The Dragon Circle (28 page)

Kim still ached for the loss of the babe. They needed to wait another moon or two for Hestiia to fully recover before they tried again. A secret smile crept across his face.

“Docking bay three cleared of all personnel. Decontamination in progress,” the feminine voice came over the comm.

The shiver of familiarity became a frisson of disquiet. Kim knew that voice. Knew that woman from somewhere.

“Now we get out of here, before they realize this ship is empty,” Konner whispered.”

“The hatches are sealed until the decontamination is finished,” Kim replied in an equally hushed tone. He had a feeling that familiar female was listening.

“There is always an emergency exit. Into the rabbit hole with the crystals if nothing else,” Konner said. Any ship that used a crystal drive had to have access to the outer circle of red directional crystals. In the torpedo-shaped cruiser, three separate circles, evenly spaced the length of the craft, kept it on course and spinning for gravity.

All three brothers scanned the bay for signs of an access hatch.

“There.” They pointed to the imperfection in the hull plating. Just the barest sign of a crack and latch. With the uniform gray-green paint on bulkheads and hatch, only those looking for it would notice it.

They made for the exit. Konner led them along the rabbit hole. They climbed. Gravity pulled at their muscles. In moments Kim was sweating, breathing heavily. He felt as if he crawled two hand-widths above the floor. Every meter presented a new, sharply-pointed red crystal ready to spear him if he lost his grip.

Konner had suffered a similar injury aboard
Sirius
. Kim had healed him with magic, without knowing how or what he did. He had no confidence that his brothers could tend him as well.

He needed more Tambootie to strengthen his body and his will.

Sirius
didn't produce this much gravity while spinning. But this was a much bigger ship. It had to spin faster to generate gravity in the interior portions, making the outer rim proportionally heavier.

At last Konner paused. Seemingly, they had traversed half the diameter of the cruiser. But they had passed only one other hatch. If he remembered correctly, they had come only one eighth of the way around.

“Loki, can you sense another mind beyond this door?” Konner whispered.

Loki held his hand flat against the bulkhead beside the hatch. After a moment he shook his head and shrugged.

“There's a long tunnel to the main corridor about as long as the docking bay is wide. It's empty. Can't tell what is beyond.”

Without another word, all three pulled stunners and aimed at the hatch. Konner flipped the latch and waited. The hatch opened a crack. No voices. No unseen hand eased the portal farther open. Loki nodded and swung through, pushing the hatch with his feet. Another uphill crawl. Because of the spin, “down” seemed to be the rabbit hole. At the end of the tunnel he shifted his angle of approach. A cautious look around the exterior and he pushed up through a hatch in the deck of the corridor. He rolled onto the deck and came up in a crouch, weapon at the ready.

Kim counted to ten and followed his brother. Eventually he, too, rolled to his feet, alert and ready to fire his weapon, or jump back into the tunnel. The corridor was empty. He scooted to the side to make room for Konner.

Konner heaved himself upward onto the deck. He stayed on his knees, breathing heavily, pale and sweating.

“Maintenance,” Loki mouthed. “Mid shift. Bet they are all in the mess hall.”

Kim nodded his acknowledgment of the assessment. But something wasn't right. With nearly three hundred people on board, in uncharted territory, with men and a lander missing, surely someone should patrol every corridor at all times.

“Well, if it isn't the infamous O'Hara brothers dumped right into my lap,” the familiar female voice from the comm system sneered.

Kim looked in the direction of the voice. A tall woman, as tall as Loki, with a cap of red curls, long legs, and green eyes that spat fire, stood in the shadow of a cross corridor to their left. Her khaki uniform with emerald trim was crisp and clean and shouted authority. She leveled a needle rifle at his heart.

Counter-grav units strapped to the soles of her boots and just above her elbows gave her the advantage of maneuverability.

All three brothers froze.

“Lieutenant JG Kat Talbot?” Kim asked.

