___
T HE FEMALE AGENT, Pradhan, kept pacing and checking her phone.
"Got somewhere to be?" Gary asked dryly from the couch. Neither of the two agents answered. He hadn't expected them to.
They hadn't tried to tie him up or even arrest him. A guy could almost get annoyed at the way they'd instantly dismissed him as a threat, except he knew they were right. An old guy who walked with canes wasn't much to concern a couple of healthy young people. And they both had guns; he'd seen the bulge under the guy's jacket and had glimpsed Pradhan's when she'd frisked him and taken away his cell phone and stripped out the battery without a by-your-leave.
They had also unplugged the land line, even turned off the porch light to keep trick-or-treaters away. No way to get a message to Sarah and Rei. No way to tell them they'd be waltzing right into a trap.
He just hoped those two kids had a good time tonight, good enough to stay out all night. Get a hotel room in Eau Claire, don't even bother coming back 'til morning.
Not that it'd be any safer in the morning, but maybe he would have thought of some way to warn them by then.
Pradhan's phone buzzed with an incoming text. She glanced at it before tucking it into her pocket. "Incoming," she told her partner, who Gary had heard her address as Rhodes.
"Hooray," Rhodes said, leaning forward in Gary's favorite armchair to unwrap another piece of chocolate from the candy bowl on the coffee table.
Pradhan went to the window and looked out.
"You call for backup?" Gary said. "Can't handle one crippled old man by yourselves?"
He fell silent, looking up. There was a sound ... no, not a sound, more of a vibration. Similar to the deep vibrato of helicopter rotors as they flew over the house—the entire town of Sidonie had been getting used to that over the last week—but deeper, almost entirely beyond sound. It was more of a pressure, like the heaviness of air before a thunderstorm.
Pradhan let the front drape fall and walked swiftly toward the kitchen.
"Hey." Gary struggled to his feet.
Rhodes dropped the candy wrapper and tensed to get up. "You sit right back down, buddy."
Pradhan turned back from the kitchen doorway. "No, it's okay. Let him look. I'll keep an eye on him." She smiled at Gary. Pretty gal. Too bad she was a member of Club Fed, not to mention half his age with the gleam of a wedding band on her finger. "You're going to want to see this, Mr. Metzger."
"Better you than me," Rhodes said after them. "The less I see of those freaks, the better."
Gary reached for a walking stick. "Leave those," Pradhan said.
"I can't walk without 'em."
"They're also a weapon."
"C'mon, lady, what do you think I'm gonna do, use my karate moves to overpower you? I'm a sixty-four-year-old guy with a back injury."
The sense of heaviness and pressure was greater now, making his head ache. Pradhan looked like she was feeling it too. "Okay, yeah, whatever," she said, but watched him carefully as he limped to her with the stick in his hand.
When she turned around to go into the kitchen, Gary gave a passing thought to whacking her over the head with it. Trouble was, she probably knew all the karate moves he didn't. And there was still her partner back there with a gun.
So he didn't, and they went into the kitchen together. Pradhan opened the back door. "Stay here," she told Gary.
"Where you think I'm gonna run to?" he asked, with a pointed look at the cane in his hand.
Outside, night had fallen, dark as the inside of a black cat. It wasn't raining, but the air had the clammy thickness that meant it wanted to. Good night for Halloween, if not a good night for the county's trick-or-treaters, but all of that flew out of Gary's head at the sight of something in the pasture that wasn't supposed to be there.
Lights.
They weren't bright. A string of dim red and amber running lights traced out the lower edge of something big and dark that was just settling down in the pasture. Warm air rushed past Gary's face out of the cool night, blowing his hair back.
"What the heck is that thing?" He squinted as if he could make his eyes pierce the darkness through sheer willpower alone. The yard lights penetrated only dimly back here, but as his eyes adjusted, he could make out the rough outline of the dark shape against the grass just as the red and gold running lights winked out. Its surface was faintly reflective, and it was too big to be a helicopter. Anyway, it hadn't made any noise, none at all except the heaviness which was gone now. And he didn't think it was his imagination that it had been in the air when he'd first seen it. It had flown here, not driven.
