Twenty-Eight #3
A ripple of color flashed across Vaudai’s skin. “If the deathless has been reactivated by the proximity of its allied fleet, it may very well attempt to reach us here. We are, after all, enemy combatants.”
“It can’t get to us with the hallways on fire like that,” Ghati said. “I mean, can it?”
“The levels of energy will not be constant throughout the battle. When they are low, we will transfer from one hardened shelter to the next until we reach the skiff, which we will then pilot away from the battle.”
“I thought leaving was very, very dangerous,” Ghati said.
“Yes.”
“But we’re going to do it anyway?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Campar said. “Shit.” He tucked the angry jar back into his case.
For the next few minutes, Vaudai recalled for them the structure of the ship, the pathways that would lead them back to the breach where they could reclaim the skiff that was supposed to take them back to the exploration ship, and which they would instead steer off into the vast emptiness of this unfamiliar system in hopes that they might survive.
Campar’s mind kept shifting, skipping, losing focus.
This was life or death. He knew that, but whether the safe room was two intersections, then three doorways or three intersections and two kept sliding off his consciousness.
There was laughter at the back of his throat, and he fought to hold it in check.
Ghati seemed to know something was wrong. He took Campar’s hand in his, their skins kept apart by the doubled layer of the vacuum sheaths. Campar held him all the same.
The sample ticked against his side. If he hadn’t known it was there, he wouldn’t have noticed it. Now it felt like the sound a gun made when it was cocked.
“Do we agree?” Vaudai asked at the end of his presentation.
“If it all cooks down to you lead us, we follow you, then yes,” Campar said. “Perfect agreement.”
“If I am killed?”
“I have it,” Ghati said, and squeezed Campar’s fingers. “It’s all right. I’ve got it.”
“Thank you,” Campar said, and the flood of gratitude welling up in him nearly choked him.
“Hold it together a little longer,” Ghati said. “You can make it up to me later.”
Vaudai shifted close to the closed door. “The intensity of the field is beginning to lessen. We cannot wait for it to fade entirely. This may be uncomfortable.”
“Are we sure it won’t just spike again when we’re halfway to the next room?”
“No,” Vaudai said. “But you will be happy to know I am no longer tired.”
It opened the door. The filthy aurora was still there, but visibly weaker.
As Campar watched, a beam of the effect sliced into the safe room like a sunbeam coming through a fold in bedroom curtains.
Instead of catching dust motes, it glittered with minute, angry sparks.
It tracked with the slow tumble of the ship, tracing a line along the deck, the stored crates, the ceiling.
It wasn’t only his imagination. He could see the vicious killing light fade as it went.
He didn’t know if it felt more like hope or a threat.
Vaudai didn’t speak, just hauled itself around the doorframe and vanished into the corridor. Ghati followed, only hesitating for a fraction of a second to be sure that Campar was behind him.
After coming to know it in darkness, the corridor seemed too bright now.
The light felt like being exposed. Campar pushed the thought aside and pulled himself hand over hand along the walls.
His skin tingled, and he told himself it was just sweat making bubbles in the sheath, plucking the fine hair on his arms and legs as it distended.
It wasn’t the field weapons. He wasn’t being cooked by invisible rays. He wasn’t dying. Not yet.
Vaudai stretched its body out thin, grabbed into the wall, then thickened as it pulled itself forward.
When it came to a corner, it hauled itself around, vanishing for a moment before Campar caught up.
Now that he knew humans had used these hallways, it was obvious.
The doors were slightly different ratios than the ones he was used to from Anjiin.
The lights were pleasant and warm to a human eye.
But the people who’d lived and worked in this space were dead and gone.
The lives they’d led were ended, and he was here, no more special than they had been.
No better protected. No more promised another day than they had been. But alive. He was alive.
“We are approaching the safe room,” Vaudai said. “It will be one more intersection.”
“And two doorways,” Ghati said.
“Yes,” Vaudai said. “That was well remembered. Well done, sticks-with-meat. You are not as inferior as most of your species. But the field effect is only just beginning to increase, and its rate so far is slow. There is a second hardened room if we go another hallway more that will bring us closer to escape.”
