Battles unfought, p.28
Battles Unfought, page 28
Meanwhile, outside, Syd opened fire. I could hear the steady droning whine of lasers, the rat-tat-tat of automated fire. But I didn’t dare look behind me. Not with fragments pelting me, and far more deadly missiles whizzing past - horribly, dangerously close.
We clattered down the hall, into nearby rooms, trying desperately to find shelter. Jewels and gems spilled off us in the process – a hail of gems, amid a hail of bullets. But we hardly noticed.
And then, as abruptly as it had begun, the firefight ended. The terrible roar of death subsided, leaving behind only the sound of debris as it fell to the ground.
Here, the upper levels of a shredded bookcase collapsing to the ground, there, a fragmented chandelier clattering downward. A section of ceiling fell in the music room. The last shards of glass dropped out of a window frame somewhere else.
Then, Syd’s voice reached me. “Katherine?”
“I’m here, Syd,” I called breathlessly. “We’re here.”
“Are you injured?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“I am,” Corano grunted.
“Me too,” Jylya said. “Not a bullet. I think it’s glass.”
“Me too,” Carter groaned. “I think I was shot.”
“I am on my way,” he promised. “The threat has been neutralized.”
He proved as good as his word, on both counts. A few moments later, he trundled through the debris, looking little the worse for wear.
First, he set to aiding the injured among us. Corano had taken a bullet to the thigh, and despite his protests that he could walk, Syd insisted on carrying him.
Jylya had taken a nasty cut to the leg, but, with Frank’s assistance, she could walk.
As for Dave, he hadn’t been shot. Or rather, his tiara had, deflecting the bullet from his skull – but leaving him with a hideous red welt around his forehead from the impact.
“You are actually quite fortunate,” Syd told him, earning some choice words in the process, from an enraged Dave who assured him that he didn’t feel fortunate.
“Perhaps not. But a concussion and some bruising will be the extent of your injuries.”
“Oh well, just a brain injury then. No big deal,” Dave snarled.
Carter snorted. “As if brain damage would even be noticeable.”
Dave was still swearing when Syd pulled out us onto the lawn. We didn’t need to climb through a windowsill to get there. The window, and most of the wall beneath it, had been reduced to rubble.
Still, I stood for a moment in shock as we emerged. It looked like we’d stepped onto a battlefield.
Which, I supposed, it was. A battle certainly had been waged here. A slaughter, more like. Syd had gunned down the Broker’s entire force, leaving behind nothing but dead bodies.
Somewhere beside me, Carter emitted a sharp, shrill whistle, and I jumped. “Geez, Tinman. Remind me not to piss you off.”
With the yard thus cleared, we sped across it toward the docking bays. Situated out of sight of the primary structure, behind a natural barrier of stone and trees, we did not at once see The Lady Bane.
But about halfway toward our destination, the compound lights sprang to life. It flooded the yard, bathing us in a pool of overbright bluish white.
For a moment, we froze in place. Despite the absence of any soldiers, I still expected an ambush. My pulse soared, and my breath came hard and fast. Beside me, Maggie drew closer. An instinctive, protective move.
But as my eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness and nothing happened, my heartrate returned to a more normal pace, and she let out a breath.
“Come,” Syd urged us. “The Broker must be coming back online. We should depart before he has a chance to retaliate.”
“It’s going to be a bumpy ride, getting out of Deadlands airspace,” Carter predicted.
“Perhaps,” Syd acknowledged. “But that assumes we will be able to depart at all.”
“Shit, are you always this optimistic?”
Syd did not answer, but trundled on in silence. As we rounded the outcropping of stone and trees, I could see our ship. She lay presumably where she’d landed. I hadn’t been on the bridge for that part, and we hadn’t been able to see anything of the landing from our concealed position in the crate.
But it looked like a standard docking bay, and it fit the reports Carter had gleaned during his reconnaissance. Standard procedure dictated that transports landed here, to be met with the trucks and cargo haulers that would cart away any freight.
