The Escape

Author: Palis Airuta

Original post: https://letterstotheosus.wordpress.com/2018/11/10/the-escape/

Entry for the YC120 Pod and Planet Fiction Contest in the A Day in the Life category.

He ran. He ran because his life depended on it. Through the station maintenance walkways following the dark map embedded in his mind. He had walked and ran this path before, a path lightly monitored by security feeds. But now his heart was pumping, the adrenaline focused his mind, and he knew this would be the last time he would run this path. A turn to the left and then wait, his back pressed hard against the cold steel walls, the cold felt like it was searing the heat of his skin. The metallic smell of the air recyclers seemed more pronounced, all his senses were heightened. Waiting for one more rotation of the camera on the far end of the corridor, wait, and then run. Another passageway, this one held the station’s comms array, he checked his wrist monitor for time and location, all good and nothing on the security feeds; and he ran. At the end of the walkway, the maintenance hatch was easy to unlock, easier than it was before, was that his mind or his current state of awareness. He cycled the locks once through, dropped his pack down and opened an access panel to an uplink port which should give him the dock number of the ship he needed. He connected his datapad to the uplink, his heart beating louder and louder now he was stationary. Waiting for the connection he looked at his hands and saw the blood, not his blood, a capsuleers blood. The dread filled him, he knew there was no going back, there was no escape and no future ahead. The datapad synced to the uplink and he started scanning for the ship, he only knew the destination, Hahda. The datapad flicked up the response.

“No!” he spoke out loud, the first thing he had uttered in a while caught him by surprise

“How can there be three ships going to Hahda” He scanned again and knew he had to guess which one to target. A mining ship, a shuttle and an Astero, moneys on the Astero, pilot Tarnok Untego.

Tarn checked his quarters before leaving for the pre-flight room, he knew he would not be back in this part of the system for a while, even if things went well. He’d been forced to stay in-station for a week now and each extra day caused an ache in his neck. The coded message he received via backchannel this morning was a welcomed relief. He cycled the door closed for the last time and made his way to the pre-flight room. The station seemed different now that he was leaving, and his mood made him a little wary of others as he started his pre-flight checks. Destination set for Hahda, although he knew that would change as soon as he undocked. He checked the manifest a couple of times thoroughly before making his way to the bay, there was a cargo of one small secure container and nothing else. Tarn had arrived on the station as part of a political delegation to Lai Dai regarding the new stealth bomber. Everyone knew Tarn was no political analyst, he was just the escape plan for the SOE negotiator if things got tight. Unfortunately for Tarn, the negotiations went well, and his services were not needed, no escape plan required.

As he checked his suit for the fifth time, he could see a slight commotion in the corner of the room. What looked like the stations chief of security talking heatedly to the station commander. His sixth sense spoke to him and he quietly moved within earshot.

“… stone dead, in a pool of his own blood” the security chief spoke quickly but efficiently “We arrived half an hour ago, but he had been dead a while”

“Professional hit?” asked the station commander.

“Yes and no” the chief said “he was killed in a way that ensured he would not be coming back in any clone form tell us who did it”

“Who was the pilot?”

“One of yours I believe” replied the chief “Latus Speizer, he was stationed here …”

“..as the test pilot for the stealth bomber project,” the commander interrupted, with an ironic smile “this is not going to go down well with Lai Dai”

“There is something more commander, we think we know who killed him”

The commander raised his eyebrows thankful for small mercies “And who would that be?”

The chief looked at his datapad “A medtec named Marrik Tellan”

Marrik closed the datapad and unplugged it from the uplink ‘So Tarnok Untego it is’ He thought. He tried to clear his mind of the image of the last capsuleer he met who was lying in a pool of blood. No time to think now, just run, fifteen minutes to undock. But then what? After he delivered the datacore what would happen? There was nowhere to run, no plan after that and no escape. He unlocked the maintenance hatch, cycled it closed and ran again. They must have found the body by now he thought, why are they not chasing me? Perhaps that will come. At the end of this walkway there was a crawl hatch to the recycler ducts that lead the central depressurized void of the station and the only way into the docking bay without biolock access, he had eight minutes.

