Dying World Read online

  “Sure, you could do that,” his quiet voice came back. “How much you got in the way of rations? Lock yourself in there, you’re as good as dead. You know who this has to be.”

  “Lurkers, probably, like you said,” I allowed. He was right. Staying in there probably was death. Besides, if I closed that door I might not be able to get it open again. “Change of plan. I’m going to leave the armory door open so they can get in.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid, kid.” Wilson’s voice had somehow gone even more soft. “I’m gonna warm up the engines. You got until those bastards finish in that armory, and then I’m gone. Best get back quick. I told the others the same. I’m leaving the second they’re done, or I see trouble, whichever comes first.”

  “I’ll be there.” I squeezed through the armory door and peered up the corridor. I couldn’t hear anything yet, but they’d be here soon.

  I trotted exactly three steps, discovered how heavy the armor was, then slowed it down to a walk. That meant lumbering up the hallway, knowing that enemies were approaching, and that if they heard a single clanking step I was done.

  “Think, damn it.” I stopped, and realized my heart was thundering and my legs were burning. I wasn’t built for this kind of exertion. That was supposed to be the muscle’s job, which we’d brought a lot of.

  I had a little magic left, though my growing headache said I needed to be careful how I spent it, because I was going to need some serious downtime soon.

  I channeled a little fire through my body, temporarily enhancing my strength. The spell wouldn’t last long unless I fed it more magic, but it would last long enough to get me out of earshot.

  My clanking steps came faster than before, and I hurried down one corridor, and up another. Finally I stopped and rested against the wall. A thick sheen of sweat coated my face and neck, and less pleasant areas. I really needed to start working out, assuming I lived.

  “Okay,” I reasoned aloud, keeping calm. “The lurkers are making for the armory. Once they find it they have no reason to look for me. I’m no threat. The Remora is though. They know we’re here, and will attack the ship when it tries to leave.”

  I lurched into motion again, and started a winding path trying to work my way back to where we’d docked. I hadn’t made it far when the math became inescapably clear.

  No matter how fast I ran I wasn’t going to make it back to the ship before the others. I closed my eyes, and relaxed as I activated the comm. At least I wouldn’t have to run any more. “Wilson? I’m not going to make it.”

  “That sucks, kid.” His gruff voice sounded a bit more tender than usual. “Anyone else got a line on us?”

  “Wait for us!” came Erica’s voice. “Davvyd and I are almost there. Need forty seconds.”

  “All right.” Wilson perked up. He’d already written me off. “Get inside, and we’ll get—”

  I switched the comm off and closed my eyes. The full weight of what was happening hit me, and I sagged to my knees in the middle of the corridor.

  They were leaving me behind. I was going to die.

  My whole body seized up, and I fought back the tears. Everyone who’d told me I’d amount to nothing—had they been right all along?

  Maybe. But if they were, I was still going to die on my feet, damn it. It was better than just lying there.

  I climbed back to my feet and kept trudging up the corridor until I reached a T-intersection, then climbed a steep stairwell to the next level. That ended at a wide glass window that overlooked the hangar bay where we’d arrived.

  I wasn’t even sure why I was still going there, since I’d arrive too late. Maybe I just wanted to see them off.

  “Thank the lady,” I murmured, resting against the top of the stairwell as my heart rate returned to normal.

  The Remora sat on the far side of the hangar, a good three hundred meters away. It may as well have been light years. As I stared in resignation her engines rumbled to life, and the corvette lifted off.

  There was no waiting lurker vessel, or at least none that I could detect. They’d have docked somewhere in order to loot the armory, and that was the Remora’s one chance. If they could get away before the lurkers got back to their ship, then the lurkers probably wouldn’t bother chasing them.

  I held my breath as the Remora passed through the shimmering blue field that separated the docking bay from the frigid vacuum. They were going to make it.

  They accelerated quickly, dipping under a torn girder, then out into open space. Even though they’d left me behind, I was happy they were getting out of there.

