“A thing or two about—?” Asa stared at him, flabbergasted. “I don’t think you understand everything that I’m capable of.”
Lilli crossed her arms. “Either they come with you to keep you honest, or you’ll never find me.”
“You can’t keep using that threat,” growled Asa.
“I can and I will,” she responded.
Asa looked like he wanted to strangle someone. He looked to Vidal and Maurus for backup, but although Vidal appeared uncertain, she didn’t say anything. Maurus just shrugged. “We can keep the Werikosa away from them.”
Asa stepped back from the table. “Fine. Mina, you will guard Parker at all times on this mission. Never leave his side. I’ll handle Ksenia and the Werikosa by myself.”
Mina nodded. “The Storrian defense Fleet appears to be moving in on the Kuyddestor now, Asa. We should leave immediately.”
They rushed through the hallways, skipping the elevator but somehow ending up at the docking bay in less than a minute. They had been in a different part of the ship than where they first met Asa, but after the long walk to get there, it had seemed to Chase like they must still be far from the docking bay. He looked at the walls, wondering if it were possible to build a ship with shifting hallways.
The vehicle they boarded was different than the transport vessel that Chase, Parker, and Lilli had arrived on. This one was open from the piloting console all the way through to the back, with seats lining the walls on either side of the long midsection, and an impressive array of blaster rifles, armored vests, and other advanced battle gear hanging overhead. Ksenia sat in the passenger seat closest to the controls, watching everyone else with her enigmatic eyes.
Chase, Parker, and Lilli chose three seats together near the middle of the vehicle, while Asa headed to sit at the controls with Jericho. Mina took the seat beside Parker. “Starting your watch already, are you?” he asked her sarcastically. She didn’t answer, and he shifted in his seat toward Chase and began to whisper. “So I’ve been thinking about the whole thing with my parents. Why Asa kept me hidden away all those years. He’s acting weird, right?”
Chase frowned and shrugged. “When is he not weird?”
“Well, it made me wonder … what if he’s my dad? Maybe something happened to my mom, so he hid me away and fed me this lie about being an orphan. I mean, where else would I get this kind of smarts? I’m the best hacker on an entire Fleet ship. You think maybe I’m the son of a genetically engineered soldier, too?”
Chase hesitated before answering. He had to admit, it kind of made sense. But he could also think of a million reasons why Parker couldn’t possibly be Asa’s offspring, starting with the fact that Asa had seemed to be against any of the soldiers having children. And suddenly he thought he understood why Parker didn’t fight the idea of staying with Asa. “You could be right…” he said cautiously.
“I think I am.” Parker paused and nodded. “I feel it.” Beside him, Mina said nothing.
Maurus and Vidal were scanning the armory affixed to the vehicle’s interior, talking quietly with each other. “Take a seat,” Asa called to them, as the vehicle’s engine powered up, rising a few feet off the docking bay floor. As the outer doors of the docking bay rolled open, he slid screens around on the console, speaking in a low voice with Jericho about their route.
“What kind of blasters are these?” asked Maurus. “I don’t recognize any of them. Are they your creation?”
Without looking back at Maurus, he said, “Annihilation radiation is an outdated technology for blasters. These are based on xenon particles, and they are lighter, charge faster, and have a much more accurate firing radius.”
“I’ll bet the warlords just love them,” Maurus muttered.
“Please sit down, Lieutenant,” came Jericho’s mild voice. “We’re about to make the first fold.”
As the galaxy collapsed around them, Chase closed his eyes and tried to prepare himself for what they were about to attempt. Everything would be determined in the next few hours—whether they were able to stop the attack on Storros, prevent the Destrier from blowing up the Kuyddestor, and save the crew. If they didn’t all die trying.
