Rendezvous With Rogue 719

by Kaitlyn O'Connor

  Did the woman, the so called healer, have anything to do with the fact that she couldn’t remember anything very clearly? Had she … wiped her memory in an attempt to cover up the things she’d done to Claudia? Not because she was worried about what Claudia might do but because she had every reason to believe Torin would be furious if he knew the full extent of her cruelty?

  Because there were, she discovered, memories she’d managed to unearth that were a long way from pleasant and they had nothing, she was sure, to do with a painful cure for her wounds. It went beyond ignorance of her biology or unintentional pain inflicted in the course of treatments. At least some of the things, some of the pain inflicted, had been very deliberate. Although she supposed the woman had been directed to heal her and dared not kill her, she had certainly not shied away from experimenting on her and probably on Reyes, as well.

  None of those things she vaguely recalled now had been nightmares, she realized. They’d happened.

  “But they aren’t ghosts. They’re real. These aren’t hallucinations—or AI machines playing with our minds. These are real peo … beings.”

  “Yeah. They’re real alright and this is a real prison. It might look comfortable—well, be comfortable, but there is no way out. And we’ve been held here for weeks past healing. Long enough I don’t know if we’d have anything to go back to if we could get out.”

  Chapter Ten

  Claudia knew the moment she saw the woman that she was an enemy.

  She breezed into the room where Claudia and Reyes had settled to try to come up with some way to escape the day after they’d been reunited. She was carrying their hab suits. She dropped them on the mattress with the air of someone discarding something nasty.

  “You are both well now. It is time for you to go,” she said briskly.

  Claudia felt a shiver rake down her spine. She glanced at Reyes and saw that he was as tense as she was.

  “Go where?” Claudia asked.

  The woman’s smile was enough to freeze the blood in her veins. “I am Katia. You will not remember me, but ….”

  Claudia narrowed her eyes. “I think I remember a lot more than you expected me to.”

  Katia looked disconcerted. She looked away. “You must hurry if you wish to go home with the other crewmembers.”

  Claudia’s heart skipped a beat, dread and excitement warring within her.

  “This is a trick,” Reyes said flatly. “We’ve been held here for weeks. They would’ve gone if there was a way. They damned sure wouldn’t be waiting for us.”

  Emotions flickered across Katia’s features that she had difficulty hiding. The hate and revulsion she felt for them was dominant.

  It triggered a wisp of a memory in Claudia’s mind but nothing she could actually capture and examine.

  “They are not waiting. They are preparing the ship to leave Vishnu. If you do not hurry, you will not catch them.”

  Claudia was fairly certain that Reyes didn’t trust the bitch any more than she did, but could they really afford to ignore the ruse—assuming it was a ruse to rid herself of them at the expense of their lives?

  But would she dare when Torin was their leader? Without his order?

  Would he have ordered their deaths when he had saved their lives? When they’d done nothing to deserve it?

  Then again, they were dealing with aliens. They couldn’t know how their minds worked.

  There their opinions apparently diverged, however. Reyes seemed inclined to take a chance that Katia wasn’t setting a trap for them.

  “I wasn’t able to focus on much besides the pain when we came, but I don’t think I imagined that it was a good distance from the wreckage of the hab wheel and that would be at least as far as the main ship.”

  “The machine that brought the two of you will surely take you back? Come! There is no time to waste discussing this.”

  Claudia and Reyes exchanged a long look, but there was no way they could discuss the situation with the bitch standing there. And did they even have time? She’d introduced a sense of urgency Claudia had a hard time even trying to ignore. She knew Reyes had been chaffing to get back.

  Without another word, Reyes moved quickly to the suits the woman had left on the bed and began to pull his on, his movements jerky with obvious anxiety to be done and gone.

  Feeling an unaccountable mixture of fear, anticipation, and reluctance, Claudia followed suit after a moment, checking her gear for any sign of tampering as she did so.

