Chapter 27
Fire Escape
He could taste blood. His legs were screaming. He enjoyed the thrill of a sprint, but this thrill was combined with too much fear. All he needed was air, and not enough was getting into his lungs.
Davik felt the edges of his vision go black as he mindlessly followed Fia’s directions. He had been running at his top speed for almost ten minutes now. He had to be close. With the sharp left turn, the squeak of his shoes on the floor echoed loud enough to make his adrenaline spike even higher.
It took ten breakneck strides to reach the door. He pressed the keypad, but the door stayed shut, and felt his stomach drop. Frantic lights flickered across the keypad screen before the panel went dim. It clicked, and then it slid aside. His guardian angel opened the way for him.
He ducked into what looked like a databank storage room. The whirring noises of fans and the crisp, cold air were a welcome cover for the sound of his own heaving breaths and a relief on his searing hot skin.
“Fuck, fuck. Shit, Fi. How are we on time?” he panted, barely able to get the words out.
“Five minutes. Evaluating an alternative route.”
Theos spoke evenly in rapid, rumbling Teelish over the comms line. Fia’s response was brisk. It was as lyrical as it was unintelligible. A furious banter he had no context for.
Fia replied softly after a slight pause.
“Skila t’eta. Davik, we are using route F. Exit the room, bear right. There will be doors in the way. I will call out when they are breached.”
That did not bode well. Their entire plan required all this running around, specifically to minimize how much Fia would need to carve into their system.
To minimize the risk to her and to avoid leaving a detectable trail in their wake.
And now, they were going to toss that out the window.
The image of her in the bell, contorting in pain, rose to the forefront of his mind.
“She’s green across the board,” Theos insisted over the comms. “Go, Dav. Now!”
Fuck.
Precious seconds had slipped away, and he wasted them worrying.
With a steadying shake of the head, he bolted out the door.
The lights in the corridor ahead of him blinked as he passed one, two, three, four security doors.
He bashed through them in a dead sprint as Fia cracked their locks in rapid succession.
A sharp left, a quick right, and then through even more doors marked with warnings about sterility and authorization. And then through a final antechamber, and into the room Fia had shown from her data-scooping.
It was a foreboding surgical theater with stark white lights, a wall of dimmed screens, medical equipment, and several of those needle-tipped mnemograph probes he had seen buried in the poor operative’s brow.
The Icthian in question lay at the center of the room, his sheet-draped chest faintly rising in shallow breaths along his slack and unconscious form.
The operative was bound to the examination table and hooked up to a variety of sensors and intravenous fluids.
There was a fresh patch of bandages on his brow.
It made his skin crawl to fathom what it might feel like to have that finger-length probe inserted into his skull. Or worse, what the removal felt like.
You’re getting him out of here. If you manage to not fuck this up, he won’t ever experience that again. So get it together.
Davik unclipped the shackles and pulled out the meds Theos had prepared for this moment, taking in a quick series of breaths as he braced to plunge the dosed syringe into the dusky purple-scaled thigh.
“WAIT!” Theos’ voice boomed over the comms.
Davik paused, syringe still in-hand.
“Fia, I’m seeing a different color in his IV bag. Can you get me his medication chart from the last shift? Dav, do not wake him up.”
Davik, awkwardly holding the syringe aloft, did his best to remain composed as all of his momentum crashed into an anxious standstill. His eyes flicked to the hanging IV bag hooked up to the Icthian.
“It’s … uh, looks yellow?” Davik muttered.
“Yeah. It’s a potassium supplement. Because apparently they have been plying him with a cocktail of hallucinogens lately. It made him hypokalemic, and—”
“Time, Theos. We ain’t got it,” Carissa barked.
“He might not be lucid when he wakes up. There’s no way to know what state he’d be in if you popped him full of epinephrine now, or if that might just kill him outright.”
“Ah shit. So we can’t sneak out through the maintenance corridor. Fuck,” Davik hissed between gritted teeth.
This had been a possibility, one he was prepared for, but not one he was excited about. This meant a risky and loud run straight down the main hallway in plain sight, doubling the workload Fia was already enduring to keep them under the radar.
“Theos, you sure?”
“Yes. Unless you think you can just carry him down the back corridors with the remaining … Three minutes you have before shift change. I’m not a betting man, but—”
“Yeah, don’t start on my account,” Davik spat, retracting the needle and pocketing the injector as he took two quick breaths to ready himself.
