Hidden Treasure [Pirates of the Galaxy 1] (Siren Publishing Allure)

by K. D. Austin

  “I believe these attackers are Khsharayan,” Arden said. Hanna and Lance could only stare at him for a few minutes.

  “The Khsharayan have been extinct for millennia,” Hanna said.

  “I thought we thought these guys were a splinter group of Galactic Marines, but I guess that was just part of the junk you put in my mind?”

  Arden’s face swiveled to Hanna, and his eyebrows rose questioningly.

  “Yeah. I told him. I had to.”

  “Hmm. Interesting. I’m sure the two of you have an interesting story to tell. But I’ll have to hear it later. I think the Khsharayan have been in hiding all this time waiting to rebuild their empire.”

  “Hiding where?” Lance asked.

  “Why, in plain sight, of course. Who knows? Maybe you’re one of them.”

  Lance did not look amused.

  Hanna stepped between the two men. “Do you really think the Khsharayan still exist? And that they look like humans?”

  Arden nodded. Lance blew out his breath in exasperation. “It really doesn’t matter who they are right now. What matters is getting out of here.”

  “Let’s agree to disagree,” Arden said and led the group deeper into the room. There were two templast chairs around a permaplast table, which was part of the structure itself, erupting from the floor. “You two look like you’ve had a rough time. Sit and rest for a moment while we figure out what to do next.” Arden motioned Hanna and Lance to the chairs.

  As Hanna looked around, she thought the room was very similar to the one in which Lance had killed the Command Trio.

  “The two of you got in here. Do you have a plan for getting us all back out?”

  Lance sat down last. “We’re working on it. We can’t go back the way we came, unless one of us can fly.”

  Lance explained how they’d sneaked back in, and how they had hidden the two hover packs in a storage crate, but had only planned on using them if they couldn’t find Arden. The packs weren’t powerful enough to carry two people.

  “Well, if we can’t go out the back, we’ll have to leave through the front,” Arden said definitively.

  Lance leaned toward the pirate captain. “And how are we supposed to do that, Arden?”

  Arden placed his palms on the permaplast table and leaned his large frame toward Lance. He looked him in the eye.

  “With Hanna’s help, of course. How else?”

  Hanna knew at least part of what he was going to say next.

  “Hanna, you have to hack the Khsharayan—”

  “Let’s just call them GrayMars,” Lance said and quirked a smile at Hanna.

  “Okay. You need to hack the GrayMars’ net, like you did with the…” Arden trailed off looking at Lance.

  “It’s okay. He knows, remember?” Hanna said.

  “Right. Hanna, you’ll need to hack the net here just like you did with the Galactic Marine net.”

  “How’s that going to help? These guys aren’t in ships that we can send off or blow up. Even if we override the Pulsar Tanks and other vehicles they surely brought, there are still dozens of people to deal with.”

  “We don’t need anything that elaborate, Hanna. We just need a distraction that will allow us to get out with the treasure and our lives,” Arden said and smiled.

  “What kind of distraction?” Lance asked.

  Arden thumped Lance’s chair and smiled at Hanna. “I noticed that the GrayMars’ weapons and body armor are made of templast.”

  Hanna couldn’t see what that had to do with her hacking of their net. “So?”

  “Think, Hanna. What did I tell you back on the space station about permaplast? It’s true for templast too.”

  Hanna’s face broke into a slow smile. “So their body armor and weapons are part of their net.”

  “Okay, but what does that matter?” Lance said, looking increasingly irritated. Sitting here talking clearly was not his idea of how to escape this situation alive, but Hanna knew why it mattered.

  “It’s crazy, but it might work,” Hanna said, already working to find a way into the GrayMar net.

  “All right, you two. Someone better fill me in.” Lance’s brow creased in frustration, and redness crept up his neck from underneath his enhancement suit.

  Hanna explained while digging for any weakness in their foreign net. “Their weapons and armor are part of the net.”

  “Yeah. I got that part.”

  “So they become an extension of the people carrying or wearing them. Like your enhancement suit.”

  “I know how the net works, Hanna,” Lance said, the irritation evident in his tone.

