Surviving The Theseus (17 page)

Rachel flew with grace, left, then right,
down, up, flying an obstacle course of mines.

“Jesus, Rachel, what did you do before this?
Fly for a stunt show or fly get-a-ways for robberies?”

“Both,” she said, telling Blair what she had
told no one, but she didn’t care. Blair would likely not take her
response seriously anyway. Regardless, it was all her past now. No
more.

The alarm went off, and to Blair’s credit, he
did not freeze. He immediately yelled out. “Right!”

Rachel veered left, and then right again
quickly to avoid another mine.

What took twenty minutes to come through the
first time, took Rachel five minutes on the return. Once through,
she set the coordinates for the return to Pyramid and accelerated
full throttle.

With the ship on automatic pilot, she relaxed
somewhat, breathed out heavily, and then stood up. “Okay, let’s
go.”

“What? Go where?”

“First, we need to get rid of that body.”

Blair and Rachel stood over the body of the
soldier, or whatever he was. Rachel assumed he was a soldier. A
defined, muscular body. The body of someone who works out every
day. Regimented. Trained. Stoic. And dead from bullets, but that
didn’t matter. Did she suspect the aliens had guns? No, but she did
suspect either the soldiers went crazy, or they panicked. All the
training in the world does not prepare you for something you’re not
mentally prepared for. It only took one to panic and shoot this
man.

Blair reached down, pulled the soldier’s
glasses from his face, and plopped them in his jacket pocket.

Rachel looked at Blair, knowing already what
it was, but asked anyway. “Recording?”

“Yes. It’s probably encrypted, but I’ll try
and crack it so we can see what they saw.” Blair paused. “I don’t
know what to say. Should we say something?”

“Probably, but they knew the risk. Let’s just
vent him through the tube.”

Blair nodded and then both of them dragged
the body over to the tube. “Just a second,” Blair said, as he
dropped the legs, Rachel still holding the dead man’s arms. Blair
activated the tube. “I hope he didn’t suffer much.”

Blair grabbed the legs again, and they
carried the man over the tube. Blair then dropped the man’s legs
into the green substance, which swirled in a downward spiral.
Rachel could see the circular motion as the substance circulated
down then back around.

Rachel let go of his arms, and the man
disappeared into the tube and vented into space. Blair turned off
the tube travel device.

“Let’s clean up the blood.”

“Just a second,” Blair said, his voice
wavering. He rubbed wet eyes, staring at the tube.

“Be strong, Blair. We are not through this
yet.”

“I know,” he said. “It . . . It’s just that
none of their families will ever know. He’s drifting out in space,
all alone.”

Rachel cocked her head to one side, her eyes
softened, and she saw Blair as a friend for the first time since
she met him. Then she shook her head, put a hand on his shoulder,
and said, “He’s got nothing else to worry about ever again. God
bless your sweet heart, but we’ve got work to do.”

“Yeah, I know.” Blair sniffed, his nose
running again. He wiped his face with his jacket sleeve.

There’s the Blair I
know
, Rachel thought, and smiled this time, instead of
recoiling.

It didn’t take long for them to clean up the
blood and jettison out the rags and any other evidence out of the
ordinary, including the soldier’s helmet.

For the rest of the trip, they both sat in
silence. Blair spent a little time trying to access the chip in the
soldier’s glasses, but the encryption was too good for him to break
with the tools he had available. It had to wait. He told Rachel he
would crack it back on Pyramid and get a hold of her when he
did.

They got back into the ship with no issues,
disabling the invisibility shield before the door to Pyramid
opened. The secrecy from Eric made no sense to Rachel, since Eric
was no more a threat to revealing information than they were, and
they all signed the same confidentiality agreement that would
result in death if broken.

She was happy to be back, even though the
mission failed. Her relief came more from not being followed. All
the way back she randomly scanned for anything unusual and nothing
alerted her. The shuttle did not have a large range, but it was big
enough to comfort her concern.

“Well,” Eric said, after the shuttle was
secured and Blair and Rachel were standing outside the shuttle.
“How did it go? Where’s the rest of them?”

