Masada's Gate: A Space Opera Noir Technothriller (The SynCorp Saga: Empire Earth Book 2)

by Bruns, David

  There was a sense of the predator about them.

  Oh, no .

  She removed the panel and reached in to grasp the cold rung of the ladder. Either the heat or all of life support was off, Bekah was relatively sure of that now. A hint of ozone, sharp and itchy, wafted up from the shaft below. Was the power grid totally fried?

  She opened a new message in her sceye.

  “Fischer, come on, come on,” she muttered. It buzzed in vain. She couldn’t even find him in the registry. Then she remembered: Fischer didn’t have an implant. “Damn it!…”

  “Ms. Franklin.” Richter’s voice again, station-wide. “Where are you, Ms. Franklin? Just hand me the Hammer. Then this will all be over.”

  He was coming. She would have run right into him if she hadn’t been worried about meeting Daniel.

  Daniel. Carrin and the others .

  Richter had been in the War Room when she called … fear gripped Bekah’s heart. Her team hadn’t been too busy to answer her call. They’d been unable. She knew it like she knew the station’s systems had been compromised … from the inside. And what had happened to Fischer?

  Oh, no, no, God…

  She stepped into the tube. Halfway to the second level, she spied the blinking emergency light of a maintenance comms panel. Like the mainframe, maintenance was on a dedicated power circuit in case of emergencies. She engaged the panel and released a breath when it lit up. Bekah dialed the code for Fischer’s cabin. He might not have a sceye, but his quarters had wall comms.

  In the dark corridor above, she heard footsteps. Glancing upward, she saw the roaming glare of a handheld light.

  “Ms. Franklin, really, none of this is necessary.”

  Richter’s voice, salivating. And echoing eerily, so close above and also, a half second later, coming over the station’s PA system.

  Bekah held her PADD against her side and swiped the volume on the panel down with a finger. She felt a cramp threatening her other hand as she clutched at the cold rung of the ladder. She tried to relax her grip without losing it.

  “Fischer, please…” she whispered. “Please, please pick up…”

  His cabin comms chimed again and again, barely audible in the tight space of the tube.

  Goddamnit, Fischer! I need your help!

  The footsteps stopped.

  “Is that where you are?”

  His voice wasn’t amplified now. It was normal, if a little distant. Somewhere just above her.

  The access panel. She hadn’t replaced it! How stupid could she—

  A light shone down from above. “Hello, Ms. Franklin.” Behind its sudden brilliance, the face of Bruno Richter, gaunt and sharpened by the shadows, cracked wide in a broad smile. “I’m going to need that key hanging around your pretty neck.”

  The hand that had been desperately trying to raise Fischer reflexively went to the key resting cold against her skin.

  Viking warriors wore a hammer around their necks as a holy symbol. They touched it before battle, asking Thor to protect them .

  Her grip on the ladder spasmed, the cramp taking hold. Bekah dropped the PADD, and it careened off the ladder below. She fumbled to regain her grip and missed the cold metal.

  And she fell.

  Chapter 20

  Stacks Fischer • Masada Station, Orbiting Titan

  The goddamned beeping wouldn’t stop. I’d been conked out like a hackhead living the high life in Dreamland until the beep-Beep-BEEP … beep-Beep-BEEP popped my sleep balloon.

  I was half awake and still cursing the noise. It’d been the best rest I’d had in a long time. I love the Hearse, but she’s a small ship that loves to cuddle. Sometimes I just like my space, you know? Pun intended.

  That’s when I felt it. Still half asleep, sorta drifting in a demi-dream. I was at Minnie the Mouth’s place in Darkside. I did side jobs for Minnie on occasion, like making sure a john paid the full fee for services rendered. You might say I was on retainer. In the dream, Minnie was paying me back in full, her light-fingered caress trailing up the inside of my leg. The beep had finally stopped beeping. I was ready to lie back and enjoy the fruits of my fancy’s labor.

  “Ms. Franklin, really, none of this is necessary.”

  Richter’s voice over the PA system. The last thing I wanted was Bruno Richter in my fantasy. My brain elbowed my libido aside and rebooted itself. The image of Minnie’s teasing fingers disappeared. The sensation didn’t.