  I was about to flip the comm back on to say goodbye when I spied movement in the black. Two rusty frigates, mismatched but no less lethal for it, emerged from cover to flank the Remora. They’d planned their ambush well.

  Both vessels fired gauss cannons, which used magnets to hurl a hunk of metal at incredible speeds. Crude, but effective and inexpensive.

  Two hunks of unprocessed ore slammed into the Remora’s main engine, which detonated spectacularly.

  She went into an uncontrolled spin, but both lurker vessels moved into a synchronous orbit and attached to her hull, one ship near the engines and the other the bridge.

  I went cold. Every relic hunter knew that lurkers were thorough, and didn’t leave crews behind. No one knew what they did with the bodies.

  Maybe I’d gotten the better end of the deal after all.

  3

  I cannot express the horror that overwhelmed me in that moment. I stood there quivering, gazing helplessly at the pair of lurker vessels attached to the Remora like parasites. Wilson and Erica and Davvyd and Sapphire…gone. They hadn’t been friends, but they’d been alive and now…just gone.

  So how would I avoid the same fate?

  I slumped over the railing, and tried to ignore the tears. It’s not like anyone would see me breaking down, but I still felt embarrassed. I’d been trained, and now I needed to use that training. Not cry and piss myself like a child. My instructors back at the academy would be horrified.

  So my first op had gone awry. I was still alive, and until that wasn’t the case anymore I needed to deal with each problem as it appeared.

  My breathing calmed, and the pain in my legs subsided to a dull ache. I considered my options. It didn’t take long, because there weren’t many. Either I needed to find an escape pod, a near impossibility on a vessel this close to the fringe, or I needed to hitch a ride on a lurker ship.

  As I mulled those options over, my salvation strode into view. Two burly men in scored body armor struggled out of a corridor carrying a crate, which I guessed must contain the rifles and body armor I’d given them access to.

  And if they were bringing it here…then they were expecting to get picked up. Of course they were. The Remora had been subdued. There was no danger. Why not use our LZ? In fact, why not bring our own ship back to haul the cargo, once they’d done for the crew?

  My whole body went cold. Even as the thought flitted through my head I knew it was true. And, as expected, the Remora began slowly limping her way back into into the hangar bay, the hull shimmering through the blue field.

  A plan began to form.

  The lurkers would load the cargo, and then they’d board the ship, and then they’d leave…and head back to wherever they’d come from.

  In the holos that would be some seedy base on the back of an asteroid somewhere, but in reality that wasn’t feasible. No, they’d need a base with atmo and that meant they’d eventually be returning to Kemet.

  I had to be on the ship when it left.

  That was going to be more challenging than it sounded, unless I could come up with a clever workaround to being in terrible shape. I needed to cross a three-hundred-meter hangar in the time it took them to lift off.

  Once I got there I needed to find a way into an airlock, and I needed to pray that it didn’t trigger an alarm the lurkers were monitoring. What could possibly go wrong?

  My first dilemma was
the armor. The stubborn pragmatist in me argued that my chances were higher if I ditched it, but the miserly scavenger in me couldn’t walk away from several thousand credits, especially given that I was in debt.

  I still had some fire magic. I could juice my strength and run. My father had always argued that you could force your body to do things. That the secret was your mind. That if you learned to embrace pain, then you could push past anything.

  Guess I was about to find out if he was right.

  The pair of lurkers walked their crate up the ramp into the Remora’s cargo hold. I winced when I saw the dark stain on the metal. Someone had bought it in the cargo hold.

  Another pair of heavily armored lurkers emerged from deeper in the derelict with another crate, and followed the first pair inside the Remora.

  I counted under my breath, and fifty-four seconds later the first pair emerged. Seventeen seconds later the second pair emerged and headed back the way they’d come.

