“Do they wear PSE?” Quinn asked, pulling his hand scanner out and raising an eyebrow.
“Normally,” he said.
“Then they aren’t invisible to us,” she said, grinning and looking down at her bare chest. “But odds are we’ll look like a hallucination to them.”
“There is that distinct possibility,” he said. “You might sneak past for sure, but Quinn, not so much.”
“Yah, he’s a freak of nature even by earthly standards.” She nodded in the handler’s direction where he’d walked over to look for the trail. “We figured in his case we’d rely on shock value.”
Rene glanced over at him and closed his eyes. Shaking his head, he whispered, “Next time he should get a longer loincloth.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Kaycee sat in the mid-deck with her head on her arms. She had been riding emotional waves as they’d recovered Sandi and then again, as they discovered that Rene was alive, and in fair condition too. Now she was just trying to keep from collapsing.
Although she knew Parker had outplayed them, she felt responsible because she was the one who had accepted his terms. There was no easy way out.
The more she racked her brain, the deeper she felt buried. Undeniably, they were humped.
“They appear to have completed loading the cargo container,” Marti reported. “Director Parker is asking to speak to you at the outer cargo container airlock.”
“I don’t suppose I can just ignore him?”
“He says he has our orders.”
Orders? I guess that’s right. He owns us until that reactor is off our backs.
With a sigh, she pushed herself onto her feet.
Parker was waiting just inside the cargo container with three guards when she got there. All of them looked to be human for a change.
“You’re loaded,” he said when she walked up. Marti had managed to pick a path around the reactor so followed several steps behind her as a visual deterrent and bodyguard.
She nodded, looking around at the sleeper cabinets they’d pinned to the deck. 300 Ut’arans slept in glass cylinders packed into racks. It looks like a morgue.
“Here are your orders.” He held out a single data stick. She took it and handed it over to Marti.
“Where are we taking the cargo?”
“You will make delivery to the Maxima Six Mining Station in Lyra Prime,” he said. “It should take you 120 hours. Unless you have problems. And then, well that would be bad.”
“Who do we contact?”
“You don’t. My people will watch for you and make contact once they detect that you’ve entered the system. That’s all on the stick.”
“Of course,” she said.
“It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Doctor.” He turned to walk away and she reached out to grab his arm.
“We’re not done. When do we get our crew back?”
He jerked his arm away and one of his guards shifted to put his hand on the butt of his sidearm. Marti swung one of his heavy manipulator arms around, bringing his rifle to bear on the man’s chest. Its second arm brought another gun up to target Parker.
He locked eyes with her for several seconds before he nodded. “We will launch in an hour. Once the sun sets.”
“I’ve heard that before. I want to know specifics.”
“You don’t seem to understand the topography here, do you?” He glanced over at the guard and shook his head. The man stood down and moved his hand away from his weapon. Marti didn’t move. “I do things my way. You’re lucky I like you or I’d be telling you to be on your way now. There really is no reason for me to go out of my way to do you any favors.”
“And you really don’t understand how desperate I am to get my people back either,” she said. “Almost insanely desperate you could say.”
“I feel your frustration, Doctor, I do,” he said, shrugging it off.
“I don’t think you do.” She stepped forward and lowered her voice. “How would it change your topography if I disconnected this cargo container from the ship’s power right now? A couple megaton blast would take most of the station with us, wouldn’t it?”
Parker eased back but his eyes flashed wide for an instant before he shook his head. “You’re bluffing.”
“Try me.” She leaned in a little closer to fill the gap between them. “You obviously haven’t done your homework.”
He swallowed and shook his head. She could tell he was trying to reinforce his faith in his superior position.
Tilting her head to the side, she opened her eyes wider for effect. “If you’d checked into me, you’d know that in the last year I lost my family in the Starlight Colony disaster, and most of my entire fortune along with it. Now you’re holding hostage the only people left in my world. I have no more fraks left to give about anything anymore.”
She leaned forward more and bounced on her toes as she flung her arms out beside her. “I’m sure you picked up on the fact that the captain thinks I’m batshit insane. Do you really want to find out if he’s right?”
She glanced around at the other guards with him. They were all sweating. Obviously, they were feeling her insanity rather vividly.
“Marti, how long will it take the reactor to overload once I disconnect the power to the box?” She didn’t turn to look at the automech.
“Five microseconds.”
She spun and took several steps back toward the ship before she pulled a medical scanner out of her pocket and looked at it like it was a detonator. “Deadman switch is such an ugly word isn’t it?”
“You’ve got bigger eggs than I would have guessed, Doctor,” he said. “Especially for a rich bitch.”
“You know, I hate that phrase,” she hissed, flipping the scanner open. She didn’t turn it on, but she held her finger over it like she might.
He held his hands up and took an unconscious step back. Not that it would make a difference if she wasn’t bluffing.
“Now I want a real frakking answer from you. When will you get my people back?”
