Escape (Blackout Book 2), page 1
Blackout: Escape
Book 2
Daniel Young
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
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1
A blast of gunfire skimmed the Blackout’s starboard wing and the ship wobbled. Captain Jackson Keogh wrestled the helm to hold the ship steady. “The Keter Legion is all over the place! We can’t land! How much longer until we get some weapons online?”
A squeaking noise came from somewhere down near his ankles, but Jackson didn’t catch any words. He started to look down when three more racers veered across the bow. He yanked the Blackout hard to port and hit the throttle to zoom back into the atmosphere…away from where he wanted to go.
“What the hell!” Roy Rawlins yelled from the port ejection block. “We’re defenseless here!”
“You don’t have to tell me!” Jackson wheeled the Blackout high through the Keter atmosphere and left the racers in the dust. That gave him just a few seconds to look down at the floor.
The lower half of an insectoid body covered in fur stuck out under the captain’s station. Spindly appendages waved and quivered with the creature’s movements. “Woolzi! What the hell are you doing down there? In case you didn’t realize, the Legion is about to destroy the ship!”
“Fuel at 10%,” Quort reported from the pilot’s station in front of Jackson. “We’ll be going down in flames pretty soon if we don’t do something.”
Jackson turned another circuit through the atmosphere. The racers didn’t follow this high, but with a network of Krakzid enemy vessels blockading the planet, the Blackout couldn’t get near enough to land.
Beyond the racers, a labyrinthine tangle of conduits, viaducts, scaffoldings, and derricks made up the Doing-Doing Smiasmiam mines—the nearest source of refined fuel to keep this ship in the air. Right now, it might as well be a thousand light years away.
Woolzi bumped into Jackson’s elbow when he climbed out from under the captain’s station. “All done.”
“Fire!” Jackson bellowed down the bombardment stack. “The weapons are online!”
“No fire!” Woolzi squawked. “Conduit from feed track ruptured. Fried all out. No fire! Cause explosion!”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Jackson countered. “You said you were done fixing it.”
“Woolzi not fix. No can fix. Need repair shop.”
“Hold your fire!” Jackson yelled down the stack. “We got nothing!”
“What?” Roy called back.
“Nothing! We got no weapons!”
“That’s impossible!” Roy returned.
“Fuel at 5%,” Quort added.
“I’m pulling out. It’s too dangerous.” Jackson took a fresh grip on the helm and yanked the ship away.
The Blackout wheeled to the east and left Doing-Doing far behind. Woolzi waddled over to the pilot’s station. “We find other fuel source.”
Jackson didn’t listen. He cursed Woolzi inwardly for making him think they might have some hope, but he didn’t tell Woolzi that. The creature couldn’t help it if his English wasn’t the best.
Jackson twisted the other way and yelled down the starboard bombardment stack. “Liri and Lana, unlock and come up here. Hurry.”
Two ejection blocks shut down as the twin Keterans unlocked from their couplings. They strode down the gangway to the cockpit. “What’s up?” Liri asked.
“We have to land somewhere, somewhere without any racers and preferably somewhere with some fuel. Any ideas?”
“Forget about going back to any of the cities,” Lana added. “The Legion will be all over the place.”
“Krakzid searching for Blackout, too,” Woolzi chimed in. “They shoot down.”
“Fuel at 3%,” Quort interrupted.
“Come on!” Jackson prodded the twins. “Give me something—anything.”
The twins looked at each other. “There is someplace,” Lana replied. “I don’t know about fuel, but the Legion and the Krakzid won’t go there. The Legion doesn’t patrol beyond the cities and the more valuable assets like fueling stations.”
“The Krakzid are definitely not there,” Liri added. “We could at least put the ship down while we decide what to do.”
“Will you both quit beating around the bush and tell me where to go?” Jackson struggled to hold the helm steady, but the ship was already losing responsiveness. The engines coughed before they burst to life again.
Liri stuck her arm between Jackson’s wrists and tapped his console. She pulled up a map of Keter. “Here, in the Asibi foothills. It’s out of the way…to say the least.”
Jackson forgot to steer for a moment. He stared at the spot she pointed out. “It’s empty. There’s nothing there.”
“Which is exactly why no one else is interested in going there,” Lana told him. “It’s completely undefended. We can land and—”
The engines gave a sickening groan, spluttered, and then died. “Fuel drums empty,” Quort announced. “We’re all done.”
Jackson rounded on him. “I don’t want to hear the words ‘all done’ again. Understand?”
Quort examined him with a curious expression, but he didn’t react. Jackson spun around and concentrated everything on the helm. Now he had to get the ship on the ground in one piece…somehow.
The Blackout drifted in a steady orbit. It wasn’t in any danger of falling out of the sky…yet. While he scrambled to come up with a plan, Liri turned to Lana. “There are five cannons in the weapons storage stock. We could use them to slow down our fall.”
“Someone would have to go outside the hull for that,” Lana returned. “It would never work.”
