One man went down. The next two shot wild, their pulses passing over Rork’s head and to his left.
Rork jumped back towards his father and rolled again. He took out two men in successive shots. They fell to the ground, one with a hole through his eye, the other through his heart.
The others returned fire. Shots flew through the front door and sparked around Rork. He stood up, aimed and took out two more in one shot.
The remaining seven broke into two groups. One pivoted to his left. They stormed the front door on Rork’s right.
Rork took a pulse to his chest mid-roll. He came up and dropped the three on his left with successive head shots.
A cacophony of blasts sounded out of Rork’s view. He ran to the front door. Four bodies clogged the home’s doorway.
He stuck his head inside and a pulse exploded next to his face. Rork collapsed onto the other bodies.
“Rork! Oh no!” Zero rushed outside, his mouth hanging open.
Rork laughed. “Thank Jupiter you’re a horrible shot!”
Zero pulled him up. “I thought—” He examined the bodies. “I can’t believe—” He threw the pulse pistol to the ground.
Rork held up a hand. “Are you guys okay?”
Mary Ellen nodded. “Don’t worry. Nobody’s hit… I think.”
Rork nodded. He walked over to his dad and looked down on him. The old man opened his eyes and grabbed onto Rork’s leg. He twisted and turned but Rork kept his balance.
“Stop it!” Rork screamed.
The old man pulled himself up. He looked behind him. “They were reliable soldiers. You shouldn’t have done that. You needed them.”
“On your knees!”
His father complied.
“Hands behind your head.”
“This is backwards, isn’t it? The son giving orders to the father.” He did as told.
Rork ran into the house and picked up Lala. He nodded to Mary Ellen, Zero and the Speaker to follow him.
He maneuvered Lala’s limp body carefully through the doorway. His father was still there.
The Speaker stepped out behind him and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. “I’ve just received word that the fleet will commence its attack in five minutes. It’s time for us to go.”
Rork turned and handed Lala off to Zero. Zero teetered then recovered his balance.
“Get a ship back in the landing bay and get out of here.”
Zero nodded. “What about the sentry guns?”
“But what about you?” the Speaker asked, her voice smooth and crisp. “We need you.”
Rork turned back towards his father, then turned around again and laid a hand on Zero’s shoulder. “If I’m not there in fifteen minutes, or if it’s too dangerous, take off without me.”
Rork trotted over to his father, pulled him up and pushed him forward. “You’re taking me to Barbary.”
“Rork!” Zero yelled. “Let it go! That is not your path. You have your girl again. She needs you now!”
Rork walked away, pushing his father ahead of him.
“Q
UIT
WHILE
you’re ahead, Rork.”
Rork creeped forward. He held his gun against the base of his father’s back. This is not how he pictured his revenge on Barbary. But this is how it had to happen.
They were inside the sheriff’s hat now. The circular space was smaller than he expected. Display screens and computer controls covered the walls, many with yellow swivel seats planted in front of them. Above that, long, narrow windows revealed space. The EDF fleet sat massive, three rows high of a motley assortment of craft.
“They’re going to open fire any second now,” the old man said. “They think we’re all criminals in here, you included.”
He jabbed the pistol in the left side of the old man’s lower back. He turned right. They rounded the bulging central controls, a small circular column of panels that occupied the center of the Cylinder’s command bridge.
The crew were missing.
His father turned around. “You’re too late. He left. He evacuated this place long before you got here. Do you think he was going to wait around? He has a dozen of these things, most newer than this old heap, better defended, too. I’ve seen them.” His eyes darted from Rork’s to something behind him.
“Then you’ll take me to them, each one, until we—”
A pulse of lightning zipped past Rork’s ear and through his father’s head. His father’s body collapsed to the ground, the sickly smell of burning hair and flesh flooding out in a hot vapor cloud. Rork rolled sideways and came up with his gun pointed at the source of the pulse.
Gamil Barbary stepped away from Rork and fired. The pulse nipped Rork’s leg just below the knee. The pain was raw fire and he limped backwards, firing a wild burst of shots in Barbary’s direction. None hit.