It was a beautiful sight, our ship glimmering in the artificial light like a beacon, urging us toward escape. Freedom. Despite my exhaustion, despite the still damp clothes, despite my fear that we would have to face some new attack from the Broker, my legs managed to work harder, run faster.
And soon, we’d reached the ship. Syd trundled up the gangplank and entered the access code. I held my breath, waiting to see if it took or not.
It did. The door slid open, and Syd called, “No additional lifeforms detected.”
We clambered up behind him, spilling into the ship. We didn’t bother to split up, or head to our respective departments. On the contrary, the entire crew flooded the bridge, to have an up close and personal view of whatever happened next.
Even Corano insisted on joining us, despite his injuries. “There will be time enough for medical attention, if we clear Deadlands airspace. If not, there really is no point in anything else, is there?”
He was right. Either we made it out of here, and the rest could follow, or we didn’t. And at that point, we’d be too dead to care about anything else.
We were a strange, almost comic band, taking up our stations – half of us still wet and bedraggled, all of us covered in grime, dripping precious gems along with sweat and sometimes blood. We looked almost feral, certainly medieval despite the very modern weapons we carried, sporting the spoils of war, good and bad.
Treasure, wealth, and excess, along with blood and injury. All the detritus of battle.
“Most systems appear to be functional,” Syd said as he examined his station. He did not, I noticed, plug into it, but rather tapped through screens like any other user.
As the Broker had been able to compromise The Lady Bane’s systems when he first attacked Mags and the crew, this seemed a reasonable precaution. Without running intense and thorough diagnostics, it would be impossible to know if the ship carried the malware that could once again render him powerless. And even if it didn’t already, now that the power was back, he might inject it into our system.
I thumbed through my own screens. The ship’s primary systems were back and operational. Those functions we’d disabled, the various monitoring subsystems, remained offline, but that didn’t surprise me.
“I’m seeing the same thing,” I said. “Hold on.” I frowned, switching back to a previous view. The screen showed active system access points. Each of the occupied bridge stations appeared in the list.
But so did one other. A point in the brig.
“What the hell?” I murmured, tapping to bring up details of the errant access panel.
As soon as I touched it, the image disappeared. Everything disappeared from my screen, and it turned black, as if a power switch had been flipped somewhere.
I glanced up, and saw the screens all around me doing the same, as the crew started or cursed or otherwise gave vent to shock and dismay.
As suddenly as the screen had gone dead, the bridge’s central viewscreen lit up. An image, a face that hadn’t so much as entered my thoughts since we’d arrived, popped up larger than life.
A young face, movie star handsome with perfect features, light hair, a somewhat faded tan, and the broad, toothy grin of someone up to no good.
Tanner Mahone.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“I was starting to think you people wouldn’t make it after all,” Mahone said. “Which wouldn’t have worked. Stopping you – those were the terms.
“Well…” The screen showed little of his body, just his face and a few inches of shoulders. But it was enough to convey the unconcerned shrug that followed. “Technically, killing you. Your lives for mine. Seemed like a fair trade.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Carter demanded. Then, frowning, he added, “And how’d you get out of the brig?”
“The Broker. Duh. Haven’t you been listening? We cut a deal, him and me, in case you escaped the games. I was going to be the – what do they call it? The final boss fight.”
He bared his perfect teeth in a smug, malicious smile. “I kill you, I get the ship and get to get out of here. So you can imagine, I started worrying when everything went dark. Thinking maybe you figured out a way to beat him after all. But now…”
The shoulders rose and fell again. “Now you fuckers are all mine.”
Dave moved for the bridge doors, but they didn’t budge. At the same time, I and several others tapped and prodded and flipped switches on our stations, trying desperately to bring them back online.
