Farenough: Strangers Book 2

by Melissa McCann

  Liam put his shoulder to the door at the top of the stairwell and shoved. It didn't budge. He looked over his shoulder at Tora.

  Speculatively, Tora eyed the cannon under Liam's arm.

  Annia hurried to break Tora’s chain of thought and said, "Medea, the door is locked. Can you open it?"

  The girl felt her way to the door without Tora's help. She had a reckless way of walking as though she didn't care whether the floor was even or she struck an obstacle. She found the hand plate and set her palm on the lighted panel. "Access override Medea two." The door opened, and she walked through it onto the balcony overlooking the atrium.

  Liam followed immediately with the pulse cannon. He shoved the girl behind him, turned the pulse cannon to the right and fired. The generator shrieked, and a bolt of white light stabbed from the muzzle of the cannon to the opposite wal.l Miniature lightning flickered around the bolt which glowed for a moment then shut off with a boom of thunder that made Annia jump. Six of Solante's guards, caught in the field, jerked and danced like puppets as the weapon overloaded their nervous systems. The wall seared and blackened in a rolling wave of plasma, and the white stone of the balcony cracked under the sudden heat and exploded outward. The electrocuted guards dropped, smoking, to the floor of the atrium. Liam cut the beam and swung the cannon to scan the remainder of the balcony, but Solante's personal guard had prudently retreated.

  Annia caught the girl by the arm. "Which way?"

  The girl moved her face minutely from side to side, orienting herself. "Two doors down on the right."

  Liam counted doors and set his palm on the pad beside the second. Nothing happened.

  Annia turned to Medea. "It's locked."

  She said sullenly, "It's controlled by his private code. I don't know if I can override it." She put her hand to the plate. "Access override Medea two."

  Nothing happened. Across the gulf of the atrium, guards were massing again on the balcony. Tora murmured, "Projectile weapons."

  The girl said, "Access override Medea nine.”

  Projectiles pounded the walls around them, and Liam grunted and staggered. He fired the cannon across the atrium. The floor and walls shook with thunder as the beam blasted a smoking hole in the opposite wall

  The girl said, "Access override Medea three." The door jerked, stopped, started to close, then juddered open. Annia entered with Medea. Tora followed, and Liam backed in, limping, just as the doors closed.

  The room was dark and had a dusty, tickling smell of mingled newness and lack of use. Annia felt the clones stiffen, and Liam shoved her behind him as he brought the pulse cannon to bear on the blackness of the room before them.

  "Lights," Annia said quickly.

  Auditory pickups recorded her voice, and the light flicked on in silence. Annia squinted against the sudden glare, but she was able to make out Ganymede Solante and a handful of his personal guards standing before the monitor of a satellite bounce station with projectile weapons aimed at the door.

  Solante hardly seemed to notice Annia or the clones. His slitted almond eyes fixed on the girl. "Medea," he said like a parent chiding a wayward child.

  Annia said softly to Liam. "Don't fire." The cannon would damage the equipment, and Annia needed the satellite station intact.

  Medea had turned pale. She swayed, and the pulse raced in her throat, but her dusky voice, a lighter version of Solante's liquid purr, was steady. "Voice command, scramble access code Medea one."

  Solante's lips tightened. "So you have been planting trap doors in the house programs. If I had known you had the wits to do that, little Medea, I might have left you your eyes."

  "If you hadn't taken my eyes, I might not have just deleted your voice access from the data bank." Then her lips narrowed. Her arched nose and the line of her mouth were the image of Solante himself. "Or maybe I would."

  Solante said, "Shoot them."

  Before the words left his mouth, Liam heaved the heavy pulse cannon across the room at the startled guards and used his own weight to drag Annia and Medea to the floor. Tora dropped and rolled as a spray of poorly-aimed bullets spattered the wall above them.

  Tora rose before the guards could shift their aim to cover her. She disarmed the nearest man and the one beside him. She used the first man’s weapon to rap a third soldier sharply in the skull as he turned toward her. One man had gone down under the hurtling weight of the pulse cannon, throwing his neighbor off balance as he fell. By the time the last two guards had gathered their wits enough to form a threat to Tora, Liam was taking them from the flank.

