Atlantia Series 1: Survivor (18 page)

‘This is a mutiny,’ Sansin uttered. ‘You’re taking control of the ship?’

‘You never
had
control, captain,’ Hevel replied. ‘We have fled for years across the cosmos, and what has changed in that time, captain? What has become of us? What have we learned? What have we done to improve our situation, to fight back against the Word?’ Hevel shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

‘And what are you going to do, Hevel?’ the captain asked. ‘What can you do? We are helpless here.’

Hevel’s mouth fractured into a grim smile. ‘We have never been helpless, captain. You have merely been unable to help us to help ourselves, as is our right. Now, we shall take it. We shall fight back, right here.’

The captain’s face turned to stone. ‘We can’t fight back, we don’t have even nearly enough troops or fighters for a pitched battle against…’

‘We will stand!’ Hevel bellowed. ‘And we will fight! We will run no longer! This is the will of the people!’ Hevel turned to Dhalere. ‘Do it,’ he said. ‘Cut the prison hull loose.’

‘No!’ Sansin bellowed. ‘You do that and you’ll kill everybody on board, including our own people!’

‘They will evacuate using the shuttle,’ Hevel snapped back. ‘No convicts allowed!’

Sansin looked at his marines. ‘Arrest this man, before it’s too late.’

The soldiers wavered, looking back and forth between the captain and Hevel. Idris realised that Hevel’s timing was perfect: Bra’hiv was absent, as was Andaim, and all of the convicts were back aboard the prison hull.

‘Do it,’ Hevel told the marines, ‘if you must, but if you arrest me you must also arrest hundreds of citizens, for I act on their behalf and they will only replace me with another of their own.’

The soldiers glanced at the citizens packed into the corridors outside the bridge, and then back at the captain. Hevel looked at the bridge command crew, his voice carrying clearly to all of them.

‘All of you are welcome to stay or to go,’ he said. ‘But you must choose whom you serve: your captain, or the civilians who depend upon your continued protection.’

The bridge crew looked at each other. Slowly, Jerren and several other officers walked away from their posts. Lael, a stocky senior tactical officer with short cropped–dark hair named Mikhain, and Aranna remained. In response, the four marines lowered their weapons.

Hevel watched as they were disarmed by the civilians accompanying him, and then he turned to Dhalere. She looked down for a moment, studied the control panel before her, and then she flipped a series of switches.

‘Order Bra’hiv and his men to evacuate immediately,’ Hevel ordered.

Dhalere looked at him. ‘If we bring them back here they may act against us.’

Hevel frowned, staring at the prison hull.

‘If they refuse, shoot them down.’

‘They’re our troops!’ the captain shouted. ‘You’re not saving lives, you’re taking them!’

‘They have the shuttle and they have a choice!’ Hevel snapped back. ‘I won’t be extending the same courtesy to murderers, especially not Alpha Zero Seven.’

‘You call them murderers,’ Captain Sansin said softly, ‘even as you murder them.’

Hevel ignored the captain and watched through the viewing ports as the tethers connecting the prison hull to the Atlantia were blasted free with explosive charges.

***

‘Easy now.’

The engine room of the prison hull was not a large compartment like those aboard the Atlantia. It did not, in reality, have much of a propulsion unit, relying instead on whatever vessel it was tethered to for motion: another safety feature built in to its design that prevented prisoners from hijacking it as a means of travel.

The room was instead a series of huge pipes, tubes, transformers and pressure units, all of which had once channelled the immense power of the fusion core through the hull or converted its energy into electricity. The entire space was now enshrouded in darkness but for the fearsome flickering light ahead of them, reflecting off mangled beams and silently spiralling debris in the bitter vacuum.

The core was still buried deep inside the engine room, its blue–white beam having scythed a channel through its fractured core and then solid metal and hull plating to blast out into deep space. Evelyn glanced over her shoulder and saw two remote drones following Andaim toward the core. Both were equipped with mandibles and drills, able to operate closer to the core than any human would dare, although they too would be vaporised if they strayed into the beam of energy blazing from it.

‘That’s close enough,’ Andaim said.

