“I'm coming.”
Ernst Yakub followed his master like a toothless dog. The man was old, and should have retired years ago. But institutional knowledge and budget cuts kept him shackled to Arrakhia, like a rusted lock on a new gate. Vadim kept on having to swallow his impatience whenever he paused to allow the old-timer to catch up.
“This shouldn't be a problem, should it?” Yakub asked.
“Only one way to find out. My best guess is that he's having a grandiose delusional spell. He knows we're about to ship him topside soon, and he wants a bit of attention. Wants us to read him a bedtime story, so to speak.”
Vadim knocked on the door to room 12. “Now, what seems to be the matter, Andrei?”
When there was no answer, he jammed a key in the lock and opened the door.
It was hard. He had to put his shoulder to it. It was as if some weight from the inside was resisting the door's swing.
The door opened, and a dead body tumbled out into the hallway.
It was wearing a hospital gown and a hood. As it fell, the hood slid backwards, revealing Mykor's slate-gray face.
Mykor's life had been filled with countless opening doors. Doors into the dark cult in the underground and below. Doors to an interstellar world. Doors beneath the ground.
But it all possessed a ghastly symmetry. Every door opened meant that another door that had to close.
He'd broken all his pacts with the Sons of the Vanitar, had betrayed their cause and set himself as a bulwark in their path. He'd risen from the bed of the Black Shift process a changed man, one who would make Caitanya-9 into a home for more than thirty years. And then he'd destroyed Caitanya-9, eradicated it from the stars like a lanced boil.
The only door left was that of his own life.
Staring into those dead eyes, Vadim realised that this door had closed too.
“The hell...?” was all Vadim had time for.
He felt someone grip the door handle from the other side with an extremely strong hand, and then the door was bashed into his face.
“Ugh...” his head snapped back, and he staggered, arms windmilling. His head felt like ground zero of a bomb testing site. Stars flew.
Andrei Kazmer was coming through the door.
Ernst tried to draw an electrified truncheon, but Kazmer pounded a fist into his stomach, snatched him up, and threw him to the floor. A split second later, the truncheon was in his hand. Vadim couldn't tell if Andrei was supernaturally fast, or whether the blow to the head was causing time to dilate.
The tall man was now up in front of him, yellowed teeth snarling into his face as a hand drove him back into a wall.
“You tried to kill me,” Andrei said.
What?
“Are you okay?” Vadim babbled, fully aware of the absurdity of the question. He just wanted this to be a misunderstanding. All an innocent mistake, one that he could banish with a few strokes of his pen.
“I woke up with him on top of me,” Andrei said, pointing with a finger at the corpse on the ground. His other hand had the electrified truncheon, and it was drifting alarmingly close to Vadim's neck.
It crackled with nearly forty thousand volts. “He tried to strangle me. Andrei might have died. Wake didn't.”
Vadim saw a livid red line girdling Andrei's neck like a choker. It was so raw and painful looking that it almost seemed to scream, like a fresh cattle-brand.
Vadim swallowed. Survival mode now. His every word had to help achieve the goal of getting that sizzling rod of electricity away from his neck.
“Andrei, listen...” he said. “I had nothing to do with this.”
“Bullshit. He's wearing one of your hospital gowns.”
Vadim glanced over Andrei's shoulder. Mykor's dead eyes stared upwards, as glassy as two vitrified planets.
“I can't explain that.”
“Don't deny it,” he snarled. “You sent him to kill me. How did he make it into this locked facility? How did he have the key to my room?”
“I don't know.”
With a berserk roar, Andrei rammed the truncheon directly into his solar plexus.
The good news was that his shirt was between the truncheon and his skin. The bad news was that the truncheon arced with enough voltage to burn through the fabric in a millisecond, discharging itself right through the center of Vadim's nervous center.
Vadim screamed, a high-pitched tone that he didn't know his vocal cords could produce. His body convulsed and flexed like a thin sheet of metal. His thoughts were obliterated by pain, and so was his nervous system. He collapsed, writhing like an insect burned on an open fire.
