Spin the Sky (39 page)

The faces all seem to blur after a while. Nausicaa points to women and asks Trevor if that’s his mom, but she’s doing it less often and the hope has fallen from her voice. Trevor keeps going, but he’s more and more sure that he’s looked at everyone in the arena and his mom just isn’t here.

At last, Nausicaa asks if they can stop at one of the vendors selling drinks and liquid snacks in null-grav sippy cups.

“I don’t think she’s here,” Trevor admits as he swipes his thumb to pay for two hot chocolates.

Nausicaa sips her drink appreciatively. She looks tired but her cheeks are flushed pink. “So what should we do?”

Trevor thinks about it. His first impulse is to go home, but what good will that do his mom? She isn’t there. He could tell his Grandpa Larry or Lupe or Argos, but he can’t imagine what they could do. Mathis went on for forever about how Grandpa was organizing the whole colony for war, but that was after two large glasses of Al’s “restorative” and Trevor has a hard time seeing his old Grandpa doing anything other than chucking tequila bottles at bad guys.

“I guess,” he says, taking a long sip. “We should go back to the docking bay and see what Cesar has come up with.”

Nausicaa brightens up. “Yeah, good idea. If your mom isn’t here, she’s probably there and they might need our help.”

They go racing towards the docks. The docking bay is almost completely empty. There is no sign of Cesar or Penelope. There’s just a group of dockworkers that Trevor doesn’t recognize loading a large cargo ship in the back.

After they walk around the third time, Nausicaa cries, “Where is everybody?”

“I don’t know. I guess they are all at the tournament, but where’d Cesar, I mean my dad, go?”

Nausicaa throws her hands up and looks just as frustrated as Trevor feels. He decides to go ask the dockmaster if he’s seen Cesar.

Trevor jogs over to the dockmaster’s station and pushes the door open. There’s a strange woman in there talking into the dock’s comm. She has a hard jaw, buzzcut hair and she’s wearing an Ithaca dockworker coverall but Trevor knows she’s not from Ithaca. He knows all the dockworkers. As she turns towards Trevor and Nausicaa, Trevor looks past her to see the dockmaster’s crumpled, bloody form curled up on the floor.

Nausicaa screams. Trevor shouts. The woman lunges for them with a snarl. She grabs the front of Trevor’s shirt and cocks her other arm back, making a fist that means business.

Nausicaa smacks the woman full in the face with her backpack so hard that her head snaps back and the comm implant over the woman’s temple cracks loudly. The woman looks stunned, but only a little. Her grip on Trevor loosens enough for him to yank his shirt out of her grasp. He looks around for some sort of weapon and spots a heavy metal wrench.

The woman turns on Nausicaa. Nausicaa whacks her with the backpack again, but it doesn’t have the same impact as the first time. The woman hits Nausicaa hard. The girl’s whole body jerks back as she lets out a pained yelp. Nausicaa would have gone flying if her boots didn’t keep her locked to the floor. Trevor doesn’t even think twice about picking up the wrench and bringing it down on the woman’s head.

It isn’t hard enough. Screaming curses, the woman pounces on him, her fingernails gouging thick rivers of pain down his arm. This time he hits her as hard as he can with the wrench, but that only makes her move her grip to his neck. She squeezes cruelly. Flailing around with the wrench, Trevor yells and twists, but he starts to weaken. He drops the wrench to claw at her feebly, his vision going dark.

All at once, Trevor feels her grasp on his neck disappear. Gasping for air, he pulls away and goes scooting across the floor, getting as far away as fast as he can. After he’s several feet away, his vision returns. The strange woman is lying in a heap. Nausicaa stands over her, breathing heavy and holding a hammer as a cloud of spherical globules of blood whirl around her.

The hammer is bloody, but Trevor only sees the naked fear all over Nausicaa’s face. “Are you dead?” she stutters. She has to try twice before she can get the question out.

“Not yet,” he replies, raspy and hoarse. His throat feels like he’s been gargling with bleach.

“I don’t think any of this blood is mine,” comments Nausicaa, sounding a little dazed still. “That’s lucky for you guys. No risk of infection.”

Trevor frowns at her. “It’s also nice that you aren’t hurt,” he points out.

