Wren kicked open the steel door at the end of the hall. We stumbled into the harsh light on the tarmac, my eyes adjusting to the white sunlight as it shafted through a rent in the clouds. I heard the blast of pulse fire, then the roar of engines. Fareon beams sighted on the warehouse roof. Another licked out at the diving Markest and the ship buckled in flames. Its grey bulk crashed into the warehouse. Right on target, TK! Starrunner burst through a cloud of fire and landed beside us, smoking. I looked up to see two of Mong’s auxiliary warships screaming in, which he’d left to safeguard the cargo. We were screwed. Wren pushed me through the open hatch, yelling commands. TK lifted off at full impulse, miraculously dodging the sprays of fire left by fareons, even as Wren got the hatch closing. Our reserve shields took major hits. I could hear Molly’s voice caterwauling: “Danger! Warning. Shields at 4%. Structural overload. Expected hull implosion in T minus 30 seconds.”
I shook my head in despair, staggering to the bridge, the ship rocking to TK’s clever maneuvering.
The sensors were off the charts. Starrunner was toast. I looked over at Wren, my eyes vacant.
Wren seized the controls and spat fareon fury at the Warkhawk in pursuit. The vessel lit up in red but did not explode.
She gave a wild start. “Aw, fuck it!”
Her hand reached for the Varwol initiate. “No!” TK jerked forward to stop her, but too late. Starrunner’s warp engaged. We tumbled end over end in a funland of blinding multicolored light. Mong’s ships in immediate pursuit stretched out like pancakes, then flared.
I heard banging like unholy drums, the deafening peals of hell ogres, as if the gongs of oblivion were out there to reduce us to atoms.
Inconceivable forces arced from Varwol to Trellian gravity. Conflicting time and gravitational forces wreaked havoc on the continuum. Our bones were slowly popping from our joints, stretching to infinity. Wren, moving in slow-motion, released the Varwol, her face a rictus of agony. The ship dropped back to impulse, slewing sideways like some rogue comet caught in a collision of 3D and 4D realities. We floated in another realm, one with a black sky drawn like a curtain with pale stars, an eerie globe with craters below us. The ship idled; we blinked as raw agony throbbed all over but we were alive, as the sensors went quiet.
Were we in the same system? In a different time? No. My right hand was still gone. The agony was still there, of course, if not worse.
TK leaned over and vomited. He lifted himself up, pale as a ghost. He flicked some dials, pulled up a 3D visual. “We’re orbiting Feldris,” he coughed, a trickle of blood seeping at the corner of his mouth. My slow brain made sense of the name. We’d made Trellian’s moon in the few light seconds we’d been in marred, warped-up no man’s land.
In other circumstances we would have been stretched to nothingness, at the mercy of infathomable physics.
None of Mong’s ships showed on our sensors. I hoped they’d all been blown to space dust, entered the horizon of oblivion, but somehow I doubted that. How long would it take our pursuers, if any there were, to pinpoint our coordinates?
I slumped back in the co-pilot’s chair, holding my mangled stump under an armpit. The cloth Wren had wrapped around it staunched the blood. I motioned to her to bring the Myscol from the cabinet and every damn painkiller there. She brought down a dozen glass pill bottles. I downed them at once like a starving man. I chased them down with what was left of the whiskey. Wren gobbled a few herself while TK felt too sick to eat anything.
“Get us out of here,” I growled at Wren.
“We’ve got to get you to a surgeon.”
“I don’t know where the nearest black market op shop is,” I croaked hoarsely, “certainly not on that crater below us.” My voice, reedy and faraway, sounded alien to my ear.
“Molly,” I coughed. “Op shop’s nearest to, to—where the hell are we?”
“Feldris.”
“Feldris!” I gasped.
“Affirmative. Delta sector. Malron, Malron City on Gainor.”
“How long?” I cried.
“Four hours, three minutes, on impulse.”
“On Varwol, you silly girl.”
“Varwol at 1% light speed capability makes it two hours.”
“Set the course.”
TK set the coordinates and engaged the drive, what was left of it, and we were in the unreality of sub warp. I looked up through bleary eyes, my arm quivering, my legs spasming, and waves of nausea assaulting my shattered nerves.
Wren looked at me from a bruised face and through a blackened, swollen eye, but with a vindictive gleam and blood on the bowie knife belted at her side.
I could tell the way TK was shivering, it was the bravest thing he ever did, coming back with Starrunner and blasting our enemies.
He saw my incredulous look and gestured. “I hid in the hold, under the mattress and moldy blankets you gave Raez. They searched the ship, eight of them, looking for crew. Didn’t find any.”
“The phaso?”
“I’m afraid they got it. If it was in that strongbox you hid, it’s gone.” He bit his bloody lip. “Wren’s locator was dead. I knew you were in trouble. But yours was still active.”
So, the fact that they had not damaged my locator had saved our hides. It was still plastered to my blood-sprayed jacket, weaved into the fabric to look like a button. I flashed Wren what might have been a grateful, questioning stare.
She grinned. “You saved me from that sorry planet of Talyon, so the least I could do is save your hide.”
“You did well. I don’t know how you did it, but you pulled it off.”
