by Scott Sigler
Colding instantly came fully awake. “Define damaged.”
“Let me patch in Brady,” Gunther said. “Brady, Colding’s on, tell him what you see.”
Gunther’s face stayed on the screen, but Brady’s girlish voice came from the speakers. “Someone whacked the fuck out of the satellite array. The dish is fine, but the receiver-transmitter unit has been smashed up pretty bad. Looks like marks from an axe.”
An axe. There were twelve fire axes spread through the small facility’s interior. Whoever sabotaged the satellite dish had come from inside the building.
“Gunther,” Colding said, “activate all the apartment cameras and give me a head count, right now.”
“No problem, boss.” Gunther’s eyes looked away from the screen, back to another unseen monitor.
“Let’s see … Jian is awake and in the bioinformatics lab, typing away. Rhumkorrf is in his bed, looks asleep. Andy disconnected his room camera, but I can hear him snoring over the vid-phone. Hoel is buried in her blankets. Brady is at the dish, I’m here, you’re there, and … hey … Tim’s not in his room.”
Colding stood up. “Not in his room? Where is he? Do an infrared body count of the whole building.”
Gunther’s droopy eyes narrowed in concentration. “Um … infrared confirms all visuals. Everyone accounted for except for Brady and Tim. And I just checked the access and egress logs. No one has coded in or out for the past two hours.”
“But I just went out,” Brady said. “Walked right out the front.”
“Not showing up,” Gunther said. “Someone shut off the tracking. And it looks like the hallway cameras are fixed on a loop. I … I can’t tell how long it’s been since they’ve shown live video.”
Colding started pulling on his clothes. “Call up access to the admin log. Whose code turned off those systems?”
“Uh …” Colding heard Gunther’s fingers tapping away. “I’m looking.”
“Move it, Gun! You’re supposed to know how to do this shit!”
“I know, I know! Hold on … here it is. Access code was 6969.”
Tim’s code. But why? Why would Tim do such a thing after all this time? Why … unless …
“Brady,” Colding said, “I want Tim found. He’s sabotaging us.”
“Yes sir.”
“And keep your eyes open. He’s got that axe at least, if not other weapons.”
“Yes sir,” Brady said. “Should I take him out?”
“No, for fuck’s sake, don’t kill anybody,” Colding said, shocked at how quickly Brady considered lethal force against a friend. But Brady was thinking like a soldier. Colding needed to think like that as well. If Tim really had taken a payoff from another biotech company, or far worse, he was working with Longworth’s special threats biotech task force, there was no telling what the guy might do.
“Protect yourself,” Colding said. “But do whatever you can to avoid shooting him, okay?”
“Yes sir,” Brady said, his voice crawling up another pitch in the excitement.
“Gunther,” Colding said, “get Andy up and tell him to guard the rear airlock. If Tim’s outside, I don’t want him getting back in. And get the internal cameras working.”
“Fuck, man, I don’t know how to do that.”
“You told me you’d studied up on the system, goddamit!”
“I know, I know! My bad, but I can’t fix it now. You want me to go outside and search as well?”
Colding punched his leg in frustration. Gunther was too busy writing his fucking vampire romance novels to do the homework that was expected of him. Colding’s own fault, really, for taking Gunther’s word for it instead of riding shotgun. “Just stay in the control room and get it fixed.”
“Yes sir.” Gunther’s face disappeared from the screen.
Colding jammed his feet into his boots, then reached into his nightstand, pulled out his Beretta and popped out the magazine—full. He made sure the safety was on before he shrugged on his parka. He quietly opened his door and cautiously checked the hallway. Seeing no movement, he headed for the main airlock.
THE ADMIN SCREEN listed five errors.
