Chapter 34
- Nora -
The calf's beak punches through the station's outer hull with a sound like a gunshot muffled in wet paper, and then we're through.
The calf holds himself trembling and still in the ragged wound he's made, his small body wedged into the gap like a tick that's bitten down and doesn't plan to let go.
"Structural integrity fields are already sealing around the breach," Lucius reports, one of his sensors angled back at the hole we've made.
"Which is good. It means their systems think this is routine damage, not intrusion.
Bad news: it also means we probably have a time limit before local maintenance drones investigate.
Could be seconds, could be hours. I don't know yet. "
"Then let's not still be here when they arrive." I unfold myself from the little chamber, joints protesting, and drop down into the space beyond the breach.
It's dark, and it smells wrong. The Beast is all warm and living and organic, but this is something colder. There's metal and ozone and, underneath that, something sweetish that I don't let myself think too hard about, but makes me think of hospitals.
The boots that I painstakingly made from rolls of the tough tape on the Beast hit a floor of ridged alloy plate, not warm, softish flesh.
"I think this is a service conduit," Lucius says, already turning in a slow circle, lights flickering across his casing as he scans.
"I see cables and waste recycling. That looks like atmospheric processing.
We're behind the walls the way we were never able to be, aboard the Beast." I can hear something almost like delight in his voice.
"Do you understand what this means, Captain?
Doors. Locks. Cameras. All of it built by hands, or the equivalent, not grown. I can talk to this."
"Talk fast," I whisper. "Which way?"
He extends his small manipulator arm and touches it to an access panel set low in the wall. For a few seconds nothing happens except a faint, high whine that makes my teeth ache.
"I'm in," he says. "These guys are in the Stone Age when it comes to cybersecurity.
That will make our mission much easier. Reading station schematics now.
This will take a moment, Captain. The architecture is unfamiliar, but the logic underneath it is not so different from ours.
Machines think alike, wherever they're built.
But I have to learn their language, and that sometimes takes a while. Stand by."
I wait, heart beating fast. I have to give him time.
Everything he says makes sense - Earth is remarkably far ahead when it comes to computer-everything, compared to what the various refugees from the Space Locusts have shown us.
So if the Gzet computers are easy to break into, then that is just a part of our plan.
This whole rescue is a long shot with a breathtakingly low chance of working.
But I have Lucius. I have my Space Force training. And I have…
Damn. My face scrunches up just thinking of him.
I take several deep breaths and get myself under control.
All right. I have the training I did with Krix'vorr, and some other things he showed me without even knowing about.
"Ah,” Lucius chirps. “Here. Detention and processing levels are two decks below us, toward the station's spin axis. There's also a section labeled, as near as I can translate it, 'preparation.' The language appears relatively easy to figure out, but I may be wrong."
I don't think he is. "That's where they'd do it," I say. "Before the auction. Whatever they do."
"From context, that seems likely."
"Then that's where we're going."
We move. Lucius has a gift, it turns out, for finding us the empty spaces.
A ventilation shaft here, a maintenance crawlway there, always one level removed from wherever the actual traffic of the station is happening.
Twice we freeze in the dark as something heavy and multi-legged clanks past on the other side of a grate, and both times Lucius has already dimmed his own red light before I think to ask him to.
"They're watching the wrong direction," he murmurs to me, once, in the narrow dark.
"Every sensor array I've mapped so far is oriented outward, toward the cells, toward the exits.
They built this whole station to keep captives from getting out.
I don't believe anyone has ever tried to get in before. "
"Just as we were hoping," I whisper back.
I'm fully aware of how dangerous this is. But it's a desperate rescue attempt and we do have surprise on our side.
The station reveals itself to us in fragments, glimpsed through grates and cracked panels: a hallway lined with sealed transparent doors, shapes moving behind the fogged material that I try very hard not to look at directly; a wide, echoing space below us that Lucius identifies as a holding bay, hundreds of small enclosures stacked in neat rows like a warehouse.
One corridor is full of Gzet themselves. They're tall, insectile, chitinous things with too many joints in their limbs, moving with the unbothered efficiency of people at an ordinary job. None of them look up. None of them expect anything to be looking back.
By the time we reach the level Lucius calls "preparation," my hands have started shaking.
We come out above it through a grate in the ceiling of what must be an observation gallery.
It's dark, unused, and thick with dust that suggests nobody's stood here in a long time.
Below us is a room I don't have a word for.
Tables, restraints, instruments arranged with the neatness of things used often and cleaned carefully afterward. My stomach turns over.
"There," Lucius says, angling a single sensor down toward a row of small holding cells along the far wall. "Body heat signatures. Six of them. One human-consistent thermal range."
I press myself flat against the grate and look.
She's in the third cell.
Sophia is thinner than I remember, her hair cut short and badly, in a way that suggests someone else did it and didn't care how, and she's sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, very still, in a way that scares me more than anything else has since we left the Beast. But she's alive.
She's here, thirty feet below me, close enough that if this were any other kind of wall between us I could call her name and she'd hear it.
"Sophia," I breathe, and my whole chest aches with it.
"Captain," Lucius says. There's something in his tone that makes me look at him instead of her.
"I count guards. Two, stationary, at the cell block entrance.
And I'm detecting movement closing in on our position from the conduit behind us.
