The Gilded Cage (11 page)

So, Javier was a specialist in the old Norse mythology cycles, as well?

And Hadiiye was going to help. It fell to Wilhelmina to put a stop to it.

There were some things that were simply too evil to contemplate. This was one of them.

She started to speak. Hadiiye stopped her, reminded her that they had to escape first.

Wilhelmina subsided. For now. They had a long road to go to escape this trap. And a shipful, a stationful, a galaxyful of pirates to escape.

Still, Navarre had taken all four vials. He had the big one, plus all three of the little ones that were apparently the antidote. That had to count for something.

First they would escape
Salekhard
. Then they would discuss the ethics of biological warfare.

Ξ

So far, so good.

Navarre kinked his head to one side, then the other. He opened his mouth wide enough to pop the jaw, then closed it.

There would be a couple of really good hickeys on his neck tomorrow, assuming he lived that long. But at least Hadiiye had kept the dragoon from killing him.

Today, anyway. She still had that light in her eyes, that hatred, that barely–in–control rage.

It made him warm all over.

He got a nod from both women, indicating their readiness. They both had pistols, although he had no idea how good Hadiiye might be. Sykora was the ballerina of death, so he had no worries there. Not right now.

Tomorrow? That would settle itself.

Home first.

The little flight controller came active and showed him the hallway.

Suvi was following orders and had found a quiet intersection where she could see partway back to engineering and all of this corridor. And she was at least generally listening to the joystick controls, aware of who the audience was today.

Things were still quiet. And dim.

You would think, plugged into station power, that a captain would leave the lights on full. They weren’t going to cost that much, especially once your docking fees would already cover part of it.

But some people were just too cheap for their own good, always cutting corners instead of doing it right.
Storm Gauntlet
came to mind, at least when he had first boarded her, but those corners being cut had saved his life. Probably. Maybe not. Who knew where he might have ended up if they had sold him to an agricultural station as labor?

Water under a burned bridge.

Javier opened the door. Navarre would had done something grand and obnoxious here. Javier wanted to sneak out the back door just like he had come in. He had to take charge here, so they could get out alive.

Into the corridor.

Nothing.

Two killer girls steps behind him silent. Eerie.

“So glad I upgraded the auto–pilot on this thing,” he stage muttered to the women as he typed.

Suvi hopped to the next intersection and looked around.

Emptiness.

Javier followed, remembering to look both ways before crossing this dangerous street.

Now they were back in the main corridor, a straight shot aft to engineering.

A nameplate on a door caught his attention.

Burakgazi
.

He only knew one person with that name. A short, skinny engineer with a heart–shaped face who had gone off with Wilhelmina to keep that old ship running.

That was too much for coincidence. He pushed the button to open the hatch.

Yup. Score one for the good guys as she looked up from a bunk.

“Javier?”

“Rescue, kid,” he replied. “Move.”

She was up off the bed in a flash.

Javier looked around.

There. Alferdinck. Navigator–extraordinaire.

Javier pushed the button.

“Piet, let’s go,” he said into the opening space.

The tall Dutchman didn’t ask, just moved.

Javier parked Suvi in place with a quick command and turned to the girls.

“’Mina,” he said. “You lead. Take everybody to that engineering hatch but don’t go through. I’ll bring up the rear with better sensors, so nobody sneaks up on us. Go.”

Two extremely nice bottoms flowed by him. Well, three, but Afia’s wasn’t even in the same league as the taller women. It wasn’t the time or place to really stop and appreciate Wilhelmina or Sykora, but they were still nice. Even if he couldn’t imagine two women less alike.

“What are we looking for?” Suvi typed on his read–out.

“Nothing,” he typed back. “Any bad guys will be coming from the bow. The girls can handle engineers. Let’s go.”

Javier had gone two steps when the alarms started.

“Warning,” a woman’s warm voice filled the corridor. “Enemy boarding parties at large. All crew shelter in place. Security teams to red alert.”

