Page 24 of Logic Broken

When the elevator doors started to open, I was ready. Ducking low to avoid laser fire and diving head-first into the cluster of males lined up in front of the doors.

Vagabond

Thorin

I paced back and forth inside the shuttle, heedless of the sensation of motion as Kitan was landing it in the desert. My leg throbbed with a dull ache, but the pain was manageable, only there because I was feeling stressed. Our lead was good, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were behind on the facts, that we were running late.

“Ah… I don’t suppose that smoke is just part of the aesthetic, is it?” Kitan asked. I rushed over to get a look at what he was seeing, cursing loudly at what I saw. The collection of white buildings appeared to have suffered some kind of massive attack. A crater was blasted into one, smoke rising from the massive hole, the pristine white stone streaked with black and pitted with marks.

“The fuck happened here?” I demanded of no one in particular. This place looked like a war zone; that crater like a bomb had been dropped on it. “Do we have life signs?” Kitan’s hands flew over the controls, checking the readings on his screen, followed by a very solemn shake of his head.

“None at all?” Camila asked from where she sat, strapped in a jumpseat, her trusty laser rifle cradled in her lap. I met her eyes, sharing the worry I felt. Had Akri and the unknown female died inside this rubble? Had they caused this? Or had it been Drameil that had somehow beaten us here?

“Put us down, Kitan,” Ziame ordered grimly from across the aisle. His big body radiated tension, smoke curling from his nostrils, and his mobile ears were pinned all the way back against the sides of his head. “Fierce, Snarl, see if you can pick up any trace of him,” he added. His green eyes pierced my brother, who was holding a mildly panicking Ferai beast in his arms. Snarl hated zero-G, and he hated landings.

The moment Kitan had put the shuttle down in the sand, Fierce was at the hatch. His hand was curled into the thick pelt of his bonded beast. “I will find them,” he vowed. They were gone in the blink of an eye, his body shifting to match the colors of the desert so he blended in, tricking my mind into thinking he wasn’t there.

“The rest of us, we’ll search this rubble. We need to figure out what happened here,” Ziame ordered over his shoulder as he jogged from the ship himself. Jakar was out next, but though I was anxious, I waited for Camila to get to her feet and join me at the hatch. She had a grim look on her face as she eyed the destroyed buildings with me.

“I think this was Drameil,” she offered, “And I think Akri got out before he got here. I think this was the result of a Crimelord tantrum.” She pointed at the smoke plums wafting up from several places, the handful of bodies we could see in the mess. “Or he was covering his tracks because Akri used the supercomputer here to get us that data; he’s hoping he stopped it from getting out.”

That cheered me a little, a grin finding its way onto my face. “I hope you are right.” Reaching out, I tugged on the long braid dangling over her shoulder, “He’s got no idea what is about to hit him. Let’s go; we’ve got a brother to find.” I found a little bit of glee again over the thought of all that data we’d sent out to other Crimelords and law enforcement all over the Zeta Quadrant.

She grinned back, her eyes growing bright with excitement. “Heck yeah, let’s go, mate.”

Chapter 15

Jenny

My thighs were sore from sitting on a hoverbike for two hours straight, but my spirits were high. We’d made it out. Akri had known exactly what route to take to get us to that garage we’d hidden in before. He’d only had to manage two scuffles along the way, the biggest of which being the elevator fight, as I’d dubbed it. I was still impressed with how he’d managed that, especially considering what he’d been through the past few hours.

“The battery is almost depleted,” Akri announced grimly, his finger tapping the little display in the steering bars of the vehicle. We knew that would happen and that we wouldn’t make it all the way back to Akrod on this vehicle, but it still sucked. We had a hike of a good hundred miles left to make through a desolate desert with minimal supplies.

If we hadn’t had to dump our coms, we could have called Akri’s ship for help. He was certain that they had arrived at Ov’Korad and would be able to assist immediately. Too bad we had no way to reach them, so hiking through this inhospitable place it was going to be. Good thing I had survival training and had done many long hikes over the years; I knew what to do even if this was an alien planet. The rules hadn’t changed.

We’d taken this hoverbike as far as we could when the depleted batteries forced us to land near a rocky outcropping with some scraggly trees. Here, the desert wasn’t so much giant dunes of sand as it was one big flat plane of nothingness with the occasional pile of rocks. We hid the bike under a rocky nook as best as we could, covering it up with some of those poor little trees.

Akri was watching the two suns tracking across Ov’Korad’s sky, calculating our direction if I had to take a guess. The suns were supposedly purple, but something in the planet’s atmosphere filtered the light beaming down on us, making them appear as orange as Earth’s sun.

I knew what way we had to go at a glance; I’d made it my business to know that kind of thing. I had felt unsettled being on this planet, not knowing how to find my place on this globe. I’d always been able to figure out where I was or where I had to go. I would have felt helpless if I hadn’t learned to do the same here, on Ov’Korad. Drova hadn’t stopped me, but he’d scoffed at my desire to know such a thing; he couldn’t imagine that I was ever going to leave the city.

“That way,” Akri said, pointing in the direction of Akrod with one of his tentacles. It was the direction we’d been headed for with the bike, so a logical assumption. It was cute how happy he was that he’d figured it out based on something as primitive as the position of the suns in the sky.

I nodded, “Yeah, but I think we should allow ourselves a slight detour by heading along that ridge.” I pointed at the sharp spine of stone I’d seen to our left, snaking along the sand in the same direction we needed to go. On it, there were signs of plant life, and there was the possibility of shelter in the form of a cave. Right now, the suns were sinking below the horizon and a chill was starting to fill the air. Tomorrow we’d have to find shelter during the worst of the heat or we would dehydrate within the hour.

Arki looked like he wanted to disregard my suggestion, so I explained to him my reasoning, and that was all it took. Walking along this kind of desert was not as tough as the loose sand that surrounded the research base, but it was still exhausting.

I looked back over my shoulder a few times as we walked, but I could no longer see the plumes of smoke; we’d traveled too far. Neither of us knew what had caused them, just that only twenty minutes into our ride, a sonic boom had rocked us, nearly causing us to crash. The smoke had appeared afterward, and since that base was the only building for miles, it could only mean something had happened there.

Akri was starting to stumble, and he lagged behind a little when we started to climb the flank of the ridge. I wanted to keep going now that the temperatures were manageable and get as much distance in as we could before the sun forced us to hide. It was clear that Akri wasn’t able to sustain that kind of strenuous walk right now. He said he was fine each time I asked, or rather, he said he was performing within acceptable parameters. Clearly, he was fooling himself into thinking that this was true.

Actually, since we’d left the base behind us, he’d been extremely withdrawn and quiet. Each time I asked him a question, he’d answer, but that was it, one-syllable replies, no eye contact, and a dark expression on his handsome face. Something was up, and it was more than just the exhaustion and the pain of whatever torture he’d been subjected to.

When I spotted the opening of a narrow cave in the ridge flank, I warned Arki to stay put while I checked it out. Carefully shining light from the datapad inside it. When I saw no signs of an animal making its home in it, I waved him over. “We’ll rest here.”

It didn’t take us long to set up camp, though we had no lights and I didn’t want to risk making fire. I checked the water we had left, two full bottles, not enough to make it through an entire day tomorrow. So I went back outside to improvise a little water collector with an empty bottle, some sticks, string, and a bit of cloth.

When I hiked on my own before on Earth, I’d always had good gear with me to do it, but I’d still learned the basic tricks in case anything broke down. It was always good to know how to get more water; without water you were dead, no matter where you were.