good to me,” the Armorer said. “Just a second.” He turned to the Downrunner who had led them to the room. “I’ve placed an explosive charge somewhere in the turbine room. Only I know where it is. We walk out of here unmolested, and when we’re safely off the ship, I’ll tell you where I hid it.”
“How can we trust that you will do as you say?” the man asked.
J.B.’s smile was as friendly as a shark’s. “You don’t really have a choice now, do you? But trust me, if anyone messes with us, the whole room goes up, and with it your steering and power. You got it?”
The men smiled nervously, revealing rotted teeth and gums as he held up the white flag again. “Yes, I understand.”
“All right, let’s go.” Ryan led the way, with Krysty beside him. “What happened to your wrists?”
“I’ll tell you later,” she replied. “Did you see a woman with blond hair, or a guy who came down here from topside named Elial?”
“So he is here.” Ryan quickly filled her in on what had happened abovedecks, but when he got to the keelhauling, she interrupted him.
“It was a fake. He wanted to go under so he could be brought down here. There’s a third group playing both sides against each other—”
“That’s right, Krysty,” a voice said from farther down the corridor. “And we’re still going to make it happen.”
Before anyone could react, there was a loud clank, and a tide of acrid-smelling fluid sloshed across the floor toward them. Ryan was the first to recognize what it was.
“Shit—kerosene!”
Chapter Thirty-One
“Nobody shoot!” Ryan ordered. “You’ll light it on fire!”
“Smarter than you look, Recovered,” Raina said from the darkness. “You and your friends are going to complete the job you started—for both sides. We haven’t come this far to fail now. You don’t, or you make a move to shoot, and I light up this whole damn corridor!”
Sensing a presence beside him, Ryan looked out of the corner of his eye to see Jak edging forward, throwing knife held between his index and second fingers of the hand at his side. “All right, now, let’s talk about this—”
“No! Time for that’s done! You do it now or you die! There are no other choices—”
A muffled report made the whole ship shudder and slew to one side. A second later, all the lights along the corridor winked out. Thrown off balance, everyone stumbled or staggered to keep their footing.
“Now, Jak!” Ryan shouted as he turned on his flashlight and aimed it at where they
’d heard Raina’s voice.
The albino leaped into the air, the knife blurring out of his hand and into the darkness. He landed with a small splash in the puddled fuel. For a moment, there was only silence. Then, a faint, choking noise could be heard.
Ryan snapped on a flashlight to see Raina emerge from the darkness, her chest covered in blood pumping from the wound in her throat. Her mouth opened and closed as she touched the hilt of the knife, but didn’t pull it free. Her face paled as the blood drained out of her body, and finally she slipped to her knees and fell forward onto her face. An unlit flare fell from her other hand.
“Fantastic hit!” Ricky said.
Jak walked over to the body and retrieved his blade, wiping it on her pants. “Not bad—”
A scream of rage alerted him to the second attacker in the dark hallway. Jak whirled to see Elial, his face swollen and bruised, charging straight at him. Like a deadly dancer, Jak whirled again, building up centrifugal force. He released it in a powerful spinning kick that smashed into the sailor’s face, knocking him off his feet and sending him slamming into the wall, headfirst. He fell backward and didn’t move.
“He’s dead,” Jak said without even checking. “Let’s leave.”
“Hang on. What was that explosion?” Ryan asked.
J.B. was looking back down the corridor. “I think that booby I set in the turbine room went off prematurely—must have been a faulty detonator.”
Just then the ship tilted even more, almost to a forty-five-degree angle before slowly righting. “I don’t think the ship is ever supposed to do that,” Mildred said.
“We better get topside triple quick,” Ryan said. “Come on. We’re heading back to the shaft we used to get here. Once we get on deck, we head for the escape pod and cast off.”
The companions began running through the corridors. “Wait a sec,” Krysty said as they jogged. “Aren’t we heading away from the rear of the ship?”
“Where we’re headed is the only place we’ll be able to get back up,” Ryan replied. “Topsiders blocked the rest of the stairways with steel plates and guards.”
“Great,” Krysty said as they turned a corner to head over to the main passageway. “Any other surprises we should know about?”
At the intersection that led back to the elevator shaft, Ryan rounded the corner to find a large party of Topsiders, led by their secman, Aturk Coller, heading straight toward them.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Apparently the captain didn’t trust us to get the job done and sent his boys after us to make sure.”
The two groups stopped in the corridor, about twenty feet from each other. “What are you all doing down here?” Ryan asked.
“Felt the explosion in the rear of the ship, and the steering’s gone. If we don’t fix it, the ship’s going to capsize,” Coller said. “We came down to see if we could help. Did you finish the job?”
“No,” Ryan said as he slowly began raising his blaster. “We brokered a truce with the Downrunners to get our people, and we’re leaving now.”
“By De Kooning’s beard, you aren’t going anywhere until you go back and kill the Chief Engineer!” Coller thundered as he raised his spear gun, which had a vicious-looking, triple-barbed harpoon on the end.
“Fuck this. Kill them—” was all Ryan got out before the ship lurched so hard that everyone was thrown off their feet into the walls. Ryan heard the twang of someone’s spear gun releasing its projectile, but he was tumbling so hard he couldn’t see where it was coming from or try to dodge it. The entire vessel began tipping—and kept going.
“She’s capsizing!” Coller shouted as he tumbled about. “De Kooning save us!”
