Pawn Page 7

  “It can’t hurt to be sure,” Nicole said, trying to disengage her arm from his hand.

  To her annoyed surprise, he merely tightened his grip. “The effects will still be present,” he insisted.

  “Yes, thank you,” Nicole said, her annoyance moving rapidly toward anger. She was the Sibyl here, not him. If she wanted an extra puff of magic powder, that was her call. “I think I can tell when—”

  The lefnizo-four Door Three has a short circuit, the voice came in her head. The conducting metal must be removed from the contacts and the system reset with the keylock control.

  “Fine,” she said, finally shaking off Kahkitah’s hand and dropping the inhaler back into her pocket. “It’s lefnizo-four. Come on.”

  Nicole hadn’t been to the lefnizo section of the ship yet, but the numbering pattern she’d memorized should put it just past the marsarvi section, where the team was currently working. The lefnizo-four room should be close in toward the ship’s portside hull, which was a flat, featureless wall running at the left-hand side of all the rest of the Fyrantha’s rooms and other hallways. She took a moment to orient herself, then picked one of the hallways that should take her in the right direction and started walking.

  The door she was looking for turned out to be closer than she’d expected, though somewhat trickier to find. That first hallway dead-ended in a group of rooms similar to those where Nicole and the others lived back in the postinda section, and she and Kahkitah had to find another hallway that circled around them. Eventually, they ended up in the extra-long hallway that ran right along the portside hull.

  They found Bungie crouched beside an unusually large door set into a tall, curved wall, digging at the lock mechanism with a screwdriver. “What are you doing?” Nicole demanded as she and Kahkitah came up.

  “What’s it look like I’m doing?” he growled back. “Give me a hand here—I want to get this open.”

  “Come on, Bungie, you need to stop all this,” Nicole said, fighting to keep her voice steady. Trake could get results by yelling at Bungie; Nicole couldn’t. “Sooner or later you’re going to wreck something we can’t fix, and Plato will have to do something to punish you.”

  “Plato can stuff it,” Bungie said, peering past the screwdriver tip into the mechanism. “You think I’m quitting now, you’re crazy. Don’t you see what we’ve got here?”

  Nicole took another look at the door. It was much bigger than most of the others she’d seen aboard the Fyrantha, a good five feet wide and reaching nearly to the top of the eight-foot-high ceiling. Its identification plate was also larger, maybe four or five times bigger than any of the other room IDs. Aside from that there wasn’t anything remarkable about it. “It’s a door,” she said. “So?”

  “So this.” Bungie tapped the big number plate. “You see any other doors or rooms around here that are labeled by just one letter and one number?”

  “That’s indeed unusual,” Kahkitah agreed, his bird whistles sounding thoughtful. “What do you think it means?”

  “It means there’s something in here they don’t want us to see,” Bungie said, turning back to his work. “Good enough reason for us to get inside. Come on, Nicole—the damn ship talks to you. Figure out how to get this open.”

  “What if it’s something dangerous?” Nicole countered. “What if it’s an outside door or a fuel tank?”

  Bungie snorted. “What, a gas tank with a big door in it? Don’t be stupid.”

  “It could still open up to the outside,” Nicole said, feeling a tightness in her stomach. She’d seen Bungie in this mood before, and he wasn’t going to let go until he got a look behind that door.

  Unless she let him wreck it. That was what the Fyrantha had said, wasn’t it? That poking around with his screwdriver had caused a short circuit?

  Only that didn’t necessarily mean the door was broken so that it wouldn’t open. It could mean that he’d broken the lock so that it wouldn’t stay shut.

  Either way, she had to get him out of here. “Come on, we have to get back,” she said. “Carp’s already mad that you sneaked off again. If we head back now—”

  “Whoa!” Bungie said sharply, his eyes on something behind Nicole.

  She spun around, expecting to see Carp or even Plato. But it was just a Wisp, moving along the long corridor toward them.

