The Dark Imbalance (18 page)
Read The Dark Imbalance Online
Authors: Sean Williams,Shane Dix
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Space Opera
She staggered as the floor shifted under her; then, regaining her balance, she headed for the checkpoint. They passed through unhindered, and headed off along the corridor.
<1 presume you can’t read her,> Roche said to Maii.
A further violent judder swept through the habitat just as they turned down another corridor, this time forcing Roche to one knee in order to keep herself from falling. “What was
that
?”
Alta looked frightened as she helped Roche to her feet. “We’ve been holed!” she said as a sudden shift in air pressure made everyone’s ears block. The sirens took on a new note of alarm. “Pressure-doors will be up all over the station.”
“We have suits,” said Roche. “Do you know the override commands?”
Alta shook her head. “My father would have.” Roche felt trapped. Keeping the Box’s existence a secret was becoming harder and harder.
The Box complied and she quickly relayed the codes to Maii.
and open those doors for us when we reach them. We’ll just have to bluff our way through this one.>
Roche nudged Alta on. “Come on, keep going. We’re going to make it, okay?”
They continued through the vibrating corridors of the habitat, though now with more pace and urgency. There was still no one around, and Roche assumed the nonessential Vax personnel were holed up in their pressurized compartments. If the majority of the security personnel were down at the docks or elsewhere in the habitat where the defense was concentrated, that at least decreased the chances of their being found. But it wasn’t enough to help Roche relax. Not until she was standing on the bridge of the
Ana Vereine,
with the habitat far behind her, would she allow herself that luxury....
They passed through two open pressure-doors, then a third. Roche could see the puzzlement on Alta’s face at the blatant lapse in safety precautions, but there was no time to explain. The only time they stopped was when a particularly violent attack shook the habitat so badly that Roche was flung into one of the walls, and Maii and Alta were thrown onto the shuddering floor.
Steadying herself, Roche asked:
From the
Ana Vereine,
Kajic said:
They passed through the first junction, taking a little-used passage that obviously connected to the maintenance tunnels they had left earlier. The second junction took them to a wide, straight corridor that seemed to stretch for miles. In the distance, loping toward them, were two figures, one dressed in black, the other in gold.
Alta started when she saw them.
“It’s okay,” Roche assured her. “They’re with us.”
Yet another violent shudder ran through the walls and floor.
“Quickly,” said Roche, stepping over to the dumper’s enormous steel hatch. “Get that thing open!”
“We haven’t used the dumpers for years,” explained Alta, tapping at a keypad. “Father kept this one in commission to use as an emergency exit, if he ever needed it. It was used occasionally, but not regularly. But the codes should still work.”
Thinking of the dissolving door in the administer’s chambers, Roche said: “If we do get out of this in one piece, we’ll have your father’s devious mind to thank for it.”
Haid and Vri arrived in a clatter of armor and heavy footsteps.
“Any problems?” Roche asked.
“None,” Haid said. “Which only makes me more nervous.”
“It would,” she said. Alta glanced up but there wasn’t time for introductions. “Cane should be waiting for us out the other side of the dumper. If they’re designed like others I’ve seen, we should be able to crawl into the induction tube and out into vacuum easily enough. Then we’ll have to jump to the scutter.”
“And then...?” Haid prompted.
“Then we wait to see what happens here,” said Roche. “The administer has been killed, so it’ll be easier to deal with things here if we can reinstate Ansourian somehow. It might be worth sticking around to see if the habitat survives the attack.”
Alta had looked up again when Roche mentioned that Inderdeep Jans was dead, but returned quickly to her task. Seconds later she had finished tinkering with the keypad and tried to open the hatch. The hinges were stiff; with Haid’s assistance the hatch finally came open a little.
<‘Unusual’? In what way?>
A trap.
Roche watched as Haid and Alta continued to pull at the dumper’s hatch. Haid might have been right to be nervous, after all.
“Just blow it, Ameidio,” she said. Then to Maii:
<1 can sense nothing, Morgan.>
She stepped back from the recalcitrant hatch as Haid positioned the charges to blow it open. She closed her eyes as she lowered Ansourian to the ground, allowing the gray vistas of n-space to unfold around her.
