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DUN PICKED A TWO-FOLK glider for ease, scooped up Kaj on the way past, and cut the tethers on the other gliders to free fall and to avoid pursuit. Kaj was ominously silent.
“What?” Dun said.
“Nothing.”
“Come on,” Dun said.
“You. What are you?”
“Sorry?”
“I don’t recognize you anymore. Mom said you were one of the good ones.”
The glider banked steeply.
It took a while after her death to find out that Stef even had a pup. Such was the whirl of the way Dun had arrived at the Collective, and for that matter the way the Collective was anyway, that he had been on several raids with Kaj before he knew who she was. He still missed Stef, for all the short time he had known her. He still felt guilty and angry for his part in the botched raid that caused her death. Oddly Kaj didn’t bear him any ill will, despite knowing everything that had gone on. It didn’t make him feel a whole lot better.
Dun focused his Air-sense below them, to find the mouth-shaped entrance to the duct that would fly them home. It was way down beneath them, thundering toward them at all the speed that gravity could muster. Glider drops were always like this: You only got one shot, and if you messed it up? Well, the best glider pilots didn’t think about messing it up. The worst never came back.
Five hundred strides.
Dun wished he had an answer for Kaj. He owed her.
Four hundred strides.
But all the answers in his head sounded hollow.
Three hundred.
Concentrate.
Two-fifty... two hundred.
Damn, off center.
One-fifty... one hundred... fifty.
“Lean!” he yelled.
Forty, thirty, twenty, ten, five
“More...”
Bang! The wind went out of Dun as the glider was winged on the hard metal edge. The wing-spar snapped in the middle. The remains of the wing flapped wildly. The glider started to spin out of control.
“Heeelllls!” Kaj shouted.
Their barely controlled plummet ended at in a thud at a sharp bend in the pipe. The idea was to bank the glider and fly/run the last 1000 strides.
The glider was a wreck. Dun and Kaj groaned.
“Sorry,” Dun said when he’d gathered his breath.
“Any landing you walk away from... ow.”
“Limp away from.”
They dragged themselves, a remaining kit bag and weapons, toward the end of the pipe, Dun in the lead.
“Nev’s going to go mental,” Kaj said.
Resources were sparse. They’d gone out with four gliders and returned with none. Dun was more worried about Bel’s reaction. Four comrades lost. And for what.
“What?” Kaj bumped into Dun.
“Fighting.” Dun broke into a trot. “Damn, damn, damn.”
Then Kaj could hear it too: weapons and shouting. Clashes and concussions. They dumped what was left of their stuff, shouldered up their weapons, and ran across the hangar, to the corridor the noise came from.
“Careful,” Dun said.
“Yeah.”
Kaj cocked the needler and headed toward the noise. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the control room. They crept warily, edging along the walls, one on each side. Then a huge concussion happened followed by hissing.
“Damn,” Kaj said, heading farther in.
Dun stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “Gas. Back out.”
“There should be masks in the hangar.”
“Go,” Dun said, letting Kaj go first, but covering the passage as he backed up. Slowly, a sweet sickly smell trailed after them. “Quickly!”
Kaj bashed her way through random boxes with embossed symbols on. It was chaos down here. Clearly, Nev hadn’t had time to get on top of things or find a new deputy.
“Come on!” Dun shouted, starting to feel the faint fizz of dizziness at the edge of his head.
“Looking!” Kaj, crashing another lid. “Don’t need guns, don’t need that. Where are you?”
Dun’s ears twitched as he heard footsteps in the corridor; his brain did not stop spinning when his head did.
“Incoming,” he hissed.
He started firing his needler into the corridor mouth and sidled toward Kaj to find cover from the edge of a box. He was losing focus.
“Found them.” Kaj fumbled with a pack. She slipped a cool feeling plastic over her mouth and snapped the tab to start some air. There was a twang by her ear, she ducked down, reaching to where Dun was. He was sliding down the box, trying to bring his still firing gun to bear.
“Come on,” she said. “Don’t lose it, you ass.” She reached around to his face and tried to pull the cord to get behind his head with her other hand. Dun groaned. Ahead she heard footsteps. The booted feet of Duchy soldiers.
“Damn.” She reached down Dun’s arm, limp from the shoulder, but his finger still gripped tightly around the trigger. She raised it, gun, arm and all. “No, you don’t.”
She sprayed the gun in a wild arc. A gasp came from right in front of her, so she kicked out sideways and connected squarely with someone’s chest.
The Duchy soldier flew across the room. It was a good kick and crashed into the wall by the door with a satisfying sound.
It was enough to startle the next soldier through the door. Kaj let go of Dun and fired toward the gasp. She heard the needles strike home, then muffled shouting farther in the corridor, “Pull back!”
She felt for clues on one of the bodies. Curious, robes, not soldier’s fatigues and a wiry pendant thing around his neck instead of ID tags. Kaj scuttled back over to Dun and applied the mask, and then cracked the air on.
“Come on, sleepy,” she said, cradling his head with one hand, gun covering the exit with the other.
Dun groaned and rolled over, falling off Kaj’s hand, and cracking his head on the hard floor of the hangar.
“Owww...”
“Oopsy. Come on you, come around. I kind of need a hand here. She gently toed him in the ribs.”
“I’ll come round... if you stop beating me up.”
“Deal.”
She propped Dun back up against the box and went to retrieve a water canteen from her pack.
“Better?”
“Thanks.”
“Right, we can’t sit here all day,” she said.
“Where are they?”
“They left by a different way; I think I surprised them.”
“Or they weren’t up for a fight,” Dun said. “Let’s go and find out.”
“Wait on,” Kaj said, ripping a strip from the bottom of her shirt. “Let’s get this scumbag tied up first.”
“We haven’t got time,” Dun said.
“You’ve shot enough people for one day, let’s get a few questions out of this one later. Help me get him into this crate for later.”
That done, they edged, weapons forward, back into the corridor. Aside from the usual fans and creaking of metal, it was eerily quiet. At the control room intersection, they nearly tripped over the first body. Dun cursed and adjusted his mask. He reached down.
“Pulse?”
“Yeah.” Dun felt the artery. “But deep and slow.”
“The gas.”
“Yeah, but shot too. Superficial. Should be ok for a bit.”
They found three more bodies on the way into the control room and two more making their way out of the dining room doorway. All unconscious.
“Think the gas has gone by now?” Kaj asked.
“Dunno, but let’s not try it out, eh?”
“Well, no.”
They encountered more bodies further into the control room and weapons scattered everywhere.
“Damn” Dun checked the pulse on who he thought to be Tam.
“Not dead?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
“So far as it goes, yeah. But they could’ve killed everyone.”
“Perhaps we spooked them?” Kaj said.
“Yeah, dream on, hero. I don’t think that was their mission.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they didn’t have the numbers to risk a fight. I think this was a specific mission for a specific group. They wanted something.”
Dun opened the door into the adjoining transmitter room and there were two more in there, one of whom had crazy hair that could only be Nev. Dun took a chance and removed his mask, placing it, the air still hissing, onto Nev’s face. Slowly as the air filled his lungs Nev coughed himself back to consciousness.
“Easy there, fella,” Dun said. “You still got that water, Kaj?”
She passed it over. Nev sipped, coughed, and then sipped again.
“Transmitter,” he croaked out. “They took the transmitter.”
