Wreck of the Nebula Dream (33 page)

As they worked in perfect unison, downshifting their respective levers to the activated position, there was a deafening clamor of warning sirens. Red lights flashed all along the corridor. A prerecorded, female voice recited a stern warning in Basic to evacuate the level, followed by the same dire communication in each of the five major languages of the Sectors. The voice continued to drone on, counting down the time till the level would jettison. The calmness of the tone only heightened the tension in Nick’s opinion.

“Come on!” Grabbing Mara by the hand, Nick dragged her, stumbling, to the grav lift. Stabbing at the controls, he keyed it open and basically threw her out into the flow of the anti-grav, leaping into the tube above and behind her, as the access panel snapped shut on his heels.

“We have to get out of the tube and into Level Ten before the cryo pod blasts free!”As soon as his boots hit the bottom of the tube, Nick cycled the access door open and pushed Mara out into the relative safety of Level Ten ahead of him, making sure the door closed behind him.

“Now where?” Mara was gasping for breath. “I’ve never been on this level, you know.”

“I have. They gave me the full tour. This way!” Blaster out, Nick led her to the left at a dead run. “We may have to take the stairs up to Level Nine when we’re finished here, you know, to get to
The
Sigrid
. The grav-lift integrity will probably be compromised by jettisoning the cryo pod. The poor ship is so stressed structurally now, the AI couldn’t make me any guarantees. It’s going to try to hold the artificial gravity for us, though.”

Stopping at the engine complex doorway, Nick punched in his code. He had to enter it twice, as the access panel was shorting in and out. He pulled Mara inside and the door slid closed behind them just as there was a gigantic explosion up on Level Six. The entire ship shuddered, twisting violently as the cryo pod blasted away from its doomed parent. Nick and Mara were thrown to the deck by the opposing forces of the giant ship’s inertia and the pod’s violent exodus.”Not good, not good,” Nick said, getting to his knees and waiting while the
Dream
spasmed through more unpredictable gyrations. “Definitely a bad sign.” He extended his hand to Mara, who had stayed sprawled full length where she fell the first time, wisely deciding she stood a better chance of avoiding injury on the deck while the
Dream
shook and shimmied. “Come on, we may have less time than I was counting on. I need the ship to blow up, not merely break apart on its own.” He grinned without much humor. “The Mawreg are too damn good at reassembling things. They like puzzles.”

Leaning on each other, they headed down the narrow access corridor, emerging in the engine compartment where McElroy and Nick had stood, so long ago, and watched the complex interplay of energy between the four massive Yeatter engines.

“I never wanted to come back here,” Nick told Mara as they stepped through the half-open door and into the chamber.

Raising her eyebrows in surprise, she clutched at his arm to avoid tripping on the threshold. “Why not?”

“Stare at the engines too long and you see things, uncanny things.” He didn’t elaborate, going over to the engineering console and rapidly checking the settings and data displayed there. “Damn designers kept the ship’s AI out of the loop on the engines,” he complained as he worked. “Otherwise, I could have done this from anywhere on the ship – patched into the AI’s neural net and told it what I needed done. But no, we had to come in person. I’m never traveling on any untested ships again as long as I live.” He ran a few more sequences. “This is a pain in the butt.” Setting the blaster on the counter, he searched for a chair. Grabbing the one that had fallen and slid across the chamber, he took it to the console and sat, concentrating on his demolition task. “You doing okay?” He glanced up from his work to check on Mara.

She’d been leaning on the edge of the observation bay, staring out at the Yeatters, apparently half listening to Nick’s running commentary as he worked. Three of the engines were still humming and exchanging their energies, even in standby mode, the fourth silent and dark. Despite Nick’s warning about the tricks the human eye would play after too much exposure to the Yeatters, she was totally fascinated by them.
 

Surprised by his direct question, she flashed a chagrined expression at him. “Sorry, what did you say? Some commando I am! Did you want me to go guard the door?”