“Ansari won’t let me do anything until sundown. Seriously, that is outside my control.” He turned his arm to look at his wrist chrono. “That’s in fifty-six minutes. Flight time is about ten and then another ten or so to make contact.”
“That wasn’t so hard was it?” She smiled and closed the lid on the scanner.
He tried to hold his face steady, but she could see relief in his eyes.
“Then as long as you do your part, we’ll be on our way.” She let the smile melt off her face. “One last thing, you might be smart to point those railguns somewhere else. I know you won’t use them, because you’ve just shown me that it’s you who’s lacking the eggs to blow us all up.”
“You’ll be leaving in two hours,” he said, spinning and heading back through the airlock to the station with his guards almost stumbling over each other as they retreated with him.
“Insanity is an effective deterrent,” Marti said.
She watched them pull the door closed before she dropped the medical scanner back into her pocket and let out a slow hiss of breath. “Even if it was a bluff.”
“You played it well,” it said.
“Lock them out of the ship. They don’t need access anymore and you need to take a closer look at that power plant to see if we can get around the failsafe.”
“I have locked the access codes on the airlock controls,” it said, pivoting and heading over to begin its analysis of the reactor.
“I need to give Ammo a heads up.” She followed Marti back toward the ship and stopped several meters away. Knowing that she was looking at an antimatter bomb still made her nervous, in spite of the fact that she’s just threatened to use it herself.
“Secure channel open,” it said.
“Yah, Kaycee what’s swinging?” Ammo said over her commlink.
“You’ve got about seventy minutes before they supposedly show up to rescue the crew.”
“Supposedly?” Q
uinn asked. “Is something telling you they’re not planning to follow through?”
“I know he wouldn’t hesitate to kill them and force me to make the run without a crew. He’s shoved an antimatter bomb up our ass to make his point.”
“What?”
“Yah. He’s got us bent way over,” she said. “Marti and I are working the problem though, so you focus on getting the crew out of there and leave this one to me.”
“Got it,” Ammo said. “We’re pushing as hard as we can.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
The sun was almost on the horizon and long orange streamers of light split through the trees along the river. Ammo leaned over a log on the side of the trail and stared off into the distance. Her legs were shaking from the continuous strain, but she knew they had to keep moving so she tried to ignore it.
“We’ve got two groups of PSE signatures ahead,” Quinn said, flipping his scanner closed and waiting for the screeching in the jungle to echo down to its normal level. “A group of six and a group of two and a half or so.”
“What does that mean?”
“The smaller group had two strong EM signals, one weak one, and one so faint it’s almost undetectable.” He put the scanner back in his pouch and leaned down beside her. “I’d assume the weaker signal is from our people. The others would be Parker’s team.”
“Where are they?”
“The larger group is eight hundred meters that way.” He pointed through the trees and uphill from the river. “The other group is about five hundred meters further downstream.”
She squinted into the setting sun. The glare was making her eyes hurt. “Could you tell what they were doing?”
He shook his head. “They’re clustered together about twenty meters above the ground in the trees. They might be setting up an observation post since the Ut’arans don’t seem to be moving.”
“That would be the Windwalkers that Rene was talking about.” She turned her back on the log and leaned against it. “We’re sure nobody else is out here?”
“There are lots of other life forms around the crew. Dozens. Maybe more,” he said. “But I didn’t detect any others in PSE. My thinking would be to take out the Windwalkers first.”
“We’re running out of time,” she said. “You won’t sneak past them as big as you are. If I can keep their eyes on me, how long would it take you to get into position behind them?”
He shrugged. “Eight or ten minutes, depending on how hard it is to cut through the underbrush. It’s a lot more dense than the path they took.”
“I’ll give you five minutes head start then I’ll take the trail and see how distracting I can be,” she said. “Hopefully, they’ll look twice at a native girl shaking her ass.”
He stood up and pointed downstream to where a large outcropping of rock jutted into the river. “Don’t go past that point. If you’re going to put on a show, those rocks should be a good place for them to see you.”
She nodded. “I’m not liking the idea of splitting up, but I don’t see that we’ve got much in the way of options.”
He pulled out his stunner pistols and chambered a round to both, then checked his extra clips. Eight in all. “I’ll take the high road and you take the low road.”
Keeping one of his weapons in his hand, he pulled himself up onto the small ridge that paralleled the river as an upper bank. He vanished in seconds, leaving her standing there counting down the minutes until it was time for her to move out.
“What the frak am I supposed to do to get their attention? Naked yoga?” she whispered to herself as she shuffled down the trail.
“Yoga could be dangerous at two-G,” Marti said over the comm.
“Nojo,” she said. She’d forgotten that they still had the AA as a backup if things got sidewise. It made her feel a lot better knowing that it was only a few kilometers away. With a shuttle, that was only a matter of seconds.
