CHAPTER 29, Dragon's Revenge

“UH, QUINN, I’VE NEVER docked a van to an orbiting vessel before,” Martin said hesitantly. The ramshackle solo vessel looked like a piece of mismatched junk thrown together with no regard for aesthetics. He was surprised any of the parts fit together well enough to maintain a seal. It looked to be just another piece of the derelict cruiser it perched under.

The lack of gravity made Martin fight to maintain a horizon. His upside-down view of their world made the air car drift at unexpected angles. The darkness, barely alleviated by the van’s headlights, didn’t help matters.

“He’s in pretty bad shape, Marty. Can’t you figure it out?” Jane asked. She continued to stroke the bodyguard’s hair and murmur soothing nonsense at him.

“Line up your headlights to the docking clamps, just like parking in a garage,” Quinn said. His words slurred and his face looked pale. That concussion was probably more serious than he wanted to let on. But at least he was conscious.

Martin gulped and did his best to follow orders. Every time he’d parked an air car—a much smaller and more maneuverable air car—he’d had attendants guiding him and gravity anchoring him. He didn’t like the proximity of the belly of the ship against the side of the van. He’d have to scrape the cerama/metal sides of both to line up with the clamps.

“I don’t think this thing is going to fit. The clamps look too far apart.” Martin slowed as much as possible, creeping forward one centimeter at a time. He had to fight the controls to keep the van in a straight line.

“You can’t hurt the hull with a van,” Quinn said. “Unless you care about returning the van to your mother in pristine condition, go ahead and scrape. Just park the damn thing.”

“That helps a lot, Bruce,” Martin ground out. “Fire won’t burn in vacuum and that’s what we’ve got outside. And I think we are running out of air inside. This van was modified for suborbital travel, not built for it.”

He eased forward a bit more and felt the docking clamp lock on to the front of the van. Martin breathed deeply. Perspiration drenched his back and brow worse than at the end of an extended fencing bout.

“Are you aligned properly for the air lock to secure tightly?” Kurt asked. He scanned the extending portal skeptically.

Tears prickled Martin’s eyes. What if he had failed and they all died in the air lock because he had done a sloppy job? His mother would kill him for damaging the van . . .

She would murder him anyway for trying to escape her net of control. She’d murdered her parents. Or at least she had hired the assassin and then bribed the investigators to declare the incident a tragic accident. She had cheated Martin’s father out of a prenuptial agreement. She had deprived Martin of a family and a normal home life, all so that she could manipulate and control everything and everyone around her.

Why hadn’t she just arranged for Konner’s death once she had confirmed her pregnancy?

If Martin and his friends died escaping her, she could blame it all on Giovanni political enemies from Nuevo Italia. Had she arranged that, too, to cover her tracks?

“What’s the seal readout?” Quinn asked. His eyes still did not track properly.

“Where do I find the display?” Martin asked, jerked from his self-defeating loop of dismal thoughts.

Martin found the red display of digital numbers. “Does eighty-nine percent sound right?”

“Good enough if we hurry.” Quinn handed Martin his handheld. “You’ll have to authorize the lock to accept five bodies without EVA suits. Code sixteen alpha, twenty-three gamma, delta, delta, beta.”

“Okay, open the doors and scramble.” Quinn didn’t look as if he could move, let alone scramble.

Somehow, they dragged him into the air lock, closed the van doors, and engaged atmosphere. A lot of air leaked out of the faulty seal.

At last the inner door opened and they all stumbled gasping and careening into a storage bay onboard the saucer-shaped vessel.

“Help me to the bridge.” Quinn looked as if he was about to vomit. But he held it in as he grasped a handhold and reached for the next. “We’ve got to get moving before Melinda figures out where we are.”

“Flight control sensors will lock on as soon as we engage engines,” Martin warned. He gulped, too. He hadn’t much experience in free fall and still had trouble finding his horizon.

“You don’t look like you can stay conscious long enough to get us through jump,” Jane said. She planted herself directly in front of Quinn.

Martin had often seen that stubborn expression on her face at summer camp. Usually when she opposed Kurt’s plans for some new mischief with the computers, or Bruce’s practical jokes, or Martin’s solo hikes deep into the wilderness. Rarely had any one of them won an argument with Jane when she put on her “den mother” face.

“All I have to do is get us to the jump. The ship’s computers do the rest.” Quinn plowed forward, pushing Jane aside. In null G, she floated to the opposite side of the bay before she found another handhold.

“We’ll have to remember that move,” Bruce whispered to Martin. In the echoey bay, Jane had to hear it.

She “hmpfed” and followed Quinn and the boys through a maze of gangways to the bridge, a bubble of viewscreens somewhere in the midsection of the ship.

“Anchor yourselves.” Quinn sounded more alert. At least he did not slur his words. He followed his own orders, pulling his safety harness over his shoulders and anchoring it to the center of his seat before the pilot screens.

Martin took the copilot’s seat, assuming he had a right to it after driving the van this far. His three friends pulled down “jump” seats from various parts of the bulkheads and strapped in as well. They all tried looking over Quinn’s shoulders to watch how he took the vessel out of sleep mode and into full power.

Martin scanned his screens and saw an icon drifting away from the ship. Jane peered out the porthole nearest her and nodded. One less encumbrance from Martin’s past.

“Does this ship have a name?” Martin asked. He tapped a duplicate pattern to Quinn’s on his blank screen. If he could just do it one more time, he’d have it memorized.

“All ships have names and ID codes. We are sailing aboard the Margaret Kristine.”

