Jeff Kozzi

Chapter 134:  Hot Pursuit

Blane raised a defensive energy field. The Kajerist enforcers pressed their attack. Lasers streaked through the hall. Bolas blindly returned fire, more by impulse and reflex than calculated combat. The enforcers charged, closing in on the cellblock.

Blane released a series of fireballs. The blazing spheres of energy flashed down the hall. Deadly lights crisscrossed the hall, burning and scorching the walls and cell doors. Illumination panels sparked and fused, darkening the hallways in sections. The lasers and Chridbursts of the battle cast flickering shadows.

Relying completely and unquestionably on Blane’s defense, Bolas raced for the door on the other end of the hall, away from the empty cell that he knew had recently contained his wife. He felt as if he had been transformed into a Simmellian beyond Kortez’s T-class, able to read telepathic whispers left in the room long after the whisperer had vanished. His wife was calling for him, despairing for him.

Blane followed, pacing backwards step by step, holding his defensive wall of intangible light across the entire width of the hall. "I think we’ve been suckered," he snarled. "Again!"

"No! She was here!"

Blane couldn’t tell whether Bolas even believed himself. It seemed like wishful thinking. "Bo, don’t get your hopes up! This was all—"

"She was here!" he shouted, louder than necessary even over the hum and sparks of lasers discharges and ricochets. "Look—the door’s open."

"So?"

Lasers pummeled Blane’s shield. Blane ground his teeth in concentration, thickening the defensive screen and releasing two fireballs. The air crackled as energy buckled and streaked down the hall at the Kajerists. The lead two cried out. The shadows on the other side of his energy screen shifted. Their lasers paused momentarily, then renewed with increased fervor.

Bolas pulled Blane through the door after him. Blane yanked it shut. "Shit! It won’t lock!"

"They’ve got keys! They’ll just open it anyway! Move!"

Blane pressed the cupped end of the Chrid against the lock and discharged a small flare. The lock melted under the heat of the burst. Blane did the same to the hinged side of the door, effectively welding the door to its frame. "They’ll either have to shoot through or outflank us. Either buys us time."

"They had to have moved her as we arrived! Recently! Or they’d’ve locked the door behind them!"

"Bo, she probably wasn’t here! The door we blasted in by would have been looked!"

"The security doors are only locked from the outside, to make sure that no one gets out. They don’t usually worry about people breaking in to a holding, especially if they can’t break back out again!"

Despite Blane’s hopes, they hadn’t bought themselves time. The enforcers had moved to outflank them from the beginning. Another squad charged up the ramp.

Blane and Bolas switched positions, with Blane taking the lead. He released several fireballs, clearing the ramp with a following stench of burning fur, scales, and flesh. They resumed their run.

Bolas ducked as a new squad jumped onto the ramp to head them off. "She was here, Blane! If she wasn’t, they wouldn’t have hidden her!"

A burst from the Chrid slid down the ramp, absorbing the enforcers’ hasty, poorly-aimed shots. It grew and twisted and changed color until it absorbed all four enforcers. "We don’t know she was ever in that cell!"

Bolas released a round of fire, too late to effect the disintegrated bodies. "That guard at the Spire said so! He was too scared to lie!"

Blane frowned at the reminder of Bolas’ tactics. "He may not’ve known an’ made up anythin’ t’save, his life!"

"She was here!"

"If she was, they’d never’ve let me through that door!"

"I’m sure they figured there was no way we could have known about it! They didn’t register her by name!"

More enforcers charged them between the first and second floors. Bolas fired at the squads coming from the first. Blane raised a shield to their backs. The enforcers’ lasers came closer and closer. Bolas fumbled back towards Blane. Their backs pressed together. Blane’s energy shield encircled them both, transparent to them, but not to the enforcers.

"Can you take the front without dropping the field?" Bolas asked as he watched lasers spark against the swirling surface of their only defense.

"Yeah—left on three!"

