Shadow Run

by Michael Miller

One second, it had been behind us, as solid as could be. The next, it was a gaping hole, revealing the breathtaking mountains outside and, impossibly, the Kaitan listing like a drunken insect. However Telu was piloting it, it wasn’t very well.

  And yet her limited abilities were enough to direct the open cargo ramp toward us…from which Eton launched himself like a meteor, framed by the early-morning rays of the sun.

  A muscular giant of a meteor. The ship bucked in the turbulence, and he used that as a springboard to fly across twenty feet of open air, crashing like a missile into the guards rushing for me. They scattered in all directions like shrapnel. The only one still standing nearby swiped at Eton with a baton. The hit landed, and thousands of volts of electricity sparked up the rod into his body.

  He shrugged it off as if it tickled. With a growl, he latched onto the hapless man with both hands and lifted him bodily over his head. As half of the guards paused to stare, slack-jawed, he threw him directly into the other half, who were bringing their photon rifles to bear. They went down in a pile of flailing arms and legs. He roared, his voice incoherent with rage.

  “Eton!” I shouted in warning, as one of the downed guards leapt to his feet, leaving his stun baton where it lay and pulling out a knife instead.

  It was too fast for Eton to turn, but not too fast for me. As the man threw himself at Eton’s back, I propelled myself into the fastest spin kick I could muster. My foot connected solidly, and the guard collapsed in a heap, clutching his chest.

  Eton and I fell upon the group together then, driven by a similar anger. Eton’s moves were brutal and somehow beautiful. He darted out of harm’s way with a dancer’s grace, blocked, and then countered with the force of a mass driver. I was already acquainted with how nimble he was, but to watch him put that to use against multiple opponents was nothing short of awe-inspiring.

  Not that I had much opportunity to watch. I had my own crowd to control. I let them come at me, inviting their blows, and hammered their batons with my Disruption Blades. As the batons’ charges winked out from the interference, I stepped in with elbows and fists to knock the guards staggering. I got lucky with two, dropping them to the floor in a daze, but this was temporary at best. The electronics in some of the batons fried and stayed dead, but others fired back to life. If I tried to incapacitate this many with the hilts or flats of my blades, it would get ugly.

  “Get her to the ship!” I yelled at Eton.

  He spun to snatch Qole up off the ground as though she weighed nothing. “Where’s Arjan?” he yelled back at me. “Basra searched all night!”

  Please forgive me, Qole.

  “I don’t know. I’m going to figure it out, but you need to get out of here before the Air Guard arrives!”

  Eton was no doubt fond of Arjan, but if there was anything I could trust, it was that he would protect Qole at any cost. Even if Arjan was the cost. I didn’t stop to watch if he’d take my advice. I turned back to the guards still on their feet after Eton’s assault. Four. Too many.

  “Stand down,” I ordered. “It’s not worth it. You can tell my father you didn’t want to hit my royal face,” I added bitterly.

  I recognized one of the guards I had sent away earlier in the hallways, a kid barely old enough to wear the uniform.

  “I’m sorry, my prince, but your father is the king, not you,” he replied, and three others dove for me, batons in hand.

  We met in a staccato burst of swords-upon-sticks. Electricity arced between us as the batons died after engaging with my blades. I worked in a furious defensive pattern, parrying the batons again and again, until I trapped one between my swords. I kicked one guard in the face, sending him staggering into another, and then with a twist of my wrists I wrenched the baton into the third guard. It flickered just as he tried to knock it away, and he dropped to the ground, twitching.

  Three down. But the kid was no longer in sight.

  I whipped around. Qole was lying on the Kaitan’s ramp, where Eton was grappling with the young guard. The kid fell back, pulling out his blaster and leveling it with trembling hands. Eton shrugged and, faster than the eye could follow, pulled out a subcompact and blew his head off.

  I froze in midsprint, staring as his body crumpled and rolled, falling onto the Atrium floor. I didn’t have any emotion outside of horror—simple, irreversible horror.

  I wasn’t given any time to process it. “Where’s Arjan?” Basra yelled, appearing at the top of the ramp and sounding nearly frantic, while Eton scooped up Qole again. “We can’t leave him!”

