Trapped: Chaos Core Book 1 (14 page)

“She’s in the cargo
bay, I think she found something there, but it’s open to space,”
Sun replied.

The radiation levels
were barely within tolerance, and Spin could see the roiling energy
tunnel they were travelling through to get away from Tullast.
“There’s an auto pry bar here.” She said as she reached the end
of her safety line, there were two metres between her and the tool
she needed. “Can’t reach it, I’m going to have to move freely.”

“We’ll find
something else, Spin,” Sun said.

“This’ll get it
done. It’ll just take a sec, be right back,” she replied,
detaching the safety line from her wrist and pushing towards the
bulkhead. The energy wall of their transit field shifted and roiled
beyond it. If she became separated from the ship she’d be lost,
atomized as she passed across the edge of the field and into normal
space. The only consolation was that it would be quick.

Spin touched the handle
of the pry bar and grabbed onto the edge of a support spar, relieved.
The pry bar unclipped and came free. That was the easy part. Looking
back towards the door she’d come from, she positioned herself
carefully, then pushed off.

Spin had practiced
space walking twice. Both times it was in an oxygenated environment,
inside a ship, with a suit on – just a little training from Sun –
but she’d never been in a vacuum with just a thin suit between her
and certain death.

The ship turned a
little, a minor course correction, something Spin did not see coming.
She was pointed at the other end of the broken cargo bay, with only
frame supports and no hull between her and the wormhole wall. “Holy
shit!” she said, near panic.

“Spread your legs and
arms out!” Sun told her. “Get ready to catch anything you can.”

Spin remembered those
light hearted training sessions then, and did exactly what she was
told, using the pry bar as an extension of one arm. To her relief her
shoulder collided with a twisted support, and her right arm wrapped
around it.

Never had her life
seemed more at risk, with an energy wall filling her view, and a
slender piece of metal providing her only refuge. The pry bar was
near slipping, so she adjusted her hold and brought it closer. “Okay,
Sun,” she said, breathing heavily. “Get to the cockpit, the door
code is three, three, three, five. Make sure this ship doesn’t have
any course corrections coming up.”

“On my way,” Sun
said, “Nice save, by the way.”

“I’m going to have
nightmares for weeks about this,” Spin said. “I still have the
pry bar, Della, hang on,” she said, knowing that there was only a
slim chance that the woman could hear her.

“Okay, I’m here,”
Sun said. “No course corrections coming up for nine minutes.”

“Okay, I’m going to
try this again.”

“Push off slowly, you
don’t have much to work with,” Sun said.

“You’re telling
me,” Spin replied. With more care than before, she positioned
herself as best as she could, took a breath and pushed off towards
the inner door. She was moving so slowly compared to the first push
off, she had time to think. “If I don’t make it, use whatever you
can to get that door open. The ship doesn’t matter, she does.”

“Shut up, spread your
arms and legs open, and get ready to grab on to anything you touch,”
Sun said. “Silly woman.”

Spin waited as she
drifted through the cargo hold, open space all around her, aware that
she wasn’t going to be safe until she actually had a grip on
something.

The line she was
tethered to earlier brushed against her chest, and she grabbed it
greedily, losing her grip on the pry bar. It started slowly spinning
out of reach. Her attempt at catching it only made it spin more.

Without a word, she
yanked on the line and bashed against the inner cargo hold hatch hard
enough to make her teeth rattle. “No way am I losing this thing,”
she said as she clipped the end of the line onto her wrist, wrapped
it around her arm a few times for good measure and pushed off hard,
aiming herself at the pry bar.

Spin collided with it
and wrapped her arms around the tool, the line stopped her hard,
momentarily jarring her. “Okay, coming back.”

“Don’t ever do that
again,” Sun said.

With a tug she started
drifting back to the inner door. “Activate the emergency bulkhead,”
she said.

The thin emergency
bulkhead began to unroll from the ceiling, stiffening as it
straightened down. As soon as it touched the quarter of the cargo bay
that was sealed repressurized and she waited. It seemed to take
forever.