  “Sorry. Okay, I can get in the net and disable the weapons. Maybe even use their armor to inhibit their movements.”

  Arden stood up and began pacing. “Good thinking, Hanna. But I don’t think we’ll have time for you to disable all those individual weapons. We’ll need to drop in a virus that’ll take it all down for a time.” His eyes were burning with the plan he was making.

  Hanna nodded. It made sense, but dropping in a virus was risky. If it were detected before it took effect, they’d be in big trouble.

  Hanna nodded. “Okay, but this’ll be dangerous.”

  “Sitting here is dangerous. We’ve got to do something to get out of here with this treasure,” Arden said, continuing to move.

  “Arden’s right, Hanna. Can you do it?”

  “The virus is the easy part. Hacking this net is proving tricky.”

  “You can do it, Hanna. Use your mind. You’re the best hacker in the galaxy,” Arden said and winked at her. Lance looked between Hanna and Arden and cocked his eyebrow. Then smirked. Hanna snarled her nose at him, and he laughed lightly. Arden appeared to miss the entire exchange as he kept pacing.

  “Their net is like nothing I’ve seen before.”

  Hanna continued roaming around the edges of the GrayMar net. She could tell it was there, but she couldn't find any way in. “It’s not really like it’s closed or secured,” she said, talking to herself as much as to Lance or Arden. “It’s more like it’s invisible. I know it’s there only because I can’t see it. I can just see where it should be.”

  Lance nodded, and Arden grunted.

  Hanna jumped up. “Wait! What’s that? A breach!”

  The opening Hanna needed happened to be exactly where she needed it—in the templast. Whoever the GrayMars were, and however they had designed their secure net, they had bought their templast from the same place as everyone else in the galaxy, apparently. That meant Hanna could understand its net. The links to the GrayMars’ templast armor and weapons were flaring on her screen now that she knew to look for it.

  “Whoa! There must be close to a thousand GrayMars in here.”

  “Can you get a virus in?” Arden asked, ignoring Lance and finally stopping his constant pacing.

  “Sure. I just needed a model to get started, and I know exactly what to use.” Hanna used the chair she was sitting on and cloned its internal net structure. Then she used that to connect to what she believed to be a gun being carried down a nearby corridor. It was the closest weapon to them, and if she got a chance to take out only one, might as well take out the closest threat.

  Hanna readied the virus. It was a simple one she’d created a while back to scramble circuits for thirty seconds. She appropriately called it “getaway.” She’d only ever used it in the past to create a distraction. Hanna quickly adjusted the virus time code to five minutes. It still wasn’t a lot of time, but the virus wasn’t likely to stay undetected any longer than that. If Hanna delayed it too long and an automated defense system wiped it out before it could deliver its payload, this plan would be over before it even started. But if all went according to plan, then as soon as the virus took effect, all of the GrayMars’ weapons and armor would malfunction at once.

  “When I drop this in, we need to be ready to move,” Hanna said to her companions. “We’ll have no more than five minutes.”

  Arden moved in besid
e her. She could feel the heat radiating off the man against her bare skin. “Let me in the hack, Hanna. Maybe I can give us a little more time.”

  “Okay, but I have to drop the virus in fifteen seconds. I can’t tell if this hack is being traced by any of the normal methods. Once the virus drops, I’m breaking the connection. I don’t want to be the victim of a back-hack.”

  “Okay,” Arden said, and Hanna patched him into the opening. Manipulating the hack this way on this weird net made Hanna sweat. She only hoped she was hiding the intrusion. If Arden pushed too hard, he’d blow the whole thing.

  “I’m dropping the virus in five…four…three…two…one…”

  As Hanna released the virus, she could tell Arden had tweaked it somehow, but didn’t have time to see what he’d done. She just prayed he hadn’t screwed it up.

  “Wait,” Lance said, suddenly standing. “Arden, where were you going when we showed up?”

  It was a good question, but Hanna didn’t have time to think about it at the moment. As the virus entered the system, something wasn’t right. Whatever Arden had done had screwed up the virus. It wasn’t attacking the templast.

