by K. Gorman
“Yes. With my help, you’re golden. So long as you’re quiet. Be mice.”
Marc grunted. “Your analogies need work. Turning the volume down. We’re about two minutes from the end of the university. Will contact you after.”
He put the netlink back into his jacket pocket. Then, with an awkward maneuver that looked as though he were groping himself, he reached in under his jacket, unclipped the strap on the holster, and withdrew his blaster.
“Let’s go.”
Either the university had closed, or all of its students and staff had decided to stay home tonight. They met no one on their way down, nor in any of the halls they passed, though all of the main lights were on. A light in an office made them duck and tiptoe up to it, but, if anyone worked inside, the tilted blinds in the window prevented them from seeing out.
Empty, Karin decided. She couldn’t imagine going to work here, alone, with Shadows about. Unless the place was staffed with ex-Black Ops crews extremely dedicated to their work—not impossible, but definitely doubtful since the office looked like it was built for support staff and, given the circumstances, any retired serviceman had probably found themselves redrafted to fight the current invasion.
That had happened last week, she’d learned. It also explained why the streets were so empty. With an estimated half of the population turned into Lost and a good number of them either currently in or redrafted into the service… and she imagined the clinics and hospitals were busy, too.
The sick had to go somewhere.
A wave of dizziness came over her at the end of the hallway, and she grabbed at the wall for support. For a few seconds, her heart pounded like a rock in her head. Prickles of feeling tingled through her brain and down her face. Static blotted out her vision.
Marc put a hand on her shoulder, fingers squeezing.
A second later, his entire arm went rigid. Without a word, he pulled her from the wall and funneled her into a small, windowless room, one arm strong across her shoulders. As her vision came back, she caught glimpses of a storage closet, with shelves full of books—actual, honest-to-saints, paper books—and more than a few pieces of antique-looking electrical equipment. Several mops and buckets stood at the end under a vent.
Everything went dark as Marc closed the door. His hand re-found her shoulder in the dark, and his breath blew across her face as he leaned in closer.
“Shh. Patrol.”
She swallowed hard, and her jaw tensed. Marc fumbled with the door, and something clicked—a lock? She froze, eyes wide and unfocused as he went still beside her, his slow breath tickling across her forehead.
Not long after, footsteps came up the hall.
There were multiple sets, with the prolonged, heavy tread of boots. In the quietness of the hall, she could make out the sound of their treads in minute detail. Other things jangled and clicked as they walked. Uniforms and equipment?
They paused down the hall, and a door creaked open. A few seconds later, it clicked shut again. The footsteps resumed.
They were coming closer.
Karin closed her eyes, willing them to go away. Breaths shallow and as quiet as she could make them, she checked every part of her body for movement, trying to ignore the clash of sedative and stimulant that made her brain so dizzy. Dry, stale air caught in her throat, and she decided that she hated books. If the dust in this room made her cough…
Marc found her left arm and gripped hard. His breath brushed across her nose. He was still, too, quiet, listening.
Then the soldiers’ footsteps drew even with the door. Her eyes had adjusted enough to see the line of light at the bottom edge of the panel. A shadow passed over it.
The door rattled in its frame as the soldier outside tried its knob. Then it stopped.
Voices murmured outside, too quiet for her to hear their words.
The soldiers moved on.
Marc relaxed as they heard another door—the same one at the end of the hall that they’d been going to—open and shut, and the footsteps grew fainter.
He squeezed her arm again and, after another few seconds, worked the lock open.
“Come on. Let’s find a different route.”
Chapter 5
“What happened to us being golden?”
Marc held the netlink to his ear—more a habit than a necessity. Even with the volume turned low, she could still hear the defensiveness in Cookie's tone.
“I have eyes under the university, not inside it! I never said I had them inside! As far as I know, the routes are still clear.”