  Two and two made a baby named four. Richter’s voice. It’d sounded wet and hopeful. And it didn’t take a genius to figure out what was crawling up my leg.

  Sonofabitch , I thought. I’d sensed the ferret’s betrayal coming somehow, but I hadn’t really acknowledged it. And now he was after the kid.

  But I didn’t move, not an inch. My instincts at work again, with a little help from the obvious.

  “Sonofabitch.”

  The snake slithered against my skin.

  It scales were cold, rough.

  I shivered.

  “Lights,” I whispered. Then, assuming the system hadn’t heard me, I tried again: “Lights!”

  Nothing.

  Well, shit. I guess I should’ve seen that coming. So to speak.

  Apparently enjoying the experience, the snake kept climbing Mount Stacks. It slid along my belly, slow and easy as you please.

  Not moving a single muscle I didn’t have to, I pulled my hand holding my knife from under the pillow. Wearing blades to bed is a good way to wake up with something you highly value cut off. But there’s careful and there’s suicidal.

  It was hard to keep my mind on task, especially when the mamba settled its weight into the nest of my chest. It hadn’t even sunk its pointy pearlies into me yet, and I was already paralyzed. I could see Richter strangling Rebekah while I lay there afraid to move. With my free hand—slowly, so slowly—I lifted the sheet.

  In the pitch black of my quarters, I couldn’t see a thing. But I could hear it. That lisping, dinner-bell sound serpents make. That come-into-my-parlor sound. It was the only sound in the room. The only one that mattered, anyway.

  I wasn’t sure what to do with the knife. If I got stabby, I’d more than likely injure myself first, then the pissed-off mamba would finish the job. Lying there till it decided to move off wasn’t an option. That image of Richter giving Rebekah Franklin a throat-wide under-smile plagued me. But if I moved…

  I lowered the sheet, and the snake lisped its disapproval. I could feel its scaly chill setting up permanent occupancy in my chest hair.

  Inspiration struck.

  I hovered my hand over the sheet where I thought its head was. I had one chance to get this right or I was going to be one, long smorgasbord to swallow. The mamba moved, then relaxed again into its nest of salt-and-pepper curlies. I hesitated, but then Rebekah appeared in my mind’s eye, bleeding out from the neck like a stuck pig. Waiting wasn’t an option.

  I dropped my hand and clamped it around the snake’s head, hoping the sheet would protect me. I yelled curses like a sailor at a spelling bee, or maybe I screamed like a little girl. The mamba thrashed. It slipped and twisted in my grip. I jerked myself out of bed in one fuck-you-knee motion, and the cold air hit my skin. My skin pimpled with gooseflesh as its fangs worked at the sheet. I threw the shrouded snake onto the mattress and brought the knife up and down, over and over. The whole thing was a three-second eternity of shouting and slashing and hoping my adrenaline wasn’t so high I’d missed myself getting bit.

  The emergency lights came up. In the red glow, it was hard to tell blood from sweat in the sheets. I ripped back the snake’s shroud and hopped away like the deck was hot coals. The bed was saturated. I’d sliced and diced the damned thing. Twitchy segments, separated, still moved on the bed.

  I remembered that breathing was a thing I should do.

  The blinking light on the wall comms caught my eye. It was Rebekah’s missed call that had chased me away from Minnie’s lustful attentions. I owed the kid my life.r />
  I’d never run a marathon, but my heaving lungs showed me what it might be like. My brain started to focus, get past the threat that lay in bloody pieces in my bed, still not quite aware they were dead. But enough of that.

  Richter was after Rebekah. I’d gotten that much from the PA system. She’d likely be terrified. She’d have to stay terrified a little bit longer. I could let her know I was coming, but then Richter would know too. He’d set the mamba on me and gone about his business. My state of undeath was my one hole card.

  I threw on clothes, trying to reason out where she’d go to ground. Maybe she’d head for the War Room. Strength in numbers with her colleagues. That seemed as good a place as any to start.

  Cleaning the snake’s blood off my knife, I reset the blade in my wrist spring. I strapped my .38 to my ankle. I stashed my stunner in the holster under my arm.

