by C. G. Hatton
Duncan was leaving them to do their ‘stuff’ and he didn’t even really know what that was anymore.
It felt like his only real role was to call the alarm if the hive appeared in system.
“I can’t sense anyone alive down there,” he said quietly.
Hil was messing on with another terminal. “Yeah, I heard. So what are you thinking?”
“You noticed there are no dead Bhenykhn?”
Hil nodded. “If their security was so shit hot, why didn’t they put up a fight?”
“Ask them.”
He laughed. “You want me to ask Kimi Itomara and Eloise Drake why they fucked up so badly?” He pushed away that terminal. “Maybe they just thought no one would ever find them. They came back here happily enough after the invasion.”
To retrieve intel from their archive.
Apparently.
LC was starting to overheat. He pulled the scarf from round his neck, dripping melted snow. “I don’t like it, whatever it was,” he said.
Hil leaned back against the bench. “If NG was here, what would he do?”
“Get down into the vault.”
Hil looked at him. “You think this is hinky?”
“I should be able to sense their life signs at least.”
“You don’t think it’s them?”
“I don’t think we can trust them.”
Hil laughed. “LC, we don’t trust anyone.”
The double doors opened behind them, one of the Hailstones buzzing in alongside Hal Duncan, Sean and a couple of Security.
“It’s clear,” Duncan said. “The elevator shaft is sealed, and both emergency stairwells are blocked by blast doors we can’t budge. Whole system is non-responsive. There’s no way down.”
LC started to strip off, leaving a pile of gear on the table, Hil joining in until they were both just wearing tee shirts, combat pants and boots, not exactly high stealth field-op kit but they hardly had a need to hide. Hil still had a guild band around his wrist. LC didn’t even have that. He had a knotted lucky charm bracelet. He didn’t need anything else.
He bent to tighten the laces in his boots, aware that Sean had walked in and was watching, concerned, eyes tracing the black lightning patterning his left arm.
Hil was stripping the pouches off the belts, leaving just the holsters, one pistol and a combat knife on each. He handed one to LC. It felt too bulky for what they were going to do but he took it, cinching it tight and fastening the ties around each thigh.
Sean was frowning as she watched him check the gun.
He had to shut out what she was thinking.
“Can we come with you?” she asked.
He shook his head. “You won’t be able to.” He secured the gun in the holster and looked around. They had no data on the structure of the palace, no schematics, not so much as a floor plan. It wasn’t great but it wasn’t the first time he’d gone in somewhere blind. He looked at Hil. “You ready?”
It was tight but not impossible. Wherever people lived, especially if there was an underground complex, there had to be ventilation and there had to be power conduits. And even in the most secure facilities with the most sophisticated protections, nowhere could ever be airtight.
LC squeezed through a gap, having to unfasten the damned belt and carry it in his leading hand to make it, and wriggled round a bend in the shaft, virtually dislocating his shoulder to fit through.
He had to climb down then, looping the belt round his neck, and shimmying twenty feet straight down inside a sheer tube, muscles at their limit, taking it steady and keeping his breathing calm. It ended at a ventilation fan. Before all this he would have had tools with him to work open the screws, dismantle the machinery and carefully reassemble it once he’d got past. Now? He wedged himself in inches from it, shielded his eyes and blasted it, powerful focused bursts that blew out the securing bolts. He bumped it with his shoulder hard enough that it clattered off and climbed through.
It opened into a low crawlspace that was barely high enough to squeeze into. It was packed with beams and conduits, pipes and cables, all immaculately clean, intricately laid out and humming with electrobes.
He felt the catch at the back of his throat, felt the virus react, aggressively enough it made his head spin for a second.
Hil nudged his ankle.
LC crawled forward and twisted around.
Hil was checking the band on his wrist. “You okay?”
He muttered something like a yes, not completely sure. They’d tested the virus with electrobes on the Alsatia, trying to recreate what it had done with Hil to no avail. He felt his chest constrict and coughed, resting his forehead down on a cool pipeline for a second. He could feel the virus fighting it.
“Don’t flake out on me.”
If anything, he felt himself drawing energy from the little bastards. LC kept his head down and breathed through it.
“I’m good,” he said, as much to himself as Hil.
He flinched as two Hailstones flew past his head, ducking in and out of the conduits, flying on ahead.
‘You’re past the first blockade,’ Duncan sent, presumably through the Senson to Hilyer as well. ‘LC, you okay, bud?’
‘All fine.’
“There’s an access panel we can get to if we drop down,” Hil said after a second. “Just up there. Looks like it connects with the elevator shaft but it’s encoded, protected.”
That meant if it was triggered, it would set off a defence protocol powered by an isolated back up.
LC coughed again. He was too hot.
He glanced back over.
Hilyer grinned. “You up for a race?”
It wasn’t exactly a fair competition. Hil hooked in by remote whereas LC had to hang upside down and tap into a terminal he hacked into by splicing two conduits together to makeshift a connection and fool it into thinking it was a routine maintenance login, cheating a couple of times and nudging a way through with force, small blasts of directed energy. Christ, if he could have done shit like this when he was running tabs…
Hil was fast but LC still got closest to busting it open first. He stopped suddenly, cursed and whispered, “Wait.”
