“Actually, it might make more sense for you and Addy to head up to the cockpit and get ready to fly. Brak and I can deal with Katawa.”
Lucien hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“It’s one little gray alien against his much bigger and nastier cousin, plus me, and I can be pretty nasty myself.”
Brak bared his black teeth in a grin. “We take care of the little gray one. Do not worry.”
“All right, but be careful,” Lucien said.
Garek nodded absently, already busy shucking his robes in favor of his Paragon-issue black jumpsuit and armor.
Lucien turned away before the sight of Garek’s backside struck him blind. He and Addy hurried from the room and ran back the way they’d come.
“How do you know you can fly this thing?” Addy asked on their way to the cockpit.
“I don’t,” Lucien said.
Addy made a noise in the back of her throat. “We should have told Garek to capture Katawa, in case we need him to pilot the ship.”
“Yeah...”
“We could end up stranded here.”
“Go back and tell him,” Lucien said. “I’ll see what I can figure out in the meantime.”
Addy nodded and ran back to Garek’s quarters.
Lucien reached the cockpit a few seconds later and fell into the pilot’s chair with a whuff of escaping air from the seat cushion. He scanned the holo displays in front of him. Thanks to his translator band he could understand the unfamiliar symbols perfectly, but that didn’t turn out to be much help. He tried accessing the ship’s engines, only to receive an error prompt:
Biometric profile not recognized.
Override code:
Lucien should have known better than to think Katawa would leave the ship’s systems unlocked. Addy was right. They needed Katawa alive or they were going to be stranded on Mokar until the next Faro ship came to visit.
Lucien jumped up from the pilot’s chair and ran back through the ship, heading for his and Addy’s quarters to get his own exosuit. If Katawa had been careful enough to lock them out of the ship, then he might have taken other precautions, too. There was no sense taking chances and facing him without armor.
Lucien tried sending Addy a message to explain the situation and suggest that she put on her suit, too, but his ARCs reported a connection error. The Specter was jamming their comms.
Lucien’s fingertips sparked with adrenaline as the implications of that hit home. Comms jamming and a systems lockout? Both seemed to point to the same conclusion: Katawa knew. Somehow he’d anticipated them. They weren’t going to take him by surprise with their ambush—it was the other way around: they were the ones being ambushed by him.
* * *
Mokar
Lucien ran back to his quarters as fast as he could. He stopped his momentum with the door, and a resounding bang shivered through it. He keyed the door open and hurried over to the closet to don his jumpsuit and armor.
Lucien had just finished putting on his jumpsuit when the door swished open behind him. He jumped and spun around, his heart beating in his ears. He half-expected to see a Mokari warrior come stalking in, jaws gaping for the kill...
But it was only Addy. Lucien blew out a breath. “You scared the krak out of me!”
She shook her head, breathless from running, and leaned heavily against the door jamb. Garek pushed in behind her, his armored boots clunking heavily on the deck.
His voice reverberated from his helmet speakers: “Katawa is gone. No sign of him on board.”
Brak stormed in next, his chest and shoulders heaving, slitted yellow eyes wide with rage. He was still wearing his shadow robes. “I will eat him alive, and make him watch!”
Lucien grimaced and shook his head. “He locked us out of the ship and activated comms jamming.”
“I know,” Garek said. “I already tried to contact you via ARCs.”
“We’ll have to go outside and hunt him down with our suit sensors,” Lucien said. “We’re not going anywhere until he gives us the override code for his ship.”
Addy ran her hands over her bald head, making the motions to tie her hair in a bun; then she seemed to notice that she didn’t have any hair to tie, and her hands fell back to her sides. “What about the Mokari?” she asked.
“What about them?” Lucien countered as he lugged his exosuit out of the closet and lay it out on the deck. He keyed it open with a holographic control panel in the chest plate, and the suit flayed open with a loud clicking of metallic joints and seals. Lucien lay down inside the suit, lining up his limbs.
