Compete (30 page)

I realize in that moment of horror that, without his hoverboard that’s still stuck on the floor, Blayne
cannot
get up.

Chapter Seventeen

W
e stand in a sorry crowd of very scared teens in the back of the meal hall. I glance at Blayne who’s still seated and motionless, and move as close to him as I can. Logan moves with me, his fingers touching mine briefly.

The six shooters herd us up against the wall, and four of them remain while two move aside to whisper among themselves. Then I see one of the two, a girl, step away and quietly exit the room though the entrance, still brandishing her gun. I have a feeling she’s been told to guard the entryway.

“All right, everyone!” Masked a-hole Trey speaks again, loudly. “This is what’s going to happen here. You are all going to stand quietly against the wall and do what we tell you to do, or you get shot. Right now, remain quiet. Got that?
¿
Comprende?
”

Some of the people nod, but most of us remain motionless and silent, watching.

While Trey is speaking, two other guys pace slowly, looking at us, while the two girls stand off to the sides, guns pointed.

“You—why are you sitting? Get up!
Now!
” A masked guy notices Blayne seated against the wall and points a gun at him.

Blayne blinks. “I can’t, my feet don’t work, sorry,” he says softly. “I need my hoverboard just to stand. It’s under the table.”

“What the hell?” The guy steps closer. It looks like he’s about to shoot Blayne.

“No, wait!” I exclaim. I’m trembling, and now my stupid big fat mouth goes into overdrive. “He really can’t! He’s disabled! Please let him be!” I say loudly in a high-pitched squeaky voice.

The guy with the gun whirls toward me. I see his eyes through the slits of his black fabric mask, considering me.

Trey, who seems to be their leader, hears and looks at us, then takes the steps to narrow the distance. He looks closely at me, then Blayne. “Hey, I know you two,” he says crudely. “You’re the ‘special treatment’ cases, aren’t you? The girl who’s not a Cadet and not a Civ, and the boy who’s got the fancy hoverboard?”

As Trey speaks, I see Logan’s eyes watching me with a very intense burning gaze. Oh, his gaze—it’s pleading me to be careful. . . .

“So,” Trey says, moving in closer to me. “You’re what? An Aide to the CCO? That’s just great! With him and you, we’ve got us a nice pair of bargaining chips.
And
a hoverboard!” And he kicks the table where Blayne is sitting, which is fastened to the floor, and doesn’t budge. So he bends under to look for the board.

“What do you want?” I ask, watching his movements. “What do you hope to achieve with this? You just killed a bunch of innocent people!”

In reply I receive a hard blow against the side of my head from the other masked gunman who’s right next to me. The impact sends me backwards, reeling, so that for a moment I see
black nothing
and stars. Logan’s hands reach out and close around me, keeping me upright while I blank out, keeping me from falling. A few barely repressed gasps sound from the other hostages.

“All of you shut up! And you,
you
especially, just shut your mouth,” Trey tells me, straightening, with the hoverboard pulled out from underneath the table and now in his hand. He approaches, dragging the inert length of orichalcum against the floor and leans in, hissing in my face, as I blink from the harsh blow. “But before you do, what’s your name?”

“Gwen Lark,” I mumble.

Trey smirks. “Okay, Gwen Lark! Now, we’re going to make a few calls, and you’ll be speaking for us.”

He then sets down the hoverboard in the middle of the floor, grabs hold of my arm and pulls me forward.

“Hey!” Logan speaks up, trying to keep his hold on me.

“Let go, or you get shot in the face,” Trey tells him, followed by an obscenity.

Logan grows silent and releases me, but his eyes are dark with fury.

The rest of the hostages are barely breathing.

Trey pulls me roughly behind him, and we approach the opposite side of the room with the food bar where a small wall computer console is visible. I step over the body of an Atlantean food server, a kid with metallic hair, no older than Gracie. He’s lying on his side, glassy blue eyes wide open, still holding a stew ladle in one dead hand, while the large tray is overturned on the heating pad surface, globs of aromatic stuff dripping down from the counter. Blood is pooling from the wound on his chest and it’s mixing with the spilled stew on the floor.