There was no noise in the vacuum of space and the core’s blue–white light seemed almost calming and hypnotic to Evelyn as she stopped near the cover of a large, twisted beam of solid metal. Ahead, near the fusion beam, she could see endless ranks of hull braces illuminated in the glow, their tips glowing with molten metal where the beam had severed them.

‘Okay,’ Andaim said, his voice distorted over the intercom. ‘Now the hard part. You ready?’

‘Let’s just get this over with,’ she replied.

Andaim used a small hand unit to guide the drones past them and toward the blazing core, its light as bright as a burning star. Evelyn watched as the drones drifted toward the device, and then she felt rather than heard a series of deep, rolling booms echo through the hull from somewhere for’ard and the entire prison shuddered.

The core shifted and the blazing beam of energy seared through fresh metal high above them, globules of molten metal spilling like galaxies and spiralling through the engine room in all directions.

‘Cover!’ Andaim yelled.

A cloud of molten metal sprayed across one of the drones, melting its surface and severing control and power lines. The tiny drone spun out of control and hit the beam of light, vanishing instantly into a cloud of superheated particles.

Evelyn hauled herself tight behind the nearest beam as molten metal sprayed past her, just missing her environmental suit as Andaim crouched beneath a collapsed wall as glowing metal fragments showered around him and faded out as the brutal cold of space extinguished them.

‘What was that?’

Andaim stared into empty space, listening rather than watching as the walls of the engine room stopped vibrating. He keyed his microphone.

‘Bridge, Andaim, status?’

A hiss of static clouded the response. Evelyn felt a chill shudder down her spine as she watched Andaim try to contact the bridge twice again with no luck. She turned and pushed off the floor, gliding through the engine room to the aft hatches that led back toward the storage units and the cell block.

She sailed down the passage with Andaim in pursuit to where the three large windows stared out over the abyss of space between the ship and the planet, and her heart flipped in her chest as she saw that the planet was filling the windows, moving past them as the entire prison hull rotated in freefall.

Eve whirled to Andaim. ‘We’ve been cut loose!’ she yelled.

Andaim stared at her in disbelief. ‘That’s not possible! They wouldn’t have done that!’

‘We’re loose,’ Evelyn insisted. ‘How long before we hit the atmosphere?’

Andaim grasped for his forehead with one hand as he tried to think straight, his gloved hand hitting his face visor.

‘They would have ejected the prison hull using forced charges, to clear it from collision with the main hull. That would have slowed our orbit and be pulling us down faster and…’

‘How long?’ she interrupted.

‘No more than a few minutes,’ he replied. ‘We’ve got to move, now!’

Evelyn followed Andaim back through the shattered remnants of the engine room and through a darkened corridor toward the storage units. Ahead, she saw a flare of light that faded out rapidly, and as they emerged from the tangled mess of the hull they saw the shuttle accelerate away toward the Atlantia, narrowly avoiding being hit by the giant rotating hull.

‘No!’ Andaim yelled.

Evelyn floated in space behind him as the shuttle shrank away to a tiny speck of light against the blackness, shining as the nearby star rose over the planet’s horizon in a brilliant flare of light. Evelyn glanced down at the planet below, saw the light creeping across vast oceans and deserts below.

‘They’re gone,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing that they could have done. We need to get back aboard the prison hull, right now.’

Andaim turned and drifted toward the prison hull again, this time accessing the vents into the storage units. Evelyn closed the vents behind them and followed Andaim down to the security door. Together they managed to push the door open enough to let a tiny trickle of air into the storage unit, which became a blast as the low–pressure vacuum sucked air from the corridor into the storage unit in ever increasing volumes.

The door swung open easily and Andaim yanked off his visor as he turned to Evelyn.

‘Bra’hiv abandoned us!’ she said as she pulled off her own visor.

‘Something must have happened aboard Atlantia,’ Andaim replied. ‘Hevel, most likely.’

‘Why?’ Evely gasped.

‘I don’t know,’ Andaim replied, and then fell silent as a new noise reached them from afar.

The sound of voices and clanging bars rang out as the incarcerated prisoners, realising what had happened, began battering at their cell doors, their commingled voices a hymn of human panic.

Eve pictured the prison hull from the outside and its shape, size and mass.

‘How much of the hull will survive re–entry?’ she asked Andaim.

He looked at her quizzically.

