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Counterpoint: Chapter 2: Part 9
COUNTERPOINT
CHAPTER 2: THE PILOT
PART 14
By Mayavan Thevendra
Dumont huffed a filthy chuckle, and reached down like a crane; his hand clenched tight around Kimiko’s collar, and he dragged her out of the locker headfirst and threw her on the floor.
“All right, girl. Looks like you’ve got some explaining to do.” Said Grill, kneeling down by her head. Kimiko grunted, and tried to scramble to her feet, but quickly found Dumont’s boot forced down onto her back, pressing her firmly to the floor.
“Nff…fuckers!”
Tavis’s voice came across the radio once again, sounding ever more distraught. “Grill, you there?”
“Yeah, it’s all right, Tav, I’ve found our little jailbreaker. I’ll take care of her.”
“They’re all gone, all the ones we dumped in freight two, they’re missing!”
Grill’s face transformed into a scowl of contempt, his eyes fixed on Kimiko like a bird of prey.
“Hold on,” he muttered, and replaced the radio at his side. “I’m impressed, girl. I didn’t expect anyone could move around this soon after getting shot full of terlazine, but I guess I was wrong. So here you are. But where are your pals?”
“Hnng, fuck you.” sputtered Kimiko, her fear receding in favour of the burning resentment she felt for her captors. She gasped as Dumont’s boot crushed harder into her back.
“There’s that tongue again,” said Grill. “and it’s starting to lose its charm. Now where are they? I doubt you’d have tried to leave here without them.”
Kimiko gritted her teeth, and laid her head against the ice-cold floor, her eyes screwed tightly shut. She said nothing.
“You got them out of Freight Two, probably had to carry at least a few of them, and you made it all the way down here.” Grill said, and stood up straight. “Must have been you that shut the hangar doors...”
He gave his chin a vigorous scratch, stared into space for a second, looked through into the hangar, and then chuckled.
“God damn, I must be extra stupid today.”
“Boss?” said Dumont.
Grill nodded over to the western side of the hangar. “They’re in the spare. Go get ‘em.”
“No!” cried Kimiko.
Dumont stepped off her back, and walked through into the hangar bay. After a moment to catch her breath, Kimiko scrabbled up to her feet, and lunged forward, only to find herself face to face with Grill’s pistol.
“You’ve got a lot of guts, girl. I like it, I’ll admit. But this is the end of the line for you, you’re just too much God damn hassle.”
“Bastard, I’ll kill you.” said Kimiko, her voice little more than a shrill whisper.
“Only if I trip over your corpse.”
Before Grill could pull the trigger, Pauly’s voice rasped through the com from the station’s ops centre.
“Grill!”
“Not now, Pauly, I’m in the middle of something here.”
“Grill, they found us! I got their ships on the scope, they’re all aroun-”
But Pauly never finished. The sudden sound of metallic thunder echoed through the walls, followed by a terrible, and tremendous whine: the sound of metal bulkheads being cleaved. Grill staggered back, and slumped against the wall as the floor shook.
“Bastards are going to blow us to pieces!” he hissed, and grabbed at one of the workstations, accessing what Kimiko had been searching for herself, before the junkers had returned – the manual controls for the hangar’s pressure pumps. Grill set the bay to depressurise in ninety seconds, and then swung his handgun around towards Kimiko to finish the job, but she was on him in a flash.
“You little bitch, you’re dead!” screamed Grill.
The gun went off next to Kimiko’s ear, and a burst of sickening, white hot pain shuddered through her skull; nearly senseless, she drove herself forward, dragging Grill down to the floor. He shrieked with pain as she drove her thumb into his remaining eye, and flailed at her like a crazed beast; ripping her hand away, he brought his leg up, braced it against her, and threw her backwards. Kimiko landed hard, nearly breaking her neck against one of the booth’s chairs, but she shook off the pain, and crawled back onto her knees. Another crack. A bullet ricocheted off the terminal next to her head; she glanced around, and saw a little black hole, the business end of Grill’s pistol, pointed right at her. Again the floor shook, but harder this time, a horrendous groan filled the air above their heads, and like an avalanche of metal, the booth’s ceiling suddenly collapsed. Kimiko threw herself towards the doorway, getting clipped by a metal fixture as she fell, but landing clear. The commotion roared and clattered behind her, but she didn’t look back; tears streamed down her face as she gathered herself up, and with what strength she had left, Kimiko staggered towards the waiting salvage boat.