  I looked over my shoulder. “I don’t know!” More guards were pouring in to reinforce the last few. I shook my head, then reached for my comm as I closed the remaining distance between us. “Telu, you have to take off now, now, now. Head north!” I sheathed my blades the second before I shoved Eton, sending him farther up the ramp with Qole in his arms.

  I was only planning to make sure they were safely aboard before going back to find Arjan and face the consequences with my father, try to convince him and Rubion to return to reason and decency, but one of Eton’s hands closed around my wrist. At first I thought it might have been his military training to leave no one behind, but then I saw his face.

  “What are you doing?” I yelled at him.

  He gave me a grim smile and shouted over the roar of the engines. “Making sure you don’t get away with this. They have Arjan, we have you.”

  The next moment, we were a hundred feet over the citadel, then a thousand, and then we were skimming over mountaintops, heading far away from my home.

  Collecting my wits felt like gathering fallen snow back into clouds. And in fact, by the time I succeeded in fully returning to my own mind, snow was billowing outside the main viewport of the Kaitan, backed by a heavy sky that turned the daylight gray.

  For a disorienting moment, I thought we were back on Alaxak. But the harsh details of my surroundings made me realize I wasn’t hallucinating, wherever we were. I lay on a cold bench on the bridge with fur blankets piled over me and the remnants of the Shadow-inspired gown still stuck to my chest and shoulders. I gazed at mountains outside that were defined, sharp, and unrecognizable. Not home.

  Then I saw Nev and Telu both in front of the control console, Telu in the captain’s chair and Nev bent next to her, like they’d piloted through a team effort, which struck me as indefinably surreal. Why were they piloting? Snippets of the previous evening came back to me in blasts, as if from a photon rifle. I was pretty sure that I’d seen more than a few of those firing last night, and that the shots had been aimed at me. I’d been captured, but I’d somehow gotten out, and Nev and Telu had helped me.

  The others were nowhere to be seen. If I’d had to guess, I would have put Eton up in the mass-driver turret, Basra down at his station monitoring comms, and Arjan…Arjan should have been piloting in my place, not Telu.

  “Arjan!” I sat bolt upright, knocking the furs away. Every part of my body ached, but that didn’t stop me.

  Telu spun, and Nev was kneeling at my side in an instant. He grabbed my hand and ran his thumb over the back of it.

  “It’s okay, you’re safe…-ish.” He cast a glance toward the viewport.

  “Where?”

  He knew me well enough to be specific and began rattling off coordinates, which I admittedly didn’t understand. “We’re in the northernmost quadrant of Luvos, just off the pole,” he added. “You’ve been out for hours. The terrain is inhospitable and scrambled by drone interference, and we flew in low enough that Telu could hide our signal. We’ve escaped the reach of the Air Guard. The drones shouldn’t bother us, though some of them are moving more than they should be, deactivated though they supposedly are.”

  I didn’t care about drones. “Where’s Arjan?”

  A grimace like I’d stabbed him flashed across his face. “I don’t know, we had to leave him—Qole!”

  I was up before he could stop me. My muscles cried out in protest, but my memories of Arjan came back t
o me with far more agony.

  “You left him?”

  But it hadn’t just been him. I’d left him too. We all had.

  “I’m so sorry,” Nev said. “I was going to go back to find him, but—”

  His apologies and explanations faded to the background as the image of my brother’s eye socket sprang to the front of my mind. We left him, we left him….The pain was so strong that I could barely gasp for breath. My head felt light, and I couldn’t get enough air. We left him. A high buzzing rang in my ears as I tried to suck more air in. We left him.

  “You’re hyperventilating, Qole.”

  But we left him. Arjan had been tortured, then abandoned. For so long I’d tried to protect him from his fears, but now I’d left him in the worst of nightmares. Arjan, Arjan, forgive me, we left you, please forgive me. And then, when I finally caught a breath, the pressure in my chest, neck, face, released in a wrenching sob. It ripped through me. I felt shredded. Like I’d never be whole again.