"What do you think it is, Mr. Metzger?" Agent Pradhan's voice was soft, and she was leaning forward intently. One of her hands, Gary noticed, had crept under her jacket to touch her gun.
Sudden bright light appeared in a door-sized block against the dark backdrop of the ...
Okay, fine, let's just call it what it is: it's a spaceship, a goddamn pardon-my-French spaceship sitting in my cow pasture, and those people walking out of it right now are probably more of Rei's blue guys.
They'd found Rei.
There were four of them, each one built like a brick outhouse. The door in the side of the ship closed behind them, and as they strode toward the ranch house, Gary kept revising his mental estimate of how big they were. Taller than NBA basketball players, wider than linebackers. The fact that two of them were female didn't seem to make an ounce of difference; the women were brick walls just as much as the guys. By the time they reached the back porch, Gary was trying to come to terms with the fact that all three of them were close to eight feet tall and probably three-fifty, four hundred pounds of pure muscle.
And they weren't Rei's type of alien. These guys were big cats. He'd seen alien cat people like that on the cover of one of Sarah's science fiction novels once. The fellow in the lead was a lion-type guy; he even had a sort of mane. The others were a tawny-colored woman, a woman with tiger stripes, and a leopard-spotted guy.
Pradhan stepped forward, interposing her own body between Gary and the aliens as they reached the back porch.
"Sergeant Kyaroi," she said, pronouncing the word carefully. "This is Mr. Gary Metzger, and this residence belongs to him and his family. The Metzgers, their livestock, and their property are not to be harmed in the search for your deserter, are we clear?"
The lion-man, Kyaroi, answered with a flood of liquid syllables. Gary couldn't understand a word, and he also couldn't tell if it was Rei's language with a different accent, or a different alien language entirely.
Pradhan seemed to understand perfectly, which meant she either had one of those same things Rei had put in Sarah's head, or she'd known the cat-people long enough to learn their language. Whatever he'd said made her scowl.
Damn it, Gary thought. And here I never used to listen to Sal Prouty down at the feed store when he'd go on about how the government was covering up alien moon landings. Looks like I owe ol' Sal an apology.
"It was my understanding that your organization and mine would be working jointly on this," Pradhan said.
Kyaroi jerked his head at the lion-woman. She nodded and went past Pradhan, shouldering her unceremoniously out of the way. Gary moved hastily aside; the woman didn't even look at him and gave him the impression she would have gone through him if he hadn't moved. She was tall enough that she had to duck to avoid bumping her head in the kitchen doorway.
"As a representative of Earth—" Pradhan began. Her hand had drifted near the butt of her gun. Kyaroi reached out, almost casually, and gripped her wrist.
Inside the house, there was a sudden yell—Gary jumped— followed by a thump, and silence.
"Get your hands off me," Pradhan said softly. She didn't look nearly as freaked out as Gary expected any reasonable person to be with eight feet of alien cat monster looming over them.
Kyaroi said a few words, his voice low and calm, but Pradhan's face twisted in fury. She lashed a foot out at Kyaroi's ankle; he blocked it. Gary moved hastily as far from them as he could get in the confines of the porch, mentally calculating his distance from the one gun on the property, a shotgun he used for duck hunting, which was stored in the basement. No chance, he thought.
Pradhan lost her brief scuffle with the alien leader, leaving her with a bruise on her cheek and her gun and phone in Kyaroi's hands. At a word from him, the tiger-woman moved forward and shoved both of them unceremoniously back into the house. Once again Gary found himself being escorted through his own kitchen, this time in the opposite direction.
In the living room, Pradhan's partner was slumped in the armchair while the lion-woman prowled the room, looking at everything. Pradhan cried out in dismay and hurried to him, kneeling to feel his pulse. Gary simply sat down on the couch. Still wasn't much he could do. He didn't think Rhodes was dead; he could see the agent's chest rising and falling from here.
