Trapped: Chaos Core Book 1 (13 page)

Spin was to take care
of everything else, and she saw herself as a passable pilot, she
didn’t have the hours of practice it took to build her confidence,
but she didn’t have much of a choice. The long ship left the cover
of the dark cities and skimmed the tops of the trees on the
outskirts. The fungus yards were next.

“You can do this,
Spin,” she said to herself. “You have to do this. No one else is
going to take care of your people.”

The fungus yards came
into view and she slowed down so the ship was hovering on its
suspensor field silently then reduced her altitude to a hundred
metres. Passive, electronically silent scanners picked up several
groups of people. Judging from the way they were moving and where
they were, she guessed that her people were in one of two groups. One
was a group of four, the other was a group of eight.

“Don’t fire yet,”
Spin said. “And don’t hit this red section of the engagement map,
I repeat, do not shoot here.” She said, marking distillation tanks
at the far end of the field. If they were full, they would destroy
the terrain and anything on it for a kilometre in all directions, but
that was just a guess.

The distillation tower
tanks did provide a potential solution. If she could panic the
slavers and the guards, they may scatter, leaving the slaves in the
pits. Spin pointed the nose of the ship directly at them. She took a
deep breath, hoping that they had threat detection on the ground and
then set the missiles to target the towers.

Alarms went off in the
base right away, it was time to act quickly. With the flipping of a
few switches, she turned the scanner suite all the way up, so she
could get a reading on the group of four below. The faces, vital
statistics and DNA profiles of all four of them appeared and her
heart sank, none of them were her people.

A loud ping against the
hull reminded her of a step she was missing. “Start firing,” Spin
said over the intercom. “Remember, do not shoot the highlighted
area.”

“Gotcha, I see a
guard tower, I’m taking it out,” Mirra said.

“Making a mess,”
Della said, giggling as her turret began spewing bolts of fire
between the main building and the swampy fungus yard where the water
flowed shallowly over foot paths. Spin turned the ship’s flood
lights on, illuminating the beige, brown and green patches of thick
fungus floating atop the hip-deep water.

The four people she
scanned waved their hands, flicking water off their soaked sleeves.
They were slaves, just like the people she’d come to rescue, so
without a second thought she tried to lower the ship so they could
get aboard, almost failing. Instead of gently moving down, the ship
dropped, dipping into the shallow water then coming up to hover only
centimetres above the surface.

Spin focused the
scanners on the next group of slaves, there were less than thirty,
fewer than expected, and took a few seconds to leave the pilot’s
seat and activate the control for the port side ramp. The internal
sensors reported four aboard in an astonishingly short amount of
time. At a glance Spin verified that they would be locked inside the
main passenger cabin so they wouldn’t wander around the ship.

Spin dropped into the
pilot’s seat and grinned as the scanners reported five matches with
her search criteria. Sun, Boro, Travis, Nigel and Prue were all
slogging through the swamp water as fast as they could towards the
ship, but they were still hundreds of metres away. She turned the
Fleet Feather so the ramp would be facing them, then carefully moved
it in their direction.

Seeing that they were
about to lose several of their slaves, the guards stopped firing
ineffectively on the ship, and trained their rifles on the slaves
instead. Spin watched on one of the monitor screens as Boro helped
Sun up the ramp, practically shoving her, and was shot several times.

Prue was caught in the
line of fire as well, along with two slaves Spin didn’t know. The
scanners reported that all of them were dead with no chance of
recovery, the guards knew how to kill their own.

Everyone who survived
made it aboard, and the guards were slaughtering everyone Spin
couldn’t get to. Della and Mirra were firing as much as the guns
would allow them to, in the atmosphere the barrels had to shut down
for a few seconds at a time to keep from overheating. “Kill all the
guards,” Spin said. “They’re going to pay for this.”

“I’m trying,
they’re dug in behind cover,” Mirra said.

“I have been too,”
Della said, hitting so seldomly that it looked like she was trying to
miss as instructed. Considering she shot at several slaves by mistake
– and missed, thankfully – that was partly a blessing.

