by M. D. Cooper
Isa couldn’t find any trace of Reiko, and there was no sign of her on the section’s network. It was as though the woman had completely disappeared.
Phaedra had told her that Reiko and Leif had traveled to a different section of the PETER after the eruption, so the AI should be able to find them now. Isa only had to ask her—though she would not be pleased that Isa had gone after them alone.
Isa wondered what could have caused that, hope that it might have been Erin’s doing springing up inside.
Isa chewed at her lower lip as she waited for the AI to go on.
A single dot appeared on Isa’s map of the PETER.
Phaedra reported.
Isa recalled that Reiko had received her ‘bad news’ a few minutes after Lark had heard about the earthquake. The timeline made sense.
Isa backpedalled, still worried that could put Erin at risk.
Isa ignored Phaedra’s pitying tone. Leif was dead, and Isa was sure that Erin had killed him. Her heart lifted. Erin was fighting back, and she was somewhere nearby. Isa only had to find her.
Isa walked out of the bay and took the passageway that led toward the dot that represented Reiko. The Transcend engineer was in a small room with an undefined purpose, according to the information on the PETER map. She was moving around somewhat erratically. Isa focused her mind’s eye on Reiko while she jogged toward her location, wondering what the woman could be doing that would cause her to move so strangely.
As Isa watched, Reiko made a sudden change of direction; the dot that represented her exited the room and moved up a passageway at a rapid rate.
Reiko was running, and she was traveling deeper into the PETER.
Is she running toward or away from something, or someone? Is she running after Erin?
Isa sped up. The convoluted interior of the PETER, combined with the fact that she was watching Reiko’s progress while also looking ahead, meant that she couldn’t run as fast as she wanted. But as long as Phaedra could track her, Reiko wasn’t getting away.
The dot halted. Isa panicked.
What is she doing now? Has she caught Erin?
Isa ran on, taking a left turn. She was about ten minutes from her target. She reached a long stretch of straight passageway and was able to increase her speed. She sprinted to the end and turned right.
Reiko began to move again, though much slower than before.
Why?
Isa checked the woman’s position; she had entered a maintenance access tunnel.
The only possible reason was that she was either hiding from someone, or planning on sneaking up on someone. Isa’s hopes rose. She could sneak up on Reiko, stand right next to her on the other side of a wall, and the engineer would never know.
Isa compared her own location. She was close to the room where she’d seen Reiko moving erratically before leaving it so abruptly. She decided she would take a look inside when she reached it before continuing to track Reiko. Perhaps she might learn something.
She ran on, joy bubbling up in her chest. Martin would be so relieved that Erin was alive, and Jude and the triplets wouldn’t lose a mother. Isa’s family would remain intact and happy.
She forced herself to hold her emotions in check. She mustn’t get ahead of herself. As long as Reiko remained alive, Erin was in danger.
Isa turned yet another corner. The room she was heading toward was less than a minute away. She caught sight of the open door, but she could see nothing through the gap. She slowed to a walk and softened her footsteps. No sound was coming from the room.
When she reached it, the first thing her gaze lit upon caused her to suck in a breath: a red-brown streak crossed the floor.
Blood.
She couldn’t imagine what else the dried liquid might be.
Isa touched her fingers to the door and slowly opened it, revealing the foot of someone lying down. As she opened the door further, she saw sprawled legs. The limbs belonged to a man, and they looked devoid of life.
She leaned through the doorway. Sure enough, there lay Leif. He was half-slumped, turned to one side behind the door, and his face and hands were grey. Dry blood encrusted his beard, neck, and clothes.
Isa acknowledged Phaedra’s request, then took a deep breath and stepped into the room. There was another door across the room, though it was smaller than the one she’d just entered through. Isa headed toward it, briefly scanning Leif as she walked by him.
Disgust and elation fought inside her. Isa was certain that Leif had died at Erin’s hands. She’d murdered him to escape, and, as Isa thought back to Reiko’s earlier behavior, she guessed that Erin had fought Reiko too.
Isa looked into the smaller room. A container with a gridded lid stood against one wall, and at its edges were opened grips. Bloodstains marked the container’s surface; Isa grimaced at the gory sight. She guessed it was Erin’s blood.
But she’s free.
