The Plague Forge (Dire Earth Cycle #3)

The Plague Forge (Dire Earth Cycle #3) Page 45

“There’s no rush,” Skadz said. “Sit tight; let’s wait and see what they do.”

“What if they toss some tear gas in here?” Sam asked.

“That would change the equation.”

Kelly turned back toward the door, using a handle on the wall to keep herself from floating into view of anyone outside. “I say we shoot out that light. We’re blind otherwise.”

“Agreed,” Sam said.

Skadz shook his head. “Bad idea. Not until we know who we’re dealing with. They could be friend—”

A whirring sound cut him off. It sounded like an electric desk fan, and Sam braced herself. Fans moved air, and air was something they couldn’t afford to lose or have contaminated.

Seconds later an object floated up to the open climber door. It propelled itself on a half-dozen small fans mounted off a central truss, aimed in each direction to give it a full range of movement. In addition there were two glass domes, one on top and one on the bottom, with glowing red cameras mounted inside. They swiveled, taking in the scene within the compartment, and almost immediately they focused on the package beside Sam.

“Drone!” she shouted.

Skadz swung the butt of his weapon down toward the thing. Its fans ramped to full power in a millisecond and on a burst of speed it avoided his attack neatly. The cameras had not swiveled toward him, so it must have sensed the impending strike with some kind of proximity detector. He swung again, to the same result, and with each motion to avoid attack the little automaton moved farther into the cabin. The two cameras jumped from one angle to the next, taking in everything. One stopped on Samantha’s face for a half second, and she did the only thing she could think to do and extended her middle finger at it.

Then Vaughn was next to her. He’d taken his jacket off and simply floated over to the thing and gently lay the garment over the top of it. Only when one of the cameras became occluded did the robot try to lurch away, fans screaming, but Vaughn pulled the sleeves of the jacket together at the bottom and held on tight. He pushed off toward a corner of the cabin and managed to wedge the bundle between himself and the spot where the walls joined. The robot squirmed inside his coat like a trapped cat.

Sam turned back to the door and her eyes narrowed. A welcome rush of adrenaline coursed through her. Whoever was out there knew much about the contents of the climber, including that Vaughn wasn’t exactly a cowering captive. But she thought perhaps it hadn’t seen Kelly.

“How about we talk,” a voice called from somewhere outside.

In the darkness Sam couldn’t see Kelly very well, but she looked at her anyway. Their eyes met, communicating the same thing: That is Grillo’s voice. “Skadz, kill that fucking light,” Sam said. “Ours, too.”

Beside the door, Skadz aligned himself and then leaned out, gun aimed. He fired once, a deafening single clap that made Sam jump despite herself. The light went out as he pulled himself back out of view.

“Suit yourselves,” Grillo said. He did a good job of sounding bored.

With sudden, nauseating motion the climber lurched. Sam felt the meager contents of her stomach churn as her mental perception of up and down changed almost instantly. Suddenly the door of the climber was down, and she was falling toward Skadz. She managed to reach out and grab one of the couch’s support legs, which were bolted to the movable base. She slipped her feet in to rest against another and found she could stand like that.

The bundle containing the alien object slid down what was now a wall, bumped against something, and went tumbling into the air.

“Catch it!” Sam said.

Kelly reached but missed, and their prize fell down the umbilical tube. Sam realized then with cold certainty that the tube hadn’t moved away when the climber lurched into motion. They’d moved together. The whole station is being moved.

A shape on the periphery of her vision dashed the thought as the captive Martin fell past her. Or maybe he’d jumped. Either way, Sam watched their last true bargaining chip plummet through the door and into darkness. She glanced back and up. Vaughn had managed to stay wedged into the corner, his back against the couch on the opposite side of hers. His face was strained from having to support his own weight and the still-struggling camera drone.

“Just drop it,” she said. She doubted the little propulsion fans on the thing could actually support its weight in gravity, and anyway it had seen everything.

Vaughn took her advice and practically threw the thing toward the door, along with his jacket. The whole package fell like a stone, and a few seconds later she heard someone, probably Martin, grunt as the little robot crashed on top of him at the bottom of the umbilical.

