Trapped: Chaos Core Book 1

by Lalonde, Randolph

  Spin was to take care of everything else, and she saw herself as a passable pilot, she didn’t have the hours of practice it took to build her confidence, but she didn’t have much of a choice. The long ship left the cover of the dark cities and skimmed the tops of the trees on the outskirts. The fungus yards were next.

  “You can do this, Spin,” she said to herself. “You have to do this. No one else is going to take care of your people.”

  The fungus yards came into view and she slowed down so the ship was hovering on its suspensor field silently then reduced her altitude to a hundred metres. Passive, electronically silent scanners picked up several groups of people. Judging from the way they were moving and where they were, she guessed that her people were in one of two groups. One was a group of four, the other was a group of eight.

  “Don’t fire yet,” Spin said. “And don’t hit this red section of the engagement map, I repeat, do not shoot here.” She said, marking distillation tanks at the far end of the field. If they were full, they would destroy the terrain and anything on it for a kilometre in all directions, but that was just a guess.

  The distillation tower tanks did provide a potential solution. If she could panic the slavers and the guards, they may scatter, leaving the slaves in the pits. Spin pointed the nose of the ship directly at them. She took a deep breath, hoping that they had threat detection on the ground and then set the missiles to target the towers.

  Alarms went off in the base right away, it was time to act quickly. With the flipping of a few switches, she turned the scanner suite all the way up, so she could get a reading on the group of four below. The faces, vital statistics and DNA profiles of all four of them appeared and her heart sank, none of them were her people.

  A loud ping against the hull reminded her of a step she was missing. “Start firing,” Spin said over the intercom. “Remember, do not shoot the highlighted area.”

  “Gotcha, I see a guard tower, I’m taking it out,” Mirra said.

  “Making a mess,” Della said, giggling as her turret began spewing bolts of fire between the main building and the swampy fungus yard where the water flowed shallowly over foot paths. Spin turned the ship’s flood lights on, illuminating the beige, brown and green patches of thick fungus floating atop the hip-deep water.

  The four people she scanned waved their hands, flicking water off their soaked sleeves. They were slaves, just like the people she’d come to rescue, so without a second thought she tried to lower the ship so they could get aboard, almost failing. Instead of gently moving down, the ship dropped, dipping into the shallow water then coming up to hover only centimetres above the surface.

  Spin focused the scanners on the next group of slaves, there were less than thirty, fewer than expected, and took a few seconds to leave the pilot’s seat and activate the control for the port side ramp. The internal sensors reported four aboard in an astonishingly short amount of time. At a glance Spin verified that they would be locked inside the main passenger cabin so they wouldn’t wander around the ship.

  Spin dropped into the pilot’s seat and grinned as the scanners reported five matches with her search criteria. Sun, Boro, Travis, Nigel and Prue were all slogging through the swamp water as fast as they could towards the ship, but they were still hundreds of metres away. She turned the Fleet Feather so the ramp would be facing them, then carefully moved it in their direction.

  Seeing that they were about to lose several of their slaves, the guards stopped firing ineffectively on the ship, and trained their rifles on the slaves instead. Spin watched on one of the monitor screens as Boro helped Sun up the ramp, practically shoving her, and was shot several times.

  Prue was caught in the line of fire as well, along with two slaves Spin didn’t know. The scanners reported that all of them were dead with no chance of recovery, the guards knew how to kill their own.

  Everyone who survived made it aboard, and the guards were slaughtering everyone Spin couldn’t get to. Della and Mirra were firing as much as the guns would allow them to, in the atmosphere the barrels had to shut down for a few seconds at a time to keep from overheating. “Kill all the guards,” Spin said. “They’re going to pay for this.”

  “I’m trying, they’re dug in behind cover,” Mirra said.

  “I have been too,” Della said, hitting so seldomly that it looked like she was trying to miss as instructed. Considering she shot at several slaves by mistake – and missed, thankfully – that was partly a blessing.

