Chapter 20
Rinna pulled her hand weapon, saw Tim signaling to her, and in a crouching run, made it to his side without getting shot at.
His free hand—the one not holding a weapon—found and crushed her hand in greeting. She didn’t dare look at him. She couldn’t afford to be distracted from assessing her surroundings.
The landscape had been intimidating viewed from inside the shuttle. Here on the ground? It might be terrifying if she allowed herself to think about it too much.
The tumbled remains of damaged ships and other, harder to identify debris, made it more hellscape than landscape.
Rust, fire damage, weapons impacts, and neglect had all made themselves felt in everything she could see. A hellscape certainly suited the doughy alien she’d watched waddle importantly down his barely functioning flyer ramp.
What was it about this place that made the man feel important? She’d have been embarrassed for this to be her domain.
She had a sense of movement at her feet and glanced down. She managed to stifle the scream down to a gasp—helped by the fact that the large insect hadn’t stopped as it passed her by.
The somewhat larger—and harder to classify—animal that seemed to be after it, also didn’t look at her.
This time she choked because she’d been in the process of gasping when she saw it and they were incompatible sounds.
“What’s wrong?” Tim asked.
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this place has a vermin problem,” she said, trying and mostly succeeding in giving him a smile. And then, when he looked surprised, her smile deepened into something without the strain. “You hadn’t noticed?”
“I’m not accustomed to interacting with vermin,” he admitted.
Now he looked around him. Of course, there was nothing vermin-like in view but he managed to not look skeptical. She almost thanked him but realized he’d have no clue why. They had enough on their problem plate without adding male and female interactions to the list.
“He seems to be keeping his head down,” Tim said, his attention turning back to the place where the ship still fired on a position. “Or he’s dead.”
“Is that where the large alien is? Did you want him to not be dead?” Riina asked. She guessed it had to be where the doughy alien was hiding, since he wasn’t in their vicinity.
“He might be a bargaining chip,” Tim said.
That was a very large “might,” Riina decided. He was a very dirty—and as previously noted—doughy chip. On the other hand, whoever was in the hostile ship seemed determined to take him out. But could they, in good conscience, trade his life for theirs?
She would have been a decided no on that subject, but it wasn’t just their lives. The shuttle also contained their mostly unwilling passengers. That turned a slightly difficult right and wrong equation into something much more complex.
How many lives saved were worth one, rather nasty life? She’d never had to face these questions before the long sleep. That wasn’t because complex moral questions weren’t there, just that her contact with them had been limited.
In other words, not her job.
Now here she was, in some unknown junkyard, fully armed, and…what?
“If we save his life,” she said, “will that help us get out of here?”
She didn’t say it out loud, but she hoped the meaning was clear to Tim. If they got involved in the current…quarrel…was there any benefit to them?
They didn’t have to help him get killed or save him from being killed. She still felt a distinct qualm. She knew this was dancing on the head of a moral pin. But they also weren’t positioned to even help themselves at the moment.
“We couldn’t afford to tell him we’re lost,” Tim said, his tone matter-of-fact.
It was interesting that Tim was so good at seeing and understanding the motives of bad people, and so lost where it came to, well, women. Though, probably not a surprise. He’d spent his formative years with bad people.
She wasn’t sure why her senses all of a sudden went on the alert—even before she received a warning signal from Trac. And before the low, menacing growl from behind them.
She put a hand on Tim’s arm, turning with him to face…
It was large. It was canine, judging by the teeth currently bared at them. The teeth were huge and looked sharp, though maybe it was the dripping saliva making them glisten and look sharp.
More shapes emerged out of the shadows. At least six of the canines.
“Of course there’d be junkyard dogs,” Lt. Dish said over the comms.
Tim pulled her next to him, so that their backs were against a large ship. She wasn’t sure it helped their situation that much when a large string of saliva dropped at their feet from above.
She risked a look up. Why yes, there was one of the canines up there, too. She was pretty sure she counted six—that they could see.
At least, she thought somewhat distantly, she probably wouldn’t have to make a decision about whether to save that doughy alien. They’d be fortunate to save themselves.
“If this situation weren’t so crappy,” Tim heard Lt. Dish say over the comm, “it would almost be hilarious, it is such a cliché.”