Not far away from them, though, she clearly saw the distinctive dip of a clone warrior.
so,> said Maii, uncertainty stressing the word.
The corridor rocked beneath them as the charges blew open the hatch. Roche opened her eyes on a cloud of smoke obscuring everything in the corridor. Haid stepped to the hole in the wall where the hatch had been.
Haid hesitated by the entrance to the refuse dumper, startled by the mental shout. The gray of n-space overwhelmed Roche’s ordinary vision—and she too saw the second hole in the field that meant a clone warrior. At first she didn’t realize how Maii had known there were two, but then it all fell into place. The second one was farther away and moving gradually closer. It had all the hallmarks of Cane’s mind.
The first one they had seen was
inside
the refuse dumper. Before anyone could move away, there was a second explosion, this time from the other side of the open hatchway. A hurricane of air roared past them as the atmosphere inside the corridor was sucked out the open outlet, into space. Roche braced herself, and grabbed Ansourian’s body as it slipped toward the hole. Pressure doors slammed closed along the corridor; alarms screamed, fading gradually as the air pressure dropped.
Then, out of the hatchway, moving easily against the whirlpool currents of air, her white ponytail whipping in the wind, stepped Inderdeep Jans.
10
Perdue Habitat
955.1.32
0810
Jans was wearing an OSFA suit not dissimilar to the ones Ansourian and his daughter had on, except her face mask wasn’t in place. That she had blown the dumper outlet without sealing her suit first surprised Roche, but she didn’t have time to dwell on the matter—the clone warrior was advancing toward her. Jans didn’t appear to be armed, but that didn’t lessen the potential threat. There was a spark of malice in her eyes, and her attention was fixed firmly upon Roche.
Before Roche could react, Haid grabbed Jans’s shoulder from behind and spun her around. Jans used her momentum to kick out and up, throwing him with ease across the corridor. Then, with a single, fluid motion, she was at Vri’s side, disarming him of the rifle he had leveled at her only a second earlier. One shot blew a hole in the far wall as the weapon was wrenched from his grasp and turned on him. In that same instant, Roche managed to snap off a shot from her own pistol, knocking the rifle out of Jans’s hands. The warrior didn’t seem the slightest bit fazed; instead, her free hand now struck out twice at Vri’s head. The third time she lashed out at him she grabbed the Surin’s arm and spun him around, hurling him at the nearest wall. He bounced off the gray-black surface heavily and fell back to the floor, his body prostrate and writhing.
The warrior now turned to face Roche. For the briefest moment their eyes met.
Then the clone warrior pulled her mask closed and took two running steps toward Roche—unbelievably fast. Roche fired just as her assailant jumped. Jans’s suit flared mirror-bright for an instant; then she was on top of Roche, forcing her down and knocking the pistol out of her hands. Roche struggled, but two incredibly strong hands lifted her from the ground and threw her across the floor. She slid into a wall; even through the hazard suit, the impact knocked the breath out of her. She raised her hands to ward off another blow, but none came. It wasn’t
her
Jans was after.
Placing her feet on either side of Atul Ansourian’s prone body, Inderdeep Jans thrust down with her left fist, penetrating his suit, rib cage, and heart with one, smooth punch.
Even in her dazed state, Roche knew what the clone warrior was doing: she was finishing the job. Now there would be no easy way that the situation in Perdue Habitat could be fixed.
Inderdeep Jans rose to her full height now and looked around, her hand dripping red. The drop in air pressure cast an eerie half-silence across the scene. Roche could hear her own breathing loudest of all, over the calling of voices in her implants. Vri’s roar of defiance from behind the clone warrior went unheard entirely, as did Alta Ansourian’s cry of horror.
Roche felt a wave of giddiness wash over her as Maii leveled a spear of mental force at the clone warrior, and thrust with all her strength. Jans didn’t even react. She just stood there for a couple of seconds, as though contemplating what to do next. Then, having made a decision, she stepped away from Ansourian’s body and over to Roche. Without wasting time, she steadied Roche with one hand to the chest and raised her bloodied fist to strike. There was no emotion in the woman’s eyes, just cold detachment. And in the seconds that Roche looked into those eyes, part of her felt a fear deeper than any she had known before. But another part of her was just tired, and the breath she released at that moment was almost a sigh of relief that it was finally over....
