Dark Solstice (20 page)

Debate rose instantly into her mind whether or not she’d be better off if he did, but she discovered she couldn’t bring herself to force him into carrying out his threat. The brief fight went out of her. The knife disappeared. Grabbing a handful of her hair, he half dragged her from the storage room and down the narrow gangway, shoving her into the open door of what she discovered was another storage room.

“Get into a suit. We’ll be taking a walk.”

He shoved her so hard when he let go of her hair that she slammed into a locker and lost her balance, landing painfully on the deck. She saw once she’d managed to push herself up that he had grabbed a PEC for himself and was pulling it on. Glancing toward the door, she bounded to her feet and raced for the opening. She managed to make it through and several bounds down the corridor before she ran into Cook, on his way back from sabotaging the door of the cockpit.

Or rather Cook’s fist. The glancing blow wasn’t enough to knock her unconscious, but it rattled her brain in her skull and sent her bouncing off first one wall and then the other before she slammed backwards into the deck. When she managed to focus her eyes, Grimes’ face swam into view as he bent down, grabbed her by her hair again and dragged her back into the room she’d just escaped from. She tried to catch her balance when he gave her a shove toward the locker again but without success. She hit the deck and skidded, slamming her head and shoulder into the metal. “I won’t be carrying you, munch!” Grimes growled. “You’ve got two choices. You can get into the fucking PEC and move under your own steam, or I’ll cut your throat and leave you here.”

The ship bucked and rolled as Rhea struggled to get up again, pitching her back onto the deck. Cook made a strange sound. Grimes cursed. “The bastards must have caught up with us!”

“Or crash!” Cook managed in his horribly grating croak.

“Get into the PEC, you stupid cunt, and quick stalling!” Grimes roared at Rhea as she struggled to get up.

Galvanized more by the possibility of finding herself in an airless, or virtually airless, environment than Grimes’ order, Rhea managed to get to the locker and pull a PEC out. She tried not to think about the fact that Raathe and Justice were trapped in the cockpit without PECs.
They’ll be alright. They’ll come for me
, she kept repeating in her mind over and over as she fought to keep her balance and get the suit on.

They
had
to be alright. She couldn’t accept that they wouldn’t be, that they weren’t invincible.

It was the only doubt that flickered even briefly through her mind. She knew they would come after her if they were able to.

Please, please let them be alright
, she added to the litany in her head as she finally secured the suit and struggled to reach the helmet and life support unit, praying to whatever power there might be in the universe to help her—luck, fate, gods, demons, saints, or sinners.

Her answer came from Grimes, the lowlife snake! She lifted her head from strapping on her life support unit in time to see him cut the air hoses on the remaining units. “No!” she screamed, leaping at him with no thought beyond stopping him.

He backhanded her. The blow in conjunction with a hard pitch of the ship, sent her flying backwards. She hit the far wall and slid to the floor, too stunned to try to pick herself up.

Cook, amazingly enough, prevented Grimes from following up and beating her senseless. “Might as well cut her throat and be done. I sure as fuck ain’t carryin’ her!”

Grimes studied her furiously for a moment and finally backed off. Grabbing a helmet, he yanked her forward by gripping the front of her suit and shoved it over her head, fastening it to her suit. “Last warning, cunt!” he growled through her comm. “Next time I’ll just cut your air hose and leave you.”

Rhea swallowed against a mixture of terror and despair that knotted in her throat. He’d cut
their
air hoses! They didn’t have a chance!

Rage washed into the vacuum of emotions that followed the recession of terror and despair. She was going to them
kill
them for that! Somehow!

She didn’t know how, but she
did
know that she’d landed in the savage land of kill or be killed. They weren’t taking her with them out of the goodness of their hearts. They had something in mind that she couldn’t even have grasped if she’d wanted to turn her mind to it. Far more galvanizing than that, though, was the realization that they’d made sure they’d guaranteed Kyle’s and John’s deaths even if they survived the landing.

She wasn’t going to let the bastards get away with it!

* * * *

“What the fuck?” Raathe ground out the moment he fell into his seat and saw the blips on the screen.

“What?” Justice demanded even as he scrambled into the co-pilot’s seat. “Shit! Where the hell did they come from?”

