by EJ Fisch
After a few more seconds, her cable jerked and she came to a sudden stop. Using the faint light from the glow stick, she could see that she had reached the end of the twenty-meter line. She looked to the others, who had also run out of cable. “Okay,” she breathed, getting a firm grip on one of the large pipes, “release on my mark. Three, two, one, now.”
She flipped a tiny switch on the side of the cable spool and deactivated the powerful magnet that had been attached at the top of the shaft. The line retracted quickly and she caught the magnet, reattaching it to the pipe she was hanging on to. They continued downward, releasing and reattaching every twenty meters. It was a slow process – too slow – but it was their best shot at reaching Jayden, Enrik and Saun, assuming they weren’t already dead.
“Are we all clear on the procedure once we reach the bottom?” she asked. “Aroska and I will go in first. We’ll go as far as the old bunker and then split up to search for Zaid and the governor. Skeet, Zinni, you’ll take the lower of the two levels and look for Jayden and the other Tantalis, who have undoubtedly been captured. We’ll meet up at the south sewer access.”
“If we go in for Bront and the other guards, we won’t have enough transportation to get them out of here,” Skeet said.
“Adin is waiting with the Intrepid just out-of-system,” Ziva replied, bothered again that he would think she didn’t have a plan. “We’ll get everyone out.”
“Elevator!” Zinni suddenly exclaimed.
The walls began to shake and Ziva let go of her cable, pressing herself as flat as she could against the crusty wall. The elevator car roared by in a gust of wind half a meter behind them and sped into the darkness above. All that could be heard for the next several seconds was the faint whistle of air swirling through the shaft and the four of them breathing heavily.
Cautiously, silently, Ziva let herself move away from the wall and carried on. “We’re almost there,” she stated, glancing downward. She thought she could see the bottom of the shaft from this point, but she couldn’t tell whether her mind was just playing tricks on her.
“Yeah,” Zinni confirmed. “This next one is it. Level 1B.”
They all stopped and locked their lines. Ziva and Aroska swung across the shaft and clung to the cables that ran parallel to the door. Skeet followed with his tools.
“Zinni, scanner,” Ziva said, extending her hand.
Zinni tossed her the handheld gadget and Ziva held it up to the door. Nothing.
“We’re all clear.” She lobbed it back and nodded at Skeet. “Let’s go.”
Once again he wedged the device into the door and forced it open. There was a long hallway ahead that was sparkling clean and smelled of chemicals.
“Keep as silent as possible,” Ziva said, indicating her earpiece. “Again, meet at the south sewer entrance. Good luck, you two.”
She and Aroska jumped out into the hallway.
-35-
Sublevels
Dakiti Medical Research Center
Sardonis
Skeet waited a few seconds after the door closed before he put his tools away and swung back across the shaft to where Zinni was waiting with her own glow stick activated.
“Let’s do this, sister,” he said, unlocking his cable. They dropped smoothly to the identical door on the next level, where all still seemed quiet. Skeet took a deep breath and reached down to release his line, but Zinni’s hand on his arm stopped him.
“Wait.” Her attention was directed downward.
He watched as she let the glow stick fall down into the darkness. Instead of hitting the ground, it continued falling, illuminating the outline of one last door before finding the bottom of the shaft. Unsure what exactly he was seeing, he activated his own glow stick and held it down as far as he could reach. Sure enough, there was one last level still to come. The architecture around the door looked recent, by no means new, but definitely not as old as the rest of the shaft.
Skeet looked back to Zinni, who was watching him with bright eyes and that same mischievous grin she’d had when she found the overwritten transmission. “Check it out?” she suggested, dropping down before he could even answer.
He unraveled his line and caught up to her, taking a closer look at the door. There was a small black pad built into it, which he carefully reached out to touch. A three-dimensional keypad formed in front of him. The layout was the same as any standard keypad, but the characters were all in Sardon.
“This didn’t show up on the schematics,” Zinni said.
