Escape (16 page)

Kieran nodded and shrugged. “We must have mentioned his name at some point.”

The boy shook his head. “We didn't.”

Kieran's green eyes narrowed pensively. “You're sure?”

“Positive.”

Chapter 7

D
immi kept the red dot of her pistol's laser sight between the captain's shoulder blades all the way back to the airlock. He didn't seem at all concerned by the possibility that she might put a hole where his heart used to be.

When they reached the airlock, Dimmi found the doors still open. The alarms in the docking tube were eerily silent, and the tube was cheerfully lit.
So the kid actually did it
.
 
.
 
.
 
.

The captain stopped inside the airlock and turned to her. For a change he wasn't smiling.

“I should shoot,” Dimmi said, letting her aim wander between the captain’s eyes. “I doubt anyone would miss you.”

The captain closed his eyes and spread his arms in welcome. “Be my guest.”

Dimmi frowned, unsettled by his indifference. “Whatever.” Her aim dipped to the captain's right thigh. “Give me the security codes for the ship, and I'll let you walk out of here with both your legs.”

“Certainly.” The captain's eyes opened. “Six, six, six
—
F, F, F.”

Dimmi's brow furrowed. “Not very creative. We'll have to change that.”

“It comes out of a very famous book, from the planet where I was born. Well, the first half of the code does. The second half is just a repetition of the first
—
the
sixth, sixth, sixth
character of the alphabet.”

“I'll take your word for it.” Dimmi punched the code into the airlock’s door controls, and selected “lock” from the menu. “Goodbye, loser.” Dimmi gave the captain a sloppy salute as the doors began sliding shut.

“Goodbye,” he replied, smiling once again.

Dimmi turned her back on the captain, not wanting to see his creepy smile for even another second. A chill wind blew into the ship from behind her, playing through her medium-length black hair. Dimmi frowned and turned back to the airlock doors, just as they sealed and locked with a soft
thunk.

Strange
 
.
 
.
 
.
there must have been a shift in air pressure between the ship and the docking tube.
Dimmi sighed and re-holstered her pistol.

A familiar voice interrupted her thoughts. “Is he off our ship yet?”

Seeing no one, Dimmi supposed that Kieran was speaking through the ship's intercom. She addressed the ceiling with her reply: “That's affirmative, chief.”

“Well, get up here, then. I need you to be my copilot.”

“Sure thing.”

Dimmi lowered her gaze from the ceiling, and pressed a hand to the comm piece in her ear. “Brathus, this is Dimmi. All clear over here on the
Shadow
.”

A burst of static hissed in her ear, then: “The
Shadow?
” Brathus’s voice was conveyed with tinny clarity by her earpiece.

Dimmi smiled at Brathus's confusion. “I think it's a good name, don’t you?”

Another burst of static. Dimmi frowned at the poor quality of the comm transmission. There was a lot of interference. Brathus's reply was hard to make out through the static. “No
 
.
 
.
 
.
I
—
”
Kkkkrrrsssss.
“
—
on't
 
.
 
.
 
.
ship's classification
 
.
 
.
 
.
can't be
 
.
 
.
 
.
name
.
 
.
 
.
 
.
Don't get too at
—
tached. We're ditching
—
”
Ssssskkkkrrrrrrrr
 
.
 
.
 
.

Dimmi winced at the noise in her ear. “Meet you at the rendezvous.”

“Eee yoooo there.”

As Dimmi made her way back to the cockpit, she noticed something odd. Illuminated beneath every light fixture in the corridor ahead of her, were drifting clouds of dust.
How long has it been since someone cleaned this ship?

“Porkines,” she muttered.But the air didn't smell musty. It smelled crisp and metallic. Dimmi frowned, briefly wondering what she was inhaling.

* * *

“You're not suggesting that that captain could read our minds, are you?” Kieran said, frowning at the boy slicer.

Mister X. shrugged. “Do you have a better explanation?”

“No, not if what you're saying is true. But it's ridiculous to jump straight to that conclusion. One of us had to have mentioned Brathus's name. You just missed it, that's all.”

Mister X. shook his head. “I'm telling you
—
”

“Look, we have a more pressing matter to discuss. I need you to locked Dimmi out of the controls. Tie them to my biometrics
—
you can do that, right?”

“Sure. I'll get right on it.” The kid bent over his work station and his hands began flying over the controls. After a moment, he zipped open his pack where it lay beside him on the floor, and removed another device with trailing wires, which he plugged into the tech station.

Kieran nodded, satisfied that Mister X. was doing what he'd been told to do. He turned back to the fore, and keyed his multifunction display to follow Dimmi’s progress through the ship’s security cameras. He watched her walk up to the open airlock. The captain walked through it without being asked. Of course, that might have had something to do with the gun pointed at his back.

“I should shoot,” he heard Dimmi say.

“Be my guest,” came the captain's reply.

“Whatever. Give me the security codes for the ship, and I'll let you walk out of here with both your legs.”

“Certainly. Six, A, six, seven, F, twelve.”

Kieran made a mental note of the code.