She started to haul herself up onto the rock outcropping, trying to make sure that if someone was looking, he was getting an eyeful. Normally, she could pull off seductive without a worry, but rock climbing naked wasn’t one of her usual approaches. Nor did she think she was particularly graceful at it in this gravity.
By the time she reached the top of the eight-meter high ledge, she felt a wave of fatigue grab her body. Forcing her legs under her, she faced toward the river and walked slowly toward the edge. Suddenly the exhaustion turned to dizziness. “Marty can you ask Kaycee what it feels like when the drugs burn through? I’m feeling exhausted and like the world is spinning.”
Spreading her feet for stability, she stopped well back from the edge and slipped her hand into her pouch, feeling around for one of the injector pins. Quinn carried the extras with him, but she had two of her own. She didn’t want to use it unless she had to, but she was definitely feeling out of spec.
“Are you alright?” Quinn whispered.
“I’m sure I will be,” she said.
“The doctor says what you are feeling is likely the drug cocktail starting to wear off,” Marti said. “She advises you to sit down before you give yourself a booster shot.”
“Got it,” she said, dropping onto her butt with a smack. Glancing over her shoulder to see if she could tell where the black hats were, she realized that it didn’t matter, anyway. She pulled the pin out, pressed against her thigh, and hit the button.
She gasped as her blood flow normalized. “Frak that’s a rush.” The world around her went from spinning to vibrating.
“Dr. Caldwell said that the boosters she prepped for you both had an adrenaline compound that was not in the original medication she gave you,” it said.
“No shit, I think I’m glowing,” she said, bouncing up on a wave of artificial energy. She twirled around several times, trying to get the feeling to burn off, but it clung to her like fire coursing through her body.
“She advises that your response to it is probably because you were unaware of how depleted you were before you medicated yourself.”
“I can see where they are,” Quinn interrupted over the comm. “Problem is, I can’t get them without going hand to hand. They’ve rigged some kind of thermal drape around where they’re hiding, and there’s only one on the outside. He’s standing guard, but whatever you’re doing, he’s watching you for sure.”
“What are we going to do?” She stopped spinning and without looking in the direction she thought they were, she started running her hands over her skin. It felt like sparks were leaping from her fingers. It would have been a sensation she would have enjoyed exploring, except she was still acutely aware of the danger around her.
“I can make some noise and drop them as they come out to investigate.” He grunted as he apparently moved in.
“If you think you’ll have to dance with these guys, you might be smart to give yourself a kick, this is a hell of a rush.”
“After I’m done, maybe,” he said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing until you hear the party start, then say a prayer that I’m faster than they are.”
Less than a minute later, she heard a loud crashing sound from the trees in the direction where she assumed they were. A deep thud followed, and more than a few animals shrieked their displeasure.
Even in an exosuit, a fall of twenty meters at two-G was enough to punctuate someone’s existence. She slid down the rock face and dove into the underbrush, trying to get into position to back him up.
“One,” he said, announcing that he’d dropped the guard.
Three hissing cracks echoed overhead as he fired off a short burst of stunner rounds, followed by three more strings of noisy crashes as his victims tumbled to the ground. “Four.”
The commotion kicked into full as the two remaining members of the party realized what was happening and started to fight back. She tracked in on them by the sounds. Overhead she could see the branches of a tree swaying as Quinn struggled to subdue both of them at once.
As another body tumbled down, she rea
lized that it wasn’t a fair fight. She was still too far away to see who had fallen, but when the sounds of the battle died abruptly, she had a moment of panic.
“Quinn, are you alright?”
“The other one got away,” he said after several seconds of silence. “I lost him, but I think he was headed toward our people.”
“That’s not good,” she said, stepping up over a rock ledge and stopping short to avoid slipping on a squishy mess that had once been a person. She eased to the side and edged past the bloody pile of flesh, pressing on toward the tree where the fight happened.
“We can track him from his PSE,” he said.
A faint hissing groan came from behind a thick tangle of vines just beside her. “I’ve got a live one down here,” she said, jumping back and pulling out her stunner. She pointed it in the direction of the sound.
“On my way.”
She could hear Quinn grunting as he worked his way down the tree, but she didn’t take her eyes off the source of the noise. She couldn’t see anything in the dense underbrush, although she knew from what she could hear that she probably didn’t want to.
Swinging down from a branch overhead, he crashed to a stop at her side. She jerked her head toward where the sound had originated. He pushed into the tangle and stopped suddenly, sucking air through his teeth. “He’s not going to last long.” Pointing his stunner at something, he snapped two quick rounds into the vines.
“He’ll be better off that way.” He turned back in her direction and she could tell from his face he was trying not to think about what he’d just done. “We should make sure none of the others will be a problem.”
She shook her head. “Judging from what I saw back there, I’d bet he was the lucky one. And we don’t have time.” She glanced to the west and realized that the sun was no longer visible at all. “We need to get back to the trail and try to catch them before we lose the rest of the light.”
Wings of Earth- Season One Page 59