They sidestepped in rotation. Their backs never parted. Fatigue, in part ushered by desperation, drained them. Both fought the despair of dashed hopes. Blane took their frontal assault, releasing a wide ray of energy through the semi-permeable illuminated shield. The enforcers screamed. Blane lowered the frontal portion of the shield and proceeded down the ramp, pulling Bolas by the edge of his chest padding while the deposed governor maintained laserfire on the enforcers that may have once been his subjects.

They reached the first floor. The Kajerists renewed the attack. Blane strengthened his energy defensive. Bolas ground his teeth, shook sweat from his face and repeatedly depressed the trigger of his lasertron.

"This way! They’re charging from the front! We’ll use the side doors!"

Blane followed. Now that they cleared the ramp, their pursuers could follow from only one direction. Blane maintained their defense and shot random blasts in returned offense. Blane Kajer had mastered offensiveness.

Bolas led the way. He had once been in a holding as a drunkard until Bodine had bailed him out and punched him upside the head. Bodine had suppressed the record of the arrest, but spent his last three years of life taunting Bolas with their secret. Bolas’ experience provided limited but usable knowledge of Shelswun’s holding stations. They were all built with the same long-antiquated yet effective design.

They raced to the loading dock. The door from the hallway was ajar. Bolas read that as clear support of his theory that Veronika had been led away by hurried agents, recently. He pulled Blane through the door and slammed it shut. "Seal it!"

"I’m on it! Quit naggin!"

"I’ll nag you black and blue, you don’t stop! Hurry!"

The outside bay door, closed during their initial approach, now swung wide open.

"I told you, Blane, I told you! The door was closed when we came in!"

"I don’t want to see you get your hopes up!"

"That, or afraid to get your own?"

Blane growled, spun, and killed the four Noshinsi enforcers that burst through the door after them.

"Veronika!!"

Bolas saw her in the distance, little more than a contour through the smog. A burly shadow in a Kajerist uniform stood over her with a rifle, pushing her through an open sewer grate. Lasers burst through the polluted air. So confident in Blane’s protection, Bolas ran through the empty loading dock without dodging.

"Veronika!!"

The large man sprayed more lasers into the air. Finished with his task of welding the door to prevent follow-up to the Noshinsis, Blane released several fireballs that cleanly intercepted the lasers meant for Bolas’ skull.

"Blane, it’s her!"

Obscured by the steam drifting from the subsurface and the sparking crackles from Blane’s releases, the shadows argued. The burly one pushed the form that could have been a human woman down the grate. Blane only saw the armed big man. "If that’s her, I’m a Shorlak! Not to mention how bad that must’ve looked pregnant."

The shadowed man discharged another round of blasts, lowered through the hole in the street, and pulled the grate back into place above his head. The metal clanged in the semi-darkness.

With the argument disintegrating any doubt that his wife was anything but a prisoner, Bolas activated his pushers and soared after them. Blane ran in pursuit. The Chrid’s cupped end glowed, ready to discharge anything Blane might need.

Enforcers turned the corner from the building and opened fire on Blane. He dove and rolled and raised an oblong shield, hoping it successfully covered Bolas as well as himself.

Bolas Scharo would not have noticed either way. He clamped the hand of his robotic arm on the grate cover and tore the heavy alloy piece from its encasement. With strength derived from a combination of cybernetics and adrenaline, he hurled the oval disk away with unconscious ease. Reeking steam drifted from the hole and into the street, spreading a stench that couldn’t be positively identified as anything but decay.

"Hurry up, Hoodlum!" Bolas dropped feet first from the street.

Blane followed after discharging a last round of Chrid-fire at their pursuers. "This better not be an express teleport t’a Smelter Siti!"

The sewer was rancid, even to someone raised in Shorns’ sulfuric air. Blane choked as he landed in knee-deep water. No matter how corroded and filthy and diseased he had considered Shelswun, its subsurface, a network of forced passages and waterflows angled between and above g-plates from the depositories to the Smelter Sitis, was infinitely worse. Everywhere wet already itched. He heard vermin, but could not see them—or Bolas.

