by C. G. Hatton
Elliott sent straight away, “Angmar Rodan is in a corporate wing, five levels down. This is his personal corpsig. I’ve cleared his diary. You get to him, you won’t be interrupted. Here’s your login ID. It’ll get you down to two. That’s as good as I can get for the moment. Good luck with the rest. Just so you know, the prisoner pens are at capacity. They’re getting regular shipments of live prisoners, processing them and dropping them down to the surface. It doesn’t add up.”
What he meant was there was next to nothing leaving. If they’d upped capacity in the mines by that much, they should have been sending out an increased tonnage of ore or metal.
And security was way too high for a regular mining operation.
It was a glaring anomaly and one that should have screamed alarm bells with someone, anyone, on the Alsatia.
They’d missed it.
NG sent a curt acknowledgement to Elliott. He didn’t like that they’d been so wrong about Zang and UM.
He breathed through the headache, ran a check on the ID Elliott had sent across for him and brought up the schematics of the facility.
Leigh appeared behind him. “What’s wrong?”
He didn’t turn.
“I’ve got you on live feed already,” she whispered. “What’s wrong?”
There was no point trying to hide it. “Headache.”
“I thought you could shut off pain.”
It was uncomfortable even talking out loud. “Not always.” He nudged the display to spin round to an exterior real-time view, catching her intention in time to flinch away as she reached towards his forehead.
“You might have a skull fracture,” she said.
He didn’t.
“I’m fine.”
She wasn’t convinced.
The check on the ID beeped an all clear. NG pulled back the view to take in the wider area. There was a cold front whipping around the peninsula. High winds. They were preparing to lock down the base.
“I need to go.”
He took a stealthed drop ship down to the surface, avoiding detection and landing some distance away, out near the cliff line. He was bundled up in cold weather gear and he’d wrapped the knee support as tight as it would go and still give him some flexibility.
The icy wind still hit him with a ferocious bite as he left the comfort of the ship and ran into the cover of one of the few trees out here on the headland. The drop ship took off again straight away.
He hunkered down and took a minute to get his bearings. He could sense the hundreds of life signs about a mile and a half to the north, going about their business, pockets of high concentration, patches of intense fear and anger, some tired, some wired on drugs. They had no idea he was here. As much as security was high, it was no match for guild stealth kit.
He ran a quick scan to be sure then started moving, the pounding in his head matching each footstep. He shut it out as much as he could and focused on gauging his pace, feeling his internal temperature rise with the exertion.
The Senson engaged after a minute or two. “This is really impressive,” Leigh sent. “They have no idea you’re there. How do you get in?”
“Through a door, like anyone,” he sent back, increasing his speed, each intake of breath filling his lungs with a sharp chill. He hadn’t pushed himself physically, not properly, in what felt like an age and it felt almost good to be at full stretch. Almost full stretch.
He closed the distance and had to slow as the knee started to twinge. He walked, breathing in the cold air, and looking at the stars in the pitch black sky. Somewhere out there, the Bhenykhn were waiting. He could almost smell their breath, feel the pressure of the buzz from their hive communications. Badger was right, nothing mattered except when they were coming back.
He increased his pace, not wanting to be alone with his thoughts.
He ended up running again, doggedly ignoring the weakness in his knee.
As he got closer, he started to scan ahead again. There were guards posted around the perimeter. It would be easy enough to avoid them. More inside. A command post that was on high alert. No one could be permanently on high alert without losing their edge. It was bad practice. And as far as he could tell, there was no reason why they were on such a heightened status.
They were all UM.
Rodan was in there somewhere.
He reached further.
“NG…”
Leigh was cut off as something else cut in.
The contact hit like a hammer blow. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t think.
The pressure was unbearable. Hot.
‘Know me…’ he heard, guttural and deep, reverberating around his mind.
It held him tight, black and dense, the connection so intense he couldn’t even breathe.
‘Fear me,’ it growled and squeezed.
Chapter 12
They were shocked. Of course they were.
There were cries of, “How? How could this happen without our knowing?”
He couldn’t answer. Couldn’t defend his ignorance. He would have been more shocked had they not responded so. Even being able to read their minds, he was unable to trust them. He had almost been testing them by revealing this.
From the way she was looking at him, she suspected so. She was wondering if he thought she could have been keeping such intelligence from him.
“Would you have acted differently had you known?” she said.
“Of course I would have.” He couldn’t keep the scorn, the disdain from his voice even in replying to her. “A Bhenykhn in this galaxy?”
“You would have told us?”
“I tell you now.” He was losing patience. “I have been looking for them, waiting for them, for so long, had I known they were right here, of course I would have acted differently.”
“But this explains, does it not,” she said softly, “how the Order knew of the virus? They created it from the Bhenykhn.”
