The Empty Warrior (83 page)

Steenini laughed. “Mate,” he began, “don’t worry about me. I can take care of everything you just said all by myself and in less than an hour or two. Vazilek remote links can be a bit twitchy, what with all their security protocols. After all, unmanned ships can’t be left as easy pickings for anyone with a comm link and a computer. But I’ll get it done. The real trick is going to be you,” he looked at the doctor, “getting all of us and the provisions we’ll need aboard these two ships and then you,” he said, turning back to Lindy, “being able to fly them out of here in the midst of an explosion the likes of which none of us has ever seen. You two are the ones that are going to have to craft a bit of magic. So you had best get to it.”

He clasped both the doctor and Lindy by a shoulder, gently pushing them out of the control room and toward the lift. “Go with the doctor, Willet,” he said. “He is going to need your help, and there is nothing for you to do here until we are ready to leave. When you get to the lift just press the area on the panel that is backlit in green and it will lower you to the floor. I’ll make the rest of the arrangements from here.” With that he returned to his seat and went to work.

Hours later, somehow everything had been accomplished. It had taken a near miracle of organization on the part of Nelsik’s men and a great deal of assistance from the dogs, but it had been done. Even Steenini had pitched in, as he had somehow managed to reprogram the colony’s system of cargo trains for use by the Akadeans, allowing them to ferry a great deal of the provisions that were needed from the storerooms to the ships with infinitely less hardship.

When the freighters were fully stocked with food, everyone—man and beast—had been crammed into every available nook and cranny the vessels possessed. O’Keefe lay unconscious in the small autodoc that served as a sick bay on the command freighter, Beccassit and Regulus there with him, while Lindy and Steenini manned the cramped control room.

The second freighter lay just to their starboard. Both ships had been moved to the rear of the now darkened hangar, with their bows pointed toward the other end of the cavern where the enormous access doors were built into the ceiling. The smallest of the three craft lay where Steenini had sent it, directly under those access doors, ready to immolate itself in the prisoners’ bid for freedom.

But even if everything went according to plan, it was going to take an extraordinary feat of flying to squeeze both ships through the hole left in the hangar as the hatch was blown outward. There would be no careful, measured ascent using only the antigravs and the maneuvering thrusters. If the shields held, as was hoped, the ships and the men inside would be protected from the radiation and the initial blast effects. But once the hatch was blown out of the stone ceiling, the pressure wave from the explosion would follow the debris out into the atmosphere of Ashawzut. That was not to mention the secondary winds that would be sweeping upward under the mushroom cloud. The ships would be sucked out of the hangar, shields or no shields, like toothpicks pulled into a wind tunnel. Only the main engines offered any hope of steadying them amidst that maelstrom. And that was hardly the worst news. Not only would they have to be flown as one and kept unthinkably close together, the angle of attack would have to be very nearly perfect. Only a few of degrees too shallow and the tails of the ships would scrape the near side of cavern’s roof as they passed through the opening created by the explosion. A few degrees too steep and the forces of the escaping blast would sweep the ventral surfaces of both ships into a catastrophic collision with the far side of the opening. Either way they would all be dead. Steenini had calculated that there would be only a matter of feet to spare on any side of the two ships as they made their escape. Lindy’s task was the equivalent of a man trying to thread a needle while standing amidst a hurricane. But there was no alternative.

“Ready?” Lindy asked.

“As I’ll ever be, mate,” Steenini replied fatalistically.

“How do the radiation levels look?”

There was a pause as Steenini leaned forward to punch in commands. “It’s bad down near the power plants,” he finally answered. “Very bad. If we were down there now trying to clear the rubble we’d all be getting a lethal dose. There’s not much to speak of in the hangar yet, but it wouldn’t hurt to get the shields up before it gets any worse.”

Lindy nodded his head in agreement, simultaneously keying the controls which caused the power to surge in the reactors. When both the ships reached full power Lindy activated the shields, adjusting them until they tightly encompassed both ships. When he was finished, the field generators were operating at over 100 percent of their rated capacity and a reddish glow from the shielding filled the hangar. Lindy unlocked the panel that would detonate the third ship.

