Human, page 27
part #1 of Humanity Ascendant Series
“Not as fast as we were,” Eve’s voice crackled, “but yes.”
Hela followed him back to the bridge where Bau sagged against a stanchion, glaring at them. She would have felt the terror of her doomed comrades.
“You killed my crewmen,” she said, weakly.
“We came here to keep you alive,” Eth said. “Those crewmen were weighing the ship down, killing you faster. That makes them the enemy.”
“I don’t see you jumping out,” Bau observed tartly.
“That’s because I bring more than dead weight to the equation,” he snapped back.
Hela should have been shocked to hear a Human talking to a princess of the HQE like that, but she was looking death in the face.
That tended to claim one’s attention.
“You said there were harvesting platforms down here,” Eth said, turning back to Hela. “They’d have to use pretty powerful beacons in this soup; are we picking up any signals?”
Gods! She turned to the comms station. “Caleb, do you hear anything?”
Caleb’s eyes grew wide. “Anshar’s itch! I’ve been hearing a signal but I thought it was coming from the cruiser beneath us. Now that you mention it, though, it’s getting closer and it’s not losing altitude…”
“Where is it?” Bau demanded.
“About a thousand meters off our bow and roughly eight thousand meters down.”
“Eve, make every effort to get us to that signal,” Hela ordered.
“They used to have condensing platforms at that depth,” Bau said. “I was planning to have them reopened if any were still afloat.”
“Well, ma’am,” Eth said lightly, “we might as well drop in for an inspection while we’re in the region. How big would you say it is? Large enough to accommodate a crash landing, perhaps?”
B au suppressed a shudder. This creature was a blank to her. How could she trust him if she couldn’t read him? Still, he’d risked his life and the lives of his people repeatedly for her, and he was doing it again in an attempt to save her from what she’d seen as certain death.
“They were supposedly the size of small cities,” she said, “but you can’t trust everything you read in a gas mining prospective.”
“I’ve got visual on the platform,” the Human sitting closest to her said. Bau looked at the holo.
A large station, roughly two kilometers cubed and hanging from a long string of massive gas bladders, was growing more detailed as they flew closer. Two smoking gouges on the upper level were punctuated by shuttles.
“Looks like someone managed to have the same idea,” said the Human next to her, his apprehension reassuringly clear to Bau.
Was their leader the only blank slate?
“They might be friendlies,” Eth mused, “but we won’t take chances. As soon as we touch down, I want everyone to switch headspace. We’re back to fighting in built-up areas, just what we were grown for.
“If you make contact and you’re unsure of their intent, put a hole in them.”
Bau wanted to protest, but she didn’t have a better plan to offer. Those two shuttles could easily have come from the enemy. Given that she’d brought only the one cruiser and the enemy had dozens of capital warships, it was probable that there were no allies to be found down here.
Still, she was unsettled by his easy ruthlessness, even if it was in her service. A few cycles ago, no native citizen would have dared to even think of harming a Quailu. She doubted that even Eth would have considered it.
Now natives drafted into house-forces were killing Quailu all over the empire and some of them were disturbingly good at it. She watched Mishak’s pirate as he organized their next desperate gamble.
He, certainly, was one djinn that could never be put back in the bottle.
“Getting an automated approach signal,” the pilot announced. “It’s sending us to a shield gate about five hundred meters from the upper level. I can make the target but not the recommended velocity. If I slow down, we’ll have dropped too far before we get there. This is gonna be a rough one, folks.”
Bau looked down at the hand on her elbow. “This way, ma’am,” the darker-skinned Human said. “Rigged up a nice seat for you, aft of the engines.” He grinned at her. “Don’t want one of the pitch drives tearing loose and smashing you to a pulp, now, do we?”
She let him lead her aft, surprised at the calm resignation in his mind. The pilot’s news must have been far direr than her tone and her feelings implied.
With a Quailu crew, the fear would bounce back and forth, feeding back on itself until they were all amped up on adrenaline. It wasn’t so extreme in a well-trained crew but it was still impossible for any single Quailu to ignore a dangerous situation.
She sat in the chair he’d apparently grown for her and the restraints closed.
He sat in another chair facing her, smiling cheerfully as it closed up. “No engineer with half a brain in his head sets up his crash-seat in front of the engines,” he explained. “Since you and I are the two most important people aboard, we owe it to the others to make sure we’re secured.”
“You and I?” Bau tilted her head to the side, though she suspected the movement was lost in the glare of the overhead lighting on her visor.
“Oh, sure,” the engineer chuckled, “our Eve’s a crack pilot, Gleb is a murderous little bastard but he’s got a great visual sense, which makes him great for filtering out the sensor data, and Caleb… well, he opens channels I suppose…
The Human frowned for a moment. “And Hela’s the best combat-leader in the empire, but they’d all be useless if I don’t find a way to fix our ship and get us off that platform we’re about to crash on.
“And you’re the reason we’re here in the first place,” he finished. “Time to go limp.”