His leg was cramping, shoulder aching. He could see what Hilyer was about to do, and hissed, “Don’t. It’s a double trip.”
He pinched the top of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut for a second and refocusing.
Hil swore. “How the hell did you spot that?”
He couldn’t explain. He’d never been able to. There was just some stuff he could see. Feel. And with a nudge it usually played out. Not always. And he’d had his fingers burned plenty of times. But usually if he went with his instinct, it was right.
He nudged it. The trap spun round safely, waiting an input. It had a countdown. Dammit. Thirty seconds. “Hil…”
“Iona’s on it, bud.”
He breathed. He might have hated AIs but rampaging through an automated defence programme and crunching numbers was something they could do a lot faster than any human. Through Hil’s connection, it stole a code from the main system, and he watched as the pathway opened up.
What little power was left drained away.
Shit.
It wasn’t a double, it was triple with a double-time countdown. There was no time for finesse, no time for hacking. No time for anything clever or subtle. He threw in a blast of energy, overloading the whole system. No idea what the consequences would be. A turn of the card.
But the system had never been designed with aliens and mutants in mind. Somewhere deep within the bunker, a backup of a backup on a failsafe attached to a safeguard rebooted the system. He watched the numbers realign and relaxed as the blast door protecting the elevator shaft opened.
“Nice one,” Hil said. “You want to tell me how the hell you did that?”
LC grinned. “Yeah, someday.”
Hil laughed. “Smart ass.”
It was almost like old times. He dropped, dragging his belt and holst
ers down with him, and stood, fastening it back round his waist, letting his breathing settle as Hil dropped down beside him.
“After you,” Hil said, gesturing, grinning.
The lift shaft was cold, lined with thick conduits, ladders dropping down to narrow walkways every five levels or so. They slid rather than climbed down, breath frosting.
“This one,” Hil yelled finally, two or three levels up from the bottom of the shaft. He landed next to LC and clapped his hands together, blowing on them. “Sean says we need to speed this up, they’re freezing their asses off up there.”
She was keeping her distance from him, not wanting to disturb him.
LC looked around. “This is the vault level?”
Hil nodded. “Five-tier biometric. Remote access fried. They can’t get it to respond from inside and there’s a failsafe if anyone tries anything from outside. Halon.” He looked like he was listening to something. “We trigger it, we’re dead. You still can’t sense anyone alive in there?”
“No.”
It was eerie. He couldn’t sense Hilyer either. He felt alone, fifty stories below ground.
“We need to run a remap and chase it back on itself,” he said, the chill in his stomach nothing to do with the air temperature.
“You want lead or back up?”
Neither. He didn’t want to be there.
“Lead.” He started to work on the panel. Getting access to run a remap back through the main system was going to take time. “Ask Drake if she has any whisky in there.”
Hil crouched next to him after a moment. “She said yes, and she said it’s better than the stuff NG got you to serve and if you’re testing her, she’ll prove to you it’s really her, personally, once we get her out of there. She said you’d know what that means.”
Christ, he almost shivered.
“Is it her?” Hil asked, taking a wire as he held it out.
“If it isn’t, whoever it is knows what happened on the Alsatia.” He leaned in to the panel, working carefully, trying not to think what the hell the implications of that could mean. He switched off. This was a tab, they had an objective, and the faster they achieved it, the faster they could get the hell out of there.
It took them two hours, working in tandem. A couple of times, he almost blew it and came desperately close to initiating the lockdown. He could almost feel Hilyer holding his breath.
The first time it happened he laughed, told Hil not to be a wuss and skipped past it by the skin of his teeth. Nothing he hadn’t done a hundred times before. He was so far past the nine lives the kids used to joke about on Kheris, it was ridiculous.
The second time left his hands shaking and left Hilyer to crack the joke.
“Yeah and you can deal with the backlash,” LC muttered, backing off and retracing the line he’d been drawing.
Hil grinned, picked up the slack and they cracked it.
LC stood up, rolling his shoulders to work out the knots.
“You ready?” he said.
“Now or never.”
Hil hit the button.
The blast doors slid open onto a subtly-lit marble tiled corridor, a hint of incense in the warm air, opposing mirrors reflecting each other to infinity, ancient tapestries hanging down the walls, rich reds and blues, gold thread glistening.
LC took one step out of the shaft and paused as a criss cross network of blue beams appeared, scanning across his body. It was what they were expecting, what they’d prepped the underlying database to be ready for. The beams scanned his retina, traced down to his fingertips, raced up to his chest, his heart.
There was a moment when they froze. He didn’t breathe.
The beams vanished.
He started to move, turn, beckon Hilyer to follow him in.
And something clutched his mind, like a fist grabbing him round the throat, air cut off, pressure points squeezed, nerve endings on fire.
The blast door slammed shut behind him.
