by Barry Kirwan
"Whatever. I know what I said. You want me to continue or not? Because this is important."
"It had better be, Sandy, because you’ve just earned some deep psy profiling, so you can never pull a stunt like that again."
She scowled at him, and held up two fingers, like he’d done earlier. Vince nodded once, to nobody in particular. The woman entered the room, and lit Sandy another cigarette. Sandy held out an empty palm, and gazed up at the woman. After a moment’s hesitation the woman placed the packet in Sandy’s hand, and left.
Sandy took another drag. "After all, I might not see these again for a while if I’m going for profiling?" She flashed a mock scared look at him, then leaned back on the hard chair.
"So the guy’s name is Archie. As Keiji went around the desk to greet and talk to him, Archie must’ve pulled a knife on him, because suddenly Keiji shouted 'No!' and then I heard this ugly sound, knife puncturing flesh – I’m sure you know the sound – then slurping back out again. Keiji gasped, grunted, then hit the floor." She took the cigarette out and bit at one of her cuticles, not looking at Vince. For a moment she was afraid she was going to well up. She’d already cried behind the mirror, when they zipped Keiji up in the body bag. She bit her finger hard. It worked. She noticed that Vince didn’t push her, even though she’d just announced the name of the killer.
"The rest is as I told it. I froze, held my breath. He walked back outside to my desk, and checked the vid-phone records to see who else Kane had phoned. Thank God he didn’t check the bathroom, where all my stuff was. Then he strolled out. I came out from under the desk and went to Keiji, but he was already dead. I waited a couple of minutes, grabbed my gear and hid. Now you now know why, of course."
Vince nodded.
"So, thirty minutes later all hell breaks loose. Ten minutes later your friends arrived along with Eden Mission’s Head of Security."
Vince looked at her. "Archibald Vernt. The killer, apparently."
She looked at him quizzically. "Aren’t you supposed to jump up and say something like ‘Let’s go get him!’?"
"Don’t worry. As you would imagine, this conversation is being monitored. My colleagues are already tracking him down. He gave us his deposition this morning, but was called away on business this afternoon."
She fidgeted. "So, that’s why I stayed hidden. Archie, our very own darling Head of Security and hobbyist killer, was still in the building, monitoring all entries and exits. And then, while he was there in the office, with you really smart guys, incidentally, the news came in that I’d never left the building. Only he and I knew what that meant. So I stayed. I had no plan actually, the vids don’t usually get me this far. I didn’t want to speak his name until I knew I was seeing someone higher up the Chorazin food chain."
Vince stood and pressed a finger to his right ear
"It appears you may be right, Sandy. Mr. Vernt’s vidcom and wristcom have disappeared off the net, and his office doesn’t know where he is. Naturally it would have been more helpful if you had come forward earlier, but given the circumstances, I understand perfectly."
She wondered if she should tell him the rest. She didn’t even know what it meant. She felt those eyes probing her.
"Is there anything else?"
She shifted, knowing she was giving herself away. He sat down again.
"Yes. Well, maybe. When Keiji was stabbed, he fell facing where I was under the desk. I saw him die, and saw the murderer’s legs, behind him. I’ve never seen anyone die, not like that anyway." I’m sure you’ve seen many, though. "Thing is, he mouthed a word to me, just one word. At first I wasn’t sure, but I’ve thought it over and over, and I’m convinced of it. I thought it must be a joke, but that wasn’t his style, and – well, you’d know better than me – but I’m guessing most people’s last words aren’t very humorous."
"Tell me, Sandy."
"Not for the microphones. Just you."
He dragged his chair closer to her. She leaned forward as he inclined the side of his head towards her mouth. She inhaled his scent, felt his body heat. Her lips moved close to his ear. She whispered the word.
Vince told those outside to let her sleep, and to place her in a higher security wing. No one else was to talk to her till he was back. No one. Vince went to his office and logged onto the nets. He carried out various Rosetta searches relating to the word and then found what he was looking for. He left orders for Louise and others, and booked one of the Chorazin fast jets to Mumbai, the site of IVS HQ.
