by Rick Partlow
“Whoever set off the alarm must have directed them to block our way, try to slow us down,” she surmised, slowing to a halt.
“If we wait, they’ll box us in,” he said, quickly making a decision. “Follow me!”
Franks broke into a run, ignoring Manning’s shouted protest as he charged directly at the gathering mass of biomech workers and then launched himself into the air in a flying leap towards the tunnel entrance. As he soared through the air, he had that gone feeling in his gut that came from knowing that he had no idea where he would land: he’d just tried for as long of a jump as possible in the one-sixth gravity.
As he arced downward, it became obvious that he wasn’t going to clear the whole crowd of worker biomechs; instead, he was coming down right in the thick of almost a dozen of the things, looking ridiculous and harmless in their orange coveralls yet each of them two meters tall and stronger than a human…
Franks drew his knees up to his chest and held his makeshift club out in front of him, trying not to clench up as the fall seemed to last forever. When the impact came, he slammed the broken maser weapon into the faces of two of the worker biomechs who’d lined up shoulder to shoulder to block his way, the force of the blow travelling up his shoulders and nearly wrenching the muscles of his upper back. The breath went out of him in a pained grunt as he wound up landing with his knees in the chest of one of the biomechs. Acting on instinct and ingrained training more than any sort of plan, he rolled forward, using the lighter gravity in his favor as he flipped back to his feet.
He’d cleared a space around his position but he’d also attracted attention: the biomechs still on their feet were closing in on him faster than he’d expected, as if they knew he was a target. He thought he could see a spark of purpose in the dead blackness of their eyes, and the first to get to him had its hands raised, actually trying to grab for him. He ducked under its grab and swung the broken maser in an arcing shot at the thing’s legs. A shock went up his arms from the strike---these things were solidly built---but the biomech went down face-first, bowling over two more that were crowding in on him.
Acting more from a gut feeling than any visual cue, Franks rode the recoil from the leg strike into a spin the opposite direction, this time at head level---head level for a biomech, which was several centimeters above his own head. The worker’s hands had been centimeters from his neck and his swing went just above the outstretched arms to catch the thing at the temple, jerking its head to the side and sending it sprawling.
That was where his luck ended: one of them dove at his ankles with surprising agility and suddenly he was going down, unable to free his legs from the thing’s iron grip. He tried to swing at the biomech that had tackled him, but he was too far off balance and wound up losing his grip on the club, watching helplessly as it skittered across the floor away from him. He twisted and kicked but he couldn’t free himself, and more of the biomechs were gathering around him. One of them raised its foot to smash down on his helmet…
…and Tanya Manning smashed the buttstock of her grenade launcher into the thing’s face, knocking it off its feet and away from him. The weapon swung around and came down on the head of the biomech holding his legs and the vice-like grip relaxed enough for him to jump to his feet and follow her as she made a break for the tunnel to the next dome. Two more of the biomechs were in their way, but she put an adhesive round into the face of the closest, then side-kicked the blinded worker in the chest, pushing it into the other.
Then she and Franks were through the pack and sprinting through the tunnel towards the freight-handling bay. Franks was breathing in ragged gasps, adrenaline surging through him, and he tried to force his respiration back to normal. He’d been shot at more than once, been in multiple space battles where he could have died at any second without warning, yet he’d never quite felt the panic or helplessness he’d experienced when that biomech had dragged him to the ground. The things had an inhuman, implacable and relentless determination that shook him at some level below the rational.
He took a deep breath and held it for just a heartbeat before letting it slowly out, bringing his body and brain both under control. Anger aided in that: he was furious with himself for giving into the fear like some ensign fresh out of the academy. He felt like kicking himself in the ass and considered asking Tanya to do it for him later; hell, she might enjoy it.
Franks and Manning emerged from the tunnel into the freight bay and he relaxed slightly as he saw that the dome was empty of biomech workers. Presumably, they’d all been called into the production bay to try to pen the two of them in there.