Pradhan had a brief, angry exchange with the two alien women that ended with her being frog-marched to the couch and made to sit beside Gary.
Despite his fear for Rei and Sarah, who would be walking straight into an even more dire trap than he'd feared, Gary couldn't resist twisting the knife. "Still think it's a good idea making deals with aliens?"
Pradhan gave him a flat look. "Shut up."
***
Driving on the familiar highway helped calm Sarah's nerves somewhat, but it also freed her mind to keep replaying the fight in vivid detail. She gripped the wheel tightly, turned the radio to a talk station to see if anyone was going to mention the appearance of aliens in downtown Eau Claire, and most importantly, tried to keep Rei from seeing how shaky she still was.
It's so stupid. What's wrong with me? I shouldn't be reacting like this. I've helped butcher chickens since I was a kid, I sat with my mom when she was dying ...
But there was something different about having someone come after her with intent to kill. She kept seeing the green light shattering on the air in front of them, the flash of the alien tiger's fangs as it sprang after Rei.
"Are there tools in this vehicle?"
Rei's quiet voice jerked her out of her thoughts. "There's a toolbox behind the seat," she said.
Rei knelt on the seat and rummaged behind it. After that, he was quiet again. Sarah glanced over a few miles down the road. With a small flashlight clamped between his knees, he was working with a small screwdriver on one of his bracelets.
... no, he was still wearing both his bracelets. This one was gold.
"Where did you get that?"
"From the Galatean soldier I killed."
Apparently she'd missed some of the fight while she was starting the truck. "I didn't see that. How many of them were there?"
"Two," Rei said absently. His tongue poked briefly out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on prying something out of the bracelet; despite the circumstances, she couldn't help finding it cute. "The one I shot was the transformed one."
"The—wait, do you mean the tiger was a Galatean?"
"You know that I can shift. The Galateans have jaegan among them as well."
Stupid genetics-meddling super-powerful ancient aliens. "I thought it was some kind of bloodhound. Uh, a tracking beast, I mean."
"It was also that." Rei clicked the gold bracelet around his wrist above the usual silver cuff, then started tinkering with the a second gold one.
"What are you doing?"
"Among other things, I'm trying to ensure that I don't give away my position as soon as I activate these. They should be subsidiary to my usual cuffs, but this will give me much more power than I would normally have."
One Galatean with a pair of these could kill hundreds of your people and lay waste to a city block ...
"How many Galateans do you think are here?" Sarah asked, her mouth dry.
"Small military ships usually have a crew of six or eight. It depends on how many ships are here. I don't think they would send a heavy cruiser just to recover an escaped slave."
"How many on a heavy cruiser?"
"Around three to five thousand if it has a full complement of troops."
"Okay, yeah, wow, let's hope they don't have one of those."
She slowed at the outskirts of Sidonie. Nothing looked different than usual, but what did she expect: the town under martial law, swarming with cat aliens?
A white blur appeared suddenly in her headlights, and Sarah slammed on the brakes, then sat shivering in reaction as a party of costumed children, accompanied by a cheerful retriever and an older child as chaperone, ran across the road. A sheet ghost was what had flashed in her headlights.
"Will there be a great many children out of their homes tonight?" Rei asked as they started moving again. There was a small click as the second gold cuff closed around his wrist.
"Not for much longer. It's starting to get late enough that little kids are going to be in bed, even on Halloween night."
They were nearing the farm. She'd tried to call her dad a couple more times on the way and each time it went to voice mail. And yet, there were no roadblocks, no signs of anything amiss as she left the town behind for the deeper darkness of farm country. Only a paranoid worry buzzing in the back of her head that this wasn't like him, he wouldn't be out of touch this long.
Maybe it's nothing to do with the Galateans at all. Maybe he left his phone in the house while he was out working in the barn. Maybe he fell and couldn't get up, and he's been lying in the pasture all this time, while I was out on a date ...
The driveway was coming up on her left. She began to brake, and then just as smoothly accelerated again, sweeping on past with her heart beating like a triphammer.
