Eli timed his movements to match the guards’. With his camouflage systems engaged, he sprinted toward the hull the moment the near guard turned around and began his walk back toward the center of the craft. The sprint between the tree trunk he was hiding behind and the ship’s hull took six seconds.
His chosen path hid him from the view of the far sentry but not from the guard posted near the front of the craft. The front guard was sixty meters away, however, and Eli counted on that distance, combined with the Minith’s inattentiveness, to be enough.
It was. He reached the hull of the ship without any reaction from the guard in the distance.
Eli released a sigh, then crouched and peered around the broken edge of the ship. As expected, the guard was nearing the center of the ship. Eli couldn’t see the far guard—the closer one’s broad body currently hid him from view—but he knew they’d be reaching their rendezvous at any moment. He gripped the metal staff tightly and did a silent count. One . . . Two . . . Three . . .
Right on time, the near guard stopped, an indication that he’d reached the far limit of his sector. Eli didn’t hesitate. Staying low and relying on the effectiveness of his built-in camouflage, he rounded the corner and looked to his right, searching for a quick entry into the ship. As he’d hoped, a corridor opened up almost immediately. This was a continuation of the corridor where he’d spent the last two nights, and he leaped into it quickly and quietly. He kept up a running, silent count as he moved. He had three to eight seconds before the guard turned back in this direction and another eight or nine seconds for him to reach the corridor.
The ranger moved rapidly along the corridor and sidestepped into the first open room he found, which was five meters in and to his left. A sleeping quarters, he noted. The room was completely dark, but his night vision took care of that. He poked his head around the edge of the door, saw the Minith pass, waited anxiously for another seven seconds for him to pass in the opposite direction, and then stepped out of the room and moved deeper into the ship.
His progress was halted by a sudden flash of light ahead. He pressed his body against the wall to his left and watched as the flash became a beam. A beam that was being aimed down the corridor in his direction. Moving quickly back toward the room he’d just left, he recognized his mistake. Minith guards were posted inside the ship also. He ducked into the room just as the beam lit the hallway outside.
With luck, they hadn’t spotted him.
He scanned the room for options and noted the bed was folded into the wall. Not wanting to bring every Minith in and around the ship to his location, he opted for cover and concealment versus an armed response. Gripping the top edge of the sleeping compartment, he levered it away from the wall. Holding the edge of the bed, he ducked down and lay on his back, pulling the bed down to cover his body. The bulky armor prevented him from lowering the bed platform completely, but he pulled it down as far as it would go. If they didn’t enter the room and weren’t actively looking for him, it should do the trick.
He turned his head toward the doorway, tried to command the sudden pounding in his chest to calm itself, and waited.
The light in the corridor grew more intense as it neared. Several seconds later, a pair of large Minith boots paused just outside. The boots were joined by a second, equally large pair.
Flock.
“I saw something, Krun,” one of the Minith said.
“You saw a shadow, Drek,” Krun replied in the low, rumbling bass of native Minith. “We’ve searched this ship three times. There are guards outside. There’s nothing here.”
“And if something got past our guards?”
“True,” Krun conceded. “You know how lax those dullards outside are. You could march a platoon of new recruits right past those idiots, and they’d never see anything but their own two feet. But that doesn’t mean you saw anything. You’re as nervous as they are dull. You see something at least twice a day. I’m tired of chasing our tails every time your sheepish nature raises its ugly head. Are you a Minith or a human?”
Eli heard a low, angry growl and knew the guard named Krun had overstepped.
“Krun, you are going to feel just how much of a sheep I am if you don’t watch your tongue. Don’t forget who pounded your ears the last time we fought.”
“All I’m saying is you need to relax,” Eli heard the conciliatory tone in the alien’s words and knew Drek’s threats weren’t just talk. Krun had been proven the lesser of the two at some point in the past. “Don’t make this task more difficult than it needs to be.”
“Easy for you to say,” Drek replied, apparently satisfied with the other’s verbal show of deference. “You don’t have a mate and a son waiting for you back on Telgora.”
“Telgora, Telgora! That’s all you ever talk about. Getting back to Telgora.” The deferential tone had been replaced with one of tired indignation. “Drah has doomed us to this life, Drek. Telgora isn’t an option any more. We have to make the best of what’s before us, and not worry about what was taken away.”
Eli heard another low growl. It was immediately followed by what might have been the sound of a large Minith fist pounding the wall outside. But he heard those only at a surface level. The bulk of his attention had been focused on the name “Drah.”
Could Drah be behind this? The same Drah who Eli and the Alliance had delivered to the Zrthns after his failed coup on Telgora?
The Minith presence here on Cerbius, coupled with what Krun just said, pointed to that being the case, despite the overwhelming improbability. Had Drah somehow made a deal with the Zrthns? If he’d known about the potential agsel deposits on the planet, it was one heck of a bargaining chip. The more he considered it, the more likely it seemed.
After defeating Drah and the invading Zrthns on Telgora, the Alliance had been faced with some tough decisions. Trials and incarceration of the guilty was one option—trials and death sentences, another. While the Minith, Telgorans and Waa had no issue with sentencing traitors to death, the peace-loving humans of Earth would have argued—probably successfully—for lifetime incarceration of the offenders.
