by Jake Elwood
She didn't intend to wait around that long. In fact, she was thinking about bugging out immediately. The cruiser was far enough away that she could use the Evening Breeze's engines with only a moderate risk of detection. She could slip behind the planet to open a portal, and be gone without the cruiser knowing she'd been there. And if they spotted her, well, they were far enough away that she could probably give them the slip.
Every hour that she waited increased the risk. In fact, it was almost at the level of foolhardiness already. She had a certain amount of intel for the UW Navy. She tried to tell herself that it would be enough.
But she'd come so far, been through so much, and her memories of Captain Johnstone and his cold skepticism were so vivid! If she gave him the images currently displayed on the tabletop, she sensed he would dismiss them. Blurry rectangles, faint lines that might or might not be fences. It wasn't enough.
Can you get more? If you can't, then you need to leave now. While you still can. She frowned, rose from her chair, and walked from the coldbox to the window and back again. She loved small ships, but they were lousy for pacing in. She dropped back into her seat. “What if we hit the engines right now? Blast past the planet at close range. Fly right over this island, take some decent pictures, and jump through a portal before that cruiser can get to us.”
“It's the wrong time of day,” he said. “The island's on the night side. We wouldn't see a thing.”
“Damn it.” She drummed her fingers on the table, accidentally zoomed in on a patch of featureless jungle, and zoomed back out. “How long until dawn?”
Ham opened a small window in a corner of the table. “Five hours, nine minutes.” He expanded the window, swiped in a menu, and tapped away for a time. “If we don't change course or velocity, we'll pass over the island in just under seven hours.” He gestured at the long-range photo displayed on the table. “That should increase our resolution by a factor of about ten.”
Alice leaned over the table, staring at the blurry pattern of rectangles that Ham assured her was a prison camp. If it was blown up ten times larger she'd be able to see individual guards and prisoners. They'd be no more than dots, but still …
“Seven hours,” she said, picturing the trajectory of the cruiser. “That's cutting it pretty close.”
Ham shrugged. “We'll certainly see a lot.”
Go, Alice. Bug out now. Call Bridger and tell him to take us behind the planet. Open a portal and get out of here. She rubbed her temples, wishing she didn't have to weigh the safety of her ship and crew – and herself – against the vague benefits of gathering military intelligence.
Intelligence that a certain arrogant captain was likely to ignore.
She thought of Tom Thrush and the drawn, haunted look on his face before the battle at Black Betty. Was this what it was like for him?
I should learn from his example. He pushed things. He ignored caution and good sense and pushed his luck, and look where he ended up. And he took his crew down with him.
Part of her, the frightened part, wanted to swallow that analysis whole without examining it too closely. It gave her a reason to flee. But there was another way to look at things. Thrush did his duty. So did his crew. They did the right thing, no matter the risk, and they accepted the price. That's the reason they're down there on Gamor.
That's the reason I have to do all I can to get them out.
All I can.
“We'll stay,” she said. “Seven more hours. We'll take one good close-range scan, and then we'll run for the hills.”
Ham nodded with every appearance of calm. She knew him well enough to see the fear he tried to hide. And she knew that, if it was up to him, he would make the same choice she just made. “I'll go tell Bridger,” she said. “Try to take a nap. I want you fresh when we make our pass.”
“Somehow I think I'll be staying awake,” he said with a wry grin. “I'll go lie down, though.” He blanked the table and left the room, and she headed to the bridge to tell Bridger she was gambling with his life.
Bridger stood the ship on its nose so that Gamor hung dead ahead as they watched the dawn line crawl across the face of the planet. Sunlight glinted on water near the south pole, but around the equator where the large island lay she saw only cloud. She stared, frustrated, knowing that she'd risked all their lives for nothing.
Until a sliver of blue appeared right where night gave way to dawn. The blue sliver grew, became a triangle, then flashed white as it caught more light. And a bar of green expanded out of the shadows as Gamor continued to turn.
