After the body parts were removed, Penny crouched behind the nav controls and tried to help Jym pull the ship’s nose up. The SADAR screen ahead of her was demolished, giving her little to go by, so she looked to Jym’s instruments as a guide. A voice crackled through the radio, barely audible over the whipping wind. It said something in Bern right as Mortimor staggered into the cockpit, breathing hard.
“Did you catch that?” Penny yelled back to Mortimor.
He reached for the mic. “Yeah,” he said. He surveyed the damage to the dash and sucked in a deep breath. “Both of you keep quiet.”
“What’re you gonna say?” Jym asked.
Mortimor shot him a look. His chest heaved with another deep gulp of air, his beard catching the snow. “I’m going to tell the rest of the Bern fleet that we’ve suffered a mechanical failure so they won’t think anything’s amiss.” He looked to Jym’s instruments as he brought the mic up to his mouth. “And then I’m gonna inform them that we’re going down,” Mortimor said grimly.
Cole and Marx coordinated arrivals as the Underground kept their jump platforms busy evacuating the base of its personnel and essentials. Anyone assigned to Support Crew, they directed aft. As members of the Evac Crew appeared in the cargo bay, they assigned them duties and loaded them up with the gear also coming through every five seconds or so. Cole marveled at the military precision of it all. An absolute flood of people and supplies were washing aboard the ship.
Up in the cockpit, the flight crew did an incredible job of holding the Bern craft steady while updating HQ with coordinates. Each arrival appeared in the exact same spot of empty air. The more that came aboard, the more Cole felt a step closer to getting out of that infernal place and tracking down Molly. He was so close he could practically remember what her hair smelled like, when just a few days ago he’d had difficulty picturing her face—
“We’ve got trouble!”
The shout from the cockpit shattered Cole’s thoughts. He and Marx glanced at each other. Marx pulled a large sack of supplies out of the arrival point and handed it off to the alien who had jumped in just prior.
“I’ll go,” Cole said.
Marx nodded as another member of the Underground fell out of the air and landed in a neat crouch. “I’m gonna insist Arthur come with the next group,” Marx said, reaching for his radio. “Protocol and seniority be damned, we need him here.”
“Agreed.” Cole slapped Marx on the shoulder and ran to the cockpit.
“What’s going on?” he asked the flight crew.
Larken spun around. The mic was trembling in his hand. “First group’s going down,” he sputtered. “Someone from the ship broadcasted a mechanical failure in Bern. I’m pretty sure it was Mortimor.”
The pilot took one hand off the steering column and grabbed Larken’s wrist; he pulled the mic away from the translator’s mouth. “You’re not gonna transmit anything to them, are you?”
“No, man! I’m just waiting for the Bern to get suspicious!”
“Calm down, both of you,” Cole said. He stepped up behind the translator and checked the strange-looking SADAR, which was a beehive of blips and odd figures. “Where does it show their altitude?” He glanced over the shapes on the screen, not recognizing any of them as numbers.
“Right there.” The pilot tapped the screen. “And that’s group one’s ship.” He indicated one of the blobs. “They’re going down soft by the looks of it. Not far from the Luddite camp.”
“Is that their camp there?” Cole reached over and tapped the screen.
“Only thing low enough,” the pilot growled.
“Well then, they aren’t going down near them,” Cole said. “I think they’re trying to land on them.”
The radio squawked with more rapid Bern. Larken turned to the pilot, his knuckles white around the mic.
“I think he’s right, sir.”
The trio of white-clad warriors shuffled down the corridor toward Edison and Anlyn, their courage seeming to have rallied as they raised the strange cylinders in their hands.
“Desist!” Edison roared once more. He berated himself for leaving his lance in the cockpit as Anlyn scooted safely around him. “Stay where you are!” he tried in Bern.
One of the Bern stiffened and pulled back on the alien ahead of him. “We’re taking over control of your ship,” he returned in Bern. “On your knees!”
Edison took a step back and growled at Anlyn to return to the cockpit. As she ran off, the three attackers surged forward, the one in the front bringing his empty hands up high as if wielding an invisible club.
Edison threw his feet forward and fell flat on his back, sending a shiver through the deck. He brought his knees up to his chest as some unseen thing whizzed through the air above him. Kicking out with his legs, he caught the figure in the chest and sent him sprawling back into the other two.
Something clattered to the ground nearby. Reaching forward to grab it—a metal cylinder of some sort—Edison paused. The bulkhead to the side of the device was sparking. A thin line of destruction streaked across the solid steel as the cylinder rolled across the deck toward him. Edison’s scientific thought processes kicked into high gear. He picked the thing up, keeping the laser end pointed away. He leveled the device at the three men.
Nothing happened.
Insufficient range, he figured.
He took a step forward, and the other two figures in white dropped their cylinders and raised their hands.
“We give up!” one of them said in English.
“Excellent maneuver.” Edison aimed the strange cylinder at the one who had spoken in Bern and switched to that language himself:
“Now, who in hyperspace are you people?”
Cole watched the blip on the SADAR, the one showing Mortimor’s ship descending toward the frozen wastelands of hyperspace. The pilot and translator were yelling back and forth, arguing about what to do for them, but it was mere background noise. All Cole could think about was what might have gone wrong with Mortimor’s group and how he should’ve been there with them.
He snapped himself out of the unproductive thoughts and looked around at the bickering crew. The raid was going to fall apart over this, he realized. Mortimor’s mythical status as leader of the Underground was now going to be a distraction rather than a motivating force.
Cole ran out of the cockpit and returned to the cargo bay. He tore open one metal cabinet and locker after another, looking through the ship’s supplies for anything resembling a gravchute, or even an old-fashioned glider. Every five seconds or so, he heard a soft pop as more people and gear arrived from HQ. The finality and awfulness of the raid, of using up what remained of the fusion fuel, of abandoning the Underground’s headquarters, it all dawned on him as a colossal mistake.
Someone grabbed him by the shoulder. Cole turned to find Arthur Dakura frowning at him.
“What’s the emergency?” Arthur asked. He looked annoyed to have been brought aboard out of order.
“One group is going down,” Cole said. He slammed a locker shut and flung open another. “And I’m going down after them.”
Arthur grabbed Cole’s shoulders. He pulled him away from the cabinet just as Cole started rummaging around inside it. “That’s a negative,” Arthur said. “Drawing any more attention will just threaten the other squads. Now, which group did you say is going down?”
Cole clenched and unclenched his teeth. “I told you,” he said. “Group one.”