“I bet she was christened Mari Kathleen O'Hara.” Loki grinned from ear to ear.

“And if I was, why shouldn't I nail all three of you to the wall?”

“Because IMPs don't kill.”

“I've cleared this corridor. Captain won't ask questions if I dump your dead bodies out an air lock. No one with a conscience will come looking to save you.”

“Then you will not shoot because the blood in your veins speaks to the blood in mine,” Kim said calmly. He felt the draw of kinship. Her physical resemblance to himself and his brothers said more than words.

“If blood speaks so strongly, why didn't you come back for me twenty years ago?” She let loose with a single blast from the stun pistol in her right hand. The bolt of energy landed at Loki's feet. The counter-grav equipment made her body jerk with the recoil.

All three brothers jumped away.

Kat lifted the muzzle of the needle rifle. It rested easily in her left hand—a miniature counter-grav unit clamped to the butt negated the weapon's weight for her. Her trigger finger twitched nervously.

“We did not go back for you because we could not go back.” Loki took one cautious step forward, hands raised. His stunner dangled uselessly from a wrist cord. “Not then. Not with Imperial troops authorized to kill Mum.”

“Imperial troops do not kill. All life is sacred,” she snarled and let loose another blast from her pistol. This one sent Konner scrambling to his right, farther away from her. Closer to the next cross corridor.

Kim coughed heavily as he scrambled left. Kat sent him a scathing look. Had she seen how far away Konner had gotten?

“Tell that to Governor Mitchell,” Loki growled back. “Dead men—or dead women—tell no tales and carry no lawsuits back to Imperial Justice on Earth. We've been on the run for twenty years because of that man.”

“Mitchell is dead,” Katie said, quite calm. Her eyes looked dead. She'd lost the fire. “I watched him die.”

She did not add that she had shared the moment of death. She did not have to. Her eyes said it all. That fact alone made her one with her brothers. They all had borne the curse of nearly following victims beyond the mortal realm.

“Mitchell's decrees of outlawry remain,” Loki said. Bitterness colored his words and his posture.

“Mitchell's falsified evidence against Mum remains.” Kim took up the recital. He forced a loving tone into his words. He tried to reach out to her with every scrap of healing empathy he could. If only he had more Tambootie! “We've been running away from a dead man for twenty years, Katie. But not for one moment did we forget that we left a family member behind. We've been trying to find you for twenty years.”

“You didn't try hard enough,” she spat. “And my name is Kat. Kat Talbot, I took the name of the man who adopted me. The man who loved me as a daughter. The man who was there for me when my
family
deserted me.” She aimed the stun pistol and blasted again.

Kim knew she would do it. Knew precisely where she would aim and that she had as good accuracy with her right hand as with the needle rifle in her left. He did not move out of the way.

He had to give Konner a chance to disappear.

Pain lanced through his bare left foot. Flame shot up his leg followed by numbness. His knee was on fire.

And then he fell. He tried to catch himself against the bulkhead. He couldn't find it with dead hands.

“She shot me!” he mumbled through leaden lips. “My own sister shot me.”

Konner took off into the blind cross corridor without a backward look, as fast as the heavy gravity would allow him.

K
ONNER KNEW what he had to do. He had to abandon his brothers, much as they had all abandoned Katie twenty years ago. He hated himself for leaving Kim wounded.

Kim must know that he had to leave. They had planned for this. At all costs Konner had to dismantle the king stone.

None of the IMPs could be allowed to leave this planet. Ever. All communication with civilization must be severed. The king stone was the key.

(
Do not forget the other beacon,
) a disembodied voice warned him. (
One you should not trust has the beacon.
)

“Later. First things first.” He ran. A blast from Katie's stunner nipped at his heels. He ran faster.

She had the advantage of counter-grav. But her quarry had split. Which would she keep under guard?

He heard footsteps behind him.

His heart thudded. The heavy gravity dragged at his muscles. He kept going.