But even if they did succeed, the price would be leaving the Kuyddestor behind and going with Asa. With a deep, pulling sadness Chase realized that his brief time aboard the starship had come to an end. All the hours spent laughing with the crew in the officers’ lounge, the confessions he’d shared with Dr. Bishallany and the safety he’d felt in the presence of Captain Lennard, not to mention his budding new friendship with Analora—it was all over. He thought he’d been unhappy aboard the Kuyddestor, but the unhappiness was his alone, and around that the ship had become his home. And now he had to leave it all and start over fresh once again. Chase watched the back of Asa’s head, the way he interacted with Jericho in short, clipped phrases. Nika was right that he acted more like an android than a human most of the time, except for those moments when a glimmer of his deep capacity for anger came briefly to the surface.
Everything on Asa’s ship had happened so quickly, Chase had barely even begun to process all he’d learned about the seven genetically engineered soldiers—now down to three. His parents had once been part of that team. Now that they were gone, it was no surprise that Asa felt responsible for Chase and Lilli. But did he want them to come with him because he felt linked by their shared background and wanted to protect them, or because he was fascinated on a purely analytical level by what had happened when his teammates had mixed their enhanced DNA? Lilli was right—they didn’t know Asa at all. She sat beside Chase, arms crossed and eyes far away in thought. He noted how the tension in her face seemed to lessen the closer they got to the Kuyddestor. He wished he could ask his parents what they thought of Asa, and why they’d chosen to keep their distance from him while making Captain Lennard a member of the family.
“Alright, there’s the ship,” said Asa. “It looks like the Storrians have begun their offensive.”
“I don’t see anything,” said Parker, leaning forward in his seat and craning his neck toward the front.
“Jericho, put the zoom up on the front screen.”
The Kuyddestor came into crisp view in the window. Regular pinprick bursts of fire from its sides showed where the Werikosa were releasing its missiles, but the screen wasn’t wide enough to show if the missiles were still being intercepted over Storros. Fiery bursts from the Storrian defense squad’s counterattack exploded along the hull, leaving blackened stretches of metal that made Chase’s heart stop.
“This is going to be harder than I thought,” said Asa.
“It isn’t going to work,” said Vidal. “Pull back.”
“No,” said Asa. “This just means we won’t have time to cut through the Kuyddestor’s hull. We need a faster point of access.”
While Asa pulled up schematics on the control panel, Maurus and Vidal conferred quickly in the back of the cabin. Maurus raised his head. “One of the thruster access hatches is probably your best bet, but trying to open one from the outside would probably be as difficult as cutting the hull.”
Asa looked back and found Lilli seated along the back wall. He gestured for her to come join him, and Chase got up and nosed in.
“Can you open an access hatch from inside the ship?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t even know where to find it—it’ll take me too long.”
“Can you find someone who can help you?”
“Everyone from the crew is locked up.”
But there was one person who wasn’t locked up, and she knew the ship as well as any engineer. “What about Analora?” asked Chase. “You said she’s hiding in the walls. She knows the ship as well as anyone. How quickly can you find her?”
Without a word, Lilli dropped her head. Chase imagined the real Lilli, climbing down out of her hiding place and running inside the walls of the ship. But more quickly than he expected, Lilli raised her head again and nodded. “Okay. She doesn’t know exa
ctly where they are, but if you tell her which quadrant of the ship, she said it won’t be hard to figure out.”
Maurus had moved forward and stood over Chase. “Tell her to go to the thrusters in sector 119.”
“Be careful,” said Chase.
“Be fast,” said Asa.
Lilli dipped her head again, and they waited in anxious silence. Chase watched her like a hawk, flinching every time she tensed a muscle or moved her head a centimeter. At one point she uttered a low cry of surprise. At almost the same time, Vidal cursed under her breath. Chase glanced up and gasped at what he saw in the window.
More of the Storrian defenders had arrived, and were launching a concentrated attack on the Kuyddestor, setting the entire side of the ship aflame. Maurus laid a hand on Chase’s shoulder. “The ship’s shields will absorb most of the damage.”
“At least this will distract the Werikosa onboard,” added Asa.
Bright light lit up the side of the window as a cluster of Storrian ships exploded. In a row, they all started to explode, one after the other, like someone was picking them off. In less than a minute, half of the Storrian defenders were gone, their flaming remains drifting away from the Kuyddestor. The rest had backed off, vanishing to safer coordinates.
