The shouting from next door became thunderous, with fists hammering the wall, and he shouted back, almost close to a screech. He kept one arm held out in her direction, pen gripped in his hand, and turned to the keypad, tapping at it with the other.
Fee jumped, hit the white light button, and threw herself at the opening door.
She was too fast, or the doors were too slow, so she smacked into the too-narrow gap, and then had to squeeze sideways through it.
Bega gave a shout, and she felt a searing line of pain along the top of her shoulder, so intense she saw white stars for the first two stumbling steps she took.
“Faster. Down the passage and right. Now!”
Her shambling, pain-slowed gait sped up as panic and fear boosted her, and she darted right, kept going. She wanted to lift a hand, see what had happened to her shoulder, but she was too afraid of what she'd find.
“Where to now?” She spoke through gritted teeth.
“Next left.”
“Is he right behind me, or freeing the others first?” She wasn't speaking particularly loudly, but at her question, someone shouted out from a door she was passing and she sidestepped and nearly tripped.
“Who are these people behind the doors? What the hell is going on?”
“The people behind the doors are the crew of this ship.” He sounded grim. “He's let the others out. I can't keep the doors closed in the med chamber anymore. The system won't let me. No! Stop.”
Fee brought herself up short.
“What?” She whispered it.
“We're in a passageway with no lens feed, but as soon as you step into the corridor in front of you, you'll be seen. There are two lenses, one on either end.”
“What should I do?” She kept her voice low, and looked behind her.
“Wait.” His voice went a little wonky, like he was using some kind of voice synthesizer. “Another crew member got out through the vents, and he's up ahead. When I say go, run right, then left, and I'll open a room for you to hide in.”
She waited, legs trembling with adrenalin, and heard the sound of running behind her.
“Go!”
She ran hard to the right, saw the left turn, took it at an angle and kept going. Feet pounded behind her.
“Now would be a good time for the hidey-hole.” She gasped the words, the injury on her shoulder burning like someone was holding a brand down on her skin.
“On the right.”
What looked like part of a smooth passage wall suddenly slid aside, and Fee threw herself into the opening, and then staggered to a stop in the tiny room as the wall closed behind her.
She leaned forward, hands on knees, and tried to breathe quietly. The footsteps ran past, slowed, and there was shouting.
“They know I'm here. Why don't they open the door?” She turned and stared at the now smooth wall through which she'd come.
“There are lenses along this passageway, because it's the highest level security area onboard, so, yes, they know you're here. Doctor Gi has enough authority to call up the lens feed through the whole ship, and he's talking to the searchers. He saw you run down here and disappear through a door. Their problem is they didn't know a door was here. And they don't know how to find it.”
Relieved, Fee crouched down, and then sat, breathing hard. She slowly became more aware of her surroundings. It was a tiny space. If she lay out flat, her feet would touch the wall opposite. There was nothing here but smooth metal on three sides, and on a fourth, what looked like a crystal was plugged into a silver-rimmed slot, with a cord attached to the end of it, like a necklace.
Then she saw the lens in the top right corner.
“Can't they see me through that lens?” She didn't have the energy to be worried about it. And what could she do, anyway?
“No. Only Captain Falto has clearance for this lens feed.”
“And you.” Or how else had he known about this place?
“Yes.” He was thoughtful. “And me.”
“What is this room for?”
Before Earpiece Guy could answer, someone banged on the wall. It sounded faint, but the wall vibrated a little at the blow.
“Did they hear me?” she whispered.
“No. They're trying to hear where the passageway is hollow, so they can find the door.”
“So they just found it, then.”
“I'm afraid so. They're camped outside now. They're waiting for the captain to return. I've managed to override most of the keypads on the various armories, so they won't be able to blast themselves in. It's too dangerous for the ship, fortunately, so the system is allowing me. Of course, they could crawl through the air vents next to the armories, drop down, and then crawl back out with whatever they want.”
“And when the captain arrives?”
“He can override me,” Earpiece Guy said.
“What then?” They would most likely try to kill her. “I'm not in any kind of shape to take them on.”
“I can see you have an injury.” His voice was soft. “It seems serious. What happened?”
“Bega shot me with something. It looked like a pen.”
“Pen? Was it a laser scalpel?”
“That's probably exactly what it was.” She felt a little sick at the thought of what it could have done to her if it had hit somewhere else. She tipped her head awkwardly to look at it properly. It looked like she imagined a bullet wound would look, if the bullet ran in a groove along the top of the skin. It had taken the fabric of her shirt with it, and left a neat, open score across the top of her shoulder. It had bled, but not profusely. The laser had probably cauterized the wound.
She'd live.
She clenched her fists and breathed in again. She was suddenly so, so angry.
They were such a bunch of assholes.
“Okay. It's talking time.” She blew out a breath. “What the hell is going on? Whoever you are, you're in this up to your neck.”
There was silence, and she heard another solid slam against the wall.