I think the maintenance drones I mentioned have finished investigating the hull breach. "
"How long?" I ask, pretty sure I know the answer.
"Not long enough."
As expected. I look back down at Sophia, thirty feet and a locked grate and two guards and an entire alien station away from me, and I think: damnit, we came this far.
"Okay," I say, and start working the grate loose with my fingers. "Then we move now."
The grate comes loose with a shriek of old metal. I freeze. Below, neither guard so much as turns.
"Good," Lucius whispers. "Their audio pickups are likely tuned to their own frequency range. We may be beneath their hearing."
I lower myself through the gap and drop the last few feet, landing in a crouch the way Krix'vorr showed me.
Weight low, knees soft, silent. The observation gallery opens onto a narrow service stair I hadn't seen from above, and it takes us down into a side passage that runs parallel to the cell block, separated from it by a wall of the same fogged, transparent material.
Up close, I can see her properly. Sophia's eyes are open, staring at nothing, and for one terrible second I think something's already been done to her. Then she blinks, slow, exhausted, and I let myself breathe again.
"Sophia," I whisper, pressing my palm flat against the wall.
Her head turns. It takes a moment before her eyes focus on me, and then her whole face changes, breaks open with something between disbelief and terror and joy all at once.
"Nora?!" Her voice is a rasp, barely audible even this close. "Nora, you're not… how are you here?"
"I'm getting you out," I say. "I have a drone with me. We have a way off this station. Just hold on."
Sophia comes to the glass and puts one palm on it. “There's…” she begins, then has to start again. “There's only you?”
"Only me and Lucius." I press my hand against hers through the fogged surface. "Are you hurt?"
She shakes her head, but the movement is too controlled, too measured. It's the kind of careful gesture people make when they're holding themselves together by will alone. "I knew someone would come," she whispers. "I didn't know it would be you."
"Who else?" I manage, and something that might be a laugh escapes her, raw and cracked and barely a sound at all.
"There are two guards," Lucius murmurs beside me. "Positioned at the block entrance, forty feet from us. I can likely disable the cell locks remotely, but the moment I do, station security will register it. I estimate we'll have perhaps thirty seconds before…"
The wall behind us lights up.
It's nothing as crude as an alarm. Just a soft, out-of-tune alien chime, and then a section of the corridor ceiling irises open and something with too many legs and a chassis like polished bone drops down in front of us, already unfolding what is unmistakably a weapon.
"Maintenance drone," Lucius says, and there's real alarm in his voice for the first time since we boarded. "Or a guard drone. It's found us. Captain, it's transmitting."
I don't wait to hear the rest. I close the distance and hit it before it can finish unfolding, driving the heel of my hand into the base of what might be its sensor cluster the way Krix'vorr showed me — any vulnerable structure — and it staggers back into the wall with a shriek of tortured metal.
It's not enough. It rights itself almost immediately, mechanical and tireless in a way no locust or human ever could be, and lunges again.
"Lucius, the locks!" I shout, no point in whispering now.
"Working."
The attacking drone's weapon arm swings and I duck under it, grab the arm itself, and use its own momentum the way I used Krix'vorr's in the training room a lifetime ago.
Pivot, pull, let its weight do the work.
It crashes into the transparent wall of the cell block hard enough to crack it, and behind the spiderwebbed material I hear Sophia cry out.
Down the corridor, the two guards are moving now, alerted, weapons rising.
"Locks disengaged!" Lucius calls. "Captain, the cell is open, but—"
I don't hear the rest of it, because the drone comes at me a third time, faster, having apparently learned something from the first two attempts, and this time it doesn't lunge for my shoulder the way a locust would. It goes for Lucius.
One skeletal limb closes around the drone's small body mid-air, and I hear the crunch of something giving way inside him, a sound that goes through me like ice water.
"Lucius!"
"I'm functional," he says, but his voice comes out garbled, wrong, one register too low. "Barely. Captain, the guards…"
I don't think. I throw myself at the maintenance drone, both hands locked around the limb holding Lucius, and wrench with everything I have. It's not a fair fight, but it loosens its grip just enough, and Lucius drops, sparking, into my free hand.
That half-second of hesitation, of choosing him over the guards closing in behind me, is all the guards need.
Something strikes me across the back. It's a blow meant to subdue, some kind of restraint field that locks every muscle in my body. I go down hard, Lucius still clutched against my chest, my legs no longer answering to me at all.
"Sophia…" I manage, and even that costs me everything I have left.
Through the spiderwebbed crack in the wall, I see her hand pressed flat against the transparent surface, her face white, her mouth shaping my name without any sound reaching me at all.
The cell door stands open behind her. Lucius did that much.
And for one wild, useless second I think run, just run, get out while you can —
But she doesn't run. Of course she doesn't. She comes toward the crack instead, toward me, and that's the last thing I see clearly before rough hands haul me upright, and the corridor tilts, and the lights of the station blur into long white streaks above me.
"Another intact specimen," a voice says, the translation flat and clicking through Lucius's broken voice. "Undamaged. Good. The auction master will be pleased to have a matched pair to sell."
I try to speak. Nothing comes out but a thin, furious sound that isn't even a word.
The last thing I register, before the dark takes the rest of it, is Lucius, still cradled uselessly against my chest, his single working light flickering once, twice, and then going out.