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Though most of my attention was devoted to the accuracy of monitor pad placement, I kept an eye on my escort. They were shifting uneasily, and it wasn't from concern over whether I survived the next step of transport off this world. Their window to get off the ship was closing.
If they were present when I went into the cryo chamber, they still might try to disable the bot and change the settings. If I stalled the process, they would have to give up and leave before I went inside.
I needed to find the kid. She was my only hope—the one person who would know what had happened out at Idwal. With that information, I could get help rescuing my partner and our ship.
The Endar on my left shifted and spat a few words at the bot.
It continued its work in the dogged, methodical way of mechanical units.
I gave a fake sneeze and brushed the monitor pad on the right side of my neck out of place as I wiped my nose with my wrist. The bot finished the task of attaching a last soft disc to my ankle before returning attention upward. It replaced the pad on my neck then gently but firmly clasped my forearm and tugged me toward the cryo drawer. I followed quietly, knowing at this point the Endar would have no problem killing a despised, troublesome Human for resisting its fate.
I twisted around to keep an eye on them, only to see the last flick of black leather disappear past the edge of the door back into the ship corridor.
"Ow!" I stared at the empty injector attached to one of the bot's appendages.
Crap!
This first shot was meant to calm me; the second would knock me out.
I could not win a physical struggle with a mechanical attendant of this size. I had to create a situation and hope no one had programmed the bot to counter it. And I had to do it fast, before I was hooked into the SAC systems with additional sedatives flowing into me.
I let the thing settle me into the drawer, my heart pounding hard despite the injection. When it straightened away to prepare for the next step in the process I tugged the sensors off my wrists and hid them beneath me. That would force it to pause and open a new packet to replace them, drawing its focus away from me.
The bot stopped what it was doing and dipped closer, as if confused by the missing pads. When it withdrew, I pulled the sensor pads off my forehead.
The bot up came with a syringe.
My panic surged. If it injected me, I was out for the duration. Maybe permanently.
I twisted up out of the drawer, evading the thrust of the needle by millimeters. I ended up on the inner side of the chamber with the bot between me and the exit. I got my rapidly numbing hands on its back and pushed down, shoving it into the SAC as I awkwardly catapulted over it.
Gravity and drugs exerted their control and my graceful jump became a clumsy flop. My feet skidded on the decking, and I fell back against the autobot, driving it further into the drawer. I shoved away, put my back against the opposite rack and kicked with a foot, jamming the bot firmly between the front edge of the SAC and the rack above it. Servos clacked and whirred as it struggled to lift free.
Some people would have busted the thing right then, but, heck, the little guy was only doing his job. Besides, I'd heard some species had semi-sentient bots. I'd feel bad if I thought this one ended up sad and alone on a junk pile somewhere for failing this task.
But I didn't want it following me, either.
I fleetingly considered locking the bot in the SAC, but this was an automated ship and it would pause the launch cycle and sound a warning if it failed to locate a signal from a critical part of its system, drawing unwanted attention.
I spotted the bot's power pack. A dislodged energy supply would be a reasonable excuse for its absence that the ship could accept. By the time a swarm of the little auto-wrenches made their way down here to diagnose and fix the attendant, I would be long gone.
Reaching down, I fumbled back the tab that fastened the battery. The block popped free into my hand. The bot gave a peep and sagged, the extension with the hypo barely missing my leg.
I dropped the battery and snatched up my awaypack.
The clock was ticking. The Endar had left the chamber minutes ahead of me, but I knew which way they had gone in their rush to exit the ship. Shrugging into the straps of my pack, I took a right out of the life chamber after them.
Overrunning them was not a risk. They were moving quickly, while I was stumbling and pushing off the walls of the corridor to keep moving forward. Besides, I wasn't following them. I knew that as soon as they exited the main hatch it would lock. I had to find another way off.
Following a lengthways passage on a deepspacer will eventually lead to a cargo hold or an engine room. I figured this one was cargo-forward so it could nose into a station and unload. If it was as close to launch as I feared, all the outer hatches were already dogged. That left a cargo bay as my only way out. The ship klaxons that would sound the all-clear before launch sequence had not gone off yet, telling me the cargo loading tubes had not withdrawn. There was a chance I could escape through one of them. Everything hinged on finding a bay without a sentient guard monitoring things.
My legs were rubbery and my vision blurred by the time I located a directional board posted in the passage. I squinted at the lighted symbols, hoping my translation software would kick in and send a scroll of interpreted text running at the corner of my eyes.
It didn't happen, either because it was beyond my software or because the tranquilizer was affecting those critical connections in my brain. If someone, namely the Zeeks, had thought to reinstall my wetware, I could have communicated with the ship's layout map directly. Instead, all I could do was stand there, weaving, with darkness pushing into the edges of my vision.
I jerked when a warning klaxon blared. That was the first sign the ship was preparing for launch. The spur of adrenalin got me moving forward again.