“We need to get outside,” Manning was saying as they approached the airlock. “They’ll have flyers out there eventually, but if we can find some cover, we can wait for our pickup…”
She trailed off and came to a halt so abrupt that Franks nearly ran into her suit’s backpack. He moved to her side, thinking that she’d spotted another of the security biomechs, but he immediately saw what had brought her up short. The indicator lights over the auxiliary airlock were blinking red, the status display showing that the small-craft docking collar was extending to mate with a spaceship. It wasn’t a cargo hauler: those would use the bigger lock. It couldn’t be their extraction ship either, as that wouldn’t have the ID codes to land on the pad and mate with the docking collar. That left only one possibility: a security detail, possibly a CIS special action team.
“Shit,” he muttered. “How the hell did they get here so fast?”
“Move to the alternate egress,” Manning said curtly. She tried to keep her tone businesslike, but he thought he could detect an undertone of panic in it. He knew why: the alternate egress was a waste disposal chute in the atmosphere and environmental control dome, clear on the other side of the facility. They would have to wade through every single biomech in the place, not to mention whatever other surprises the security system had for them, to get to it.
Franks turned back towards the tunnel entrance…and saw a column of biomech workers marching their way through it, with four biomech security guards in the lead, hands filled with weapons. He turned and shared a glance with Manning, catching her eye through the helmet faceplates. He didn’t have to say anything. They both knew there was no way they were getting through the biomechs, so they would have to take on the crew of the ship.
Manning positioned herself just to the side of the airlock, her grenade launcher held at chest level. Franks knew she couldn’t have more than one or two shots left in the thing, so he looked around quickly for a makeshift weapon and finally settled on a pry bar he spotted in a corner of the bay. Grasping the weapon tightly and keeping one eye on the approaching horde of biomechs, he went to the other side of the door and waited for the lock to cycle.
When the light turned green and the door slid aside, the only thing that saved Abshay Patel from taking an adhesive canister in the chest was that he wasn’t wearing a suit.
“Don’t shoot!” the young officer exclaimed, ducking involuntarily at the yawning muzzle of the launcher.
Franks blinked, feeling the roller-coaster dip in his stomach of someone who expected to die and was suddenly given a reprieve.
“Patel?” he blurted, then remembered to switch his helmet communication to external speakers. “Patel?” he repeated, disbelief thick in his tone even on the second repetition.
“Get in quick,” the younger man urged, waving at them demonstrably. “We picked up two flyers inbound only ten minutes out.”
Franks was so taken aback that he nearly carried the pry bar through the airlock with him. He only remembered to ditch it when he saw Manning tossing down her grenade launcher before she entered the lock. He dropped the metal bar and followed her through the docking collar and towards the small cabin of the suborbital rocket ship.
“How the hell did you manage to dock here?” he asked Patel as he undogged his helmet and pulled it off before ducking into the cabin. “How could you get the authorizations to…”
/>
His mouth snapped shut as he realized that there was a fourth person in the cabin of the spacecraft with them, then dropped open again as he saw that the fourth person was Caitlyn Carr. She smiled with what might have been self-satisfaction, then nodded to Patel, who seemed to be trying to decide if he was more intimidated by her or by Franks.
“Get us out of here,” Carr instructed the young man. He nodded and scrambled into the pilot’s seat, strapping himself in with one hand while another danced over the control board.
Franks glanced back at Manning, who was in the process of taking off her helmet. She shook her head, frowning silently, and moved to close the airlock and retract the docking collar. He hissed out a sigh and finally addressed Agent Carr.
“So,” he asked, “are we under arrest?”
“If we don’t lift off soon,” she said, “we’ll all of us be under arrest.” She gestured to the acceleration couches behind him. “Strap in. Explanations can wait.”
Franks fell into one of the seats and began pulling on the safety harness. He still had the roller-coaster feeling in his gut, but it wasn’t quite as pleasant any more.
Chapter Seventeen
Jason McKay pushed the door chime one more time and waited a good thirty seconds before he sighed and hit the override command. The door’s security plate read his DNA and opened obediently, and McKay took a tentative step into the Visiting Officers’ Quarters room, waiting for his vision to adjust and penetrate the gloom.
