by Elsa Jade
She sidelonged a glance at him. “What reward?”
“You don’t think QueCorp took just anybody as hostages, do you? And if Ming Waller decided these sleepers are worth more than the qubition…” He let out a tuneless whistle.
Jashanna scowled. “Didn’t I already tell you they aren’t assets?”
“If you won’t take the glory, you don’t deserve the guilt.” He gave her a meaningful look.
After a moment, she returned it with a stiff nod. “The rest is up to us,” she repeated.
He’d seen the route she planned to the pickup, and they needed to get down out of the range. But exposing themselves visually or on sensors would only mean their immediate destruction via the attackers’ laser cannon. And the berm was taking them ever higher.
“So, since we’re sharing…” He leaned over the comm panel, studying the map. “How exactly are we getting over these mountains?”
“By going under.”
He winced. “Falling again?”
“With more finesse this time. I hope.” One hand on the controller, she scrolled through the onboard map. “No real-time data because of the interference,” she reminded him, “but this is the latest updated survey that Rio and Martika compiled into our systems.” She poked at one quadrant. “The Sultanas,” she said. “We’re right around here. Here”—she scrolled sideways—“is a played-out drift. Abandoned a century ago when the accessible veins were depleted. But Martika roamed all these hills when she was wormy, and best as she remembers, the shafts were never backfilled.”
“Meaning we can stay undercover to the pickup?” Could it be that easy?
“Mostly.”
He grunted. “I’ve heard stories of your mostly.”
She flashed him a grin, but her dark eyes were shadowed. “We’d be exposed here”—she touched a low point on the map—“at an open-pit quarry in the middle of the route, and here at the end, when we’d leave the mountain and make a run for the pickup point.” She huffed out a breath. “Assuming Gavyn got the message.”
“We can at least be sure they’re wondering where we are.” Forcing himself not to glance over his shoulder at the caskets, he settled into his seat. “How long?”
She did look back, brow furrowing. “Cutting it closer than a Q chisel.”
He rubbed his chin. “So… That’s how close?”
“Close. The runabout wasn’t meant for speed.”
With a sigh, he swiveled his chair to face the back. Drumming his fingers against his jaw, he considered. “Redirect power from all cabin systems to externals? Could even draw a bit from air cycling. That’d boost us.” He glanced at her to gauge her reaction.
She stared back. “Might risk Q exposure.”
“I’ve revealed all my demons already, and you don’t seem to hate me.”
Reaching across the space between them, she touched his arm. “If you fall, I’ll catch you again.”
He rose, kissed her hard, and headed back to the caskets to make the adjustments.
Whatever else remained in his deeps, his hardrock miner had the sunshine and starlight to chase it away.
Chapter 11
Fenn’s tunings gained them only a few kilometers an hour of speed, but she’d take everything she could get.
Quite the turnaround for a simple miner slaved to the rock.
Though all her attention was focused on the uneven pathway ahead and potential threat from the sky above, a tiny sliver of her imagination remained locked on the man whistling tunelessly while he worked in the crowded hold.
How could he whistle under these desperate conditions? More importantly, why had no one taught him to carry a tune?
Despite the (mostly playful) complaints, her mood was light, almost disconnected from her well-pleased body. Too light, really. Her heart seemed to skip along like the runabout treads over the brittle stone—too high and risking a nasty plunge. But what other choice did she have? Deny a chance for pleasure because it might be torn from her grasp again?
She was stronger than that.
A stuttering sound from the comm, like a jeering laugh, made her stiffen. She pounced on the transceiver. “Base? Are you there?”
She thumped in her seat as a hand pulled her away from the comm. Fenn frowned at her. “Don’t answer. You’ll give away our position if—”
“Jash—a?” The urgent voice cut out.
Glowering back at Fenn, she leaned forward again. “Gavyn? It’s us. You got our beacon?”
More binary crackle as the signal struggled through the interference. “—our way.”
She pressed her knuckles into the edge of the comm panel, as if she could squeeze the electrons into proper order. “On their way?” she guessed.
“If base can find us, so can that ship,” Fenn warned. “Shut it down before they trace us.”
“We’re almost to the drift mine entrance, and we’ll be out of sight soon,” she argued. “We should make sure our friends will be on the other side to get us.” She toggled the comm, searching for a clearer link. “Gavyn, we need your help.” Quickly, she pushed through the message Fenn had coded before. “Where the deeps meet the sun.”
“Enough.” Fenn severed the link.
She blew out a hard huff. “Jealous.”
“Terrified. I don’t have any more grenades.”
With a grimace, she urged another burst of speed from the runabout. “Don’t grenade Gavyn.”
“I meant for the ship that attacked us.” He tapped his lower lip thoughtfully. “But now that you mention it…”
Never looking away from the precarious tilt of the imaginary road, she grabbed the merc’s ass and reeled him in by the seat of his pants. “Don’t be jealous. Don’t joke. We lived only because we loved too much to let go.”
The intensity of Fenn’s hooded stare burned like coherent light even though she refused to meet his glare.
But when he tipped her chin upward, she couldn’t resist the crash of his mouth over hers.
She was only so strong after all.
