Starbase Human (2 page)

She should have questioned so many things.

Like the creepy older guys who looked like the baked and fried versions of the men in boots, stomping down the corridors, killing people.

She blinked, wondered if her eyes were tearing because of the smell or because of her panic, then voted for the smell. The air in the corridor had a bit of white to it, like smoke or something worse, a leaking environment from the alien section.

She was torn between running and tiptoeing her way through the remaining forty-seven meters. She opted for a kind of jog-walk, that way her heels didn’t slap the floor like those boots stomped it.

Another scream, farther away, and the clear sound of begging, although she didn’t recognize the language. Human anyway, or something that spoke like a human and screamed like a human.

Why were these matching people stalking the halls, killing everyone they saw? Were they trying to take over the base? If so, why not come to her office? Hers was the first one in the administrative wing, showing her lower-level status—in charge, but not in charge.

In charge enough to see that the base’s exterior was compensating for having a hole blown in it. In charge enough to know how powerful an explosion had to be to break through the shield that protected the base against asteroids and out-of-control ships and anything else that bounced off the thick layers of protection.

A bend in the corridor. Her eyes dripped, her nose dripped, and her throat felt like it was burning up.

She couldn’t see as clearly as she wanted to—no pure white smoke any more, some nasty brown stuff mixed in, and a bit of black.

She pulled off her blouse and put it over her face like a mask, wished she had her environmental suit, wished she knew where she could steal one right now, and then sprinted toward the docking ring.

If she kept walk-jogging, she’d never get there before the oxygen left the area.

Then something else shook the entire base. Like it had earlier. Another damn explosion.

She whimpered, rounded the last corner, saw the docking ring doors—closed.

She cursed (although she wasn’t sure if she did it out loud or just in her head) and hoped to that ever-present unknown deity that her access code still worked.

The minute those doors slid open, the matching marching murderers would know she was here. Or rather, that someone was here.

They’d come for her. They’d make her scream.

But she’d be damned if she begged.

She hadn’t begged ever, not when her dad beat her within an inch of her life, not when she got accused of stealing from that high-class school her mother had warehoused her in, not when her credit got cut off as she fled to the outer reaches of the Alliance.

She hadn’t begged no matter what situation she was in, and she wouldn’t now. It was a point of pride. It might be the last point of pride, hell, it might mark her last victory just before she died, but it would be a victory nonetheless, and it would be
hers
.

Takara slammed her hand against the identiscanner, then punched in a code, because otherwise she’d have to use her links, and she wasn’t turning them back on, maybe ever, because she didn’t want those crazy matching idiots to not only find her, but find her entire life, stored in the personal memory attached to her private access numbers.

The docking ring doors irised open, and actual air hit her. Real oxygen without the stupid smoky stuff, good enough to make her leap through the doors. Then she turned around and closed them.

She scanned the area, saw feet—not in boots—attached to motionless legs, attached to bleeding bodies, attached to people she knew, and she just shut it all off, because if she saw them as friends or co-workers or other human beings, she wouldn’t be able to run past them, wouldn’t be able to get to her ship, wouldn’t get the hell out of here.

She kept her shirt against her face, just in case, but her eyes were clearing. The air here looked like air, but it smelled like a latrine. Death—fast death, recent death. She’d used it for entertainment, watched it, read about it, stepped inside it virtually, but she’d never experienced it. Not really, not like this.

Her ship sat at the far end of this ring, the cheap area, where the ceiling of the base bent downward and would have brushed the top of some bigger ship, something that actually had speed and firepower and
worth
.

Then she mentally corrected herself: her ship had worth. It would get her out of this death trap. She would escape before one of those tall blond booted men found her. She would—

—she flew forward, landed on her belly, her elbow scraping against the metal walkway, air leaving her body. Her shirt went somewhere, her chin banged on the floor, and then the sound—a whoop-whamp, followed by a sustained series of crashes.

Something was collapsing, or maybe one of the explosions was near her, or she had no damn idea, she just knew she had to get out, get out, get out—

She pushed herself to her feet, her knees sore too, her pants torn, her stomach burning, but she didn’t look down because the feel of that burn matched the feel of her elbow, so she was probably scraped.

She didn’t even grab her shirt; she just ran the last meter to her ship, which had moved even with its mooring clamps—good God, something was shaking this place, something bad, something big.

Her ship was so small, it didn’t even have a boarding ramp. The door was pressed against the clamps, or it should have been, but there was a gap between the clamps and the ship and the walkway, and it was probably tearing something in the ship, but she didn’t want to think about that so she didn’t.

Instead, she slammed her palm against the door four times, the emergency enter code, which wasn’t a code at all, but was something she thought (back when she was young and stupid and new to access codes) no one would figure out.

What she hadn’t figured out was that no one wanted this cheap-ass ship, so no one tried to break into it. No one wanted to try, no one cared, except her, right now, as the door didn’t open and didn’t open and didn’t open—

—and then it did.

Her brain was slowing down time. She’d heard about this phenomenon, something happened chemically in the human brain, slowed perception, made it easier (quicker?) to make decisions—and there her stupid brain was again, thinking about the wrong things as she tried to survive.

Hell, that had helped her survive as a kid, this checking-out thing in the middle of an emergency, but it wasn’t going to help her now.

