Dusk (56 page)

Toutopolus stopped and Milliken subvoced through the
earwig, “Stop this ship. Now!” The command, filtered by the earwig
network, was calm, but Milliken’s face was not.

The two glints of silver and orange inside the
Echelon craft stole Milliken’s breath from his body. He could not
even find the words he needed to get Toutopolus to stop shooting.
He had shaken him, and when he had stopped, Milliken had barely
found the faculties to subvoc to Uzziah to stop the ship. Milliken
planted his feet beneath him and unlatched the safety on his rifle
as the damaged ship came at them like it was dragged by some
ominous, unseen hand. Milliken braced himself, prepared to fire,
and hoped that training in Earth’s gravity in the rumble room had
worked the way Tanner and Cyrus had planned.

Toutopolus had no idea why Milliken had asked him to
stop firing, and then had asked Uzziah to stop the ship. As the
fighter behind careened toward them, Toutopolus saw the Echelon
soldier inside rear his arm back to throw the silver egg, and it
made even less sense. And then, the most confusing thing of all
happened—just before the nose of the Echelon fighter smashed into
the flatdeck of their own, Milliken took a running leap through the
windshield firing his weapon and screaming as if he had lost
whatever tenuous link to reality that remained.

When Milliken flew through the windshield of
the craft, he expected to be knocked right back onto the flatdeck.
The other half of him expected to be dead by the time he landed.
Both halves agreed, however, that this was the single stupidest
thing he had done to date; but he couldn’t just sit there and wait
to be disintegrated. He squeezed the trigger of the assault rifle
as he cleared the shards of clear composite framing what was left
of the windshield. The muzzle flash caused some of the obscured
figures inside to recoil, but the one rearing back to throw the
silver egg fell in their midst as tiny, dim sparks danced across
his chest.

Milliken landed on his butt on the console of
the ship and his momentum carried him across the console and
knee-first into the face of the pilot. The pilot slumped over the
controls, raising the nose of the ship behind Milliken, which
dumped him deeper into the craft as the figures inside moved away
from him. He continued to fire the assault rifle into the mass of
men inside the craft, but something was odd. Even though at this
range there was a high chance the bullets would penetrate the
Comptex or hit with such force there was serious internal damage,
Milliken’s presence did not seem to elicit the undivided attention
one would expect.

And then he realized what had their
attention—the armed, and now lost, Squib.

In his moment of hesitation, the rifle flew from his
hand as something smashed into the inside of his wrist. And as he
drew his hand back into a defensive stance, the ominous reality of
the position in which he had placed himself became lucid, and the
sharpening incline of the floor reinforced his realization. He was
standing in the midst of trained killers, whom he had just
single-handedly put in mortal danger—and he was alone. But he would
be damned to the lowest coward’s cage in hell if he would let any
one of these men, killers or not, take him without him taking some
of them with him.

Jang watched as Cyrus’s ‘C’ blip stopped in a
room in the living quarters of the Paracelsus. He moved his eyes
down to the corner of the holomonitor where the eight other
miscellaneous blips hovered around the bulkhead blocking the hall
leading from the airlock to the jetway. They had been there for an
uncomfortably long time, and pretty soon Cyrus’s path of egress
would be swarming with them. Being compressed in the small
compartment had made Jang’s toes numb earlier, but now the heat of
anticipation filled his body with warmth and forced blood into his
extremities. He had seen the ‘S’ next to his own compartment on the
screen, but his heart still jumped into his throat when something
banged against the compartment door.

“We’re running out of daylight!” Six’s
muffled voice was loud enough to penetrate the wall of the
compartment even though the computer compensated for the rise in
his voice.

“Cyrus went back for something. He said we
should leave him,” Jang was still subvocalizing, even though at
this point it was not necessary.

“We’re not leaving without him!” the message
came in through the wall of the compartment and the earwig in
bizarre stereophonic. Jang had already internalized this
information, but what to do about it had not quite registered.

“If we’re going to ride your Earth ship down,
we had better get moving.”

