by P. T. Hylton
She found the place nearly empty. The exception was one table where the rest of the GMT sat.
Alex sauntered over, a knowing smile on her face. “Shouldn’t you be resting?”
Ed looked up at her and chucked. “Shouldn’t you?”
Alex slipped into the nearest empty chair. “Fair enough. I just spent an hour watching two vamps sparring. They are some incredibly deadly creatures.”
“Maybe,” Patrick replied, “but we are pretty deadly creatures too.”
No one objected to that.
“Speaking of being deadly,” Wesley said, “when do we get to go mess up Fleming and save the city?”
Alex looked at Owl. “That depends on how fast we can fix the ship once it gets back.”
Owl said, “The batteries are in good shape, and George and I are pretty sure we can make the new circuit board work. I'm hoping I can have the ship up and running a few hours after Jaden gets it here.”
“That should be any time now, right?” Chuck asked. “Dawn is getting close.”
Alex nodded. “I’ll go check in with George, but let’s start getting ready to move out. I want us ready to roll as soon as the ship is ready. New Haven needs us.”
CB, Brian, and Jessica moved quickly through the maintenance tunnels deep in the belly of New Haven. Brian held up a hand as they approached a tunnel opening that crossed paths with theirs. They stopped, and Brian held up his echolocation device and pointed it in the direction of the other tunnel.
After a moment, he said, “We’re good.”
The group started moving again, almost running now.
CB shook his head and chuckled as Brian held up the device and he caught a glimpse of the three-dimensional image of the tunnel around them on its screen. The stupid-looking thing had helped them avoid Fleming’s faceless GMT goons ever since the encounter with the group Jessica had electrocuted.
It was hard not to marvel at the possibilities that existed in Brian’s mind. He’d made the echolocation device as a side project in his spare time. For someone else, such a device might be the work of a lifetime.
Now here they were attempting to overthrow a leader who would most likely kill them all. It would be a damn shame if someone as brilliant as Brian met his end in these tunnels. CB hoped that their one-in-a-million chance would pay off, but he knew the reality would almost certainly be different. The thought of losing these great people for a cause that was already lost made him sick.
He tried to push the thoughts from his mind. There was no time to go down that path. He needed to focus and hope that his leadership and the brilliance of these two would be enough to pull this off.
Jessica stopped a bit further down the tunnel. “This is the place.”
“Thank the sun,” Brian muttered, a little short of breath. He sat down, resting his back against the tunnel wall. He looked pale, and a thin layer of sweat covered his face.
CB patted him on the arm. “Brian, you really need to get out of the lab more. A healthy body makes for a healthy mind.”
Brian raised an eyebrow. “Okay, Colonel. If I live through the next twenty-four hours, I promise to take up the CB fitness routine. For now, keep your guilt trips and let me rest a moment. I need to concentrate on hacking the system.” He looked at Jessica. “Are you sure the Hub security lines run through here? We’re under sanitation, right?”
Jessica was already working on removing an access panel from the tunnel ceiling. “Have a little faith. I’m more than just a pretty face. The security network room in the Hub is well protected, and the lines have a failsafe, so they would know if we tapped into them directly. But the backbone that they run on shares bandwidth with the agricultural systems. If we tap into the backbone here, we can access the Hub undetected.”
Jessica finished unscrewing the access panel and bent down to place it on the floor.
CB tried not to stare as she worked. He’d been attracted to her for a long time, but seeing her like this, fighting for her life, facing near-certain death with such poise and brilliance, the attraction had grown into an ache inside him. He wanted her badly, both for her mind and her body. Why hadn’t he done something about it before now?
If they made it through this, he vowed to correct that at the first opportunity.
“You are a lot more than just a pretty face,” he said. “How do you keep track of every system on this ship?”
Jessica stuck her head into the opening and looked up. “This ship has to be one of the most amazing engineering feats humanity has ever created. How could you not want to know about every working piece? Now give me a boost. I need to get up into the cable tray.”
CB linked her fingers, creating a step. Jessica’s foot slipped into it and he lifted, boosting her up into the ceiling.
She worked in silence for a few moments, then she re-emerged with a wire she hooked into a device attached to Brian’s tablet. “Okay, you should be tapped into the network.”
“Here we go,” Brian said. He worked silently on his tablet for ten minutes, his fingers moving quickly for a few moments, then pausing for a minute or two while he calculated his next step. Finally, he said, “Got it. We’re in the system.”
Jessica smiled widely. “Okay, that means you’re up, CB. You ready for your acting debut?”
CB felt an unexpected knot of worry in his stomach. Leading a team into battle he could do, but this? This was something else. It was a whole different type of subterfuge.
Brian pointed the camera at CB and manipulated the picture a moment. "Ready on this end. CB?”
The colonel took a deep breath and then nodded. It was show time.
The mood in Daniel Fleming’s office was tense. Sarah and Fleming were alone, but there were two guards outside the door. There was no way any unwanted visitors were getting in this room.
Sarah sat on her chair, not daring to relax for a moment as Fleming paced, muttering under his breath. She had to admit, if only to herself, that she was worried.