Pain... the sting of a fiery bee blazed beneath his pectorals.
Andrei Kazmer's mouth was moving, but he couldn't hear a thing. By the time his brain figured out to module sounds, he'd missed the entire speech.
“....Is that clear, Mr Gokla?”
It is, it is, he couldn't talk but struggled to nod, saliva spilling from his slack mouth as he moved his head. He had no idea what the man had just said, but whatever it had been, he agreed.
Anything, just so long as he didn't get another shock.
“Then let's go,” Andrei said, yanking him upright. “You and your dopey friend are taking me to the weapons room.”
He and Ernst struggled to keep their feet, and they leaned on each other for support. All the while, Andre watched them, truncheon crackling.
Andrei Kazmer looked at the briefcase that had fallen to the floor, and the paper files falling out. Some of them had his name on them.
He snatched them, and slung the briefcase on to his back.
Then, they started to move.
The facility did not have a weapons room. This was a medical facility, a place where scientific research was conducted.
The only guns stored in the place were the private property of whatever patients they'd admitted. All of which was kept in a general purpose storage room.
They moved at an excruciating pace.
“I'd get a move on,” Andrei said. “There's guards patrolling these halls. And if anyone sees us, they'll die. You don't want that on your hands, do you?”
They walked further and further into the nightmare.
Hallways turned into corridors, turned back into hallways. The facility was deserted, with most of the staff off the clock. Their pained gait echoed on the polished tile floors, marking their pained progress.
“Let me ask you about Emil Gokla,” Andrei said. “How did he die?”
“P...p...poison,” Vadim gagged.
“Good. Couldn't stand the thought of someone like that dying peacefully in bed. By God, there's justice! There's actually justice! Did they catch the poisoner?”
“No,” Ernst said, face white from shock.
“Then they never will,” Wake said. “The Sons of the Vanitar would have spared no expense in finding the one who lopped the head off that particular serpent. You know what I think? It was a ghost.”
Please stop talking, Vadim said. Each consonant Wake spoke caused additional vectors of pain to spike in his chest, as though there was still residual amperage discharging itself.
“Emil created the Black Shift corporation, and the Black Shift corporation created ghosts,” Wake said. “All the ghosts in the world, decanted from hell and spilling into the world. They ripped souls from bodies, and let the bodies do their bidding. Did Emil think those disembodied ones would fail to seek vengeance? I like to think he died in his own shit and piss, staring into the eyes of someone he'd harmed, someone who no longer had a body for him to torture and mis-use.”
They reached the storage room, and Wake imperiously stood by as they fumbled with keys. Finally, the door swung open in a gust of stale air.
The room was a depressing cube of stone, lined with a few supplies. Wake's eyes lit up when he saw the military-grade weapons hanging from the walls. A pair of Meshuggahtech assault rifles. A KA-32 pistol. A Skortek V990 Sonic Cannon.
These were the things Yat
z had brought with him in his short and ill-fated stay.
He walked over, admired the heft and size of the weapon, first with his eyes and then with his hands. He checked the load on the Meshuggahtech, saw that it was empty, and rifled through an army nano-teflon backpack until he found ammunition.
“You have made me very happy,” Wake said. “I've found my missing pieces.”
Then, to their horror, he started loading all the weapons.
“You shouldn't have done this,” wheezed Ernst to Vadim. “You should have refused. He would have killed us, but that would have been that. Now, you've given him the tools to massacre everyone in the hospital.”
“Shut up,” groaned Vadim. “I'm keeping us alive.”
“You think he's not just going to murder us now?” Ernst said. “We're dead men.”
Wake turned around. His face was curiously revitalized. Above the irritated red ring around his neck, his face had a messianic glow.
“Your friend,” Wake said. “...is completely correct.”
Then he lowered the Meshuggahtech at Vadim Gokla's chest, and opened fire.
