Chapter 52: Betrayal

Ren’s hand clamped around Leo’s knuckles like a hydraulic visem, his fingers grinding into the bone with sudden terrifying violence.

Leo’s eyes went wide.

"What—"

Ren twisted.

His left hand whipped behind his own back and slammed down on the emergency manual decouple stud on the outer rim of the airlock frame!

CLACK... BANG!

A concussive blast of gas tore through the collar...

The magnetic latches let go with a tearing shriek and the thick rubberized sleeve ripped away from the Wanderer-7’s outer ring by more than a meter, opening a jagged screaming crescent of hard vacuum right between the two moving ships.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

The air in the junction exploded outward into the dark, dragging loose papers, plastic clips and frost into the void in a blinding white vortex as Leo’s boots lost the floor... He slid across the plates toward the gap!

"REN!"

His free hand clawed for the doorframe...

Ren didn’t let go.

He used the pull of the decompression, planted his left boot against the inner threshold and drove his right heel straight into the middle of Leo’s chest with brutal sickening force.

CRUNCH!

It hit him dead center over the ribs.

The breath exploded out of his lungs in a spray of red spit... and at the exact top of the kick, Ren opened his hand as Leo flew backward.

He went out... Through the torn gap in the sleeve, into the freezing airless black...

THWIP!

And then there was no sound at all.

He hit the vacuum tumbling with his arms flailing and his jacket whipping around him, and through the tear in the sleeve, for one frozen millisecond, he looked back.

The bright corridor of his ship... The faces of the women standing five meters away looking frozen and white and Chloe’s mouth opening.

...Then physics took over.

Both ships were burning at a steady five kilometers per second.

The moment he was kicked out of their envelope, they left him behind like a pebble tossed off a speeding train as he tumbled.

Ahead of him, the turquoise plumes of the Wanderer-7 and the pale green flare of the Black Kite burned bright against the dark, and every second put another half kilometer between him and them.

The sleek gunmetal hull of his ship... the ship that moved when he thought, the ship whose corridors he’d walked carrying warm bread... shrank into a tiny grey needle.

...It became a speck then nothing but a fading blue spark lost among the cold unblinking stars.

The cold hit him like a wall.

It bit into his eyes and his lips and the wet of his tongue all at once, and the spit on his teeth started to boil and freeze in the same instant. His lungs heaved for air that wasn’t there and his chest screamed where Ren’s heel had caved it in.

’Chloe... Harper...’

His vision was going grey at the edges and right there in the corner of it, at the very edge of the closing dark, a small golden tab was still pulsing.

[Wheel of Fate: 1 Spin Ready.]

...

Aoi’s mind didn’t process it.

...It refused to.

Her eyes stayed locked on the open threshold of the airlock, on the empty plates where Leo’s boots had been half a second ago as the floor seemed to tilt and spin under her.

"Leo...?"

It slipped out of her small and thin with no air in it.

’No.’

A wall of blinding white noise slammed down over her mind.

’No, no, no... he was just there. He was just taking his hand. He was just shaking his HAND...’

WHAM... CLANK!

The airlock shook.

The torn sleeve slammed back against the ring as the raider’s thrusters forced the collar to re-engage, sealing the tear and cutting the shrieking vortex off into a heavy pressurized hiss.

HISSSSS!

Ren didn’t look out into the void as his face had changed.

The warm brotherly smile was gone and the tired protective lines around his eyes were gone as well.

"Hehehe..."

What was left was cold and razor-sharp... the empty face of a slaughterhouse worker who’d just dropped the bolt into an animal’s skull.

Before the ship could even react, before it could lock the hatches or spin up the turret, his right hand moved.

He pulled something out of his breast pocket.

A small heavy rectangle of matte-black composite with eight tiny gold pins on one end, flickering with a faint sick internal glow which was exactly the size of the port Dekker had been measuring.

He slammed it into the exposed maintenance port in the airlock wall.

CRACK... SHCK!

The pins drilled straight through the delicate glass cabling.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!

A pulse of unnatural crimson light detonated out of it. It didn’t just plug in.

It spread... crawling out along the exposed conduits like an infection and racing up the spine toward the bridge.

The ceiling speaker crackled with frantic screeching static.

[Master Captain bio-signature sever—]

The AI’s voice felt... afraid?

[Hostile external override in primary bus! Executing emergency self-destr—]

PZZT... POP!

It stopped mid-word.

A sharp little crack came out of the grille, and a thin wisp of black smoke curled out of the speaker as the ship’s brain was dead.

WEE-WOO! WEE-WOO! WEE-WOO!

An ugly discordant klaxon tore through the corridor, nothing like the ship’s normal chimes.

The blue runners along the floor died... strobing crimson took their place, throwing grotesque blood-soaked shadows across every wall.

HISSSS!

The vents groaned and reversed as the main air pumps choked.

The air went thin and dry and bitterly cold, fast, as life support froze under the thing jammed into its throat.

The deck shuddered under Aoi’s boots and the gravity flickered and lost half its weight, and everyone’s stomach floated up into their throat.

"What... what’s HAPPENING?!"

Camila’s crate hit the floor with a wet crunch, scattering green stems and black dirt across the metal.

She clamped both hands over her ears with tears pouring down her face as she stared at the red strobes.

"Where’s Leo?! Ren, where did Leo GO?!"

Elena stood frozen with her pupils blown to the edges of her irises and her fingers digging into her collar.

’The ship...’ Her talent was screaming in agony through the soles of her boots. ’The link is severed... The main bus is paralyzed... The ship is dying... Why is the ship DYING?!’