The corridor ended in a closed hatch with dead silence behind it.
Loading cargo is a noisy business.
My options were to move up or down a deck. With the tranq in my blood, I would not handle upward very well. Besides, cheap cargo usually stowed in lower external holds where the risk of damage during transport was higher—and it loaded last.
I got most of the way down the ladder before my legs gave out. I fell the rest of the way.
With my back against the deck plates, I felt the vibration of heavy machinery. Cargo was still shifting somewhere.
Pushing to my feet, I stumbled over to a pressure plate on the bulkhead beside a bay door and slammed it with a shaking hand.
The hatch slid open onto a glorious display of activity.
Named for an alien creature capable of grappling and carrying off livestock and large children, the levitating freight movers known throughout the Whooex Union as whizbats, did not require sentient supervision.
Desperate as I was, I did not charge out into the bay. I stopped two steps inside the hatch and blearily watched the cargo lifters, with their four massive, three-meter long dangling legs. They whipped about the chamber, grabbing containers off a conveyor belt that lifted them out of vast storage areas beneath the spaceport and whisked them into place inside the hold. The outer areas were already stacked high and the whizbats were dropping containers in neat rows, building walls that moved steadily inward toward the conveyor.
Despite the noise of the activity around me, darkness nudged my vision. I'd been running on adrenalin up to this point. Now, seeing a way out, I was starting to lose my edge.
I thought about Saura and our ship out in the cold darkness and dug down for the fire of anger. No one was taking away anything else I valued.
The fog in my brain thinned and I realized I had to move to the far end of the conveyor, where the umbilical latched to the external hold doors. Fighting to stay out of the flight path of dangling containers, I staggered along the nearest stack of boxes to where the arriving cargo released from the rows of vacuum holes that held it on the belt during the vertical lift out of storage. Climbing on the metal maintenance walk, I edged past the moving boxes to stare down the throat of the huge tube. Crossing the belt to climb down the ladder inside the tube was impossible. The belt was moving too fast and in the wrong direction. Even if I got over there, the climb down was too long. I could end up falling or the umbilical might retract and crush me. I checked the area beside me, where it connected to the ship's hull. The seal was tight, offering no chance to wiggle between it and the ship to the outside. Besides, the fall to the spaceport surface, if I got through, would probably kill me.
The Thief's Hand was a chow box compared to this vessel. The comparison brought a pang of sadness, and the sadness brought renewed resolution.
The klaxon sounded again.
Lights along the conveyor rippled warning yellow. Within seconds, the flow of containers ended, the lift shut down and the belt came to a halt. The sudden silence was nearly overwhelming.
The whizbats began to form up in a line down the center of the hold, preparing to exit. I'd found my ride out—if I could catch one.
I had no idea how a whizbat would react to the sudden addition of my weight to its hanging grapples, but I was about to find out. As soon as the last container dropped into place, the things streamed toward the mouth of the umbilical. They flew fast and hard, with little space between them. If I didn't time things just right, the blow from three meters of hard metal grapple would crush me.
I let the first one zip past to see how high the grapple tips ran above the belt. They cleared by a good ten centimeters.
A loud crash and a crack of light bloomed between the umbilical seal and the ship's hull. The damned tube was retracting to base storage even as the whizbats flew into its gaping gullet.
Left with no choice, I made a flying leap for the fourth whizbat and got my arms and legs wrapped around one of the steel grapple legs. The sudden addition of my weight threw the thing off kilter. It tilted and my hands slipped on the smooth metal. I lost grip with one leg and my foot dragged on the rough surface of the conveyor belt. The resistance nearly jerked me off my precarious perch. I scrambled, my arms struggling to pull my body upward on the grapple, only to slip lower. The whizbat slowed with the inertia and the one behind slammed into it, causing my whizbat to slowly rotate, putting me directly between the two. I closed my eyes, unable to watch the slabs of metal swinging toward each other. If I fell off now, the metal legs of all the whizbats behind mine would smear my body across the cover of the belt.
The cobwebs in my brain vaporized and my heart squeezed as my whizbat struggled to reposition its place in line. It gave a soft mechanical "squee" and slewed toward the widening gap between the ship hull and the umbilical. Daylight blazed in front of me. The whizbat headed for the open air of the spaceport. At the last moment, however, it righted itself and slid into the umbilical opening. As we passed into the yawning maw, I caught a glimpse of the spaceport surface far below me. I would not have survived that method of exit.
The whizbat, still struggling to regain its balance under my added weight, tapped the back wall of the umbilical before dropping. The slight delay caused a grapple arm on the unit behind me to strike the upper crossbeam of mine with a teeth-rattling clang, sending us into a dizzying spin. I shut my eyes and held on with everything I had.
The whizbat's controls made a clicking sound above my head. It leveled out, the spin stopped, and the air felt abruptly cooler. I gave a whoop of terror as it accelerated its drop down the vertical shaft into the blackness beneath the port.