  Nicole took a deep breath, feeling herself wilt as the sudden tension flowed out of her. “It’s just a Wisp,” she said, eyeing the tall silvery being closely. They didn’t see a lot of Wisps around the living and work areas, but she occasionally caught sight of one moving silently along the corridors on some unknown mission. For a while she’d wondered if their presence meant that someone else had just arrived, but since no one new had joined their little group she decided that wasn’t right.

  “Yeah, just one of the little bastards who kidnapped us,” Bungie bit out, still glaring at the Wisp as it glided delicately past them, heading forward along the long hallway.

  “This one isn’t one of the ones who did that,” Nicole said.

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  Nicole opened her mouth … closed it again. Now that he mentioned it, she had no idea. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I just do.”

  For a long moment he stared at her. Then, with a grunt, he turned back to the lock. “Whatever.”

  “No, wait, please,” Nicole said, wincing as he jabbed the screwdriver back into the lock. If she didn’t stop him, he was going to break something for sure. “Let me try.”

  “Why?” he asked suspiciously. “So you can make sure it stays locked? ’Cause if you do, you and I are going to have problems.”

  Kahkitah stirred. “You mustn’t threaten her,” he said, sounding embarrassed at having to talk to someone else that way. “Plato says we’re to be polite and civil to each other.”

  “Plato can stuff that, too,” Bungie said. He eyed Nicole another second, then stood up and slapped the screwdriver into her palm. “Just make sure you don’t wreck it.” He glanced around, frowning. “Where’d it go?”

  “Where’d what go?” Nicole asked.

  “The damned butterfly,” Bungie said. “It was here a second ago.”

  Nicole peered down the hallway. The Wisp had disappeared, all right. “Probably went into some room down there.”

  “I don’t think so,” Bungie said darkly. “There aren’t any.”

  “There are rooms and compartments everywhere,” Kahkitah reminded him, craning his neck to look that direction.

  “Not over there,” Bungie told him. “You’ve got the long hallway with no doors at all, and you’ve got this thing”—he thumped his hand on the big door in front of them—“and nothing else on this side until the hallway dead-ends about fifty yards up.”

  Nicole shaded her eyes, frowning harder. From what she’d seen back in the sevko and postinda sectors, she’d assumed the portside hull hallway ran the entire length of the ship. Had they really made it all the way to the Fyrantha’s front end?

  “Never mind,” Bungie said, giving Nicole a not-so-gentle nudge toward the door. “Get busy.”

  Nicole felt her stomach tighten as she knelt down and peered into the lock mechanism where Bungie had been poking. If he’d managed to bend some piece of metal around until it had created a permanent short circuit, she would have to take the whole thing apart in order to fix it. That would require another whiff from her inhaler to get repair instructions from the ship, along with probably a bunch of tools she didn’t have. And probably wouldn’t know how to use even if she had them.

  But she couldn’t see anything obvious. With the tip of the screwdriver, she pried open the small keylock control panel and studied the pad. She’d helped Jeff and Levi do half a dozen system resets during her time aboard, and this pad looked like all the others they’d used. She’d try the standard code first, she decided, and if that didn’t work she would use her inhaler and hopefully get the default lock code from the ship. She punched in the code
, then touched the two enter/apply keys.

  To her surprise, the door popped open. Apparently, this door’s default wasn’t to be locked, but to be open.

  If she’d immediately thrown herself against the door, she might have been able to push it closed and maybe reset the lock. But in the first moment of surprise, that thought never occurred to her. Before she could do more than goggle at the open door, Bungie grabbed the edge and started pulling. “Out of the way,” he ordered.

  There was nothing for Nicole to do but scramble to her feet and hastily back up. The door was heavy, and even with Bungie pulling with his full weight it came only slowly open. Nicole circled around behind him, her heart thudding with both anticipation and fear as she peered through the opening.

  She’d been right. The door did indeed open to the outside.

