CHAPTER 016
NIGHTMARES & AIRLOCKS
The whir of machinery beat a static whuph that covered my approach as I tiptoed my way around jutting electrical panels and abandoned linen cabinets, occasionally turning to shuffle sideways through crimped junctions. While I gained ground silently, steadily, CAT’s newest friend sprinted in bursts of a dozen paces. When they stopped, I did the same, listening for the beeps of the access panels attached to the hidden doors. How they determined which rooms to try was another question for what I was beginning to hope to be a long, painful interrogation. I thought back to the list of missing items from around the Express—Vatel’s knife, Tamsworth’s heart pills, Fox’s nanodrive. What better way to steal from right under the noses of everyone onboard than sneaking through unused access tunnels? It dawned on me that it was also the perfect escape route for Matteo Russo’s killer.
CAT’s presence had not been a deterrent, meaning they were either dumb enough to risk dealing with a German Shepherd or smart enough to buy him off with treats and belly rubs. I had a feeling Russo would not have been so easy to persuade. Could the single diamond have been part of a greater haul? Matteo walked into his room, caught the thief in action, and then what? There were no signs of a struggle. My personal experience of observing Matteo in combat was limited, considering I’d kicked a door halfway through his face before giving him a chance to show me what he could do. Still, he didn’t strike me as the type that would go down without a fight. He’d been ambushed.
The curved hall flattened out enough for me to catch my first glimpse of the offender. Their hooded garment thwarted my initial efforts to get a description of their appearance beyond the obvious. They were small to the point of appearing childlike, under five feet tall, but strong enough to support their bulging backpack with the natural ease of a tortoiseshell. I wondered how many of the guests’ missing belongings were secreted in its multiple flaps and pockets.
In one hand they clutched a bizarre-looking device. The grip, which appeared to be from a bicycle handlebar, was mounted to a boxy frame containing a central display screen and an array of tuning knobs and switches. Crimped, irregular sensors sprouted from the top like a caterpillar’s antennas. It looked distinctly homemade and quite possibly capable of taking out a professional gunman without leaving a trace.
I crept along the wall, trying to get a closer look without drawing attention. Once again I caught myself reaching for an imaginary holster. Instead, I found CAT’s leash, which I’d apparently pocketed in my haste to examine the secret doorway. My real armaments were still tucked away somewhere further down the bowels of the ship. It occurred to me that if I were on the inner portion of the outer ring, then somewhere these corridors must intersect with the support columns attached to the middle ring. The utility tunnels in those columns were the only way to reach the middle ring, and baggage compartment within it, while the Lunar Express was not grounded. My guns were close, but not close enough.
Distracted by my best efforts at mentally mapping the layout of the Express, my dress shoe landed squarely in a puddle beneath a neglected plumbing valve. I heard the splash before I felt it. My target did too.
They whipped around to find the source of the disturbance. Any expression of surprise they may have worn was concealed beneath a featureless silver and blue mask. When they spotted me, the lime green light radiating from their eye sockets flared in intensity. I flinched in anticipation of an incoming laser attack. As shameful as it might have been, I had no clue what this creature was capable of.
“Oh shit!” they squealed in a high-pitched voice, then turned and sprinted the other way.
I took up the pursuit. At first I gave them plenty of space, not wanting to risk finding myself on the wrong end of the improvised gadget they still focused on. I kept up with long, steady strides, ducking low-hanging loops of cable and dancing around abandoned room service carts.
The closer I got, the less of a threat they seemed. Their steps were clumsy and panicked, and their refusal to look up from their device caused them to carom off walls and trip over their own feet. Still they scrambled ahead out of sheer will to survive. I almost felt sorry for them. Against better wisdom, I allowed my instincts to take over.
“Hey, kid,” I called out, “I don’t want to hurt you. I just wanna ask you a couple questions.”
They looked back over their shoulder but kept running, but only long enough to snag their backpack on a segment of pipework jutting from the wall. They strained against it, trying to pull free, but they were hopelessly lodged. Rather than slip their arms from the straps and leave the backpack behind, they continued messing their handheld. A rookie mistake.
At least that’s what I thought until my legs turned to lead.
Everyone knew that feeling you got when you were trying to run in a nightmare. Your feet churned endlessly but you couldn’t go anywhere. You slipped and slid like a newborn deer on ice or you sunk straight into the ground like it was made of Jell-O. This was nothing like that but every bit as horrifying. I was still awake. The floor was solid as ever. I just couldn’t move.
