Into the Void

by Nick Webb

  But now he was finally gaining on it, albeit from above. He cranked the accelerator and sped down the next roof, swerving to avoid a clothesline strung across it and jumping down to another roof, this one of cement instead of corrugation. Deck furniture and planters littered the surface as if the inhabitants used the roof as another room and, swearing, he smashed into a chair which collapsed from the impact but sprayed debris up into his face.

  He looked ahead off the next roof.

  “Oh, shit,” he murmured.

  The buildings ended abruptly there, and by that point the houses were all at least two or three stories high off the street.

  But there, at the end of the building he saw a half-meter-wide iron pipe extend out from the roof and slope down to the ground some ten meters below—some sort of drainage for the complex of buildings he was riding across.

  Jake grit his teeth, debating the sturdiness of it. He imagined Po chiding him, telling him he shouldn’t even be debating the sturdiness of the pipe but should be looking for another way down. And hurry, dammit, is what she’d add.

  He went for it. As he sped towards the edge of the roof he hopped the bike, gave it slight nudge to the left, and landed the midsection of the frame on the iron pipe and started skidding down at a frightful speed. Sparks blazed out on either side. With a flip of his thumb he cranked the gravitic stabilizer up to maximum, hoping that would be enough to keep him tied upright to the pipe and let him slide safely all the way to the ground.

  Halfway down there was a flange acting as a union between two sections of pipe and he braced himself to hit it, leaning back to avoid tumbling forward over the side of the bike with the impact.

  Screech … clunk. The bike jolted and he nearly fell off as it bounced over the union, but soon the midsection of the body was sliding and sparking down the pipe again. He breathed a sigh of relief when he was less than a few meters off the ground, and when the pipe angled back to be parallel with the ground he jumped the bike off and revved the accelerator as he hit the ground and sped back over the pavement of the sidewalk to the road.

  The black car was just ahead, much closer now as it had had to negotiate a string of barriers. It finally returned to the road as the sidewalk was full of concrete planters and construction equipment, but was scraping and slamming other cars as it pushed its way down the busy street. Jake nudged closer.

  Shots rang out. Two arms hung out the windows of the black car aimed back at him, and he darted behind another car to avoid the fire. He cringed as the sharp discharges reminded him of his shoulder—he’d forgotten about the wound in the adrenaline rush of the previous few minutes, and he glanced down to see a hole in his uniform and a spreading patch of red radiating from it.

  The street had progressed from the shanty-town to a more established urban environment, and looking up he saw that they were working their way into the center of the city, above which hovered the Phoenix near the top of the towering spaceport.

  Smashing through cross traffic at an intersection, the black car sped towards downtown with little regard for any obstacle in its path. Jake followed, holding back a few dozen meters to stay out of firing range of the occupants inside, and glancing up ahead he planned his next moves.

  He had to stop the car, and disable the occupants.

  Without hurting Po.

  The gun was still tucked into his pants behind his back, but he knew that was out of the question. Even firing at the car’s wheels might result in an accident that could kill Po, and the bullets might even strike her. No, he had to stop the car some other way.

  But before he could think further, two blue blurs shot past from one of the side streets. The first one turned onto their street and caught up with the black car. Jake turned and watched the second, and recognized Anya hunched over on the motorcycle, leaning left to push the bike into a hard turn.

  More shots rang out. The rider on the first bike, feeling more confident in the shadow of the black car, had turned around and aimed at Anya, who swerved and dodged, trying to elude the shots.

  He had to stop that car. And the other motorcycle. With the rider focused on Anya, he reached around and pulled out the gun, aimed it at bike, and fired. He missed, but fired again.

  The bullet caught the rider in the chest, and blood sprayed his windshield. Jake watched the figure slump forward, and in short order the bike veered left, straight into the black car.

  With a bone crunching collision, the rider flew off the bike and slammed into a concrete barrier lining the road, and the car spun around, before grinding to a stop.

