Stolen Flyght – Chapter 22

Getting everyone into the duct is difficult, especially with the chaos of the evacuation going on about a hundred meters away down the corridor. The lights flicker as we pull couches and carts over the wall from the adjacent offices and create a ladder on which to climb up. But it’s not enough to get us all in without having to pull people up behind us. Jinzo is second to last into the duct. He pulls Lia up last. She flips over in the duct and thrusts our ladder to the floor so no one else can follow us inside.

“This is not as claustrophobic as I thought it would be,” I say, huffing my way through walking on my hands and knees and following Carlos’s ass in front of me. We pass a sign that reads, “Exit,” with an arrow that points in the opposite direction. “But it looks like they thought people might use these for moving around.”

“I was often in air ducts on Ossun Orbital Station.” Jinzo’s voice echoes from behind me. “They make them bigger now than they used to because it’s another way to circumvent areas if there’s a problem. Ouch.” He winces and sucks his teeth. “I forgot how sharp the edges in here can be. Be careful, everyone.”

The duct is dusty, and my knees ache now. My whole body aches and shakes. I can’t remember the last time I filled up with actual food. It was less than a day ago I was frozen in stasis, so yeah, a hell of a long time ago.

“Never had this nice of a view, though,” Jinzo says, and his hand touches my ass. I laugh and squeak, jolting forward into Carlos.

“Hey! Keep it down back there!” Nina hisses.

I roll my eyes at Carlos looking my way.

Wow, Nina. Way to ruin the fun around here.

Who am I kidding? This whole day has been nothing but a joyride.

A cool gust of air brushes past me, and I sigh and inhale. Oh, that’s nice. After all the smoke and recycled air of the sublevels, this is a treat.

“We’re almost at the junction,” Carlos says, his head turned to the side. “Everyone in front of me is climbing up.”

I lean to the side to see what’s going on. Gloria’s feet are disappearing upward in a perpendicular shaft. Okay. We’re close.

The building sways with another explosion. I wonder how much longer until it all collapses.

Don’t think about it, Vivian.

Once I’m up the air shaft, I regret leaving the warmth of the station proper, even if it’s blowing up. I pull myself out of the air duct and onto the floor of the hangar bay while my teeth chatter in my head. The place is eerily quiet.

“Where is everyone?” I ask, hugging myself. This long-sleeved shirt I chose will not cut it if we end up outside on Neve. Let’s hope we don’t.

I use my towel to dust myself off, and then I wrap it around my neck for warmth.

“Evacuated,” Nina says, pointing to the yellow evacuation sign and the red fire sign. Both are lit bright and hard to miss. “But we need to —”

Skylar breaks into a run even though she’s wheezing and out of breath.

“Hey, wait!” Nina calls. Her voice is strained and almost distant.

Skylar slows down after only a few meters, but I can see where she was going. The Amagi is only three ships away!

Jinzo’s hand is on my shoulder, and he’s holding on tight. “Vivi, do you feel that? I thought…” He looks up at the ceiling of the hangar bay, many meters above us.

Yeah. I’m a lot more lightheaded than I was only a minute ago. Eamon is suddenly right in front of me with a mask on, and he’s shoving one into my chest and another at Jinzo.

“Hey, genius, don’t you know anything about Neve? Put it on.”

I pull the mask over my face and breathe. My vision starts to return to normal, and my brain bounces back. Jinzo secures a mask to his face as well.

“What?” I ask, grabbing Eamon’s shoulder. “What about Neve?”

“The atmosphere. It has a lower oxygen content, and they open this bay all the time, which is why it’s so cold.”

Oh. Oh yeah, right. I remember it being mentioned in our original briefing in Renata Dellis’s office. This will not make our escape any easier.

But can we escape?

I swing my head around and get a read on everyone. Carlos is tightening a mask on Skylar and holding her up. No wonder she came to a grinding halt. She was running in this environment and tapped out of oxygen a lot quicker. Everyone else appears to be okay, masked and breathing.

I wonder how long the small tanks on this mask will last. There’s one on each side of my head and a regulator dial on the front.

“Ugh. How else is this planet going to try to kill us?” I stride up next to Jinzo as we make our way to the Amagi.

“Don’t tempt fate.”

That’s right. I should be blaming fate for all this crap.

Jinzo groans in dismay as we approach the Amagi. “They removed the outer hull panels. And the temperature regulators. And…” He waves at a set of dangling wires. “Shit. This is… This is bad.”

I follow him as he circles the ship and meets up with Skylar on the other side. It’s moments like this that remind me of how big the Amagi really is. When we’re in space against the blackness of the universe, we seem so small. But here in a man-made military base, the ship feels ten times bigger than usual.

“They fucking stripped it. Took the air tanks even.” Skylar waves her hand at a spot on the ship. “Should we chance it?” she asks me. Shit. I don’t know enough about these things to decide what to do.

“Will it fly? What about comms?”

I have two priorities — get the hell out of here and call for help.

