Escape (31 page)

“Kefick!” Brathus exclaimed, rubbing his bruised nose. He made a lunge for the pilot's chair, kicking off of the door frame, before anything else could slam into him. Struggling briefly, he clicked his seat restraints into place, and began restarting the ship's systems. Starting with artificial gravity.

A thundering crash
issued from behind him as the floating oxygen tank dented itself on the deck plates behind his chair. There was a subsequent hiss of escaping air. Brathus grimaced, realizing that the tank could have exploded.
At least we'll have plenty of breathable air.
Gravity was running at 76% of normal, which was better than nothing. Next he restarted the intertial dampeners
—
a subsystem of gravity. Suddenly the ship's dizzying spin all but ceased. Brathus's vision blurred and his head swayed even more dizzingly than before as his inner ear caught up with the sudden stop.

Beyond the cockpit, the mottled, misty blue nebula went on spinning in lazy circles. Inertial dampeners were also functioning less than optimally, but at least they were functioning.

Finally, Brathus restarted engines. They roared to life with a scream, which soon settled to a resisual hum that he could feel vibrating ominously through the deckplates.

It'll hold.

Brathus spared a glance for his copilot, still out cold beside him, and then grabbed the flight stick and applied rudder counter directional to the ship's spin. Once he had the fighter under control again, he checked his sensor screens for the outcome of the battle they'd stumbled into.

There was nothing but debris. A few stations had survived
—
the orbital transfer station, and half a dozen point defense sattelites, but as for ships, there was none left in the immediate area that could still move under its own power. A couple of derelict destroyers, some huge, melted chunks of what might once have been the Union leviathan, but there was no trace of the hordes of fighters which had been dogfighting around the larger ships. Brathus whistled quietly. They'd blown each other to scrap
—
so effecively that there weren't even appropriate quantities of debris to mark the space where they'd been.

Space was ominously quiet.

But there was
something
moving out there. Brathus frowned at his screens, wondering if he could really be that lucky. Jetting toward him from the direction of the planet was a corvette. A shadow-class corvette. It went by the designation of
Dark Invader
and was as yet uncloaked. Brathus passively targeted the ship and used his rental fighter's optics to magnify it. The familiar, flowing black lines of the corvette swelled to fill the viewscreen, and Brathus gave a predatory grin. He immediately sent his ship into another spin, and killed power to all systems except the comm, artificial gravity, and life-support. Perhaps the damage his rental craft had suffered could be of some use. He set the comm for some appropiate distortion, disabled video, and sent a distress call to the corvette.

“SOS!
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
kkkraacccssskkkaa
 
.
 
.
 
.
suffered serious damage
 
.
 
.
 
.
shhhrsssss
 
.
 
.
 
.
copilot injured
 
.
 
.
 
.
emergency!
Dark Invader,
please repond!”

Brathus released the comm and grinned smugly at his own brilliance. The reply came a moment later:

“This is
—
” the pilot hesitated. “
Dark Invader.
I will dock to offer assistance. Prepare to be boarded.”

You bet I'll be prepared,
Brathus thought. He unstrapped from his flight chair and carefully made his way back to the cabin. The inertial dampeners weren't functioning perfectly, so he could still feel the ship spinning beneath him.

Stopping beside the equipment locker which flanked one of the cabin's two sleeping pallets, Brathus opened it and withdrew a shiny black gun belt, with an MX-10 neural disruptor pistol holstered in it. He strapped it around his waist. The disruptor was just in case he was feeling merciful, or in case he felt in the mood to savor his revenge. In either case he wouldn't want to kill Kieran immediately. The next weapon Brathus withdrew from the locker made both cases seem a slim possibility. It was a fully-automatic PSR-40 (photon shredder rifle), able to fire 40 short, pulsed laser blasts per second, or one long, charged shot, delivering up to 6.5 diquols of energy per second. That was enough to blow a hole through an inch of duranium. Used on Kieran it wouldn't leave any pieces large enough to identify.

As he was closing the equipment locker, Brathus felt a graviton beam arrest his fighter's spin, he armed his rifle and made his way to the airlock at the back of the ship. He waited patiently on his side of the airlock. The dim, red emergency lighting set an appropriate tone for his thoughts. Then there came a shuddering
thunk
as his ship mated its magnetic docking clamps to the corresponding pair from the corvette. Brathus keenly watched the blinking green ready lights on the airlock control panel. Finally, the green ready lights turned to red, indicating that the airlock was in use. Brathus smiled and pointed his rifle at the door. The airlock door hissed open amidst a billowing cloud of steam. Brathus frowned, thinking that yet another system had been damaged by the missile. He pointed his rifle into the steam.

“Hello, Brathus.”

He frowned, and his aim wavered. The voice was female
—
sultry, husky
 
.
 
.
 
.
and familiar. As the steam cleared, he saw her face, and that adorable smile he remembered so well.

“Dimmi?” Brathus's aim fell until his rifle was pointing at the deck.

“I missed you.” She stepped through the airlock, walked right up to him, and kissed him on the lips.

By the time he remembered that the voice which had replied to his emergency comm transmission had been distinctly
masculine
, it was too late.

His rifle clattered to the deck, slipping from suddenly numb fingers. His knees buckled a second later, and he slid to the deck beside his rifle. Dimmi smiled sweetly down at him.

