The power indicator on the suit still glowed strongly. Thank Dynark for Welkin’s wafer battery technology. Even this old model was rock-solid in the power department. And the various power losses and surges from the ship’s power seemed not to have affected the suit.
“We’ll get you out of there soon, Dad,” I said more to myself than anyone else. It was a promise I intended to keep, but we needed a stretch of at least 24 hours when we weren’t running from exploding asteroids, fascist armadas, or creatures bigger than our ship.
I returned to the top level of the Vostok, and made my way to the brig.
Even out in the corridor, I heard Qualt groaning—although I’m not sure if he was making those sounds for my benefit or not.
“Fucking A, kid. What the hell happened?” He was slumped on the floor in the small cell, but didn’t look injured at all. “A.Z. forget how to fly a starship?”
“Never mind,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t dead.”
“Almost, sport, almost. Seriously, what the hell is going on? You didn’t break my ship, did you?”
“The ship’s fine,” I said. Although, in truth, I wasn’t so sure.
“It better be.”
As I turned to go, Qualt called after me. “Hey, kid. Come back a sec. There’s something I want to run by you.”
“What?”
“Listen, I don’t know what your boss is playing at, but this is rapidly turning into a situation here. You feel me?”
“Not really.” I was curious what his angle might be.
“I’m guessing that the Mayir are either in system already or real close. What do you think will happen when they hail the Vostok and no one answers?”
“Not my problem.”
“Not your problem?” he chortled. “I beg to disagree, manito. See, when Uncle Prundt realizes he’s got a rogue ship on his hands, he’s going to assume the worst—i.e. traitors, thieves, hijackers. I believe you and your compadres fall into that latter camp.”
“Again, not my problem.”
“Bear with me here, sonny. Because a ’57 Lamprey-class such as the Vostok has some intrinsic value, the good Field Marshal may be a bit hesitant to reduce it to so many scattered atoms, so he’ll knock out the engines and send a dozen of their crimson legionnaires in to do pest control. No offense. I can see you’re a studly guy and all, but you are no match for a legionnaire. And likewise for Miss Agrada and little Professor Ladybug.”
I didn’t say anything—just let Qualt talk. He was on quite a roll.
“There really is only one play here, son. Let me out so I can answer when the big man comes a-calling. And then we hand over the Kryrk and bask in our collective rewards.” He grinned at me. “I can see those wheels turning, Jannigan Beck. You know I’m right.”
“Uh huh. We’ll see.” With that, I spun on my heel and strode away from the brig.
“Beck!” Qualt called after me. “I am not fucking around. You need to let me out of here pronto.”
When I returned to the bridge, I found Ana-Zhi cursing at the console and flipping through displays seemingly at random.
“That doesn’t look good,” I said.
“It’s not. The cthulian broke something. I just can’t trace it.”
I could tell from looking out of the main viewport that we had set down somewhere. Judging from the darkness, it was probably inside the cavern that ran a half a kilometer into the base of the mesa beneath Roan Andessa.
“Did we make it?” I asked Ana-Zhi.
“Of course we made it. What do I look like?”
“So we’re safe?”
“If you call nearly being ripped in half by a cthulian safe, then yeah.”
“I meant safe from the Mayir.”
She slammed the heel of her hand against a relay box, trying to get something to work. “Damn it!”
“The Mayir?” I asked again.
“What? Yeah. There’s six hundred meters of stone between us and the surface. Unless they’re running geo scans with deep EMR, there’s no way they’d know we’re down here.”
“Good.” I sighed as I eased myself into the co-pilot’s seat. “Then we can talk about reviving my father.”
“Yeah, that’s not a good idea until we figure out why the power’s so sketchy. You don’t want to be halfway through a karokinesia procedure and everything goes dark.”
“Surely the MedBed has a battery back-up?”
“For simple procedures. But karokinesia takes a little more AI than the built-in unit. That’s why you run it off of the ship’s brain.”
“Have you ever done that before?”
“What, wake someone up?”
“Yeah.”
“Only once. When I was crewing for Donal Sarkelan.”
“Sarkelan? I thought he died.”
“Yeah, this was a long time ago. I was way younger than you. We were in the Old Cariq mines on Rygond for six months. One of our guys contracted taricula syndrome and we had to put him under until the supply drone came back.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Three, four months?”
“Then you revived him?”
“Once we were all inoculated.”
“And you used the facilities on a ship?”
“We had an expedition base in the caves. Full infirmary with medics. Not just a MedBed. People tend to get kind of chewed up when mining for cloud diamonds.”
That was for sure.
“So it wasn’t really the same situation as we have here?”
Ana-Zhi shook her head. “No. Didn’t matter, though. The guy didn’t make it.”
“Great.”
“Yeah, it’s not quite as simple as you’d think. You should access the KB. Learn more about it for yourself.”
She was right. I had a decent theoretical knowledge of the karokinesia process, but obviously no hands-on experience. I did know it was something that couldn’t be interrupted. The Sean bot had told me that the right way to resuscitate someone from long-term stasis was in a controlled environment with medical staff monitoring. Unfortunately that was looking like less and less of a possibility. Especially