She relaxed her muscles. It was interesting how she was the reason for their presence in this system and, yet, he sounded far more indispensable…
The light coming in through the two holes in the hull above them went from a steady dull blue to a darker scheme, punctuated by brilliant flashes as they entered the floating city and roared down the approach tunnel at many times the recommended velocity.
She fought the urge to tense up. The engineer’s advice was correct; she’d break all of her bones if she didn’t go limp.
Still, she was terrified. Thankfully, none of these natives would be able to tell.
There came a shrieking noise and the deck under her feet began shuddering. The noise died abruptly, only to be replaced a moment later by more of the same, though this time they were hitting the tunnel roof. A cascade of debris fell through the holes above, which were growing steadily larger.
They fell away from the roof, bouncing now along the floor as the scout-ship flexed alarmingly. The timbre of the shrieking changed as their progress along the tunnel slowed suddenly.
Bau began to feel a shred of relief growing in her mind but she could feel the engineer’s apprehension and she followed his gaze to where one of the pitch drives was leaning drunkenly, its two forward mounting points sheared off.
The pilot must have thought to use the drive to slow the ship. Now that they were held up by the tunnel floor, using the drive’s power to brake would no longer cost them altitude.
It also meant that, if it tore loose, it would come tumbling aft, crushing her and the engineer. She smiled despite the danger.
Perhaps the Human wasn’t as clever as he’d thought.
Fortunately, something gave out inside the engine or, perhaps, in its power source, because the deceleration suddenly ended and the engine dropped back down onto its torn forward mounts.
The impact came as a surprise. One moment they were sliding along at twice a running pace and the next her brain was bouncing off the inside of her skull. She sat there, flexing her neck, but the Human engineer was up immediately and heading forward.
She realized there might be a fire risk and followed his example but he wasn’t simply evacuating. All five crewmen and their piratical leader were pulling weapons from a locker and strapping on ammunition pouches.
And they’d just crashed, not five seconds ago.
She stepped closer and Eth turned to her, holding out a pistol. “You’ve used one of these, ma’am?”
She shook her head.
“Point it at the enemy and pull this trigger. Safety’s in the trigger,” he said. “And there’s atmo here, so…”
Perhaps the crash had shaken her up more than she thought because she realized, for the first time, that she was the only one with her helmet still up.
Sighing ruefully, she opened it.
“So, what’s the plan now?” she asked.
“One of our engines is beyond repair,” Eth said. “The other is heavily damaged and we need two to get us back into space.”
“So, we’re spending the rest of our lives here?” She asked, grimly amused.
“Well, we did see two shuttles up topside. We might be able to salvage one or both of their engines…”
The engineer cursed so vividly it was obvious that he’d forgotten all about Bau in his distress.
Eth turned to him. “What is it, Meesh?’
“Our damn PLC module is damaged! Of all the gods-damned luck! We can’t build shit without a logic controller!”
“The patterns are lost?”
Meesh kicked at the module mountings. “They’re probably intact but half of the bus emitters are smashed. We can’t transmit the whole pattern to the nanites. Certainly not enough to keep two pitch drives operational…”
“Let’s hope we can replace all of that topside.” Eth cocked his weapon. “We’ve got a long walk ahead of us and two shuttles can land a lot of enemy crewmen, so stay sharp!”
They had to backtrack slightly. The crash had driven them deep into a secure storage system and the access doors were all locked down, so they were obliged to leave through the tunnel they’d created in the walls.
Bau had seen Quailu training for infantry operations, mostly in connection with her own security detail. She’d seen them line up to breach a room or close in to protect a principle, all the while, their commander had provided a running commentary for her.
These Humans seemed different to her. Their movements seemed to have a furtive grace that her own security team lacked and they moved with a near-silent harmony. Each seemed to know where they should be looking and aiming at any particular moment.
They flowed through the pierced rooms and into the open space of the arrivals platform without a word, spreading out to cover the area as well as might be expected of only six people.
The only exit from this secured zone was easily guarded and the pilot took up a position that gave a view along the approach. The warrant officer moved to a spot opposite her to cover the hallway from a slightly different angle.
She saw the engineer was already working to tap into a security console at the scan-gate.
A long row of bags and cases lay along the elevated platform and Bau wandered over to get a closer look. They all had name-holos that sprang to life as she approached, projecting the owner’s names above each item as she approached.
She reached down toward a small hard case but a hand clamped around her wrist, pulling her hand firmly away. She looked up, glaring, but Eth was impassive, unreadable.
“Unless you’ve got a chip that matches that bag, ma’am, it’s gonna get pretty loud in here,” he told her.
“I doubt their owners are still around…”
“We aren’t the only ones to find this platform’s beacon in the last thirty minutes,” Eth cut her off firmly. “We’ve got two shuttles crashed topside. They’re almost certainly enemy and they’ll probably have seen us on our way down.
“We need to give their brains a good airing out but that’s gonna be harder to do if we advertise our location.”
She sighed, nodding acceptance of the rebuke. He might only be a native, but he had saved her life and seemed inclined to continue in that vein. “I was just drawn by the story that must lie behind these possessions, just abandoned. It didn’t occur to me that they’d have alarms on them.”