He disconnected the tubes hooked up to the poor guy with as much gentleness as he could, kicked the locks on the gurney wheels free, and pushed off towards the main double-doors.
“Alright, guardian angel, guide me home.”
He followed the cool, clipped words of Fia’s directions. She sent him down a few more corridors, past a blessedly empty break room, and finally found a hallway that ended at a bright red door marked with a sign that read: EMERGENCY EVACUATION ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND.
He shifted his grip on the Icthian-laden gurney as he felt the sweat of exertion travel down his face, bracing for the last, terrifying leg of this trip.
As he pushed the door open, a deafening wail of sirens shrilled out from every direction.
The gurney barely fit through the doorway, and Davik felt his stomach turn as he stared at the wall of riveted and slim metallic evacuation pods.
There were six in this room, all roughly the size and shape of a coffin and bearing just as much comfort as one.
He was an engineer; he knew how they worked.
That knowledge didn’t make it less terrifying that all that would be between him and the vacuum of space was a bit of insulation and aluminum.
No view port. No navigation. Just a pressurized tube with enough propellant to launch him away from the station to float untethered in the black.
In a rotating series of languages, the alarm system announced: “EVACUATION PROTOCOL IN EFFECT. PROCEED TO THE NEAREST EXIT STATION.”
He had maybe a minute, two tops, until someone realized it was a false alarm. Maybe even less if someone took the warning seriously and fled to this escape hatch. He had to move.
He lifted the surprisingly heavy frame of the unconscious Icthian off the gurney and into the nearest pod.
The operative was a head or two taller than Davik, and his legs dragged on the floor as he hefted him upright and into the cramped tube.
Getting the harness cinched around him in the narrow space was a nightmare, but the buckles clicked, and their sleepy stranger was locked in.
The pod sealed shut with a snap, the ejection tube lowered around it with a thud, and the reassuring hiss of rapid airflow as it pressurized followed.
“Your boy is in the chute. Pod bay 4. Can you remote trigger it, Fi? He’s not really awake to confirm the launch.”
There was a lengthy pause. Davik could count at least ten heartbeats while he waited.
“Fia?” Davik called again. “You there? Are you okay?!”
The plan had gone too far off-course. She had been pushed too hard. He was sure of it. Things had gone off the rails, and he was asking her to do the impossible.
“Y-yes. Get … move, now. I have it. Go!”
The lights in the room briefly dimmed, then surged as the pod was ejected down through the exit hatch. Davik bolted into the nearest pod.
Door shut. Feet braced. Harness buckled. Mask applied.
He was sealed in, locked in, and the only thing he could see was the handle to launch illuminated in bright orange.
He pulled, prayed, and braced as his entire world folded in on itself.
The jolt of g-forces made everything he could perceive bend away, the sound of his own heartbeat dissipating in his mind and the quiet voice of his love too distant to hear.
Your love? Have you even said those words to her yet?
That thought engulfed his mind as the veil of unconsciousness fell over him.
The lurch of awareness that hit him knocked the wind out of him.
The feeling of fullness in his ears made it sound as if everything was underwater.
There was an eerie sense of unburdening from the lack of gravity.
It added a layer of fuzzy disorientation.
He couldn’t quite tell where his limbs were.
The air flowing from the mask attached to his face didn’t feel sufficient.
He was stuck in a lightless box, with no sense of up or down, floating in the great black.
He wasn’t claustrophobic, but this drove even his tolerance for cramped, dark locations off the edge.
The propulsion on his pod had cut out at least ten panic-stricken minutes ago.
He hoped he had been propelled far enough away from the station that he would be safe to pick up soon.
He let go of his death grip on his chest harness and tapped behind his ear to queue up the comms.
“I’m out and drifting. Where are you guys?!”
There was a reply, but it was garbled and hard to make sense of. Maybe it was residual disorientation. Maybe he was only hearing his own voice reverberating in this tin can.
“—ace, we have... Locking..”
He strained to make sense of it, but the effort was dizzying.
Then the dizzying sensation he was feeling morphed into a familiar, sickly push and pull as pseudograv began to tug and tether.
His stomach flipped, his head felt like it was spinning, and for a second time he felt a clash and impact that squeezed every whisper of air out of his lungs.
Then, brightness. Blinding white, splitting the darkness in twain. A dark silhouette leaned over him. Hands cupped his face. Cold, wet, shaking hands clutched him. A trembling touch, a tender one.
Hers.