BACKUP FAILURE
SATELLITE HARDWARE FAILURE
DOOR ACCESS TRACKING SYSTEM FAILURE
CAMERA SYSTEM FAILURE
HANGAR TEMPERATURE LEVEL DANGEROUSLY LOW
Jian’s fingers danced across the keyboard, calling up menu after menu, or trying to—most of them were blocked. Her access code had been erased. She had to move fast. Whoever was doing this wanted to wipe out the research. Something had taken out the satellite uplink, so she couldn’t even do an emergency data-dump to Genada headquarters in Manitoba. On top of that, the hacker had already erased the off-site backup drive. Erased it. The only remaining active data set was in the main drive, located right under her desk in the bioinformatics lab. Jian had caught the attack on that drive, intercepted it in midstream and countered it. If she had been sleeping they would have lost everything the God Machine had produced since Bobby Valentine brought the latest samples.
And that would have been disaster indeed … because it was finally working.
She split her focus between wiping out the last vestiges of the rampaging computer programs and watching the God Machine’s readout. She would handle the other problems as soon as she could. Fixing the cameras would be a snap, but she didn’t know what was causing the hangar temperature to drop. Someone had manually shut off the radiant heaters, but why?
The God Machine interrupted her thoughts with a cheerful chime that sounded horribly out of place considering the current situation. Jian looked at the upper-middle-left screen, the one that showed the new announcement.
GENOMES A17 SEQUENCING: COMPLETE
PROOFREADING ALGORITHM: COMPLETE
VIABILITY PROBABILITY: 95.0567%
Ninety-five percent. She had done it. Whatever it took, she had to protect this data set.
HE HUNG IN that space between conscious and unconscious. Bits and pieces came back … a sound, his name, the shitty taste in his mouth. Andy Crosthwaite just wanted to stay asleep.
But that rotten cocksucker Gunther would just not shut the fuck up.
“Andy, come on, wake up!”
The only light in the room came from the vid-phone, which was damn near blinding to Andy’s squinting, sleepy eyes. The phone’s screen showed that dickhead Gunther looking like he needed a bathroom pit stop pronto before he dropped the Hershey squirts in his pants.
“Gun, don’t you have a fag novel to write, or something?”
“Andy, I’m not kidding, get your ass up now.”
“Fuck off.”
“Get up! Tim’s sabotaging the place, you need to guard the back door!”
Andy reached out and put the vid-phone facedown. Then he put his spare pillow on top of it. It didn’t drown Gunther out completely, but Andy was a very sound sleeper and it would be enough.
“ANDY, YOU SHITHEAD, wake up!”
The feed from Andy’s vid-phone had gone black. Gunther started to scream again, louder this time, when motion on another monitor caught his eye.
The hangar.
“Brady! Brady, come in!”
“Easy, Gun! This headset is inside my ear, okay?”
“Right, sorry.” Gunther continued in a calm voice. “Infrared shows the cows in their stalls in the hangar, but there is a person moving by the vehicles.”
“Just one? You’re sure?”
Gunther looked again. The black-and-white monitor showed heat in white, cooler colors in gray shading to black. Aside from the cows and the mystery heat source, he saw only Brady, moving from the satellite dish toward the hangar’s front door. “Confirmed, just one target. Gotta be Tim.”
“Can you see what he’s doing? Where is he?”
“Looks like he’s in front of the Humvee. No, he’s moving to the back of the hangar. He’s going for the cattle! Move!”
Colding’s voice sounded on the same channel. “Brady,
slow down. I’m on my way outside.”
Gunther saw Brady’s heat signal close on the hangar’s front door.
“Gotta take him now,” Brady said as he closed the last ten feet. “Can’t let Tim kill the cows.”
“No,” Colding said. “Brady, just wait!”
On the black-and-gray monitor’s picture, Gunther saw Tim’s white heat signature sprint away from the hangar’s back door. The signature stopped for just a second, then Gunther saw a tiny flicker of white moving back toward the hangar. Very small, not human-sized at all, and moving fast.
“Brady, be careful, I’ve got another heat source …”
BRADY BARELY HEARD Gunther’s words as he put his big shoulder into the hangar’s front door, slamming it open with a clang. He ran through, cut left, then knelt and leveled his Beretta in the direction of the Humvee and the fuel truck, the best spots for cover if there was a second enemy soldier.
But it wasn’t his eyes that detected danger.
It was his nose.