“That was Grillo talking, wasn’t it?” Skadz asked.

“Yeah,” Kelly said.

“Fuck. He picked a bloody convenient time to be in orbit.”

She nodded. “Options?”

“I say we go now,” Skadz said, “guns blazing. We’re sitting ducks in here, and just giving them time to plan. Plus they’ve got the object and our one real captive now.”

“I agree. Let’s go.”

“Hold on,” Sam said. She fixed her gaze on Kelly. “I don’t think the drone camera saw you. Skadz distracted it when it came in, and it never looked your way after that.”

“So? He’ll know I’m with you.”

“But he doesn’t know you’re with us. So when we go out, turn on us, say you planned the whole thing. We wanted to flee on foot, you suggested orbit where you know he’d be.”

“To what end?”

“He must want us alive, or he would have just left the climber sitting outside for a few days. So you present us, take credit for bringing us in, and when he’s mulling that over you pull the same move you did in the vault.”

Kelly bit in her lower lip, thinking it through.

“It might work,” Skadz said. “Sounds plausible. Too plausible, if you ask me. Sorry, Kelly, I don’t know you too well.”

“Plausibility is why it might work,” Sam said. “And there’s no time for another plan. Let’s go.”

Reluctantly, Kelly nodded.

“Your move!” Grillo shouted. “No rush, we’ve got plenty of time.”

Kelly frowned. “We’re coming out. I’ve disarmed them.”

“Is that Sister Josephine?”

“It is, Father.” She rolled her eyes at the title. “Can you kill the gravity?”

Within seconds the press of acceleration faded and weightlessness returned. Sam tucked her pistol into the back of her pants and floated over to the door next to Skadz.

“You’d better be right,” he said under his breath. “That he wants us alive, I mean.”

“Who wouldn’t want us alive? We’re so much fun to be around.”

Sam went first, bracing herself in the door and pushing off gently to float down the white tube that had been attached to the climber. Without the blinding spotlight she could see the tube ended at a normal hallway about twenty meters away. That hall in turn continued much farther, ending at a T intersection a good hundred meters distant. There were people down there, waiting. Four or five, at least.

She glanced back and saw Skadz was right behind her. Kelly had pushed out, too, and floated a meter back from him, her gun trained vaguely toward his back.

“Keep your hands visible,” Grillo called out.

Sam turned back as they crossed the threshold of the umbilical and into the hallway. A series of red ladder rungs lined the wall on her right, and she recalled a similar layout in Gateway’s cargo bay exit, though this tunnel was narrower, and bare metal instead of painted. A door drifted by on her left, with signage next to it:

MIDWAY STATION—AUX. CLIMBER CONTROL

She’d never spent much time studying the various space stations and their places along the cord, but she remembered Midway simply because it sat alone at the very center of the cord, with nothing on either side of it for thousands of kilometers. Sam recalled something about it being the smallest station, an outpost really, serving merely as an emergency stopover for climbers on their way to points much farther above or below.

But they hadn’t traveled nearly far enough to reach it. Sam pondered this as she floated toward Grillo and a handful of tough-looking Jacobites.

Grillo eyed her with casual interest, like a surgeon analyzing a patient. He’d ditched his usual business suit for a uniform of sorts. Black shoes, khaki pants, and a black sweater open at the neck to reveal a white turtleneck beneath. Almost priestly. Almost.

He must have moved Midway Station down, near Gateway. But why? There wouldn’t have been time to do it simply to capture her climber. They would have had to start moving it days ago.

Of course, she thought. Kip. He told Grillo everything. Grillo had been planning this all along. Not our presence, but moving the object over to the Key Ship. And we brought the fucking thing right to him.

The thugs at the end of the hallway pushed back to give her a wide berth as she reached the wall. Sam stopped herself with her hands and feet, and used a rung on the wall to move aside so Skadz could land. For the moment she decided to avoid Grillo’s gaze, which she felt hot on her like the glaring spotlight before.