  Nev seized my arm, trying to pull me back down to the bench.

  And with that, I snapped back into myself. I looked at his hand, then at him. “Let me go.”

  He did, luckily, so I didn’t have to make him. If Nev had gotten me out, he’d also helped leave Arjan. He was the reason we’d come to Luvos, after all. For a split second, I felt like tearing him apart with my bare hands, but the devastation on his face stopped me.

  I straightened my spine, wiping my tears on the back of my hand. “Telu, get everyone on deck,” I said. “And please get me some real blasted clothes.”

  Telu shot Nev a glance, and he nodded. He moved back over to the console to keep track of the data feeds while she slipped away from the bridge. She soon returned with a folded stack of leathers and thermals.

  “I’ll be back with Eton and Basra,” she said, and ducked back out.

  I looked at the clothes on the bench and then at Nev’s back. There was nothing else for it, and I was beyond caring. He stayed facing away while I clawed off the remnants of the ragged dress. Afterward, I yanked on a pair of leather leggings and a tank top, followed by a fur-lined jacket and boots. It wasn’t cold enough for more, though I almost wished it were. I craved the protective layers.

  Nev seemed to know when I was done changing, because he glanced back at me. “Qole, I didn’t know about Arjan until—”

  “Save it,” I snapped.

  We were spared from having to say anything else by the arrival of the rest of the crew. Maybe Nev wanted to speak more, but I didn’t, not to him. Telu, followed by Eton and Basra, filed onto the bridge.

  They all looked at me with an intensity I’d never seen, each in their own way. Telu seemed like she wanted to both cry and scream along with me. Eton stared as if I were bleeding out in front of him, and he didn’t know how to save me. Basra…on the surface, Basra seemed indifferent, back to a more neutral appearance with his usual androgynous attire. But in his eyes, I caught a flash of the same depthless rage that burned in my own core.

  In that instant, I knew none of them would disagree with what I was about to say. “We have to go back for Arjan.”

  “Tell us something we don’t know,” Telu said.

  “I’ll tell you something I don’t know.” I sat down harder on the bench than I meant to. Whatever way my anger empowered me, my body was still exhausted. “And that’s how we’re supposed to go about it.”

  “I know how,” Eton said, as blunt as a boot. “We ransom the little prince to get him back.”

  Everyone looked up at that, even me.

  Nev sighed. “That won’t work. I wish it would, but it won’t.”

  Eton rounded on him like a gun ready to fire. “Of course you would say that.”

  “No,” Nev snarled, suddenly angrier than he’d ever been at any of us. “I would have gone back to try to find Arjan and get him out no matter what, but instead—”

  “And you expect me just to believe that?” Eton shouted back.

  Nev got right in his face, his words blistering. “I just betrayed my family, fought my own men at your side and watched them die for you, for Qole, for this crew. You damned well should believe it.”

  Eton opened his mouth to respond, but nothing came out. Not even he could argue with that.

  “Which is why”—Nev scrubbed his hands through his hair and took a step back, as if restraining himself—“my father would likely not make the trade. I’m a traitor, so now Arjan is probably worth more to him than I am. With Qole’s escape, Arjan is the key to my family’s survival.”

  “No,” I said, and he blinked at me. “Arjan is the key to their triumph, not survival. Your uncle told me he already has the formula to make Shadow into a widely usable fuel. He wants us for the same reason as the Treznor-Nirmanas, as far as I could gather. Our abilities.”

  “I can’t believe this.” Nev’s hands turned to fists in his hair, which he dragged over his face, covering his eyes. Almost like he couldn’t look at us. “I trusted them….”

  “Regret your family and your idiotic gullibility on your own time,” Basra said. He didn’t spit the words, but somehow his flat tone was worse. “For now, this is about how you can repay us, repay Arjan.”

