Escape (30 page)

Jilly shook her head once the fire storm passed. “They blew the reactor.”

“Yes”

“Just to take as many with them as possible before dying themselves.”

“In death they are victorious. The enemy fleet is destroyed. And some of our fighter ships escaped.”

Jilly looked directly at Kieran. “You’re scaring me. What is this ‘our fighter ships’? What do you mean by that. The Kieran I know has never been a friend of the Union.”

“I am not the Kieran you know.” The pilot turned to her with a broad, unsettling grin.

She blinked stupidly at him. “W-what do you mean?”

“Come closer please.”

Jilly leaned away, and began fumbling with her seat restraints. “No. Stay away from me.”

“This will only take a moment.” Kieran reached for her with one hand. His fingers closed like a vice around her upper arm.

“You’re hurting me!” Jilly gave up fumbling with her restraints and reached for the neural disrupter she'd tucked into her belt.

Her hand grew numb around the handle. Frowning, she tried to flex her fingers. She could feel nothing. The numbness was spreading.

Fast.

From hand, to elbow, to shoulder
—
and now her brain grew fuzzy and her eyelids drooped. She tried to shake her head. “Wharr ooo ooing oo ee?”
What are you doing to me?

“Sweet dreams, Jilly.”

* * *

The man who looked like Kieran Hawker aimed his freshly reappropriated corvette for the dawning edge of Da Shon's dayside. It began to emerge more clearly from the icy blue shroud of the Blue Flower Nebula, and he could see the dark green of the planet's rolling fields below. Every now and then an old crater could be seen dotting the surface of the world with blue. The craters had long since filled with water. Fresh asteroid impacts were once in a century events thanks to the planet's ring of point defense satellites, but the recent space battle had knocked out a few of those, so anything was possible.

The imposter watched the planet swell until the canopy's layer of shielding began to glow blue from friction with the upper atmosphere. The ship began to shake with turbulence, but the imposter felt nothing thanks to inertial dampeners. Clouds rushed up to obscure his view of the green world below. With one hand he queried the navcomp, keying it to scan the terrain below for a familiar landmark on the otherwise unremarkable landscape of grassy hills and water-filled craters.

He found what he was looking for after just a moment of searching. It was farther into the dayside of the planet, so the imposter corrected this course accordingly and set a waypoint for the autopilot to follow. The landmark was a sheer gray cliff face at the bottom of a long slope. From what seemed like a previous lifetime (and in some sense it was), he recalled the shadowy cave carved somewhere into the face of that cliff.

It would be safe to leave the ship's former crew with the inhabitants of that cave, he knew
—
and the irony of doing so did not escape him. Kieran Hawker, especially, would be interested to meet them. If only he knew their connection to his past.

The clouds parted, and dark green of the planet's surface rushed toward him with dizzying speed. The autopilot leveled out a scant hundred feet above the surface. It was unlikely that the planetary authorities could track his ship while cloaked, but it was better not to take chances. The grassy hills below blurred to a featureless green, rising and falling like waves on a vast, algae-covered ocean.

Barely a minute later, the terrain fell sharply away and disappeared beneath a gray carpet of mist. The man who wore Kieran Hawker's face grinned. He had reached the landmark. Keeping an eye on his sensor displays, he noted that a few hundred lifeforms had been detected, the majority of which were densely-clustered behind him, in the direction of the cliff. Human signatures. There were also at least a dozen larger, animal signatures scattered through the surrounding area
 
.
 
.
 
.
and one more human signature, twenty degrees to starboard.

The imposter cocked his head curiously, wondering if he might know the individual.

There was only one way to find out.

He aimed the ship toward the individual and throttled down. When he passed through the curling wisps of smoke from the man's fire pit, he brought his ship around in a tight turn and hovered briefly a few dozen micró-astroms above the ground. He spent a moment studying the small figure sitting cross-legged by a crackling fire. It was a man, and he was looking about curiously, no doubt searching for the source of the sudden gust of wind he'd felt.

With the ship's cloaking system engaged, to the unaided eyes and ears the corvette would be nothing but a faint shimmer in the air and a barely audible whistle. Nearly impossible to notice, unless one was standing directly in front of it.

The imposter recognized the figure below from his long gray beard and hair, and from his distinctively wrinkled face. Given the distance between them, it should have been impossible to make out details like that, but the imposter was not concerned by what
should
have been impossible. He remembered a time when his eyes had been that weak, but those memories came from the same seemingly distant past as his memories of the old man below.

Grinning broadly, with a significance that only his people could appreciate, the imposter began the landing sequence for the corvette. He let the autopilot take care of it and made his way back through the ship. He wouldn't be staying long, just long enough to offload the ship's former crew.

When he reached the aft airlock and had cycled it open, the imposter saw them lying there just as he had left them, stacked one atop the other like sacks of flour. They were not dead, though they appeared to be. Ironically, they had never been more alive. He needed to be rid of them, but not to kill them. He planned to leave them stranded amongst his former brothers and sisters of the Constantic Order. Amongst such primitive religious fanatics they wouldn't have an opportunity to get off world again until they were fully changed.

Which was good. They knew too much. He could hear it in their minds
—
the doubts, the suspicions
 
.
 
.
 