Instead she scanned the faces of the men with him. Jacobites, she assumed, but they wore none of the usual garb. These men were dressed instead like Gateway Security. Sam flicked her gaze across each, sizing up their weaponry and anything else useful she could glean. The problem with zero gravity, though, was getting the measure of a man. How he stood, what kind of confidence wafted off his posture.

Two of them, she realized suddenly, she knew. Alex Warthen himself, along with his right-hand man, whose name she’d forgotten. They’d interrogated her after Skyler fled Gateway what seemed like a lifetime ago. Platz and council allies once, then Blackfield’s, and now Grillo’s. Some people never change, though neither man looked terribly happy to be here.

One of the others looked familiar, too. Had she stalked him in the halls of Gateway? Perhaps stolen from his quarters while he slept? That had been a favorite game of Kelly’s. Swap two guards’ shoes around, or steal the caps from their flashlights and earpieces. But no, Sam knew where she’d seen this one.

Hightower. Bonaparte.

Weck was his actual name, if she recalled, and she’d floored him with a kick, starting the brawl that ended the lives of Angus and Takai. The brawl that sent Skyler fleeing the station. And all because Sam had drank a bit too much. He was staring at her, his head tilted to one side, brow furrowed. Sam looked down. He recognized her, of course, but she didn’t want him to see the wrath in her own eyes. Her gaze found his weapon, a snub rifle like Roddy had carried. What had she said? Something about an electric shock … No, a toxin.

Skadz landed next to her, moved, and then Kelly arrived.

“Get us moving again,” Grillo said under his breath. A few seconds later Sam began to feel the press of gravity again. The wall she’d landed on became the floor, and once she felt firmly held to it, she stood and mentally reoriented herself.

“I caught them at the vault,” Kelly said. “But they killed the others and so I pretended to be on their side. They were after the object, of course, and I couldn’t let them walk out into the city with it. The confines of a climber seemed—”

A sharp crack cut off her words.

Sam felt a warm spray across her face.

Kelly dropped to her knees and toppled over, blood seeping from the back of her head.

“I’m so very tired,” Grillo said, “of liars in my presence.”

Samantha reacted without thinking. She pulled the gun from her belt and aimed for Grillo even as tears welled into her eyes and rage flooded her mind. She fired once, but no one was there. The fucker had moved.

Something bit her in the neck. Two fangs, sharp as needles. Sam swatted at it and found a cord that stretched from her to Weck. He held his weapon, the toxic whatever-the-fuck, like a shotgun, and had a satisfied grin on his face.

A mass slammed into her legs. One of the thugs. Men around her were shouting; orders were being barked. She tried to turn the gun downward but another body crashed into her, and before she knew it her face met the floor and there were three people holding her down. Something drew around her wrists and tightened. She felt no pain from any of this. Her body felt like it had melted into a nerveless mass as the chemicals from that damn weapon seeped into her brain.

“Keep an eye on them until we reach the temple,” Grillo said. “I only need one alive, so if one resists … I don’t know, shoot the other.”

A knee kept Sam’s face pressed to the floor, not that it mattered. She couldn’t move a muscle. She doubted she could even blink. All she could do was stare into the dead eyes of Kelly Adelaide. The woman who’d freed her from her cell on Gateway. A woman she’d fought with, killed with, hidden with, and in that time learned from. Learned when to leap back into shadow instead of forward into fray. Learned the true meaning of loyalty, no matter the cost. Kelly had feigned conversion to that sick cult and lived under Grillo’s thumb for two years just to keep Neil Platz’s vision of the future from being perverted.

She deserved a hero’s death. To go down fighting like Prumble or Jake, not halfway through some bullshit line. Samantha gazed deep into those cold, unmoving eyes and made a silent promise.

Not like this. Not like this.

Grillo’s face filled her view. He’d crossed to her and knelt down, his eyes looking at her chest with a perplexed expression. He reached out and began to fiddle with her vest, Sam helpless to stop him. Finally his hand pulled back, a bag clutched between two fingers. His lips curled back in a smile and he began to laugh at the sight of the notebook. The Testament. “Oh, Samantha,” he said, still laughing. “You really have made this far too easy.”