“Where’s your ship?” cut Nira’s whisper back at Kai.
He flicked at his hand-display and held up a glinting map of intertwining vectors. She looked back, her eyes searing through the shadow between them as she deciphered the mesh in a heartbeat.
“Right — follow me!”
She twisted her body round and slid immediately down the side of a ship, followed unquestioningly by Onnd in a faultlessly silent somersault. Shen quivered into yellow indecision, but Kai slipped away after them and grabbed Shen’s leg, pulling him down.
They dropped together to see Nira and Onnd disappearing over the edge of the concrete platform into blackness; Kai and Shen leapt as one into the falling flash of sanguine diamond, and Nira drew them unforgivingly through a precariously cautious descent, slipping from level to level, twisting between hulking hulls and scurrying through shadows until at last they dropped onto the dank grit of another platform, just a few ships along from Kai’s.
“Here, sir,” seeped a SYS-soldier’s voice into the dusk around the hunted four as he marched past dejectedly, his colleagues patrolling the area farther along, “Yes, I read you, sir....No, sir, we still haven’t relocked their signal, sir. They got out, somehow, and.... Yes. Yes, sir!”
He sighed heavily, and as he passed beyond a blade of stationed ships, Nira slunk out around the hull, pistol in hand, with Onnd, Kai and Shen snaking after her, weaving through umbral wakes until they came to Kai’s metallic sphere. Kai leapt up to its equator at once; Onnd carefully broke his fall as he tumbled unceremoniously back from its smoothness. Looking up in confusion, Kai’s wide eyes could find no trace of the etched ladder he had climbed down earlier. The shuffle of approaching troops yanked him back into the shadows, and he thrust himself to his feet running his hands over the cool ripples of the hull searching desperately for the way to ascend. Suddenly Nira grasped at his sleeve and pulled him close.
“This what you’re looking for?” she hissed, and pressed him against a cold, serrated strip of alloy in disgust, adding, “Stupid kid!”
Following Kai, they each stretched up and surreptitiously scaled the ship’s side, then dropped in through the hatch.
In a flurry of golden ruby gleam, the ship’s consoles winked in and over and fell round and through each other in limp disorder, before Kai hastily flicked them back into place one by one like unruly children.
Shen, Onnd and Nira looked around, thoroughly unimpressed.
“Is this IT?!” blurted Shen in crimson bluster.
“This will be...adequate,” muttered Onnd in gentle disquiet.
Kai looked at Nira apprehensively. In silence, she simply shrugged, then quietly shook her head, “Well...just another of the day’s disappointments, I guess. Don’t worry, kid, I’m already over it. Let’s just hope...”
She stopped short, and the others turned to where she was looking; through the milky white panel in front of the steely chair they could see outside — SYS-soldiers were busily collecting into a confusion, pointing, speaking frantically into communicators, and aiming their weapons straight at the ship.
“Let’s just hope,” repeated Nira dryly, “that it can get us out of here.”
“So now we simply follow the prodigy?” hissed Jhor at Sann’s ear as she cut a marble vein of warriors deftly through Destiny’s stone labyrinth.
“This was Onnd’s decision,” said Sann calmly; she flicked her staff out as she leapt and an errant SYS-soldier rolled into a wailing heap beneath her.
“Indeed it was, my very young Sann.”
“B’rra?!” said Sann with sudden urgency into her hand-communicator.
“We are all One,” continued Jhor, “yet we — most of us — must simply follow.”
“Now is not the time, Jhor!”
“And who, dear Sann, decides the time?”
“B’rra?! Come in!” continued Sann, “Where could he be?!”
Suddenly a score of flare-repeaters crackled up and seared through the air as the street behind them filled with a horde of SYS-soldiers sprinting into pursuit like a foul shadow.
In a small, plain room with grey makeshift walls adorned by nothing but a single, tiny sheet of garish blue and yellow curling in at the sides — a printed image of an idyllically sunny beach — a long, bronzed creature dangled and coiled its various appendages over and around an equally saggy yet ill-fitting chair as it snored loudly from two slits that may well have been smiling, delightfully unaware of the disembodied voice trying to cut into his dream.
“B’rra? B’rra?! Are you there? We’re coming! Now! And so are the SYS!”
Next chapter — Challenges
Sunday 30 October 2011
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