Compete

  “Then call him there!”

  “I don’t know what gym—”

  “Keep being an idiot and I start shooting your body parts. Call him now!”

  My pulse is thundering now, and honestly I don’t know what to do. So I try something that Gennio had taught me about—a ship-wide general VIP intercom for public announcements only, otherwise a big no-no. Its use is reserved solely for Commanders, Command Pilots, Captains and other authorized high-end personnel.

  I punch in the classified PA code, and speak into the console. “Command Pilot Kassiopei, this is urgent. . . . Please call Yellow Quadrant Cadet Deck Four Meal Hall—right now.” As I say the words, I hear my own unsteady voice amplified and echoing from the very walls of the ship around me.

  There is a long moment of silence.

  I start counting seconds in my head. Four . . . Five . . . Six . . .

  “Well? Why doesn’t he answer?” Trey pokes my shoulder with the muzzle of his gun. “Call again!”

  I gulp. Then I begin punching the PA code again.

  Before I’m done, the video display comes alive, and I see the face of Aeson Kassiopei, up-close, staring into the camera. The remarkable close-up reveals the stunning detail of his lapis-lazuli blue eyes highlighted in a shadow fringe of jet-black lashes, that natural “kohl” outline around the lids, dark eyebrows with the faintest hint of lapis gloss, straight nose and hard austere line of lips—altogether the face of a demon. He is grim with intensity, and his forehead is covered with a light sheen of sweat, with strands of pale golden hair sticking to his skin. As far as I can tell, his bronzed upper body is naked. . . . He must’ve been working out, because behind him I see the sparring area and walls of a gym.

  “This is Command Pilot Aeson Kassiopei,” he says in a cold hard voice. And he looks straight at me.

  But Trey shoves me out of the way and keeps his gun to my chest.

  “Command Pilot!” he says. “This is Terra Patria, and as you can see we have your little office Aide, and your favorite hoverboard boy, and a dining room full of other hostages. Sorry to say, we had to shoot about half of them, but still, we’ve got plenty more, maybe thirty-five people left alive here. So if you want them to stay that way, how about we talk?”

  Aeson does not blink. “What do you want?”

  “Straight to the point, I like it!” Trey shuffles momentarily, adjusting his grip on the gun, and then he points with the gun at the video screen and starts speaking, sounding like he’s memorized a script.

  “Terra Patria has several demands for Atlantis. First, you are going to take this ship and turn it around and head directly back to Earth. Second—you’re going to take a detour to drop most of us off back on the planet, and then you will take the empty ship and fly toward the asteroid while it’s still a good ways away from impact. Third—you will crash this ship right into the asteroid, going at full speed. The resulting multi-megaton explosion should take care of the asteroid, problem solved. Fourth—you will take your entire damn Fleet and get the hell out of our solar system, and never come back!”

  A moment of silence.

  Kassiopei’s face is a frozen mask. “It’s not going to happen,” he says calmly.

  Trey pokes my shoulder with his gun. “Oh, yeah? Well, that’s not something we want to hear.”

  Aeson watches him. Then he glances at the rest of the room. “You know you’re not getting out of this alive. Let everyone go, and I promise you a fair trial and your life, together with the lives of others in your group.”

  Trey cusses. “You’re kidding me, right? So I’m going to begin shooting some hostages. Starting with this girl.” And he strokes the gun across my chest, sweeping it to the left, to position it directly over my heart. “Gonna count to three, Command Pilot, and little Gwen Lark here is going to be one ugly bloody mess—”

  Aeson blinks. “Wait,” he says. And his voice becomes hollow, dark, unrecognizable.

  Trey makes a snorting laugh. “What? What did you say? I don’t think I heard you, Command Pilot—”

  “I said, wait.” Aeson looks at Trey with serpent eyes. “I am coming over.”

  “Oh, you’re coming here? When?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  Trey nods, again waving the gun that he’s taken from my chest. “Great! Be here and we can talk terms and details. Because I promise you, if you don’t, none of these people will be alive by the end of the hour. It’s all on your head. Oh, and be sure to come alone. If we see guards with you, we start shooting hostages.”

