The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  At the back of the lobby, painted the same color as the walls, is a windowless steel door with hidden hinges. Jaynie is standing beside it, checking the load on her breaching shotgun. Flynn catches up with me. We move in behind Jaynie, our HITRs ready.

  “On three,” Jaynie says, resting the shotgun’s muzzle against the door, above the presumed position of the bolt. “One, two, three.”

  The shotgun’s concussion is muted by my helmet. A hole is punched in the door and an alarm goes off—but the door is not open yet.

  “Again,” Jaynie says, moving the shotgun a few inches. “On three. One, two, three.”

  Boom!

  This time the door shifts. Jaynie moves to the side and I step in, kicking the door wide. On the other side is a dimly lit hallway running right and left. It’s clear of people, but the air is vibrating with the vicious, mechanical buzz of a swarm of tiny drones, at least fifteen of them, speeding toward me in an inverted V. They are just an inch long, their black bodies tapered into blunt cones, with beelike wings to keep them in flight.

  No way to tell what kind of hazard they present. I just assume they do.

  I raise my HITR. My tactical AI doesn’t know what to make of the swarm and offers no targeting circle as the tiny black drones bear down on me. I shoot anyway, three quick rounds, hoping I get lucky. Flynn is crouched by the door, firing alongside me. One of the mechanical bees shatters. The shrapnel takes out another and slows the advance of the swarm, but not for long.

  We need a more effective solution.

  “Flynn, fall back! Clear the hall!”

  I transfer my HITR to one hand. Two bees dive at me. I take a wild swing with the HITR’s muzzle and clip one, knocking it into the other. At the same time I try to get a flash-bang out of my vest pocket—but Jaynie moves faster.

  “Fire in the hole,” she announces, lobbing a grenade past my shoulder.

  I pivot out of the hallway, getting the wall to my back.

  Flynn screams. The flash-bang goes off, its concussion muffled by my helmet. My visor darkens to compensate for the glare. The dark screen makes it easy to see Flynn’s icon. It’s shifted from the standard faint, translucent green to strident yellow. Her status posts: Declining heart rate, elevated body temperature, loss of consciousness.

  I turn to look for her. She’s sprawled on the other side of the doorway, unmoving, her HITR fallen beside her. Embedded in the sleeve covering her left forearm is the little black body of one of the bee drones. There’s another stuck in the center of her gloved palm. Jaynie moves in, crouching beside her.

  I keep turning until I can peer into the hallway.

  All the drones are down. Narrow black wings and glittering bits of glass lie scattered between thimble-size mechanical bodies, some still buzzing faintly and spinning in slow, erratic circles. With their motion stopped or nearly so, details are revealed. At the front of each mechanical bee is a camera button surrounded by a ring of broken glass needles.

  When the bees hit Flynn, the needles must have gone right through her clothing, piercing her palm and her arm. Delivering a knockout drug? I don’t think it’s going to be lethal, because the report on my visor indicates her status has stabilized.

  “Hallway clear?” Jaynie asks as she uses her arm hook to knock the quiescent bees off of Flynn.

  “Roger that. Advancing.”

  I step inside, crushing drone bodies beneath my footplates.

  The alarm is an irritating mechanical bleat accompanied by flashing ceiling lights that illuminate recessed steel doors, set at wide intervals on both sides of the hallway. “Freight elevator to the left,” I report. “I’m going to check it out.”

  “Roger that,” Jaynie says.

  I head down the hallway at a trot, while Jaynie manages the squad. “Moon, take care of Flynn and do not let yourself get stung by these bee drones. Nolan, status?”

  He’s breathing heavily. “We have just secured the guardhouse, ma’am—goddamn it, Tuttle, move!—third prisoner on the way.”

  I reach the first door, look in through the little window to see ready lights glowing in the darkness. I try the door handle. It’s locked. I switch to night vision to get a better look inside. A lab is revealed, but I don’t see anyone in it. It’s possible someone is hiding, crouched under a long worktable or squeezed into a closet, but we don’t have time to breach every door.

  I check the lab across the hall. It’s locked too, with lights off. I move on.

  Jaynie begins assessing the hallway in the opposite direction, checking the first door on the other side of the breach. On gen-com she says, “Nolan, you have your assignment.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Hold the entrance. Guard the prisoners. Maintain communication.”

  “And kill that alarm.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Moon, you’re with me.”

  I pause briefly to confirm the next two rooms are locked and dark.

  Jaynie again: “Harvey, Tuttle, ETA?”

  Harvey bursts into the hallway. “Here, ma’am!”

  “Good. Finish surveying the rooms on this end. Confirm all are locked and quiet.”

  The alarm switches off; the lights stop flashing. Jaynie’s footsteps are loud in the sudden silence as she trots after me through the shadowy hallway.

  I reach the freight elevator and punch the call button just to see what happens. Nothing does. Like the elevator in my dad’s apartment building, it’s keyed to registered users only. “Negative response on the elevator.”

  Our intelligence stated that the Uther-Fen guards were exterior only, but on a typical night, one to three scientists could be expected to be present. We have to find one of them because odds are good they’ll have the authorization to use the freight elevator.

