by Rick Partlow
The side hatch of the plane yawned open, and a man’s body was sprawled half-in and half-out of it, blood spilling down the boarding ramp in winding rivulets. His head had been caved in, likely by the butt-stock of Fellow’s rifle, and Sam let his eyes skip away from the sight of the stoved-in skull, the misshapen head that didn’t even seem human anymore.
“There’s another over here,” Fellows reported quietly, speaking in a low tone but not whispering. Telia had explained to Sam once how a whisper actually carried further than simply keeping your voice down.
“Over here” turned out to be through a stand of trees that had survived the vagaries of the lightning-strike fire, over a low rockfall pile and right up to the side of a hill. The woman was dressed in the same drab grey as the man had been, the unmarked uniform of Consensus Executive Security, which Sam hadn’t quite been able to figure out if it was an official government agency or a private firm. She hadn’t been bludgeoned to death like the man; there was the hilt of a boot knife protruding from her left ear where the blade had stuck in her skull. She’d been a handsome woman in life, with a regal nose and high cheekbones, but now the light was extinguished behind her eyes and she seemed fake, a robot greeter with a short in its motherboard.
His gaze was so drawn to those dead eyes it took him a moment to notice the doorway. When he saw the shadowed arch, he thought it was a cave at first, but there was something too regular about the shape, something too smooth about the walls inside. They were pitted with age, but they’d started out straight and level, a tunnel right into the side of the mountain.
“I guess this is why they’re here,” Telia murmured.
“You got the infrared eye, Proctor” Fellows told her, motioning with the emitter of his rifle. “You go first.”
Telia moved ahead of him, intentionally brushing him with her shoulder hard enough to knock him back a step. Fellows chuckled and swatted her on the back with a casual camaraderie Sam found jarring. Just how well did these two know each other? Fellows had been a complete asshole to her---and all of them---when they’d first arrived on Luna three and a half years ago. What had changed?
“Hey flyboy,” Fellows said to him, as if he’d sensed the eyes on his back. “Make yourself useful and watch our asses.” He craned his head around and sneered. “That means walk backwards behind us and shoot anyone else you see, in case I was being too technical.”
I take it back, Sam thought, letting the others past him and putting a hand against the wall to guide himself as he stepped carefully backwards from the entrance. He’s still an asshole.
Chapter Twenty-Four
When the technicians had told her about the infrared functions in her bionic eye, Telia had imagined the effect would be something like the night-vision filters in her battle armor’s helmet, with everything flatly two-dimensional and tinted green. She hadn’t thought about the eye being wired directly into her optic nerve, and the function the brain played in vision. Her brain didn’t want to see the green tint, so she didn’t; the images were black and white instead, as if she were under the brightest full moon ever, and somehow her brain added depth to it as well.
Normally, none of it would have helped this deep underground; there was just no light, infrared or otherwise. She would have been forced to use an infrared flashlight, which would have been just as obvious to anyone watching with night vision goggles as if she’d simply used a visible-spectrum flashlight.
Normally. But there was light somewhere up ahead, still far enough it was just an almost imperceptible glow, but it was sufficient to give the broad entrance hall some detail, to allow her to stay at the center. The glow was comforting; if Tejado and his people expected company, they wouldn’t have left the lights on. That’s what she told herself anyway.
The light grew brighter as she moved, urging speed, but she resisted the pull and advanced carefully and methodically. There were other things her eye could see more clearly than a biological version: remote sensors, laser tripwires, insect drones left along the trail to watch for intruders. She could spot them before they spotted her, most of the time, but only if she was thorough and slow.
She saw nothing, not a sign of rear security and it bothered her. The sloppiness bothered her, as did the inattention of the guards Fellows had killed. He was good, but he was one man and he’d taken out both of the protection detail alone and without using a gun. It wasn’t just that they hadn’t expected opposition, it was as if they were in a rush, as if the whole thing hadn’t been planned at all.
Why were they here?
