He did something with his commlink and the system powered back up with a low whine. The elevator doors opened and they all piled in. It was a freight elevator, spacious enough to allow for movement of large items, though perhaps not big enough to smuggle out this artifact of theirs. Eva wondered how they would manage that when they found it.
It was also a very slow elevator, worse than the ones on Nuvesta. Eva started to whistle until Vakar put a hand on her arm and shook his head. She considered dancing but decided against it.
The doors opened onto the fourth sublevel. A security desk sat at the far end, protected by impact-resistant transparent polymers, as evidenced by the lack of scratches and cracks in an otherwise trashed room. The remains of a security turret sparked on the floor, fallen sideways, but the room was unoccupied.
They passed through the open door to the connecting tunnel, which showed no signs of a fight. Sue had to duck into the body of her suit to avoid hitting her head on the ceiling, but the tunnel was as wide as the freight elevator. At the far end they hit a pair of closed doors, which Vakar immediately began to hack.
“Another security room?” Eva asked. He shrugged assent, and she gestured at the scientists to hug the walls behind Sue. If the doors were undamaged, the turrets inside probably were, too.
She wasn’t wrong. As soon as the doors opened, a cheerful computerized voice said, “I see you!” and a stream of projectiles shot straight up the center of the tunnel.
Eva squeezed off a few shots at the turret’s sensor, but her rounds weren’t strong enough to penetrate the material.
“Let me, Captain,” Sue said. “Bots, lunchtime!”
All of Sue’s bots came rushing out of nooks and crannies in the mech, more than Eva could have imagined would fit. They raced toward the turret, dodging and weaving as the bullets rained around them. Eva provided cover fire, and Vakar followed suit.
Like a wave of giant yellow ants, the bots swarmed over the turret, knocking it onto its side. It continued to fire, but now it was flopping around on the floor, a victim of its own recoil. Some of the bots had tiny hammers, and many of them carried welding torches. In the space of a dozen seconds, it was all over.
Another security turret fell out of a hole in the ceiling, landing on its face but nonetheless humming to life as it unfolded its legs and rolled, turning its big red eye on them.
Sue stomped on it with Gustavo and stuck a drill-hand into its eye. It shuddered and deactivated with a sad “ah” sound.
“Reinforcements are not forthcoming,” Vakar announced. “Security has been ordered to abandon posts and converge on the central core.”
Eva examined the hole the turret had fallen through. She had assumed it was a shaft or pipeline for turret delivery, but it was literally a hole, oval-shaped, about three meters long by two meters wide. The edges were bright green and blurred, which was weird, but not as weird as the fact that the room on the other side was sideways, and couldn’t possibly exist in the space that the location of the hole seemed to indicate it did.
“We’re all seeing this, right?” she asked.
“It looks like a Gate,” First Scientist Orana said.
“A Gate in the middle of a ceiling?” another scientist—Volucia—said. “Impossible.” They began to argue among themselves about physics and scalability.
“Sue.” Eva held out her hand. “Give me a bot.”
Sue whistled and one of her tiny minions climbed out of the mech and shuffled over to Eva. She picked it up gingerly.
“Sorry,” she said, and tossed it straight up into the hole.
Instead of flying up and falling back down, as soon as it passed the edge of the hole, it kept going and arced away to the left, disappearing from view. There was a soft thud of impact and a squeal, and then a few seconds later a pair of tiny yellow hands gripped the edge of the hole, and a tiny yellow head peered down at them.
“It’s a portable Gate,” Sue whispered. “They made a portable Gate.”
The scientists’ arguments erupted into speculation and theory, all of them smelling indecently excited.
Eva, meanwhile, did a careful sweep of the room. Her grounding in the technology of the Gates was geared more toward their use than their underlying principles, partly because no one had any clue how they actually worked. Until now, apparently. But normal Gates, the kind that hovered out in space in seemingly random places, were much bigger and encircled by metal rings that maintained their stability and let users set coordinates to change their destinations. If this didn’t have a ring, then there had to be some other mechanism controlling it.
On the floor next to the door was a bullet-riddled corpse. A strange-looking arm cannon encased most of its arm. White with black parts, including a glowing purple-pink power source that reminded her of those energy cubes from the temple. She knelt to examine it, aiming it at the wall and gently trying to pull it free.
It triggered, shooting a ball of green light past Eva that hit the wall, stretching instantly into an oval hole of the same shape and size as the one on the ceiling. Which was now gone, interestingly, leaving no trace it had ever been there.
Almost no trace: a pair of tiny yellow hands hit the floor, along with a tiny yellow head.
“Oh no, Seven!” Sue cried, climbing awkwardly out of her mech to pick up the pieces.
Eva walked over to the new hole and peeked through. The rest of the little bot’s body had fallen over on the floor, which was about ten centimeters from the edge.
The room beyond was two stories high and fifteen meters across, and in significantly worse shape than the one they stood in. Not designed to repel armed incursions, she imagined. The walls were pockmarked with impact craters and covered in scorch marks that smelled fairly fresh. The pools of blood under the various bodies were also disturbingly fresh-smelling.
