Dark Solstice (18 page)

Justice joined them after a few minutes, tossing a flight suit at Rhea. “All clear. I’d hoped they were all down at the arena, but I still can’t believe our luck.”

Raathe slid a speculative look at him but merely grunted in response. “Where’s Grimes and Cook?”

“Plundering through the cabins,” Justice responded derisively.

Raathe sent him a hard look. “Looking for weapons, no doubt.”

Justice pulled a pistol from his waistband, seemed to weigh it, and finally handed it to Raathe. “They won’t find any. I collected everything I came across while I was searching and locked the guns in the captain’s gun locker.”

“Unless you collected the cutlery and everything that could be used as a club, they won’t come back empty handed,” Raathe said tartly. He glanced around at Rhea. “Strap in, munch. We’re going for a ride—long or short.”

Rhea tumbled into the nearest seat and grabbed the restraints as she felt the ship begin to move. It swiveled, turning slowly to face the bay doors.

“Fuck!” Justice swore as the doors came into view.

“Not a problem,” Raathe retorted, reaching over to grasp what looked like the handle grip of a gun—and was. A narrow missile shot from somewhere beneath their feet. The doors disintegrated as the torpedo made impact and debris began to fly outward—and not just the doors.

A guard flew by the ship, his face frozen in a scream. Several more meaty thuds made impact with the ship shortly behind that and images rose in Rhea’s mind, even though she couldn’t see what it was, that the guards who’d been chasing them had been caught by the vacuum created when the doors had been blasted open.

She felt bile rise in her throat. The ship shot forward at just that instant, however, plastering her against the back of her seat and forcing the bile back down her throat. Despite the hard G’s pulling at her, her stomach went weightless as the ship cleared the doors and Phobos fell away beneath them.

Almost immediately, something slammed into the ship hard enough to rattle her teeth. Alarms began blaring. The computer announced a missile impact and damage to the lower deck. “Seal off the doors, you stupid bitch!” Raathe snarled at the computer. “And next time tell us before we fucking get hit!”

“Incoming, starboard trajectory,” the computer announced.

Raathe rolled the ship onto its side.

Rhea grabbed her stomach with one hand and covered her mouth with the other as the ship began bucking and zigzagging and rolling. Missiles trailing fire zipped past the front view screen. Raathe and Justice both cursed in a steady stream while the computer calmly announced the declining status of the ship.

“Turn off the alarms!” Raathe roared.

Rhea’s ears rang with the sudden cessation of the alarms, but, in the next instant, the other sounds it had masked grew more pronounced. Heavy objects could be heard slamming around in the rearward section of the ship and Rhea wondered it was Grimes and Cook. There was too much noise, she decided, for it to be only the two men even if they accounted for part of it. Debris?

She didn’t know enough about the parts of a ship of this sort to understand where the ship had been hit or how damaged it was. She only knew that as quickly as the computer announced more damage and more bulkheads sealed, it then announced another hit.

She hadn’t expected
this
when she’d agreed to escape with them. It wasn’t
less
terrifying that being in the prison. It was just a different sort of terror expecting any moment to be her last.

She would’ve screamed if she could’ve found her voice, but it seemed trapped in her throat with the churning remnants of her last meal. She swallowed convulsively several times, squeezing her eyes shut as much to help her focus on trying to keep from throwing up as because she just didn’t want to see what was happening.

She’d begun to pray for death by the time the bucking and rattling and rolling of the ship slowed and finally petered out to a level of jarring vibration that was almost bearable.

“We’re beyond range.”

Such a profound sense of relief flooded her that Rhea thought for several moments that she would burst into noisy sobs.

“How bad’s the damage?”

“Critical,” Justice responded after a lengthy pause. “The entire hold has been sealed off and most of the deck just above it. We lost almost fifty percent of our air before the computer could get the affected areas sealed off. The levels are still dropping, just not as fast as they were. We won’t get far in this. I’m surprised the thing is even holding together.”

Rhea’s heart plummeted to her toes. “That sounds really bad,” she said a little weakly, hoping they would assure her that it wasn’t nearly as bad as it sounded.

Both men turned to look at her, glanced at one another, and then returned their attention the instruments in front of them.