Blair looked at Rachel. She debated whether
to say anything, but it was only fair to Eric who had been nothing
but helpful.

“Dead,” she said and then explained
everything that happened.

“Jesus!” was Eric’s response after Rachel
finished. He then reached into his jacket and brought out a joint
and lit it, holding it out in offer to Blair and Rachel.

Rachel shook her head.

Blair stared at it. “What is it?”

“It has been around for hundreds of years, if
not thousands, my friend. Tried and true. It will center you.”

“I better not,” Blair said. “I need to go and
decrypt these glasses. I’ll let you both know when I’ve got it.
Where can I reach you?”

Eric shook his head, the joint hanging
loosely from his pursed lips. “I have to dismantle that tube thingy
in the shuttle and weld the most perfect seal in the world so it
looks like it did before. If my boss sees it, he’ll fire my ass,
and my ass needs the money, especially if this debacle in front of
us goes south even more.”

“Need help?” Rachel said, but not with much
conviction.

“Nah,” Eric said. He took a long drag on the
joint, held it for a few seconds, and released a large puff of
smoke. “You guys go. Sounds like you’ve been through hell.”

As Blair and Rachel walked away, Eric said,
“Hey, Sasquatch Hands, I’ll meet you at the Bruges Bar in two
hours.”

“You got it, Delicate and Dainty Hands.” She
didn’t turn around, but kept walking. “Maybe you can explain what
the fuck a Sasquatch is.”

Eric laughed, his machine-gun laugh, bringing
a smile to Blair and Rachel’s faces. “It’s a huge, hairy, man-like
beast, with big hands and really big feet.” He laughed even
harder.

Rachel stopped for a second, a laugh
exploding out of her. Blair burst out as well. Neither Blair nor
Rachel ever saw Eric again.

“I got it,” Blair said, as Rachel took a swig
of her sixth beer.

The bar was packed, even though it was seven
in the morning. Time is a funny thing in space. It doesn’t mean
much when you don’t have the sun to go off of. Most people, from
what Rachel could tell, did not wear a watch.

She sat at the bar on a tall stool. Blair
stood beside and just behind her. The noise level was high, the
chatter a steady drone.

“I can’t maintain comfortable numbness, if
you’re standing behind me,” she said.

Blair sat down on a stool beside her.

The bartender, a tall, thin man with a thick,
bushy mustache, looked at Blair, and Blair shook his head.
“Nothing. Thanks.” Blair looked around. “Where’s Eric?”

“No show. He probably passed out in the
shuttle before he finished the welding job.” She smiled.

“We should go look at the footage from the
glasses.”

“One drink first. I insist.”

“I’m not much of a drinker.”

“You probably won’t like beer then.” Rachel
ordered a vodka special for Blair, which he sipped slowly.

He looked at Rachel with an impatient
expression on his face.

Rachel looked at the reflection in the mirror
behind the bar. “Maybe we shouldn’t look. Just hand it over. Be
done with it. Maybe it’s better not to know.”

Blair’s eyes furrowed. “What? Are you kidding
me?”

“Look, Blair, it’s done. Over. We did our
part. We need go no further. If we watch it, and they find out we
did, they’ll kill us and you know it.”

Blair stared at his drink for a bit. “They’ll
never find out. I’ll make sure they don’t know it has been
viewed.”

“Nothing you say can convince me of
that.”

He sniffed. “I need to know.”

“I don’t. Go ahead and watch it, but I want
no part, and I don’t want to hear about it.”

Blair’s face was sullen, almost devastated,
and a pang went to her heart. All she wanted was her money and a
life to make her forget the whole thing. She never wanted to see
Blair again, not because she disliked him, because she didn’t, but
because that’s the way it needed to be.

They sat in silence, other than the constant
chatter filling the small bar.

Blair started to open his mouth, and then he
shut it, looking over at an observation window. He walked up to it,
and Rachel got up and followed, wondering what he was looking at.
She brought her beer with her.

“What?” she said.

Blair turned to her. “We’ve stopped.”

“Maybe we’re at the next gate.” Even as she
said it, she knew that couldn’t be.