Then the clone warrior’s fist fell.
A flash of white, and the fist missed her helmet and embedded itself in the corridor wall.
Roche sagged, her legs turned to water. Only Jans’ hand on her chest held her upright as the clone warrior turned, eyes flashing at Cane standing in the open dumper hatch, a pistol steadied in both hands, still aiming the shot that had knocked Jans’ punch aside.
Ana Vereine,
then to Roche’s implants.
Jans’s face became an angry sneer and the hand on Roche’s chest tightened.
Cane shot her again. The suit’s reflective powers had been compromised by the two shots it had already received, and this time the reflective flash was more purple than white. Jans recoiled from Roche, then sprang forward so fast that her figure became a blur.
Cane didn’t waste time firing again. The pistol had hardly begun to fall when her lunge met his defensive crouch. Their limbs moved too rapidly for Roche to make out anything clearly. One would strike, the other would defend and counterstrike—the exchange almost too quick to follow. There was a dizzying effect to the battle as each whirled, ducked, and thrust, with no indication as to who was gaining the upper hand.
After a few moments the two of them came apart, as if thrown from each other by a small and silent explosion. Cane bounced back into a wall as Jans skidded along the corridor. Quicker than it would have taken Roche to blink, the two were poised again, ready to attack.
His call brought her to life and, as the two clone warriors clashed again—with Cane leaping forward to prevent Jans getting any closer to the hatch—Roche reached for Alta, who was crouched over the body of her father.
“Come on!” she shouted. But Alta ignored her, whimpering as she pulled ineffectually at her lifeless father, as if trying to drag him to his feet. “We have to
go!”
Roche dragged her to the hatch. Maii followed, clutching the back of Roche’s suit as though it were a lifeline. Once there, Roche took Alta’s face in her hands and forced the woman to look at her.
“I need you to help Maii through the hatch. Do you understand?”
Alta blinked back tears, sniffed, nodded.
“Okay,
in
,” said Roche.
The floor bucked beneath them as first Alta, then Maii, climbed through.
“Help Maii into the scutter at the end of the outlet,” she said to Alta while their suits were still touching. “I’ll follow in a second.”
Vri was standing over Haid, his gold armor dusted with frozen water vapor. Haid was out cold, his armor heavy and inert. Roche helped Vri drag him toward the hatch, each taking one leg. She briefly considered using one of the weapons in his suit pouches to shoot Jans again. But when she glanced up the other end of the corridor, she knew there was no way she would get a clear shot.
The two clone warriors were a blur of motion with only occasional, unpredictable pauses. There was a strange beauty and grace to their movements, almost balletic. Each was as superb as the other at combat, each forced to rely on subtleties and surprise rather than brute strength to gain the edge. Roche had never seen anything like it, and knew that in such a conflict she would have barely lasted a second against either of them. And in realizing that, she also realized just how lucky she was to be alive right then. Had Cane reached her a second later...
“Lift,” Vri grunted, returning her attention to her injured friend. She bent her knees to slide Haid’s body into the hatch. The floor shifted beneath them again, and Roche distinctly felt the ambient gravity dip. That was a bad sign, even if it did make Haid easier to carry. Somewhere, something was going terribly wrong for the station.
<1 can feel it,> said Roche.
With Haid through the hatch, Vri also went through, and lent Roche a hand. Together they maneuvered Haid along the chute and to the open end. The hatch there was blackened and bent open from the outside. Seeing it, Roche realized that
Cane
had blown the outer door on the outlet, not Jans, thereby forcing the other clone warrior to attack before she was ready. Had he not done this, it was unlikely they would have survived so long.
