"Princess!" The tall Eldsen bodyguard cried in shock and bent over to pick her up. She was almost weightless in his arms, her frame small and slender even for the child-like Chinobi. Her legs hung limply and her head lolled to the side. The girl's face was frighteningly pale.
"My lady," murmured her tutor in a tone of paternal care he rarely exhibited. His young charge was a typical teenager, impetuous and lazy, and he recognized the inappropriate desire she shyly exhibited toward him. But despite it all, he cared for her as well, if in a more professional manner. Now she was hurt, and only his own negligence could be to blame.
"I should have noticed you were more injured than you let on," he muttered to himself in frustration. He looked over at the monitor, still glowing with those disturbing eyes, and shut if off. He decided that she was in no condition for further excitement and began to plot a route through the ship that should take them away from areas of danger, even if it would take them a little longer to reach their destination. His options were limited, due to the severe extent of the damage to the Explorer, and their next step was forced through the deck immediately below. It had been completely depressurized, requiring special gear for prolonged exposure—gear that he had, but Mytana didn't. They would need to pass through the space between hatches in less than five minutes—difficult even for him, let alone for his young charge.
The princess stirred in his arms. "Ugh," she groaned, her eyes opening weakly. The blue-skinned bodyguard set her down gently.
"My lady, are you okay?" He asked in concern.
"My head feels like it's about to explode," she said, rubbing her temples. "My whole body aches."
"We need to keep moving, my lady. It's going to be hard, but it will only get worse the longer we stay here." The Eldsen looked around, searching for an airlock door above them. If he opened the hatch below now, they would be dangerously sucked into the vacuum. But there was no door to be found.
"The next section is depressurized, my lady. We have to pass through as quickly as we can because you don't have a suit. Get on my back and hold on tight!"
"What?" The Chinobi girl said, her eyes wide and color flooding her cheeks. Her bodyguard groaned silently, wishing that his charge wasn't a teenager.
"Just climb up and hold on," he muttered.
She hesitantly obeyed his instruction and put her arms around his chest with the strongest grip she could muster. When she was ready, the tall man stood on the ladder and hit the button to open the hatch below them.
The hatch opened swiftly and air rushed through, tugging at the two survivors. With his maglock boots keeping his feet on the rungs, he carefully climbed down. He couldn't see, but he could imagine the fear disfiguring the features of his precious cargo.
As he climbed, he looked around at the deck they were passing through. Deck Four had been heavily damaged, and the resultant loss of pressure had scoured all but the skeletal framework of the bulkheads and ceiling from the ship. The monstrous alien destroyer that had attacked them could be seen through cracks in the hull, floating next to them ominously.
He felt Mytana's grip weaken, and hurried to open the next hatch. The air rushing down from the shaft above was barely enough to prevent her from being entirely exposed to the vacuum of space, but it would run out soon enough. He dogged the hatch open and held on tightly to the bottom of the ladder as atmosphere from the belly of the Explorer blasted him. He forced his way down and closed the hatch.
As the atmosphere stabilized Mytana got off his back and clambered onto the ladder. Her black hair was disheveled and her face pale.
"You alright?" The Eldsen asked. She nodded weakly. "Let's continue then," he said and began to climb down to the next deck hatch. They were both silent, the girl overwhelmed with all that was happening, and the bodyguard processing their situation, considering their options, and pondering the video footage they'd seen. It was a lot to take in, and he was grateful for his military training. He had developed survival instincts which were keeping them both alive.
They had only descended about a meter when his feet, demagnetized for convenience, floated off the rung. He held on by his hands, looking down at his weightless legs bemusedly. The gravity in this section must be malfunctioning.
"Careful, princess. There's no gravity below this point," he said and pulled his legs back onto the ladder. His boots magnetized with a sharp buzz, anchoring them to one of the rungs. He looked up at his charge wryly.
"You really need to take your dress off now, my lady. It'll be dangerous if you get tangled up in it."
Predictably, her face burned and an embarrassed, outraged expression adorned it. But after the short but harrowing experienced they'd just had in the deck above, she knew the wisdom of his words. She hooked an arm through the ladder and unzipped her skirt, pulling it off to fall to the next hatch.
"Just-don't look!" She squeaked, tears in her eyes. To her, this was an extreme breach of her dignity.