But she couldn’t get to it. The entire bay had been turned upside down; another explosion rocked the station, bringing ship chassis and yet more unsorted junk tearing down onto the hangar floor. The entire structure was shaking itself to pieces around her, and she could barely see straight; a wall of mangled wreckage blocked off the westernmost edge of the bay, cutting the spare salvage boat off from sight. Kimiko had no idea of how long was left before those great doors in front of her would open once again, but she had to join the others before they did, or else be dragged into oblivion.
Suddenly, Dumont appeared, clambering over rubble and smashed machinery. Little more than a dizzy animal, he floundered to and fro, shielding his ears from the bellow of explosions and twisting metal. A huge, rusty turbine came loose from its support hooks on the ceiling, and crashed into the floor to his side, throwing him down. Still more debris tumbled, smoking and sparking, until it had nearly surrounded him.
Then, like something out of a nightmare, a cold, cruel lump of metal pawed at Kimiko’s cheek, and she looked back into the muzzle of Grill’s gun. He stood over her once again, his face sopping with blood, his other arm hanging limp and ruined by his side. He screamed a last command across to Dumont in the distance:
“Get to your boat!”
And then he squashed his gun into Kimiko’s temple.
“You! Get in there, now!” he yelled, shoving her towards the salvage boat behind her. The awful sounds of mayhem chased them inside, and after slinging her roughly into the pilot’s seat, Grill sealed the access hatch, and strapped himself into one of the side-benches behind her.
“I can’t fly with this busted arm, so you’re going to do it for me – and I know you can. You fuck this up, you’ll die too, you think about that. And if that isn’t enough, you think about the gun I’ve got pointed at the back of your pretty head. Now get the engines going; when those door open, you fly us the hell out of here.”
The ship’s burners groaned from beneath and behind as Kimiko brought them on line; as soon as she had, the hangar doors abruptly exploded with a near deafening blast. A great blossom of fire ringed the frame as the fractured panels were blown out into space, and suddenly every fragment, every tin can, every piece of junk in the hangar that wasn’t nailed down, was flying out to follow them. The ship lurched forward uncontrollably, bits of debris clanging and scraping against the hull as they were sucked out into space.
“Go, go!” hollered Grill.
Steering the boat was nigh impossible, so Kimiko threw the boosters on, and hung on for dear life. The other ships were being pulled out along with them, one of them piloted by Valerie, but amidst the storm of flying scrap, there was no way of knowing which one it was.
“Watch out!”
Kimiko saw them floating a kilometre outside of the station, amidst the tumbling chunks of rock – a band of tugs, surely the ones that had attacked the junkers. As the boat cleared the hangar, she glanced through the side window to get her first look of the station from the outside, and found that their attackers had already levelled most of it. A sweeping inferno had consumed the uppermost decks, and huge, cavernous holes had been blown in the hull. Volleys of cannon fire danced around them; one of the tugs veered away from the group, latching onto the salvage boat’s tail as Kimiko swerved it past. The other junker ships stumbled on into the crossfire, and in the corner of her eye, she watched one of them – it moved and turned as though being flown, rather than sliding pilot-less through space. Its thrusters fired madly, as it was smashed sideways by a drifting asteroid; then the hunting pack of tugs moved in quickly, circling it, taunting it, and finally pulverising it with their guns.
There was no time to think. Kimiko watched space burn red and amber off the prow: cannon fire erupting from the tug behind them.
“He’s right on you! Lose him!”
The boat handled like a slab of duracrete. Kimiko yanked the nose up, skimming the side of a gigantic asteroid, and tried to weave the ship through the debris. As though it were bound to their rear by a cord, the enemy tug held fast behind them, its guns blazing. Alarms howled like babies.
“We’re taking damage!” Kimiko yelled.