•
It held him there, frozen in the dark, pressure increasing, then just as abruptly let go.
He collapsed in a heap, face down on the cold ground, heart pounding. He half-expected Sebastian to appear and take control but there wasn’t so much as a whisper.
The Senson engaged. “NG, what’s wrong?”
“Nikolai?”
That last was Elliott.
He blinked and sucked in a breath that stung his lungs.
“NG, don’t do this to me.”
Leigh again.
“I’m okay,” he managed to send.
“No, you’re not,” Elliott sent. “You just lit up on all radars. They’re mobilising. What the hell happened?”
He dragged himself to his feet. “They’ve got a Bhenykhn in there.”
“They’re going to reach you before we can.”
Shit. He started to run, stripping off every scrap of guild kit he had on him, sparking the self-destructs and tossing them aside.
A roar of engines cut through the wind.
One of the extraction agents sent, “NG, you want us to come in heavy?”
“Negative.” They didn’t have enough firepower with them to do it right.
More engines, closing in.
“Let’s go with it,” he sent, still running, tearing the band off his wrist, snapping it to erase the data and discarding it as he moved.
Four gunships flew fast and low overhead, searchlights scouring the ground, banking hard to circle round.
He veered left and half slid down a bank. “Don’t worry, I have a plan.”
They cut him off as he tried to make a break for the cliff edge, surrounding him, one dropping down low to hover in front of him, pinning him in its spotlight.
The icy wind was cutting into his face, the rumble of its engines resonating deep in his chest.
He skidded to a halt, turned slowly and raised his hands.
They shot him anyway.
The facility was old, decaying, dirty and rusting. Not the type of place Zang had ever listed o
n its corporate portfolio, except for the profits from its mine, and UM had done nothing to improve its upkeep. It was one thing to hear the rumours, something else to see it first hand.
NG walked, surrounded by an entourage of UM security, hands cuffed to the front, trying to ignore the headache that was becoming the only constant in his world.
They’d slapped a temporary dampening patch over the Senson then taken him into a holding room, run him through every bioscan possible, strip-searched him to the extent of cracking the cast off his arm and then held him down while they tore out the implant completely. All without a word. Then they’d stuck a button device in the back of his neck, right over the sore spot where the three FTH rounds from the gunship had hit. The device was humming merrily at the base of his skull, competing with the presence of the Bhenykhn that was a constant pressing darkness in the depths of his mind. As far as plans went, this wasn’t looking like his best ever.
Noises from the mines below clanged through the cramped, dark corridors. They’d let him dress but hadn’t afforded him the luxury of keeping the knee support, so it was hard not to limp as it threatened to give out with every other step.
They took a rickety lift down two levels. He could feel the heat of emotion emanating from the prison cells before the door opened. They pushed him out and took him along a narrow walkway to a cell, one in a line of single occupancy, opposite huge pens that were full to bursting.
He let them shove him inside, didn’t fight them as they fastened the cuffs to chains attached to the ceiling, and reached out as far as he could to find LC or Duncan. Nothing. Too far. The alien hadn’t made direct contact again but he could feel that it was there. A few levels down. There was that same skin-crawling, dank leaf mold stench wafting about its presence that he’d been haunted with since Erica.
They backed off. One son of a bitch pressed a remote and the chains rattled up, fast, dragging his arms with them and catching just as he reached full stretch. If they were serious, they’d up it another inch or two. They made it three for good measure.
He relaxed.
He could take this for hours.
Even with a broken arm.
It didn’t take hours. They came for him after twenty minutes or so and released the chains, which wouldn’t have been so bad except they sparked the device at the same time and had to haul him to his feet.
He still didn’t fight them, reading from the mind of the guard in charge that they were going to take him exactly where he wanted to go.
Prisoners rattled the bars of the pens as he was taken past. Their minds were a roiling mix of aggression and fear, violent criminals who’d been tried and convicted, pirates who’d been caught in the act, drifters and vagrants, dissidents and protestors, and disturbingly, colonists who couldn’t figure out why they’d been imprisoned. They were being transferred out in batches. No one returned. Insane rumours on what was happening.
NG shut them out and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, anticipating the shoves from the guards and letting his mind wander to see what he could find.
It was overwhelming, all against the backdrop of an alien that was captive, pissed off and watching him closely with a sly, simmering hatred.
They took him down further, pushed him out onto a level with marble paved floors, wall hangings lining the narrow corridor and a faint scent of incense. It was old corporate. Ostentatious but worn. Scuffs and cracks in the floor, tattered edges and a mustiness that all stank of the old money that had been poured into these frontier posts centuries ago by pioneers who fancied themselves kings of the new territories.
Rodan was close, in his suite of private offices.
NG kept his breathing steady.