“I hate to add chatter, but it takes three
untrained people to land that ship, and it takes five minutes to
power up the re-entry systems,” Uzziah’s voice interjected from the
network.

Jang set the self-destruct sequence on the
explosives Fenrir and Aerik had set up inside the compartment,
because when this was over, the Echelon would tear this ship apart
looking for leads. Jang typed a sequence into his datadeck and
pressed the button that opened the panel. Six was pulling him out
of the compartment as soon as the door slid open.

“Old boy is going to get us killed,” Six said
as Jang landed on his feet.

“Luckily he has as much of a knack for
getting out of these situations as he seems to have getting into
them.” Jang adjusted his glasses and they moved toward the jetway
to the Paracelsus.

When they rounded the corner to the jetway,
they could see the glow from the laser-bit as it completed a ragged
square in the bulkhead. As they entered the jetway, they heard the
loud thump of the excised piece of bulkhead hitting the ground. Six
paused for a moment as if to turn and face the men pursuing them,
but Jang grabbed him by his collar. “There’s a better way,” Jang
said. “Voice Command:” he reported through the microphone, not
bothering to subvocalize. “Drop bulkhead BF-49.”

He paused, and then as he and Six cleared the
opposite side of the jetway he belted, “Confirmed,” his calm
disturbed by the echoing footfalls of the Echelon. There was a
metal slam behind them as the pressure change seemed to give them a
push forward.

“That will buy us some time,” Jang said,
subvocalizing again, “but we need to get to the command center.”
The network parsing system filtered out the anxiety in his
breathing. “Cyrus, I hope you have something magnificent planned to
get us out of this debacle.”

Cyrus rounded the corner empty-handed. It had
not been fully articulated, but after the Echelon had broken
through the initial bulkhead, and Six and Jang had moved to the
bridge, there was now only one way out of this—which meant Tanner’s
Bible could stay in his room for now. Jang’s last words rang
through Cyrus’s head as bile rose into his throat. He was
endangering people on a whim, and it sent cold stilettos through
his veins.

And then, something, magnificent or not, did
come to him. “Jang, are you tapped into the Paracelsus base
system?”

“We need the Agamemnon to cross reference the
functions, but I’m already reconnecting it through comm-sat. But
I’m gonna need no less than four to five minutes to drop this thing
without burning up.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll buy us the time. When you
get it back online, I need you to do three things. Close all the
external vents from the waste processing center except the one that
leads into the jetway. Then, get yourself and Six bolted in, and
when I give you the word, cut the gravity.”

“Okay, so what are you planning to do in the
meantime?”

Cyrus arrived at his own room just as Jang’s
word came over the earwig. He slid his door open to find his staff
leaning against the wall, exactly where he had left it. “I’m going
to be a good host and meet the Echelon at the door.”

Toutopolus tried to subvoc to the others but
found himself screaming, “We have trouble back here!” as the nose
of the Echelon fighter recoiled from its contact with the flatdeck
and rose, pulling it into the air. Toutopolus craned his neck,
debating whether or not to fire at the Echelon fighter with
Milliken in it.

And then his question was answered for
him.

A tiny glint, like a new point of starlight
in the Miasmic sky, streaked over the edge of the black craft and
fell toward him. Instantly he knew what it was, and he didn’t need
to see the bluish aster, as the egg moved slow enough to penetrate
the electromagnetic membrane that protected the ship, to dive from
the seat of the auto-cannon to avoid the destruction.

Toutopolus hit the flatdeck hard, and when he
lifted himself up and looked to see if he was still in one piece,
he saw the auto-cannon, or what was left of it, cut clean through
to the bottom section where the ammo belt fed into the gun. Part of
the gyroscopic base was gone as well as the seat—the fucking seat
he had been sitting in. The rest had been disintegrated, cleanly
wiped from reality itself, just as the top half of his own body
would have been if he had not looked up at the moment he did.

And the idea alone, knowing he did not want
empirical knowledge of whether or not having his molecules turned
to radiation would hurt, seemed to lift him from the flatdeck by
itself. He stood, removed his sidearm from his belt, and with
clear, calm inflection, subvoced Uzziah to take him up to the
Echelon fighter.