“You think this was all by chance?” Addy said. “I think Katawa planned the whole thing, and he locked us out of his ship to make sure that we’d have no choice but to go down into the underworld. There’s supposed to be some kind of quantum junction down there, right?”
“Right,” Lucien said as his ARCs connected to the suit’s systems and he mentally sealed his armor. More clicking as it wrapped him up in a metal skin. At least the comms jamming didn’t affect communication with his suit.
“What if Katawa’s plan was to strand us here and then wait for us to go down and find the key to open that junction?” Addy continued.
“What’s he get out of that?” Lucien asked. “He’s looking for the lost fleet. If he betrays us and we find the fleet without him, we’re not going to use it to help him find his way home.”
“We might not have a choice. He’s probably got some kind of tracking device on us,” Garek pointed out.
“Or in us,” Addy said. “We’ve been eating his food.”
“So we’re doubly frekked,” Lucien said, standing up in his suit. He clomped over to the closet and retrieved his helmet. As soon as he slipped it over his head, HUD displays swarmed his view. He minimized the non-essential ones. “We can’t take his ship and leave, and we can’t go into the underworld to escape.”
Addy nodded slowly.
“I find the little gray one and squeeze his head until he give me the code,” Brak said.
Garek nodded. “That sounds about right to me.”
Lucien pointed to the closet where Addy’s exosuit was waiting for her. “Suit up and let’s go hunting. Brak—you, too. You’re going to need your suit for this.”
Brak’s predatory grin faded to a petulant frown. “I cannot rip out his throat with a helmet on.”
“You can’t rip out his throat period. He’s going to need it to tell us that override code. Now go.”
Brak hissed, but turned and left the room.
Addy hurried to undress, and Garek respectfully looked away. In less than a minute she was armored up and ready to go. A few seconds after that, Brak came hulking back into the room, his head now brushing the ceiling with the added inches provided by his armor.
“On me,” Garek said, and marched out the door.
They fell in behind him and followed him back through the ship. Lucien was technically the ranking officer, but Garek had a lot more experience as a Paragon, so Lucien was content to defer to his leadership.
They reached the cargo bay and were just about to open the doors to get to the rear airlock when the deck shivered under their feet. The movement was accompanied by a sound like grass swishing against the hull. They all froze, their heads cocked toward the outer bulkheads, listening.
The deck shivered once more, again accompanied by that swishing sound.
“What the frek...” Lucien muttered.
Another shiver. More swishing.
“I think the Mokari are trying to push us over the cliff!” Addy said.
“Frek that!” Garek slapped the cargo bay door controls and raced through to the rear airlock. Lucien and the others ran up behind him as he cycled the inner doors open. Garek waved them through just as the deck started trembling again. “Come on!” he yelled.
Before Garek could join them, the deck kicked up, angling sharply and sending them all tumbling and sliding back through the cargo bay, picking up speed. With the ship
’s main reactor off, the inertial compensator and artificial gravity were offline, too.
Lucien fired the grav boosters in his boots to cushion his fall, but there wasn’t enough time to react, and his knees still buckled with the impact. Brak landed on top of him with a loud thunk that knocked him over and left him seeing stars.
Garek stumbled to his feet and stood with one foot on the wall of the cargo bay and the other on the deck. “We’re balanced on the edge of the cliff! We’ve got to get out now!”
Lucien scrambled to his feet and gazed up at the distant airlock. The deck was smooth as ice, and tilted up at a forty-five degree angle. There was no time to climb back up. They had to fly.
“Use your grav boosters,” Garek said, and blasted off at an angle, heading straight for the open airlock.
It was bad timing. The ship shuddered briefly once more, and then fell. Lucien’s stomach leapt into his throat as weightlessness set in. They all floated a few inches above the deck—except for Garek. He sailed up to the airlock with the momentum imparted by his grav boosters at nearly the same speed as the airlock was now falling toward him. He put out his palms and fired his grav boosters for braking thrust, but it was too late to slow down. His head clipped the top of the inner door frame, and then he slammed into the outer airlock doors with a resounding thunk!
