How the Dead Men Wake, part II

[windfallswest]

part I


"I want to show you something. Come."

Derevko led him through the echoing corridors to a room. It was as bare as the halls except for a pedestal in the middle. On the pedestal was a book, brown and wavery-paged with age. In the book was a poem. It was backwards. There was laughter in Yusuke's head.

"It's gibberish."

"No, it's code," Derevko corrected him. "This book was written by a prophet almost a thousand years ago. The language he used is practically extinct."

"Great, so what's so important about it?" Looking at it upside-down didn't provide any grand insights.

"It tells the future."

Derevko watched him closely for his reaction, eyes expectant.

"Sure, old bat; whatever you say." Yusuke rolled his eyes. See, this was why he stayed away from gangs: the nutcases. There was always at least one, and it was usually the guy in charge. "So what does it say? Are we about the be invaded by brain-sucking aliens?"

"This prophecy is about you." Derevko touched the page briefly.

"Yeah, what's it say about me?" Yusuke peered curiously over her shoulder.

Derevko smiled, bad sign. "It says that you will have great power and cause great destruction."

"Well isn't that cheerful."

Just then the comm unit Derevko kept strapped to her wrist beeped. She watched it intently for a minute, then turned to the burly man who'd been blending into the room's far wall.

"Murray, stay with him for a moment. This won't take long."

Murray inclined his shiny brown head. Yusuke sighed. He'd encountered Murray a couple of times since he'd apprehended Yusuke a few days ago. His main function seemed to be guarding things, which he did by fading watchfully into the background, unless Yusuke happened to be around, in which case he shifted tactics to loom pointedly in his direction. If he had to guess, Yusuke would say Murray was less than happy with Derevko's inexplicable adoption of him.

Casting a wary look Murray's direction, Yusuke contemplated the book. It looked more mouldy than ominous, truth to tell. The blocky letters that draggled unevenly across its pages seemed almost misshapen in places. None of it made any more sense than it had before. Power and destruction? Well, shit. What the hell was that supposed to mean? Besides no good. Assuming it meant anything anyway. As far as he knew, this was an out-dated cookbook.

Yusuke threw himself against the wall and sighed again. "So what do you think of all this?" he asked, only half-expecting to get an answer. He was not kissing this one, though.

"I do not believe in her prophecy, if that is what you are asking."

"What, you think it's wrong or somethin'? Prophecies go against your religion?"

"I do not believe in such things. I have neither morals nor faith nor scruples," Murray replied, a little pointedly.

"Well, that doesn't leave much. What do you got?"

"Lots and lots of money."

Yusuke laughed. It felt good. "Hey, whatever works for you."

"How much longer?" Shizuru firmly quelled her impulse to scan the corridors again. Fred would see them coming long before she could hear them herself and warn them on the comm.

George bit his lip. "Just a few more minutes. This isn't easy, you know. Ah!"

"What?" Shizuru asked anxiously. She leaned forward over his shoulder to peer at the lines of complete gobbledegook.

"...nothing..." George trailed off distractedly.

This was the bad part, George hunched over his tablet doing an on-site hack to open the damn doors with Fred up above watching the security feeds but unable to touch anything. If someone came along, they were royally humped. No guns, no knives, not even a screwdriver. All Shizuru had was the portable refrigeration unit and her back to the door they were trying so frantically to open. Her usual function of 'providing cover' when things went south would pretty much mean throwing herself at the pursuit if this got bollixed. Which, Shizuru admitted to herself, was likely enough. They were already three minutes behind schedule.

Shizuru bit her lip. The oddly garbled din of pop music playing on the only frequency the twins had been able to piggy-back continued uninterrupted in her left ear. Fred and George swore up and down that no one could decipher the encryption algorithms in less than a week, but undetectable it wasn't, apparently, so the peanut gallery was quieter than usual. It only reinforced Shizuru's growing opinion that this was a bigger fish than they usually tried to fry.

The door slid decorously open. Shizuru jumped, expecting to see someone exiting the lab behind it.

"Relax, boss." George winked, winding his uplink cable. "These doors are insane. It kept wanting to make noises at us."

