Terminus Shift (Targon Tales - Sethran Book 2) Page 6

  Something moved in the corner and, slowly, the spanner came to his feet. “Ciela?”

  “Yes, come on. Hurry.”

  He stepped into the hall, blinking. The long tunic he always kept spotless and free of wrinkles looked like something dragged around the floor for a while. “What… what’s going on? What are you doing?”

  “Later. Just come along. We have to get Luanie.”

  Miko grasped his arm to propel him along. “Does this teach you to trust our Ciela?” he said to Deely, ignoring the man’s scowl.

  “Shh, down this way.” She steered them around a corner until they stopped near the ship’s small mess hall. “There’s a locked storage room in there,” she said.

  Seth glanced at his wrist. “Two other people in there, moving around. Cooks, probably.” He drew his gun. As an afterthought, he drew another which he handed to her. He raised an eyebrow in question.

  She nodded and hefted the gun. “Go.”

  He released the door and, keeping his gun out of sight, stepped into the galley. “Are we in time for dinner?” he asked the Human facing him across a conveyor stacked with bins. He gestured for Ciela to find the storage room.

  “What kind of a question is that? We’re getting ready to leave,” the cook said, looking from Ciela to the two men standing in the doorway. Miko was anxiously scanning the hallway. “What do you want in there,” he added when she rattled the handle on the food locker.

  Seth raised his gun. “Over there,” he directed, and then looked to the second crewman. “You, too. Move.”

  Ciela aimed her pistol and shot at the mechanical lock. It twisted under the assault and she stepped back to kick it away. Luanie emerged almost at once and Ciela wrapped a protective arm around the woman’s shoulder. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “We’re here.”

  “So dark in there,” Luanie said. “I was so scared.”

  Seth looked around as if counting heads and then quickly shot both of the staffers.

  “What are you doing!” Deely exclaimed.

  “They’re just out for a while,” Seth said. He leaned against a cart on the conveyor to shove it aside and then looked down into the shaft used to supply ships and take away refuse. There would be people down there, and perhaps safety. “We’re going this way.”

  “Are you crazy?” Miko said. “That goes straight down to the surface.”

  “Hush,” Ciela said. “Pull your inserts.” She sat on the edge of the conveyor and unclasped the pockets on her boots holding the thin counterweight sheets. The others followed suit, not without extreme misgivings about leaping down an open tunnel to whatever awaited them below, even at reduced gravity.

  A strident alarm brayed once in the hall and Seth whirled around when the access port to the delivery shaft slammed shut and the airlock pressurized.

  “What? Are we leaving?” Luanie said.

  “Seems like it,” Seth said. He checked his proximity scanner. “We’ll try to make it to the escape pods. If we drop as soon as we leave the station we should be able to get back to the moon.”

  “Should!” Deely muttered and reinserted the weight he had just removed from his boot.

  Miko nudged Ciela and then cast a quick glance at Seth, a theatrical leer on his face.

  She frowned and looked over to where the Centauri crouched to help Luanie with her weights. As usual, Miko had found a way to ignore all things dark and dire and turned his attention to more amusing things. Ciela watched the stranger’s long-fingered hands re-fasten Luanie’s boot and smooth her skirt back down over her knees before rising to pull her to her feet. It wasn’t easy to ignore the lean grace of his body and the assuring smile he gave to the woman. The smile extended to the warm glow of his eyes and Luanie returned it tentatively.

  Ciela sighed and punched Miko with her elbow, as she had done a thousand times before. Would he ever grow up?

  “Out,” Seth said and went to the door, again checking for people in the corridor. “To the left. There should be a service passage.” He hooked his hand around Ciela’s arm when the others filed past him into the hall.

  “What?” she said.

  “Let’s see how smart you are.” He pointed at a com panel by the door. “Get in there and block all access to the portside escape pods except the one from here. You should be able to go through maintenance for that, not security.” He turned to the others. “Go! That way!”

