With definite destinations decided (the Aisha home world first on our agenda), we began executing the escape plan. It went off without a hitch initially. Gormos trotted off down the hallway to collect provisions and open a door to the spaceship hangar, and I helped Hoshiya transfer to a wheelchair, careful to not put too much strain on her still-adjusting heart. We wheeled down the wide, white hallways silently. It was an eerie feeling. The wing had the spitting image of a hospital, save for not having a central locus for nurses and doctors to congregate. The wooden hand bar that lined the walls and the sterilized white tile and paint job seemed to effect the smell and presence of the corridor. Hoshiya's wings drooped down, body language roughly equivalent to an animal folding its ears in fear.
On our way to the hangar, our only obstacles were the guards at the entrance and exit of each corridor we had to pass through. Hoshiya handled them with elegance. When we rolled up to them, she stared them square in the eye and delivered a curt, no-nonsense smile. Her hands, low enough for the guard not to notice their suspicious movements, twirled her pinkies in lazy circles, conjuring up a spell of persuasion. The eyes of each guard would glaze over like the eyes of a passionate fool, and just like that, they would step out of our way with an oafish smile.
"That's pretty good magic, Faerie," I whispered to her as we approached our final guard, "but how can I be assured that you're not using that same spell on me?"
"Simple, Dr. Frank," she replied, not bothering to lower her voice. "My spell only works on the stupidest of species."
"Oh," I said with a nod, willing to believe her—after all, she was the expert on magic, not me. It was only after I looked down at her hands to see her pinkies spinning that I grew suspicious of my own acceptance of her explanation. I glared at her distrustfully. "Faeries—the maidens of deceit."
"Feathers—miserable ground munchers," she sang back, apparently very pleased with herself.
The hallways, in our zig-zag to make it safely to the hangar, had slowly transitioned from the blinding white of a hospital setting to a stainless steel, no longer smooth but many-faceted with multiple control panels that seemed attached to nothing. The floor, too, turned from tile to a metal grate, the working of the space station clearly visible beneath it. The dimensions of the hallways also shifted, from a size suitable for humanoid walking to enormous proportions: tall ceilings and wide girth. The hangar entrance we were heading towards was, according to Gormos, primarily used for bringing in equipment and technology for the penitentiary. That explained the large corrugated garage doors lining the hallway, as well as its obnoxious size.
It was a bit creepier to travel those huge hallways all alone, and with the intention of going undetected. It seemed so much more likely for a figure to pop out of one of the many doorways or hatches distributed throughout the walls and ceiling. The only thing preventing me from spiraling into a full-on anxiety attack was Gormos' reassurance that today's shipment had come in hours ago. Also, Gormos reported that those who worked in shipping was notoriously lazy; if there wasn't a shipment directly on their doorstep, they were unlikely to be in the workplace.
As we neared the end of the hallway, I saw a single doorway open, and prayed that this was our exit. We hadn't the foresight to equip the two teams of our plan with walkie-talkies, which left Hoshiya and I guessing at whether or not Gormos had sufficient time to open the door, and whether or not the coast was clear for us to scramble towards Gormos' craft. I hadn't the guts to tell Gormos that I wasn't exactly sure what his ship looked like, either. I knew he would've taken the question as an insult: I had seen his ship a million times, I knew, but my mind had terrible trouble distinguishing one space craft from another. (They were all anonymous, winged lumps of metal to me.) Yet Gormos took such perverse pride in that ship that my inability to identify would strike him as a personal affront, and I hadn't wanted to deal with the repercussions of a slighted Gormos—repercussions that would've ranged anywhere from that annoying sad-puppy face, to a swipe of the claws across the face, to a complete lack of cooperation with our plan. My fingers were crossed that my decision wouldn't completely backfire.
Murphy's law seemed to be the mandate as we approached that open doorway. As soon as we got close enough to distinguish figures on the other side of the door, it became clear that there was quite a bit of movement out in the hangar, contrary to Gormos' reassurance. My stomach dropped to my knees as a loud, mechanical clanking rang dully through the corridor—and with a nauseatingly gradual movement, the large main door at the very end of the corridor began to rise, revealing the boots of idling workmen and a large, many-wheeled cart.
I broke into a sprint for the smaller door, slowed slightly by having to push the bulk of Hoshiya. Hoshiya fumbled with the handcuffs, casting all sorts of minor curses to unbind herself. In apparent panic, though, it seemed her magic betrayed her, keeping her fastened to the wheelchair and giving us both a handicap in making our escape.
Clutching the arm rests with whitened knuckles, she shouted for me to hurry up—a little too loudly. The door was already halfway open, which left Hoshiya and I in plain view. We had only been left unnoticed because of the deafening rattle of the door's mechanism, and the fact the workmen were less interested in the path ahead than swapping obscene personal anecdotes (or at least from what I could surmise from certain whole-body gestures some of the workmen mimed). Hoshiya's shrill voice managed to penetrate the low roar of the door, catching the workmen's attention. Assorted exclamations dropped from their lips, and a few higher-ranked workmen reached for the laser guns holstered on their belts.