  “I am on my way,” Aeson says. “I will come alone. Harm no one.” And the display screen goes dark.

  I stagger back as Trey shoves me roughly and takes me back into the group of hostages, leaving me to stand near the wall next to Logan and some terrified girl Cadet.

  “You okay?” Logan whispers.

  I reply by widening my eyes. Because two guns are pointed at me and him.

  “No talking,” a masked girl says harshly.

  So for the next ten minutes we stand, breathing and waiting. A few whimpers and sniffles sound around the room, but mostly there’s silence. The gun-toting assailants seem high-strung. They talk occasionally in quiet tense voices, while pacing before us, and I can’t tell what is being said. Furthermore, not all of it is in English.

  At some point, Trey walks closer to the exit corridor and says loudly, “Jenny, can you see anyone coming?”

  “Not yet,” a girl’s voice replies from outside the meal hall near the entrance.

  And then, a few minutes later, her voice sounds again. “He’s here.”

  Trey slaps his leg with the side of the gun and stops pacing. Through the mask, his eyes glitter with excitement. “Disarm him. Check carefully and take all the weapons he might have on him. Then let him in here.”

  “Okay. . . .”

  Another minute passes. And then Aeson Kassiopei enters the meal hall. His hands are lowered at his sides and he is once again fully dressed and wearing his uniform shirt.

  Without saying a word he walks quickly toward the hostage takers, straight-backed and unyielding.

  Trey orients in his direction, with his gun pointing at Kassiopei. The other four masked Terra Patria members linger momentarily with indecision, some of them eventually deciding to keep their weapons aimed at us.

  “Command Pilot!” Trey says. “Welcome! Come closer and let’s talk.”

  But Aeson does not reply and keeps moving toward him. His face is frozen in a cold, expressionless, focused mask. When he gets to the middle of the room his gaze flashes with life. . . .

  And suddenly, everything seems to go slow motion.

  I watch as his hands move in tandem, wrists fly up and twist, strong elegant fingers flashing with impossible speed. And then he fires, with both hands simultaneously—rapid, multiple lightning-fast micro-volleys of pure laser light from two needle-guns—aiming perfectly five times.

  At five different targets.

  The first one to fall is Trey. He goes crashing down, and before he even hits the floor, Aeson Kassiopei is firing elsewhere.

  Down goes the masked girl nearest me, with an exhaled breath and the hiss of scorching flesh and fabric. Then, a fraction of a second later, the guy nearest her, crumples. There’s no time to blink, and the remaining boy and girl collapse in a lifeless heap on top of each other. . . .

  Not one of them has had time to fire their various weapons.

  Aeson Kassiopei stands in the middle of the room, breathing silently—a demon of destruction. He makes no sound, but I can see his chest rise and fall.

  His glance sweeps all of us. Then he walks, stepping over the fallen bodies—both terrorists in masks, and ordinary innocent Cadets who had been shot earlier. At the console wall he pauses, keys in a security code. “All clear,” he says coldly into the wall speaker.

  As armed Atlantean guards move in from the entrance, the CP finally turns his attention to us.

  “Is everyone okay?” he says, app
roaching our large group of hostages swiftly.

  Then it’s like a dam busting, as hostages start talking at him all at once. Voices rise, nervous, emotional. A few people hug, others sit down at the nearest tables and put their heads down in aftershock. “Oh, thank God!” some exclaim. Meanwhile others just yell out random expletives.

  “F— me, did you see that?” a badly shaken Cadet behind us babbles with emotion, glancing from Blayne to me, to Logan. “He’s a maniac! He just walked in and took out five people in two seconds! Alone and no backup! Oh, man!”

  Blayne snorts in relief. “Yeah. That’s why he’s the CP.”

  “Thank you, Command Pilot!” a girl cries, with tears in her eyes. “Oh, thank you so much! I thought I was going to die! I really did! Wow!” She looks like she’s about to hug him.

