“I’ll go and have a look,” I told him, then squeezed back through the gap. But before I did any more exploring, we needed to get the shelves off the Solof man. Kade and I made short work of moving the boxes that had been on the shelf, then we each gripped one side of it. “On three,” I said, once again taking the lead. “One… two… three.” We lifted it, and the man groaned with relief as he dragged himself out from under it. He sprawled across the floor, catching his breath.
“Are you injured?” Kade asked him, running a hand over his back and legs to see if there was any blood.
“Just bruises, I think,” the man said. “Hang on, let’s see if I can stand up.” He clambered up onto his hands and knees, then leaned on Kade’s arm to get himself all the way upright. “You hanging in there, Timsan?” he asked his companion.
“Still breathing,” the other man said. “I’ll be damn glad to get out of here.”
“Where does this door lead?” I asked the Solof man next, pointing to one of the two doors leading out of the room. One led to the front of the ship, in the direction of the people we were supposed to be rescuing, while the other one pointed towards the rear. “Sorry, what’s your name? I’m Jai, and this is Kade.”
“Pleet,” he said. “It’s a storage room. But I heard an explosion in there. Be careful if you open the door. No telling what might be going on in there.”
“Were there chemicals in there?” Kade asked, activating his comm. He did several sweeps of the door to see if anything unusual showed up.
“Not chemicals, no. But the forward engine is on the other side of the far wall. If something went wrong with the engine, then who knows.”
I thought back to the way the ship had looked when we’d arrived. The port side wall had been torn to shreds, but I didn’t remember there being any noticeable damage around the engine casing.
Then again, the ship had been shot at with laser canons, so I shouldn’t be making too many assumptions. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” Kade reported, once he’d finished his scans. “Let’s crack it open and see what we’ve got.”
“But be ready to close it again in a hurry,” I cautioned him. I sidled up behind him, ready to get a glimpse through the door. He turned the handle and opened it just a crack. There was no rush of air, no heat, no chemical smell. There was a faint scent of burning, but not enough to be truly alarming. Kade pushed the door open further, and then further…
“Oh, fuck,” we both swore at the same time, as we finally got a look at the state of the room. And it made sense now why the bulkhead was buckling. A large chunk of the engine had been blown out of its casing, and from the looks of it, it had smashed straight through the wall, ripped a sizable tear in the floor likeit was a giant can opener, and finally come to rest on top of the bulkhead.
But that wasn’t the worst of the news. I caught a glimpse of movement through the hole in the floor and craned my neck to peer down into the room below. There were five… six… no, there were a total of eight people down there, covered in various combinations of blood, soot and some kind of white powder.
“Well, at least we found a way into the room,” I muttered, so that no one but Kade could hear me. “Now we just have to get them out before the ceiling collapses.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
JAI
Kade hovered at the edge of the room as I carefully lowered the ladder my master had provided down into the lab below us. It had been a complicated dance to manoeuvre the ladder up past the crates in the stairwell, but there had been nothing within the lab itself that could have helped us climb safely down into the room below –safelybeing the operative word.
The white powder that covered several of the staff was nothing more than calcium carbonate, they had assured us. The blood, on the other hand, was from a severe laceration on one woman’s arm, and a puncture wound on another woman’s leg. That one was not pleasant to look at. A wooden spike had punched straight through her thigh, and it was still lodged deeply in her leg, wrapped up in a makeshift bandage made out of someone’s sweater. While one of the other staff had told us the bleeding was under control, getting the woman out of the room via a ladder was going to be a nightmare. I could dimly hear shouting from back down the stairs, though I didn’t give it too much attention. If my master and the rest of the team weretrying to move the crate, that could easily justify making a bit of noise.
I turned around and climbed very carefully down the ladder – not because I was particularly wary of ladders, but because the edge of the floor that it was leaning against was unstable. The engine had shredded the floor as it passed through, leaving a jagged edge with strips of metal hanging from it. The sturdier of the strips could be bent out of the way, while the weaker parts were prone to breaking off without notice, leaving an edge for the ladder to lean against that was far flimsier than I would have liked.
I made it to the ground and turned to assess the people, eight anxious faces staring back at me. “Those of you who are able to climb, I’ll help you get up into the room above,” I told them. “We have medical supplies on the way, but you’re going to have to stay in the lab above us for now. There’s a crate blocking the exit route back down again, but there’s a team working on clearing it. Once we have better access, we’ll be able to get more equipment in here to help those of you who can’t climb the ladder. You, ma’am, are you able to climb?” I asked the woman standing closest to me. I didn’t want to give them the option of deciding who went first, as that sort of thing tended to result in either everyone clamouring to go first, or everyone attempting to be chivalrous and insisting they go last.
“Yeah, I think so. Just a few bruises,” she stammered. She came over and set her foot on the first rung. “How safe is this?” she asked, pushing on it a little to see if it held.
Unfortunately, safe or not, this was the only way we were going to get them out of here. There was only one door out of the room we were currently in, and the weight of the engine block had warped it so it was now impossible to open.
“I’ll be holding it still from the bottom,” I assured the woman, moving to grip the ladder from the other side. “And Kade willbe steadying it from the top.” I looked up at Kade, who gave the woman a reassuring nod.
“Okay, I’ll give it a go,” the woman said, not sounding terribly confident about it. She took it slowly, one careful step at a time, her hands gripping the bars until her knuckles were white. At the top, Kade took her hand to guide her the last few steps, and I breathed a sigh of relief when she disappeared over the top and into the other room. Kade went with her to settle her into a seat, but then I heard his startled cry.
“What’s wrong?” I called up to him, already up on the first rung of the ladder. Did I need to go up and help him? But it wasn’t Kade’s face that came back to peer down at me. It was a Wasop woman that I hadn’t met before.
“Sorry, I think I just startled your colleague,” the woman said. “I’m Doctor Lantaraz. Commander Hill helped me climb up past the crate. And you’re right, it’s full of rocks. They’re going to pulverise most of it with a pulse projector, but that could shake the room a bit, so he didn’t want to do that while someone was on the ladder. Let’s get a couple more people up here and I can start treating their wounds, and then we can let him know when it’s a good time to break up the crate.”
The doctor disappeared and Kade was back a moment later, so I waved the next man over, to repeat the slow, careful climb to freedom.
Ten minutes later, we had five of the eight people up and out of the room, and being tended to by the doctor. The last three were the two injured women, along with a Denzogal woman who had generously volunteered to go last, to make sure everyone else was able to get out safely. Or to give us a hand lifting the others, if we needed a bit of extra strength.
“Okay, it’s as good a time as any to break up the crate,” I told Kade. “Let’s get away from the edges of the ceiling, in case anything loose falls down,” I advised the three remaining crew. Ihelped the woman with the leg injury move further towards the side of the room, then nodded at Kade. “All set.”
He disappeared into the other room, and I heard a muffled conversation as he relayed the information to my master. Then I braced myself for a loud noise. Pulse projectors were often used as a weapon, the pulses of laser beams highly effective at killing, but they could also be used for terraforming or mining, for breaking up rocks.