Milliken dove right for the soldier that had
kicked the Squib out of the windshield, catching him off balance.
Milliken dipped his shoulder as something collided with his knee
and smashed the soldier into the weapon rack on the wall of the
ship. The fighter was still climbing slowly, but the incline sent
Milliken sliding away as his own footing faltered, moving his back
out of range of the kick that he had not seen coming behind him.
The kick missed Milliken and hit the soldier he had tackled
somewhere in the midsection, crumpling him. Milliken steadied
himself against a bar on the wall, but it came loose, and he
realized it was a weapon. He took another step backward and planted
his butt against the wall to regain his balance, but his legs were
clipped from under him. As his butt slid down the wall, Milliken
realized there were entirely too many people in the room, and they
all wanted to kill him. But the thought perished in his mind
quickly as his tailbone collided with the floor, and the muscles
from his glutes to his toes loosened in the wake of the pain that
spread through them.

Something hit him in his chest, sending
mucous from his nostrils as the air in his lungs evacuated. Then,
in a flicker of light, he saw something moving toward his face that
could have only been someone’s boot. Even as he moved his head to
the right, he realized he still had the gun in his hand. It felt
like a shotgun because his hand was on the pump. As his head moved
out of the path of the kick that slammed against the wall, Milliken
cocked the shotgun. He brought the butt of the gun into the back of
the kicker’s knee, and then, in the same motion, brought the barrel
across to the inside of his knee. The man collapsed over Milliken
and was falling as something hit Milliken’s left temple. Milliken
still managed to catch the falling man’s crotch with the muzzle of
the shotgun. He pulled the trigger, not even bothering to shelter
himself from the inevitable spray.

Yet there wasn’t any. There was only the loud
peal of thunder as the darkness in front of him receding into an
array of orange flickering lights. Something hit him hard, and his
own body was bounced off the wall behind him as if he had been shot
himself. He felt knees and shins collide against him as his body
rolled across the floor of the fighter.

When he finally stopped rolling, he was in a
pile of writhing bodies, and he was unarmed. He felt his brain
rolling around in his head, but the darkness and instability of the
room itself made his own vertigo seem more stable. He spun his legs
beneath him, crossed and extended them, but as he stood, he was
immediately caught in the chest with another kick. This time,
thicker fluid than mucous erupted from his nose, and a metallic
twinge filled his nostrils. He stumbled backward up the incline
toward the front of the still climbing fighter. The wind buffeted
his back as he steadied himself, and despite the howling of the air
rushing in through the destroyed windshield, he heard the pilot
moan. The soldier in front of him emerged from the darkness into
the soft blue glow cast by the holomonitor. The man was drawing a
dull-colored knife from his belt as he moved over someone on the
ground. Milliken lifted his leg and thrust it backward into the
pilot’s seat, knocking the pilot’s dazed body forward. The pilot’s
weight was more than Milliken had anticipated and it knocked him
off balance, but as the body flopped across the controls, the ship
dipped back toward the planet, and the soldier with the knife
stumbled toward Milliken. Milliken launched himself forward and
drove his forearm into the man’s face, snapping the man’s head back
violently and sending him backward to the floor with force.

But something that felt like another leg came
out of the darkness and hit Milliken in his stomach, knocking him
to the side across the controls. The ship dipped a little more, but
Milliken caught himself against the wall with his foot and launched
his body at the man who must have kicked him.

But the man was fast and ducked under
Milliken’s punch, parried his elbow, and then twisted Milliken into
a choke hold. Milliken managed to slide his left hand between the
man’s forearm and his own throat, but he could not stop the man
from securing his grip. Milliken flailed his legs and hit the pilot
in the face. The pilot’s body collapsed to the floor and the ship
tilted back in the opposite direction. Milliken saw the stars
outside eclipsed by another black blob, but he couldn’t tell if it
was the other fighter, a building, or the ground. And then the man
yanked him around. Milliken felt for something vital around the
man’s waist to grab but only found round, cold metal. He grabbed
it, but it loosed from the man’s body and provided no leverage.