Asa placed a hand on Lilli’s shoulder. “Lilli, it’s now or never. We need to make our move.”
Lilli looked up. “We’re at the spot, but…”
“What?”
“Analora’s having trouble with the panel. There’s a security code to open it.”
“Tell her to try code 0990,” came Vidal’s voice. Chase glanced back at her. She was staring at Lilli with a slight frown, but he could tell she was picking up on what was happening.
Lilli dropped her head again. “That did it,” she mumbled. “Panel armed for opening.”
“Jericho,” said Asa.
Jericho’s hand slid across the panel. “Prepare for fold.”
Chase had just enough time to grab the back of Lilli’s chair, but the fold was an exceedingly gentle one. When he looked up, the hull of the Kuyddestor hovered mere feet away from their cruiser.
“Sons of Hesta,” muttered Maurus, looking out with astonishment. “You really did it.”
“Activating latch systems,” said Jericho. A series of mechanical sounds came from the back of the cruiser, and a very loud THUH-THUNK. “Testing latch. And secure.”
Maurus led the way to the back of the cruiser, where a wide door was already sliding open to reveal the cold gray metal of the Kuyddestor. The outline of a round hatch was cut into the wall.
“Everyone make sure you’re armed. No, not you, Ms. Oriolo.” Ksenia looked like she was about to protest, but Asa had already turned to Lilli. “Tell Analora she can—”
Before he could finish the sentence, the hatch blew off the wall, knocking Maurus to the floor, and passing right through Chase, who found himself standing with his ankles vanishing into the middle of the steel panel. Looking around, he saw that Lilli had vanished from their midst, but she was already leaning out of the access hatch of the Kuyddestor. He squinted at her, wondering if he was finally seeing her real self or another copy. Part of him hoped it was still a copy. She was safer that way.
Asa and Vidal lifted the panel off Maurus, who looked slightly dazed, a trickle of blood coming from his hairline.
“Hurry up,” said Asa. “We need to get past the safety doors as soon as poss—”
Before he could finish, a blast shook the entire cruiser, shifting it an inch off the latch. With a terrible roar, the vacuum of space sucked at the entire room, bending the panel beside the latch and pulling at them all.
“Someone’s firing at us! Get out!” roared Asa, pulling Maurus off the floor. Vidal grabbed Chase by the arm and pushed him ahead of her, so that he was the first one through the doorway.
Inside the Kuyddestor it was almost completely pitch black, the only light coming from Asa’s ship. Chase remembered that they were somewhere inside the thruster compartment. He could see Lilli, but it took him a moment to spot Analora standing beside the operations panel. It hadn’t been more than a day since he’d last seen her, but she looked pale and worn. Chase grabbed her hand and squeezed it, and she threw her arms around him in a quick, tight hug. “I’m so scared,” she whispered in his ear.
The others were stumbling through the hole and into the compartment, Mina bringing up the rear. “Keep going—we have to get out and seal this room up,” said Maurus. “If they hit the ship one more time, we’ll all get sucked out.”
Analora led the way through the darkness, and they came out through a door and into a red-lit hallway. The overhead lights were flashing, and an incessant, monotonous siren blared. Asa slammed the door once they’d passed through and touched the communicator by his ear, speaking in a voice too low to hear.
“Who fired on us?” Maurus yelled over the siren. “Was that the Storrians?”
Asa shook his head. “I’m not sure. I sent Jericho back to our holding position; he’s trying to figure it out.”
Maurus stopped Chase as he and the others followed Asa into the stairwell. “There’s probably going to be some fighting up ahead, and I need your promise that when I tell you to hide, you’ll hide.”
Chase opened his mouth to protest. Maurus knew he couldn’t get hurt—why wouldn’t he let Chase help?
“Chase, you’re the leader. You have to keep the others out of danger, okay?” Maurus gave him a piercing look, and Chase realized if he went charging into a firefight, Parker or Lilli or Analora might follow. And he’d never forgotten the lesson he learned when Parker almost died from a poisoned spike thrown from the back of a Goxar: He himself might be immune to harm, but he couldn’t protect anyone.