The hatch reported
closed, and Spin raised the ship, backing off to a safe distance as
both her missile launchers reported a lock on the distillation
towers. They were struck hard on the aft and starboard sides several
times, and red lights indicating breaches flashed on a diagram of the
ship.

Spin’s missile launch
system gave her a long, loud tone, indicating that she had a full
lock on the towers, and she fired a missile from each launcher. She
watched as the missiles passed between the Fleet Feather and their
target. The tank tower exploded, lighting the sky and setting the
nearby building on fire. It was impressive, the operation was
destroyed, but the field was almost untouched, the tanks must have
been nearly empty. She took solace in the fact that the place was
effectively shut down, it would take years and millions of credits to
get it back up and running. That would be the second time in as many
years that the Countess would have to revive the operation – the
first being when the planet was nullified by the electromagnetic
pulse bombardment. Spin doubted the Countess would bother at all.

There was a knock on
the pilot door hatch, and Spin ignored it until the shields were up
and ship was speeding away from the planet. A glance at the security
screen revealed Sun waiting to be let into the cockpit.

Spin set the autopilot
and leapt out of her seat to open the door. Sun greeted her with a
wet, grateful embrace. “That was the most amazing, reckless, sloppy
rescue I’ve ever seen. Thank you, Aspen, oh God, thank you.”

“You smell terrible,”
Spin laughed.

“I can’t tell, my
sense of smell died a few hours after we arrived.”

“I’m sorry we lost
Boro and Prue,” Spin said. “If I waited, planned, did some recon
before trying that.”

“Then more people may
have died in the meantime. That fungus was contaminated by something
that made it inedible and dangerous, we were using chemicals to
restore it, but it was killing us, Aspen,” Sun said. “Most slaves
were dropping after three days, some lasted five.”

“I’m so sorry, all
this is because of me,” Spin said. “I shouldn’t have joined a
crew, I should have stayed on my own.”

“Hey,” Sun said,
turning her chin up. “Then I’d have never met you.”

“Hey, Aspen!” Nigel
called up the stairs. His grinning face looking up at her was good
consolation. “I can’t believe you rescued us! Don’t sweat the
people who didn’t make it, you did more than most of us could have.
Just wondering, do you have a medbay down here? We’ve gotta get
some serious anti-fungal and restorative stuff in us. Well, on us.
Um, okay, in and on us and probably on you too just to be safe.”

“One sec,” Spin
said, returning to the controls. There were no fires in the breached
sections, but she couldn’t help but be alarmed that half the main
hold was wide open. The cash they gathered had been moved to a secure
cabin, but most of the other loot was still in the hold. The small
infirmary was still intact, and they had enough containment to make
it to space, then to faster than light travel. The sensors didn’t
detect any ships in the area, it was eerily quiet in orbit, so she
set the navigational computer to start calculating the jump. “Do
you have any safe havens in range?” Spin asked Sun.

Sun looked at the
navigational screen and pointed at one glimmering point. “Diori. I
still have a few friends there, there’s no law, and we might get
some real help from my old boss in Quino.”

“The crime boss?”
Spin asked.

“More of a
professional looter, salvager now, but he’s got a weakness for
ladies, so I think we’ll have an easy time. Where did you get this
ship, by the way?”

“Go get treatment,”
Spin said, noticing the scabs on Sun’s hands and arms. “Tell
Nigel not to use any restorative until your infections clear up, that
could make them a lot worse.”

“Okay, I still need
to hear the story behind this rescue,” Sun said.

“Later, make sure
everyone gets treated right away,” Spin said.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Sun
said with a smile, closing the cockpit door behind her.

Spin locked it, there
were too many people she didn’t know or trust aboard. “Ladies,
are you all right?” she said through the intercom to Della and
Mirra.

“I’m all good
here,” Mirra said. “Nice work. I don’t think the Countess will
be too happy when she hears about this.”

“I hate to say it,
but that was fun,” Della said. “My turret caught fire for a
moment, I got a little burn, but I’m okay.”

