Brain Storm (US Edition)

by Nicola Lawson

  He cut the connection with the security chief and turned to the other person in the room with him. "It would be a good test of the new models skills to have them join in the hunt for Fox. It is a pity that the next batch won't be ready for another few years."

  The woman in the room with him nodded. "We wanted to give the prototype a thorough test in the field before we tried to introduce them properly. In hindsight it seems we could have done with accelerating the procedure. Of course if we had been able to install a proper control mechanism on the prototype this would not be a problem," Christine said.

  "I am sure you will be able to manage," he replied. "We should go to Swift to question her. We need to know what she knows about project Brainstorm and who she may have told. Of course I will need you there to ascertain the veracity of any answers she gives."

  Christine nodded. "It will be my pleasure, Josh."

  "This could be interesting," Josh Barret, the founder of Omnitech, said. "We will be able to see how her potential has come along without the proper education. Grosset has presented us with a unique opportunity."

  ***************

  The security chief swiped a card through the reader and the large steel door opened automatically. The chief went through first followed by one of the other officers, the last security officer jabbed Carla in the small of the back with the tip of the barrel of his automatic weapon to get her moving after them. The last officer then followed her in and the door closed behind them.

  The door led into yet another identical security corridor. Unlike those they had passed through previously this one was occupied. A pair of security officers, armed and wearing body armor similar to the two who were escorting Carla, stood on either side of the door they had just passed through. A corresponding pair stood flanking the door at the opposite end of the short, straight hallway. Again there were no other doors leading off the corridor which Carla took to be a good sign. A third pair of security officers were walking in the opposite direction and passed through the door Carla had just arrived through. The security chief nodded as they passed him.

  She had no idea whether Sara was planning on keeping her promise to come and get Carla out of this situation that she had put her in, or whether the tale she had told to the security chief had been closer to the truth that Sara had allowed Carla to be captured to better effect her own escape, but if Sara was coming for her at least the trail was straight forward.

  Carla was marched along with her escort to the door at the end of the corridor. The security officers either side of it remained stood as though they were made of stone. Only their eyes moved checking out Carla and her escort and even they were quickly brought back to their previous position staring at the other end of the corridor.

  The security chief used his key card in the reader on this door and it too opened automatically. This time it opened into a larger circular room. Including the door they had entered through there were seven identical doors spaced equally around the circumference of the room.

  So much for Sara having a clear trail to follow.

  The main section of the floor was in a reflective black material but where Carla and her escort stood just inside the door there was a square of white. Identical white patches were position in front of each of the six other doors.

  They remained where they stood. The security chief, being careful to stay within the boundary of the white square, moved around and touched a pair of points on the side of the door frame. A section of the frame twisted and moved aside revealing a keypad underneath. One of the other officers noticed her watching him.

  "Hey, face over there." The officer gestured across the room with his automatic rifle.

  Carla did as she was told. There was a sequence of five identical tones and then a click.

  The security chief stepped back into view moving off the patch of white and onto the reflective black floor. Carla was pushed off after him and the group moved to the door which was the second on the right from where they had come in. Carla knew that as soon as she passed through that doorway, whether Sara planned to come after her or not, she wouldn't be able to find her.

  The security chief pulled out his key card yet again and ran it through another reader. The door came open and Carla knew that she had to act. The security chief stepped inside through the doorway. Carla tried to think of anything she might have on her that she could drop to leave behind as a sign but there was nothing. The security officer at her left side moved through the doorway after the chief, it would be Carla's turn next. The security officer behind her shoved her forwards with a hand between her shoulder blades.

  It was then or never, Carla knew. She took a step, stumbled she couldn't use her hands to regain her balance and so she started to fall to the floor. She twisted as she went down, as though she was trying to keep her front and her face from taking the brunt of the impact. She didn't particularly want to land on her front but that was only a secondary reason for the motion.

  She hit on her right side the impact hurting her hip and her right arm and shoulder. She called out even though the pain wasn't so bad that it required it. She called out to cover any noise that she might make as she rolled fully over on to her back and scraped the edge of the restraints around her wrists on the white flooring. She kept trying to add to the scratch as she was pulled roughly to her feet.

  Carla was moved through the door. She resisted the temptation to look down at the floor to see the results of her mark making attempt. If she had succeeded in making a mark she didn't want any of the security men with her to notice it. She actually doubted whether she had been able to scratch the floor, and if she had that it would be visible without knowing what you were looking for or having your face up close to it. For all Carla knew Sara wasn't even coming after her.

  This time the door didn't open up into another hallway or a room. The four of them had left the circular room and were stood in a small elevator with a pair of benches running along opposite walls. Carla was told to sit on one of the benches. A security officer sat down next to her and the other positioned himself on the opposite bench. The security chief entered a code into the panel next to where they had entered. Another set of doors closed inside those that cut the elevator off from the circular room. The chief took the empty seat next to the security officer opposite her as the elevator lurched into motion.

