“Just protecting my property,” Asa Stone said. “The brainwaves should work just fine right through the glass. That’s all we need her to do. Then she disappears. Happy now? She’s real and she’s here. Just like I promised.”
Rage made Mark’s combat program surge. He almost smashed the instrument panel. “I’m on my way. With my security.”
Mark waited, teeth grinding, as Brenner mechanically relayed the message.
“Two for you and two for me, as we agreed,” Stone said. “If he stays here to monitor her, you come in with one more.”
Caroline was disappearing from Mark’s field of vision as Brenner followed Stone with his eyes. “Turn so I can see the girl!” he snarled into the comm. “Don’t look away from her for one single fucking second until I’m in the room with her!”
Brenner spun obediently back to face Caroline again, and Mark feasted his eyes on her. He was burning with eagerness to see her, smell her. Touch her.
Maybe he shouldn’t have brought the safe. He had every intention of taking Caroline back for himself, but shit happened. It would be better to get the safe opened and take possession of its contents now. They could discuss who got to fuck the girl after the other issue was settled. He was a practical man, not a slave to his impulses.
Three clueless unmods and a helpless girl against himself, five slave soldiers, and a truck full of space-age killing toys that he could not wait to play with. Yeah.
Finally, this was starting to be fun.
* * *
“Hey. Spotted three surveillance drones circling up there.” It was Hannah’s voice in his earpiece. “Flying low, probably armed. Do I block the frequencies now?”
“No,” Noah said. “Let him get closer. I’ll signal when it’s time.”
Noah peered through the screen of his thermal shield helmet. He hated having to look through mechanical eyes, particularly in a combat situation, but the drones were sure to have good imaging tech, and their team had to stay hidden.
Mark’s truck sped closer. Two distinct heat signatures were visible in the cab.
“No one in the woods?” Hannah asked.
“Haven’t seen anyone yet,” Noah said. “Doesn’t mean they’re not there.”
“My brother, the optimist,” Hannah murmured.
“You’re ready to pull Caro out the second I tell you?”
Hannah made an exasperated sound. “As promised. Relax.”
Right. Sure. He watched as Mark’s truck rumbled past the marker.
“Now,” he said. “Jam all frequencies except for this one.”
“Done,” Hannah said, with satisfaction.
He recognized Mark as he got out of the truck. Tall, dirty blond hair, hawk nose, ice blue eyes. Dead heart.
Mark stood, arms folded, while some musclebound dude in a helmet and body armor hoisted a huge silver box out of the back of the vehicle. The GodsEye safe. Asa came out, as he had done before, and exchanged words Noah could not hear.
The three men went inside. Their heat signatures were soon lost to sight.
Noah risked lifting the faceplate on the shield, and peered bare-eyed at Zade and Sisko’s positions. “He’s in,” he said into the comm. “Get into position.” He scanned one last time for heat or energy sigs—
And saw a ripple of movement in the leaves. Not wind. He searched again. Close to Zade, too close. There. Animal?
No. The fucking tree wasn’t swaying back and forth, it was moving forward. Zade couldn’t hear it because of the protective headphones he’d wired into his helmet to block his stun and kill codes. Shit.
“Zade! Behind you!” he shouted into the comm, as the attacker sprang.
Zade spun around and went down in a flurry of thrashing foliage.
“Hannah!” he shouted. “We’re under attack! Get Caro out! Now!”
Trees bent and branches cracked. Zade was still fighting. Which meant that the attacker hadn’t used the code. And Zade could fight like a demon straight out of hell.
Noah sprinted toward Caro.
* * *
Caro shivered. That beam of bright, blood-tinged light made her feel like a witch doll on display in a glass case. But she was still alive, and Noah’s final, searing kiss still tingled and burned on her lips.
Asa had left. So strange, to just stand there and wait, offering herself up. She stared down at the man Mark had sent to monitor her. Big and strong, weapons slung all over him, but his eyes looked dull. Lost.
Familiar, too. She studied his face as recognition dawned. The TV interview she’d seen online. This was Brenner Jameson, father of two-year-old Callie.