Klaxons blare out of the silence, and a voice booms into the cavernous open space.

“All hands evacuate to the surface. All hands —”

The announcement cuts out right as a hole rips open the ceiling of the hangar bay.

We dive under the relative safety of the Amagi as the structure holding the ceiling up comes crashing down on the ship next to us. Dust fills the air, and someone screams. I’m really grateful for the oxygen mask. It’s filtering out everything that just burst into the air.

“Ah! My leg!”

Who is that screaming?

I reach up and wipe the dust off my face mask, but the air is still too full of debris to see anything farther than two steps away.

“Help!” It’s Gloria.

I rise to my hands and knees and work my way through the mess towards her voice. Despite the pain in my knee, and now my hand is bleeding, I find her along the starboard side of the Amagi. She’s on the ground, and her leg is bloody and gruesomely twisted. She’s half-sitting up, trying to reach it.

Oh fuck. Where is Gus when I need him?

Her face mask has come loose, and she’s gasping for breath.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” I place my hands on her upper chest and push her back down to the ground, then I adjust her mask onto her face, turning up the oxygen. She’s going to need it. “You’re going to be okay, Gloria.”

Uhhh, uhhh. Okay. Basic medical triage, right, Vivian? Stop the bleeding first.

I pull the towel Gloria brought with her from the back of her waist and wrap her leg in it. She screams from the pain, and tears jump to my eyes. Sorry, sorry. I need a tourniquet now, or she’ll bleed out. I try to rip off my sleeve, but my hands are shaking too much.

“I’m here,” Jinzo says, crouching down next to me. “Skylar is okay. Eamon is hurt, though.”

“Rip off my sleeve.”

He gets his fingers into a weak point in the seam and tugs. The sleeve comes off, and cold air washes over me, bringing me back to the task at hand.

I wrap the sleeve around her thigh, tie a knot, and twist.

“The leg needs to be set and elevated.” My words come out between chattering teeth.

I close my eyes for a brief moment and remember that it was only a few days ago that I was lying in Mat’s arms in his bed. It was only a few days ago I was warm and secure in Ken’s apartment. It was all too long ago.

It’s okay, Vivian. Get through this. You’ll return to your life.

Gloria sobs as Jinzo searches the surrounding debris to find something we can splint her leg with. I grasp her hand and hold tight; she squeezes back. He returns with two lengths of metal, just the right size, and lays them both to either side of her leg.

“Okay. This is what we do,” he says, taking on an authoritative tone. “You hold her leg just below the knee. I’ll set it and splint it. And then we’ll carry her out of here.”

“Have you done this before?” He sounds so confident.

“Oh, no. Never.” He laughs. “I’m channeling Gus.”

I tip over my wristlet, hoping I can channel Gus, but the wristlet doesn’t respond at all.

Jinzo pulls out his towel, starts a cut in it with a broken piece of metal, and rips it in two. He positions the two pieces of metal on either side of Gloria’s leg and then claps his hands and rubs them together. I tighten Gloria’s tourniquet, and I’m buoyed by the fact that the blood has stopped gushing out of her leg.

“Start screaming now,” I say to Gloria. Her eyes widen, and she lets out a howl as Jinzo twists her leg back to the way it’s supposed to be.

I almost pass out, but I hold on for Gloria. She squeezes my hand so hard, I’m sure there’ll be a bruise there in no time. Her teeth chatter behind her mask, but I know that’s not just the cold. That’s shock, too.

Nina runs up to us. “Sit-rep.”

It takes me a few blinks to understand what she’s said. “Gloria has a broken right leg, and she’s lost a lot of blood. Jin has set her leg, and I’ve applied a tourniquet. I think… I think she’s stable for now.”

“Can we move her?”

“If we create a stretcher, yes.” My head bobs up and down, and this prompts my stomach to reject anything I had ever put in it. I jump to my feet, make it three paces, pull my mask off, and puke into a pile of debris. God, make the world stop, please?

Before I put my mask back on, I take a breath of cold thin air and look up at the ceiling. White-blue sky stretches across a vast expanse of the open hangar bay. Black dots in the sky shrink smaller as spacecraft blast away from the surface and escape the base into orbit.

I pull the mask down over my face and return to Gloria, Nina, and Jinzo.

“You okay?” Nina asks.

“Just peachy. Everyone is escaping. It’s time we got out of here too.”

“How are we going to get out?” Nina asks. “There’s no one around to open the hangar bay doors.”

I point up, and she ducks out from under the Amagi. The sky reflects off her mask.

“I see what you mean. Let’s get everyone on board and power up. There should be enough left of her to lift off and fly far enough away from the base.”

Jinzo and I lock eyes behind our masks. Nina is being a lot more optimistic than I feel right now. I’ve seen the Amagi in great shape, and she’s far from it.

Will she even make it out of the building? I doubt it.

“Let’s make a quick stretcher and carry Gloria out of here,” Jinzo says, wiping his bloody hands on his pants. “I have mechanical work to do if Nina gets her way.”