by Rick Partlow
She picked up her rifle and headed for the exit.
***
Sam Avalon was drowning. All of his life, he’d floated on a stable, inviolable raft of truths, core beliefs supporting everything he thought, every action he took. Now the raft was gone and doubt clawed at him, dragging him down where there was no breath, no truth, no certainty and all was grey and murky and shadowed.
He crouched on the cold, stone floor and watched horrified as John Gage’s blood crept slowly toward him, watched Pris running after Jeddah Valley and wondered if he should follow her. Fear held him back, but not fear of the incoming gunfire; instead, the terror he felt was of making the wrong decision. Maybe Valley was right; maybe this place should be destroyed. He couldn’t imagine anything good coming of it, couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to know the facts undercutting their truth.
In the end, he followed Pris not because he thought she knew the best course to take, but simply because it was Pris and she was the very last thing he had to hold onto, the last bit of flotsam keeping him out of the waves. He flinched at the flashes and bangs of incoming rounds, but didn’t look aside, didn’t take his eyes off of Priscilla. She had Telia’s pulse pistol in her hand but she didn’t shoot at Jeddah Valley’s retreating form, and he wondered if it was because she wanted her alive in some forlorn hope of proving all this to someone in the Resolution Diplomatic Corps or simply because the woman was the closest thing she had to family.
Which is almost exactly why I’m going after her.
The tunnel back through to the antechamber was bathed in darkness, blacker still since his eyes had adjusted to the light in the records room, and he lost sight of both the women in an instant. Just one shot, one round out of the black and he’d be dead, but the alternative didn’t seem any less dire and he ran into the unknown.
The hatch was only halfway open, the gap wide enough for either of the women to slip through, but too narrow for him. He slammed his left shoulder into it and a dull pain forced his breath out in a gush, bouncing him back from it; it was much heavier than he’d thought, and Telia Proctor was much stronger. He heard shouting, a crash from farther in, somewhere beyond the door; he gritted his teeth and put his right shoulder against the door, digging his feet into the stone and pushing with everything he had.
The hatch moved just a few centimeters, just enough, and he squeezed through, worn metal scraping against his chest and back through his uniform jacket. For a panicked second, he thought he might be stuck in the gap, helpless and worse, useless. One last surge and flesh wore off beneath his jacket and he was through, sucking in air.
Light beckoned ahead, forcing him back into motion, forcing urgency back into his limbs. The portable lights set up in the antechamber glared into his eyes and he threw up his left hand to shield them, yanking his sidearm out of its holster, looking for a target amidst the bodies they’d left behind. The Executive Protection agents were still splayed out, ravaged and obscene in death, and he tried to look away from them before the image could be seared onto his memory.
There was a blur of motion off to his right, the two women grappling against the far wall, near the nuke. He raised his gun but they were too close together and moving way too fast, the way he’d seen Priscilla move back on Mars when they’d fought the assassins. It had been so long, he’d almost forgotten what she was capable of…and apparently, Valley was just as capable.
It made sense; they were both cut from the same genetic cloth, both prepared for dangerous missions, boosted and implanted well beyond the norm. They were moving so fast he could barely follow, bouncing off the walls and each other, crashing into the light stands and knocking them down, the glare throwing long shadows. He moved into the center of the room, trying to get a better vantage point, and suddenly Priscilla was tumbling towards him, bowling him off his feet.
He remembered how to fall, it was ingrained into his instincts from years of martial arts training. Unfortunately, the training hadn’t involved falling with a gun in his hand and he dropped the pulse pistol as his palms slapped backwards into the stone, the metal and plastic clattering against the ground. His shoulder struck next, but he managed to keep the back of his head from hitting, ducking his chin into his chest.
His eyes were on Valley and he saw her grab the gun, pointing at them, not firing, just covering the both of them as she moved towards the control panel for the nuke. Blood trickled down her lip and the left side of her cheek was red, already beginning to bruise.