“You’ll have to ask the emperor that. It was his ship before I bought it. I kept the name because I like it.”

“What’s that blinking yellow light over my head?” Kurt asked. He strained against his harness to see the beacon better.

“Already?” Bruce gulped. “We haven’t even disengaged from the derelict yet.”

“Then that red light flashing on the comm board is normal, too,” Jane said. Her voice quaked a little.

“Quinn, someone is trying to signal you. I bet it is flight control on the orbital station.”

“Ignore it. We’ll be out of here before they can send someone out to see what’s going on.” As he spoke, the ship moved. Acceleration gave them limited gravity.

A klaxon blared three times. Martin wanted to hold his ears and close his eyes against the noise. He didn’t dare. He needed to say awake and alert. He had to make sure Quinn did, too.

And then they were into the jump. Martin looked down upon his inert body from somewhere . . . some-when else. Time became a meaningless measure of existence.

Jane screamed. Kurt slipped his harness and dove through low G to shake Quinn’s slumped form.

The klaxon sounded a proximity alert. “Unknown ship approaching,” ship’s computer said in a sweet, lilting feminine voice. “Proximity alert. Prepare for crash.”

After a second lonely night of sleeping in the clearing alone, without Bruce Geralds at her side, Kat joined her brothers Kim and Konner as they marshaled every available hand and headed back to clear a new field in the village.

Kat toted rock after rock out of the west field until her back felt as if it would split in two and her hands were a swollen mess of cuts.

Her brothers expected a wave of refugees from near Base Camp. They needed several more acres cleared and planted before they arrived. The season had already progressed too far into summer for them to expect a full crop. Hopefully, they’d harvest enough to get them all through the next winter.

Kat mopped sweat off her brow with her sleeve. The remnants of her uniform looked as tattered and filthy as the clothing of everyone else in this village. She’d carried her fair share of rocks from the field to the borders where skilled stoneworkers piled them into low walls. Eventually, the walls would separate the various fields and keep the livestock from munching new crops.

She plopped down upon a good-sized boulder, one too big to carry, and took a swig of water from a nearby bucket. She’d seen others take brief rests here.

Everyone in the village and the clearing had been drafted to help—even the protesting and disdainful Lucinda Baines. Taneeo, the village priest, had told her that she would not eat unless she worked. The village would not survive without the crops.

Even the Stargods—the three O’Hara brothers—added their backs to the heavy labor.

Kat’s shoulders and legs ached from the unaccustomed work. Her back itched where perspiration had dripped and dried.

Trying to look casual, Kat made her way to the festival pylon at the center of the village. She leaned against it, letting the poles support her weight. The three poles lashed together into a tripod and anchored deep in the ground marked more than the middle of the living area. It marked the junction of three ley lines.

She had some serious experimentation and research to do before Loki’s plans for mining went any further.

Kat breathed deeply as Kim had showed her: in on three counts, hold three, exhale on three. She felt the now-familiar shift in orientation and spectrum. Power tingled in her feet, up her body, and into her mind. Her perspective shifted from inside her body to up above the top of the pylon. She looked down upon her body and up into the heavens. With just a little stretch she could reach . . . reach out to Gentian.

Her mind zeroed in on her errant flywacket directly into his body. The gray-green desert around him/them looked frighteningly familiar. Gentian clawed and twisted at something metallic and mechanical. Too close. She couldn’t discern what the thing was from five centimeters’ distance.

Forcibly, Kat removed herself from Gentian’s mind and watched him from a slight distance. The metal “thing” resolved into the hydroponics tank inside the lander she’d had to abandon after Jupiter crashed. Gentian worked at freeing pumps and hoses from the innards of the contraption.

Kat chuckled. Gentian wasn’t truly a coward, he just disagreed with nimbus definitions of courageous acts. Right now, he defied the nimbus to help Paola with a kind of weapon to defend the port city.

She shifted her mental reaching upward. Up . . . up to the saucer-shaped Sirius. She drew its deep silence and patience into herself, understood the nuances of the sleeping crystal array, and listened to the computer running maintenance diagnostics.

For a femto of a second she flitted through the fiber optics to the computers. She became the ship, attuned to the crystal array.

She could now fly this ship no matter what booby traps and safety protocols Konner had installed.

Communication with Mum, or possibly even Kat’s adopted father, Governor Talbot, should be an easy jump from here. Dad would not know how to respond to a telepathic call, might not even receive it. But Mum . . . all four of her children had psi powers. She probably did, too. For that matter, both Kat’s blood parents probably had strong psi factors for their children to manifest their talents so strongly.

All she had to do was find the transactional graviton the king stone used to contact its mother stone. That web of energy should be a mere extension of the ley line she stood upon.

There. She grabbed hold of the energy with her metaphysical hand and began tracing it back toward Earth’s moon and the crystal factory in orbit around it.

(Go back,) a deep voice, that might have been many voices, echoed in her mind. (Do not venture beyond the realm of dragons.)

“I have to,” she told them. “Since you won’t return Gentian to me, I want to talk to my mother,” she lied. She did not want to talk to the obsessive woman her mother had become, but she needed to know how, to show Loki.

(You speak the truth only when you say you miss your flywacket. For the rest: You can lie to your brothers. You can lie to the stranger, the Sam Eyeam you want as a lover. You can lie to yourself. But you cannot lie to us.)

(Not until you have found your true home and know what you want from your mother and your brothers.)

“Let’s get you a cool drink and some shade,” Bruce Geralds said. He took Kat’s elbow and led her off to the nearest cave. “You should know better than to work out in the sun without a hat.”