“Head for the engine room!” shouted Vidal, taking the lead. Single-file, they ran after him down the corridor and up a narrow flight of metal stairs to the engine room level, their footsteps echoing against the low blare of the siren.
They had just passed the second stairwell door when Asa stopped and looked around. “Where’s Ksenia?”
A moment later, the stairwell door exploded.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Werikosa soldiers poured into the hallway through the blown-out door, blaster rifles perched on their shoulders. Maurus and Vidal had been in the lead, but this placed them farthest away from the soldiers, with everyone else in between. Closest was Analora, who screamed and stumbled back away from the array of blaster nozzles in her face.
Chase pushed his sister back against the wall and started running forward to create a distraction. In a blur of movement, someone else got there first, shoving Analora to the ground. It was Mina, who grabbed the nozzle of a blaster and tore it away from its owner, using it to knock away a row of Werikosa before she turned and dashed for Parker, slinging him over her shoulder like he weighed nothing.
But as swift and strong as Mina was, it was Asa whom Chase couldn’t take his eyes off of. Smoother than an android, faster than any human Chase had ever seen, Asa seemed to be doing six different things at any given moment. He took out a whole row of Werikosa with his blaster while leaping over one of their fallen comrades, grabbing a light fixture and using it to spin around and take out two combatants in two different locations.
This was what Asa was built for. As Chase watched him singlehandedly decimate the contingent of Werikosa soldiers, a series of questions flashed through his mind. Had the Fleet put Asa into battle? Had they used his parents for this too? He suddenly had a very different image of who they might have been, not a pair of frightened runaways like the captain had once described, but a pair of dead-talented, cold-eyed killing machines.
Something rolled into the middle of the floor with a glassy sound.
“Cover!” screamed Maurus, diving away from the object.
A second later, a sharp, deafening POP sounded along with a flash of blinding light, and immediately the hallway began to fill up with thick, acrid smoke. Chase heard a girl’
s wail and rushed toward the sound. He almost tripped into Analora, who had crawled over to the wall. Her hands were clapped against her head, and Chase pulled them away, smearing the blood that trickled from one of her ears.
Wrapping an arm around her shoulder, he pulled her up and ran away from the explosion. The smoke was spreading around them thick as pudding, and so he nearly crashed into Lilli, who mutely grabbed his wrist and led him and Analora over to a place where she’d pried a panel of the wall free. They climbed in after her and scuttled through the duct until they came to the inside wall space. As Chase slid out, he was relieved to see that Parker was already there, Mina crouched at his side. It was dark, but there were no red emergency lights inside the wall, and no siren.
“We have to get to the engine room,” said Parker. “The computers there are the best place for me to start looking for the trojan.”
Analora gazed ahead for a moment, thinking. “We can’t get all the way there, but I know how to get us pretty close.” She took off at a jog, and they ran single-file through the tight corridor until she stopped short in front of another crawl space and cried out in despair. “This was one of Dany’s holes. Somebody patched it!” A round piece of metal was welded onto the end of the crawl space. Analora took a utility knife from her pocket and tried to jam it through the weld, and after a few strikes she found a weak spot, wiggling the blade in between the metal patch and the wall. When she tried to pry the patch away, her blade snapped, and after a stunned pause, she threw the knife to the floor with a frustrated sob.
“Let me try,” said Chase. If there were weak spots on the weld, and it was done from the outside, enough force from the inside might be able to break it free. Taking a deep breath, he ducked his head and phased through the patch into the crawl space. Analora’s cry of surprise carried through the thin metal.
Feeling his way around the black space, Chase lay on his back and positioned his feet on the patch. He worried that between his already elevated adrenaline level and the impact from hitting the metal, his feet might just phase uselessly through it, so he took a few moments to make himself focus. He envisioned how his heels would crash against the weak spot. After a couple breaths, he slammed his feet into the wall.
Lost Planet 02 - The Stolen Moon Page 21