A sudden bright, white light grew in space behind them, bathing everything within sight in its vivid glow. In an instant, it had surrounded them, and like a tidal wave, a terrific shockwave pummelled the ship’s stern. Kimiko couldn’t see around to the rear, but knew it was the station that had just succumbed to the tugs firepower, and exploded. A secondary blast battered the boat along, and Kimiko tried to ride the tremor; she caught the barest glimpse of their pursuer being macerated against a large asteroidal reef, and wrestling with the controls, she tried to steer their ship away from the same fate. For a half a dozen kilometres, the boat thundered on, and slowly, eventually, the surging wave behind them dissipated. As Kimiko brought the salvage boat around, the two of them saw the space the junkers’ station had once occupied, now engulfed by a gradually swelling firestorm, a vast twisting thing, sprouting curling, smoky vines out into the ether.
“Shit,” said Grill, sounding as wretched as Kimiko felt. “I had big plans for that place.”
Kimiko stared deeply into the bright ball of flame, and tried to think, but no thought would come. Drenched in sweat and barely able to catch her breath, she just sat, and watched.
“Come on, let’s get out of here before they catch up with us. There’s a waypoint logged into the comp, named ‘Josephine’, lock it in and start flying. Move it!”
Remembering the gun that was being pointed at her, Kimiko did as she was told. The stars and rocks spun past. Soon, the rocks became more scarce, and the salvage boat began to emerge from the tattered edge of the asteroid field. An unfamiliar sun shone coldly at them. They were a long way from the Confederate rally point at Cid Fleiis, and Kimiko guessed that the fringe territory ‘badlands’ didn’t lie too far off.
“Sorry about your pals.” Said Grill plainly, not even trying to sound sincere.
“What do you mean?” Kimiko said quietly.
“Well, they bought it, didn’t they? Those tugs blew the shit out of them.”
“That wasn’t them,” said Kimiko, shaking her head, “that was your pal. Dumont.”
“You think I don’t know my own ships? No, Dumont’s made it out. Your pals were in the spare, that’s the one that got wasted.”
It was a lie, thought Kimiko; he was trying to mess with her head. It had to be a lie. But Kimiko couldn’t be sure; there was just too much garbage floating in the way to have gotten a good look at the boat before it was shot to pieces. She really couldn’t tell whether it was her classmates’ ship, or Dumont’s. The only thought, the only meagre hope she had, was that Valerie was too good a pilot to have led them into their deaths like that. All of the dreadful boasting she did about her flying skills, it was for a reason - they had to be alive.
“No, you’re lying. My friends aren’t dead.” Said Kimiko to Grill, and twisted around to face him. “Dumont’s dead. All of your asshole, junk-collecting friends are dead. And you’re next, ‘Grill’.”
Pulling the pistol’s hammer back, Grill raised it up, pointing it at Kimiko’s forehead. His eye was slick, glassy, but there was murder behind it, cold and clear.
“You believe what you want, girl, if it makes you feel better. It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. But get this straight; alive or dead, your friends are gone – it’s just you and me. You put any thoughts of escaping, or getting even with me out of your head, right now. The moment I want you dead, you die…you’re mine now.
Now turn the f*ck around.”
She turned around. The ship carried on along its course, and arrived at Grill’s waypoint, some forty kilometres beyond the asteroid field’s outer boundary. There was no sign of any of their pursuers; for the moment, at least, they were safe. She was safe. As long as she did what she was told. All she had to do was fly.
“I’ve got to get my shit together”, muttered Grill, “lay low for a little while. Okay, there’s another waypoint in there, named ‘Alice’, you see it?”
Kimiko nodded.
“All right. That’s where we’re going. Now you follow that waypoint, and if you even think about trying to steer us away someplace, then I won’t even think twice. Do you understand?”
Another nod.
“Smart. That’s smart. Now listen, it’s not going to be easy flying; there are going to be at least a few more rock farms to fly through, magnetic winds, maybe even a solar storm. And there are any number of places where we could get jumped by raiders; it’s no free ride. You’ve got to be good, girl. Are you good?”
The engines hummed from beneath. Kimiko guided the salvage boat towards its new heading, and slowly eased the throttle forward.
“There’s no-one better.” She said.
END OF CHAPTER TWO
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