“Thanks. Goodbye, loser.” Kieran watched Dimmi give the captain a sloppy salute as the airlock doors began sliding shut.

“Goodbye,” came the captain's reply.

Kieran watched Dimmi turn around, and just as she did, a rush of static burst across the screen. Kieran frowned, and tapped the display unhelpfully, wondering if the problem was with the camera or the multifunction display in the cockpit.

Kieran keyed the intercom for the area that the camera was showing. “Is he off our ship yet?”

He watched Dimmi look around briefly for him, and then look up to the ceiling to give her reply: “That's affirmative, chief.”

“Well, get up here, then. I need you to be my copilot.”

“Sure thing.”

Kieran released the button for the intercom just as Mister X. piped up behind him: “I've got the controls locked to your biometrics, but you need to come up with a code to disable the security protocol.”

“No problem.” Kieran got up from the pilot's seat, turned, and stood waiting beside the tech’s station where the boy was seated. “Step aside, kid. I don't want you to know the code, just in case she tries to threaten or torture it out of you.”

Mister X. stood up and shuffled out of the way. “Sounds like a good idea to me.”

* * *

When she reached the cockpit, Dimmi found Kieran already seated in the left, frontmost station
—
the pilot's chair. The kid was seated behind him at the tech's station, right where she had left him. The pair of seats on the right were empty. Dimmi walked down the aisle and took a seat in the copilot's chair beside Kieran.

“Glad you could join us. Strap in. I've set inertial dampeners to 90%.”

“Trying to make me throw up in our new ship?” Dimmi said as she buckled the crisscrossing pair of flight restraints, one on either side of her.

“No
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Kieran absently replied as he went through his preflight checks. He was peripherally aware of the transport he'd rented flying out ahead of him. He looked up briefly to see the
Interloper
jetting into the tunnel back to the asteroid's surface at an incautious speed. Kieran looked over at Dimmi to finish his explanation. “In case the instruments malfunction and I think we're flying straight when we're actually about to collide with a solid wall of rock.”

Dimmi snorted. “You'd need a
cerebral
malfunction for that to happen. Besides, isn't there a greater risk from blacking out?”

“The inertial dampeners are set to auto-adjust as necessary to keep g-forces within tolerable limits.”

“Whatever, chief. Just get us out of here.”

Kieran frowned, still flicking switches and checking readouts, diligently finishing his preflight checks. “That's what I’m trying to do. If it weren't for your pointlessly stupid questions, I'd be doing it a lot faster.”

“Pointlessly
stupid?
” Dimmi echoed, managing to turn despite her flight restraints to face Kieran.

He ignored her fuming scowl. “I'm sorry, did I say stupid
 
.
 
.
 
.
?” He checked another readout
—
sensor jamming and cloaking systems were all functioning optimally. “I meant ignorant.”

“You
—
”

“Hey, kiddies
—
is anyone else catching this?” Mister X. interrupted.

Kieran and Dimmi turned simultaneously to look down the aisle toward the slicer. “What?” they demanded in unison.

“Check the sensor screens. Something is coming through that TLS gate
—
something
big.
”

Kieran turned back to the fore. Sure enough, the sensors were registering a massive signature. The part of the ship which had already emerged from the wormhole was in excess of a milé-astrom long.

Frowning, Kieran abandoned his preflight checks, and disengaged the magnetic docking clamps. He fired the thrusters to get some distance from the station, and then turned the ship to face the TLS gate.

“Wow
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Dimmi whispered.

“Now that's what I call a ship!” Mister X. exclaimed.

“That’s a leviathan.
arbiter
-class.” Kieran's voice was full of awe. When the ship finally finished sliding out of the wormhole, Kieran checked sensors to verify that classification. Over three milé-astroms long. It was shaped like a blunt rocket, from the rounded nose to the ever-widening hull. Eventually it thickened into a massive superstructure at the back, which was overseen by looming bridge towers top and bottom
—
containing the main and auxiliary controls for the ship. The entire ship was painted the black and red of the Union Sentinels, and was literally bristling with cannons and torpedo tubes. It was purely a military vessel, well outside the purview of UBER.

“What is a leviathan doing on the frontier?” Dimmi asked, turning from the viewport to regard Kieran with her wide, mahogany eyes.

Kieran fired the corvette's braking thrusters, to better watch the massive ship go by. It was accelerating slowly down the tunnel to the surface of the asteroid. It would have to go slowly, since the diameter of the ship was practically half that of the tunnel.

“I'm not sure,” Kieran said. “But you can be sure that it wasn't sent on an exploratory mission. Whatever's on the other side of that gate was considered a serious threat to the Union.”

“Like what? Apart from anarchists, terrorists, and clans, the Union has no enemies. Those are all threats from within, and usually end up being handled by patrollers and enforcers. The sentinels haven't seen any real action for decades.”

Kieran shook his head silently. No one needed to say what everyone was thinking: maybe UBER had discovered sentient life after all, and maybe that encounter hadn't been entirely peaceful. It would explain the secret TLS gate. Perhaps the Union was unofficially at war.

“Well, whatever it was, it looks like we won,” Mister X. chimed in.