Suddenly I start to gag. I’m about to be sick all over my uniform, but I hold back the reflex, just barely. Glancing behind me, I see the crowd of hostages, Logan and Blayne among them. Many terrified eyes watch me move, while the armed assailants continue to point guns at them.

“All right, here we go!” Trey pushes me to the wall with the console. “Now, Gwen, baby girl, you’re going to call up the CCO and ask for your commanding officer.”

“And if I don’t?” I don’t know what kind of crazy crap in my head makes me say that.

“If you don’t, I shoot your brains out.”

I start to punch in the call. Immediately I get a low beep tone—a null signal indicator, meaning that there’s no one in the office at the moment. Crap!

“Okay, it’s not answering,” I say. “He’s not there. He’s probably having dinner.”

Trey leans in close to my face so I see the black fabric of his mask and his two glittering eyes. I also smell cheap musk body spray for men. “So, where would he be now? You know his schedule, right?”

“Actually I don’t.” And then I remember. Aeson Kassiopei works out before dinner. “I think he might be in the gym. . . .”

“Then call him there!”

“I don’t know what gym—”

“Keep being an idiot and I start shooting your body parts.
Call him now!
”

My pulse is thundering now, and honestly I don’t know what to do. So I try something that Gennio had taught me about—a ship-wide general VIP intercom for public announcements only, otherwise a big no-no. Its use is reserved solely for Commanders, Command Pilots, Captains and other authorized high-end personnel.

I punch in the classified PA code, and speak into the console. “Command Pilot Kassiopei, this is urgent. . . . Please call Yellow Quadrant Cadet Deck Four Meal Hall—
right now
.” As I say the words, I hear my own unsteady voice amplified and echoing from the very walls of the ship around me.

There is a long moment of silence.

I start counting seconds in my head.
Four . . . Five . . . Six
 . . .

“Well? Why doesn’t he answer?” Trey pokes my shoulder with the muzzle of his gun. “Call again!”

I gulp. Then I begin punching the PA code again.

Before I’m done, the video display comes alive, and I see the face of Aeson Kassiopei, up-close, staring into the camera. The remarkable close-up reveals the stunning detail of his lapis-lazuli blue eyes highlighted in a shadow fringe of jet-black lashes, that natural “kohl” outline around the lids, dark eyebrows with the faintest hint of lapis gloss, straight nose and hard austere line of lips—altogether the face of a demon. He is grim with intensity, and his forehead is covered with a light sheen of sweat, with strands of pale golden hair sticking to his skin. As far as I can tell, his bronzed upper body is naked. . . . He must’ve been working out, because behind him I see the sparring area and walls of a gym.

“This is Command Pilot Aeson Kassiopei,” he says in a cold hard voice. And he looks straight at me.

But Trey shoves me out of the way and keeps his gun to my chest.

“Command Pilot!” he says. “This is Terra Patria, and as you can see we have your little office Aide, and your favorite hoverboard boy, and a dining room full of other hostages. Sorry to say, we had to shoot about half of them, but still, we’ve got plenty more, maybe thirty-five people left alive here. So if you want them to stay that way, how about we talk?”

Aeson does not blink. “What do you want?”

“Straight to the point, I like it!” Trey shuffles momentarily, adjusting his grip on the gun, and then he points with the gun at the video screen and starts speaking, sounding like he’s memorized a script.

“Terra Patria has several demands for Atlantis. First, you are going to take this ship and turn it around and head directly back to Earth. Second—you’re going to take a detour to drop most of us off back on the planet, and then you will take the empty ship and fly toward the asteroid while it’s still a good ways away from impact. Third—you will crash this ship right into the asteroid, going at full speed. The resulting multi-megaton explosion should take care of the asteroid, problem solved. Fourth—you will take your entire damn Fleet and get the hell out of our solar system, and never come back!”