“I’m not stupid enough to monologue for you all without a reason,” she said, and he could hear the dry, sardonic tone of her voice even as she gasped in air, out of breath from the fight. “I just needed Calvin and Jordi to get into position.”
She backed towards the metal case, left hand hunting for the control panel while her eyes stayed locked on them. A flicker of her gaze towards the panel to confirm where her fingers were touching, and Sam saw Priscilla try to push herself up. Blood matted her hair above her right ear from a pressure cut, but she ignored it and scrambled up onto her knees, ready to lunge at Valley again.
The other woman interrupted the motion with a round fired into the stone of the floor between them, the flare of light and flash of heat driving Pris backwards a step, halting her forward momentum.
Valley touched a symbol, then another, and the display blinked yellow three times before it blanked out, not black but a solid, ominous red.
“Just twenty minutes now,” Valley murmured. She tilted her head towards Priscilla, almost apologetic. “Sorry, sister, I hate to do this to you but it’s why I exist.” A sneer belied the words. “Some of us haven’t forgotten their purpose.”
“Mother would never allow Earth to be destroyed,” Priscilla spat back at the woman, though Sam thought the words smacked more of denial than conviction. “Even if everything you’ve told us is true, she still wouldn’t let the ramship hit without trying to stop it.”
Valley chuckled softly, shaking her head.
“You’re such a damned baby.” Condescension, maybe laced with pity. “You have no idea how the world works. Mother,” she bit down on the words, emphasizing each as if speaking to a child, “created the fucking ramship.”
Sam had thought nothing else the woman said could surprise him, but she kept proving him wrong. Priscilla seemed caught between one word and the next, but whatever her response might have been, Jeddah Valley would never hear it. Something hot and bright and moving fast enough for its passage to echo sonic shockwaves off the walls slammed into Valley’s chest and burned a hole through it the size of a dinner plate.
Valley stumbled back, hands falling to her sides, the gun slipping out of nerveless fingers as blood poured down from the charred, smoking hole, the edges of the fabric of her shirt smoldering into short-lived flames. She collapsed with a heavy finality onto her side, eyes wide and white, face already growing pale from shock and blood loss.
Sam tore his eyes away from the dying woman and finally saw Telia Proctor limping into the chamber, rifle extended in her left hand like a gigantic sidearm. Her right arm hung limp, half of her right hand blasted away, and there was a nasty, jagged, blackened hole through what would have been the AC joint if the arm had been biological. The whole right sleeve of her fatigue jacket was burned away and the skin on that side of her neck was red and blistered.
“Are you injured?” she asked, the question seeming odd coming from someone as shot up and mangled as she was.
Sam shook his head, rolling onto his feet. Priscilla didn’t reply; she was standing over Jeddah Valley, watching the woman die. Her eyes were almost a twin for Valley’s vacant stare.
“Has anyone seen that shithead Tejado?” Fellows asked, striding through the hatchway behind Telia like he’d just come off his lunch break, despite a nasty graze leaking blood across his left side just below his ribs. “I thought I saw him heading this way when the shooting started.”
“We have to get out of here,” Sam told them, speaking to T
elia and Fellows, but putting a hand on Priscilla’s arm to try to rouse her from her stupor. “The nuke is set to detonate in twenty minutes and it’s going to take us nearly that long just to get back to the shuttle.”
“Well, damn,” Fellows sighed, shoulders sagging. “I was looking forward to trying to explain all this,” he waved behind him, “and a dead Minister, and how Tejado was behind Brecht’s assassination to my superiors. Not.”
He tucked his rifle under his arm and waved to Telia, heading out of the cavern in a fast-walk. “Come on, Cadet.”
“Pris.” Sam pulled gently at her arm and she turned, blinking as if she were just waking up. “We have to go.”
She pulled away from him and knelt down and he thought she was going to say something over Valley’s body, or make some symbolic gesture. Instead, she scooped up the pistol and handed it to Sam, then stepped past him, silent, nothing readable behind her blue eyes.