“They do have Smiasmiam in their power cells, though,” Quort chimed in. “We could bleed them into the feed track. It would give us just enough thrust to slow us down and land.”
Lana frowned and rubbed her chin. “That might work if we bled every weapon in the stock. That would leave us with nothing to defend ourselves if we ran into unforeseen circumstances on the ground.”
“We’d have to shut down life support, too,” Liri added, “not that it would matter much. We’re in the atmosphere. There’s plenty of air.”
Jackson spun around. “The Skeeter! The Skeeter has fuel on board, too. We can add that to the feed track.”
Liri nodded. “You’re right. I didn’t think of that.”
Just then, Roy sauntered up the gangway. “Well, that was a colossal waste of time. What’s the point of locking into an ejection block if we aren’t going to shoot anything?”
“Go with Liri and Lana, Roy,” Jackson told him. “I need you to help them and Quort harvest as much Smiasmiam from the weapons and the Skeeter as possible, to get us down on the ground alive.”
Roy scowled at the twins. “You want me to work with them?”
“Just go, Roy!” Jackson barked. “We don’t have time to pick and choose who we work with. Just go.”
Roy compressed his lips. He, Quort, and the twins left the cockpit and left Jackson and Woolzi in blessed silence.
“Captain come up with plan,” Woolzi assured him.
Jackson expanded the chart Liri had showed him. “I’m entering a degrading orbit. We’ll need to reduce altitude as much as possible without increasing speed.”
“Planet’s gravity fluctuates,” Woolzi told him. “Spots with less…Woolzi show.”
“That would be great. Where are they?”
Woolzi sent through a modification to the chart. He highlighted seven spots on the planet’s surface where the gravitational force was as little as half the strength as the rest of Keter. Jackson steered for the nearest, which was still more than nine thousand miles from the place Liri had suggested he land the ship.
That didn’t matter right now. He didn’t care where he landed, as long as he did it without destroying the ship along with the crew.
Unfortunately, the ship’s forward momentum caused the Blackout to glide through the weakened gravity well. Jackson had to soar in a spiral to stay near it. Once he established a holding pattern inside the well, he switched over to communications.
“How’s it going down there?”
“Slowly,” Roy called back from the weapons storage stock. “This is gonna take forever. Quort and I have bled two cannons so far. We haven’t even started on the hand weapons, and we all know how much fuel each one of them carries.”
“What’s the story with the Skeeter? How much fuel does it have?”
Liri and Lana cut in from the discharge ramp. “Not nearly enough. You’ll have enough for one quick burst. It isn’t much, so you’ll just have to make it count.”
“Screw it. Transfer the fuel from the Skeeter and add whatever you’ve got from the two cannons. We’ll have to make it work. I don’t want to hang around here.”
He turned the helm back toward the Asibi foothills. In half a second, the Blackout left the gravity well and started to descend. Jackson gripped the helm and hauled the nose back against the rising pull of gravity.
The planet towed the ship downward on a steep dive. Jackson leaned his weight all the way back against the helm control. The ship shuddered and gr
“Asibi Mountains direct ahead!” Woolzi twittered.
Lana’s voice came through the speaker at Jackson’s elbow. “Fuel from the Skeeter loaded into the feed track. You should have enough for about ten seconds of steady reverse thrust.”
“Cut life support,” Jackson told Woolzi. “Open the external ventilation ports and flood the hull with atmospheric air.”
“Life support down! Ventilation ports wide open.”
Jackson’s arms strained, holding the ship in a straight line. The damage the ship took during its battle against the Krakzid interfered with its aerodynamics. It wobbled and shuddered worse than ever. The wind from outside screeched over the tattered hull.
“Hold on!” Jackson called to no one in particular. “This is gonna get bumpy.”
The noise drowned out whether anyone answered. The ship trembled as gravity dragged it faster and lower. The wings pounded.
Jackson did his best to steer toward the Asibi Mountains, but it wasn’t easy. Every second, he battled temptation to activate the engines and use the fuel to slow the ship down, but it was too early.
The noise escalated to a deafening roar almost as loud as battle. The ship tossed back and forth. Jackson focused hard to keep the Blackout pointed anywhere close to the Asibi Mountains. With great difficulty, he got the nose back in the right direction, only for the Blackout to swivel off course again.
Someone yelled through the communications system. He tried to ignore it. The Asibi Mountains were rushing closer, and the ship was flying way too fast. It would shoot right over the spot Liri mentioned.
The ship suffered another bone-crushing jolt. Jackson fought the helm back to center, but at that moment, a powerful updraft of hot air from the ground hit the ship under the wings.
Jackson had no time to correct. His effort to keep the helm steady ripped the ship upward, and the updraft flipped the Blackout over on its back. Jackson reacted a second too late. The ship tilted in a complete somersault and pointed its nose straight toward the ground.
Woolzi screamed. Jackson thanked the stars the others weren’t around to see this. He punched the controls to activate the engines. The feed track kicked to life and the ship rocketed straight down.
