Summerhill (35 page)

“Who are you?” one of the guards demanded. “Identify yourself, immediately!”

Summerhill took a couple steps closer. The guards reaffirmed their grips on their rifles and kept their aim squarely on him. “My name is Summerhill,” he announced, “and I’m here to escort Ms. Tinsley out of here.”

“The human woman is a legal prisoner of the Transdimensional Spacetime Integrity Enforcement Consortium. She is being held on three counts—”

“Three counts of violating existential spacetime yadda yadda, yeah, I know the drill.” Summerhill flapped his hand as he spoke and took another step. “I don’t care what she did. She’s coming with me.”

One of the guards took a hand off of his rifle to touch a button on the side of his helmet. “Intruder alert in section Four-Two-One—”

The rest of the call was cut off by the sound of the other guard’s rifle going off. Searing green fired from the muzzle of the gun, a lance of light and energy heading right for Summerhill.

Summerhill made no attempt to dodge. He stood his ground, and in the fraction of a second between the guard pulling the trigger and the energy beam hitting him, he brought his arm up, palm extended forward.

The green beam stopped about a foot from Summerhill’s hand, changing at that point from a bolt of energy into an explosion of pink flower petals that raced past him and down the hall in a double helix. Heat washed over his face and body, but he forced himself not to flinch.

A second or two later, the rifle stopped firing, and the remaining flower petals billowed down the corridor and out of sight. Summerhill grinned, making sure to show his teeth, as he took another pointed step towards the two guards. “Feel like trying that again? Because I can do this all day.”

That was a lie. Doing that once had been exhausting and demanding, and Summerhill knew that he’d only be able pull that stunt off once, maybe twice more before the effort drained him completely. Hopefully the Consortium agents wouldn’t try to call his bluff.

They didn’t, at least not right away, and in that moment of distraction, Katherine acted.

The guard who had made the emergency call still had one hand to his helmet, and he was caught completely off his guard as Katherine kicked the back of his leg from behind. He yelled and dropped to one knee, and then Katherine delivered a follow-up kick to his elbow, causing him to drop his weapon to the floor.

Summerhill rushed forward as the second guard turned to train his gun on Katherine, but before he could line up a shot, she had ducked well inside his reach to deliver a firm headbutt to his chest. The blow didn’t take him down, but it did knock him off balance. Katherine used that opening to rush him back against the slanted lower wall of the hexagonal corridor, momentum knocking the wind out of the guard’s chest and making him drop his gun, too.

The first guard reached for his own weapon, still on the floor, but Summerhill hooked his toes into the trigger guard and flipped the gun into the air. He caught it and pointed it down at the guard, trying his best to look the man in the eyes through his blank helmet. The guard stayed on his knees and held up both hands in surrender.

Somewhere in her tussle with the other guard, Katherine had gotten her cuffs wedged into one of the sliding panels on the wall. She turned and wrenched, gritting her teeth as she did so, and though she couldn’t possibly have been strong enough to break those cuffs, the metal snapped apart with a sharp yank. She shook her arms out, then muttered a quick, “Much better,” before grabbing the side of the guard’s helmet and smashing it hard into the wall. She did this two or three more times until the man went limp and crumpled onto the floor.

“Oh, Mr. Summerhill,” she said as she bent down to pick up the second rifle. “You’ve finally mastered the art of making a proper entrance.” Striding up behind the guard on his knees, she raised her rifle, flicked a switch, and fired.

The green bolt struck the guard in the back, and he crumpled to the floor in a heap. “Oh, bugger,” Katherine said, looking at an indicator set in the rifle’s stock. “Looks like this thing’s out of juice already. Just what did you do to it when they fired it at you?”

Summerhill ignored the question, his muzzle hanging open with shock. He shook his head to help recompose himself, and tried to avoid looking at the guard on the floor. “Sorry. I just—I’ve never seen anybody kill someone before.”

“The Consortium’s got enough to be mad at me about,” Katherine said. “Don’t need to add murdering one of them to the list. That was just the stun setting.” She looked at the rifle again. “At least, I think it was. I don’t exactly read ‘Consortium’ or whatever language this is.”

Summerhill and Katherine then both looked at each other. Despite being disheveled and panting, Katherine looked excited, like she was riding an adrenaline rush and loving every second of it. Seeing that made Summerhill’s tail wag, even though he was still acutely aware of his fear and anxiety from being where he was.