"The porch light's not on," she told Rei. "And there's a car out front I don't recognize."
Rei twisted around to look out the back window. "Your people, not mine?"
"Unless your people use cars now. It could just be trick-or-treaters, but the light's not on, and Dad always leaves the light on. He never forgets, he didn't even forget the year Mom died. Damn it!"
There was another turn coming up on the left. She slowed and took it. The truck swayed on deep ruts.
"Where are we going?" Rei asked.
"We're on an old road that goes up the back side of the Haverford farm, the neighbors next to our place. I used to be friends with their daughter when we were kids." She paused to concentrate on not getting the truck mired in a boggy place. The road was in much worse shape than it had been the last time she came this way, and it had been a wet fall. "We can drive through their back hayfield and park behind the old mill. Actually we might be able to drive all the way through our pasture to the house, if we can find a place to get the truck through the fence and it's not too overgrown back there, but I don't want to try. We don't know what we'd be driving into."
"Approach on foot and leave an escape vehicle at our back." Rei sounded approving. "You're a good tactical thinker for one who has never been in battle, Sarah."
Sarah hoped she wasn't blushing, but she knew she probably was. "Is it possible you could ... uh ..." She reached out to point at his bracelets. "Since you have an extra set now, could you give one of those to me and teach me how to use it?"
Rei shook his head. "I'm sorry. It won't work for you. You would need nanites and implants."
"Damn," she muttered. Briefly, she wished they kept a gun in the truck, as some of their neighbors did, but her dad had never been that type.
Anyway, from what Rei said and what she'd seen in Eau Claire, a gun might not be much help anyway.
She stopped to let them through the Haverfords' pasture gate. They jolted through tall grass, the truck rocking as it hit unseen ruts in the darkness. The Haverfords hadn't cut this field in years, from the look of it, and Sarah parked when it finally got too rough to drive, in the edge of a stand of brush and small trees along the property line with the Metzger farm.
"The mill is right on the other side of that fence," she told Rei quietly as she stepped down from the truck. She reached behind the seat and felt around until she found a tire iron.
"That's not going to be much use against energy weapons."
"Maybe not, but it makes me feel better."
Once she closed the door and the truck's dome light went off, it was utterly dark. Light from the town reflected off the low clouds and cast a dim, orangey light that her eyes slowly adapted to. Down at the bottom of the gently sloping pasture, the Haverfords' cluster of house and yard lights had a warm, homey look. Sarah wished she was heading that way instead of into the dark woods to face aliens or the Army or God only knew what.
With a small sigh, she squared her shoulders and followed Rei into the dark woods.
She regretted instantly that she was wearing a dress instead of jeans. Her legs were freezing, and the skirt kept snagging on brambles. It wasn't actually raining, but everything was damp, and even the dim town-glow was lost among the trees. She had to grope her way by feel, while roots tangled her impractical shoes and branches snatched at her hair.
She stumbled into the wooden fence rail and climbed over it, thinking of the long-ago days when she used to do that to go play with Susie Haverford. At the time, however, she hadn't been doing it in a skirt while cold and wet and carrying a tire iron.
"You're still here, right?" she whispered.
"I am still here, Sarah," Rei's quiet voice came out of the dark. He was perfectly silent. If he hadn't spoken, she would never have been able to find him.
The darkness was weirdly disorienting. She knew the farm as well as she knew her own face in the mirror, but without landmarks to guide her, she had to struggle to orient herself. She could hear the millstream, and she knew the mill was around here somewhere, but it seemed to appear out of nowhere, a dark shape framed against the faint amber glow in the sky. They'd come upon it from downstream rather than approaching directly from the back as she'd thought.
Rei touched her arm to stop her. He leaned close enough that she could feel the warmth of his body and see the faint shine of his eyes in the dark. "You must stay very close to me now," he murmured. "If my people are here, they will be able to detect us approaching by our body heat and other traces. I can shield us from that sort of detection, but only if you are very near."
Sarah felt in the dark until she found his hand and wrapped hers around it. His fingers felt very warm to her cold ones. "I will be."
