Escape (59 page)

Gallian hesitated visibly, eyes flicking to the rifle, then to her. “What will you use?”

She shrugged and patted a pistol already holstered on her hip. “I prefer to travel light.”

Gallian nodded, then reached out and took the rifle from her by its strap. “Thank you,” he said, and flashed her a smile as he slung it over his shoulder.

When they were done tucking, strapping, and holstering as much equipment as they could carry, they started up the stairs. Kieran made sure to keep Gallian in front of him, just in case. He didn't like that the former psych ward patient had also armed himself, but under the circumstances, they couldn't exactly refuse him the right to defend himself.

At the top of the stairs, Jilly spared a frown for the charred and gaping hole where the moasic crest used to be, then she started to the left, over the threshold of another broken set of doors, and down a short hall which quickly broadened into a ciruclar room. Here bodies also lay scattered, but the patrollers lay clustered around their weapons and hiding behind banks of seating, desks, couches, and upturned tables. They'd obviously improvised fortifications when the first line of defense had failed. There were also reams of dead patients again, identifiable by their shredded blue hospital gowns and torn and blackened gray flesh, but not all of them were clad in hospital-gown blue. Also in evidence were white lab coats, green surgeon's coats, white nurses uniforms
 
.
 
.
 
.

Jilly gasped, realizing what must have happened. “They sent the patients in first to clear the way
 
.
 
.
 
.
and when they ran out of patients, they attacked themselves.” He turned sharply to Gallian. “Did you know about this?”

“Well
 
.
 
.
 
.
I don't know. Maybe. I was pretty out of it, you know.”

“Because of the dementia?” Jilly asked, frowning. Gallian nodded, and she looked away, unconvinced.

“We should check the bodies here as well,” Ferrel put in.

“Agreed,” Kieran said.

They set to work again, stripping the patrollers of their armor and equipment, but this time checking the medical personnel as well. None of them expected to find useful items on the dead patients, but the doctors and nurses were another matter. Ferrel kept hoping to find a half eaten chocobar, but no such luck. He found himself graviating toward the fatter corpses, hoping they would be hiding uneaten snacks. Better yet, a nice masser steak
 
.
 
.
 
.
but he knew better than to look for that in someone's back pocket.

Ferrel rifled through another lab coat, and his hand closed on a familiar shape. Heart suddenly pounding, he withdrew the rectangular object, and suddenly he forgot about his gnawing hunger completely. He stopped and stared at the gleaming gray rectangle, one end blinking green in waiting readiness. He could hardly believe it.

“Hey, guys
 
.
 
.
 
.
” he began, his voice soft with wonder.

No answer.

“Guys!” he said, allowing his excitement to bleed into his voice.

Kieran looked up from the patroller he was searching. “What's up, Ferrel?”

“You're going to want to see this.”

Chapter 38

“I
t's a decoder key,” Jilly said, the confusion evident in her voice. What was so special about that?

Having had to use many such keys before, Kieran recognized it instantly. “It's a
ship's
decoder key!” He slapped Ferrel on the back.

Ferrel just grinned. “See the status light? All green, baby!”

“
Blinking
, green,” Kieran corrected. “That ship's already warmed up and ready to go. We just have to find it.”

“Spectral!” Ferrel said, grinning broadly. His grin quickly faded, however. “Wait, find it? Shakra! It could be anywhere in the whole city, how the kefick are we going to find it?”

“Well
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

“I think I have an idea,” Jilly said.

They turned to her expectantly.

She went on, “Those patients and doctors were assaulting the precinct for a reason, right? What if that reason and the ship we're looking for are one and the same? Think about it. The ship is already warmed up, so they were about to use it. Maybe it was impounded somewhere in the precinct and they were just trying to get to it. Seems as good a motive as any for hundreds of patients and med staff to throw their lives away.”

Kieran nodded. “She has a point.”

“So what are we waiting for?” Ferrel asked, getting off his haunches and pocketing the decoder key.

It took less time than any of them expected to find the impound levels. The first impound level was 5 floors down from the one they'd originally entered, and all the floors in between were abandoned offices
—
it had been enough just to poke their heads through the doors on their way down the stairwell to see that. Fortunately, they hadn't encountered any more survivors.

Now, standing in a dark, yawning space that echoed with even the slightest sound, they surveyed the hangar, their eyes darting between the small handful of ships arrayed there. There were only four that they could see, and all four appeared to be small atmospheric craft.

“So few?” Jilly asked.

Kieran sighed. “All the spaceworthy ships are already gone.”

“Well,” Gallian began, “maybe Jilly's theory is still correct.”

Jilly turned to glare at him. She'd never so much as introduced herself to the man, and now he felt like he could use her name, as though he knew her? As though they were
friends
? Jilly realized her fists were clenched, and recognized the irrational swell of anger for what it was. She let it out in a sigh and looked away.

Gallian went on: “Maybe the attack on the precinct was to get a ship. Maybe it was to get as many ships as possible. They had to know the impound hangars would be full with a planet-wide quarantine in effect.”

Kieran shook his head. “Maybe so, but that decoder key belongs to a ship that's still on the planet somewhere. It wouldn't still be blinking green if it were offworld. The transmitters don't have that kind of range.”