Tarn was already in motion, his mind gluing the rest of the story together. As he left the pre-flight room the security chief was offering the commander a tactical plan. He knew the drill from here on in, the station would go into higher screening process and in less than fifteen minutes CONCORD would arrive. The murder of a capsuleer was not unknown, more often than not while baselining, but here pilot side, in their own quarters, that’s a whole different story. He paged his crew, Selene who was the best coms, navigation and ECM expert he’d known responded first. She was already aboard rechecking systems. Bento, whose huge frame hid a heart of gold responded with his usual o7 and appeared to be in the loading bay checking engineering. They would know what to do with his cryptic text. As he made his way to the docking bay his wrist monitor went off with a high priority encrypted message, just two words ‘Extract Marrik’. Tarn smiled “Well there’s a surprise”

Marrik crawled through the recycler ducting, only big enough to scamper on hands and knees. In the confined area he could smell his own sweat and the iron blood of the capsuleer still on his hands, the blood of his guilt. No one would believe he didn’t kill him, he knew that. He was expendable now, a pawn in a greater game. He nearly broke with emotion but screamed as loud as he dared to gain focus. He needed to finish this. Marrik cycled the outer locks, removed the small EV suit from his pack activated and pressurized it. Opening the hatch to the void was exhilarating compared to the cramped ducting. He scaled the maintenance ladders as fast as he could. Thirty meters below, or was it above, there was no way to tell now, was a docking bay. This should be bay 490 where he hoped the Astero would be if he had guessed right, if he didn’t get lost in the void, or if a lot of other bad things didn’t happen. Don’t think just go.

Tarn made the docking bay with only a few adjustments in his pack, the taser was charged and loaded, although he doubted he would have to shoot anyone. Both Seline and Ben were outside the ship and he gave a knowing nod to both as he walked around the vessel. He often did this before going back to his pod, he liked to touch the outside of his ship, and this one had seen him through many a dark night. But this time Tarn was using the walk to scan the other bays.

“All good boss?” Ben called as he looked around warily too.

“All good Ben, how do you think she will take overheating in the next five mins?” Tarn asked.

“Not a problem Boss, you want me to put the kettle on?” Ben replied still following Tarn’s gaze.

“Might be a good idea, think we may leave a little hot” he said

Selene looked up from the stern of the Astero and said “Please don’t bend the comms array on the way out, I have only just fixed the new one”

Tarn smiled and said, “Do my best”. Out of the side of his vision, he could see a group of Lai Dai security agents merging on bay 470 and 480 and said “You may want to warm up a third chair”

Marrik made the entrance hatch in under three minutes he could see the Astero up close and three people in the docking bay. What he didn’t see was the fourth person in the hanger and the faint blue light of an ID Scanner targeting him. Moments later the blast from an ion gun drove into his right shoulder tearing and scorching his flesh. Marrik saw nothing but a ball of light, time slowed down as he fell backward, milliseconds seemed like minutes, he watched the world and the Astero spin around as he fell to the docking bay floor.

The security chief walked up to Marriks broken body with the ion blaster in his hand, not that Marrik was going anywhere. Tarn met them both on the floor of the docking bay. The security chief looked at Tarn and said.

“Your Special Envoy Untego?”

Tarn said nothing.

The security chief continued “I saw you in the briefing room and I thought this would be the place to look”

“Did you” said Tarn

“My names Chief Shardon, and this pile of bones is wanted for murder”

“Well Chief Shardon, you need to look no further.” Tarn raised his eyes just a little “Ben?” Behind Shardon, Ben delivered a noiseless blow to the Chief that caused him to crumple like a house of cards.

Tarn stripped Shardon of his comms and weapons, tied and gagged him, then both he and Ben carted him off to the secure container that was now on the loading bay. Selene was trying to stop the flow of blood and inject Marrik with stims to stop shock.

Marrik tried to breathe, tried to talk, he extracted the datacore and gave it to Tarn.

“I didn’t kill him” Malik croaked

“Never mind son” Tarn Replied “Ben strap him in, let’s get out of here”

Tarn checked the camera monitor in the cargo hold and Marrik’s half lifeless body, the rehydrator in the med bay was pouring nutrients into his body which should keep him alive. His Astero’s data analyzer was going through the datacore contents now the encryption was broken. His ship safely cloaked in Thera Tarn looked through the data with a wry smile. When building new ships manufactures would write code into the navigation transponder system to log each time the warp drive cut out to send its location back to operations. It was a mechanism to ensure they could always locate ships during test flights. Instead of removing this code, it seems Lai Dai has sponsored burying it deep within the microcode of the nav systems. Unknown to the purchaser this would make the new stealth bombers trackable to someone in Lai Dai, and presumably the highest bidder. Tarn glanced back at Marrik and thought “I guess someone needed an escape plan after all”