Starfighter Down Read online

  Captain Osprey turned back to her footage. First, she showed the sick bay. A man woke groggily and clutched his head.

  “That’s Park?”

  “Yes, sir. He was unconscious after the gas canister ruptured in the hangar. Lieutenant Yorra took him to the sick bay to recover, and when he woke up he had a headache.”

  “He was concussed,” Harmony chimed in. “A headache is a natural reaction to such an event.”

  “She has a point,” Kira said.

  “That’s what I thought. Except then I realized that Petty Officer Mick Perry exhibited exactly the same reaction after my Sabre docked in the hangar.”

  Now it made sense why she had multiple feeds open. She was comparing Lieutenant Park’s reaction with Petty Officer Perry’s. When Osprey pulled that frame forward, she saw a small mousey-looking man flash a smile at Captain Osprey, and then clutch his head as a sudden pain caused him to wince.

  “I see they both had some kind of head pain, but what makes you think it was caused by this parasite?”

  “Well it’s hard to see, but—” A control board appeared on the desktop. Casey hunched over the table as she attempted to wind back the film. “There! Did you see that?”

  “Not exactly… Harmony,” Kira said, “zoom in and sharpen the image.”

  The control board was pulled away from Osprey as the AI adjusted the frame, zooming in and sharpening on the speck of dust the captain had pointed to in the frame.

  The enhanced image showed an oversized mechanic in grease-stained coveralls ducking under the wing and plugging in a diagnostic cable as a thin, web-like strand dripped down from the starfighter. The parasite itself curled in the aluminite jar was barely the size of her thumbnail. If that was the parasite in the holovid—and it could be, about the size and worm-like shape of it—it fell onto Petty Officer Mick Perry’s hair near his ear.

  Seconds later, he gripped his head.

  “How many more of these things are on our ship?”

  Captain Osprey winced. “I expected you’d ask that, and I’m sorry, sir, but the answer is I just don’t know.”

  Kira heaved a great sigh.

  “Admiral,” Harmony said. “The last shuttle has reached the Mammoth.”

  “Thank you. Tell Colonel Volk I’m on my way back.”

  “There’s one more thing, sir. The question of how it hitched a ride back on my ship in the first place.”

  “And what’s your theory on this one?”

  Now it was time for the third frame. This was the same footage from Osprey’s Sabre they’d reviewed before, she could tell by the timestamp and the tail number on Captain Never’s ship, not to mention the drone he was pursuing.

  She fast-forwarded through the phasing maneuver that had caught Kira’s eye, only stopping when Osprey herself fired upon the Kryl drone, raking its underbelly and rupturing a fuel sac.

  “See that?”

  Kira crossed her muscular arms. Osprey had turned the tables on her in an unexpected way. The roles of student and teacher had been momentarily reversed. “Fuel? Or some kind of bodily fluid? It’s common knowledge that the drones are not machines, but living organisms. When they’re hit, they bleed.”

  “Yes, sir, but I think this is a trick. Not only does the drone enter the atmosphere after I shot it—Harmony’s lidar readings have it landing on the moon under power—but I flew right through that liquid. Whatever it is, I think that’s where I picked up the parasite. It must have clung to the outside of my starfighter and when I got back into the hangar, infected the first host it could find.” She swallowed and fought off an involuntary shiver. “It could have been me, but it got Mick instead, sir.”

  “How would that little thing survive the vacuum?” It looked so insubstantial and weak, curled up at the bottom of the jar.

  “Maybe the liquid protected it somehow. You said yourself, the Kryl aren’t machines, they’re organisms, and if their drones and ships can survive the vacuum, then it’s not a big leap to assume the parasite can, too.”

  Kira cursed. The captain had a point, a damn good one that she didn’t have time to deal with right now. But she was in command. It was her job to take problems like this in stride.

  “Harmony, I want you to sweep the ship for signs of similar lifeforms. Contact Major Obin Seklor in Engineering and tell him to search every ship in that hangar with a microscope. Also, make sure every starfighter and shuttle gets scanned as it comes back into port. Advise him to section off a part of the hangar for quarantine. Also, alert the Chief Medical Officer. I need her to come up with some kind of screening protocol in case anyone else shows up with another one of these little vermin lodged in their nose.”