“Thanks for not taking five years to catch up with me, Mr. Summerhill,” Katherine said. “So, how’d you manage to get here this time? Wait, no, don’t tell me: it’s a long story.”

“Pretty much,” Summerhill said, and then alarms started to ring through the corridor, emergency lights flashing. “It just always comes down to finding you and making sure I stay with you.”

“Just like back when we first met, huh?”

“Yeah.” Summerhill thought again about his trip back to the World of the Pale Gray Sky, and his mysterious other self giving him the impetus to find Katherine in the first place. “Though remind me that, at some point, I still need to figure out why I even know to find you.”

“Good to see you still make as much sense as you ever did. If it’s all the same, right now I’m glad you came to find me at all. Figure out the small stuff later.” Katherine then nodded down the hallway. “Come on. I’m guessing that however you got here, we can’t get out the same way.”

“Well, with just the right focus and a whole lot of determination, I can break through the boundaries between realities,” Summerhill replied as he handed the other energy rifle to Katherine. “But it’s pretty tricky, and more importantly, I don’t know if I can take other people with me.”

After giving the rifle a quick once-over, Katherine poked both guards with her feet to make sure they wouldn’t be in pursuit anytime soon, and then brushed the curls of her hair our of her eyes. “Then I guess that means we’re stealing an emergency craft and getting out of here that way.” She then broke into a brisk job down the hallway.

Summerhill followed after her. “Are you sure they even have those?”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Katherine called back to him. “This won’t be the first one I’ve stolen from them.”

“You seem to have a bad habit of stealing things.” Summerhill had an easier time keeping up with Katherine’s pace than he thought he would, his exhaustion from stopping the energy blast now washed away by his own endorphin rush.

As they approached a sealed door, Katherine looked back and smiled at him. “Isn’t this just like old times, Mr. Summerhill? You and me, trying to escape the clutches of the Consortium while racing to the nearest escape pod?”

“Can we not make a habit of that, too?”

Katherine punched the door panel, and the six-sided door slid open with a few jerking motions. “Only if you stop making a habit of disappearing on me.”

“Deal,” Summerhill agreed, and then they were off down the next corridor. This one was wider, more imposing, the sound of the blaring klaxons louder and harsher in his sensitive ears.

“Stay on your toes,” Katherine shouted, slowing down as they approached a hexagonal junction a couple hundred feet down the hallway. “And try to pay attention to signage. Near as I’ve been able to tell, the interior of Consortium ships and facilities don’t need to follow the normal rules of three-dimensional space.”

“And what does that mean, exactly?”

“It means that different pathways may not go the direction you think they go.” Katherine drew the rifle into a firing position as she stepped to the edge of the junction and turned to look down one of the branches. “I guess when you’re the ones who enforce the laws of reality, you’re free to break them as you see fit.” She then gave Summerhill an ‘all clear’ gesture with one hand and waved for him to follow.

He did, checking behind him as he went. Near as he could tell, the hallway they’d taken was going exactly the direction he thought, but he was willing to take Katherine’s word for it that that might change. “So are these emergency craft likely to be well guarded, I take it?”

“Probably more so than usual. I really pissed the Consortium off good last time they had me as their guest.”

“Great. So what’s the big plan? Shoot our way out?”

“We’ve got a lot more firepower than I had last time,” Katherine said. “May as well use it.” The hexagonal corridor ahead sloped downward at what looked at a steep angle, but as she and Summerhill trotted along it, the incline appeared to level out; instead, now it looked like the way they had come was angling up to meet them.

The wall panels were opening and closing much faster now, too, and the klaxons and loudspeaker system kept broadcasting intruder alarms. “I don’t suppose you have another, less violent solution in mind?”

“If this were a story of my granddad’s, he’d want us to come up with something elegant and clever, I suppose. Tell you what: if another way out presents itself, I’ll definitely consider that over a firefight where we’re hopelessly outnumbered.”

The hallway ended in a rounded cul-de-sac with a translucent colorless hexagonal pillar that ran from floor to ceiling. Katherine walked around to the opposite side and smiled with recognition at a holographically projected panel on its surface. There was a large series of buttons, labeled with pictographs instead of text. “What does this all do?” Summerhill asked.

“This is how we get to different areas of the ship much faster.” Katherine’s hand hovered over the buttons as she scanned them all for the one she wanted.

