The Reforged Trilogy: Book 1 — Crucible of Stars
Chapter 31
Integrity
“Death is the end to all roads.”
– Corrien Markav, professor of Dailon Studies, AUM (212 PA)
Tiberius rushed down the stairs and down into the cargo hold. Xia was already there, retrieving her laser from where it had hung since Coldhand delivered Vyron. Had that only been a few hours ago? It seemed like days. Grimly, the doctor belted her gun back into place.
Kessa stood up on the catwalk, gripping the railing tightly and favoring one of her legs, probably banged in the crash. To Tiberius’ amazement, Gripper wasn’t back with Kessa, but waiting, trembling next to the airlock. He had a welder clutched in his shaking claws. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was all he had.
“So, are… are we going to save Smoke or what?” Gripper asked with an almost impressive display of quavering bravado. “I checked the airlock and it’s mostly working so let’s go do… whatever it is we’re going to do!”
Xia stood beside the Arboran. “What’s out there? I’m assuming there was a good reason for ramming the ship into a building.”
“Nihilists,” Tiberius answered, nodding. “I’d guess there’s about twenty of them left outside. The rest are trapped inside the cathedral or tunnels we collapsed on them. Coldhand’s out there and he’s got Maeve… She wasn’t walking on her own. Let’s get her out of his hands and onto the bird. The Gharib police and CWAAF can mop up later. We’re just here for Maeve.”
“Got it,” Gripper squeaked.
Xia nodded. Tiberius punched the release on the airlock. The inner door hissed open, but the outer one creaked and grated for a moment, straining against fallen rocks and metal. Finally, it slid out of the way too. The three made their way out of the Blue Phoenix, weapons held at the ready.
The world outside was all tumbled, broken black masonry. The spotlight mounted onto the underside of the Blue Phoenix was smashed and dark. Only the gray moon and a sprinkling of stars lit the ruined church. It looked like an overturned cemetery. Shattered slabs of stone lay everywhere and two of the walls had fallen outward in the collision, leaving just one corner of the cathedral still standing. It towered over the wasted scene like a cruel alien god. For a moment, Tiberius feared that Maeve had been caught under the toppled walls.
“Gods…” Xia whispered.
A new shape appeared, silhouetted against pale sand and dust. It was Coldhand, his monstrous metal hand glinting red. He ran toward them, Maeve limp in his arms. There was a dark stain across her breast. Tiberius charged at Coldhand.
“You killed her, you bastard!” he shouted, ripping his NI pistol free. “There isn’t a hell deep enough for you, but I swear I’ll send you to every single one!”
Coldhand didn’t flinch. Tiberius pointed his gun at the younger Prian, but the dark shape on Maeve’s chest wasn’t blood — though there was plenty of that smeared across her skin. It was Kessa’s baby boy cradled safely in Maeve’s arms, somehow fast asleep.
“Uh, why didn’t you just take your fighter and get out of here?” Gripper asked as Coldhand ran toward them.
“Because your little ramming trick buried it under an entire desert’s worth of sand and rock,” Coldhand answered.
He handed Maeve over to Gripper. The Arboran dropped his welder at once and took her, staring fearfully at her colorless skin and shallow breath.
“She’s not dead, Tiberius,” Xia said. “But she’s close.”
“Oh, Smoke… What happened to you?” Gripper asked.
“The same thing that’s going to happen to the rest of us if we don’t get up in the air,” Coldhand said.
The crash had bought them only a temporary reprieve. Nihilists were already pushing their way through the rubble, those who had managed to get out of the tunnels before Tiberius collapsed the entrance or found shelter against the remaining walls. One of them wore the same bright red robes as the Lyran Emberguard that still lay dead in the Blue Phoenix mess.
There had to be at least thirty Nihilists charging toward them. Coldhand yanked Tiberius back as a glowing line of white laser scorched the sand at his feet, followed by half a dozen bullets that shattered stone and sprayed the Blue Phoenix crew with gravel. Only distance saved them and that was quickly dwindling.
“Get back!” Tiberius shouted, gesturing over his shoulder to the open airlock. “Get into the Phoenix!”
Gripper and Xia were already running away into the ship, the two Prian men close on their tails. Tiberius yanked out his com.
“Duaal! Duaal, get those engines up and ready to take off!”
