by Rick Partlow
Men and women dressed in some sort of clean-room or Haz-Mat suits were processing out of some sort of airlock, their helmets held under their arms or hanging from their hands as they exited, heading for another short set of steps leading to a more naturally lit set of rooms with walls made of cheap aluminum. No buildfoam down here, I noted; you couldn’t safely spray it this far underground without automated construction equipment, and they’d have to rent that, which would leave a paper trail. I saw the door to one of the other rooms open and a couple of people walked out, dressed in normal civilian clothes, heading down another set of stairs that led deeper down to another level.
Who the hell were these guys? Why would the Cult let outsiders down here?
I needed to get a look inside that clean room, but it was impossible from this angle…and there were guards on the stairs, armed Acolytes like the one I’d overpowered near the elevator. I regarded them for a second from behind the cover of the exoskeleton, then made a decision. I left the hand-truck behind, figuring it had served its usefulness, and held my appropriated carbine at low port, walking towards the stairs like I owned the place.
I didn’t look sideways at the guards, just strode on down the stairs with a purpose, and they didn’t say a word to me. I felt a surge of hope; maybe this would work, after all. I headed straight for the clean room, brushing past the airlock like I was heading to one of the other offices up the stairs from it, but slowed as I passed by the windows.
And there it was. The Predecessor corpse was laid out on some sort of examination table, stripped of the odd clothing it had worn the last time I’d seen it and lying under half-rings of sensors that ran in and out of the base of the table. A woman in a sealed Haz-Mat suit was adjusting something on one of the sensor rings, while a man was doing something to a clear transplas tube that reminded me of an auto-doc, except surrounded by equipment and biotic fluid tanks that dwarfed any medical unit I’d ever seen.
Inside that tank, surrounded by fluid roiling with nanites, was a long, dark, humanoid figure with a deep chest and an odd bend to its arms and legs that looked an awful lot like the Predecessor corpse.
What the hell?
I had to get out of there. I had to get somewhere I could call the others and let them know what was going on. I turned away from the window, vaguely aware that someone was approaching from the direction of the office but figuring it was one of the technicians.
Something hard and moving fast slammed into the side of my head and I went down like my legs had been cut out from beneath me. Stars filled my vision and a ringing sounded in my ears and before I could move, something very heavy was stepping on the receiver of the pulse carbine, grinding it into my chest. My vision cleared just enough to see the crystalline lens on the muzzle of a laser weapon hovering over my forehead.
Behind it, a cheerful grin on his too-handsome face, was Alberto Calderon.
Chapter Twelve
“A wise man learns from his mistakes, Munroe.”
I wasn’t sure what was worse, the dull, throbbing pain in my head, the neural restraint web paralyzing me from the neck down, or the fact that I had to sit there motionless and listen to Calderon brag. I glanced around at the Acolytes guarding me, their pulse carbines held at low port with the muzzles trained on me, and reflected that I might have ignored one possibility for the worst part of all this: that I was likely going to die very soon.
The room where they’d detained me was small and windowless, with no more furniture than the chair in which I was restrained and another a meter away across from it, currently unoccupied. The walls were equally featureless and the single door was grey and metal and intimidating. We were downstairs from the lab where they were…what? Duplicating? Yeah, I guess they were duplicating the Predecessor. Why, I had no idea.
I figured I was probably going to die anyway, so I decided to mess with Calderon, because that was always fun.
“No, Albie,” I corrected him, trying not to wince as my own voice made my head hurt. “The quote is, ‘a smart man learns from his mistakes; a wise man learns from other people’s mistakes.’ And honestly, I’m not sure you’re that smart.”
I felt each one of his knuckles as they smashed across my left cheek, snapping my head around. More stars, more pain, sharper this time.
“My mistake,” Calderon went on, flexing his hand out as he paced around my chair, “was in underestimating you. And I won’t make that one again.”
