The World Forgot (17 page)

“Shit,” I whisper, watching my daughter choke on her sobs.

“What's going on?” comes Ducky's voice from behind me. “Don't tell me you're stuck. This is so
not
where I'm dying.”

“I'm not stuck,” I tell him. I push myself forward and start working my way over the edge. The entire passage is slick with blood now, and I force back the bile that rises in my throat from the sticky-sweet smell. I'm doing my best to shimmy around the bend, my head and shoulders already over the edge and tilting downward, when my right arm slips and, thanks to a luck only I seem to possess, lodges itself at an incredibly painful angle beneath my chest.

“Okay,” I tell Ducky. “
Now
I'm stuck.”

Groans from the entire length of the duct.

“What's going on up there?” Chloe calls. “Hurry up! We've got to get to the ship!”

“Just . . . hold . . .
on
,” I grunt, trying out various uncomfortable contortions to try to pull my arm free. But no luck. The worst part is that I can feel the pull of gravity on my body, and the sensation is giving me a Ducky-size case of vertigo. As the blood rushes more quickly to my head, I really begin to panic. Is this how I finally die, as a clog in a drain? Is this how we
all
die?

That's when I hear Ducky thumping forward in the passage behind me. I feel pressure on my feet and soon realize that he's nuzzling my boots with his head.

“Duck?” I ask as I feel him parting my feet slightly with his noggin. “What are you doing?”

“I'm sorry,” Ducky says, and I can tell he means it. But what in the world is he—

“Ducky!” I scream, jolting up and hitting my head on the top of the duct. Ducky has slid my feet to the edges of the narrow tube and is currently
crawling headfirst between my legs
.

“Sorry!” he says again. “I'm so sorry! Really! Sorry!”

The repeated exclamations of apology do very little to allay the incredibly uncomfortable situation that we find ourselves in.

“What are you
doing
?” I say again. Broken records, the two of us.

“We've got to get you moving,” he says. “I can't move my arms. This is the only way I can . . .”

And then, with no further warning, my best friend in the whole world has the top of his head pressed squarely into my butt.

“Sorry!”

“It's working!” I cry as I feel my body slide a few centimeters. “Keep it up, Duck!”

“Donald!” Marnie calls from behind him. “Careful, love! I'm quite fond of that head of yers.”

Two more bumps, and my elbows have cleared the edge, joining my head and shoulders in the very downward dog position. Gravity finally grabs hold of me, and now I slide slowly along until I'm completely upside down and falling toward the receptacle bin.

I pop out like a gumball from a candy dispenser and come down with a squishy
plop
into the bin. Bok Choy and Chloe have climbed out already, but Chloe's too busy comforting her friend to help me clear the edge as I slip and slide on the Jell-O-like padding.

“He's hurt,” Chloe says, rather needlessly, when I land beside them on solid ground.

Bok Choy shakes his head. “There'll be time to deal with it later,” he tells her. But the rag, sopping wet with blood, seems to imply otherwise.

Ducky flops down into the gelatin bin behind us. He climbs out and lands next to me, his face all different kinds of red. “Again,” he mumbles. “Sorry.”

The others follow, one by one, and we find ourselves in the loading bay for the factory's private hangar, where the bricks are gathered, tagged, and loaded onto the ships that will deploy them into the atmosphere. Bok Choy gathers his strength and leads us, as quietly as you can move with a bunch of confused and genetically- and intellectually-challenged clones, up a large, wide flight of stairs to the control room between the loading bay and the hangar.

The control room is long, probably twenty-plus meters across, with a transparent aluminum window panel looking out over the hangar. Cole edges up to the window and peeks down over the edge.

“Well?” Marnie asks.

“Shit,” he says.

I creep up alongside him, hoping to embellish his commentary with a little more detail.

“Shit,” I add helpfully.

Below us the smoking wreckage of dozens of small ships litters the deck. At first I wonder if the Devastators targeted the hangar with some sort of ship-to-ship missile, but the damage is too specific, with ships lying in useless fiery heaps while the cargo loaders and flatbed trolleys remain untouched—­presumably because the Jin'Kai determined that it's difficult to escape into outer space on a forklift.

