by M. D. Cooper
There was a high-pitched whine that seemed to come from the air itself. The anti-gravity effect ramped up sharply, almost wrenching Larry from Konto’s grip before they both shot upwards at eye-watering speed.
With his free hand, Konto grabbed for the walls of the shaft, but every viable handhold was just beyond his reach.
“Do something, Mr Garr!”
“I’m trying!” Konto barked. “Just hold on and don’t throw up!”
Scrabbling at his belt, Konto unhooked the whip. He snapped it towards a door mechanism as they raced past, but the anti-grav threw his aim high.
Another story whistled by. Konto cracked the whip towards the next door. It wrapped briefly around a lever, then uncoiled.
“Shizz!”
They had to be past the floor they had been aiming for now. The roof of the shaft was maybe twenty stories above, and closing fast. Konto snapped the whip out again. This time. Please.
He jerked to a stop. Larry’s hand slipped from his, but then the boy caught Konto’s legs, almost pulling off his pants. The anti-grav was still trying to drag them upwards. Konto’s muscles strained with effort as he tried to pull them closer to the door.
There was movement from below. Konto groaned as dozens of vomit-filled bubbles rocketed towards him, then bounced off his face and arms. Through the bubble storm, he saw another movement, too. Two Xandrie were in the elevator, peering up through the hatch. One of them said something into a comm-device and, a moment later, the elevator began to climb towards them.
Veins bulged in Konto’s neck as he tried to pull against the force of the anti-grav generator above them. It was no use. He was too weak. Too old. His shoulders burned and his hands ached, and no matter how hard he pulled, they were going nowhere.
“The bad guys are coming, Mr Garr!”
“I know, Larry.”
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know, Larry!”
There was a moment of silence. “I know what the Magister would do,” Larry said.
Konto groaned. “No, you really don’t.”
“I do, Mr Garr. He’d do this.”
Konto felt something jerk from his belt. He turned his head just enough to see Larry yank the grenade free, flick the switch, then toss is down towards the approaching elevator.
The grenade soared almost a full two inches downwards, before the anti-grav caught it and pulled it upwards. “Oh,” said Larry. “On second thoughts, maybe he wouldn’t have done that.”
Konto tightened his grip on the whip. “Larry, hold—” he managed, before the grenade hit the top of the shaft and detonated.
Several things happened at roughly the same time. The explosion, with the anti-grav working against it, was a low drama affair. Or at least, it was until the anti-grav equipment itself was damaged, at which point the flames erupted like an angry demon.
Almost simultaneously, gravity welcomed Konto and Larry back into its bosom and they swung down, then slammed against the wall below. Larry’s grip slipped again, but Konto managed to lift his legs and contort himself enough to catch the boy with one hand, while the other kept its grip on the whip.
Below them, even as they started their downwards swing, the elevator plunged downwards. The screams of the Xandrie inside started loud, faded quickly, and then were cut off by the crash of a metal box hitting a metal floor at tremendous speed.
With a lot of heaving, scrabbling, the odd bit of cursing and a worrying moment when it looked like Larry might throw up again, Konto got them both onto the narrow ledge on the shaft-side of the doors.
Digging his fingers into the gap between them, Konto heaved the doors apart. He and Larry both fell through together into a dimly-lit room. A handful of people were watching a two-headed figure standing on a small stage. The heads were taking it in turns to sing into a single microphone, their eyes flitting left to right as they read the words from a screen.
Ugh. A song bar. Konto almost considered throwing himself back into the elevator shaft and taking his chances.
Instead, he grabbed Larry by the arm and pulled him along, searching for the exit. On stage, both heads had a bash at a warbling harmony, failed miserably, then bowed to the muted applause that followed their performance.
“Lovely stuff!” echoed a man’s voice from the speakers. “Now, who will our next act be? How about you, sir?”
A spotlight illuminated around Konto. Without breaking step, he drew the blaster pistol and shot out the bulb.
Song bars. Kroysh, he hated song bars.