This was a crisis. Fleming’s plan had utterly failed. Times like this were tests for a leader, Sarah knew. Would they rise to the occasion, learn from their mistakes, and use the experience for the betterment of their people? Or would they double down on leading their people to destruction?
It wasn’t too late for Fleming to go the first direction, but so far he was leaning hard toward the second.
Maybe this was why Sarah was here. Why she’d gone through everything from being shot to helping him take out the council. Maybe it had all been leading to this moment.
She cleared her throat and leaned forward. “You need to sit down. Relax. Kurtz and his people are out there right now. They will find him. The whole city is after them. Three people can’t hide in New Haven for long.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Fleming snapped. “The new GMT will get them. Colonel Brickman got lucky. That’s the only reason he’s alive. Luck runs out, and usually much sooner than you expect. It’s not him I’m worried about.”
“Then what is it?”
Fleming let out a high-pitched laugh. The strange, unhinged tenor of the laugh set Sarah’s teeth on edge.
“It’s a hundred things. I’m responsible for this entire city. That’s a job one man can’t do alone. And so far, everyone I trust is letting me down.”
Sarah tried to ignore the sting of those words. “What do you mean? Nearly the entire city’s on your side.”
“Sure, but what’s it matter if those closest to me are so ineffective? Take Firefly. Who the hell knows what happened at Fort Stearns, but it’s clear he lost control of the situation. And then there’s Kurtz failing to take out Colonel Brickman at point-blank range.”
“And what about me?” she asked hesitantly.
“Well, Brian McElroy is currently hiding somewhere on this ship. He was critical to Resettlement, and it looks like we’ve likely lost him forever. There’s no way I could ever trust him again. That wasn’t how things were supposed to go with him.”
Attempting to seduce Brian McElroy had been like trying to seduce a chair. She’d put out plenty of signals, many of them so ridiculously overt, but he’d ignored every one of them.
The more worrying thing about Fleming’s statement was that he was still talking about Resettlement in the present tense. Like it was still moving forward. He hadn’t accepted that it had failed. At some point, he was going to have to realize that the entire Resettlement colony was likely dead. Hell, even most of the GMT squad they’d sent down to assess the situation had died. That was a pretty spectacular failure.
“I think that this could work for the best,” she said. “CB is the perfect scapegoat for the Resettlement project. We can tell the people that it would have been a success, but CB sabotaged it. That’s what caused the failure. You can get the city running on track again and then we'll start over.”
Fleming raised his voice almost to the point of shouting. “Resettlement is not a failure! We may have had a setback, but once we get a full assessment of the situation, we will move forward. We just need to step up the defenses.” He took a deep breath and collapsed into the chair behind his desk. “CB did sabotage Resettlement, by the way. If he would have believed in the project and truly dedicated himself and his team to its success, things would have gone very differently on the first night on the surface.”
Sarah could see the desperation in Fleming’s eyes and hear it in his voice. This speech was just an attempt to convince himself that it was true. She had seen the team members who survived the trip to the surface and heard their report. Fleming didn’t have the ability to cope with failure. Sarah didn’t know how to respond, but thankfully she didn’t have to.
There was a pounding on the door and a voice came from the other side. “Sir, we have a situation.”
Fleming glanced at Sarah. He hopped from his chair and hurried across the room. He opened the door, a concerned look on his face. “What situation?”
“There’s an intruder. Someone tripped the motion sensors on the fifth floor.”
Fleming’s eyes narrowed. “When and where?”
“An empty office on the west side. Happened less than five minutes ago.”
Fleming hurried back to his desk and tapped at the monitor embedded there. A moment later, security footage appeared.
“We don’t know how he entered the building without being detected,” the guard said, stepping into the office. We’re on high alert here. Every entrance is covered.”
Fleming ignored the man and squinted at the monitor, flipping from room to room on the fifth floor. When he found the footage of the intruder, he drew a sharp breath.
Sarah peered over his shoulder, and she too was startled by what she saw.
It was CB.
Colonel Brickman was standing in an empty office. He quickly moved into the hallway, and Fleming flipped the footage to the hallway camera. Then CB ducked around a corner and disappeared from view.
Fleming frantically flipped through footage, trying to find the missing colonel. With his other hand, he grabbed the radio off his desk. “Kurtz, this is Fleming. I need you to get everyone here, and do it quick! CB is in the building. I want you to make damn sure he doesn’t leave alive.”
Kurtz responded immediately. “I’m on my way. Stay in your office with the guards inside. I’ll have more posted outside the office soon. If CB is there, he is probably coming after you. He thinks taking you out is his only path to victory. Do not leave that room.”
Sarah watched as Fleming slammed down the radio. A vein stood out on his forehead, and his face was growing redder by the moment. Fleming always controlled the situation. He made people do what he wanted and forced the outcomes to conform with his will. Now one man was refusing to play by his rules and seemed to be a step ahead.
If Fleming didn’t get himself under control quickly, things could get much worse for everyone.