  She could see nothing that suggested it had been sabotaged, and she quickly checked Reyes after she’d examined her own, but she was still deeply concerned about it when they left the room and headed down the hall in the opposite direction from the room where she’d been staying.

  The wall at the end slipped open as they approached, revealing a large room that might have been a gathering area or a dining area or maybe both—it was hard to say when the floor had been cleared and furnishings stacked against the far wall in a way that made it impossible to identify their use. They crossed the area and entered another, wider hallway, arriving eventually at the airlock Claudia thought they must have entered through.

  Expecting to be jumped any moment, or maybe just shot, Claudia followed quickly on Reyes’ heels, casting anxious glances all around as she walked, searching for any threats.

  Thankfully, no one jumped out at them or tried to stop them. They actually didn’t see another soul.

  Claudia didn’t know why that made her feel like crying, but there was no arguing that a sense of bereavement started in her chest and gained weight as they moved closer and closer to ‘freedom’ until breathing almost seemed a struggle.

  Her eyes and nose stung.

  She would almost have preferred to blame the symptoms on malfunction or tampering with her suit, but she knew better.

  She just didn’t understand why she felt like crying, as if she’d lost something, or someone, so important to her that her life was never going to be the same, that she would never feel happiness again.

  Walking briskly, almost as if she feared she would be caught, Katia took them directly to the airlock. When the inner door opened they saw that the skimobile was waiting and that their supplies were neatly packed on the sled that had pulled Reyes’ protective ‘bubble’.

  As relieved as Claudia was to see it, she was also unhappy.

  It seemed to her that Katia wasn’t working alone as she’d decided the woman must be from her behavior. Someone had arranged to have the skimobile waiting and it seemed unlikely that Katia would have done this herself.

  She had a snooty way about her that suggested she was a person of importance.

  Or at least thought so.

  Or maybe she just felt that superior to humans?

  It went against the grain to thank the bitch and yet Claudia had had good manners too ingrained to ignore the habit, she said ‘thank you’ before she even considered being as cold and impolite as Katia.

  Katia looked surprised.

  Especially when Reyes very politely thanked her, as well.

  Irritated with herself for not snubbing the woman, Claudia climbed on the bike behind Reyes. Reyes turned on the direction finder. As the doors to the airlock closed behind them, Claudia did yet another system’s check on her hab suit, but she wasn’t anymore reassured when it showed that it was functioning at peak performance than she had been the first two or three times she’d checked.

  ‘Something’ just didn’t feel right to her.

  Why was Katia suddenly in such a hurry to get rid of them when they’d been virtual prisoners … probably since they’d arrived?

  When the outer doors opened, she felt like she’d found the ‘wrong’.

  Daylight filtered in first—very weak light, granted, but enough to illuminate the landscape.

  The gust of wind that hit them as Reyes started the skimobile and pushed it out of the airlock was substantial enough to convince her that things had changed radically on the Rogue sin
ce they’d arrived at the sanctuary of the Vishnu people.

  The hard ice sheet they’d traversed to get to Torin’s refuge had thinned enough to become slush in the wake of the heavy snowmobile. Snow was falling from the sky and creating drifts.

  The planet had thawed enough to release some of its atmosphere and increase pressure or they wouldn’t have even felt the wind.

  And that could only mean Rogue 719 was much closer to a heat source than it had been when they’d entered the mountain.

  Months.

  They had to have been gone for months. Certainly more than a month!

  They were running out of time to modify the ship and take off! If Wilkes and Johnson hadn’t made a hell of a lot of progress in their absence, the odds weren’t in their favor that they could make the changes in time to get off the Rogue and make it home!

  Apparently, Reyes was of the same mind, although she was surprised he seemed to have knowledge of what had been decided when he’d been so out of it. Following the laser beacons they’d set up, he went directly to the location of the main ship instead of heading toward the hab wheel they’d been using as home base.

