Cottonwood (54 page)

“Oh no, you don’t,” the guard began, and that was when Sanford’s cell seemed to explode outward and he was already in the air, both legs drawn up and arms out, like nothing she’d ever seen before, to land on him and twist the head right off his shoulders like he was a pop bottle with a very loose top.

She landed on her butt and screamed again, feeling that jolt all the way up to her teeth too. Sanford bent over her, but she was already up and running to open the next cell.

The yang’ti inside raised his head and studied her without much interest until she actually got the door unlocked. Then she all but saw the thought-bubble appear over his head: his door was open and the human outside was alone and unarmed. In the very next instant, he had seized her by the throat and slammed her into the opposite wall, but before he could rake his spiked forearm across her face, Sanford crashed into him and the two of them went clattering across the floor.

While they were working things out, Sarah fumbled out the keycard and ran to unlock the next cell. In an effort to avoid further misunderstandings, she made sure to give the alien watching her through the narrow window a big, reassuring grin through her tears of pain and panic.

“Sarah!” Sanford was back, feet skidding on the polished floor. He caught at her shoulder to steady himself, looking wildly up and down the hall. “Where did they take T’aki? Did you see?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t in the lab with me. Here.” She pushed the doctor’s keycard blindly into the newly-freed prisoner’s hand and stumbled back to the headless guard to find another one. “You get that side, I’ll get this one.”

“You!” she heard Sanford snap behind her. “Where would they take a child?”

“If he’s not here, he’s on the killing floor,” came the reply, but someone else said, “They keep kennels down that way. If he’s small.”

Sanford leapt away, landed and slid all the way to an intersection, catching himself on the wall there. He clicked loudly, then shouted something to make the prisoners clamoring around her fall silent. He clicked again, a hard, ear-splitting
TAK
, and listened.

He must have heard something. He ran. Sarah finished with the last cells on her side of the hall and ran after him, pausing only once to drop her scalpel and grab the dead guard’s much more effective big gun. She’d never fired a gun before in her life, but all things considered, it seemed like a hell of a nice day to start.

Sanford clicked again, began to go door to door along this passage, clicking and looking in frustration through the glass. These were not cells anymore, or if they were, they weren’t occupied. She saw tables and chairs in one, stacks of boxes in another. Storerooms, archive rooms, research rooms, break rooms for all she knew.

TAK
! And then she heard it too, that rattlesnake sound of T’aki’s I-am-here reply. She ran with her stolen card—someone had to know they were here by now, but no, it still worked—and then Sanford was inside, feeling his way around the plastic kennel that contained his son and pinching in futility at the lock.

“Get down,” he said finally, raised his arm, and brought his spiked elbow down just as he’d done once to Samaritan’s head. And like the head, the kennel cracked.

Again. Again. And then it split and Sanford was ripping it open and pulling T’aki out into his arms. There was no embrace, no father/son exchange of relief. Sanford grabbed him up, chirring in hard, panting breaths, and ran back to the laboratory.

Sanford covered T’aki’s eyes before he went in and they all followed, their many running feet acting as a kind of harmony to the sound of pounding fists on the freezer door. Sarah struggled to keep up. A real hero wouldn’t have been slowed in the slightest by a broken arm, but she was all but blinded by it. Lingering in the lab to catch her breath was not an option. She could smell old yang’ti blood, chemicals, and the sharp stink of her own cooling vomit, all of it much worse than she remembered. Her stomach flipped warningly; she held her breath and didn’t take another until they were out again in the hall.

“Now what?” one of the prisoners asked, not without a bitter sort of laugh. “We’re on a fucking boat. Where do you think we’re going to go?”

“Home,” Sanford said as Sarah opened the door to van Meyer’s warehouse of alien technology. “We are going home.”

Then the elevator doors opened and a young man in lab whites looked up and saw a hall filled with aliens, and Sarah in her blood-stained and tape-striped gown, holding a gun. His face dropped all its color, but he did not scream. He stepped calmly back into the elevator instead and closed the doors. A second later, the alarms went off.

“Inside,” said Sarah. “Hurry!”