  Jake breathed a sigh of relief, but realized he had little time as the occupants of the vehicle would soon unleash a barrage of fire at them. But at least they were stationary. Now if he could only alert the authorities where they were.

  He pulled on the front brake and motioned for Anya to do likewise, and he veered towards a concrete barrier, getting out of the line of sight of the black car, which idled just a few dozen meters away down the street. The wreckage of the bike was strewn over the street between them and the car, and the lifeless body of the rider lay mangled up against the concrete barrier.

  With the bike idling, he let Anya pull up next to him before yelling, “Nice of you to join me!”

  “Uh huh.” She peered over the barrier at the car. The windows stayed up, but the car remained motionless. For all they could tell, the car was fine, except for the huge dent in the side, but the vehicle remained where it was. Maybe the engine had been damaged in the crash? “Ok, Mercer, let’s charge. There’s two of us, and probably only two of them in there. The odds are even.”

  “No. They have cover, and we won’t if we charge. And Po is in there—we’d risk hitting her.”

  She glanced back and sneered. “So you want to sit here and wait like a pansy-ass dickwad and wait until they come out with their hands up?”

  “No, we’re waiting until the authorities show up, and then we’ll all surround the bastards and encourage them to give up without a fight. If any of us go in there with guns blazing, Po’s as good as dead.”

  “Who are they?” She peered back at the car. He looked at it too, looking for markings that might betray its origin, but the car’s frame was a solid black.

  “No idea. Vikorhov? Brand hinted that they were trying to infiltrate the Oberanian government. Maybe they had word we were coming?”

  “But why would they nab Po?”

  Jake shook his head. “No idea.” But if it was the Vikorhov Federation behind this, they were fucking with the wrong crew.

  A whine overhead indicated the coming of the cavalry. Jake grinned and looked up. Sure enough, an airship blazed down the street towards them. It was only fifty or so meters off….

  When it opened fire.

  At them.

  “Get down!” roared Jake, and he thrust Anya to the ground behind one of the concrete barriers. He dove next to her, and not a second too late—the motorcycle he left behind exploded as the fire from the airship pierced the fuel tank, and the shock wave caught Jake in midair as he careened several meters away, slamming into the barrier so hard he saw stars.

  The air ship descended and touched down next to the black car, out of which sprang two masked men who, opening the back seat, pulled out a still unconscious Megan Po, and dragged her to the opening door of the ship. Anya, crouching behind the barrier, reached over and aimed her handgun.

  “Grace! Stop, you could hit her!” Jake swatted at her arm, and ducked as the airship raked the concrete barrier with another volley of fire.

  Anya swore. “What, are we just going to sit with our thumbs up our asses and let them get away?”

  “No.” Fumbling in his pocket, Jake retrieved his comm pad and held it close to his face, peering over the barrier to watch as the men dragged Po up the ramp of the ship. “Ben! Ben, you hear me?”

  After a few moments Ben’s voice crackled over the comm pad. “Captain, we’re almost there. Have you got her?”

  �
��Negative. They’re loading her into an airship, and it’s armed. We’re pinned down behind some barriers here on the street.”

  “Acknowledged,” came Ben’s reply.

  Jake watched as the ramp on the airship began to retract. “Dammit, Ben, they’re leaving—”

  “Almost there….”

  They heard a roar behind them from down the street, and the Phoenix’s shuttle barreled towards them.

  “Careful, Ben, remember that thing is armed!”

  As if to punctuate his warning, a streaks of bullets lanced out from the airship towards the shuttle, but Ben was ready. He swerved left and right, effectively dodging the majority of the fire, and within moments had closed the gap between it and the airship.

  “Ben, uh, what exactly are you planning on—”

  Jake watched—gaped—as the shuttle seemed to cut its engines and dropped straight onto the airship with a clang. Metal screeched on metal as the shuttle’s main gravitic drive reengaged and seemed to thrust the ship downward, into the airship below, pinning it fast to the ground.