“Go,” Campar said. “Don’t talk, just go .”
“I felt it would be polite to ask.”
“Something’s behind us,” Ghati said, and Campar looked back.
At the far end of the corridor, the thing swam toward him. Its tentacles flowed with an eerie grace, twirling as it moved through the space. Only the two missing limbs gave it a sense of wrongness and unbalance.
“Hurry!” Vaudai screeched in Campar’s ears though it was much closer to the second safe room. “We must outpace it!”
Campar’s fear made him push too hard, and he started drifting across the hall without intending to.
Behind them, the three-legged thing reached out, bracing itself on both walls and the deck, and then pushed itself forward, tentacles flowing in the vacuum behind.
Vaudai reached the doorway to the hardened section and beat its body against the hatchway, trying to trigger the latch.
The vacuum in the hallway seemed to fizz, and Campar felt his muscles twitching like a billion tiny electrodes were clearing their collective throats before a life-ending seizure. The field weapons, ramping up.
The three-legged thing reached out to brace and launch again, but with only two of its tentacles.
The stump twitched and shifted like it was suffering from a phantom limb, and when it pushed off this time, it came at an angle, slamming its central body into the deck and flailing as it rebounded.
Ghati pushed the hatch open, and Vaudai barreled inside.
Campar, coming last, paused in the hatchway and looked back.
The deathless enemy had given up the chase for the moment and was opening the way to the safe room that had been their original target.
Campar closed the hatch and sealed it as the hissing of annihilating waves of energy filled his ears and flashed behind his eyes.
The new room was smaller, and clearly intended as a shelter for the crew, but whatever had killed them had come too quickly for them to find safety here.
Padded bunks with wide, woven restraint belts lined three walls.
A locked cabinet against the fourth wall was labeled in bright, bold letters that Campar didn’t know.
Ghati floated at the back, his hands pressed to his throat in distress.
The mask that covered his face clouded and cleared with every breath.
Vaudai drifted in a long, slow circle, its flesh shifting colors.
“It took the other safe room,” Campar said. “It seems disoriented by its amputations, but it knew what it meant when the overspill came. It still thinks, somehow.”
“The army of the dead often displays this behavior,” Vaudai replied. “Intriguing to see firsthand.”
“What do we do?” Ghati said. “If we’d stopped where we’d planned to stop, it would be in with us right now. We can’t outrun it. Can we? Vaudai, can we outrun it?”
“I am considering. Briefly, no, but I am considering. It is unlikely that we will move faster than it does. It is unlikely we could overpower it if it reached us. It is unlikely that we will gain access to a weapon that will give us an advantage. Our optimal strategy is to leverage our numbers.”
“I thought we couldn’t beat it in a fight,” Campar said.
“When the energy falls back down, we have to follow different paths to evacuation,” Vaudai said. “It will be unable to follow all three. By the time it tracks and kills two of us, one may reach the skiff and escape.”
Campar tried to wipe the sweat from his brow and couldn’t. The urge to rip the mask away for the pleasure of dying with a clean face was deeper than it should have been. “Escape in this case meaning riding an unshielded ship into an ongoing battle.”
“Yes,” Vaudai agreed.
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“No, if I’m going to die, I’ll die without abandoning my friends.”
“Campar, if there’s a chance, even a very, very small one,” Ghati said.
“And it would be vanishingly small,” Vaudai agreed. “Even if one of us reaches the skiff, they are almost certain to die.”
Campar felt a kind of peace come over him before he knew what had inspired it. The enemy had told them what it feared. Not them. But something.
He took the sampling kit off his shoulder.
Ghati shifted, seeing something in the way Campar moved or how he held himself.
It was funny. They’d been together so briefly in the scheme of things, and the other man apparently had still come to know him well enough to sense the change in Campar’s heart.
“Give me a route,” Campar said. “Halls and corridors without the hardened sections. In a loop if it’s possible.
When the weather clears up, you two stay here.
I’ll lead our new friend around and stay ahead of it as long as I can.
With luck, it will be caught out when the next wave of overspill comes.
Then you two can wait here. If it works, you’ll have shelter until the battle’s done. ”
Ghati crossed his arms. “And if it doesn’t.”