Back into the fire, p.47
Back Into the Fire, page 47
The view shifted again as Josie glanced about, a helm-mounted lamp casting its pool of light over the hull until it found the port side hatches—wide open, as she’d noted before. A look back showed Jerry her companions, in their bulky zero-g gear, not too dissimilar from their standard assault armor, but the sealed helmets more bulbous, flaring with their own lamps.
The Raiders scampered with nerve-racking speed up along the hull to the hatch and swung slowly into the dark within. Light beams played across bulkheads and hexagonal angles of corridor. Bits of debris drifted into the brilliance, a snake of cargo strap, a flap of abandoned armor, a crumple of discarded ration pack.
Jerry tensed from head to toe, expecting remains of a human sort. But nothing so grisly interrupted the trio as they glided their way forward along the hall, all of them unshouldering blastrifles—still on their guard, still Raiders, even if their goal was rescue. Their lamp lights played across a hatch at the end, highlighted the viewport at eye level. Hoarfrost whitened its transparent blastisteel corners, webbed across from them. Beads of condensation from within formed tiny jewels as the light struck them.
“The signal’s coming from beyond,” Josie reported huskily. “And sensors confirm a single life reading, too. Looks like they sealed themselves in.”
“The hell?” Agnes whispered from aft, apparently watching the Raider team’s progress, too. “They left someone like that? Locked behind?”
Josie’s fist lifted into the globular view and reached out, thumped off the hatch, the sound carrying through her suit. Something shifted silently beyond the frosted viewport. Jerry had a rushing, horrid feeling he should look away, should not see what he was about to see. He couldn’t say why.
A face appeared in the viewport, blurred by the puff of its breath. A sleeve shafted into sight, smudged frantically, smeared away some of the frost. The face reappeared. Green eyes flared out, wide, panicked. Breath puffs began to cloud the port again. The Raiders’ light converged on the features, highlighted them in momentary, rich chocolate perfection.
“Shit!!!”
Jerry slammed back against his flight couch as though taking an uppercut to the jaw. The dread he’d felt building till that moment shattered into shock, horror, disbelief. He knew those features, knew them better than his own face.
“Rodann?” Agnes squawked. “What the hell? You all right?”
He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The face staring out from the viewport in the hologram looked right through it, looked right at him.
“Appears like just the one survivor,” Josie reported in a mystified tone.
Not a survivor. No way. Jerry shivered, felt every centimeter of his flesh slicken with cold sweat. This was no fluke of fate or accident.
This was Jerry’s daughter.
Tina.
Part 7 – Epilogue
Another shiver ran the length of the prison barge, rattling bolts loose behind the gunmetal grey bulkhead. The rumble of an explosion reverberated through the grated floor. Inmates could be heard howling, hammering on the walls, the doors to their cells.
Sons of bitches, Bradley Boxer thought, seated on his cot, playing dejectedly with the fraying sleeve of his orange prison overalls. This is how they tie up the loose end.
He’d known something was wrong when the wobbling sensation of hyperspace exit awoke him from the first decent sleep he’d snatched in a week aboard the prison transport vessel. The shudder of another ship forcibly docking confirmed it. The clamor of a firefight was almost unsurprising after that.
Suppose I should be flattered, he seethed. It was worth enough to Alexi to have a special team come and finish me off. And this is slick work. Probably had the barge dragged out of hyper with a gravity mine, far away from any settled system. Probably tell everyone it was an accident. No trial for me. No chance for plea deals or loose talk.
Blasterfire screeched in the corridor outside his cell and he flinched. It took real effort to keep his bladder from spasming. For a moment, its sounded like a stubborn fight. But shouted orders and screams cut out in another flurry of fire. Footsteps clanged down the hall, the sounds of resistance fading with them, blaster bolt clamor thinning out.
Won’t be long now, he thought, and the shakes did come then. He wouldn’t say it was fear exactly. He’d gone beyond that. This was pulse-by-pulse hammerings of raw, acidic paralysis, numbing his limbs, liquifying his guts, fogging his brain. Even something as sharp as his anger couldn’t pierce the blanket of dread that settled crushingly over Boxer’s shoulders.
It’s weird, though, some scrap of calculation still remaining to him thought. Why board the ship, at all? Why not just blast us apart at long range?
Sparks exploded from his cell door and the lights all died, plunged him into darkness only lit by the ember glow of a slagged hole where a lock had been. Crack! A cyan flash ripped the side of the hexagonal hatch. Crack-crack-crack! The last blast kicked specks of molten alloy and metal shavings across the tiny cell. One of the latter skipped across Boxer’s cheek with the cold-hot streak of a tiny cut. He tasted blood.