Well, crap. Still, better than he had been expecting. Probably a video monitor in a hallway somewhere, or they would have seen Sykora leave the bed. Of course, that assumed anybody but Tamaz got to watch her. That would be like him. Probably an alarm on the other two crew.

Wilhelmina and the others were outside the engineering hatch.

Wilhelmina pushed the button as he approached, but nothing happened.

“They’ve locked it,” Sykora said harshly, obviously blaming him for everything. “Now what?”

Javier held his snarky comment inside. They would gain nothing but lost time right now.

“You remember my first remote?” he asked the dragoon, pointing at Suvi back over one shoulder.

Sykora just nodded, her eyes a little bigger than a moment ago as she realized the new one was much larger.

“You were sad it wasn’t armed, as I remember,” he continued. “I fixed that with this version.”

“Who let you have a weapon?” she snarled quietly.

Javier pointed to the one in her hand.

“Probably the same people who wanted me to rescue you,” he retorted.

She refrained from commenting. Or doing anything stupid. Probably for the best. She might be fast. Suvi would be faster. And didn’t particularly like Sykora.

“Everybody step back behind me,” Javier said, fiddling with buttons. “I need to pretty much overload the turret to do this.”

Hopefully, the stunt pilot was listening. He didn’t even have controls for that turret programmed on his console. She would have to handle everything. Besides, it was her ship now.

A bright red targeting reticule appeared on one of his screens, blinking lightly. Oh, yeah. Stunt pilot to be sure.

Javier felt like he was flying a World War One Red Baron game. It had that feel to it. Maybe that was what she’d programmed for herself.

He made a note to ask her later. She had access to most of history to look things up.

Right now, he moved the impact point up and left a little.

“Everyone close your eyes,” he called over the wailing sirens.

He did the same as he pushed the button to fire.

A light strobed through his eyelids.

Javier blinked. A new message appeared on his console

Warning: onboard power at 9 percent. Please charge as soon as possible.

Nine percent? But that would mean…

Javier looked up.

He had meant to blow the locking mechanism apart, so Sykora could crank the door open manually.

Suvi had damned near blown the thing off the rails.

So much for sneaky. Everybody on the ship probably felt that one.

“Sykora leads,” he said. “’Mina follows. I’m last with the remote.”

Nine percent power? Wow. But that was still good enough for the rest of the day, assuming nothing bad happened from here.

Or rather, nothing Sykora couldn’t handle with a pulse pistol.

Which was nothing at all.

Part Four

Abraam Tamaz came awake at an alarm beeping madly.

He was tired, he was groggy, he had drank way too much Sambuca last night. His head rang with the pounding of large industrial machines making fender panels again, on the inside of his skull.

It wasn’t the duty alarm. That had a much different tone. And it wasn’t a system alarm. They were docked to a station. What kind of emergency might strike them here?

The world did not want to come into focus.

He knew it should make sense, but the alcohol had evaporated into a lovely fog this morning, making his head feel like a field in Flanders on a quiet, fall day. Nothing but bundles and rumbles of clouds moving about.

He staggered to the console and pushed the red button to silence the alarm, mostly on auto–pilot. Two still did not want to work with two to make any number, let alone four.

The sideboard was close. Tamaz grabbed a dirty glass and poured in a dollop of bitters and a finger of rum, followed by a good zap of soda water. He swirled the mad concoction around the glass a few times to stir it, then slammed the whole thing down the back of his throat in one go, letting the fire burn all the way down and sort out the mess it found in his stomach.

That seemed to cut through the fog. He felt sunrise slowly begin to burn away the clouds that had taken root in his head.

Tamaz blinked furiously a few times, willing himself to conscious thought. It was a hard road this morning.

Why was he awake?

Thought grew slowly concrete, but he got there.

The alarm.

The laboratory.

Someone had opened the door without putting in the correct code combination. Nobody but he and Igor knew that combination. Nobody but the two of them had any reason, any business whatsoever, going in there.