His glare hadn’t abated. If anything, the blaze in his tarnished silver eyes was even more fierce. “Don’t ever let go.”
Since they were barely clinging to the side of a mountain, she didn’t want to joke about that either. Instead she curled her lips inward to hold onto the taste of the energy tab he’d been drinking.
Surely that was enough to explain the zing in her blood. Because she’d never be so weak as to rely on someone else to hold her up. She was the strong one, rock steady and grounded.
It was one thing to rely on someone to save her life, something else entirely to risk her heart. Maybe she and her stone-cold merc had more in common than she wanted to admit.
As she promised him, they weren’t far from the entrance to the drift. But she almost missed it, and it wasn’t until the runabout’s primitive AI beeped a warning that she threw the brake. She leaned forward to peer at the map.
Fenn, who’d been checking the stasis units again, popped into the cockpit. “What’s wrong?”
He looked more than ready to launch a few grenades, which she suddenly appreciated.
“I thought the access shaft should be right here.” She spun the map and let out a groan. “It’s not here, it’s below us.”
He grimaced. “Another fall?”
She shook her head. “That was desperation, not decision. The dig didn’t follow this berm of scrap rock. It followed the precipitating vein running perpendicular.”
“How far?”
“Not even twenty meters.”
He snorted. “You say that as if we can just float down.”
“Not float, maybe. Never been my style. But we can winch.”
When they were directly above the access shaft, they hopped out of the runabout and peered over the ledge.
Face paling, Fenn jerked back. “Long way down.”
She reassessed. “Yeah, maybe a little more than twenty meters.”
“I meant all the way to t
he bottom.”
Since she couldn’t actually see the bottom of the chasm due to all the jagged rock and shadows, she wasn’t going to hazard a guess.
While she prepped the winch, Fenn deployed the runabout’s agility struts. Although not as nimble as any of the crawler class, between the struts and the winch, the runabout would have enough mobility to gingerly descend the cliff to the access.
Or they’d plunge to their certain doom. Again.
The rock was too brittle to hold them unassisted, so she had to blow anchor holes as deep as her det cord could go. Then they backed the vehicle slowly over the edge.
Fenn peered out the front viewport at the winch cable stretched tight. “That’s… unnerving.”
“It’s gonna get worse,” she warned.
It took longer than she hoped to pick their way down the sheer wall. The mobility struts were made to maneuver the vehicle horizontally over the occasional rockfall, not skitter vertically across cliff faces. She held her breath the whole time they dangled awkwardly against the stone.
“I’ve had my ass hanging out before,” Fenn grumbled as he played out the winch cable, “but this is ridiculous.”
As she maneuvered each strut carefully into place to lower them down the wall, she didn’t argue. How could she when she was holding her breath?
But she found enough air to curse when they finally lowered themselves within reach of the access. “There should be support structures here. Everything must’ve been reclaimed or rotted away over the turns.”
The open shaft was like an empty, gaping black mouth—except there was no extruding tongue for a landing, not even any toothy anchor points they might lash onto. With the winch currently occupied in holding them aloft, most of their other gear jettisoned outside the relay station to make room for the cryo-units, and nothing but air under the runabout’s treads, how could they pull themselves into the shaft?
And every moment they delayed, they were exposed to QueCorp’s agents, who obviously wouldn’t hesitate to shoot—or maybe worse yet, take them as hostages against Nazra and Gavyn.
“We have to get inside, out of sight,” Fenn said, the urgent note in his voice sharpening his tone.
“You think I don’t know that?” She ran a shaking hand over her head. When he did it, the caress sent little jolts of pleasure through her blood. But her own touch was too rough. “I’ll have to do it myself.”
“How? With your bare hands?”
“Yes,” she snapped. “Well, plus a tow line.”
“Jash, even you can’t lift a runabout.”
“I don’t have to lift it. I just need to be the anchor with enough leverage to get one of the struts into the shaft. That’ll pull you close enough for a tread to grab hold.”
He stared at her, his face paling more toward bilious. “You want to just…swing us into that hole?”
She squinted. “Mostly, yeah.” Locking the struts and the winch, she swiveled out of the pilot chair and strode through the hold. Those poor sleepers had no idea…
The suspended runabout swayed a bit as she forced the hatch open. Fenn hissed, whether at the sickening sway or her dubious plan, she wasn’t sure. But the sound was lost in the thin whistle of wind swirling in.
Somebody should teach it to sing too.
Lucky for her, the hatch faced the cliff wall so she wouldn’t have to clamber around the hull of the runabout to reach the shaft. She just needed to step across the small gap between. Yeah…
As she wavered, hands around her hips drew her back into the runabout. Fenn dumped a web of straps into her hands.
“What…” She juggled the bindings.
“Put that on. It’s the restraint harness from my chair.” He unspooled a thin cable she hadn’t seen before. “Kemet always says, no merc travels without rope,” he muttered. “There. I’m tying you off to the runabout so if you fall…” He let out a breath even as his grip clenched on her waist above the harness. “Once you’re inside, you can reel us in like a fish.”
“Ydro-Down doesn’t have fish.”