"Don't worry, my lady. We're going to get out of this soon enough," her bodyguard said, his effort to comfort her sounding flat and unconvincing to his ears. His thought was unspoken—if deck four had been so badly damaged, what would be left of the hangars? Still, that was their best hope for escape, unless they could find a functional emergency pod. At least Deck Three had appeared undamaged in the surveillance video.
He looked around, noticing that this segment of the tube was a little different than the rest. Just opposite the ladder was a short ledge, above which was a small white hatch, probably for maintenance drones. He couldn't be sure, but it appeared to be about a half meter in diameter. Mytana just might be able to squeeze inside.
"The deck below us is where the aliens are," he said in a low voice. "We'll need to traverse it as quickly and quietly as we can."
Mytana was silent, her face expressionless. The Eldsen bodyguard knew she didn't have the instincts to think about survival; she would follow his lead. It was a heavy responsibility at times, although her obedience was always appreciated. He brought up the holo schematic of the ship and considered it for several minutes, trying to figure out how to bypass the invaded deck.
Presently he closed the schematic and frowned, rubbing his temples. The only way to the hangar from their current location was through Deck Three, or to a different tube on the other side of the ship. They'd have to go through the depressurized fourth deck in order to get to there, so that wasn't an option. Unless... An idea came to his mind, and with unease, he realized it was the only way.
"My lady, we're going to have to split up. This drone passage will take you through an off-limits section, which should be disconnected from Deck Three. You can bypass the rest of the main decks and make your way to the hangar without drawing any attention while I go back up to Deck Four and cross to the other maintenance tube. We can rendezvous at the hangar control room."
Mytana paled. "Split up? But what if I run into some of those aliens? What if something happens to you?" She began to breathe heavily.
"We can check in every two hours, but this is the only way. I can't fit into that drone tube and you can't cross a depressurized deck. If we just keep going down in this tube we'll run into the aliens for sure—and we have to move fast because they could start coming up here any second now." He spoke firmly and calmly to try to soothe her fears. It didn't work.
"This is terrible, a travesty! You're supposed to be my guardian—how can you do that halfway across the ship?" Her voice rose in pitch and volume.
"Princess, be quiet!" He snapped, not out of anger. His charge went silent again and hung on to the ladder in desperation.
"My lady, this is the only way," the Eldsen said quietly. "We have to split up. I don't like it any more than you do."
Mytana shivered, and finally nodded. They awkwardly traded places on the ladder. The tutor was about to offer instruction when a banging on the locked hatch below them injected the two survivors with a sense of immediate urgency.
"They're coming, quick! Get into that drone passage and get as far down it as you can! I'll call you in two hours," The Eldsen whispered fiercely, and began climbing back up to the Deck Four hatch. The Chinobi girl climbed down so she would be opposite the drone hatch, but found to her dismay that this was beyond the reach of the artificial gravity. The handle on the door to the third deck began to jiggle.
"Hurry!" Whispered the Eldsen. He quickly opened his hatch and slipped through before too much atmosphere could escape.
Here there was no sound of ship systems or ventilation, no feeling of weight. His magnetized boots clamped him to the deck, and he turned on a low-energy laser sight augmentation system so he could see where he was going without resorting to his headlamps. He didn't want to alert any watchers on the alien ship to his presence, which visible light would surely do. His helmet visor lit up with a wireframe overlay, revealing the twisted metal and scorched walls that remained in the decimated section of the ship. Fragments floated in the vacuum, and more than a few bodies could be seen here and there. The loss of life had been massive.
He began to carefully maneuver along what remained of the corridor, dodging and climbing around debris. He had to be cautious, as even his battle armor could be compromised by a floating shard or a sharp edge. Losing suit integrity would end his journey quicker than it started. He sidled around a display panel drifting aimlessly across his path; a sparking power port on the wall signified where it had once resided, probably to show students when the next lecture was or what the weather was like on any given planet. At least there was a little power still on this deck.
The hallway ended ahead, and the armored man could tell the entire hull and most of the walls had been entirely vaporized in this section. He had an unobstructed view of the vacuum of space, empty save for trace molecules and atoms on their mysterious journeys through the universe. The alien ship was, luckily, on the opposite side of the Explorer. He wondered where they were; the Explorer had been stopped mid-jump, and their streamspace path could have taken them anywhere.