“Escape pods?” Raathe asked after a prolonged silence.

“There was a shuttle in the hold,” Justice responded.

“Short ride,” Raathe muttered, scrubbing a hand tiredly over his face and then reaching forward to use the manual keypad for the communications computer.

Justice was focused for some moments on studying the computer’s assessment of the damages but, when Raathe continued to tap at the keypad, he finally turned to look at him. “What are you doing?”

There was more curiosity in his voice than suspicion, but Raathe sent him a hard look. “Communicating with the Johann computer,” he said finally.

That caught Justice’s full attention. “What for? It’s not going to do us any good up here.”

“Nothing is going to do us any good,” Raathe said shortly. “If what I’m doing works, though, I’ll be taking those fuckers with me.”

“How? You plant a bomb in their main system?”

Raathe didn’t look at him that time. “My, aren’t we curious?” he said sardonically.

“What the hell difference does it make now?”

Raathe seemed to think it over. Finally, he shrugged. “I knew I couldn’t get past security with the dirt I’d uncovered about Johann Solutions. I built myself a backdoor so I could get in and out—without having to get in and out.”

Despite the fear that was clogging Rhea’s throat, the calmness of both men had calmed her somewhat. “You have evidence against the company?” she asked a little breathlessly.

Raathe glanced at her as he finished whatever code it was that he’d been typing in and closed communications. “Now everybody does,” he said with satisfaction. “I remote programmed the computer to upload all of their data to the commerce net, media net, and government net.”

Justice sent him a startled look. “Are you serious?”

Raathe uttered a derisive laugh. “Deadly.”

“John! They’ll kill us!”

Raathe and Justice exchanged a look. Raathe unfastened his harness and got up, moving toward her. Crouching down in front of her, he took one of her hands in his. “They already have, baby. We don’t enough air to make it back to Earth—even for one, and they’ll blow us to hell if we try to make it back to Phobos. We’ve got no where to go.” He lifted her hand, kissing the palm. “This is why I didn’t want you to come. There’s no future here.”

Disbelief clamped around Rhea’s throat and chest like a vice. She couldn’t accept that there was no chance for them at all. “But … one of the colonies?”

He shook his head. “The ship isn’t going to make it that far. Even if it did, it’s in too bad a shape to land it and the shuttle’s history.”

A wave of heat and then icy cold washed over Rhea. “What about Mars?”

Raathe tilted his head, studying her curiously a moment before his eyes lit. “You know where the caverns are.”

The comment stunned Rhea. “You know about the caverns?”

“It’s in the files I just uploaded. That’s probably their dirtiest little secret next to Phobos. I didn’t have time to go through all of the files—actually not many before I heard them coming, but, yeah, I know about the caverns. Could you get to them if I can set this thing down in one piece?”

“What caverns?” Justice demanded.

“The caverns I found on Mars,” Rhea said. “It was why they sent me to Phobos—so I couldn’t tell anyone what I’d found.”

“Caverns?” Justice repeated, irritation in his voice. “There’s caverns all over most of the dead worlds.”

“But Mars isn’t a dead world. That’s what they don’t want anyone to know.”

Chapter Sixteen

“I think I can pinpoint the fissure I discovered if you can pull up a survey of the area near the latest construction site.”

“Think?” Raathe asked, identifying her problem immediately.

Rhea looked at both him and Justice apologetically. “I’d been out collecting ore samples for almost a week when I found the entrance to the cave system, crisscrossing the grid map. There weren’t any readily identifiable landmarks. I know it was near a new construction site. I saw it in the distance. I think it was the same one where we worked.”

Raathe and Justice exchanged a speaking look. “It’s a big planet. We’re only going to have one chance at this—if we get that,” Raathe said.

Rhea swallowed convulsively. “I’ll do the best I can—I think they sealed the entrance, though. It looked as if there’d been a rock slide recently that had uncovered it.”

She looked down at her hands uncomfortably. “I found what looked like had been another entrance at one time that had been sealed off. I just didn’t put it together as a deliberate cover up. I know it’s stupid, but I was so excited I just wasn’t paying attention to anything except the cavern system itself.”

