Brendan had died, and he had been brutalized in a way that made me more than a little sick.
It saddened me to see the life of someone so young be taken so abruptly, but it also made me feel more than a little pride in the kid. He'd been a Marine, though he had only been in for a single tour before getting into the private sector. However, once a Marine, always a Marine. I would make his death count for something.
I dragged his corpse back behind the desk for safety. I was reasonably confident in the ability of the bubble to stop Jou, but not entirely. If it fell while I was in an exposed position, I wouldn’t last very long in a stand-up fight against the giant.
“Central, this is Manning at Control,” I said as I turned away from the duo, pressing the comm button. “We've got a security breach in the prisoner’s cells. Mass prisoner break has occurred. Initiate lockdown protocols.”
Nothing. I frowned.
“Central, this is Manning. Come in. Anyone on this net?”
Silence.
“Well, damn,” I muttered. The protective bubble must have been preventing me from contacting Control. I didn't think that could happen but I wasn't an engineer by any stretch of the imagination. It was entirely possible that the bubble blocked the comms, an oversight that had to be some kind of safety violation. Not that it mattered, since I seriously doubted that the Health and Worker Safety Commission would drop by at that exact moment.
I peeked over the countertop, looking for Jou. The massive prisoner was nowhere to be found.
“Jou?” I called out tentatively. “You mind telling me what you're doing? It's not like you can get off the station or anything. Just surrender peacefully and we'll see about working this whole thing out.” After I get done beating your ass, that is.
Still nothing. I frowned. Maybe he was smarter than he looked, either keeping quiet to ambush me when I released the bubble, or he had done the more sensible thing and was run for his life. I drew the tranq gun and checked the charge on it. Four shots left. I hoped that would do.
I hit the red button again and the bubble dropped. I aimed and waited nervously for Jou to reappear, hands sweaty despite the relative cool room. A prisoner on the loose defined a bad day for any guard. Eleven of them…that was nightmare fuel.
I wiped a palm on my pants, trying to get rid of the greasy feel. Still nothing. Fighting impatience, I recalled the mantra that my training sergeant had beaten into my head, Rash actions lead to dead Marines. A few deep breaths helped, the last one coming out as a growl.
“C’mon Jou, I don’t have all fucking day.”
I risked another peek. The hallway remained empty. Jou was gone. Dammit. Think, Marine. Think!
I glanced down and took a closer look at what Jou had been throwing. Whatever it was, it was red, oozing…Oh Christ.
Anatomy wasn’t one of my strong points, but I knew a heart when I saw one. I was pretty sure the other thing was a liver. But whose? I looked back at Brendan and shivered. That was a hell of a lot of blood, but…
Time to move. If there were any staff members in their quarters, I had to keep Jou from getting to them. Kirby didn’t have a sidearm on him, but maybe…Yes. Hard to see when Jou had been standing there, someone’s feet were now visible in the hallway. Not a scientist, from the look and design of the boots. It was a guard, and probably a dead one. I approached slowly, tranq gun at the ready, feeling like I was hunting a pissed-off rabid Rottweiler with a rolled-up newspaper.
Still clear. There was no sign of Jou. I knelt down next to the body, one eye on the hall. A quick glance told me who the poor, dead bastard on the floor was. Dale Fletcher. Good guy, had an ex-wife and a few kids back on Earth. I hoped against hope that Jou hadn’t noticed what poor Fletcher had on him.
Fate was on my side for that singular moment.
Today had been Fletcher’s turn with heat. It was a bit shocking that Jou hadn’t searched the body, but I wasn’t going to complain. I unbuckled his shoulder rig, trying hard to get a grip through all the blood, shuddering as something slimy and solid slipped over the back of my hand. I repressed a shudder. Now I knew where Jou had gotten his biological missiles.
“Poor bastard, you never saw it coming.” I took the holster, extra magazine, and his tranq gun, working quickly to get it all situated on my person. Out of habit, I checked the mag and racked the slide. It was oddly comforting, the weight and feel of a real weapon as opposed to the lighter tranq pistol. I couldn’t help the sigh of relief as I raised it. “Yeah, baby.”