And a voice whispered into his head, “Good to see you again, Luka.”
Chapter 24
“What would you have given to have had access to that vault a year ago, ten years ago?” He said it casually, testing, wanting a reaction, betting with himself that the Man had had access to that vault, probably whenever he wanted.
The Man shook his head. “Don’t presume to know me, Sebastian. You might be free now, but that freedom comes with a price. Drake was not the only member of the High Guard to snub me. The Order has manipulated the human race for millennia, long before I arrived here, long before humans colonised this galaxy. The Order, in one form or another, was pulling those strings of conflict when war was one country marching against another across a field of mud. That human space now spans star systems makes no difference. That there is now a new enemy with which to contend makes no difference. The Order, with all its opulence and wealth, lives to survive and profit. That’s it. Outright war ending in oblivion benefits no one. Hence, the need for balance.”
Sebastian separated the power pack from the body of the rifle and set it to one side. “Why do I get the feeling something or someone has just tipped the scales?”
•
He couldn’t move, suffocating, heart beating so fast he thought it was going to burst. He couldn’t scream, couldn’t breathe.
And just as suddenly it let go.
He fell to his knees, forcing his left hand to move, dragging out the gun and lifting it, holding it up in a steady aim, squinting down its barrel, and making himself stand.
A door opened at the far end of the corridor.
‘Sean?’ he thought. ‘Hal?’
‘LC,’ Sean replied, fast, concerned. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know.’
A trickle of sweat ran down his ribs, temperature rocketing.
He took a step forward, keeping the gun up.
He glanced back over. From this side, the blast door was slick, smooth sheet metal with an almost mirror finish, in an elaborate frame, firmly closed.
He turned back and walked along the corridor, scoping out the walls and ceiling, looking for the tech behind the opulence, heart pounding. He could see the vault through an open door ahead.
He looked inside, checking round, and sent to them both, ‘There’s no one in here.’
‘Roger that,’ Duncan thought back. ‘We’ll get you out. Maintain contact.’
LC lowered the gun and walked in, looking around the vast vault, shelves and banks of lock boxes lining the walls, tables piled high with document boxes, paintings, artefacts.
“Well done. I knew you’d find a way in.”
It was weird to hear a voice so clearly inside his head again, without an implant.
‘Sean, Hal,’ he sent, cautious, not totally trusting himself. ‘Are you hearing this?’
‘Negative,’ Duncan replied.
‘Only you,’ Sean thought, concerned. ‘What are you hearing?’
He didn’t know, didn’t know what to think and started to send, ‘I don’t…’
“It’s been a long time…”
LC backed away. He knew that voice. Holy shit, he hadn’t heard that voice in years. Not since he was a child.
“Spearhead,” he breathed, stomach flipping as he turned, not sure if it was even real. “You’re dead. I’m just hallucinating.”
“Trust me, Luka,” that voice said, “you failed in your attempt to kill me on Polaris. This is not a hallucination.”
LC sent, fast and clear, ‘Sean, tell Hilyer it’s Spearhead. It’s fucking Spearhead.’
His heart was thumping, adrenaline rush pounding in his chest. It wasn’t talking out loud. It was inside his head and he had no idea how it was even doing that. His neural interface was trashed. It didn’t feel like he was inside an AI domain, the transition too smooth, that vague awareness of being in a different spatial context just not there. He was standing on solid floor. He still had the gun in his hand, cold and heavy.
“It’s been a long time,
Luka,” it said.
“Not long enough,” he muttered.
“You seem surprised to see me. Surely you didn’t really think you could kill me that easily?”
He’d seen it die, damn right he’d thought it was dead.
“Oh child, it’s good to see how well you’ve grown up. Most impressive. Of course, you have had excellent teachers.” It sounded almost wistful. “If only Nikolai had chosen to work with us instead of against us. He might not have got himself into the predicament he is in now.”
Us?
Pieces dropped into place.
“You’re Order?” LC said, stomach turning to ice, trying to back away but struggling to move his feet, muscles like lead.
The tone changed, darkened. “The Order is dead. It served its purpose, now it’s gone as much as the Thieves’ Guild is gone.”
He couldn’t help the flashback, ten years ago, darkness, pain, confusion. He sucked in a breath that felt like it was devoid of oxygen. He managed to mutter, “What do you want?”
“I want you.”
Without any warning the Bhenykhn hive hit his mind with overwhelming force. No vague awareness, no slight hint of an alien presence at the edge of his mind. It hit hard. In a split second. As if a command ship had materialised right there in orbit above them.
LC folded. His knees hit the floor and he slumped forward, the pain in his head unbearable, red hot daggers stabbing into his eyes and every nerve ending on fire. It wasn’t just the hive, the pain was worse than ever before.
He reached out with a desperate, ‘Sean…’
‘LC…’
It felt like she was a thousand miles away, shouting through dense fog.
“No,” he gasped out loud, chest heaving, head down.
‘We’re in real trouble here, LC,’ she sent. ‘Bhenykhn ships just entered the system. Incoming fast. Are you okay?’