He approached the corner; ahead nothing, to his right a smaller corridor that clearly had been intended only for staff access. It ran along the edge of the deck, with only warped and blackened studs separating the walkway from the thick layer where the hull used to be. It lacked the tiled flooring and atmospheric lighting common to public areas of the cruise liner. Miraculously, the emergency lighting remained intact here, allowing him to see with visible light rather than the often confusing wireframe overlay of the laser interferometer. He paused, peering down the hallway to make sure it was clear.
Suddenly, his nanotool comm crackled with static. He heard a labored voice.
"Mayday, mayday! This is Chinobi Royal Guard F5-Alpha. Is there anyone on this frequency? Please respond!"
Damn, thought the Eldsen. It's the escort of those two Chinobi nobles Mytana spotted the other day.
"CRG F5-Alpha, this is CRG C1-Alpha. Switch to QEC channel one. The ship has been boarded and radio frequency channels are compromised," he said, breaking radio silence. Hopefully, the aliens wouldn't be able to triangulate his location on a single transmission.
"Copy, F5-Alpha changing modes." The channel went silent.
Moments later, a ping sounded in the Eldsen's helmet, signifying a contact attempt via quantum entanglement communicator, an encrypted channel that only members of the Chinobi Royal Guard could access. It was the safest form of communication, if wildly expensive and low-bandwidth. Speech was severely compressed in quantum comms.
"C1-Alpha, this is F5-Alpha on QEC. Do you copy?"
"I copy," he replied. "Where are you located?"
"I'm with both my wards in a currency vault on Deck Four. The vault is sealed to vacuum, so I understand the deck's been compromised." The digitized voice clearly had one of the Terran accents. A human, then.
"Deck Four's hull is mostly gone. Where is the vault?" The Eldsen looked around, but didn't see any likely places for a currency vault. He brought up the schematic on his nanotool and entered vault into the search. Several results came up, one of which was on his way. He started moving forward.
"We were towards the aft of the deck when the attack happened. Subsection Golf," the other bodyguard replied.
"You're in luck, that's right along my path. I'll see if I can find some spacesuits I can bring you," the Eldsen said and ended the contact. Quantum entanglement calls had to be short, or the entangled particles could heat up and fuse together. That would ruin the entire device—a very expensive repair, and in this situation, disastrous. No other form of communication would allow for safe contact to Mytana while they were separated.
He stepped off, carefully moving debris aside with his gauntleted arms. Empty space was eerily silent, but this destroyed section of the ship was downright spooky. Here and there he brushed against frozen blood or gore, and found himself pushing body parts out of his way on more than one occasion. Space warfare was a gruesome, horrific business, leaving despair and ruin in its wake. The unreliable emergency lighting made the scene even more macabre.
He almost passed a locker room, but noticed it in his peripheral vision and stopped to look inside. Any lockers that had been unlocked were empty, but the closed doors presented the possibility of gear that had survived the attack. Perhaps he could find a few spacesuits to give to the other guard and his Chinobi wards.
After a thorough search he finally came up with three spacesuits. He didn't know the sizes of the people who would be wearing them, but it was a safe bet that the human was a large human male, and the Chinobi boys would have to live with small human female suits; that was the best he could come up with. Even the smallest adult human female size would likely be bulky on a young Chinobi. He gathered the suits into his arms and continued on.
Moving through wreckage in zero-gravity was hard work and required a lot of close attention, so the Eldsen bodyguard wasn't looking very far ahead when he approached the section where the vault and maintenance tube were supposed to be. When he looked up his heart sank—an enormous chunk of the ship, centered on Deck Four and including much of the decks above and below, was missing. It seemed to have been the site of a direct plasma hit, with frozen globules of metal floating around and stuck to every surface. Twisted, melted alloys were still glowing with heat despite the cold of space, and a tiny stream of atmosphere leaked from a third deck duct.
He rushed forward and began to heave wreckage away from the maintenance tube. It was mostly intact, if partially exposed all the way down to the third deck hatch. He should be able to descend safely.
Looking behind, he searched for where the vault should have been. The crater in the side of the ship curved in from where the tube was, engulfing the location of the vault. It was nowhere to be seen.
The Eldsen scratched his head for a moment. He'd definitely conversed with a member of the Chinobi Royal Guard on an encrypted QEC channel, and that guard had truly believed he was safe in a currency vault. It must have been dislodged when the ship was struck but maintained its atmospheric integrity. An impulse caused the armored tutor to look behind him.
There, not fifty meters away, could be seen the shadow of an intact currency vault, drifting slowly into space.
ns 15.158.61.12da2
