Children of Scarabaeus (31 page)

She wanted to scream back at him that she needed help. Why had no one come to look for them? Surely they wouldn’t leave a child behind.

“Hurry!” Galeon pushed on the lid’s edge. “Why hasn’t he woken up yet?”

“It takes time.”

Too much time. The readout showed Finn’s plasma replacement was less than two-thirds complete and his heart rate was deathly slow.

Edie took hold of Galeon’s shoulders and crouched to his level. “Listen to me, Galeon. You have to go to the lifepods. I’ll get Finn out.” He shook his head emphatically. She tried a different tack. “I need you to find someone to help me. Get back up there and send someone.”

“
You
find someone. I’m not leaving him.”

Leaning into the cryo capsule, he pulled on Finn’s shoulders in a futile effort to haul him up. Finn remained unconscious, but Edie thought she saw his eyes move behind the lids. The plasma replacement was up to eighty percent. She touched his hand—it was ice cold. But his upper arm was merely cool, his face almost warm. His heart rate was up a little, too.

An automated voice over the shipwide announced a five-minute warning.

“We have to get him out of this,” Edie said. “Help me tip it.”

Galeon followed her actions, hooking his little fingers under the side of the capsule, and together they lifted the edge to tilt it. Finn’s body rolled to the side of the chamber.

“That’s it. Just a little more…”

Edie wedged her shoulder against the side and gave it a hard shove. It tilted a few more degrees, and Finn rolled out. Galeon dropped his end and ran over, calling Finn’s name. Edie lowered her end more carefully, not wanting to damage the capsule while it was still attached to Finn. He lay sprawled facedown on the deck and connected to the capsule by an umbilical cord of wires and tubes running into the cuff on his forearm.

“Finn, wake up, wake up, wake up!” Galeon yelled as he tugged on the leg of Finn’s pants.

Edie leaned into the empty capsule and found the bag of IV fluid attached to the other end of Finn’s cuff. She peeled it off the inside chamber, complete with the tiny pump clipped
to the edge. The monitoring wires were not portable—she ripped those out.

She fell to her knees next to Galeon and jammed the IV bag into Finn’s belt. Then she lifted Finn’s arm over her shoulder and dragged him into a half-sitting position. His body was twisted awkwardly.

“Finn—get up. Move!”

She squeezed his trapezius muscle as hard as she could, her fingernails digging into his cool skin. The pain elicited a groan and he attempted to pull away. Edie kept a firm hold of him.

“Get up, Finn. The ship’s going down. We have to get out of here.”

He shook his head slowly, then sharply, as if to wake himself up. Leaning heavily on Edie, he pulled himself to his feet…and lost his balance. He collapsed to the deck. She helped him up again and kept up a string of encouraging words while Galeon echoed her in his high-pitched voice.

They made it a few meters toward the hatch before he fell to the deck again. Over the shipwide came a three-minute warning. They would never make it.

A shadow crossed the light spilling in through the hatch.

“Hey! Help us!”
Edie yelled.

Whomever it was backed up and came inside. It wasn’t one of the crew.

“Achaiah…”

He stepped into the cargo hold, his pale blue eyes glowing in the emergency lighting.

“The captain sent me to look for you.” He grinned charmingly. “Said he wouldn’t let me on a lifepod unless I came back with you.”

“Well, you found us. Are you going to help?”

“You and the boy, that’s who he told me to find.”

“Help me with Finn.”

Achaiah cocked his head slowly, as if that course of action hadn’t crossed his mind.

“Damn it, Achaiah, we had to freeze him because of that
detonator you made for Natesa. This is your fault. You owe him!” When Achaiah didn’t move, she felt despair close in. “Then take Galeon. Get him to safety.”

Galeon tilted his pale face to her, his brow set stubbornly. Edie looked from him to Achaiah, waiting for some response. Something flickered across Achaiah’s face. It might have been remorse. Edie found the man incomprehensible. He’d done despicable things without ever giving a thought to the people he hurt, and he’d also shown moments of compassion. Those two sides seemed to war within him now.

To her relief, he stepped forward and grabbed Finn’s arm. Edie took the other and together they hauled him up. Finn had enough wits about him to get his legs moving so they could drag him out.