She could hear voices and she stopped short, holding up a hand to alert Fellows and the others. He’d halted already, head cocked towards the sound. She couldn’t make out what was being said, just the unmistakable buzz of conversation, maybe a man, definitely a woman. She made a questioning gesture, confident the light was bright enough now for him to see it. He turned to the others and held up a hand for them to wait, then pointed to her and to himself and raised his rifle to his shoulder.
The meaning was unmistakable: the two of them were going to move up and take out the threat. “Take out the threat” sounded so antiseptic, so textbook. It wasn’t quite adequate to describe the mechanics of killing people, but it would have to do. She nodded to him, raising her rifle one-handed, the weight of the massive pulse gun nothing to her bionics. She could have held one in each hand if it wouldn’t have been impossible to hit anything that way.
She moved out first, knowing Fellows would take point if she gave him the chance, and also knowing she could take more punishment. Her left pant leg was still charred and ragged, the dull-grey of the bionics polished silvery bright by the plasma blast she’d taken back in Capital City, a reminder gleaming faintly in the light filtering into the tunnel.
After, she promised herself. If we live through this, if we manage to find some way to save everything, then I’ll travel to the Resolution and I’ll use their medical cloning, unholy though it may be, and I’ll be whole again. It’s what Mawae would have wanted.
And what she would do with herself after that was a matter best left for the future. The end of the tunnel brought her thoughts back to the here and now. It terminated in a T-junction, and the light and the voices both came from the left leg of the intersection, which didn’t necessarily mean the right side was unoccupied. She gestured for Fellows to cover the right while she edged forward, hugging the wall and feeling the cold, pitted surface of the stone pulling at her hair as she darted around the corner for a split-second glimpse of the other side.
The image was a single frame frozen in a video stream, a snapshot of data that took her brain a moment to process. The room was large and looked larger because of the odd play of shadows from the portable lighting stands set up in the corners; the glare had washed out her vision, made it hard to discern the details, but she’d definitely seen a door of some kind, metal, with a large, physical lock.
Six people, that much she was sure of, though the only face she’d recognized on first glance was Tejado’s. He was there, and Valley probably was as well, but she’d never met the Resolutionist and couldn’t pick her out from the other two women she’d spotted in the group. What they were doing…that was harder to figure. There’d been some sort of heavy, metal case on the floor next to the doorway, two meters long and a meter across, and the lid of the thing had been propped up while one of the women kneeled beside it and fiddled with something inside, something Telia hadn’t been able to see.
The others were guards, she thought, posted around the room with guns in their hands, what sort she couldn’t make out. Except Tejado…he was pacing, impatient, an expectant father. She wasn’t sure if he was armed, but if he had a gun, it wasn’t visible.
She signaled to Fellows and he indicated there was nothing down to the right. She held up five fingers, then closed her fist and an additional one to make six. Four more fingers and she patted the side of her rifle; four of them armed. She chopped her hand in different directions
as if around a compass, giving him the positions of everyone she’d seen, then indicated herself and the left side of the room. She’d take the left, he’d take the right.
Fellows nodded, a hint of a grin playing across his ugly, blocky face, and she remembered why she’d once fallen for the man, a lifetime ago. She held up the last three fingers of her left hand, began counting them down one at a time. When the last one folded, she spun around the corner, still feeling that empty free-fall in her gut even after all these years.
She couldn’t see them as individuals. She’d freeze up if she did, if she let herself look them in the eyes, so she watched their center of gravity instead, their chests grey and armored and impersonal. She wasn’t conscious of pulling the trigger, didn’t feel the recoil; the flash of the first round igniting at the bore was a surprise to her, and an even bigger surprise to the Executive Protection agent. Plasma speared through his chest armor, the military rifle too powerful for the light vest to defeat it, and even if the first round had been stopped, the second and third would have killed him.