  In the distance, they could see that Johnson and Wilkes seemed to be attempting to stand the ship for launch. Claudia’s heart skipped beats when she realized what they were doing, and where they were attempting the launch.

  They hadn’t managed to get the ship to the shore line.

  Because there was no one working on it but Wilkes and Johnson, she thought guiltily, abruptly realizing that she was going to be facing charges when and if they made it home.

  She supposed it spoke for how extraordinary her situation was that she’d been so caught up in survival she’d ‘forgotten’ a return to civilization meant that the laws of order prevailed.

  Would prevail if they made it.

  The evidence that she’d only defended herself in Shelly’s death would be gone by the time they reached Earth, she realized in dismay.

  But maybe she’d have time to make it to the hab and collect the security videos?

  Or maybe Wilkes had done so when he’d found Shelly’s body?

  They would certainly have found her.

  They would’ve had to go back for supplies.

  It would’ve been protocol to collect evidence.

  The problem was that everything took a back seat to surviving when death seemed the most likely and imminent outcome.

  The ominous sound of cracking ice as they approached the ship redirected her mind to more immediate concerns.

  Claudia could see there’d been a good bit of modifications made to the ship. The most notable was the fact that the main ship’s engine had been altered. The push plate that the engine had fired against to propel the ship was gone. Struts had been added and a band to hold the upper end of the braces she realized had been attached to hold the ship upright and form a crude launch ‘pad’.

  Makeshift or not, it looked like it would work—or at least had a chance of working.

  The trick was going to be standing it on its nose when it hadn’t been designed for that—the main engine had been designed to pull the ship, not push it—and booster rockets they no longer had had propelled the vessel into space.

  As they reached the ship, they saw that Wilkes was on the tractor the two men were using to lift the ship. Johnson was struggling to position the makeshift supports they’d attached to the fuselage to keep the ship upright.

  Wilkes looked stunned to see them, but relieved, flashing them a brief grin.

  Johnson threw a look of suspicion in their direction but didn’t acknowledge them beyond that.

  They’d been gone for weeks. And yet no flurry of questions? No accusations?

  Then again, they were quite desperately occupied with survival. She was sure that would come later.

  “You think it’s going to work?” Claudia asked Johnson as she cut the engine and she and Reyes climbed off the snowmobile.

  “Obviously, NASA thinks so. It better or we’re stuck here … as long as that lasts.”

  “You think the ice is thick enough to hold for a launch?” she asked doubtfully.

  Wilkes joined the discussion. “I sure as hell hope so. We didn’t have any options, unfortunately. It was here or nowhere. We couldn’t move it to high ground. We scavenged everything we could from the hab wheel in the way of pulleys and cables, but the Rogue pulls too many Gs for anything we’ve got with us. Everything we have. If we’d been on the moon or even Mars, we might have had a chance of getting it off this ice shelf. But we couldn’t budge it. We had to set up here and hope for the best.”

  He paused, studying them for a long moment. “I’d ask where you two have been for the past month or more, but right now I’m just glad as hell to see you. We need all the manpower we can get. The questions can wait.

  “Three will make moving the braces into place a lot more possible.”

  He’d hardly gotten the comment out when Johnson abandoned the support he’d been wrestling, darted toward the airlock, and disappeared inside the ship.

  “Johnson! What the hell are you doing? We have to get these supports positioned! The snow cat isn’t going to hold this bitch by itself!”

  “Checking the systems, Commander!”

  “Fuck! Get the hell out of there, damn it! We can’t take off. We don’t have it stabilized!”

  “We’ve got it!” Reyes bellowed, grabbing the support Johnson had abandoned and struggling with it. Claudia followed him, throwing her weight into it and, after a short battle, they managed to get it in position and locked.

  “That’s one,” Reyes said neutrally, staring down at the crack by his boot. “It’s not going to hold, Commander! The ice is cracking.”