"Well, this could've gone better," I grumbled, gritting my teeth. "Hoshiya, if you can only do one spell and not screw it up, be a doll and retrieve me one of those suckers' guns, will you?"
"Can do better than that," she proclaimed haughtily, obviously insulted by me implying she was useless. Directing her still-bound hands towards the line of workmen who were now taking intermittent shots at us (a few others chattering in a foreign language into communicators on their forearms), she cast a potent spell towards them. Blobs of thick, translucent turquoise leapt from her hands to encase and mute the few who had communicators; smaller globules consumed the gun-hands of the armed gunmen, one of the blobs lifting the gun from its workman owner's hand entirely. The suspended gun traveled back to us rapidly, and I caught it right above my head. As the gun made contact with my hand, the turquoise bubble burst, splattering Hoshiya and I with a rain of turquoise goo.
"Smooth, Faerie," I mumbled, wiping the goo free of my eyes with the back of my hand, the other still pushing the wheelchair as fast as I could. "Let's hope your spell didn't completely incapacitate this gun." Getting a good grip on the handle, I aimed the laser downwards, apparently about to shoot Hoshiya. She twisted her body around as best she could, gawking at me.
"What in the Faerie Queen's name do you think you're doing?!" she shrieked.
"Just stay still, sweetheart." I scrunched one eye closed and aimed. With four precise shots, the handcuffs that shackled Hoshiya to the wheelchair broke away easily, skittering across the metal floor with a sizzling sound. Hoshiya popped out of the wheelchair quickly, and I tossed the useless chair aside. Completely unintentionally, the wheelchair sideswiped one of the workmen we were passing, knocking him flat on his face.
Apparently the workmen had called security backup, because soon the red emergency doors were issuing in alarming amounts of armed and armored security personnel. Hoshiya was using long-range spells to keep a portion of them at bay. Her arsenal was quite impressive, ranging from shimmering barriers to massive tidal waves conjured out of thin air. I served as her pathetic sidekick, able to offer only the occasional rear cover in the form of poorly aimed laser blasts.
"You're really awful with that gun," Hoshiya said. Her voice wasn't mocking, but genuinely surprised at how terrible my long range shot was.
"You worry about keeping them off, I'll worry about finding Gormos' ship," I grumbled, trying to keep a portion of my pride in tact.
Hoshiya and I stood back-to-back, her front facing a legion of firing guards, my front facing a string of unidentified ships. Some owners who had been tinkering with their ships upon our arrival took the liberty of assisting the penitentiary's troops, aiming their cannons at us. This helped me to eliminate at least a few of the ships that couldn't possibly belong to Gormos. Hoshiya made quick work of those ships that dared point their barrels at us. Straining one arm backwards, she sent a bolt of lightning through each attacking ship, rendering them nonfunctional and, for many, blackened and fried.
For a full ten minutes we battled in this position, moving slowly sideways to allow me, frantic and clueless, to scan the aisles of ships and find Gormos'. Finally, Hoshiya screamed back at me.
"It's not a needle in a haystack, Frank! Find the bloody ship!"
"I-I … I don't know which one it is," I stuttered, my face flushing in embarrassment.
"Oh for the love of …" she groaned. I could practically hear her rolling her eyes. "Never trust a Feather to do a Faerie's job, I guess," she grumbled. With one handing maintaining the spell that held off the fire and forward movement of the reinforcements, Hoshiya used the other hand to create what looked like the ghost of a loudspeaker. She spoke into it, and her voice projected throughout the hangar with unexpected volume. "Gormos, Frank is a bloody idiot, so give us a little hint where you're hiding out, ok?"
Immediately, a green laser lanced through the hangar over our heads, blasting a troop of soldiers that were just attempting to enter the hangar. My head snapped in the direction of the laser blast—my mind traced it back to a smaller-sized ship near the exit of the hangar (which happened to still be distressingly closed). I grabbed Hoshiya with one arm around the waist around my back and began dragging her in the proper direction. She at first struggled at my sudden grip on her, but upon seeing that I was actually making progress in my search for the ship, she wrapped her legs around my midsection in a backwards piggy-back, continuing to hold off the troops with both hands.
I galloped towards the ship as fast as I could as a bipedal mammal carrying someone roughly my size. The ship I traced the laser back to dropped its entry bridge as I approached. Without thinking twice, I scrambled up the hatchway, the bridge lifting up to close as I walked on it. The entrance closed with a slight sucking sound, and Hoshiya hopped off my back.
