Delirium must be setting in.
And now he was hearing things. Over the rush of the wind and the staccato of his crashing teeth, Cole imagined he could hear starship thrusters roaring outside: the high pitch of jet turbines mixing with the loud air nozzles used for maneuvering. It seemed awfully detailed for an auditory hallucination.
Pulling his boots completely out of the window, Cole raised his sore chin and looked down the length of his beaten body.
Through the small square of light, he gaped disbelievingly at the mirage rising into view.
If that wasn’t real, Cole knew he’d really lost it.
Walter tested the webbing harness, yanking the tether that secured him to the cargo bay. He couldn’t believe he was going along with this. He’d nearly mutinied when he learned what Molly had planned. Not that he understood how this would work, but nobody broke out of Palan Max. He’d tried it himself. It was impossible. The only two ways out were bribery and death. And most Palans only had coin for the latter.
Then again, he’d gone and helped her escape for nothing but a promise and the mere hope for reward. What had he been thinking? Or had he been thinking? This girl—floods take him—she was strange and incredible and intoxicating, making him do stupid stuff. And he was not stupid.
Walter watched the canyon wall slide by beyond the porthole, wondering how he’d gotten himself in this mess. Didn’t matter now, he decided. There was no turning back. Someone would be waking his uncle soon, blabbering about an empty cell and a lot of oiled hinges. He just needed to stall the escape and hope the guards had already gotten to the boy. What choice did he have? He couldn’t fly this contraption, and now he really needed to get off-planet. He’d return for the other spoils later. Much later. When someone else was in charge.
He shifted the strange contraption in his hand. It was nice and light; he couldn’t see how this thing was going to free the human. At one end of the pole the girl had welded a wide cross, about six feet between the tips. The other end, about twenty feet away, had a chain attached which snaked back to the workbench. Four wires trailed from the tips of the cross and disappeared around the corner into some sort of mechanical room.
Walter supposed they could be blasting wires. He’d seen explosives that worked like this. Was the plan to blow through three feet of Palan stone? If so, she was going to be pretty upset when she saw how small the boy’s cell was. And what will be left of him inside?
The loading ramp opened a crack, letting in a sliver of morning light and a loud hiss of wind. He leaned against the tether and tightened his grip on the cold metal.
He’d help rescue her friend, Walter decided, or at least make it appear he’d tried. Besides, he’d have plenty of opportunities to get the human boy out of the way.
Later.
Molly lowered the cargo ramp from the cockpit and turned on the floodlights to illuminate the side of the canyon. Once the ramp extended fully, she pulled the ship up, pivoting it around until the open bay lined up with the solitary, barred window. She shot a brief glance over her shoulder and saw Walter extending the long boom through the opening.
She performed more calculations in her head, thinking about the thickness of the wall in her own cell and how much mass was likely in the rock. She kept dialing the hyperdrive down, far past its lower limits. Safety overrides flashed red and chimed at her relentlessly as the howling wind coursed through the ship. Molly’s hair had grown long enough for the ends to flick into her eyes, but she couldn’t take her hands off the flight controls and the maneuvering jets to do anything about it.
This was her least sane plan. The one that toyed with the laws of physics.
She could only get within five meters or so of the canyon wall, even with Parsona’s wings retracted in their zero-G position. Harsh gusts swirled and buffeted the ship from every direction. Holding her steady while simultaneously performing rough hyperdrive calculations was a challenge of dexterity and clear-thinking unlike anything the Navy had ever thrown at her. Deep in the recesses of her female ego, Molly wondered how many men would be able to pull this off, much less dream it up.
Then again, it was precisely this sort of stunt that won her demerits at the Academy and eventually got her expelled.
She had the cargo security cam pulled up on the dash’s vid screen. It was one more thing demanding her attention. On it, she could see Walter struggling with the long aluminum frame, yelling at her over the howling wind, complaining that the contraption was too heavy.
It shouldn’t be, she thought.
“OKAY!” he hollered. “Ready!”
Molly silently urged Cole to the other side of his cell. She reached over quickly to turn down the hyperdrive a little more, just in case, then checked the security cam again.
The device wasn’t in place. Walter was holding one of the tips in the center of the cell window.
Damn. She’d explained it a dozen times. No way was she going to pull away and go over it again; they were running out of time. She kept her eyes on the video screen and fought to hold the ship steady in the howling wind. Both of her hands twitched with every gust, counteracting each blast of air with an opposite one from the maneuvering jets. Flying while looking at the screen felt like combing her hair in the mirror for the first time. She moved the wrong way, corrected, tried to get the hang of it.
They only had one shot. Molly boosted the ship up a meter or so to compensate for Walter. She also brought the ship closer to the cliff wall, pressing the device in place herself.
The jump coordinates were already plugged in—she’d chosen to move the mass thirty meters straight up. She let go of the maneuvering jets and punched the hyperdrive as fast as she could.
With a loud ZAP and a yelp from Walter, the drive fired, trying to move the ship through hyperspace and up thirty meters. But instead of sending these instructions to the four anchor points throughout the ship, they travelled down the less-resistant wire Molly had added. What they found at the tips was solid rock, and not knowing any different—mass was mass—they moved the specified amount to the programmed coordinates.
The window and one side of Cole’s cell vanished, entering hyperspace. Thirty meters up, the material would find no place to return and disappear forever.
On the vid screen, Molly checked the hole she’d made. The size was right and had punched all the way through. She held her breath and moved the searchlight over. Something moved.
Cole.
A mix of dread and relief swelled up inside. He was alive, but what kind of hole had they been keeping him in? The cell was much smaller than the chunk of rock she’d removed. She watched him scoot forward and lower himself to the ledge formed by the evacuated square of stone. She could also see something else on the camera screen: something moving beyond him.
She shut down the hyperdrive to transform the magic wand into a lifeline. “Walter!” she yelled over her shoulder. “Get the pole back up there!” He had let it sag after the zap. Cole stood in the square hole, the incredible thickness of the gaping wall creating a nice perch. He looked over his shoulder at whoever was crawling in after him, then turned to look back at the ship.
“Grab the cross!” Molly yelled at the screen, as if Cole could hear her over the roar of the thrusters. She focused on Walter as he wrestled with the wind for control of the aluminum pole. Molly urged both of them along, wishing she could do more as Walter turned to the security camera and yelled something, shaking his head. His metallic face contorted into a mad grimace from the effort—a sneer of sorts.