She held the door as they poured in, then bashed at the pass-card console with the butt of the gun until it sparked and fell apart. Thunder came rolling down the stairs and Sarah pulled the storeroom door shut and hoped it held a little while.

“Sarah! Here!”

Yes, there. The other room behind the glass where the escape pod teased them. She ran, slipped, struck the door, and screamed.

Sanford looked at her, then looked harder. “Your arm,” he said, almost conversationally.

“It’ll keep,” she managed, tears of pain pouring from her eyes. She swiped the dead guard’s keycard.

Nothing happened.

“Give me the other one!” she shouted, waving frantically until one of the yang’ti stepped up with the doctor’s card.

She swiped it. The LockLite blinked, but stayed red.

Pounding on the storeroom door, followed by shooting, then an ominous sort of silence. Sanford glanced that way, snapped his palps, picked up his code-bank and jumped halfway across the room to land atop a neat stack of crates. He bashed it open with ridiculous ease and pulled out a gun. The code-bank emitted its polite, electronic tone; the gun charged; every yang’ti turned as one and looked at him. In that moment, they ceased to be prisoners as utterly as if they’d never been. They were not refugees. They weren’t colonists. No matter what they had been before, they were soldiers now and they were so much better at it than Sarah. Without discussion, the yang’ti pulled boxes out, took covering positions behind crates and metal counters, aimed their guns as fast as Sanford armed them, and waited.

Sarah threw down her useless keycards and leaned in to look through the safety glass. Not at the ship, but at the door. No card-console on that side, just a latch. She bit her lip, looked at the gun in her hands, then at the glass.

Sanford saw what she meant to do at once, took the gun, thumbed switches, and thrust it back at her. “Aim at an angle!” he called, backing up. “Target
one
place!” And then he took his position with the rest of them and raised his weapon.

She stepped back, holding the gun out before her, forcing her broken arm up to steady the barrel. Her hand wouldn’t grip right and it weighed about a hundred pounds, but all it had to do was keep the bullets from going wild and she thought she could do that. She thought of all the shoot-em-up movies she’d ever seen with a big automatic like this one, braced her bare feet on the floor, then slipped her finger into the guard and squeezed the trigger.

It was as if a baseball bat came flying invisibly out of space and slammed into her chest. She fell back and hit one of the yang’ti prisoners; he grabbed her arm and steadied her until she righted, then pointed at the storeroom door and clicked, “Hurry!”

A pinpoint of fire had appeared high along the door’s lock-plate. They were cutting their way in.

Sarah staggered forward and peered at the window. The bullets had hit the glass all right, and ricocheted harmlessly off into the unoccupied end of the storeroom, but left nothing behind that she could see as proof of damage, not even a nick. She braced herself again, forced her bad arm up to really grip the barrel, and fired.

Bullets spat out by the dozens, by the hundreds it seemed, rattling her bones and shaking her vision. She stopped, gasping, checked her aim, and fired again.

Cobwebs appeared in the glass, all at once, as if slapped up by God’s own hand. Sarah stopped, adjusted her aching grip, and fired, now with something tangible to aim at.

The cobwebs spread, great chunks of broken white erupting side-by-side until, with a wheeze, the gun gave out. Empty. The window stood.

Sarah half-ran, half-fell against it, tears of pain and disbelief streaming unnoticed from her eyes. She touched the glass and felt hairline cracks and miniscule chips under her fingers. When she pushed, she thought she felt a little give to it. Raising her gun in both hands (and screaming, although she could not hear that and didn’t know she was doing it), she swung it like a club over and over against the window.

The barrel cracked in her hands. The butt splintered. The bullet chamber flew off and hit someone in the back. She kept swinging, bashing at the broken patch like a cavewoman until, all at once and all in one piece, the whole section of cracked glass caved in and fell away, leaving the rest of the window whole around it.

The hole was small. Even after she broke off what she could with her bleeding hand, it was scarcely larger than a basketball.

Fortunately, she knew someone very small.

“T’aki!” she cried. She could barely hear herself, like she was shouting into a pillow. “I need you!”

He grabbed her hand while she was still looking for him in the shadows of the crates. She picked him up in one arm, hugged him tight, and fed him into the other room. He was his father’s son and didn’t need to be told what to do.