She scrambled inside her ship, felt it tilt, heard the hull groan. If she didn’t do something about those clamps, she wouldn’t have a ship.

She somehow remembered to slap the door’s closing mechanism before she sprinted to the cockpit. Her bruised knees made her legs wobbly or maybe the ship was tilting even more. The groaning in the hull was certainly increasing.

The cockpit door was open, the place was a mess, as always. She used to sleep in here on long runs, and she always meant to clean up the blankets and pillows and clothes, but never did.

Now she stood in the middle of it, and turned on the navigation board. She instructed the ship to decouple, then turned her links on—not all of them, just the private link that hooked her to the ship—and heard more groaning.

“Goddammit!” she screamed at the ship, slamming her hands on the board. “Decouple, decouple—get rid of the goddamn clamps!”

Inform space traffic control to open the exit through the rings,
the ship said in its prissiest voice.

Tears pricked her eyes. Crap. She’d be stuck here because of some goddamn rule that ship couldn’t take off if there was no exit. She’d die if there was another explosion.

“There’s no space traffic control here,” she said. “Space traffic control is dead. We have to get out. Everyone’s dead.”

Her voice wobbled just like the ship had as she realized what she had said.
Everyone
. Everyone she had worked with, her friends, her co-workers, the people she drank with, laughed with, everyone—

We cannot leave if the exit isn’t open
, the ship said slowly and even more prissily, if that were possible.

“Then ram it,” she said.

That will destroy us,
the ship said, so damn calmly. Like it had no idea they were about to be destroyed anyway.

Takara ran her fingers over the board, looking for—she couldn’t remember. This thing was supposed to have weapons, but she’d never used them, didn’t know exactly what they were. She’d bought this stupid ship for a song six years ago, and the weapons were only mentioned in passing.

She couldn’t find anything, so she gambled.

“Blow a damn hole through the closed exit,” she said, not knowing if she could do that, if the ship even allowed that. Weren’t there supposed to be failsafes so that no one could blow a hole through something on this base?

That will leave us with only one remaining laser shot,
the ship said.

“I don’t give a good goddamn!” she screamed. “Fire!”

And it did. Or something happened. Because the ship heated, and rocked and she heard a bang like nothing she’d ever heard before, and the sound of things falling on the ship.

“Get us out of here!” she shouted.

And the ship went upwards, fast, faster than ever.

So fast she could hear the engines screaming—

Which meant she didn’t have to.

TWO

AS THE SHIP
screamed its way out of the base, Takara tumbled backwards. The attitude controls were screwed or the gravity or something, but she didn’t care.

“Visuals,” she said, and floating on the screens that appeared in front of her was the hole that the ship had blown through the exit, and debris heading out with them, and bits of ship—and then she realized that there were bits of more than ship. Bits of the starbase and other ships and son of a bitch, more bodies and—

“Make sure you don’t hit anything,” she said, not knowing how to give the correct command.

I will evade large debris
, the ship said as if this were an everyday occurrence.
However, I do need a destination
.

“Far away from here,” Takara said.

How far?

“I don’t know,” she said. “Out of danger.”

She was pressed against what she usually thought of as the side wall, with blankets and smelly sheets and musty pillows against her.

“And fix the attitude controls and the gravity, would you?” she snapped.

The interior of the ship seemed to right itself. She flopped on her stomach again, only this time, it didn’t hurt.

She stood, her mouth wet and tasting of blood. She put a hand to her face, realized her nose was bleeding, and grabbed a sheet, stuffing it against her skin.

She dragged the sheet with her to the controls. The images had disappeared (had she ordered that? She didn’t remember ordering that) and so she called them up again, saw more body parts, and globules of stuff (blood? Intestines?) and shut it all off—consciously this time.

God, she was lucky. She had administration codes. She had a sense that things were going bad. She had her ship ready. And, most important of all, she had been close enough to the docking ring to get out of there before anyone knew she even existed.

She sank into the chair and closed her eyes, wondering what in the bloody hell was going on.

She’d met those men, the creepy older ones, and asked her boss what they wanted with ships, and he’d said,
Better not to ask, hon
.

He always called her hon, and she finally realized it was because he couldn’t remember her name. And now he was dead or would be dead or was dying or something awful like that. He’d been inside the administration area when the twenty clones had come in—or the forty clones—or the sixty clones, God, she had no idea how many.

It was her boss’s boss who’d answered her, later, when she mentioned that the men looked alike.

Don’t ask about it, Takara
, he’d said quietly.
They’re creatures of someone else. Designer criminal clones. They need a ship for nefarious doings.

They’re not in charge?
she’d asked.

He’d shaken his head.
Someone made them for a job
.

Her eyes opened, saw the mess that her cockpit had become. A job. They’d had to find fast ships for a job.

But if the creepy older ones were made for a job, so were the younger versions.

She called up the screens, asked for images of the starbase. It was a small base, far away from anything, important only to malcontents and criminals, and those like her, whose ships wouldn’t cross the great distance between human-centered planets without a rest-and-refueling stop.

The starbase was glowing—fires inside, except where the exterior had been breached. Those sections were dark and ruined. It looked like a volcano that had already exploded—twice. More than twice. Several times.