  Anya grinned. “Mischievous little bastard, isn’t he?” She surveyed the scene—the shuttle thrusting down onto the airship, holding it the ground as the other ship’s engines began to whine, striving to push against the shuttle and escape. “Uh, now what?”

  “We’ve got to disable their engines,” said Jake, looking around himself for something—anything that might help them disable the ship and keep Po on the ground. A low rumble behind them, almost lost in the screeching noise of the shuttle squeezing against the airship, caught his attention.

  The other motorcycle. It had escaped the bullets of the airship, but had been blasted back onto the ground by the explosion from the other bike. Yet it still idled. Jake sprang up and dashed for it, hoping the occupants of the airship were too occupied with the shuttle pinning them down.

  He lifted it up, jumped on, pushed it into the lowest gear, and revved the accelerator. The rear tire squealed as he peeled away, leaning hard to the left as he rounded the barrier and shot straight towards the airship. From his pocket he could hear Ben yelling at him. “Captain, we can’t hold this position. Another five seconds and they’ll be free!”

  Five seconds?

  He’d only need three.

  Thumbing the gravitic drive on, he pushed the grav-accelerator to maximum, leaned on the left handlebar to aim directly at the spot on the undercarriage of the airship that he suspected housed their gravitic drive, and with the bike accelerating rapidly from the virtual gravity field pulling it towards the ship he jumped off.

  And landed hard. He rolled on the pavement, scraping the skin off his forearms and back as he slid so hard his uniform was torn to shreds. With his last strength he craned his head up after he’d slid to a stop, watching the bike continue to accelerate towards the ship….

  But it exploded into a glaring fireball as a stream of blazing bullets from the airship caught it just meters from its hull, and in the same moment the ship pulled free from the ground, scraping past the protesting hull of the shuttle.

  “Shit,” breathed Jake. The airship shot away. He could barely feel his arms—judging from the deep scrapes he knew he should be in terrible pain, but all he felt was adrenaline and anger.

  He would not lose Po.

  Someone was calling his name. He looked up, and saw that the shuttle had landed and Ben was leaning out the door, beckoning to him. Springing up onto his feet he dashed to the shuttle, and when both he and Anya had climbed in Ben closed the door and jumped back into the pilot’s seat.

  “Follow her.” Jake motioned vaguely up towards the sky. The pain started to break past his adrenaline. His head felt heavy, and he knew he’d lost some blood.

  “We are, Jake. They won’t get away—not with us on their tail,” said Ben. He held the controls in his confident grip, and steeled his jaw—watching the other ship glide away upward, towards the spaceport.

  Glistening against the brilliant clear blue sky, the skyscraper that was Dezreel City’s spaceport jutted up from the city skyline like a giant angular shaft. All along its height, various ships, freighters, frigates, and smaller vessels hung, suspended in the air by their gravitic drives, and at the top, overshadowing all, was the hulking behemoth of the Phoenix, looming far larger than any other ship docked at the port.

  “Look. It’s heading towards that frigate.” Ben pointed towards a large ship docked about halfway up the spine of the spaceport. “I’ll signal the Phoenix to be ready to receive us.” Ben reached over to the comm and activated it. “Phoenix, this is Commander Jemez. Please be ready to receive the shuttle in the fighter bay, and make ready to pursue a ship that has taken Commander Po hostage. Relaying ship details now….” He typed in a few commands to the computer to pass the description of the ship to the Phoenix.

  Jake sat down in the chair next to Ben and jabbed at the comm button again. “Why aren’t they answering?”

  Anya slid into the seat behind him. “Weren’t expecting us so soon? Give them a few seconds, Mercer.”

  They waited, and they watched. The airship, with Po aboard, now approached the larger frigate, whose bay now opened to receive her.

  “Mercer to the Phoenix. Ayala, are you there?”

  Silence.

  “Answer me, dammit. Falstaff?”

  The airship disappeared into the frigate, which then pulled away from the port, snapping an umbilical as it soared away. Ben aimed for the rear of the Phoenix, towards the great door of the fighter bay, hoping it would open soon to receive them.