They found the exit quickly and hurried out onto the plaza. It was low-market bars and restaurants as far as the eye could see, their frontages plastered with animated neon and the odd flickering hologram.
Konto spotted three elevators within easy reach, but they couldn’t risk that again. The Xandrie obviously had some level of control over the transport system, and Konto wasn’t about to give them the chance to take advantage of it again.
“You,” he barked, pointing to a shifty-looking man with a face like a startled sky-weasel. “What floor is this?”
“Um, um, what?” the man stammered.
“Floor number. Hurry.”
“F-four … four-six-eight.”
Larry’s eyes widened. “Four-four-six-eight? I didn’t even know it went that high! Well, there is no way I’m climbing all those stairs.”
“Four-six-eight,” Konto said, barging past the man and pulling Larry with him. “We’re six above them. Come on.”
They hit the stairs. Larry didn’t complain this time, largely because they were going down, instead of up. He did open his mouth to say something as they began their descent, but Konto gestured for silence. They tiptoed down a few flights, Konto holding his blaster lowered, but ready.
The door leading out to four-six-three had been welded shut. The floor below—where the children were being held—was the same.
“Fonk. They’ve barricaded themselves in,” Konto muttered.
“Can we break it down?” Larry asked.
“Maybe, if we still had the grenade,” Konto said, slightly more accusingly than he meant to. He caught Larry’s expression and almost apologized, but there was no time. He took out the tracking gadget and realized he’d been too scared to look at it until now, when there was no other choice.
The sense of relief when he saw the life-sign data from Deenia’s tracker took him a little by surprise. Of course he was happy, he’d been expecting that. What he hadn’t expected were the tears pooling at the corners of his eyes. He blinked them away, zoomed in on the floors around them, then set off up the stairs again.
“Uh, where are you going, Mr Garr?” Larry whispered. “Shouldn’t we be trying to get through?”
“Can’t, it’s sealed shut. The blaster won’t make a dent in it,” said Konto. “But I have another idea.” He quickened his pace, and Larry hurried after him. “I just hope we’ve still got time.”
Floor four-six-four was mostly designated parkland, with lots of grass, a small lake, and a rainbow of different colored flowers that thrived in the UV glow of the artificial sun. The sights and the sounds and the smell of it stopped both Konto and Larry in their tracks.
The world they’d come from was just on the right side of being a barren, inhospitable dustbowl. The air was dry, the soil was rocky, and the flora was mostly limited to a variety of thorny or poisonous plants, trees and bushes.
Here, the air was heavy with moisture. Fat, furry insects flitted lazily from flower to flower. A soft breeze, pumped in through hidden vents, rustled the bright yellow and green leaves of the towering trees.
Picnickers on blankets dotted the grass. In the distance, a child threw a ball for her pet theeg. There was a faint paff as the animal teleported ahead of the ball, and the girl fell about laughing when the ball bounced off the back of its head, causing it to spin on the spot and start chasing its tails.
It was, by quite some margin, the most beautiful place Larry had ever seen. It
didn’t even make Konto’s top fifty—sure, it was nice, and a world away from what home was like, but he’d seen far more of the galaxy than most people—so he recovered from the surprise more quickly than Larry, and quickly marched on across the grass.
As he walked, he studied his scanner. It led him in a zig-zag pattern past picnickers, around the lake, and over to a dense copse of trees standing along the deck’s curved outer wall. Winding through the trees, Konto found what he was looking for.
Having quickly acclimatized to the natural, organic feel of this deck, the metal door and illuminated sign above it seemed almost offensively out of place.
“Emergency exit,” read Larry, panting slightly with the effort of keeping up. “Is this another staircase, Mr Garr?”
“Not quite, Larry,” said Konto. The door worked on a simple mechanical lever. Konto pulled it, releasing the lock mechanism, then pushed through into a room that was completely unlike the deck they’d just left.