“You explored it?” Justice asked sharply. “It’s livable?”

She grimaced. “I didn’t get far, actually. I was afraid I’d get lost. I had no idea what might be in there that could be dangerous. I only went deep enough to see that it went on for miles. I don’t really know what’s down there besides air and water—plants like I’ve never seen. It’s a living cave. That’s the only thing I’m sure about.”

“I’ll see what I can pull up on the computer,” Justice said decisively.

“If I’m right about the location, it’s about ten maybe twenty miles northeast of the construction site.”

“What’s northeast of the construction site?”

Rhea, Justice, and Raathe all turned at the intrusion. Grimes and Cook, both battered and bleeding but very much alive, had joined them in the cockpit.

“The cave system on Mars.”

“What the fuck are we talking about Mars for?” Grimes demanded.

Justice and Raathe exchanged a look. Justice focused on the map while Raathe filled Grimes and Cook in on the situation. Grimes and Cook both turned red with fury once Raathe had lain out the plan.

“They’ll fucking come after us! You can bet your ass they know we got the munch with us and she knows about the caves.”

Raathe’s expression hardened. “Did you miss the part about not having any fucking options?”

“There’s got to be something else we could do!” Grimes snarled.

“Yeah,” Cooks seconded him in a gravelly croak that sent shivers creeping up and down Rhea’s spine.

“Rebuild the ship and suck the air we lost back in?” Justice suggested sarcastically. “Take our word for it, it’s the only option or we wouldn’t be considering it.”

“What the hell makes you think I’d want to take your word for anything?” Grimes growled. “I only let you in on the escape because you had the piece of code we needed. That don’t qualify as me trusting you further than I can spit.”

“If it comes to that, I’d have to say I don’t trust any fucking one of you,” Raathe growled. “The fact remains that we’ve only got two choices—we can die here, or we can take our chances in the cave system on Mars. Rhea says it has air and water. We gather up all the supplies we can carry and hit for the caves and stay there until we think of another option.”

“What option?” Grimes bellowed. “We stay there until we fucking die! There won’t be no leaving!”

“You like Phobos better?” Raathe asked coldly. “All you have to do is wait for the warden’s men to come pick you up. You’re right. They won’t be far behind us. They’ll search until they get tired and leave, or until they think we’re dead, or until they find us. Any way you look at it, we’ve at least got a chance if we can get to the caves. We don’t have
any
chance if we stay with the ship. Ask the computer if you don’t want to take my word for it or Justice’s.”

Rhea cast Grimes and Cook an uneasy glance and then unbuckled her restraints and moved to where Kyle was scanning the maps in the computer’s memory. Raathe joined the two of them after a few moments and Rhea glanced around to see where the other men were. They’d moved to the very rear of the cockpit, she saw, and were talking animatedly to one another. They might’ve been rehashing the argument, but she had a bad feeling they were making plans of their own.

She saw when she looked away that Raathe was studying her. “I don’t trust them,” she said quietly. “They’re plotting something.”

Raathe nodded slightly. “We’ll lose them before we get to the caverns if we can. If not, then as soon afterwards as possible.”

It popped into Rhea’s mind that it would be a lot safer all the way around if they killed the pair. It horrified her that the thought had even occurred to her, though. She certainly wasn’t going to voice it. Instead, trying to shake the sick feeling the thought had produced and the uneasiness she felt about the two men, she tried to focus on the screen.

“There!” she said abruptly as an image flashed on the screen that she recognized. “No, not that one. Go back. Stop!” Leaning closer, she studied the map carefully. “That isn’t it,” she said after studying it for several minutes, “but it’s one of the maps I had. Try bringing up a wider area.”

The computer zoomed out, but she could see immediately that that wasn’t going to help. “Try bringing up all of the construction sites. Eliminate the completed factories and the proposed sites and let me see the maps of areas where construction is in progress.”

Raathe straightened after about thirty minutes, scanned the cabin behind them and left abruptly. Rhea saw when she looked around that Grimes and Cook had vanished, as well. The uneasiness washed over her again. She tried to comfort herself with the thought that Raathe was armed and the other two weren’t, but it didn’t make her a lot easier in her mind.