Drum was too large to fit in a uniform, so he and the only woman of the group, Sarah, would be the captives, along with Tim-Tom.
Desmond and the other three changed clothes. The fit was a little snug on Desmond and a little loose on others, but “beggars can’t be choosers,” he remarked out loud.
Tim-Tom tapped Drum on the shoulder and motioned for him to lean his ear down. Cupping his hands around his mouth for secrecy, Tim-Tom whispered, “What’s a beggar?”
This brought a laugh from the big man, which earned a dirty look from Tim-Tom. Drum curtailed his laughter and leaned back in, replying in a low voice, “It’s someone who wants something, but doesn’t have anything of value to trade for it.”
“Why doesn’t he have anything to trade for it?”
Sensing that this could drag on for hours, Drum looked to put an end to it. “That’s something you might understand when you’re older, and have traveled the Verses a bit.”
Tim-Tom brightened at the thought. “I can’t wait til I’m older! I’m gonna be bigger than you!”
Drum laughed again. “Well, good luck to you!”
Desmond cleared his throat. “Let’s load up. Uniforms, have your weapons ready, but don’t engage anyone until I give the go-ahead. Prisoners, these are for you.” He held up several pairs of wrist cuffs. “We won’t secure them, but you’ll still have to wear them, just in case. Also, should we be stopped, you should do your absolute best to appear stunned and unconscious. Any questions? No? Good, then let’s move out.”
The group piled in the speeder. The prisoners layed down on their sides, Desmond flew, and the rest tried to look soldier-like.
The speeder slowly hovered out of the building through the propped open doors. Desmond made a right and accelerated, heading south, out of the city.
The streets remained empty, and it was eerily quiet inside the speeder. Desmond thought about trying to start a conversation, but he didn’t really have anything to talk about, and it was probably better to keep his focus on piloting the vehicle.
They would occasionally catch a glimpse of other speeders zipping by several blocks over, but aside from the patrols, there was little else going on, as far as Desmond could detect. The faces of his people would peer through building windows here and there. Their expressions were those of worry and confusion. He could only imagine what they were thinking. Such a strange feeling, to not be able to know what they were experiencing.
Still several miles from the edge of the city, Desmond slowed down to what he thought of as patrol speed. No sense in drawing any unwanted attention merely because they were speeding.
The number of speeders on patrol began to increase as they neared the city’s edge. Once or twice they even passed a speeder on the same street going the other direction. “Just breathe,” Desmond told his crew. “Act normal. If they smile or nod, smile or nod back, and then look forward again. Try not to make direct eye contact, but don’t try to avoid it either. If it happens, keep it brief.”
The speeders passed without incident. Desmond was beginning to think escaping the city would be easier than he originally thought when a man’s voice spoke over the speeder’s comm.
“Victor Patrol Five, you missed your check-in, is everything alright? Over.”
Victor Patrol, Desmond thought, cocky little pricks. “Everything is fine, our comm was damaged by some Sixes throwing bricks, we just now got it back to working condition.”
“Roger that, Victor Five. We show your transponder as several miles out from your patrol area, care to explain?”
“Uh, yes sir. We were on our way back to the base for repairs.” Desmond cursed that he didn’t have any better excuse.
“Victor Five, the base is in the opposite direction.”
Desmond cursed again. “Copy that, base. Our nav system took a thumping too, I thought I knew the way back to base, but every street just looks that same. I’ll turn around and head the other way. Can you guide me in?”
There was a long pause before Desmond received a response. “Affirmative, Victor Five. One-eighty and go for approximately five miles. I’ll let you know when to turn.”
“Roger that,” Desmond immediately sped up to well over patrol speed. He knew he wouldn’t have long, but hopefully he could cut the distance to the edge of the city in half before they realized he was running for it. “Hang on back there,” he said. “This might get bumpy.”
There was no sense in having Drum, Sarah, and Tim-Tom play the prisoners anymore, so he told them to take their cuffs off. “Drum, I need you up on the stun cannon. Think you can handle that?”
Drum mocked disdain before cracking a smile. “Sure thing. Just point and shoot, right?”
“That’s the idea. Take out their pilots if you can, and their gunners if you can’t.”
“You got it,” Drum replied. He didn’t have to wait very long for his first opportunity. Two speeders came into view behind them, turning from side streets. They were gaining ground but slowly.
Desmond weaved their speeder back and forth as Drum opened fire. His first few rounds missed completely, while his second volley splashed harmlessly into the body of the speeders. Harder than it looks, Drum thought.
Return fire from the chase speeders came pouring on. “Keep your heads down!” Desmond yelled. A direct hit from a stun cannon would most likely not be lethal, but Desmond knew that it happened occasionally. Besides, he didn’t want to have to carry someone’s unconscious body around if he didn’t have to.
He took evasive maneuvers, making a hairpin turn down a side street followed by another and ending up parallel to their original course. For a moment it seemed to have worked, but the pursuit speeders were back behind them now, joined by a third.