Some of the symbols had meanings that Summerhill could take simple educated guesses at, like the knife and fork for the mess area, or the row of three rifles for the armory. Others were much more esoteric, like the nine-pointed star with the clockwise arrow curved around it, or the three solid dots arranged in an equilateral triangle. Another button bore what looked like a stylized representation of the six-eyed alien’s head.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the button Katherine pressed; instead,
she hit one marked with what looked like a pair of wings.

A chime sounded, and then the hallway leading away from the cul-de-sac changed. It was still a hexagonal corridor, but this one was much narrower, lined with indicator lights and devoid of the same shifting panels. “Come on,” Katherine said, swinging the rifle back up into both arms. “This should lead to the flight deck.”

She was already jogging down the corridor, and so Summerhill had no choice but to follow after her. “We’re going to steal a ship right off of their flight deck?”

“Don’t be silly,” Katherine called back. “We’re going to cause a catastrophic accident on their flight deck. That should hopefully set off their evacuation protocols.”

“Hopefully? And what if it doesn’t?”

“Hey, it’s the closest thing I can come up with right now to an elegant and clever solution. Think of it as a work in progress.” The hallway curved left and ended at another closed door. Katherine stopped in front of it. “Trust me. I can be pretty damn inventive when the situation forces me to be.”

Summerhill chuckled. “Isn’t that what leads to things like you becoming a hostess on a dimension-traveling cruise ship?”

Katherine made some kind of hand gesture above the panel that Summerhill couldn’t make out, and the door slid open. “Hey, that worked out just fine for a few years. Right up until around the time you showed up, actually.”

“The timing of that was a complete coincidence, and you know it.”

“I’m not sure I believe in coincidences anymore after meeting you, Mr. Summerhill.” The blaring of the klaxons was even louder now with the door open, the pitch lower and more hollow. “But hopefully that just means you didn’t show up out of thin air to save me only to have us fail now.”

The fur on the back of Summerhill’s neck stood on end, and his ears folded back. “Actually, speaking of which, I’m kind of worried that we haven’t run into any resistance yet in our escape.”

After giving her energy rifle another quick check, Katherine smiled. “Maybe they got cocky after finally managing to recapture me. We just need to make the best of the head start we’ve got.”

“Hey, you’re the one who said they’d probably be on high alert because of you. I’m just saying.”

Katherine set a hand on the dog’s shoulder. “Hey. We’re going to get out of here, Mr. Summerhill. Don’t worry.” She paused for a moment in thought, then reached around the back of her neck and pulled off some kind of chain necklace, which Summerhill hadn’t seen before due to Katherine’s hair and clothing covering it up. “Here. For good luck.” She reached up and placed the chain around Summerhill’s neck.

A pair of tiny, inscribed metal plates hug against his chest. “What’s this?”

“Those are my dog tags,” Katherine said. “Almost makes more sense for you to wear them anyway.”

Summerhill wrapped his fingers around the tags hanging from the chain, and then he smiled. “I’ll take all the good luck I can get right now. So, is the plan still to hit the flight deck as hard as we can and cause some mayhem?”

“Either hard or precise. Preferably both.” Katherine took point again and led the way down the hallway. “Keep your eyes peeled for anything that looks like it might be really important. Or like it might explode.”

“I still can’t believe this is your definition of ‘elegant.’”

“It’s better than the idea I had before, you have to admit that.”

“That’s not exactly saying much.”

Katherine gave Summerhill a gentle nudge on the shoulder with her fist. “For the moment, it’s the only idea we have. But don’t worry: with my ingenuity, this energy rifle, and your... whatever it is the thing you can do is called, we’ll be fine.”

Summerhill wanted to be able to say that they’d gotten out
of worse situations before, but he wasn’t sure how true that
actually was. Besides, Katherine was right about needing to make the best use of their time, and stopping to concoct a more solid plan was a luxury they didn’t have. “Okay. If I see anything
that looks like it might explode, I’ll be sure to point it out.”

An eager grin spread across Katherine’s face. “See, that’s the spirit,” she said, and she charged on through the open door into the adjoining hallway.

After a few dozen yards, this new hallway opened up into a much larger area. As Summerhill got closer to it, he could see that this was the flight deck that Katherine had mentioned. It was brightly lit, but there was little distinct that he could see from so far away, with the exception of a series of launch tubes on the far side, and the wing of what must have been some kind of plane or small starship.