NASTRAGULL: Pirates (19 page)

Then her knight was there, lifting her up into a kneeling position, still forcing her to bend back her head. In his right hand he held her marker, its head glowing bright orange. She could feel the heat on her face, though it was almost a foot away. 

"You said you wanted to be my everlasting soul mate, and together we would conquer the universe," Alec said bitterly. "Ha! And all this time I believed you."

To her horror, Alexa began weeping; not from the pain her bounds were causing or from the burning sensation on her left buttock where she had been branded, but from the bitter pain she felt from having to betray her love. That love was about to come to an abrupt end, one way or another, because she couldn't tell him why she'd done what she'd had to do for all of them to survive.

Her everlasting love, the sole love of her life, was standing right there, so close and yet still so very far away. She'd never cried like this before, not even when her beloved siblings had sold her into slavery to save themselves. Maybe it was because her heart had never broken before. She lowered her head against her bounds, trying to strangle herself.

"And all this time you were planning to have me for
supper
. Your Captain told me everything, whore."

When Alexa heard this, she lifted her head again, trying to scream through her gag while shaking her head. Then she saw Alec's dead Silver Guard eyes, and she knew that she would die. She closed her eyes as the tears dried up, surrendering herself to her destiny.

Alec stopped talking. He stepped back, feeling faint; it seemed like a red mist was fading from his mind, as if he were coming back to himself after some horrible purpose had taken possession of him. He looked around, bewildered, and in a sudden rush, everything he had just done came back to him. He felt a little sickened by his actions, but less than he might have expected just a few weeks ago; after all, everything he'd done had been justified. However, what he'd been about to do next hadn't been, necessarily.

He looked at Alexa, and saw that she was deliberately straightening her legs, so that the cord tied around her toes was pulling tight the noose at her neck. Nina was crying helplessly, trying to worm her way towards Alexa. Alec took a deep breath, and really
looked
at his two helpless victims. A voice somewhere deep inside told him,
You're a soldier...perhaps a killer. But you're not a murderer.
With that he drew one of the knives at his belt and sprang forward, cutting the strangling cords on both of the girls.

He looked at them with sad eyes, then knelt by Alexa and combed her raven hair with his fingers. "For what it's worth," he finally whispered, "I think I did love you." He removed the gag, then sat up and tossed a knife on the bed next to her. "Help my friends, because I cannot."

Alexa coughed and spat, trying to catch her breath. By the time she did, he was out the door and gone. Finally she shouted harshly. "Wait! Wait...I can help you!
I love you!
"

But it was too late. Her knight had left her.

Alec never heard her last words. He was moving fast by the time the hatch slammed shut, weighed down by the weapons though he was, hurrying back towards Zuzack's secret quarters. When he reached the hidden opening to the suite he made a sharp right, plunging through what appeared to be a solid bulkhead. It wasn't; it was an air-tight nano-wall, and it let him right through with only a slight scratching sensation as the tiny bots it was composed of dragged at his skin. He found himself in a cylindrical chamber with rungs bolted to the wall. He scrambled up the ladder and spun open the pressure hatch, then climbed through. He was in Zuzack's personal shuttle.

After a quick inspection, he started prepping for take-off and spun up the engines. While they were rumbling to life, he took the time to return to Zuzack's office, where he'd stashed the bag of loot. He rushed it into the shuttle and made ready to leave; but as he was donning a pressure suit, a wicked smile grew on his face. There was quite literally a king's ransom down in the treasure room; might as well take as much as he could carry. He emptied the bag's contents into a locker, then raced back into the pirate Captain's quarters with greedy eyes.

When he entered Zuzack's suite, he saw someone else leaning down, peering into the hole in the floor.

Grotech heard footsteps behind him, and looked up to see a person he didn't recognize. Senses honed by more than a standard century as a pirate, he knew immediately that something was awry. He slapped a control on his wrist comp, then spun, a huge knife in one hand and his particle-beam blaster in the other.

Alec was taken aback at first by how quickly the alien reacted, but he was able to dive to his left, so Grotech's first shot went wide, gouging a hole in the bulkhead instead of him. An alarm started to groan as the pirate rushed him, and Alec fired the pulse gun that he'd kept hidden under the bag as a precaution. The pulse hit the pirate in the chest, making him bounce back as if he'd run into an invisible wall. He crashed to the deck, unconscious.

Too bad pulse guns were meant for non-lethal crowd control rather than combat,
Alec mused.

The bulkhead irised open just to Alec's right—another freakin' hidden door—and Alec tossed a fragmentation grenade into the middle of the right group of guards as he dove toward the nano-wall behind them. The guards never knew what hit them. The grenade
was
meant for combat, and it intermingled the body parts of all four men quite nicely as it exploded.

None of the grenade fragments made it through the nano-wall, though some of its concussion did, causing Alec's ears to ring. He dove back through the nano-wall, hitting the ground on his shoulder before rolling smoothly to his feet. He yanked a hovermine from his belt, twisted a little knob on the side, and dropped it. It rose to chin height and hovered in the center of the room. Alec glanced at the hatch the guards had come out of. It was still irised half-open, and he could hear groans coming out of it; they'd be back upon him soon. He quickly programmed the mine to detect motion and air-density gradients, and set the protection field so that nothing else, from grenade concussion to bullet impacts, would set it off. He set the timer for three minutes; after that, it would detonate whenever it detected any movement at all.

He cursed himself for his greed as he turned back to the nano-wall leading to the shuttle—and that's when he noticed the new doorway on the other side of the room.
Another
secret door? Sheesh! Actually, there was no door or hatch at all, just an archway; probably it had been another nano-wall, disrupted by the grenade blast. Curious, he reset the mine for six minutes and slipped inside.