"Alarms?"

George shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. I buttoned it up good and proper, though, whatever it was."

"That's all I need to hear." Shizuru stepped forward into the lab and began winding her way through the maze of benches.

"This place is a mess. You'd think scientists would know how to clean up after themselves." George tsked.

"Yeah. You'd think that about grown men, too." Shizuru stopped and looked down.

"How do you do that?" George whined. "You're as bad as Mark sometimes."

Shizuru didn't reply as they both stood mesmerised by the soft blue glow emanating from the overgrown tomato.

"What is it, the fruit of the tree of knowledge?" George asked after a minute.

"If it is, I wouldn't eat it. Remember what it did to life-spans the last time," Shizuru remarked dryly. She dug out the key-card, opened the refrigeration unit, tugged the thing neatly from the vine and deposited it inside. The lock mechanism snicked satisfyingly into place.

"Maybe it'll just turn my hair blue."

"Finally, a way to tell the two of you apart." The idea had the added merit of reducing the number of redheads on her ship.

"I could always nick some of Oz's nanobots."

Shizuru winced. Still nothing over the radio. "Let's get going. How much time do we have?"

George glanced at his chrono. "Four minutes and twenty seconds."

"Stuff all the-great." Shizuru reminded herself as she led the way out that knocking George over the head and slinging him over her shoulder would be about as productive as chatting up some lab assistant's PDA. Later, she admonished herself, and tried not to look like she was in too much of a hurry. No one was supposed to be in here after hours except security, and they didn't leave during the night. Scientists had to get locked in from time to time. Shizuru figured they just stayed there until morning, hence the lab assistant and her PDA. Unfortunately, it had taken all the twins' ingenuity and three hours of hacking once they were actually on the planet's surface to coax the pass codes out of the system. The codes reset themselves every twenty minutes. This plan hinged on speed: if George and Shizuru couldn't get in and out in that window they were pretty much dead.

They came to a door. George fell on it without being told. Shizuru kept a rein on her impatience while he unwound the cable again and plugged it in. The seconds fell like boulders in a mountain-sized hourglass. George tapped in something, then did it again, his frustration clearly mounting.

"Just open it already," Shizuru snapped. Even through the garbling of the decryption algorithm, she was certain she'd already heard this song three times. "We'll just have to risk it."

"Screw me with a cattle prod," George swore and hit the button. The door opened with an almost orgasmic sigh. He stared at it blankly.

"Whatever." Shizuru grabbed George by the collar and yanked him through. He stumbled along after, trying not to trip over the dangling uplink cable.

"Oy, cap'n," Fred's voice sounded, tinny, though the radio. "Company, A and two."

Headed for the lab. "Got it. George, door."

"Righ'."

Under George's prompting, the door sprang open almost immediately, voicing a sound of guilty pleasure.

"I hate these doors," Shizuru complained. "When we're done with this, remind me to find out who makes them and shoot him."

"SIRIUS Technologies," George supplied.

"Company!" Fred interrupted. "Two, B and closing."

"Ahead?"

"Clear for now."

"Good. Keep a weather eye; we're going to make a break for it," Shizuru told him.

Shizuru sprinted off down the corridor, George on her heels. If she remembered right, there was only one more door between them and the outside.

"One more coming up!"

"Where?" gasped Shizuru.

"Nn-on your right."

The corridor came to a hammerhead. Shizuru pounded around the corner. "I was going left anyway."

"Hey!" a shout rang out from behind.

"First group's reached the lab," Fred informed them.

"Give me the bad news, will you?"

"Uh, the guy behind you's called for backup?" offered Fred.

Shizuru growled. Another corner. The door was in sight. George put on a final burst of speed and passed her. Shizuru wheezed annoyance at him but said nothing. The noise of boots was now audible behind her.

"Damn." Shizuru slammed into the wall next to the door just in time to see the ranks of nonsense on George's tablet vanish beneath a bouncing yellow circle inscribed with a smiling face.

"Drop it!!" The voice shattered Shizuru's rising panic. She turned to face the security guards with it clattering around her feet.

