Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex (32 page)

“I see a damaged window,” Izin’s
artificial voice sounded in my ear. “How close are you?”

“We’re clear,” I said. “Let them
have it!”

Moments later, one of Izin’s
penetrator rounds smashed through the side of the building and detonated a
cloud of micro munitions in the center of the lab. A dozen tiny explosions sent
shrapnel splinters flying in all directions. I took a step forward, about to
run towards the lab, when a disk-like mortar-drone flew out into the corridor.
I turned and threw myself at Marie, knocking her though the open door of the last
lab we’d unlocked. We hit the floor together as the mortar-drone’s upper
surface popped up three centimeters, revealing ten small explosive shells lying
side by side. The self propelled bombs launched together, detonating against
nearby walls, tearing the third floor apart. One bomblet flew past the doorway
behind us, through the corridor and detonated in the stairwell. I was vaguely
aware of a lump of prefab wall glancing off my head, then after a while, a
familiar artificial voice sounded from my earpiece.

“Captain, respond.”

I couldn’t have been out for more
than a few seconds, but I could barely hear Izin’s voice over the deafening
tone in my ears. Marie stirred beside me, dazed from the explosions. I climbed to
my feet and staggered into the corridor. The entire third floor was in ruins
and spot fires were taking hold everywhere. The pico lab’s wall had collapsed. Scarface
and the lab technician were both dead, shredded by Izin’s shrapnel slug, and
Vargis, Jawbones and the Codex were gone.

Marie emerged into the corridor
clutching both her needle guns. Together we stepped into the lab, avoiding the
two bloodied corpses on the floor. The picometric scanner was riddled with tiny
holes, except for where the Codex’s impenetrable alien-tech skin had absorbed
Izin’s shrapnel blast, leaving an undamaged footprint on the flat metallic
scanning surface.

“The fool!” I whispered, knowing Vargis
had left me no choice. Whatever he thought he was going to do with the Codex, I
knew he was playing right into the hands of the Matarons. “Izin,” I wheezed in
a voice I barely recognized.

“Yes, Captain?”

“Vargis has the Codex! Don’t let
him leave!”

The view screens on the walls
were cracked and pitted with shrapnel. Some were inactive, some hissed with
static, while those that still functioned repeatedly flashed the same message:

EVACUATE! EVACUATE! EVACUATE!

ENERGY PLANT SUPERCRITICAL!

A timer was ticking over fast
showing less than four minutes remaining.

Marie holstered her gun, staring
at the screens. “That can’t be good.”

I stepped towards the nearest
functioning display. Row after row of barely visible numbers ghosted behind the
alert message, corrupting the base’s control system. Whatever those ghost
numbers were, they didn’t belong.

 
DIGITIZE OPTICS, I thought, triggering my
threading to record everything I saw in perfect detail.

“Captain,” Izin’s voice sounded
over the slowly receding ringing in my ears. “Vargis’ vehicle was shielded. I
could not destroy it.”

“What’s it doing now?”

“Heading for the spaceport. The
Soberano
is preparing to lift off.”

“Is Klasson still with you?”

“Yes, Captain.”

I closed the channel and turned
to Marie. “If they come for us, there won’t be time to clear the blast radius.”

She nodded slowly. “I know.”

“Izin, get aboard Klasson’s crate
and get as far away as you can,” I glanced at the timer. “You have three
minutes until the E-plant explodes.”

“Captain?” Izin said uncertainly.

“Get out of here now, while you
still can. I’m going to call out a series of numbers I want you to remember.” If
he could pass the number sequence to Lena Voss, the EIS might still have time
to figure out what they meant. “Go to Hades City Spaceport. Ask for–”

“Be on the roof in one minute!” Klasson
yelled at us through Izin’s communicator.

“Klasson! The E-plant is supercritical.
There isn’t time!”

“Then haul ass, flyboy! I ain’t
letting you die ‘til I get my guns!”