Woolzi flung his arms in front of his eyes. Jackson ripped the helm up with all his strength and the ship zoomed parallel to the ground, but now the engines were burning way too hot to stop.
The Blackout hurtled across a sandy desert plane with the engines howling at full power. The ship catapulted miles away from the landing spot, into the distance.
In ten short seconds, the fuel ran dry. The Blackout skimmed the cracked soil twenty feet above the ground. The engine noise choked out, but that ominous wind whistling across the hull didn’t.
Jackson wrenched the helm back as far as it would go. Sweat beaded on his brow. The ship heeled, but he didn’t dare let go of the helm to extend the landing gear. He didn’t even know if it would hold the ship at this speed. “Brace for impact!”
At that moment, an alert flashed on his station. Landing gear extended. Woolzi. The creature’s limbs sailed over the pilot’s station in a blur.
The landing gear locked down. As carefully as he could, Jackson eased the ship forward. The instant he slackened his hold on the controls, the ship rocked down. The landing gear touched the flats and ripped clean off. The Blackout slammed down on its belly and skidded more than five miles before the powdery soil slowed it enough to stop.
2
Roy stuck his head into the cockpit. “Are we dead yet?”
“Either we’re still alive or we’re in Hell. I can’t think of any other place we’d be, in a grounded ship with no fuel or weapons.” Jackson turned back to Woolzi, who was back under the captain’s station. “How bad is it?”
Woolzi scooted into view again. “No better than before.”
“Well, at least we know what we’re dealing with.” Jackson strolled over to Roy. “Where are the others?”
Roy jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “They’re eating in the commissary.”
“Eating! They’re eating at a time like this?”
“They said we have a long walk to the foothills, and they don’t want to leave the ship without eating something.”
Jackson sighed. “I guess they might as well. Come on, Woolzi. Leave it be for now. There’s no point repairing the ship until we find some fuel.”
Jackson, Woolzi, and Roy headed down the catwalk and found Quort and the twins eating at the tables like Roy had said. Jackson peered into Quort’s bowl. He was spooning a steaming concoction that looked like soup into his large mouth. “What do you call that?”
“Standard Keter Legion rations,” Liri replied from the counter, where she ate standing up. “Learn to love it, ‘cuz that’s all you’re gonna get.”
Jackson followed Woolzi to the wall, where the creature stuck a bowl into a retracting slot. A dollop of soup blobbed into his bowl. Jackson sniffed it. “It doesn’t smell too bad.”
“Taste and smell don’t figure into it,” Lana replied. “It contains a balance of carbohydrates, protein, fat, and essential nutrients. It’ll keep you alive, and that’s all the Legion cares about.”
Jackson got himself a bowl and lifted it to his nose. “It smells like glossop.”
Roy stuck his face close to the dish. “You’re right. It does.”
“Glossop?” Woolzi peeped. “What glossop?”
“It’s an animal native to the Zenith homeworld. It was shipped as livestock to all the Zenith colonies, so everyone in Zenith eats a lot of it.” Jackson stuck a spoon in the soup and tasted it. “It tastes like glossop, too. If it’s native to Zenith, it might be on Keter, too. What kind of meat is this?”
“It isn’t glossop and it isn’t meat,” Lana replied. “All the ingredients are synthetic and reconstituted. You won’t find any natural ingredients in these rations.”
Jackson paused with his spoon halfway to his mouth. The meal didn’t appeal as much, all of a sudden. “I don’t know if I want to eat a completely synthetic meal.”
Liri laughed at him. “You better eat it. You won’t get anything else, and none of us wants to carry your unconscious carcass across this desert.”
“Think of it as synthetic glossop.” Roy settled down with his own bowl and started eating heartily.
“Think of it as a cultural adventure,” Lana added.
The others all laughed at Jackson’s expense, until he took the first bite. As soon as he tasted it, he could delude himself that it was glossop and not some reconstituted slop from a Keter Legion lab somewhere.
Lana stuck her bowl into a different slot and sat down across from Jackson. She took out a collection of hand weapons and started checking them, adjusting them in front of him. “Are you going somewhere?” he asked.
“I’m sure as hell not staying here. Where we’re going, we’ll need to be armed.”
“Why?” Roy asked. “Where are we going?”
“The Asibi foothills. Liri told you that.”
“What’s there that we’ll need to be armed for?”
“I don’t know that we’ll need to be armed for what’s there, but it would be stupid not to take weapons. The New Cooperative has their base there.”
“What’s that?” Roy asked.
“It’s an army for hire,” Liri interjected. “They work for the Legion or the warlords or the mines, or whoever needs them.”
“New Cooperative,” Jackson mused. “That’s a strange name for an army for hire.”
“They have some strange ways,” Liri replied. “They’re bound together by their own religion with their own beliefs. They fight for their beliefs, which is why they don’t have a problem fighting for anyone else while they’re at it.”
Roy snorted. “So they’re fanatics. Wonderful.”
Jackson looked up at Liri and licked the soup off his spoon. “You know about as much about them as you do about the Legion. Were you members of this New Cooperative, too?”
