by Elsa Jade
He let out a slow breath. “I’ll take what’s left.” As he collected the rest of the weapons, he hoped she understood that he also meant he’d take the chances, the risks, and the condemnation.
Whatever else they’d shared on this escape through the mountain had ended.
Chapter 13
She’d hurt him. Though she hadn’t meant it, in the moment, the negligible mass of the gun had tipped her over into a nasty attack on the wrong person. But with the hazards of the quarry just ahead of them, there was no time for an apology.
Or maybe she shouldn’t give him one.
He was the mercenary paid to watch over her little world. Anything else was just a fleeting moment of pleasure, like a volatile molecule of Q that would blast them across the galaxy…and then leave them cold and stranded on the lonely edge of the Rim.
When QueCorp controlled Ydro-Down and all the diggers thereon, she hadn’t bothered to hope for anything more than such moments, or maybe a few strung together like careless knots in det cord that usually caused more complications than detonations. But now they were free.
And maybe she wanted more than moments.
When a light appeared in the tunnel, it seemed like the tease of an answer… But it was only the old quarry where they might be picked off from above like bits of lint. She powered down the runabout, staring out the viewport.
“I’ll take a look.” Fenn headed for the hatch.
She pushed up from the pilot seat. “I’ll go with you.”
“No. Just be ready.” He disappeared between the cryo caskets.
With a muttered curse he didn’t even hear, she sank back. Ready for what? To what? They couldn’t keep running. Their batteries and supplies were low. The sleepers wouldn’t last much longer. Her shoulders twinged every time she lifted anything heavier than a half-empty beverage cube, but the worse ache was somewhere inside, as if she’d pulled a muscle she couldn’t quite reach.
She wanted to tell herself it was the joy of flesh between her legs but she rather feared it was her heart.
Had the universe tricked her into falling in love with a merciless merc?
If only she wasn’t immune to Q exposure, she could blame some whiff of dust for such folly. But she didn’t even have a draught of sunshine to excuse the wistful airs whispering through her mind. All the best songs were about love.
And loss. Hadn’t she lost enough? How could she chance it again?
No, like Fenn, she needed to cauterize her emotions. Or if not that, at least bury them deep. She was a hardrock miner, after all.
When he reappeared in the cockpit, she imagined herself as stone, unfeeling, unmoved. “Anything?”
He flashed the screen of his tab at her. The scan showed clear. “Almost no signal strength, but I don’t think we have any other choice.”
No, they never did. “Fast and light,” she murmured.
“I also got an image of the rock face on the far side of the col.” He scrolled across the screen and angled it toward her again. “This is the other access, yes?”
She confirmed on the survey map of the layers of stepped berms. “According to this, yeah. The quarry was still in use until a dozen turns ago, mostly good-quality scrap for construction printing and shotcrete. Rock was hauled out through that tunnel to the plain on the other side. That’s where I told Gavyn to find us.”
Fenn’s jaw hardened, but he made no comments about her affection for the almighty Grey. “The Nazra shuttle will be more than a match for the ship that came after us. But only if we get to them. Are you ready?”
Lifting her gaze from the screen, she met his tarnished silver stare. She was fooling herself to think she could be as hard as him. The small pistol felt hot in her pants, but he wouldn’t have given her an overheating weapon. “Ready.”
She drove and he was at the open hatch, scanning ahead. As they emerged onto the berm carved across the face, she blinked hard to clear her eyes. After their time in the tunnel, she had to check her clock to confirm the hazy light was the middle of another day. It seemed like they’d been running forever.
But it would soon be over. She’d be back with her friends, and Fenn would rejoin his company. Once the hostages were revived and returned to their people—disrupting QueCorp’s schemes—maybe mercenary services wouldn’t even be needed anymore.
Not needed by Ydro-Down anyway.
Not needed by her either! She scowled into the indifferent sunlight. She had survived all her turns of servitude with a whistle and a song and skin of stone—all hiding an impossible hope that someday a small dead moon would be beautiful and free. One ice-cold merc with no heart who’d recklessly rejected everything she’d dreamed of couldn’t weaken her resolve. And one small gun wouldn’t win the day.
Jaw clenched, she aimed the runabout down the slanting berm toward the bottom of the quarry. Though the col had once been a natural dip between two peaks, excavating had carved clearly unnatural flats all the way up both faces and down to the bedrock. Considering the damage to the runabout, she was relieved not to fight steeps and sharps.
But the open pit meant no protection either.
There was some sort of lesson there, but she was too jittery to contemplate it. She’d taken another dose of analgesic plus two more energy tabs to counteract that mellowing, and now her bones were trying to clatter out through her skin. She flexed her fingers around the runabout controls and kept herself and the vehicle steady.
“Got a short-range view,” Fenn called forward, his words nearly eclipsed by the rumble of the tracks over rock and the rasp of wind through the open hatch. “Sky is clear.”
So why did she feel so dark?
The floor of the quarry was littered with piles of sorted riprap—probably intended for processing into smaller aggregate for the 3D printers. Had the site been shuttered because it was too close to Waller’s private frozen prison?
She snarled softly to herself. No place on Ydro-Down would lock away the innocent, not anymore.
