Escape (20 page)

“Come on!” Kieran said, sprinting forward and grabbing Ferrel by his arm. The boy was briefly yanked off his feet and Kieran was forced to drag him for a handful of steps. Ferrel recovered and they sprinted together for the freight car.

The booming voice returned: “I said halt!”

The air was suddenly rent by a crackling sound, like lightning
—
the sound of a neural disruptor being fired. The shot missed so narrowly that it raised the hair on Kieran's right arm. Then came a sudden, high-pitched whine of servos followed by a thundering roar of footfalls. Kieran gritted his teeth and willed his legs to move faster. He spared a glance for the enforcer
—
who was now fast approaching, a literal blur of green and black armor, sprinting down the alley toward them with inhuman speed, dodging between, jumping over, and barreling through stacks of supply crates. Only power-assisted armor could afford that kind of speed. Kieran's head snapped back to the fore. The freight car was just half a dozen micró-astroms away, the automatic doors already closing, its cargo already deposited in the alleyway. It was going to be close.

When he was two micró-astroms away and going so fast that he could feel his muscles tearing, Kieran launched himself at the freight car. He flew through the narrow opening between the freight car's doors and slammed into the back of the car with a hollow, reverberating BANG! His forehead connected with something solid and set his ears ringing.

Ferrel slammed into his back a second later, before his body had even begun to register pain. Then a solid thunk split the ringing silence and the wan slice of light that had been pouring into the freight car was snuffed into oblivion.

Darkness. A rattling whoosh! And then sudden gut-wrenching acceleration which pinned them in place, followed a minute later by a screeching stop which sent both Kieran and Ferrel flying through the empty blackness inside the freight car, slamming them mercilessly into the opposite end. They fell to the floor of the car with a collective grunt.

“Brilliant! Just keficking brilliant, man!” Ferrel said, his voice slicing through the sudden silence like a knife.

Kieran gritted his teeth against the explosion of throbbing pain in his forehead, back, right knee, and right shoulder. “Shut up, Ferrel. It worked, didn't it?” Kieran began picking himself up off the floor, and felt something soft give way beneath his hand. Ferrel let out a yelp.

“Hey, watch it! You want me to lose my lunch?”

“Sorry.”

There came a ratcheting sound, and the grinding of gears in dire need of oil. Then clear, white light split the darkness and boiled into the rail car, searing Kieran's already unaccustomed eyes. Now standing beside Ferrel, he squinted out into the light.

“What the
—
” came a voice from the midst of that brightness. Kieran could only make out the man's silhouette. “These cars are for freight! They aren't meant for live cargo! What in the Infernal are you doing in there?”

Kieran and Ferrel began walking (though Kieran was forced to limp, favoring his right knee) down the ramp of the freight car, toward the enraged stevedore who stood at the bottom. The stevedore was a tall, muscular man in gray coveralls with a dark, caterpillar mustache across his upper lip and a dense broom of equally dark hair sticking up from his head. He wore a power-assisted backbrace and a pair of matching arm and leg braces
—
the same as might be found lurking beneath the armor plates of one of the enforcer's suits.

Kieran nodded to the fuming hangar worker as they walked past him at the bottom of the ramp. “Sorry, we thought some of our cargo got stuck inside
—
and got stuck ourselves while looking for it.”

“Well that was a brain-swirler of an idea! You two cretitches could have gotten yourselves killed! And I would've had to clean up the mess!”

Kieran shrugged, wincing at the lancing pain that shot through his shoulder. “Sorry. Won't happen again.”

“I ought to report you to the administrators!” the stevedore called after them.

Kieran sped up his limp, angling for the double doors which formed the exit to the yawning hangar bay where he and Ferrel now found themselves. It was the station’s loading and unloading zone, packed to the ceiling with multicolored plastiform supply crates, which forklifts and stevedores were ferrying back-and-forth, to and from rail cars which were arriving at one end of the track and leaving from the other.

“He's right, man,” Ferrel said as they reached the exit. The doors opened automatically for them, and they continued out into the corridor beyond. Ferrel recognized it as the corridor which ran past the station's docking tubes. Their MF-19’s would be docked somewhere up ahead. “That was a real brain-swirler. In fact, this whole little detour was. What were you hoping to accomplish? You almost got us captured by enforcers!”

Kieran was frowning, his brow oddly and painfully furrowed around the lump on his forehead. “Don't you want to figure out what we've gotten ourselves into?”

“Not particularly.”

“Well, it wasn't one of my smarter plans.”

Ferrel snorted. “No shakra.”

They walked past a docking tube, and Kieran's head turned to check the designation
—
G11. The next docking tube was G12. Kieran nodded down the gently arcing corridor.

“Almost there.”

The intercom crackled to life: “Attention: this is station administrator Gridley Potran, all incoming and outgoing flights have been temporarily canceled due an unforeseen crisis. Please excuse the inconvenience. We are working hard to resolve the problem.”

Kieran came to a sudden stop. “Kefick!”

Ferrel kept walking, only stopping when he noticed that Kieran was no longer beside him. “Don't worry about it. I’ll slice our authorization into the docking computer. They can't ground me.”

Kieran grinned and began a limping jog up to Ferrel's side. “Keep it up and I’m going to have to increase your share of our corvette.”

Ferrel returned the grin with a lopsided equivalent and joined Kieran in jogging down the corridor. They passed a group of angry travelers loitering in the corridor and cursing at no one in particular. They wouldn’t be getting off the station until the crisis had been resolved. In the distance Kieran saw a pair of drifters, walking down the corridor with their backs to Kieran and Ferrel. One of them was wearing a familiar suit of shiny black armor. The other was wearing an equally familiar suit of blue armor whose paint was comprehensively peeling to reveal a matte gray surface beneath.