The door into the box behind her crashed open. Hannah beckoned. “Come on!”
She whipped her head around. “What happened?”
“We’re under attack!” Hannah grabbed her hand. “Noah said to pull you now!”
Caro sprinted after her, and even so Hannah practically yanked her arm from its socket, dragging her faster. Hannah dragged a camo tarp off a massive motorcycle, and straddled it, revving the engine. “Get on!”
Caro obeyed, clutching Hannah’s body as the bike took off, banging and thudding over the rough terrain.
A flickering shadow, and the sky fell. The ground swung up and smacked her hard, knocking her breathless.
When she focused again, she saw a woman in dark camo shoving a hypodermic needle into Hannah’s throat.
Caro lunged to stop her. The woman held her back with startling ease, barely reacting to Caro’s frantic clawing. She was supernaturally strong. A modified supersoldier.
Useless to struggle, but Caro couldn’t stop. The woman jerked her around and slammed her to the ground, fastening her arms behind her with zip ties.
The she-beast dragged her backwards toward the house by her arms, wrenching brutally hard. Caro scrambled to keep her feet beneath herself.
Noah burst out of the trees. His visor was up, showing the glowing amber of his eyes. That split second that their eyes met pierced through her panic, and touched her depths. She knew he’d do anything to save her. Sacrifice anything. Everything.
She felt it, with a wild, screaming intensity. Everything that they were about to lose. How beautiful it was, how precious. How fragile.
He raised his gun, and took aim.
Caro lurched to the side as the gunshot sounded. The woman who held her jerked sharply, but didn’t release her grip. She kept moving. Noah slowed to aim again—and two flashing silver things swooped into her vision, hovering.
Noah swung his gun up and shot one of them right out of the sky. Small, shining pieces flew—
Suddenly, Noah stopped, staggered . . . and then collapsed.
Caro screamed, twisting in the woman’s hard grip. She could just barely see another man running toward the spot where Noah had fallen before she was dragged around the corner of the house. Noah was lost to sight.
She went wild, screaming, flailing. Something hit her head. Darkness. Excruciating pain.
She came to on a floor somewhere . . . and she wished she hadn’t.
Asa lay on his belly near her on a bloodsmeared floor. The cords in his neck strained as he lifted his head. His hands were cuffed behind him, and the slave soldier she’d identified as Brenner sat on top of him.
Both of Asa’s security men lay still and silent. One lay just a few feet from them, a dart piercing his chest. Another one lay close to the entrance.
Another man, maybe Mark’s, was sprawled on the ground, a bullet hole between his eyes. Brain tissue was spread out on the floor behind his head in a splattered pinkish fan.
Asa’s eyes met hers asking a silent question. She replied with a tiny shake of her head, still half deaf from the blow to her head.
His lips pulled back from his teeth in a hiss of dismay. No help on the way.
The toe of a heavy black boot nudged her face, forcing her to look up.
Mark’s unshielded eyes had an eerie glow, like arctic ice.
He grinned. His teet
h seemed unnaturally white and sharp.
“Caroline,” he said. “Finally.”
Chapter 33
Noah heard sounds in the vast emptiness. Faraway, tinny. He latched onto the faint stimulus, using it to drag himself up. Toward consciousness.
Closer. His battlefield processor assessed his condition while random images and thoughts pinged wildly around like an insane pinball machine.
Caro, Hannah, Zade, Asa, Sisko. Counting on you. Wake . . . the fuck . . . up!
Couldn’t do it. Sedated. Massive dose.
He forced his brain to rev up, enduring the pain. Neuron by neuron. Hurt like a bastard. He kept his eyes closed, hoping nobody was measuring his brain waves, or looking at his sig.
His own fault, thinking he could outwit Mark. The guy had more than a decade of evil deeds on him. Dickbrain stupid to assume that Mark had only unmods to back him up. He’d dug up some slave soldiers even without Lydia’s safe.
He tried to move a little, willing whoever was watching not to notice. His hand tried to obey. Nothing. Like shoving a truckload of bricks.
