Chapter 27
Alice
It had been days. Several long and arduous days, but Alice was back on her feet. Her bones had healed, the cracks in her skin were gone, and she was alert and steady on her feet.
She still had not moved from her position in the service ducts, exactly where she had fallen. She would sometimes crawl along a little, face one of the security fields for a different view, then crawl back to her position.
She did not want to move until she was good and ready, until her body was healed and her natural energy reserves had been recharged.
And that time was rapidly approaching her. As she leant against the bulkhead behind her, soaking up the rays of the omidium core meters and meters behind, she let out a satisfied and relieved sigh.
Somehow she was alive. She'd lived through that harrowing experience. Just to prove that point she brought her hands up, turned them over, and stared at them hard.
They were hers alright. And they were no longer cracked and broken.
‘Lucky,’ she said. She let the word ring out and echo through the enclosed space around her.
She really had been lucky. Not many people could have put themselves through what Alice had endured without getting thoroughly killed.
Alice rested there against that bulkhead with her eyes closed for too long to count. Not ready to move from the warmth and safety just yet, she just let a genuine smile spread her lips.
Being this close to the core, she felt connected to it. It was no surprise then when she felt it powering down long before the distinctive hum of it changed.
She snapped her eyes open.
The ship was slowing down.
She pushed herself up from the bulkhead.
She still did not know what ship she had wondered on to or where it was headed. Her only priority had been finding an omidium core. But right now as the prospect that the ship was about to dock somewhere loomed large in her mind, Alice got ready to move.
Though the prospect of staying close to the core was a tempting one, she would not be able to do so forever. Eventually she would be found out.
But it was just so hard to drag herself away. There were precious few omidium power sources on Orion Minor; the backwater planet could not afford technology like that. In fact, that Alice had found one had been a stroke of unbelievable luck. The only vessels that tended to have them were Union Force ships or experimental research cruisers; in other words, ships the Union would be happy to spend the funds on.
‘You have to move,’ Alice begged herself. ‘Stay here and someone will catch you.’
She knew that, god did she know that. But the pull of staying near the core was so great. Alice hardly ever felt safe, but basking in its light she got a glimpse at that welcome state of being.
‘Move, come one,’ she grumbled.
The engine's distinct hum had changed, and its output had reduced to half.
They were obviously near docking.
Come on, she thought one last time as she shifted along the service duct. When she had first clambered her way in, her body had been so broken that the process of crawling had almost killed her. Now as Alice moved she did so lithely and easily. Her body was strong and fast again. She felt like she could take on the world. Though of course she hoped she wouldn't have to. She'd had her fill of fights for the time being.
As Alice reached the first of the security fields that ran around the engine core, protecting the inhabitants of the vessel from the unique form of radiation omidium produced, she got ready to yank open a panel and start to hack it.
She didn't get the chance.
She felt it before she heard it, before the blessed light dwindled from behind her.
The core shut down.
Usually a ship never shut down its engines, regardless of whether it was in dock or not; they ran all ship's processes, after all, not just propulsion.
You only shut down your engine if you had to do direct maintenance on the core.
As the engine died with a distinct hum, Alice's back prickled with cold.
There was no problem with the engine; she would have felt it. Being this close and being capable of connecting with and feeding off the distinct energy of omidium, she could understand the engine like a mother to their child.
The engine was fine. It felt like there was a small problem in one of the magnifier coils, and it sounded like the core chamber could do with a clear out, but that was it. Nothing worth shutting the whole thing down over.
Unless of course you were trying to track a problem. Or, more to the point, a person who was curled up close to your precious engine.
Did they know?
Had they found out she was down here?
Alice brought her hand up and punched it into the panel just before the security field. She didn't have time to be subtle; she had to get out of here.
Ripping her hand into the exposed cables beyond the panel, she yanked them right out. A huge amount of electricity discharged up her arm.
She just ignored it. Now she was running at top energy again, she could do something like that.
Repeating the process, Alice crawled through the tunnels as fast as she could, shutting down each force field that got in her way. With the engines shut down, there would be no chance that the inhabitants of the ship would be fried by the omidium radiation. Still, Alice was not so desperate that she didn't bother to put the fields back into place afterwards to hide her tracks, just as she had done when she had entered the ship.
Other than that, she ran.