“Garek!” Addy screamed.
Lucien drifted in shock, his feet dangling bare inches above the rusted metal wall. The sound of air rushing past the ship’s hull was a constant roar in his ears.
Time seemed to slow, but Lucien’s thoughts were racing at a lightning pace. Katawa had said the pit that they were now falling into was seven kilometers straight down. Mokar’s gravity was a little less than a standard G, so maybe eight meters per second, per second, but it would take them just a few seconds to reach terminal velocity, at which point they’d no longer be accelerating, and the effects of the planet’s gravity would be restored.
Lucien’s feet touched down, his prediction fulfilled.
“What the...” Addy marveled at the sudden sensation of normalcy. “Did we stop falling?”
Outside, the air was still roaring past the Specter’s hull.
Garek came plummeting back down from the airlock, unconscious, and Addy screamed.
Lucien angled his body toward Garek and triggered a blast from his grav boosters.
They collided in midair, and Lucien got the wind knocked out of him, but he managed to slow Garek’s fall from a deadly tumult to a hard knock. Garek landed on top of him with a loud clatter of armor, plastering him to the cargo bay wall for the second time in the past few seconds.
“We have to get out of here!” Addy said.
“Yess,” Brak hissed. “This is a fool’s death. No honor in it, only shame.”
Lucien crawled out from under Garek and shook the veteran by his shoulders to wake him up, but he didn’t even stir. Lucien’s suit sensors reported Garek’s life signs were strong, but he was out cold.
“Get over here and help me!” Lucien said. He took one of Garek’s arms, and waited for Addy to take the other. As soon as she did so, he said, “On three! One, two, three!”
They boosted off at almost the same time, but almost wasn’t good enough. A fraction of a second’s difference in their timing sent them careening to one side of the open airlock. Lucien decreased power to his boosters and managed to correct their course just in time. They sailed into the airlock and landed on the inside wall of the door frame. Brak boosted in after them and landed on the other side of the door.
Lucien bent to reach the control panel at his feet and toggled the inner door shut. It irised closed, leaving them to figure out how to reach the panel for the outer door.
There were no zero-G rails in the airlock, just a few rusted out rivet holes to suggest where they used to be.
“How are we going to get out?” Addy asked, searching the airlock frantically. The outer door control panel was at least four meters above their heads.
Lucien scanned the walls, ceiling, and floor, but he couldn’t see any kind of handholds. “Let me try something,” Lucien said, and fired his boosters at ten percent thrust. He shot up faster than intended and had to put out his hands to cushion his impact with the door. Now he was pinned in place. He backed off his boosters to five percent and reached for the control panel with one hand...
But the movement threatened to overbalance him and send him spinning out of control. “Frek!” Lucien gritted out. He tried again, swiping desperately at the control panel. Again, he was forced to plant his hand against the door a split second later.
This was taking too long. Lucien couldn’t be sure what their terminal velocity was, but even with seven kilometers to fall they wouldn’t have more than a few minutes before the Specter hit the bottom. They needed some of that time to negate their momentum and to get to a safe distance from the Specter before it hit.
Addy hovered up beside him and mimicked his trick of holding himself in a powered handstand against the outer door. Luckily she’d managed to pin herself within closer reach of the control panel. She spared a hand to work the panel...
Come on... He thought, watching as her other arm trembled and her whole body arched against the forces now threatening to unbalance her.
They didn’t have time for another attempt.
“I got it!” Addy said. Lights flashed briefly inside the airlock; then the outer door irised open and out from under their hands. Both Lucien and Addy were thrown free of the airlock, tumbling and breathing hard. Air roared in Lucien’s ears. The black abyss below traded places with a bright circle of sky over and over again. This was the proverbial dark tunnel with a light at the end, except they were heading into the darkness—not the light.
Lucien threw out his arms and strategically fired the boosters in his palms to counter his downward spiral. After three more spins, he had his flight path under control and he fired his grav boosters at maximum thrust to climb back up.
