by John Mierau
“This is war!” Doctor Mentel told Willard. “I needed to get back to my wielder proto—”
Bowen’s fist crunched into Mentel’s nose. The woman landed on her ass, eyes unfocused. She slurred a few words, heard they made no sense, and shook her head. She glared up at Bowen. “You can’t hit me! I’m our only hope against the Takers! I—”
“My brother stopped breathing for four minutes the first time they strapped him in a mech,” Bowen said, his voice unsteady.
Willard reached down and hauled her to the feet by the back of her hooded sweater.
She gurgled and choked, and her eyes conveyed to Willard honest, animal panic. Only the second honest emotion he’d seen since they’d met.
If she was starting to fear them half as much as she feared what she’d left at the end of this corridor, that was fine with Willard.
“I know why they stuck you with that team,” Willard snarled. “Only human beings should make life or death decisions for other human beings.”
Mentel offered no answer. All three stayed silent until they cleared the next pressure door.
“The Taker studies were simply fascinating!” Mentel’s feet lost their rhythm, as if she were having trouble talking and walking at the same time. She picked right back up though, and her words grew passionate. “The sensor data from the last convoy reveals an incredibly simple and incredibly evolved life form, all at once.”
“That’s enough.” Willard turned and physically blocked Doctor Mentel from continuing forward, unwilling to listen to her praise the creatures giving his entire species nightmares. He was exhausted from dealing with the brilliant, arrogant nut job, and the last pressure door in the spoke was close enough to literally read the writing on the wall. “We asked you what happened behind that door. First you say the crew’s all dead, then you say someone up here wants you dead.”
“Talk,” Bowen grunted, his thumbs tucked under the black webbing of his combat rifle’s shoulder harness. “Or we toss you through that door alone and head back to our tender.”
Willard matched Bowen’s scowl, but inside he hoped Mentel wouldn’t dig her heels in. He didn’t want to have to talk Bowen down, but if this was the brain behind interface implants and functional grav-drives, she really was their secret weapon against the Takers.
No way he could cut the crazy bitch loose and walk away.
Mentel did her hair-touching routine, then folded her arms across her chest. “What if, flying your tender back to your base ship, you experienced a psychotic break and decided to ram it instead of docking. You could do that, easily. Thanks to me, humans can now navigate via implant faster than traffic control computers could lock you out. How many would die? Hundreds? Thousands? That’s why Fleet wants an override.”
Willard grimaced. The whole ship could go up, if I targeted Cloke’s reactor.
“The prevailing theory is that the Takers hopped to Earth, colony by colony. Who knows if the Takers left anyone alive on Drayton, Ostrov, or any other settlement. Or on Earth, for that matter” Mentel shrugged. “The last convoy didn’t just send back data on the Takers, they gave us our chance to stop the Takers before they get to Reach. If we kill ourselves before we reach Intercept, we could be killing the human race. So we built an override.”
“Skin still beats silicon in combat, so you built an interface that lets us fight as fast as we think.” Bowen shook his head. “Now you want to build an override to slow us down, just in case some of us don’t think how Fleet thinks. How Earthers think, I mean.”
Mentel smiled smugly. Bowen grew furious.
This wasn’t happening, Willard told himself. The ten-member Fleet council was comprised of three Earthers, three Draytons, three Reachers, and one Ostrovian: Fleet Admiral Daku. There was no way this was happening.
Willard closed his eyes. Deal with this later. First, find the crew and get off this ship.“Just tell us what we’re walking into.”
Mentel chewed her lip. The smug look bled into petulance. “You’ll be happy to know Fleet Council killed the Override Project.”
The air in the spoke was cooling as they approached the outer wheel. Willard told himself that was the reason for his goosebumps. “But?” he asked.
Petulance flipped back to smug. “I never let a project go, once I start. I don’t take orders, I make miracles.”
“You built it anyway,” Willard snarled.
“Guilty,” Mentel chirped. “Almost done, too. Nothing so primitive as brainwashing or threat-chain obedience, either. What I built could actually change people’s minds.” The incorrigible grin faded. “For a few hours, at best. Then the brain rewires itself back to normal.”