Turning Drah and his rebel followers over to the Zrthns whom they’d aligned themselves with had seemed like a good decision at the time. It had relieved the Alliance from having to conduct lengthy trials and discipline the rebels themselves. The fact that the Zrthns were known slavers, who would not hesitate to treat Drah and his coconspirators as such, was deemed punishment enough. However, in light of recent events, Eli was beginning to think they’d made a serious error. The Alliance had made their decision based on convenience and expediency and was now feeling the pain of that choice.
Oh well. Nothing to be done about it now, except play out the hand they had been dealt. Drah’s name pulled his attention back to the Minith outside the room.
“—don’t care about Drah. He’s the reason we’re here. I never believed in his cause, and argued against it.”
“If you argued against it, Drek, why are you here, on this flock-awful planet with the rest of us?”
“It doesn’t matter, does it, Krun? I’m here, standing beside you, on this Alliance wreck. When the Alliance comes to investigate, they won’t care if I followed Drah or not. We’re guilty just by being here.”
“True,” Krun agreed with a sigh. Eli could imagine the ear twitches being shared by the pair in the corridor. “Can we at least return to our game of Warrior’s Mate, though? I’m tired of chasing ghosts.”
“Fine,” Drek sighed. Eli’s breathing returned to normal as the booted feet turned and walked back in the direction they had come.
Chapter 18
Eli trailed the two guards from a distance as they made their way toward the front of the craft. They passed the doorway that garnered Eli’s interest and kept moving. The ranger breathed a sigh of relief.
His relief turned to angry resignation when he reached the doorway and noted the two-inch-thick agsel-reinforced portal had been smashed open. He stepped p
ast the broken entryway and, instead of finding a well-stocked armory, found himself looking at empty racks and shelves. The Minith had cleaned out the ship’s weapons vault.
Eli wasn’t surprised at finding an empty room—he’d expected as much—but the loss of the weapons was painful nonetheless. He still held some hope, though. His personal weapon, an Alliance Ginny—what his dad called a shotgun—had been in his room when the ship went down. He checked the hallway before stepping from the armory and, not seeing any sign of the guards, moved quickly to the left.
His personal quarters were only a few doors down, and he covered the short distance in seconds. The doorway was open, so he stepped into the room and pushed the door quietly closed behind him. A sense of calm spread over him at the familiar surroundings. His bunk was on the right. The rack where his PEACE armor was stored when not in use was on the left, directly across from his sleeping space. At the far end of the room were a closet and a small bathroom area.
Eli moved toward the closet, gripped the handle, and took a breath. He willed the Ginny to be there and pulled the door open.
The grin was immediate and automatic. There, clasped to the rack at the back of the closet, was the Ginny, exactly where he’d left it. On a shelf beside the weapon, two hundred rounds of ammunition in boxes and a pair of bandoliers also awaited his return. He propped the metal staff in the corner of the closet and pulled the shotgun from its perch. The feel of the weapon in his gloved hands was perfect; he was whole again.
He gave the loaded weapon a once-over, then slipped it into the empty scabbard on his right thigh. He then attached the bandoliers to the receptacle slots that had been built into the shoulders and waist of his armor for the specific purpose of holding ammo and other mission-essential equipment. The suit bore the extra weight of the rounds with no problem, and Eli bounced up and down a few times to test for unwanted sounds and unexpected looseness caused by the new additions to his load.
There were none. He was ready.
He had one more stop to make before he headed back into the jungle, and after a moment of consideration, he retrieved the makeshift staff. While the Ginny provided much-needed firepower and gave him a sense of security, the staff offered stealth and silence, which made it the better choice of weapon for the time being.
As ready as he could be, he sighed, stretched as well as he could inside the armor, and then glanced out into the hallway. His night vision and proximity sensors showed a damaged but vacant corridor stretching to the front and rear of the ship. He stepped from the room and turned toward the front of the craft. The two Minith guards, Drek and Krun, had gone this way, and he expected to find them near his destination, which was the corridor outside the command center of the ship.
Eli’s objective was the ship’s communication closet, where the real-time communications unit was housed. If the Minith hadn’t already removed the communication device from the ship, Eli planned to liberate it and take it with him. Although he didn’t have a power source for the unit, its presence on the ship was a closely held secret and he didn’t want the unit—or even the unit’s presence, if possible—to be discovered by their adversaries. The technology had been won from the Zrthns and quickly reengineered by the Waa to support Alliance operations. The unit had been installed on the Agate just before their departure from Telgora.
Even though the Zrthns knew the Shiale Alliance had the technology, they might not know it had already been put into use on Alliance ships. They certainly wouldn’t know the Agate had already received the upgrade unless they looked for and recovered the device. If they didn’t already know, Eli intended to keep the information a secret. Misinformation, operational security, protection of secrets . . . all were just as important to winning a war as the tactics, strategy, and weaponry employed against an enemy. These were the thoughts running through Eli’s mind as he approached the command center near the front of the ship.