Raathe didn’t answer, but then he didn’t have a fucking clue of where the other ships had come from. As far as he’d been aware the shuttle the prison used to transport them from Phobos to Mars was the only ship in the quadrant.

He took control of the ship and veered away from the incoming torpedoes, discovering too late that they were still out of range to be a real threat. The evasive maneuver sent the crippled ship wildly out of control. By the time they’d managed to regain some stability, they discovered they’d already been caught in the pull of the red planet.

“Strap in!” Raathe bellowed over his shoulder, struggling to slow the ship down. “We’re going to come in hard! I can’t slow this son-of-a-bitch down!”

Kyle, as busy as Raathe working his own controls for several moments, finally flung a glance back to make sure Rhea was strapped in and discovered she hadn’t followed them to the cockpit. “Shit! Raathe! Rhea’s still in the back somewhere!”

“Help me get this bastard leveled out and then go get her! If we don’t get this thing slowed down there won’t be a safe place for her on the ship!”

As preoccupied as they both were, they heard the sound of the door to the cockpit closing. Both men glanced around, expecting to see Rhea. Instead, they caught a glimpse of Cook just as the door closed. Kyle grabbed his pistol and aimed, but the door closed before he could get off a shot.

He sent Raathe a hard look as comprehension hit him. Bolting from his seat, he charged the door and tried to open it. “The bastard’s disabled it. I can’t get it open.”

Raathe cursed long and hard. “Let’s just get this thing down in one piece,” he growled finally. “We’ll deal with them then.”

“Jesus!” Justice exclaimed as he saw the planet looming in the view port. “We’re not going to make it!”

“The hell we won’t!” Raathe growled. “Get in your fucking seat and help me with this bastard! I can’t hold it and slow it down at the same time!”

Justice fell into his seat, trying to secure his restraints and work the console at the same time. “One of the thrusters is stuck, damn it to hell! It isn’t responding.”

“Use what you have then, damn it! I’ll hold it!”

The first burst nearly ripped control from Raathe. He gritted his teeth, trying to keep the ship from going into a spiral. “Easy with that fucking thing!”

Cursing under his breath, Kyle applied the forward thrust again, easier, punching at the control of the damaged thruster at the same time. It began to move, sluggishly, into the forward position and his heart leapt with hope. It stuck again before it had completed the turn. “Fuck! I got the other thruster to move, but it froze again!”

“Try it anyway. At this point we don’t have a hell of a lot to lose. We’re still moving too fast!”

The ship bucked and pivoted, threatening to go into a spiral fall or break apart. Kyle applied the thrusters steadily, trying to compensate for the angle of thrust of the misaligned thruster, slowing the ship’s descent.

“Forward shields up!” Raathe bellowed. “We’re out of time! Kiss your ass goodbye!”

The words were barely out of his mouth when the ship slammed into the Martian surface hard enough to jar them loose of the controls. “Don’t fire the misaligned thruster!” Raathe bellowed as Kyle lurched to grab the thruster control again. “You’ll flip us!”

The ship bucked and skidded over the rocky, uneven surface, nearly jarring their teeth from their head and shaking bones from sockets, but it began slowing.

“Oh fuck!” Raathe exclaimed.

The exclamation brought Kyle’s gaze to the forward view. Seeing the house sized boulder flying at them, he bore down on both thrusters at one time. The ship bucked and careened sideways, slamming into the rock hard enough to buckle the side of the ship before it came to a halt.

For several moments, they were both too shaken to gather their wits or move. Raathe shook his head to try to shake off the encroaching darkness and struggled to assess personal damage. His rib and hand were still hurting like a son-of-a-bitch, but he couldn’t tell that they hurt any worse than they had before the crash. A throbbing pain in his head and neck had been added to the mixture, though. Lifting a hand, he searched his head for the wound and found a goose egg on his forehead that was bleeding sluggishly.

“You still among the living, Justice?” he growled.

Justice grunted. “Think so. Don’t think I will be long, though, if we don’t get our asses in gear. It’s getting colder in here by the minute and I either punctured a lung or the air’s leaking like a son-of-a-bitch.”