A moment of silence.

Kassiopei’s face is a frozen mask. “It’s not going to happen,” he says calmly.

Trey pokes my shoulder with his gun. “Oh, yeah? Well, that’s not something we want to hear.”

Aeson watches him. Then he glances at the rest of the room. “You know you’re not getting out of this alive. Let everyone go, and I promise you a fair trial and your life, together with the lives of others in your group.”

Trey cusses. “You’re kidding me, right? So I’m going to begin shooting some hostages. Starting with
this
girl.” And he strokes the gun across my chest, sweeping it to the left, to position it directly over my heart. “Gonna count to three, Command Pilot, and little Gwen Lark here is going to be one ugly bloody mess—”

Aeson blinks. “Wait,” he says. And his voice becomes
hollow
, dark, unrecognizable.

Trey makes a snorting laugh. “What? What did you say? I don’t think I heard you, Command Pilot—”

“I said, wait.” Aeson looks at Trey with serpent eyes. “I am coming over.”

“Oh, you’re coming here? When?”

“Ten minutes.”

Trey nods, again waving the gun that he’s taken from my chest. “Great! Be here and we can talk terms and details. Because I promise you, if you don’t, none of these people will be alive by the end of the hour. It’s all on your head. Oh, and be sure to come alone. If we see guards with you, we start shooting hostages.”

“I am on my way,” Aeson says. “I will come alone. Harm no one.” And the display screen goes dark.

I stagger back as Trey shoves me roughly and takes me back into the group of hostages, leaving me to stand near the wall next to Logan and some terrified girl Cadet.

“You okay?” Logan whispers.

I reply by widening my eyes. Because two guns are pointed at me and him.

“No talking,” a masked girl says harshly.

S
o for the next ten minutes we stand, breathing and waiting. A few whimpers and sniffles sound around the room, but mostly there’s silence. The gun-toting assailants seem high-strung. They talk occasionally in quiet tense voices, while pacing before us, and I can’t tell what is being said. Furthermore, not all of it is in English.

At some point, Trey walks closer to the exit corridor and says loudly, “Jenny, can you see anyone coming?”

“Not yet,” a girl’s voice replies from outside the meal hall near the entrance.

And then, a few minutes later, her voice sounds again. “He’s here.”

Trey slaps his leg with the side of the gun and stops pacing. Through the mask, his eyes glitter with excitement. “Disarm him. Check carefully and take all the weapons he might have on him. Then let him in here.”

“Okay. . . .”

Another minute passes. And then Aeson Kassiopei enters the meal hall. His hands are lowered at his sides and he is once again fully dressed and wearing his uniform shirt.

Without saying a word he walks quickly toward the hostage takers, straight-backed and unyielding.

Trey orients in his direction, with his gun pointing at Kassiopei. The other four masked Terra Patria members linger momentarily with indecision, some of them eventually deciding to keep their weapons aimed at us.

“Command Pilot!” Trey says. “Welcome! Come closer and let’s talk.”

But Aeson does not reply and keeps moving toward him. His face is frozen in a cold, expressionless, focused mask. When he gets to the middle of the room his gaze flashes with life. . . .

And suddenly, everything seems to go slow motion.

I watch as his hands move in tandem, wrists fly up and twist, strong elegant fingers flashing with impossible speed. And then he fires, with both hands simultaneously—rapid, multiple lightning-fast micro-volleys of pure laser light from two needle-guns—aiming perfectly five times.

At five different targets.

The first one to fall is Trey. He goes crashing down, and before he even hits the floor, Aeson Kassiopei is firing elsewhere.

Down goes the masked girl nearest me, with an exhaled breath and the hiss of scorching flesh and fabric. Then, a fraction of a second later, the guy nearest her, crumples. There’s no time to blink, and the remaining boy and girl collapse in a lifeless heap on top of each other. . . .