***
Rei adapted his pace to Sarah's, exerting a small effort of will to keep her shielded along with himself. The sensor shielding was low-power enough that he could keep it up for hours, and it was passive, making it unlikely the Galateans would be able to detect his nearby use of the cuffs. He still didn't dare use the cuffs' scanning or communication functions, but he was fairly sure everything else was safe enough, including the weapons. The Galateans weren't used to having their own tech used against them.
However, there might also be sentries out here that he couldn't detect. Good to keep that in mind.
They crossed the stream with Sarah's small, cold fingers quiescent in his. Rei's eyes had fully adapted to the dark by now, and he could see clearly, if a bit fuzzily. Sarah seemed to be almost completely night-blind, so he guided her with small tugs of his hand as they retraced the path they'd taken a few days ago when she had first shown him the old mill.
Pleasant memories ... to be recalled at a later, less desperate time.
If there was a later.
They came out of the trees behind the Metzger farm. Sarah let out a tiny gasp just as Rei jerked on her hand to pull her down beside him. Maybe she could see in the dark more than he'd thought.
There was a Galatean ship parked in the long expanse of Metzger pasture between them and the house.
It was dark, all lights off, but he could see it well enough to tell that it was a mid-size chaser, an elongated teardrop shape with a pointed prow and smoothly rounded sides flaring out into stubby winglike extensions just ahead of the engines. Eight crew, probably, on a ship that size. He couldn't tell from this angle if either of the two skimmers were docked to the back of the wings in their usual location. Most likely, the team in Eau Claire had taken one of those, unless there was a second chaser in the area.
"Is that a spaceship?" Sarah whispered.
"Yes," Rei whispered back.
"Galateans?"
"Yes. Let me think, please."
The lights in the house were on. Some of the crew must be down there, probably with Sarah's father. Unless Gary was—but no; Rei refused to consider it. They weren't here to conquer, so they wouldn't want trouble. They were just here to recapture an escaped slave.
Unless they were also here to conquer. It was possible he'd led the Galateans straight to an undeveloped world they would happily add to their empire. But that wasn't a problem he could afford to deal with right now. Anyway, they clearly weren't out for conquest at the moment, not with one small ship.
With two soldiers in Eau Claire, that left six here, possibly seven if the survivor of the Eau Claire team had managed to return—
"Rei!" Sarah whispered, squeezing his hand.
She was looking back the way they'd come. Rei took in what was coming at a single glance and threw an arm over her, pressing them both to the damp ground and trying to stay as still as possible.
A skimmer swept over them, no more than fifteen feet off the ground. If the crew had looked down at just the right moment, they could easily have made a visual identification of the two intruders. Rei waited, heart in mouth, as the skimmer descended and vanished behind the chaser's wings, settling into place.
Sarah stirred after a moment, pressing closer to whisper to Rei, "Coming back from Eau Claire?"
"Probably." The chances were now quite good that they only had the one chaser to deal with. But he was still outnumbered seven to one.
... or seven to two, counting Sarah. Though he didn't know how much help she could be. Sarah was brave and intelligent, but she had no weapons or skills that would be useful. Her people were like his people had been when the Galateans came, clever but vastly outclassed by superior technology. Like the people of his village, Sarah didn't seem to understand the magnitude of the threat she was up against. Hopefully, unlike them, she would figure it out before it was too late.
The ship, he decided, would need to be their first target. It had powerful weapons, powerful sensors, and most likely the majority of the Galateans were on board. If they could take the ship, they might actually win this.
"Sarah," he whispered. "I need you to stay here—"
"Like hell," she whispered back fiercely.
He wanted her safe, but it wasn't worth fighting about. "All right, then stay behind me. In a fight, my shields will also protect you, and you won't be in the way of my weapons."
Sarah nodded and tightened her grip on the useless, primitive piece of iron she'd decided to bring with her.
