Contest: The Great Escape, July 2022
Host: @antiheroesgalore
Prompt: Always have an escape plan.
Word count: 1,981
Content warnings: Coarse language; mild gun violence.

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Fifteen seconds.

That's how long Peregrine would have after being sucked out into the cold vacuum of space. Anything longer and she'd lose consciousness. Then, presumably, die.

But, she and her partner, Panda, had this all planned out. Peregrine only needed ten of those fifteen precious seconds.

She stood towards the back of the large metal office, slightly away from the two other black-suited goons and Billy Bass - the wideset, stocky kingpin whom she had just robbed. Peregrine too wore a black suit, which had quite a wonderful crimson trim and a good bit of stretch for those emergency exercise moments. Hidden beneath it was her compact Bianchi 550 low-velocity space pistol, a magnetic grapple gun, and a muesli bar (unrelated to the crime). No one here knew she was the thief.

Alas, in a few moments, they'd learn everything.

"Get that fucking video playing!" screamed Billy, spittle flying from his mouth like a tiny, wet meteor shower. The kingpin had no patience for IT support. He knew he'd been robbed. He knew the system had been accessed. He knew he had it on camera. They were pulling it up on his office computer screen now.

But it's OK. There was always an escape plan.

In one pocket, Peregrine (not her real name, of course) had a sleek squaredrive, onto which she'd transferred a treasure trove of political blackmail material that Billy had been using to get rather a lot of leniency from the Solar Federation police. In her other pocket, she had a bomb detonator.

Her finger slipped to the detonator.

She and Panda had one job: transfer all of the data onto the squaredrive, erase it in the original system, and return to the Sol System. Rendezvous was a station above Mars. Peregrine would never see her handler's face, but they would wipe her criminal record in return for the job. Finally, she could ditch this god-awful codename and start afresh. Go legitimate. Somewhere with a breeze. She hoped Panda would join her. They'd been working together for years.

She bit her lip.

Her thumb flipped the cap off the detonator.

"Fast forward you idiot! The alert went off at two twenty-five. Two twenty-five! Christ it's like you've got skull all the way to the middle."

Unbeknownst to Billy Bass, Peregrine and Panda had placed a special charge on the outside of this office. When she blew it, standing closest to the wall, she'd be sucked straight out into the frigid vacuum over Skadi - a rocky little piece of shit moon floating above Epsilon I - where she'd whip out her grappler, fire it into the open airlock of her ship, the Tick, zoom into the airlock, slam into the wall, and black out. But, Panda would seal the door, pressurise the airlock, and she'd be back on her woozy feet within twenty or so seconds.

They'd trained for this.

She could do it with her eyes closed.

Which was just as well, because she'd probably go blind for a bit after firing the grappler.

"There, there! Who's that? Zoom in!"

Go time.

"Wait," said Billy, craning towards the square monitor. "That's ... why you cheeky little fu-"

She hit the button.

The blast came quick and fast, almost knocking her from her feet and showering the room in smoke. A shard of metal sliced across Peregrine's shoulder as the suction started - explosive decompression, all air in the room being violently ripped into space. As planned, Peregrine went first, her breath exploding from her lungs and her body yanked backwards.

She flew across the last few feet to the wall in the blink of an eye, arms pulled out of her pockets by the force. Mentally she readied herself for pain, blindness, oxygen boiling out of her mouth, and, of course, the grapple gun. But...

...she never got there.

The hole wasn't big enough.

They'd misjudged the bomb.

Peregrine jammed into the hole ass-first and stuck fast, sealing the gap. Her back and sides blazed with sudden fury, causing her to scream embarrassingly aloud. A klaxon started klaxoning in the room, and the door to the office swung shut of its own accord. Three very angry men slowly got to their feet not far from her.

Sodding shitballs did she hurt. Peregrine might not have been in space but her back sure bloody was. She could feel her insides wanting to become outsides, torn metal trying to force its way into her ribs.

"Get her, you useless sods! She has the fucking drive!" roared Billy.

Crap crap crap.

Still stuck in the wall, Peregrine whipped out her handgun and loosed two shots, the pair of goons flopping down in an instant - not expecting her to still be fighty. The blasts startled Billy too, who turned in fright and slipped on the splattered blood of his erstwhile underlings.

This gave Peregrine a few seconds.

Always have an escape plan.

She glanced around - back positively roaring now, making her feel almost drunk from the sheer, overwhelming burn of it all - and locked eyes on a nearby bulkhead. She lurched to grab it with her opposite arm, failed the first time, then tried again - gripping her fingers around the thick edge of the metal girder.

Right.

Time for Billy to be useful.

She yanked herself out of the hole.

Of course, decompression began anew. Oxygen immediately rushed through the gap, but this time Peregrine held fast to the bulkhead, manoeuvring herself so that she was firmly anchored. Billy was in no such position. The decompression grabbed him with its big cold hands and pulled him towards the tear - lodging him in the exact same position Peregrine had been in mere moments before.