  I thought Nev might get angry at that, but instead he took a deep breath and dropped his hands. “As I was saying, my father would likely refuse to deal with you, simply to teach me a lesson if nothing else. He’s fond of those, and I’ve just failed him more thoroughly than he probably thought possible. Even if he agreed”—he swallowed, as if whatever he was about to say was less pleasant than admitting his father was a ruthless piece of scat who wouldn’t bargain for his own son’s life—“then I’m guessing he wouldn’t play fair. He views the family’s success to be nearly as crucial as the family’s survival. He wouldn’t give up Arjan, and at the same time, he would try to get Qole back or kill as many of you as possible, even at risk to me. If we try a trade like that, we lose all element of surprise. We walk right into a trap of his own design, and my father is very, very good at such things.”

  “Is he?” Basra sounded unconcerned. Then, surprisingly, he said, “Nev is right.”

  “Next plan,” I said. A mostly numb part of me didn’t mind leaving that one behind.

  “Full-scale assault?” Eton suggested without missing a beat. Oddly, he didn’t sound too disappointed, either. Maybe Nev had made an impression on him in a way that his fists hadn’t.

  Telu cracked her knuckles, then flexed them as if to type over an infopad. “In more ways than one. I have other ways of hacking them to pieces.”

  Basra smiled coldly. “We have three ways, actually.”

  “Right, all this sounds lovely, but perhaps we should take a moment to consider.” Nev didn’t quail when everyone shot him glares as powerful as energy blasts. “First of all, our full-scale assault will be nothing against the armies of an entire planet. We need to plan. This area is covered in drones that have blaring signals to hide us, and that would respond to a direct threat. We’d be difficult to attack here. The Air Guard didn’t shoot us down in the first place only because my father likely commanded them not to—”

  “Are thanks in order, then?” Basra asked, his tone like a slap to the face.

  “No,” Nev said, as patient as could be. “I mean to say they might be more inclined to shoot us down now that my father’s had time to mull my betrayal. And since we’re no doubt being hunted by every ship in planetary security, it might be wise to lay low while we can.”

  To be fair, I did take a moment to consider his words. I met his eyes. “I’m sorry, but I can’t wait. I saw him, Nev. It was worse than…It was the worst. Who knows what they could be doing to him, even since we left? I just…can’t.” I shook my head, trying to dispel the memory of Arjan’s pain so I could focus, and then I cleared my throat. “So, I have to say this. If any of you want to debark, I will let you off without question, with as many provisions as you might need. Not that it would be completely safe here, but—”r />
  Telu snorted loud enough for everyone. “Whatever. Like any of us would give up on Arjan like that. He’s as good as our brother too, and he’d return for any of us. Now let’s stop wasting time and come up with a plan.”

  I could have hugged her…and surprised myself when I actually did. I stood and threw my arms around her before realizing it. “Thank you,” I breathed into her shoulder.

  She gave me a tearful smile, one that was also as sharp as a knife. I appreciated her edge like never before. We needed it.

  We also needed Basra, I realized, as soon as he spoke up.

  “I have something that might help, a way to hit the Dracortes where it will hurt them the most—their finances. I’ve actually been working on it for over a week in case things went sour here on Luvos,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “However, it necessitates my going back in. If I’d known things would fall out like this, I would have just stayed in the citadel. I’d tried and failed to comm Arjan, and went in to make sure he was all right. I was only able to get a few things in place while looking for him. A pity I got back to the ship before you could leave me, Telu.” He shrugged slightly curved shoulders, and for a moment he looked incredibly unthreatening. “So we’d better not count on it. We should still try to save Arjan as if it were entirely a suicide mission.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling too grim to be amazed that he could talk about giving his life for my brother so easily. His determination to get Arjan back was second only to mine, it seemed. But then wasn’t everyone else saying the same thing, in their own way? “Then we’ll come up with the suicidal part.”

  Planning began in earnest then. Whether or not we were walking into a trap, returning to Dracorva was practically suicide. The discussion occupied most of my attention, but it didn’t escape my notice when Nev stepped off the bridge. I left Telu, already hammering at different infopads, and Eton and Basra, debating the merits of different aerial approaches to the city, to follow him.

  Nev, as it turned out, was no longer on the ship. I tracked him into the hold and found the hatch open to the white expanse of a blizzard, his footprints curving off into the snow.