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As soon as the words left Leon’s mouth, the door opened, and a large man walked in. A very large man. A klah’eel. Leon saw the horns on his brows silhouetted against the banks of windows as he walked in front of them.
“Engineer Carey Hartle from Facility Yuni here to perform emergency maintenance on your vessel.” Sebastian’s voice through the earpiece, though perfectly audible to Leon, came in too quiet for the klah’eel to even twitch as he paced across the room.
Leon stayed as still as he could and breathed as shallowly as he dared as he watched the klah’eel guard stop in front of the windows and look out. Carry on, carry on, carry on, Leon willed him to continue his patrol. Clearly, the guard did not have his full attention on his job, or he would have smelled the cooling body just a few desks away from him and Leon’s anxious sweat just one desk over.
Sebastian continued trying to convince the smugglers the Turners had hired to let him board. “Look, man, all I was told was to make sure your ship doesn’t blow up when you go racing down to the planet. You want to send me home? Fine, I’d rather be asleep anyway. But maybe you want to call down to my superiors before you go getting yourself in trouble.”
Leon gritted his teeth as he watched the klah’eel turn away from the windows and start toward the door on the other side of the room. Go, go, go. If the smugglers deliberated long enough, and this guard moved on fast enough, then this whole thing could b—
“This is the Barzen calling down for the control tower of the Yuni facility. Do you copy?” The speaker on the communications panel of the console crackled to deafening life in the silent control room.
“What the—” The klah’eel guard turned to it at the same time Leon lunged at him. The man outweighed Leon by a huge margin, but Leon had spent years bringing down klah’eel. He got the garrote around his throat and used his shorter stature to pull so far down, he pulled the klah’eel’s back into an arch.
“Yuni facility, do you copy?”
The klah’eel twisted before Leon could choke his blood off completely and slammed his skull into Leon’s solar plexus. He fell back with a gasp and just managed to get his arms up in time to catch the klah’eel’s wild punch on his forearms. He caught the next kick on the same forearms and bit back on a yell as the pain rocketed up the bones of his arm.
“Yuni facility—”
“Leon, they’ve got three gunships on me—”
Leon dropped his arms and found himself looking down the barrel of a gun. On instinct, he swung to the side and clamped his hand down on the barrel. He slammed his fist into the klah’eel’s gut and used the opening to yank the gun away. He flipped it around, put it under the man’s chin, and pulled the trigger.
“Leon!”
“Yuni facility, do you—”
Leon slammed his hand down on the reply button just as the sound of the gunshot faded away. “I copy, I copy. I was just getting some fucking klak. Did our engineer get up there yet?”
“Oh, thank god.” Sebastian sounded like he’d collapsed in relief.
“Did you authorize an engineer to take off tonight?”
“I don’t authorize nothing.” Leon pulled out his vowels in a more exaggerated version of Garrett’s rural accent. “But I was told by my boss, who was told by his boss, to be here tonight and make sure one of our mechanics got up to you.”
“Can you identify this engineer?”
“Yeah, I got it here somewhere.” Leon paused and counted to two. “Carey Hartle, should be.”
“Thank you, Yuni Facility, that’s all.”
“Send him back soon as you can.” Leon kept speaking to keep up the bit, but now that the stress was sliding back out of him, he noticed his chest was splattered with blood, his face was a little wet, and his hands were shaking. “I can’t leave ’til he lands.”
The smugglers didn’t bother to reply, but Sebastian’s came back heavy with relief. “Alright, they’re letting me through.”
“Let’s hope that was the hard part.” Leon wiped the splash of blood and gore off his face and pushed the klah’eel under the only desk big enough to hide him so that Leon wouldn’t stumble over him later. That gunshot would have been audible throughout half the facility, and Leon had a bad feeling it wouldn’t be the first.
“Unfortunately, I think that was probably the easy part.”
“I thought you were an optimist.” Leon grabbed the guns from the two dispatched guards, checked the ammo, and stuck them into his extra holsters.
“I am,” Sebastian said with an audible smile. “That was the easy bit, and it’s only going to get more fun from here.”
“Whatever you say. Are you almost to the ship?”
“Yeah, docking now.”
The internal communications panel crackled. “This is sector five. Did anyone else hear that gunshot?”