“Security is high, a governor, his son, and a foreign agent are being held captive, and now we have an unknown level that doesn’t show up on anybody’s charts. Where would you stash your hostages in a place like this?”
“We need to get in there,” was Zinni’s reply.
Skeet put a finger to his earpiece. “Ziva, we’ve come across an unknown level of the building and we have reason to believe that searching it should take priority over the other restricted level.”
“Roger that, Skeet,” came Ziva’s quiet voice. “Proceed with caution.”
“How’s your Sardon?” he asked Zinni. “Think you can open it?”
She was chewing on her lip and nodded slowly. “I can try. We just have to hope that screwing up doesn’t trigger some kind of alarm.”
“It looks like this is designed so that when the elevator door opens, this door will still be shut. The code has to be entered in order to get out, and the same goes for coming into the elevator from the other side.”
Zinni nodded and looked up. “Speaking of elevator, it’s headed back this way.”
“Don’t worry. What are the chances it’s coming all the way down here?” Skeet pried at the black pad with his fingers. “Maybe if we could get this thing off—”
“Skeet, the elevator.”
“I hear it.”
“Skeet!”
He looked up to see the elevator car barreling toward them and showing no signs of stopping at either of the two levels above. “Whoa!”
With pure reflex taking over, Skeet released his cable and fell the remaining meter to the bottom of the shaft, landing flat on his back – rifle and all – on a bed of wires beside Zinni’s glow stick. He gasped for the air that had just been punched out of his lungs. Zinni arrived next to him a split second later with a grunt. The car was still coming.
She put her hands up to shield her face.
He closed his eyes.
Boom.
Gentle creaking. Silence.
Skeet looked up, momentarily unsure whether he was still alive. The bottom of the car sat mere centimeters above his face, resting on a sort of shelf identical to the one at the top of the shaft. He could hear a series of key tones followed by the sound of the doors opening and hushed Sardon voices. Dim light seeped in through a crack between the car and the wall, and shadows crossed over his face as figures stepped from the hall into the elevator.
He rolled his head to the side to check on Zinni, who still had her eyes closed but had put her hands down to her sides. Her chest was rising and falling steadily as she attempted to slow her breathing. She appeared to be listening.
The passage door and elevator door closed one after the other and the car took off up the shaft just as fast as it had come. Skeet watched it go until he could no longer see its outline in the light from the glow sticks and then scrambled to his feet. “That’s one for the records,” he said, dusting himself off and reaching down to help Zinni up. “You okay?”
“Fine,” she replied, rubbing the back of her head and cracking her neck. She picked up the remaining length of her grappling cable, which had jammed, and wound it up manually. “How about yourself?”
Skeet nodded in response. “Did you get the code?”
“Do I hear doubt in your voice?” Zinni said, gathering up the glow sticks before pulling out her scanner again. She tapped her ear. “Of course I got it.”
He laughed. “I just thought that the fact that you were nearl
y crushed by an elevator might have affected your ability to retain that information.”
Zinni held the scanner up to the door. The device beeped and she checked the reading. “I’ve got nothing for at least a hundred meters.” She looked to Skeet, waiting for an order.
“Tunnel, maybe?”
“Find out?”
Skeet nodded. “Open it.”
Zinni re-activated the keypad and entered the digits to match the key tones they had heard a moment before, humming them to herself as she did so. The hologram was highlighted in green and the door slid open.
Before them lay a long, straight tunnel that had been carved out of the earth. Dim lights placed every few meters bathed the walls and floor in an eerie yellow hue. At the far end was another door, possibly another elevator.
A foul stench reached them as they climbed up into the tunnel and began walking. It smelled hot – it was already strangely hot and muggy down here – and it made Skeet’s stomach churn. He took another whiff; it was a mixture of overcooked meat and something rotten.
“Smell that?”
Zinni nodded. “Disgusting. I don’t even want to know where it’s coming from.”
“It’s probably the source of that smoke we saw on the way down. That stuff was coming from a vent somewhere down here.”