“You’re already making it,” I said, shaking my head to clear it. “You haven’t killed me.”
“That’s coming,” he promised, leaning over to grin at me. Well, let him enjoy himself; I’d beaten the shit out of him a few times now, after all. “But first, I need to find out a few things.”
I saw out of the corner of my eye as he pulled the door open and waved at someone outside of it. There was a gentle squeaking of wheels on the bare, concrete floor and a cart was pushed in front of me, its frame supporting the familiar mechanism of a hypnoprobe. I very deliberately didn’t laugh.
“We’re going to need to know who you’ve shared information with, Munroe,” he said, pulling out the extendable eye cups and adjusting them for my height. “And exactly how long you’ve been conspiring with Patrice Damiani.”
“You should know how long,” I told him. “You’re the one that made her seem like the lesser of two evils when you kept badgering me to murder that DSI agent.”
“Oh come on!” He was skeptical, and with good reason: I was lying my ass off. But it was keeping him talking, and he’d paused from strapping me into the machine. “You don’t really expect me to believe you suddenly had a change of heart in the last few weeks!” He shook his head. “Your mother was somehow able to acquire security codes that overrode ours on Johnny, and to plan that would have taken months!”
I concealed a sigh of relief. At least he didn’t suspect that I was working with Murdock…yet.
“You know you’re not fooling me, Albie. We both know you’re only trying to find something that’ll placate Cowboy when he finds out you sold out to the Cultists.”
“You’re not half as smart as you think you are,” Calderon snapped with a sharp laugh. “You didn’t see the technicians working in that lab? Those aren’t Cultists and they’re not the dregs that the Cult could afford, either. Monsieur Damiani has been working with the Cult ever since Peboan.” He shrugged. “No one asked me where the Cult got the Predecessor artifact, and I didn’t volunteer the information, but at this point, it doesn’t really matter.”
He grabbed me by my hair and jerked my head back to let him work the chair’s strap around my forehead.
“What matters right now is where your little team of misfits is hiding. I know they’re not with your ship, because we’ve been watching it since about ten minutes after you landed…I wasn’t sure if you’d be stupid enough to come here, but you didn’t disappoint me.”
“You don’t need to worry about finding my team,” I ground out, jerking away from his hands as much as I could, glaring at him. “They’ll find you.”
He frowned at that, stepping away and regarding me carefully.
“They’re here now, aren’t they?” He snapped the question, as if angry he hadn’t thought of it already. “They’re outside the walls waiting for you.”
He turned and spun on his heel, slamming the door behind him.
Finally. I gritted my teeth, wished I could clench my fists. This was going to hurt.
All it took was a thought, a command to my headcomp relayed via my implant ‘link to the metal capsule embedded in my shoulder just below my scapula. I’d had it put there after Divya, our last evil piece of shit liaison from Cowboy, had disabled me with a neural restraint and nearly killed all of us. I might not be wise, but at least I was smart.
You know that sensation you get when your leg goes numb because you haven’t moved it in an hour and it’s so numb it hurts? And you know that sensation you get when you hit your funny bone really hard? W
ell, imagine one of those squared by the other and then times a thousand, and that’s exactly how my back and shoulders and head felt for the next fraction of a second.
I don’t know if I screamed; I doubt it, because I couldn’t even draw the breath for it. But once it was over, once that miniature EMP had fired off its focused charge, I could move again. And the last thing I’d done before setting it off was to dose myself with synthetic adrenalin and painkillers out of my pharmacy organ.
The two guards were moving in towards me, having seen me briefly convulse, and one was reaching out a meaty, thick-fingered hand to shake my shoulder. I yanked the restraints out of their moorings in the chair with a move that would likely hurt really bad in a few minutes, and grabbed the hand before it could reach me. Everything seemed to take on a surreal clarity and my perceptions trailed my actions by a fraction of a second, the combat programming in my headcomp taking control.
