"No you can't," Lehane agreed. "But I want you to use a lifepod instead."
"Why?" Creek said.
"We have dozens on the ship," Lehane said. "If I launch them all when you launch, the Nidu will have to track them. You'll have a better chance of making it to the surface."
"That leaves you with no lifepods for anyone else," Creek said.
"It's a risk," Lehane said. "But a calculated one. Each lifepod has its own beacon that connects to the nearest CC network. If we launch the lifepods, some of them will get past the jamming radius and start signaling. Then it becomes harder for the Nidu to pretend we didn't arrive."
"It's a gamble, Captain," Creek said.
"It's better odds than what we have now," Lehane said.
"Where do we go?" Creek said.
"I want you to use the lifepods on the Promenade Deck," Lehane said.
"Give me a fucking break!" Creek said. Robin, who could hear only Creek's side of the conversation, looked over in shock. "That's ten decks up. We nearly got killed three times getting down here. By now they're watching the stairs and elevators both."
"If you use the lifepods on the Promenade Deck, I'll be able to give the Nidu an extra surprise," Lehane said.
"Your surprise won't do us any good if we're dead," Creek said.
"There's a service elevator in the shuttlebay, along the aft wall," Lehane said. "I've unlocked it for you. It can take you up to Promenade Deck into the crew corridors. I can't guarantee they won't be waiting for you, but it seems less likely that they would. I've just turned on the emergency lighting on the Promenade Deck. Follow the nearest lit path to a lifepod. Once you're in a pod I'll program it to land at the Pajmhi communication center. Good enough?"
"Good enough," Creek said.
"Good luck, Creek," Lehane said. Creek closed the communicator, then opened it again and turned the notification signal to "vibrate." No need for another unpleasant surprise.
Creek pointed to the elevator in question. "Our next stop," he said to Robin.
"I thought we were going to take a shuttle," Robin said. "Now we're going back up?"
"The captain thinks we'll be safer using a lifepod. He's going to launch them all and make it hard for them to find us," Creek said.
"We're already here," Robin said. "Why don't we take the Nidu shuttle?"
"Do you read Nidu?" Creek said. "Because I don't. Come on, Robin. We're almost done. We can do this one last thing."
"They're in the elevator," First Mate Aidan Picks told Lehane.
"Good," Lehane said, and turned his attention back to the small bank of monitors in front of him, in which he could see what remained of the Nidu marines pacing through the various decks of the ship. There had been 20 of them, not including their shuttle pilot, when they arrived. Through the monitor banks, Lehane and his bridge crew—all the principals on station because they had come out of n-space—had watched as Creek dispatched six of them; Lehane had heard him shoot the pilot over the communicator. Lehane felt very bad about exposing Creek like that, but it couldn't have been avoided. He needed Creek to get to the lifepods so he could take care of the other marines.
Lehane knew about Creek and Robin Baker since shortly after Ned Leffhad approached him about finding a dress uniform for Creek. Leff was clearly excited about having a "survivor of the 6th" take part in the ceremony; Lehane was skeptical. There weren't enough survivors of the 6th for one of them to randomly pop up under the radar, and certainly not a clearly non-Asian man with a last name of Toshima.
Lehane met with "Toshima" shortly thereafter and tossed the name of a fictional colonel at him to see if he would bite; he didn't. After Toshima left him, Lehane had his security chief Matt Jensen pull up a data feed from the UNE network to find out what he could about the 6th. No Hiroki Toshima. But there was a picture of a Private First Class H. Harris Creek, thinner and younger but unmistakably the same man Lehane had just seen. An actual survivor of the 6th, yes. And a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross. Just not under the name he was using now.
Jensen's digging revealed why: Creek and his female friend were wanted in connection with a shoot-out in a DC area mall, which left four men—men with interesting police records—dead and another couple injured. Creek's friend also appeared to be named in some sort of legal suit by the Nidu government; Jensen didn't go into it but offered the opinion that the two were con artists of some sort. By the time Jensen caught Lehane up with all this, they were already under way to Brjnn, and their schedule was too tight to accommodate an emergency stop to have the two removed. Lehane instructed Jensen to alert authorities at Phoenix colony, their next UNE destination; the two would be discreetly removed from the ship then. Until then, Lehane didn't see why they shouldn't enjoy their vacation. Lehane told Jensen to keep an eye out to make sure the pair didn't try to con any of the passengers, but otherwise let them be.
Lehane hadn't given the pair any additional thought until the Neverland popped out of n-space and discovered a Nidu gunship waiting for them and jamming their communications. Lehane immediately locked down the bridge, sealing the bridge crew in with airtight blast doors. The commander of the Nidu ship sent a message demanding the surrender of Creek's friend Robin Baker (with whom the nation of Nidu was enigmatically at war), the location of her cabin, and that the Neverland open its shuttlebay to allow a squad of marines already en route to the Neverland to retrieve her. The failure to perform any of these would result in the gunship opening fire on the Neverland. Lehane complied, sent Baker's room information and ordered the shuttle bay to begin its cycle.
"If we let them take these two, do you think that'll be the end of it?" Picks asked Lehane, as they watched the Nidu shuttle enter the Neverland's bay.
"They jammed our communications as we entered normal space," Lehane said. "No one knows we're here. I don't think they plan to let anyone know we were ever here."
Then he was on the communicator to Creek; the Nidu were jamming outbound communications but personal communicators had a short-distance peer-to-peer protocol that operated on a separate frequency. It was thankfully unjammed. As Lehane and his crew watched Creek and Robin evade the Nidu marines (or not evade them as the case was on three occasions), Lehane thought mirthlessly that his security chief was dead wrong. Whatever Creek and Baker were in trouble for, simple con artistry was not part of the equation.
"Elevator's at the Promenade Deck," Picks said.
"Here we go," Lehane said. "Let's see if this guy's luck holds out."
"There's one," Robin said, pointing at a lit path on the otherwise dim Promenade Deck that led to a lifepod door. "Now all we have to do is get to it."
The two of them emerged from the elevator in a corridor behind the kitchen of the Celestial Room, the Promenade Deck's restaurant. The Celestial Room was constructed on a platform that stood above the rest of the triple-height Promenade Deck for what the brochures for the Neverland promised was a "delightful dining experience, floating among the stars." At the moment, however, it just meant that Creek and Robin had a flight of stairs to get down.
Creek poked his head up over the railing and spotted three Nidu marines in front of them, walking in the direction opposite of that he and Robin needed to go. The marines Creek had seen were working in pairs. That meant there was one missing. Robin tugged on Creek's shirt and pointed down the stairwell they needed to walk down. The fourth Nidu marine had just appeared in front of it.
Creek and Robin flattened down to avoid being seen, but the Nidu marine wasn't looking in their direction anyway. As they watched, the marine scratched himself, yawned, and sat on the bottom stair. He reached into a pouch on his belt and pulled out a silvery object, then peeled the silver skin, letting it flutter to the ground, and bit off part of what was left. The marine was having a snack.