  Aeson nods at her, at all the rest of them, as he moves through the crowd. He then raises one hand for silence. “All right, everyone!” he says loudly. “If you are injured, go to the medical deck immediately. If you need help getting there, security will assist you. Everyone else, please clear the room! As you exit, give your names and get processed by security at the doors, so we can keep track of what happened here. Expect to be briefly questioned at a later date, but there is nothing for you to worry about. Now, dismissed!”

  He finishes speaking, and heads directly toward Logan and me.

  Meanwhile, the Atlantean security guards begin moving all around the room, examining the fallen victims, looking for possible survivors, and dealing with the crime scene.

  I must say, I am stunned, shell-shocked and kind of overcome right now. I don’t know what just happened. When Aeson Kassiopei nears me at last—when he looks down at me in that very first second, with a very strange expression in his eyes, I don’t know what it is, what to say, how to react to him.

  “Lark, are you okay?” he says, standing directly before me.

  “Oh yeah, I’m okay . . .” I mutter. “So sorry I had to use that PA system, I know I am not supposed to do that, I am so sorry—”

  He motions with his head negligently. “You did the right thing.”

  “She got hit, hard, right here,” Logan says, pointing to the side of my head.

  Honestly, I’d forgotten! It’s true that my head is kind of stinging in that spot near the side of my temple, and I bet I’m developing a honking ugly bruise.

  Command Pilot Kassiopei examines the side of my head, and his expression becomes veiled, unreadable, somewhat distanced. He nods, coolly. “There’s a swelling. You’ll need to get to medical deck, as soon as possible, after we’re done here.”

  “Oh, but I’m okay—”

  But Aeson Kassiopei is no longer looking at me. His attention is now on Blayne, and he is inquiring if he’s hurt.

  “Just need my board back, and I’m completely okay, thanks,” Blayne says with a light crooked smile. “No bodily harm, only damaged pride.”

  “Good.” Aeson switches to Logan. “You’re unhurt, Sangre?”

  Logan nods.

  “In that case, grab a gun.” Aeson points to the closest fallen weapon on the floor near one of the masked Terra Patria. “And come with me. We’re under attack.”

  I stare with confusion, but Logan shows no surprise. He leans down, picking up a mid-range handgun. He checks it proficiently, then retrieves a belt holster from the fallen, and attaches it to his waist. “Where are we going?”

  “This was a distraction, an opening act,” the Command Pilot says curtly, and begins to walk. At the same time he wordlessly signals a few of the guards, and they use wrist comms to relay low-voiced Atlantean commands to others elsewhere. Then they fall in line behind us.

  “Yeah, I got that. Terra Patria idiots used by EU to create multiple attack points.” Logan follows him, and I trail after.

  “We’re going to Command Deck Two. Apparently, guards there are not answering, so the assumption is, they’re down. The CCO is currently taken.” Aeson glances at Logan, then at me briefly, as we all move rapidly to the exit of the meal hall. “Your Earth Union ops did a clever number, agitating the Terra Patria so-called idiots and staging an incident here in the wide open public space, while apparently the CCO was the primary target.”

  “Too bad for them, you were elsewhere,” Logan says.

  “Too bad for the CCO, actually.” Aeson keeps his face averted from us, looking straight ahead, so I can only see his three-quarters profile. “Yes, I’ve been varying my schedule, but not enough. I should have been at the CCO twenty minutes earlier. If I’d been there, the present situation developing in my office would not have happened.”

  I catch no glimpse of his eyes, but the proud disdain radiating from him is palpable. If I hadn’t witnessed his amazing weapons performance in the meal hall just now, I would think him arrogant, but he is perfectly serious. Holy crap, I think, he is absolutely confident his presence would’ve prevented the takeover. . . .

  And the truly scary thing is, he’s probably right. After all, he just killed five people.

  No, I take that back, he killed six.

  Because, as we exit the Cadet Deck Four Meal Hall, the sixth terrorist—Jenny, the girl who was sent by Trey to guard the entrance—is lying there on the floor, only a few feet into the corridor, in a pool of her own blood. And she’s still holding several weapons.

  Aeson steps over her, then quickly leans down and picks up a standard handgun from her hand and returns it to his own empty weapon holster.

  He then resumes walking quickly.