Their lead had dwindled to a hundred meters, when Drum finally connected with the stun cannon. His shot took out the lead speeder’s pilot. He watched as the man slumped over the controls and the speeder went veering off into the display window of the nearest building. The pilot behind them swerved his speeder to avoid a collision. The pilot managed to avoid the speeder, but was not so lucky with the large sculpture he smashed into, nearly tearing his craft in two.
Drum’s cries of celebration were quickly quieted when the third speeder broke through the smoke and wreckage followed by three more speeders. He turned and thumped his hand on the roof several times. “Better make this thing go faster!”
“I’ve got it floored!” Desmond yelled back. “We’re over-weighted, just keeping firing!” They were on the outskirts of the city now. At any moment they should come up on the outer limits of the EM fields.
A speeder pulled out from the side street directly in front of them. Desmond put his speeder into a skid, trying to swerve out of the way. He had almost cleared the craft when he felt the back end make contact with a bone jarring thud.
The collision sent light-weight Tim-Tom flying, his face a mixture of terror and exhilaration. Just before he was free of the speeder, Drum reached out and snatched him from mid-air, returning him to the floor of the open-backed vehicle.
Desmond had some how managed to right their course and they were again heading for the edge of the field, albeit at a slower pace now, thanks to the damage they picked up in the collision.
One kilometer ahead of them, Desmond could make out a blockade made up of several speeders and plenty of soldiers. The soldiers had taken up position behind the speeders with weapons drawn. The good news is we’ve almost reached the edge of the field—he knew that somewhere beyond that blockade, he’d be able to use his abilities again—the bad news is I have no idea how to get us there.
His first thought was to run the blockade and smash their way through. It seemed like an elegant solution at first until he realized the speeder would never make it without killing all of them, probably instantly. Besides they would most likely be taken out by the stun cannons before they ever got close enough to ram the blockade.
To either side, down alleyways and side streets,
Desmond could see numerous speeders flanking them. They’re herding us, Desmond realized. That left only one direction to go. Up and over, I guess.
Speeders hovered above the ground, but at the set height of a meter. The height could be adjusted depending on the strength of the hover-engine, but even most military speeders weren’t equipped with hover-engines powerful enough to raise the craft more than two meters. Even if Desmond could re-route power to the hover-engine and rig it to pulse on command, thereby essentially letting them jump, he didn’t have the time necessary to do it.
He scanned ahead looking for anything that might help. Then he saw it. “Keep your heads down and hang on!” Desmond warned.
He headed straight for the blockade, as if he had decided to ram it anyway. When they were still several hundred meters out and closing fast, the soldiers opened fire. Desmond immediately began weaving and bobbing, ducking down as far as he could while still being able to see where he was going.
With nearly thirty meters to go and a collision seeming imminent, soldiers began backing away from the blockade, looking for different cover. At the last instant, Desmond steered hard to his right into the display window of a building on the side of the street. He crashed through the glass on a diagonal and out again the other side, ending up on the side street where the soldiers hadn’t thought to barricade. Now for one more. Desmond accelerated as fast as he could, trying to gain back the speed the collision had cost. This time he entered the next building head on, crashing through glass, desks, and displays before steering to the left and back through another window and onto the street once more, only now, they were behind the blockade. Drum wasted no time in getting back up on the stun cannon and sending a volley of bolts toward the now exposed soldiers.
A few fired back, but most of the soldiers ran for cover. No one tried to follow them. For a moment, this puzzled Desmond, but within seconds, he understood why.
As they passed the invisible barrier, Desmond felt his senses come alive. They had done it! They were outside of the EM field. He didn’t have to look around to see if his crew knew it too, he could feel their excitement and relief.
“Well done, everybody!” Desmond said, truly proud of his little band of rebels. “Sadly, however, this is just the beginning. I have no doubt that the EM field will soon encompass this entire area. We need to keep moving away from the city. We’ll find some working hovers and split up. Evacuate everyone you can. Those that can, should jump to the Third—they’ll be relatively safe there. Any who wish to stay and resist should be picked up and taken out of the city.”
Desmond and his crew broadcast their intentions out into the EM field-free portion of the city. Hovers lifted off and flew to escort the speeder. Desmond would stay with the speeder—they would need it again, he was sure.
Test Results
Julia showed up at the lab within the hour. As she got off the lift, she saw that Dorian had beaten her there. He was talking to the strike team leader. The ventilation system had done a decent job of drawing out most of the smoke, but a haze remained.
“What are you doing here?” Dorian asked her.
“I heard the news over the military scanner… Your father? Are you alright?” Her concern seemed genuine, but Dorian knew it was mostly a show for the common folk. She knew how he felt about his father, but appearances were still necessary.
“I’m shocked, I must confess,” Dorian said, playing his part in the act. “I knew he was unhappy, but this…” He shook his head, as if he just couldn’t understand why this had happened. In truth, he didn’t understand why his father had broken into the lab. Nothing appeared to be missing. When he heard that there had been a blast, his first thought was that Julia’s new skin was the target, but after he found out her skin was untouched, any guess as to why his father had blown up the lab was as good as his. He told as much to Julia. “…and you’ll be happy to know that your new skin is undamaged and doesn’t appear to have been the target. Unfortunately, we don’t know what the target actually was, if there was one at all.”
