Wings of Retribution (51 page)

Morgan led them inside, pausing only briefly to gaze through the open door.  The woman followed them inside and, as promised, began removing their collars.  Ragnar was first.  She had just finished entering the code when Morgan and Paul jumped on her, throwing her to the ground.  The door began to swing shut.

“Ragnar,
go!”
Morgan shouted.  “
Yeit! 
Now!”

The woman on the ground threw the two off of her with the speed and strength of a master martial artist.  She hopped to her feet, spun, and caught Morgan in the jaw with her foot, whipping his head to the side.  He crumpled like a doll.  Paul tried to grab her, but she swiveled and slammed her foot into his gut, then lashed out, hitting his temple with a knifelike hand.  He, too, crumpled.  Then she turned on Ragnar, the whole process taking less than two seconds.  Behind him, the door was closing.

“Don’t do it,” she warned.  “There’s nowhere for you to go.”

Ragnar shifted to the first thing he could think of and burst through the door at near-skimmer speeds.  The door slammed on his tail, crushing part of it into the wall.  Ragnar barely felt it as he tore away.  He had left Paul and Morgan.  He hesitated in the hall, wondering if he could still help them.

The door began to open and Ragnar could smell the gun on the other side.  He spun, and took off in the opposite direction on six legs.  He reached the main corridor and turned again, racing into the unknown, his claws clicking on the marble as he fled.

He raced past three startled guards, slid to a stop against a marble pillar, and took a huge spiraling staircase to the upper floor.  Here, the décor was much less dramatic.  The small, boxy windows were covered with utilitarian brown drapes, the floors made of a hard white substance that smelled of the sea.  He paused to shift again to staunch the bleeding in his tail.  He didn’t have time to concentrate on a localized
yeit.

Ragnar raced down the hall in his new, blockier form, took the first stair he found, and doubled back.  Ragnar found a niche and shifted again.  He walked out of the shadows on two feet, his face an ugly image of a demon.  He peeled off his torn clothes, leaving only his ragged undergarments, then stuffed the discarded items into an empty vase.

No one had come to stop him.  He heard shouts, but they were distant, coming from the lower levels.  Ragnar leaned out of the window on the landward side of the palace and looked down.

Morgan and Paul remained motionless on the grasses below, their collars intact, a group of humanoids gathering around them.  As he watched, Paul woke up and vomited.  One of the other shifters helped him to his feet and began asking him questions.  Behind him, Morgan stirred.

Groaning, Ragnar turned away from the window and slid down the sill until his bottom rested on the floor.  Three shifts in less than twenty minutes…  He moaned, closing his eyes.  Pounding agony lanced his body, starting at the center and radiating outward.  He could feel each cell, each individual nucleus.  They were all afire, exhausted from the misuse.  He envied Paul his headache.

Ragnar forced himself to his feet and stumbled away from the window. 
Have to get away, find a way off planet.  Find a ship.  Get Attie.  Must get Attie.

His thoughts were flickering, fading, as his core shut down to regenerate.  He staggered, weaving as he walked.  His extremities were going numb, the connections dormant.  He stumbled a few more yards, then collapsed in a dark corner behind a decorative statue.  His eyes closed and let the exhaustion overtake him.

“When I get out of here, you’re both dead.”  Athenais fumed, stalking back and forth in her room.  How
dare
Rabbit lock her in?  And to give
Fairy
the captain’s codes…  Rabbit was deliberately provoking her.

“Then I guess I just won’t let you out,”
Fairy said over the speaker system.  
“And stop pacing.  It’s pathetic.”

Athenais turned to scowl at the cameras.  Without the override codes, there was no way to turn them off from her side of the door.  Seething, she said, “Fairy, have some decency and turn those things off.  I deserve some privacy, at least.”

“You will refer to me as Captain or you will be ignored.”

Athenais’s hands fisted.  “I want to talk to Rabbit.”

Nothing.

“…Captain.”  Athenais choked on the word.

“Rabbit’s sleeping.”

“Goddamn it, Fairy, I’m gonna scalp you and feed your entrails through the exhaust system!”

Fairy ignored her.

Roaring, Athenais began kicking at the door.  The alloy did not even dent.  Screaming, she tried to rip the chair off the floor so she could throw it at the cameras.  It was bolted to the floor and didn’t even move.  In fact, everything in the room was either part of the design or glued in place.  She tried bashing her fist against the camera, but the transparent lens shield was shatterproof. 

Furious, Athenais went into the bathroom and started digging through the drawers.

“What are you doing?”
Fairy demanded.

