Barbarian Lover (Ice Planet Barbarians #3)(45)

It’s a small room that looks like a storage closet. Of course it is.

Breathing a little easier, I pick up my extra hand and move down to the next door. This door leads to a cargo bay that makes me shudder with bad memories. It reminds me too much of my first time here.

It’s also oddly empty. That makes me incredibly uneasy. Where are all the aliens?

The door at the end of the hall leads to another hall shaped like a T. I head directly across instead of forward, because I want to narrow down all possible ambushes. The last thing I want is to be close to freedom and then have it taken from me because I wasn’t careful. So I explore the other wing of the ship. I find the medical bay again, and resist the urge to use my gun like a flamethrower and burn everything to the ground.

I also find the dead body of one of the Little Green Men sprawled on the floor. My poison’s working better than I thought. I push away the twinge of sadness I feel at killing them. They wouldn’t have thought twice about me, and they aren’t worth my pity.

Two doors over, I find a room with four small, strange doors lined up in a row. They’re rounded, almost like bubbles in the wall, and I can’t quite figure out what they are. I push my severed hand on one of the panels next to a bubble and speak in szzt. “Computer, can you open the door to one of these? What are they?”

“The doors in front of you are emergency deployment units.”

“Escape pods?”

“They are alternate methods of egress, yes. Shall I ready one for you?” The computer’s voice sounds as pleasant as the one back on the surface, despite the guttural tones of the language I’m speaking.

I get a wild idea. “Ready all of them.” The panels light up, and then flash green. “How do I deploy them?”

“The unit can be deployed via an interior panel. Alternately, you can deploy a panel remotely from the control panel behind you on the wall.”

I turn to the wall and sure enough, there’s a flashing schematic of four pods. Writing flashes across the screen, indicating the various system checks.

“What do I push to deploy?”

The computer gives me the instructions, and I press the sequence with the guard’s dismembered hand. A door locks in front of one of the panels, and I watch as it moves backward down a tunnel, then shoots out into the air. Sunlight streams in from the place it once was, and I can see snow and the mountains far below.

Quickly, I deploy two more of the escape pods until just one is left. Then, I grab my hand and my gun and head off to figure out how to take over the rest of the ship.



? ? ?





My badass takeover of the ship ends up not being quite so badass. When I find the bridge, all the aliens are unconscious or dead. There’s three Little Green Men sprawled on the floor and two more guards, and even though they’re the enemy, I can’t find it in myself to put my gun to their temples and kill them in cold blood. So I step around them and try to figure out how to interface with the chip I’ve so carefully smuggled on board.

It doesn’t work, though. No matter what I do, I can’t figure out how to get the stupid chip interfaced, and no amount of questions I ask the computer itself seem to help.

Frustrated, I slap the panels with the disembodied hand that is my key-card to accessing the ship.

The world tilts.

I catch myself before I can tumble to the ground and stare at the control panel, alarmed. What did I hit that made the ship move like that? Through a little experimentation, I find that one of the panels is touch sensitive, and acts a bit like a steering wheel. I tilt the ship downward, and then figure out how to make it accelerate instead of simply hang in the air.

Then, with one last slam of the controls, I push it into gear.

The ship groans and moves forward, and I watch as it begins to pick up speed. It doesn’t move much at first, then slowly, it begins to descend, heading on a crash course for one of the far away mountain peaks.

That done, I get my gun and hightail it back to the last remaining pod. I slide in to the seat even as I hear the wind whistling and searing. It sounds like an airplane crashing – except I’m in the plane still. I slam the panel shut around me, hating that it feels like I’m trapped in a test tube. I push the alien’s hand on the panel. “Release! Go! Go!”

“Where do you wish to go?” the computer asks. “Please input coordinates.”

As if there were any question where I want to go. “Take me back to the surface.” Back to my mate and my new people.

“Please enter in coordinates or access manual controls.”

“Um, give me the manual controls, I guess.”

Two joysticks spit out from the control panel, and I grab them. The moment I do, the pod detaches and slings backward in high speed, and my ears pop a bajillion times as the pod flings itself into the atmosphere, then hovers, waiting.

I watch as the alien ship tilts even more, listing to one side as it heads for the mountain. I wince, waiting for the collision. It doesn’t seem like it’s moving that fast, but—

BOOOOOOM.

The mountain – and the ship – explode in a fiery inferno. I sigh heavily and a weight feels as if it’s been lifted from my shoulders. Those aliens won’t bother us again.

Also, damn. I’m kind of a badass for taking down the bad guys. Who knew that little, shy Kira had it in her, huh?