Telia didn’t watch him fall, though she knew the shots had been fatal; instead, she was moving, just two steps to the left as she transitioned to her next target, a tall, gangly woman with shocking red hair shaved into a mohawk and a sub machinegun held loosely in her hands. She was trying to bring it up, training overcoming the shock at seeing the man shot in front of her, but it was already too late. She was dead, and the three-round burst was merely a formality.
The first two were free, the benefits of surprise; the last man was fast, and a professional, and already firing. She’d anticipated it. You never counted on more than two. He’d expect her to move forward and left, so she didn’t. Just one sliding step back, a duck to the right and the rocket-assisted slugs from his sub machinegun passed by centimeters from her face, a wash of hot wind against her cheek.
She made a mistake then and looked him in the eye. Disappointment, annoyance, perhaps a bit of respect behind those blue eyes, plus the knowledge his time was up. Heat and light and vaporized blood washed the face away before he could fire another shot, but she knew she’d taken too long. If anyone had gotten past Fellows…
They hadn’t, of course. The last remaining Executive Protection agent was slumping face-first, a haze of steam rising up from her charred body armor, her features slack and lifeless, and Fellows was standing over Jamie Tejado while he trained his rifle on a woman Telia presumed was Jeddah Valley. Tejado was moaning softly, flat on his back, with a pressure cut on his cheek oozing blood, the skin around it red and already starting to bruise; she guessed he’d been the recipient of a butt-stroke from Fellows’ rifle.
Jeddah Valley looked much the same as she had in the surveillance videos, though they hadn’t quite managed to capture the wild tangle of her auburn hair, a look of benign neglect that might have come naturally or might have been cultivated as part of her cover. She was still kneeling, caught in the midst of whatever she’d been doing with the metal case, and her long, plain face was ashen with shock.
Telia snuck a glance beneath the open cover of the container; there was a simple, touch-screen control panel inside, a virtual keyboard taking up half the display, the other half with a list of symbols. Some were letters, some numbers, some just shapes such as triangles and circles. It didn’t make a damned bit of sense to her.
“Whoever you are,” Valley was saying, her voice rough and hoarse, “this is a mistake. You need to leave now, it’s vital…”
“And what exactly are you doing here, Citizen Valley?”
Priscilla stepped into the chamber, Telia’s pistol hanging loosely at her side, her blue eyes fixed on Jeddah Valley.
“What would a Resolution citizen be doing here on Earth?” Pris said, striding slowly across the room, side-stepping the growing pools of blood without looking down at them. “What would a Resolution citizen be doing hijacking a Belter barge, murdering dozens of her brothers and sisters and then running to Earth to meet with the head of the Naturalist Party?” She indicated Tejado with a casual sweep of the pistol’s muzzle. Tejado saw it and flinched away.
“And what the hell is that thing?” Sam asked, walking in from the tunnel with John Gage in tow. He was pointing at the coffin-size metal container, though not with his gun; he either had better training with firearms than Priscilla or perhaps wasn’t as cold-blooded. Telia could have believed either.
“How did you find me?” Jeddah Valley’s eyes were wide, her tone venomous, but the target was Priscilla rather than Sam. “There’s no way you could have found me here!”
“Shut up, Valley!” Tejado snapped, rolling onto his side, hand pressed to his cheek. “Don’t tell them anything!” He turned on Fellows, motioning at Sam and Pris. “Guardian Fellows, as an appointed Minister of the Consensus government, I order you to arrest these two enemies of the state!”
“Yeah, dipshit, about that,” Fellows drawled, rolling his eyes at Tejado, “I got a Minister here telling me to do something else, and he ain’t hanging out with the bitch who blew up the only hope we had of saving this planet.”
“Be smart, Adrian,” Tejado growled, coming slowly to his feet. “You’ve always known which side your bread was buttered on. Only one of us is going to come out of this on top.”
Gage moved before Telia could stop him, shoving Tejado back to the ground, hands at the man’s throat.
