Authors: Adam P. Knave
At the head of the room sat a slightly raised stage with a starliner’s command chair bolted to the center of it. A throne fit for a child. And a child sat there, no more than twenty-five. He commanded his domain with an eye toward cruelty. His eyes swam with it, lank hair drifting into his line of sight and hanging there like crappy curtains. This was a man I was supposed to respect, who the rest of these chumps actually did.
I didn’t even wait to get his name. I called up my HUD display, selected the ceiling and the edge of the stage in a tight sequence, and turned my pack on. I shot into the room like missile. Up and then down in a short arc, leaping over everything between myself and the boy in charge. I landed on the edge of the stage and watched his eyes grow wide.
Yeah, he must have been the smartest guy around because he saw me for what I was: hurried and not in the mood. His fear brushed by me, not anything to relish or dwell on, just another factor as I raised my gun and fired on him. He slumped in his seat and went dead limp. I shoved him out of his chair and sat down.
“Now, who’s smart enough to tell me what’s going on here? We don’t have much time,” I said airily.
They stood there, gaping at me. Brilliant. “Listen! We don’t have much time. Bring me the bright folks who can speak, or I’ll shoot the rest of you and call it a day!” That got them to move. They didn’t know who I might be, but they respected power and anger well enough.
One of the guards who ran out of the room calling for help and screaming about the situation must’ve gotten the attention of someone who gave a damn because a bunch of kids ran into the room, armed. They saw their leader, looking dead, which he’d go on looking for an hour or so at least, and stopped. I just sighed.
“There is, right now, an invasion force coming to wipe out this planet,” I said, not caring if they all followed or not - I knew someone in the crowd was bound to understand. “I need ships, I need to restore off-world communications, and I need all of this right now!”
One guy in the back worked his way through the crowd. “We don’t have ships,” he said glancing toward the ceiling as if, by saying it, a ship would land right there in the room. No such luck.
“Who does, kid?” I asked, waving him forward. They were just buying my bid for power. I had hoped they would, but there are days you don’t think things will go according to plan until after they have. “And how do we warn the planet?”
“We—well, we don’t,” he told me. “Off-world communications and transportation are forbidden by the Council. Wait, but then who are you?” Oh, a smart one indeed.
I grinned at him, “Exactly. I didn’t just - well, no, actually I did just fall out of the sky. And now I need to get back up there and take as many of you as possible.”
“But we’re at war with the Red Blood,” he told me. The crowd murmured agreement, tinged with anger.
“And you’re…the…” I dragged out, feeling my way.
“Stone Hammer!” the room shouted. Stone Hammer and Red Blood, sure, why not. Little gangs fighting over control of a world that didn’t even know it was already dead.
“Wonderful. Well, Stone Hammer, you make me proud today. Why, when I came to this world I knew I had a choice between Red Blood and Stone Hammer, and I can see I chose correctly,” I lied happily. “But now I need you to prove me right one more time. We need to make the Council understand the invasion is real, and I need a ship to get off-planet.”
They muttered amongst themselves for a moment and I let it drag out. As they came to the realization that their new leader might just be serious, I added the capper. “And I need it all done inside two hours.”
That part they really didn’t like.
Chapter 1
7
– Shae
I WOKE UP GROGGILY. Sonic blasts give me a hangover, I swear, though Jonah thinks that isn’t possible. It is, because I get them. I tried to not move my head - and kept my eyes closed, opening them would only make me hurt more - and took in my surroundings by feel.
They’d decided to tie me down better this time, I’ll give them that. I was seated and secured at the wrists and elbows, as well as across my chest, hips, knees, and ankles. The chair itself felt bolted to the floor, of course. I gave in and moved my head a bit, wincing, and found they’d left my neck and head free. If they knew about the hangovers I got from sonics I would have thought them right cruel for that oversight, but they couldn’t have.
I opened my eyes and silently thanked whoever had locked me in here. The room sat pitch dark. Bad for escaping - I couldn’t see a damn thing - but great for my head. Light would’ve been anything but helpful.
What were my options, really? Sitting and waiting could work. I’d sent off family alerts after all, and though I didn’t know where either Mud or Jonah were, one of them (if not both) were bound to come get me. It made sense, just wait it out and stay alive.
The other option, of course, was to escape again. No tools, they knew I would try it again, they were prepared for it, and, worse, they knew that I knew they were human now. They - and I still had no clue who they were - had every reason to have secured me properly this time. Which all, really, made it far more fun for me. I also don’t do damsel in distress really well.
Never did, either. Back when Jonah and I first met, there were a few too many times his enemies used me against him. They all decided I must be helpless, an easy tool to use to stop him. It didn’t take long before I learned how to fight, found a love of explosives, and took to getting myself out of messes on my own. Why stop now? No reason I could think of.
I listened, holding my breath while I did. Nothing to hear, outside of my own heartbeat, so I could assume there weren’t guards waiting just out of reach in the dark. Good. Next I flexed everything I could think of, and heard the straps creak softly. Not much, but it meant they weren’t made of metal and had give and flex. Good again. Well, good for me, bad for them.
My captors were our own military, which meant everything would be milspec. I knew milspec possibly better than they did. The bolts securing the chair would be single thread and hardened, the chair itself a rigid, no-flex metal blend. The straps would be attached inside the chair with bolts and welding, so I couldn’t rip them out.
The weak point would be the buckles themselves. Secure but designed for emergency release in case of depressurization: you didn’t leave captives to die, and if you had to free them in a large pressure suit, that’s what you did. It meant that if I could reach the buckles, chances were I could undo them eventually.
That was why the wrist straps were tighter than the others. I couldn’t rotate my hands to get them palm up at all. Palm down, I could only grip the arms of the chair. With my elbows secured and pressed against the back of the chair, I couldn’t pull the same trick as last time; they’d learned that much.