  But it wasn’t the outside Plato had warned was out there, an outside of space and stars and stuff. Instead, beyond the door was a peaceful country landscape, with trees and bushes and low hills, with a cheery greenish-blue sky and a sweet-smelling breeze rustling through the leaves and rippling through the tall grass.

  Behind her, Bungie swore. “That lousy, stinking liar,” he rumbled, his breath hot on the back of her neck. “Like hell we’re wherever the hell he said we were. We never even left the damn ground.”

  Nicole frowned at the landscape. It certainly looked like Plato had lied to them.

  But there was something odd about the scene, something that sent a warning shiver through her. “Bungie—”

  She broke off as he shoved past her, banging her shoulder against the edge of the door as he did so. “What are you—?”

  “Come on,” he said, grabbing her wrist and pulling her through the doorway.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, struggling to keep her balance as she rubbed her shoulder with her free hand.

  “Where do you think?” he retorted, leading her around a cluster of half a dozen low bushes. “We’re getting the hell out of here and going home.”

  Nicole focused on the bushes as they passed. The plants were about chest height, shaped like old Christmas lights, with wide bases just off the grass that swelled outward and then tapered up to their tips. They had thin branches, blue-green leaves, and dark purple berries.

  They didn’t look like any plants she’d ever seen in the parks in Philadelphia. Or anywhere else her grandmother had ever taken her.

  “Wait!” Kahkitah called from behind them, his whistling voice on the edge of panic. “Come back! You can’t go in there—it’s not allowed. Please—come back!”

  “Why?” Nicole called over her shoulder, struggling to free herself from Bungie’s grip. “What’s out here?”

  “It is not out!” Kahkitah called. “It is not allowed!”

  “So stay out!” Bungie shouted back.

  “Maybe we should go back,” Nicole suggested, still trying without success to break free as he dragged her along. “Or I could go back, and you could keep going?”

  Bungie didn’t answer. He led the way through a stand of tall, thick grass, and Nicole saw that he was steering them across the more or less level ground that lay right in front of them to the right. Seventy or eighty yards ahead was a low structure made of stone that she hadn’t spotted before. The building wasn’t much bigger than one of the play structures at the park she’d gone to when she was little, but it looked a lot sturdier than any of those had been. It was half-hidden by the grass and bushes, and there were some trees arching over its roof that probably gave it some welcome shade when the sun was in the sky. More trees stretched out behind it, reaching into the sky as far back as she could see. There were lots of cutout windows in the structure’s sides, probably for ventilation.

  She could also see several shadowy figures moving around behind those open windows. Children at play, maybe?

  But this didn’t look like any kind of city park she’d ever seen. Certainly not a Philadelphia park. There was no skyline, for one thing. Even with trees this tall, there should be at least a few buildings visible against the greenish-blue sky.

  She stopped short, her eyes widening. The greenish-blue sky?

  An instant later she was yanked off her feet as Bungie kept moving. Or rather, as he tried to keep moving. With his hand still clutching Nicole’s wrist, her unexpected stop pulled him off balance, wrenching her arm and yanking them both down in the grass. “You stupid—” he snarled.

  And broke off as a sudden flash of green light lit up the ground to their left. Reflexively, Nicole ducked, twisting her head around to look.

  Where there had been only bushes and tall grass a minute ago, a dozen creatures had suddenly appeared.

  They were definitely not children at play. They were shorter than Nicole, the tallest maybe three and a half feet tall, with light brown fur on their arms and legs. They wore dark brown leather-looking smocks draped over their chests and upper legs and sandal-like shoes tied around their ankles and feet. Their long necks and smallish heads were also furry, with short, upright ears, long noses, and black eyes. They were like nothing she’d ever seen before, but at the same time there was something about them that popped the thought of upright weasels into her mind.

  And each of them was carrying a slender, four-foot-long black tube.

  Her mind had barely registered all that when the whole group dashed out of their partial concealment behind trees and bushes and charged across the plain, their black tubes spitting out flashes of green fire.