Tranqs were a handy way of keeping order with the prisoners. The tranqs often caused the recipient to wake up with the migraine from Hell, and since we rarely offered amenities to someone who earned a tranq shot, it was a debilitating thing to recover from. Of course, that assumed that the tranq didn’t fizzle or something worse, like not work. Training dictated using a tranq gun as a second-to-last resort.
The last resort was at hand, and nothing fit it better than something a little more lethal.
I took stock of the situation. I knew precisely how many hostiles were out there, though not where. I had an unknown number of guards alive, presumably. The supervisors were unaccounted for, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Gerry could have slept through the blaring emergency alarm, the riots, the gunfire and the splattering of body parts throughout the station.
Right, and I’m the Space Pope.
I checked my comm again but nobody responded. I pulled up my PDA and looked to see if I was even receiving any signal. The PDA wasn’t picking up any signal, which told me quite a bit. Internal comms were down, as was the networking system. My PDA should have been able to pick up some sort of signal otherwise. That’s the basic way Wi-Fi worked. I dug through the settings of the PDA and found the secured channel, which acted as a hidden signal broadcaster for each and every PDA within a limited space. Granted, “limited space” was about five hundred yards in every direction, but it was used more as an emergency beacon than anything else. The secured channel should have picked up the other PDA’s in the station at the very least.
So why wasn’t anybody responding?
A few guesses flew through my head, all worse than the last. Deep down we’re all pessimists.
With the station on lockdown for the time being, the elevator tube was out of the question. I would have to risk the stairwell, which would limit escape options should I run into Jou or any of the other escapees running amok on the station. Not an ideal situation but the only one in front of me at the moment.
“Wait,” I muttered as a small blip suddenly appeared on my PDA. It was a ghost-like image, showing me that another PDA was close. Two floors down, to be precise. It disappeared seconds later but I already had the location fixed in my mind. It was near Doctor Marillac’s private suite, or in it. I wasn’t too certain about which, but at least I knew that someone on the station was up and about. For how long, though, I couldn’t say.
I quickly made my way to the stairwell, staying in cover as best as I could the entire way. I knew that if one of the prisoners caught me out in the open, I’d be forced to use the handgun, which would probably be heard by anyone and everyone. That would tell the enemy precisely where I was. No, I had to use stealth for as long as I could. Gunshots would only draw unwanted attention.
I slid open the door to the stairwell and stuck my head inside. The air was cold but safe, though the air blowing up from the bottom of the shaft prohibited me from hearing anything other than circulating oxygen. On the plus side, it meant that nobody could hear me as I made my way down the metal stairwell.
I paused as I reached the proper level and peeked through the small window before I stepped inside. The lights were dimmed but still bright enough for me to see that the coast looked clear. I tried to peek around the edge but I couldn’t see in either direction. If someone was lurking around the corner waiting to clobber me, I wouldn’t know it until they hit. Time to be preemptive.
I yanked the door open and dashed into the hall, t
hen tucked into a roll. I came up from the acrobatic maneuver with my gun trained on the stairwell. Nothing. I pivoted on my heel and brought the gun around. Still nothing. I had control of the level.
Relief flooded through me. I still held the handgun at the ready, but I was no longer in immediate danger. I could relax and take a deep breath, so I did. I wiped a sweaty hand on my pants. I needed to find some tactical gloves or something to help absorb the moisture. I hate when my hands sweat. It was a nasty, disgusting thing. Women especially don’t like it.
I made my way down the hall. I wasn’t too familiar with the level, since it wasn’t on any of my usual paths for leak-and-peek check. It did resemble base housing a bit, minus the usual wear and tear one would expect from a government facility. I had a feeling I knew what the area was used for, but I wanted to make certain. I brought up my PDA and checked.
Once more, I applauded my foresight. If I hadn’t downloaded the schematics of the station and relied on the cloud storage like everyone else, I would have been up the proverbial creek without any sort of propulsion device.