What I could count on them not learning was to do a dual-mix explosive search on me. No one ever did. Last time I escaped I hadn’t gone for it because it’s the sort of thing you save for the last minute, but now I couldn’t see an alternative. Also, this would hurt far worse than the thumb trick had.
Against my collarbone, one on either side, were two tiny capsules that produced a nice bang when mixed. That’s the sort of thing you sometimes leave under your skin for later. Or maybe that’s just me. I’m perfectly all right with it just being me.
By not securing my head they’d given me a tiny window of opportunity. I’d take it. I bent my head to the right and started to gnaw at my own skin. Hurts like the devil, biting through your own flesh. A few minutes and some careful work later, I had one capsule in my mouth.
I spit it out and aimed for my hand. My fingers bent enough for me to catch it, just barely, except I missed. The capsule brushed my fingertips and dropped onto the floor, next to my right foot. I took a deep breath and lowered my head again, stretching to bite into my other collarbone. I wanted to scream, that or gag on the blood filling my mouth. Also, my head still hurt fiercely. I knew the headache had thrown my aim off last time, so I took a deep breath with the second capsule in my teeth and thought about this.
The best I could hope for would be for the two capsules to hit on the floor. They would explode and, if they were close enough, blow one of the straps with little enough noise that I wouldn’t be noticed. If it had been at my wrist I could predict it, but the first capsule was lost in the darkness somewhere by my foot. I moved my boot around and felt it on the floor. Taking a second slow, deep breath, I spit the second capsule out toward the first and heard it plink delicately on the floor.
I had to escape soon, now, or I would risk bleeding out. The ragged holes on my shoulders weren’t going to close by themselves. They at least needed bandages of some kind. Time would be short.
Nudging first one capsule and then the other between my boots, I picked them up and rolled them onto the top of my right boot. It took every inch of painful extension I could manage to get my toes to touch that way, but I did it. In the process of getting them both on my foot I smashed them together, starting the reaction.
With both on top of my right boot, fizzing audibly, I flicked my foot up as best I could and felt the mashed-up capsules roll down my leg and hitch against the strap across my right ankle. This wouldn’t be pleasant - all I could hope for would be that it wouldn’t take my foot off when it blew.
My boot and the strap took the brunt of the small explosion, but I knew that my right ankle wouldn’t be a happy place to visit, either. I bled freely from three points now, and my time ticked away. Then again, my right leg could move freely. The strap broke nicely. I wormed out of my boot and moved my right leg over to my left. The straps, like I thought, were designed to be worked by a thick-gloved hand, which meant my toes would do fine.
Except they were also slippery with blood, so it took a few seconds longer than I would’ve liked, but then both legs were free. Now it came down to a question of flexibility. Yoga, stretching - I might have gotten older as the years went by, but that was no reason to slack off. Taking a deep breath, I slowly moved my right leg up until it could work on the strap holding down my left wrist.
With a hand free, the rest proved easy enough. I sat there, in the chair, and thought for a second or two longer than necessary. The blood loss wasn’t trivial. Nothing for it, though. A few strips of outfit here and there and I stopped most of it, enough to count, at any rate. Then I managed to get my mangled boot back on my torn-up foot without screaming.
On the bright side, I really didn’t notice the headache anymore.
Now I just needed to get out of this room, off this ship, and work out what the hell was going on. Not necessarily in that order, mind. Except the room should come first. Moving in the dark meant going slow and searching for light. The door sealed fully, so I wouldn’t have to worry about light showing from under it - none showed from outside, and I could bet they hadn’t darkened a whole lot of the ship just for me.
Of course they could still have windows into the room, one-way jobs that wouldn’t show light from the outside. I had no way of knowing how observed I was except for the fact that no one had come in to get me yet. I limped around the room twice, memorizing it, and decided to not bother with finding a light after all. I found the door, and a dark open room would be far better to fight from than a well-lit one.
Assuming I could get the door open. The trick I’d used last time wouldn’t work twice, I had to assume that they’d be looking for it. Then again, I also knew whose doors stood in my way this time. Advantage about even, really. I didn’t have any more implanted explosives, either, or any good way to keep bandaging myself even if I had. No, I’d have to pick the lock.
Not easy to do when the lock in question is a biometric scanner. My prints wouldn’t work on it, and I didn’t have anyone else’s hand lying around to try. Instead I took my left boot off (the boot still in one piece) and used it to beat the casing off the door scanner. Wires I could deal with.
With access to the system, I could get the door open easy enough. I could also, I realized with a muffled laugh, short half the ship’s systems. The leftover remains of an old design flaw in the doors, one Jonah and I had pointed out to them years before. Why they wouldn’t have fixed it I could imagine all too well. They took the problem to committee and review, realized we were right, and pushed out the fix to all new designs, planning to implement it in the older systems when they got their standard upgrades. Those upgrades could be decades between installations for things like this and, it seemed, in this case literally had been.
One wire over here, another over there, and a few quick twists. That’s it. Now the next time anyone opened a door on this side of the level I was on, the whole system would unlock, switch states, and then lock down until they worked out what had happened. That would give me practically no time at all to slip through the door.
About two seconds later, the door opened. On any big ship there’s always someone going somewhere. Perfect. I slid through the door as it opened, getting clear before everything clanged shut and locked.
Of course, that meant I stood in a brightly lit hallway, ragged and bleeding, bandages made from bits of my own clothes wound around me, and a right boot that flapped because half of it wasn’t there anymore. I stood there in the middle of a ship that seemed to want me locked up, weaponless, alone, a bit woozy, and in pain. I smiled.
There’d been worse. Now for the next step.