  It surprised Carla that the elevator didn't move up or down but sideways. They were taken away from the circular room. Her stomach lurched as the elevator started moving downwards as well as sideways. She could tell that it was now travelling diagonally but the elevator itself remained horizontal.

  She didn't know how far they had travelled by the time they came to a stop because she had no way of knowing how fast they had been going. She couldn't even say exactly how long they had been travelling for although she thought it had only been a couple of minutes. Still, a couple of minutes travelling even if they had only been moving quite slowly would have taken her outside the Omnitech building that they had started in. If Sara was looking for her and she missed her sign she could search the Omnitech building forever and she wouldn't find her.

  This time the chief didn't use a key card to get them through the door and out of the antechamber to the elevator. He entered a code into a keypad and the door opened.

  "Wait here," the chief ordered the two security officers who had been escorting Carla.

  The security chief and Carla stepped through out of the antechamber and into a huge room. Banks of computer and electronic equipment took up a large amount of the floor space. The space around the walls was lined with large vats surrounded by pipes and monitors. Pipes snaked up from the vats and crept around the ceiling.

  Carla had a strange sense of déjà vu. This place reminded her of the burned out room they had found during their escape from the prison facility, but she wasn't certain that that was where the feeling came from.

  Carla glanced at the monitor screens and readouts as the security chief
brought her deeper into the room but they were all off-line or deactivated. The vats around the walls were empty, their thick plastic cases reflected the lights which appeared to be the only part of the facility that was still powered up.

  They came around one large bank of equipment that was attached to some sort of horizontal bed and the two other occupants of the room came into view. Standing watching Carla being herded towards them, a middle-aged man and a woman maybe five or ten years younger, they both smiled when she saw them. The man was dressed smartly, obviously very wealthy, his dark hair was cut quite short and had gone silver at the temples. The woman with him was also dressed smartly in a skirt and jacket. She wore only minimal make-up and had let her once red hair fade without trying to halt the process with artificial colors, there was only the slightest hint of her original color left. The sense of déjà vu that had hit her when she entered the room was stronger after seeing these two. A pair of armed security men, not wearing the Omnitech uniform but a uniform cut along military lines, stood a short distance away on either side of an open doorway that led out of this room.

  The man took a step towards her and opened his arms in the same motion. "Welcome, Carla," he said. "Welcome home."

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Sara had her arms and her legs stretched out in front and behind her. She had them locked in place on opposite walls holding her aloft above a pair of armed security men. She had followed Carla and her escorts into the corridor, having bypassed the card reader on the door with some of the equipment she had taken from Jaret's, but then moments after Carla was taken out through the door on the far end this pair had come through it. Reacting on instinct Sara had moved herself up onto the ceiling and out of sight behind a support that ran across the corridor. The two security men were patrolling along the corridor underneath her now.

  Sara ached to be going straight after Carla, she was afraid that if the other woman was taken too far ahead she would lose her. But Sara hadn't been able to risk attacking the two men and being heard by those she was pursuing.

  The first man passed directly underneath her. The muzzle of his weapon came first followed by his hands, arms and the top of his head. The second man came just behind and to his left side. Both men wore radio communicators on their left shoulders.

  Sara released the tension in her limbs and dropped off the ceiling. She wrapped her left arm around the neck of the rearmost man tightened it and dragged him back off his feet. The other security man whirled around. He took his right hand from under the muzzle of his rifle and brought it up across his chest to the radio on his shoulder.

  Sara tightened her grip around the man’s neck and swung herself around his body. She brought her feet up to kick the second men in the hand and in the head, he fell sideways into the wall. At the same time she used her twisting motion to snap the vertebrae in the first mans neck. With his neck broken she let the first man drop to the floor. The second caught himself on the wall and moved both his hands back to his weapon but he was too slow.

  Sara saw him moving as though through treacle. She swept her jacket to the side and grabbed hold of the handle of one of her tactical pistols. She moved forwards and pressed the barrel up against his head and hit the trigger once so that she triggered only a single shot. The sound of the report as the bullet sent the back of the man’s head over the wall sounded too loud to her ears and heralded the move back to normal speed. She pushed her other hand under her jacket and it emerged with the twin weapon to the machine pistol she already held.

  She stood in the middle of the corridor a weapon pointed at the doorways at either end of the hallway. The only sound was her own blood pumping in her ears. There was no immediate investigation of the gunfire. No alarms went off.

  Sara pushed the weapons back into their holsters and went to work on the card reader on the door Carla had been taken through. The process was much faster this time, the device she was using had a short-term memory and tried the last successful sequence first. It seemed that the same key card was being used to gain access to each new area.