“Careful,” Marnie says from beside me. “They're still wandering around down there.” I spot roughly a dozen Devastators on the floor. They're all hovering around one ship, the sight of which fills me with excitement and dread both at once.

“That's our ship!” I cry.

“You came here in that thing?” Britta asks. “How did you expect to fit us all into that little tin can?”

“I didn't,” I snap back. “If you want, we can leave you here.”

Ducky's comment is slightly more helpful. “It looks like they didn't blow it up or anything.”

“They're probably right confused about why it's there,” Marnie says. “It's not Jin'Kai or human. They might be tryin' to find out if there's an Almiri presence aboard the station.”

“Well, our ship's in one piece, so that's good,” Cole says. “But I hate to point out that it's also crawling with those things.”

“That's not all,” Bok Choy says, grimacing. Chloe offers a concerned hand to steady him at the console, but he shakes her off. “They've attached something to the ship. Some sort of docking clamps. It'll take me a while to disable them.”

“You start fiddlin' with those, and they'll know we're here,” Marnie says.

“Not if we distract them,” I say. I flick on the console next to Bok Choy and bring up the inventory screen for the loading bay.

“There's more than two thousand ozone bricks sitting in here waiting for a stack and pack,” I say. I turn to Chloe. “You feel like setting off any more fireworks?”

“You can't detonate those bricks,” Ducky warns. “If we can't get the ship to fly, you'll block our only way out.”

“If the ship doesn't fly,” I point out, “then we're all dead anyway.” I hold out my hand to Chloe, who smirks and drops a long, pointy blaster into my grip. “Bok Choy, you work on those clamps. Cole, you and the others take the Brittas—” At the sound of their name, all of their perky blond heads turn to me in unison. “Wait down in the access corridor until the coast is clear. Chloe, let's go shoot this place to hell.”

Chloe and I make our way back into the loading bay. A floor console stands near the front loading gate that connects the bay to the hangar. I activate it and initiate the loading sequence. Immediately, shielded panels begin sliding open on the three walls, frosty mist rolling out from the refrigerated storage compartments. Inside each compartment, rack after rack of dark purple bricks begins to automatically extend into the bay, where normally a loader would be waiting to install them on a deployment craft. The bricks themselves are actually quite pretty. They look like a cross between colored quartz and grape-flavored Popsicles.

“Okay. We're only going to get one chance at this,” I say.

“Well, now's not the time for cold feet,” Chloe says. She positions herself in front of the loading gate and cocks two big guns, one in each hand, like the little Rambolina I always dreamed of rearing. “Open sesame.”

I tap in the commands, and the gate groans and creaks open, rusted metal screeching against rusted metal.

“That got their attention!” comes Bok Choy's voice over the comm in the control panel. “They're sending two your way.”

“Well, they're going to love this, then,” Chloe replies. As soon as the gate is fully open, the two Devastators come into view and see her. Before they can react, she opens fire. “Die, you sap-suckers!” she cries, unleashing unholy hell on them with their own advanced firearms. The two giant creeps stagger backward under the barrage of fire. From behind them enraged voices fill the air.

“Here they come!” Bok Choy warns.

Chloe runs back inside the bay, sending random fire toward the gate, being careful not to shoot anywhere near the bricks. I hightail it back up the stairs toward the control room and crouch by the door. Chloe races my way.

“Now!” she says.

Not yet,
I tell myself. I square up my gun and balance it on my knee.

Once Chloe reaches me, she spins around, looking back down at the empty bay below us. “What are you waiting for?” she asks.

“This,” I say.

As the Devastators come barreling into the bay, I take aim and fire my weapon, straight past the aliens, at the stack of bricks at the opposite end of the room. The bricks explode one after another in a chain reaction, cascading around the room from one stack to the next. The concussive force knocks both me and Chloe to the ground, but the Devastators on the floor are completely engulfed by the maelstrom, and they wail in pain. Still, blaster fire seeks us out as we scramble on our hands and knees back to the control room. The door slides shut behind us as soon as we're inside.