Marc glanced up at her, his expression flat. When he spoke, it was with great patience. “No, they’re not. Those two patrolmen you didn’t see just went down our B Route, so unless you can find me another connection—”
“I’ve got one.” Soo-jin, this time, opening her link into the comms group. “Verina’s got eyes on her, so I’m moving her to a dummy location. Jaxx says his area is still in the clear. Where are you?”
Marc looked around, taking a brief stock of the hallway. “In HNU somewhere. The office says ‘Records and Transcripts.’”
A series of clicks sounded over the line. “Got you. Okay. Give me a minute.”
Karin hugged her arms across her chest and hunched, stamping her feet to ward off the cold, shaky feeling rolling through her. The tingling had started in her legs again, a kind of pins and needles that felt like rain falling on the inside of her skin. Light spilled out from the office down the hall. They hadn’t moved much, working on the assumption that a recently-patrolled area would probably not be checked again for a while, but the closeness of those two soldiers made her uneasy.
Just how the hell were they supposed to get through this? Marc was good, but he wasn’t some Black Ops miracle worker. As far as she’d gleaned, his tenure in the military had wound up only a little longer than average. Fallon training might have given him an edge, but what the hell did that matter now?
He watched her pace out of the corner of his eye, turning to keep her in sight as she wandered close to the office on the other side of the hall. A loose darkness clouded the inside of the windows, but its shades had been pulled back to allow her to peer in. The dormant base of a holoscreen sat on one side of the desk. Books, files, and pages of looseleaf lay scattered across the rest of the space. Just what was it with these people and their paper-products? Maybe Nomiki’s hardcopy notebook hadn’t been that odd.
“Okay,” Soo-jin said. “Got it. You’ll want to head for janitorial. There’s a hatchway that connects between the boiler room and an access tunnel into the eighteenth floor. After that, you can…”
A small clunk drove her attention away from Soo-jin’s voice. Karin looked up the hall with a frown, searching for the source. It had been quiet, like an automatic air duct clicking open, or maybe something in the plumbing.
Probably nothing. The city was full of weird sounds, and Arcin-17 doubly so.
She let out a slow breath, trying to dispel the sudden spike of tension that gripped her—but then caught movement.
Visible through the windows of the office, a sphere the size of a baseball floated its way up the adjacent hallway toward them.
“Marc,” she hissed, backing away. “Marc, look.”
Startled, he turned to follow her line of sight. His eyes widened. “Run. Go, go, go, go, go!”
He grabbed her arm and hauled her back toward the door. Her shoes slapped against the floor as she stumbled the first steps, Marc’s support the only thing keeping her from falling, and a flash of pain made her hands tense into fists. Breath gasped through her throat as she fought to even herself out.
A whirring noise sounded from behind her. She gave a wild glance back, and Marc hauled her forward as the action made her trip again. The sphere had turned the corner. She could almost feel it behind her, like it were something alive, coming for her.
The spot between her shoulder blades tingled, as if someone were staring at her. A low crackling sound built up.
Marc shoved her to the side as a bolt of energy shot through the spot she’d been. Electricity exploded as it hit the wall ahead of them, and she flinched as it arced away from impact. Crackles of energy sparked a meter in each direction and left a dark, scorched spot on the wall.
Sol's burned child. It's going to kill us.
Adrenaline pumping into her blood, she raced, pounding every last bit of energy down into her legs.
The sound of crackling came from behind them again.
They slammed through the doors just ahead of the second shot, ducking into a flailing roll as it blew past. This time, she got a good look at the ball of energy as it smashed into the stairs just ahead. Electricity wrapped around the railing, buzzing like a split transformer. Its splash crackled several centimeters down the spokes of the metal railing, and a burning, ozone smell rose in the air.
Marc pushed away from her and leapt up. The door’s hinges and hydraulics squealed and hissed as he muscled it closed. Beyond, the vision of the sphere, electricity powering up around its body as it floated inexorably, relentlessly closer, was replaced by a closing wooden panel.
It shut with a click.
She stared at the wood paneling. “Can it get through?”
