Collision Course (Class 5, #6)

Chapter 43

CHAPTER 43

Dav once again found it hard to keep up with the Hasmarga. The warrior, Rul, who was leading him to the breach point, was fast.

When they reached the stairs at the far end of the passageway, Rul came to a stop, and called down the stairwell. Dav guessed it was to one of the warriors who’d gone down to the engine room, but he pulled up short, blinking as a monster emerged from below. It took him a moment to realize it was one of the warriors but he was covered in babies. At least six clung to him, hanging on to his suit wherever they could.

The two warriors spoke quickly to one another, and Dav stepped aside to let the baby carrier through before he joined Rul. The warrior led them up two flights before he stepped back into the main corridor.

Dav could see where they’d come through—the door was damaged and hanging at an angle into the passage. He followed Rul to it, and looked inside.

It seemed to be a maintenance room. There was a ladder up to a hatch, which was closed.

Dav checked his time. It had taken them ten minutes. Sazo said the drone would get to the Havelan in fifteen.

He patched into his comms. “We’re below the hatch. Let me know when the drone arrives.” He waited, but there was no response, and he thought he could hear the faint crackle of interference.

He glanced at Rul, but he couldn’t communicate with him if Sazo wasn’t there to translate.

Was this Pyre interfering?

Rul pointed up, made a motion as if to ask if he needed help carrying the charges.

If they were the ones Dav thought they were, he would not. He shook his head, and Rul gave a half bow, and ran out, leaving him to it.

Gone to help with the babies, Dav guessed.

He checked his suit, checked his helmet, and climbed the ladder up to the hatch. If he couldn’t talk to Sazo, Sazo would at least see him waiting. There was nothing Pyre could do outside the ship.

He opened the hatch, which swung downward, and felt the strange resistance of the force field beyond, like a squishy cushion pushing back at him.

He had to exert himself to pull himself through and balance on the edge of the hatch hole.

He turned slowly to orient himself.

Sazo’s Class 5 hung so close it seemed almost touchable, and beside it was the Hasmargan ship, a strange, alien shape that would have Kila, the head of his explorations team, in raptures. As he studied it, the Barrist arrived—massive, fast. It came almost too close, then backed away, given the crowded airspace.

He felt better just seeing his ship.

“Sazo?” He could just see the drone, black and cylindrical, moving toward him. It was short, the length of his arm at most. He had been crouched down, holding one of the grips beside the hatch hole, but when the drone reached him it didn’t have the power to get through the force field that was keeping him in place.

He tested the metal hoop, found his boot fit under it, and wedged himself in before he slowly rose to standing.

As he reached up and pulled the drone in, the struts of the hatch made a strange squeak, and it rose up from below and slammed shut.

“Shit.” Dav awkwardly tucked the drone under his arm and attempted to open the hatch, but it was not budging.

Pyre?

It had to be.

And the force field was probably blocking his comms with Sazo.

He knew there was a force field outside the launch bay, and one here, but he wasn’t sure if it covered the whole of the Havelan .

He looked around for the next hand hold, and couldn’t find one close enough to reach. He would have to trust the field to hold him in place to get to the next one.

He got the drone firmly tucked up against his side, rose to a half crouch, and took a few steps forward.

He felt the hold the force field had on him stretch, weaken, and then break. He grabbed the hand hold just as he lost contact with the side of the ship, and his feet floated out from under him.

“Dav!”

“Sazo.” His voice, even to his own ears, was weak with relief.

“She locked you out.” Sazo didn’t make it a question.

“She did. How was she stopping the comms?”

“There is only one comms receiver on this ship that’s working, and she controls it. She listened in on our plan and decided to stop it.” Sazo sounded weary. “With you outside the ship, I can communicate with you directly.”

It was what it was. Pyre had tried to thwart them at every turn. Even when it didn’t make sense.

“What now?” Sazo asked.