He stopped at the last turn in the corridor to gather his thoughts and scope out what lay ahead. Unlike the rest of the ship, the large room where the ship’s crew operated was well lit. The muted growl of Minith complaints filtered into the corridor from the command center and confirmed the presence of the two alien warriors. Eli wondered how many other Minith might be in the room and hoped the pair wasn’t part of a much larger contingent.
The light from the command center lit up much of the corridor to either side of the door, and Eli counted the electronic panel covers that lined the corridor outside the command center. Eli located the fifth panel quickly and was pleased to note that its cover was closed. Good. It was unlikely the Minith knew the special unit existed and his seeing the panel cover firmly in place seemed to support that notion.
The comms unit had been fitted into a space behind the panel only five months earlier. The installation had just happened to coincide with Eli’s first visit to the ship that would deliver him and eleven of his rangers to Cerbius, and he’d paused to observe the installation as a matter of curiosity. He was now thankful that he’d paused to take the time. Hopefully, the experience would help him retrieve the device without alerting the Minith.
Good luck with that, Eli thought. Just taking the panel off the wall would probably alert the large-eared beasts, who had excellent hearing.
Eli considered taking out the Minith before attempting to remove the unit but quickly discounted the idea. He didn’t know how many aliens were inside the command center. Also, he wanted to get in and out without the guards ever knowing he was there. Which meant he had to at least try to get the comm unit without being detected.
Eli checked the Ginny on his leg, then hefted the metal staff into a ready position. With a deep breath and a nod of readiness, he moved.
The twenty meters to the panel was covered quickly and silently. Eli stopped at the panel but turned his body toward the command center doorway, ready to defend himself if his approach had been heard.
After several seconds with no indication of being found out, he turned to the panel on his right and gave it a once-over. Built into the corridor wall, the panel looked exactly like the dozen other panels that lined this section of the ship. Most were a mystery to Eli, though he knew each opened up to reveal a specific set of systems, wiring, or equipment that supported ship operations and enabled flight. Number five, though. Number five held the comms unit that had been designed using the technology they’d won from the Zrthns.
The panel was secured by a latching mechanism that allowed the door to swing open to the right. With one eye on the command center door, Eli carefully leaned his staff against the corridor wall, then slowly pulled the lever to unhinge the latch. He was rewarded with a small click as the latch disengaged, but he waited for several seconds before deciding it was safe to open the panel. He waited for a telltale squeal as the door swung wide, but it never came, and he breathed a sigh of relief. So far, so good.
Eli looked inside and couldn’t hold back a smile. Everything was exactly as he remembered from the installation. The unit—canister-shaped, and roughly the size of a human arm—was nestled in its expected position, untouched.
Here’s where it gets tricky.
Watching something being installed is one thing while actually doing the install—or uninstall, in this instance—was something else entirely. Eli scanned the device and tried to make sense of the connections and wiring. A dozen wires extended from the top of the unit and seemed to lead toward the command center. Three other thicker cables ran from the bottom and led off into the bowels of the broken ship.
With no visible way to easily disconnect the wiring, Eli elected for expediency. He retrieved the battle knife from the sheath built into his left thigh and made the necessary cuts. The thin wires at the top were quickly severed. The three thicker cables at the bottom were more difficult, and he struggled to saw through them without making noise. After several minutes, they finally gave way to the blade.
Metal brackets—one at the top of the device, the other near the middle�
��were all that locked the unit in place now. Eli gave the canister a slight tug, testing to see how securely it was locked in place. It was tight. Pulling the device straight out of the clamps would make a lot of noise, so he looked for another way to free it.
The bracket arms holding the unit appeared somewhat thin so Eli tried bending one of the top arms backward and away from the device. It worked, so he gripped the unit with his left hand and bent the second arm.
Eli was pleased with what he’d found aboard the ship. He’d managed to retrieve his weapon and was close to seizing the Zrthn comm unit. Even better, there had been no indication that anyone had died during the crash. The lack of carnage, the missing carriers, and the presence of the Minith guards all pointed to the very likely possibility that his crew mates had survived and had managed to escape. That meant they were out there . . . somewhere.
The top of the comm unit was quickly freed, so Eli turned his attention to the base. With half his attention listening for the two Minith on the other side of the wall, he reached down and bent the lower arms. They were easily twisted away from the unit, and with a grim smile, he slowly eased the goal of his incursion up, out, and away from the panel, taking special care not to bang it against a wall.
Eli released a deep sigh when he finally held the apparatus. Not wanting to leave any evidence of his presence, he reached for the panel cover and slowly swung it back into position. He held his breath against the possibility of a squeal, but the cover settled into position without making a sound.
With the panel door closed, Eli reached for the staff he’d leaned against the wall and—
like an idiot—knocked it away.
He stared open-mouthed as the metal bar slid away from his reaching hand, scraped its way along the wall, and fell toward the floor.
The gig was up.
He didn’t wait for the resounding clatter of the staff hitting the deck to react. Knowing he had seconds before finding himself face to face with two armed Minith, he gently dropped the comm unit to the ground, reached down to seize the still-clanging staff, and pivoted to face the command center doorway.
Stranded Justice (The Justice Trilogy Series Book 2) Page 11