“Go brains,” Bowen said.
Willard snapped his fingers in Mentel’s face. She turned, surprised and silenced. “What’s behind door number three, Doctor?”
Her head cocked to the side, bird-like again. “One of the override test subjects, of course.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Willard triggered the door and backed up as it hissed and trundled up from the deck. He knelt across from Bowen, raising his assault weapon.
Mentel leaned one shoulder against the wall, a resigned expression on her face.
The far wall was thirty to forty metres distant. No windows. Lighting tracks along the floor and walls. Two light rail tracks were embedded in the floor, one close to the spoke pressure door and the other close to the far wall. Four large cargo pods—identical to the ones suspended from the ceiling in Mentel’s lair—were set up in the cavernous space. Two of the pods disappeared around either curve of the wheel and two were secured near the mouth of Spoke 3 just a few dozen metres apart. Cargo crates and electric carts were situated in front of each. Perhaps twenty metres of empty space lay between the mouth of the Spoke and the pods.
The wheel was empty and silent.
White print sprayed on the side of the left pod read ‘The Fridge.’ The print on the right pod read ‘Rec Room.’
Willard nodded towards the right pod. Bowen climbed fluidly to his feet, weapon against his shoulder, and walked close to the mouth of the spoke. He scanned the area twice, barrel of his weapon chained to his gaze. “Clear.”
Willard duplicated Bowen’s moves, scanning the opposite side of the wheel. His line of sight clear, he moved out into the wheel proper. Bowen followed, back turned and weapon raised in the opposite direction.
“You’re going to get me killed!” Mentel hissed, clutching Willard’s shoulder.
“Back up!” Willard nudged her hard with his elbow.
She stumbled back, rubbing at her chest, her face blank with shock. Clearly, Carina Mentel wasn’t used to being handed roughly, but she stayed clear of Willard’s personal space.
The pressure door hissed back to the ground automatically as Willard and Bowen crossed quickly to their chosen pod. Mentel half-jogged, half-tiptoed past them, her head swinging side to side, nervous eyes wide. She held her hand against a display mounted to the right of a crewman-sized pressure door.
Blood smeared the display, and the swing-arm locking the pressure door in place.
Willard heard a click, saw a green light flash on the panel a moment before he levered the door’s handle down. It swung open.
Bowen disappeared inside. Mentel followed on his heels.
Willard scanned the wheel one last time and followed them in, dragging the door shut behind him.
Mentel locked the door as soon as it shut.
Willard peered through the square window in the door. Still, nothing moved. He turned and scanned the pod: a hall led into the main floor on the right and a short flight of stairs up to the left led to the second floor.
Bowen waved for Willard’s attention and pointed. Bloody fingerprints smeared the wall beside the stairs.
“Hello?” Willard waited. No reply. “This is Lieutenant Willard Tsu, off the Peter Cloke. The Ryson has been damaged and is drifting. We’re here to get you all out. Hello, is anyone there?”
&nb
sp; A thump from up the stairs. “We’re here!” Unsteady footsteps beat their way. Willard and Bowen raised their rifles. A pale white kid with wire-frame glasses, maybe seventeen or eighteen, skidded into view at the top of the stairs. When he saw the guns, he fell to his knees. He wore a slim vacuum-suit, the upper body tied around his waist. Blood coated his right shoulder. “Don’t shoot, Janeen’s not here, it’s just—”
Terror turned to hate on his face, when he caught sight of Doctor Carina Mentel.
“You!”
Bowen bounded up the stairs, his rifle slung and a first aid pack already in his hands.
Willard lowered his barrel to point at the ground. He raised his eyebrows. “Friend of yours?”
“Hardly,” Mentel huffed. “Meet Scott Kincaid, the least important and remarkable of my sitters.”
Bowen was already tearing the seam of Kincaid’s collar, examining the source of the bleeding. He whistled. “What happened, kid, get gored by a bull?”
A short, tubby guy and a tall, red-haired woman crept into sight further down the upstairs hall. They were holding onto each other and trembling. Willard read disgust on both their faces.