“I can’t,” the boy said. His voice hissed over the channel. “The engines won’t come back up!”
“What? Why not?” Tiberius asked, huffing.
“You ran the Phoenix into a church!” Duaal said. “That might have something to do with it!”
“Damn it!”
Tiberius dove through the outer door of the airlock as swiftly as his old, aching hips would allow, turned and then slammed it shut. The light beside it cycled from green to red. Sealed. The rest of his crew was inside, but so was Coldhand, Tiberius noted ruefully. Xia already had Maeve laid out on the deck, snapping her long fingers impatiently while Kessa ran to get her kit.
“The bird took some damage in the landing,” Tiberius said as calmly as he could manage, but his deep voice cracked. “We’ve got the Phoenix sealed and the CWAAF is on their way. We should be safe enough until they arrive.”
Everyone jumped as a hiss issued from the airlock. A burning smell filled the tense air and the lock began to glow faintly.
“My torch!” Gripper cried.
“They’re cutting down the hatch,” Coldhand said.
“How long until CWAAF gets here?” asked Xia.
“They said two hours,” Tiberius answered. “And that was about twenty minutes ago.”
“But there’s no way we can hold out for over an hour!” Gripper said.
Kessa ran down the cargo bay stairs, taking them a pair at a time and threw the medical kit into Xia’s waiting hands. Duaal was close on the Dailon’s heels, ignoring a furious look from Tiberius. Xia flipped open the kit and began spraying the deep wound in Maeve’s ribs with antiseptic. The canister hissed, sputtered and died. Xia shook it angrily and tried again, but the can remained stubbornly empty. She frowned and filled a syringe with something Tiberius didn’t recognize.
Kessa lifted her baby from Maeve’s limp arms, weeping openly. Baliend yawned and opened his large black eyes to regard his mother. He burbled happily and held out his chubby blue arms.
“My baby, my boy. My little Baliend,” she said between kisses. She knelt and whispered to the unconscious Maeve. “Thank you. Thank you for bringing my family home to me.”
“It’s bad,” Xia said. “Maeve’s lost a lot of blood and I can’t close up the wound or the air will collapse her lung. If we don’t get her to a proper hospital in the next thirty minutes, she’s going to die.”
Coldhand snarled. “No!”
“Why do you care what happens to Smoke?” Gripper asked.
“I called the Gharib police,” Duaal interrupted. “Again. They won’t move any faster, though. They’re still waiting on the CWAAF and griping about budget cuts.”
“Won’t anyone come to see what’s going on?” Gripper asked. “I mean, there’s been a crash! Surely everyone in the city heard it!”
“This is Stray,” Tiberius said, shaking his head. “Half the people on this planet are on the run from something — either criminals or those hiding from them. No one is running toward trouble. Not unless there’s something in it for them.”
“So we’re on our own until the CWAAF arrives?” Gripper asked.
“Yes,” Tiberius answered.
The airlock sparked and smoke began to rise from the burning fibersteel. Tiberius closed the inner door. It would buy them only minutes, but he wasn’t ready to die so easily. Kessa held her son tightly to her and stroked his tiny thatch of white hair.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“We can’t get this old bird off the ground,” Tiberius admitted. “So we sit tight and defend ourselves until the CWAAF comes to bail us out.”
“Wait, why can’t we fly?” Gripper asked. “We hit with the nose of the ship, right? But the fuel and engines are all in the aft.”
“I don’t know, but the engines won’t engage,” Duaal said.
Gripper frowned and rubbed his shortened ear, gasped in pain and stopped. “There are only sensors and stabilizers in the front. We should be fine to fly, if kind of wobbly and blind.”
“Nothing is working,” Duaal insisted. “The computer said something about a null-field integrity compromise and shut everything down.”
“What?” Gripper asked. “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”
“Does it matter?” Duaal asked.
“Does it matter? By the Green, yeah, it does! It means something happened to the null-field lines.”
“Those fields don’t matter unless we’re in SL,” Duaal said. “They shouldn’t be stopping us now!”
“But trying to engage superluminal drives with compromised null-fields would tear a ship into atoms,” Coldhand said. “Any ship’s computer system is designed to lock everything down and prevent that from happening.”
“Can’t you tell the computer to just ignore it?” Tiberius asked. “We don’t need to fly all the way back to Axis, just out of here!”