  Time to get to work.

  • • •

  Rebekah Franklin • Masada Station, Orbiting Titan

  She’d managed to break her fall, but the impact had twisted her ankle. Gritting her teeth, Bekah stood at the bottom of the maintenance tube and unsnapped the access panel from the inside. Richter’s light danced two levels up, searching.

  She loped onto the Lab Level, wincing whenever she put weight on the ankle. She had to get to the War Room. That breach had been Richter inviting the wolf inside the house.

  Masada Station’s backups kicked in, and the emergency lighting came on. Well, that was something.

  “Rebekah, just give me the Hammer. I’ll let you live.”

  Richter was back on the station’s public address system. Her stomach flip-flopped every time she heard his voice now. She staggered into the War Room, gazing first to the large screens monitoring the cyberattacks. Bekah stopped short. They were activated but blank, devoid of data. Cassandra’s attacks on the Labyrinth had stopped.

  “Carrin?” she called. “Anyone?”

  “Rebekahhh…”

  The familiar fear uncoiled inside her again, but she locked it away, contained it behind a stony resolve to complete the mission assigned to her by Gregor Erkennen. Then, she spied Carrin Bohannon bent over her console.

  Oh, no .

  Bekah rushed to her friend’s side. She slipped as she neared the body, had to catch herself. Carrin’s death hadn’t been a clean one. Her eyes were open. Blood still oozed from the half-moon wound midway down her neck. It dripped from the cold console to pool on the deck.

  She was part of my team . I should’ve protected her .

  An alarm next to Carrin’s bloody right hand went off. Its strident grating made Bekah jump.

  “Oh, God.”

  Data began flooding Carrin’s screen.

  Cassandra was assaulting Masada’s mainframe.

  A low chuckle sounded from the public channel.

  “Soon this will be all over,” Richter said. “Let’s complete our business, you and I.”

  Setting aside her guilt, Bekah took the seat next to Carrin’s. Her job was to protect Masada as long as she could. A quick assessment showed that Carrin had been working on a series of floating protocols based on a self-replicating, machine-learning algorithm Daniel created. In theory, it would delay Cassandra’s penetration of the firewall for a while. At least until she figured out how to bypass it.

  It looked like Carrin had been seconds away from finishing it before—

  The door to the War Room opened behind her.

  “Alone at last.”

  Richter’s voice was smaller without the walls of the deserted station to amplify it. He walked slowly forward, almost leisurely, an odd reflection of the nude Daniel from her dream. Richter moved patiently. Despite his earlier rush to find her, he now seemed to relish their time together.

  The thought made her ill.

  With willpower, Bekah turned away from his hungry gaze and keyed in a sequence, completing Carrin’s work. She sent a silent thank-you to her murdered friend through the twilight void now separating them. Then she stood up and backed away from Richter’s advance.

  “Cassandra’s not getting in anytime soon,” she said.

  “Only a matter of time,” Richter answered as he came nearer. His narrow face leered at her. “Only a matter of time.”

  • • •

  Stacks Fischer • Masada Station, Orbiting Titan

  The emergency lighting made everything red. The artificial gravity was working, but life support still seemed to be off. Or set to minimum, anyway. My achy knee barked about the cold. There was the sharp, pungent scent of chlorine in the air, like the pool had drained into the station. My brain reshuffled that data point; it wasn’t chlorine, it was ozone. Like after a thunderstorm, when lightning strikes. Maybe the primary electrical grid was offline too.

  I spied a heap near the vator. I knew what it was before I even got close. One of the geeks, a young woman. Asia something, I think. Aisha something. I knelt down to confirm the kill. That red under-smile I’d seen splitting Rebekah’s face in my mind’s eye? It wasn’t a dark fantasy anymore. Richter’s razor at work. Staring at that murdered waif of a woman, I wondered why he hadn’t simply killed me in his quarters? It felt sloppy to me.

  “Rebekahhh…”

  Then, the way Richter drew out her name, I understood. It was like he was playing hide-and-seek with Bekah Franklin—ratcheting up the fear to the uninitiated. So I’d answered my own question, then. Richter hadn’t killed me outright because where’s the fun in that?