.
combined with the symptoms they were surely already experiencing, it wouldn't take them long to come to dangerous conclusions.

The imposter stepped over the motionless bodies of Kieran, Dimmi, Jilly, and Ferrel. While he still retained the biometric profile of Kieran Hawker, he slapped the control panel with his palm, cycling the outer door of the airlock open. It immediately began to open, as there was breathable atmosphere on the other side. A howling wind began whistling into the airlock. The ship hadn't landed yet; it was still half a dozen micró-astroms above the ground. Which was just as well.

The imposter's features began to rearrange. His profile shrank; his clothing changed from Kieran's black flight suit to a more familiar dark blue uniform; Kieran's short blond hair disappeared, replaced by a shiny scalp.

Now he was a captain of UBER. In his own skin again, so to speak.

The ship settled down with an audible
thud
. A landing ramp automatically extended from the aft of the ship to the ground, and the UBER captain stood grinning from the top of the ramp, staring down into the gaping visage of his old friend.

“Paladian Deswin!” the captain called. To the old revolutionary, it would seem as though he were standing in a boxy, metallic room that had appeared out of nowhere, with no walls, and supported by nothing but air and a silvery ramp. Cloaking technology would be unheard of to all but the handful of undercover Constantic agents like himself
—
his old self. The captain stood aside and gestured to the unmoving pile of humanity behind him. “Would you mind helping me with these
 
.
 
.
 
.
friends
of mine?”

The old man slowly rose from his crosslegged position with a long, archaic rifle held at shoulder height. He proceeded slowly toward the cloaked corvette, his eyes narrowed in frightened suspicion. “Identify yerself, changer! I dun wan' no truble!”

The captain went on grinning, but started slowly down the ramp. “Is that any way to greet a friend?”

“I dun know you, changer. Go back to yer changers' cities and cower beneath yer domes. I dun wan' no
 
.
 
.
 
.
” The old man trailed off as his eyes widened in recognition. “Prime
Praxis?
Is that you?”

“It is I.”

The two stopped a few micró-astroms from each other, the old man blinking rapidly as though to wake himself from an unlikely dream. He lowered his rifle slowly and leaned upon it like a cane. “What are you doing here? How is
 
.
 
.
 
.
the
 
.
 
.
 
.
the Origins Project going?”

Captain Praxis replaced his grin with an even wider one. “It is failing miserably,” he lied. “My colleagues are still struggling in vain to discover the address of the Earth gate.”

Paladian Deswin sighed. “Good.” He pointed with one gnarled hand toward the top of the ramp. “Are they
 
.
 
.
 
.
dead?”

“Just sleeping.”

“Friends of yours?”

The captain nodded. “I need you to look after them for me. When they wake up, they will be
 
.
 
.
 
.
confused. They won't remember exactly how they came to be here, and what they do remember will be unreliable. Don't worry if they say something that alarms you. Answer their questions if you can. Do not mention my name, or anything about me.”

The old man nodded, opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated. “Are they
 
.
 
.
 
.
dangerous?”

“No.”

Another lie.

Captain Praxis half-turned toward the ship and the open airlock. “I will need your help removing them from my ship.”

Paladian Deswin nodded and together they turned and began walking toward the corvette. As they walked, another irony occurred to Captain Praxis: Paladian Deswin was now unwittingly walking beside the anathema of his order. The very reason for the order's existence was to prevent the existence of what he, Captain Praxis, had become
—
and what Kieran and his friends would soon also be.

Captain Praxis licked his lips. Delicious irony.

* * *

Brathus's head was pounding with a horrendous headache, which wasn't at all helped by the fact that his rented fighter was spinning in dizzy circles, and his head was presently buried in a mess of burned and smoking power conduits. It was hard to tell whether it was in the acrid smell or the ship's constant motion that was making him sick. The inertial dampeners and artificial gravity, along with almost every other electrical system, had been damaged by the missile, so he could feel every twist and spin. He hadn't gotten around to restarting those systems yet. He was still struggling to reroute enough power for the engines. At the moment, he was splicing and soldering power conduits with a laser torch, rerouting power from the damaged conduits through auxiliary systems that he could possibly live without
—
auxiliary systems like the ship's twin neutron lasers and climate control.

It was about to get very cold inside the ship, but that's what suit heaters were for. Speaking of which, he needed to get back up to the cockpit to activate Garlan's suit heater before he froze to death. As far as Brathus knew, Garlan was still unconscious. The missile impact which had nearly destroyed their fighter had knocked an oxygen tank free of its rack, and sent it hurtling toward Garlan's head. He wouldn't have lived through it if he hadn't been wearing his helmet.

Brathus stopped soldering and lifted his protective eyewear to examine his work. It wasn't particularly neat, but it would probably hold until he could get the ship to a repair yard. Meanwhile, it was time to get back up to the cockpit and continue his mission: rescue Dimmi and steal his ship back. Brathus disengaged his magnetic working harness, and pushed off the deck plates.

It took him five minutes of drifting, bumping, and spinning through the cabin's zero-g environment, with the added complication of the fighter's nauseating death spiral, which actually had the ship bumping into
him,
before he reached the door to the cockpit. As he was floating through the door, grabbing desperately to the door frame to guide his movement, Brathus slammed face first into the oxygen tank which had knocked Garlan unconscious.