They made their way cautiously down the tunnel. There were no doors or other passages, only the occasional pipe running up the wall into the floor above. It reminded Skeet of a prison they had infiltrated once. There it had reeked as well, but of sweaty bodies and fecal matter. The smell here was neither of these. It wasn’t coming from the walls or the pipes, but was growing stronger as they neared the door at the end. It gave Skeet an uneasy feeling in his gut, as if he were an animal sensing a predator close by.
“I don’t like this at all,” Zinni murmured, glancing back down the tunnel. “There’s something awful going on around here.”
“Mmhmm,” Skeet replied. He ran his tongue over his lips, which had suddenly become very dry, and raised his rifle toward the door. Whatever was behind it was a threat in one way or another; he could feel it. Perspiration was beginning to build up on his forehead, both because of the heat and because of nerves. He couldn’t breathe.
Skeet blinked and they were at the door, or at least that’s what it felt like. There was a little black touchpad built into the control panel that was exactly like the one they’d just used, though upon closer examination this no longer appeared to be another elevator. Skeet put his ear up to the door, listening, and Zinni held her scanner up, searching.
“Nothing,” they said simultaneously, each taking a step back.
Skeet took a deep breath and waved toward the touchpad. “Try the same code. Let’s get in there.”
Zinni repeated the pattern of key tones and the door slid open. A massive heat wave hit them as they rushed in, weapons up.
Skeet froze.
-36-
Holding room
Dakiti Medical Research Center
Sardonis
The hood was yanked off Jayden’s head and he cringed against the sudden brightness of the room around him. He was sitting in a chair with his wrists secured to the armrests, facing two figures. The first was a tall Sardon whom he assumed to be Dane Bothum. The second was a Haphezian woman who bore a striking resemblance to Ziva, but her eyes were sunken in and her face was ashen. She looked ill.
“Now Jayden – I hope you don’t mind if I call you Jayden – see how easy this was?” Bothum strode over to him, hands clasped behind his back. “If you would have just come to visit me in the first place, this could have been over a long time ago and it would have saved you all the trouble with the Haphezians.”
Jayden glanced at the woman, who was watching him intently with cold purplish-pink eyes. He wondered who she was, and guessed she had been the mole at HSP responsible for this whole mess. He raised his eyebrows and shifted his attention back to Bothum. “I’d also be dead by now if I’d done that.”
Bothum grinned, revealing a typical set of incisor-like Sardon teeth. “Yes, yes you probably would.”
“I won’t do it, Bothum. I know what you want from me. Even if I do delete that transmission, it’s too late. HSP knows exactly where you are.”
“I am well aware of that,” the Sardon replied, glancing approvingly at the woman, “but do they know where you are?”
Jayden hesitated, mouth slightly open. He’d left in such a hurry without telling Ziva and the others of his plans. Would they be able to guess where he had gone? Would they even try to come get him out? He was beginning to wish they hadn’t parted on such negative terms.
“Ah,” Bothum chuckled again. “They have no idea, do they?”
“That’s not true,” Jayden replied quickly. “There’s a squadron on the way here now.” If there was indeed anyone coming for him, he doubted it would be any more than Ziva’s spec ops team. Emeri Arion hadn’t been happy when Jayden and Bront had informed him of the incident at her house, and he had threatened to have her thrown off the case. He hoped that wouldn’t stop her from coming anyway.
“You’re not very good at bluffing,” Bothum said, clicking his tongue.
“Where’s my father?” Jayden demanded, changing the subject. “If you’ve hurt him—”
“Never mind that, boy,” Bothum snapped, his tone changing abruptly from smooth to threatening. “Is HSP coming or not?”
“Damn it, Dane, just kill him now,” the Haphezian woman spoke for the first time, stepping forward with a newly drawn pistol in her hand.
Bothum put his hand out to stop her and stood over her in a menacing manner. “Patience, Saun. I told you I’m not going to be killing anybody until we’ve confirmed that Tarbic and Payvan are on site.”