  Her focus on her hack was interrupted by Lance’s angry cry. Hanna pulled her eyes away from her HUD and couldn’t believe what she was seeing. There was too much going on at once.

  Lance was sprawled on the floor. His chair was wedged between him and the permaplast table, which was melting! Not actually melting, but deforming into a shapeless blob on top of the GalMar. Arden spun away from Lance. Clearly, he had trapped the man in this position for some reason. Hanna jumped up and tried to pull Lance free, but he was stuck fast. Arden grabbed Hanna’s arm and pulled her away.

  “Hanna, I don’t have time to explain everything, but we need to get out of here.”

  “What? What about Lance? What are you talking about?”

  “He’s not important, Hanna. You are. We’ve got to get out of here now.”

  Hanna just stared at Arden. Nothing made sense, and her mind was spinning like an out-of-control satellite.

  “But Lance,” Hanna said again, unable to fully process everything that was happening.

  Lance was trying to push the chair away, but the table had warped completely around it now, bowing out the chair’s legs and pinning Lance. The deforming permaplast would soon envelop his legs also.

  “Hanna, you know as well as I do that, given the chance, he would kill you. Leave him. We’ve got to get out of here with the treasure. Now!”

  Hanna looked at Lance and then looked back at Arden. This was not happening.

  “We can’t leave him.”

  “Why not, Hanna?” Arden asked her with what sounded like strained patience. “You know as well as I do that the only reason he hasn’t killed you already is because we programmed him not to. He’s not important, Hanna. This treasure is.” He emphasized his statement by waving it in her face before stuffing it into a pocket on his thigh.

  “The fate of the entire galaxy will be determined by whether this artifact leaves here with us. This is more important than you, or me, or Lance, or anyone else. This is the last remnant of a once-great civilization. We own it now, Hanna. We’ll be set for life.”

  Hanna stammered as her brain tried to keep up. “It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense!” Hanna pointed at Lance’s increasingly desperate struggles.

  “What do you want? We’re pirates. We found our treasure. He’s a GalMar. His purpose is finished. Now come on. This whole place will collapse soon.”

  Hanna’s head spiraled like the galaxy itself. On the surface, what Arden said was true, but she had come to think of Lance as more than a GalMar. He had saved her life several times today already. Maybe it was the programming. Maybe it wasn’t. Of course, Arden had also saved her from certain death, too. Her head felt like she had been kicked again. Somewhere in the fog that was her brain, Hanna realized what about the trackers had been nagging at her. Lance, Salvor, and she all still had theirs. Arden may have his, but he had created the trackers. He could’ve given them to anyone he wanted. She suddenly doubted it was bad luck or coincidence that had allowed the GrayMars to be constantly on their tail as they had escaped earlier. They had been tracked the entire time.

  “You called for the ambush. You called the GrayMars! You tried to kill us!”

  “They’re Khsharayan, Hanna. And they’re trying to kill all of us. They want to reclaim their empire.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’ve been working with them for years, but today they made the mistake of trying to double-cross me. Now we’re out of time. Are you coming with me?”

  Hanna looked at Arden and then over to Lance struggling under the weight of the sagging table. The reality of what Arden had just said sank in and sat heavily in her stomach. He had been working with the aliens for years to overthrow humanity. And now he was angry because they had double-crossed him. Her mind also noted some important holes in the story. If the GrayMars were really Khsharayan, then the item he held wasn’t the last bit of Khsharayan tech. But it was definitely something the aliens wanted badly enough to kill for it. And Arden wanted it bad enough to sacrifice his own crew to acquire it.

  She realized whom she could actually trust in this room. Hanna ran to Lance, grabbed him under the arms, and tried to pull the man free.

  “I’m not leaving without him,” Hanna said with determination.

  Arden growled. “So be it.”

  The giant man’s left leg shot out suddenly, and Hanna’s legs flew out from under her. She landed hard on her butt and tumbled over backward. Arden moved to kick her, but Lance’s right hand swung out and hit Arden squarely in the stomach. As Arden doubled over, Lance twisted his arms around the pirate captain’s nearest leg, trying to pull him into a lock. But Arden had too much of an advantage in position. He slammed his free boot into Lance’s hands, causing the GalMar to release, and dashed out the door.