  There are two more floors of labs and office space left to search, but first we have to get downstairs.

  I try the door to the stairwell.

  “Stairway locked.”

  We can breach every door standing between us and the basement, but to use the freight elevator we need an authorized user—and there is no way we’ll be able to extract two vans rigged as improvised nuclear devices if we can’t use the freight elevator.

  “Let’s breach it,” Jaynie says as she joins me.

  “Roger that.”

  From the opposite end of the hallway, my helmet audio picks up the heavy click of a door unlatching. I spin around, my HITR ready to fire. Jaynie responds the same way. Then together we lower our weapons because it’s Harvey who’s in our line of sight.

  Just steps away from her, a door is opening, swinging cautiously inward. Harvey lunges at it, hammering the door with the footplate of her dead sister, sending it flying back on its hinges.

  “What the—?” a woman screams. “Oh God, it’s real.”

  Harvey rolls into the room and three seconds later a civilian is shoved forcefully into the hall.

  A registered user.

  • • • •

  She’s a senior researcher, fiftysomething, dressed in brown slacks and a gray sweater. She has Asian features, with silver highlights in her short black hair. Shock makes her talkative and my helmet picks up every word as Harvey hustles her down the hall. “Oh my God, oh my God. I didn’t think it was real. The alarm goes off all the time. We’re supposed to stay in the labs, but it’s always a false alarm, a simulated attack, some stupid drill. What do you want here? Everything is proprietary, years of research—”

  “I want you to listen to me, ma’am,” Jaynie interrupts as the prisoner is brought to the freight elevator. “We need to get downstairs, and we need your help to do it.”

  Tuttle comes racing down the hallway. The thump of his footplates startles the woman. She twists in Harvey’s grip, her lips parted, her breathing swift and shallow—but given that she’s surrounded by four hostile mercs rigged out in armor and bones and
anonymous black visors, I think she’s holding up pretty well.

  “The elevator, ma’am,” Jaynie encourages her.

  She nods, touching the elevator button with a shaking finger. The mechanism responds with a hum, and a few seconds later the double doors pull open.

  The floor and walls of the elevator are crosshatched steel. There are doors on the opposite side, and it’s easily big enough to take on a large van.

  We board. There are three floors below us. Jaynie hits the button for the basement. Nothing happens. “Key it,” she tells the prisoner, who has a magic touch. The doors close at her direction, and we descend.

  She starts to challenge us: “I don’t know what you’re expecting to find.”

  “How many people do you estimate are in the building, ma’am?” Jaynie asks.

  “I don’t know. It depends who had experiments running overnight. Usually it’s just two or three. Everyone will be coming in . . .” She pauses to check her wrist. She’s wearing a wristwatch, one with a simple analog face like the kind in old movies. I guess that’s what you do to tell the time when you’re not allowed to wear farsights. “Oh God, not for another four hours at least. Did you kill the security guards?”

  “What’s on the bottom floor, ma’am?” Jaynie asks.

  She draws a shuddering breath. “Please don’t kill me. I have children. Grandchildren—”

  “Cooperate, ma’am, and you’ll be fine. What’s on the bottom floor?

  “Storage! And utilities. Labs are only on the three upper floors.”

  The doors open. We’re looking into a cavernous space supported by square concrete columns, floored in concrete, walled in concrete, smelling of concrete. Panel lights on the ceiling cast an even illumination across shrink-wrapped pallets with cryptic labeling, pressurized gas cylinders, a thrumming air-conditioning plant, and a line of six white roll-up doors on room-size storage lockers installed along one wall.

  No vehicles anywhere in sight. I step out of the elevator. “Tire tracks on the floor.”

  “I see them,” Jaynie says.

  “Looks like a vehicle rolled out of the elevator, and then backed up”—I follow the tracks, pointing to the first storage locker—“right into there.”

  Jaynie comes after me with the shotgun in her hands. “Harvey, keep the prisoner on the elevator. Tuttle, breach team.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  We are almost there. Blue Devil and Gold Devil are almost in our hands.

  There is no chance the door is unsecured—there’s a keyhole beside the switch that controls its opening mechanism—but I slide the switch anyway just to see what will happen, and to my shock the mechanism triggers and the door rolls open.

  I fall back, bringing up my weapon—but nothing is there. The locker is completely empty. Only the black marks of two sets of tire tracks on the smooth concrete indicate the vehicles were ever here.

  “Fucking damn! Jaynie, they’re already gone.”

  “Next locker!” she barks.

  I try it. I slide the switch, but nothing happens. “Locked.”

  On gen-com, Jaynie says, “Harvey, ask the prisoner if she has keys for these doors.”

  The answer comes back a few seconds later: “Negative, ma’am. She does not.”

  Tuttle and I provide backup as Jaynie uses the shotgun to get the door open: two blasts that reverberate around the concrete chamber. I force the door up. The locker is crammed with pallets.

  We move on to the next. Breach it. Open the door. More pallets.

  And the next.

  Every door takes more than a minute to open and it’s all wasted time. We need to get back upstairs, report the absent INDs, let Cryptic Arrow’s intelligence network get started on tracking them down—but we have to clear this floor first, be absolutely sure we did not overlook the weapons.

