Countdown
Nothing this sneaky should go this well. He kept expecting alarms to start going off, doors to start slamming shut, or for the kid to decide to resist or start talking or something. Not that Kenren would understand any of it if he did, but it could certainly be enough to get them spotted. He couldn't let that happen, no matter how fucking stupid he'd been to do this in the first place. He was a man of his word, even if it was given only to himself and was objectively bloody idiotic.
Either way, his career was over. The only question was whether his life was going with it.
Kenren stopped at a t-intersection in the tube, closing his eyes as he mentally ran over the map he'd memorised and then incinerated. They weren't far now, the maintenance tubes running a much more maze-like and yet direct course than the corridors did. Left here, and then a drop a little more than a hundred metres ahead. They just had to make it there, and then down the ladder and they would be on the right level. After that it should be fairly easy until they got to the ship. Kenren glanced back at the kid (he'd been thinking of him as that ever since he'd first seen those huge golden eyes and the grin that formed around a mouthful of meat bun (well, protein bun, anyway; it's the little fictions that keep you going sometimes), watching him take everything in, avid and intelligent, calculating in a weirdly innocent way. It was the kind of look you got on the nerd kids in science class, though, not the trained observation of a soldier, and that made Kenren wonder. He nodded at the kid and got one back, then started moving down the tube, grateful that the kid seemed to understand what was going on at least well enough to keep quiet.
The decision hadn't been a difficult one. Looking back later he would realise that it hadn't actually been a decision at all. He had managed to get Aline to let him get in to have a look at the pilot who definitely didn't exist, needing more information for his handler, and even now his stomach tightened with the ghost of the twisting that had hit him when he saw the kid in his cell, munching away, for all the world as if he wasn't a prisoner of war. He'd turned huge eyes and that ridiculous grin on Kenren, showing the scarring on one side of his face and down his neck, and fuck if he didn't look like just about any kid back home. If he'd been human Kenren would have pegged him at eighteen or nineteen, just barely old enough to volunteer to die. He remembered being that young, several lifetimes ago. Then he had thought about the other pilot the army had recovered, apparently half-melted and comatose, locked down and Disappeared less than twenty-four hours after capture. He had wondered if the two of them had known each other. Kenren hadn't even found out about the other one until they were already gone, but this one was here, and alive, and maybe it was completely insane, but it took less than one second for him to know in his gut that he was going to steal the kid.
There hadn't been time for elegant plans. As best he could figure he'd had maybe fifteen hours between when he saw the kid in his medical cell and when they'd be taking him away to wherever they had taken the first one, never to be seen again, and not so much as a ripple in the information feeds to tip anyone off that that pilot had even existed. People might get ideas about hope, and hope was dangerous; they would only wind up even more disillusioned than ever when the army tore that hope apart and left the whole race stained with its blood because no army just wants to end a war. An army wants to win.
Fifteen hours wasn't much, and he didn't have as well-developed a network on this base as he did on some others. This was only his third round out here, and if it wasn't for Aline, he probably wouldn't have any. She'd been glad to see him, and they'd slipped back into the old patterns when he'd first turned up. Thanks to her he had a semi-reliable network that he might be able to use once, but that would be it. There just hadn't been enough time to cultivate the elasticity of bond that would allow him multiple trespasses, which meant that apart from maybe Aline this whole station was about to be one crispy bridge.
Kenren had thought fast and used what he could, getting Aline to set him up with a security pass for the med cells and a cloaked override to use in one of the bays where a couple of her people had set up empty shuttles as Plan-B escape pods if he couldn't get to his own small ship, which had been manually moved to an unused cargo bay. If everything worked right, it would look like a bay malfunction, with his ship drifting out along with whatever other crates and old equipment no one wanted anyway, looking like a part of an accident that was going to cause someone a lot of paperwork, and not much else. Plan-C was one of three very small and very uncomfortable crates hidden in various garbage containment areas, to be dumped much like the cargo bay but without any kind of power to get them anywhere. They would have to wait until they were picked up by someone in an outside ship, and fuck only knew if Aline's contact there would even bother. This plan was, to put it bluntly, optimistic fucking suicide.
Kenren stopped at the edge of the drop tube and peeked over the edge to make sure there were no unexpected people in it, down or up. Hunched over in the small space, he turned to the kid (who didn't have to duck at all) and motioned at him to go down the ladder. It was best not to speak, even if the kid could understand him which, it had been firmly established, he couldn't. Thing was, this kid was army, too, just on the other side; even if he didn't know what he was heading toward, he probably had a real good idea of what he was getting away from. When Kenren had taken the shackles off him there had been a tense moment, a wary sizing up, and while neither one of them exactly trusted the other one, it was pretty clear that they were in this part together. The big question was what would happen once they were safely away from here. Was he going to have to fight? Cuff the kid up again? Not that he figured that would be easy. He might look like a runt, but the kid moved with the ease of someone comfortable with a fair amount of power at his disposal. Kenren would bet credits to donuts that at the very least the little fucker was packing a punch like a freight train.
They reached the bottom of the ladder and it took Kenren a moment to orient himself, remember which tube to take, and to prepare himself for the hunching before they could get underway again. Huge golden eyes regarded him, and fuck if the kid didn't look ready to bounce off down that tube like it was first night of furlough, though he had to know that this was a dangerous game, and he was playing with even fewer cards than Kenren was. He nodded and gestured to the tube curling over a little bit to enter, cursing under his breath at whoever decided that there was some kind of maximum engineer height and built accordingly. At least it wasn't much further, the bay where Kenren's tiny ship had (hopefully) been stashed only some two-hundred-odd metres from that last drop.