Trevor grabs the dockmaster’s duct tape and quickly tapes the woman’s arms and legs. As soon as he is done, the hammer slips from Nausicaa’s shaking hands and gently twirls in midair while she collapses to the floor. When Trevor goes to her, she waves him away.

“Go check on that guy in there,” Nausicaa insists.

Dino, the injured dockmaster, is groggy and keeps mumbling about a terrible headache. Trevor asks him, “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Dino just calls him a very rude name and tells him to get out of the way.

“Whatever that
puta
was trying to do, she’s not getting away with it on my watch,” swears Dino, his fingers flying over the comm.

Trevor and Nausicaa hover in the doorway, alternating between exchanging worried looks and scanning the docks for trouble. Trevor retrieves his wrench and Nausicaa plucks the hammer from the air.

Finally, Dino punches a fist into the air. “Ha! I don’t think so!” Turning to Trevor, Dino shouts triumphantly, “Those bastards think they are gonna rustle cattle out of
my
docks? Let’s see them try it with the outer doors sealed and all the cargo elevators jammed.”

Nausicaa claps and cheers.

“Won’t they send someone else to beat up on you?” asks Trevor, his mind going to those dockworkers in the back. He hasn’t seen them for a while and that is making him nervous.

Dino’s hand goes to his bleeding scalp but he stops before touching it. Trevor winces just watching him.

“Yeah, I hope not,” Dino says, prodding his wound gently. “I’ll put out an emergency message and then lock the door. From what I saw before that
pendejo
beat me half to death, those guys were heavily armed. We are going to need help.”

“Did you see Cesar Vaquero?” asks Nausicaa.

Dino’s eyebrows shoot up. “Did I what?”

Nausicaa repeats her question.

Dino answers before Trevor has a chance to explain and his voice takes on a reproving note. “Listen, miss, if Mr. Vaquero were still alive, there’s absolutely no way he’d be involved with these jerks, stealing and attacking people.”

“Dino, my dad is back,” Trevor says urgently. “He was here just a while ago, but he’s not with these guys, he’s trying to save my mom from them.”

This time Dino gasps and, fumbling for his chair, sits down quickly. “He’s here? Alive?”

Gesturing to the woman taped to the chair, Trevor says, “I think these guys may have taken my mom and dad came here looking for her.”

“Oh!” cries Dino, looking flustered. “That was your dad? Wow. That explains a lot. I’m sorry Trevor, that knock on my head must have really rattled my brains. I was here before when he came looking for Mrs. Vaquero. Yes, they took your mom. Seven Skies. I was just putting out an emergency call about it when that stupid woman over there pulled open the door and started hitting me.”

Dino stops as though he’s had a sudden thought and starts tapping on his computer.

“We should go get help,” Nausicaa whispers urgently.

Trevor likes that idea.

“Your dad took that ship you guys came in on,” Dino says.

Trevor nods, “Good, then he went after Mom. Wait. Did you say cattle rustling a minute ago?”

Dino responds by getting on the comm, blaring out emergency calls on every frequency. Ithaca is under attack from within. Trevor knows that what he needs to do right now is go protect his family’s herd. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do exactly, but he does know that he can’t do it here.

Trevor and Nausicaa sprint towards the elevators near the stadium, but the explosions and gunfire start before they make it out of Ithaca’s core.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

A
fter the third or fourth blast knocks Penelope on her now thoroughly bruised bottom, she decides to stay down. Unfortunately, the sliding storage bins and falling equipment in the cargo bay make that difficult.

Penelope spends a few minutes curled in the fetal position under a pile of discarded hazmat suits before pulling one on. Ships rush in and out through the pressure locks, making the docking bay icy and cold. Then she spies the little repair skiff sitting neglected in the corner, its grappling claws tucked up under it like a sleeping crab. They will miss it after the action when they want to fix the damage, but she’ll be long gone by then.

Perfect.

With all the people running around and all the sirens going off, Penelope decides it is time to risk it. It isn’t too difficult to grab a mask hat and pull it low over her face after stuffing her hair up inside it. Mask hats are shaped like tall baseball hats with an oxygen mask that pulls down over your face and attaches to your hazmat suit for limited vacuum protection. They only have maybe thirty minutes worth of oxygen in them, but they come in handy during emergencies so they are common headgear in docking bays.