“That should make it easy to catch us.” After one more squeeze, he released her. “I won’t let you fall.”
The gap between the runabout and the shaft wasn’t exactly a step—more like a jump. When she looked down, the shadows in the chasm seemed to be creeping up the wall toward them.
If she thought about it too long…
With the sensation of Fenn’s hands still around her, she jumped. The anabatic wind rising from below snatched at her coveralls, but she had enough momentum to clear the shaft lip.
Still, she sprawled as she landed, going to one knee. Leaning out of the hatch, Fenn shouted her name, and she waved a reassurance at him though her heartbeat thudded in her throat.
Forcing herself upright, she hastened back to the edge. From this side, the runabout didn’t seem so far away. But it did look imposingly large as it hung there from the winch cable, its thick leg struts stabilizing it against the cliff. She just had to get enough momentum to haul it into the mouth of the tunnel before the anchors failed.
How hard could it be? She’d handled carts with a thousand kilos of ore. She’d just never held a half-dozen souls, light as vapor, in her hands.
Plus Fenn.
If only she could summon him from the vehicle to join her in this shaft. At least his boots would be on solid rock. But he needed to be at the controls to fire up the track as soon as the runabout could get a grip. And they dared not swing the heavy weight too far for too long. The bolts she’d implanted had only gone so deep. If the anchors thirty meters above their heads worked loose, the runabout would fall, and no treads or struts or even her desperate grip would save it.
The shaft around her had been bored smooth, leaving nothing for her to brace against. Just her versus the inertia of the heavy vehicle then—fine.
Grimly, she widened her stance, bracing her boots on the stone. Fenn retracted the struts, and that small movement as the runabout released its tenuous grasp on the cliff face started the swing. Timing her own effort, she leaned into the motion with all her body, rocking it harder, thrust and release.
Not unlike last night with Fenn. A gasp of amusement and exertion burst from her chest. Except the peak of this effort would assure not mutual satisfaction but their mere survival.
She bowed her spine into the harness Fenn had given her, the straps digging into her buttocks and shoulders. She strained back as hard as she could, muscles locking and sweat prickling.
Her boots skidded in the dust as the weight of the runabout pulled her forward. Scrambling to follow it, she let the pendulum swing out, dragging her almost to the ledge. But she dared not bleed off any of the momentum; the swinging vehicle needed to reach far enough inside the shaft to grab hold.
Through the front viewport, Fenn watched, his eyes wide and frantic as she staggered on the lip. Then the runabout swung toward her again.
With everything she had—and in her life, that had always been enough—she surged backward, hauling against the cable like she was swinging the weight of the world.
And maybe she was. The fate of Ydro-Down might hang with those six anonymous souls, half frozen and slumbering. She groaned and then screamed as she heaved backward. So close, so close… The front track veered toward the lip right where she stood. Fenn revved the engine—
But the tread didn’t engage. The indicator on board at the control panel would tell him when the vehicle had solid contact. Until it did, the runabout was a dead weight.
The retreating bulk of the runabout dragged her toward the cliff again, and she followed, steeling herself for the next sweep. She would rip rock and muscle apart until he was beside her again.
The runabout was swinging away from the shaft opening, so far, too far. She stumbled after it to the very edge, the cable taut over a lethal fall. The toes of her boots dangled over the abyss, and she arched back against the drag until the harness straps dug deep.
Fenn’s mouth was open, a
s if he was yelling something, and he gestured wildly, but she couldn’t hear over the roar of blood in her ears or see past the tunneling of her vision, narrower than the mineshaft.
As the runabout arced toward her, she hauled backward again, this time not letting up any of the tension though the straps went from bruising to tearing against her skin, grinding muscle down against bone.
She locked her eyes on him, as if she could pull strength from the precious element in his eyes. He was still gesturing, and dimly she realized what he meant.
He was going to cut the line that joined them on the next swing. Because if he didn’t, the arc would yank her into the chasm. Since she’d be still tethered to the vehicle, he’d at least be able to retrieve her battered body from the jagged rocks below.
This was her chance, their last chance. How many of those had she had now? She set her boots hard, as unyielding as the rock she’d fought all her life. She would not lose Fenn or the hostages.
But she wasn’t made of stone, and other universal forces were arrayed against her bowing tension. Though the momentum of the last swing brought the runabout within reach, the angle of the arc meant the toothed tread never made contact with the stone. The indicator light on the control panel wouldn’t light up, and blinded within the cockpit, Fenn would never know how close he was.
Despair sapped the strength from her shaking legs, and her boots lost traction as the runabout began its inexorable swivel away from her. The next arc would pull her off the ledge, or Fenn would cut the line and she’d have no way to draw him in. And she’d lost the strength to start again.
Through the viewport, she caught his eye and stabbed one finger at the offside strut. “Now,” she screamed at him.
No way could he hear her through the hull, impossible that he would believe this was their only chance.
But his hand swept across the controls, firing the thick strut leg outward. The composite sparked against the stone, sending the dangling runabout into the beginning of a spin.
A spin that angled the tread above the stone lip.
She blew out all the breath in her body on a cry of resolution and burned every muscle throwing herself backward—