“It got into the university, didn’t it?” He backed away, attention on the door, then turned to her. “We have to go.”
She took his offered hand. Adrenaline made her legs feel shaky and watery, but she forced them to work. Soon, the air filled with the sound of their footsteps racing down the stairs.
“So, is anyone going to tell us what the fuck that was?”
Soo-jin’s voice came from Marc’s pocket. He didn’t bother to take it out, instead giving the door a glance back. Karin thought she could see a light on the other side that hadn’t been there. Just how did it open doors? There was no chance it had already been there, not unless the soldiers had dropped it. HNU security—or, for that matter, Arcin-17 security—wasn’t that intense. But it had come from a different direction than the soldiers.
She met Marc’s gaze, and he shook his head at the question on her face.
“No, I’ve never seen anything like that. Closest is hover-drones, but even they… Well, they are pretty obvious.”
“Come on guys, you’re killing me here,” Soo-jin said. “What the hell happened?”
This time, Marc pulled the netlink out of his pocket. “Can you guys run a search? We just got attacked by a floating metal sphere that shoots electricity.”
“Seriously?” Cookie said.
Soo-jin’s tone was much more professional. Above the sound of their racing footsteps and the rising rate of their breaths, they heard a couple of clicks.
“Military?”
“No idea, but I’ll assume yes.”
“It was mechanical,” Karin added. “I heard machinery inside.”
“Mechanical flying things. That’s definitely Soo-jin’s area,” Cookie said.
“It’ll take me a few minutes to dig the data, if I can find it. Cookie’s helping,” she said. “You guys—”
“We’re running. Don’t worry. Any bead on where the two soldiers we encountered went?”
“No.”
“Okay. Stay on the line. Be quiet if you hear quiet.”
Marc thumbed the volume lower on the netlink, returned it to his pocket, and switched his blaster into his left hand. With a backward glance at her, he moved ahead, veering to the wall and aiming across the stairs as they came to the next landing.
From above, they heard the distinct crackle of the sphere’s discharge. The doors rattled.
Following his lead, she switched to the wall-side railing, making an effort to quiet her steps and breathing. The two soldiers had gone down this way, and, by the amount of noise they’d just made, there was a good chance they were doubling back to check it out. A coil of tension tightened through her stomach as the stairwell turned quiet. A hum of electricity and whirring machinery came from above.
Marc signaled for her to wait at the following landing. He quietly moved down the next flight of stairs, peered over the railing, then came back up. He used the cuff of his sleeve to cover his hand as he opened a small wooden door on the right-hand side of the landing, then waved her through.
“I think it’s heat-sensing,” he whispered as she went by. “If we can just get out of its range, then…”
He trailed off as another sound came from the stairwell, this time from below. Boots tramped up, accompanied by the clack and jingle of equipment. Without another word, he and Karin ducked inside. The door shut with a click, then clicked again as he threw the lock.
They inched forward in the dark. Karin cussed as her shin bumped into something hard and metal on the ground.
Marc cleared his throat. “Karin, can you—”
“On it.” Light flared to life on her palm, and she dimmed it almost immediately, blinking away the sudden brilliance. Its mercurial, quicksilver glow reflected off the shelving and pipes that crowded both sides of the long room and stretched to another door at the end. It stood ajar.
Jaxx’s work, she'd bet.
She stepped over the defunct cleaning robot she’d bumped into and moved inward. Marc followed close to her back. They had almost reached the other end when a small concussion rocked through the air. The hiss and crackle that followed rang muffled and distant, but dust shook free from the ceiling, filtering down into Karin’s light and making her squint.
Behind them came the sound of alarmed voices. Boots pounded up the stairwell.
She doused her light as they heard the soldiers race past. Something brushed against their door.
To their surprise, more shouts came back. And the distinct sound of crackling electricity.
Blaster-shots cracked. A staccato of red and orange light played on the bottom edge of the door as the soldiers yelled.