  In moments, the clones stood over the unconscious bodies of the guards. Tora had been banged about a little. Liam limped, and blood soaked his trousers from a projectile wound above his left knee, but it was not severe enough to incapacitate him any time soon.

  Solante had backed away from the fighting. Now he said, "Voice command, open door."

  The door remained tightly shut.

  Annia picked herself up, pulling Medea to her feet as well. "Give me my data, Solante, and I won't let the clones kill you."

  Tora scowled. "Enemy."

  Solante raised his voice again. "Voice command, initiate Solante omega one."

  Sonic projectors positioned around the room erupted in a piercing whine that stabbed through Annia's head. She instinctively clapped her hands to her ears, but the sound resonated directly through the bones of her skull—impossible to shut out. She felt dizzy, nauseated. Honeybear writhed off her shoulders and dropped to the floor, twisting itself into knots and probably squealing with distress, but Annia couldn't hear it. She lost her balance and fell to the floor, still trying to protect her ears. Beside her she saw Medea also clutching her head. The clones were still on their feet, but they were shaking their heads violently, unable to coordinate an attack.

  Solante was unaffected by the piercing sound. He must have had counter-resonators implanted in his ears when he installed the system. He stepped over his guards’ writhing bodies and walked to the door. Annia saw his lips move, but she could hear nothing above the paralyzing assault on her ears. The door opened. He stepped through.

  Somehow Medea brought her hands down from her ears, got up on her hands and knees, and crawled after him. She followed him through the doors just before they closed. All Annia could do was lie on the floor and try not to vomit as the sound played havoc with her inner ears

  Tora and Liam tolerated the sonic violence better than Annia. Tora staggered to one of the fallen guards and took his weapon. She scanned the walls until she identified a projector and fired the rifle. The sound whining through Annia's head didn't seem to diminish until after the second rifle blast. Regaining some of her balance, Tora spotted another sonic projector and destroyed it, and Annia found her hands and knees. If she'd had something to hold onto, she thought she might be able to stand up.

  Two more shots from Tora's rifle reduced the auditory assault to a bearable shrilling. Tora paced around the room, looking for the remaining projectors. While she did that, Liam stood up and tested his weight on his injured knee. Annia couldn't see the extent of the damage under his trousers, but the blood on his boot was dark and starting to turn sticky, and he could put weight on it, so the shot must have missed both the joint and the major bones. He took Annia by the arm and helped her up.

  Another blast from the projectile gun almost made Annia collapse again, but afterward, the debilitating whine dropped to a bearable level, an unpleasant background whine that could be ignored with practice.

  Liam helped Annia to sit in one of the swivel chairs in front of the satellite bounce station. He picked Honeybear's limp body off the floor and dropped it into Annia's lap. The animal lay slack, extended to its full length. Annia tried to gather it up and curl it in her lap, but Honeybear felt like a slack rope in her hands. She’d already seen that Honeybear didn’t like the sonic frequency of her scanner. What if Solante’s sonic stun had killed i? She might have lost her reservoir of live phage. Was there an
y of the partial cure left in Annia's system?

  Liam limped to the door and tried to open it without success. Annia hoped that meant Solante's guards, if any remained active, would be unable to access the room from the other side. Tora began to collect all the dropped weapons, removing their ammunition and the generator from the pulse cannon while Liam used the sashes from the guards' belts to tie their hands and ankles.

  The satellite bounce station was stark by the standards of most affluent worlds—a simple monitor and chair, data feeds sticking out of raw boards, and coils of cable roughly taped and fed through an opening cut in the ceiling. By Murrayville standards, it was a well-equipped system.

  She moved to the data terminal. She activated the directory tree and got a blank screen. "Sib of a bad brood." She wouldn't get in at all without Solante's access key. There was no palm pad or ocular scanner, so it was some kind of private code only Solante and a few of his trusted officers were likely to know. Annia could not get in.

