Flight of the Outcast (23 page)

   "Kayser."

   "I don't know. I think so, but—I don't know."

   "And now his uncle is in control of the whole sector. We have to tell someone."

   "Who?"

   Dai shook his head. "I don't know…"

   "We have to wait," Asteria said. "It's going to be hard, but we're going to have to find people we can trust, let them in on the secret. Make sure more people know so if something happens to us—"

   "But it's crazy. Who would ally with the Tetras? For what?"

   "Control of the Empyrion, maybe," Asteria said.

   Dai gave her a sick look. "They're Aristos," he said in a whisper. "But they're human!"

   Asteria said, "I—I don't know what to call it—I plugged in to the Tetra mind somehow. I think it was the belt. But, Dai, I saw how they feel about us. They don't even know we're alive! Not in the same way they are. And I think they ran into an Aristo who feels that way too. We don't matter. People don't matter. Just—just power and control."

   "He has to be stopped," Dai said.

   "But we can't do it alone," Asteria said. "Not yet. So we have to stick it out. We have to go back to the Academy, make our way up through the ranks, and one day—one day we'll have our chance."

   "If we live," Dai said with a grin.

   Asteria took a long, deep breath. The belt felt strangely heavy, a burden almost too great to bear.

   "Yes," she said. "If we live."

The adventure continues in the next book of

E
ven the underpowered practice weapons had to be

      handled carefully. As quartermaster for the team, Asteria had the responsibility of checking in the side arms and storing them following every practice session. It was a routine task, but she had to be attentive. Each cadet in the section had to turn over his or her weapon, stunners or disruptors or missile guns, to Asteria. In turn, she had to deactivate each, log it in, and see that it was properly stored. It usually took her half an hour to get everything done, and then she would have to dash to Tactics—each time a cadet was late, the teacher handed out five demerits.

    On the seventh day of the week, just before End Break, Asteria had depowered all twenty-five stunners. As usual, that did not take very long, even though not all cadets were as enthusiastic as Kayser—his weapons always came back drained, needing only a quick check and deactivation. Most had to be powered down, which could take a few seconds.

    Asteria checked the time and saw she was cutting it close. The last thing she needed this week was five more demerits. Last stunner done. Good. She placed it on the cart with the others and then pushed the hovercart to the weapons storage vault, opened the shield door—it had to be blast-resistant so it was a heavy five-layered durosteel and flexal construction—and then took a deep breath. Her claustrophobia always bothered her when she first stepped into the vault. She shoved the hovercart ahead of her, pushed it to the set of drawers that her class used for storage, and unlocked tray 11. The drawer slipped smoothly out of the back wall. Then each stunner had to be fitted into the correct recessed holder, from 11–1 to 11–25. Only when that had been done and the AI had scanned them to make sure they were deactivated would the drawer slide closed and the tray lock re-engage.

   Because the narrow vault made her feel so uneasy, Asteria was hurrying, maybe concentrating a little too hard on the task. Behind her the door slammed, taking her completely by surprise. The light went out. Nothing is as dark as the inside of an unlighted vault.

   Her first wild thought was that the door had simply swung closed on its own. It was heavy but delicately balanced on its hinges, and sometimes it would swing a little if you hadn't opened it all the way. She held up her arm and commanded, "Light," and her wrist communicator gave her a pale blue beam. She touched the storage drawer; it slipped back into place, and the red "locked" light glowed briefly to confirm that the weapons were secure and accounted for.

   Then Asteria, breathing a little too fast, tried to turn the release wheel to open the vault door.

   It stuck.

   Someone had locked the vault door from outside.

   Kayser? Or—someone else?

   Now Asteria was gasping for air. She knew that it was just a panic reaction. There was plenty of oxygen in the vault, enough for hours. But this was like her nightmares, like being stranded in the darkness inside the disabled fighter ship back at Theron. Her heart was thudding fast. Being closed in was the one thing she could not stand.

   Her voice shaky, she keyed the comm line to Emergency and said, "Cadet A. F. Locke here. I'm locked inside the side arms vault in the Quartermaster Unit. I need immediate help. Any Academy personnel respond. I need help."

   No response. Gasping, beginning to sweat, Asteria realized that someone had not only locked her in but had also turned on the vault's electromagnetic shielding. It was designed to prevent AI scans of the facility, just in case some bright student wanted to borrow a weapon and needed the combinations, but it also damped out communications.

   They'll come looking for me, Asteria told herself. Dai and the others knew her routine. It might take a few hours, but they would come to check on her. If she didn't go crazy from claustrophobia first. She tried to take deep breaths, to calm herself—

   Without warning, she felt the belt begin to flow over her skin. "No!"

   But she couldn't stop it or control it. The quicksilver metal encased her in moments, and the humming, maddening Tetra voices whispered just below the threshold of comprehension. Cold and inhuman voices. And she couldn't understand a syllable, though she had a paranoid sense that they were aware of her, were seeking her.

   But with the silver mask completely covering her face, at least she could see. The armor converted infrared and ultraviolet to visible shapes. She could make out the vault, a wide room six meters from side to side but only a meter and a half deep, in cold blues and purples. The pulsing dull red lines of shielding crept and writhed over the walls and doors. A humming crackle of electromagnetic energy muttered in her ears, overpowering the voices. She felt an urgent tug at her attention.

   Off to the left in the back wall, one whole drawer glowed a brilliant yellow.

   Power. The weapons in the drawer are fully powered.

   Asteria felt a jolt of adrenaline. Something was very wrong.

   She stepped to the wall of storage compartments and entered the code, and the glowing drawer slid noiselessly open just below chest level. On the tray lay twenty-five Keeler stunners, used by the senior classes and quite a bit more powerful than the ones her classmates were allowed. They shimmered with orange white power, looking like metal heated to the melting point.

   With a shock, Asteria saw that the energy cells were looping, their power circuits resonating and thrumming. They were ready to—

   Explode.

   And even though the silver armor gave her some protection, if twenty-five stunners blew up in this contained space, she would be dead.

   Moving faster than she would have thought possible, Asteria snatched one of the stunners from its recess and keyed it down, dropped it, reached for a second one, switched it off before the first had hit the deck, reached for a third—

   Even moving at incredible speed she wouldn't be able to turn them all off.

   Someone had trapped her.

   Someone wanted her dead.