"Hey!"

Bolas fired into the water. The laserlight scattered throughout the liquid grime brilliantly in the sheer darkness, shadowing floating solids and deeper strains through the flow. Blane moved slowly towards the brief light.

"Hurry up!"

Clang!!

Blane froze. "What was that?!"

The sound repeated, with a slight whine.

Bolas stopped all motion, listening beyond the sounds of bubbling water and distant squealing pests. "I don’t know."

The straining whine continued. A new water flow trickled louder.

"Oh, shit. Blane, grab onto something!!"

"Wait!" a woman’s voice called from the darkness.

Clang!! The whine was prolonged. The trickling flow became a rush.

"Move! Move!!" a gravelly voice ordered in the darkness. A torrent thundered through the hammered-open sewer valve, engulfing everything. Power from the Chrid discharged on Blane’s command, searing straight up to the sewer roof, blowing a hole through the street above. Bolas rode the current to Blane and grasped the younger man in a constricting hug when they slammed together. Bolas activated his pushers and brought them to the street via Blane’s new access.

"That was her! Veronika!!"

Blane had seen her in the flashing, eerily-hued light he had discharged. Now he believed it too. "We can’t fight a flood." He ground his feet against the itch that intensified as soon as Bolas had pulled him from the oozing liquid. "Not underground."

"It’s already pass—shit!"

Bolas opened fire at the charging enforcers. Blane joined the fight with a succession of fireballs. Bolas grabbed the younger man’s midsection and dove back through the gaping hole in the street. He employed his pushers to navigate the water, fighting the still-strong flow.

The sewer forked at the valve.

"Which side you want?" Bolas asked.

Blane grunted frustration. "Either."

Bolas turned left. "Shoot in the water once every minute," Bolas ordered.

Blane trudged to the right, eyes probing for ambushes and hurdles carried by the corrosive flow. In less than a minute he heard a slam. Something heavy impacted into the rushing fluid from the adjoining pipe-tunnel.

"Bo!"

Blane spun and sloshed through the water, forcing his way past the open valve and into the tunnel Bolas had entered. He ran twenty steps before he stumbled over something beneath the slimy surface. The barrel of a gun imbedded in his back, directly between his shoulder blades. "Freeze, punko!"

Raised on Shorns, Blane’s eyes had easily adjusted to the almost absolute blackness. He saw the profile figure of a short human on one knee over Bolas’ prone from. He had a beard, and a nose that looked like it had been broken, several times. He wore a Kajerist uniform. He had inserted the barrel of his pistol into Bolas’ mouth.

Blane’s captor gripped his wrist. "Drop your piece," the big man ordered. Blane knew he could probably take both humans down with a thought, but concern for Bolas, and his mother, stopped him. He dropped the Chrid, but stepped on it to ensure he didn’t lose it in the currents. He knew he could fire it with the contact even through his boot, and watched for a safe opportunity.

A sparkling flare ignited from behind the short homely man. The figure holding the flare sloshed to Blane and held the light to his face.

"Blane, it is you! Daddi, let him go!"

Blane Kajer had only knowingly seen his mother once in his life. The honor and relief of her recognition dissipated instantly as she dismissed him entirely and turned excitedly away. She lowered the flare. Its light reflected off the short man’s silverstone earring and illuminated Bolas’ face.

"Oh—my—god—"

The woman holding the flare threw it aside and dropped to Bolas. "Cosha—Daddi—it’s true! IT’S TRUE!"

She tore Cosha’s gun barrel from Bolas’ mouth and replaced the offence with her own lips and tongue. Her kiss annihilated any doubt of his identity posed by Bolas’ peculiarly unchanged appearance. She leaned back from him, arching her back with a full spread of her breasts above his face. She screamed, excruciatingly loud in the small passage, as if she had waited to announce that precise message all her life.

"My husband is alive!"