“Your bastard mummy isn’t going to save anyone, stupe!” Ryan snapped as his elbow slammed painfully into the wall, then he rolled with the impact to come back up on his feet. He found himself standing on the left wall, which had become the floor. Ryan checked on his people and found J.B. and Jak had kept their feet and were still pointing their blasters at the Topsider party.
“Anyone hurt?”
“I am afraid I have taken a nasty gash to the leg, Ryan,” Doc said, clutching at a long, oozing slice across his thigh. “Fortunately, it does not seem to have cut any major arteries, although walking from this point on will be difficult, at best.”
“You’re going to have to do the best you can, Doc,” Ryan said. “Ricky, give him a hand?”
“Right. Lean on me, Doc.” Still pointing his carbine at the tangled mess of the Topsider party, Ricky put the older man’s arm around his shoulders and held his wrist with his free hand. “Ready.”
“Everyone else okay?”
Getting nods from the others, Ryan addressed the Topsiders. “Coller, there’s nothing more to do down here but abandon ship. Now, we’re going—through you if we have to, but we are going back up that shaft. What’s it going to be?”
“All right, Ryan...” the huge man replied. “Let’s go back to the ladder and get out of here—”
He was interrupted by the loud sound of metal rending under great stress.
“Now,” Ryan said as he looked down the left hallway to see water already rushing into the hold. “We have to get out before the shaft goes under!”
Both men got the Topsider group, including several who had serious injuries, moving back to the elevator shaft. “Come on, people, we have to move!” Ryan said. “Unless you want to be down here for the rest of your very short lives!”
The Topsiders began walking up the now-horizontal shaft, with the less injured helping those who couldn’t move by themselves. All around them, everyone heard the shrieking of metal plates as they gave way under pressure they were never meant to bear.
The sound of rushing water grew louder as they hurried down the shaft. The ship pitched back and forth even more violently in the storm, making their footing treacherous. One of the Topsiders caught his leg in the ladder, snapping his ankle with an audible crack. Coller whirled and, with a speed Ryan wouldn’t have thought him capable of, freed the man, hoisted him over his shoulder and kept plowing forward.
Ryan glanced back to see black ocean water rushing into the passageway and quickly gaining on them. “Move! Faster!”
Everyone started running, or at least moving as quickly as they could. Spotting Ricky laboring to haul a panting Doc along, Ryan fell back and grabbed the old man from him. “Go! Clear the way out!”
By now the water was lapping at their boots, with the two groups barely staying ahead of it. They could see a square of daylight ahead, and everyone redoubled their efforts.
Despite his load, Coller made it to the opening alongside Ryan, and together each man heaved his injured comrade up through the exit several feet overhead. It worked so well that they began lifting the others together by unspoken arrangement, nearly throwing the men out of the shaft onto the upended deck.
“Clear the exit as soon as each man is out!” Coller shouted with each toss. The ocean water was lapping around their ankles when it came time for Ryan’s group to go.
“Get up and out—head for the rear of the ship,” Ryan told everyone before they started out.
They propelled Ricky out first, then sent Doc up so the teenager could help him. Next came Jak, then Mildred, then Krysty.
Finally, J.B. and Ryan looked at Coller. “You’re up.”
The big man laughed. “You think you two can get me up there—” His words were interrupted by the splash of a fire hose landing next to them.
“Tie yourself off. We’ll pull you up!” Ricky said.
Coller looked at Ryan, who nodded. “Outside, you’re on your own, but at least we’ll help you get there.”
The secman looped the hose around his waist and gave it a tug, while Ryan and J.B. slung their weapons and readied themselves by making stirrups out of their interlaced hands for him to use as steps. “All right, on three! One—two—three!”
Bracing themselves in the thigh-high water, Ryan and J.B. took the man’s weight
with a groan as he clambered up their legs. They shoved at him with all their might as the others hauled him up to where he could grab the edge. Even Mildred and Krysty lent a hand in pulling him over the side. A moment later, the hose came back down.
“Climb up!”
“Go, J.B.!” Ryan said. “I’ll be right behind you!”
The Armorer shinnied up the old hose, reaching the edge of the exit and climbing over. “Come on, Ryan!”
With the water swirling around his waist, Ryan grabbed the hose and started hoisting himself up. He had only gotten halfway there, however, when a tall wave burst through the shaft from the hold. It slammed into Ryan, knocking him into the wall and tearing the hose loose from its fixture outside.
“Ryan!” Krysty shouted, reaching down to him as he disentangled himself from the hose. “Grab my hand!”
The water was swirling around him even quicker now. Ryan lunged up to try to grab her fingers but missed them by inches. The water was still rising, but there was an undertow that threatened to drag him back under. “Can’t....reach...you!”
“Here, good sir, perhaps this will help!” Doc’s head appeared over the side, followed by the trunk of a coconut tree that slid down into the cool water. “Swim for it, Ryan!”
Striking out for it with all of his strength, Ryan got a hand on it and hung on for dear life. Once he got his other hand around the trunk, he climbed up and reached the top where J.B. and Krysty, along with Coller, could grab his arms and haul him out.
The scene on the overturned ship was total chaos. Crew members and officers ran everywhere through the sheets of driving rain, trying to keep their footing on the slippery walls. Hearing a scream from their right, Ryan and the others looked over to see Chief Officer Markson slide down the side into the frothing water.
“Good luck, Cawdor!” Coller saluted him, then ran off with his men to assist with the ship’s evacuation.
“You too!” Ryan called after him. “All right, let’s get to the rear!”
The others had already used the severed fire hose to tie themselves together. Ryan wrapped the end around his waist and began leading the way, hanging on to the railing as they went.