Chapter 38
“There they are!” Chel leapt to his feet as their scanners registered the battleship up ahead.
“Go wide, come in fast,” Hal ordered. He already knew what they’d find here.
Eazi had let him know a Garmman battleship was hovering over the old Tecran base.
Chel ramped up the speed, slid them sideways, and rounded on their prey.
“It’s the Unhil.” Gerbardi shook his head. “I’ve been on that ship, at the UC headquarters comms convention.”
“Who captains it?” Hal asked, but before Gerbardi could answer, the Unhil shot at them.
“Up,” Hal shouted, and Chel lifted them straight up as the sirens warning of a laser strike began to wail.
“Damage?” Hal kept his voice cool, keeping all signs of his fury buried.
“Some shielding damage, nothing structural.” Chel’s voice was quiet with shock.
“And we’ve got three more battleships coming up behind us,” Voa called out. “Coming in a V formation.”
“The fuckers.” Gerbardi got to his feet. “In our own air space.”
“It’s probably two runners using magnifying arrays, plus the Ciollo,” Hal said. “But we have to check because we can’t have them at our backs.”
“This is why they were playing those games with us. Testing this out.” Voa sounded disgusted.
“I’m guessing the Ciollo is in the middle, the decoys on either side,” Hal said. “Go right first, Chel.”
They shot through space, looping around to the right, and when Voa’s scanners were shrieking that they were about to collide with nothing, he gave a nod.
“Destroy the runner.” They couldn’t even see it, but it needed to be wiped out.
Hanli, his weapons officer, who usually sat quietly with nothing much to do, leaned forward and opened up the small phase lasers. There were a few small explosions as they hit the arrays, and then a slightly larger one when they hit the runner.
“One battleship gone.” Voa sounded sarcastic.
“Now?” Chel asked.
“We take out the one on the far left, and leave the Ciollo until last.” Hal wanted to know what he was really dealing with. “Go low.”
Chel nodded, dropped them down and put them at full speed, then spun them into a full 180 degree turn when they reached the next battleship. Which didn’t exist.
“Hanli, I hope your hands aren’t going to get too tired,” Hal said.
Hanli chuckled. “Maybe they will.” He proceeded to destroy the invisible runner.
Everyone else on the bridge took a moment to catch the joke, and then began to laugh.
They needed it after the shock of the Unhil’s laser strike.
They had almost gone to war with Tecra a few months ago, and there had been some space battles, but they’d gone in expecting it. Getting hit by a supposed ally within your own space boundary was a slap in the face.
“Captain.” Voa rose to her feet, then turned to him. “The final battleship has disappeared.”
“Light jumped away?” Gerbardi guessed.
“Or used that same tech to make itself invisible,” Hal said.
He had to tamp down on his anger a little harder.
“Hunner saw we were clearing the decoys, and he knew we’d be coming straight for him,” Chel said.
“Yes.” If his backup had been here, they could have each taken a ship, but he’d had to go it alone, and there was nothing he could have done differently.
“So what now?” Gerbardi asked.
“Head toward to the Unhil, but hang back. And bring Yiko up from Engineering. We need to find a way to make the invisible visible again.”
Fee stepped into the corridor just as the strangest sound vibrated through the base.
She froze, then ran toward the stairwell and down to the storage level.
She opened the door cautiously, to find chaos.
It took her a few moments to work out what she was looking at.
One of the cables the runners had brought down to fix to the frame had been dropped from on high and fallen through the open lift, crushing supplies. Two Balcoans lay tangled up in the massive pile, clearly dead.
From the view she had of the area above, she could just make out part of another cable draped over the side of the amphitheater and disappearing at the top.
It looked as if the Garmman had cut the massive cables loose from their battleship and let them fall to the desert floor. All the way from nearspace.
A noise behind her had her turning, and suddenly a hand grabbed her throat and hauled her back against a hard chest.
The hum of a shockgun pressed against her temple.
“Now how did you get out of your cell?” The man yanked her back into the stairwell and shoved her up the stairs.
Fee glanced over her shoulder, but she hadn’t seen him before.
“Fiona Russell. I don’t know why I thought you’d be taller, but you’re just the same height as us.” The Balcoan indicated she keep climbing.
“My planet is a similar size and therefore has a similar gravitational pull as yours.” She noticed the Balcoans always reacted with discomfort to that fact. It made it hard for them to see her as other.
“Bart, bring Pallo and come grab your prisoner. She escaped.”