As the
Molly Mei
hurtled into the upper atmosphere, the gravplating destabilized. It switched on and off randomly, making them lurch and stumble. Galeon ran ahead, stopping frequently for them to catch up. Whenever Finn fell, Achaiah helped him up. The calm, impersonal voice on the shipwide gave them two minutes, and then, as they turned into the last corridor, one minute.

Galeon bounded ahead. “This way—hurry!”

They passed the bridge hatch. Vlissides backed out, reluctant to leave. He spun around at their approach.

“Where the fuck were you?”

“You said you’d send someone for Finn. Where were they?”

“I sent Private Isaacson.”

“Well, no one came.” Private Isaacson, the op-teck, had apparently chosen to disobey that order in the confusion.

“Come on.” Vlissides swung Galeon into his arms and ran the last twenty meters to the lifepod bay, where two pods stood open. One was empty, while the other held the rest of Vlissides’s crew. A third pod had been ejected, and a quick headcount told Edie that Cat, Corinth, and the four children must be aboard. Cat must be overjoyed at that arrangement.

An explosion ripped through the ship. Edie lost contact
with Finn and tumbled out of control as the grav switched off, then slammed to the deck as it came back on. With a terrific wrenching sound, part of the corridor caved in and the bulkheads ripped open. Smoke filled the air.

Vlissides was at her side in seconds. “Explosion in the engine room. The altitude stabilizers can’t handle the strain.”

When he tried to help her, she pushed him away. “Help me with Finn.”

He didn’t waste time arguing. Finn was nearby, unconscious again. They dragged him the last few meters to the empty lifepod and maneuvered him inside.

“Strap yourselves in.” Vlissides turned to the other pod, the one with his crew. “Isaacson, eject,” he told his op-teck, and snapped shut the hatch.

As Edie strapped in Galeon, she realized what was wrong. “Where’s Achaiah?”

They both looked back down the corridor. Achaiah was on the deck, his legs trapped by a twisted piece of plazalloy paneling.

Vlissides wavered. He looked at Edie, turned back to look at Achaiah, looked at Edie again. She knew they were both thinking the same thing.

Is he worth it?

She loathed Achaiah. She’d never forgive him. But…

She stepped out of the pod, her body making the decision before her mind caught up. She and Vlissides ran back to Achaiah. While she lifted up the paneling, Vlissides pulled him out. His legs were a mangled bloody mess. Vlissides lifted him over his shoulders and staggered down the corridor. Edie supported him as best she could as the ship squealed and shook and began to break apart.

They sealed themselves in the pod and it lit up under its own power. A holoviz bloomed out of a console near the hatch. The pod shimmied and jarred, and then the display showed it falling away from the ship.

The lifepod had a med brace, little more than a strap to secure a patient to the floor. They had two unconscious pa
tients before them. They’d just risked their lives for Achaiah, but he was in a bad way, bleeding heavily from gashes in his legs and other wounds in his torso that Edie hadn’t seen until Vlissides pulled open his shirt. His chest was a jumble of blood and bone that Galeon couldn’t stop staring at. Finn was pale and motionless and still had poisonous cryo fluids in his blood, but his chances in the next few minutes were better. Weren’t they? Edie had no hope of being objective about the decision. She hurried to secure Finn.

“Strap in!” Vlissides yelled over the whine of the pod’s thrusters.

Edie took a seat next to Galeon and pulled the harness over her shoulders. Vlissides braced himself on the floor and tried to attend to Achaiah’s wounds. The pod performed a series of near somersaults, throwing both men around until its trajectory finally stabilized.

Edie slipped out of her harness then, trying not to look at Achaiah’s twisted body, and checked Finn’s IV. He was breathing shallowly. Still alive. She buckled up again.

The lifepod screamed through the atmosphere, shaking like a popcorn popper. But all of the warning lights stayed green. She knew Achaiah was dead when Vlissides stopped what he was doing, hauled himself onto the seat beside her, and strapped himself in.

CHAPTER 27

The lifepods weren’t sophisticated vessels—they were supposed to float around in space providing life support and basic medical aid until a ship picked them up. Dirtside, they had minimal functional capabilities as land vehicles. Between them, Vlissides and Edie figured out how to deflate the landing balloons and deploy the wheels. It was only when he started moving around that Edie noticed Vlissides was injured. One ankle was swelling up from a bad sprain and he’d wrenched his shoulders at some point during the landing. He most likely had a lot of other bruises that he wasn’t complaining about.