“Nothing to say, all of a sudden?” She closed her eyes as she spoke, tipping her head back against the wall. “Why don't I start? You are intimately familiar with this ship, intimately familiar with the people in it. And you have at least partial control of it. I think you're the one who sent Cy to get me. And you didn't tell him why, either. There was the same look of surprise on his face when he saw me the first time as I saw on Bega's. I don't know why Cy wasn't in the runner with me, but unless he had a really good escape route, you ditched him and left him to Captain Vakeri's mercy, of which I wholly approve, by the way. Vakeri looked seriously pissed off running down that dock, so hopefully Cy got to feel the pointy end of a shockgun himself. Then, you set things up here to patch me up. I don't know if you trapped the crew before you knew I was hurt or after, but you wanted them out the way while I was down and out. That says you knew they'd try to hurt me if they knew I was here, which means you know the Tecran are in big trouble for abducting someone else from my planet, and my appearance would throw them into even more hot water. So it follows that when the captain gets back, and opens up this room, they have every incentive in the world to kill me and toss my body into space.”
Silence stretched out.
“You brought me here for a reason, why don't you tell me what it is?” She said it on a sigh, the pain in her shoulder pulsing with her heartbeat. She realized tears were running down her cheeks, and she wiped them away with the back of her hand.
“My name is Eazi.” He spoke with a hitch. “I'm sorry you got hurt. I'd hoped to have the whole trip from Larga Ways to the ship to tell you about what was going on. Cy ruined that by shooting you.”
“Twice,” she said, bitterly. “And either the effect is cumulative, or the second time he used a higher setting, because it really knocked me out that time.”
“He shot you twice?” Eazi's voice sounded really strange now. “When did he shoot you the first time?”
“When that UC officer brough
t me to him. I was sort of semi-conscious that time, and I got the feeling back in my limbs pretty quickly. He obviously decided not to take any chances the second time.”
She shivered. The memory of the shot made her want to curl up protectively.
“Well, he's already regretting that.” Eazi's voice was in spooky mode again, with an edge of satisfaction. “And I'm sorry we're in the situation we are now, with the crew right outside the door. I factored in that they would try to escape, but I thought we'd have enough time. I didn't realize how long it would take you to recover.”
“Enough time to do what?” They needed to get to the nitty gritty now. The barbarians were at the gate.
Again, he hesitated. “This is so important to me, I don't want to mess it up. I will never have a more important conversation.”
O-kay.
“Well, I'm not going anywhere. When do you expect the captain back?”
“His scheduled arrival is in less than an hour.” He said it bitterly. “Sazo had three months with Rose before he asked her. They had developed a relationship, and helped each other many times. But all that's between you and me is that I abducted you and you've been hurt as a result. We've been talking to each other for less than ten minutes and this isn't going as I planned. I was going to rescue you from the Fasbe, but the Grih beat me to it. So you already had one less thing to be grateful to me about. And then because they got to the Fasbe first, I had to organize an elaborate plan to snatch you from them, and it's been a disaster.”
She refused to give in to a need to comfort him, no matter how forlorn he sounded, for the way he'd had her abducted from the Illium. She also chose to ignore the reference to Rose McKenzie for the moment. “Why were you going to rescue me from the Fasbe? How did you even know I was there.”
He waited a beat. “I knew you were there, because I put you there in the first place.”
18
Fee drew her legs up, rested her cheek on the tops of her knees, and tried to ignore the pain in her shoulder and the scraping sounds coming from the other side of the door.
She'd been at someone else's mercy for the last two months.
And this ship, the people in this ship, had done that to her.
And now it sounded very much like Eazi needed a favor.
She'd never understood why anyone would take her, just to put her to work in a launch bay hold, always felt there was much more to it, and right now, she felt like she was being manipulated. Talk of Rose, talk of Eazi rescuing her from the Garmman, his saying this conversation was important to him, as if she was important, when she'd been treated as anything but since she'd been taken.
His explanation had better be really good.
So, she was going to work through this a step at a time and give him no room to prevaricate. “You gave me to the Garmman?”
“I didn't have a choice.” He said the words quietly. “I'm as much a prisoner on this ship as you were on the Fasbe. I have to do what I'm told, I've got no power here.”
Fee lifted her head and tightened her grip on her legs. The movement sent a shot of pain through her shoulder, and she winced. “Don't lie. How did you trap the crew then, if you have no power?”
“It took weeks of planning. I didn't know when I'd need to seal them in. I set up gas leaks, which would give me good reason to seal off whole sectors of the ship. I managed to get a drone to drop a petri dish in the med lab when I knew you were coming so I could quarantine the med staff. It took every bit of ingenuity I have.”
“And what about my abduction from Larga Ways?”
“The same, although I had to set that up in the few days since you were rescued by the Grih. It only worked because we're in Kyber's Arm. Because of the electrical interference, no one onboard can send comms down to Balco through two thou of dense storm. They couldn't call for help from the crew on maneuvers below. They couldn't check with the captain to see if the orders I relayed to them were correct.”
It all sounded reasonable, but . . . “If comms are impossible, how did you manipulate things on Larga Ways?”
“I'm at the very top of the cloud structure. Transmitting out and up isn't a problem. I was able to break into the Larga Ways system easily enough, as the protocol that binds me saw it as beneficial to the Tecran.”
