“I got one!” Skin screeched, making Stacia wince. “I got one I got one I got one!”
“Oh God, his head,” Stanton said. “It just… I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Just remember that puking on me makes it harder for you to hold on,” Stacia said. “Skin, good job, but try not to celebrate so much that you…”
“Oops.”
“You dropped the pistol, didn’t you?”
“Yes, she did,” Stanton said. “The good news is that it hit the other Shellhead on the way down. She didn’t fall, but she’s struggling for her grip now.”
Hopefully, that would buy Stacia the time she needed. They were near the top, but the only remaining handhold she could see was nearly a meter up.
“Okay, both of you two, be quiet. This is going to take some calculating.”
Of course, this was punctuated by more bullets streaking past them and exploding in the rocks. Hardly the ideal situation in which to concentrate, but it wasn’t anywhere near the most distracting place she’d ever found herself. That honor went to the time she had to escape an erupting volcano with a Shakespeare-quoting robot.
She took several deep breaths as her tactical implants did their work, calculating speed, force, trajectory, distance to the last handhold. A diagram appeared in her mind, showing exactly what she needed to do at what moment to move what height.
Complete with a banana for scale.
Stacia leaped up and grabbed at the handhold.
She missed by a few centimeters.
Apparently, a banana was a poor way to measure distance.
Her two passengers screamed as she hit the side of the cliff, failed to get a grip on anything, and then tumbled down the side. Her implants did their work better this time, though, forcing her to reach out and grab the remaining Shellhead before they dropped past and turned into blood smears on the ledges below. She was sure this was just a temporary measure, that the Shellhead would get ripped off the cliff and fall with them, but the Shellhead held on as Stacia got her fingers in a gap in the Shellhead’s poorly attached armor.
“You bitch,” the Shellhead said. “Let go of me or…”
“Climb,” Stacia said in her ear. “Unless you want to get splattered like your friend.”
The Shellhead paused, then said, “He wasn’t my friend. Actually, he was a real dick.” She climbed, although even for someone with her augmentations, the weight of three people, one in full armor, was an obvious strain. There were still a few shots from below that went wide.
“Hey, stop shooting at me!” the Shellhead called down. “I’m on your side!”
“I take it they’re not your friends either?” Stacia asked.
“If they were before, they aren’t now. I’m Kendara, by the way.”
“Stacia. Nice to meet you.”
A plasma shot hit somewhere below them.
“Idiots,” Kendara said. “All of them should know there’s no way to get an accurate plasma shot at this range.”
“I don’t know,” Stacia said. “Some of those pistols looked like they might be the PQ models.”
“Really? I didn’t see that. I’ll have to take a closer look. Assuming you don’t kill me when we get to the top.”
“I’m not going to make any promises just yet.”
“Hey, can’t blame a girl for trying.”
“Seriously?” Stanton asked. “This is seriously the conversation that’s happening right now?”
“You got anything better to talk about?” Kendara asked.
“How about not talking about anything and instead concentrating on not falling?”
“Okay, yeah, I see now,” Kendara said.
“See what?” Stanton asked.
“Why the Lord Commander wants to shoot you.”
At the top, the four people awkwardly pulled themselves up over the ledge. There was still a great deal of shouting below, accompanied by the occasional random pot-shots, but it didn’t look to Stacia like anyone else was trying to follow their insane escape route. They would have to take the long way around to get up, however far that might be.
Kendara collapsed with great heaving breaths as Stacia undid the rope that secured her passengers to her back. “What are you going to do with her now?” Stanton asked Stacia.
“The only smart thing to do would be to kill her so she doesn’t muck up our escape,” Stacia replied.
“No!” Skin shouted. “You can’t! She helped us!”
“Only after I forced her,” Stacia said. “Only after she was preparing to kill us.”
“Stacia does have a point, guys,” Kendara said between gasps. “That’s the way of war sometimes.”
“But this isn’t a war,” Stanton said. “There’s no war within light-years of this planet.”
Kendara shrugged, as if she fundamentally disagreed but didn’t have the energy to argue.
“Are you actually arguing that I should shoot you?” Stacia asked Kendara.
“No, not at all. I’d like to live, thank you very much. I’m just saying that if you do, no hard feelings.”
“And if I don’t kill you, what will you do?”
“Try to catch my breath some more. I mean, Jesus, you are really heavy.”
“You’re not going to come after us?”
“Oh, I probably will. If I don’t, I might as well throw myself right back off this cliff. It’ll be quicker than whatever the Lord Commander will do if it looks like I just let you walk away.”
Stacia raised the rope in her hands. “And what if it doesn’t look like that at all?”
Kendara raised an eyebrow.
Within two minutes, Stacia had the ropes tied thoroughly around Kendara. “Too tight?” Stacia asked.
“No, just tight enough. Can’t make it look like I could easily get out, can we?” She looked distant for a second, then said, “That jump you tried to make on the cliff. You should have been able to do it easily.”
“You’re right. I should have.”
“It was the banana, wasn’t it?”
“Yep. Always the banana.”
“Man, if I ever get my hands on the jackass that programmed that in…”
Stacia pulled her a respectable distance from the cliff so she wouldn’t somehow tumble off accidentally, while also making sure she could kick at anything that might try to come and take a bite out of her while she waited for the rest of the Shellheads to come along and find her.
“Is this often the way you do things?” Stanton asked Stacia.
“No. I like to think of my methods as flexible. Comfy, Kendara?”
“No, not comfortable at all. It’s perfect. Hey, thanks for not shooting me.”
“Any time. Maybe you can repay the favor sometime.”
And with that, Stacia, Skin, and Stanton ran off, trying to put as much distance between them and Lexton’s forces as possible.
Chapter 13
The Fine Art of Being an Unreliable Narrator
“Could someone please explain to me what exactly is going on?” Skin asked. “I’m feeling very confused at this point.”
“Yeah, I can’t say that I’m too clear on any of this either,” Stanton said.
Stacia took a good look at their surroundings and decided that this would be a good enough place to stop for a while, rest, and explain herself. She was actually surprised that neither of her companions had pressed her for details before this. They’d been moving at their best speed for hours, heading in a direction that only Stacia knew to a target that shouldn’t have existed on Leviathan. They’d kept their curiosity in check for this long. She figured it was finally time to come completely clean.
“We’ll set up camp here,” Stacia said. “Once we’re settled for the night, I’ll tell you both everything.”