The storeroom door crashed open. Yang’ti and humans opened fire at once. Bullets tore through chitin. Human bodies turned in an instant to charred vapor.

T’aki opened the door.

“Sanford!” Sarah shouted, but dimly, so dimly. “Where are you? We’re in!”

He came running, pushed her and T’aki together into a protected corner of the smaller room, and ran to plug his code-bank into the panel at the center of the escape pod’s only door.

Nothing happened.

“Oh God no!” she wailed, and a more heartfelt prayer she had never spoken. It couldn’t all be for this—Fagin and Larry the nice guard and
Kate
and the horrors in the lab for a dead ship with a locked door.

“
Fuck
!” snapped Sanford, the only time she’d ever heard him swear. He slammed his foot up on the side of the ship, wedged his fingers underneath the panel and heaved on it until, with a shriek of twisting metal she could feel in her fillings, the whole panel peeled up, snapped off, and went flying off into the corner. Sanford hunkered down, his eyes moving urgently over the exposed cables. A few crossed wires, a loose connection, a little dust in the works; he worked fast and when he slammed the code-bank into its port for the second time, the door released a hiss of ancient air and came groaning open. Sanford was inside at once, shouting for T’aki.

Sarah ran the boy over and got her first real look at an alien craft. It was small. A whole lot smaller than she’d thought from the outside. Bigger than her van, maybe, but not by much.

She turned and looked out into the storeroom, where the firefight went on and on. She could see a dozen yang’ti from here and she knew there were others.

They weren’t all going to fit.

“Sanford…” She leaned into the belly of the ship and saw him in the cockpit, fitting the code-bank to what she could only describe as a dashboard. He pushed three buttons on the console, just three, and light and sound flooded the pod’s interior at once. “Sanford, listen—”

“T’aki, sit down and don’t move. Sarah, find out how they brought this in,” Sanford said curtly, his fingers flying over the controls. Beams of light were shooting up into the air before him, opening into grids, spilling out lettering, flashing symbols as bright as stars for him to dash away with hurried taps and touches. “Something must open—a wall, a panel, something! Hurry!”

She ducked out and looked around. Okay, sure, they didn’t squeeze the pod in through the door or build the room around it. There had to be a hatch. Right.

The walls were completely featureless.

But the rear wall was different from the other three, made of corrugated metal instead of metal panels. And there was a power strip next to the door, with two buttons, one green and one red.

Sarah pressed the green one.

A siren went off directly over her head. In the storeroom, yellow lights spun and flashed. And in here, the rear wall began to fold in on itself like an accordion. She stepped out a short ways onto a metal ramp, letting the sea air hit her in the face and sting at her little wounds, staring around in disbelief at the lower deck of van Meyer’s Zero. She’d imagined somehow that they were so much deeper that to see open sky and ocean was not merely shocking, but actually a little embarrassing.

It took her a moment to realize that in addition to all of IBI’s spare helicopters and a few stacks of lifeboats, Sarah was also looking at dozens of soldiers and people in flight suits just staring back at her.

“Oh,” said Sarah, blinking at them. She took a few steps back; some of them took a few steps forward. She stumbled up against the escape pod and shouted, “Help! Big…Big open door and lots of people headed this way!”

“Get back, you idiot!” someone snapped in her ear and yanked her behind the cover of the pod’s hull. Yang’ti filled the doorway she had just vacated, opening fire. People started shouting, screaming, and shooting back.

Now what? She backed up, clutching her broken arm, smelling smoke and seawater, and turned around. Time to go. The pod wasn’t big enough. The wounded, then. The wounded first.

She ran out into the smoke and the noise, and tripped over her first two targets, sprawling stupidly out in the open as bullets tore over her head. She heard choking and crawled towards it, feeling her way through the smoke until she fell against the chitinous body prone at her feet. She got her arms around him and pulled; he was lighter than she expected. The yang’ti were all so much taller, but of course, they had no bones, not a lot of muscle. She dragged him back to the relative protection behind the safety glass and only then saw the gaping hole in his chest, the blood pouring from between his palps.