The air in the hold was thick with the smell of burning metal. The Nihilist must have gotten through the outer doors and were working on the inner ones.
“That’s a hard-coded safety system,” Gripper told Tiberius. “The whole point is to keep people from dying just because they’re too impatient for null-field repairs.”
“But the null-inertia control lines don’t run to the beak of the ship,” Coldhand said, frowning. “They shouldn’t be damaged.”
Gripper nodded, clenching and unclenching his huge fists. He kept glancing at the airlock door. “Yeah, yeah. But like I said, the computer core and sensors are all up there. One of them is probably damaged and reading the data from the NI generators wrong.”
Tiberius stared at the airlock, too. The inner door shuddered in its frame and Tiberius could hear voices screaming for blood on the other side.
“Can you fix it?” Duaal asked.
“Maybe…” Gripper said. “There’s an access hatch on the outside of the nose. If I can get to it, I might be able to fix the sensors enough to get the computer to release the lock. But that’s if it’s even a sensor problem… If the computer itself is busted, it’s going to take weeks to repair.”
“Can you get to the hatch?” Tiberius asked.
“Yeah. I can use the same airlock that old Red-and-Dead broke in through. That Emberguard guy,” Gripper said. “I… I need someone to cover me. I’m not sure I can do it quiet enough to keep the guys outside from noticing and I really don’t want to die.”
Coldhand and Tiberius looked at each other.
“I don’t trust you, boy,” the captain growled. “You’re staying right next to me.”
“Fine,” Coldhand answered with a shrug. He looked at Maeve lying still and pale on the floor. “I’m not letting her out of my sight, anyway.”
“Well, someone needs to go,” Tiberius said. “And I–”
“I’ll do it,” Duaal interrupted.
“No,” Tiberius snarled. “No way in any hell!”
“There’s no time to debate this,” Duaal told him. “I’m going with Gripper. You two should be here, with Kessa and Vyron and the baby. And Maeve. Better to keep our best fighters here where there are more lives to defend.”
Coldhand narrowed his eyes, but the hunter didn’t argue.
Tiberius did. “Xia can go!”
“She’s the only doctor we have! She needs to stay with Maeve. I’m going!”
“I’m ordering you to stay!” Tiberius shouted.
Duaal turned away and gestured to Gripper.
“Let’s go,” the boy said.
With an apologetic glance back at Tiberius, Gripper followed Duaal up the stairs and out of the hold.
“That boy! Why do I have a bird full of hard-headed young chicks?” Tiberius shouted, shaking his fist after the departed Duaal.
“You hired them,” Coldhand reminded him.
The old cop was getting himself entirely too worked up over a single stupid teenage boy. If Duaal was as overconfident and foolish as he seemed, he would die. If he didn’t, then what was the point of all that shouting?
“Get that gun ready,” Coldhand told Tiberius. “They’re almost through the airlock.”
“I didn’t hire Duaal,” Tiberius said, but drew his weapon. “Let’s make this good and loud and pray those Nihilists bastards will be paying more attention to us than Duaal.”
Coldhand shrugged. “Pray all you want, but no one’s listening.”
“How can you say that?”
The question came from Kessa, standing behind the two Prians. She held Baliend against her shoulder and cocked her head toward Coldhand.
“I prayed every day on Axis for help,” Kessa said. “And He sent me a miracle. I met you and Maeve there.”
“That wasn’t a miracle,” Coldhand told her.
“Wasn’t it?” Kessa asked. “But maybe the even bigger miracle, I’m learning, is that you two didn’t carry on merrily killing each other instead of bringing me here. And you brought my Vyron back to me, Coldhand. I thank God every day for you, for Maeve and for what you’ve done for me. In spite of yourselves.”
Coldhand narrowed his eyes. “I’m starting to regret that choice.”
Kessa stared back defiantly. A loud clang came from the airlock and a blackened scrap of fibersteel fell to the floor, edges glowing red with heat. It would be only moments before the Nihilists were inside. Kessa and Xia jumped.
“Shouldn’t we move Maeve?” asked Kessa.
Xia shook her head. “No. There’s already air in her chest and it’s putting pressure on her lungs. She shouldn’t have been running around like that, but I suppose there wasn’t any other choice. If we move her now, we risk tearing the wound wider or getting more air in there.”