Sure enough, it was one of the berthing areas for guests and VIPs whenever they arrived on the station. It was rarely used, which made sense for the good doctor to use it for her own personal space. She did like her privacy, after all. I wondered if her ego and desire to reign over all her little minions caused her to isolate herself accordingly. It would have made sense, actually, her staying away from the little people.
I shook my head to clear my thoughts. I sure could be a dick at times.
A muffled sound came from the door a few meters down. The fleeting sense of control I had felt earlier disappeared, all nerves back on full alert. Jou was here somewhere, likely trying to hide until I left the area. I moved carefully, my head on a swivel as I passed the first two doors. I stopped at the source of the noise and recognized the sounds from within. A knowing grin began to spread across my face before I remembered what, precisely, was going on in the station. The office belonged to Doctor Marillac and, judging by the sounds coming from within, she had finally decided to fully get to know Gerry. In a biblical sense.
In case I haven’t made myself perfectly clear– sex. They were having sex. Noisily and vigorously, if my hunch was correct.
I knocked, softly but firmly. What sounded like grunts, groans, and a wet smacking noise continued. It was weird and I hated to interrupt them, but there was a crisis on hand. I sighed. If we lived, Gerry was going to kick my ass for this.
“Guys,” I said, feeling a flush spread across my face. Interrupting people in the middle of bumping uglies embarrassed the hell out of me. “Hate to be a bother, but we’ve got an emergency situation here.”
More muffled sounds of exertion, followed by a wet smacking. Loud moans. I rolled my eyes. This was ridiculous. I knocked harder.
“Doc, Gerry? We have a mass breakout. Inmates at large.” I looked around quickly, not wanting Jou to catch me with my pants down. Speaking of pants down… “Gerry, I need you out here.”
I tried the keypad on the door, but Doctor Marillac was high enough up on the pecking order that my ‘master override’ code didn’t work. So much for the master override code being the all-mighty great and powerful.
“Fine, dammit, you two have fun, we’ll be out here trying to keep violent…” The door slid open, and I found myself face to face with Doctor Marillac.
Blood, wet and dark, dripped from her face. One hand slowly smeared what was on her lips as she stared at me. Through me. Her eyes were unfocused and wild, her pupils dilated large enough that I couldn’t tell what color they originally were. I think her eyes had once been a warm brown shade. Now they were empty pools of black. There was no life there. I’d seen looks like that before, on fellow Marines who had simply seen too much. It was pretty damn creepy.
“What the fuck? Doc, what happened?” I lowered the pistol slightly as she continued to stare, eyes blank and unfocused. I took a small step back, just in case. “Are you okay?”
Still no answer. She blocked enough of the door to make it impossible to see into the room behind her.
“Gerry! You in there?” Dr. Marillac turned and walked back into the room, looking more like a zombie than a biologist. Her steps seemed stiff, as though someone were operating her remotely. Alarm bells began to go off in my head. Something was not right here, not in the least. The blood on her face was the most obvious clue, but there was more going on here than I knew. I followed her inside before the door could close again but kept my pistol trained on the center of her back.
“Ma’am, I’m going to need you stay in here, with the door locked until we get this taken care of.” I kept moving into the main room, a combination kitchen and office area. The bedroom, from what I could tell, was a smaller section in the back of the apartment. No door, just a blank space where two walls met, allowing me to see the foot of a bed.
A bed with Gerry’s boots, covered in blood, were situated on top of it. Next to those on the floor was Gerry’s body. Rather, what remained of it.
Someone—I assumed the culprit to be Doctor Marillac—had ripped open his throat and let him bleed out on the bed. I could faintly see bite marks all over the poor bastard’s body, as well as more of him than I ever needed. His body had been worked over by a true sadist. I nearly gagged.
The pistol came back up, this time aimed directly at Dr. Marillac’s head. Cold fury coursed through my veins. I’d seen a lot of bad things in my time, but rarely had I seen this sort of cruel attack on someone I respected and cared about.
The situation on the station had gone from dangerous to flat-out terrifying.