  But instead of opening its bay door, the ship moved. The connecting umbilical, acting as a hallway between the port and the ship, snapped in half as the Phoenix pulled away, and drifted up, lumbering high over the spaceport.

  “What the hell are they doing?” said Jake. He punched at the comm again. “Ayala, come in. Open those bay doors now! We’ve got to follow that ship!”

  The comm crackled, and they could just make out Ayala’s voice. “—ontrol of the bridge. We’ll try— … —but I don’t know how many are up there. Tomaga says he’ll kill them if we try to— … —bridge. …—access tubes, but I’ll try to—”

  The comm fell silent. Ben glanced down at his dashboard. “The signal is jammed at the source.”

  “Look,” said Anya, pointing out the viewport. The frigate, now climbing steadily away from them, pushed its gravitic engines to full power in a shimmering pulse and it shot away out of sight. “We can’t match their speed.”

  And before their eyes, the Phoenix disappeared. Vanished in a gravitic shift that left a vacuum in its wake that was quickly filled by an explosive inrushing of atmosphere which blew the shuttle backwards several dozen meters.

  Ben examined the dashboard. “She’s gone, sir. I have no reading on the Phoenix. And the frigate is nearly in space—correction, the frigate has also shifted away.” He looked up at Jake, pursing his lips. “Destination unknown.”

  They’d lost her. Them—both Po, and the Phoenix, within seconds of each other.

  ***

  Willow Ayala pounded the comm panel when she realized the signal had been jammed. She glanced over at Galba, who was still looking nervously towards the door of the quarters in the expectation that they’d be found out. “Harrison, we’ve got to get the bridge back.”

  Galba looked down his nose at her—sometimes he still managed to ooze the patrician contempt for anyone of lower status that he’d cultivated all through his long career. “We? And just what do you propose we do to get it back? You should have just let me shuttle down to the planet where I’d be free of this mess—free to go back to Corsica and enjoy my retirement. Did you know I turn seventy next month? I’m supposed to be sitting at the bar of my favorite cabana on Sagittaria beach getting drunk off my ass, and instead I’ve gotten caught up in some hopeless, ill-conceived, misguided rebellion with the likes of your Captain.” He put a hand through his gray-streaked hair and blew out air between his teeth in frustratio
n. “Why Mercer even let those soldiers on in the first place is beyond me….”

  Ayala shot him a deadly look. “The Captain didn’t let anyone on the ship. If you remember, your good friend Admiral Trajan sent the 51st brigade as a boarding party, most likely to kill us all. You included, as the good Admiral didn’t even know you were aboard at the time.” She turned back to the comm board and fiddled with a few of the settings, hoping to punch through the jamming signal.

  “He practically invited the lot on board when he refused to give up!” Galba stood and hitched up his trousers which had begun to sag low due to his slimming waist—nearly three weeks on the spare rations Ayala managed to smuggle up to his quarters had not permitted his full waist to maintain itself—and he grumbled about his persistent hunger. “And then once they were aboard, he should have just killed them all. Then we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  Ayala didn’t look up from the console, and touched a few more buttons. “And there is another big difference between you and us. We don’t throw away lives so callously. We are not the Empire.” She glanced over at one of the indicators, and sighed. “We’ve shifted away from the Oberon. We’re now orbiting one of the gas giants in the Oberon system.”

  Galba held up his hands. “Well? What next, darling?”

  She sat thinking, not answering his question, considering their options. The 51st brigade had blockaded the entire forward section of the ship above deck four, effectively cutting them off from any approach to the bridge. She guessed the whole brigade was up there, and that whatever crew had been in that section was either dead or held hostage. Would Tomaga kill them all?

  Maybe. She really had no idea what kind of man he was. Not like she knew Galba. Him she knew. She ran a finger along her green-black tattoos running up onto her neck—her connection to Belen. A reminder of her heritage. Her birthright.

  And her power.

  “I need access to one of them. One of the 51st brigade,” she said, finally looking at the Senator.