“D’mitry?” he said quietly. He stood in the doorway for a second, scanning back and forth through the sparse, impersonal emptiness of the room until he saw D’mitry Podbyrin sitting on a couch, alone in the darkness with a drink in his hand. He was dressed in a calf-length tan robe, the kind provided in the room’s closet, and he was barefoot.
“Hello, Jason,” the old man replied, his voice as normal as if he hadn’t been sitting in the dark, ignoring the doorbell. “Close the door, will you? I’ve just had treatment for my vision and the light, it bothers my eyes.”
McKay nodded, palming the control to close the door behind him. “How are you feeling, D’mitry?” he asked, stepping closer to where his friend sat.
“It wouldn’t really matter if the lights were on, you know?” Podbyrin went on, taking a sip from the drink, ice clinking softly in the glass. “This room…it is sterile. It’s like it is not here. It’s not my room. It’s not my home.” He shook his head so slightly that McKay almost missed it in the low light. “I don’t know that I will ever have a home again, Jason.”
McKay sat down in a chair across from the couch, trying to see Podbyrin’s eyes. “Where do you want to go, D’mitry? I’ll take you wherever you want, set you up there. I owe you that.”
“I want to go to St Petersburg,” Podbyrin said with a trace of bitterness in his voice. “St. Petersburg, August 10th, 2,051. That was the last day I was in my home…” Another drink. “It was a nice place, you know? Out of the city, next to a pond. It had been my grandfather’s house…I remember ice skating on that pond in the winter when I was a child.” McKay wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a nostalgic smile creep across the man’s face.
“You’ve never spoken much about your family…” McKay began hesitantly, knowing it could be a sore subject for the old Russian.
“That’s because they all hated me,” Podbyrin told him, matter-of-factly. McKay blinked at the unexpected answer, but stayed silent. “My mother and father…they were very strict Russian Orthodox, Jason. Things were different back then, you see…with the turmoil that was engulfing the world, the economic collapses, the civil wars, the Church had begun to regress, to retreat to more old-fashioned doctrines.” He sneered, the expression visible even in the dimly lit room. “Particularly when it came to issues such as sexuality.”
“Oh,” McKay said, trying not to seem shocked. “You mean…”
“Yes, Jason,” Podbyrin confirmed with a humorless chuckle, “I am a homosexual.” He shrugged. “I was, anyway. For the last…hell, for the last hundred years I am not much of anything. The General, he was…he is…” He shook his head. “Whatever. General Antonov did not approve---not for the same reason as my parents, but he still did not approve. So I pushed these things down, buried myself in my work and just…” he waved a hand, “got old.”
McKay blinked, feeling disbelief. Was he that clueless about people? He hadn’t ever even considered the possibility, despite the fact that Podbyrin had never spoken of any women in his past.
“You know that’s not a problem here, right?” McKay asked. “I mean, there are still some religious sects that disapprove, but for most people…”
“Yes, yes,” Podbyrin said with a dismissive shrug. “You are all so enlightened here, and everyone is happy and the unicorns shit rainbows.” He tossed back the last of his drink and then slammed the glass down onto the coffee table. “I don’t belong here, Jason. I don’t belong anywhere and I haven’t since August 10th, 2,051, when I left that house for the last time.”
McKay racked his brain for something to say that would make the man feel better, but Podbyrin snorted loudly and rose to his feet, pacing across the room. “Forgive me, Jason,” he said, sighing deeply. “You have to understand…it’s my age. I sometimes remember things more strongly, more clearly from 150 years ago than from yesterday. You asked me how I was feeling…I am feeling better than I have in years, in truth, thanks to your doctors.” He laughed. “Maybe I will even start thinking about sex again someday soon.”
“Just keep in mind, I’m spoken for,” McKay said dryly, relieved the mood had passed.
“Would you like a drink?” Podbyrin asked him, retrieving his glass and moving to the refrigerator to refill it.
“Bit early for me,” McKay said, shaking his head.