The stone walls that were thick enough to hide most of the sound.
Minutes later, Wake was trudging towards the hospital.
He was a walking arsenal. A collection of firing rods, gun barrels, and magazine clips that happened to have a flesh and blood human at their center. Grenades dangled from his belt, as did Mykor's polyfleshing device from Caitanya-9. He had a bulletproof nanomesh suit of body armor, and a kevlar-lined helmet.
He chambered a fresh round as he approached the building.
Never had such a strong weapon been used against such weak cows.
Ubra woke up again with the baby.
Yalin's cries were a piercing wail, designed by evolution to be impossible for a parent to ignore. She roused herself irritably for what seemed like the sixth time that night, ready to see what was wrong with her baby girl.
She went into the rec room that was close to the kitchenette, and started running through a basic a-z check of anything that could be wrong with Yalin. She hadn't dirtied herself. She refused a suck. She didn't want to play.
Most likely, she'd just been afraid of the dark.
I wish that was me, Ubra thought. Scared of phantasms. Scared of the invisible. I've learned the hard way that it's things that are visible under the light that cause you real trouble.
In moments, Farholt wandered out into the rec room. He walked with an unsteady shuffle behind his seeing-eye apparatus.
“Did Yalin wake you?” Ubra asked as she comforted the baby.
“Don't worry about it,” Farholt said. “Ever since the godless heathens burned out my eyes on Mars, my hearing has gotten better and better. It's amazing how much aural sensitivity you lose when you've got eyes. I can hear all manner of things now. Just a moment ago, I thought I heard shooting.”
“Huh,” she thought. “Shooting from where?”
“Could have been from the research facility. Could have been from my imagination. That's the problem – I can hear sounds, but I'm no good at placing where exactly the fuckin' noise is coming from.”
“Well, just relax,” she comforted the insane veteren. “Speaking as someone who's been on the receiving end of more than enough, bullets are at their absolute safest when they're imaginary.”
Farholt cocked his head. “Well, isn't that funny. Now I can hear footsteps. From outside the building. Who could be up at this hour?”
She was about to answer with something else flip, but she realised that she could hear them too.
A slow, steady tread across the tarmac, outside the building.
And then a click.
Funny, she thought, that almost sounded like a gun safety being -
A barrage of automatic gunfire wracked the building.
Dozens of bullet holes exploded from the walls in detonations of plaster and brick. Debris swirled and filled the room as tracers stitched lines of fire from the holes, seeking to quench themselves in human flesh..
Ubra yelled and hit the ground, shielding Yalin with her body. Farholt did the same, with an incongruous smile on his face.
“The time of the testing is at hand,” he proclaimed as the shooting died away. “When God separates the sheep from the goats on the staircase that steps eternal.”
Another wave of shooting blasted the building, dozens of shots lancing through the building's fragile wall. Ubra clutched and clung to the ground, seeking to become the ground. Seeking to absorb into the concrete foundations, where she would be safe, where nobody could hurt Yalin.
Then, through a fist-sized bullet hole, she saw a round metallic device poke its way into the room.
Grenade. Green logo on the side.
Yalin was screeching in fear at the loud noises, but she jumped back up to her feet. “Come on!” she shouted to Farholt!”We're getting smoked!”
“God's vengeance is beautiful, isn't it?” he cried as the grenade detonated, filling the room with a poisonous cloud.
She pulled back, trying to distance herself as much as possible. Her mind was filling with flashbacks of Caitanya-9, of struggling to survive a smoke attack in the corridors of a space station.
But then she'd had a helmet, and oxygen. And he'd had a weapon to shoot back with.
Now, she had none of these things.
And worse, now she didn't have Aaron Wake firing alongside her.
Now, he was the one trying to murder them.
The three of them made it to the other side of the rec room before they breathed in the toxic compounds. Ubra dragged Farholt by his hand for most of the distance. Once he was through, she locked the door, wedged a chair against it.