“I believe I can be of service with that,” Dr. Mesham stepped out from his seclusion.
Dorian and Julia turned at the same time. “And who might you be?” Dorian asked.
“Dorian, this is Dr. Mesham. He’s been working on my… situation. Isn’t that right, Doctor?”
The man straightened his coat. “Of course, yes. I’m Dr. Mesham.” He reached out and shook Dorian’s hand before addressing Julia. “Uh, your situation, is, I believe, what this whole fiasco is about, actually.”
“In what way?” Dorian was agitated at the interruption.
“Easy, darling,” Julia said. “I’m sure he was just about to explain it all to us, weren’t you, Doctor?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” the doctor said. He cleared his throat and continued on. “As we can see from the pattern of destruction, the would-be thief entered the lab through the lift and made his way immediately to the armored vault where we keep genetic samples and some of the more sensitive materials that we use here. He must have had someone’s key to gain access to the lab after-hours, but the vault door requires two keys. Apparently not knowing this, he set off the alarm. In a panic, or perhaps it was his plan all along, hard to tell, he set an explosive charge, taking care of the vault door. Once inside the vault he left the vast treasure of genetic samples right were they were and tried instead to open the quarantine safe. This time he had the right combination—an access key, and a genetic sample—but the sample was tainted with traces of a powerful sedative, which is how he most likely got a hold of the access key in the first place.”
Desmond had heard most of this from his men on the scene already, but this bit about the quarantine safe was new. “What was in the safe?”
“Is in the safe…” Dr. Mesham seemed pleased with himself, at least until he saw the glaring look he received from Lady White’s consort. He mumbled an apology. “We rarely use the quarantine safe, as we don’t usually work with harmful or contagious substances in this lab, so the only sample in the safe belonged to Lady White—or the body she has now, anyway.”
The revelation brought looks of surprise and confusion. “Why was my sample in quarantine?” Julia asked.
“Yes, that was my next question as well,” Dorian said.
“I was running some tests on your nanites yesterday after you’d left, trying to see what was causing the nanites to cease functioning. In doing so, I introduced new nanites to your sample to see if they could perhaps repair the damaged ones. What I found was that the new nanites became inactive as soon as they came into contact with the damaged ones. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I placed the sample into the quarantine safe, to be safe, and left for the night. I had planned on running some more tests today, to see if I could determine what was causing the reaction.”
“Looks like my father caught wind of it,” Dorian said.
“Your father?” Mesham asked.
“Yes, my father… The man responsible for this?” Dorian replied. Apparently the doctor didn’t know, which relieved a little of the annoyance Dorian felt towards him.
“I’m sorry, I had no idea the man was your father.”
“These things happen,” Dorian said dryly.
An awkward silence hung in the air. The doctor was the first to break it. “I am still concerned that this problem with the nanites might be more serious than anyone thinks. If these damaged nanites contain the ability to disable any working nanites they come in contact with then we could have an epidemic on our hands.”
The doctor’s announcement surprised Julia. “I thought the nanites just couldn’t deal with the two minds in one body.”
“That was what it appeared to be, and that may have been what initially caused the abnormality in the nanites, but I think we also need to leave room for the possibility that the host body is responsible, in and of itself.”
From behind the veil, Ava smiled with a deep satisfaction. Of course her body was r
esponsible! What did they expect? That she would just lie there and accept what was being done to her? She might not have control over her body, but she was still connected to it. After the last conversation she’d had with the bitch who stole her body, Ava had gone silent, searching for some other way to wrest her body back.
She wondered if, somehow, through her will and imagination, she’d reached out and created a contact with the nanites that had given Julia control of her body. It didn’t matter to her if she was responsible for it or not.
Ava reveled in her small victory as she listened in as the trio discussed plans to quarantine her body for as long as it took for Julia’s new skin to be ready.
“... and how long will I have to endure this quarantine?” Julia asked.
“Providing that the skin wasn’t damaged in the explosion—I still haven’t had time to check—it shouldn’t be longer than a few days,” Dr. Mesham replied.
“In the meantime, I’ll assign one of my agents as your personal guard. Now before you object, you need someone to look out for you while I’m gone—” Dorian said.
“And just where are you going?” Julia interrupted.
“—and I have just the man for the job. He was injured on his last mission, the one that put all of this into motion, if you’ll recall, and as a side effect of the injury, he no longer has any of his nanites, so he’s a perfect fit. There will be nothing for you to infect should he be exposed.”
“That’s hardly likely to happen, I can assure you. From everything we’ve seen so far, the nanites must come into direct contact with each other for the condition to spread. As long as Lady White keeps all of her insides on the inside, there shouldn’t be a problem,” Dr. Mesham said.
“You still haven’t answered my question, Dorian. Where are you going?”
“While you’re safe here, I’m going after my father. He shouldn’t know about your situation, but yet it seems that he does, and if he knows about this, then he probably knows even more. I need to find him and find out what he’s up to and exactly what he knows about our operation.”
Strangers and Shadows Page 28