“Not much to tell,” the Human shrugged, gesturing to the holographic tags hovering above the cases. “All native names, mushkenu workers.
“It’s nothing new. When the Quailu-run company says the last shuttle’s leaving at a certain time – that’s it. If there are too many workers left for the last ride off a closing facility, Quailu luggage is the first to go and natives are a close second.”
“No!” The word exploded out of her before she even knew it was coming. “I would never allow such callous waste of lives in my dominions…”
“This has only become a part of your fief quite recently,” Eth reminded her curtly. “Not all system-lords show the same sense of… efficiency.”
She noticed, not without some irritation, that he’d attributed her outrage to economics, rather than morals.
“I’d wager that we’ll find some Arbellan corpses between here and the shuttles,” he added, “but such blatant fraternization would be overstepping my bounds.”
He said it calmly enough but she felt as though she should be picking up resentment along with the words. She fought back against the chill creeping up her spine.
This was worlds worse than dealing with a Zeartekka. Humans were known to have emotions and the thought of what might be lurking inside the Human officer’s head, out of her reach, was deeply disturbing.
He seemed to notice something and he stepped over to a scattered pile of baggage. “Looks like someone didn’t want to be left behind,” he said softly.
She looked down at the cases and he pointed to a dark brown stain. “That’s not coffee,” he said.
“They shot someone?”
“We’ve just seen how desperate people can get when there’s only one way out of a bad situation,” Eth told her. He pointed to a series of brown streaks, punctuated by less distinct smears.
“Dragged away, probably by the victim’s child, given the inability to move them more than a couple paces at a time.”
He stood and met her gaze. “I killed your bridge crewmen, when I came aboard that scout-ship, but they were in the process of killing you with their self-interested panic. You’d be dead right now, otherwise.
“They knew they were in a high-risk occupation. They’d signed up to work on a warship and they owed you their oaths.” He waved at the smear that led out past his two sentries. “The natives here were just on a mining contract. They thought the company would do right by them.”
Bau had never spent so much time with natives before in her life and this was proving a very uncomfortable encounter. She owed this team her very life and every moment in their company increased her debt as they continued to protect her.
She’d never given much thought to the lives they led, except for the occasional pat on the back for having improved the conditions of those she ruled. Here, though, was incontrovertible evidence of natives having been abused and of a simmering hatred for her kind.
The engineer saved her from having to comment by waving for them to join him at a projection above the security console.
“Pretty much what you’d expect,” he told them. “Pre-nanite construction so we have no nearby source of repair material. The separators and the condenser farms are in this area,” he said, pointing to the middle of the upper half of the platform.
“Vulnerability to small arms fire?” Eth asked.
“Moderate to high,” the engineer replied. “Lots of caustics still sitting in those pipes and pressure vessels. Not the sort of place I’d want to fight us, let alone a pack of amateurs who think fire-control is a setting on their hearth…”
“You’d rather go around, Meesh?”
The engineer shrugged. “We start taking fire in that mess and I can’t guarantee our suits would stand up to the kind of stuff that’ll start spewing from the pipes.”
“Then we’d better go around,” Bau decided, but she frowned at the impudent finger Eth held up.
“Let’s think this through properly,” he said, apparently oblivious to the implied insult or simply not caring. “Our enemy is probably going to stay topside, hoping for some improbable rescue operation to take place. They aren’t likely to patrol in any depth. In fact, I’d be surprised if they patrol at all.”
Meesh nodded. “They’ll likely put sentries on the approaches and stare up at the sky until hunger drives them to foraging.”
“We have till the end of the day before they start thinking about looking for stabilized foodstuffs,” Eth said, nodding. “Their training for a scenario like this is probably pretty minimal. We’ll likely meet up with some of them a level or two beneath their crash site and that’s far enough from the gas-separation plants.”
“How long will our people wait for us?” Meesh asked.
“They’re gone by now,” Eth told him. “I ordered them to help General Tilsin defend the Lady Bau’s home world. That means we want to take off in five days.”
“Just one day to beat them?” Bau asked, affronted by the certainty she felt from the engineer in response to this bold statement.
“Two days each way,” Eth confirmed, “and one for the fight. They shouldn’t be much trouble, not after being slapped around three times. The crews are probably on the verge of mutiny.”
“And you’re sure your ships will be out there looking for us after three days?”
“They weren’t happy about leaving me behind,” Eth assured her. “They’ll be back.”
Even if her conscious mind hadn’t managed to notice that his crew was concerned for him but not for her, her ego certainly caught it and it crowded in against the earlier issues, such as his casual overriding of her decisions.
“You take too much upon yourself, sir!” she snapped, gratified, at first, by the feelings of alarm now radiating from the engineer. The gratification faded quickly as the unreadable lieutenant stared back at her.
The uncomfortable silence grew between them and, just before she was about to speak again, he replied.
“My apologies, ma’am.” He tilted his head in a gesture of acquiescence that didn’t feel at all like acquiescence. “I sometimes forget my station. I have taken drastic measures without your consent, forcing our services upon you without first ascertaining your wishes.