Erin had gotten away and killed one of her captors. That explained why Reiko entered the maintenance tunnels: she was hiding. She was scared that Erin would kill her as well.
It was probably the smartest decision Reiko had made since arriving in New Canaan. Isa would never forget that moment on Troy when Erin had shot Martin’s killer dead without an instant of hesitation.
Reiko is right to be afraid.
Isa spun around and ran out of the room. She had to find Erin and help her, she was prob
ably injured and in pain. They would catch Reiko together.
At first, Isa set off in the direction Reiko had traveled when she left the room, but when she checked the woman’s current position, the Transcend’s engineer had doubled back and was moving toward the landing bay.
Isa wondered if she was trying to leave. She won’t get far. Not now that Phaedra knows the truth, and the Marines are coming.
If Reiko was lucky, the Marines would catch her before Erin did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
STELLAR DATE: 05.14.8942 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: PETER (Planetary Exo-Thermic Extraction Ring)
REGION: Athens, New Canaan System
Erin halted. She hadn’t heard Reiko’s footsteps for a while, and the spots of blood had disappeared. After taking numerous turns down fresh passageways, she was also entirely disoriented. Without her Link access, she was handicapped. She didn’t have the first idea where she was inside the PETER, and she didn’t even think she could find her way back to the room where she’d killed Leif.
Slumping to the floor, Erin pulled up her knees, and rested her forehead on them, trying to silence the buzzing in her head. Her injured hand throbbed, and she ached in places she didn’t remember ever aching before. More than ever, she missed Walter—not because he would have taken care of all her pain. She missed his calm voice, his sardonic humor, his upbeat attitude….
Without him, she was alone.
She had to catch Reiko and make the woman pay for killing her best friend. But she could not find her, and she didn’t know how much longer she could go on. She was so tired and weak after the hours she’d spent hanging suspended above the pipes.
Erin lifted her head and leaned back against the wall, her half-closed eyes taking in her surroundings. The passageway looked identical to the others she’d passed through. The interior of the ring carried no signs or markings to show people their position or directions to significant areas, like the landing bay. There was no need. Anyone who was supposed to be there would be able to access a map of the place. For all she knew, she could be leaning against the only barrier between herself and space, or she could be around the corner from the place where she’d started. Perhaps both.
But was she really completely lost? Though she didn’t have Link access or Walter to help her, she did have her memory of everywhere she’d run while trying to catch Reiko, and she had seen the PETER plenty of times when traveling toward and away from the structure via skiff. The good thing was the structure was the same all over; the same construction pattern repeated around the entire circumference of the ring.
Keeping one ear open for the sound of footsteps, Erin closed her eyes and began to mentally replay her journey to her current position. She had traveled about one and a half kilometers, all told, along passages of varying length and orientation. In her mind’s eye, Erin traced a line to represent her route. Perhaps it wasn’t perfect, but it would do.
Next, she brought up a memory of a complete section of the PETER. The structure was complicated, and she had few recollections in her organic memory that included an entire section. The clearest was from the time she had planet dived, when she had looked back at the ring as she fell away from it. That meant her view was from the underside…not perfect for her needs, but it could work.
Erin moved the fabricated line of her path through the PETER to set it against her memory of the structure’s design. The first thing she noticed was that she was far from the living area, where nearly all the passageways were the same length. She was also fairly certain she was not close to the base of the ring, where myriad dropaway points led down to the nodes that drew energy from Athens. And the upper reaches were skeletal framework only, for strength. No rooms or even maintenance tunnels existed up there because all repairs were made externally.
She continued her search, turning her mental line around in her mind and trying to make it match up to somewhere in the maze. Finally, she found it. Her route fitted against an area of the PETER roughly midway between the base and the outer framework.
Holding the image in her mind, Erin opened her eyes and stood up. It was possible that she was wrong. Perhaps the mental line she’d created of her route would match against another place in the structure. Perhaps even more than two places. But she could test whether she was correct by traveling beyond the line. If she’d gotten it right, she should be able to successfully predict what she would encounter next.
While she had been trying to figure out where she was, Erin had come to a conclusion: staying alive was more important than finding Reiko. The woman had escaped her for now. Searching for her within the labyrinthine PETER was beyond Erin’s capabilities in her current physical state.