"Sorry Billy," she said, getting down off the bulkhead and regarding him wish as casual a look as she could muster while being in horrible pain and utterly breathless. "Gotta run."

"I- I'll get you for this!" hissed the kingpin, whose face had turned glowing red. He writhed, gritting his teeth, unable to get out of the tear like she had done. He was too bulky. "You can't run from ... me!"

Peregrine clicked her tongue. "Watch me."

She darted to the other side of the office, trying the main door. But it was sealed shut, magnetically locked due to the decompression.

Come on!

"Panda," she hissed, touching a hidden earpiece embedded inside her earring.

"Peregrine!" came the nasally voice she knew and platonically liked crackling through the radio. "Where the hell are you? I felt the bang, but there's no you."

"Sodding hole isn't big enough for me to fit through," she replied. "Billy's blocking it up for us. I need another exit."

"Christ. Uh, there's a garbage chute just to the right of the door. See it?"

"Gotcha, on the way."

Clanging sounded on the office door, and voices yelled for Billy. He screamed back, all sorts of profanities. She was getting out of here just in time.

The Tick had docked on the outer hull of the moonbase one floor down - a tiny little ship that they'd latched in secrecy to the base equivalent of a broom closet, burning through the hull to make a hidden entrance a few days prior. Now she needed to get down to it.

She yanked open the garbage chute, pulled out her grappler, and ploughed in feet first. Slipping through the square grate, she twirled and latched the circular magnetic clamp of her grapple onto the stainless steel wall, finger hovering over the button that would activate its pull. She fell, banging off the sides all the way down, until she saw the next grate rushing towards her feet. Her finger jammed on the grapple button, the magnetic pull jerked to life, and she swung her feet through the grate - and onto the landing below.

And that's when the security alarm went off.

The station lights clicked from fluorescent white to an angry red, a horrible blare coming out of unseen speakers in the ceiling. Some posh Eridani woman spoke over the loudspeaker, declaring a security emergency and demanding all personnel to converge on Peregrine's position.

Fifteen seconds. She was meant to have been out in less than fifteen seconds!

She sprinted down the hall, which she knew to be a little-used utility corridor, passing a series of dusty air filtery-looking consoles, a storage bay, a few escape shuttles, and one damp-looking toilet.

"Panda, I'm running for you! Get ready to blast off."

Then - bangs ahead. Gunshots. Four of them. A few shots returned fire.

"Panda?"

More shots.

"Argh! Shit, Peregrine, they found me!" came Panda's voice, crackling in her ear. He sounded hurt. "The Tick is compromised, I repeat, the Tick is compromised. Do - not - come - here!"

"Sod that, Panda," she replied, trying hard not to yell. Her eyes were going dry from not blinking, heart pounding, back roaring with every little motion. "I'm coming to help!"

"No! Don't co-"

And whatever he meant to say next was cut off by more piercing bangs. Now she could hear yelling ahead, more Eridani accents. Billy's goons.

No!

"Panda, Panda come in! Panda are you there?"

No response.

She bit her lip again, exasperated now.

No, god no not Panda. Not now. Not after so many years...

But she couldn't dwell, couldn't mourn. She had to get out of here! She needed another escape plan. If not the Tick, where?

The escape shuttles.

She froze, skidding to a halt, and turned on her heels.

"There she is!" screamed a voice behind her.

Crap crap craaaap.

Peregrine took off back in the other direction, stopping only to lodge a few well-placed shots into a nearby control panel, destroying which put one of the corridor's emergency bulkheads into damage control mode and sent it slamming shut. But it wouldn't stay locked for long.

Moments later she was back at the escape shuttles, pounding the butt of her weapon into the panel to open one up - and not a moment too soon.

A bullet whizzed just past her head from the opposite direction, pinging off the wall and ricocheting harmlessly away.

Soon a second shot followed, then a third, but Peregrine was inside the airlock and mashing the 'Close' button as if her life depended on it (which, of course, it did). Outside, security goons swarmed her position, one particularly quick bloke even lodging his boot in the door before it could close, swearing at her to open up. She heard a hiss somewhere up the corridor, and knew that the emergency bulkhead had been unsealed too - which meant she had two squads of goons descending on her.

Go go go.

She lifted her pistol and ruined the face of the guy whose boot was in the door, allowing the airlock to finally clunk shut. Then she smashed the console, putting yet another door into DamCon auto-lock. Next she was through the tight airlock and diving into the shuttle's pilot seat, gritting her teeth as her back sent waves of dizzying pain into her skull. Her fingers danced across the various switches that would bring this thing's old software to life. With no time to perform a pre-flight check, she just booted everything up willy-nilly and pounded the big red launch button.

If she was gonna die, she'd do it out there, not here.

And so Peregrine was jettisoned into space in a tiny escape shuttle with a pre-programmed flight path that would take her into a tight prograde orbit of Epsilon I, then burn rapidly in the opposite direction to dip into the atmosphere and land somewhere on the planet.

Where she would land, she had no idea.

Who she would face there, also no idea.

But she did know one thing:

There was always another escape plan.

* * *

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