“What?” Jayden said quietly. If he’d just understood correctly, this was hardly about him anymore. This was a trap for Ziva and Aroska and he was the bait. Now part of him hoped they wouldn’t come looking for him at all. “What are you going to do to them?”
Bothum and the woman stopped and stared at him thoughtfully for a moment and then glanced at each other. With a flustered sigh, she moved around to the back of Jayden’s chair. He turned to find her just as a syringe was jabbed into his throat. He gasped for a breath and then fell asleep.
-37-
Sublevels
Dakiti Medical Research Center
Sardonis
Ziva slipped cautiously behind the short wall that bordered the balcony with Aroska hot on her heels. She glanced back down the hall from which they had come, wondering if they were attracting attention yet. They’d already had an inevitable run-in with a couple of Sardons in medical attire who had mercifully continued studying their holographic tablets without giving the intruders a second glance. Just a moment earlier, a doctor had come through with a man carrying an expensive, secure-looking case. The two had nodded in acknowledgement but had passed without a word. The thought occurred to Ziva that she and Aroska probably looked like a pair of security detail – if there was a Solaris cell here, it probably wasn’t uncommon to see the odd Haphezian every so often. It now seemed that the doctors and other medical personnel wouldn’t be a problem; it was the real guards that worried her.
They peered down over the edge of the balcony and scanned the huge floor below. It was vacant except for a Sardon man in a military get-up who was pacing back and forth in front of a large platform. A massive viewscreen rose up behind him, no doubt used for some sort of presentation. The man was clearly waiting for something, and Ziva was nervous to find out what it was. The way she saw it, they were one step behind since the discovery of the additional level of the building that hadn’t appeared on Zinni’s schematics. Dakiti, one. Alpha team, nothing.
Ziva directed her attention to a vast door that began to rise on the far side of the assembly area. She could see a row of boots lined up side by side, waiting to enter. The boots grew into legs, which eventually grew into Sardon bodies wearing identical u
niforms and toting rifles. They marched in to the center of the floor, ten rows, six across. The man who had been waiting began barking orders, which they carried out in perfect synchronization. Jayden’s words eased into her memory: “Military stuff – the building of an army. They were calling it ‘Shelora Boeta’.”
“What is going on around here?” Ziva muttered.
“A whole lot more than we knew, that’s for sure,” Aroska replied, shifting his weight a little as he too stole a peek behind them. “We shut these guys down after the War over twenty years ago. What are they doing back in business?”
“I’m not so sure it’s the same business. Look.”
Ziva pointed down to the floor, studying the group of soldiers again. Sardons weren’t known to be overly tall creatures – these were. In fact, they were all precisely the same height, and everything else about their physical appearance was the same. They were built like Sardons, strong and wiry, and had the classic leathery gray skin, but they had… hair. Yes, each of their heads was covered in a thin layer of fuzzy, light brown hair. Sardons never had hair of any kind.
“What are they up to now?”
Ziva shook her head. “I think we need to find out.”
There was a squeak of leather boots behind her and she picked up something black in her peripherals. She stood up quickly and swiveled with her rifle raised, but lowered it slowly when she got a look at the man who had suddenly appeared. He was the same height as she was, clad in a black and gray uniform similar to the jumpsuits she and Aroska were wearing. It was clear that he was – or at least had been – Haphezian.
“What are you two nimrods doing?” he demanded. Judging by his demeanor and the way he spoke, Ziva could tell he wasn’t quite with it. His eyes were a brilliant green, though one was rather cloudy and kept drifting lazily in different directions. She wondered if it was even functional. His hair was black and close-cropped, with no stripes that Ziva could see. One side of his face, the side with the lazy eye, drooped a bit. He was standing with his knees slightly bent and favored one leg as if he were in pain. Ziva looked to where he was clutching a rifle of his own and did a double-take. Each hand had a thumb but only three fingers.