  Not like the laser blasts or flamethrower bursts she’d seen on TV or in movies. These were like nothing else she’d ever seen.

  Like nothing on Earth.

  Nicole screamed, a cry of horror and fear and hopelessness that came boiling out of her mouth without any conscious thought as the air lit up around her. She threw herself onto her face in the grass, her body tingling with the horrible anticipation of the shot that would burn away skin and muscle and bone and kill her.

  She was going to die. Here, pressed into the weeds of a world whose name she didn’t even know, a group of alien weasels she had no quarrel with were going to blast green fire into her back, and she was going to die. From behind her came the thudding swish of furry legs as the weasels charged toward her through the grass. She tensed and waited for the end—

  A second later, with green bolts still flashing over her head, the running feet swept past without even pausing and continued on across the field.

  It was another couple of seconds before it penetrated Nicole’s suffocating swirl of fear that she was still alive. It took a couple more before she could gather enough nerve to open her eyes and cautiously raise her head.

  Her ears hadn’t lied to her. The weasels had indeed run past the two humans sprawled on the ground. They were still on the move, in fact, dodging in and out of each other’s paths like they were performing some kind of crazy group dance.

  She frowned. Was this some sort of game? Were they really just some alien children at play?

  And then, as the weasels continued to weave their pattern, a new spray of green shots slashed outward from the stone building she and Bungie had seen earlier. Three of the weasels jerked as some of the bolts sliced across them, and Nicole half heard, half felt, a tingling high-pitched scream echo across the ground. The scream was cut off, and the three weasels toppled to the ground. As they did so, the rest of the weasels threw themselves forward and to the sides, some into tall clumps of grass, others seemingly trying to get behind trees or bushes.

  But for that first paralyzed second, Nicole hardly noticed them. Her eyes were locked on the three crumpled weasels, her brain once again twisting in the hellish reality of this place. She’d seen dead bodies before, on the Philadelphia streets, and she knew the utter stillness that no one still alive and breathing could ever quite achieve.

  All three of the fallen weasels were dead.

  They weren’t children. And this was no game.

  Another green flash, a closer one, slashed across th
e ground at the right-hand edge of Nicole’s vision. Steeling herself, afraid to move but even more afraid that something might be sneaking up on her unawares, she eased her head and eyes in that direction.

  It was one of the weasels, lying flat on the ground behind the group of bushes she and Bungie had passed on their way in. He was peering along the barrel of his gun, and as she watched he fired another green bolt through the bush’s lower branches in the direction of the stone building.

  And then, to her bewilderment, he tucked his gun close in to his chest and rolled onto his back and then onto his stomach, ending up behind a different section of the bushes.

  She frowned. What in the world?

  An instant later, she got her answer. A green bolt from the direction of the stone building sizzled through the spot where the weasel had just been lying, blasting through the branches and sending burned and blackened leaves wreathed in yellow fire fluttering to the ground.

  She nodded to herself, the sudden rush of excitement as she figured it out almost making her forget the danger she was in. “He was changing position so the people in the building would shoot back at the wrong place,” she murmured.

  There was no answer. “Bungie?” she asked, her fear suddenly flooding back in. Had he been shot? Bracing herself for the worst, wincing as the weasel behind the bushes fired again, she looked at the place where Bungie had been lying.

  Bungie wasn’t there anymore.

  Clenching her teeth, she eased up onto her elbows and started crawling slowly forward, the way she’d seen soldiers do on TV. Directly ahead was a particularly thick clump of grass, surrounded by a circle of lower blades that shouldn’t wave as much as she passed through it. If she could get to the taller grass and look around it, she would have a better view of the stone building.

  With the green bolts still lancing back and forth, and with an occasional high-pitched scream from dying weasels stabbing in her ears, the crawl to the tall grass seemed to take forever. But finally she was there. Gathering her courage, hoping desperately that she hadn’t come all this way just to get her head blown off, she eased her eyes around the side of the grass.