  I’d used the air ducts to reach the armory, but they were going via the ship’s corridors. That would take something like ten minutes, one way. I wasn’t religious, but that had to be the maker watching out for me.

  A turbo lift stood a dozen meters away, which would get me into the hangar. If I could cross the hangar in less than twenty minutes I could sneak inside the ship before they got back.

  I lurched into motion and found a comfortable walking rhythm. It was hard, but manageable, even without the infuse strength spell. I grunted with each step, and thought about my father’s disappointed face if I didn’t make it home.

  I doubted he’d mourn me for too long, but he would be disappointed that his son hadn’t followed in his footsteps and made a name for himself. I loved my father, but he’d made it clear at an early age that my responsibility was to eclipse him.

  The lift had a simple panel, and I pressed the down arrow. It whirred into motion, and the platform floated down a level. I exited, and passed through a blue membrane into the cargo hold’s dimly lit expanse.

  “There’s no way this is going to work,” I muttered, as I forced myself into motion.

  Twelve steps later I paused, and channeled my final infuse strength. I’d wanted to wait longer before using it, but my limbs were screaming and I didn’t know how far willpower alone would take me.

  The spell helped, and I settled into an easy trot that was anything but. Every step sent shards of agony further up my shins, and into my knees.

  Adrenaline masked the pain, enough for me to soldier on, anyway. My father’s growling voice echoed in my ears, and I trotted ever closer to the Remora.

  My biggest fear, that a guard would emerge or one of the lurkers would return, was unfounded. I crossed the hangar, and reached the Remora’s blessedly cool hull.

  “Oh, lady, no…” Horror bloomed when I saw the pair of guards standing at the top of the ramp inside the ship.

  Neither one noticed me, and I ducked out of sight before they turned.

  I hurried around to the underside of the ramp, and paused to catch my breath as my heart thundered in my chest. Exhaustion pulsed a counterpoint to the pain, and despair welled up underneath it all.

  What the depths was I going to do?

  I couldn’t sneak up the ramp. I had a little dream magic left, but the closest I had to an invis spell was camouflage. I’d fade into my surroundings, but if I moved, the spell would break, and it could only fool one sense. That was no good.

  Could I somehow get inside one of the crates? No, they were already on the ship, and the ones they were bringing were being carried by very alert guards.

  I could ambush the pair of guards, and I might even take them down, but then what? Four more were coming back, and I didn’t know how many more were already inside the Remora.

  I huddled under the steps, my mind spinning. No solution presented itself. Was I going to die? This close to survival?

  Should I turn myself over? Maybe lurkers didn’t kill prisoners. Yeah, right.

  Eventually the lurkers with the crates returned, and I heard grunts as they muscled their way up the ramp above me. Their booted feet thudded directly over my head, and disappeared into the Remora’s cargo hold.

  Then the ramp began to retract, and exposed my cowering form. Thankfully no one was there to see it. They were all safely aboard the ship that was about to carry them back to Kemet.

  “No.”

  That one word sparked a deep resolve. I was going to live. I was going to find a way. I glanced down at my armor. There’d been no obvious helmet, but that seemed pretty stupid. It had to be better designed than that.

  I closed my eyes and probed the armor with my magic. The armor gave a faint echoing answer, ready to receive whatever commands it had been enchanted with.

  “I need a sealed environment, and internal life support.” Issuing the order seemed like a child’s nameday wish, and yet the armor responded. The wiry exterior slithered over my face, and a bright green HUD sprang to life.

  I couldn’t read the sigils, but the little blue cloud was probably oxygen. That was good. Now I just needed a place to hold onto.

  I looked up through the faceplate at the Remora’s landing strut, which would be retracting any second.

  Now or never.

  I stumbled over, and grabbed onto the strut. The ship began to rise from the deck, and the strut began to retract, with me attached.

  “Please don’t crush me!” I winced as the landing gear whirred shut, but I was folded into a comfortable area that might even have been air tight. It was too frigid for an unaugmented person to survive, but the armor might make it possible.

