Escape (76 page)

Kieran pivoted in place on top of the pipe, and his left foot slipped on a greasy patch.

“Kieran!” Jilly watched in horror as he lost his balance.

Feeling himself falling, Kieran reached out reflexively as he fell. His hand found the shut off valve. The lever turned back the other way and groaned under his weight as he dangled high above the deck. He felt the lever starting to bend, and was just about to jump to the ground when it gave way with a sudden snap. Coolant began hissing from the pipe, spraying into the air and falling around him in a searing rain. Kieran landed lightly on the deck
—
it hadn't been that far to the ground
—
but the damage had been done. The valve was stuck on, and now superheated coolant was misting into the room. Kieran winced as the chemical rain burned his skin, and he ran from under it to where Jilly stood gaping at the disaster.

“Now what are we going to do?!” she asked.

Kieran stood beside her and frowned up at the gushing coolant leak, his nostrils flaring from the acrid vapors pouring into the room. “Well, the good news is that the reactor should still overheat, but it could take some time for that to happen.”

“And the bad news?”

“Superheated coolant is pouring into the room. If the fumes don't kill us, the heat probably will. It's about to get a lot hotter in here.”

* * *

“As you can see, we all look perfectly healthy,” Gallian said, gesturing behind him to the dozens of officers that populated the bridge and crew deck below.

“Looks can be decieving,” the lead automaton in the trio of inspectors replied. “We'll need blood samples to verify your health status and that of your crew.”

“Of course,” Gallian purred. “Would you prefer to take the samples here, or in the medbay?”

“Here will suffice.” The skeletal machine turned it's brushed duranium torso to address one of the other two, but no audible sounds were exchanged. The other automaton seemed to know automatically what was required of it. Perhaps they had communicated silently. Gallian smiled at the thought. Telepathy looked so much more plausible when machines did it, which was in a sense, how they could likewise mimic the feat.

The second automaton moved forward with a large black case. It set the case on the ground and popped the seals, revealing dozens of test tubes and syringes, as well as a bottle of disinfectant and a bag full of sanipads to staunch the blood after it was drawn.

Readying the first syringe, the automaton waved the nearest crew member forward. “Form a line please. It will make the process much more efficient.”

“Of course,” Gallian replied, and nodded to his crew. They were already lining up.

After the first half a dozen crew had given blood, Javax interrupted the process: “Excuse me, but since no one is monitoring their control stations at the moment, I felt it my duty to point out that coolant pressure is dropping in the reactor room, and reactor temperature is rising steadily. I believe we have sprung a coolant leak.”

The automatons turned as one to Gallian, who was suddenly frowning. “You had better deal with that. If your reactor overheats it will make our job much more difficult.”

Gallian smiled thinly. “Of course.” He stepped to one side, where the small knot of crew members who'd already been tested were standing. To the nearest one he said, “Go investigate the situation, would you, Teslin?”

The man nodded and started off immediately.

When Teslin arrived at the reactor room he found the temperature to be unusually warm in the access corridor. Frowning, he closed his eyes and sent a quick telepathic command to Gallian, requesting that the reactor be shut down so he could get inside the reactor room to find and repair the coolant leak. Almost instantly the lights went out in the corridor, but they were quickly replaced by a dim, red emergency lighting. The deep thrumming of the reactor was now eerily silent. Teslin stepped up to the door and placed his hand on the handle. It was uncomfortably hot to the touch. He wondered for a second if the door were so hot, how well Kieran and Jilly were faring within, and whether they had even survived the coolant leak. With an indifferent shrug, he began to turn the handle
.
 
.
 
.
 
.

And the door slammed open with a rush of superheated air and acrid coolant vapors. Before Teslin could brace himself against the door's sudden momentum, it knocked him backward and slammed him against the reactor wall with a terrific bang. His thoughts grew disorganized, but he still retained enough of his senses to push back against the door. It yielded almost instantly to reveal a man with dishevelled and smoking blonde hair, his clothes charred and smoking tatters, the skin pink and blistered beneath.

“Kieran?” Teslin gasped.

And then Kieran hit him with the door again. And again. And once more before Teslin slumped to the ground. But not before he'd sent an urgent message to the others:
they've betrayed us.

Teslin was too desperate to properly shield his thoughts, and Kieran was able to read them as well. He turned to Jilly with an urgent look, but she was already running up the corridor.

Chapter 55

G
allian's face clouded over, and nodded to the growing group of crew members who'd already had their blood drawn. They immediately strode from the bridge, and began jogging down the corridor. One of the automatons noticed, and fixed Gallian with a beady blue gaze. “Where are they going?”

Gallian smiled. “They are going to help repair the coolant leak.”

The automaton cocked its head curiously. “I didn't hear you give them instructions.”

“A good crew knows what to do without having to be asked.”

“Ah. I'd always thought humans were too disorganized to be that efficient.”

“Indeed.” Gallian's gaze slid away and he stared down the corridor after the men who'd left to deal with the 'coolant leak.' “Humans are inefficient creatures, aren't they?”

* * *

Jilly reached the hangar bay a second ahead of Kieran. Once they were both inside, she slapped her hand across the door controls, shutting the double-wide doors. They slid together with a
clang
that echoed in the cavernous hangar. Kieran spent a moment studying the controls, looking for a way to lock the door, but there was nothing he could do that wouldn't be easily undone from the other side. So he cranked his arm back and punched his fist through the control panel. Blue sparks flew into the air, and a thin river of smoke poured from the control panel.