  We follow.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We walk swiftly through corridors toward the ship’s interior where the Command Decks are located, crossing over into the Blue Quadrant.

  Aeson Kassiopei periodically talks into his small wrist comm in Atlantean.

  When we’re just a few corridors away from the hub with the CCO, we pause. The CP touches a small section of paneling on the wall and calls up a display console. We stand and watch as he enters codes and a multi-screen mini-display comes alive. Surveillance images of the hallways around the CCO show two dead guards at the doors and three masked operatives standing with weapons. Another surveillance scene shows the interior of the CCO itself, where two masked individuals occupy the CP’s own desk. Mech arms are supporting several monitors as they peer into them. One person is keying something into a console.

  “If they’ve figured out how to use your general surveillance network and broken through even the lowest security levels, they can probably see us now, out here,” Logan says in a low voice.

  “Assume it is so,” Aeson replies coldly. “It is likely they’ve also seen what happened in the meal hall, so there will not be an element of surprise. For the moment I’ve disabled the highest security access from the CCO, so at least they won’t be able to affect the vulnerable ship systems from there.”

  “Are these Earth Union?” I whisper, standing next to Logan.

  “Most certainly,” Logan replies. “Notice their body positions and well-coordinated movements. Terra Patria was a disorganized mess. I’m sorry to say, my fellow EU ops are real military and far better trained.”

  “Is there a way to talk to them, maybe get them to recognize what’s really going on?”

  Aeson Kassiopei glances at me suddenly. “Lark,” he says. “You need to be somewhere else. I want you to turn around and return to the Yellow Quadrant and go directly to the medical deck. Then get back to your personal quarters, lock your door, and stay there.”

  “I—I mean, okay.” I blink tiredly. He’s right, I’m not sure why I’m here exactly. This is kind of crazy. I have a concussion. I’ve just been in a hostage situation. And now I am surrounded by a bunch of military guys—Logan included—and taking part in a high security operation to retake the Central Command Office? WTF?

  “Too late, she can’t go back, at least not down that same hallway. They’re coming this way.” Logan points to a display of another corridor juncture, where half a dozen more masked ter
rorists are moving in a disorderly fashion but quickly, weapons drawn. Apparently Earth Union got more Terra Patria members involved. Or maybe these are yet another group of foolish teen rebels. At this point, who the hell knows?

  My head hurts. It really hurts now. I definitely have a concussion.

  “Not a problem. This ship’s security patrols will soon be after them, cutting them off from behind,” Aeson says. “But meanwhile they can do some potential damage here. So we need to keep moving.” He then talks through his wrist comm again, and starts to walk, taking a turn at the next corridor junction.

  Again, we all follow.

  We pause a few minutes later, and I lean against the wall tiredly and watch the guards and the CP talk among themselves. We learn meanwhile, that similar hostage operations have taken place at all the four Imperial Command Ships.

  “The flagship is safe. Commander Resoi’s forces have isolated and captured the Earth Union operatives there,” Aeson Kassiopei remarks to Logan, and glances at me casually. “Less fortunately, the situation at ICS-4 is not so good. Command Pilot Quarar Ritazet is one of the hostages. Now, tell me again, Sangre, what specific initial demands can we expect from your people?”

  While Logan is talking quietly, I zone out momentarily, and think about how safe or unsafe it is, theoretically, to fire weapons on board a starship. Won’t all these randomly fired lasers cut through the walls and all the layers of the hull, and depressurize us? Or doesn’t it work that way? I recall the Atlanteans employ these funky purple plasma shields. . . . Do plasma shields serve as secondary airlocks and prevent pressure loss? How does pressure loss work, exactly?

  Pressure loss. . . .

  “Gwen?” Logan touches me on the shoulder gently. “Gwen, we really need to get you out of here.”

  I really must’ve zoned out. Because even Aeson is staring at me now, with his supremely intense hull-piercing gaze, while four of the guards stand checking weapons.

  “It’s going to get a little hot out here, very soon, so. . . .” Logan points me to the nearest cabin door. Apparently we’re in another officers’ residential corridor, and this must be someone’s empty quarters. “Can we get this door opened for her, someone? Is there a security override to unlock—”