It was a cavernous, yet spotlessly clean room, with banks of equipment and shiny chrome lockers lining the walls. Low, calming music lilted from hidden speakers, and soft lighting painted the whole area in a comforting fuzzy glow. It had the feel of a warehouse, but one that probably had an exceptional record for health and safety, and record-breaking levels of employee satisfaction.
Illuminated strips along the floor pointed the way to the room’s far wall, where scores of escape pods sat nestled in their launch tubes. Larry gazed at them for a few moments, trying to figure out what they were. When it clicked, his eyes went wide.
“Wait, we’re not running away, are we, Mr Garr?”
Konto shook his head and made for the closest locker. “Of course we aren’t.”
Unfolding his knife, he jammed it into the gap where the door met the locker body, and gave it a well-rehearsed wiggle. The door gave a soft clunk and sprung open a few inches. Pulling it open the rest of the way, Konto reached inside and pulled out a lightweight EVAC spacesuit, complete with built-in breathing apparatus.
“Here, hold this,” he said, shoving the suit into Larry’s arms, then moving onto one of the smaller lockers.
Larry looked down at the bundle of fabric and glass in his arms. “Uh, Mr Garr? Is this a spacesuit?”
Konto nodded and jammed the knife into the child-sized locker. The door opened, but there was no suit inside, just a stack of spare oxygen cartridges.
“Uh, Mr Garr?” Larry continued. “Why do we have a spacesuit?”
Konto’s blade unlocked the next door. “Shizz,” he muttered. No suit. He looked around for a sign that would tell him where the child-sized EVAC suits were, but saw none. Maybe that health and safety record wasn’t so hot, after all.
“Because we’re going outside,” said Konto. He tried the next locker. No suit. Likewise, the next.
Larry looked from the EVAC suit to Konto, to the suit, to Konto, to the escape pods, to Konto, then back to the suit again.
He wanted to ask more questions, but all those head movements had made him feel quite ill, so he concentrated on not throwing up, instead.
“Aha!” said Konto, prising open the next locker. His excitement was short-lived, though. What he’d thought was a child-sized suit turned out to be some kind of bag with an oxygen-feed built in. Probably for transporting pets.
Konto moved onto the next locker, then stopped. Something niggled at the back of his mind. He sidestepped to the previous locker and unfolded the bag a little. There, emblazoned on the side in red text, were the words: ‘Animal Vac-Pack’.
He thought back to the old woman who’d stopped him earlier. She’d told him one of these things would ‘be useful’—but how had she known?
She had to be a nun. It was the only explanation. She’d foreseen this whole thing. That would also explain the feeling of unease he’d had when she’d approached him. Nuns were some of the most highly-trained killers in the galaxy, and far more dangerous than they looked.
Still, they were generally trustworthy—assuming you weren’t on their hit-list—and most of them had a soft spot for kids. Konto made a mental note to thank the woman, if he ever saw her again, then took out the bag and tossed it onto the floor.
“What’s that for, Mr Garr?” Larry asked.
Konto took the EVAC suit from the boy’s arms. “That, Larry,” he said. “Is for you.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Vac-Pack with Larry inside had been heavy, and, in hindsight, Konto had wished he’d waited until they were closer to the door before ordering the boy to climb inside. Instead, he’d ended up having to drag the fonking bag several hundred feet across the floor, the effort of it making his visor steam up.
Now they were out of the airlock, though, the bag weighed nothing at all. Konto had the strap hooked onto his belt, pulling it behind him as he picked his way down the outside of the station. Larry was hunched up inside it, floating around with his knees pulled up to his stomach and a look on his face that told anyone who saw it how much he disapproved of this.
There was no sound but the echo of Konto’s own breathing inside the mask, nothing to see but the stars above. Kroysh, he’d missed this. For years, he’d told himself he didn’t need it, that he could settle down, stay planet-side, take a job, but … Kroysh. He’d missed this.
He was gazing out at the abyss of space when he saw two Zertex transport ships come out of warp. They appeared one after another, decelerating rapidly, then banking towards the landing decks on impulse thrusters.
The shock-troopers had arrived.