“Well,” he breathed, “here we go.” He engaged the antigravs and the two freighters lifted from the floor. Steenini’s left hand reached for Lindy’s shoulder and gripped it tightly. The support struts folded neatly into the hulls of both ships. They had been secured for only a moment before Lindy punched in the destruct code with his left hand, while at the same time using his right to throttle up the conventional drives of both ships to full power.

Out in the hangar, the sacrificial freighter erupted in a blinding white light as the power of splitting atoms vaporized it. Lindy’s viewscreens went dark, overloaded by the flash of power. For a fraction of a second, both the big transports stalled as titanic forces struggled for dominance in the hangar enclosure. Heat seared their hulls even through the shields. Their engines pushed forward against the blast, but the Brobdingnagian forces involved nevertheless propelled them ominously back toward the rear wall of the hangar. But in less time than it took Lindy’s heart to pulse a single beat the enormous access doors blew, exploding outward under the strain. Tons of molten and solid rock, sized from dust motes to boulders of asteroid proportions, followed in a radioactive holocaust of fiery annihilation. Through that storm Lindy piloted the two vessels. They accelerated through the wide rent ripped out of the ceiling by the explosion and out into the atmosphere of Ashawzut. The detonation of the Vazilek freighter had blown a gaping hole in the hangar ceiling around where the access doors had been, so despite the men’s earlier fears, the ships’ departure window had been considerably larger than they had initially estimated. They had blasted through the aperture with room to spare.

Now the danger lay in the flying rubble around them. Debris impacted the shields relentlessly, threatening to collapse them. Only the power generated by two ships and their overlapping protection kept the deadly tempest at bay. In seconds they were racing high into Ashawzut’s thin atmosphere, and the big engines of the ships began to push them ever faster into the flying detritus ahead. Lindy eased back the throttles until the ships were moving more with the debris than through it. Then using thrusters he expertly maneuvered the ships slowly away from the center of the debris field, to an area where the shields were more than capable of preserving the big ships. They pushed aside all but the largest fragments, and those Lindy was easily able to avoid.

In only minutes they were clear and into the vacuum of space. Lindy slumped back into his chair, the tension streaming from his back and shoulders like water coursing down a mountainside. He swiveled to face Steenini and found the gimpy man grinning hugely at him through his scarred countenance. As one they stood, reached for each other and embraced, clapping each other on the back and celebrating furiously. It seemed to both of them as if it was a very long time before they could stop screaming joyfully. At last Steenini pushed away from Lindy and looked at him solemnly. “Now that we’re out, we’ve still got big problems, you know. Where do we go?” he asked. “What will we do?”

Lindy scowled. “I don’t know. I do know there is nowhere for me to go. I have no home now. Without Cyanne I have nothing. I may as well stick with Hill, become an aberrant myself, and fight; push the Vazileks back where they belong.”

“Well, that’s a fine sentiment, Willet, but from what I’ve heard from the newest arrivals to our so recently vacated prison, their latest attacks have crippled virtually all the shipyards and destroyed or damaged much of the police’s fleet. All that’s left now are remnants. It seems that the Vazileks can take whatever and whoever they want as fast as they are able. Just how do you propose to send them packing?”

Lindy turned away, flipped up a toggle, and stared pensively at the viewscreen which the control had activated. On it shown the millions of stars out over the bow of the freighter. Lindy stared at them for several long seconds before he answered. “You’re right, Bartle,” he said slowly. “It hardly seems possible that we could drive them away.” Then he turned to look once more into the eyes of his friend. “But then Elorak seemed invincible, too. We both thought Hill to be totally insane, and yet still he took her down. Maybe he is simply better at this kind of thing than we or anyone else suspects. Maybe he knows what we do not about how to beat them. And even if he doesn’t, I’d just like to be around to see what sort of lunatic plan the man comes up with next.”

This concludes Volume One of the Aberrant Chronicles. The as yet untitled Volume Two has begun inching its way toward completion as this is written. I hope to finish it as soon as possible, but I offer no guarantees, for as I type this I’m not making a dime writing books. For progress updates, see my Twitter page at
http://twitter.com/jdirkmccartney
. Finally, I hope you enjoyed the book. If you did, it is my fondest hope that you will recommend it to a friend, as without a mainstream publisher word of mouth advertising is the best marketing tool available to me. Thank you very much for taking the time to read my work. J. D. McCartney