Penelope keeps her head down and avoids eye contact as she briskly walks across the large room to the little repair skiff. She almost reaches it before she hears Uri Mach bellowing across the cargo bay.

“Get every ship with a gun out there and hit that bastard!” he roars.

Penelope’s heart sinks so fast that it lands right on her stomach and she has to swallow back a gulp of bile. She stops walking for only a second, and then hurriedly dodges behind the wheel of a large fuel tanker. It is unlikely that he spotted her, but it’s not like she can trust her luck. Not today.

She peers around the edge of the tire to find people in flight suits surrounding Mach, keeping him blessedly distracted.

Someone is asking Mach, “Why aren’t the lasers working? They should have fried the attacking ships before it got close enough to hit, right?”

“The lasers are working just fine,” snaps Mach, sounding even angrier. “It’s just one ship. This guy is too small and too fast for them to burn. They can’t get a lock on him. The lasers need to stay focused on their target for a moment to heat it up enough to burn. He’s got some kind of reflective armor on that thing.”

There is general muttering before Mach snarls, “It’s just one little ship! Go get him!”

People scatter. Penelope takes the opportunity to hurry closer to the skiff she has her eye on.

“Just one ship?” mutters one of the pilots getting into a ship near Penelope’s new hiding place. “Where’s Asner? He’s been talking about how nothing can get through the laser field for months and one little ship gets through to do all this damage?”

Penelope wonders who is out there giving Uri such hell. Whoever it is will get a big kiss of gratitude from her for providing this distraction, if she ever meets them.

People back at Ithaca might have noticed she’s gone by now, but that is doubtful. It will be hours, maybe days, before anyone figures out what happened to her. She isn’t even sure there is anything to see. Asner and Mach could have erased them or positioned themselves so that the cameras failed to record her little kidnapping.

The person climbing in behind the first pilot replies, “Asner? Never around when we need him. Figures. He’d only say he designed the stupid lasers to take out big military ships or some crap like that. He’d say small ships are our problem. He’s always putting it on us.”

Penelope hopes this means no one has found Asner yet. It will give her more time to escape. It takes her a few tense minutes to get the door open and climb in. She fumbles through powering it up, praying that she remembers how to do that correctly from that flight simulator. She wishes she paid more attention during those lessons. She wishes she hadn’t taken them so long ago.

Penelope sighs, feeling the profound embarrassment she’s been ignoring since she woke up. How could she have let herself be taken so easily? What kind of fool walks right into that kind of danger? She might as well rub herself down with bacon, pop into a tiger’s cage, put her head in its jaws and then act shocked when it bites her.

The worst of it is that she was warned. That Ulixes man warned her about Mach and Asner and she dismissed him as a raving lunatic. Penelope feels very stupid. Actually, realizing he was right about that means he may have not been totally mad.

Penelope feels so exposed, sitting in the cockpit of the little skiff. The clear plastic front of the cockpit gives almost everyone in the docking bay a view of her sitting here. She can see Mach in the extreme right-hand side of the window, warped where it curved to meet the metal walls. People surround him as he barks out commands.

Her hands shake while she waits for the engines to power up. She can only hope that, with all the other ships jostling to get out and into the fight, they don’t notice her sneaking off in the skiff. She eases the skiff into flight and prepares to make a break for it.

There is a flash from the right. Penelope sees people running towards her and the little skiff. She turns to see Mach glaring right at her. They found her. Penelope reflexively winces, causing the little skiff to veer suddenly to the left before she guns it hard, pushing for the doors.

The skiff lurches forward to the sound of small pings against the hull. They are shooting at her. Penelope knows it’s all over, but she is damned if she will stop fighting.

There is a large blue ship blocking the door. Penelope flies the skiff up, seeking a chance to slip out over the lumbering thing as it moves into the airlock.

No good. The huge blue ship swerves up and she narrowly avoids getting flattened like a bug against the roof of the docking bay, to be scraped off later. Then the inner door slams shut, ending all hope of escape.

Penelope pulls the skiff back and looks around, desperate for a way out. She knows they’ll probably just shoot her down the second she breaks free of the bay, but she doesn’t care. If this thing had guns, she’d make sure that at least she takes out Mach.