***
Gabriel awoke to the sound of high-pitched buzzing. He instinctively cracked open the second false upper molar, and felt awareness and life course back into his system, courtesy of the synthetic adrenaline. He’d long ago replaced the standard Alician suicide pill with a neural and heart suppressant he’d acquired five years earlier from his Master in Tibet. It had slowed his heartbeat to once every two minutes, giving the semblance of death, simulating rigor mortis, leaving him in deep coma. During that time his body had reverted to what the ancients called tortoise breathing, exchanging air in his lungs at a very slow rate, just enough to prevent brain necrosis. Of course, Louise hadn’t known that when she’d cracked the tooth open.
He lay naked on a robotic autopsy table, cutting tools hovering above him on gleaming multi-jointed arms. The sound that had awoken him belonged to a circular skull-saw. His muscles were still stiff from the drug, but the counter-stim worked fast. As he tensed his muscles he realized he was restrained, presumably because the body had to be held in position against the motion of the autopsy blades. But the bonds weren’t strong – they weren’t meant for live patients.
The saw was so close it was out of focus. Ignoring cramps in his legs, he broke free from the lower restraints and pulled himself down the table just in time, slipping his torso and head underneath the chest harness. He rolled off the operating table, snapping off a robo-scalpel. The door to the oblong room burst open and a man rushed in. Gabriel launched the scalpel across the room straight into the man’s throat, spattering his white lab-coat with blood. The lab-assistant staggered forwards, two more sprays issuing in fast succession, his gurgling gasps failing as he toppled head-first into a growing pool of his blood.
A second man in a grey Chorazin uniform flew through the same door, pulse pistol blazing at where Gabriel had just been. The agent ducked down to see where Gabriel was, when the wheeled operating table suddenly shot towards him, scattering various razor sharp instruments in its wake, making him fall over backwards. Gabriel rammed the table into the agent’s neck just as he was trying to aim his pistol. Gabriel threw all his weight onto the table, sending the other end upwards beneath the agent’s chin, resulting in a crunching noise as the agent’s spine snapped. The agent slumped, eyes vacant.
Gabriel vaulted over the table and ran outside to the supervisory work station – the alarm was already sounding. From the console he saw it was 3am, so he had a few more seconds than usual due to lower night-time staffing. He guessed he was inside a Chorazin med facility, which would be underground. He switched off the cameras in the two rooms, locked the door to the corridor, and grabbed a fire extinguisher and a chair. Still naked, he stood on the chair and pushed open an air conditioning grill above the workstation. Placing the Halon gas fire extinguisher in the conduit, he tied the firing pin to the grill, re-sealed it, got down, and then knocked the chair over.
Retreating back inside the autopsy room, he stepped over the two bodies, ignoring the growing lake of blood, and picked up the pulse gun. He heard shouts. But they would be cautious – they could afford to be; where could he go? There were no windows, and no other exit beside the corridor now filling with agents. He noticed a square grill in the floor, about forty centimeters in diameter, evidently to collect blood and other bodily fluids. Gabriel figured it would go to an acid treatment bath somewhere below. He could distinguish the voices as they drew closer: short, clipped-speech commands: Chorazin, rather than normal security.
&nbs
p; There was no way out – only the corridor or the grill. He looked around, controlling his breathing. Three. Three is always the key. Where is the third way out? He inspected the grill in the floor again.
Four Chorazin agents in battle gear, wearing gas-protective face masks, broke through into the lab. They saw the two bodies in the autopsy room, faces drenched with blood. The operating table was upside down in the middle of the room, which was otherwise clear. One agent detected the broken seal on the air conditioning grill above the supervisor’s workstation, and the knocked-over chair. While the other three covered for him, the agent pried the hatch open. White gas jetted towards him, knocking him to the floor, engulfing all four of them in a cloud of Halon.