“If I can’t get back in, then I can go around. Blow the doors from the outside.” Dav didn’t like that option as much, as the debris would blow inward, but if Rose—if everyone—moved far down the passage, they should be safe.

“I’ll tell them to set up well out of range,” Sazo said. “I can take control back of the drone, pilot it down to the launch bay.”

“No, it can’t get through the force field. Can you hover it close to me until we’re almost there, though, so I can use both hands to hold on? The force field around the body of the ship is a lot thinner than at the maintenance hatch, and I’m assuming the launch bay, so I need both hands to keep from floating away.”

The drone tugged from under his arm and he released it. Sazo put it up over his head and he gave a nod of relief.

“Tell the others to make sure they wedge open the doors to all the rooms they need access to and from,” he said. “Pyre obviously found her way into the hatch system. She’s taking over more and more of the Havelan . There’s no saying what she can control now.”

Sazo hummed in agreement, and then Dav concentrated on moving from hold to hold, making his way down the side of the ship to the launch bay.

To blow it up.

The temperature felt colder.

Rose shivered, even with her suit on, and turned her head in the direction of the cold air. It seemed to be coming from a vent in the ceiling.

It gave her a headache.

The warriors had moved Gerna beyond Captain Priyan’s office, closer to the stairwell, and so far the warriors who’d gone down to the engine room had brought up about two thirds of the babies.

One had taken on the grim task of find all the babies who’d been killed, and there were now six little bodies lying along the wall.

Rose hoped that was all of them.

The warrior standing watch over Gerna and the babies turned toward the vent as well, and it suddenly hit Rose.

Pyre was making it colder.

“Why are you doing this?” she called out.

“If you are all dead, then there is no need to open the hatch,” Pyre said. “Your partner is gone, I shut him out of the Havelan , and he will either die outside, or be taken back onto one of your ships. If you don’t die of the cold along with the Hasmarga, I will change the air again, and kill you.”

“Does what the Hasmarga warriors are doing now for the dead babies seem like a willingness to discard the dead to you?” Rose asked. “Does it look like they’ll just go away if you kill everyone on board? Or will they have even less to lose when it comes to blasting onto this ship to collect their deceased?”

There was no response, and Rose wondered if it was shocked silence or pouting.

She was so done with this.

“So you locked Dav out when he went out the hatch?” she asked. She wondered if Pyre understood what he had gone there to collect.

“He cannot bring whatever it was he went to fetch into my ship to cause damage.”

“So did a drone fetch him, then?” Rose asked. She had thought the plan he and Sazo had come up with to break open the doors was a good one, but she had not anticipated Pyre locking him out. They should have thought of that.

Again, Pyre refused to answer. She hoped it was because she couldn’t see what was happening outside the ship, and she didn’t want to admit it.

“Turn the temperature back up, Pyre. If the Hasmarga die, there will be multiple breaches of this ship as their people come to collect them.” She rose to her feet. “Do it now.”

“No.” Pyre said nothing else.

The lead warrior, Rul, who had taken Dav up to the breach hatch, came up the stairs, and settled the five babies he was carrying next to Gerna, and then gestured to Rose to come closer.

“Rose.” Sazo’s voice came out of his helmet.

“Speak English, she’s listening,” Rose warned him.

“Yes. Dav is walking on the outside of the ship. Pyre locked me out of the comms for a bit, but she’s let me back in, I think so she can catch what we’re up to. Dav’s going to set the charges on the outside, then I’ll get the drone to tow him out of the blast radius. You need to be well away from the launch bay because the blast will go inward doing it this way, not out.”

“You’ve told the Hasmarga?” she asked.

“I have.”

“It’s good to talk to you,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you,” he said, after a moment of startled silence. “I’ve missed you a lot.”

“We have a lot to catch up on when I’m out of here. Speaking of which, how long until Dav gets things in place?” She didn’t like the idea of him being in space without protection when the blast detonated, but Sazo would make sure he was all right.

“Another ten minutes at least.”