  He enjoyed the game of hunting, of killing. He enjoyed the smell of fear in a victim’s sweat. He must’ve gotten tired of killing by poison. He’d chosen a very personal way to murder Aisha. Brandishing that razor around me in his quarters had been a private little joke for him. Showing the black mamba off to me and how the mouse suffered—he’d planned for me to think about that while I lay in bed, suffocating, while snake juices shut me down, one involuntary system at a time.

  I could see him standing over Aisha on the floor while her panic set in. Watching her eyes as she realized she was going to die, and nothing and no one could stop it. I could see Richter smiling down at her terror, drinking it in like a vampire sucks blood.

  That ferret-faced fuck was one sick bastard.

  But not for much longer.

  The moment he stopped taunting Bekah Franklin—that’s when I needed to worry. So far, she’d outwitted him, a professional killer, and that confirmed the kid was clever. I finally got why Erkennen had entrusted the Company’s future to her.

  Another alarm began to howl.

  “Soon this will be all over,” Richter said. “Let’s complete our business, you and I.”

  You said it, asshole. Be patient. And keep letting me know she’s still alive.

  I stood up and keyed the vator. Part of me—the male part, the dumb part, the lizard-brain part that doesn’t think about strategy—wanted him to hear it. Wanted him to see me coming for him over the security feed.

  I stepped aboard the lift and pushed the button for the ground level. The hydraulics whined as I descended the two stories. It felt like I was moving in slow motion.

  I pulled my stunner before the vator opened. No Richter. Part of me was disappointed. A few quick steps later and the War Room doors swept aside.

  “…a matter of time.” Richter’s words were sautéed with honey and vinegar both.

  “Well if it ain’t Mr. Big Mouth,” I said, overly loud. I leveled my artillery at him. First order of business—get attention off the kid.

  Richter whirled. “Fischer?”

  There was a body laid over a computer console. My heart did a two-step, then I realized from the hair color it wasn’t Bekah Franklin’s. My angle brought her into my eye line, and my ticker settled down.

  “Yeah,” I said, affecting nonchalance and walking into the room. “Your perfect killing machine made for the perfect kill. Mice everywhere: rejoice!”

  Richter’s anger drove him a step or two forward. Then he noticed the barrel
pointing his way. I pulled the trigger.

  Punk!

  Richter bounced back a step, then smiled. He was wearing MESH clothing like me. It’d deflected the stunner fire.

  “Stay right there,” I said, crouching to grab my .38.

  Richter ran.

  Aiming carefully takes time, and when the target’s running, sometimes you don’t have that much of it. I threw a couple of shots his way, but they ricocheted off the fancy walls. He’d moved quickly, expertly, then dived through the other door to the War Room. It closed after him.

  Bekah moved quickly to the comms panel.

  “Noa?” she said. Her voice sounded scared of itself. “Maya? Aisha? Daniel!”

  Not a single member of her team answered.

  “Hey kid,” I said, not knowing how to give her the bad news. When Bekah looked at me, it was like she knew what I was about to say. “I found Aisha upstairs. She was…”

  She closed her eyes tight. “What about the others? Have you seen anyone else—”

  “No, but … what are you doing?”

  Bekah hopped to another panel and called up a list of data records. “Their implants. We can at least see…” Then her words stopped. She’d pulled up three data sets. Two were flatlined. They were labeled Noa Comar and Maya Breides. “All of them? How can … no, Daniel! Daniel’s alive.”

  I hated to rush her. But I didn’t have time for nice.

  “Can you lock down the War Room? Keep Richter out if he doubles back?”

  Bekah stared at me, shock frozen on her face. She was still processing that most of her team was dead—murdered—and how close she’d come to their fate, I imagine.

  “Rebekah!”

  “Yes,” she whispered. Then, more aware: “Yes!”

  “Then do it.” She worked buttons on the console in front of the bloody corpse. The cybersecurity expert, Bohannon.

  “We have a bigger problem than him,” Bekah said. “Cassandra’s attacking Masada’s mainframe. She’s found the real prize, thanks to Richter.” She spat his name out, but outlining the threat was helping her mind to focus. “She’s already breached one of the seven security levels protecting the system.”