They both rose to a crouch, and then Rei immediately pushed them down to the ground again when something moved off to his left. At first it seemed no more than a darker shadow detaching itself from the woods. Then he made out the shape of a Galatean striding across the pasture toward the ship with a predator's easy grace.
There had indeed been a sentry, and Rei hadn't even seen him. His blood ran cold; they could so easily have stumbled onto him in the woods. By sheer chance he'd been stationed on the other side of the ship, across the pasture from the mill. The Galateans, unfamiliar with the area, didn't know there was anything else back here.
"Rei?" Sarah whispered. Night-blind, she probably hadn't seen the sentry at all yet.
"Shhh." Rei squeezed her hand and waited. The sentry vanished under the wing of the ship. There was a brief flare of light on the pasture grass—he felt Sarah flinch in surprise—that faded immediately as the door closed.
Rei waited a few moments longer to make sure it wasn't a shift change, but no one else came out, unless they were hidden on the house side. Since the Eau Claire party had come back, the sentry had probably returned for some kind of briefing.
Which meant there were now at least two more enemies in the ship than there had been a few minutes ago. Damn it.
It wasn't like waiting was going to make things better, though.
"Stay behind me, remember," he whispered to Sarah, and she nodded.
They moved swiftly through the grass toward the ship, Sarah a step behind with one of her hands resting lightly against his elbow. Rei felt hideously exposed under the too-large sky—anyone looking out at the right moment could see them—but they reached the ship without incident.
It sat flush against the ground in a wide circle of torn-up grass, marking the concussion radius of the anti-gravity repulsor shockwave from its landing. From a distance, the surface of the ship had looked opalescent and smooth, but up close the individual seams of the hull plates could be seen, as well as the inevitable damage that every ship accumulated from interstellar debris and from atmospheric landings like this one: small scratches and pits, burn marks, and charring along the lower edge of the ship's bottom skirt.
Sarah started to reach out to touch it. Rei caught her hand and lowered it back to her side.
She looked at him, wide-eyed. He touched his finger to his lips.
Whether or not the ship had a warning system that could detect intruders touching it from the outside, they'd find out in a minute, but he didn't want to risk tipping his hand before he was ready.
Instead he moved slowly along the curving line of the ship's hull, trying to reconstruct its internal structure from memory. He hadn't been inside chaser-type ships all that often; most of his life had been spent on the big cruisers or in battlepods. But he'd studied the layouts of all the common types of Galatean ships. They were generally built along very similar plans, for ease of manufacture at the big shipyards and to make it easier for personnel to switch between assignments. The Galateans were very focused on efficiency and modular interchangeability in their technology. The cargo areas should be just in front of the skimmer docking pods, on the lower deck of the ship—
The skimmers. Hmmm.
Both of them were docked in place, one under each wing. He'd originally planned on cutting through the chaser's hull, but that would take awhile and run down the charge on his cuffs. The skimmers, intended for traveling short distances in atmosphere, weren't even armored, and they were much less likely to have some kind of alarm system to detect tampering.
He drew Sarah's attention by touching her arm and tapped his finger to his lips again to make sure she stayed quiet. She nodded and went back to staring up, wide-eyed, at the chaser's wings and engines. That's right, she'd never seen an actual ship before. She had been fascinated enough by the battlepod. He wished he could watch the play of fascination and wonder on her expressive features, rather than having to look out for hostile Galatean soldiers.
He powered up one of his newly augmented cuffs and poured the energy down his fingertips, concentrating it through the implants under his fingernails into a fine laser beam. It cut into the skimmer's hull with a sharp sizzle and a piercing smell of hot metal. Sarah transferred her amazed fascination from the engines to Rei using his hand as a cutting torch, as Rei cut a porthole in the skimmer's side just back of where he guessed the pilot's seat to be.
"Hold this for me," Rei whispered. Sarah planted her hands against the section he was cutting out, and helped him catch and lower it to the ground as it came free. She leaned forward to look into the small ship's dark interior.
Rei pointed to the red-hot, bubbling metal along the edge, and mimed caution. Sarah nodded, but that didn't stop her from staring into the skimmer's small cockpit with interest normally reserved for things that were, well, interesting.