She looked at Ham. “Are we recording?”
“Of course.”
Alice leaned over, looking at Ham's console as he fine-tuned the scanner display. Cloud filled his screen, glowing white and gray as sunlight played across it. Then the cloud ended and she saw jungle, an endless canopy of green.
“It won't be long now,” he said. “Ah. Here's one of the remote sites.” A rectangular hole appeared in the jungle, cluttered with the unmistakable shapes of human technology. She saw long white stripes, rectangles, and a white triangle that glowed in the early-morning sunlight.
“I was right,” Ham said. “Parabolic dishes. It's going to be a scanner array.”
Alice shook her head. “Dishes are round.”
“They ship them in sections,” he said, and pointed at the white triangle. “That's a circle right there. It's just in pieces, all stacked up.”
She opened her mouth to ask if he was sure, then closed it again without speaking.
“The first camp should be lit.” He worked the controls on his display and the gap in the jungle vanished in a blur of green. When the display stopped moving the unmistakable shapes of simple buildings filled the screen.
“There's a person,” Ham said triumphantly. “A whole bunch of them. They're coming out of the buildings. Wow, they're early risers.”
Alice watched tiny specks pour from the little buildings and wondered if she knew any of the people she was seeing. Was Tom in that multitude?
“Let's check the big camp.” Ham fiddled with the controls, and Alice had to look away as the display blurred again with motion. She looked out the windows instead. Gamor was so distant she could have hidden it with the palm of her hand at arm's length. The entire island wasn't much more than a speck. She squinted at it, wondering where on that distant blob of green the camp was.
“Found it,” Ham said. She watched as he made the view trace back and forth across a fenced compound. She couldn’t recognize individual people, but she could see color variations in the uniforms on either side of the fence that divided the enclosed space. Prisoners on one side, guards on the other.
“This must be enough,” she said. “We need to get this back to the UW Navy.”
Bridger said, “You want us to duck behind the planet?”
“No.” The cruiser was likely to see their engines, and if they didn't, the supply ship certainly would. She didn't want to waste a precious minute or two that she could spend fleeing through hyperspace. “We'll open a portal right here.”
Bridger nodded and tapped a couple of icons. “Ready.”
“Wait.” She stared through the bridge windows, thinking. Remembering her conversation with Ernst back at Garnet. “Is there a mesa near the camps?”
“One sec.” Ham zoomed out the view. “Oh, yeah.”
The dawning sun made five mesas instantly obvious by casting long tapering rectangles of shadow across the jungle.
“I need to see the tops of those mesas,” Alice said. “One at a time.”
Ham touched the mesa top closest to the smaller camp. The screen flickered and became a close-up of a shadow-dappled circle of stone. “If we wait half an hour the shadows will be gone.”
Alice nodded absently, knowing they couldn't delay their escape that long. “Do you see anything?”
“Just rocks,” he said, then zoomed out and touched another mesa top.
She had a moment of excitement when she sa
w a dozen little black streaks, lines of shadow from something about the size of a human being. But there were other lines of shadow just a bit longer, and others that were too short. And none of them moved. She pointed. “What's that?”
“Trees,” Ham said. “They don't seem to grow very tall on the mesa tops.”
Damn. She waited as he zoomed out and picked another mesa. You're wasting your time. There's no escaped prisoners sitting on a mesa top hoping a friendly ship will go by. It's ridiculous. Still, she couldn't help leaning in as the new mesa top appeared.
The first thing she noticed was a circular shape that cast a long rectangle of shadow. It had to be a natural formation, a finger of rock jutting up near a fissure at the edge of the mesa. She scanned the rest of the mesa top, seeing no movement, nothing that looked like a human being. Two more mesas remained, but her heart was already sinking. She wasn't going to find anyone.
She glanced at Ham, waiting for him to zoom out. He met her gaze, smiling like he'd just found a bacon cheeseburger under his console. He said, “This is it.”