  The door came open and Sara pressed herself up to the side and looked through. Two guards were positioned at either side of the door and they were turning to see what had caused the door to open. At the far end of the hallway another pair of guards were already going for their weapons or radio.

  Sara brought out one of the machine pistols and sent a burst of fire at the furthest guards. The man who had been going for his radio dropped his hand down and went for his weapon instead. His instinct for self preservation coming to Sara's aid.

  She stepped to the side to put herself fully in the doorway, it was bad tactically to frame herself in this way because it made her an easy target, but she didn't stay in the position for long. She grabbed the second machine pistol and through herself down and forwards. She twisted in mid-air as bullets cut the air above her tearing through the space where moments before she had been standing.

  Again her world became slow motion as multiple weapons tracked towards her. She targeted the closest men first. The first went down with a hole through his eye socket before Sara hit the floor. She bounced on her back and the bullets chewed into the second man moving up in a line from his neck, through his mouth and in the middle of his forehead. Both men jerked backwards and slumped to the floor.

  Sara rolled sideways and the backwards. She twisted around as she came to her feet and ran at the remaining two security officers. Bullets sent sparks and shrapnel from where they hit the wall at her side. Sara ran across the corridor jumped up placing her foot halfway up the opposite wall. She kicked off and used the energy to spin her upside down. She fired as she twisted and used her feet on the ceiling and wall to stabilize herself as she came down.

  She landed in a crouch and fired a pair of short controlled burst from close range at the two men who were still confused by her acrobatics. She hit them both at the same time in their mouths sending bursts of red out of the backs of their skulls to daub the wall behind them. They fell to the ground in almost perfect synchronization.

  Sara came to her feet leisurely and hit the clip release on her guns. The near empty magazines clattered on the floor at her feet and she slammed fresh clips into place. She kept one of the machine pistols in her hand now, she couldn't rely on her reactions anymore. It had been a noisy job taking down the four men in this hallway and Sara had to assume that she would be expected from now on.

  The door came open just as easily as the others. Sara was in a crouch at the side of the doorway sweeping the room beyond with one of the pistols. There was nobody inside the circular room what she found was worse. Sara stepped just inside onto a patch of white flooring. Most of the rest of the floor was black but there were other patches of white like welcome mats in front of six other identical doors. Sara's heart sank. Carla had been taken through one of those doors but there was no way for Sara to know which one. She had promised Carla that she would rescue her from these people but now circumstances were conspiring to make her break that promise.

  Sara stepped off the white surface and onto the black. Before her foot touched down there was a mechanical sound and then a pair of panels opened in the ceiling. Automatic turrets came down through the holes and started firing as they tracked towards her. Sara shifted into motion before the bullets could hit her. She ran around the edge of the room getting up enough speed so that she was half running up the walls. She was fast enough to evade a human had it been a human firing at her but these were machines.

  A single bullet caught her across the back of her left thigh. It cut through her trousers and just barely grazed over her skin but it was sufficient to cause her to lose her footing. She stumbled and rolled over the ground. She curled up reflexively where she landed expecting at any moment to feel the numerous bullets as they shredded her. She just realized that in the time she had taken to have that thought that she should have been hit several times. She should already be dead.

  Sara started to uncurl an
d looked over at the turrets. She was lying at the base of a door, it could have been the one she entered through or any of the others, but she was too disoriented to know. As she stretched her feet came off the white doormat and the turrets resumed their firing.

  Sara managed to pull her feet back in before she was hit again. She was safe for as long as she remained on the white patch. Slowly Sara got to her feet, the turrets had not retracted back into the ceiling so Sara took aim and fired with her machine pistol to take out the turrets. She disabled the gears that allowed the turrets to move so that she could move freely and decide which doorway to try.

  Her thigh burned where the bullet had gazed her. Sara twisted and looked down. Through the tear in her jeans she could see a trickle of blood and a cut across her skin but nothing more serious. She looked back up as she tried to think of some way to decide which door Carla had gone through. She blinked and looked back down. There was a small mark on the floor next to her feet that reflected light slightly differently to the rest of the floor. Sara went down on one knee to investigate the mark. It was little more than a small scratch but Sara took hope. She went around each of the other doors but this was the only one with a mark of any kind. She didn't know whether Carla had made the mark for Sara to follow knowing that there was no other way for her to know where Carla had gone, or whether it had been left by somebody else's carelessness. It didn't matter, it was all she had to go on. Sara would investigate this way until she found Carla or it was clear that this was not the way she had gone. Sara would then come back and search through each of the other doors until she found Carla or she was killed trying.

  ***************

  "Welcome home, Carla."

  The man just stood there looking at her as though he expected her to know what he was on about. Carla thought that both he and the woman with him looked familiar but she wasn't sure that she had ever seen them before. What she was certain of was that this wasn't home in any sense of that word. So Carla didn't respond.