  Was there was anyone she could call for help. Elizabeth-Belle or Jordan-Kyle? Cho'en? Could any of them break an encryption while they still had time? She looked over her shoulder at Liam. He had an affinity for numbers and patterns. What else was an encryption? "Come over here, Liam."

  He stopped limping around the perimeter of the room as if he could keep enemies from emerging through the walls and came toward her. She should have stopped to examine his leg before this. He had begun to bleed again. Fresh red stained his trousers and boot. "Sit here." She vacated her seat. "Look at the monitor. Do you see anything?"

  Liam sat and looked as instructed. He cocked his head.

  Well, it might take time. "Turn so I can see your leg. No, don't stop looking at the monitor. There's a pattern there that I need to have."

  The wound looked about like she'd expected. The projectile had gone through the meat of his calf without severing the hamstrings or shattering the joint. It had missed the major arteries. If Annia had brought her EFK, she would treat it with bandages to sterilize entry and exit wounds and dismissed him as fit enough to return to the barracks. "Tora, can you bring me another one of those blue belts?"

  #

  Liam's leg hurt. The blue-sash enemies had started pounding on the door while Annia wrapped his leg in a blue sash which didn't make it hurt less. He identified seven voices outside the door. From their positions and distances, he determined there were another five enemies there whose voices he had not heard. Positions indicated projectile weapons.

  Liam was looking at Annia when, like the flicker of an eyelid, Maycee appeared in the room. "There you are," she said brightly.

  Annia stared at Maycee. "What are you doing out of bed?"

  Liam thought she should ask how Maycee got here without coming through the door. Maycee was thin and pale, and she trembled. "I'm looking for you. Are you all right? Lee, you're hurt."

  The enemy that had been hurting her was gone. She looked bigger to him, brighter. She made everything around her look small and grey.

  Annia went to Maycee and pulled Maycee's long, dark hair aside where it hung over the machine she had put on Maycee's head. "You shouldn't be out of bed. Doesn't your head hurt?"

  "It feels like somebody has been drilling holes in my skull."

  Annia primmed her lips. "Yes, well, if you can think of some other way to install a neural modulator, be sure to tell me about it. You should be back in the hospital where someone can give you an analgesic."

  Maycee pulled Annia's hand away from her head. "Whatever you did, it worked. What can I do to help?"

  "Can you break into an encrypted data bank?"

  Maycee shrugged. "Maybe." She came and knelt by Liam and touched his knee where Annia had tied it in the belts of the blue-sash enemies in the corners where Tora had put them. "Were you shot again, Lee? Annia, you can't keep letting people shoot him."

  "It could be worse," Annia grumbled. "He could have the plague."

  Maycee stroked Liam's face with her cool, scaled palm, and he rubbed his cheek into her hand. She smoothed the hair back from his forehead the way she had done before the Elizabeth-Belle and the Jordan-Kyle had let the enemies get her and make her unconscious. He wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her neck. She stroked the back of his neck, and he didn't want to go anywhere or do anything else ever again.

  Then Annia said, "Reunions later. Encryption now."

  Annia was right. Enemies still had to be fought. He let go of Maycee and pushed himself up by the back of the chair, careful not to put all his weight on his damaged leg. He made room for Maycee to sit in front of the monitor.

  She squeezed his hand. "We'll make up for lost time later."

  Liam watched the competent set of her shoulders and neck. Maycee was repaired. She had human work to do, and she did not need him to protect her now.

  Before very many minutes, Maycee swiveled her chair away from the data board and said to Annia, "We're looking for a ten symbol entry code and no way to know what it is. If I had a solid week to work on it, I could unravel the encryption, and the code wouldn't matter."

  Annia made an impatient sound. "I've got fifteen minutes to get my data out and send it to the DPH before someone breaks into this room. Can't you get the entry code?"

  "What am I, a mind-reader?" That was one of Maycee's jokes, half humor and half irritation.

  Annia did not think Maycee's jokes were funny. She folded her arms.