Ferrel turned to him with a sour look. “Maybe it belongs to one of these skimmers?” He gestured to the quartet of dilapitated atmospheric craft.

Kieran frowned, and held out his hand. “Give me the key.”

Ferrel recoiled, suddenly suspicious. “Why?”

“Just give it to me.”

Ferrel held his gaze for a moment, then decided there couldn't be any harm in it, and handed over the key.

Kieran studied it, the blinking status light casting his face in an intermitent, eery green glow. Then he thought to turn it over. He looked up quickly, a smile on his face. “Ferrel, you cretitch, this is the key for a patrol cruiser! It's not going to be on one of the impound levels.”

“Wait a minute.” Ferrel held up a hand. “How big is a patrol cruiser?”

“A lot bigger than what we'll need to get offworld.”

“Bigger than what might fit in a hangar like this?”

Kieran's brow furrowed as he saw where Ferrel was headed with his questions. “Well
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

Ferrel nodded, that brief hesitation having answered his question. “I think I know where it is.”

* * *

They ran up the staircase, and 18 floors later, burst out onto the roof, barely winded from the exertion. Thank the nano virus for that.

As predicted, dominating the rooftop was a massive ship, which for whatever reason had been passed over by the assaulting masses from the adjacent med center. Maybe simply because the key, the merciful key they needed to crack her open had been lost amidst the fighting in a dead doctor's coat pocket.

Kieran let out a long, slow whistle, unintentionally mimicing the bracing wind which was whipping accross the rooftop.

“My sentiments exactly,” Ferrel said, and started eagerly toward the waiting vessel.

Kieran admired its lines as they approached. It was quite a lot larger than the
shadow
-class corvette they'd briefly owned. Less flashy, bulkier, and from the look of it, the cruiser had seen a lot more action than the corvette. But there were no signs of grevious damage which might prevent the cruiser from lifting off.

As they reached the landing ramp and started up to the waiting airlock, they began to pick out a few troubling details. The door and the hull around it was deeply scoured and pitted by small arms fire.

“Looks like someone has been trying to force their way in,” Gallian said.

“Yeah
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Kieran stopped in front of the door and frowned at the superficial damage.

“Kefick!” Ferrel exclaimed.

“What?” Kieran asked, his head turning. Then he saw it, too. The control panel where they need to insert the decoder key was a ruined mass of melted alloy and vaporized circuitry. “Any chance you can
—
”

“No. Without proper tools and replacement parts, no chance.”

“Okay, let's not panic yet. There's got to be another entrance somewhere. A ship this size doesn't have just one airlock.”

Ferrel frowned and absently fingered a vestigial growth of stubble on his chin.

“What about the loading bay? We could try that,” Jilly suggested.

Gallian was already way ahead of them, standing a few dozen micró-astroms away, holding up what looked like a ruined circuit board and shaking his head. “This one's fried, too!” he called.

After almost twenty minutes of checking every available entrance to the ship, their situation was beginning to look very bleak. Port and starboard airlocks fried. Aft loading bay fried. Ventral escape hatch only recognizable as a blackened patch on the hull. Hangar bay doors: no way to enter from the outside. Now they had Ferrel crawling around on the top of the hull, looking for a dorsal hatch.

“Anything?” Kieran called.

No reply.

Jilly sent him a miserable look and shook her head. What were the odds that the infected masses had benevolently overlooked one, just one, of the airlocks? For all they knew, the precinct's patrollers had blasted the airlocks themselves in an effort to enforce the quarantine, even against their own officers. That actually made a depressing amount of sense.

Suddenly, they heard a peircing scream from the upper hull of the ship.

“Ferrel?” Kieran called. No answer. He jerked into motion, running toward the ship, and then leaping four stories, straight up, onto the hull.

Jilly watched him draw the pistol holstered on his hip and then ran after him. She landed on the hull just behind Kieran and heard the
thump
of Gallian's landing a second later. She turned to look, just in case, and saw him grinning from ear to ear. He looked like a patroller, clothed from head to toe in the combat suits they'd scavenged in the precinct.

They ran after Kieran, leaping over gun turrets, sensor nodes, and manuevering thrusters as they climbed the sloping hull. Upon cresting the reinforced, tetrillium-shielded rise, they were granted a clear view of the entire topside of the hull.

And Ferrel was nowhere to be seen.

Kieran was running aimlessly down the bulbous spine of the ship, shouting, “Ferrel! Ferrel, answer me you vacuum-sucking little shakra!”

Jilly pounded down the hull after him, having the presence of mind to draw the pistol at her side. Whatever had grabbed Ferrel could just as easily grab them as well, and she wasn't going down without a fight
—

Another scream. Jilly felt a spike of adrenaline pushing up her blood pressure, and she urged her body to run faster.
We're coming, Ferrel!

She ran past Kieran, who had stopped to gaze curiously at the hull. Then it hit her what she'd just seen, and what she'd really heard, and she skidded to a stop. That hadn't been a scream. It had been a whoop of delight. She turned around, taking in Kieran's grin and what he was gazing at with a glance. His face was bathed in warm yellow light from the gaping hole in the hull panels at his feet.

Ferrel had found a working airlock.

Gallian had stopped beside Kieran to turn his grin upon the sight which had all of them transfixed. Ferrel's head popped out of the opening. He was wearing a grin that rivaled Gallian's.