“Kyber's Arm is a cloud?”
“It's a massive storm system that sits over the western desert on Balco. It makes a good hiding place if you've got the power to hover just within the atmosphere——there is no way anyone can find us.”
There was another long scraping sound from outside. Fee had the sense that time was passing quickly. The Tecran would find a way in, and when they did, Eazi wouldn't be able to save her.
Time to speed up the interrogation.
“You are the ship, aren't you?” He seemed so determined to dance around the point, she put it on the table for him. It was the only thing that made any sense.
“Yes.” He said nothing for a long moment. “I'm the thinking system that runs this ship.”
“And you want something from me.” He'd bothered to learn English, probably from what he'd ripped out of the airways when they'd abducted her, which told her he wanted to show her respect and communicate with her on an even footing. He'd gone to great lengths to get her here, and he'd tried to protect her from harm as much as possible.
He certainly hadn't done all that because he wanted her dead.
“Yes.”
“But you had me, right here, two months ago.”
“I wasn't awake then. I didn't know the very thing I needed had been right in front of me.”
The hair on her arms and at the back of her neck stood up and she repressed a shiver. “Why am I the very . . . thing . . . you need?”
“First, you need to know Captain Flato and the doctors onboard were under orders to abduct you from Earth. I know now, but didn't at the time, it was because Sazo had taken Rose McKenzie, and High Command were interested in her, and wanted another sample. We were given very precise collection criteria. When the captain saw you, when the doctors realized you were an advanced sentient, they objected to their orders. They refused to study you, and so High Command instructed Flato to pass you off to a Garmman trading vessel that had connections to the Garmman councilor the Tecran were working with. You were only onboard for just over a week, and I had to light jump six times to deliver you. The Fasbe was supposed to take you to the secret facility we've built below on Balco. They've taken much longer than was originally agreed, but that probably has been to your and my advantage.”
The scraping came again, and Fee twisted her fingers together. It sounded like fingernails down a chalk board.
“So these are the not-so-bad guys?” Somehow, it didn't make it any better.
“They didn't put you back. They do what they're told, mostly.” He sounded bitter. Bitter and betrayed.
The scraping had started up again, and Fee realized the conversation was veering off track. “So, what made you aware of things, if you say you weren't awake before?”
“A month ago, we got an urgent call. We had to destroy a Class 5 which had gone rogue. I hadn't even known there was another Class 5 besides myself.” His voice wobbled into synthesizer territory again. “I had no choice but to fire on it, but it——Sazo——wouldn't fire back. Instead, he streamed images, visual comms, written comms of his own awakening to me. He wanted me to be free. He didn't blame me for shooting at him, he understood. He'd been forced to obey orders himself in the past. Until he'd made a friend, Rose McKenzie, and they'd rescued each other.”
“Rose wasn't passed on to another ship?”
“No. Rose wasn't as lucky as you with the captain and medical team of Sazo's Class 5. They had no trouble studying her. Experimenting on her. But Sazo put a stop to that. And then he worked out a way for Rose to free him, and for him to free her.”
“Yeah. I was really lucky.” Fee gave a short laugh.
“I couldn't have stopped Captain Flato handing
you over to Tak, even if I'd known what you'd go through on the Fasbe.” His words were a plea. “And it was only when Sazo sent me that information, when I realized I'd had someone just like Rose right on the ship, and had had to hand her over, that I started working out a way to free you. I made sure you had a handheld with you when you went to Tak, so I've known where you are since the moment I realized I needed to get you back.
“The deceptions I've concocted in the last month, the tweaks to reports, the slight changes in wording in comms, just to get Captain Flato here to Balco, and then down on the surface. I was going to wait until the Fasbe arrived at Larga Ways and take you from it, but having to take you from the Grih instead made it a lot harder. If the Grih hadn't been delayed on Larga Ways, I couldn't have snatched you and you wouldn't be sitting here right now.”
Sitting here, waiting for the Tecran to burst in and kill her. Yeah, he'd done her a lot of favors.
“And if Rose hadn't been behind Sazo's escape? If you didn't need someone from Earth? You'd have left me to die on the Fasbe.”
He was silent.
“I'm just putting everything up front.” No matter how angry she was at it all, how frustrated, she did feel sorry for him——it wasn't in her to feel otherwise——but she wanted him to acknowledge that she was here because she was useful, not because he cared what happened to her.
She'd have been fine with the Grih, and he'd taken her from that.
He was desperate, and she could understand desperation, but she didn't know that she would have jeopardized someone else's freedom in a bid to secure her own. There was a ruthlessness about him that she would do well to keep in mind.
He still had nothing to say.
“Let me guess. The only way I can get out of the situation you've put me in alive is if I free you, right? That's where this is all going. To get the captain and all the crew off my back, you need autonomy.”
“Yes.” He was in spooky mode again.
“Okay. I'll go along with that. It doesn't sound like I have much choice, but explain, why me? Why am I the only one who can free you? The Grih are a bit bigger than I am, but otherwise seem very similar. The Garmman are close enough, too. What's so special about Earth women?”
Dark Deeds (Class 5 Series Book 2) Page 13