The scutter hung tethered two meters from the outlet. Vri jumped the gap, easily negotiating the change from gravity to zero-g. A quick glimpse of the local region of space revealed several ships accelerating brightly across the starfield, some of them under fire from cannon out of sight behind the tangled bulk of the habitat. Gas clouds, glowing and expanding, hung in numerous places between the ships, although Roche couldn’t tell whether they were the remains of destroyed fighters or missiles that had missed their targets. Another shudder rocked the section Of the habitat she clung to while leaning out to pass Haid’s body to Vri. Looking back along the length of the outlet chute, she could actually see the structure flexing.
When Haid was safely aboard the scutter, Vri reached out for Roche’s hand.
She shook her head.
He turned away, returned a second later with two weapons pulled from Haid’s armor, then jumped across the gap. Handing one to her, he said:
She shrugged, turned, and began crawling back along the chute. She didn’t have time for arguments.
Neither Cane nor Jans had followed them, so they had to be still inside—unless one or the other had forced their way through the pressure doors at either end of the section of the corridor.
He nodded, shifting the rifle into the optimal position and taking one side. Roche took the other.
Peering out of the hatch, to the right along the corridor, she could see nothing. Vri, on the other hand, nodded, and she shifted over to his side.
Cane and Jans were still fighting furiously, although both had sustained injuries now. During one standoff, Roche noticed that one of Jans’s fingers stuck out at an odd angle, and that she seemed to be favoring the hand in combat too. But the blood on Cane’s face mask was thicker and darker, and it had to be obscuring his vision.
Jans lunged again; Cane parried her blows with familiar grace. But this was different from the fights he’d had before. Then he had been fighting almost for the fun of it; now he was fighting for his life.
And learn,
she thought to herself, hoping it was worth risking a companion’s life in exchange for such knowledge.
The two combatants separated and maneuvered for position. Jans caught sight of Vri and Roche in the open hatchway and kicked off for them immediately. Taken by surprise by the move, Cane was a split second slow in jumping after her. Roche recoiled as Jans’s hands reached out for them, but the clone warrior rolled at the last minute and kicked off the wall. Cane was caught mid-leap and flung across the room.
Jans was on him before he could recover, rolling him over so he was between her and Roche, with an arm firmly around his neck. Cane’s spine bent backward, and he twisted to look into Jans’s eyes. As Roche aimed her rifle on the slight chance Jans miscalculated and gave her a clear shot, Roche saw their eyes lock.
Then, with a sickening lurch, gravity failed entirely. Using the sudden shift to his advantage, Cane pushed away from the floor and kicked Jans into the ceiling. As she rebounded, he was ready with a second kick that sent her spinning into a wall. He followed, catching her around the throat and wrenching her backward. It was her turn to be pinned from behind.
Jans writhed, managing to twist her hands behind her and pull Cane’s mask off. He hung on even tighter, provoking a grimace of pain from the woman. Roche could see air puffing out of his suit, around his cheeks and jaw, but he seemed oblivious. Jans screamed silently into the vacuum, and for a moment Cane’s grasp seemed to relax. Only slightly, but enough to allow Jans to twist her own head around to look at him. He leaned into his sibling, then suddenly tightened his grip once more. With one savage twist he snapped her neck.
Her body went limp, but he waited a further minute before letting her go. Then he collected the face mask dangling about his throat and carefully replaced it. The exposure to vacuum didn’t seem to have harmed him at all.
Roche climbed out of the hatch, followed by Vri. Cane looked up. His face was black with frozen blood.
?
>
His voice, even via implants, sounded weary.
He nodded and let Vri take him by the arm.
Roche eyed the corpse of Inderdeep Jans with distaste; it was one of two in the corridor.
She grabbed the body with both hands and pushed it toward the hatch as Vri and Cane passed through. With considerably less difficulty than she’d had with Haid—for Jans was smaller and unarmored—Roche got her through the hatch and dumper chute and into the scutter. She sealed the airlock behind her, glad to be in familiar territory once again.
Maii and Alta were already braced and ready in the cockpit. Alta looked up as Roche brought Jans’s body inside, then glanced away, her eyes watering.
Vri helped Roche stow the body in the rear hold, where the Box could keep an eye on it. Then she went back to the pilot’s station, which Cane had left vacant, and took control of the scutter from Kajic.