  “Ciela!” Miko whispered urgently, unwilling to leave her.

  She tucked her gun into the back of her trousers and her hair behind her ears. “Go, I’ll catch up,” she said without looking at him, already tapping her way into the system. Her neural interface kept the security measures at bay while she coded an emergency lock on some of the compartments, making it look like a pressurization problem. It would also put the escape vehicles into standby mode. She hoped. “If they’re not onto us by now, they soon will be.”

  “Wait,” Seth said and placed his hand over hers to stop her rapid commands. He waved to the others waiting down the hall. “Get in there. Weights off now.”

  He steadied Ciela with his arm when a shudder went through the ship. Both swayed on their feet when the Hajsa’s thrusters came online and the gravity spinners wound up in preparation for lift off. The maneuver, for an instant, engaged every system in one more maintenance check for any last minute faults. Indicators flashed on all components of the panel. “Now.”

  Ciela entered the final sequence to activate the internal pressure doors at the aft section of the ship. A notice appeared on the panel, easily dismissed as yet another task on the engineers’ list of things to do.

  “Nice work,” he said, flashing a broad grin. She noticed a faded scar above his eye and then saw the neural node embedded in his temple.

  “You’re a pilot?”

  “Yeah.” He bent to wrestle with his counterweights again.

  “So where’s your ship?”

  Luanie’s scream reached their ears from the service passage, followed by angry shouts warning them to stay on the ground.

  “Crap!” Seth grasped her arm. “Run.”

  “I can’t!” She stumbled forward, nearly glued to the spot by the weights on her feet.

  He lurched to the cabin door opposite the galley and shoved her inside. They scrambled to unload their boots, aware of more shouts in the hall. Clearly, they heard Deely yelling at the rebels who seemed to have caught up with them now.

  Seth looked around. “Come on.” He pulled her up and through a shared decon chamber into a second crew cabin.

  “Stop. We can’t just leave them!”

  The door beside them slid open to admit two Arawaj, weapons drawn. Seth swept the leg out from under the first so quickly that his partner stumbled over him, taking Seth’s elbow to the side of his head. Ciela darted forward and pressed her gun to the downed man’s head, silencing him. Seth grappled with the other until something snapped audibly, followed by a silence that made clear that it wasn’t just a bone that had snapped. She froze until she saw that it was the rebel who fell to the floor.

  “Gods,” she huffed, watching Seth wipe blood from a split lip. “You’re fast.”

  He moved to the door, not even winded from the effort of this brief but intense bout. “It’s all in the wrist,” he said and motioned her to follow.

  “The others? They don’t know how to fight. We have to help them.”

  “That’s not working so well for us right now. We’re just a little outnumbered.” He pulled her along the hall until they found another route into the service passage. Someone shouted behind them and both ducked through the opening. “See if you can seal that door.”

  Ciela glared at him, knowing there was nothing they could do now for the others. But having him point that fact out to her was a little irritating. She drew her pistol and shot the key panel. “There. Sealed.”

  He exhaled sharply and pushed her further down the hall into the port cluster of escape vehicles, already open and waiting f
or them. The Hajsa held four of these, designed to facilitate a quick exit from the ship, equipped with enough air for a few days for six people. Given the glimpses she had so far of the ship’s general upkeep, her faith in their capabilities was limited. “Get in there.”

  The interior of the pod consisted of a circle of benches, two of them with access to a control panel. She dropped into one of them and snapped into the crash restraints. He sealed the door and took the other seat.

  “The Hajsa’s already pulled away from the station,” she reported after a few moments of checking the pod’s displays. “And they got through the compartment doors now. Coming this way.”

  “So let’s go.” It took only a few taps on the controls to catapult the vessel away from the Hajsa. Anyone trying to flee a ship in peril was able to execute this maneuver and they were away within seconds. She ground her teeth against the sudden acceleration away from the ship’s gravity well and the moon’s weaker pull until they finally floated free.

  “They’re firing!” she yelled.