  Arden had to duck even lower than usual to clear the door, and Hanna realized that it was about half a meter shorter than it should have been. That’s when Hanna finally understood what was happening. The whole room was melting, with them in it.

  Chapter 36

  Hanna had had far too many near-death experiences in the past few days, but this one had to be the most ridiculous—flattened by a collapsing permaplast room, something that should be impossible. The door Arden had jumped through was getting smaller by the second. Hanna grabbed the remaining chair and lunged toward the opening, wedging the templast chair into the shrinking doorframe.

  Snap! The chair shattered. The doorway completely collapsed. The rest of the room was following quickly.

  “We’ve got to do something. Fast!” Lance said.

  “You got any ideas?”

  Hanna scrambled over to Lance. The GalMar had managed to free himself most of the way from the chair-table trap. Hanna helped him the rest of the way out, and they scrambled to the side of the room. The ceiling was only about a half meter from Hanna’s head now, and Lance already had to hunch.

  Lance spun Hanna to look at him. “We’ve got about thirty seconds until we become pancakes. We need some of your impossible talent right now.”

  Hanna’s mind spun at both Lance’s compliment of her hacking prowess and the insanity of everything that had just happened. Why had she thrown her lot in with Lance instead of Arden? She still wasn’t sure, except that she felt responsible for Lance’s life since the mind-hack. And though she pushed it from her mind, she thought she might be falling for this man, even though she knew his life was a lie she’d created. None of that would matter if this room collapsed on top of them.

  “Lance, your enhancement suit has an electropulse, right?”

  “Yeah, but what good—”

  “Just point it at the wall and fire when I say to,” Hanna said, working furiously on a desperate hack.

  They were both forced to crouch and scurry to the wall.

  Fifteen seconds.


  Hanna pulled up Lance’s personal net on her HUD—it was fairly automatic since she’d basically created its present form—and found the controls for his electropulse.

  Ten seconds.

  Hanna routed as much power to it as she could from both her suit and his.

  Five seconds.

  Permaplast relied on electric signals to take a solid form, so in theory, this could work. Hanna didn’t have time to even hope. She focused Lance’s electropulse into a cone pattern.

  “Now! Fire now!”

  The air crackled. The hair rose on Hanna’s arms.

  BAM!

  A brilliant cone-shaped blast of electricity slammed into the wall in front of Lance. When her vision cleared, Hanna saw that a meter-wide disc-shaped section of the melting wall had turned solid again.

  Now lying prone on his side, Lance kicked the solid section, which flew away into the darkness beyond. Immediately, the liquefied wall around it began filling in the hole.

  “Go!” Hanna pushed at Lance.

  He dove through the hole, which was already closing again. Hanna scrambled to her feet and tried to follow him, but she wasn’t quick enough. The wall collapsed on her left heel.

  “My foot!”

  “Hold on,” Lance called.

  He raced back and blasted the wall with a very weak electropulse. As the wall liquefied slightly, Lance gave Hanna’s leg a painful jerk. It came free with a sickening snap. A wave of nausea rolled through her, and Hanna screamed to keep from puking.

  Lance cradled her in his arms. “Sorry, Hanna. Are you okay?”

  Hanna gritted her teeth against the pain and realized they were not out of danger yet. “It’s okay. Better than being trapped. Thanks.”

  Lance shook his head at her poor attempt at humor. “Can you stand? We have to get away from here.”

  He was right. The permaplast virus was spreading fast. It hadn’t affected just the room they had been trapped in. The entire complex was becoming a massive, formless glob. What had once been rooms, doors, and hallways was now all flowing together into a solid mass. The permaplast was returning to its original formless state and immediately rehardening into a solid. Luckily for Hanna and Lance, they were standing in a carved-out section of the obsidian cliff. The room they had been in had been attached to the cliff at this point, and they now stood in what had been an anchor point before the permaplast collapsed. Their current danger, though, came from the levels above that were running down the cliff.