“But what if someone… you know, steps on her?” Kessa asked. “Or hurts her?”
Xia wiped bloody bubbles off of Maeve’s lips with a folded piece of gauze. The Ixthian closed her medical case and stood, resting her six-fingered hand on the grip of her gun. It was shaking, Coldhand saw, but none of that quaver made it to the doctor’s voice.
“We’ll just have to keep that from happening,” Xia said.
“We?” Kessa asked.
“Me and Xia,” Tiberius answered, and then indicated Coldhand with his out-thrust jaw. “And that traitor over there, I guess.”
“I’ll need a new cell for the Talon,” Coldhand said, ignoring the insult. “Mine’s dry.”
“I don’t keep batteries for those things around here. I passed my Talon on when I retired,” Tiberius snorted. “Like any proper officer would.”
The hunter nodded once, but his blue eyes were on the airlock. There was a spit of blazing white as the Nihilists finally cut through the lock, followed by a heavy thunk as the bolt pulled back. Kessa took a step away, clutching her baby.
“Get Baliend up to the medbay with Vyron,” Xia said. “Close the door and lock it. Hurry!”
“But I want to help,” Kessa protested.
“You can help by getting out of here,” Xia said. “Go be with your family.”
Kessa turned and ran up the stairs, vanishing into the ship. Xia turned to Coldhand, flipped the slender laser pistol in her hand and grasped it by the refraction chamber. She held it out toward the bounty hunter.
“You’re a better shot than I am,” Xia said.
“Yes,” Coldhand agreed.
He took the offered gun. It was a light weapon, but it was something. Coldhand stood protectively over Maeve as the airlock grated in its tracks and then ground open.
“Hurry!” Duaal hissed.
“I thought you said to be quiet,” Gripper whispered.
“Hurry and be quiet.”
The Arboran crept gingerly along a narrow fibersteel ledge that led up to the nose of the crashed Blue Phoenix. It was barely wide enough for Gripper to stand on, much less try to scamper over behind Duaal.
It was a long drop down to the ground, but that wasn’t what frightened Gripper. He was born on a world of trees that towered like starscrapers and never fallen. Not until the sycona that ended up sending him through a strange gate and into Alliance space.
But the Nihilists swarmed beneath Duaal and Gripper, charging through the shattered walls of the cathedral to claim vengeance from those hiding inside. They were all shouting to one another, screaming that their master was dead, others that he was still alive and demanding the heads of his enemies. Duaal flinched and paled with every cry of Gavriel’s name, but he kept moving.
Worst of all were the Nihilists who laughed and grinned and promised to join the gloriously dead soon. Gripper held tightly onto the hull of the Blue Phoenix, willing himself to climb silently. Tiberius would be just furious when he saw the new claw marks… Gripper just hoped he would still be alive to get yelled at.
Up ahead, Duaal edged around the ship slowly, too. Everything was slippery with a fresh coat of phenno and even the nimble Hyzaari was having difficulties climbing it. He carried Gripper’s tools in a battered box balanced on his shoulder and struggled to maintain his balance.
Gripper held his breath. How long before one of the Nihilists looked up and saw them?
The footing grew more treacherous as they neared the front of the Blue Phoenix. The nose of the ship was crumpled and smashed like paper. Gripper and Duaal had to duck in between sensor spars, many broken or badly bent. Their ledge walkway was torn away in several places, requiring both the mage and mechanic to leap the gaps. After what seemed like hours of climbing, Gripper crouched beside a ruined fibersteel panel and gestured for Duaal to stop.
“Here it is,” Gripper said.
“Doesn’t look too good,” Duaal whispered.
“Neither does the rest of the ship, Shimmer.”
The fibersteel was cracked and crumpled alarmingly. Gripper tugged on the handle of the access hatch and it groaned, but didn’t open. The two young men froze, but the Nihilists below didn’t seem to have noticed — they were too busy cutting their way through the larger airlock below.
Gripper bit one huge knuckle. There was no way the panel was opening in a civil manner. He took a steadying breath, then sank his claws into the fibersteel and tore the cover free. Gripper winced as it shrieked in loud metallic protest, but he still heard no change in the commotion below to indicate that the Nihilists might be swarming up to kill them.