  Maycee's lips twitched because she was trying not to laugh. She said, "Don't panic. The encryption can be broken. All it takes is a big enough brain and a little time. Fortunately, I can buy you some time, and I know people with very big brains. I'll be back, Lee." She stood up and kissed him. She still smelled tired and sick, but the enemy that had been hurting her inside was gone. She would be well again.

  "Now stop getting shot, and I'll see you as soon as I get back from a few errands." She stepped back and disappeared like an eyelid closing.

  Annia said, "She's translocating on her own. What in the deep void have I done?" She turned to Liam. "How many are outside the door?"

  He cocked his head to hear the thumping from outside. More enemies had come. "Fifteen."

  "Tora, if we got the door open, could we fight our way out?"

  Tora shook her head. "Too many enemies. Too many weapons. Too close together.”

  Liam went back to looking at the numbers circling in the monitor. Nine symbols, but they repeated and recombined in ways he did not understand. Patterns formed in his head—combinations of numbers that appeared over and over. He stuck his finger in the column of numbers. They scattered, then reformed around his finger. He moved his finger up and down, and the cloud of numbers went up and down and when it went up, new numbers came up from the bottom. He saw the pattern he already knew and more combinations of numbers that came over and over.

  He liked to look at the numbers. The whole pattern began to form in his mind as parts and pieces built into a bigger shape, but he did not know what the shape meant. Annia sat down at a data board nearby. He did not know what she was doing, but it made her mumble in an angry voice. Tora patrolled the perimeter of the room, but there were no enemies. Enemies could not get in.

  Liam had nothing else to do. His leg was not too damaged to patrol, but the room was not very big, and Tora could patrol it without his help, so he watched the numbers, picking out more patterns and seeing how they fit together even if he did not know what it meant.

  Annia screamed.

  Liam whirled out of his chair and almost fell because he forgot his leg was damaged. For a moment, he could not understand why the room was so crowded, and he prepared to kill enemies. Then he stopped because there were no enemies. The room was full of strangers. Only two, but they were very big.

  He recognized them by the smell. They smelled like Cho'en, musty and dark. They crouched in the middle of the room with their heads together and their massive tails cocked at defensive angles. They were four times as big as Cho'en
and dull green where Cho'en was golden bronze. If they stood up straight, they would stand half again taller than Liam. They cocked their gigantic heads, and huge golden eyes flicked from side to side.

  Annia had jumped up to run away, but there was no place she could run. Tora put her hand on Annia's shoulder. "No enemies." Tora knew how to tell enemies from friends, so these big people with many legs must be humans.

  Liam straightened, carrying his weight on the back of the chair to ease his knee. The nearest stranger recoiled from his movement and altered the attitude of her tail. The bells clipped to her hide from head to toe said, alarm/surprise/discomfort.

  Tora said, "Friends. No enemies."

  The big stranger turned her head toward Tora, and her tail relaxed so it was not a weapon anymore. She rose up a little on her four thick legs and unfolded her arms from her chest. Her pale crest rose to half-height. Then Annia came forward, and the stranger recoiled again. Her companion swung her tail.

  Annia froze.

  "Too fast," Tora said. She approached the two hulking strangers with slow movements. They watched her with their crests flat on their skulls.

  The strangers stood again and raised their crests with greater confidence.

  The nearer stranger dropped her head to a level with Tora's eyes and hissed, "Hattia?" Query, This One (three) seeks One (one only). Assistance offered.

  Tora nodded her head toward Annia. "Annia is there."

  Annia stood very still. "I am Annia. You are friends of Maycee?"

  Both strangers slewed their heads around toward Annia. The further one said, "Chaythee?" Query/confusion.

  The other said, "Thaktalheth-Cahel."

  Comprehension/affirmative. "Thaktalheth-Cahel." Close-as-kin. This One (three) comes to assist. "Heth." She dipped her nose to jingle the bells on her face.

  The other stranger courteously dropped her head and chuffed. This One (three)also to assist. "Taha."

  The strangers were hard to understand because they didn't talk in their throats like Cho'en. They had to make sounds only with breath and their tongues and jaws because they didn't have lips for talking like other humans. So they could hiss and click their tongues and move their jaws, but they could not talk like other people.