“More friends of yours, Doc?”
“Where is she?” Mentel asked them, urgently. “Where’s Janeen?”
“Hunting Stuart and Rick, last we saw,” Scott Kincaid spat at her.
Bowen sprayed the wound in the kid’s shoulder. Kincaid screamed, and sagged. Bowen’s forearm kept him from falling down the stairs.
Willard had had enough. He yanked Mentel’s arm and swung her around. She yelped and fell, hind end landing hard on the bottom step of the stairs.
“You,” Willard pointed at the tubby guy. “Janeen’s an 'override', yeah?”
The man blinked. The redheaded woman nodded, lips trembling.
“I’m betting Janeen’s a Reacher, too,” Bowen said, unrolling a bandage over a wide, jagged wound in Kincaid’s shoulder.
The kid -Kincaid- nodded, face pinched with pain. “Carina tried to switch them all off.”
Bowen frowned. “What's that mean?”
Kincaid stared at the wall. “We got orders to terminate the project, and she tried to kill all our subjects.”
Willard and Bowen stared hard at Mentel. She, more composed now, smiled primly back. “Of course I did. What else does terminate mean?”
“Terminate the program, not the subjects!” The short, pudgy guy stepped forward, wringing his hands. “We have a duty of care!”
Mentel shook her head. “The Alliance granted wartime exception for prisoner experimentation.”
“You mean Reacher experimentation, don’t you?” Bowen’s eyes burned at Mentel. “All your test subjects came from our side, didn't they?”
Scott suddenly leaped to his feet, body trembling fiercely. He sucked in a deep breath and froze in place, eyes wide.
Bowen jumped up beside him. “Ha! They mix some righteous stims in that spray-skin, huh?” He thumped Scott once on the back. “Breathe, kid.”
Scott did breathe, and was off to the races again. “Carina coded their implants to turn off all autonomic functions in our subjects. We restarted them and deleted their overrides.”
Mentel clapped slowly. “Congratulations. Now no-one can shut her down!”
Scott, Tubby, and Red all started shouting.
“Hold it!” Willard shouted. The scientists held it. He reached in his spacesuit visor and scratched his neck, sorting the facts out of the exchange. “How many ‘overrides’ are we talking about?”
“Fourteen,” Mentel supplied.
“Nine in cryo, four sleeping next door, and Jenna,” Scott said, his words racing. “We put them in comas. Machines kept them alive until we could get disable the override”
“After Janeen woke up...” Tubby swallowed hard. “We're keeping the rest under, until we can…”
“Make sure they won’t try to kill us too,” Mentel finished in a bored voice. “First sensible thing they—”
The door boomed behind Willard, and he spun. There was a helmet-sized dent in the centre of it. Another thundering blow landed, and the window shattered. Willard looked around. Mentel fled deeper into the pod's ground floor. Tubby and Red disappeared down the upstairs hall, screaming. Scott jumped up a stair, but looked at him and Bowen and stood his ground.
Willard nodded at him. Brave kid.
“What’s she hitting the door with, kid?” Bowen yelled over his shoulder.
Before Scott could answer, two ice-blue, writhing tentacles—each the size of Willard’s wrist—slithered in through the shattered window. They flattened, pressing on the inside of the door. The door groaned, and crumpled outwards. The tentacles thrashed blindly until they found spots where the door lifted away from the frame. The tentacles slithered back through those holes and tore it free of its hinges.
The door crashed to the deck with a multi-part boom.
A shadow appeared in the door. “I dialled up my olfactories, Carina,” called a shrill voice. “You smell twice as bad now, you bitch!”
Willard froze when Janeen walked through the door. She was naked. Blood dripped across her chest. Silver disks, glowing in the center, were implanted all over her body. Sores and inflamed skin surrounded the disks.
None of that kept Willard from sighting his weapon on the center of her blood-soaked chest. He opened his mouth to bark an order. What finally vapour-locked his brain and bolted his feet to the ground were the blue tentacles weaving over her shoulder.
“Janeen!”