Here was Zuzack's real sleeping quarters. It was huge, but then so was Zuzack. He immediately noticed that there was a prisoner decorating the far wall, his arms and legs shackled to the bulkhead. Alec recognized him as Nikko Behl, the civilian Captain of the
Bright Star
. Formerly of the Herrarier system, the elderly man had spent his career as a fighter pilot for the Nastasturus Federation. Alec and his friends had met Behl on several occasions, and they admired the old veteran. He'd recently retired to what he thought was a safe job...and now this.

Alec glanced at the wrist comp he'd taken from Zuzack, then glanced at the mine hovering in the center of Zuzack's office. There was time. He hurried to free the unconscious Captain Behl; the old man fell to the floor like a damp rag when he was released, but a quick check of his pulse proved he was still alive.  Of course, he'd been tortured. He lifted the old man carefully and draped him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry, then moved as fast as he could out of the bedroom and toward the nano-wall on the other side of the office.

They'd just gotten through when time ran out and the grenade exploded, hurling Alec and Behl to the deck as a residual overpressure wave pushed through the wall.  A second later the nano-wall emitted a quiet hiss and failed, falling into an inert layer of dust on the threshold. Alec could hear agonized screams out there, so apparently security personnel had tried to rush the room as he and Behl were going through the wall.

They probably wouldn't try that again for a while.

He tore open a medkit and found a blue self-injector full of stimulant, which he jabbed into Behl's nearest bicep. The old man came around almost immediately, completely aware; his combat training hadn’t abandoned him. Alec whispered urgently, "Captain, there's no time to explain. There's a shuttle up there." He pointed upward. "We need to get up there and go. Can you climb?"

The Captain didn't waste words. He gestured at Alec, who slapped a blaster into his hand. Then he turned and laboriously started climbing the ladder. Alec followed, carrying the loot, covering them as a clamor of voices came through the empty archway where the nano-wall had been. Face grim, he removed another grenade from his belt and lobbed it through the opening.

It exploded very nicely.

Then they were through the hatch. Alec tossed a pressure suit to Behl, quickly sealed the hatch, and dove for the controls. He'd already initialized the flight computer and spun up the engines, so everything was set. He jammed down his fist, breaking a glass cover over the emergency accelerator and jamming it down in one brutal motion.

He was pushed back into his seat by a giant's fist as the engines lit off and accelerated them down a long tunnel. He kept his eyes glued to the monitor in front of him as, somehow, the suited Captain Behl managed to pull himself into the co-pilot's seat and strap down, despite several gravities worth of acceleration. His breath echoed hard through their comlink, but he seemed healthy enough.

The tunnel ended abruptly, and the
Tramp
accelerated away from the destroyer into the Big Dark. As soon as they were free, Alec started evasive maneuvers; and just in time, because by then some of the
Bitch
's weapons had come online, and the lasers and particle beams were stabbing out toward the shuttle. Behl cursed and said calmly, "Hand over the controls to me, son. I've got forty years of experience doing this."

Alec nodded and tapped a few keys, transferring full control to the co-pilot's console. He pulled up the weapons/ops screen, and immediately noticed a tab marked
Anti-Flak
.  "Permission to release countermeasures, sir!" he barked.

"Do it!"

He pressed the tab, and a dozen small missiles erupted from the back end of the shuttle. They intercepted a half-dozen larger missiles launched from the destroyer, and interposed themselves when they could between the
Tramp
and the energy weapons lancing out from the
Bitch
. Between Behl's inspired flying and the countermeasures, space behind them was swept clear by a series of explosions. Meanwhile, Behl kicked in the afterburners, and the shuttlecraft rapidly increased the distance between them and danger.

Retrorockets flaring, the destroyer spun on its short axis and headed after the shuttle, the massive engines piling on velocity at a rate the smaller ship couldn't hope to match. Zuzack stood on his command bridge, his face a mask of pain, as the Doc patched him up.

"Stop shooting at that ship, you idiot, its cargo is worth too much to be lost," he growled to his tactical officer. "Use the tractor beam or the grapple!"

The tacco shouted, "Sir, they're too fast! We can't lock on with either!"

Zuzack cursed at the sudden pain as the Doc thrust a syringe filled with a pale green liquid into his neck. As the goop drained into his bloodstream, he muttered, "Of course she's too fast. She was made for me." 

He pushed the Doc aside and walked over to the large viewscreen at the forward end of the bridge, and watched the
Tramp
as it disappeared into distance. Briefly, he turned back to the tacco. "Very well. Cease attempts to lock on with the tractor beam or grapple, and make no more effort to fire on the shuttle. There's a tracking system on board; we'll get her back soon enough."

He turned back to the viewer, which now showed nothing but the bright pinpricks of stars. "I'll catch you, soon, very soon," he vowed. "There aren't many places to hide in this region of space."

Zuzack turned around, and for the first time saw his own reflection on the silver shining breastplate worn by Lieutenant Hughes, who stood there facing him with an idiotic grin. It turned out that Hughes didn't need any wings in order to fly. He crashed face first into the Doc, and they both went down in a heap.

Chapter
11

The limousine sped through an exotic mélange of sculpted parks, sparkling waterfalls, tiny gem-like pools, calm woodlands, and thousands of palaces in various sizes, colors, and architectural styles. The structures stood many kilometers apart, rising up like individual dreams in the exquisite landscape. Small shuttles and hovercoupes passed the limo occasionally, but the traffic was very light, barely enough to disturb the delicate animal life that grazed the greenswards below. Clouds of flutterbirds graced the upper reaches of the airspace, their bright colors sharp against the cerulean skies. Were one to look in that direction, far to the north was a dazzling cityscape constructed of countless enormous skyscrapers, their elaborate designs as varied and competitive as their heights.