  The hatch reported closed, and Spin raised the ship, backing off to a safe distance as both her missile launchers reported a lock on the distillation towers. They were struck hard on the aft and starboard sides several times, and red lights indicating breaches flashed on a diagram of the ship.

  Spin’s missile launch system gave her a long, loud tone, indicating that she had a full lock on the towers, and she fired a missile from each launcher. She watched as the missiles passed between the Fleet Feather and their target. The tank tower exploded, lighting the sky and setting the nearby building on fire. It was impressive, the operation was destroyed, but the field was almost untouched, the tanks must have been nearly empty. She took solace in the fact that the place was effectively shut down, it would take years and millions of credits to get it back up and running. That would be the second time in as many years that the Countess would have to revive the operation – the first being when the planet was nullified by the electromagnetic pulse bombardment. Spin doubted the Countess would bother at all.

  There was a knock on the pilot door hatch, and Spin ignored it until the shields were up and ship was speeding away from the planet. A glance at the security screen revealed Sun waiting to be let into the cockpit.

  Spin set the autopilot and leapt out of her seat to open the door. Sun greeted her with a wet, grateful embrace. “That was the most amazing, reckless, sloppy rescue I’ve ever seen. Thank you, Aspen, oh God, thank you.”

  “You smell terrible,” Spin laughed.

  “I can’t tell, my sense of smell died a few hours after we arrived.”

  “I’m sorry we lost Boro and Prue,” Spin said. “If I waited, planned, did some recon before trying that.”

  “Then more people may have died in the meantime. That fungus was contaminated by something that made it inedible and dangerous, we were using chemicals to restore it, but it was killing us, Aspen,” Sun said. “Most slaves were dropping after three days, some lasted five.”

  “I’m so sorry, all this is because of me,” Spin said. “I shouldn’t have joined a crew, I should have stayed on my own.”

  “Hey,” Sun said, turning her chin up. “Then I’d have never met you.”

  “Hey, Aspen!” Nigel called up the stairs. His grinning face looking up at her was good consolation. “I can’t believe you rescued us! Don’t sweat the people who didn’t make it, you did more than most of us could have. Just wondering, do you have a medbay down here? We’ve gotta get some serious anti-fungal and restorative stuff in us. Well, on us. Um, okay, in and on us and probably on you too just to be safe.”

  “One sec,” Spin said, returning to the controls. There were no fires in the breached sections, but she couldn’t help but be alarmed that half the main hold was wide open. The cash they gathered had been moved to a secure cabin, but most of the other loot was still in the hold. The small infirmary was still intact, and they had enough containment to make it to space, then to faster than light travel. The sensors didn’t detect any ships in the area, it was eerily quiet in orbit, so she set the navigational computer to start calculating the jump. “Do you have any safe havens in range?” Spin asked Sun.

  Sun looked at the navigational screen and pointed at one glimmering point. “Diori. I still have a few friends there, there’s no law, and we might get some real help from my old boss in Quino.”

  “The crime boss?” Spin asked.

  “More of a professional looter, salvager now, but he’s got a weakness for ladies, so I think we’ll have an
easy time. Where did you get this ship, by the way?”

  “Go get treatment,” Spin said, noticing the scabs on Sun’s hands and arms. “Tell Nigel not to use any restorative until your infections clear up, that could make them a lot worse.”

  “Okay, I still need to hear the story behind this rescue,” Sun said.

  “Later, make sure everyone gets treated right away,” Spin said.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Sun said with a smile, closing the cockpit door behind her.

  Spin locked it, there were too many people she didn’t know or trust aboard. “Ladies, are you all right?” she said through the intercom to Della and Mirra.

  “I’m all good here,” Mirra said. “Nice work. I don’t think the Countess will be too happy when she hears about this.”

  “I hate to say it, but that was fun,” Della said. “My turret caught fire for a moment, I got a little burn, but I’m okay.”

  “Della, when something like that happens, you tell everyone on comms,” Mirra said, the sounds of her unbuckling from her seat and getting out of her turret in the background.

  “I put it out with an extinguisher and I’m fine,” Della said. Her speech sounded slightly slurred and she was breathing more heavily than normal.