“Guess they’re not on the same team,” Marc murmured into her ear. “Come on. We’re close.”
Together, they felt their way toward the end of the room. The fighting intensified behind them, but the not-quite-closed door at the end of the room gave them enough light to see their target.
They shut it behind them when they left.
Chapter 6
“I’m not getting any info on the sphere,” Soo-jin said. “Or—more accurately—I’m getting too much. Don’t hold up hope that I can sort through all this in time.”
“Keep on it, anyway. Cookie, you got an ear on Jaxx?”
Marc held the netlink between them, his blaster still in his left hand. They’d left both the sphere and the soldiers behind and put several twists and corridors between them. In another minute, they’d hook back up with their B Route and, hopefully, Jaxx.
As if on cue, the netlink crackled. “Yeah, I’m here.”
“We still clear?” Marc asked.
“Cops have been by twice. I’ll tell you if they come again.”
“Good. We’re almost to you. Signing off.”
He thumbed the netlink display off and put it back into his pocket. They walked in silence. By the posters and notices tacked to the walls, and the holos that flickered to life as they walked by, showing pictures of happy lab students and semester schedules, they were in the chemistry department. One door had a biohazard symbol mounted on it.
“You doing all right?” He glanced down at her. “How are you feeling?”
“Awake and sleepy at the same time.” She stifled a yawn. A dryness had entered her eyes at some point, and a raw, gnawing sensation pulled at her stomach. When had she last eaten?
He side-eyed her. “You’re definitely getting first sleep when we’re back on the ship.”
She laughed. “You mean, after I fly us out of atmo and past the blockade?”
“Well, we wouldn’t want Cookie doing it.”
“Or you, for that matter. Gods, I can’t believe you were actually trying to fly that thing.”
“Hey, now, we did all right without you. It was a lot of pre-planned r
outes and auto-pilot.”
“And prayers?”
He sighed. “Yes, those, too.”
They fell into an uneasy silence after that. The hallway’s lighting gave it a blue tint, reflecting dully off the scratched, well-worn floors and even duller off the matte-white walls. A stale, closed-in smell permeated the air. It was so quiet, she could hear the buzz of the electric exit sign at the end of the hall.
“Lorraine had contacts in, didn’t she?”
She thought back to the way the woman’s eyes had looked. They had definitely been black, though it was clear she hadn’t been Lost. Even if Karin had gotten the same eerie creepiness from her as she did from actual Lost. A psycho-somatic effect, probably. It was the image of the Lost that put them into unease, not the actual physiognomy. Their eyes were the only physical change, after all, apart from the stasis. The only noticeable change, anyway. Their reactions to the Lost were just instinctual human feelings taking over. The fear of the unknown, of the unnatural.
Historically, the diseased had always been shunned. Preservation of species and all that.
“That’s my guess.” Marc glanced back down the hall. “That, plus some acting skills.”
She snorted. “It doesn’t take much to act Lost.”
“No, it doesn’t. Just an experience with any creepy movie.” He side-eyed her again. “Cookie and Soo-jin would be great at it.”
“Soo-jin likes horror?”
“Much of her net-fiction comes from the space horror genre.”
“She lives in space. Why the Sol would she want to read that stuff?”
“Gives her a bit of a thrill. Or, at least, it gave her one.” His jaw worked, his face suddenly serious. “Not sure how much of that stuff she’s reading nowadays.”
Karin sobered.
Probably not much. They were living a space horror.
Sol. Would things ever go back to normal?
No. Not for her, at least. Her secret was out.
They dropped down another few levels, slowly working their way toward the bottom. They needed to get into the basement level to take advantage of the tunnels leading out of the complex. Pipes hissed overhead as they cut through one of the complex’s many sub-boiler rooms. The concrete changed only in style, pour, and the amount of staining that had browned and blackened the walls. Once, they hid in the shadows of a large shelving unit as a patrol of soldiers crossed the end of their hallway.