Chapter 6
Chapter Six
“Hang on!” Rylando shouted as he braced himself against his standing frame and fought the controls. “I’m opening the side door. Dump everything you’re carrying, or we won’t make it to the top.”
In the display for his monitoring cameras, he saw Pelvannor use the grab bar to lever herself, muscles bulging with effort, into a quasi-standing position.
More debris from the top of the shaft rained down. Tilting the airsled again failed to dislodge the heavy section of denscrete that clung to its roof. Alerts flashed and pinged about too much weight. The overheating coil wouldn’t last.
On the display, Pelvannor unslung her duffle bag and heaved it with amazing accuracy through the door opening opposite her. The airsled rose. How much had that bag weighed?
Po, instantly outraged, called her the Mandarin equivalent of shit for brains.
Rylando righted the airsled and put every kilo of command he had into his voice. “Dump your luggage, now! We’ll get it later.” He opened the door next to Pelvannor wide enough to push things out.
Wide-eyed, Stramlo clutched his bag even tighter.
Po unhooked the web and stood. Instead of removing his backpack, he produced a beamer and aimed it at Jhidelle’s head. “You! Girl! Out!”
Rylando only had time to subvocalize the word “trouble” to Taz before Po’s gaze swung to Stramlo. “Pull her out and hand her to Pelvannor. She’s leaving, alive or dead.”
Astonishingly, Stramlo only hesitated a moment before doing as he was told. Not even Jhidelle’s expression of shocked betrayal stopped him.
Rylando sent the airsled as close as he dared to the service ladder wall. Kicking himself for not thinking of it sooner, he touched the control to mirror the audio and video feeds from his tech. If Po killed them all, the recordings would help see justice done.
Pelvannor hooked one leg around a holdfast bar, then lifted Jhidelle like she weighed nothing and held her out to the ladder rungs.
Rylando watched his exterior camera display to make sure the girl grabbed on tight. A small brown shadow appeared on Jhidelle’s shoulder and jumped onto the airsled’s roof. Only Pelvannor could have seen it, and she was already turning back to face Po.
Rylando didn’t have time to think about it as the airsled rose again. With all the dust in the air, he couldn’t tell if the aftershock was over or not.
Po turned his beamer on Rylando. “You, Mr. Gee-Sar man. Tell your partner everything’s good if she leaves us alone, then strip off your earwire and toss it to Pelvannor.” Po’s lip curled. “Get us free and you can chat all you want after we’re gone.”
Rylando reluctantly touched his earwire, spoke the required words out loud, then pulled it off. If he’d been smarter, he’d have been subvocalizing to Taz this whole time. He’d been so focused on the rescue and worrying about her and his team that he’d missed all the signs of trouble.
He tossed it awkwardly toward Pelvannor, who snatched it out of the air with blinding speed and tossed it to the back. It landed somewhere behind the stationary equipment lockers.
Po shook his head and spoke a sneering insult in Mandarin. Stramlo winced. Pelvannor’s expression didn’t change.
Only half the top scanners and none of the external comms survived the rain of rubble. Thankfully, the bottom camera eyes survived, allowing him to see Taz connect with Jhidelle and web the girl to the front of her mech suit.
Finally, the lift lobby came into view. He turned into the opening as soon as they cleared the floor height.
Debris on the floor began dancing. The lift opening visibly swayed and warped. In front of him, a blue section of denscrete crashed down to block the hallway exit.
Rylando spun the airsled right to avoid the sudden obstacle, only to find the other hallway already fully blocked from a cave-in.
The tortured left coil flatlined. The best he could do was ground the sled and hope the lobby ceiling held.
A tremendous, deafening crack made him hunch involuntarily. Mariposa clung to his shoulder with her sharp owl claws.
The airsled’s functioning camera eyes recorded the collapse of an enormous block of denscrete that wedged itself into the lift shaft like a cork, blocking the entire opening.
Po shoved Pelvannor aside and climbed out the still-open side door.
A moment later, he jumped back in, rage distorting his face. He pointed the beamer square at Rylando’s chest.
“Get us the fuck out of here right fucking now!”
Taz wished her mech suit had Jumper drugs to manage her runaway adrenaline and nausea. Above her, violence spiked strong enough to wake her sifter talent. The wobbling airsled nearly rammed the side wall, and suddenly, Jhidelle was left clinging to the service ladder.
Rylando’s irritating habit of forgetting to maintain a live comms connection left her ready to bite him. Or at least ask Shen to do it. Everything was as far from “fine” as it could get. As soon as she rescued the girl, she bloody well would not be “leaving them alone.”