The next thing Shizuru knew, she was being dragged backwards through the door. It slammed cheerfully in her face.

"What was that?" Shizuru demanded.

"Don't talk, just run," George advised.

They made it across the compound and over the ornamental fence with a conspicuous lack of pursuit, spotlights and klaxons. Making a sharp turn, they slid down a ravine, Shizuru still clutching the refrigerator unit's handle.

The shuttle was parked in a field nearby. Shizuru heaved a sigh of relief when she saw it over the lip of the ravine. She was never sure in these moments whether she was glad living shipboard kept her from smoking too much or if she just wanted a cigarette.

"Care to explain what happened back there?" It wasn't really a question.

"Well," began George after the shuttle's hatch was secured, "nothing more than an incidental stroke of brilliance, really. I uploaded a virus into their network. Wasn't sure about it at first, of course. Blighters have an A-rate system. Fred'n I cooked it up for laughs like, because how could we deliver it? Physical mechanism in the door's all we could risk buggering with. And I mean, you'd never let us use it, not at all secretive, viruses. Chaos and glorious malfunction. Plus there was always the chance that it'd blow the place sky-high. Paranoid feng kuang de nutters. So I set it t' go off about when it was time we were gone."

George was grinning with the force of a supernova. Some people never changed. Rather than smash his face into the controls, or possibly just her fist, Shizuru powered up the shuttle.

"-came off magnificently!" George was rhapsodising as they lifted off. "Going to have to remember that double-sided bit on the-"

"Could you pretend, just for a minute, that you have a brain?" Shizuru's voice was flat as week-old Sparky Cola. "What if it was detected? What if it triggered a lock-down? It could have put a big, neon sign saying, 'Intruders here! Please fry 'til crispy' on every channel in the complex the second you delivered it. When did this become a good idea in your head? Fangzong fengkuong de jie."

George's glee was untamped, though he made efforts to convey a world of hurt, hurt and betrayal, with his eyes.

"I do too have one, it wasn't, and that's exactly what it did. Genius, see?" George ticked the points off on his fingers. "It wouldn't've, anyway. It would've led them to that lab-assistant bird. And the opportunity was just too good to pass up."

Shizuru sorted though his gabble and fixed on the important part. "Are you insane? Did you want to trap us in there with the people wanting to kill us?"

"That's the beauty of it. The virus was like a glove. It wriggled into that universal system of theirs, that one they won't let anyone take anything out of, and assimilated. All I had to do was tell the virus to let us out."

"What if it hadn't worked that way?" Shizuru grated through clenched teeth. Is there a god for the captains of fools and madmen? Peace, grant patience.

"Oh, I figured we'd be long gone by then."

"Obviously, we weren't, dickhead." Shizuru sighed.

The Heart of Darkness was growing in the window, barely visible against the black between the stars. It was a Shentian GG80, a slip-ship, made for stealth and illegality and finicky as a pedigreed glass-bird.

"Shuttle to the Heart of Darkness."

"Here, cap'n my heart," Fred greeted her.

"Hey, what'm I, chewy liver?" protested George.

"Just clear us for dock," Shizuru pled.

"You are cleared, shuttle. How'd it go?"

"Just tickety-boo," George volunteered before Shizuru could say anything.

"Docking." The shuttle hit home with slightly more force than was unavoidable.

Fred met them at the airlock. He immediately swept up George, who emerged rubbing his neck absently. Shizuru left the tomato with the two of them, bouncing like excited five-year-olds, and headed for the bridge.

"What's up?"

"We just broke orbit. There's a lot of activity around one of the spaceports, though." McHenry was less than bright-eyed and alert at the controls. What did a body have to resort to to get a sense of urgency from these people?

"Get us out of here fast. I want to run as silent as we can. You hear that, Oz?"

"Every word. Also prepping for evasive action."

"Let's hope we don't need to."

"I think we'll need to," McHenry broke in. "Looks like a leg-ship."

Shizuru's eyes fixed on the scanner display. He was right. Once of the specks clustered around Casanoi was coming after them, and it was gaining.