"Ren!" Aoi stumbled one uncoordinated step forward with her voice climbing into a cracked hysterical shriek that rang off the metal. "Ren! What did you do?! What did you DO to Leo?!"

Ren didn’t look at her.

He reached down to his right thigh and flicked the retention strap off his holster with his thumb.

Click!

By the companionway, Chloe was already moving.

The second Leo went through that gap, the quiet shy eighteen-year-old girl just... shattered, like glass... as if she had never been there at all.

Her eyes became two blinding apocalyptic rings of pure murderous fury.

"GRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAH!"

It was akin to the sound of starving wolf that had just watched its meat thrown into the sea.

Her bare feet dented the deck... The plates buckled under her heels as she launched in a low blinding blur through the half gravity with her fingers hooked into talons, aimed straight at Ren’s throat to rip his windpipe out through the back of his neck.

Ren didn’t panic though, his right hand cleared the holster so fast it was barely a blur.

BANG!

The shot was deafening in the narrow corridor, a flash of yellow muzzle flame across the red walls...

And the bullet hit Chloe dead center in the forehead.

CRACK... SPLAT!

It didn’t go through since her skull was too dense but the force of it caved in the skin and blew a starburst of thick dark blood out into the thin air with dozens of perfect little red droplets floating away from her face in the low gravity like a spray of rubies.

Her head snapped back and her whole body was flung backward like she’d been hit by a truck.

THUD!

She slammed into the far bulkhead and slid down it into a limp heap on the floor with smoke curling up from the bleeding hole in her brow.

"CHLOE!"

Harper lunged forward, but her boots slipped on the half-gravity plates and nearly put her on her knees.

Ren lowered the smoking barrel five centimeters and thumbed the hammer back.

CLICK!

He looked down at Chloe twitching on the deck, and his dark eyes lit up with something cold and greedy and ravenous.

"A Supernatural, huh?" he murmured, and a slow smirk carved itself across his face. "Unregistered mutation. Christ... what a score."

Aoi stopped breathing.

The corridor went dead except for the red strobes and the faint wet gasping of Chloe trying to push herself up off the floor.

"What..." Her whole body was shaking so hard her teeth were clicking together. "What did you say...?"

Ren didn’t answer his sister as behind him, two heavy sets of boots came stomping out of the tube.

CLOMP! CLOMP!

Voss came through first and filled the entire corridor, his dead eyes sweeping over the crying women without a flicker of pity with a heavy pulse rifle slung low across his hips with its charge light glowing a steady lethal amber.

Dekker came right behind him, twitching worse than ever as his watery eyes skittered over the flashing consoles and an assault carbine clutched in both hands with that greasy sickening grin stretched wide across his sunken face.

...The blue-and-silver Sterling patches on their chests caught the red light.

They didn’t look like badges but rather trophies that were worn by wolves.

Elena saw the rifles, she saw Dekker’s grin and it hit her all at once like a hammer to the temple.

’There is no mothership.’ The corridor spun. ’There are no engineers... There is no drydock... Mother isn’t waiting for me... They never found Station Nine... They cut those patches off of...’

Off of who?

Her legs gave out.

She dropped to her knees beside her silver trunk and clawed at the deck with her perfect nails, choking on dry silent sobs.

Camila had curled into a ball on the floor with her arms over her head, crying so hard she couldn’t breathe.

Harper stood frozen two steps back with her hands hovering by her tool kit and her face white as death and her eyes locked on Voss’s barrel while Jin-Ah was pressed flat against the wall with her lips moving silently, counting something over and over.

On the floor, Chloe groaned.

Blood was still pooling under her head, but the skin over the wound was already knitting itself shut, the bone grinding back into place as her body burned through everything it had left.

She got one hand under herself then the other as her lips peeled back from her bloody fangs.

And she started to laugh.

"Hehe... hehehe..." Her red eyes rolled up to Ren’s boots. "You threw him away. You threw him AWAY."

She got a knee under her.

"He gave me mint water," she whispered, giggling, blood bubbling on her lips. "He held my hand and you threw him away like trash."

Her head tilted too far. "I’m going to eat your heart while you watch, Ren... I’m going to eat it slow."

Ren didn’t even look down, he just tilted his wrist.

BANG!

The bullet went straight through her right kneecap.

CRACK!

The snap of bone was horrible as her leg folded under her and a strangled breathless shriek tore out of her as fresh blood sprayed across the floor and she fell.

’Supernaturals are really a hassle...’

She was still laughing.

Screaming and laughing at the same time, her fingers clawing at the deck, dragging herself toward him one centimeter at a time with her shattered leg trailing behind her.

"NO! STOP IT!"

Aoi threw herself forward with both hands out... and Voss swung his rifle up and stopped her dead with the barrel ten centimeters from her forehead.

Ren smiled.

It was wide and sick and sadistic, and it was the realest thing she’d ever seen on his face... The brother who’d been living in the dark the whole time.

He looked like the wolf finally letting the sheep’s wool drop to the floor.

He held the smoking pistol loosely in his right hand with his left resting easy on his hip, and looked across the red-lit corridor at the five trembling weeping women in front of him.

"Hands behind your backs," He said flatly. "Right now... On your knees... All of you."

He took one slow step forward with his boot clicking on the deck, his eyes moving from Elena sobbing on her knees to Aoi frozen in front of the rifle.

"Do it," he whispered, his grin pulling tight across his teeth.

"Or I’ll kill all of you where you stand."