“What?” Alice shook her head, baffled. “This is what?”
“Look!” He pointed, his fingertip almost touching the screen. She looked where he pointed, and saw nothing but a jumble of rocks. There were no black dots, no stretching shadows that might indicate people. There was nothing. She opened her mouth to tell him he was an idiot - then blinked, stared, and left her mouth hanging open.
There, in the middle of the mesa, was a shape drawn in rocks. A familiar shape, one she'd seen a thousand times.
The starburst of the United Worlds Navy.
Chapter 21
Prisoners have been there. But they might be long gone. In fact it could be the original prisoners that Ernst told me about, the ones who escaped months ago.
No, it's not them. Those were Strads. They wouldn't draw a UW starburst.
Ham zoomed in until the starburst filled the screen. Then he started a slow pan to the left, searching.
“Go to that round feature,” Alice said.
He nodded, flicked his finger across the screen, and the top of the mesa rushed past. When he came to the edge he changed direction and followed the edge of the mesa until the fissure filled the screen.
Black dots moved in that cleft of rock.
“I don't believe it,” said Ham.
“What?” said Bridger.
“There's someone there.”
Bridger made one brief attempt to look past Alice at Ham's display before giving up and returning his attention to the helm controls.
Ham adjusted the zoom until he was at maximum resolution. The area around the cleft and the stone circle bustled with activity. Men moved around the perimeter of the fissure. Others bustled around inside the fissure itself.
“Ship!”
Alice whipped her head around, looking at her own console. There were no proximity alarms. She could see the cruiser, still on its distant patrol, and the supply ship, orbiting with cold engines. She looked at Bridger. “What ship?”
“There's a flitter heading toward the mesa.”
For an endless moment she stared at him without seeing him, her mind racing. A flitter meant Dawn Alliance troops. Was it Dawn Alliance personnel she'd seen on the mesa top, and not escaped prisoners at all?
No. That starburst was the work of United Worlds prisoners. They were on the mesa top, and they were in trouble.
“Get us down there. Right now!”
The engine roared and the planet seemed to leap toward her. Ham sucked in a quick, frightened breath. Bridger cackled as the ship plunged toward the surface of Gamor.
“Open the gun locker,” she said to Ham. “This might get messy.” She switched her console to a tactical display and tapped the icon that brought the ship's twin laser cannons sliding out of their protective casing. “Land us on the mesa top. As close as you can get to that circle of rock.”
Ham hurried out of the bridge, and Bridger leaned over the helm controls. Alice adjusted her tac display, zooming in, ignoring the cruiser and the support ship and concentrating on the planet below. The flitter appeared as a yellow blip racing toward the mesa from the direction of the larger camp. Then the yellow blip slowed, turned in a curving arc, and headed back the way it had come.
“The flitter's turning tail,” she said. “That's one less thing to worry about.”
Bridger nodded without looking up. He had more than enough on his plate. The Evening Breeze began to vibrate as her nose touched atmosphere. The island ahead disappeared in a haze of red as friction heated the nose of the ship. Alice watched the altitude drop on her tactical display, wondered if she should tell Bridger to slow down, and decided to keep her mouth shut.
“Braking,” he said, and she braced her feet against the console. The ship decelerated hard, pushing her half out of her seat, and a thud came from aft, followed by a loud curse from Ham.
“Sorry,” Bridger shouted, then laughed. He was as gleeful as a small child with a new toy. “Hang on, in case that wasn't enough of a hint!”
The nose of the ship swung up, and Alice's seat pushed hard against her. The ship was still dropping, but slower now, her limited wings increasing her drag. They were belly-down now instead of nose-down, and the sunlight abruptly disappeared as the ship dropped into cloud. A soft fog surrounded them, hiding their velocity, making it easy to imagine they weren't still hurtling toward the planet at a terrifying rate, and racing forward just as quickly.