  If, and only if, the lurkers were flying directly back to Kemet. If they really did have a secret asteroid base I had exactly as long as life support held out, and then I was dead.

  4

  The adrenaline began to fade as the ship rumbled into flight. I felt a momentary lurch, then things normalized as the Remora’s artificial gravity kicked in. Well, they normalized for an instant anyway.

  “Errk.” My face was suddenly pressed against the landing strut, and I couldn’t lift it. The gravity was stronger this close to the hull, and well, we already talked about how strong I wasn’t.

  Thankfully, I still had the best defense an, uh, combat averse relic hunter can use. Sleep. I closed my eyes, and gave in to the inevitable. As darkness overtook me I idly wondered how long the life support would last.

  I couldn’t control whether I woke up or not. I’d done everything I could to make it this far. I’d earned a nap.

  That nap went on for quite some time as it turned out. When I woke up, there was a puddle of drool under my right cheek and the HUD had changed. There was now an inflamed border to the whole thing, a pulsing angry red that made it very clear something critical was wrong.

  I studied the HUD, and immediately spotted the problem. The little blue oxygen icon, a happy looking plant, was no longer happy. It had wilted into a near-lifeless brown shrub, and its roots were turning red. I don’t know how that equated to time, but the message was clear. Life support was failing.

  The air in the suit was a little stale, but only a little. I forced my breathing to slow, and relaxed a bit as my heart rate normalized. I had no idea how long I’d been asleep, but it had been long enough that my headache had faded to a dull throb. My legs burned, especially when I shifted in the armor.

  “Okay,” I muttered. I valued the oxygen, but sometimes talking to myself kept me moving. “How do I get out of this? I can’t count on us arriving on any sort of timeline.”

  The problem loomed there, as another leaf fell off the dying plant icon. Shit.

  “The life support is using magic. Air magic,” I explained to myself, because self was in primitive-animal mode and needed a little TLC. “The ship let me repair a panel with dream. I have dream. Can I recharge the armor?”

  I closed my eyes and probed my magic, which, as I mentioned before, lives in my chest. It’s easiest to think of it like a hun
k of radioactive matter that is now hardwired into my DNA. If I don’t use my magic for a while that hunk will develop a skim of magic, sort of like radiation. That’s how we power spells, but the closer mages run to dry the more it hurts.

  I focused on that skim, the purple-pink mass I could feel, and fed a tendril of magic to the armor.

  The HUD changed color immediately, and the angry red shifted to a rapidly flashing yellow. I kept up the flow of magic, and the flashing became less urgent, than stopped entirely.

  I kept going, until the edge of the screen was once more tinged green. The oxygen icon had stabilized and now looked healthy once more.

  I also noticed a change in another icon, though I had no idea what it did. The armor had a sort of paper doll icon, which I guess was meant to show me where battle damage happened. Above the paper doll was a golden crown that had been greyed out.

  Now it was starting to turn yellow. Faintly still, but the icon had changed when I fed the suit magic. Interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the newly rejuvenated plant.

  “Thank the lady,” I muttered, eminently pleased with myself as I inhaled clean, fresh air. “Okay, now I can think out loud. So we’re flying to their base, and we’ll probably get there in something like eighteen to twenty hours given the Remora’s top speed, which they’re probably using.”

  I had no way of knowing how long I’d been asleep, but I’d guess six hours? Something like that anyway. Theoretically I could sleep again, and when I woke up I could replenish the armor’s oxygen one last time. That would keep me alive until they reached their base, but I’d have to be awake when that happened.

  The seconds after the landing strut descended would be critical. I needed to get away from the ship and to a safe hiding spot before the ramp came down, or there was a good chance someone would see me.

  There was also the chance that people might be waiting at the LZ, which meant I was boned no matter what I did. I had to ignore that possibility though, since I couldn’t directly deal with it.