CANNONBALL EXPRESS - Prisoners of Mars by Kane Kit

Author:Kane, Kit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SEVEN MONSTERS MEDIA LTD.
Published: 2022-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

18

A Pitstop in the Clouds

Almost an hour later, with the sloping space elevator now sitting stationary amid dense cloud, Jess found herself no closer to solving the problem of how to rescue the Cannonball, its crew, and its passengers. Squatting amid the wreckage of the gantry crane, she grunted in growing frustration, her investigations thus far having revealed nothing that might help them haul hundreds of tons of train back up to the relative safety of the main platform. Hoists for all the crane hooks were battered beyond function, trolleys wrecked, motor gearings stripped. The whole thing was a nightmare.

That said, some part of Jess couldn’t help but wonder if her left brain were truly giving the matter its all, seeing as how her right brain appeared determined to nudge ol’ Lefty into analyzing something else entirely—to wit, the scene playing out atop the tether engine at the platform’s northwest corner. Crouched there by an open maintenance hatch, having already fixed the engine at the northeast corner, Casey Beckham was elbow deep in the machinery’s innards, working on final repairs that would hopefully see all four engines back to fighting fit. And offering Casey support in this noble endeavor were a total of two willing assistants, one of them sporting a waggy tail and big eager eyes, the other minus the tail but with eyes just as big and eager, or so Righty was determined to insist. And as for Casey’s eyes—in particular, the way they seemed to Jess to be growing less and less reluctant to alight fully upon Assistant Number Two…

A loud metallic banging brought Jess back into the moment, and as she turned to the source of the sound, a furious masculine ranting followed:

“Hey, I need more pain killers!” the man called Bates yelled from behind the padlocked door of the tool store they’d stuck him in, the three of them having dragged his unconscious body there once Casey had brought the elevator to a halt at its current altitude. “It’s a goddamn bullet wound!”

Jess ignored Bates, her gaze once again drifting unbidden to Casey and Dave on the tether engine… before Lefty, thank the lord, pulled rank and ordered Jess to adjust her damn priorities, lives being literally on the (carbon nanotube) line here…

•••

“A chihuahua? Really?”

With the whole of her upper body deep in the tether engine’s primary maintenance port, Casey Beckham’s voice emerged muffled but audible, and while Dave certainly heard a note of surprise in her words, any sense of impending ridicule appeared absent. Which, to Dave, was a surprise in turn, because frankly, the whole thing had been completely ridiculous.

“Well, part chihuahua, part blood-crazed xenomorph, obviously,” Dave said as Casey re-emerged from the port and handed him a massive wrench, which he duly replaced in the toolbox at their feet. “Happened at a Doctor Who convention, believe it or not.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Doctor Who is a sci-fi TV show. Conventions are where all the fans get together.”

Casey nodded, and as she

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