Lost Planet 02 - The Stolen Moon (28 page)

Maurus had moved forward and stood over Chase. “Tell her to go to the thrusters in sector 119.”

“Be careful,” said Chase.

“Be
fast
,” said Asa.

Lilli dipped her head again, and they waited in anxious silence. Chase watched her like a hawk, flinching every time she tensed a muscle or moved her head a centimeter. At one point she uttered a low cry of surprise. At almost the same time, Vidal cursed under her breath. Chase glanced up and gasped at what he saw in the window.

More of the Storrian defenders had arrived, and were launching a concentrated attack on the
Kuyddestor
, setting the entire side of the ship aflame. Maurus laid a hand on Chase's shoulder. “The ship's shields will absorb most of the damage.”

“At least this will distract the Werikosa onboard,” added Asa.

Bright light lit up the side of the window as a cluster of Storrian ships exploded. In a row, they all started to explode, one after the other, like someone was picking them off. In less than a minute, half of the Storrian defenders were gone, their flaming remains drifting away from the
Kuyddestor
. The rest had backed off, vanishing to safer coordinates.

Asa placed a hand on Lilli's shoulder. “Lilli, it's now or never. We need to make our move.”

Lilli looked up. “We're at the spot, but…”

“What?”

“Analora's having trouble with the panel. There's a security code to open it.”

“Tell her to try code 0990,” came Vidal's voice. Chase glanced back at her. She was staring at Lilli with a slight frown, but he could tell she was picking up on what was happening.

Lilli dropped her head again. “That did it,” she mumbled. “Panel armed for opening.”

“Jericho,” said Asa.

Jericho's hand slid across the panel. “Prepare for fold.”

Chase had just enough time to grab the back of Lilli's chair, but the fold was an exceedingly gentle one. When he looked up, the hull of the
Kuyddestor
hovered mere feet away from their cruiser.

“Sons of Hesta,” muttered Maurus, looking out with astonishment. “You really did it.”

“Activating latch systems,” said Jericho. A series of mechanical sounds came from the back of the cruiser, and a very loud THUH-THUNK. “Testing latch. And secure.”

Maurus led the way to the back of the cruiser, where a wide door was already sliding open to reveal the cold gray metal of the
Kuyddestor
. The outline of a round hatch was cut into the wall.

“Everyone make sure you're armed. No, not you, Ms. Oriolo.” Ksenia looked like she was about to protest, but Asa had already turned to Lilli. “Tell Analora she can—”

Before he could finish the sentence, the hatch blew off the wall, knocking Maurus to the floor, and passing right through Chase, who found himself standing with his ankles vanishing into the middle of the steel panel. Looking around, he saw that Lilli had vanished from their midst, but she was already leaning out of the access hatch of the
Kuyddestor
. He squinted at her, wondering if he was finally seeing her real self or another copy. Part of him hoped it was still a copy. She was safer that way.

Asa and Vidal lifted the panel off Maurus, who looked slightly dazed, a trickle of blood coming from his hairline.

“Hurry up,” said Asa. “We need to get past the safety doors as soon as poss—”

Before he could finish, a blast shook the entire cruiser, shifting it an inch off the latch. With a terrible roar, the vacuum of space sucked at the entire room, bending the panel beside the latch and pulling at them all.

“Someone's firing at us! Get out!” roared Asa, pulling Maurus off the floor. Vidal grabbed Chase by the arm and pushed him ahead of her, so that he was the first one through the doorway.

Inside the
Kuyddestor
it was almost completely pitch black, the only light coming from Asa's ship. Chase remembered that they were somewhere inside the thruster compartment. He could see Lilli, but it took him a moment to spot Analora standing beside the operations panel. It hadn't been more than a day since he'd last seen her, but she looked pale and worn. Chase grabbed her hand and squeezed it, and she threw her arms around him in a quick, tight hug. “I'm so scared,” she whispered in his ear.

The others were stumbling through the hole and into the compartment, Mina bringing up the rear. “Keep going—we have to get out and seal this room up,” said Maurus. “If they hit the ship one more time, we'll all get sucked out.”

