CHAPTER NINETEEN
JAI
I stood back to let Zip-Zip leave the stairwell, then took a closer look at the crate wedged partway down the stairs.
I went up the first few stairs, then, ready to make a sudden exit if necessary, I gave the crate a shove.
It didn’t budge. I pushed it harder, then leaned my full weight against it. It didn’t move so much as a millimetre.
“It looks like it’s wedged fairly tightly in there,” I said, glancing back down at Kade and my master.
“I’m going to get up onto the railing and see if I can get around it.
It might be a good idea to stand back, in case it does move.
” I was vaguely annoyed that I couldn’t just say ‘Stand back’, nice and simple, but my master was standing at the bottom of the stairs, and a dimari could not give orders to their own master.
The crate was about a metre wide, and it was lodged at an angle, resting mostly on one of its corners.
As far as the climbing went, that was a good thing, as it gave me more room to slide around the top half.
Another corner was wedged against the railing of the stairwell, while the top corner had lodged itself against a ridge where the ceiling changed angle in between the two levels.
The hardest part was going to be getting up onto the railing, given the vertical metal wall.
Above the railing, there was nothing else to hold on to.
I lifted one foot onto the railing, steadying myself with one hand further up, and the other resting lightly against the crate.
For all its apparent sturdiness, I didn’t want to put too much weight on it.
In a carefully calculated movement, I jumped with my remaining leg and twisted, landing balanced – just about – on the railing.
From there, it was a delicate process of sliding upwards, easing one leg, then the other, past the crate.
Once I was above it, I was less cautious about leaning more of my weight against it, given that if it did fall, it wouldn’t be falling on top of me.
Once I was clear of the crate, I jumped down onto the stairs, the first hurdle behind me.
There was about a two metre gap between the first crate and the second one, and from this angle, climbing the second one looked significantly more daunting.
“Come on up,” I called to Kade, knowing the second part would be easier with someone to help me.
That thought made me feel odd. If I’d needed to, I could have figured out a way to get onto the second crate by myself.
Even though waiting for Kade was the more sensible option, I couldn’t help feeling like it was somehow cheating.
In the last year of my training as a combat specialist, I’d been taught exclusively how to solve problems and navigate battle fields completely alone.
Kade had been watching me intently, albeit from a safe distance, and I waited while he performed the same twisting clamber that I’d done, a few muttered curses drifting up to me, until he, too, was standing on the stairs between the two crates.
“Let’s see if we can just push it backwards,” he suggested first, and I nodded.
“Are you there?” I called to the people we’d heard before.
“Not going anywhere,” one of them replied, sounding tired, but not angry.
“If we push the crate out of the stairwell, is there anything in the way?”
“There’s everything in the way,” the man replied.
“A set of shelves fell over and there are boxes all over the floor. Sample containers. Gas cylinders. They’re all empty,” he added, just as I was starting to get worried.
“There are no chemicals or anything. But it’s all jammed up against the back of the crate. ”
“Looks like we’re going over the top, then,” I said to Kade. I looked around for a likely climbing position, but Kade put his hand on my arm.
“Let me go first,” he said, more a suggestion than an order. “I’m lighter than you. You can give me a boost up onto the top, and then, if I can clear some of the debris, we might be able to move the crate so you don’t have to climb it.”
I frowned at him, feeling an automatic indignation at being consigned to the secondary role.
“Why are you so concerned about my safety?” I asked.
“I had exactly the same training as you did.” I didn’t really want to get into an argument about this right now, not when we had more pressing things to take care of, but his attitude surprised me, nonetheless.
“This is your first mission with us. It would be nice if you didn’t get injured right out of the gate.
” He offered no further explanation than that, and I stood for a moment in stunned silence.
A lingering part of me felt that I should be able to complete this mission without assistance.
But I also felt an unexpected warmth at his gentle expression of concern.
I was not used to people worrying about me.
I stomped hard on that little spark of gratitude.
Kade and I were not going to be friends long term, and I should avoid getting too comfortable with these little tidbits of camaraderie.
Refocusing on our assignment, I said, “Fair enough. Give me your foot, then. Let’s get you up there.
” I linked my hands together over my knee, and Kade put his boot into my hands.
“On three. One… two… three!” Kade launched himself upwards, and I gave him a sturdy lift to get him safely onto the top of the large crate.
He landed well, his torso draped over the top of it, and then he slithered forward, managing to squeeze his head and shoulders through the gap.
But he ran into a problem when he came to his belt.
“Fuck,” I heard his muttered curse. His guns were too bulky, unable to get around the hard frame of the door.
He edged backwards a little, and I could hear some fumbling about.
“I’m going to kick the guns back down to you,” he said, his voice muffled as his head was already through the doorway. “Can you catch them?”
“Okay,” I said, lining myself up. Dropping guns was bad for them, but at the same time, I was startled that Kade would so blithely entrust his firearms to me. That would put me in a position where I had four guns, and he had none.
The guns slid over the edge of the crate, one at a time, and I caught them deftly, clipping both the holsters to my own belt. That meant that either we were going to have to move the crate, or I was going to have to unclip them again to get through the gap.
Kade resumed his slithering progress, and his feet disappeared through the gap.
I heard a muffled thump as he landed on the floor on the other side.
“Yep, it’s a mess back here,” he said. “Hold on, I’m just going to check the crew.
