Alexander Outland: Space Pirate by G. J. Koch

curse and brush off wildly as the ceiling tile disintegrated thing, did the search for a portable light thing, then did the check the extra junk thing. Sure enough, Nitin had a penlight with him. Nice of him to come so equipped.
    A part of me wondered how much of a set up this was, but, as Great-Aunt Clara always said, in for a penny is a stupid amount to get nabbed for, if you play, play big. She didn’t always make complete sense, but I got the gist of what she was going for.
    I moved into the ventilation system, penlight held in my teeth, and started the long, dusty crawl. The system was one I was familiar with—interconnected up and down. Common to military and prison complexes for some reason. Presumably those all forced to dress alike wanted to also all smell the exact same air all the time.
    No vermin showed up to share the fun with me, which was a small blessing. Not that vermin bothered me all that much, but there’s something about having a crawly with a lot of legs inside your clothes to make you jumpy, and I didn’t have a lot of room to jump in.
    Crawled to the end of the corridor and found the shaft going up to the next level. This was the fun part, so to speak. If you enjoyed shoving your back against one side, bracing your feet against the other, and shoving yourself up, it was great. I didn’t think about slipping down—once I was up a few feet, that wasn’t an option I was willing to contemplate.
    Inched and shoved my way up to the next level. Collapsed in the horizontal shaft for a minute. I used the time in between pants to check the schematic. Was rewarded for the effort—there were gray dots all over the schematics now, anywhere I looked.
    For good or bad, Herion Military’s ventilation system was a crisscross, meaning that I had to crawl the entire length of this floor in order to get to the next upward shaft. Wanted to send an angry memo to the cosmos, but knew it would get returned unopened
with a “balance due” stamp on it.
    Did the inch and shove routine again. Wondered if I could send in a bill for my cleaning services—no one else had been in here for ages, if the dirt my clothes were cleaning off was any indication.
    Reached the top, got to crawl all the damned way back to the blue dot. I was getting to the point where I didn’t care who or what was there, as long as I could get out of the stupid shaft.
    Finally arrived. The ventilator grill was under me and I took a look. Couldn’t see a damn thing. Not because it was dirty, though I assumed it was, but because there was nothing much to see. A carpet was about it. According to the system tracker, however, I was right above the blue dot.
    I listened. Nothing. I chose to hope this meant Slinkie was tied up but alone, versus tied up and being ravaged or, worse, not tied up and happily in bed with someone. Decided not to wait to find out.
    The grill lifted off easily enough, but then it slipped through my hands and crashed to the floor. Not my smoothest move. But, no one came running. Maybe there was no one in the room. Or they were waiting for me to come down before they killed me. Figured I’d make it easy on them and a lot more pleasant for myself.
    I slid over the opening and went down legs first. Landed in what I had to admit was a pretty cat-like way—standing, knees slightly bent, ready for anything.
    Well, anything but what I was looking at.

CHAPTER 25
    “C aptain, I’m very glad to see you.”
    I looked around. There was no one else here, just me and Audrey. “Um, hi. You got captured?”
    “Yes. They said they would harm Randolph if I didn’t come with them.” She sounded calm and cheerful. We really had to do something about the voice program on Audrey.
    “Who’s they?”
    “Major Nitin and his men.” She was sitting on the bed. Just sitting. Not pacing, not lying down, not wringing her hands, and, key point, not trying to get away. Just sitting.
    “Ah, Audrey, did Randolph actually program you to do whatever a