The interior hatch door
finally unlocked once the pressure in the sealed section of cargo bay
was equal to that of the hallway, and Spin burst through, running
back towards the main cabin. “Here!” she said, handing the pry
bar to Nigel, who had it jammed in and activated in seconds. The
gyros built into the long pry bar added force to his efforts as he
tried to pry the door open. With a long, ponderous creak, the
doorframe began to twist. He jostled the end further in. “Stand
back.”

With one hard push the
hatch burst open. “Get her out,” Nigel said.

“She should have been
wearing her helmet, but she said it felt claustrophobic with it on,”
Mirra said as she rushed in and pulled her best friend free of the
turret seat. Smoke rolled out with her.

Travis arrived with a
small revitalizer and put it over her heart. He sat down beside her
hard, overtaken by a coughing fit. Spin took over, activating the
circular device, then opening the front of Della’s suit wide so it
could have access. Tendrils poked through her skin to oxygenate her
blood, massage her heart back into a beat with physical, chemical and
gentle electrical stimulation.

It took over her
circulation as it worked on her heart, and presented a breathing cup
to place over Della’s mouth. Spin pulled the cup mask only to
discover that the line was frayed.

“Old fashioned way it
is,” Spin said, checking Della’s airway, straightening her neck
and breathing into her. A positive triple beep sounded from the small
unit, indicating that there was a regular heartbeat.

Spin kept breathing
into Della, regularly. She lost count of the breaths she gave her.
“Della, please,” Mirra said, picking up her friend’s hand. “I
don’t want to be free and alone.” She kissed it.

The breath was suddenly
sucked out of Spin’s lungs, and she leaned back, her lips still
close to Della’s. “Della?” she asked.

“Thank you,” she
said, coughing and wrapping her arms around Spin. “Oh my God, that
was scary.” The small life-saving device fell off of Della’s bare
chest. “I’m topless, aren’t I?” she whispered.

“Yup,” Spin said,
making a shallow attempt at pulling the front of her suit closed, but
failing.

“There are a lot of
people here,” Della said.

“Yup, and they’re
all impressed,” Spin said with a chuckle.

Della laughed, coughed,
and let Spin go, re-sealing the top of her jumpsuit. You would have
never been able to tell that anything had happened to her. Mirra
brought her to her feet and embraced her closely. “Don’t do that
to me,” she said.

“I’m okay,” Della
said, reassuring her.

Mirra pulled her head
back and kissed her soundly, and everyone looked on as Della,
surprised at first, reciprocated. Sun stopped half way down the steps
leading to the bridge and cocked her head, smiling. Then her
expression became serious. “Travis?” she asked, rushing to his
side.

He was sitting on the
deck, leaning forward, passed out. Spin got down to his level and
helped Sun lay him out. “He’s barely breathing,” she said.

“He fell into the
swamp as soon as we got there,” Leland said. “Got a whole mouth
and lung full of that stuff, I doubled his anti-fungal dose, it
should be working.”

“Unless it’s too
late,” Spin said, her medical training telling her that it almost
certainly was. She picked up the revival device and used the medical
scanner inside. Its supplies were depleted, and it couldn’t help
Travis, not with what he had. “It’s grown in his lungs, the
fungus is dying, but it’s causing clotting in his lungs and his
bloodstream.”

“Can that save him?
What can you do?” Sun asked.

The scanner revealed
something Spin did not want to know, and she put it down. “There
are many clots in his brain, at least twenty, a lot more near his
heart. I’m sorry, he’s already gone.”

“Oh, man,” Nigel
said, sitting down beside him and touching his face. “We signed on
to the Cool Angel together.” He touched his friend’s hand, then
withdrew, running his hand over his face. He looked at Travis with
tears in his eyes, and Spin put an arm around him. “He was just
bored, fuck. He wanted adventure, to get out there and see the
galaxy.” In a gesture that made Spin wish she could weep, Nigel
gently touched his friend’s cheek. “I’m gonna miss you, man.”

“There’s nothing?”
Sun mouthed silently behind Nigel’s back.

Spin slowly shook her
head. If she wasn’t medicated, she’d be in a blubbering pile
beside Nigel, but all those emotions seemed just far enough away for
her to keep her composure.

“He was the nicest
guy,” Sun said, putting her hand on Nigel’s shoulder. “Worked
hard and put other people first.”

