“Dlaczego jest odblokowany drzwi?”
“Tak go zablokować.” He recognized Dukvita’s barrel chested voice instantly. The grand warlock himself was on the other side of the wall. The door slammed, the lights winked out, and a disquieting click raised the hair on the back of Tom’s neck. He put an ear to the door and heard Dukvita talking with one of his cohorts. He didn’t know if they were discussing humans, the antibiotics, Cinconians, money, what dinner would be, all or none of those subjects.
He slumped on the floor against the wall and rubbed his cold hands together. He didn’t realize he’d been inside the ship long enough that Pegasi could have come from nowhere in sight to on the ship. Had Scott seen them? Had they caught him? The voices stopped and he heard the feet shuffling again. The bulkhead door opened, shut, and all was quiet outside his little dark room in the passageway to freedom.
He jumped around a little and a motion sensor turned the lights on for him. With the darkness lifted he spotted another door but hadn’t a clue where it might lead to. The outside? The engine room? The reactor? He looked at the rest of the room. Another room inside the room behind a heavy glassine wall had a large bench against the wall, a basin and faucet, and what must have been a Pegasi lavatory as its only furnishings. He was in a Pegasi brig. Of all the rooms to hide in, he picked the hardest one to escape from. Couldn’t have been an armory, a kitchen, or the EV suit closet. No, it had to be the brig.
The sliding doors must go somewhere, not to the outside. He walked up to them and looked hard at their structure. It was two doors that slid apart to accommodate something large, not a swing door like the one he’d just gone through.
“Oh, shit!” he growled as the floor began to vibrate. He spun about but he was trapped. He knew the feeling perfectly and the shuttle was about to take to the air. “Arrrghh!” he yelled and grabbed his hair in his hands trying to rip it from his head, but, alas, all he did was hurt his scalp. He slammed a fist against the wall and the shuttlecraft lurched up, sending him abruptly and unceremoniously to the floor. “This is not my day,” he said to the ceiling.
When the inertia from ascension diminished, Captain Jackson sat up and gathered his thoughts as the nominal gravity began to kick on. He estimated it at about 0.4 Gs, something close to the gravity on the Pegasi home planet. Without gravity, tools were difficult to use and he couldn’t get much traction with his feet and hands. Nevertheless, he wasn’t going to sit around and let someone else determine his fate.
He clawed at the crack between the doors but they didn’t budge even a micron. His pocket. Fishing the chip out he jammed it behind the only black button on the panel, wriggled it side to side and pried it off. Behind he found several promising electrical components.
He quickly pulled the gold chain around his neck over his head, grateful that he and Rianya had traded their wedding jewelry years ago. A garland of chunky stones around his neck would have been not only cumbersome, but useless in this particular situation. He pulled his hand inside his sleeve and rolled the chain until he’d isolated one link. With a precision touch he inserted the tip of the link where a capacitor interrupted the electromagnetic flow.
Gold sparks shot out of the panel and Tom jumped back a half a meter as a small flame erupted on the wall. He glanced at the door and a centimeter crack had appeared just big enough to jam the tips of his fingers in. He took a deep breath and pushed until the gap widened; his hands slipped in, and with as much strength as he could muster he pried the doors apart, slowly, just a few centimeters. He jammed his foot in the opening and squeezed his shoulder in as well, taking another breath and holding it to fortify his position. He only needed a another twenty centimeters to get through. The doors broke open and Jackson catapulted to the floor on the other side just getting his foot loose before the doors to his cell snapped shut.
~~~
Dr. Scott Gregory had watched in horror as Dukvita and his minion boarded the ship. He’d flung some stones to distract them, hoping Captain Jackson would hear and have extra time to escape, but after a moment of investigation, the Pegasi simply moved on and climbed aboard. He paced around behind the rock, wanting to obey orders and wanting to flout them simultaneously. He clenched his fists several times and decided there were times when orders had to be broken.
He slipped away from the boulder and took the same path Tom had to reach the shuttle incognito. He waited on the starboard until he couldn’t find any Pegasi in the vicinity then snuck around to the port. It was several meters from the stern to the hatch; he crept one foot at a time and reached for the handle to haul himself in. The hatch slammed shut almost taking his damn hand off his damn arm!
He stole around to the back and took refuge in the tall grasses near a stand of trees, away from the clearing. The roar of the shuttle engine destroyed his hopes of getting Tom off the shuttle, unless he’d found another exit on the bow or starboard sides. It was his experience, however, that shuttle craft usually had a single point of ingress and egress for safety reasons. The craft blew substantial dust and debris in the air, mostly in his direction, and lifted off the ground in a vertical burst from rocket thrusters along the ventral surface, just as Maria Mitchell’s shuttle craft operated.
“Oh, Neptune’s goddamn nertz!” Scott watched the Pegasi vehicle rise higher and higher into the clouds until it was gone but for the residual Doppler sound of its rocket thunder.
He needed to find the rest of the crew and the Osprey but hadn’t a clue where to start. Back at New Hope center might be the best option since that was his last known position. It was nearby, on the other side of the stadium, opposite the building where they’d been held the day before. He couldn’t possibly get to UMA or the other medical stations before nightfall, indeed, even if he walked for months the closest was UMA about 3000 kilometers away.
He wanted to run back but had no energy left. His shoulders fell but he established a pace that might get him to the medical building in two hours or less. He still had some Cinconian currency in his pockets; obviously their abduction hadn’t been for monetary gain. Cinconians dashed past him on their way to the stadium, perhaps those that missed the opening savagery hurrying to enjoy another opportunity to witness bloodshed.
Although still early, he found a small eatery serving something akin to hush puppies, which although weren’t much nutrition, they were at least edible and would help power his journey across the kilometers. He didn’t have a com button and had declined an intradermal transmitter years ago, citing the invasion of personal privacy guaranteed under the North American Conference of 2141. So much for principles; he considered having one implanted as soon as he got back to Maria Mitchell, if he got back to Maria Mitchell.
He spotted the New Hope medical building in the distance, another two kilometers, and decided to rest for a few moments on a bench made for Cinconian legs, with a shallow seat for Cinconian butts, and a tall back for Cinconian spines. He watched as two white Cinconians crossed in front of him, walking slowly together toward the medical building. One stopped to nurse a raucous cough and spit some blood out on the road. Scott closed his eyes realizing at least one of them, likely both, has the plague raging in their body and now it was raging on the road in a red glob of spittle.
This was his last mission. He was about to take a retirement from the space program and spend time with impending grandchildren since he’d, regrettably, not had much time with their parents over the years. Melinda had been a patient space widow, for lack of a better term, but he owed her, and wanted for himself, time without a deployment, time to stop working so hard, and so far away from home. Having her own career she’d never wanted to go to space the way Rianya had joined Tom, and he had been okay with that... until he thought he might never see her again.
As soon as he saw the captain again he was going to put in his resignation from the Maria Mitchell effective upon arrival at Earth. At the most he would take up on Mars or the Luna Colony. Despite his respect, and long, deep friendship with Thomas Jackson, it was time to put his feet on some ground.
When he arrived at New Hope midday, the building was all but empty but for a few of the short-furred people cleaning, cooking, and otherwise going about their business. Inside the rooms were warmer than outside by at least ten degrees. He dropped his jacket, kicked off his boots, and plunked into the sagging hammock of a cot thinking of a spring day in Virginia Beach.
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