“You son of a bitch!” he screamed into the Naturalist’s face. “None of us are coming out on top of this! We’re all going to fucking die thanks to you and your friend! Give me one fucking reason I shouldn’t kill you now!”
Tejado tried to strike at the older man, but Gage wasn’t having any of it; he yanked the other Minister bodily and slammed him back to the stone floor. There was a painful crack as the back of Tejado’s head smacked against Stone and the wind went out of the Naturalist, his eyes rolling back in his head. Gage’s left foot was smeared with the blood of one of the protection agents, the red dripping from his heel as he crouched down over Tejado.
“Minister Gage…” Telia began, intending to try to calm the man down, but stopped as something about the metal case struck her. Her bionic eye had several different functions beside infrared filters…including a Geiger counter. “Oh, fuck me,” she muttered.
“What is it?” Fellows asked sharply. He’d be the one to know something was wrong; he knew she rarely swore.
“I think I know what that case is,” she stated, surprised at how steady her voice was.
She took a step toward it, still keeping her gun trained on Valley. The reading was unmistakable, a red flashing in the corner of her vision.
“It’s a nuclear weapon.”
***
“It’s some kind of password,” Sam decided, peering at the touch screen on the weapon’s control panel. He was bent over the open lid of the case, hands carefully at his side, not wanting to touch anything by accident. “Shouldn’t we just try deleting the symbols already typed?”
“We don’t know what she did to it before we got there,” Fellows scoffed, tightening the restraints around Jeddah Valley’s wrists. The woman yelped slightly and glared at him but he simply pushed her back to a seat on the floor beside Tejado, who was still lolling incoherently. “We hit the wrong key by accident and…” He mimed an explosion with his fingers.
“Tell us how to disarm this thing,” Telia Proctor barked at Valley, brandishing her pistol in the woman’s face.
“Put that aside for a moment,” Priscilla said, her voice and demeanor much calmer than anyone else’s. She approached the Resolutionist woman, crouching beside her to look her in the eye. “What is this place? And why is it so important that you’d use a nuclear weapon to destroy it?”
“This place,” Valley told her, contempt dripping off the words, “is the death of both of our civilizations. And if you have a shred of loyalty left to Mother and to the Mother Gaia, you’ll cut me loose and let me finish what I have to do.”
The fero
city of the woman’s tone, the intensity of her gaze made Sam shudder; she was a fanatic. But a fanatic for whom?
“You mean through there?” Pris jabbed a finger at the pitted grey metal of the hatch, the ancient wheel at its center, somehow free of rust or corrosion. “What’s in there, Citizen Valley? If you can convince me you’re right, perhaps I will indeed allow you to destroy it.”
Sam could almost believe her; Pris was still the most convincing liar he’d ever met, even if she’d had a three-year hiatus in what she called “exercising diplomacy.” Valley, however, wasn’t as easily convinced.
“You might have once, but you’re not what you were.” The older woman pulled her knees up to her chest, resting her head on them. “You were such a disappointment to her.”
“To who?” Sam asked sharply, maybe being defensive for Pris if he was being honest with himself. “Who are you working for?”
“This is a waste of time,” Fellows grumbled, leaning back against the far wall, arms crossed. “We have what we came for. We’ll take Tejado back and try his ass for assassinating Brecht, you take this psycho bitch and parade her in front of your people to get them to send help. As for the nuke…” He shrugged. “As long as I’m far away from it when it blows, what the hell do I care?”
Valley made no reply to that, but Sam thought she seemed a bit too comfortable with the idea. Something was wrong here, something beyond the conspiracy.
“No,” Pris declared. “There’s something here they don’t want revealed and it’s important enough they rushed here immediately when they found out Sam and I were coming to meet with Prime Minister Brecht. All this…” She waved a hand around them demonstratively. “The assassination, this trip to the middle of nowhere, this was last-minute, poorly-planned, improvised.” She grabbed Valley’s face between the fingers of her hand, jerking it upwards to meet her eyes. “What is this place?”