The sun had climbed higher into the morning sky and Sam blinked and squinted as his eyes fought to adjust. It didn’t feel right that it was still the same morning; it felt to him as if they’d been down there for days. Their whole world had changed, and yet only an hour---maybe two?---had passed. He fought to keep up, barely able to see the others in front of him; he was last in the line down the path to the shuttle and also the slowest.
He hadn’t thought to start a timer on his personal ‘link and he had no idea if Valley had even been telling the truth about how long they had, but he began counting in his head anyway, trying to estimate. It reminded him of the backcountry hikes he’d taken with his parents when he was a child. He’d ask his father how much longer till they reached camp and Dad would say “another ten minutes,” or “another half an hour,” and Sam would start counting off the seconds to himself. He knew now his father had simply been trying to keep him occupied, but it was an old and comforting habit and it kept him from thinking about other, even more disturbing things.
“One thousand fifty-nine,” he murmured, taking short, quick steps down the slick stone steps heading downward off the mountainside. “One thousand sixty.” Eleven minutes.
That was an estimate; he’d tried to figure out how much time had elapsed between Valley hitting the button and when they’d began running down the trail and he’d settled on three minutes, though Gaia alone knew how accurate that was.
“One thousand one, one thousand two…”
By the time he’d reached twelve minutes, he’d lost sight of Priscilla around a curve in the trail, behind a stand of dark balsam fir. Before he could clear it, he heard the voice. It was sickeningly familiar, deep and strong at its heart but strained now, cracking and desperate.
“Put your fucking guns down or I’ll kill him!” Jaime Tejado was screaming.
Sam nearly tumbled forward off-balance when he tried to stop, eyes darting around. The trees off to the left of the trail called to him, a shelter against the threat, and he stepped carefully into them, watching his feet even though he knew he should be watching ahead. He couldn’t afford to be heard.
“You’re a fool, Tejado,” Telia Proctor said. “That nuclear weapon is going to detonate in minutes, and if you kill our pilot, you’ll die right alongside us.”
The pilot…Sully. Tejado had Sully. He’d reached the shuttle ahead of them and taken the man hostage. Which meant he’d gotten a gun somewhere, probably off one of the bodies in the antechamber.
“No, you’ll die alongside me,” Tejado corrected her, trying to sound fierce but only managing petulant. “I care more about the Consensus than I do my own life.”
That was a lie. If he did, he would have just killed Sully and sabotaged the shuttle. He wanted to live.
Yeah, well, so do I.
Sam waited for the next voice before he took another step, steadying himself against a tree with his left hand, maneuvering carefully around dry twigs and fallen leaves, staying to the firm ground.
“Fuck this,” Fellows pronounced, sounding annoyed. “I don’t mind this here kid, but fuck if I’ll sit around and wait to get blown up. Why don’t I just shoot the both of you and take my chances we can figure out how to take off?”
“Adrian.” Telia’s tone was familiar, chiding beneath the strain of the moment.
And then Sam could see. Just barely, through the tiny gaps between the boughs. There was the shuttle, bits of grey and silver stretching out across the clearing as far as he could see, the belly ramp down. A bit closer, a few careful steps and there was Sully. He had a bruise across his jaw and blood still trickled fitfully from his broken nose but he was still standing, with Tejado’s arm across his throat.
“Look man,” Sully pleaded, hands up, palms out, “I can take all of you guys. It’s a big boat, I ain’t got no problem with…”
“Shut up.” Tejado cracked the barrel of the handgun against the pilot’s head. It was a belly gun, the sort of thing one of the agents might have kept as a backup. Not long-ranged, but still deadly enough.
Tejado was ducking behind the pilot, only centimeters of him visible on any side, doing his damnedest not to give either of the two Guardians a target. Sam looked at the pistol in his hand, wondering how much he trusted his own aim. He whispered a curse and tried to move closer.
“I won’t say this again. Toss your fucking guns down or I kill the only one who can fly us out of here.”
Sam sucked in a breath and stepped through the trees out into the open.