Rork dove for cover behind the central controls. Barbary circled around towards him and Rork retreated further. Shots sparked on either side of Rork and he froze.
“You made a lot of trouble for me, Rork!” Barbary fired two more pulses. “I’m here to collect you. You had your chance to join me. Now I’m taking you out of here with your pretty face intact...”
This was his chance and he was failing. He spied Barbary’s hand coming into view and shifted away from it. The floor smoked where he just was. His leg ached, raw flesh scraping broken ligaments. His hate for Barbary didn’t burn so bright anymore. He wanted out of here. He wanted to live. With Lala. He steeled himself. He couldn’t walk away from this. He had to finish it, now. Barbary had to die.
“...so I can hang it on my wall!” Barbary rushed him.
Rork commanded his legs to stand but his injured knee gave out. He lay on his back, Barbary standing over him, sporting that fat, toothy grin.
“Just stay there.” Barbary stepped backward toward the central controls, his pistol aimed squarely at Rork’s chest.
Rork pushed himself backward, his pistol held low against the floor. He glanced back towards the door. Still there, still open.
Get up!
He willed his legs to comply.
“No! I said stay!” Barbary fired and Rork’s pistol exploded in a smoky haze of sparks.
The floor rocked beneath them and Barbary looked out the window. “No, not yet! Not yet!” He ran back to the central controls and smacked a button.
A low vibration started under Rork. He pushed himself up and ran for the door. Laser pulses landed around him. The floor threw him up and he slammed his head into the low roof.
“I’m not done with you!”
Red lights flashed. “Emergency separation in three seconds,” a computer voice said.
Rork landed in a crouch and threw himself through the door, landing on his back.
Barbary sent a final pulse through the doorway, catching the top of Rork’s left shoulder. Hot, meat-stinking vapor polluted his nose but he was beyond the pain now. The ship rocked again. Barbary ran towards Rork, his gun held high. It flashed.
The door slid shut and sealed with a blast of air. A deep metallic release sounded.
I
LOVE
you.
Rork bounced through the forest, his body horizontal, his back aching, no breath coming to his shocked lungs, his ears stuffed with wool. His body wrapped around one rough tree trunk, sharp branches ripping his skin, then was blown to the next.
Explosions boomed in the distance. He watched, immobile, on the ground. The houses above him shrunk, collapsed and disappeared like a soap bubble in reverse. The hull dematerialized.
He stared into blackness, a powerful wind sucking him away from the trees and up. He grabbed a branch. It broke off, the snap and crunch transmitting to him not as sound but as vibration.
Barbary’s detached sheriff’s hat of a bridge made a circuit around Rork’s position and zipped off in a burst of speed away from the attacking EDF ships. He observed it with an unconscious indifference as his mind struggled to regain sense.
The Cylinder broke up around him. The wall separating the forest from the landing bay detached and crumbled. The magnetic field barely held near him. Rork looked down and the Cylinder floor fell away in another explosion.
Still intact, the landing bay moved closer. He brought his feet up in the disappearing gravity. He anchored them firmly against the tree trunk and pushed off, flying, arms ahead of him toward the landing bay.
The landing bay edge was only ten meters away now. A pulse of light flew in between Rork and the landing bay’s twisting deck. It exploded. The deck flew away from him. He ricocheted backwards.
He twisted around and sighted the edge of the faltering magnetic field.
The remaining atmosphere was a vaporous haze and beyond that, nothing, like the edge of a cloud on a stormy, moonlit night.
He struggled for breath and his vision faltered. He turned back. The landing bay deck crashed into the still-intact other side of the Cylinder and bounced back, small spacecraft rebounding in all directions, most exploding on impact.
But one flew in Rork’s direction. It was too fast. It turned, its airlock facing him.
He stretched out his hands. A shockwave smacked him from behind. He got his hand into the ship’s airlock door, popped it and threw himself inside.
A whoosh of air marked the end of the magnetic field. A chill passed through him. Everything went black.
“H
E
’
S
WAKING
up!”
A disheveled blue-haired girl leaned over Rork, her teeth shining out from her oversized mouth. She jumped up and down and clapped, a two-sizes-too-big EDF uniform bouncing on and off of her thin shoulders.