"Judging by how difficult it was to make off with this thing, what would you want to bet it's armed, though?"

"Shiny," McHenry muttered.

Shizuru watched silently as the leg-ship closed in.

"You gonna do something about that?" she asked finally. They were almost in firing range.

"I-" The ship rocked violently with the familiar shock of weapons fire. Shizuru's jaw clenched. McHenry's indifference had been gradually clearing. Now he looked angry. He punched in ship-wide. "Everybody, hang on. Oz, I'm going to need a hundred-fifty degree down-angle in about forty seconds. Give me some spin if you can."

"Right. Kuwabara, get to those lateral thrusters."

Another lurch. And here I was hoping no one would be shooting at me after we lost the war.

"Now!" McHenry shouted and bore down on the steering grips. Realisation kicked in a second before the inertial dampers and two seconds after it was too late.

"Are you out of your mind?!" Shizuru shouted, clinging to a chair for dear life.

The Heart of Darknesshad been accelerating up out of the Casanoi system as fast as Oz could push the engines. The idea was to avoid the local space-junk while getting the hell away with as much speed as possible. They weren't just slipping back down and trying to lose themselves in the mix, oh no. McHenry had sent them plummeting straight into an asteroid belt at full speed. Granted, the idea of cover was an immensely appealing one at the moment; but the notion of aiming for a densely packed field of rocks, each of which was forty times their size, would've gained something were their current velocity several orders of magnitude less than it currently was.

Oz's voice came crackling up from the engine room. "Hey, Shizuru, this isn't a bad time to ask about that assistant again, is it?"

"What, Kazuma isn't good enough for you?" Shizuru asked over the screams of Aaahg, please don't eat me! emanating from the auxiliary drive compartments.

"Something tells me this ain't the favourite part of his duties."

"We'll have us a discussion if you can keep Mark from blowing us up long enough to make port." Shizuru eyed the nearing asteroid belt and bit her tongue. You can pull up about any time now, she urged him silently.

They weren't going to make it; if Shizuru had still harboured any doubts, this would have laid them. No way Mark could level off this now before they hit the belt. Going through it at this velocity, it would be either unholy luck or impossible skill (Shizuru didn't want to contemplate which) if they didn't smash into anything and explode into a million shiny fragments. On second thought, Shizuru hoped it would be luck; if it were luck, this would suck all of it out of the system and leave their pursuers hurtling through a singularly uncaring stretch of large, solid asteroid. It had to be one of the stupidest things Shizuru had ever seen anyone expect to pull off. Too, there was the added fact that most of the other contenders had ended up dead. Shizuru arranged herself with more dignity and watched grimly as they made the plunge.

McHenry's face had lost all of its vagueness. He was for once bending his considerable powers of concentration on the immediate present. McHenry had absolutely no intention of crossing the asteroid belt. He waited precisely two and one quarter seconds after Heart of Darkness screamed past the first asteroid before tugging calmly on the controls and levelling her off. Beads of perspiration started running behind his ears as he dipped and darted the Heart of Darkness around the barrage of obstacles in her path, desperately not-thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong.

"Come on, baby," McHenry breathed. He was the ship. He was the ship.

"There he goes. He just bashed into an asteroid. Now get us out of here."

Right. Away.

He felt a hand on his shoulder.

"McHenry! Mark. Out. Up. Now."

McHenry set the autonav, sat back in his seat and sighed. Space was clear around them as far as their sensors could sweep. He never saw the blow coming.

"You might like to warn a body next time," Shizuru reproached him as he sat up, rubbing his head.

"I did. I said 'everybody, hang on.'"

"I know explanations aren't your strong suit, but I really don't think it'll damage you to be more explicit." Shizuru's voice was gradually on the rise. "Could you have cooked up a more hair-brained stunt, or is this the bottom of the barrel?"

McHenry looked thoughtful. "Well, if we had two mechanics, I'd have flipped us over at the end of the dive and gone in the opposite direction."

Shizuru said a remarkably loud nothing on which McHenry was about to comment when she sighed and left.