  When she was done giving orders, she looked over at Captain Osprey, who had melted in her chair as the stress of the investigation fell away. Harmony leaped into action, scanning the parasite with a laser and delivering missives to various parts of the ship.

  “Captain, you report back to the sick bay and make sure you haven’t been infected yourself.”

  “But Admiral, I haven’t—”

  “I don’t want to hear any excuses. You’re not flying until I make sure you’re clean and healthy.”

  She straightened and gave a sharp salute. “Yes, sir!”’

  “Admiral, there is one more thing,” Harmony said. She had taken the form of Captain Osprey again. The captain blinked at the AI’s hologram as she recognized the resemblance.

  “What did I forget?” Kira asked.

  “Nothing, Admiral. It is simply that we’ve located Captain Nevers.”

  “What!” Osprey jumped out of her seat. “Where? When?”

  “On Robichar, in the foothills thirty kilometers northwest of the spaceport.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “I cannot tell, Captain. Only that the cube from his starfighter has finally connected via tightbeam. I am once again picking up radio communications from the moon’s surface as well, so perhaps Captain Nevers cleared whatever was jamming the airwaves.”

  Captain Osprey’s face was flushed, her eyes wide, and even the bags under her eyes seemed to vanish in the sudden rush of elation. She turned to Kira, longing plainly evident in her face.

  “Fine, you can join the Search and Rescue team—but only after you report to the sickbay and are cleared by the Chief Medical Officer herself.”

  “Thank you, sir! I won’t let you down.”

  “Admiral!” Another voice spoke through Harmony’s facial interface. The face morphed from Osprey’s feminine features into those of a gruff man with a shining hairless pate. “The Kryl just finished clearing the mines. We need you up here.”

  “On my way, Colonel. Is the shuttle unloaded yet?”

  “Nearly.”

  “Good. Contact the captains of each longhauler and tell them to plot a hyperspace course back to Ariadne and prepare to jump.”

  Eighteen

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Elya ground his palm into his forehead. Dirt got into everything down here—his eyes, his mouth, under his fingernails. He spat in disgust.

  How could I have been so naive?

  All the signs had been there. The priest’s kind offer of help. Charlie’s sudden cooperation in planning the infiltration. The whole crew’s ever-so-reasonable request to leave Hedgebot behind. Even Thom’s irrepressible nervousness should have been a dead giveaway. Of all the men he’d traveled with since that morning, he had gotten to know Thom the best. And still he hadn’t seen it.

  Elya should have trusted his instincts. His whole being had screamed out not to trust the priest. Escorting Heidi and Hedrick up into the mountains had seemed like the best option at the time, but he should have returned to his plan after delivering the woman and her son to that nutty cult of fools. He should have struck out on his own and focused on getting back to the Fleet. There’s always another option. If he’d stuck to his plan—to his training—he’d never have been betrayed, let alone stuck in this dank hole in the groun
d.

  You can only be betrayed if you allow yourself to trust people in the first place. That was a painful lesson, one it seemed Elya kept having to relearn.

  They’d taken his pack and his water and left him Hedgebot, disabled and powerless. He had no weapon, not that the blaster had any juice left after the fight with the sentinels. Without water, he wouldn’t last more than a couple miserable days down here. Without his bot, he wouldn’t be able to signal for help.

  The hole itself was small and cramped, barely wider than both arms outstretched, with walls made of soft dirt. The grate over top of the makeshift prison cell was fashioned to a metal frame and held fast with a chain. The soil was soft enough that if he managed to get up there and gain enough leverage, he might be able to dig the soil out around the frame with his hands, making the hole wide enough to drop the grate inside the hole, then haul himself out.

  But when he tried climbing the walls, all Elya did was pull dirt down on top of himself. When his arms were filthy and the dirt began to burn in his eyes, he gave up and stopped wasting his energy. He hadn’t even come within arm’s reach of the grate.