Nick shook his head, smiling but keeping his attention on the controls. “No, I don’t want you trying to fight off pirates or looters single-handed. Although I don’t imagine there’s anything on this level to interest any of them.”
 

He stood up, kicking the chair away impatiently. “I’m nearly done.”

Mara swiveled to have a better view of the engines. “Oh, yes, I can see a change – all the activity is intensifying. How much time are you allowing for us to get to
The
Sigrid
and make our escape out of range?”

“Half an hour. It’ll be tight, but doable.”

“No time to search for any other survivors, then,” Mara commented somewhat sadly. “I was thinking you could ask the ship’s AI if anyone else is left on board.”

“I did,” he admitted with a trace of reluctance.

“And?” she prompted, when Nick failed to elaborate.

He frowned, staring at the controls beneath his hands, before raising his gaze to her. “After we escaped, the pirates moved any other prisoners to stasis prisons in their ship.”

“So when the
Dragon
blew the pirate cruiser up, all those people died, too?” Color draining from her face, Mara was aghast, and she swayed a little, clutching at the console.

He nodded slowly, once. “There weren’t many, according to the AI, but yes, they died. They’d have been in stasis, so they didn’t feel a thing when the ship exploded. They didn’t suffer. Probably a mercy, because there wouldn’t have been any possibility of rescuing them from the pirates.”

“Not even if the admiral you’re expecting had arrived sooner?” Mara was surprised. “Surely he could have tried something?”

Nick shook his head. “No. The Shemdylann kill themselves rather than be captured, and they try to take as many of their enemy with them as they can. Admiral Reston never would have made a deal with them for the hostages. That’s another standing order for at least the past two hundred years or so – no negotiating with the enemy over prisoners. We got burned too many times, trying to free someone through a prisoner exchange and finding out too late it was a Mawreg trap. So, chalk up another fifteen or twenty deaths to Bonlors and his boss Yankuri.”

There was a faint chiming sound. Nick checked the console. Apparently, whatever request he had encoded was now done cycling and the engine AI controller was ready for further instructions. “Okay, I’m going to enter the last sequence and then we can get out of here. If you’re ready,” he teased.

“Am I! You have no idea.” Mara stretched, rubbing her abdomen. “My stomach is in knots from sheer nerves, but you were right, I got used to the various smells.”

“Done,” he announced, picking up his blaster with a flourish. “We have twenty-nine minutes and counting to be as far away from here as
The
Sigrid
can travel.”

“Let’s go then.” Mara cast a last glance at the engines and stopped. “Did you reactivate engine Number Four?”

“No.” He looked for himself. Sure enough, small flames of energy were coruscating around the fourth of the big Yeatters. Nick grabbed at Mara’s elbow. “Come on – this place is too damn spooky for me.”

She stared at him a bit strangely but followed his lead. They traversed the short corridor inside the engineering territory and then Nick opened the access door to the main corridor beyond, where the grav-lift entry was located. He took one step into the corridor and stopped so suddenly Mara ran into him. Head up, he was alert, sniffing at the air suspiciously, hand out to hold her back.

“What? What is it?” Mara retreated a step, sampling the air herself.

He turned to her. “Mawreg. There are Mawreg on this ship now.”

“How do you know? How can you be so sure?” she whispered, staring at the deserted corridor in puzzlement.

“Don’t you smell it? A faint, sickly sweet scent? Like a night-blooming, rotting flower? It’s faint, I grant you, but once you’ve been near enough to them to smell it, you never forget it. Come on, we have no time.”

Running to the grav lift, Nick yanked the door open, sticking his head over the threshold to stare upward cautiously, blaster at the ready.
Seems safe enough
. He decided to risk it. “I’ll go first. You stay close. Thank the Lords we only have to get up the one level. Hopefully they’re preoccupied with the bridge and the passenger decks.” He stepped into the grav flow, staying unusually close to the wall of the tube. Mara followed him, her blaster out, safety off.