I twisted the hand and broke the wrist, yanking the pulse carbine off the guard’s shoulder before the pain had even registered in his eyes. The other one, who by looks could have been this one’s twin or his clone, tried to swing his weapon around, but it was already too late. I didn’t have to aim, I just shoved the carbine’s muzzle against the man’s chest, turned my head away, and jammed my finger down on the trigger pad. The armored vest might as well have been made from paper at this range, and he pitched backwards on a jet of superheated blood that sprayed all over me and the guy with the broken wrist.
He hadn’t been expecting it and the hot steam that scalded the back of my neck took him right in the eyes. He screamed, a high-pitched animal sound, and stumbled backwards. I used the butt of the carbine to smash him in the face. He went down, stumbling over my chair with a crash and I followed him, going to a knee and clubbing him in the side of the head until he stopped moving.
I stayed in that crouch, pulling the deactivated neural restraint web off my back and wiping blood from my face as I aimed the carbine at the door, expecting it to burst open any second as someone came to investigate the shots and the scream. When it didn’t, I cautiously moved to the side of it, and pulled the handle down, then inward. It scraped open and with it out of the way, I heard the faint, distant but unmistakable rumble of an explosion. The team apparently hadn’t waited for my signal, so I had to figure that they’d been spotted.
I risked a glance out the open door and saw people running, some up the stairs towards the lab, some for the elevator and some deeper into the installation. I wondered if they had any idea where they were going or what they running away from or toward. Only two of the Acolyte guards hadn’t moved, the ones stationed at the stairway between the lab and the elevator. They stood like statues, as if the chaos didn’t affect them, and I admired their dedication, right up till the point where I shot them both in the head.
One of them tumbled back over the railing and fell to the hard concrete with a wet, meaty smack; and the other just collapsed on the metal grating staircase, his blood leaking through it to the floor below. With them down, I rushed out of the room, my leather sandals slapping loudly on the floor and then making a hollow clunk as they banged against the steps of the staircase to the lab.
A pair of technicians were busy cycling out of the airlock, visible through its window and visibly upset; they’d probably been getting some sort of alarm calls over their ‘links because I didn’t hear any general klaxon sounding. They were generic looking males of indeterminate age, the marks of someone born with access to modern health care but without the means or perhaps the desire to make themselves look more distinctive.
I waited for them beside the window, eyeing the Predecessor corpse. I wasn’t sure if you needed a special code or pass to get into the lab and I didn’t want to take the time to try to crack it with my headcomp, particularly since my headcomp was still rebooting. The EMP had shut it down along with the neural restraints, and I had no idea how long it was going to take to start working again. When the outer lock opened, I grabbed one of the technicians by the collar of his Haz-Mat suit and shoved the muzzle of the laser carbine into the face of the other. Their upset frowns quickly turned to panicked whimpering.
“Shut up,” I ordered curtly. “Open both locks at once.”
“We can’t do that!” The one I was holding by the collar insisted, his brown eyes going wide. “It’ll contaminate the scans!”
“What would a fine spray of your brain matter do to the scans?” I asked him.
“I’ll open it,” the other guy offered, pointing at the control plate.
“If you fuck with me,” I warned him, “you’ll wind up like them.” I cocked my head towards the dead guards and the one whose collar I was holding put a hand over his mouth, making sounds like he was going to throw up.
The other one nodded vigorously and punched a code into the keypad, then hit three different setting adjustments and had to input another code. The outer door was already open from their exit, and with the final code, the inner one began to slide away with a shrill warning alarm and a hiss of escaping air as the pressures equalized. I nodded at the one who’d hit the controls.
“Now, go bring me the body.”
His eyes opened wider and he began to shake his head. I sighed, then cracked him lightly on the side of his head. He cried out, ducking down and cringing, cradling the pressure cut oozing blood above his ear.
“Bring. Me. The. Body.”
He whimpered almost unconsciously as he began to move into the lock.
