Escape (23 page)

“Lights off,” he commanded, and the room plunged into an airy darkness. Ferrel shivered beneath his blankets and pulled them higher, tucking them beneath his chin.
Space is cold enough when you’re wearing thermal underwear,
he thought.
I better not uncover myself in my sleep or I’ll wake up as a neuter.

As the thermal blanket did its job, trapping his body heat and turning his bed into a cozy little oven, Ferrel’s eyes began drifting closed. The steady hum of the ship’s engines was like a lullaby, and the subtle vibration rolling through the ship and his bed was as good as any cradle rocking him to sleep
.
 
.
 
.
 
.

The soft hiss of air was another matter.

Ferrel’s eyes shot open, and his heart began pounding. He focused on the noise, his mind supplying helpful possibilities:
Decompression. Hull breach. Suffocation.

They hadn’t suffered any damage
 
.
 
.
 
.
had they? As far as he knew, no one had even fired a shot at them.

Ferrel sat up and felt a fresh shiver rack his body as the covers pooled in his lap.

“Lights on!” The darkness disappeared in a blinding flash. Ferrel blinked twice, three times
—
almost drawing tears from his tired eyes. He looked around the room in a rush, as if he might be able to see the leak with his naked eyes. Spots were dancing in front of him, and Ferrel blinked to clear them away.

They kept dancing.

The hissing stopped.

Ferrel frowned, feeling suddenly foolish. It was probably just the climate control system cycling on and then off again.
You're getting paranoid, Ferrel.

“Lights off,” he said, and lay back down. He tucked the covers beneath his chin again and let out a shaky sigh.

As his eyes were drifting closed once more, Ferrel caught a whiff of something metallic. His nose wrinkled. The scent settled on the back of his tongue with a bitter aftertaste, and he grimaced.

Someone needs to check the air filters in the climate controller
.
 
.
 
.
 
.

Ferrel was dimly aware of a spreading warmth, followed by a fuzzy feeling of disconnectedness. He felt his mind growing slower and slower, and all of it seemed a natural progression toward sleep
—
until he tried to roll over.

He couldn’t.

Ferrel tried to yell, but his jaw wouldn’t even open for a scream. The last coherent thought he had before blacking out was:
Dimmi’s p-
 
.
 
.
 
.
poy? Poisoned
 
.
 
.
 
.

* * *

Jilly sat down with a steaming cup of perk at the data terminal in the break room of Outpost 110’s medbay. After a long night cycle of tending to routine mining accidents
—
hands lacerated by sonic drills; arms amputated by backfiring laser torches; ruptured tendons and torn muscles from dock workers’ power-assisted braces failing
.
 
.
 
.
 
.
It was an unspeakable pleasure to have a moment’s peace with a hot cup of
wake-me-up-please
. She’d left her patients in the capable hands of her automaton assistant, AZP7, or
Zip,
as she preferred to call him.

Working the night shift in medbay was usually a good way to avoid most of the action
—
Outpost 110’s night cycle mining crews were only half the size of it’s day cycle crews
—
but tonight had been a grand exception to that rule. A new belt had been discovered out along the IF-57 at 2200 hours, and the day crews were clocking overtime until reinforcements could arrive. Tired, overworked miners were a high-risk group for injury, and stupid, sloppy mistakes became the norm.

Jilly set her cup of perk on the counter beside the data terminal and began using the terminal to check her netmail account. She typed in her username and password.

The screen changed to a view of her inbox, and Jilly noticed that the most recent message was from Kieran. It was marked
Urgent
and the subject line was
Trouble
.

Jilly frowned, hoping nothing had gone wrong on Kieran’s trip to tag his big claim. The last thing she wanted was to have to send a medevac shuttle after her best friend.

Her palms were suddenly sweaty as she brought Kieran's message on screen. She began reading:

Jilly, I hate to involve you in this, but I’ve gotten myself into some trouble with one of the clans. They’re going to come looking for you to gain leverage over me. Get away from the outpost, okay? Lie low for a while. If you need to reach me, I’ll be at the Da Shon orbital transfer station all day tomorrow.

-
Kieran

Jilly’s brow was angrily furrowed. “What the Infernal, Kieran!” Her nostrils were flared and her blue eyes were narrowed to slits. “What happened?” She considered writing a reply to his message, but then she thought to check the timestamp on the message
—
2355
—
and then her watch
—
0347. The message had been sent almost four hours ago. She had to get moving. But Kieran owed her some answers, and she was going to get them.

In person.

* * *

Kieran groaned. He became gradually aware of an alarm
—

BLING
 
.
 
.
 
.
BLING
 
.
 
.
 
.
BLING
 
.
 
.
 
.

—
echoing painfully into his consciousness, and there was a revolting metallic taste on his tongue that made him want to gag. Those unwelcome sensations eventually woke him up, and he reluctantly cracked his eyes open. He frowned, noticing that he was sitting on the floor with his back propped painfully against the door frame.

“What happened?” He tried to shift his position to take the pressure of his back, and merely succeeded in awakening a thousand sleeping nerve fibers that alternatingly ached, throbbed, and burned.

