Page 22 of C is for Captive

“We have to get off world.” His voice came out ragged. The white simplicity of the fight was draining out of him now and what it left behind was worse—the paralytic drug slithering through his system, his torn wrists screaming, a deep grey heaviness pouring into his legs like wet sand. He shoved it down. Later. He could fall down as much as he liked later. “Show me the field.”

She showed him. Down a set of service stairs slick with runoff, along a gantry behind the fuel racks where no honest male walked, and out at last onto the raised lip of the landing field. It opened out before them—flat and open, with a scatter of hulls squatting on their struts and the smell of scorched earth and heavy fuel thick in the throat.

“There.” He gripped her shoulder and pointed her towards his choice. A small blunt cargo hauler sat off at the field’s edge, ramp up, and he would have laughed if he had breath because it carried the crude fanged mark that was Krebb’s brand. “That one. It’s Krebb’s. He’ll have kept it fueled.”

“Won’t it be locked?”

“Yes.”

He crossed the last stretch of open field with her tucked against his side, the fading sunlight making their shadows huge on the ground. Every stride was harder than the one before it, his heartbeat growing loud and irregular in his ears. At the ramp he dropped to one knee in front of the lock-panel and pried the casing off with his claws and studied it. For a terrible swimming moment the wires doubled and slid and would not hold still.

“Brannik.” She grabbed his arm. “I think they’re here. I hear⁠—”

“Quiet.” He blinked hard, and the world snapped back into focus. He laid two fingers over the exposed wires and traced the connections, looking for the override. He’d done this on a dozen ships over the years, coaxing failing locks and stubborn systems into giving him what he needed. Machines made more sense beneath his hands than they ever did when someone tried to explain them.

His fingertips settled over two contact points. He couldn’t have said exactly why those two rather than the others. They simply felt right. He bridged them with one claw, and something inside the panel clicked. The ramp cracked, hissed, and began to lower.

“You did it—” She was already climbing onto it before it finished dropping, hauling at his arm. “Come on, get up.”

He got up. He got them both up the ramp and into the dim cargo hold of the hauler. He slapped the control that raised the ramp and sealed it behind them. The lock reset with a solid heavy thunk that shut the port and Krebb and the priest and any possible answers outside.

And then his legs, which had carried him through the fight and the town and the field on nothing but will, suddenly stopped belonging to him.

The floor came up. He got a hand out before he hit metal, and the grey wet sand that had been rising in him all this while closed over his head at last. The last thing he knew was her voice cracking above him and her small hands fisting on his shoulder, far too small to hold his weight and trying anyway.

“No! Not now, Brannik… Brannik!”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Get up,” Amy pleaded, her voice thin and desperate. “Please, Brannik. Please get up, you’re too big, I can’t⁠—”

Because she couldn’t. She got both hands under his shoulder and tugged at him with everything she had and he didn’t move, not an inch. Three hundred-odd pounds of alien warrior was poured across the cargo floor like a felled tree, and she was a small woman who’d spent four years learning to weigh nothing at all. Her feet slipped on the deck plates. Her arms shook. He was down and there was nothing on this ship or in her body strong enough to get him back up.

Then his eyes opened.

Just a slit, silver reflecting the dim cargo bay lighting, and the sight relieved something knotted in her chest and tied it up worse at the same time. Because he was awake, but he looked like a male watching himself sinking from the bottom of a well.

“Leave me,” he said.

“No.”

“Amy.” His jaw worked. The words cost him. “Fly first. Then me.”

“I don’t know how to fly a ship.” Her voice shook and she hated the sound of it. She’d spent four years never letting her voice shake. “I cook, I don’t… I’ve never even seen a⁠—”

“You will.” His hand found her ankle and closed around it, warm and enormous even now, and the touch steadied her the way nothing else could have. “Cockpit. Forward. Go.”

She went.

She left him on the floor because he told her to, and it felt like leaving her own arm behind. She scrambled up a narrow ladder and into a cramped forward space stuffed with panels and worn seats and a view screen that showed the field around them. She dropped into the pilot’s chair. It had been shaped for something twice her size, and it threatened to swallow her. Every surface swam with symbols she couldn’t read and lights she didn’t understand, and outside the ship she could hear the faint wail of the port alarm.

They were coming.

“Talk to me,” she called down, her hands hovering over the console, terrified of touching the wrong thing. “I’m in the pilot’s seat, talk to me.”

His voice came up to her, low and slow, each word like a stone he had to carry there first. “Left hand. Flat panel. Red line. Press it.”

She found the line. She pressed. The console woke under her palms in a wash of amber, and somewhere below her feet something huge and sleeping cleared its throat and began to vibrate.