“If you try to lock yourself inside,” I warned him, “I’ll make this asshole,” I jerked on the other technician’s suit collar, eliciting a grunt from the man, “open it again, and then I’ll kill you.”
I was being a dick, I knew, but it wasn’t like these guys were innocent civilians, either. They couldn’t be working here, on this, and not know there was something dirty going on.
He put his helmet back on before he went inside, perhaps out of habit or perhaps because he was afraid of catching some weird alien disease, I didn’t know which. I watched him carefully, keeping the laser trained on him just in case he tried something stupid, but he just shut down the scanner, then pushed the ribs of the machine upwards and grabbed the corpse around the waist, visibly straining as he pulled it off the table. He laid the thing out on the floor, then retrieved what seemed like a body bag out of a storage cabinet and pulled it open, laying it down beside the corpse.
I was getting antsy, trying to watch for Calderon or other Acolyte guards, but I didn’t rush him; I didn’t particular want to carry a naked alien. He rolled it into the plastic sheet, then sealed it around the thing before he grabbed a handle on the side and began dragging it toward the airlock. I pushed the other technician into the lab, then backed them both off with the muzzle of my carbine as I took hold of the handle and pulled the body out of the airlock. Once I was out, I hit the flashing control and the inner lock slid shut. They could probably get out, but it would slow them down a little.
I bent down and muscled the corpse onto my shoulder, grinding my teeth with the strain as I rose back up. The thing weighed at least a hundred and twenty kilos, maybe more, and I could feel my quadriceps quivering as I headed up the stairs with it. I wanted to keep the pulse carbine ready in one hand, but I needed both to steady the body and there was no getting around that. Fortunately, whatever silent alarm the Cult had sent out had cleared the path for me from the lab to the elevator, so the lift station was clear when I arrived and hit the call button.
I leaned the corpse against the wall and waited, hoping they hadn’t shut the lift car down, because my headcomp wasn’t even close to being up yet and I couldn’t crack the system without it. I could sense it now, just a presence behind my eyes, not active yet or linked with my thoughts the way it had been, but at least there, like a blinking cursor on a display waiting for input. It kept drawing my attention to it, the way a piece of food stuck in your tooth drew your tongue over and over to work at it, until my mind was as sore as
the tongue got.
Less than half a minute after I hit the call control, the doors slid aside and the empty car greeted the muzzle of my pulse carbine. I let out the breath I’d been holding and dragged the body bag inside. The ride up seemed interminably long, like I was going to step out and find everything already over, the others dead; but when the doors opened again, I heard the explosions and the gunfire and knew I hadn’t missed the fight.
“I’m out,” I transmitted, hoping my implant ‘link hadn’t taken as long to recover from the pulse as my headcomp. “I’ve got it.”
There was a burst of static, sounding sweeter than anything I’d heard in a while, and then Bobbi’s voice.
“Get into the main courtyard,” she said. “We’ll pick you up.”
I pulled the body bag out of the car with one hand, sweeping the laser carbine back and forth with the other, watching for any threats. Another “crump” of an explosion shook the steel walls, shaking loose a cloud of dust that wafted down from the ceiling, but nothing moved in the warehouse. I shouldered the body again and it felt even heavier this time, but somehow, I managed to keep one hand on the grip of my weapon as I staggered along with it.
Outside, things were utter chaos. Dedicants were running from one perceived shelter to another, sometimes with mentors in tow, shepherding them along, and sometimes chasing after the mentors who were running even faster. The looks on their faces were of sheer terror that almost made me feel guilty. Dirty white robes flapped everywhere and smoke was rising from a dozen different fires that were spreading over the thatch huts. I didn’t see anyone hurt yet, but that’s because Victor was aiming for the rooftops. He, Kurt and Vilberg were driving a rented cargo truck outside the walls, peppering the place with fire from their grenade launchers, at least if they’d stuck with the original plan.