  “Della, open the door to your turret,” Spin said, trying the control from there and getting nothing but an annoying buzz that said the connection between that button and her door was broken.

  “I tried, I couldn’t,” Della said. “Am I stuck in here?”

  09

  “No, you’re fine,” Spin said. The navigational computer reported that they were ready to jump, so she initiated the faster than light drive. The next instant she was through he cockpit door and sliding down the stair rails on only her hands.

  Travis was already in front of the turret hatch. “Yeah, need a pry bar for that. A hit a couple frames back twisted the doorframe just enough to jam it shut. No air getting to her either, the exchanger vent is blocked somewhere down the line.” He coughed wetly.

  Mirra arrived in time to hear his explanation. “I’ll go find something.”

  Nigel emerged from the forward hallway completely naked, rubbing lotion on his scabby body. His legs were even more scabbed and irritated than his arms. “I’m all gooped up with anti-fungal cream and took the pills that should make this go away, there’s about ninety doses left, so everyone can get some.” He said to the cabin with the slaves quietly watching the emergency unfold. There were ten slaves Spin didn’t recognize, most of them sitting in posh passenger seating. A few of them laughed at Nigel, who didn’t seem to care that he left his clothes in the medbay at all.

  “What? My clothes are saturated with the shit we were in down there. I’m not going to let it eat me up, so get used to this ass. By the way, there were a couple places I couldn’t reach.”

  Sun emerged from the medical bay in a paper gown, rubbing lotion on her arms and shoulders.

  “I didn’t see those, where’d you get that?” Nigel asked, turning and running back to the medbay.

  “Middle shelf, forward bulkhead, look for large,” Sun said, shaking her head. “Anyone here critical? Coughing, feeling weak?”

  “We were just dropped there today,” one of the ten said, he was thin, tall, and had a lost expression on his face. “Maybe some of that cream would help, but I think we’re okay.”

  “We’ll get you all cream and a pill once the crisis is over,” Spin said.

  “Okay, I’m Jorin,” he said. “Thank you for saving us. Is there someone stuck in there?”

  “Yes,” Travis coughed.

  “I’m going to find something to pry that open with,” Spin said. She pulled the flexible helmet for her suit out from her inside jacket pocket, pulled it on and clipped it to the collar, where it sealed and hardened. “I know there’s one in the main cargo, but part of that section is open to space.”

  “Do you need help?” Sun asked. “If you have another suit, I could…”

  “Come with me,” Spin said, focused on getting Della out. The sensors were dead in her pod, she couldn’t tell how much air was left in her turret, but Della had been quiet for several minutes.

  Spin ran to the rear hold, Sun behind her, and pointed to a crew berthing. “There’s a bunch of suits in there, I’m going to go ahead and get something to break that hatch open with.”

  “Okay, I’ll hurry up.”

  Spin opened the door and stepped into the pressurized quarter of the cargo bay. Breach doors had sealed off three quarters of the bay, and Spin knew that they’d lost the clothing, a lot of the trinkets, a few real valuables, and a month’s supply of food. That stuff was worth ten times what the cash they’d stowed was if they found a half-interested fence. She didn’t let it bother her, instead, closing the door behind her and affixing a safety line to the metal loop beside it.

  Without hesitation, she opened one of the breech doors and let the air rush from the room. It pulled on her, sweeping her feet out from under her for a moment, but the loop and her line held, keeping her from rushing out with the air under the emergency door as it rolled up. As soon as she regained her feet she hit the release so she could rush into the damaged section of the cargo bay, where a gyro-equipped automatic pry bar was strapped to the bulkhead.

  “Spin, she’s not breathing,” Mirra said, panicked. “All I could find to get the door open were hanger rods, they’re not working.”

  “She’s in the cargo bay, I think she found something there, but it’s open to space,” Sun replied.

  The radiation levels were barely within tolerance, and Spin could see the roiling energy tunnel they were travelling through to get away from Tullast. “There’s an auto pry bar here.” She said as she reached the end of her safety line, there were two metres between her and the tool she needed. “Can’t reach it, I’m going to have to move freely.”