As Gabriel hoped would happen, another agent fired defensively into the shaft, rupturing the extinguisher and causing a shock wave of decompressing Halon gas, enough to knock the other three agents off their feet. In the fog of the gas, they didn’t see the dead security guard leap to his feet. Gabriel, clad in the dead Chorazin guard’s uniform, seized one of the prone agents’ rifles from him whilst crushing the man’s windpipe with his knee. He fired point blank at the heads of the three others, then ripped off the first agent’s gas mask and took several deep breaths.
Smearing more blood down his right leg and face he limped unarmed down the corridor, still dressed in the Chorazin uniform, gesticulating and shouting for more guards, using perfect Chorazin-coded speech. "He’s still in there – five down already!"
Several Chorazin ran past him, but seconds later there was an explosion that shook the whole corridor – Gabriel had turned on the oxygen taps in the autopsy room and had left the pulse pistol on overload.
He staggered along the corridor, then darted into a laundry room, put on some dirty but serviceable clothes, and found a service lift going to the surface. Opening the hatch in its roof, he climbed the greasy wires, eight floors up to ground level.
It took an hour and a roundabout journey to arrive at one of his safe havens: a "cube" that some of the poorest lived in – a cell two-and-a-half meters long, wide and high, comprising a cot, sink and toilet, vid-player and stove. There were stacks of them a hundred high in various parts of the city; a good place to pick up fresh diseases, and an equally useful location to lie low for a while.
In his hideout he injected a Chorazin booster into his thigh, and sat back for a moment. The booster kicked in, and he let his head fall back to the pillow, feeling its soft embrace as he stared upwards to the Himalaya holo-vista. He had failed to recover Sandy and secure the password if she had it, but at least had identified the Chorazin double-agent. He hoped Louise hadn’t been able to debrief Sandy.
There was only one remaining option: the Alician chapter. He had to locate the true leader – the one that mattered, the one who belonged to the ancient sect of the Alician Protectors. Sister Esma. She must be cleansed.
Gabriel knew the chapter would have dispersed by now. But one thing would bring her out of the shadows – himself. At their last meeting she had wanted him dead. If he appeared again, she would want to be present to make sure the job was finished. But he probably wasn’t the first assassin to try to cleanse her. He went back to his basic training: never, ever underestimate your opponent. He wondered if the legends were true, and if so, how old she really was.
Chapter 22
Phoenix
Kat peeled herself off the skimmer, and surveyed the football-field size crash zone where the craft had landed hard and rent apart, disgorging equipment like a broken toy. Much of it was recognizable – a stasis pod, metallic boxes and cables, a flight seat, and a meter high cube which had to be an early prototype of the neutralino detonator. Definitely from Earth.
The dark matter engines had disintegrated, leaving only a vitrified double-cone imprint in sand turned to shadow glass. She stood on the edge of one of the circles, peering down into a frozen blackness, only guessing how many kilometers deep it went. It finally proved the theory about what would ever happen in a dark matter high energy crash. She shivered.
Blake took off his helmet and pointed toward the detonator. Kat envied him. She was tired of wearing her fishbowl, listening to her breathing.
Only the occasional rustling of a sheet of gauze-like material in the sporadic breeze told Kat that her external sound system was working; the desert was so quiet. She knelt down in front of the detonator and inspected it.
"Seems to be intact, Sir." It was disarmed, but several lights glowed dimly. An unusual box-like device was attached to the arming controls. Blake tapped it with his finger a few times.
"A remote triggering device?" Kat ventured.
He nodded.
She wondered why; it couldn’t launch anything from a planet’s surface, only from orbit. Unless it had been rigged as a weapon. She remembered the early trials in the Sahara desert. A quarter of that great desert was now glass. But whoever had set it up knew their stuff – it looked pretty tamper-proof.
She followed Blake over to the cockpit, the second largest surviving structure, lying on its side like a giant clam cracked in two. She bit her lip; no one should have survived. Rust encrusted the interior, the console areas were smashed. A faded brown stain marked one of the seats: dried blood – a lot of it. She moved aside to let Blake climb in; he was careful not to snag his suit on ragged edges of torn metal. He stood on the edge of one of the two chairs in the cockpit, and checked the two weapons lockers. Kat could see them too, both empty. He lowered himself into the comms console. She tried to see what was there, but there was only room for one person, so she had to wait.