“Della, when
something like that happens, you tell everyone on comms,” Mirra
said, the sounds of her unbuckling from her seat and getting out of
her turret in the background.

“I put it out with an
extinguisher and I’m fine,” Della said. Her speech sounded
slightly slurred and she was breathing more heavily than normal.

“Della, open the door
to your turret,” Spin said, trying the control from there and
getting nothing but an annoying buzz that said the connection between
that button and her door was broken.

“I tried, I
couldn’t,” Della said. “Am I stuck in here?”

“No, you’re fine,”
Spin said. The navigational computer reported that they were ready to
jump, so she initiated the faster than light drive. The next instant
she was through he cockpit door and sliding down the stair rails on
only her hands.

Travis was already in
front of the turret hatch. “Yeah, need a pry bar for that. A hit a
couple frames back twisted the doorframe just enough to jam it shut.
No air getting to her either, the exchanger vent is blocked somewhere
down the line.” He coughed wetly.

Mirra arrived in time
to hear his explanation. “I’ll go find something.”

Nigel emerged from the
forward hallway completely naked, rubbing lotion on his scabby body.
His legs were even more scabbed and irritated than his arms. “I’m
all gooped up with anti-fungal cream and took the pills that should
make this go away, there’s about ninety doses left, so everyone can
get some.” He said to the cabin with the slaves quietly watching
the emergency unfold. There were ten slaves Spin didn’t recognize,
most of them sitting in posh passenger seating. A few of them laughed
at Nigel, who didn’t seem to care that he left his clothes in the
medbay at all.

“What? My clothes are
saturated with the shit we were in down there. I’m not going to let
it eat me up, so get used to this ass. By the way, there were a
couple places I couldn’t reach.”

Sun emerged from the
medical bay in a paper gown, rubbing lotion on her arms and
shoulders.

“I didn’t see
those, where’d you get that?” Nigel asked, turning and running
back to the medbay.

“Middle shelf,
forward bulkhead, look for large,” Sun said, shaking her head.
“Anyone here critical? Coughing, feeling weak?”

“We were just dropped
there today,” one of the ten said, he was thin, tall, and had a
lost expression on his face. “Maybe some of that cream would help,
but I think we’re okay.”

“We’ll get you all
cream and a pill once the crisis is over,” Spin said.

“Okay, I’m Jorin,”
he said. “Thank you for saving us. Is there someone stuck in
there?”

“Yes,” Travis
coughed.

“I’m going to find
something to pry that open with,” Spin said. She pulled the
flexible helmet for her suit out from her inside jacket pocket,
pulled it on and clipped it to the collar, where it sealed and
hardened. “I know there’s one in the main cargo, but part of that
section is open to space.”

“Do you need help?”
Sun asked. “If you have another suit, I could…”

“Come with me,”
Spin said, focused on getting Della out. The sensors were dead in her
pod, she couldn’t tell how much air was left in her turret, but
Della had been quiet for several minutes.

Spin ran to the rear
hold, Sun behind her, and pointed to a crew berthing. “There’s a
bunch of suits in there, I’m going to go ahead and get something to
break that hatch open with.”

“Okay, I’ll hurry
up.”

Spin opened the door
and stepped into the pressurized quarter of the cargo bay. Breach
doors had sealed off three quarters of the bay, and Spin knew that
they’d lost the clothing, a lot of the trinkets, a few real
valuables, and a month’s supply of food. That stuff was worth ten
times what the cash they’d stowed was if they found a
half-interested fence. She didn’t let it bother her, instead,
closing the door behind her and affixing a safety line to the metal
loop beside it.

Without hesitation, she
opened one of the breech doors and let the air rush from the room. It
pulled on her, sweeping her feet out from under her for a moment, but
the loop and her line held, keeping her from rushing out with the air
under the emergency door as it rolled up. As soon as she regained her
feet she hit the release so she could rush into the damaged section
of the cargo bay, where a gyro-equipped automatic pry bar was
strapped to the bulkhead.

“Spin, she’s not
breathing,” Mirra said, panicked. “All I could find to get the
door open were hanger rods, they’re not working.”