  “We’ll find something else, Spin,” Sun said.

  “This’ll get it done. It’ll just take a sec, be right back,” she replied, detaching the safety line from her wrist and pushing towards the bulkhead. The energy wall of their transit field shifted and roiled beyond it. If she became separated from the ship she’d be lost, atomized as she passed across the edge of the field and into normal space. The only consolation was that it would be quick.

  Spin touched the handle of the pry bar and grabbed onto the edge of a support spar, relieved. The pry bar unclipped and came free. That was the easy part. Looking back towards the door she’d come from, she positioned herself carefully, then pushed off.

  Spin had practiced space walking twice. Both times it was in an oxygenated environment, inside a ship, with a suit on – just a little training from Sun – but she’d never been in a vacuum with just a thin suit between her and certain death.

  The ship turned a little, a minor course correction, something Spin did not see coming. She was pointed at the other end of the broken cargo bay, with only frame supports and no hull between her and the wormhole wall. “Holy shit!” she said, near panic.

  “Spread your legs and arms out!” Sun told her. “Get ready to catch anything you can.”

  Spin remembered those light hearted training sessions then, and did exactly what she was told, using the pry bar as an extension of one arm. To her relief her shoulder collided with a twisted support, and her right arm wrapped around it.

  Never had her life seemed more at risk, with an energy wall filling her view, and a slender piece of metal providing her only refuge. The pry bar was near slipping, so she adjusted her hold and brought it closer. “Okay, Sun,” she said, breathing heavily. “Get to the cockpit, the door code is three, three, three, five. Make sure this ship doesn’t have any course corrections coming up.”

  “On my way,” Sun said, “Nice save, by the way.”

  “I’m going to have nightmares for weeks about this,” Spin said. “I still have the pry bar, Della, hang on,” she said, knowing that there was only a slim chance that the woman could hear her.


  “Okay, I’m here,” Sun said. “No course corrections coming up for nine minutes.”

  “Okay, I’m going to try this again.”

  “Push off slowly, you don’t have much to work with,” Sun said.

  “You’re telling me,” Spin replied. With more care than before, she positioned herself as best as she could, took a breath and pushed off towards the inner door. She was moving so slowly compared to the first push off, she had time to think. “If I don’t make it, use whatever you can to get that door open. The ship doesn’t matter, she does.”

  “Shut up, spread your arms and legs open, and get ready to grab on to anything you touch,” Sun said. “Silly woman.”

  Spin waited as she drifted through the cargo hold, open space all around her, aware that she wasn’t going to be safe until she actually had a grip on something.

  The line she was tethered to earlier brushed against her chest, and she grabbed it greedily, losing her grip on the pry bar. It started slowly spinning out of reach. Her attempt at catching it only made it spin more.

  Without a word, she yanked on the line and bashed against the inner cargo hold hatch hard enough to make her teeth rattle. “No way am I losing this thing,” she said as she clipped the end of the line onto her wrist, wrapped it around her arm a few times for good measure and pushed off hard, aiming herself at the pry bar.

  Spin collided with it and wrapped her arms around the tool, the line stopped her hard, momentarily jarring her. “Okay, coming back.”

  “Don’t ever do that again,” Sun said.

  With a tug she started drifting back to the inner door. “Activate the emergency bulkhead,” she said.

  The thin emergency bulkhead began to unroll from the ceiling, stiffening as it straightened down. As soon as it touched the quarter of the cargo bay that was sealed repressurized and she waited. It seemed to take forever.

  The interior hatch door finally unlocked once the pressure in the sealed section of cargo bay was equal to that of the hallway, and Spin burst through, running back towards the main cabin. “Here!” she said, handing the pry bar to Nigel, who had it jammed in and activated in seconds. The gyros built into the long pry bar added force to his efforts as he tried to pry the door open. With a long, ponderous creak, the doorframe began to twist. He jostled the end further in. “Stand back.”