I couldn’t tell whether I’d been shot or part of my brain had been liquefied or what, but I knew the answer was exactly as far away as that twerp with the backpack. They’d managed to escape the straps and had turned their back on me in an effort to yank their payload free.
I took a deep breath and forced one foot ahead of the other. It was like dragging a log through mud. I didn’t bother trying to shout. Filling my lungs had been tricky enough. I wasn’t going to risk emptying them. I reached out to grab a handle on the wall, thinking that maybe I could somehow pull myself forward, but in the process knocked a handful of miscellaneous hardware off an adjacent ledge. The screws and bolts plummeted to the floor with impressive force. The problem wasn’t with me. They’d somehow managed to screw with the artificial gravity generators, locking my area down with extra force while leaving theirs unaffected. So that was what that stupid device was for. All of a sudden being shot didn’t seem like a terrible alternative. At least I knew how to deal with that.
A placard on the wall a few feet ahead noted the border between section H-2, where I was, and section H-3, where the tiny terror was still trying to free their backpack. Whatever was in there must have been good. If I could make it across the boundary into unaffected territory I could find out for myself. Assuming, of course, that the Express’s artificial gravity generators worked on the same grid layout as the rest of the ship. I couldn’t afford to consider that it didn’t.
The culprit broke free right as I nosed the line between the two sections. They took the time to flash me the same obscene gesture Matteo had. It seemed much more vulgar when delivered by someone half my size. When I went to return the favor I noticed my hand moved freely, unburned by the additional effects of the generators. I couldn’t run after them, but if I’d had my gun on me they were still well within range. Unfortunately all I had was CAT’s leash, and that wasn’t going to do me a damn bit of good. Unless…
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
With nothing to lose, I took the leash from my pocket and hurled it at the fleeing suspect. It didn’t fly with the neat, whirling action of a bolas like I had intended, but that was probably because it was a fucking dog leash. All the same, the hand loop managed to snag their toe. The other end of the braided cord caught a pile of debris along the way and yanked tight. The attempted escapee tumbled to the ground in a heap. Their device skittered across the dusty floor, winding up well out of reach.
I emerged from the hypergravitational field, content not bothering to ask myself how or why I’d managed to pull it off. The universe owed me this one. I’d take it.
They stayed frozen in place as I approached. Their continued refusal to call out for help told me they feared the consequences for being found in the off-limits area worse than they feared me. After dealing with Captain Fox, I hardly blamed them. The lime green eyeholes of their mask tracked my movements warily. I held my hands up and open to show them I was unarmed as I high-stepped over their device like it was a coiled snake. Its screen continued to spit out a scrolling field of digits and vacillating waveforms beyond my comprehension. Again, I would have preferred the snake.
“It’s not broken, is it?” I suspected the odd undulations in the warbling voice were due to a modulator hidden within the mask. If so, it did little to disguise the snotty trill of a sniffle toward the end.
“I’m not sure,” I replied honestly. “Then again, I don’t even know what it is.” I retrieved the gadget and dusted it off as best I could against my pant leg. For all the strands of exposed wiring and sloppy solderwork, it felt surprisingly solid.
The device chirped. A pair of tiny indicator lights near the base flickered in an alternating pattern. Eager to be rid of it, I thrust it toward the stranger without thinking.
They accepted it with a giggle. I thought I noticed the device’s antennas waggle in response. “It’s a remote control. I built it myself.”
“And you used it to turn the artificial gravity machines on full blast to stop me?”
“Full blast? I wasn’t trying to kill you, I was just trying to get away. I’m not supposed to be in here.”
“You and me both.” I eased myself into an approximation of a squat, trying to level out our point of view. “Mind if I ask why you are?”
“I ran away from school. It’s so boring on Earth. My parents said I could come visit whenever I wanted, but they’ve been so busy with their convention and this stupid spaceship that they forgot all about me.”
Parents? Convention? Oh. Oh no.
“Gianetta?”
“Busted.” With a simple gesture her mask dissolved, its remnants beating a liquid retreat into the fibers of her hooded sweatshirt. “I knew they’d send someone to find me. I go by G now, in case they didn’t tell you.”
They hadn’t. I had no idea that the ten-year-old daughter of Gabriella and Frankie Denaro would be on board the Lunar Express. Something told me they didn’t either.
“Of course they did,” I blustered. “They’ve been worried sick about you, G.”
“Really?” She perked up a bit. “How’d they figure out where I was?”