I'm pretty sure mani-pedis would've been a more stress-free form of mother-daughter bonding.

Bok Choy is still working intently over the docking controls.

“Are the others aboard?” I ask.

“They're at the ship,” he informs me. “They're under fire from a few stray hostiles.”

“What about the docking clamps?”

“I need another minute.”

“We don't have a minute!” Chloe shouts.

Bok Choy doesn't look up from his work. “Just get to the ship,” he says. “Stick close to the left wall there. You'll be able to flank them and create cover so the others can get aboard.”

“What about you?” Chloe asks, her voice strained.

Bok Choy pauses for the first time and looks up at her. “I'll be with you soon,” he tells her, then immediately returns his focus to the control panel.

“But . . . ,” she starts, but she can't get any more words out. I grab her arm and tug her toward the exit.

“Chloe, we have to help the others,” I say.

Chloe reluctantly exits with me, but she keeps her gaze on Bok Choy as we move. He never looks up.

I can hear the blaster fire as we move quickly along the left wall, weaving around the rubble that was once a small fleet of crappy fliers. As we zoom around a long block of loading equipment, I make out Cole and Marnie exchanging fire with the Devastators from behind the ship's loading ramp, while the others use the ramp as cover. There are three baddies returning fire. Our vantage point creates a triangle among all three parties; we're slightly behind the Devastators but still obscured by debris.

Without a word between us, Chloe and I open fire. As soon as we do, the Devastators pivot and discover us, sending a return volley before retreating to cover. This gives Cole, Marnie, and the others a chance to scurry up the gangway into the ship. Once everyone else is aboard, Cole and Marnie emerge halfway back down the ramp and fire again at the Devastators' position. Pinched between two sets of foes, the Devastators can't line up any good shots, and Chloe and I are able to make a dash for the ship, the Devastators' fire clearing wide of us and exploding harmlessly against the hull of a ruined ozone flier.

“Get in!” Cole says, waving Chloe and me past him into the main hold.

I run inside to find Ducky trying to calm the Brittas. “We're fine,” he tells them. “You're all fine. Remember how cute Cole is? His, uh, butt and everything? Just concentrate on that.”

The Brittas, rattled like a group of puppies during a thunder­storm, settle slightly at the thought of Cole's posterior. Well, save one.

“I hate every last one of you,” Original Britta tells her gaggle of clones.

Ducky spots me as I come up the ramp. “Elvie, thank God,” he says.

“We've got to get this tub in the air,” I say.

“We can't leave yet,” Chloe says, shadowing me to the cockpit. “He's still back there. We're not leaving without him.”

“Of course not,” I tell her. I slide into the pilot's chair and begin the takeoff sequence. “Go back out there and help Cole and Marnie hold those scumbags back.”

Chloe doesn't look wholly convinced, but I give her a good mom-glare, and she retreats back to the ramp.

“Ducky!” I shout back into the hold. “Get your ass up here!”

He runs in at breakneck speed. “What is it?”

“I know you don't know how to fly this thing, but I need a co-pilot.”

“What about the Brittas?” he asks.

“Let Britta handle the Brittas.”

Ducky slips into the seat next to me without further hesitation.

“Check that our thrusters and stabilizers are all online while I fire up the engines,” I tell him. And when he gives me a
Wha-huh?
gaze, I elaborate. “Think
Tech-a-Mecha Revolutions 3
. Heroic mode.”

“Now you're talking my language,” Ducky says. He begins deftly flicking through the touch screen controls. But after just a few seconds he lets out a low whistle. “Um, hey, Elvie? What is this?” He flicks the display toward me, and his screen slides onto my display. At first I think that Ducky has accidentally accessed some weird redundant system, but when I give it a second look, I realize what it is.

“Jesus, Mary, George, and Ringo,” I gasp. “Bricks. A full load of ozone bricks. At least a hundred.”

“On this ship?”

“The Governor's men must've had the ship retrofitted after Marsden handed it over,” I say, cycling through the system. “They've installed a launcher into the aft section too.”