Then the door opened.
She found herself staring into a square room, housing what looked like tables and chairs. One chair still spun about, another had been knocked over. A hasty evacuation? With a hull breach just meters away, it made sense. There was another exit on the opposite side. Gloria ushered her friends in and shut the door behind them. Within seconds a thin hissing could be heard as air was fed back into the chamber. Other sounds bled back in, too. Something like an alarm—high-pitched E followed by a low doop, repeating every few seconds. The sound echoed, giving the impression that it was bleating site-wide.
Gloria moved aside as Vanessa and Xavi rushed to the opposite door, ready for anything. Just in case, she took a knee behind one of the tables and waited. Beth and Alex followed her example. Since air had filled the room, Gloria decided a small gamble was prudent. She switched on her suit’s external speaker, then instructed the others to do the same. “Just keep the chatter to a minimum, right?” They all nodded. “Vanessa, Xavi, check the next room and make sure we’re not going to get ambushed in here.”
A light above the door went green. Vanessa, copying what Gloria had done, opened this inner door. It reacted instantly, and so did Vanessa, pushing into the space beyond as soon as there was room to do so. Xavi followed her, again covering the left to mirror her focus on the right. They moved like they’d worked together for years, Gloria thought with more than a little pride in how her navigator was handling himself.
Beth moved past her, but not to the door. Her focus was firmly on the table nearby. Dismissed as being empty, she realized now that was wrong. Or rather, it was empty because it wasn’t a table. It was a display, and on it information and graphics begged to be noticed. Gloria allowed herself to rise from her hiding place and stand across from Beth, looking down.
Terror and dread flooded into her at the sights displayed there.
X-rays. A rib cage. A skull. Human.
Close-up imagery of limbs and organs. One showed an entire intestine splayed out, with several Scipios hunched over the gore.
Gloria’s stomach heaved. “Xavi,” she managed to say.
He must have heard the strain in her voice, the fear, because he came back in almost immediately, pistol raised, ready for anything. He saw the look on her face and came to her directly. “What is it?”
The question needed no answer. He followed her gaze and tensed up. “Oh. God.”
“Some of them may still be alive,” a voice said. It took Gloria a moment to realize it was Alex Warthen. “If we hurry.”
If we hurry. Somehow the tone and delivery of that single word told Gloria everything she needed to know about Alex Warthen. Whatever his ultimate motivations or goals, he was with her. He would help. She realized she was nodding at him and stopped, turned to Xavi. “This place is huge. We need to split up.”
“We talked about this. Bad idea.”
“That was before we saw what they’re doing in here, Xavi. I don’t care about our safety now, and you know what? Fuck radio silence. If they figure out how to break the encryption on our signals then so be it, because then they’ll have to figure out our language.”
“It’s triangulation I’m worried about, boss.”
Vanessa poked her head back in the room. “What’s the holdup?” she asked.
Gloria pointed at the display table, ignoring the gasp that came a second later. Her eyes never left Xavi’s. “I’ve made up my mind. Beth? Go with Vanessa. You too, Alex. I’m with Xavi. Remember we have two goals: Get our people out of here, or barring that, make sure there is nothing left of us, them, or their ship big enough to study without an electron microscope. That clear?”
Alex moved without a word. Beth, however, lingered a moment, no doubt trapped between the fear of being separated and the desire to spend more time with the two historical figures they’d become allied with. Soon enough curiosity won, and the young engineer relented. She moved to Vanessa’s side.
Gloria looked at each of them in turn. “We meet back here, go out the way we came in unless a better option presents itself. Our comms are different, so Beth, your job is to act as relay between Vanessa and us.”
“I can do that,” the woman said.
“I know you can. I’m counting on you.” She gave Xavi one last, hard look, pushing the doubt from his expression by sheer force of will. After a second he jerked his chin toward the door and was off.
