Rift in the Races (105 page)
“Don’t do it,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you. Don’t do it, I swear to God. This doesn’t have to go bad.”
“This place is going to be flooded with people in less than a minute,” said the Marine on the left. “Put the gun down.”
Orli turned and looked into the cell. Altin was asleep, oblivious to the rescue she had underway. He couldn’t hear a thing through the thick security glass.
She reached out to the downed Marine and tried to pull him close enough that she could search him for the control that would open the door.
A blast of red light cut across the top of her forearm, causing her to yank it back. She ignored the pain. She’d been burned by dragon’s fire before.
“Give it up, Pewter,” said the guard. “This is stupid. You know you can’t get him out of there.”
“I don’t know shit,” she spat back. “All I know is that this fleet has treated him like garbage since the day he arrived. He’s never done anything but help. If his people show up and kill us all, it will be exactly what we deserve.”
As if on her command, a rush of air suddenly blew into her face, the rush of it announcing the arrival of three crossbowmen in the crimson cloaks of the Palace Guard, two wizards in military robes and the Queen’s elf with his black armor and all his bristling knives.
“Unravel it,” snapped the elf. The two Marines fired their weapons at the same time the crossbowmen did. Both Marines and one of the crossbowmen went down.
One of the mages began chanting something, but the second sorcerer, this one wearing white robes with a red oak tree emblem on it, dropped to his knee and began mumbling something else, his hand upon the hole that had been burnt into the crossbowman’s chest. Immediately the man began to make noises befitting a man in pain but far from dead.
“Miss Pewter, can you open it?” the elf asked.
She darted a look down the hallway where the two downed Marines lay. “Maybe.” She moved to the Marine she’d knocked out and patted down his uniform. The control was in a breast pocket, which she quickly found. She didn’t know the code.
“I’ve got it,” said the taller of the two mages, his chanting done. “It’s down. Get him out.”
“He’s asleep. He won’t teleport like that,” said the other mage.
“Wake him,” Shadesbreath snapped. “They are coming. Several of them. Both directions.”
The white-robed mage began pounding on the glass, shouting for Altin to wake up.
“No, like this,” Orli said, standing and pressing the button on the com panel near the door. “Altin, wake up.”
Altin stirred, but did not wake immediately.
Shouts behind them signaled that more security guards were nearing the door by the vent.
A canister of gas rolled through the open doorway where the two guards lay at the other end of the corridor.
“Shit, we have to get out of here,” she said. “And don’t breathe that.”
Orli sprinted back down the corridor to check the lock on the door near the vent. It was secure. That was good. Maybe. She turned back just as another canister of gas shot into the hallway, this one bouncing clear past the group from Prosperion and almost all the way to where she was. Gas hissed out in a white cloud, drawing loops in the air as it rolled toward her.
“He’s awake,” she heard one of the mages say over the sound of escaping gas. She tried to run through it to them, but the burn of it in her eyes made her gasp, which then choked her, and halfway to them she stumbled to her knees. Her eyes felt like they were on fire.
“Get us inside,” she heard the elf say. “Do it in there.”
More shouts, these from Marines.
She crawled through the smoke, trying to find a space to breathe. Tears poured from her eyes as if from open faucets. Another canister of gas rolled in.
She tried to get to them, scrambled blindly through the thick fog on all fours, and barely got to the door of the small chamber before she collapsed, gasping and gagging. She lay on her stomach, wheezing, nearly blind. She rolled her head to the side, peering through the burn into Altin’s cell. She realized right before she passed out that it was empty. He was gone.
When she woke up, the
Aspect
was in orbit above planet Earth. It had been for over an hour. She got the dim sense of it from snatches of frantic conversation as she was coming out of the gas-induced delirium.
At first she thought it must be a dream, but she could turn her head to the left and see the familiar image of her long-lost home world in the monitor at the nurse’s station across the room. She supposed that might be part of the dream, too, but this didn’t have the feel of that. She was alone in the room, but several people were yelling in the one next door.
She tried to sit up, intent on going to the monitor and having a look at the image of planet Earth. The sound of the shouting unnerved her, though she could not say why. She wanted to see if it was true. They didn’t sound excited in the way she thought they should be. But she couldn’t sit up. She’d been strapped to the bed.
A nurse came running in and tapped up something on the computer, but she couldn’t see through him to make out what had changed on the monitor. Still, she could ask what was going on.
“Hey,” Orli called to him, her voice hoarse and cracking from exposure to so much of the gas. “Where are we? Are we home?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’re home, all right.” The way he said it frightened her.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Why is everyone shouting?”
“Because the Hostiles are everywhere.” He tapped off the monitor and ran back out.
The End
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