CB, Jessica, and Brian waited silently, gathered around the radio CB had taken from the leader of Fleming’s faceless GMT.
CB was beginning to wonder if they’d miscalculated or if maybe Fleming had seen through their ruse when a voice came through the radio.
“This is Colonel Kurtz. I need every badge that can hear my voice to converge on the Hub. Colonel Brickman is currently in the council building and ensuring he does not leave is our top priority. Get your asses over there, post haste. Kurtz out.”
CB looked at Brian and said, “My God, I can’t believe you actually pulled that off. Well done! How exactly did you do that?”
Brian tilted his head a bit. “It was pretty easy. I set up the footage of you overlaid with some of the security footage from the cameras in the Hub. I just had to make sure that it was in an empty room so that no one could verify if you were there or not. Once I had a nice new set of footage, I fed it back into the security system so that the camera itself interpreted the video I had made as live footage. I also made sure to trip the motion sensors for the area to get security to check the footage for that time. As far as they are concerned, you are sneaking around on the fifth floor of the council building.”
“Looks like Fleming bought it,” Jessica said. “He is probably shitting himself, thinking you’re going to burst into his office at any moment.”
“Great work, guys. We should have a pretty easy time getting around, at least for a little while.”
Jessica nodded. “We have our opportunity. Let’s make the most of it.”
CB smiled. “Then let’s get to work on taking control of the flight deck.”
11
Jaden lay on the ground, momentarily stunned from the unexpected attack.
Just prior to the first shot, Jaden had sensed something. It was battle rage. Not the type that the Ferals experienced, the blind explosions of emotion. No, this was the strange combination of fear, excitement, and trepidation that only a more advanced mind could conjure. He’d experienced it many times, in fact, always just before attacking his opponent.
He silently cursed himself for not picking up on it sooner. Things were muddled with all these Ferals nearby. Still, he should have caught it. He hadn’t and his team had paid the price.
Granted, if not for his warning, half the team would have fallen, but still. One loss was too many.
He looked to his left and saw Lesley on the pavement, clutching her stump of an arm. And suddenly—
It was 1919. Jaden had come to Chicago for a meeting of the vampires. He’d heard Gustov had created a new prodigy, bringing their numbers back to one hundred. A young woman. He met the new vampire in a bar off Water Street. She was dancing, but she sensed him as soon as he entered. She sauntered over, her skirt swaying with each step, every male eye in the place on her and a few of the female eyes too. When she reached Jaden, she didn’t greet him. Instead, she reached up and touched his cheek with her hand—
—the recollection came in a flash, unbidden, a sensory memory of those soft fingers grazing his cheek. Fingers on a hand that was no longer attached to Lesley. She’d survive the injury, but unfortunately, any hit from a fifty-caliber weapon was a serious one. The force had spun her around and thrown her against the truck. Her torn-off lower arm lay ten feet away from the rest of her.
But she hadn’t gotten the worst of it. She’d survive the injury. Tim and Adam had been in the cab of the flatbed truck, and they hadn't been so lucky. His memories of them—
It was 1708, a battlefield in northern France. Jaden had answered the call, coming to the aid of a vampire who was alone and being hunted. Jaden had been in the area on business involving a cannon and a general’s daughter, but the panicked feeling from a fellow vampire had sent
him racing into enemy territory in the dead of night. He found young Timothy huddled in a latrine—
—were many. He didn’t have time to think about the tragedy now. The loss of potentially immortal beings he’d known since—
It was 1612. Jaden had been laying low in the new world for decades, but duty brought him back. In the shipyards, just after sunset, a cocky vampire had tried to sneak up on him. Jaden had easily caught him, grabbing him by the neck and saying, “If you want to last long, you’ll need to be much faster than that. Or else pick much slower targets."
—centuries ago. A loss that profound couldn’t be grasped. Not now. Not if he wanted to avoid losing anyone else.
Only moments had passed since the attack, but Jaden realized affording himself even a moment of reflection was too much. Thankfully, the gunfire from the rooftops had stopped. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why.
The Ferals gathered in the downtown area were already on edge, and the gunfire had been the fuse that blew the powder keg. Ferals were scurrying up buildings, clearly going after the sources of the gunshots. They were closing in on Jaden and his team too, apparently deciding that all those not like them were a threat.
The team didn’t need Jaden to tell them what to do. They went to work, clearing the area around their fallen teammates. Jaden quickly joined them.
He’d fought long odds many times in his lengthy life, but he might have been pushing his luck with this one. The Ferals around him pressed forward, closing in around the team.
The report of gunfire came from one the of buildings, and the Ferals froze a moment, then turned toward it. This wasn’t the sound of sniper rifles like before. This was automatic fire. It must be the unknown enemy trying to fight off the Ferals.
Unfortunately for them, their gunfire was attracting even more Feral attention.
There were still plenty who kept their focus on Jaden and his team. The vampires worked quickly and surgically with their swords, tearing through their attackers. They moved fluidly as they fought, aware there may still be snipers in those buildings and not wanting to give any of them a clear shot.