Analora led the way through the darkness, and they came out through a door and into a red-lit hallway. The overhead lights were flashing, and an incessant, monotonous siren blared. Asa slammed the door once they'd passed through and touched the communicator by his ear, speaking in a voice too low to hear.

“Who fired on us?” Maurus yelled over the siren. “Was that the Storrians?”

Asa shook his head. “I'm not sure. I sent Jericho back to our holding position; he's trying to figure it out.”

Maurus stopped Chase as he and the others followed Asa into the stairwell. “There's probably going to be some fighting up ahead, and I need your promise that when I tell you to hide, you'll hide.”

Chase opened his mouth to protest. Maurus knew he couldn't get hurt—why wouldn't he let Chase help?

“Chase, you're the leader. You have to keep the others out of danger, okay?” Maurus gave him a piercing look, and Chase realized if he went charging into a firefight, Parker or Lilli or Analora might follow. And he'd never forgotten the lesson he learned when Parker almost died from a poisoned spike thrown from the back of a Goxar: He himself might be immune to harm, but he couldn't protect anyone.

“Head for the engine room!” shouted Vidal, taking the lead. Single-file, they ran after him down the corridor and up a narrow flight of metal stairs to the engine room level, their footsteps echoing against the low blare of the siren.

They had just passed the second stairwell door when Asa stopped and looked around. “Where's Ksenia?”

A moment later, the stairwell door exploded.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Werikosa soldiers poured into the hallway through the blown-out door, blaster rifles perched on their shoulders. Maurus and Vidal had been in the lead, but this placed them farthest away from the soldiers, with everyone else in between. Closest was Analora, who screamed and stumbled back away from the array of blaster nozzles in her face.

Chase pushed his sister back against the wall and started running forward to create a distraction. In a blur of movement, someone else got there first, shoving Analora to the ground. It was Mina, who grabbed the nozzle of a blaster and tore it away from its owner, using it to knock away a row of Werikosa before she turned and dashed for Parker, slinging him over her shoulder like he weighed nothing.

But as swift and strong as Mina was, it was Asa whom Chase couldn't take his eyes off of. Smoother than an android, faster than any human Chase had ever seen, Asa seemed to be doing six different things at any given moment. He took out a whole row of Werikosa with his blaster while leaping over one of their fallen comrades, grabbing a light fixture and using it to spin around and take out two combatants in two different locations.

This was what Asa was built for. As Chase watched him singlehandedly decimate the contingent of Werikosa soldiers, a series of questions flashed through his mind. Had the Fleet put Asa into battle? Had they used his parents for this too? He suddenly had a very different image of who they might have been, not a pair of frightened runaways like the captain had once described, but a pair of dead-talented, cold-eyed killing machines.

Something rolled into the middle of the floor with a glassy sound.

“Cover!” screamed Maurus, diving away from the object.

A second later, a sharp, deafening
POP
sounded along with a flash of blinding light, and immediately the hallway began to fill up with thick, acrid smoke. Chase heard a girl's wail and rushed toward the sound. He almost tripped into Analora, who had crawled over to the wall. Her hands were clapped against her head, and Chase pulled them away, smearing the blood that trickled from one of her ears.

Wrapping an arm around her shoulder, he pulled her up and ran away from the explosion. The smoke was spreading around them thick as pudding, and so he nearly crashed into Lilli, who mutely grabbed his wrist and led him and Analora over to a place where she'd pried a panel of the wall free. They climbed in after her and scuttled through the duct until they came to the inside wall space. As Chase slid out, he was relieved to see that Parker was already there, Mina crouched at his side. It was dark, but there were no red emergency lights inside the wall, and no siren.

“We have to get to the engine room,” said Parker. “The computers there are the best place for me to start looking for the trojan.”