The brown man with the intense, pearl-white eyes walked into his field of vision. He couldn’t read his expression.
Something deep within Rork stirred. These people held something for him. He struggled to remember what it was. He moved to sit up. Everything stung and he laid back down.
Another woman appeared. Her black, frizzy bobbed hair framed a permanent sneer. He looked away.
“Rork! Say something!” The blue-haired girl’s face was pure energy. Her green eyes said, “I love you.” There was a nervous energy to her, a purity. He liked it.
“Lala.” He said it without conscious thought. It simply popped out of him. And then it all came back. He turned to the other side. “Zero, my friend!”
Zero nodded to him. His mouth resisted the inevitable smile for a heartbeat before it burst through. He kneeled down and put his hand on Rork’s cheek. “You made it. You found your path, my friend.”
Lala laid her head on his chest and sighed. She kissed him, her lips dry but sweet. She wrapped her arms under and around his neck and squeezed. “I love you.”
The memory of her there in that house on the Cylinder, near death, flashed back to him and his face darkened. “Your wrists— Are you okay?”
Her lips pursed, her brow tense, she nodded. The sob exploded from her. Her whole body clung to his. She shook in silence, then cried out.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
He found strength in his arms and encircled her bony back. He pulled her tighter to him and felt her sobs transmitted through his body. A tightness formed between his eyes and he suppressed it.
“Well, I made it too. Where’s my hug?”
Mary Ellen. He laughed. Lala picked herself up and wiped her eyes, laughing.
Zero came up next to Mary Ellen and pulled on her. She resisted and shot him an ugly look.
“I believe it is the proper time to give our friends some space.” Zero cleared his throat.
“I don’t think—” Mary Ellen started before the mystic jerked her away.
A door slid open, then closed again.
“I
JUST
want to say I’m sorry. I called you a fraud and that was wrong.”
Zero, Rork, Mary Ellen and Lala sat in the brig of the ESS
Moskva
. Mary Ellen and Zero meditated, cross-legged on the floor. Lala napped on a bunk, her hand interlocked with Rork’s as he sat and thought.
Zero opened his eyes. “Only my ego took offense. I, as well, apologize for calling you a selfish, disloyal, lying, deal-breaking fake.”
Rork’s face took on a pained expression. “You really said that?”
“It is the least of our concerns now,” Zero continued, his speech accelerating. “I am more worried about Sarita. I have not seen her. Have you?”
“And, Mary Ellen, I just want to thank you—” Rork started.
“She did not give up the coordinates for your sake,” Zero replied. “She has taken the critical step of beginning her own spiritual journey. It was important for her to stop being afraid. That is why she did it.”
Mary Ellen remained silent, her eyes closed.
Rork nodded. “Thanks buddy. I owe you.”
“You still do not understand.” Zero shook his head.
“Don’t worry. We’ll get Sarita and the other ten or twenty-thousand kids back. I overheard Eldridge talking about them. Then we have to find Anju and Devi.”
Zero eyed him. “And return them to their parents?”
Rork nodded. “And then we get my ship back and we start on your—”
Boots clacked in the hallway. Captain Eldridge entered, a document reader in his hand.
“I’m afraid I have bad news for you people.”
“Is Barbary back?” Rork asked.
Eldridge shook his head. “I’ve received the list of charges against you.” He brought the reader up and squinted at it. “For dozens of piracy charges, the death of Gamil Barbary, Jr., a Delhi prison guard and two Delhi cops, the hijacking of various ships, your role in the Luna City attack—”
“Hey, that was a frame-up!” Rork stood up.
Lala sat up, her eyes puffy. “What’s wrong?”
“—the kidnapping of Hercules Haddad and the assault on Port Vantage, you face nine-hundred and forty-nine years. Your companions face similar sentences.”
Lala grabbed Rork’s hand and squeezed it tight.
“How are you feeling, by the way?”
“New meds are great,” Rork said.
Eldridge nodded in approval. “But they’re seeking the death penalty. In fact, I believe you’ve already been convicted and sentenced on some of these charges.”
Rork stared at him, his mouth open and laughed. His laughter rose to a crescendo and echoed down the hallways.