“What about Murroux?”
“It’s not looking good for him either.”
Shit, shit, shit!
“Get out of there!” I said.
“No.” It was Obarral. His voice was barely a whisper. “We’re too close.”
“Return to the ship,” I commanded. “That’s an order.”
“No can do, mon capitaine.”
Then both the video and audio feeds went dead.
9
“We need to go after them,” I said.
“How do you propose we do that?” Galish asked. He had been unable to activate any of the sled’s other cameras. Apparently the entire comm module had been shut down. The incursion team was completely on its own.
“We must have some more exosuits. We just follow their path. We saw where they went.”
“Yeah, we also saw those blast doors close behind them.”
“So, we open them?”
“You have a spare donokkal? I didn’t think so.”
“We can’t just do nothing. They could be in trouble.”
“We’re not going to be doing nothing. We’re going to be prepping the infirmary for seriously injured crew members. We only have one MedBed, so we’re going to need to do some improvising.”
“I don’t know anything about medical treatments.”
“I do,” Chiraine said. “Both my parents are surgeons. They forced a lot of first aid training on me and my brother.”
“You know how to operate a Medascap?” Galish asked her.
“Of course.”
“Great. You’re hired, sister. Meet me down in the infirmary.” He turned to me. “Captain, I suggest you stay at the comm station. Hopefully they’ll re-establish contact once they come to their senses.”
Waiting was killing me. And I was getting more and more pissed off.
I came to the bitter realization that Ana-Zhi, Obarral, and the rest of them weren’t professional crewers. Not at all. They were reckless. No better than a bunch of bounty hunters or Stygian rousters. Out for some thrills.
It was no wonder my dad got killed on one of these missions.
The thought burrowed deeply into me, and my thoughts darkened.
When we got back—if we got back—I was going to call Wallace on it. Demand an investigation. And if I found out that any of these dimbags were to blame, I’d—
“Hey,” Chiraine said.
I hadn’t noticed her come in. “I thought you were helping in the infirmary?”
“Everything’s set up. I can wait up here as good as down there.” She nodded towards the comm unit. “Anything?”
“Still dead.”
“How long has it been?” she asked.
I glanced down at my datapad. “Sixty-four minutes since we lost contact.”
“I’m sorry,” Chiraine said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“I kept pressing for us to find this node. I didn’t think this would happen.”
“Any time you go into a confined space, there are dangers,” I said. That was a little truism that had been implanted into my memory, but it made sense.
She sat down next to me. “Yeah, well, this is my first actual mission. And it’s pretty clear I shouldn’t have come.”
“What do you mean?”
“I pressed for it with the Shima. Demanded it, really.” She shifted her weight in the seat. “When I re-negotiated my employment contract last year, that was part of the deal. I was going to have a seat on the next mission to Yueld.”
“But they trained you for it, right?” You don’t send someone into an unpredictable and hostile environment without training.
“I was scheduled for training, but I kept putting it off. I thought I had plenty of time. The Fountain wasn’t supposed to open so soon.”
Chiraine looked down. In this light, she looked very young. Her eyes were soft and full of pain. And she was right, she didn’t belong on this mission. Neither did I.
At that moment, the comm unit sounded an alert.
“Open the goddamn door!” Ana-Zhi yelled. “We’re heading towards the ship!”
Chiraine and I raced to the launch bay. Galish was there by the air lock, peering through the portal.
“I have a visual on them!”
I looked out and saw the sled approaching the ship. Only three of the five members of the incursion team were upright on the sled.
The next several minutes were a chaotic blur. Once they arrived at the airlock, we ushered the team in. The ones who were still conscious were all bloodied and injured, and there were two unmoving bodies on the sled.
“Xooth didn’t make it,” Ana-Zhi said as she staggered into the launch bay.
“What about Murroux?” Galish asked.
“Alive,” she grunted. “Barely.”
Carefully Galish and I carried Murroux to the MedBed and Galish initiated the automated triage sequence. Then we attended to the others.
Yates was bleeding and looked like he was ten seconds away from passing out, but he lurched over to Chiraine. “We found the node.”
Ana-Zhi made her way over and slumped on to an equipment crate. “Get to work, princess. This better not have been for nothing.”
It took several hours to stabilize everyone. Murroux had to be placed in an induced coma, but the MedBed thought he might survive.
The crew members who were able to stood in silent remembrance of Xooth. His tiny broken body was wrapped in a sheet and placed in a storage tube in the hold. The company would return his remains to his family on Plargond.
Even though I had only known him for a short time, I was torn up about Xooth’s death. I kept asking Ana-Zhi questions but she was sullen and just wanted to retreat to her cabin.
“What are we supposed to do now?” I asked.
“You’re the captain. You figure it out.”
I returned to the engineering bay, where Chiraine was glued to her workstation. It was obvious that she had been crying.
“How are you holding up?” I asked.
“Not good. You?”
“Not good either.”
“I’m just going to keep working until I locate that fucking Kryrk.”
“But the node they found? That was the right one?”
She brushed a lock of hair away from her face. “Yes, A419.”
“And it’s not just going to lead us to another broken node, will it?”
“Hard to say. The Ambit is seriously fragmented. You know that.”
I didn’t know that, but I nodded like I did.
“It’s going to take a while to integrate A419.” She tapped at her biklode resonator. The