  They’d chosen well. The hole was deep, the soil too loose to climb. He was going to die down here.

  Elya jerked out of a restless slumber to the sound of engines roaring overhead. He would recognize the noise of a Sabre in flight anywhere. Their hybrid engines were designed to work in space as well as in atmosphere, where they made a noise that had always reminded him of a yzir, a predatory cat species native to Yuzosix, purring happily—right before it pounced on a field mouse.

  They’re still looking for me! Hope flared in his chest.

  “Hey. Down here! I’m alive. Hey! Come back!!”

  His mouth was so dry and parched that his upper lip split from being stretched too wide. Who’s the fool now? They couldn’t hear him. Screaming was a fruitless endeavor. They weren’t even really looking for him—they were looking for the tightbeam connection with the cube, not an idiot pilot who got himself trapped in a hole in the ground.

  Still, he shouted. What else could he do? Elya screamed himself hoarse for what must have been a solid hour after the roar of the jets had faded from hearing range.

  It was all he could do. And even that wasn’t enough.

  Feeling useless, he removed a folding screwdriver from a hidden compartment on Hedgebot’s mechanical body and used it to take the bot apart. It was a lost cause. The contact plates had been mangled, as he’d already seen. He was pretty sure the battery still had some juice, but it wasn’t something he could fix without new brackets.

  The rage he’d felt while yelling for help seeped out of him, then. Like Hedgebot, Elya too had lost his power source. He lay there, lips throbbing, back aching, full of raw emotion, a condensed cloud of anger and shame. He eventually went numb. The red soil sapped him of his strength and fed it to Robichar. Robichar, in turn, would feed it to the Kryl.

  The circle of life always ended in death. If he was lucky, he would die of thirst and exposure long before the xenos found his body.

  At first Elya mistook the faint whine for a ringing in his ears. Eeeeeeee. He’d been here for hours and, since the starfighters passed overhead, he’d imagined many such noises. The lack of water and the heat of the jungle, even in the relative cool of the dank hole, had begun to make him dizzy and lightheaded. He didn’t trust his own mind. When the whining noise paused, there was a faint rustling of footsteps, and Elya’s throat seized. Was it a Kryl groundling? Or had Charlie returned to finish him off? Or maybe it was the priest come to gloat about his foolish plan to stay on Robichar.

  Hah.

  “Elya?”

  A face appeared over the grate. Elya felt certain he was hallucinating. “Heidi?”

  “Finally.” She exhaled deeply. “Thank Animus I found you.”

  Wait a second, he thought. Is this another trick? Fool me once, et cetera. He was so tired and dehydrated that even finishing his thoughts seemed like an extraordinary effort.

  Elya gathered enough spit to swallow, then croaked, “How did you find me?”

  “Heard you yelling. Even then it took me a while.”

  Elya struggled to his feet, his sore body protesting. The power of reason seeped through the mist of despair. “But… you… what are you doing out here? Where’s Hedrick?”

  Her lips pressed into a thin line and though her face was cast in shadows, Elya recognized the way her face pinched as her jaw hardened. His mother got that look when someone threatened one of her boys. “Hedrick went missing this afternoon.”

  Elya’s jaw fell open. “Oh, no.”

  “When you didn’t show up with the rest of the men and the priest, I knew something was wrong. They told me you got killed by the Kryl, but I didn’t believe them, not with Hedrick still missing. They almost had me convinced Hedrick had wandered off. We searched these narrow tunnels in the back of the cave all morning, it feels like. When the priest came back without you, I knew they had been lying to placate me.” She twisted her lips and hung her head. “He would never run away without me. Not at a time like this. So I snuck away, stole one of the skimmer bikes they had hidden near the ravine and came looking for you.”

  So it had been a skimmer he’d heard! Not the auto they’d left on the mountain pass, but a hoverbike. Elya couldn’t help but laugh. Heidi sure showed them! It felt good to laugh.