Athenais came out with a tube of toothpaste.  With great satisfaction, she coated each of the lens shields with opaque white paste.  The room began to take on the pleasant smell of mint.  When she was finished, Athenais capped the tube and threw it back into the bathroom.

“Bitch,”
Fairy muttered.

Athenais moved to the opposite side of the room and began methodically dismantling the standard picture-frame bolted to the dresser.  She came back with two slim sheets of metal, which she slipped under the door.  She slid them back and forth until they caught, then left them there and went back to the dresser.  She tore the alarm from the wall and began stripping the wires.

“What are you doing in there?”
Fairy demanded.  
“You’re paying for any damages, you know.  This is
my
ship.”

Athenais ignored her and yanked another cable free, this one connected to the lamp in the wall sconce above the door.  She pulled as much wire out as she could, then twisted the lamp free of its socket.

“You’ve gotta live in there, you know.  Maybe for a few months.  Depends on how generous I feel.  I’ll send you some food every once in awhile through the tube system.  But then again, you don’t
need
food, do you, Attie?”

Athenais carefully removed the socket from the wire, sustaining several electrical shocks as she did so.  The lights flickered, but she continued working.

“What are you doing to the power?  Getting nice and crispy?  Don’t think you can threaten me.  The power to that room will shut off completely if the disturbances endanger the rest of the ship.  You know what that means.  Frozen space pirate.  Sure, it’ll take a few weeks, but eventually it’s gonna get as cold as a freezer in there.  You’ll spend the rest of the trip in cryo.  How’d you like that, Attie?”

Athenais applied a wire to either metal sheet.  She heard a solid
thud
in the bottom of the door and she pulled the two metal pieces free.  Then she wedged them under in a different spot.

“You know, we might as well use this time to get to know each other.  I worked for you for two whole years and you still don’t know me, really.  Did you know I grew up on Derkne?  My mom was a mathematician and my dad was a schoolteacher.  They didn’t have the money for my education, so I had to work my way through college.  Worked as a wildlife control agent.  Flew skimmers out over the flats each weeknight, searching for redcats…
”

Athenais rolled her eyes and applied the wires a second time.  Another thump.  She got up.

“Those things were always crawling around the garbage dumps around the big cities.  We had to be real careful.  Don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with a redcat, but even after they’re dead, the poison can kill you.”
  Then a pause.  “
Well, not
you
, because you’re a freak, but they kill most people.”

Athenais grunted, pushing, shifting her weight and straining.

“And it’s almost impossible to kill ‘em.  Gotta get a direct shot to the lower chest.  There’s a nerve center there that controls the rest of it.  A lot of tourists think it’s in the head, because they look a lot like those big cats they’ve got on Earth.  Those types don’t last too long out on the flats, though.  The cats always get ‘em.  They’ve learned they can get a free lunch just by letting those morons blow their heads off.”

Metal scraped against metal, protesting.

“It’s the environmentalists who’re the worst, though.  They go out there with their vid equipment and journals and document their behavior, trying to prove they’re not a menace.  You know how many of those morons’ bones I had to go clean up?”

Metal screeched and caught.  Athenais grunted and heaved, sweating, her fingers sliding against metal as she struggled.

“Six.  Well, seven if you include that guy and his wife, but when the cats were done with them, we couldn’t tell them apart.  We just threw everything in a bag and sent it back to headquarters.  Let the guys behind the desk deal with sorting them out.  They’re the ones who—
”

Athenais let out a triumphant shout and squeezed through. 

Behind her, she heard,
“Just so you know, every time you interrupt me, I think I’m going to reduce your rations.”

Athenais stormed through the hall like a thunderhead.  Rabbit and the colonel’s doors were closed, the sounds of sleep emanating from each.

Good.  The tart was
hers.

She stepped into the helm in time to hear, “…buy you an ass-hugging miniskirt and a tanktop that shows what little boobs you have.  That’ll be your uniform for the next four months, and I’ll hire some thug outta a bar to grope you every chance he gets and then cut your rations every time you sock him.”

Athenais grabbed the back of Fairy’s chair and swung her around.  Fairy’s jaw dropped and the comset fell from her stunned hand.

“How did you…”

“Let me get one thing straight, you incompetent twit,” Athenais growled.  “I’ve been around longer than the Utopia.  I know every trick on and off the books.  Rabbit may like you, but you screw with me and you’re gonna wind up space debris.  Capiche?”

Fairy nodded, mouth still open.

“Good.  Now get out of that chair.”

Fairy jumped out of the seat and stood, wide-eyed, as Athenais sat down and began working with the console.

“What are you doing?”

“Hacking into the system,” Athenais replied.

“Why?”

“I’m taking over the ship.”