‘Not much. She’ll mostly burn up in the atmosphere, break up into smaller pieces. There won’t be much that will hit the ground intact.’

‘But some will,’ Eve replied, and looked up at the cells. ‘The hull will self–orientate for re–entry, right?’

‘Standard procedure,’ Andaim agreed. ‘She’ll still have enough fuel and power to right herself. That’s probably what’s already happening if she’s rotating.’

‘We’ve got to move, fast,’ she said. ‘Release the prisoners.’

‘Do what?’

‘Release them!’ Evelyn snapped. ‘They’re dead if we don’t take them with us!’

‘Take them where?’

‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said.

Evelyn sprinted away down the corridor toward the cell block, Andaim following her until they reached the block itself, the clamouring of the prisoners almost deafening as they burst out onto the gantry.

Eve ripped off her boots and her environmental suit as Andaim ran for the control tower, and then pushed off the gantry until she hit a corpse. She pushed it aside and raised her arms and hands, looking at the cells until she had the eye of every inmate and their anguished cries faded into expectant silence.

‘Listen to what I have to say,’ she called out. ‘Don’t interrupt, because we’ll be dead in a few minutes if you don’t do exactly as I say.’

The inmates watched her, none moving, Cutler’s eyes boring into hers from his cell as she spoke.

‘We’ve been cut loose,’ she said, fully expecting another broadside of rage, but the inmates remained silent and still. ‘The hull will not survive re–entry into the atmosphere intact and we have no idea what or whom might be awaiting for us down there. Our only chance is to hunker down in the engine bay and hope for the best. To do that, we must free you all.’

The inmates watched her silently and she went on.

‘We are enemies,’ she said. ‘We hate each other. But right now the only way we can survive this is if we work together. In a moment, Andaim is going to open the cell doors. I want all of you to make your way aft to the engine rooms that have not been breached, quickly but without panicking. The sooner we’re back there, the sooner we can protect ourselves. Any questions?’

Cutler stood forward, lifted his chin.

‘Why would you free us, just so we can kill you?’

Eve grinned without warmth.

‘If you’re stupid enough to kill the people who save your life, then likely every other inmate here will skin you alive right after, Cutler. So you go ahead and take your best shot. On the other hand we could open every cell door here, except yours…’

Cutler ground his teeth in his jaw but he said nothing. A soft but audible ripple of grim chuckles fluttered among the other inmates and Eve knew that she had them, at least for now. She turned and nodded at Andaim in the control tower.

Andaim adjusted the controls and with a mighty clatter the cell blocks opened as one. Eve rolled upside down alongside the nearest corpse and then pushed off it, back toward the gantry and her gravity suit and boots. She yanked them on just as the prisoners were floating over the tier balconies and moving toward her en masse.

She zipped up her suit but forced herself not to reach for her pistol as the inmates touched down all around, their eyes upon her.

‘How come the mask is gone?’ one of them asked her.

‘That way,’ she snapped back, jabbing a thumb over her shoulder at the exit. ‘Move, now!’

The inmates turned as one and glided with admirable smoothness toward the exit. Cutler drifted by her, his icy little eyes fixed upon hers as he floated past, and then Andaim appeared from the control tower.

‘That’s it,’ he said as he joined her. ‘What the hell are we going to do with them now?

Eve was about to answer when a deep voice rumbled like boulders toward them.

‘Leave that to me!’

They whirled to see Qayin appear on the gantry, his towering form stooping through the exit. A rush of hateful gasps rippled among the convicts and Qayin sneered at them.

‘Whine all you want,’ he growled, ‘but Hevel just mutinied and cut us off. If we’d been aboard the Atlantia he’d have had us all shot on sight instead. Only reason you’re all alive is ‘cause of me.’

‘What the hell are you doing here?!’ Eve asked.

‘Hevel,’ was all that Qayin said.

‘Where is the captain?’ Andaim asked.

‘Under guard,’ Qayin replied. ‘Hevel’s taken the ship, threatened to shoot Bra’hiv down if he did not abandon you here and return to the Atlantia. He didn’t have much choice but to leave.’

‘Damn,’ Andaim growled. ‘I knew it, Hevel will kill us all.’

‘You had a choice,’ Evelyn said to Qayin. ‘Why didn’t you go back too?’