“I could fly us out of here,” he declared, levelling his pulse gun. From this angle, he just had a shot. But that wasn’t the plan.
Tejado moved, spun just slightly to face the new threat, and it was enough. Fellows fired, a single, barking shot, and Jaime Tejado’s head disappeared in a red spray.
Sully screamed, in shock and fear and pain; the plasma had seared his neck and burning, vaporized blood had splashed into his face. He fell forward to his knees as Tejado’s headless body thumped to the deck behind him, and Sam was already scrambling down the slope toward him. Priscilla reached Sully first, yanking him up the ramp, ignoring his pain and pulling him up into the shuttle.
“Sam!” she was yelling over her shoulder. “If you can really fly this thing, get it in the air!”
He squeezed past Telia and Fellows, slipping in Tejado’s blood and nearly tripping over the man’s body. Behind him, he had the vague sense of Telia kicking the Naturalist Minister’s corpse off the side of the belly ramp, and then he was inside the bird. Pris was strapping Sully into an acceleration couch while the younger man moaned softly, hands covering his face, and he wanted to say something encouraging to the pilot, but time was pressing down on him, a foot on his throat. He passed by them without a word and fell into the pilot’s seat.
The controls were different from a Resolution shuttle, even the trainers where he’d learned manual flight, but Sully had been on the crew at the station for two years and what the hell else did pilots talk about? His fingers danced over the controls like piano keys, playing a tune he’d learned by ear, and turbines began to spin up, sucking greedily at the mountain air.
“Sam,” Telia said from just behind him. “Where are we going?”
He began to answer automatically, but stumbled over the words. It was a damned good question.
“Everyone back in Capital City is going to think we killed Brecht,” Fellows agreed. “I mean there’s security vid that’d show we didn’t, but who’s in charge of looking at it? Can we trust them?”
“Once we show our faces,” Telia added, “they’re going to throw us in a cell and chemically interrogate us until we don’t know what year it is.”
“Apparently we already don’t know what year it is,” Priscilla commented softly, barely audible over the building whine of the jets.
“Sully,” Sam called, trying to make sure his voice cut through the noise of the engine and the young pilot’s own personal head-noise from the injuries. “Can you get us clearance to Fortuna Station without letting anyone know who’s on this bir
d?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just opened the throttle and yanked the control yoke upward. The belly jets roared and boost pushed him into the seat, power vibrating through the yoke and into his hands, an old feeling but a welcome one, the sense of escape. He began angling the variable thrust nozzles forward almost immediately, barely clearing the trees ahead; he could see the tops of the pines swaying in the blast from the jets as the acceleration began to push him back as well as down.
“Yeah,” Sully grunted the words past the strain of the boost. “I got a guy I know on board. I’ll get us the clearance.”
Sam pushed the throttle all the way forward, the breath going out of him, lips skinning back from his teeth. He didn’t even wish for a g-tank or a neurolinked ship; the squeeze of the g-force on his chest was life. Behind them was death and he had no idea how far he had to go to escape it.
“One thousand one,” he whispered hoarsely. “One thousand two…”
The HUD probably had the distance in it somewhere, but it wouldn’t matter if he knew. Nine g’s was the most he could take without passing out, and this shuttle wouldn’t have an AI to take over if he went under; they’d just plow straight into the ground.
“One thousand three…”
The ground flexed behind them, and at first he thought it was a heat mirage in the rear cameras, until light so bright the camera couldn’t register it blanked the picture out in fuzzy grey. He knew what would come next: the shock wave. It would be travelling close to the speed of sound, and the shuttle wasn’t quite there yet, not enough time, not enough altitude. He couldn’t go any faster, couldn’t risk it.
There was just the slightest shudder, as if the mighty hand of an ill-tempered titan had reached for them but fallen just short, the brush of the beast’s fingertips against their back. And then they were clear, free. In the camera view behind them, the side of a mountain collapsed, and Sam felt himself collapse with it as he ramped down the shuttle’s acceleration, the sweet kiss of air finally reaching his lungs again.