“Hopefully that holds them back for a while,” Kieran said. Jilly was frantically searching the hangar for a ship large enough to carry them back to Union space, but there was nothing with that kind of range, just a dozen X19 interceptors that wouldn't even have TLS drives, and the shuttle that the automaton inspectors had brought. Kieran zeroed in on the shuttle and began striding toward it.

“Kieran, it's no use. The shuttle won't be able to take us back either.”

“It doesn't have to.”

“I thought you said you'd rather die than infect Acasia.”

“I would, but there might be another way.”

They reached the shuttle just as they heard pounding on the other side of the hangar doors. Kieran spared a quick glance over his shoulder at the doors as he jogged around the shuttle to the aft boarding ramp. They weren't coming through.

Yet.

Jilly was two steps behind him as he pounded up the boarding ramp and into the ship. It wasn't much, but there was room inside for a pilot, copilot, and at least a dozen troops in the rear. By the look of it, the shuttle was a short-range assault craft, designed to carry space marines into combat.

Kieran fell into the pilot's chair and powered up the shuttle. The systems flickered to life with a protesting whine from the ship's reactor, and he thanked Deus that there wasn't some form of security system installed. Apparently the Acasian fleet commanders had opted for launch speed rather than internal security. Besides, who would be stupid enough to steal an assault shuttle from a fully-armed battleship? They'd be disabled before they could get a milé-astrom from the ship. Kieran ran through an abreviated preflight check to familiarize himself with the controls and capabilities of the ship.

That turned out to be a bad idea.

“Kieran!” Jilly pointed out the canopy.

“I see it!” The hangar doors were being manually cranked open, with dozens of fingers prying from either side of the slowly widening slit between the heavy double doors. Kieran pulled the lever to close the rear hatch and retract the landing ramp. He was gratified to hear an answering swish of hydraulics and grinding of gears. Cold-starting the engines, Kieran dialed up the intertial compensators and hovered the ship on anti-grav before turning it around to face the hangar bay's blast shield. The enormous doors were tightly sealed, and would remain so unless a command was sent from the bridge to open them. Worse, they'd need to send override codes to open the doors to space while the hangar doors were being pried open.

“Kefick!” Kieran spat.

Jilly turned to him with eyes wide. “You mean you didn't think this far ahead?”

“Hold on.” Kieran frantically studied the control panels before him.

“Hold on?! Kieran, they're coming through! They'll be inside the hangar any second, and then they'll pry us open just as quickly as the hangar!”

Having found what he was looking for, Kieran sent her a quick smile. “No, they won't.” He toggled the shuttle's shield systems and shunted as much power from the reactor into them as they would take. Then he tightened his grip on the flightstick and flicked off the fire-control safeties. A row of four lights blinked from red to green on the control panel.

“Brace yourself.”

“What are you going to do?”

Kieran depressed the firing stud under his thumb and four brilliant streaks of blue flame flared out from the bow of the shuttle. They impacted a dozen micró-astroms away with a defeaning
ka-bang
. Sheir eyes were dazzled by a roiling white fireball that quickly faded to orange, and swept by their ship in an instant, buffeting it so powerfully it flew into the far wall of the hangar. Deafening crashes sounded all around them, and alarms blared inside the cockpit. Just as the smoke began to clear, the ringing silence began to howl and whistle outside their ship, and the smoke was swept clear in an instant.

Jilly had a moment to gasp at the wreckage piled all around them. The dozen or so interceptors that had been inside the hangar with them were now torn and mangled scraps of alloy, smoking and flaming with whatever oxygen was trapped inside their hulls. The hangar doors were stuck halfway open with no sign of the men/creatures who'd been prying at them. And the hangar's blast shield was bowed out in ragged strips of duranium, revealing the misty red and gray nebula beyond.

Kieran grimaced as he checked the damage reports.

“That was really vacuous of you, Kieran!”

“Well, I got the hangar open, didn't I?”

“Yes, but at what cost? Will this barrel even fly us out of here now?”

“Give me a second. I'm still trying to figure that out.”

Jilly let out a frustrated hiss of air. “You're unbelievable!”

“Hold on. Before you punch me again, you should know that the ship's shields protected us from most of the blast. They're down to 5% and we've sustained some heavy damage to our port engine, but I should be able to limp along with the starboard. Everything else seems more or less intact, including the TLS drive.”

“Limp along? Kieran, who cares about the TLS drive if we can't get away to use it? As soon as we leave the hangar, every gun on this ship is going to be tracking us.”

Kieran shook his head. “I don't think so. If they fire on the inspection team's shuttle, the Acasian fleet will fire on them. It will take too long for them to explain that we stole the shuttle, and the Acasians will probably want to recover it themselves.”

“Fine, so what happens when the Acasians come after us?”

“I'm hoping we'll have jumped to TLS before they can catch up.”

“Hoping? You're
hoping?
”

Kieran sent her a quick grin. “Only one way to find out.”

Chapter 56

K
laxons began wailing on the bridge, and Gallian's head snapped around. “Javax, what's going on?”

“It appears we have suffered some type of explosive decompression in the hangar. Before they were destroyed by the blast, my sensors detected a radiation signature consistent with DCX explosives. Probably Pirakla Missiles.”

One of the automatons looked up, its blue optic receptors brightening suddenly. “Our shuttle carries Pirakla Missiles.”

Gallian ignored the comment and strode over to the command chair. “Everyone back to your stations.”