  “It has to!” Wilkes bellowed. “Get the others into position! That ought to take the pressure off this one. If we can’t stabilize it, we can’t take off!”

  They knew that. They all knew that.

  Reyes and Claudia moved to the next support. Grabbing it, they moved it as far as they could and then Reyes looked around until he found a sledge hammer and began pounding it until it inched far enough in the right direction to lock in place.

  Claudia had moved to the next support and had it almost halfway to the brace point when Reyes joined her, pounding on that one until it, too, locked.

  Just about the time it occurred to Claudia that they might have been better off to stagger the supports around the base and then set those in between, they realized the ship was beginning to tilt away from the braces they’d locked.

  She and Reyes called out a warning alarm at almost the same moment and raced around the base of the ship to try to get a counter brace in place before it reached the point of no return.

  Wilkes was bellowing for Johnson to get out of the ship.

  He couldn’t leave the tractor or Claudia didn’t doubt he would’ve raced in to try to drag Johnson out.

  Instead of complying, Johnson started the engine, yelling for them to get inside.

  The warmth from the heating engine was the last straw, pitching them into disaster. Reyes and Claudia had just managed to position the brace they’d grabbed when the ice beneath it cracked.

  “Run!” Claudia screamed, grabbing the sleeve of Reyes’ suit and trying to race across the ice. Skidding and slipping, the two of them managed to get to the ‘safe’ side as the ship began to tip dangerously.

  The angle, however, tilted the engines upward and melted the ice in a long streak toward the tractor.

  The weakened ice broke under the weight of the tractor. Wilkes leapt off as the rear end of the tracks dropped into a hole. “Johnson! Ralph! Get out! Now! It’s going down!”

  “Hell no! We’re gonna die here without it!” Johnson bellowed back. “I’ll get it out! I’ll use the stage one rockets to move it across the ice.”

  Claudia and Reyes were racing toward the snowmobile they’d left.

  “It won’t work, Johnson!” Claudia yelled. “Get out! It’s going
down!”

  They’d already mounted and started the engine when they realized that Wilkes was down and had no way to escape the blast of the engine if Johnson did manage to get it to fire. Claudia hesitated and then whipped the snowmobile toward Wilkes. He leapt onto the rear behind Reyes, half on and half off and nearly pulled both Claudia and Reyes off when she hit the accelerator.

  The ice was cracking and crumbling so fast, though, that there wouldn’t have been time to retrieve the snowmobile Johnson and Wilkes had left on the shore and still get to Wilkes in time. Claudia wasn’t even certain they were going to make it until she discovered they’d managed to reach solid ground.

  Semi-solid.

  The ice was melting and the more it melted the deeper the water was getting and the faster it was rushing toward low ground—the ocean.

  “Don’t stop!” Wilkes bellowed. “That crazy bastard is going to try to take off!”

  Johnson hadn’t said that. He’d implied he was going to try to save the ship for all of them, but Claudia suddenly realized that that was exactly what the crazy bastard meant to do.

  Because if any of the sea water got into the containment for the nuclear reactor they used as the main ship power source ….

  Their suits would protect them from radiation, but they hadn’t been designed to weather a full on nuclear explosion if they were at ground zero.

  Wilkes half jumped, half fell off the back as they neared his bike. Racing, slipping and sliding, he leapt onto it like a cowboy mounting his horse, started the engine and took off in the direction of the hab wheel wreckage.

  They hadn’t put nearly enough distance between them when they heard the nuclear engine explode. Fortunately, it was a very small scale nuclear bomb.

  Claudia gunned the engine, leaning over the steering handle in an effort to move faster.

  A wave of heat caught up with them about the same time the concussion did.

  It pitched all of them into the snow and slushy ice—which, Claudia supposed, was what saved them, cooling the hab suit just enough to prevent them from combusting.

  But unfortunately not enough to prevent them from being damaged.

  It was a terrifying way to discover the planet had thawed enough to support life—just barely.