He was about to get everything he needed. All he’d need then was a way out.
Except more guards intercepted them as the corridor split, shouldered their way in and took him roughly by the arm, turning him and taking him in the opposite direction, with only a curt exchange about orders.
He scanned ahead.
There was one person in the quarters they were now headed to. Not Angmar Rodan. Someone else, someone who had made claim on their new prisoner and pulled rank over the CEO.
The mind he encountered was icy cold.
Old.
Maeve Rodan.
The guards left him at the door, retreated and closed it behind him. She was sitting by an open fire with her back to the door. There was another chair by the fire, a table between them. There was a bottle of wine on the table next to two goblets. Two goblets with twisted black metal stems.
He almost took a step backwards.
Her voice was as cold as her soul. “Come sit down, NG.”
He didn’t bother to hide the limp. He sat, avoided looking at the goblets and raised his eyes to look at her.
She was looking him up and down, matching what she could see of him here to what she knew of him, his reputation, what their scans had reported. She was appraising him and it was making his skin crawl.
This was the real power behind UM. And before he even ventured further into her mind he knew that he was within reach of the High Guard. Old Order.
It made him feel ridiculously young.
He let her take her time.
She had a faint smile dancing over her lips, no emotion in her eyes. She was impressed, as if she was looking at a new specimen for her private collection. She couldn’t quite believe it was him sitting here, thinking he looked younger than she was expecting but that this boy definitely matched every pointer on the biometrics it had cost them so much to obtain… yes, he was definitely for real. He was everything she could have hoped for. He was the Thieves’ Guild. And she had him right here. In chains.
She might as well have been rubbing her bony hands together.
It was chilling.
She gave a slight nod, satisfied. “We’ve been looking for you for a long time, NG,” she breathed. “Far longer than you’ve used that name.”
She reached and poured the wine.
She was wearing an amulet on a chain around her neck. A Bhenykhn kill token. Polished.
He kept his expression neutral.
She looked up. “The handcuffs are not necessary.” She was supremely confident that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hurt her, that he needed to be here and that he knew it. She was also curious and she wanted to know how he’d get out of the restraints if she didn’t offer up a key.
He could have snapped his hands free with a twist but he didn’t feel like playing. He threw the mechanism instead. They opened. He placed them on the table.
The smile didn’t change. She was thinking that Drake would be furious to have been beaten to the prize.
Prize? It was hardly flattering and he was nowhere near as confident as she was that he needed to be here. Not in these circumstances. This was hardly a fair and level playing field. Maeve was barking mad. He’d never heard of Drake in any of this, not from the Man, not from any of the Order that he’d managed to chase down so far, but the way this old lady was looking at him and the way she was revelling in the thought that she’d won some kind of advantage over a fierce rival for having him in her hands didn’t fill him with hope.
“You have an alien marker in your bloodstream,” she said to provoke some kind of reaction. “Now where could that have come from?”
The poison. They’d matched it to their samples from the Bhenykhn.
He matched her smile without a word.
She nudged one of the goblets in his direction. The way the Man always used to. He didn’t touch it.
“And what wars have you been in so recently, NG, to have experienced so many hurts?” She knew every detail of every injury.
He watched as she took a delicate sip of her wine, still reading what he could from her mind without going too deep. She was bemused that he was snubbing her offer of hospitality, assuming that he must be thinking, rightly, that it would be drugged. She didn’t mind, thinking to herself that he
r prize would talk, with or without it, sooner or later.
“We know you’ve been looking for us,” she said. “You have caused quite a stir.” She gestured generally around with a hand that was pale and thin. “Well, you’ve found us.” She looked him in the eye and added simply, “You might wish you hadn’t.”
She put the goblet down, stood and walked away. “We have a house guest. I’d like you to meet it.”
Chapter 13
“You knew the Order was a threat to our plans,” one of them said. “With all your, and our, resources, how did this High Guard manage to remain so elusive?”
He looked up and down the line at them, at this assembly of such powerful individuals, gathered here to assess the situation and, as she kept reminding them, to make a decision.
“Do you stand by your actions to make an enemy of the Order?” another threw in.
He caught her eye. She was dismayed at the thought that Nikolai could have been at their mercy, in the clutches of one such as Maeve Rodan.
“I do stand by that decision,” he said. “Events proved it to be justified.”
•
He followed her down a set of steep winding stairs. She moved gracefully. He had to hold onto the handrail to make it down each step. He could have broken her neck and pushed her down the stairs in a split second but even with him at her back, she still didn’t consider him a threat.
She wanted him to see the alien because she knew that he’d appeared on their sensors at the exact same instant that their captive had freaked, roared in anger and thrown itself against the bars of its cage. She didn’t believe in coincidences and she wanted to know why.