“Sweet dreams, Brathus.”

Chapter 14

A
s Kieran came gradually back to consciousness, raw tingling lit up his nervous system like a string of festive lights. The after effects of being shot by a neural disruptor. He blinked his eyes open.

“I was wondering when you’d awake.” The voice was unfamiliar.

Everything was. The sky was a dark, gloomy blue overhead. In the distance something howled mournfully. The wind whistled, freezing Kieran's exposed skin. There was a crackling sound coming from somewhere behind him. He sat up, and noticed then that there was a sharp rock poking into the small of his back. He rubbed the spot, and frowned, blinking out at the vast and rugged terrain
—
all jutting gray rocks, long, blowing green grass
—
a deeper green than any he’d seen before
—
and short, thorny-looking bushes with no visible leaves. Where was he? How had he gotten there? He breathed in deeply through his nose, smelling the unfamiliar air. There was a fresh, minty tang to it, which he assumed to be coming from the grass. He could breathe that air all day and not get tired of it
—
if only it weren’t so cold. Kieran shivered and let out his breath in a sigh. He watched it condense into a cloud of white vapor as it left his mouth.

“Beautiful, ain it?” There it was
—
that voice again.

Whoever had spoken was behind him. Kieran turned, and in the process saw a few familiar faces: Jilly, Ferrel
 
.
 
.
 
.
and Dimmi? That was a surprise. They were all lying in the grass, face up and eyes closed, all unconscious
—
including Dimmi.
Brathus grew tired of your company, huh?

The man who had spoken was regarding him cautiously over the rim of a steaming cup of
 
.
 
.
 
.
perk? His expression was hidden behind a long gray beard. The hair on his head was equally long and gray. His face was creased and lined like old masser hide. Between them was a flickering fire. Kieran scuttled toward it. The heater inside his flight suit was turned off, and without his helmet, there was nothing to stop the cold air from creeping in.

“Where are we?” Kieran asked, trying ineffectually to warm his gloved hands over the fire. The temperature had to be near freezing.

“Da Shon. Your first visit, I assume.” The man took a noisy sip of whatever he was drinking. “Your eyes look mighty red for someone who just awoke
.
 
.
 
.
 
.
Been cooking the grass with one hand and eating it with the other, ey?” The comment, strange as it was, seemed intended as a jest, but there was a curious note of seriousness in the man's voice.

Kieran rubbed his eyes. “What?”

“Ne’ermind. Just a local expression.” The old man took another sip from his steaming mug. “Wan’ some? I guarantee you it's the finest brew you’ll find anywhere in the Forsaken Lands.”

“Sure
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Kieran's eyes squinted shut, and he began massaging his temples as if he had a headache. He didn't have one. He was just trying to remember, but battering his sleepy mind with anxious questions about where he was and how he'd gotten there was starting to give him an actual headache.

The mournful howl he'd heard upon waking returned, closer than last time; it was soon joined by another, and then a third. Kieran opened his eyes and looked around for the source of the noise. He wasn't used to wide open spaces, that by itself was enough to make him nervous, but he was even less used to hearing wild animals. The last animal he'd seen had been a holographic projection recorded on a world that was likely trilinears away
.
 
.
 
.
 
.

The howling stopped. Kieran continued listening: the wind whistled; the grass rustled; the fire crackled, and his anxious breathing periodically froze in erratic white puffs.

“Oh, dun let the wolvins scare ya. They hate fire. Long as we keep it around, they ain gonna be.”

Kieran turned from his anxious perusal of the rolling green fields and watched the old man toss a handful of gnarled and thorny gray sticks on the fire. He didn't appear to notice the thorns. The sticks hissed and crackled in the fire, and the flames turned momentarily blue, shooting gamboling sparks into the air.

“I can't
 
.
 
.
 
.
I can’t remember how I got here.”

The old man poured him a cup of whatever he was drinking and passed it around the fire. “The man who dun dropped you ‘ere said you might ‘ave a few memory problems. Said y'all hit yer heads. There was a battle up there, ya know.” The old man pointed up, to the dark, indigo sky and nodded gravely. “Pretty big one from what he said. A’course I wudn’t know, asin I dun ‘ave the Net. I dun hold with that gabberish anymore. Not since I ‘eard about the Great Rebellion. You ever ‘ear 'bout the Great Rebellion?”

Kieran was looking up, searching the sky. There were no stars, but that was to be expected, as the planet was surrounded by nebular gases. It was very dark, though. They must have landed on the night side, but then again
 
.
 
.
 
.
He had no way of knowing how long he'd been asleep. He couldn’t see any meteors lighting the sky with fire, so that likely meant Brathus had had the courtesy to drop them on the side of the planet farthest from the battle
—
farthest from the debris which would come raining down through the newly-opened holes in Da Shon’s orbital defense network.

“Yeah. I’ve heard of the Great Rebellion. That’s from the Constantic Codices, right?”

“That all ya know?” The old man shook his head. “Lystra Deswin’s gonna ‘ave to liven your glit-fried brain with a fewa the facts. Canna appeciate livin’ in the dark unless ya at least seen somma the light, ey?”

Kieran’s gaze returned from the sky. “Lystra Deswin?”

“Yeah. That’s me. I dun forgot to make introductions.”