Duaal balanced the toolkit on a pair of sensor spars and leaned over the ledge, staring down.
“Gripper, hurry!” he hissed. “They’ve cut the airlock open!”
The Arboran risked a glance downward and gasped. How could they possibly survive this? Even if Gripper managed to get the NI lines straightened out, Tiberius would be taking off with a ship full of Nihilists who outnumbered them ten to one. Duaal snapped his fingers at Gripper.
“There’s no time to worry. We have to do this, Gripper.”
“Right,” Gripper said and turned back to the now open panel.
“Aim for their legs,” Coldhand said as the airlock opened to reveal a sea of wild eyes and black robes. “Make them climb over each other to get in. It will buy us some time.”
Xia winced at his brutal advice, but said nothing. Tiberius only nodded in agreement. Most every being in the worlds was ready to throw principles to the wind to survive, Coldhand noted with chilly satisfaction. The doctor and the honorably retired officer were just as willing to maim the oncoming Nihilists as the loathed bounty hunter was. They had dropped their ship on top of hundreds of them. Honor meant nothing in the end, like the countless men and women who had fallen defending it.
Coldhand couldn’t stop himself from glancing down at Maeve. She had gone underground to save Baliend from the Nihilists, to save a baby boy that wasn’t even Arcadian. And both Tiberius and Xia could have retreated, locked themselves behind more doors like they told Kessa to do. But they remained here with Maeve and would fight to the death to protect her.
Maybe these people actually had honor.
Coldhand brought his eyes and gun back up as the swarm of Nihilists screamed for blood and charged into the Blue Phoenix cargo bay. It had been a strange day.
“No!” Gripper cried.
Duaal shot a look down at the sea of Nihilists seething below.
“Quiet!” he hissed. “What’s wrong?”
Gripper pointed to a bundle of red and white wires running through a bracket inside the hatch. A small light set into the metal glowed a contented green.
“Green is good, right?” Duaal asked.
“It means the lines are fine,” Gripper said. “It means it’s the computer. Either the core is busted or the cables aren’t connected to something in the engines!”
“You said that would take days to fix!”
Gripper banged his head against the hatch and Duaal didn’t tell him to stop. It was all over. In spite of everything they had tried, it was over.
Kessa tiptoed quietly into the cockpit. She could hear shouts and shots echoing up from the cargo hold now. Tiberius and Coldhand were fighting for their lives. For all of their lives. Xia was supposed to be hiding, locked away with Vyron and Baliend.
But she couldn’t do it. These people had risked so much, given up so much for her. Kessa wanted to cry, but even more, she needed to help. And what was the point of everything Coldhand and the Blue Phoenix crew had done if Baliend and Vyron died now?
No one is running toward trouble, Tiberius had told them all. Not unless there’s something in it for them.
Kessa sat down in the big pilot’s chair. Tiberius was a large man and Kessa sank down into his seat. In her arms, Baliend seemed to sense her fear and cried in tiny, hiccuping sobs. Kessa rocked him absently and read the message flashing in red on most of the control screens.
NI field integrity compromised
Engines disengaged
Kessa didn’t understand what the glowing message meant, but it wasn’t the engines she needed now. The young Dailon mother searched the maze of controls and sensors, readouts and displays, chewing her lip until she found what she was looking for. Kessa found with relief that the communications system was still set to the Gharib police frequency. She switched it on. The video was turned off, but she had sound.
“Hello…? My name is Kessa,” she said. “Can you hear me? I’m a passenger on board the Blue Phoenix.”
“An hour at least and that’s the best we can do!” said a harried-sounding male voice on the other end. “Just like the last time you called. We don’t have the resources to expend on this!”
Kessa swallowed hard and hoped Maeve wouldn’t be too angry with her when this was all over. If she lived.
“I know,” Kessa answered. “There’s someone here on this ship. Her name is Maeve Cavainna. Look up her bounty.”
She gave the man on the other end a moment and was rewarded with a gasp. “Thirty-five thousand cen? Oh my God. And you say she’s on board the Blue Phoenix? And she’s alive?”
“For now. But she’ll be dead inside ten minutes,” Kessa told the cop. “If you want the full bounty, you’ll have to hurry.”
“But why would you turn in someone on your own ship? I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to,” Kessa said. “Just do it!”