Mahone laughed. “Come on. You don’t think I’m going to let you walk, do you? And you’re wasting your time with those machines. They’re not coming back. See, the Broker – he transferred power of the ship to me. Here in the brig. Ordered – or rather, advised – me to wait for you here. So you wouldn’t realize anything was wrong. And you fell for it, like he said you would.
“Not very smart. That’s what he said. And looks like he was right.”
“Speaking of not very smart,” Dave said, “did you miss the part where the Union took the Broker offline?”
I tried to avoid fidgeting. I didn’t want to weaken Dave’s strategy, if he had a strategy. Part of me suspected he might just be reacting. But even if in the end the Broker had intervened, he’d still shown an unexpected ability to read the pirates back in the labyrinth. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here.
Still, I couldn’t ignore how the power had come back, which only seemed possible if the Broker was back too. And if so, Mahone could – would – call our bluff.
“Maybe you missed the lights coming on again?” he shot back.
“Huh,” Dave said. “I suppose that means you’ve talked to the Broker, then?”
Mahone blinked, a flicker of doubt crossing his face. It vanished as quickly as it appeared, but not before I noticed it.
Not before Dave noticed, either. He grinned. “That’s what I thought. Game’s up, dumbass. The bad guy lost. We won.”
Mahone’s jaw set in a tight scowl. “Bullshit.”
“Then why hasn’t he contacted you?”
“I didn’t say he hasn’t.”
Dave laughed. “So what’s the plan, genius? The Union’s already on their way. What are you going to do, shoot it out with the whole fleet?”
“He’s right,” Maggie said. “You’ve got one play here that gets you out alive, Mahone. Surrender, before you do anything the Union would chock up to treason.”
All around her, we nodded. Not because it was true. It might be, or it might be pure invention. Certainly, the admiral planned to send forces here, when and if they regained control of their systems. Whether that happened, though, I had no idea.
But as long as Mahone believed it, he might be persuaded to surrender.
A vein in his neck spasmed as he clenched his jaw, and crimson color seeped into the supersized face on the screen before us. I held my breath, thinking – hoping – he’d see the reason in our argument.
Then, his eyes flashed, and he shrugged. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, but his tone didn’t sound like agreement anymore than his expression looked like it. “Picking a fight with the Union – not smart. But killing you stupid bastards? Well, not like I don’t already have a few murder charges waiting for me, is it?
“So what’s a few more?”
“Great work,” Carter murmured.
“Don’t be stupid, Mahone,” Maggie tried. “If you cooperate –”
He interrupted with profanity, and, “I wasn’t born yesterday. You should have thought twice before you crossed me. Now, you can choke. Literally.”
He moved one arm decisively. I couldn’t see his hand, or even below his elbow, but I got the impression that he’d pushed a button, with emphasis.
A moment later, the bridge ventilation system began to hiss.
“A little present,” he said. “Compliments of the Broker.”
At the same time, Syd informed us, “Detecting high concentrations of carbon monoxide incoming.”
“Enjoy,” Mahone smiled.
“Syd,” Maggie said, “can you stop it?”
“Negative, Captain. I am unable to restore access to my terminal.”
“Then we need to get out of here.”
“Oh, that’s not going to happen,” Mahone said. “Say, you ever see someone die of carbon monoxide poisoning? Me either. But I gather, it’s not much fun. For the person breathing it, anyway. Me, I think I’m going to enjoy watching you choke on your own vomit, Captain.”
We were all scrambling about now, trying desperately to restore power to our terminals, to pry the door open – to find a way to counteract the attack, or at least escape it.
Mahone laughed as he watched, offering faux encouragement one moment and outright derision the next.
Despite our efforts, the doors held fast, and the terminals remained dead. And the vents went on hissing with encroaching death.
“I will attempt to cut a way out,” Syd decided. He didn’t sound hopeful, and I knew well enough why. The Lady Bane had been designed as a military vessel. It was meant to withstand all kinds of attack, and the bridge – well, it had been built to fend off boarding parties and their efforts to breach the command center.
The same engineering that had gone into making it impenetrable to outside forces would make it similarly impenetrable to us.