His eyes skipped around the room. An empty sleeping pallet lay to his left, near an open door, which led to the room’s cleansing station. The far wall contained a viewport, which looked out on an impressionistic swirl of streaking, rainbow-colored light. Apparently he hadn’t thought to blank the screen before
 
.
 
.
 
.
falling asleep against the door? He must have been sleepier than he thought.

For a lingering second Kieran was mesmerized by the view of trilinear space. Even as accustomed to its beauty as he was, he could stare at it for hours.

But the insistent alarm
BLINGING
through his brain reminded him that he had to get up to the cockpit before they arrived at Da Shon.

Kieran’s eyes wandered right, to the other side of the room
.
 
.
 
.
 
.

There was another sleeping pallet against the wall there. This one wasn’t empty, and the occupant wasn’t stirring
—
despite the alarm.

Frowning, Kieran got unsteadily to his feet and walked over to the bed.
What happened last night?
he wondered again, still confused to have awoken on the floor rather than in one of the two beds. He stopped beside the occupied bed and shook the lump that was curled into a fetal position with even its head tucked beneath the thermal blanket.

“Hey, Ferrel, wake up, kid.”

The lump stirred and turned over.

Kieran blinked.

“Dimmi?”

“Yeah?”

“Ahh
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Kieran pressed a hand to his suddenly throbbing head. He rubbed his forehead absently, worriedly. It was coming back to him: Dimmi pulling him into the room, kissing him, trying to seduce him
 
.
 
.
 
.
and then
 
.
 
.
 
.

“Dimmi, what happened last night?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” she said, her eyes narrowed suspiciously as she gazed up at him.

“What's the last thing you remember?”

She smiled coyly at him. “Well, let's see
.
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Dimmi swung her legs off the bed and covered a yawn with her hand. The bed covers fell to her lap, revealing that she had gone to bed in her clinging, black masser-hide bodysuit. Kieran was grateful to see that she wasn’t naked. That filled in a few of the blanks at least.

Kieran’s head was throbbing mercilessly under the
BLING-BLING-BLINGING
assault of the alarm he’d set. He turned to look over his shoulder at the door, where the room’s security camera and audio pickup was: “Alarm off!” he yelled, hoping the ship’s computer would hear him.

The alarm grew silent, but continued echoing in his head. Kieran turned back to Dimmi with a grimace. He was just in time to see her bolt to her feet and fling a wide right hook at his jaw. Her fist connected solidly, and he was knocked off his feet.

He lay sprawled and blinking up at her from the deck
—
his jaw now throbbing in addition to his head.

Dimmi’s face was red, and her brown eyes were blazing. She kicked him viciously in the ribs.

He let out a yelp and curled around the fresh injury.

“What was that for?!” he demanded.

Her foot was raised and poised over his crotch. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t stomp.”

Kieran scuttled away from her, wheeling backward hand over hand. “Hold on a minute!”

She began slowly advancing on him. “The last thing
I
remember is going into the cleansing station in my cell, fishing around inside my undergarments, and finding that you’d already had your sweaty hands in there! And now
—
” Dimmi looked around the room. “I wake up in your quarters! You keficking pervert!” Dimmi’s face was full of loathing and disgust.

Kieran backed into a wall, and Dimmi loomed over him.

“Get up!” she roared. “Get up and fight like the man you aren’t!”

Kieran was blinking stupidly up at her, trying to figure out how Dimmi could have recovered her memory, but lost all the memories she’d accrued while she’d had amnesia. Clearly she didn’t remember trying to seduce him.

Dimmi kicked him again, aiming for his crotch, but he had the presence of mind to deflect the blow off of his knee
—
which subsequently erupted in a flash of white hot pain. It was the same knee he’d hit aboard the
Corollary
.

Kieran bolted to his feet
—
his injured knee nearly buckling. “I said hold it!” He grabbed Dimmi roughly by the shoulders.

She spent a moment struggling viciously, but to no avail. Then she headbutted him. Kieran’s eyes involuntarily shut as their heads cracked together. He stumbled back against the wall, with one hand unconsciously reaching up to his throbbing forehead.

When his eyes opened a second later, Kieran saw Dimmi take half a wobbling step toward him, and then her eyes rolled up in her head and she sank to the deck with a
thud!

Grimacing and rubbing his forehead, Kieran stepped to Dimmi’s side and gazed down upon her.
Headbutting someone when you’ve just recovered from a serious head injury
 
.
 
.
 
.
not the smartest thing you could have done.

He was grateful, though. Dimmi had been in a terrifying rage. Obviously she had awoken in her cell at some point to discover that he and Ferrel had removed all of her concealed weaponry. Worst of all, she had discovered that they’d removed the explosives she’d had hidden in her bra. He couldn’t blame her for being angry about that, but the way she’d reacted to waking up in the same cabin as him
—
after she’d insisted that he accompany her last night
—
was confusing. Just a second ago she had been insinuating that he might have raped her. The last thing she remembered was waking up in her cell?