Oz staggered into the kitchen, smudged artistically with grease. McHenry slid his mug of coffee across to Oz when he sat down, feeling somewhat guilty.

"How is it?"

"Nothing's broken. I think we might have some ion dust in our filters but I can shake it out." Oz took a gulp of coffee and almost spat it out again. That was a really interesting expression on his face. McHenry smiled a bit.

"Houzi de pigu, that's foul," Oz choked. He took a closer look at McHenry. "How long have you been sitting here? That's practically a sentient life-form."

McHenry didn't look up, just twitched. Oz raised his eyes to see Shizuru entering from forward.

"The next idiot redhead sets foot on my ship gets shot." She looked like she meant it.

McHenry twitched again. Oz decided to change the subject. "So how was the illicit activity? What's the verdict? Vegetable? Electronical? Animal?"

"Still no pursuit. Are we going to make it to Jervis in one piece?"

"No permanent damage. Flushed out the thrusters but good. We're running on silent for now anyway, until I get a chance to clear the microfilters," Oz told her. He glanced back and forth between McHenry and Shizuru, neither of whom was looking at the other.

"Kazuma still in one piece, too?" Shizuru asked.

"More or less. I think he's sleeping it off."

Shizuru grunted and drifted over to the cupboards. The digital clock above them proclaimed it to be late. He wasn't really hungry, Oz decided. Just sort of...spaced. Was this what McHenry felt like all the time? Probably not. This was what McHenry looked like all the time. Oz wasn't sure McHenry's mind ever stopped rolling. Exhausting way to think. Oz dumped the coffee and headed for his bunk.

McHenry followed the sound of water to the shower, dropping his clothes on the floor of Oz's room along the way. He stood for a minute tracking the little eddies and Brownian motion of the steam before sliding the shower door back and climbing in behind Oz.

"Need someone to wash you back?" he asked, slipping his arms around Oz's waist.

"Hey," Oz greeted McHenry, leaning into him. "Mm."

"Hm," agreed McHenry. He traced space-routes absently on Oz's wet stomach. "Have you ever wondered about showers?"

"Showers?"

"Well, have you ever been on another ship that has showers? It's not what you'd call standard issue."

Oz pressed himself back against McHenry's hard-on. Tease, a silent reproach. "It's the engine."

"The engine gives us showers?"

"The engine produces excess water; have to use it up somewhere. Aah." Tasted like engine grease, not soap yet. McHenry hmmed and dipped his hands lower.

"Is that the way engines usually work? Hey!" Oz chuckled and pinched McHenry's ass again

"Don't know how the engine works."

McHenry stared at the hair plastered to the top of his head. "What d'you mean, you don't know how the engine works?"

Oz shrugged. "No one knows; that's one of the problems with this make. I know how it's put together and what to do when something goes wrong, but damned if anyone remembers how the central mechanism does what it does. It's leftover tech from the migration. More sophisticated, but it's harder to handle."

"Harder, hmm?" Oz's thigh was slippery under his hand as he thrust shallowly against the small of his back. Oz responded by linking his arms behind McHenry's head, twisting his head over his shoulder for a kiss.

"I have to tell you," McHenry felt Oz's lips graze his jaw, "-oh dai ruo mu ji-that was some seriously hot flying."

McHenry grinned and gave Oz's cock another pull. Never do it without you, he might have said, breathing the humid air in through his mouth and letting it warm him all the way through, because Oz replied, "Hell, no; anyone else'd get your ass blown up."

"You can blow up my ass," McHenry whispered into Oz's ear, which got him a groaning laugh, that or the way their thrusts were getting faster. Oz rocked back to meet him, warm flesh sliding against his, feeling the shivers along his spine. This part of McHenry's mind lost itself entirely to Oz's skin and his sounds. He pressed open-mouthed kisses along Oz's arm and shuddered himself when strong fingers slipped into his hair. When McHenry came, his head sagged over Oz's shoulder and he brought Oz off with a few final, twisting pulls until they both slumped against the wall of the shower.

After a few minutes, Oz grabbed a washcloth and snapped it at McHenry's thigh. "Now you can scrub my back."

part III