Noah felt himself hoisted, then dragged. His legs trailed behind him, limp and helpless, scraping over rocks, dirt, dead branches. Caro. Hannah.
Hannah, lying still on the ground. Caro, dragged away screaming. No. Stop.
He pushed the terrifying images away, reminding himself of what he had to do.
Remember how to fucking move.
The slave soldier heaved Noah into the back of the truck and started to pull Noah’s body armor and weapons off. All of it, right down to the briefs.
OK. Robots had their reasons.
He was hoisted into a black case lined with metal, chilly against his bare skin. They used cases like that at Midlands. Designed for the transport of modified humans. The flat, dead-eyed face of the slave soldier gazed down at him without curiosity.
The heavy lid thudded shut, swallowing him and the light.
But darkness was relative for him. He could still see with his infrared. He used his combat program to reassess his physical condition. He was metabolizing the drug quickly, but not fast enough.
Thinking of Caro and Hannah in Mark’s grip made his numbed body twitch. That was a start. Anything to change the cards on the table.
He closed his eyes. Seized onto his last analog, imbed and all. Volcanic crater with his father’s murder festering inside it? Bring that shit on. Very intense, very toxic.
The details appeared one by one: The hot fissure, the steam, the smells.
But it had changed. The fissure was larger now. Tracks led out of it, like an old-time mine. Battered ore carts waited to be filled.
He packed the carts with every memory he could think of that carried a punishing, gland-jolting kick, transforming each one into a visual analog. Dynamite, Semtex, C-4. There were plenty. Hannah, head shaved, skull drilled and sawed open for experimental surgery. His friends, suffering and afraid. Rebellion Day filled two carts. Leon bleeding out, eyes open to the sky. Kane on the ground in a pool of blood, a bullet lodged in his leg. Devon screaming as Noah cut a geotagged tracer out of her back.
Mom, gone without a note or a word. That was a ton of ANFO blasting agent, right there.
Caro tied to that bed, blood trickling down her naked chest, was his detonator.
By now the whole mental mountain rumbled in anticipation of what was coming.
Might kill him. Who gave a fuck. Living could be worse. Depending on how things went.
The loaded carts began to move down the tracks, picking up speed and momentum. He followed along, right into the hot red glow of the ominous fissure as the tracks curved . . . and then led straight into the glowing yellow light of his imbed.
Noah heaved the train forward, sending the loaded carts rattling straight into that image of the strip mall parking lot, where the grizzled man loomed over Noah’s father’s corpse with his bloody baseball bat. He squeezed the detonator.
He must have had a seizure. He came to with his feet drumming the inside of the carrying case. Warping it, then breaking it open.
A blaze of light assaulted his eyes. He leaped out with a shout, and stood, fists clenched, ready to do battle.
The slave soldier was gone. His body armor, clothing, guns and knives were gone. The truck was full of crates. He wrenched one open. Stared blankly at the contents. Weaponry, but he had no clue how that crazy shit worked and no time to figure it out. Back to basics.
The space-age cyborg freak had devolved into a howling cave man armed with sticks and stones.
* * *
Mark gestured at the grisly corpse with the hole in his forehead that lay behind him. “That’s thirty million dollars, lying right there,” he said. “Too bad your fuckboy has such good aim.”
Caro was mute. She just kept seeing Noah, shot with that dart. Endlessly falling to the ground, over and over.
“Open the safe,” Mark said. “Then we’ll have a talk about the money and trouble you’ve cost me, and what’s to be done with the fuckboy. Where did you find him? And how did you pay him? Never mind. Stupid question. Obvious answer.”
Asa lay pinned beneath one of the slave soldiers, who held a gun to his head. Blood oozed from a gunshot wound in his upper arm, but his clear gray gaze never wavered, even when Mark sauntered over and kicked him viciously in the back.
Asa huffed out air, but made no other sound.
“I’ll open the safe,” she burst out. “Just don’t hurt him.”
“But I want to,” Mark said. “He’s going to die. Today. Though how loud he screams and how long it takes will be up to you.”
He seized a battered old chair that lay on the floor, and placed it in front of the safe, positioning both in the ruddy shaft of sunlight.