Oh, Syd might be able to get out eventually, with enough time and effort. He might even get out in time to catch Mahone.
But we’d be long dead.
I felt – stunned. Devastated. Almost numb. Had we really survived everything in the tunnels, everything in the compound, just to die here, now?
It seemed impossible. Beyond unfair. And yet, that’s exactly what was going to happen. Every second that passed made it more likely.
And we could do nothing about it.
Mahone knew it too. The Broker, he said, had assured him of the fact. “To think you marched up, bold as brass, to his front door and thought he’d let you get away with robbing him, Captain. I’m almost impressed. A real cowboy move.”
He snorted. “But, a dumb cowboy. The cowboy that ends up dead in the dirt. Because he didn’t draw fast enough. That – that’s you. All of you, sitting there so meek and complacent. Too busy trying to sneak in to even notice his crew hooking up the gas cannisters.
“Of course, that’s what you get for relying on robots and aliens to do your work for you. If you’d been paying attention, with your own two eyes, instead of thinking your high-tech advanced computer sensors…” He moved his fingers in front of the camera, in a hocus pocus, twinkling kind of gesture, like someone trying to summon magic that wasn’t really there. “And your little alien buddies would help you, maybe you’d have spotted him. Kind of ironic, that. It’s what I always say: they’ll be the downfall of us all. Well, they sure as shit were yours, weren’t they?”
“You’re helping a computer,” I said. “Killing us for the Broker – you’re just doing a computer’s dirty work. That’s all he is, an AI.”
He didn’t argue with me. He frowned, then grunted. “Should have figured a computer would be behind it. But no. I’m not doing it for him. This, watching you freaks and traitors choke to death on your own vomit? I’m doing that solely for me.”
He was grinning in satisfaction when a noise sounded somewhere offscreen. Turning sharply, he let out a hiss of breath just as a blur of motion barreled into him. Then, Mahone and the blur vanished.
Angry cries and the sounds of a brief struggle followed. Our view of the brig jumped once, as if someone had smashed into the camera, or its supports. Then, came a crushing, cracking sound.
I shuddered. Somehow, instinctively, I knew the sound. But lest I had any doubts, a muted thud followed, a thud that signified something heavy but soft.
The sound of a limp body hitting the floor.
A moment later, another familiar face appeared on the screen. Jonas Chesterton, the Cheshire Cat. Not smiling this time, but looking frazzled as he stared past us, at some point visible only on his side of the screen.
For a few moments, he tapped furiously at that something. Then, the hissing on our end stopped as suddenly as it started, and slowly, his face broke into a wide grin.
“That’s better. Welcome back, Captain.”
It took several minutes to get the full story out of Chesterton, because his first order of business was cycling oxygen into the bridge. This required walking him through the processes involved, parts of which I had not yet committed to memory. I could follow the steps with a screen in front of me, but could not recount them on the fly without a description of what he saw.
Then, with the air issue resolved, he worked to restore power and door access, and talked as he worked.
The Broker had indeed contacted them. Or more specifically, he’d contacted Mahone. Apparently, he’d read both of their files, and decided a serial murderer would be more useful for his purposes than an accomplished conman.
The Broker had offered the deal Mahone he mentioned: he would get both the ship and his freedom if he killed us. It had come with a stern exhortation, that if he attempted to flee or double-cross the Broker, he’d be shot out of the sky without a second’s hesitation.
Mahone had taken him at his word, and attempted nothing. Instead he waited in port, his trap ready to spring.
He had not seen fit to free Chesterton during that wait. On the contrary, he’d spent a good deal of the tedious wait detailing the many ways in which he might kill the Cheshire Cat once all was said and done.
“I didn’t plan to go down without a fight, but I didn’t figure I’d win the fight,” Chesterton admitted. “But when you guys showed up, well, I realized I had a chance after all. Nothing like an attempted mass murder to provide a distraction.”