  “What the hell?” He switched on the overhead video display. “Are they insane?”

  Not only had the rebel ship opened fire well within the airspace belonging to Tayako Station, they were now clearly intent on destroying the very spanner they had promised to the Shri-Lan. And, of course, the Hajsa itself squatted like a bloated beetle between them and the moon now.

  He punched up shields that were never meant to stand up to a firefight. “We’re going to have to go down.”

  “Down? What do you mean: ‘go down’. You can’t be serious!”

  A scattered volley of projectiles peppered the shields. The image on their screens rotated as the pod spun away. “I am. I think they’re angry.”

  “Are you sure about that?” she snapped. “You better be one hell of a pilot, whatever your name is.” They took another hit. “Those are just warning shots. They could have toasted us by now.”

  “Did you want to go back?”

  She just squinted at him.

  He let the pod spin until it pointed generally toward the planet and engaged its bare-bones boosters, doing what he could to keep them dodging in a loose evasive pattern.

  “Someone’s giving them grief from the station,” Ciela reported with her ear to the emergency com system. “Lots of shouting now. Sebasta is accusing us of being Shri-Lan infiltrators.”

  “Inventive.”

  “Think they’ll send someone after us? Hajsa won’t be able to enter the atmosphere.”

  “Depends on how persuasive Sebasta gets. Or how much coin he’s willing to spend.” Seth gave her a curious glance. “How much are you worth to him?” She started to answer when another broadside slammed into their shield. “Dammit.” Something whined at them about a malfunction. “Hang on, we’re going in.”

  Ciela gripped her armrests, putting all of her faith into this stranger as they barreled into Tayako’s outer atmosphere. She might have been screaming.

  Chapter Five

  “Waiter! A bottle of wine for my table, please.”

  The woman bent over an illuminated tabletop map looked up to see who had broken the studious silence of the research room. Her stern face softened to smile at Tal Carras outlined against the light from the corridor.

  “Your kind can’t afford our selection,” she said and left her work to meet the colonel at a more brightly-lit workspace along the wall.

  He slid into a chair with an audible grunt and waited for her to take the opposite seat. “I don’t know how you can huddle here in the dark all day, Daphine. That’s just bad for mind and body.”

  “So is the wine and sweets you like so much,” Major Daphine Verick replied, hinting at the sizeable girth, uncommon for a Centauri, that he had squeezed behind the table.

  He nodded when she raised an eyebrow in question and so she activated the nearly invisible partition to create a soundwave-scattering baffle between them and the handful of other agents working here today. None of them had even looked up from their charts and holograms and monitors; down here rank was observed only when the general decided to visit, which wasn’t often. Daily briefings kept him abreast of Intelligence developments and his staff came by for more thorough updates. Colonel Carras, operating a team of field agents whose names appeared on no one’s roster, was a more frequent fixture.

  “What brings you to these hallowed halls?” She watched him access his data sleeve.

  “Just trying to put some threads together,” he replied. “Probably nothing terribly important but I like things tidy. Probably just gossip.”

  She nodded. “And you know how much I love gossip.”

  He chuckled over this, knowing quite well that the woman would rather leap naked into one of the fuming mud cauldrons that clustered near the base here on Targon than disclose anything she didn’t have to. Her team ensured that the correct information reached the appropriate ear and nothing leaked unless it was meant to. “Your boys still sorting through the Precia interviews?”

  “Endlessly. Ever try to pry information out of a Highland Bellac? They talk for hours without ever saying a thing.”

  “There’s probably an algorithm for that.” Carras ran his hand over the dense stubble on his head, forgetting again that he had resumed shaving when he came out of retirement to take over Targon’s covert ops. “While on the subject of babbling, I think what I’m looking for is anything you might have in terms of chatter lately. Specifically about some deal between Shri-Lan and Arawaj. Fairly high level, not the usual small-time collusion we see now and again.”

  She pursed her lips. “Hell, yes. What do you have, Tal? Out with it, I’m taking notes.”