Every step now made him more nervous, every moment of non-discovery making the next one more pregnant with the possibility of disaster; flicks always made things go wrong right about now, for drama, but if anything - anything- went wrong for Kenren and the kid it wouldn't be exciting at all. They'd just wind up fucked. Kenren would be killed and the kid taken back to captivity with a new grudge painting a target on his back, and with Kenren's handler in the hot seat.
Damn it, he'd been doing so well not thinking about Goujun. Not even a chance to say goodbye, after everything. Kenren's chest tightened with the thought, but he did his best to quash the intrusion, needing to stay focused. The issue of his commanding officer and the way they'd left things was going to have to wait. If he was alive in twelve hours, he'd have time for feelings and regrets, but until then the kid needed him. Everyone did. Until then, Kenren wasn't his own.
As he made his way through the tube he couldn't help but wonder why the kid had decided to trust him. Maybe it was just because Kenren looked different from the others, or maybe he remembered the first sight of Kenren, the grin returned with a smile...or maybe the kid just had nothing to lose. He'd watched Kenren carefully swallow the pill with the biodampers in it, and had obediently done the same when Kenren handed him the other one, though he couldn't possibly know what it was for. Hell, Kenren didn't even know if they would work on the kid's body. He knew absolutely fuck-all about how the other side worked, apart from what the humans had learned of what Kenren had recently come to think of as the biomechs - the giant biological fighting apparatuses that people like this kid piloted - which wasn't all that much. The existence of pilots had been a complete surprise to everyone after more than eight years of fighting the fucking things, which was as clear a picture of how things were going as Kenren could imagine.
The little indent in the wall of the tube that indicated a hatch appeared just a little way ahead of them, and Kenren looked back at the kid, giving him a reassuring little nod. The kid grinned back at him and nodded, too, and Kenren reached into the pouch on his belt for the scanner and the little jammer for the door. It'd be easier to just forge or steal an engineer's pass, but that would leave a record of the door having been used, and he needed a pristine failure cascade in the logs for this. They might still figure it out eventually, of course, but it would take at least days of dedicated checking, and he and the kid would be long gone by then.
He held out an arm to tell the kid to stop behind him, and he took a moment to scan the room beyond, to make sure there were no unexpected people in the bay. It was all but entirely unused - which was why they had chosen it - but many a fantastic plan had failed because of a detail overlooked or forgotten, and the stakes here were just too fucking high to let that happen. The bay looked clear (without even his or the kid's bodies turning up on the scan, thank fuck), so he slipped the jammer into the manual bypass slot designed to make sure that a failure in identification by the mainframe didn't leave anyone trapped inside in case of emergency. It was a good system, and the only real weakness. But that was always the trouble, right? The meat was just too fucking fallible.
After a moment of mechanical confusion the door slid open. If the jammer had done its job properly, it would have posted a time stamp four minutes and thirty-eight seconds from the moment Kenren used it. That should give them enough time to get into the ship and to set the override in motion, so that that first jam would look like an integrated part of the cascade. Kenren muttered a soft curse of a prayer to Luck as he spotted his ship hulking near the hull door, and he grabbed the kid's wrist, taking an observing peek out the hatch to make sure nothing was out of place, and no one was around. Machinery was fallible, too, after all.
Having ascertained that the bay was indeed empty, he bolted from the hatch, the little pilot in tow, and moved all but silently across the floor to the silent bulk of his little ship, relief sweeping through him just to see it. Kenren opened the hidden manual panel with a key that he slipped into a normal-looking crack, and turned the handle inside it until the door opened far enough for them to slip through sideways. He didn't have time for more. Closed the panel with a near-silent snickand gestured the kid to go through first. Those oddly golden eyes studied him for a moment, and Kenren nodded (you can trust me). The young pilot seemed to understand, and slipped through the opening, Kenren right behind him to open an identical panel on the other side to close the door after them. It was imperative that they not use any power they didn't absolutely have to, though the larger jam would cover a little.
His heart beating loudly in his ears, Kenren led the kid to the helm, gesturing to the co-pilot's seat and then slipping into his own. This was the big test, the bit where he had to trust and hope that Aline hadn't steered him wrong, or that any of her people hadn't decided it was better to turn him in. He trusted her, though, from long experience, and so he had to trust her judgement in comrades. It wasn't as if everyone wasn't sick to death of this fucking war already, and that the home team looked like losing was becoming a more and more inescapable fact, so they were at least as likely to be okay as not. And that was the end of it; either he was right or he wasn't. He was about to find out which. Kenren switched on the auxiliary systems, stuffed the override into the port and waited.
For a long moment nothing much happened. Kenren could hear that the kid wasn't breathing either, listening, waiting. Then a series of lights began flashing around the bay, at hatches and doors and the floor guidance lights for the cargo shifters, the interior lights flashing for a moment, and then everything going dark. When the lights came back, they were almost blinding, everything lighting at once and the bay doors opening - even the inner door to the protective airlock, though the external stayed closed tight, protecting the crew on the other side - a sudden shift in pressure dragging the ship and the cargo crates out and into space. The ship was big, though, and Kenren had to use pneumatic thrusters just a little to help it along, to ensure that it got lost among the other things. They tumbled slowly away from the larger ship, power cloaked, both of them silent, as if speaking would give them away, and Kenren realised he was holding his breath again when his lungs began to ache and demand release.
He exhaled heavily and looked to the kid, who grinned, nodded, and put a hand over his mouth to tell Kenren he understood what was going on, and that they weren't out of danger yet. Kenren looked down at his controls, then out at the big ship, which didn't seem to be moving away very quickly at all, and set a timer for two hours. He looked to the kid, pointed at the clock, and waited for the nod. Grinning, he leaned back in his chair and took his first deep breath in what felt like days.
They just might make it out alive, after all.