  The fifth locker is unsecured. Tuttle rolls open the door on another empty space. Jaynie reloads, then moves on to the last locker. “On three. One, two, three.”

  Boom!

  Right away we know something’s different, because light is streaming out through the breach hole. Jaynie steps back, letting the shotgun fall behind her on its sling while she takes her HITR in hand. She and I are positioned on opposite sides of the huge door. “Okay, Tuttle,” she murmurs. The door shrieks and rattles as he forces it open.

  Inside is a housing module. It’s similar to the border forts the army used in the Sahel—complete living quarters in a portable package—but this one is small, a size that gets used for emergency housing. It’s only a little bigger than a cargo van, but even so, it must have barely fit on the freight elevator.

  The module is centered in the locker, filling up most of the space. Its outside walls are a cheery light yellow, there’s one step up to a brown front door, and alongside this door is a picture window draped in curtains. Lights are on behind it.

  “What the fuck?” Tuttle whispers.

  But I think I know exactly what we’ve got—and Jaynie does too: “We’ve found our engineer.”

  “I can encourage him to come out.”

  “Do it,” she says obligingly.

  I move in from the side, keeping my HITR pressed against my shoulder, the muzzle trained on the picture window. “You in the box!” I shout in a command voice that echoes around the basement. “Come out now, hands on your head, or I’m going to pump a grenade through that window.”

  This is a lie, of course. If this really is the nuclear weapons engineer who helped construct Coma Day, I want him alive—but I’m hoping he doesn’t open the door, because I want an excuse to go in after him. There wouldn’t be much hazard to it. Vanda would not have left weapons in the hands of his captive engineer . . . although he is an engineer. Maybe he’s rigged some kind of electrical bomb inside his little habitat.

  “You have ten seconds,” I warn—and start counting.

  On seven, the door opens, but only a few inches.

  “Eight,” I insist.

  It pulls wider and I can see him looking out, a thin, tall man, a lot younger than I would have guessed, probably near my age. Brown hair in a neat ponytail, brown eyes. Skin that’s pale, but with color to it that hints he would tan if he ever saw the sun.

  “Nine,” I say.

  He remembers to put his hands on his head.

  “Come out.”

  He feels for the stair with his foot, then steps down to the concrete. In a thin voice, with a European accent I don’t recognize, he asks, “Have you come to kill me?”

  It’s not going to be that easy, buddy.

  • • • •

  We start the interrogation as we march him to the elevator, his hands zip-tied behind his back.

  “Where are the remaining INDs?” I ask him.

  He looks perplexed. His gaze searches the open locker doors and the far corners of the basement. “They were here.” He eyes the tire tracks. “They’re gone now.”

  “How many INDs were there?” Jaynie demands.

  “Two! Only two.”

  We hustle him onto the elevator, where the researcher stares at him like he’s a ghost. “What is going on? Why did you say ‘INDs’?”

  Jaynie directs another question at the engineer. “What kind of vehicles were they in?”

  He shakes his head like he’s going to refuse to talk. Jaynie grabs his shoulder with her arm hook, squeezing gently. “What kind of vehicles?”

  This guy isn’t one of Thelma Sheridan’s devoted fanatics. I watch the shift in his eyes and I imagine him calculating the parameters of his situation, concluding he might as well talk now because he will talk before we’re done with him.

  In a quiet voice, he describes the make, model, and colors of the vans, exactly the same as Vanda reported. Blue Devil and Gold Devil.

  “That’s like Coma Day,” the resear
cher says. “Improvised nuclear devices . . . in vans.”

  “Have you seen any vans around here?” Jaynie asks her, still gripping the engineer with her arm hook.

  “No, no. I don’t know what he’s doing here, or how he got here. Who is he?”

  “Tell her who you are,” Jaynie says, a vicious note in her voice.

  He speaks to the expressionless black surface of her visor. “My name is—”

  “Not your name!”

  His face is gaunt with fear; I can smell the stink of his sweat. He stammers: “I . . . I don’t want . . . to say anything . . . else. I have a right . . . to an—”

  Letting go of his shoulder, Jaynie draws a pistol, puts it to the side of his head.

  He pulls back, eyes squeezed shut. The researcher turns away, hiding her face behind her palms.

  “Tell her who you are,” Jaynie repeats.

  “I . . . I . . . I designed the weapons used on Coma Day.”

  The researcher lowers her palms to look at him, horror on her face.

  “The weapons?” Jaynie asks.

  “The INDs.”

  “The nukes?”

  “Yes.”

  “You designed the nukes. Who built them?”

  “I . . . I oversaw the assembly.”

  “So you built them.”

  The researcher looks like she wants to put a knife in his throat. “It was you?” she whispers. “You fucking son of a bitch. You fucking murderer. I have friends who died in San Diego! Who would do that? Why?”

  I have to admire Jaynie’s strategy. She now has an impassioned witness who can testify as to why we were here and what we found.

  “Why don’t you answer the lady’s question?” Jaynie suggests, pressing the muzzle of her pistol a little more firmly against the side of his skull. “Why did you do it?”