Gaylen snatched up his comm.
“Jekata, what is going on?”
There was no response.
“Jekata!”
The comm remained silent.
Gaylen glanced outside. They were being taken down alongside one of the towering support pillars, into an abandoned underworld lit only by the occasional light set up for the benefit of maintenance crews.
He hit the control panel, to no effect. The emergency brakes didn’t respond either, and a scenario laid itself out in Gaylen’s mind. In it the mercenaries, or some other group, had known where the handoff was to take place, and so beaten the Addax here. They had stealthily made their way beneath the station and jacked into the systems just enough to take control of a single tram. Then all that was needed was to copy a frequency and wait for their arrival.
“Jaquan!” Gaylen said into the comm as Herdis sensed his distress and unslung her rifle. “It’s a trick! We’re being forced to the bottom of the gully!”
“What??” his friend said.
“We need help!”
Gaylen ended the call and switched to the station’s general channel.
“Jukata! Emergency! Tram 12 has been jacked into!”
“- - epeat - - tram?” came the garbled reply.
“Jukata Station, Tram 12! Can you hear me?!”
“- - ann - -”
The voice on the other end faded away into indecipherable crackle. They were already halfway down, with a whole lot of interference and metal between them and any receivers.
“What do we do?” Herdis asked curtly, with her armoured hood up and her weapon at the ready.
“Well, what we don’t do is give up!” he said. “They’ll have no reason to let us live and tell powerful people who stole their damn cylinder!”
Gaylen glanced out again. The occasional barely-visible markings on the pillar marked their descent. He touched both cylinders in his coat.
Keep calm and survive.
He had seconds to spare, so he shut away everything extraneous and simply focused on the factors he had available to him.
“Right,” he said, and turned back to Herdis. “Here is what we do.”
“I’m listening,” the woman replied in that same tone of voice, natural fear kept under control by ingrained training.
“For all they know there’s just one person on board.”
He took out the red apple cylinder and held it in his left hand.
“I’ll step out and make myself visible. You hide next to the door, ready to pop out and fire if necessary.”
“If necessary?” she asked.
“We have a hostage,” Gaylen said. He drew his pistol and held the muzzle to the cylinder. “They can’t fire on me without risk to their prize.”
He tapped a wall-mounted map of the tram system.
“I’ll try to make for this pillar over here. Number 9. I don’t know if a tram can be called from down here, but it’s worth a shot.”
Seconds remained, as they continued on downwards at a terribly steady pace.
“I’ll see about inching my way towards it. You emerge once their backs are turned. Try to follow. Or find another tram. Use your judgement.”
“Got it.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Herdis flattened herself up against the wall, right next to the door. Gaylen took up position on the other side of it.
“Good luck,” she said as the tram came to a stop.
The door opened.
“Step out!” shouted a male voice, altered by a helmet. Gaylen thought he recognised it from that brief conversation when he was flying away from Chukata Mog.
“Hold your fire!” Gaylen shouted back.
“I said step out!”
“And I said hold your fire!”
He leaned out just enough to show them what he had in his hands.
“Or you’ll have come here for nothing!”
It was Blue Strike. All seven of them. All wielding rifles.
A light on top of the tram shone out over the scene. The overbuilt gully concealed either rock formations, the foundations of very ancient ruins, or some combination thereof. The mercenaries were lined up among the uneven terrain, about ten metres in front of him.
Keep calm and survive.
The stocky man in the middle, the one with the officer’s pauldrons, was the first to speak.
“Drop it!” he demanded.
“No,” Gaylen told him firmly. “I am walking off into the gully and you boys aren’t going to do a thing about it.”
He stepped out of the tram, doing his very best to watch their body language for immediate precursors to violence. But there were seven of them to watch.
“You’re not leaving,” the captain sneered.
“Yes, I am,” Gaylen said, and took the first step off to the left.
The captain fired. His bolt struck the rocky ground in Gaylen’s path with a burning hiss. A jolt of adrenaline shot through Gaylen’s body, screaming for immediate action.
“You’re lucky I’m a seasoned hand at all this,” Gaylen said with calm he was able to force into his voice. “Or my finger would have jerked just now. You idiot.”
There was a formation of some kind just twenty steps away. And those seven gun muzzles remained on him.
“Just put it down, and we’ll let you walk,” the captain said.
“No. I told you: I’m seasoned. You’ll silence me as soon as you have this.”
He took another step, and another.
“It can take a shot,” the one on the far left of the band said.
“No, it can’t,” Gaylen said, and risked another step. “Or you would have fired the moment I showed myself.”
He took another step. He was a quarter of the way there.
“I didn’t come all this way for nothing,” the captain said dangerously as Gaylen continued to move at a careful pace.
The man’s rifle stayed on target with the smoothness of steady nerves. Gaylen wished he could see his face.
“Me neither.”
“I’ll take revenge, if nothing else.”
“Go on then...”
Gaylen twisted slowly as he walked, keeping the cylinder between himself and the group.
“... destroy your treasure.”
He was almost there. Almost to that formation. Gaylen tensed his body to bolt, to sprint with all of his strength.
It all happened very quickly.
The captain fired. The shot hissed home, straight at Gaylen’s gun hand... except it stopped as the energy shield on his belt crackled into being. Herdis emerged from the tram and fired a shot as she ran to the right.
Gaylen broke into a run. Everyone fired, him included, and a blast missed him by inches as his own shot crackled against the captain’s own shield. And then the formation hid the mercs from view.
“Get her!” the captain shouted, and Gaylen pictured a hand signal.
He picked up speed with every step, going deeper into the gloom, into the general direction of Pillar 9. He noticed the dip in the ground a moment before his feet carried him into it. The meagre light carried even less down here, and he almost tripped over some obstruction or another. A plasma blast then provided a flash of illumination as it hit the ground behind him, and Gaylen cut to the left.
There were more gunshots a bit further away, as Herdis bore her own portion of all of this.
Another formation beckoned, and something tripped him as cover was an arm’s length away. This time he did fall, and with both hands occupied he could only brace to a limited degree.
Gaylen ignored the pain and scrambled on. A shot hit him from behind, and an unpleasant buzzing sensation went over his entire skin as the shield fizzled out and died.
He looked over his shoulder, seeing the silhouette of four mercenaries. He fired just before making it behind the formation, and yet another shield protected his target.
On he ran, and threw the decoy cylinder away. Perhaps they would notice it and at least delay a moment. But it had done him all the good it could. He cut a right, then a left, then a right again. Straight lines and predictable patterns were his enemies now.
His environment was definitely at least partially made up of ruins. There was the occasional flat surface or right angle, obviously man-made in spite of the ages and ages of dead plant matter that covered them. A random turn of Gaylen’s brought him up on what he supposed had been a roof. Then it brought him up farther and farther, higher up than he’d been able to predict in the gloom.
The ascent was making him a better target, and now he had no shield. Though it had been a wonder that Jaquan had managed to get the pirate’s gadget back into any kind of working order.
The distant hisses of plasma continued, and as he glanced back he saw flashes on the other side of the tram, assuring him that Herdis was at least still alive. Then he noticed a mercenary down below and threw himself flat.
A shot flew over his head, and he began crawling. Another shot flew, and another right after it. Small arms couldn’t fire this quickly. There were at least two of them.
Gaylen reached an edge of some kind. He couldn’t see what the drop was like and he had no time for caution. He simply swung his feet out over the edge and let them lead the way down. Time stretched out in darkness and freefall, and Gaylen had all the time in the world to imagine his legs shattering on impact.