“Shizz,” Konto spat. He bounded on down the side of the station until he reached the floor he was looking for. He stopped, then was nudged forwards a step when Larry’s bag bumped into his back.
He hoped the kid was OK. There was a little porthole window in the Vac-Pack, but it was on the side, and there was no time to turn the bag around to check. He was still moving around inside there, so Konto took that as a sign that the seal had held, at least.
The handle that opened the airlock hatch was large and bright red, designed to be easy to see and operate by someone in an EVAC suit. Konto took hold of it and wasted a moment collecting himself. How the next twenty seconds played out would depend on how deep into the station’s security systems the Xandrie had got. Hacking the elevators would be relatively easy. Getting access to the escape pod systems—and, by extension, their security cameras—would be much more difficult.
If the Xandrie had seen Konto head outside, they’d know they were coming. As soon as Konto and Larry stepped through the inner airlock, the gangsters would be waiting, and there’d be very little that Konto could do about it.
Still, they couldn’t hang around out here forever.
Konto pulled the lever. The outer airlock door opened, and Konto swam inside, pulling Larry along with him.
Once they were both in, Konto closed the door and pulled himself along the wall to the inner door. He couldn’t spot anyone through the porthole window, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Only one way to find that out.
When Konto activated the door controls, oxygen flooded the chamber. Gravity returned quickly but gradually, pulling him and the Vac-Pack gently towards the floor. Konto threw off the EVAC suit quickly, and drew his blaster just as a light above the door turned from red to green and the lock released.
Nudging the door open, Konto risked a peek. The evacuation room stood silent and empty. He listened, but the only sounds were his own heartbeat and the rustling of Larry moving around in the bag.
“OK, hold on, I’m coming,” Konto said, tucking the blaster back into his belt. He peeled aside the Vac-Pack’s seal and unzipped the bag. A little waterfall of vomit trickled through the gap, then Larry exploded upwards and leaped out of the carrier like a scalded yursk.
His shoes had been painted in puke but, miraculously, the rest of him seemed to have escaped mostly untouched. He must’ve batted the barf bubbles away just before gravity had returned, then jumped free before the
stuff had a chance to slosh back down to his end.
Larry gulped in a series of big breaths, his eyes wide and staring, his hair slicked to his red face with sweat. “Mr Garr, promise me we’ll never do that again!” he said.
“I promise to try,” said Konto. He led the way out of the airlock, headed for the door leading out onto the main deck. According to the schematics on the tracker, this was a storage level with a large main warehouse space, and some open plan offices near the center. That was where Deenia was, which almost certainly meant that was where the other kids were, too.
And Nobosh, of course. Konto was very much looking forward to catching up with him.
He looked back at Larry and felt a twinge of … something. Guilt, he thought, but that wasn’t fair. He had nothing to feel guilty about. It wasn’t Konto’s fault that Larry’s dad was a no-good shizznod who’d tried to have his own son kidnapped so he could claim the insurance. The boy deserved to know. He deserved to see what his old man really was.
And yet …
Konto grunted, annoyed at himself for wasting time. He stopped, all the same, then spun to face Larry. “Look, kid, this is going to get dangerous,” he said.
“Get dangerous?” said Larry. “You mean it hasn’t been dangerous so far?”
Despite everything, Konto couldn’t stop his mouth twitching into a smile. “Good point, well made,” he admitted. “But I’m going to need you to stay here now. They can’t see you in here. They won’t know where to find you.”
Larry opened his mouth to protest, but then reconsidered. He nodded. “OK, Mr Garr. Whatever you say.”
“Good boy,” said Konto. “Find a corner, stay out of sight. If anyone comes in here, don’t try to fight them, don’t try to do anything clever. Just put your hands up and don’t make any sudden movements. You got that?”
Larry nodded again. “I got it, Mr Garr,” he said. “You’re going to come back for me, though, right? Once you’ve saved everyone?”
“I’ll get the kids safe, then I’ll be back,” Konto said.
“And my dad,” said Larry. “You’ll save him, too, right?”