“Is it?” Podbyrin asked as he poured two fingers of vodka into the glass, the light from the refrigerator illuminating the half of his face closest to it. He did look better than when he’d returned from Alaska---younger, even. “I can’t tell what time it’s supposed to be on this spinning soup can. No matter when I go out, people are always doing something.”
“You get used to it,” McKay told him. “I’ve lived here most of the last nine years.”
“You wanted to talk to me about something,” Podbyrin declared without further preamble, moving back to the couch and sitting down with his drink. “I can tell. Out with it.”
“I’m stuck here right now, D’mitry,” McKay admitted. “I’ve got my people, people who trust me, out doing things I can’t because I’m being watched, and I have to sit here like a damned decoy while they take the risks.”
“Such is the life of a senior officer,” Podbyrin lamented. “We risk our careers while others risk their lives.” He grinned. “Did you want me to listen to you whine about it? Because I must warn you, I am a whiner myself and we are the worst ones to come to for sympathy.”
McKay couldn’t help it: he had to laugh at that. “No, no whining. I just…I was trying not to worry about them, and the…other investigations I have going on didn’t need me hovering around, so I began thinking about something else. I was thinking about what exactly Yuri wanted from you.”
“That sounds unprofitable,” the old Russian chided him. “We don’t have enough information to speculate, do we?”
“Humor me,” McKay said with a shrug. “I’ve had AIs running possibilities on this for a week and it’s got me ready to tear my hair out.”
“Perhaps soon I will be able to say that myself,” Podbyrin interjected, grinning as he ran a hand over the fresh down sprouting on his formerly-bald head.
“Everything seems to keep coming back to the nanovirus,” McKay went on. “From what you’ve told me, the Protectorate couldn’t have created it and yet Republic scientists aren’t capable of making it either. And according to what you’ve told us, the alien technology you discovered on Novoye Rodina could only duplicate already existing items.”
“Well,” Podbyrin p
rotested, “I can’t say for sure it could not do that, McKay…only that we could not make it do that. We had no way of communicating with the equipment…we simply put things into the chamber and closed the door. When we opened it, there were two things there.”
“Are you sure that Antonov hadn’t discovered more about the machine?” McKay pressed him. “You said he was paranoid when it came to the alien technology…maybe he compartmentalized things, kept you in the dark?”
Podbyrin seemed to consider the idea for a moment.
“I suppose it’s possible,” he allowed, finally, “but it wouldn’t make much sense. My team was made up of the best minds we had in half a dozen fields, and my training back home was in biological and chemical weaponry. I can’t think of anyone else who could even safely handle something like the nanovirus if he managed to produce it.”
“There is,” McKay pointed out somberly, “one other possibility, D’mitry.” At Podbyrin’s curious look, he went on. “We’ve seen firsthand that Antonov’s people are capable of some very high-level brainwashing: he altered the memories of the whole crew of the star cruiser Patton, after all, and did it thoroughly enough to resist a conventional hypnoprobe.” He shrugged. “You could have worked on the nanovirus and been forced to forget it.”
The thought seemed to rock the former Protectorate Colonel. His eyes went wide and he opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“By God,” he said, “I had not thought of that! Did you want to try chemical interrogation again?” His face screwed up in dread at the thought. It hadn’t been a pleasant experience the first time, nor the second.
“Not as a first resort,” McKay answered, shaking his head. “There are significant health risks to the enhanced chemical methods that can penetrate that sort of deep conditioning, and I don’t want to subject you to that unless we don’t have any other choice.”
“This is a bit disturbing, McKay,” Podbyrin muttered, staring into the gloom, face a bit paler than it had been a moment before. “I am uncomfortable with the idea that my memories have been altered. As imperfect as they are, they are all I have.” He shuddered slightly. “By God, they are all I am.” His eyes darted back to McKay. “But let’s say you’re right: we managed to decipher more of the machine’s ability and were able to get it to make new things instead of just reproducing old ones. Why then did he not use this nanovirus in either of the wars he fought against the Republic?”