Steering around the giant piles of stone reminded her of the ancient Earth stories of vermin called mice that apparently skittered and hid and were reviled by all. And apparently they were very successful creatures, which she could appreciate. But apparently they were small, and she didn’t like that feeling at all.
No wonder Fenn Alexos had no heart—the little man had no room for it in his cold body.
Concentrating on the steering and grumbling helped lessen her nerves, but still she kept one ear tuned to Fenn hanging out the hatch. With the sensors unreliable, they needed that view, but breaching the scant protection of the runabout’s hull made her nervous in a way that even grumbling about the heartless merc wasn’t calming. When they reached the haul road on the opposite face of the quarry, she let out a harsh breath of relief. Just a quick climb up the slanting berm, no steeper than the one they just descended, and they’d be safe under the rocky ridge again. Within striking distance
Nearly home, her home anyway. Just because a merc believe in a free and beautiful Ydro-Down—
“Incoming!” he screamed.
Before the last syllable cleared his throat, the pile of riprap off her port bow seemed to burst from within, showering the hull of the runabout with corpse-sized boulders.
Oh, she wished she’d used a different imaginary size…
“The Corvit doesn’t have a sensor lock,” he yelled. “Steer toward the rock to muddy the readings.”
The runabout wasn’t built to climb riprap, she wanted to yell back. Of course, it hadn’t been built for repelling down cliff faces either. With the menacing black shuttle above pausing to distinguish between flying debris and their fleeing bulk, she was able to edge closer to the haul road. But once they started up that incline, they’d have no place to hide and no other direction to go but up. Or fatally down, of course.
The small ship fired again, blasting another pile of rubble into smaller rubble. Good for them not to become rubble themselves, but the scattered debris was
chewing through the treads and might knock the tracks askew. Even if they weren’t obliterated, they’d be dead on the ground—
“They’re not trying to hit us,” she yelled back to Fenn as insight struck almost as hot as laser fire. “They know we have the hostages. They’re just trying to block us in with the rocks.”
“Keep running.” Fenn appeared at her elbow, glaring narrowly through the viewport. “I’d say faster and lighter, but we’re down to basically just you and me and the cryo units. If we dump the hostages, Waller’s people will swoop them up and then wipe us out anyway. And you’ve already thrown me out once, and how’d that go?”
She glowered. “I suppose you could throw me out this time.”
He glowered back at her. “Then who would drive us through the rocks?”
That almost made her laugh. But not quite. Frantically trying to remember what he’d stuffed back in his pockets after he gave her the second pistol, she prodded, “Don’t you have any more grenades?”
“Not that will bring down a Corvit.” He raked a hand over his head. “They have to stop us, and we can’t stop. Just get us into that hole.”
“Don’t I always?” she muttered.
He laughed. And somehow that eased some of the raking zings of fear down her spine. “If we can hole up, they’ll have to land the ship and send a gang after us. We’ll have the advantage in the runabout.”
Having the advantage? That would be a first for Ydro-Down.
Yanking the runabout around—and sometimes over—the leftover wreckage of open-pit mining, she tried to keep one eye on the tunnel into the mountain. The haul road sloping up the sheer face branched in several places, feeding into and out of other workable segments of the faceted quarry walls. Some of the horizontal drift tunnels went deep enough to swallow the sunlight now angling lower as the day faded.
But according to their survey, only one tunnel went all the way through the mountain. If they chose the wrong hole…
She wasn’t going to tell Fenn that.
Another clanging shower of stone forced her to veer sharply off the course she’d set. “They’re going to blow a ring of rock around us, to trap us.”
“Keep going.” His upper body canted over her shoulder, as if he would carry the runabout up the haul road if she didn’t, and his expression was ruthless.
“We lose the tracks, we can’t go anywhere,” she reminded him. With no struts, no winch, their options would be…none. They’d be dead on the rocks and then just dead shortly after that when the Corvit swooped down on them.
He pushed back from her chair with a curse. “Give me all your det cord. And anything else in the runabout that makes holes in things.”
“This was supposed to be a repair mission, not demolition,” she said. “There’s a chem kit in the galley that you can check for materials, but likely won’t be much.”
“Don’t need much with explosives, just to convince them that we’re a threat.” He accepted the last of the det cord she pulled from her pockets. “We already hurt them once, and they’ll be afraid we can do it again.”
Yeah, she knew what that was like.
The ring of insurmountable debris that the shuttle was building around them loomed in the front viewport. Actually, it was more like a half circle, all ahead of her, but they couldn’t go back.
That too she knew oh so well.
Her heartbeat throbbed in her throat, choking off all the curses that she normally stacked like her own wall around her. Fenn was somewhere in the hold, presumably mixing up a fiery defense under the oblivious eyes of their slumbering cryo ghosts. Even knowing she was in the crosshairs of the ship above, she’d never felt so alone.
All she could do was cling to the controls and jolt wildly over deep divots and hillocks of debris, wondering frantically each time if this was the fall that would break her.
A hollow roar filled her ears, and she wondered if it was finally too much, that this fight was deeper than the well of her strength.