Tamaz lunged suddenly at the console. He took three tries to enter his password correctly into the keypad, coming dangerously close to locking himself out and forcing him to reset the entire authentication suite from files in his personal safe.

There.

That was the alarm from the lab. Bring up the camera.

She was gone.

His love, his treasure, his little titmouse in her gilded cage. She had flown.

Someone was going to die for this.

Slowly, painfully. Someone would take years understanding the depths of his vengeance. Who?

Quickly, Tamaz cycled through cameras.

There. In the hallway. Several figures.

NAVARRE!

I would have given that man Sokolov’s head on a stick as a holiday present.

It was all a sham. He was here to rescue the woman, not avenge himself on her. Not like Tamaz would do.

Frantically, he toggled the comm until he found the channel he wanted.

“Security station,” he growled. “We have intruders aboard. Lock down all access ports to the station and scramble your teams. I want them alive.”

Let that bastard make his way forward. Most of the crew would be at the front of the ship. And waiting.

“Acknowledged, Captain,” the man replied. “Stand by.”

Tamaz watched the man begin to push buttons on his own console.

Somewhere, heavily armed men were moving towards armaments lockers. Death would not be quickly coming for Navarre and his woman. Women.

Tamaz watched the group approach the starboard axial corridor on deck one. That made logical sense. It gave them access almost all the way to the bow airlocks if they moved quickly enough.

What? Why are they headed aft? What was in engineering?

Tamaz slapped his hand on another red button and held it down.

“Warning,” a woman’s computerized voice filled the corridor. “Enemy boarding parties at large. All crew shelter in place. Security teams to red alert.”

Normally, that was recycled on a loop when they had played dead and allowed another vessel to try to take them. Wolf in sheep’s clothing. Let them think the crew was in a total panic, but also it let his crew know to lock themselves away from trouble, because the hunters were armed and stalking.

Tamaz opened a secondary drawer close by and pulled out a larger pistol than he normally carried. This was a stun–only model, a neural whip designed to overload someone’s brain, without actually killing them.

It would just put them down, so he could capture them for play later.

Navarre was not allowed to steal his toys. He would keep the other woman as a prize.

But they were all going to die for this.

Part Five

“Are you sure about this?” Javier heard one of the women yell. He wasn’t paying enough attention to tell them apart right now. Around them, flashing red lights and a painfully overloaded siren wailed.

“Do you want to be here when Tamaz arrives?” he yelled back, pounding down stairs, almost flying, and letting his feet touch about one in three as he went.

Suvi cheated and dropped straight down the outside of the stairwell. She would beep if she saw anybody, but her gun was pretty much just for show at this point. Still, it had saved them a lot of time at a moment when the sands might be running out.

Sykora probably could have passed him if she’d wanted to, but she was too busy looking everywhere to move around him without falling on her face. And how Wilhelmina ran down stairs in fourteen centimeter heels was a mystery for the ages. But she did.

At least Piet and Afia kept up.

Javier hit the main deck as a hatch opened one level above them, at the far end of the open space, from the forward sections. Men poured through it. Javier didn’t take time to count. It was enough.

The pirates opened fire wildly, beams ringing off stairs and rails and metal but not hitting anyone. Not yet.

Sykora was apparently in her element now. Javier was facing enough of the right direction to see her pop off three shots in rapid succession.

The first one blew up a significant chunk of railing on the catwalk, right about dead center of the guy moving behind it. He survived because the metal exploded instead. The second and third hit the two men in front of that other guy. They got drilled dead center, from fifty meters away, both shooter and target moving rapidly in three dimensions.

Seriously, that woman was scary.

Javier raced across the open space toward the open airlock hatch, three steps behind Suvi. Fire erupted behind him.

After a moment, Javier could identify when the girls were firing versus when the boys upstairs opened up. The pulse pistol had a higher pitch than the rifles the boys were toting. It took him a second to identify that sound.