Page 23 of C is for Captive

“Is that the engine?” She almost laughed at the stupidity of the question, but it came out closer to a sob. “Okay. That’s the engine. What now?”

“Struts. Green. Two of them. Slide them up together.”

Two green sliders, side by side, low on the board. She slid them both up. The ship lurched as the landing gear folded up under it, and she yelped and grabbed the edges of the console.

“Good.” His voice came up from the darkness below, fading at the edges, but still there. “Now the wheel in front of you. Pull it towards you. Slowly.”

She tried to move slowly, but her whole body was one long scream to be gone, to be anywhere but the landing field where the alarm was louder now. She could see running shapes at the field’s edge coming closer, coming for this ship⁠—

She pulled the wheel towards her and the ship leapt. It jumped upwards, the cramped cockpit tilting sickeningly, and her stomach dropped out through the floor. She wrenched the wheel back the other way and overcorrected, and the landing field spun past the ship in a dizzying circle. Something in the cargo hold slid and crashed. Brannik made a deep, involuntary sound of pain, and that was worse than the spinning. She made herself go still for one half-second and breathe, the way she’d learned to breathe under Pelloq’s counter when the wrong sort of customer came in.

Then she eased the wheel back a hair, and the ship steadied. It wobbled, but then it climbed.

“That’s it,” he called from the floor beneath her, and she could have wept at how gently he spoke.

“I’m going to be sick.”

“Afterwards.”

The ship climbed. The landing field fell away beneath them, then the port, and then the whole grim grey sprawl of the town where she’d made herself into no one for four years. All of it shrank behind them, disappearing from the view screen. And then the screen was filled with black, deep and endless and pricked with more stars than she had let herself look at since the night they took her. She was leaving. She was actually leaving.

A hard tone sounded through the cockpit, and a red glyph pulsed on the board.

“What’s that?” Panic turned her voice thin again. “There’s something red, and it’s flashing⁠—”

“Someone’s looking at us.” A pause. She heard him drag himself towards the ladder, and she wanted to tell him to stop and lie still, and she knew he wouldn’t. “Weapons lock, or a hail. Doesn’t matter. We run.” His breath was ragged, but closer now. “Ahead of you. The ring. Do you see the ring?”

She looked. Far out against the dark, small with distance, floated a vast pale circle of light, as faint as a smoke ring blown across the sky.

“I see it.”

“Jump portal. Take us into it. As fast as she’ll go.”

“And then what?”

“Then we’re gone.” His hand appeared at the top of the ladder, hauling his body behind it. His face followed, grey under the bronze, his silver eyes fixed on her in a terrible effort of will. “Push the wheel forward. All the way. Don’t stop for anything you see.”

She pushed the wheel forward. All the way.

The engine went from a hum to a roar to a scream, and the little hauler leapt forward like something whipped. The red glyph shrieked and far behind them, she saw two brighter sparks lift off the field and give chase. She didn’t stop for them. She didn’t stop for the alarms. She aimed the ship at the pale ring growing wider and wider across the whole of the glass, her mouth dry, and her hands white on the wheel. A woman who cooked and hid in oversized coats flung a stolen ship at a hole in space⁠—

—and the ring swallowed them whole.

The universe folded. There was a sudden wrench, a moment where every part of her body seemed to be in a slightly different place than the rest of it, and then the black outside the view screen wasn’t black any more but streaks of light streaming past on all sides. The alarms fell silent and the red glyph faded, and the only sound left in the small ship was the deep, even purr of the engine and her own rapid breathing.

She sat there for a long time not moving. Unable to move.

“Brannik,” she whispered finally.

“I’m here.”

She turned in the chair. He’d got himself halfway through the opening and no further. He sat slumped against the frame, one huge arm hooked over a pipe to hold himself up, and he was watching her. His eyes were open, barely, but they were open.

“Are we safe?”

“For now.” Each word sounded as if it took all of his effort. “Nobody follows through a portal blind. They don’t know where we jumped.” His head tipped back against the frame. “You did it.”

“You did it. I just pushed things.”