Analora gazed ahead for a moment, thinking. “We can't get all the way there, but I know how to get us pretty close.” She took off at a jog, and they ran single-file through the tight corridor until she stopped short in front of another crawl space and cried out in despair. “This was one of Dany's holes. Somebody patched it!” A round piece of metal was welded onto the end of the crawl space. Analora took a utility knife from her pocket and tried to jam it through the weld, and after a few strikes she found a weak spot, wiggling the blade in between the metal patch and the wall. When she tried to pry the patch away, her blade snapped, and after a stunned pause, she threw the knife to the floor with a frustrated sob.

“Let me try,” said Chase. If there were weak spots on the weld, and it was done from the outside, enough force from the inside might be able to break it free. Taking a deep breath, he ducked his head and phased through the patch into the crawl space. Analora's cry of surprise carried through the thin metal.

Feeling his way around the black space, Chase lay on his back and positioned his feet on the patch. He worried that between his already elevated adrenaline level and the impact from hitting the metal, his feet might just phase uselessly through it, so he took a few moments to make himself focus. He envisioned how his heels would crash against the weak spot. After a couple breaths, he slammed his feet into the wall.

Half of the patch came loose, and a shaft of dim light shone into the crawl space. “Yes!” came Parker's voice. “Hold on a second.” Slim fingers appeared around the edge of the metal, and a second later Mina tore the plate clean off. Through the hole Chase could see Analora's astonished face.

“Chase, did you—?” she began.

“I'll explain it later,” he said quickly, and he turned and started down the crawl space. After all his effort to keep it a secret, he'd shown her what he was. At least, he told himself, she'd seen him succeeding at something and not falling from a tree or getting overrun by forest monsters.

“Analora says to push the next panel out and go to the hall,” said Parker from behind. It popped out easily, and they crawled back out into the red light–bathed hall. There was no sign of Asa or any of the others.

Parker looked both ways down the hall. “Oh, we're really close.” Quietly he led the way toward the engine room. The double doors were wide open, but over the sound of the alarm in the hall it was impossible to tell if there was anyone inside. Chase jogged past Parker to stick his head in first, just in case there were armed Werikosa. It was completely empty, and all the consoles were dark.

“How are you going to log into the mainframe if the crew's all been blocked from logging on?” asked Chase.

“The crew has to use their badges to log on, and their badges are DNA-coded, right?” said Parker, as he powered up the nearest console. “Whoever's locked the crew out just disabled all the DNA coding. But I had to figure out how to get past that when I hacked the mainframe earlier, so I already have a bypass set up. Now I just have to figure out where the trojan was installed.”

As Parker worked, Chase paced through the empty engine room. Mina looked over Parker's shoulder, watching the code scrolling on the screen, while Analora and Lilli stood watch by the door.

“Shouldn't the others be here by now?” asked Analora.

Parker slapped the console. “The file was installed in the engine computer,” he said in a thunderstruck voice. “Right here in front of the dummies.”

“Can you stop it?” asked Chase.

“I can't disable it. The whole computer would have to be wiped clean and reinstalled.” He turned to Chase. “All I can do is shut down and disconnect the engine computer.”

“Does that mean the engines won't work?” Chase asked.

Parker nodded. “We'll be stranded.”

“Is there anything else we can do?”

“Nope.” Parker turned to Mina. “I'll start shutting it down. Once I'm done, you can unplug the connectors.”

Chase started pacing around the room again. As long as Parker was fixing the problem and Mina was here to protect him, there was nothing for him to do in the engine room. “Where do you think everyone else is? Mina, do you have a way to contact Asa?”

She looked up for a moment. “He's not responding to my calls. But I can hear him fighting somewhere.”

Chase headed for the doors. “I'm going to go look for him.”

“I'll come with you,” said Analora.

“No way. Stay here. Mina, watch her and make sure she doesn't get hurt.”

Analora glanced over at the android and gave Chase an offended look. “I can take care of my—”

“I'll come with you,” interrupted Lilli, following him toward the doorway.

“No!” He wouldn't be able to do anything if he was worrying about Lilli the whole time. “Please, I don't need anyone's help, just let me do this on my own. Nobody else leaves the engine room.”