” I waited, hearing nothing in particular, then there was a loud scraping sound.
“I’m moving the shelves out of the way. Once I clear a few of the boxes, we should be able to move the crate,” Kade said.
There was more scraping, then a series of thumps.
“See if you can push it from that side,” he instructed me. “I’ll try pulling it from here, but there’s not a very good handle.”
“Okay,” I agreed, and arranged my footing to be as secure as possible, given that I was standing on a staircase.
The crate was heavy. The stars only knew what it was full of, but I didn’t think it could have been heavier if it was packed to the brim with rocks.
We managed to get it to slide a couple of inches, and then a couple more.
I might have been tempted to give up and just climb it instead, except for the fact that we were going to have to get the injured crew members out of the room, and this was currently the most likely exit.
We made slow, painstaking progress, and I was panting and sweating by the time we managed to get it far enough for me to squeeze through the gap and into the room.
The first thing I did, once I was through, was return Kade’s weapons to him.
I wasn’t aware of the Alliance’s regulations on that sort of thing, but during my training, it had always been impressed upon me how important it was to look after my weapons.
It was entirely possible that they could be the only things standing between me and a gruesome death.
Only once that task was done did I take a look around the room. And my heart sank as I saw the carnage the crash had caused.
The tables in the room were bolted to the floor, as was the case on the vast majority of interstellar vehicles, but there was a mess of equipment and samples scattered all over the floor.
Cupboard doors had been flung open, and I guessed that the crew had been hard at work when they’d been attacked.
If it had been at night, or during a quiet period, the cupboards would have been locked, to prevent exactly this sort of chaos.
But worse was the state of the crew themselves.
There was a Solof man pinned down underneath a set of shelves, and I could see the ragged holes where the screws holding it up had been ripped right out of the wall.
Over in the corner, there was a human man lying on the floor with an obviously broken leg.
But worse than that, he was also pressing a bloody pad of fabric to his midsection.
I dashed back to the doorway, knowing we were going to need help with this one. “Sir?” I called down to my master. “We’re going to need medics up here. There’s a human who’s badly injured.”
“Any chance we can get this other crate out of the way?” my master asked, peering up the stairs. “The medics aren’t going to be able to get up past it.”
“Not likely. The one at the top was too heavy. I think they’re full of rock or soil samples. You may have to cut the crate into pieces from the bottom and move the contents by hand. It’ll be a slow way to do it, but we can’t lift it from here.”
“All right, we’ll get working on it,” my master replied. “What about the main lab that’s behind the bulkhead? Any access from there?”
“I’ll go and have a look,” I told him, then squeezed back through the gap.
But before I did any more exploring, we needed to get the shelves off the Solof man.
Kade and I made short work of moving the boxes that had been on the shelf, then we each gripped one side of it.
“On three,” I said, once again taking the lead.
“One… two… three.” We lifted it, and the man groaned with relief as he dragged himself out from under it.
He sprawled across the floor, catching his breath.
“Are you injured?” Kade asked him, running a hand over his back and legs to see if there was any blood.
“Just bruises, I think,” the man said. “Hang on, let’s see if I can stand up.” He clambered up onto his hands and knees, then leaned on Kade’s arm to get himself all the way upright. “You hanging in there, Timsan?” he asked his companion.
“Still breathing,” the other man said. “I’ll be damn glad to get out of here.”
“Where does this door lead?” I asked the Solof man next, pointing to one of the two doors leading out of the room.
One led to the front of the ship, in the direction of the people we were supposed to be rescuing, while the other one pointed towards the rear.
“Sorry, what’s your name? I’m Jai, and this is Kade. ”
“Pleet,” he said. “It’s a storage room. But I heard an explosion in there. Be careful if you open the door. No telling what might be going on in there.”
“Were there chemicals in there?” Kade asked, activating his comm. He did several sweeps of the door to see if anything unusual showed up.
“Not chemicals, no. But the forward engine is on the other side of the far wall. If something went wrong with the engine, then who knows.”
I thought back to the way the ship had looked when we’d arrived. The port side wall had been torn to shreds, but I didn’t remember there being any noticeable damage around the engine casing.
Then again, the ship had been shot at with laser canons, so I shouldn’t be making too many assumptions. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” Kade reported, once he’d finished his scans. “Let’s crack it open and see what we’ve got.”
“But be ready to close it again in a hurry,” I cautioned him.
I sidled up behind him, ready to get a glimpse through the door.
He turned the handle and opened it just a crack.
There was no rush of air, no heat, no chemical smell.
There was a faint scent of burning, but not enough to be truly alarming.
Kade pushed the door open further, and then further…
“Oh, fuck,” we both swore at the same time, as we finally got a look at the state of the room.
And it made sense now why the bulkhead was buckling.
A large chunk of the engine had been blown out of its casing, and from the looks of it, it had smashed straight through the wall, ripped a sizable tear in the floor like it was a giant can opener, and finally come to rest on top of the bulkhead.
But that wasn’t the worst of the news. I caught a glimpse of movement through the hole in the floor and craned my neck to peer down into the room below.
There were five… six… no, there were a total of eight people down there, covered in various combinations of blood, soot and some kind of white powder.
“Well, at least we found a way into the room,” I muttered, so that no one but Kade could hear me. “Now we just have to get them out before the ceiling collapses.”