“Pyre is trying to kill the Hasmarga. She’s turned the temperature right down.” Rose could see the warriors were moving slower, and the babies had stopped glaring at her and whirring their wings.

“That’s something I can try to reverse. But there are so many missing and broken connections on this ship, I’ve found it difficult to take any control.” Sazo sounded frustrated.

“Pyre has the advantage, because the system would be similar to her own programing.” Rose wished for the first time that Irini had come with them. She would have known how to break in. “How about we just break the cooling unit, rather than trying to control it.”

“I could try to overload the circuits.” Sazo’s voice was thoughtful. “It would be easier.”

“Good luck, and hurry, if you can.” Her words puffed out in a white mist as she spoke, and she turned to see the warriors putting all the babies on top of Gerna, as if to crowd them together to generate as much warmth as possible.

She was alarmed at how still they were now, when before they seemed to be vibrating most of the time.

“Pyre, stop it. Stop it or you’ll kill these babies.”

Pyre didn’t respond.

One of the Hasmarga suddenly stumbled, and there was a clang of metal as something hit the wall.

It was the lever Dav had used to open the door to Priyan’s office.

Rose moved back to Rul, who was leaning against the wall, half bent over. “Sazo, can you hear me?”

She only had to wait a beat before he came through. “Yes.”

“Where will I find the equipment that’s cooling the air?” she asked.

“Down in the engine room,” he said. “From the rough schematics I’ve managed to build by poking through things, it should be somewhere to the right as you walk in.”

“Got it.” She had avoided the walk down four flights so far, but now anger motivated her. Besides, it would help warm her up.

She scooped up the lever and headed for the stairs, grateful there were no doors to the stairwell—it was all open. One less way for Pyre to trap them.

She couldn’t jog down, or move at all quickly. Her lower back hurt, and the baby felt like she was pressing outward with hands and feet as hard as she could, but Rose made better time than she thought.

She found the body of the guard who’d been ordered to go with Dav to the engine room lying in a bloody puddle.

The warriors had found him. And they had not come to play.

The door to the engine room was propped open, so she guessed the Hasmarga or Dav had taken precautions. The room was slightly warmer than above, but whatever cooling system Pyre had unleashed was also at work down here. Especially as the engines were dead and no longer generating any heat of their own.

She turned to the right, found the first piece of equipment, hefted the lever, and swung. Hard.

It weathered the blow well, so she studied it for a weak spot, swung again, battering it until it was dented. Then she moved on to the next machine. This one had a lid on it, so she levered that open, then smashed the circuitry she found inside.

There was one more piece of equipment left, and she saw it was clipped into the floor. She levered off the floor restraints, braced against the wall, got a foot up on the side, and shoved it over. Then she smashed it a few times for good measure.

Hopefully she had managed to destroy them all.

She swung the lever onto her shoulder, and was headed out, when something moved just in her periphery.

She stopped, heart pounding, and slowly turned to look.

A Hasmarga baby crouched in the shadows.

“Come little one.” She extended her arm and shuffled closer. “Let me take you upstairs to be with the others.”

It moved toward her, then away, eyes huge and dark.

“Come on.” She held out the hand that had been holding Gerna’s, and suddenly it leapt, grabbing onto her arm with all six limbs.

“Ouch. You are spiky.” She sucked it up, and made it out to the stairs, then had to abandon the lever at the bottom because she needed a hand to help pull herself up the stairs using the railings.

When she finally reached the fourth floor, shivering and slow, all eight Hasmarga warriors turned her way.

They were weak, but she thought some of them reached for their weapons, then relaxed again when they saw it was her.

One came to pry the baby off her arm.

“Is it warmer?” she asked, then remembered they couldn’t understand her.

“They say it is,” Sazo said from Rul’s helmet. “You’re just in time. Everyone needs to brace.”

She slid down the wall, pressing back against it, and was sorry only the launch bay was about to blow. She wanted to torch the whole ship.