By unspoken agreement he went left in the next hall, leaving the other direction for Vanessa and her team. Gloria ran along behind him, no easy task in the weak gravity and low-ceilinged hall, but soon enough she found the right stride and posture and was managing to keep up. She and her navigator fell into a rhythm. He would stop at a door, put his back to the opposite side of the hall, and wait for her to trigger the lever. As it opened he would push inside and clear the room, as if he’d trained for this kind of thing all his life. Probably learned how to do it from all those police sensories he lost himself in.
Three times they repeated this without finding anything. No humans, no remains, not even a Scipio to fight or interrogate. Just empty rooms of vague purpose, all with signs of hasty abandonment. All the while the warning lights flashed and their odd erratic version of a Klaxon wailed.
She was approaching the fourth door when white powder began to flood through air vents in the hallway ceiling. It was as if someone had turned on a fan covered with baking powder.
“Virus,” Xavi grunted, stepping back. Only there was nowhere to go. The hall behind them was no less inundated. In seconds her visor had a dusting that obscured her view. Gloria wiped at it, but the arm of her suit was no better off, making the problem only marginally better.
“Suit integrity?” she asked.
“Holding. Beth, are you guys okay?”
The reply came a second later. “Powder all over the place here, too, but we’re managing.”
He didn’t bother to ask if they’d found anything. She’d have said if they had.
Visibility fell to a few meters. Gloria decided this wasn’t such a bad thing, assuming the Scipios didn’t have some way to peer through the fog. For her, unarmed, it meant no one could shoot at her from afar. Given the enemy’s diminutive size, she liked her chances in a fistfight.
Then Xavi struck gold. The door he’d just opened entered into a chamber tailor-made for analyzing technology. Bins of spare parts lined the walls. Half-dissected machinery lay on knee-high tables under bright work lamps. Gloria followed him in, looking for anything that resembled human gear. Her heart sank quickly, though. This was no analysis room, she realized. It was a repair center, or assembly plant. Everything on the tables was run-down Scipio tech. Xavi went to the bins and started rifling through them, stooped over to get a close look.
“Don’t bother,” she said. “Remember the goals. Their crap is not important.”
He stood, holding something up to examine. “Not so fast there, boss.” He tossed the item to her.
It was a length of pipe, about a meter long. White porcelain in color and sheen, and though solid as rock it felt extremely light, almost like paper. She understood immediately, and gave one of the tables a swift whack to test it out. The pipe did not bend or crack. The table, on the other hand…it folded in half, crumpling under the force of the strike.
“This will do for now,” Gloria said with honest admiration.
They continued the search. Two more doors, same lack of result. The hall took an elbow corner, and then ran off into the haze of the virus spray. Gloria kept closer to Xavi lest she lose him in the murk. Hefting the pipe gave her a surprising surge of confidence she tried to quell. To let her guard down now would be foolish in the extreme. She had to remind herself of where they were, and that they had no way to escape this cursed moon. At best, they’d die on their own terms. At worst, they’d be torn limb from limb, their organs stretched out on metallic tables for Scipio scientists to ponder.
Xavi slowed, held her back with an outstretched ha
nd. “What is it?” she asked.
He pulled her forward to stand beside him in the hall, both of them pressed against the walls. The space widened, Gloria saw, and the ceiling angled upward into blackness and smoky blur. Perhaps some kind of junction, she thought. The place had a modular style to it, not much different from human outposts on moons all over the Sol system and beyond.
Undulating red lights created glowing orbs of the virus powder, giving size and shape to the otherwise hidden space. It was large. One of the towerlike buildings she’d glimpsed, located at intervals throughout the complex. She’d assumed they were multistory structures, but the lights here told a different story. They were simply high-ceilinged, square buildings.
“Xavi,” came Beth’s voice.
“Go ahead,” he replied.
“Vanessa’s visor can translate some of their words. We think we’ve found the…security office, or something. Anyway, we’re going to try to turn the lights back on, and kill that alarm.”
It was a lot to process. Xavi glanced at Gloria, eyebrows raised in a “That sounds good” kind of way. She replied, “We’re ready, go ahead. Anything like camera feeds or a blueprint there?”