“Incredible,” Orana said. “That device was able to create a Gate—a controlled tear in the very fabric of space-time—but what powers it, and how did it trigger? What is keeping it contained rather than spreading?”
“And how was the other Gate created?” Volucia asked. “The one on the other side?”
“Don’t touch it,” Eva said. “I’ll be right back.” And with that, she jumped through the hole.
From this side, the hole was the same glowing green oval, except of course it showed the room she had just left. It was situated on one of the walls and surrounded by bullet marks, which probably explained what had happened to the person on the other side.
Eva had been expecting a lab, but this looked more like an obstacle course with movable components—platforms, half walls, pits and even conveyor belts. Observation windows lined one of the walls near the ceiling, presumably for monitoring the progress of whoever was running the course. But who were they training, and why?
One of the corpses had a cannon thing like the one in the other room. That made sense: presumably someone had to make an entry hole while another person set up the exit hole. Time to test the theory.
This former person was easier to disarm; the device slid right off. Eva examined its controls. Hand grip, simple triggering mechanism. No apparent switch to disable it or turn it off. She slid it onto her left arm and felt the weight, about on par with a rifle. Could be used with one hand, probably made for two.
“Everyone get back,” she shouted at the Gate in the wall. Didn’t want to have someone else lose their extremities, or head. Sure enough, they had clustered around to see what she was doing, and Vakar had to shoo them away.
Eva aimed just to the side of the existing hole and fired the cannon. The same green sphere of light shot out of it, hitting the wall and flattening into a hole. The existing Gate vanished as if it had never been, leaving a perfect oval of empty wall space surrounded by impact craters. Creepy.
Pausing to scoop up what was left of Seven, Eva climbed back into the other room. The scientists and Sue stared at the cannon in awe, while Vakar continued impassively reflecting things with his stupi
d armor.
“Get the other one,” she told him. “Carefully. I don’t want to find out what happens if you hit someone with this thing.” She also didn’t want to leave it with The Fridge, though she imagined they had the schematics somewhere.
As she watched Vakar, her arms broke out in goose bumps. Portable Gates. Two guns, paired to each other somehow, each capable of opening one end of a wormhole instantaneously. On the one hand, their usefulness was limited, since you had to physically get someone to where you wanted the other Gate to be. On the other hand, once they got there, you could move almost anything through from one place to the next in an almighty hurry. Instead of having to sneak a whole team across enemy lines, you’d only have to move one person. That one person would be carrying an entire potential army in a small, lightweight device.
It had much more practical applications, too, but she knew how people thought. Maybe some of these scientists were imagining galactic peace through resource relocation, but she doubted the upper echelons of The Fridge were quite so altruistic. And while these holes were relatively small, if they were able to harness the power to make Gates big enough to move a whole spaceship . . . Eva made a disgusted noise and shook herself like a wet dog.
“All right, people,” she said. “Let’s finish crashing this party.”
“Wait,” Vakar said. “I have found something else.”
“We don’t have—”
“We must make time for this, I believe.”
Eva gestured at him to lead the way, conscious that every moment that passed could be putting La Sirena Negra out of her reach.
This had better be worth it.
“Me cago en diez,” Eva said.
The room looked like any other low-ceilinged warehouse, except instead of cargo containers, it was filled with row after row of cryo storage pods. Many of them were empty, but if the first row was any indication, there had to be at least two dozen people held here in stasis.
And if she didn’t get them out, they might very well stay that way, assuming the place wasn’t blown up before someone else found them.
“This is barbaric,” First Scientist Orana said.
“On the contrary,” Eva said. “It’s civilized as fuck. Civilization is just bullshit.”
Sue, meanwhile, was stomping around from pod to pod, presumably looking for her brother. Eva hoped she found him, thinking with a pang of how she had intended to rescue Mari much like this, once upon a time.
“We cannot leave them here,” Vakar said.
“No shit.” She hefted the Gate cannon. “I guess I should run back to El Cucullo, open up a hole, and we walk all these popsicles through in a hurry.”
“Or I could return to the ship while you remain here.”
She stared at her reflection in his helmet. There it was again. The line. Captain and crew, boss and subordinate, one person telling the other what to do, the other having to obey.
Except he wasn’t her crew anymore, was he? Vakar had his own ship, his own mission, and he didn’t have to take her orders for shit. So this was just two people having an argument, and they had to hash it out like anyone else.
“Which of us is faster?” she asked. “Who can get to the ship first? Because once the Gate is open, we can come right back through and be here in a second. But it has to get done right in the first place, or we’re all screwed.”
Vakar cocked his head to the side. Considering.
“I am faster,” he said.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.” He didn’t sound happy about it, though.
Eva shot a Gate at the nearest wall. The other side showed the security room they had left a few minutes earlier, still empty.
“We can retreat back there if we have to.” She resisted the urge to hug Vakar, her skin prickling all over with bad feelings. “You waiting for an invitation? Hurry up already.”
He touched her arm briefly with a gloved hand, then raced off.
Eva blinked back tears. Stupid. Focus. Get it together, Captain.