“Hard starboard,” Fenn shouted over the sizzle of laser cannon and the shriek of the runabout engine. He had the hatch open again.
Unable to see him, she could only hope he was holding on tight as she rocked the controls hard for his command.
While she had no visual on her merc, she had a front row pilot’s chair to the burning halo of det cord and the white-hot glare of phosphorus he must’ve found in the chem kit that arced up from the runabout’s hatch. Like a tiny comet burning in the planetoid’s thin atmosphere, upward with a power she assumed came from his grenade launcher, although it was no sort of grenade she’d ever seen. It blazed so hot, and too fast, searing a streak across her vision, so strong that even the runabout’s sensors—still muted by the local interference—chimed a warning.
The Corvit must’ve given the same warning. The unknown pilot high above swerved easily, much more nimble in the air than the poor half-hamstrung runabout. How nice for that pilot to not have to worry about bashing into anything, up there in the sky. She wouldn’t crash as much either if she had a spaceship—
And the nose cone of the shuttle bloomed with vicious light as it slammed into a hovering aerial charge that she hadn’t noticed against the dazzle of the det cord comet and the dusty sky.
“Hard about while they’re blind,” Fenn shouted. “I have one more.”
One more chance? Dare she hope they’d always have one of those?
She threaded the struggling runabout through a remaining gap in the blockade while the shuttle above screamed a frustrated note across the col.
Maybe sometimes it was good to be the mouse.
The engine screamed and the treads clattered as the teeth bit into the rise of the haul road—leading them to the drift tunnel that was their freedom.
The berm had been cut into the face wide enough for heavy hauling equipment much larger than the runabout. And the well-packed stone felt surprisingly more secure than the dust-filled col with its maze of riprap.
—Until the Corvit blew out a chunk of the road directly ahead.
With a shriek of dismay and anger, she veered inward, the front track tearing sparks and stone from the wall before she straightened.
If the hole had been any bigger, she would’ve been forced to stop or risk driving the runabout into a lethal fall.
Again.
Oh, how she resented the impersonal, distant Corvit mocking her with the inequality of forces arrayed against her little world. Ming Waller had never cared about her while she was digging for him; he’d never even see her as his underlings blew a hole in her. They could fly while she would fall.
And all she could do was run.
But she knew the rocks.
They weren’t going to make it to the access. The attacking ship just needed another pass or two to blow out the path in front of the runabout or even pinpoint target the tracks if they finally got tired of the chase.
They couldn’t play this game anymore. The mouse had to go to ground.
Biting her lip, she cranked hard on controls, wheeling them into the next tunnel. One more flash of light blazed as the Corvit behind them launched another blast of annihilating laser light, and then the tunnel was cast into darkness.
“Wrong way.” Fenn appeared at her elbow. “We’re off course.”
“Only way,” she countered. “There’s no way we could’ve reached the access without that ship stopping us.”
His jaw clenched, but he didn’t disagree. “So where are we now?”
“Buried,” she admitted. “Or about to be.” She halted the runabout. “Give me the last grenade.”
He stared at her. “Jash.”
“With that gang right behind us, one grenade won’t do much. If we can get ahead of them—”
“We are ahead of them. We have to keep going.”
She nodded. “Take the runabout a hundred meters up. Just in case…”
“In case what?”
She held out her hand. “The grenade.”
Anguish tightened his features. “You are not sacrificing yourself for this.”
“No. If there’s one thing Ydro-Down has taught me, it’s that we stay alive. And there’s always another chance.” She stood unmoving until he settled the fist-sized grenade in her palm. “Still, get yourself and the sleepers up the road, just a bit, just in case I’m wrong.”
She strode to the hatch and jumped down, illuminating a light stick as she went.
From the back, she couldn’t see Fenn through the viewport, and as he guided the runabout up the tunnel, she was truly alone.
Turning her back on the retreating vehicle, she studied the walls on either side then the tunnel roof. She didn’t have time to do this right—
Luckily, explosives just had to be close.
Hefting her spanner, she slammed a divot out of the nearest support beam. Not so different from how the ship had taken a chunk out of the berm. Except, just as she’d suspected, the cross bracing—which had been printed from processed quarry scrap—was only fifty percent of recommended stability.
QueCorp never let them be safe. So many miners had died or been injured in rockfalls and cave-ins because the support wasn’t strong enough.
This time, it would work in their favor.
With another vicious swing, she took out a bigger chunk of the bracing. She jammed the grenade into the hole, unraveling the threads of det cord she’d given Fenn for the vicious little bomb.
A growling whine echoed down the corridor from the entrance. Jerking around, she lost her grip on the end of the cord. Impossible that the Corvit had followed…
Four hovercycles raced down the tunnel toward her, the shriek of their powerful rotors shredding the air.
Cursing, she scrambled back toward the exposed crossbeam. No time to wait for Fenn to get far enough away. No time to best angle the blast. She ignited the end of the det cord—burning her fingertips—and she ran.
Not fast, not light, but she ran.
The runabout was only a few dozen steps away. Fenn hadn’t gone far enough at all, and she would yell at him for it—later. Right now, she was desperately grateful he’d stayed.