“Lights. Camera. Action. Ready for your closeup?” He indicated the chair. “Sit.”
Caro dragged herself up to her feet, fighting for balance with her hands fastened behind her. Her footsteps sounded eerily loud in the echoing room. The rickety chair wobbled as she sat.
Mark opened the aluminum carrying case and looked at the GodsEye helmet, cradled in its nest of molded foam. “Proud of yourself? Inconveniencing me like this is a real accomplishment.”
For a moment, Caro searched her mind for something to say that might influence him one way or the other. The urge drained away into nothing.
No point. He meant to hurt them. His hint that she could change the outcome was just another kind of psychological torture. No reason on earth to play along.
She shook her head. “I just wanted to live,” she said.
He slid his fingers into her hair, digging in deep. “I wouldn’t have hurt you. Not if you’d been a good girl, and did as you were told.”
“You killed Dex Boyd,” she said. “I saw you do it.”
His fingers twisted in her hair, tightening until she gasped with pain. “Yes, but that was your choice,” he said. “If you’d agreed to open that safe when I asked you to, I wouldn’t have been forced to kill Boyd. Or Tim Wheaton. Those deaths are on you.”
“No,” she said. “No, they are not on me.”
“Are you arguing with me, Caroline?” Mark’s voice was poisonously soft.
Huh. Dead end question if she ever heard one. “Can we just get on with it?”
He shoved her chin up, and poked at the scabbed wounds she’d gotten from Metalmouth’s knife. “So Carrerra tickled you before Stone showed up? I didn’t authorize him to do that. I would have punished him, but Fuckboy here beat me to it.”
The door opened, and the female slave soldier entered, maneuvering herself through the door with Hannah’s limp body loaded on her shoulder.
She walked over to them, and let Hannah slide to the floor in a crumpled heap.
Asa jerked his head around to look, dislodging the slave soldier. The guy whacked him with the gun butt. Once again, Asa made no sound.
Mark used his foot to turn Hannah’s limp body onto her back, studying her before he turne
d back to Caro.
“Midlanders,” he said, in a tone of discovery. “I’ll be damned. How the hell did they find you?” He stared down at Asa. “And you. Noah’s brother? I thought you looked familiar.” He laughed. “Bonus! When she wakes up, it’ll be playtime!” His laughter cut off suddenly, as if he’d flicked a switch. “But first, the safe.”
He placed the helmet on Caro’s head, positioning the sensors over her forehead and temples, and stroked her hair tenderly off her cheek. “It’s decorative, on you,” he said. “An empress with her crown. A high priestess with her headdress. Beautiful.”
She recoiled from his caressing touch. “Stop it.”
Mark’s hot blue AVP gaze looked right through her, but the effect was the exact opposite of when Noah did it. It reduced her, made her feel shivering and small. She wondered if he were reading her sig, like Noah did.
He had to be. He had the same mods. She had to keep her thoughts and plans small and emotionless, floating on the outskirts of her mind. Nothing happening in there but fear. Fear blanked out everything.
No need to fake it.
She felt the tickling hum in her ears as the helmet was activated. Mark loomed over her, hungrily. “Step back,” she told him. “I can concentrate better if you do.”
Mark chuckled. “Nothing doing, bitch. Make an effort.”
It felt strange, to work with the GodsEye interface after eight long months. She struggled to compose her mind to the necessary initial stillness, and closed her eyes, trying to reduce sensory input. The blazing red light, the rancid smell of Mark’s sweat. Her own rapid breathing and quick, thudding heartbeat.
“Zero the mechanism for me, please,” she said quietly. “Green button on the bottom of the control rod.”
“It’s zeroed.” Mark sounded peeved. “It’s ready for the sequence. Do it.” His voice vibrated with anticipation.
Caro pulled Lydia’s training sequence out of her memory. Ten years of intensive practice had made her an expert in manipulating the Inner Vision software. She could control the shape of her brainwaves with more sureness and accuracy than anyone alive. She also knew how to exceed program parameters, trip the security, and blow up the safe, completely incinerating the contents.
Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1) Page 35