“We passed through the other one, to my great
relief I might add, an hour ago. There’s no way. There’s --”

“Something wrong,” she finished for him.

Blair sniffed.

“We need to get those glasses and get off
this ship,” Rachel said.

“Let’s just go.” Blair was wide-eyed, looking
around the bar.

“No glasses, no money.”

“Fuck the money.”

“The money is everything. Otherwise, why’d we
do this? And, just a minute ago, you were all gung ho to view the
video on those glasses.”

“I’ve got a huge bonus coming to me for
supplying them with the tools for this mission, and I can live
without viewing what happened to those soldiers. Like you said,
maybe it’s better not to know.”

“Yeah, well, none of it will mean shit if
we’ve got nothing to show for it.”

Blair grabbed her by the arm with one hand,
and her beer with his other. As he pulled her away, he slammed her
beer on the nearest table, scaring the patrons sitting there.
Rachel pulled her arm out of his grasp. Both of them continued to
move quickly, Blair in the lead.

“We never made it back to Blair’s room,”
Rachel said, not without some sadness in her voice, something she
had not shown yet, but she couldn’t help it. As much as she hated
Blair when she first met him, she grew to understand him. He had a
heart and he didn’t deserve to die.

Regina glared at her, but said nothing. The
others all stared, but their judgments did not matter to her. She
didn’t reveal anything about her past that would incriminate her,
like the criminal activity she told Blair about. They now knew
everything she did about what happened on Pyramid.

“When we realized people were disappearing,”
Rachel said, “we went for the shuttle bay, but by the time we got
there, others must have already tried, because the doors were
sealed and we couldn’t get in.”

“And you didn’t see anything else?” George
said.

“The orange light that Regina saw, but we
never got caught in it until the control room with the rest of you.
We tried walking back to Blair’s room, but crowds of people pushed
us the other way, yelling about people dying, about stuff oozing
from their eye sockets, mouths, and ears, and their bodies sizzling
away to nothing.”

“All right, Rachel,” George said. “I
appreciate everything you’ve told us, and I understand the risk
you’re taking.” He nodded at her. “Here’s what’s going to happen,
people. We need to get off Pyramid. Half of us will stay here and
try and get our ship going. The rest will be going to get those
glasses and the device Blair used to bypass the matchstick
markers.”

There was some chatter amongst everyone, and
then George put his hand up and they stopped talking. Regina said
nothing to anyone.

“All right. Mary, Brett, Travis, and Paula,
you stay here. Myself, Michael, John, Cindy, and Rachel will go to
Blair’s room.”

Everyone looked over at Regina, who was not
included in either list.

Brett glared at Mary when he found out he was
still stuck with her.

“And Regina, I’ll leave it to you what you
want to do,” George said.

She looked right back at George, and without
hesitation, said, “I’m with your group, George.”

George closed his eyes and nodded slowly.
“Okay then. Group, continue to watch your device for any activity
on the cameras, and report anything. Be ready to go in five.”

Mary looked at Brett, Paula, and Travis,
sitting in the cockpit of their ship. These would not have been her
choices to help get the ship going, something more important than
finding glasses. But, so be it. That’s the way it was. She would
deal with it. Complaining was not something she ever did, not out
loud. Ever.

The smell of charred circuitry still
permeated the air. So, what do you do when you’re dead in the
water? Nobody really knew how bad it was, because they couldn’t
turn anything on. Every system was dead. An idea popped into her
head. It was a long shot, but it was worth a try. Unfortunately, it
required leaving their ship.

“Paula and Travis,” Mary said, “I want you to
start searching Pyramid shuttles on the far side of the bay,
looking for flight boards we can swap out for our crispy ones.
Brett and I --”

Brett dropped his head.

“-- will look on this side of the bay. My
hope, and it’s a long shot, is that whoever fried all the boards
did not do so on the shuttles since they would not be able to go
anywhere unless near a marker.”

Travis looked at the others. Nobody said
anything. “Ummm, Sir, if aliens did this, how would they know the
difference? Wouldn’t they just fry everything?”