With most of my senses cut off, all I was aware of was a faint high-pitched whine in the darkness and the ground rumbling and jumping beneath my feet. This went on for a half a minute at least and I felt myself curling in a ball on the floor, instinctively trying to protect myself.
Once my suit’s sensory grid stabilized, and I realized that I was still alive, I sat up and examined what was going on around me. I could see something had affected the stability of this part of the station. Cables swayed, lights flickered, glow tracks winked out and then back in. Dust and dirt, dislodged from gantry girders, fell in delicate streams from above and hung in thick clouds below.
Through the observation window I saw all kinds of bots swarming the outer landing deck, spraying foam on the blackened husk of a destroyed ship. But what I was seeing could not be possible…
“Jannigan?” Ana-Zhi Agrada’s voice crackled over the comm link. “You okay?”
“Yeah, what the hell was that?”
“Something blew up the Freya.”
Even as she said it, I knew what I had seen. We were attacked. A red ship armed with void cannons.
The Mayir.
Before I could even begin to process what had happened, a voice came on the comm channel. A female voice.
“Hello? Anyone there?”
“Chiraine?”
It was her voice, but how could this be?
“Yes, Jannigan, are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Where the hell are you?” Ana-Zhi asked.
Then a figure stepped out thirty meters away at the far end of the corridor. She waved gently.
Chiraine had escaped from the Freya just a few minutes before the ship was attacked. Or, according to what she thought, was intentionally scuttled. The blip on my Aura was her, not Yates.
I quickly explained about finding my father and Yates’s betrayal. Chiraine hadn’t heard any of our comm broadcasts.
My father…
The thought of him lying amidst those machines hit me hard. With the Freya gone, how was I going to safely get him out of hibernation?
“I think Obarral was in on it,” Chiraine said. “Likely with the Mayir.”
“Someone certainly shut down the Freya’s proximity plates,” I said.
“Start at the beginning,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Soon after you left, Obarral sent me down to the hold to check on a wonky status light. I didn’t find anything and then I realized that he had locked me in the hold. I tried to contact you, but he also took control of the comm array.”
“Obarral was in communication with us,” Ana-Zhi said. “I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t think anything was wrong on his end.”
“What did you do?” I asked Chiraine.
“I mostly tried to get out. When that didn’t work, I tried to initiate a secondary communication array—which also didn’t work. My final idea was to get into an exosuit and use the its comm unit to alert you guys. That’s when I saw the Mayir ship.”
“What was it doing?” I asked.
“Just sitting there. Like it was monitoring us. I couldn’t hear anything going on over the comm, of course, so I had no idea if Obarral was talking to them. I started to get a little paranoid about being locked in the hold, so I decided to try to get out of the main airlock and go and find you all. Luckily, Obarral hadn’t thought to lock down the exterior hatch.”
“Why did you think Obarral was working with the Mayir?” Ana-Zhi asked. “He must have been killed as well when the Freya was destroyed.”
“Right before I left the ship I saw a life pod eject,” Chiraine said. “I think Obarral was on it.”
“He flew a lifepod out of a parked ship?” I asked.
“That’s a difficult maneuver in gravity,” Ana-Zhi said. “He would have to clear the landing deck.”
I knew what she was talking about. Life pods had minimal propulsion systems. It was a tricky move, but an engineer like Obarral could probably pull it off.
Ana-Zhi crossed her arms. I could tell that she had been blindsided by this betrayal.
“What I want to know is what happened to Yates,” I said. “Did you see him?”
Chiraine shook her head. “No. After Obarral left in the pod, I just wanted to get away from the ship.” She pointed down the hallway. “I went in that airlock and hid.”
“I think I know where Yates went,” Ana-Zhi said. She brought up Bandala’s topo on her Aura. “This isn’t the only landing deck. There’s a bunch. The closest is on the other side of Bandala, up six levels.”
I looked at my own topo. Like Ana-Zhi’s it was incomplete, with different areas grayed out. I could make out another landing deck, but it appeared to be nearly a kilometer away from where the Kryrk had been stored.
“What I don’t understand is how he got past the security bots,” I said. “He was paranoid about having the LVX and clearing the zones. Then he just left it and made his way across the whole length of the fortress? How?”
“He must have known something we didn’t,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Maybe the upper levels don’t have bots,” Chiraine said.
“Maybe,” Ana-Zhi said.
I could tell she was thinking about something.
“Are we sure that Yates escaped?” Chiraine asked.
“There’s only one way to be sure,” I said. “We have to track him.”
“And you’re positive that he has Kryrk?”
“Yes. Unless the vault you found was already empty.”
“This is bad,” Chiraine said, sitting down on a cargo crate. “Very bad.”
“What’s bad is the fact that we’re stuck in this godforsaken place,” Ana-Zhi said.
It finally sank in. We were trapped—trapped on an abandoned orbital fortress — with eighteen hours to go until the Fountain opened. It would only stay open for a few hours while the ships returned. And that would be that. In the best-case scenario, we’d be trapped here for seven years. Worst case: twelve. Or more.
“No,” Chiraine said slowly. “If the Mayir get their hands on