Blake hauled himself back out from the wreckage, jumped back down to ground level, and dusted off his gloves. "Not much left, comms ripped out, the rest fried. Two pulse rifles missing, a pistol or two." He stepped back from the shattered cockpit.
"Sir – why’d they tried to land this way? And why is the ND here rather than in orbit. It can’t be used from here, except as a rather messy weapon."
Blake marched back to the skimmer, and retrieved his pulse pistol.
"Only questions here. Let’s check the main structure."
Kat noticed something else before she left. One of the braking harnesses for the pilot’s chair had been sliced through with a knife. Blake saw it too.
"Like I said, only questions here."
The remaining intact cylindrical module, the size of a bubble-train compartment, had a single airlock hatch at one end. Fragments of metal had been wedged underneath its sides to prevent it from rolling, though it would have taken a gale-force wind to upset it. Two oval plazglass portholes stared out from the giant carbon-wire can, too high for either Blake or Kat to see inside. The antenna on top of the module, undoubtedly the source of the "Do not land here" signal, was bent in a few places, but otherwise looked pretty serviceable.
At one end, the airlock had makeshift steps outside it, assembled out of old plastic food crates. Smiling at the thought of it, she wondered if they should knock. Blake fished around in the debris, and picked up a piece of shining metal the size of a hand, and a short stretch of piping split at one end. He pushed the two together, and gave Kat a half-smile.
"Old habits die hard," he said. He checked the direction of the sun – Kat presumed so his makeshift mirror wouldn’t reflect sunlight into the compartment – then lifted it up to one of the portholes and tilted it a few times.
"Nobody home." He walked around to the foot of the steps and ascended to the hand wheel on the airlock hatch. Kat flicked her pulse rifle on, the short low buzz it made not lost on Blake. The hand wheel twisted easily. He opened the door a fraction and paused. Nothing happened, so he opened it wide, having to step back to ground level to do so. There was another inner airlock door. He tried to see if it would open, though one door should always be sealed in an airlock system. Surprisingly, it did.
"Interesting," Kat said. "Whoever’s here doesn’t fear the biosphere as Pierre does, or has decided it’s harmless."
"Or e
lse had no choice. But it does mean that what Pierre detected isn’t fatal to humans in the long term."
She ventured up a step.
"Wait outside till I check it first."
She complied, but her instinct told her the threat was not from whoever might still be around. The threat, if there were one, wasn’t human. Her dreams had rammed that home to her.
Blake disappeared inside for a minute then reappeared. "Okay, come in, and put something in the outer door to stop it from closing."
Kat found a small metal bar and propped it in the airlock entrance at the bottom and stepped inside.
She paused mid-step as she entered the main compartment. It was gloomy inside, but – she almost had to shake herself–someone had decorated it. The walls had been painted, and not bad a job. A vista of a russet-colored fortress on a hill against a twilight sky spread along one complete side of the rounded hull. Stars decorated the ceiling, which was the color of night, and on the other side the sun rose on an ornate pearl-white structure with four minarets, that looked oddly familiar. Dark-skinned figures knelt at the water’s edge in the sunrise part of the fresco. The two portholes each had an orange curtain, drawn back at the moment, but within the frescoes these would represent the sun, one setting, and one rising. Kat was impressed by the clever artistry, especially since the portholes faced the right way to catch morning and evening sun. She cocked her head at Blake, but he was already hunched over the lone computer terminal, oblivious to the artwork.
Kat spotted the comms device in a corner next to the single stasis pod serving as a cot. She stepped over several taped-over fissures in the hull of the pod, trying to ignore the frescoes. Who had done this? What type of astronaut would ornament his spacecraft? The answer came to her – he thinks of this as home. He’s not going anywhere, or has given up on a rescue attempt, and so he has adapted to this world, embellished his small shelter. Or his sarcophagus, she thought ruefully, were he to die here alone.
