Perdition's Child

Chapter 9

He was losing seven to two and he had a sneaking suspicion that one of those wins had just been her letting him think he'd caught her off guard so he wouldn't get mad and quit. He had switched headsets. He had made her switch headsets. All the headsets were perfectly functional.

Hide and seek but with virtual reality laser guns, and he was getting his tail kicked. To his credit, even she couldn't hit him in the winding corridors if he saw her in time, but she did know where all the best ambush spots were in the ship and he couldn't seem to surprise her at all.

So it wasn't surprising that his currently hair-trigger reflexes immediately tried shooting at the bit of movement in the corner of his eye.

A savage-looking lellian with Lausiat features cocked her head at him, unaffected by the game lasers, and motioned him to be silent.

"Irika? Is there supposed to be company in here?" It belatedly occurred to him that a Lausiat person from space was probably not a racist hick and that he should have given her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she was rescuing him. A brief instant later the knee-jerk fear reaction that had made him call Irika for help was justified when the stranger pulled a hand gun from her belt holster.

Mehk ran.

There was a shout, and shots, but from ahead rather than behind. Irika barreled around a corner ahead, took aim at him reflexively, then grabbed his hand to yank him along behind. She dove towards a grate in the next corridor, yanking it up and roughly shoving him inside before leaping in after him just as more shots dinged off the steel floor above them.

The grate led to a tight series of maintenance tunnels he found himself kicked and shoved down any time he slowed even for a moment, and after an interminable time span that may have been seconds or minutes they fell into the loading bay from the ceiling grate and tumbled out the hatch into the private hanger beyond.

Irika grabbed his hand once more and yanked him upright with her, scanning their surroundings for a moment before hurtling towards the exit leading up.

Mehk took the lead with his 5-step-long bounds. The door at the end of this flight would lead to the colony proper, and Mehk only hesitated at the top for a second to see if Irika was catching up before shoving it open and tumbling out into the noisy, brightly illuminated interior of the colony.

The sky was falling, buildings skewed to impossible angles and about to descend straight down upon them. They'd fucked up, they were going to die, their attackers had already destroyed the colony. Mehk launched himself backwards towards the exit he had just left with a strangled rasp of terror, crashing into Irika just as she emerged. She caught him, yanked him savagely away from the relative safety of the colony walls towards an opening at the end of the alley.

Mehk yowled, a feral screech of fear and anger, but Irika shook him hard and hissed a curse at him in response and he fell silent.

The sky wasn't getting any closer. Those skewed buildings were all anchored firmly to the artificial gravity of the hull, each aligned perfectly perpendicular to the ground even as the city curved along the inside of the mile-wide sphere.