Fee glanced around as he spoke, and saw he was talking into a small comms unit attached to his lapel.
“We didn’t have time for your nonsense before, but now we definitely don’t have time for it.” He stopped a step down from her when they reached the top. “Open the door.”
Before she could, it was opened for her, and Bart and Pallo stood, breathing hard, on the other side.
“How did you get out?” Bart asked, pulling her into the passage.
“I stuck something in the lock mechanism while you two were unconscious. Just in case I had a chance to escape later.” She shrugged. “You’d do the same in my place.”
Bart’s eyes widened at that.
“Put her in a room with lens feed. Not—” The man stood in the stairwell entrance, but didn’t step into the passage. He glanced at Fee and his mouth formed a thin line. “Not with the other one. Under no circumstances. Do it fast and then come back to help. Now, fuck off, I’ve got shit to do.”
He slammed the door and she heard the ring of his footsteps down the stairs.
“There isn’t another room with lens feed if we can’t . . .” Pallo shot Fee a quick look. “If that’s out, there’s nowhere else, since the holding room lens was ripped out of the wall.” Pallo glared at the closed door, and Fee thought she could see actual dislike on his face.
“What about the conference room?” Bart said. “That has one.”
“Hard to secure,” Pallo said.
Bart shrugged. “Kilmar is the boss, and we were just given a direct order.”
They were obviously very over whatever was going on here, Fee was happy to see. Bring on the malicious compliance.
She also wondered what was in the other room they were carefully not talking about. And wondered who was ‘the other one’.
She wondered if it was the medbay Vira was so concerned about earlier, and who could be in there.
“What’s going on?” The voice coming from Bart’s comms unit, which he wore like a watch, was Vira’s, and it was beyond irritated.
“Kilmar just ordered us to take Fiona Russell to the conference room and lock her in there.” Bart began pulling her along, and Pallo trotted on her other side.
“Why?” Vira sounded surprised.
“Because he says we can’t put her with—” Bart bit off what he was about to say. “It’s the only place we’re allowed to take her that has a working lens feed.” Bart kept his tone short.
“Fine. Secure her and then come help. This is chaos.” Vira shut off the comm.
“What’s going on? Why did the cables drop?” Fee asked.
“Not sure. It looked like—” Pallo started to answer then cut himself off. “Never you mind.”
That was fine. Eazi could tell her when they were alone. Although she’d have to sing out her questions, if there was lens feed.
She was led past the foyer, to a room to the left of the entrance, and as they passed the little lounge area, she noticed the disposable cups were all over the floor again.
“Must be when people open the door,” Bart said, looking at the mess. “The hot air rushes in from outside.”
Pallo grunted, as if he didn’t care, either way.
They unlocked the room, and Pallo checked the closing mechanism, as if she might somehow have rigged this one, too, and then Bart motioned her in.
The room was much larger than her cell, with about twenty chairs around an oval table.
The floor was the Balcoan equivalent of polished concrete, and there was a small area at the back that looked like a tiny kitchen, and perhaps a bathroom.
As soon as she cleared the door, it shut behind her, and she heard the electronic lock snick into place.
She did a slow turn in place, looking for the lens, and couldn’t see one.
She frowned, but Bart and Pallo had been telling the truth when they’d spoken about the lens feed, she was sure of it. So maybe the lens in here was hidden. Perhaps so that the company heads from Distani who came here didn’t know they were being recorded.
It might be how the companies dealing with Paxe were pressured to switch their production to this facility instead. They might have initially thought they would be supplying both groups, only to be blackmailed into dropping Paxe.
And the one group who wouldn’t bend, for whatever reason, got burned to the ground as an extra lesson to the others.
“What the hell is going on?” she sang under her breath, trying to channel Imogen Heap’s Hide and Seek.
Whoever was monitoring the lens feed wouldn’t be able to understand her if she spoke in English anyway, but if she sang, they would probably assume she was singing to herself, rather than speaking to someone.
She headed for the back of the room to see what was in the kitchen and whether there was a bathroom behind it.
“Hal is here. Or he was. He found the Unhil, the battleship that’s supposed to lift the frame up, and the Garmman shot at him, but they panicked, because they didn’t know what he’d do in response, and so they dropped the cables to allow them to maneuver and fight.” Eazi sounded very distracted.
“You say he was here. Where’s he gone?” Fee kept the questions up using the same tune as she opened the cooling unit and checked out the food inside.
She hadn’t eaten for what felt like a very long time, and she crouched down to see what there was on offer.