The interior of Gormos' ship was far more familiar than its outside. The ship was shaped like a three-dimensional parallelogram with extreme obtuse and acute angles, wings near the rear and boost engines affixed beneath them. I mentally chastised myself for not recognizing the extremely cheesy, species-pride black Kougra stripes painted on the side of the craft, three on each side, like vertical claw marks ripped in the side. (It was the intergalactic equivalent of displaying redneck pride.)
The walkway led to a long corridor that ended in the cockpit of the ship, where I could see Gormos' profile facing the control panel in his captain swivel chair. Several doors lined the hallway, along with several vents, trapdoors and control panels that controlled various life-support or mechanical functions of the ship. The doors led to personal rooms, most of which were used for storage—storage of certain stolen medical supplies and equipment that couldn't be safely stored in public storage. Hoshiya and I stormed down that single path to the cockpit, where Gormos was flicking switches and levers seemingly at random.
"So are we good to go, cap'n?" I asked Gormos, slightly out of breath and speaking in my best sailor accent.
"Well, we would be, if you hadn't forced me to make myself completely obvious by firing a laser all could see … because you couldn't recognize my bloody ship!" There it was—the shrill note of personal injury in Gormos voice. I covered my face with my hands in aggravation.
"For the love of betty, Gormos, knowing the exterior of your ship by heart is not high on my priority list right now," I groaned, clenching my jaw tightly.
"Doesn't matter. I can't get clearance for them to open the gate, 'cause they know we're the ship with the fugitives," Gormos said, glaring at me pointedly.
"This wouldn't've happened if you actually knew the hours shipments came in!" I retorted, pulling my hands away from my face so I could engage in the malevolent glaring contest being waged between us.
"Will you two stop it with your love spat? Just tell me where the button or lever or whatever it is that opens the gate is," Hoshiya fumed, throwing her hands up in exasperation.
"It's not just a button. There's a whole series of voice-clearances and commands you have to get through. It's a complicated process," Gormos explained wearily, momentarily deflated by Hoshiya's sudden spurt of rage. I, on the other hand, was still brimming with anger.
"Which, if you had gotten beforehand, wouldn't be a problem!" I nearly exploded at Gormos. Gormos' anger reignited, the Kougra stood up with a stomp his feet from his chair, towering over me a good few feet. Despite the height difference, I refused to back down, glowering up at him with all of the irritation and hatred I could muster. His fur bristled on end to give him the appearance of greater size, and he opened his mouth just slightly to unveil his fangs.
"For the love of the Faerie Queen! You babies are gonna get us killed. Never mind, I'll do it my bloody self," Hoshiya hissed, and stormed over to the very middle of the cockpit control panel. Raising both her hands as if summoning a crowd to continue a roaring cheer, she lowered her chin, focusing her eyes on the massive gate in front of us. Gormos and I looked over at her simultaneously, our curiosity temporarily stemming our hostility. Her fingers curled into fists, and she squeezed her eyes shut, obviously performing some sort of magic. Yet outside the gate didn't budge, and the sound of approaching group footsteps grew closer. Still, she maintained her position, her fists shaking with effort first, a tremble that traveled to her entire body. Blood began to dribble from between her fingers as her nails penetrated the flesh of his palms in excruciating effort.
Gormos and I exchanged a quizzical look. Gormos, relentlessly kind-hearted, padded over to her quietly, and placed a hand on her right shoulder. "S'ok, Hoshiya," he said softly. "Don't hurt yourself now. We'll only get a few years in jail. It's no biggie."
"A few years? Oohhh betty," I groaned, falling to my knees. I beat the metal ground in utter frustration, unable to contain the feeling any longer. Indeed, getting caught might mean a few years in the slammer, but such a stain would never leave my record. I'd be fired from the only job as a legitimate intergalactic doctor I ever had, and it would be impossible to obtain an actual intergalactic medical license with a record. This was all assuming that cursed mark took more than a few years to spread. If it didn't, I wouldn't even have to worry about my entire reputation being ruined—I would be, metaphorically, six feet under. "I don't have a few years!" I cried out, and the beginning of a sob strangled the end of my sentence.
Inspired by desperation, I sprang to my feet. I took to Hoshiya's other side, perching my head in a falsely affectionate gesture on her shoulder. While wrapping my right arm around her waist, I made my left arm parallel with hers, grasping her with my infected hand by the wrist. Though she didn't turn her head to face me, I turned mine so my lips were aligned with her ear.
"Now you listen to me, Faerie. You're gonna open that gate, you hear? You're gonna open that gate if it takes every last ounce of strength in your body. And you know what I'm offering you? My strength, too. Take it. I won't need it if I can't cure this bloody disease. So take it. We're going to open this godforsaken door, do you hear me? Do you hear me, Faerie?"
My whisper was laced with spite, insanity, and a subtle sadness—a knowledge of imminent destruction if this last ditch plan didn't work. She kept her eye trained on the door, but her mouth opened a tiny slit, enough to form words at a volume just enough for my ears. "I hear you, Feather."