“Well it wouldn’t be much fun if I told you, now would it? Where do you think you screwed up?” In my experience, getting a kid to explain how clever they’d been was a surefire way to get answers.
“My guess would be…the messages? You know, pretend I’m dad telling school I’ve got permission to fly back to Luna, then pretend I’m the school telling dad I’m going on a field trip. I knew there was no way it would be that easy. For such a big company, their digital security is—” G finished her thought by blowing a raspberry, accompanying it with a hardy thumbs down.
“Bad enough that anyone with the right resources could fake a ticket?” Wilder didn’t strike me as being particularly tech savvy, but he had deep enough pockets to buy off someone that was.
“Ticket? Who said anything about a ticket? Do you think they’d have let me on board, no questions asked?”
“Probably not, now that you mention it. So you’ve been hiding out in these…tunnels this whole time?”
G rolled her eyes. “They’re utility corridors. And no, not the whole time, but most of it. No one is supposed to be in here after launch. They lock it down, but I can still get in.” She stroked the strange device between the antennas, like someone petting a rabbit.
“Does that thing have a name?”
“Not yet. He’s still in testing.”
“Well, it’s never too early to think about it.” Or else you’ll end up with a dog named CAT, I left out. I casually glanced at her overflowing backpack. “You wouldn’t happen to know about anything going missing from the passengers, would you?”
She might have taken me in a science fair, but judging from her poker face, I could have held my own in a hand of cards. “I didn’t steal anything, if that’s what you’re trying to say. I only borrowed some things because they looked interesting. And I always tried to put them back somewhere, even when I couldn’t remember exactly where I got them.”
“The chef’s knife?”
“I left it in a kitchen.”
“Which one?”
“The big one?”
“Okay. How about Mr. Tamsworth’s heart medicine?”
She shrugged. “I thought they might be sleeping pills I could use for an escape plan if I got captured. I put them back after we scanned them and found out they’re not.”
I couldn’t even really be mad at that one. “Okay. And the captain’s nanodrive?”
She clutched her device a bit more tightly. “I’m still using that one,” she said defensively.
“Okay, okay,” I backed off. “As long as we know where it is, that’s all that’s important.” I stood up, hoping she’d follow my lead. “Now that I’ve found you, what do you say we head back and let everyone know you’re doing all right?”
G remained seated on the floor. “Are you going to tell my mom and dad?”
“I’m going to have to tell them something, aren’t I? It’s not like I can leave you running around in here ’til we get to Luna.”
“Why not?” G pouted, but rose to her feet all the same. “Uncle Matteo taught me how to protect myself. And he’s the one in charge of security, so he knows what he’s talking about.”
Great. Another conversation I wasn’t looking forward to having. As I tried to figure out the best way to break the unfortunate news, a steady thumping broke through the constant din of machinery. Footsteps. They were in the utility corridor with us and they were getting closer.
G’s head snapped around as she heard them too. In a snap her mask reformed over her face. She began adjusting the knobs and switches on her device.
“I thought you said no one else could get in here.”
“They’re not supposed to be able to,” her artificial voice shot back. “Someone else must have overridden the lockout.”
As much as I needed to figure out who, now was not the time. I grabbed G by the wrist and took off in the direction we came from. She managed to keep up despite the heft of her backpack causing her to bob back and forth. Our own paces thundered throughout the metallic corridor but were not loud enough to drown out the ones still gaining on us. As we squeezed through one of the periodic crimped junctions, she shook herself free of my grasp and stopped dead in her tracks. Her attention was completely consumed by fiddling with her remote. Boss’s kid or no, this was no time to argue. I reached out to scoop G into my arms but she held up a single hand to stop me.
“This should only take a second. Get out of the way of the door.”
I didn’t see any door, but I did hear our pursuer rounding the bend. I stepped through the constrained segment of passageway just in time for it to telescope shut behind me with impressive speed, nipping the heel of my shoe as it went.
“Backup airlock,” she said, the traces of a grin barely perceptible beneath her mask.
“You almost took my leg off,” was all I could muster.
Our pursuer’s footfalls dropped from a sprint to a clipped walk as they approached the other side of our improvised barrier. A series of faint beeps started to emanate from their side of the wall. As they sped up, I looked to G to see if they were her doing. She stared at her display, unmoving.
“But how are they—”
I didn’t wait around to hear the rest. The words Manual Unlock Sequence flashing on her screen were enough.
“Doesn’t matter. My room, now!”
This time I didn’t need to grab her wrist. We took off down the corridor in lockstep, neither of us looking back.