Raathe struggled for several moments and finally managed to disentangle himself from his restraints and lever himself out of the seat. The ship was tilted at a crazy angle and he had to fight his way to the cockpit door. Kyle joined him just as he pulled his pistol and tried to focus on the locking mechanism, grabbing his arm.

“The crash ripped the whole side of the ship open. If you open that we’re going to suffocate in about five minutes flat!”

“Rhea’s in there with those two animals!” Raathe growled. “I have to get to her!”

“Neither one of us are going to do her any good dead!” Justice snarled instead of voicing the doubts swarming his mind that Rhea had even survived the crash.

He knew from the look Raathe gave him that Raathe didn’t think she’d survived either. “I can’t help her by staying here. We aren’t going to have any air in a few minutes anyway.”

Justice released his grip on Raathe’s arm. “I saw PECs in a locker room about half way between here and the tail end of the ship. You think we can make it to them and get into them?”

“I don’t think we’ve got a fucking choice about whether to try for it or not. Anyway, the air’s not as thin as it was. We’ll have maybe fifteen minutes before we pass out.”

“If we don’t over exert,” Kyle reminded him. “The ship’s in pieces.”

“Suck up what you can and get ready to move,” Raathe said grimly. “Assuming those two fucking rats survived, and Rhea with them, I’m not leaving her to their tender mercies. Between them, those two sadistic bastards raped and tortured nineteen women to death.”

“Fuck!” Kyle exploded. “What the
hell
did you partner up with men like that for?”

Raathe ground his teeth against his fury. “You think there were any upstanding citizens in Phobos I could’ve picked? Rhea wasn’t in the picture! They were partners. They worked together, killed together. I knew they wouldn’t turn on each other and blow the plan. You want to stand here and argue about my fucking choices? Or go after her before they find the time to enjoy her?”

Chapter Eighteen

The light was already fading when Raathe and Justice stumbled from the cockpit and looked around at the wreckage of the ship. Part of the corridor was still relatively intact, though, and they followed it, climbing over the debris that littered the passage. Raathe’s teeth were chattering from the bitter cold by the time they reached the section of the ship where Justice had indicated they could find PECs. The warmest the planet ever got was the mid fifties, at the equator, and they were well above the equator. With the descent of the sun toward the horizon, the temperature was rapidly dropping below freezing.

The locker had been broken open with the crash. PECs were scattered around what was left of the cabin. Grabbing one with fingers already stiff with cold, Raathe quickly checked it to make certain it was intact and began to struggle into it. Dizziness assailed him as he worked his uncooperative fingers up the closure. He blinked, wondering if it was the head wound or the lack of air that was bringing on the encroaching darkness so rapidly.

His lungs were on fire, his chest aching with the effort to breathe. Folding an arm tightly against his cracked rib, he tried to blink his eyes into focus and look for a life support unit. He needed air quickly, he knew, or he was going to pass out.

Spying what looked like the corner of one under a pile debris, he staggered toward it, dropped to his knees and dug for the unit with one hand. Grabbing at the hose the minute he unearthed it, he lifted it up and stared at the cut line stupidly for a split second before he gathered his wits enough to shove the end in his mouth. Air filled his lungs for the first time since he’d blasted the door off the cockpit, chasing the darkness back.

Sucking on the hose, he jerked at the edge of the unit until he’d pulled it free.

A crash behind made him whirl with his pistol leveled.

He stared at Justice for a long moment and finally shoved himself to his feet and staggered over to the fallen man. “The line’s been cut,” he gasped when he’d pulled the tube from his mouth and pushed it between Justice’s teeth.

Justice grabbed at it, filling his lungs several times before Raathe could wrest it away from him again. Justice sat up with murder in his eyes. Raathe settled the barrel of his pistol under his chin.

The two men leveled a hard look at one another. Finally, Justice looked away, scanning the debris for another unit. They shared the air from the unit Raathe had found while they searched, finally discovering a second and then a third. “The bastards sabotaged all the units,” Justice said in disgust.

“Then we’ll make do,” Raathe said grimly, his teeth chattering so hard now that he could barely speak. “We need to move. They’ll keep her alive until she shows them the way to the caverns. After that ….”