“Addy!” he yelled, with his suit speakers at max volume to compete with the wind of his ascent. He desperately searched the hazy darkness for her as he shot straight up at high speed.
“Here!” she said, and came floating up beside him. She was barely visible in the dark. The only way he could see her at all was because of the dim blue glow of HUD displays radiating from her helmet.
Lucien breathed a sigh.
“Where’s Brak and Garek?” Addy asked.
Horror sliced through Lucien’s gut. He glanced down and saw the Specter vanish into darkness. “We have to go back!” Lucien yelled, already cutting the power to his grav boosters and orienting his body for a nosedive so he could chase after the Specter.
“There’s no time!” Addy called after him as he began falling once more.
She was right. From the now tiny, thumbnail-sized opening overhead and the sheer darkness all around them, it was obvious that they’d already fallen most of the way to the bottom of the pit.
Lucien gazed helplessly into the hazy black abyss where the Specter had vanished. It was gone. They were gone. Brak’s words echoed through Lucien’s head: This is a fool’s death. No honor in it, only shame. Shame on us, Lucien thought. His conscience screamed at him, telling him all the things he could have done differently: while Addy was busy trying to get the doors open, he could have dropped back down and helped Brak carry Garek out. He could have—
A flash of light lit up the bottom of the pit, and a split second later the thunderous boom of that explosion rattled through Lucien’s armor, shaking him down to his bones.
Fiery scraps of shrapnel streaked up like fireworks. Lucien re-oriented himself and fired his grav boosters once more to get some distance from the shrapnel.
As he rocketed up, his whole body felt cold and leaden with grief. He’d just lost his best and oldest friend, and it was all his fault.
Lucien glanced down to see a solitary speck of shrapnel sailing on toward him even as the glow from the others faded. Tha
t speck grew steadily larger, glinting with deadly promise.
Then came a soft ping from his sensors.
“They made it!” Addy said.
Lucien blinked in shock. That piece of shrapnel was Brak! Seconds later the Gor sailed up beside them, carrying Garek over one shoulder like a sack of taber roots.
“You ugly kakard!” Lucien roared. “What the frek took you so long?”
Brak grunted under the weight of Garek’s unconscious body. “You leave me to carry this one out alone.”
“We didn’t mean to leave you behind,” Addy said.
“Yess, I know. If you did, you would be sorry. We hunt the gray one now?” Brak asked.
“What for?” Addy asked. “His ship is gone!”
Lucien peered up at the growing circle of light overhead. They were rocketing back out of the pit at high speed. Their surroundings became progressively brighter, and sheer black cliffs snapped into focus all around them—as did the angry swarm of black specks circling the pale sky overhead.
“The Mokari are still there,” Lucien said.
“Good,” Brak said. “I break their wings, and then we see how they like being thrown off cliffs.”
“I don’t know...” Addy said. “There’s a lot of them. I’m reading hundreds of signatures. We won’t stand a chance against that many, not even in our armor. They’ll rip us apart.”
“Addy’s right,” Lucien said. “We need to go back down.”
“Into the underworld?” Brak asked.
“Yes,” Lucien replied, backing off with his grav boosters until he started falling back down.
“And then what?” Addy asked.
“Find the gateway,” Lucien said.
“That’s what Katawa wants us to do!” Addy objected. “He got the Mokari to push us off the cliff knowing full well that we’d find a way to escape before we hit the bottom. With no ship, there’s no point in us going after him for the override code. He pushed us into this corner, and now he’s waiting to follow us when we find a way out.”
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Lucien replied. “Even if we find another exit to the underworld that isn’t guarded by Mokari, there’s no other ships on the planet. We’re stranded unless we find the key and the gateway. So we do that, but first we find whatever Katawa’s using to track us and we disable it. If it’s something we ate, then it’s only a matter of time before we pass the tracking devices in our stool.”
Dark Space Universe (Book 2): The Enemy Within Page 21