Tim ignored her interjection. It wasn’t relevant that he could tell. His sensors had found at least eight of the canine creatures, with other stealthy movement that might indicate more of them closing on their position.
It would have been ridiculously easy to deal with them if he weren’t half human. And if Riina weren’t here? He might have found it, not easy, but manageable.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said, shifting so that she was mostly behind him.
“Probably not,” she agreed.
She didn’t sound upset. He didn’t dare look to see if she was upset.
The canines were pacing slowly closer, their tails snapping from side to side. He had the sense they were trying to discover how well armed they were.
His initial thought—to boost Riina up on the ship at their backs—had, of necessity, been abandoned. These predators had done a good job of cutting off all retreat.
He wondered how sentient they were or if they were acting on instinct.
He shifted again, so that Riina was fully behind him. He released the longer weapon strapped to his back. He could operate both, but he was looking for the best, first target.
If these were canines, if they had canine instincts, then there might be an alpha, a leader. He wanted to target that one.
His sensors noted and cataloged the canines in each position, comparing size and other factors.
“I think that one’s in charge,” Riina said. “The one in the center. Typical pack behavior,” she added.
His own calculations had determined the same thing, but he had to smile that she’d done it using her eyes and from behind him.
And then the smile faded as he braced, noting that the leader was bunching for an attack. Tim aimed, but before he could trigger his weapon, there was a roar of motion overhead, like a burst of wind passing overhead.
He didn’t take his eyes off the pack. He didn’t dare, but his other sensors noted—with considerable surprise—that it wasn’t the shuttle, but the ship that the flyer pilot had entered.
Was he trying to help them? Or just passing by?
The canine pack retreated some, as if they were also uncertain.
He felt Riina’s hand on his shoulder as she said softly, “What if there were other energy barriers in different locations? When they went down, these canines were able to enter areas that had been blocked off to them?”
Tim wasn’t sure why it mattered.
Tim had bare warning, just long enough to turn and protect Riina, before the ground between them and the canines exploded, dirt and debris rising in the air.
He thought he saw a few bodies flying, too. Tim had a sense of something larger in the air—something with wings—but that’s all he had time for.
The ship that had fired the shot lurched once, then went spinning out of sight, its engines screaming from the attempt to recover from the impact. At least the pilot had tried to help. Or shoot them himself. Tim wasn’t entirely sure.
“You’re still cloaked, right?” Tim muttered into the comms.
“Affirmative,” Trac said.
“What is it?” Riina asked.
“It is a large avian,” Trac said.
“I did not have Jurassic Park on my bingo card,” Lt. Dish said.
The debris cloud began to settle, but it was Tim’s sensors that registered the remaining canine’s slinking back into the shadows.
The large avian settled into the clearing left by the explosion. If Tim hoped it hadn’t seen them, it was a faint hope. The avian was facing them, the slow movement of its wings brushing against the ground and reaching to both sides of the tumble of debris.
Its red eyes regarded them from either side of a beak that looked like it could peck through metal.
The ground underfoot rumbled slightly. From the ship’s impact with the surface, Tim guessed. He hoped the pilot managed a controlled crash. It did appear he had tried to help them.
The other ship, the one that had been firing on the big alien was nowhere in sight, nor was it visible on his sensors.
The silence from Veirn began to tell on Kellen. If asked, he’d have said he had no problem traveling without other humans on his ship.
It wasn’t about that, he told himself. It was about his missing humans. And the lack of input from the AI. Humans, he reminded himself, needed input, they needed data—or the pretense of data.
And he missed—he half frowned—the sense of sharing the worry perhaps? That could be it.
He felt useless. All he could do at present was worry. He’d resisted the temptation to break the silence. He knew Veirn would inform him if there was anything to tell him. He knew this.
The AI wasn’t like a human who talked to hide their worry. It just didn’t talk unless it had something to say.
The words, the questions, the worry felt thick in his throat, as if he needed to cough them up to breath freely again.
“How are we doing?” he asked, finally, when he could hold them back no more.
“The data is interesting,” Veirn said, surprising Kellen.
Had it been hoping for a conversation, too?