  He tapped his com screen and played Seth’s message for her, recorded only a few hours ago on Tayako station. Verick listened in silence, eyebrows raised.

  “Ivor Sebasta,” she said when the short message ended. “That name just keeps coming up everywhere. Do we know which spanners he’s got his hands on?”

  “No. I don’t like that at all. We thought all Arawaj spanners are accounted for. But giving up four of them to the Shri-Lan is what interests me.”

  “And not voluntarily. This isn’t the first I’ve heard about some very serious dissention inside Arawaj. A rising number want to join Shri-Lan. Not just cooperate, but plain out leave the faction. We’re not sure if it’s a strategic move to strengthen their number against us or just a matter of economics. Arawaj is barely managing to keep their fleet in the air these days.”

  “So these four spanners are probably a peace offering.”

  “Seems like it. We know that there is a conference of sorts on Taancerum in a few days. Both Shri-Lan and Arawaj ships are mobilizing but the meeting will be limited to few observers. The more intelligence we pick up the more we think that it’s bigger than it looks.”

  “Taancerum? That is a problem. We can’t even get close to the place with our hardware.”

  “Indeed not. But we’ve managed to land some Vanguard agents among the Shri-Lan.”

  “What did they find?”

  Verick tapped the table top to activate a hologram. After a brief search she pulled up the most recent files smuggled out of the sub-sector by Air Command agents. The rocky terrain scrolled before them, apparently recorded from orbit, showing a network of canals and rivers crisscrossing the surface. The Union once had an outpost there, a very efficient and self-sustaining, fully enclosed habitat that easily withstood the planet’s atmosphere. Taancerum had rich resources of fresh water but the air was unbreathable for most Prime species.

  Too remote and of little commercial value other than a few mineral mines, the installation went understaffed and neglected for years until the Shri-Lan, in search for safe havens, took notice. Instead of taking the habitat by force and risking damage, they simply bribed the native population to expel the Union from their planet. Which they did. And so this remote and very secure location fell to the rebels.

  “Not keeping up with the landscaping, I se
e,” Carras said when the image shifted into a broad valley among the mountain ranges and focused on the habitat. A five-sided pyramid, massive compared to its barren surroundings, reached for the sky in a glittering display of solar panels covering all sides. Evidently, in the fifty years since the Shri-Lan took over much of the site had fallen into disrepair. Some of the panels were gone or broken but judging by the tilt of the others, the system was still very much in use. The panels provided the electricity needed to separate oxygen from the ground water, sustaining a maximum population of nearly a thousand. A covered concourse led from the pyramid to some low buildings to which cruiser-class ships docked. Anything larger would have to remain in orbit. The image showed several Fleetfoot ships, favored by the Shri-Lan, as well as an astonishing number of Shrills, the small, agile fighter plane used almost exclusively by them. Air Command relied on the more powerful Kites in their fleet.

  “They’ve added a hangar for the Shrills but other than that, nothing much has changed there. Our agents have not been able to access the upper levels of the pyramid, which seems to be a sort of command center for them. We even had hopes that this might actually serve as the current Shri-Lan headquarters but it does not appear that way. They’re using most of the lower levels for storing contraband and fuel. We estimate perhaps three hundred rebels there at a time, some with families.”

  “Cozy. Those are new, though?” Carras’ hand moved through a cluster of smaller, rectangular buildings with sloping sides near the foot of the pyramid.

  “Yes, looks like a bit of an industry’s sprung up there. The locals have gone to work for the Shri-Lan, extracting belene crystal and shipping it out to Pelion. It’s worth a fair bit there. Of course, the Shri-Lan collect the largest share of that. In exchange, they provide sugar and mince. The Taancers seem to be hooked on both now.”

  Carras grunted in disgust. “I guess we can’t expect them to trade anything actually useful with those people.” His attention turned back to the pyramid. “As safe a place for their summit as any other. Any approach from above will be spotted and the underground levels are bunkers of solid rock.”