And my shield promptly took hits from multiple stun rounds. I shot both Rockhurst soldiers blocking the hall, but I could see another squad in the next room. I turned to go back the way I’d come, but Richard’s soldiers were already there. The shield took more hits and started beeping a low-power warning. I fired back and they retreated through the doors.
I couldn’t let House Rockhurst have our shielding technology. I’d left my cuff and necklace hidden in the ship for the same reason. Before the shield completely ran out of power, I clicked the middle button in a seemingly random pattern. Rhys hadn’t mentioned it because he likely didn’t know, but all House von Hasenberg advanced tech had self-destruct options built-in. A small vibration confirmed I’d gotten the code correct.
I now had ten seconds before the shield self-destructed. I had at least five people between me and the hangar and eight or more if I kept moving deeper into the facility. I decided retreat was the best option. I slung the long gun off of my back and set it to shotgun mode.
Time for shock and awe.
I hit the doors at a run and fired before I had a clear sight line. My firearms tutor would be extremely disappointed, but one of Richard’s guards went down and another had been clipped. I fired again and missed, blowing a hole in a lab table. At least it made the remaining guards wary of leaving cover.
I kept firing, but, unfortunately, I was still badly outnumbered and no longer protected by the shield. A stun round narrowly missed me on the left. I swung the shotgun around and blasted the table the soldier was using for cover.
The shield’s vibration pattern went steady at the same time Richard stuck his head up, so I unclipped it and threw it at him as hard as I could. The shield generator self-destructed midair in a burst of white-hot flames. I didn’t get to enjoy the surprise on Richard’s face for long because stun rounds hit me from two different directions.
I screamed as little bolts of agony licked through my system, causing my muscles to contract and twitch. I caught a glimpse of soldiers in space suits as I fell. The world went distant, and I didn’t feel the floor that rushed up to meet my helmeted face.
When I came back to myself, a blurry Richard stood over me. Someone had removed my helmet. I blinked to clear my vision, but it helped only marginally.
Blood caked the side of Richard’s face from a cut over his eye. With the blood, his handsome face had taken a sinister turn. “It didn’t have to be like this, Ada,” he said. He sounded sincere.
“Then let me go,” I gritted out.
“I’m afraid not,” Richard said. “You know too much, as evidenced by your search. You must not be allowed to alert the other Houses before we are ready. So, you can marry me, save your friends, and live in relative comfort, or you can rot in a cell while your friends die. You have until Santa Celestia returns to decide. Take her to the holding cell.”
I was lifted by two soldiers and placed on a stretcher. They strapped me down, then picked up the stretcher and moved deeper into the building. I tried to keep track of our movements, but the ceiling kept dipping and swirling in my vision.
I couldn’t feel the backpack under me, so they must’ve stripped me of gear while I was out. On the bright side, they hadn’t stripped my clothes. If I could find my helmet or another like it, I’d have a working space suit.
The soldiers maneuvered me through a doorway into a small room. They lowered the stretcher to the ground. The restraints loosened but didn’t fall away completely, then the soldiers left. The door closed and locked behind them.
I forced my neck to work. It looked like I was in an office that had been stripped of furniture. There was a large window next to the door, and a helmeted guard faced me through the glass. Another guard faced out into the larger room.
So much for escaping unnoticed.
It was much more interesting that all of the soldiers I’d seen so far were wearing space suits. Either Richard expected me to blow the atmospheric field or he had only just arrived and they hadn’t had time to change.
It took a few minutes, but I finally made my arms functional enough to pull the restraint strap off of my chest. I sat up with a groan. My abs trembled with the effort. I pulled the restraint from my legs and wobbled to my feet. I would need a few minutes of recovery before the ass-kicking started. I staggered to the window and tapped on the glass in front of the soldier facing me.
He did not react.
Looking past him, I could see a few more soldiers milling around in what appeared to be an office area. Desks sat in neat rows with a cleared space in the middle where a grouping of couches surrounded by a low wall made an informal meeting spot.
Richard stood next to one of the couches, close to another man who had also removed his helmet. The man nodded while Richard talked. By the deferential way he stood, even though he towered over Richard, he was likely the guard commander.
In fact, all of the guards were on the tall and bulky side—not a lanky guy or gal among them. My plan to play guard would go nowhere fast; they’d take one look at me and realize I wasn’t one of them.
I turned around and leaned against the window to better assess the room. Solid plastech walls and ceiling meant I wasn’t escaping unless I found a plasma cutter stashed conveniently nearby. I looked around, but the room failed to deliver. Even the air vent was a tiny rectangle that no human could fit through.
Richard had chosen my prison well.
My only chance of escape would be the window or when the soldiers entered the room to move me. And with a dozen guards standing outside the door, the chance of success rested at approximately zero.
It would help if I knew what Richard had planned for me. We were waiting for Richard’s battle cruiser, the Santa Celestia, to return, which meant it wasn’t here. Telling me that information was a slip on his part because it meant he had no backup except the soldiers with him. And while I worried that the Santa Celestia had followed Rhys to the gate, even if it had, space was vast and the stealth on the smaller, nimbler Polaris was second to none.
It meant that Polaris wasn’t caught yet.
It also meant that I had two hours or so to escape, assuming the Santa Celestia jumped with an alcubium FTL. Escaping from Richard’s ship would be orders of magnitude more difficult than escaping from this barely secured facility.
I just had to get out of this room.
I walked to the back wall. When that was successful, I paced back and forth. The soldier watching me didn’t move his head, but I had the sense that he carefully tracked my movements nonetheless.
I had a stretcher, a glass window, and a locked door, plus a roomful of soldiers waiting outside. These were not the ideal circumstances for escape.
I kept pacing, stretching the muscles that had tensed into knots under the onslaught of the stun rounds. Once pacing no longer hurt, I boxed an invisible foe. My arms felt heavy and slow, but I kept at it until the muscles warmed and softened.
Richard walked out of sight, the commander trailing behind him. The rest of the guards stayed, though they lounged around more with their superiors gone. Plans flitted through my head, but I discarded them as fast as I thought them up. Richard had been thorough and I didn’t have much to work with. Only one option presented itself and it was guaranteed to get me stunned again.
Yay.
With nothing to lose, I picked up the stretcher and slammed it into the window in one smooth motion. The handles penetrated the window and glass shattered into a million tiny pieces. I kept pushing, ramming the guard who watched me. Before the other guard could react, I’d caught him by the belt and pulled his blaster from the holster, using him as a human shield.
The room froze, as if they couldn’t quite believe their eyes. I did not waste time. I’d hit three soldiers with incapacitating shots by the time they regrouped and took cover.
The guard I held tried to pull away. I jammed the blaster in his kidney. “Move and die,” I said.
“You won’t shoot your shield,” he said. His voice came out muffled thanks to his helmet.