“No,” Beth replied. “Just controls for the alarms and such. We think.”
Under any other circumstances Gloria would have told her not to touch anything. Tactically, a bad situation that was known beat out an unknown alternative, any day. Any day except today, rather. “If you can do anything about the powder spraying from every air vent, that would be nice.”
“No promises,” her engineer replied.
Even through the tinny speaker and interference, Gloria heard the renewed calm in Beth’s voice. Perhaps due to the company she was in, or maybe that she’d found some way to contribute, Gloria couldn’t be sure. She felt glad for it, though. It had hurt to split up her crew back there, a direct affront to some deeply seated need every captain had to do right by the people who’d placed trust in them. It couldn’t have been helped, though. She needed a way to communicate with Vanessa and Alex, and this was the only option.
All at once the red glow of emergency lights vanished, along with the erratic sirenlike noise. There was a second or two of absolute darkness, long enough for terror to grip and squeeze Gloria’s heart, and then the lights came on. Bluish white and strangely calming. In the absence of the Klaxon came the sound of the laboring ventilation system. Laboring, to Gloria’s ear, at least. It sounded raspy, clanking and grinding inside the ceiling as it struggled to flood the base with the powdery air.
That did not go away. Beth was right not to have promised, Gloria thought wryly. She shifted her focus to the expansive chamber they’d arrived in.
To her surprise it did not just extend upward, but down as well. The hallway they’d arrived in ended at a railing that ran around the interior perimeter of a deep, square shaft. It descended perhaps thirty meters below, to a grated floor. Gloria counted two other levels between here and there, with similar railings and doors leading off into rooms or more hallways.
“Bad news,” Xavi said, for both her and Beth. “This place is bigger than we’d thought. Goes at least three levels underground.” He glanced up. “Maybe the same above.”
“No,” Gloria said. “Not above. We know that from what we saw outside.”
“Good point,” Xavi conceded. “Still, there’s potentially a lot more area to cover.”
“Do you have somewhere else to be?” she asked him, managing to add just enough sarcasm to her voice to let him know she didn’t mean it. Gloria racked her brain, wishing she’d studied the layout from their perch on that dune a bit more closely. Then she smacked herself.
“What is it?” Xavi asked.
Gloria ignored him. She brought her left arm up and began to tap through the menus there, an interface decidedly difficult to manipulate with thickly gloved hands. Her navigator shifted uneasily, waiting, no doubt feeling as if the walls had eyes.
There! She tugged at his arm and pulled him over to look. On the curved screen mounted on her forearm, she’d accessed the video feed constantly recorded by her helmet, pausing the image on her view of the Scipio base from outside, thirty minutes ago.
“So what?” Xavi asked. “We don’t know what any of it is.”
Gloria shook her head. Something had bothered her about this view earlier, she just hadn’t known what. But thinking about the small tower they now stood in had triggered her memory of that vague concern, and now she saw the solution. Plain as day. “Here,” she said, pointing.
She enlarged the image. On the far side of the base, one building did not match the others. It was of medium height, its walls of a different material. Easily overlooked when one didn’t know the purpose of any of it. All she had to do was apply the one thing she did know: They had Dawson here. And Dawson had been aboard the Lonesome.
“That look like a hangar to you?” she asked him. “And a temporary one at that?”
He scrunched his nose.
Gloria pointed to the walls. “Look. No moon dust. These are clean. This thing was just put up.”
“How the hell’d we miss that?” he asked.
She zoomed back out, then pointed at one of the few tall buildings. “I think we’re here,” she said. Xavi nodded agreement. “So, we go this way.” She pointed ahead and to the right.
“On it,” he grunted.
As he bounded away, Gloria marked up the image with her finger and shot a copy of it over to Beth’s suit. “Meet us there,” she said when Beth acknowledged.
Given a purpose, a true goal, Xavi moved like a man possessed. The slow progress and careful checks of doors were set aside. But the path was still invisible to him, and twice he led them into a dead end. It was as they backtracked down the second of these hallways that Gloria noticed the doors on either side had small porthole windows, a feature not present anywhere else. She slowed, curious, and had to bend at the waist to look through one.