Nick was drawing even with the threshold of Level Nine when suddenly the lights blinked out and the anti-grav mechanism power failed.

Emergency generators kept the artificial gravity working, unfortunately.

Mara screamed as she plummeted in free fall to the bottom of the shaft, in the total dark. Nick groaned as he landed on the deck a second later, managing somehow not to fall on top of Mara.

“Are you okay? Can you move?” he whispered, frantically. “We have to get out of here. Now.”

Huddled where she had fallen, Mara felt blindly for the weapon. “I lost my blaster. I think my arm’s broken. What happened?”

“The Mawreg cut the power. They probably terminated the AI completely. Artificial gravity and life support must be running on emergency.” He crawled across her to get at the access door, locating it by touch alone. Setting his blaster at the lowest setting, he burned through the controls.

“Be ready to move,” he said, wishing the damn metal would melt faster.

“Do they know we’re here?” she whispered.

“No idea. I hope not. Nearly done with this.” He holstered his blaster and worked to push the door open.

Harsh, glaring white light poured into the shaft from a level much further up the grav tube.
 

Nick glanced upward involuntarily and swore, grabbing Mara and bundling her through the partially opened door. Two globes of intense green light came floating down, moving under their own power. About a yard in diameter, rolling and drifting around each other like huge leaves or seed pods, caught in a nonexistent breeze, the devices fell.
 

“Green death grenades,” Nick said after one more horrified, swift glance. He shoved through the opening after her. “Run, run for the engineering quadrant!” With one hand, he hauled her roughly to her feet. “I’ve got to get this door closed again before those grenades land.”

Fighting to stay upright, Mara stumbled awkwardly, holding her broken arm immobile against her chest with her right hand as best she could. Nick caught up with her a few seconds later, sweeping her into his arms and moving out at a dead run toward the haven of the engineering bay. He had just forced his way inside, set Mara down, and was shoving the door closed when a green glare lit up the entire level, followed by a silent shockwave that rocked the deck under his feet. Nick managed to stay upright, his hand clenched on the inner door controls. He held Mara to him with the other arm wrapped firmly around her waist.

“Too close,” he said, breathing hard. “Come on, we have to get into the engine compartment. If I can close the portal and seal it shut with my blaster, they won’t be able to reach us. Not in time, anyway.”

He led her toward the faint glow coming from the Yeatter engines, which were continuing to build to an eventual explosion.

“What was that stuff?” Mara asked as they entered the engine compartment.

Nick guided her to the lone chair, beside the console, and then sprinted to the door. Taking his blaster, he began welding the door’s entire perimeter, working fast and efficiently.

“Green hell fire. It’s a favorite weapon of the Mawreg. Touch it, or let it touch you – even a droplet – and you die. You melt into ooze. It’s an ugly way to go. After the grenade explodes, the hell fire spreads for quite a distance, blanketing everything, although it only affects living tissue.”

“It can’t get in here, can it?” Involuntarily Mara drew her feet up, away from the deck and then, apparently realizing the futility of what she had done, set them down, bracing herself in the chair.

“No. It won’t come this far. And it’ll keep the Mawreg from passing through the corridor either. For a while. Eventually the death mist dissipates in the open air, but the process takes an hour or two. They must not realize I can blow the engines from here, or they would have come in force. I suppose that’s the only blessing of this new design – in any other ship, self-demolition would be harder, if not impossible, with the ship’s AI terminated.” He finished the welding job and stepped back to check it out. Satisfied, he holstered his blaster and stared at Mara, trying to assess her condition. “How badly are you hurt?”

Biting her lip, shaking, she tilted her head to the left. “My arm – I think it’s broken. I fell on it in the tube.”

“Let me see.” Crossing the distance in two quick steps, he gently examined her lower left arm in the flickering ambient light from the Yeatters. Stripping off his battered blue shirt, Nick tore it in half to improvise a rough sling. “Any improvement?”