She had also realized that if she allowed her anger and grief over Walter’s death to control her actions, she was going to end up dead. If that happened, Reiko might get away. It was probable that no one else knew what she and Leif had done, and though they might suspect her of wrongdoing, they wouldn’t be able to prove anything, and Tanis would be forced to allow Reiko to return to the Transcend.
Or even worse, despite all that had happened, Reiko might stick around and pull her tricks on someone else she thought could tell her about New Canaan’s picotech and defenses, and Walter’s death would not be avenged.
These were possibilities that Erin could not allow to come true.
Erin had realized that she was the proof of all that Reiko and Leif had done. She was the evidence that was needed to expose the engineers’ scheme. The instant she returned to Lark and Fazir, they could tell Phaedra what had happened, and the AI could send in Marines to find Reiko and bring her to justice.
Her realizations were bitter. Erin would have liked nothing better than to kill Reiko for what she had done, but she had to face the fact that that avenue was closed to her.
Usef’s words came back to her: 'It’s about survival’.
Erin set off, returning the way she had come. She walked quickly, continuing to strain her ears for the sound of Reiko moving nearby, but the passageways offered only empty silence except for the quiet echo of her own footfalls.
She continued retracing her path back toward the room where Leif lay dead. After that, she would head to, if she guessed correctly, a landing bay that was positioned another eight hundred meters from the spot where she’d been held and tortured.
She figured that Reiko and Leif had to have traveled to this section via skiffs. If Reiko hadn’t already departed the same way, she could be heading to the bay now. Erin had to reach a vessel first.
She weighed the possibility that she would encounter Reiko at the landing bay. If that happened, she decided, it would be all to the good. She still carried one of the torture wands.
She gripped it tightly and walked faster.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
STELLAR DATE: 05.14.8942 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: PETER (Planetary Exo-Thermic Extraction Ring)
REGION: Athens, New Canaan System
Erin sped past the room that held Leif’s corpse without even a glance. She’d found her way back there quickly, but not as quickly as she would have liked. Her spurt of energy when she’d been running after Reiko had faded, and she couldn’t seem to muster any more speed.
Traveling beyond the room where she’d fought Leif brought her into new territory. She would soon find out if she’d mapped her route against the PETER correctly.
She walked on. The passageway ended in a fork. The right-hand path led upward for another twenty meters, while the left-hand route remained on the same level. The left passageway was long, and many openings lay on both sides.
Erin nodded in satisfaction. She was now certain where she was. To get to the landing bay, she had to go left and take the second right turn, which would take her downward.
She followed the corridor, her success sending a fresh burst of adrenaline through her. Somewhere, she found the strength to speed up a little.
She thought throu
gh the steps she had to take: first, catch Reiko and make her pay for killing Walter. Failing that, she would find a skiff and use its Link access to alert everyone to what Reiko and Leif had done.
Whether or not Hal and Jere had been involved would be for an official investigation to determine, but she would gladly escort them from the system herself if they were. Lark would be sad, but the Transcend had clearly shown they could not be trusted.
Thirdly, she had to fix the damned PETER so Athens could return to its regular stabilization schedule. And then, finally, she could go home.
The temptation to simply kill Reiko would be strong, but she had to resist. One of the TSF engineers was already dead; that would take some explaining. If Reiko died too, it could be just the sort of excuse Admiral Iysra was looking for to justify an attack on New Canaan.
She needed to keep Reiko alive. The woman had to confess what she had done so that it would be clear that New Canaan was not at fault. They had to show that the Transcend had committed a hostile act by sending in spies.
She had nearly screwed up once by killing an enemy in a thoughtless rage. She was not going to make the same mistake again.
Erin loped along another passageway, and then another, working her way downward. The landing bay lay only two hundred meters away. Soon, the distance had shrunk to less than one hundred meters.
Erin slowed down and continued more cautiously. Reiko wasn’t dumb; She might have predicted that Erin would head for the bay. It was the only way off the PETER, after all.
The final passageway opened on her left. Erin stepped slowly toward it, creeping close to the wall. When she neared the opening, she put her back against the wall and edged up to the corner. She peeked around it. Nothing. She walked on.
The entrance to the landing bay appeared ahead, tantalizingly close, but Erin only crept toward it. The place had several entrances, Reiko could still be waiting for her. No sight or sound gave Erin any indication one way or the other.