After strapping Jhidelle to her suit like she was a casualty, Taz had intended to go up. The shower of debris from the largest aftershock yet changed her mind. That, and her scans warning of the imminent failure of the pins holding the shaft’s capstone.
Climbing down took all her concentration.
The crates on her back couldn’t take much abuse.
Squashing live rescue targets was considered bad form.
Groaning from above overloaded her audio and triggered her noise-canceling implants.
Dust swirled everywhere, impairing visibility and making Jhidelle and the animals cough.
Inside her suit, all she could smell was her own sour sweat.
The pivot-swing back into the basement hallway wasn’t pretty. The last ladder rung gave way. She stumbled forward, then scrambled to keep her footing on the slick floor as the aftershock finally dissipated.
Anger at herself for not listening to her instincts about the targets warred with terror that her failures might have gotten Rylando hurt or killed. He wasn’t answering any of her pings.
The basement seemed to weather the aftershocks better than the shaft. As soon as she got well past the dust, almost to the cursed storage unit where the trouble began, she stopped. Freeing Jhidelle took just a few moments, giving Taz the chance to retract her armor and step out of her suit.
Taz took a long moment to put her chaotic feelings in a box to sort later. “First off, are you hurt?”
“No,” said Jhidelle. She opened her coat and looked down at a creature she was carrying in a sling. A tiny orange-and-white foxlike head sported ears big enough to fly with. “Farenoso is okay, too.”
Truth, according to Taz’s sifter talent.
“Okay, tell me what happened up there.”
“The airsled was too heavy and they didn’t want to let go of their bags. Po made me get off. He threatened to shoot me if my father didn’t hand me off to the woman Pelvannor so she could shove me out.” Despair laced her tone. “My father had no choice.”
“Holy chaos, what is in those bags?” She should have scanned them when she had the chance, regardless of GSAR privacy regulations.
“I don’t know.” Her shoulders hunched tighter. “I came here to save him, but I just made things worse.”
Taz kept a lock on her temper as she caught the girl’s eye. “Save him from what?”
“Po. Pelvannor.” She pointed up. “All I could do was send Tzima back to the airsled to look after him.”
Now Taz was confused. “Who is Tzima?”
“My kinkajou. She’s very good at jumping and good at getting into things. I can see through her eyes. Hear through her ears.”
It took Taz a second to realize what that meant. “You’re an animal-affinity minder, like Rylando.” When Jhidelle nodded, Taz continued. “Let’s go back to the saving part.”
“Father brought me to Salamaray to do some shopping. In the middle of the night, four people broke into our condotel. Po and Pelvannor took my father. The other two stayed with me to hold me hostage.” She frowned.
“They took my percomp and comms, locked me in my bedroom with water and a mealpack, and told me to keep quiet. They didn’t know I had my pets with me.
Farenoso is a fennec fox. He can hear a whisper from a kilometer away.
” The fox looked up at Jhidelle’s chin when he heard his name.
“The two who stayed didn’t even check my room before they locked me up, and they complained about everything.
Having to guard a stupid kid instead of going to the CAC with Po, who had instead taken stupid-as-stardust Pelvannor.
What they’d do with their share. What Po would do to my father if he didn’t cooperate. What they’d do to me.”
“I see. What did they want your father to do?”
“Help them steal from the basement storage units. That’s how I knew where to go.” She blew out a sigh. “I couldn’t let them use me as leverage, so I escaped out the window and came here. I thought if my father saw I was free, he could get away. The earthquake changed everything.”
The girl’s story sounded like a tri-D adventure thriller plot, but Taz’s talent said she was telling the truth as she knew it.
Half the rescuers in her unit wouldn’t have been so resourceful. “How old are you again?” asked Taz.
“Almost sixteen.” Subtle annoyance threaded the words, like she had to answer that question a lot.
“But why your father, particularly?”
“I haven’t figured that part out.” Jhidelle shook her head, frustration evident. “He’s a design engineer for asteroid mines, not a thief.”
Taz rolled her shoulders back and took a deep, calming breath. “Why didn’t you tell us this immediately?”
Jhidelle shrugged sheepishly. “I was afraid you’d wait for law enforcement instead of helping my father. Po and Pelvannor would have killed him to hide their crimes.” Abject remorse settled on her face. “I’m sorry I got your partner in trouble. I messed up.”
“Yeah, kid, you did.” Taz waited until Jhidelle looked up. “I did, too. So let’s figure out how to fix it.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re not mad?”