Right ten paces, left two. He grabbed the rungs of an emergency ladder and pushed himself up to the next deck and slightly lighter gravity.

The footsteps behind him fell away. He thought. He couldn't be certain. His heart pounded in his ears so loudly he heard nothing else. Too fast. Gravity was too heavy. He had to slow down and think.

This corridor ended in a blast door. Kat had said that she'd cleared the area before confronting her brothers.

Konner spun the lock. It slid open.

He heard voices off to his left. A cross corridor ahead. People. IMPs.

He ducked into a storage locker. Cables and grapples and magnetic couplers filled every available inch. He pried a space for himself between two neatly stacked coils of cable. One long breath in and out. Then another and a third. His pulse calmed to a more reasonable level. He listened. A coupler pressed painfully into his back. One hundred heartbeats later the voices moved on.

Not bothering to fully close the locker, he crept out. Now where? He had to work his way into the heart of the ship to the king stone.

Konner drew his stunner, a toy compared to the pistol and the needle rifle his sister packed. He checked the charge and the setting. Mid range. A solid hit to the chest would render most adults of civil height and mass semiconscious. No sustainable injuries. But this crew seemed to have as many bushies as civils. Their greater height and weight might take a stronger charge.

The vision of Lieutenant Pettigrew's death's head grinning at him wiggled into his mind once more. He left the setting in the middle. He'd take his chances.

One corridor at a time he worked his way inward, toward ever decreasing gravity. The area grew more and more populous. Everyone carried a sidearm. Many packed larger weapons. He detected no more needle firearms. They were illegal after all. So why did Kat have one?

Knots of people gathered around viewscreens peering at the planet below them. Two fistfights broke out when someone refused to give way.

Konner gulped and pressed himself deeper into the shadows. The fight broke up. Three men drifted away directly past him. They searched the area warily, but their gazes slid right over him without a flicker of acknowledgment.

Maybe the Tambootie continued in his system, allowing him to misdirect their attention.

He passed crew quarters and a mess hall. The scent of textured protein and tanked greens did not entice him at all. Voices raised in disagreement sent him scuttling past the open hatchway.

Just beyond the mess hall, he found a lift, an open affair, merely a series of platforms rising on a continuous belt. Beside that was a closed stairwell. He took that up one level. The corridor there seemed to go only north and south. He couldn't see any cross ramps going east-west or up and away from the concentration of gravity.

Up two more flights. He found it! A ramped passage going east-west. He stepped into it. On the bulkhead a terminal blinked at him. He pressed two buttons and found a map. But he did not truly need it. He could hear the crystals whispering to each other up ahead.

Gravity eased. He moved more quickly. Each step bounced and threatened to send him in oblique directions. He could not afford the time recovering from rebounding off the bulkheads.

Concentrate,
he admonished himself.
One step in front of the other. Straight lines. Straight ahead.

The crystals came alive in his mind. One king stone and twelve drivers. Always a symmetry of twelve. But this ship had three circles of drivers, twelve each, at bow, aft, and midship. Each ring of drivers had one hundred forty-four directionals spread around the circumference of the torpedo-shaped vessel.
Sirius
had a more efficient design—to Konner's mind—with a single ring of drivers around the king stone and a directional circle around a saucer.

He heard/felt the magnetic monopole drivers sharing the nitrogen that bathed them. They spat energy along fiber optics to the twelve directionals assigned to each driver. Each crystal was connected to the others. They needed no opposing pole to complete them. They had a circle of like crystals. An entire family of green drivers, red directionals and a single blue king stone that interpreted computer commands for direction and speed. Every crystal in the three arrays was grown together. The king stone maintained an invisible tether to a mother stone at the place of their birth. As long as the king stone was in communication with its mother stone, it could always find its way home. It could also communicate with every other king stone tethered to the mother faster than the speed of light.

Crystal scientists theorized that the stones used the invisible transactional gravitons to communicate almost instantaneously anywhere in the galaxy.