But then, he'd been equally curious about her vehicle. Unfamiliarity bred fascination.
Rei stripped out of his thick sweater and used it to cover the sharp, hot metal edges so Sarah, with her bare legs, could crawl inside without hurting herself. He followed her and pulled the sweater in after them.
The lights came up automatically as they crawled inside. The skimmer was the same as the ones he'd learned to fly during his pilot training, a two-seater with a small cargo area and an airlock connected to the ship at the back.
He could just fire it up, he thought. No need for a fight. They could flee instead ...
—abandoning Gary, abandoning the farm, and leaving an enemy with a much bigger, faster, better-armed ship free to hunt them. No. Flying away would only delay the inevitable confrontation and give the Galateans time to summon reinforcements. Best to take them now, with the element of surprise.
Rei tapped the skimmer's airlock control experimentally, expecting it to be locked, but it cycled neatly onto the ship's cargo hold. He flung up his shields to cover himself and Sarah. No attack came. The hold was empty except for the expected crates and barrels of supplies, lashed neatly into place. There was also a tidy row of Galatean-height capsules arrayed vertically along the outer wall. Good thing he hadn't tried to cut through the hull there; it would have taken forever.
"What are those?" Sarah whispered as they crept silently from the skimmer into the cargo bay.
"Stasis pods." Used to contain prisoners or injured crew members, they could also be used as emergency escape pods and ejected to be picked up later. Small ships like this one typically carried enough to accommodate all of the citizen crew members. There were eight pods here, which confirmed his guess about the number of crew, now minus the one he'd killed in Eau Claire.
Sarah moved closer to the pods. At first he thought she was just curious—he was busy checking the charge on his cuffs—until she gave a soft gasp. "Rei, there's someone in one of those pods."
Rei moved instinctively, blocking her progress with an arm, even though there was no way someone in a functioning stasis pod could get out and attack them. She was right; the first in the row of pods had a panel of lights and a dim figure behind the transparent lid. Galatean, judging from the height—well, Galatean or dragon, but he doubted the pods would work on one of Lyr's people.
"Why is he in there?" Sarah asked, staring curiously at the man in the pod.
"Could be a prisoner or a wounded member of the crew." Rei moved close enough to determine that the sleeper wasn't wearing a Galatean army uniform; instead he wore a long leather coat, beat up and scarred with what looked like old knife slashes. "Not crew. Must be a criminal they picked up. They could've been pulled off another job to come hunt me." He turned away; the prisoner was no threat to them, and therefore need not be given further consideration. "I don't suppose I can convince you to stay here."
"I want to help," Sarah said, tightening her grip on the iron bar.
Perhaps she could be useful, as a distraction if nothing else. "Very well, but stay behind me." He slipped off his shoes, breathing a sigh of relief at the feeling of the deck under his bare toes, and set out quietly down the cargo hold.
The hold ran the entire length of the ship's lower deck, with the hulking mass of the shielded engine core in the middle. As in the skimmer, the hold's lights came up automatically as they crept through it. Above them would be crew quarters and the small amount of recreational space that a ship like this could accommodate, with the bridge up front.
There was a big lift in the back for raising heavy cargo, and two man-sized access ports, one on each side of the hold. Both trap doors were closed, with ladders leading up to them. It was just a matter of picking the one less likely to lead to a bunch of Galateans—
"Rei!" Sarah whispered, but he'd already heard it: the clatter of metal as one of the ports opened.
With the lights on in the cargo hold, they didn't have much chance of concealing their presence. Rei powered up his cuffs as he dashed forward and stunned the tiger-striped Galatean soldier who was just setting her boots on the ladder. The woman folded up like a rag doll and plunged down the ladder. Rei caught her, knocking them both to the deck with a bruising impact.
Sarah scrambled up the ladder and struggled with the mechanism for a moment before figuring out how to pull the trap door shut. The whole thing took seconds.