What he smelled in that last second of his life told him he had made a really, really bad mistake. The thick, rotten-egg scent of natural gas. In a fraction of a second, his eyes flicked to the radiant heater inside the door, to the shattered plastic gas pipe leading into it. Hacked open, he realized, with a fire axe.
Brady didn’t have time to see that all sixteen ground-level heaters had suffered identical damage. For thirty minutes, sixteen cracked one-inch PVC pipes had poured gas into the hangar’s closed environment, where it floated up to the ceiling, gathering in an invisible cloud.
A gasoline-soaked rope made a simple fuse. The saboteur had left one end inside the back door, then trailed the rope fifty feet outside. One flick of a lighter had done the rest. Just two seconds after Brady Giovanni’s muscled mass slammed through the front door, the rope’s flame danced into the hangar and kissed the gathered cloud of gas.
The fireball started at the back of the hangar and grew exponentially, lashing out at a pressure of twenty pounds per square inch, the equivalent of a gust of wind traveling at 470 miles per hour. The shock wave smashed into Brady, throwing the big man back. Had he gone through the door he might have lived, but he hit the hangar’s inside wall and was knocked cold. He didn’t feel the three-thousand-degree Fahrenheit fireball engulf him, didn’t see his clothes burst into flame, didn’t sense his skin bubble.
The cows fared no better. The shock wave knocked them about like little dogs, not the fifteen-hundred-pound creatures they were. Cows tumbled, burned and smashed into stalls. Some hit the hangar walls with a gong audible even over the explosion.
The hangar’s huge roof seemed to lift up, balanced on a growing cloud of flame, then crash down, smashing the Humvee and the fuel truck, punching through the truck’s tank and exposing aviation fuel to the still-roiling fireball. Dark orange flames shot up from the destroyed hangar, scorching metal and melting plastic.
BEFORE ANDY’S MOTHER had abandoned him to try her hand at whoring for Alberta loggers, she had always said he could sleep through a herd of buffalo stampeding through his room. That was before the military. While there were many things he could sleep through, such as Gunther’s annoying voice on the vid-phone, a ground-shaking explosion was not one of them. If Andy knew one thing in this world, it was how to wake up fast to avoid getting killed.
He was off the bed, crouched on the ground, Beretta in his hand before he even processed what he’d heard. Gunther had tried to get him up.
“Oops,” Andy said.
He started scrambling into his clothes.
IN ERIKA HOEL’S bed, Tim Feely rolled over, the covers falling away from his face. Who was making all that damn noise? And he was hot. Someone had tucked the covers all up over his head. Damn, the room still spun like crazy. One thing about those Dutch women, they sure could drink. Drink, and fuck like nobody’s business. He often wondered what Erika Hoel had been like in her twenties, and he often reminded himself he probably didn’t want to know—the woman was forty-five, and he barely lived through their lovemaking sessions.
He reached out for Erika only to find her side of the bed empty. She was probably taking a leak. The room spun again, and Tim Feely dropped back into a deep sleep.
WHAT AN EXPLOSION, what a rush. Erika Hoel couldn’t believe how well her plan had worked. Simpletons. And the back door wasn’t guarded. In her projected timeline, she’d figured Andy would be there by now. She checked her watch, and waited. Another few seconds before the final hacking program kicked in. When it did, she could slip back inside, make sure the bioinformatics lab’s petabyte drive was erased, then crawl into bed with Tim and just play stupid. If she ran into Colding along the way, she’d just say she was trying to get away from Tim, who’d suddenly started making threats and acting crazy. The ruse wouldn’t last long, of course, but Fischer and his gorillas would be here soon. When Fischer arrived, Erika would be safe—then she could rub it in Claus’s face and her former lover would know that she had destroyed all of his work.
She stared at her watch and counted down the seconds.
GUNTHER JONES GAVE up trying to reach Brady. The man wasn’t going to answer. The hangar fire made the exterior infrared cameras useless. The hallway monitors were still looping, but he had good coverage in all the rooms, and the normal exterior cameras worked fine.
At that moment, all of his monitors simultaneously filled with static. His computer terminal beeped a pointless alarm:
CAMERA SYSTEM FAILURE
“No fucking shit,” Gunther said as he reached under the counter for the system manuals.