“Doctor, I need to know what’s going on, right—”
In one fluid movement, Dr. Marillac spun, crouched and sprang, fingers curled into talons. Surprise sent my first shot wide, the bullet boring into the wall above her desk. She hit me harder than I thought she could, knocking me solidly on my ass. Her fingers closed around my throat as she pulled my face towards her snapping teeth.
I jammed my forearm under her chin, using what little leverage I had to keep her at bay. It bought me enough time to bring the pistol up and fire into her ribs. Her body jerked as the bullets tore through her, the pressure on my Adam’s apple loosening enough for me to get free. I rolled, slamming Marillac to the floor. The last shot went between her eyes, splattering pink and grey matter across the imitation Persian rug.
I scrambled back, panting, until I reached the wall of her quarters. The gun in my hand trembled a little, which didn’t surprise me. I’d killed before, obviously. It was part of my job. A sniper doesn’t fight, a sniper kills.
I’d never killed a civilian though. Not like this, not this way.
For a moment, I thought that Chef’s Special was going to paint the walls of the doctor’s quarters, joining the now-deceased duo’s blood. That greasy, roiling sensation in the pit of my stomach was both familiar and unwelcome. I swallowed a few times to keep from losing my lunch and slowly dragged myself back to my feet. I was a bit unsteady but otherwise unharmed. Physically, at least. Emotionally, I was something entirely else.
I refused to look at the doc. That would have been bad. Instead, I ejected the magazine in my handgun and checked the count. I had five rounds left, plus the two extra mags I’d pilfered from Fletcher’s corpse. That could theoretically get me up to the armory, which would probably still be secure. If there were any guards in the area, we could link up and push back to retake the station.
That thought made me pause. Had we lost the station yet? For some reason, a small voice in the back of my head suggested that we had. I hoped that my intuition was wrong. I took a deep, calming breath. I needed the proper mindset for what was to come. Assuming, of course, that my intuition was correct.
I started to go back over the base’s standard procedures in my head. Securing the cell block was out of the question, given that 11 of the 12 were out and roaming the station already. Comms were still down, which screwed the ne
xt three steps. Eventually, I’d have to go and get them back up and running, or find someone who actually knew how to do the technical stuff. We had a maintenance crew on board who were contracted to do the technical repairs of the station, but I hadn’t really seen them around much. With the comms down, there’d be no easy way to get the contractors to—
My train of thought screeched to a halt.
Where the hell was everybody?
I pushed the thought away—I’d have to assume I was on my own for now. I walked into the bedroom. Gerry’s eyes were wide open, face frozen in surprise. Dr. Marillac had torn out his throat, then started on the fleshy part of his chest.
“Damn, Gerry.” I moved closer, trying to avoid the blood pooled on the floor and around his body. “Hell of a way to go. I’m sorry I wasn’t faster getting here.” I holstered the pistol and gently closed his eyes.
I carefully adjusted his shirt, checking his breast pockets as I covered the wounds. He wasn’t wearing any pants, and I couldn’t see any sign of them. If Gerry followed the new protocols that we had drawn up, though, I shouldn’t need to search for his pants. I felt around in his shirt. His keycard should be…here. I wanted a backup plan, in case my codes didn’t work at the armory.
I was in luck. His keycard was precisely where it should have been.
There was nothing else for me here, Gerry hadn’t been armed when he’d come back with the Doc. I pulled the sheet off the bed and over him. I walked back to the front room, keeping my distance both physically, and mentally, from Doctor Marillac’s corpse. The door opened as I got within range of its sensor.
Bringing me face to face with Jou.
One would think that a guy as big as Jou wouldn’t be all that fast. They’d definitely be wrong.
Before I could react, his fist connected with my nose, rocking me back. Stars exploded in front of my tearing eyes, effectively blinding me. The punch was so hard, so vicious that I could have sworn my hair hurt from the blow. The second punch took me hard in the gut, my breath rushing out of my lungs with a strangled groan. I struggled to breathe as I hit the floor. I tried to inhale but my diaphragm was not following instructions, so I lay on the floor, gaping like a drowning fish as Jou loomed above me.
Kraken Mare Page 10