The kid in the glasses was talking. Willard shook off the shock and darted his eyes from the target to Scott Kincaid.
He was coming down the stairs, hands held up in front of him. “Janeen…we didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
Janeen ignored the two armed marines set up in prime firing position. She took to powerful steps forward, then froze. “You didn’t know about this?” She held her wrists up and out in the classic ‘arrest me officer’ pose. Two delicate strands of blue curled into the air.
Bowen gasped. “What did they—?”
“Shut it, Bone!” Willard hissed.
The strands disappeared back into her wrists.
They were implants, Willard realized with a wave of nausea. All those little disks cut into her body were implants. He was a pilot, and his implants were specialized for flying. Bowen was a soldier and his enhanced his ability to walk, plan and fight in a mech. Janeen’s had a new specialty: wielding crysteel.
“Oh, lady,” Bowen moaned, and Willard could hear the pity thick in his voice. “Did they pour a jug of the stuff right in you?”
Her eyes turned to Bowen’s, and they turned ugly. The sharp-tipped tentacles behind her head reared back.
“Yes, we knew about all the implants, we knew about the risks, too!” Scott drew Janeen’s eyes again. Probably saving Bowen’s life, Willard thought. “…and I’m sorry, Janeen. But I swear none of us knew about Project Override. Please don’t hurt anyone else because of—”
“Of her?” Janeen shrieked. She sniffed deeply and looked down the hall where Dr. Mentel had disappeared.
She looked right through Willard as if he didn’t exist.
“It wasn’t us!” Janeen and Willard both looked up. Tubby and Red were back at the top of the stairs, both as white as ghosts. “A soon as Scott found out Carina was pursuing Override, he told us,” Tubby said. “We locked her out off the system! We made her stop!”
Red’s lips shook so bad she could hardly speak. “D-did you k-kill Stuart an-an-and Rick?”
“They helped her,” Janeen snarled. “Ricky and Stuey helped her!” She giggled, high-pitched and hard. Tentacles above her head trembled along with the hyena sounds. “I could feel them in my sandbox with Carina.”
Red started crying.
“We never helped!” Tubby shook his head, like maybe if he shook hard enough this would all go away. “Never!”
Willard believed them. Looked like Janeen did, too. The anger gut
tered out. The swirling crysteel lattices softened and thinned, and disappeared behind her back.
“You always got me extra juice,” she said to Scott. “Watermelon flavour.”
Janeen sagged against the wall, staring up at Tubby and Red. “You guys…you’re okay.” She shrugged her festering shoulders. “You can go.”
Janeen noticed Willard again. She weighed him with her eyes. “You guys got sand in your boots, L.T?”
“Reach first,” Willard said.
“And always,” Bowen and Janeen replied together.
Janeen looked at Bowen. “Not going the way we thought.” She looked down at her naked body and let out a half-laugh, half snort. “I died to save Reach. Then I let them bring me back to save her again.”
She lifted her hand, waved it at Willard, then Bowen. “You can go, too, but Mentel stay—”
The blue glowing center of every disk on Janeen’s body winked out, and she dropped to the floor like a wet rag.
“Janeen!” Scott pushed past Willard, skidding to his knees and pressing fingers to her throat. Tubby and Red dashed down the stairs to help.
“Daniel, Judith!” Everyone froze at the sound of Dr. Mentel’s call. “Put her out! As fast as you can!”
Mentel had a glowing screen in her hand. When the room froze and stared at her, she threw the tablet at the gawkers. “Need I remind you she’s trying to kill us? Sedate her. Now!”
Tubby sank hard to his knees and retrieved the tablet. His lips moved as he read. “You tried again?”
Red leaned over Tubby’s shoulder. “You disable her implant?” She read further. “You shut down her breathing!” Red’s eyes widened. “Carina, she wasn’t a threat to anyone!”
“You heard her just now, she still wanted me dead!” Mentel stared disbelieving at her teammates. “Listen to me! She’s altered her base code since the last round of tests, all I could do is force-reboot her interface.” She made fists out of her hands and shook them. “Move! She’ll only be out for seconds!”