Page 19 of Escape from Nova Nine
Soon they were surrounded by a flurry of griffins. One landed in front of Zade’s knees. He looked down. She didn’t need to see his face to feel his joy and wonder.
She’d never met abekorensgaveminder who could affect animals, but only the CGC’s benighted Citizen Protection Service pretended they knew everything about minder talents. The Volksstam would welcome him with open arms. Or at least she would.
Daydreaming wasn’t helping. She should be taking advantage of her god-gifted opportunity instead. She set the scanner down, then sat cross-legged behind it. The readout on her oxy concentrator said the external air had too little oxygen to breathe, but it wouldn’t kill her. Focusing, she took several big gulps of air to charge her lungs. Then she took a normal breath and held it while she quickly opened her helmet and removed her gloves.
The flock of vocalizing rock griffins sounded like cyclonic winds. Bitter cold shocked her eyes as she quickly slid her little fingers under her braids. When she located the tiny lumps just above and behind both ears, she pressed the complex sequential pattern. Ice stung her nostrils and froze her eyelashes.
As she sealed her helmet again and gulped air, the Volksstam-style bio-controller in her head woke up. With no time to waste, she closed her eyes and queried all the bands the CGC had ever used for intergalactic communications.
And there it was. A vintage exploration comms relay. From the ping-back, it was a configuration her people had hacked long ago. The signal was strong enough that it had to originate somewhere in the asteroid. Taking the chance while she had it, she used memorized backdoor codes to query the relay for a diagnostic dump, committed every datapoint to memory, then immediately closed her connection. The scanner in front of her remained blissfully quiet, but others in the mine’s security center might notice the activity. She hoped the traffic would get lost in the sea of anomalies that had sparked their current investigation in the first place.
Her head swam with the masses of numbers swirling in her thoughts. It would take days to sort them. She’d have to disable her bio-controller later. As it was, her achingly cold, stiff hands made it a struggle to pull on and reattach her gloves.
A new voice came online.“Defayensdytr, check the scanner and tell me what you see.”It sounded like Halool, one of the facility techs.
Julke adjusted her light so she could see the display better. “Our comms, plus a two-second blip.”
“Why do I have to do everything myself?”said Halool.“The blip should be the camera. Power it down and up again.”
Zade, surrounded by griffins, rose to his feet and made shooing motions with his hands. The griffins seemed to think it was a game to dodge his hands and land on his arms or shoulders. There had to be at least fifteen of them. One landed on his helmet, making him look like an avian alien invader from an adventure serial.
Thinking fast, Julke spoke out loud. “Lunaso can’t get to the cable. I’ll have to unhook it from his shoulder. Do you want a panorama of the Abyss?”
“Yes.”Lhap Cho.
She pointed to all the griffins, then used sign language and waving motions to tell him to convince them to move back behind him.
He nodded and stepped back. With another wave of hisbekorensgave, the griffins followed as if basking in sunlight. Julke was hard pressed not to laugh as two of them played tug of war with his safety line and three rode his boot like they were children.
When the griffins were crowded against the wall, he stepped in front of them. They seemed content to stay where they were. He coaxed the helmet-riding griffin onto his arm, where it wrapped itself around his forearm like living jewelry.
She crossed to him quickly and unplugged the camera, put it on her shoulder, then plugged it back into the power source belted to his waist. She took a deep, calming breath, then turned and stepped closer to the edge of the plate so the camera had a clear view of the Abyss.
“How’s that?” The distant lights seemed to jitter. She tblinked her eyes several times hard.
“Good,”said Lhap Cho.“Sweep in horizontal rows, left to right.”
She did as ordered, watching to make sure she didn’t catch any griffins in flight. Behind her, Zade continued broadcasting his amazing talent. It madeherwant to get skin-to-skin close to him, and she wasn’t even a griffin.
When the sphere of blue lights came into frame, Lhap Cho ordered her to stop.“What’s that?”
“Zoom in,”said Halool. “Defayensdytr, can you get closer?”
“No.” To forestall any arguments, Julke rotated the camera and her light down toward her feet to show where the plate ended. She was sorry she did so, because as far as she could tell, the plate was hanging in midair.Just like a spacewalk, she told herself.
“It’s not our target. We’ll look at the vids later.”Bless Lhap Cho for his focus.“Defayensdytr, get the rest of the coverage. Come back to the airlock when you’re done.”
As she swung the camera back toward the Abyss, it suddenly hit Julke what the blue lights were. When she’d first arrived, one of the long-timer Volksstam prisoners had gifted her with a legacy packet of collected Volksstam memories to help her survive. She hadn’t needed to access it in a long time. The lights marked a back entrance to the warden’s personal ship hangar.
By itself, the fact was useless. They’d need a spaceworthy ship just to cross the Abyss. But with that memory came another, of a detailed navigator-style holo map that included the prisoner cells, the various staff offices, and the executive suite. Most importantly, it covered the front entrance to the warden’s private hangar. The gifted memory felt decades old, and some of the map was outdated. The pharma company now occupied what had once been the prisoner area. Several former excavation tunnels now housed the new prison cell blocks. No telling what changes had been made to the staff areas since.
However, the current warden struck her as the type to have multiple ways to save his red-robed rump. Such as a well-armored transit-capable starship, primed and ready to launch at a moment’s notice. They wouldn’t need Zade’s distraction if they could get to it, and no one would shoot it down if they thought Kanogan was piloting. Then they could go for help to rescue all the prisoners.
Too many unknowns to track down by herself. Didn’t want to do it alone, either. When she’d been younger, she might have believed she was the only person who could save them all. Real life had knocked some sense into her.
And if Nova Nine had taught her nothing else, it was like Zade said: Working together was their best shot. Hisbekorensgavetalent gave him an edge in ferreting out vital information. But she’d have to make sure the man understood what he was risking.
To pull off an escape, many things had to go miraculously right. Even so, this moment in the shattering Abyss felt like the closest to freedom she’d been in five hundred days.
