Escape (70 page)

“Well, I guess we know where the wind was coming from,” Jilly said.

Dead ahead was a gaping, ragged hole in the side of the city's shield dome, through which they could see a dark and cloudy blue sky
—
Da Shon's real sky
—
and a pallid green sun peering down on the ruins of the city below. And ruins they were. Even more than the rest of the city, the area directly beneath the hole was leveled for miles, no doubt by the remains of whatever had broken through the dome.

Kieran angled the ship more directly for the hole. “Well, I guess that saves us the trouble of blasting a way out.”

The dark and crumbling skyscrapers rushed by below them for an unending minute, then they were flying over an empty patch of rubble, and Kieran nosed up until all they could see were the jagged lines of the shattered shield dome, and the dark, brooding blue sky beyond. Once they cleared the hole, Kieran punched the throttles up to 100%. They felt the roar of the engines vibrating all around them, and it was barely another minute before they were sailing into the waiting clutches of the icy, Blue Flower Nebula.

As soon as they were in orbit, Kieran called down to Jilly: “Check for any active comm relays.”

The drifting blue clouds of stellar ice and dust pelted the cruiser's canopy with a noise like water splashing across their bow, but the shields were on and easily dissipating the minor impacts.

“I think I found something. Let me see if I can bounce a test call back to us
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

A moment later Kieran heard her speaking quietly into a mic, and a few seconds after that, her voice boomed back over the bridge speakers: “Testing, testing, anybody out there?”

“Seems to be working,” Kieran said.

“Seems to,” Jilly replied. “I'm going to see if I can ping one of the relays orbiting Sylica.”

“Okay. I'll start plotting our jump.”

He was barely halfway through feeding the route data to Javax for nav computations when Jilly exploded with, “They're responding!”

Kieran launched out of his chair and flew down the steps to the crew deck. He and Ferrel each leaned over one of her shoulders to get a better look. There was an incoming signal. Text only.

YOU'VE REACHED THE SYLICAN COMM CENTER. WHAT FOLLOWS IS A PRE-RECORDED MESSAGE. DO NOT TRAVEL TO SYLICA. BY ORDER OF THE UNION AND IMPERATOR DREKLAUS CHEVARI, ALL INTERSTELLAR TRAFFIC MUST REDIRECT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. NONCOMPLIANCE WILL BE MET WITH DEADLY FORCE.

“Then
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Kieran trailed off, and silence ticked by painfully. At length, he cleared his throat and said: “I'm sorry, Jilly.” He laid a hand on her shoulder, and she reached up to clasp his hand.

“They could still be okay,” Jilly insisted. “If they caught the virus soon enough and isolated the infected
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

“Yeah, but you saw how well that worked on Da Shon,” Ferrel said. “They gave up and started isolating the healthy ones from the infected, rather than the other way around. Even then, it's just a matter of time. Once their supplies run out, they'll be forced to break quarantine and join the infected populace above ground.”

Kieran shot Ferrel an angry look. “Thanks, Ferrel. We had so much hope to begin with, it's a good thing you dashed some of it.”

Jilly sniffled, and silence fell like a suffocating blanket. Kieran felt the despair like a tangible force. Ferrel seemed to realize what he'd done, and he took a halting step toward Jilly. “I'm sorry. I just
—
”

She shot him a crumbling smile. “It's okay. You're right. We can't afford to hold on to our illusions at this point, no matter how comforting they may seem. Let's just get to Acasia before they suffer the same fate.”

Kieran shot Ferrel another dirty look behind Jilly's back before returning to the command deck. If Sylica had become infected, the chances that Outpost 110 had stayed clean were infinitesimal. Not that he'd been terribly close to his brother
—
especially in recent years
—
but by now Reddick was probably a cannibalistic monster like the rest of them.

Kieran flopped into the command chair and fed the remaining coordinates of their proposed TLS route to Javax. After that, he aimed the ship toward the least cluttered part of space and instructed Javax to automate the ship's weapon systems to aim at the smaller asteroids and pieces of debris. For the larger ones, he'd have to keep an eye on the scanners and try to fly around them, but Ferrel was manning the sensor station, so at least they had two sets of eyes on the job. Kieran allowed his mind to wander, and he drifted into a kind of waking sleep. If the virus had gotten as far as Sylica, there was no way of knowing that their destination was safe either. Probably it wasn't. For all they knew Acasia had been infected a week ago. Or would become infected just days before they arrived.

“I have finished the calculations for your first TLS jump,” Javax interrupted. “Would you like to jump now?”

Kieran didn't reply immediately, he just sat there, his gaze riveted to the swirling blue mist beyond the viewports.

“Contact!” Ferrel called out. “Giant asteroid, headed straight for us! 5 seconds to impact!”

Still Kieran didn't reply.

“My weapons systems cannot destroy it before it hits us,” Javax added.

The proximity alert sirens began wailing through the bridge, and red lights began flashing on deck.

“Did you hear me?” Ferrel demanded. “I said
—
”

“Jump now, Javax,” Kieran replied.

A brilliant flash of light appeared just ahead of them, as though they were flying straight into a sun, and then the swirling clouds of the Blue Flower Nebula evaporated into the rainbow-colored streaks of fire that were trilinear space.

Chapter 49

T
he following weeks went by uneventfully. Once every few days they would be reminded by Javax that the ship was close to dropping out of trilinear space for another redirection. Their presence on the bridge deck was more perfunctory than anything, but they didn't have much else to do, so they showed up to supervise the transitions from TLS to normal space and back again.

