We entered the access shaft and scrambled down the ladder. The hatch door at the bottom was open and the sled was still hovering below it.
“Yates? Galish?” Ana-Zhi called.
No response.
She jumped down onto the sled, RB drawn. I followed her, fear clawing at my gut. This felt like a trap.
“Anyone here?”
Then I spotted something.
It was a body, sprawled in a heap at the base of the pillar.
“Fuck me.” Ana-Zhi keyed the sled’s thrusters down and we plummeted ten stories to the ground. Then we jumped off the bobbing sled. As we got closer I could make out whose broken body it was.
No surprise. It was Hap Galish.
“Check him,” she ordered as she dashed around the perimeter of the pillar.
I didn’t really need to check Hap Galish’s condition. I saw where a judder knife had torn out his throat and most of his neck—right through his suit.
My gorge rose and I barely got my visor open before barfing up everything in my stomach. I slumped back on the sled and it was a few moments before I realized that I shouldn’t really be breathing the air in here. It was frigid cold and there was a strong odor of ozone.
“No sign of Yates,” Ana-Zhi said, returning to the sled. She activated her comm unit and sent a warning to Obarral and Chiraine. “Obarral, if you can hear me: Yates has gone rogue. He’s murdered Galish and is heading back to the Freya. Lock the ship down. If you see Yates, shoot on sight.”
Then she turned to me. “You okay, junior?”
I nodded and spit to clear my mouth. Then I sealed my visor once more. The suit’s D/O converters notched up and soon I was breathing safer air. But it didn’t make me feel any better. Neither did the fact that my suspicions about Yates had been confirmed.
“Back to the ship,” Ana-Zhi said. “Pronto.” She started to move, but I grabbed her arm.
“The LVX,” I said. It was still right here on the sled. That meant Yates wasn’t worried about security bots. “Can you operate it?”
She shook her head. “Not quickly enough. We’re just going to have to take our chances. But that reminds me. We need to go dark, you and me.” She was referring to our exosuit beacons needing to be deactivated. It was against all kinds of rules and safety protocols, but unless we killed our beacons, we’d be lit up like Christmas trees on Yates’s scanner.
With that taken care of, we took the sled and hustled back down the cargo tunnel, retracing our steps through the first depot towards the big hall with the murals. It was a longer distance than I had remembered.
“I just hope to Dynark…we get there…before Yates,” Ana-Zhi wheezed. She looked worse than just out of breath.
“Me too,” I said. “Has this ever happened to you before?”
She stopped and caught her breath. “What? Have one of my crewies go psycho? No, this is a first.”
In order to keep a lower profile just in case Yates was in the area, we had to ditch the sled. We hid it in a maintenance bay outside of the depot. Then we made our way through the big entrance hall with the dead maintenance bots, stealthily going from shadow to shadow. Once we got close to the airlock I chanced a peek out of one of the big observation windows to the landing deck.
Outside the Freya stood, parked peacefully where we had left her. There was no movement anywhere near her. Maybe Yates hadn’t arrived yet.
Ana-Zhi was probably thinking the same thing I was. “We need to stake out the area,” she whispered. “He’s got to come back this way.”
We split up and I hid behind some empty crates, while Ana-Zhi found a spot behind a low wall that acted like a corral for a line of the hover-carts. We both had good views of the hallway and the landing deck through an observation window.
I checked my RB and tucked myself into position. I generally hated to wait for anything. Waiting for a murderer to show up was even more stressful. I tried breathing deeply to get beyond the pain in my chest and the pounding at my temples, but I was wound too tightly.
Images kept playing back in my mind. My father—left for dead by Yates, as good as murdered. Then Hap Galish—his broken body, his butchered throat. The blood…
These thoughts weren’t helping. And probably would end up getting me killed. With some effort, I pushed them away and tried to focus.
I kept alternating my view, back and forth, between the window and the hallway. I cranked up the sensitivity of my external audio sensors even more and thought I could hear Ana-Zhi Agrada’s heart beating fifteen meters away from me. It was my imagination, of course. I could barely see her in the gloom, let alone hear her.
Just for a second I dared to glance down at my Aura’s scanner, hoping that Yates had forgotten to turn off his beacon. The scanner’s display was blank, just as I expected—
But then a faint blip popped on the screen.
It was down by the other airlock.
Shit! He was escaping to the landing deck through another door.
I sprang to my feet and ran towards Ana-Zhi. “The other airlock!” I cried.
“What?”
I gestured to the east, as I sprinted towards her. “He’s circling around us.”
During the next few seconds, time seemed to slow.
I remember my boots kicking up dust as I ran.
I remember glancing out of the observation window to see if I could spot Yates approaching the Freya.
I remember seeing something hovering in space beyond the Freya. It was red. A red ship. In the distance. And then—
Sizzling bolts of energy shot into the Freya.
A massive explosion of light and a roaring sound eclipsed all my senses. I was thrown to the ground as a shockwave hit. In the blink of an eye the observation window’s hyaline rapidly darkened in response to the