ERIKA POSITIONED THE axe under one arm and looked at her watch. Her program would have just launched and shut down the cameras. She had to go. Now or never. She peeked in the rear airlock’s small window—no one there. She punched 6969 into the keypad, then walked inside and shut the door behind her. The airlock pressure cycle took only five seconds, but it felt like five minutes—Gunther, Andy, Brady or Colding could be anywhere inside, or even following her from the outside. And they had guns.
The five-second cycle finished, the interior airlock door beeped and opened. Erika ran silently into the facility and headed for the bioinformatics lab. If her program had worked, it was over. If Jian had countered it, Erika would have to destroy the petabyte drive by hand.
COLDING OPENED THE front airlock to see flames billowing up from the shattered hangar. Thick smoke twisted in the night wind, blocking out the stars. Even fifty yards away, the heat was damn near blistering. He crouched behind a boulder off to the left, both to take cover in case Tim was out there and to shield himself from the fire’s radiating rage.
He still couldn’t quite grasp the fact that Tim had waited for two years, worked away on the project, really contributed to it, pushed for its success, only to suddenly do this. Colding had thought he knew the man.
“Gunther, where the fuck is Tim?” His earpiece let out a burst of static, followed by Gunther’s voice.
“All the cameras are out. I can’t see a thing. And Brady was in the hangar when that thing went off.”
Shit. “Brady, come in,” Colding said.
No one responded.
“Brady, if you can hear this, tap your earpiece twice. Anything to let us know you’re there.”
Colding waited for three slow breaths, but still no response. If Brady had entered the hangar, he was already dead.
And that made Tim Feely a murderer.
Colding had to protect the scientists. That meant neutralizing Tim first, searching for Brady second. A fucked-up prioritization, because if Brady was bleeding out somewhere, unable to respond, delaying a search might cause his death. But Brady Giovanni was paid to put his life at risk if need be—Rhumkorrf, Jian and Erika were not.
Colding scanned the area as calmly and as patiently as he could. He saw nothing.
The front airlock door opened. Colding turned, instantly leveling his Beretta, ready to fire at Tim if the man made one wrong move. Only he wasn’
t pointing his gun at Tim … he was pointing it at Andy Crosthwaite.
Andy Crosthwaite, who was supposed to be guarding the back door.
“Motherfucker,” Colding said to himself as he took his aim off Andy and once again knelt behind the boulder.
Andy ran in a half-crouch, reached the boulder and knelt at Colding’s left. The smaller man swept his vision from straight out to his left, automatically counting on Colding to sweep from straight out to the right. Andy wasn’t panicking; he was calm and patient, doing everything right … except, of course, staying by the back door that he’d been ordered to guard.
“Andy, you keep your ass right here,” Colding said. “I’m going inside to round up the staff, and I’ll bring them back to the front airlock where you watch them. You don’t move until I call you. Do you understand?”
“Back off, dick-face,” Andy said. “I know what the fuck I’m doing.”
A rage grew inside Colding, but there was a time and place for every battle. “Just stay here,” Colding said, then scooted to the front airlock and slipped inside. Unless Gunther fixed the cameras, he’d have to check each room one by one.
ERIKA SLIPPED SILENTLY into the bioinformatics lab and saw the one thing she did not want to see—Liu Jian Dan, sitting at her multi-screened computer station, fat fingers click-clacking away.
Jian turned in her chair, heavy black hair falling over her face like a mask. Erika’s eyes automatically flicked to the upper-row monitor above Jian’s head.
GENOME A17 SEQUENCING: COMPLETE
PROOFREADING ALGORITHM: COMPLETE
VIABILITY PROBABILITY: 95.0567%
“You did it,” Erika said. “I don’t believe it.”
“You …” Jian’s voice was a chilling whisper. “You put that down.”
Erika looked at her hands. She’d forgotten she was holding the fire axe. So close to pulling it off and getting back to her room undetected. But now Jian had seen her. Erika’s word against Tim’s was one thing, but Colding would automatically believe anything Jian said.