“Open these iceboxes, now!” Eva barked at the scientists. “I want every single one of these meat popsicles conscious by the time that Gate opens.”
She found Sue in the far corner of the room—or rather, she found Gustavo, apparently empty. Sue was curled up inside, crying silently.
“Sue,” Eva said softly. “We’ll find him.”
Sue didn’t respond. Eva got it, she really did, but now wasn’t the time.
“We need to help the people who are here,” Eva told her. “You can do that.”
“What’s the point?” Sue whispered.
“The point is, you have the power to stop other sisters from feeling the way you do right now. But you have to get up. Or you get to look in the mirror tomorrow and know that you did nothing.”
Eva left her there, because what else could she say? Either Sue would get up, or she wouldn’t. Eva wouldn’t judge her either way. Meanwhile, she had to help open the pods.
The scientists weren’t well versed in the systems, but after a few minutes of frustrated interaction with virtual intelligences, they figured it out.
Eva watched one person after another wake up, no doubt feeling much as she had when Mari freed her. Some were confused, some afraid, others angry or aggressive. There were a couple of humans, a trio of kloshians, a quennian, a dytryrc . . .
One of the pods contained someone who looked so much like Pholise, Eva grimaced. Same coloring, same features, same delicate neck folds. At least the tuann would be able to sleep easier tonight, assuming everyone got out of this alive.
The hole in the wall still showed the security room from earlier. How long ago had Vakar left? Should he have made it to El Cucullo by now?
As if in response, the Gate changed and Vakar jumped through. Eva had only a glimpse of the outside of the building, which seemed to be taking heavy fire from ship-based weapons.
As soon as he made it through, he shot another Gate at the wall next to the first one. It created a strange mirror effect that made her vaguely queasy.
“Where’s El Cucullo?” she asked him.
“Gone,” he said.
Eva sucked in a breath. “Okay, we planned for that. Things got hot, they had to move. We’ll have to find another way to the rendezvous point.” She cursed mentally, not wanting to alarm the still-defrosting people accumulating around her like a shitty birthdate party.
“I may be able to offer an acceptable alternative,” Vakar said.
“Yeah?”
“I have located La Sirena Negra.”
Chapter 25
Traeme la Bulla
The central core of the compound was one massive room with floating catwalks of varying sizes crisscrossing it. These led to different alcoves, some of which looked like hangar bays or storage areas, while others were walled off with glass like offices or control booths. The ceiling consisted of a large round door that opened like an iris, and was currently shut except for a tiny hole in the center just big enough to admit an average-size human.
A battle raged all around, with squads of guards and soldiers facing off from opposite sides of the room, or platforms on different levels, or right up in each other’s faces. Their uniforms suggested the troops were human military, of all things, with a few others mixed in, some military, some merc, and even some BOFA.
At the center of it all, hovering in midair in some kind of stasis field, was the stolen Proarkhe artifact.
At least, Eva assumed it was the artifact, since she had been blind when they found it. The thing was shaped like a box, just how the quennians had described it, about three meters high, five meters wide and one meter deep, with strange markings along the front like the ones from the temple. It seemed to be made from the same kind of metal, too, but the color was closer to a deep blue or black.
“So,” she said to Vakar, “how are we going to get that giant thing down and sneak it out without becoming incredibly porous?”
“Perhaps we might
use that,” Vakar said, pointing with the cannon-arm.
“The Gates it makes are too small.”
“No,” he said, gesturing with the pistol in his other hand. “That.”
Eva followed his gesture. Sitting pretty as a picture in a hangar on one side of the room, behind a wall of security guards, was La Sirena Negra. She grinned like a kid at Christmas.
Vakar shot at a guard charging toward them. “I sense a plan forming,” he said.
“Let me orient some goals at you,” she replied. “One, we open that door up there in the ceiling. Two, we deactivate that stasis field around the artifact. Three, we get my ship, get the hostages, get the artifact, and get the hell out of here. Four, pants party.”
“I feel there are more implied steps that complicate this plan immensely.”
“When is anything we do not complicated?”
She spared a glance at the absurdly large crowd of hostages, scientists and Sue awaiting her and Vakar in one of the access tunnels nearby. They’d decided it wasn’t safe to leave them in the cryo room, in case the attacks outside got worse, but at this point it was rocks and hard places as far as the eye could see.
“Start figuring out the door control situation,” she told Vakar. “If we can’t get that open, we’re toast anyway.”
The hole in the ceiling grew from the size of a person to the size of a medium todyk. It jammed, then opened wider, then jammed again.
“Looks like someone else has a similar plan,” Eva muttered.
“Remote access to the controls has been disabled,” Vakar said. “I am attempting to reactivate them, but we can reach them manually at the control center there.” He pointed at an outcropping three stories up, where two concentrated forces were exchanging fire.
Eva hefted the Gate cannon. “Let’s test the range on this thing.” Carefully, she aimed at the wall above the outcropping and fired.
The ball of green light shot out, flew straight as a laser, and flattened itself into an oval that showed the now-empty cryo room.
Chilling Effect_A Novel Page 36