They plunged through the bottom of the cloud bank, and Alice looked up, using the clouds to gauge speed. It wasn't as bad as she'd feared. The cloud seemed to shoot up as the ship dropped, but not too quickly. She caught her first glimpse of jungle below, still reassuringly distant.
“I know what I'm doing,” Bridger said testily.
“I know you do,” she said.
“Then why do your knuckles look like icecaps?”
She looked at her hands, tightly clenched in her lap, and made herself relax them. “I don't know what you mean.”
He chuckled, then focused on flying. She saw the mesa ahead, like a stone tooth erupting from the jungle floor. The ship was well below the mesa top, and she gasped, realizing just how low they were. The mesa loomed larger and larger, and the nose of the ship rose. Bridger decelerated, more gently this time, and Alice unfolded the joystick that would give her manual control over the guns.
The side of the mesa rushed toward her, she fought the urge to brace herself for an impact, and then the last of their forward momentum bled away. The ship hovered, stationary, and she saw men climbing and dodging and firing rifles no more than a dozen meters away.
For a moment she stared, not sure what she was seeing. Men in pale uniforms lined the top of a triangular fissure in the rock. Men in darker uniforms scrambled around on the rocks below them. Not much sound made it through the hull of the ship, but she heard faint gunfire, like pebbles dropping on a tile floor. She stared helplessly, her overwhelmed brain unable to tell who was who.
Then a man on a high ledge turned, leveled a rifle at her, and fired. A divot marred the window in front of her face, and abruptly everything made sense. The ragged-looking men in baggy ill-fitting uniforms were prisoners. They were flinging rocks down on Dawn Alliance soldiers. It was the only thing that made sense. There was no way the prisoners had all the guns and assaulted a plateau while the guards defended themselves with rocks.
More rifle fire clanged and pinged against the ship, a fresh divot appeared in the window, and her hand squeezed on the joystick. Laser fire erupted from the underside of the ship, and she pulled back on the stick, tilting the guns up. The man who'd first shot at her disintegrated, consumed by a column of fire that blackened the rock behind him. His rifle – or most of it – went bouncing down the rocky cleft, and the men around him fled. They went the only way they could go, straight down, leaping from rock to rock, some of them tossing their rifles away, others slinging the guns across their backs so they could catch a
t the rocks with both hands.
Bridger moved the ship back, and Alice saw a terrified soldier leap onto a ledge that crumbled beneath his boots. The man fell, arms waving, into the void, tumbling as he hit the side of the mesa.
She pushed forward on the joystick, tilting the guns down. She didn't fire, though. Not at fleeing men. A cold voice in her head told her to destroy them while she had the chance. They would certainly kill good people later if they were able. She couldn't do it, though.
“Get us up there. We need to land and load up fast. We're not out of this yet.”
Bridger's only answer was a grunt. The ship surged up and forward, clearing the top of the mesa by such a small distance she was sure the prisoners must have thrown themselves flat. The ship thumped down on the mesa top and the main hatch hissed open.
“Come on!” It was Ham's voice, at a volume that would have impressed a drill sergeant. “We're not waiting around all day. Get on board or get left behind!”
Boots thumped on the boarding ramp, and she wondered just how many men they were picking up. How many people could cram themselves into one small freighter?
One crisis at a time. She glanced at Bridger, who leaned over his console, hands poised. He knew as well as she did the cruiser was coming this way. They would need every second they could get.
Feet thudded in the tool room. The hatch to the bridge hissed open and a man ducked through. It was a stranger, a dark-haired young man with gaunt cheeks and haunted eyes. He said, “We've got men around the perimeter of the mesa. Three of them.” He peered at her, and his head jerked back in surprise. “Alice?”
Alice said, “Captain Thrush?”
“Half right,” he said.
The ramp hissed and Ham bawled, “That's everyone!” Bridger kicked the ship into the air and they surged forward, no more than a couple meters above the mesa top. He pointed the ship straight at a distant figure, a man in a pale prisoner's uniform coming toward them at a shambling run.