Rei touched his finger to his lips. Sarah nodded. They both remained quiet for a moment, listening, but apparently it hadn't made enough noise to draw attention. The whole ship had pretty good soundproofing—useful when you were trapped in a confined space with a bunch of other people, but not so great when intruders were sneaking around on your ship. Rei made a mental note of that.
"Did you kill her?" Sarah asked softly.
Rei shook his head. "Just stunned. Quick, help me get her into one of the pods."
"Even the women are huge," Sarah murmured as Rei heaved the female Galatean over his shoulder. His strength enhancements were up to the task, but only just. "Are they all like this?"
"Most of them. Haiva was very short for a Galatean, but still taller than me." He grunted, dropping the woman on the deck next to an empty pod. "There are rumors the Galateans tinkered with their own genetics to make themselves into bigger, stronger warriors. I don't know if it's true."
Sarah took the woman's feet and helped Rei maneuver her into the pod next to the one with the prisoner. "You know, it's not that I want you to run around killing people, but ... is this really a good idea? All their friends have to do is let them out."
"I'll kill if I must, but I'd rather not. They're just soldiers doing their job. As far as they know, they're apprehending an escaped criminal."
"Escaped slave," Sarah said, her voice flat.
"They're still only following orders. Like I would be in their position. It's not their fault."
Before closing the pod, Rei stripped off the woman's cuffs and the power pack belted to her waist. He looked for a way to time-lock the pod so it couldn't be opened at all, but was unable to find anything, so he turned it to its maximum setting. Between stun and stasis, she would be severely groggy if anyone let her out, so that would have to do.
"What's that?" Sarah asked as he buckled the belt around his waist.
"Backup power for the cuffs. No need to wait until they recharge off my metabolism and—" He flashed her a quick grin. "—it makes a bigger bang."
"Big bangs are definitely what we need right now. Eight pods, so that means six more Galateans, right?"
She'd even thought to account for the dead one in Eau Claire; Rei smiled. "Yes. Most of them will be in the ship above us. Perhaps some are in the house with your father." And there it was: the perfect way to get her out of the line of fire. "We need to know where he is and how many are in the house. You can go down and scout while I take out the ones in the ship."
Sarah gave him a suspicious look as if she knew full well what he was up to. "You said they can scan for life signs. Won't they see me coming?"
"You're a native and a noncombatant, and if it's just you by yourself, they may well mistake you for one of your domestic animals. Anyway, if they find you, they'll only capture you. Galateans have a strict code of conduct for prisoners—at least prisoners who aren't trying to attack them." He pointed at the iron bar. "Leave that here."
Sarah clutched it tighter. "I don't think so."
The Galateans might not even consider it a weapon. He probably wouldn't have, a week ago. "Fine, if it makes you feel better—oof!"
She kissed him first, fierce and passionate, and then hugged him until his ribs ached, the iron bar pressing into his spine. "The only reason I'm letting you talk me into this," she said into his chest, "is because I know you'll be able to fight better without having to protect me. So this way I can help Dad, and help you—just, you'd better not do anything stupid if I'm not here to stop you, okay? No pushing self-destruct buttons or throwing yourself in front of energy blasts. You're going to beat those bastards."
He held her tightly against him, felt the living warmth of her, the beating of her heart against his chest. "I'm not in the habit of doing stupid things," he murmured into her hair, and very deliberately did not think about the way he'd jumped his ship to unknown coordinates a week ago, the way some small part of him had almost hoped he'd jump into a supernova or collide with a planet ...
Now he could hardly relate to that desperate, hopeless person. He wanted to live. He wanted to win.
Sarah gave a choked little laugh. "You'd better not."
"Take your own advice too. Don't do anything stupid." There was nothing he wanted less than to pry himself out of her arms, but he separated regretfully and stepped back. "I must hurry before they discover their missing comrade. Go, Sarah, quickly."
Sarah started to open her mouth, then closed it and gave him a small, fierce nod, her lips clamped into a bloodless line. With both hands wrapped around the iron bar, she vanished into the skimmer.
Rei turned the other way to find the rest of the crew.