The tiny pod windows showed a late-afternoon vista of desolate, rocky plains in all directions. The scope showed more of the same.

They had nowhere to go and a corpse to dispose of.

The medkit thoughtfully included a body bag. Edie sent Galeon into the impossibly small head and told him not to come out until he’d washed every smudge off his skin
and
his clothes. Then she and Vlissides put Achaiah inside the bag, sealed it, and pulled the tab that released its refrigerant chemicals. Edie would just as soon have left the body bag outside. She thought it best not to say so aloud. Instead, she
helped Vlissides empty out the storage bins under the seats and they wrestled the body bag in there.

Vlissides slapped a patch on his ankle to reduce the swelling, and insisted he was fine.

The pods had been programmed to land close to each other. Whether any other pods had survived the landing or were in the vicinity, they didn’t know. Edie had no luck raising anyone on the comm. The signal had to bounce off the commsat and its relays, and the commsat was apparently under the planet’s control. Right now, it didn’t work. As for rescue…any ship that parked in orbit was likely to suffer the same fate as the
Plantagenet
and the
Molly Mei
.

Edie concentrated on more immediate problems. Her major concern was Finn, now plugged into the onboard med-teck unit. It diagnosed cryo sickness and suggested various drugs, which she found in the medkit. He slipped in and out of consciousness, and she couldn’t tell how much he understood when she explained what had happened. She didn’t mention the real fear—that Natesa might arrive within hours with the ability to kill him remotely, in an instant, soon after she entered the system.

Galeon was as restless and impatient as any seven-year-old confined to an area the size of a couple of double beds.

“When can we go outside? I want to talk to Macky.”

He was impossible to subdue until Edie found him something to do—reading a holo of the pod’s instructions in order to find out what every single switch and light meant. She heated him a serve from the breakfast rations and he happily delved into the task. She saw him slide a suspicious glance only once toward the seats where the body bag was stored.

Two hours after landing, the sound of a voice on the comm was a welcome relief. It was Cat. She and Corinth had accurately predicted the direction of Edie’s lifepod and driven theirs sufficiently close so that site-to-site communication between the vehicles was possible.

“Rough landing,” Cat reported. “Our pod was damaged but the kids are okay, other than some scrapes and bruises
and so much bloody screaming I’m ready to murder them all.” Edie could hear the frightened children crying in the background.

“What about the other pod?”

“It’s on my scope two klicks due east, in rocky terrain. Completely dead, by the way.”

At that, Vlissides took over the comm. “Are you sure?”

“Uh, yeah. I know how to read my scope. Who is this?”

“Lieutenant Vlissides, commander of the
Molly Mei
. I don’t believe we actually met.”

“Your loss. And just because you commandeered a ship doesn’t make you its commander. You milits killed the commander of the
Molly Mei
.”

Vlissides gave Edie a
Who the hell does she think she is?
look, but persevered. “Let’s deal with the issues at hand. You should send a search party.”

“Great idea. Which little girl should I take with me while Corinth watches the others?”

“Don’t be—” He cut himself off. Edie could see his frustration rising. He might be a Crib officer, but here no one was likely to follow his orders. “The kids will be all right by themselves for a while,” he finally said.

“Actually, we shouldn’t be wandering around outside,” Edie said. “According to Theron, this planet actively resists attempts to explore it. E-shields won’t protect you. In any case, it’s almost dark and you’re still limping.”

Vlissides looked at her, horrified. “That’s my crew out there. They could still be alive. Not to mention possible survivors at the
Plantagenet
’s crash site.”

Edie gave what she hoped was a nod of understanding. “Let’s start with a rendezvous. Cat, can we meet you halfway?”

“I’ve burned through the wheel rims on this thing. I think you’ll have to come to me.”

Driving was something else for Galeon to get interested in. Edie let him scrutinize the instructional holoviz until
he pronounced himself an expert. Vlissides was clearly no teck, and actually seemed to appreciate the boy’s help. Together they figured out the steering controls and exterior spotlights.