“You can’t make minimum safe
distance if you pick us up!” When he didn’t answer, I swore under my breath. Marie
and I ran through the door Vargis had used to escape, then up stairs to the
roof.

“Klasson’s ferry can do mach
four,” Marie said hopefully as we scaled the stairs.

“He needs ten times that to
outrun the blast!”

Three men wearing the
Soberano’s
crew uniform lay dead near
where the executive transport had landed. Izin had cut them down, but Vargis
and Jawbones were not among them. The down blast from Klasson’s ferry’s engines
swept the roof as it dropped out of the sky in front of us, landing hard. Its
rear cargo door was already open, with Izin standing at the entry motioning for
us to run to him.

Behind us, the
Soberano
lifted off. The super transport
rose on more than forty thrusters, turning slowly in the air as one of her huge
cargo doors opened outwards. When the door was horizontal, a tremendous energy
blast flashed from the hold’s dark interior, destroying a building on the far
side of the base. The
Soberano’s
cargo
door immediately started to close as she nosed up began climbing on her sixteen
engines, forcing us to shield our eyes from the dazzling light radiating from her
stern. As she became a receding star, twenty ejection pods streaked skywards
from the eastern side of the base, each carrying a hundred people to the
distant safety of orbit.

Marie and I ran to the ferry as the
blast of its engines died, and charged up the ramp into the cargo compartment.

“Go!” I yelled

Izin began raising the rear door,
filling the cargo compartment with the grinding metallic sound of rusting
servos as the ferry’s engines roared to life. It lurched into the air as I hurried
forward to the cockpit. Klasson was flying one handed, remarkably relaxed as
the ferry’s engines rotated to the horizontal.

“Once you’re over the crater
wall, go low!” I yelled as I slid into the copilot’s seat.

“Nah, the trees will block us,”
Klasson said as he put the ferry into a steep climb.

“The crater wall will absorb some
of the EMP.” Even if by a miracle, we could escape the blast wave, the
electromagnetic pulse would fry the ferry’s systems, sending us nose diving
into the ground at four times the speed of sound.

“This old girl won’t survive even
a flicker of EMP.”

“Going high won’t help!” We’d be
exposed to the full force of the blast when the E-plant went up.

“Don’t be so sure!” Klasson said
with a sly grin.

I thought he’d lost his mind,
then Jase’s voice sounded over the communicator. “Cut your power now!”

“Never flew a glider before,”
Klasson said as he silenced the old ferry’s engines. “First time for
everythin
’!”

The roar of the engines was replaced
by the whistle of wind over the hull as the ferry hurtled through the air. A large
shadow passed over the cockpit, then the
Silver
Lining
dropped down on top of us. Brilliant blue lights appeared either
side of Klasson’s ferry as the
Lining’s
two engines, glowing on minimal power, dropped either side of us. The
Lining’s
number two gantry’s maglock glowed
to life overhead, snatching the ferry out of the air as if she were an empty VRS
container. The ferry slammed up hard against the gantry’s maglock, knocking
Izin and Marie off their feet as it was locked into place by powerful magnetic
fields.

“I got you!” Jase’s voice yelled
from the cockpit’s communicator. “Hold on.”

“Oh no!” I muttered, realizing we
were outside the
Lining’s
inertial
field, leaving us no protection from her acceleration. “Brace!” I yelled.

Marie and Izin rolled flat on the
cargo deck as Klasson looked up curiously at the three towing gantries
extending from the
Lining’s
stern,
seemingly unaware of what was coming. A moment later, the ferry filled with
blue light as Jase fed a trickle of power to the ship’s engines. The
Lining
stood on her tail and began
streaking up through the atmosphere, crushing us under the enormous weight of acceleration
many times greater than Klasson’s rust bucket could ever have achieved. The old
ferry had no chance of outrunning a reactive explosion, but the
Lining
could do it easily, providing the
acceleration didn’t kill us. We gasped for air as Jase piled on ten gravities –
as much as he dared. I nearly blacked out as I sank into the hard copilot’s
seat which had never been designed for that kind of acceleration. Beside me,
Klasson gritted his teeth, shocked by the force pressing down on him. After
what seemed an eternity, Jase shed a few G’s to let us breathe, although we
still couldn’t move.