  “I’m glad you find this amusing, but Hedrick is still out there! He could be in danger! I need to find him. Please.” Her voice cracked on the last word and Heidi choked back a sob.

  She was as desperate as he was. She was also his ticket out of this death-trap. Elya gestured around him. “Can’t do anything from down here.”

  Heidi yanked on the grate. “It’s stuck. Hold on, there’s some stuff in the bike’s storage compartment.”

  She brought back a couple pieces of linen—rags or towels—and tried to wrap them around the grate to haul it out, but it wasn’t enough fabric to reach the bike. She disappeared and returned a few minutes later with a big rock, which she dropped on the chain a few times in a vain effort to break it.

  “Forget that, just dig around the outside of the grate.”

  She found a smaller stone shaped like a trowel that she was able to use to dig out the edge of the grate. From his limited vantage point, Elya saw dirt fly and then heard a clunk as the stone struck another piece of rock.

  “Uh, Elya. This is cemented in.”

  He cursed. “Damn it. Try digging farther out in front of me.”

  It took several more agonizing attempts, working the problem from both sides, before they found a solution. Elya bruised his leg muscles and bled from his fingernails clawing dirt out of the wall, while Heidi began to excavate the cement, digging out at its edge with the stone spade and her fingers. Fortunately, whoever had installed this makeshift prison cell hadn’t built it to last forever. Heidi reported excitedly when she found that the cement was only about 15 centimeters thick. She got under it pretty quickly. Then Elya, elbow deep in the dirt wall, located a tree root and was able to haul himself up higher in the shaft to kick out big chunks of earth.

  “I see it!” Heidi cried. Seconds later, the dirt Elya was clawing at with his filthy hands shifted and light shone through. They brushed fingertips.

  This breakthrough reinvigorated their efforts. They quickly widened the hole enough for Elya to pass Hedgebot gingerly through. They widened the opening considerably more, until it was large enough to fit Elya’s head and shoulders. He had to wriggle and worm his body back and forth, kicking more soil downward, but it was chopped and loose now.

  “Come on!” Heidi cried. “You’re so heavy, you have to push with your legs.”

  Elya spat dirt out of his mouth. “I’m—pffttt pfftt—trying!”

  She yanked on his flight suit. A fabric seam tore at his shoulder. Elya finally got his dirt-filled boots on top of that tree root and kicked. His shoulder popped loose and he and Heidi fell, together, back ont
o the damp forest undergrowth.

  Elya had never been so happy to see a canopy of trees in his life. It must have been late afternoon, approaching nightfall. The skimmer bike lay against a tree nearby, its storage compartment flipped open with Hedgebot lying on its back atop a pile of rags. The temporary foot Thom had given him stuck out at a weird angle compared to the others.

  The sight popped an airy sense of relief at having escaped certain death and replaced it with a hard fist of anger. Elya came up on his elbows, then rose shakily to his feet.

  “If we don’t know where your son went, how are we going to find him?”

  “I was really hoping you’d have some idea where they took him.”

  Elya’s brow furrowed as he thought furiously. What do they want with the boy? Why would they kidnap him?

  He didn’t know. Unless Hedrick saw something he wasn’t supposed to and they just wanted to get rid of him… but why take him and not his mother? What did he do to deserve such treatment?

  A high-pitched whine cut through the forest, silencing the background music of chirping birds.

  Elya hurriedly kicked some dirt back toward the hole they’d dug, then scrambled for the skimmer bike. In the distance, in flashes seen between thick tree trunks, another skimmer bike zoomed by. A brown robe fluttered about the driver’s frame. The hood was pulled down over the man’s head, so Elya couldn’t see the face, but he recognized the priest’s luxurious yet worn homespun robe. He clutched something to his front. A small figure.

  A small boy-shaped figure.

  They were gone in a flash.

  Elya pushed Hedgebot into the storage compartment, snapped it closed, and jumped onto the bike. It hummed to life as Heidi hopped on behind him, holding tight to his waist as they pursued the priest and the boy.

  Nineteen

  “Alpha one zero niner, prepare for take-off.”