Realizing where he recognized those suits of armor from, Kieran suddenly reached out to grab Ferrel’s arm. He dragged the boy over to a nearby data terminal alcove. “What?” Ferrel asked quietly from the concealment of the alcove.

“I think I just saw Brathus and Garlan,” Kieran whispered.

“Where?”

“Up ahead, walking down the corridor.”

Ferrel peeked around the side of the alcove to check. A second later, he ducked quickly back out of sight. “That's them all right.”

“Well, let's lie low until they're gone.”

Ferrel shook his head and turned to the data terminal in the alcove. “I have a better idea.” He began punching a sequence of commands into the data terminal. A few seconds later, an image of Brathus and Garlan appeared on the data terminal's screen.

“You just hacked into the security system? That took you less than a minute!”

“Independent stations don't bother much with encryption. Part of their anti-regulatory modus operandi.”

Kieran shook his head in silent awe, watching Brathus and Garlan walking toward the camera. He could see their lips moving, but couldn't hear what they were saying.

“Let's tune in, shall we?” Ferrel punched another series of commands into the data terminal, and a soft, static-filled murmur began to issue from the data terminal, accompanied by subtitles at the bottom of the screen.

“Still no answer from Dimmi?” The voice sounded flat and monotone, as it would sound conveyed through Garlan's helmet speakers.

“None! I'm going to gut those defalitas!”

Definitely Brathus, Kieran thought.

“We have the registration for his flitter. We can track of that back to his living quarters. I'm sure we'll find something or someone there that will motivate him to make a trade.”

“I don't want to trade with him! I want to find everything and everyone he holds dear and put them through a trash recycler! And then I want to take that keficking ship from him and put him through the recycler!”

They were close enough to the camera now that Kieran could see the rage boiling on Brathus's face. His nostrils were flared, his eyebrows clenched in an angry knot
—
and his scarred and stubbled face had turned a dangerous shade of red. Noticing all the same details, Ferrel turned Kieran.

“Looks like you're in for a bit of trouble, man.”

Kieran gave no reply; his eyes were locked on the display, his mind churning with horrifying dread.

“They're going to find Jilly,” Kieran whispered.

“Who?”

“Slice us a way off this station. We need to get to her before they do.”

Ferrel was frowning at him. “Look, man I don't know who or what you're talking about, but I don't care either. I humored your little jaunt out here
—
now it's time to ditch that corvette at the nearest uncharted shipyard, and pay up. As soon as we get off this base, that's our number one priority, okay?”

Kieran’s eyes were still locked on Brathus's snarling face, but he nodded absently, knowing that he couldn’t afford to alienate Ferrel.

“Fine.”

“Good. Great! Give me a second.” With that, Ferrel turned to the data terminal and began punching commands into the input panel. The image from the security camera disappeared.

Kieran closed his eyes slowly and whispered: “What have I gotten you into, Jilly?”

Chapter 9

K
ieran was hurrying to strap into the cockpit of his MF-19 when the comm crackled to life:

“Remember to gun it as soon as you're away from the station. I hacked us into the station's flight schedule, but that’s not going to fool any patrols out there.”

Kieran replied: “You just worry about getting yourself back to the corvette. I can fly circles around whatever patrols they've got.”

Ferrel's only reply was a dubious snort.

Kieran skipped the preflight and sent his bogus authorization to the station's flight control computer. A few seconds later he received clearance, and he detached the magnetic docking clamps on the base of his ship. Since the MF-19 was an interceptor and lacked space for a proper airlock, the docking port was located on bottom of the ship, below the cockpit, and just in front of the pilot’s seat. If need be, the entire cockpit could function like an airlock, with the air inside being compressed into tanks to allow the pilot to go EVA in a pressurized flight suit.

Triggering the maneuvering jets on the bottom of his ship, Kieran put some distance between him and the station’s airlock, and then pulled back on the flight stick to bring his ship into line with the hangar bay doors.

The hangar was a big boxy module with space for a few dozen small to medium-sized ships. The inside was poorly lit, and odd shadows cast by the ships docked within were painted across the gray alloy walls and floor. To his left, Kieran saw a black, arrow-shaped craft detach from one of the airlocks and join him in angling for the hangar doors. Flight control would never authorize two launches at the same time
—
that was just asking for a collision
—
but technically flight control hadn't authorized
any
launches. And they were in a hurry.

The hangar bay doors began opening, and Kieran flipped his interceptor onto its side to present a smaller profile. He jammed the throttles full forward and rocketed through the narrow gap between the doors an instant later. Grinning from the exhilaration, Kieran flipped his interceptor back to level with the ecliptic. His sensor display showed Ferrel coming up behind him at a distance of 0.73 milé-astroms and closing.

They showed something else, too: a
Libertine-class
Destroyer and 12 EF-10’s
—
Harrower
Fighters. Enforcer ships. The harrower fighters reacted immediately
—
their signatures on the gravidar pivoting on the spot to face him. Just as the first weapons’ lock alarm began screaming through the cockpit, Kieran toggled the cloaking systems, and flicked the overhead switch to put his interceptor in low-power mode. He keyed the comm system:

“Ferrel engage your cloak. We've got company.”

“Shhh! I see ‘em. Stay off the comm. They could be monitoring our transmissions.”

Kieran bristled at the boy's tone. “Unlikely. These ships use narrow-beam transmissions. Point to point only. They'd have to get between you and me at just the right moment to pick anything up.”