One of the slaves
approached and took the reviver quietly, reactivating the scanning
tool on it. Spin didn’t stop him. He cleared his shoulder length,
dark hair out of his face and checked the results, shaking his head.
“It would have happened to all of us eventually if we stayed in
that place, he was done for before he got on this ship,” he said
quietly. “I’m sorry. I can tell you that he’s not feeling any
of this though. I’m a Medical Technician.”

Travis’ chest stopped
rising and falling. The device beeped an alert and the Medical
Technician turned it off. Nigel sighed, his cheeks covered in tears.
“See you in the next life, brother.”

Sun was on her feet
first. “He wanted a burial in space. Is there somewhere we can put
him?”

“The medbay for now,”
Spin said. “There’s a stretcher there.”

“We can move him,”
said a pair of rescued slaves. “If you want help.”

Mirra led them to the
medbay while Spin moved Nigel to a passenger seat. “Listen, Aspen,”
he said, clearing his eyes and wiping his face. “Whatever you’re
doing next, if it has anything to do with bringing pain on the people
who did this to us, then I’m in. Those fuckers just killed my best
friend and my uncle.”

Spin had completely
forgotten that Nigel was Boro’s nephew. To her, he was a friendly
man whose humour was so attractive that she couldn’t help but flirt
with him, but he was family to Nigel. “I can’t captain a ship,”
Spin said. “But I might be able to get us one.”

“What do you mean,
you can’t captain a ship?” Sun asked, her offended tone
surprising. “You got free of the Countess, right?”

Della nodded. “She
did, and she stole this ship, and planned your rescue on her own, we
weren’t much help. Oh, she wants to be called Spin now.”

“Then you pulled that
action hero shit back there to save her,” Sun continued. “And who
knows what else you had to do to get through the last couple days.
Hell, when I looked at the cockpit console, I couldn’t help but
notice that you hacked this ship so deep that no one could prove it
belonged to anyone else unless they checked the serial numbers under
the dash. That’s some pro level work,
Spin
.”

“I can’t be the
captain of a ship because I’m about to be the most wanted woman in
the sector, and dolls are prohibited from owning anything,” Spin
retorted. “The word is about to get out, and soon, everyone will
know that I’m not a real human, I just have the same flesh and
blood as one. They’ll also know that I turned on my master, and
nothing is more dangerous to the slave trade than one of the most
prized auction pieces going rogue. No, I can’t be a captain, and we
have to dump this ship fast. What’s worse is that we’re all
registered slaves now. Slave hunters won’t just be after me,
they’ll have all your names on the list. Any port run by the UCA or
any of their allies are off limits to us.”

Everyone in the room
was quietly watching her, even Nigel, who would look ridiculous in
his baggy jumpsuit if he weren’t beside the body of his best
friend. “I can afford a ship if we can find someone who will sell
us one without ratting on us. To be honest, it would be better to
steal one, so we can pretend there’s a legitimate captain aboard
until we find someone who isn’t wanted, someone with a clear name
to put a new ship under. Without that, we’re stuck with the black
markets, the wasted places, and the lawless systems.”

“We’ve been there
before,” Sun said. “Some of us even have friends in pirate
havens, we just need something to trade.”

Spin found herself
smiling, really smiling for the first time since Larken was killed.
She held up her wrist. “I have a download of the Countess’s
entire personal and corporate database. Shipping routes, banking
information waiting to be cracked, locations of operations, caches,
you name it.”

“That’s a start, a
good start,” Sun said. “But I was thinking we could go get the
Cool Angel, and tear Captain White apart. He betrayed you and threw
crewmembers away for a pile of cash. I can’t let him get away with
that.”

“Definitely,” Spin
said. “So, you’re in?”

“Sure, what’s the
plan after we kill White?” she asked.

“Um, wait, wait,”
the Medical Technician said. “Can anyone join in, or is this a
private party?” His dark eyes were focused on Spin. “I have
nothing, they found me barely surviving, scrounging in the wastes
like most of these people and then put me to work whether I liked it
or not. I’m a great med-tech with years of experience, and I need
onto your crew if you’re going after them.”