Her breath caught in her throat. Human feet pointed upward, the skin bloodied, scabbed. A hand swung at the end of a limp arm. The rest obscured by the medical—presumably medical—bed upon which the person lay.
“Xavi,” she hissed. He heard her and doubled back, at her side in a second. He knew this tone; he knew not to question it. Her navigator took his standard entry position and waited for Gloria to open the door. Only, she hesitated. Afraid of what they’d find in there. What it might mean, and who it might be. Gloria couldn’t help it. She closed her eyes as she yanked on the lever and let Xavi in.
He moved past her in a rush. She felt the wind of it on her suit. And then the pop as his gun fired. Two times. By the time Gloria made it into the room, two Scipios lay dead. Xavi did not spare them a second glance. He was at the table, holstering his pistol. She’d never seen that expression on his face before. She hoped she never would again.
“It’s Dawson,” he said. “It was Dawson.”
Gloria liked to think of herself as tough. She’d been called a cast-iron bitch by her medical officer on more than one occasion, always acting hurt by the remark but secretly proud. Not now, though. She could see Dawson’s body out of the corner of her eye and could not bring herself to focus on it.
“What were they doing when you came in?” she asked Xavi, her words so skewed by nausea that she started to repeat herself, but he’d heard. He stopped her.
“Poking at her brain.”
Gloria staggered to the other side of the room, her gaze unfocused on the dark wall, the corpse at her back, a thing to mourn but not see. Her hands found a surface and she leaned on it, willing her knees to keep her upright.
It was another table before her, a narrow one, higher. There was a bundle of silvery fabric on it. A helmet, tossed carelessly aside. A backpack.
Dawson’s gear. Gloria stared at it for a moment and then, with a shaking hand, she reached into the pack. Her hand curled around the grip of a service pistol. Identical to Xavi’s. Standard issue on a fold-ship.
> Gloria pulled the weapon free and turned it from side to side in front of her face. She didn’t even remember dropping her pipe length.
“Good,” Xavi said, seeing what she held. “Come on.”
He moved with absolute purpose. From room to room, finding the same situation in each, his pistol barking once or twice, sometimes three times. Some part of Gloria knew these were just scientists or coroners, studying specimens, but she did nothing to stop him. Because she knew what the Scipios were hoping to learn, and knew what would happen if they found it. That, and because she needed the revenge.
“We need to get to that ship,” she said when the rooms Xavi crashed into started turning up empty. “Make sure they can’t access the data core. Leave nothing but—”
“No argument from me, boss,” he said. “Beth, status?”
“We took a wrong turn,” the engineer replied. “Backtracking now.”
“Hurry it up. We found the Lonesome’s crew.”
“Alive?”
Such hope in her tone. Gloria fought fresh tears.
“Far from it,” Xavi replied.
“Oh…oh no.”
“And if they’re treating that ship the same way they treated her crew…,” Xavi said.
“We understand,” Beth replied. “We’re going as fast as we can.”
There was nothing more to be said. Xavi stormed through the halls, pistol held in front of him, cradled by his other palm, swinging about with each hallway entered or junction crossed. Gloria did her best to mimic his posture, covering the hall behind them and double-checking the halls and doorways he passed.
A minute later the state of alarm returned. Gloria found she didn’t care now. She didn’t much care what they threw at her at this point. Maybe that was the pistol talking, but so be it.
Another turn, another junction. Xavi pushed through, moving by some internal map she could do nothing but trust. He was a navigator, after all.
In the junction now herself, Gloria heard a sound to her left. She turned in time to see three Scipios burst through a bulkhead door about ten meters distant. They were dressed differently from the torturers. Blues and grays, their gliding flaps covered. And they wore helmets, full-face. She noted the moon dust on their shoes and lower legs. They’d been outside, maybe just come in. Out searching the wreckage of the Wildflower, perhaps.
Escape Velocity Page 19