The cell door fell inward, landed upon the floor with a crash that seemed to go on forever. In the hall beyond, smoke drifted from slumped armored forms; Penal Guard mowed down by plasma bolts where they’d stood. A blastisteel globe hummed drifted over them, pivoted on its anti-gravity fields to bring a sensor about to regard him. The blaster mounted to its side trained a laser siting beam upon him.
Vomit coursed up to the back of Boxer’s throat, but he held it back with a clenching so violent he could see red at the corners of his vision. Snarling, he spat out a gobbet of bile-tasting phlegm. “Fuck you, Noovin,” he rasped. “I’m not going to beg.”
A many-segmented robotic leg wound around the corner and into the cell, clenching at the wall, and pulling another, larger globe in ahead of the hover drone. More legs followed with a clack, clack, clack. Not one of the steps that followed, that spread out a series of five limbs at various balancing points, disturbed the robotic sphere at their center. It kept its single eye lens focused upon Boxer the entire time.
“Go ahead!” he barked. “Finish it! What are you waiting for?”
“Bradley Boxer,” an androgynous AI voice intoned, “former CEO of Syntar Fleet Corporation.”
“Yeah, you know this already!” He smacked his forehead. “Right here! One blaster bolt! Do it, you dumbass machine!”
“I am not a dumbass machine,” the globe said with a hint of what suddenly sounded like very human petulance. “Nor am I here to end your existence.”
Boxer cackled, couldn’t help it, was actually impressed at Noovin’s sadism. “Oh, I suppose this is some sort of game, is it? Some sort of torture?”
“No, Mr. Boxer; this is a jailbreak.”
Boxer laughed maniacally. “Oh, is it? I suppose you’ll give me hope and then throw me back in the cell a few times. Or will I just be led to the nearest airlock?”
“The nearest airlock leads to my vessel,” the machine says, “which is, in fact, where you will be going. With me.”
Brows began to furrow. The crazed giggling tripped over itself. Boxer began to hope against hope. “What...what the hell is this?”
“Really, humanity is a loss,” the machine huffed—huffed, like a person! “But I need you, Mr. Boxer. The records I have indicate you were at the center of a number of plots involving the Hell’s Jesters. From them, I also glean they have a significant grudge against you.” It pauses to flex its legs and lean in very close, so close Boxer can see his own stubbled, hollow-eyed reflection in the lens. “And I presume you have an equal one against them?”
This was insane. But it wasn’t death.
“That’s right,” he replied.
“Good!” the machine replied brightly. “Then we can help each other! For I have a grudge against the Jesters, as well.”
“What...” Boxer stopped himself, sensed that he should change how addressed this very human-like thing. “Who are you?”
“I’m your new partner, Mr. Boxer. And you may refer to me as Ghost in the Machine.”
THE END
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Did you love Back Into The Fire? Then you should read Hell or Highwater by K.J. Coble!
All things have their breaking point – and the war for the galaxy is about to reach its own.
The Union of Free Stars was supposed to collapse after six months of galactic civil war. Instead, worlds flock to their cause as their hard-luck star fleet ekes out key victories in battle. And the Grand Galactic Alliance, beginning to run out of the hyper-fuel necessary to power the superluminal reach of their empire, resorts to ever more fascistic means to hold its citizenry together.
Something's got to give.
The Hell's Jesters are going to make certain it does. Whittled down to only the most fanatical, battle-weary survivors, they're coming out of hiding, one more time, to make certain the Union fleet finally finishes the job. They've lost friends, family, love. It has to have been for something. The forces of freedom must finally break the hold of tyranny and corruption over the galaxy.
The Jesters are going to win it all – come Hell or Highwater.
Read more at K.J. Coble’s site.
About the Author
Born too strange for a normal world, K.J. Coble endures adulthood through long-distance running, rock ’n’ roll guitar, and his writing. A love of history, weird fiction, and explosions fills his world-building. In his stories the righteous may suffer, but the corrupt get their comeuppance, and evil always receives its justly-deserved kick in the teeth.
Lairing somewhere in the Midwest, he is tolerated by his wife, three kids, and a very opinionated coonhound.
His home on the web is kjcoble.com. Email at kj@kjcoble.com.
Read more at K.J. Coble’s site.
K.J. Coble, Back Into the Fire