Outside, a shimmer obscured the
air as the
Lining’s
battle shield went
up.

We continued climbing, picking up
speed and piling on distance between us and the doomed E-plant. Suddenly, the
sky around us filled with a stark white light. I squeezed my eyes shut, facing
down away from the blinding flash. Below us, the BBI base vaporized, turning
the ancient caldera into a boiling lava crater. The blast wave expanded like a
bubble, ionizing the atmosphere to the edge of space and dumping star-intensity
heat on our shield. A sphere of orange and red glowed around the
Lining
and its captive ferry as the
curvature of the planet appeared. For several seconds, we raced through the
upper atmosphere as the air inside Klasson’s poorly pressurized rust bucket
began to thin, then the shield cooled and the acceleration eased, letting us
move again. Soon we dived back towards the safety of the lower atmosphere, now half
a continent away from the blast zone.

“That was close,” I said, glancing
at the ferry’s blank control console.

The
Lining’s
battle shield had protected us from the blast, but not the
electromagnetic pulse. While the ship’s hull was designed to reflect radiation,
the old ferry’s systems had been
fried
by the EMP. I did
a quick status check of my own, finding my biological threading had been
unaffected, although all of my mechanical equipment was dead. Only my P-50 had
survived, because like most weapons, it was EMP-shielded.

“Your ferry’s had it,” I said.

“Yeah, she was a good old girl,” Klasson
said, glancing back through the cockpit window at the glowing dome rising beyond
the horizon behind us. “It was worth it, to put an end to them
terraformin
’ shenanigans!” He chuckled, then craned his
neck as he watched twenty points of light angling for orbit high above us. “Looks
like most of them dirt doctors got out alive.”

I followed his gaze to the
ejection pods. The light radiating from their engines was proof they’d escaped
both the blast and the electromagnetic pulse intact. “Where will they go?”

“Refuge most likely, unless they got
a deal with the smugglers.”

“Will you accept them?”

“Yeah, but only ‘cause the kelp beds
needs a good cleaning.” He grinned. “Might do them terraformers some good to
get their hands dirty and their feet wet.”

“They’ll rebuild the base.”

“No stopping it I guess, but by
the time they do we’ll have a hundred of them fancy rifles and a few of Izin’s little
sharpshooting cousins helping us out.”

The way he said it, it sounded
like fun. If the navy confiscated the
Lining
for smuggling his guns, I might even join him. “It’ll take a year for word to
get back to the Core Systems, then another year or two to get replacements out
here.”

“Yeah, and then they got to grow
them test plants all over again.” He gave me a crafty look. “Enough time for
you to go get me an orbital gunship!”

I laughed. That was definitely
impossible and he knew it, but I went along with his dreaming. “Anything else?”

Klasson sighed thoughtfully. “A
case of Kentucky bourbon. I’m not talking ‘bout that
pisswater
from New
Bardron
. I want the genuine article – from Earth.”

“You’ve got more chance of
getting an orbital gunship.”

He sighed wistfully. “I figured
you’d say that, but a man can dream, can’t he?”

* * * *

The
Silver
Lining
kept hold of Klasson’s ferry until we landed in Refuge. Jase waited
while we all climbed out, then released the maglock. The old ferry crashed onto
the petrified branch with a clatter of loose metal, now a pile of scrap to be cannibalized
and melted down. An hour later, all of the ejection pods had splashed down in
the harbor and were being towed to shore by survivalist boats. They were
virtual enemies in an undeclared war, yet the survivalists treated the people
in the pods, more than half of whom were women and children, with compassion
and care.