It was a feeble chair. Everything in this hospital was fragile, weak, breakable. Especially the people.
Wake kicked down the door, snapping the thick wood off at its hinges with powerful kicks. Then he activated the closed-system filtering on his suit and rushed through the door, gun up.
The room was utterly devastated from his gunfire. From chairs to tables to walls, everything had the mark of high-velocity ammunition passing through it.
He found the smoke-spewing grenade on the floor, and shut off the valve. It stopped its release of hissing death, and he put it back on his belt.
The omni-directional audio detection in his helmet recorded the sound of footsteps from the adjoining bedroom. Idly, he checked the load in his magazine.
Nilux Red staggered through the door in her nightgown. “Uhhhh....what just happened?”
Wake shot her in the head. Blood and brains splattered against the wall, followed a second later by her decapitated body.
“It's Wake,” Ubra said.
“Who's Wake?” Farholt asked. “Is he a holy man? A chosen man?”
“Jesus, I don't have the fucking patience for this,” Ubra cried. “Where are the guards? Can we wake them up?”
“Many moments are stolen from us by sleep. I learned that on Mars, the hard way. The demons do not rest, and they do not slow in their assault on the living.”
“Get away from the door,” she dragged him away. “It's a clear fire-through zone. Goddamn it, you've been here longer than any of us. What do you know about this building? Is there anywhere we can find weapons? Any place where we can bar ourselves in? Any escape routes?”
Farholt shook his head. “I am sorry. My sight is stolen from me. I can detect obstacle from clear passage, but I cannot view the contents inside drawers.”
“Right, sorry.” She tried to shush her crying baby. “They never let us far out of sight. By my count, there should be orderlies, and they'll all have heard that. We just have to hang on for long enough for Vadim to organise a counter-response.”
Unless he's already dead, she thought, wanting to kick herself for having such thoughts.
From here, the hospital sprawled out into a maze of wards, passages, and secluded rooms.
She wracked her brains. There were places to hid,
places that would take a long time for a lone gunman to root out. But between the shooting having nearly destroyed the hearing in one ear and Yalin's crying doing an equal number in the other one, she just couldn't think of anywhere.
Couldn't think of anything.
Then she heard someone kick the door, and cried.
Wake was coming through.
Beyond, Wake heard the sound of a baby crying.
His daughter.
The one that whoreslut said he could never see. Like hell!
“She's mine, Ubra!” roared Wake. “I made her, and I'm taking her from you! Just fucking leave her on a table, and I'll let you have your life! Right now, that's all I can do!”
He kicked the door again. The doorknob came off, swinging askew to reveal a hole about the size of his fist.
He snatched a frag grenade from his belt, armed it, and tossed it through the hole. Any defenders on the other side would be shredded.
Just then, he heard movement from a door to his left.
Three hospital orderlies rushed through, coming from an adjacent room. They were wearing nightclothes, and they looked stunned, confused, acting simply for the self referential purpose of having acted.
One of them had a KA-32 pistol in his hand. That was funny.
He spun, fast and confident, fired the Meshuggahtech from the hip. His first burst disembowelled the leading man, just vapourised his midsection and sending his guts flying outwards in a glistening, fibrous rain. The next burst caved in the chest of the second man. Just imploded his chest, like a hammer swung at a watermelon. He was hurled backwards under the ferocious weight of Wake's fire. No weapon delivered high-impact death like a Meshuggahtech.
The third one got his gun up, and fired at Wake.
The bullets slapped at Wake's chest, but failed to penetrate the military-grade nanomesh body armor. Wake smiled the smile of the mad, sighted, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet ripped the man's lower jaw off his skull, shattering his masseter and sending bone fragments back into his brain. The dangling tongue flapped once or twice, and then he fell.
Wake strode over to him, picked up the gore-splattered handgun, and added it to his arsenal.
Skyline Severant (The Consilience War Book 3) Page 20