Apart from those transitions, all they could do was eat, sleep, and explore the ship. As far as ships went, the cruiser was fairly large, but it hadn't taken them long to poke their noses into every nook and cranny. Dozens of crew cabins, a giant mess hall, a large cargo bay, and an even larger hangar, complete with nearly a full squadron of two-man fighters. Among the dozens of crew cabins, they'd found at least a third of them to be locked with personal security codes. Ferrel had promised to try to hack through the security systems, but so far he hadn't made any headway on that. Jilly suspected he just couldn't be bothered. What would they find in those cabins anyway? Some momentos and personal effects which would only have value and signifcance to the person or persons to whom they'd belonged.

Now, two weeks into their journey, they were all clustered on the bridge deck for another transition to normal space. ETA one minute and counting. This would be the first of a series of closely-spaced transitions which would take them in a tight circle around and eventually through the fringes of the Whirlpool, a giant asteroid-filled nebula with a black hole at its center, to their destination.

Acasia. The world was far out along a fringe of Union space known as the Stygian Cluster. Plagued by black holes, the area was renowned for its lack of visible starlight and complicated TLS routes. It was also rumored to be a haven for pirates, who used the maze of gravity and radiation to hide from the patrollers and Sentinels who hunted them.

“Ten seconds until transition to normal space,” Javax said, breaking their collective reverie. “Nine, eight, seven
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

The rainbow-colored swirl of TLS evaporated in a blinding flash. Their eyes recovered a second later, and then they saw a mottled vortex of brightly-colored gasses streaking in a slow spiral around a greedy black heart. From this distance, it was easy to see how the nebula had gotten its name. It really did look like a giant whirlpool.

They heard the attitude thrusters firing and saw the view shift away from the distant whirlpool as the cruiser began turning on autopilot toward the next TLS entry point. Once it stopped turning, Javax started another countdown. They spent the few minutes it took to reach the entry point reveling in the relatively unhurried calm of normal space. It was a welcome change from the nauseating, rainbow-colored swirl of TLS. But as the more static background of the Whirlpool and the surrounding blackness of space disappeared with another transitional flash of light, Jilly let out an audible sigh.

“Two hours until the next reversion to normal space,” Javax informed them. “Hope to see you all back here. It was the
highlight
of my day.”

Kieran shot a wry glance to the ceiling. “Count on it.”

Jilly ascended from the crew deck to the command deck and she and Kieran walked off the bridge together. Ferrel caught up to them in the access corridor.

“So, what now?” he asked, slowing his stride to keep pace with them.

Kieran shrugged. “I think I'm going to take a nap. Not much else to do around here.”

Jilly nodded. “That sounds like a good idea.”

Ferrel grinned. “Sure, a
nap
. I'll leave you two alone, then, shall I?”

Kieran's mouth twisted wryly. “Ferrel, we really are just going to get some sleep.”

Ferrel's grin broadened and he held up his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, man, whatever you say. While you're
sleeping,
I think I'm going to take another crack at the door locks for those unopened cabins. Maybe they're locked for a reason, you know? Could be the officers' rooms, in which case, you never know what kind of high-quality liquor I'll find in there.”

Kieran smirked and sent Ferrel a sideways glance. “Planning to get drunk?”

Ferrel shrugged. “Not much else to do around here.”

“Well, if you do find some, save a bit for us, and we'll join you for a celebratory toast once we reach Acasia. Only a matter of hours now.”

Ferrel nodded. “Will do, cappy-tan.” He gave a mock salute, then turned and started back the way they'd come.

Jilly frowned and cast a look back over her shoulder. “Where are you going? The crew quarters are this way.” She pointed ahead of her.

Ferrel turned to meet her backward glance and shook his head. “Easier to hack through security systems from the bridge. Enjoy your
'nap'!
” Ferrel made quote signs in the air, chuckling as he turned away.

Jilly snorted. “He's incorrigible.”

“Yeah,” Kieran replied with a snort of his own.

“So
 
.
 
.
 
.
how about it?”

Kieran turned to her with eyebrows raised. “How about what? It's not like I can read your mind
.
 
.
 
.
” He grinned and focused on her as he'd done a thousand times before, trying to get a glimpse of what she was thinking. His grin abruptly faded. “Jilly, are you doing something?”

She met his gaze with a puzzled look. “Doing what?”

He shook his head and stopped walking. “I can't read your mind.”

Jilly's eyebrows shot up. “Are you sure? Try again. What am I thinking about now?” Jilly conjured an image of her and Kieran kissing.

Kieran's brow fell in a shadow across his glowing red eyes, and he appeared to focus intently for a moment. At length, he shook his head once more. “Still can't.”

“Huh. Let me try.” She bit her lower lip as she concentrated, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't read his mind either. “Well, well. Looks like we finally developed the same resistance as Ferrel.”

Kieran looked away, back down the corridor to the bridge deck where Ferrel had gone. “How's that possible? We disabled the virus before we left. We shouldn't be aquiring new abilities.”

Jilly shook her head. “It's not a new ability. It's just a mental adaptation to an old one. Some kind of unconsious defense mechanism. Besides, you saw our test results. The virus was disabled.”

Kieran nodded absently. “Yeah
 
.
 
.
 
.
” He turned back to her with a crooked smile. “So, since I can't
actually
read your mind, what
were
you talking about?”

“Well
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Jilly trailed off coquettishly and stepped toward him. Her head tilted to one side and she smiled demurely at him. Her hand came up and stroked his stubbled cheek. “If you can't read my mind, maybe you can read this instead.”