by K. Gorman
He veered right after several landings—she hadn’t kept count—and squeezed them in through a narrow door and down a cramped hallway. A patch of shadow covered them as they slipped across the threshold, and she blinked as her eyes adjusted to the new, dimmer area. Pipes and vents bulged from the ceiling, and the concrete sat stained with yellow-brown moisture. Hanging lights buzzed overhead, some so close, their heat burned into her hair.
She tapped his shoulder as they came to a second stairwell, this one wider and less industrial—one of the university paths? They had come through a door first—and he paused.
“I think I can walk now.” She squirmed, one arm going to his shoulder to brace herself.
“Good. I’m not sure how long I can keep that up.”
Sweat glistened on his forehead. As he let her down, she caught a whiff of his smell, a mix of the Nemina’s circulated air and fabric detergent tinged with salt. His arm shook as he lowered her to the ground, but he didn’t look anywhere close to tired.
“If Cookie were here, he’d be making fat jokes,” she said.
“Yet another reason he wasn’t on board with the original crew.” He frowned as she stumbled. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes.” She flapped a hand at him and tried to ignore the rush of blood to her limbs. For a second, her heart seemed to beat so hard that it overpowered her lungs. She sucked in a slow breath as spots filled her vision. “Just give me a moment.”
Marc’s netlink chimed.
Sol, she thought as he took it back out. I’m not going to get a minute.
“What is it?” he said.
“Alliance and security are crawling the place.” Cookie’s voice faded. They heard him mutter, as if he were leaning away from the microphone to confirm something. “They’ve blocked part of B Route, too.”
“Where?”
“Under the university. They’ve got a patrol in the corridor. I’ve got the Nemina logged into their feeds. I think we can still do the route if we’re careful. It’s only one patrol.”
Marc’s teeth grit together, but he turned and waved Karin down the stairs. They moved slowly. She peeked over the railing as she went. Their current stairway continued down another two floors, all of them dim except for the last one, which brightened at the bottom. A broad Hegir-Nuna University banner confirmed her earlier suspicion than they’d wandered into one of the schools. Below, the portraits of twenty headmasters and mistresses were mounted on the wall, along with several signs that called for silence.
Maybe they were close to the library. Or maybe the university just had a really uptight view of its hallway regulations.
She shook her head. Either was believable. Despite the location of its campus, HNU was known for its more straight-laced, disciplinarian approach to studies as opposed to Ninurta and South Francis universities.
“You think we can get by?” Marc’s voice rose to express his doubt. “How many?”
“One patrol, two patrolmen. And I think one is a girl.”
Karin raised a silent eyebrow at Marc, who rolled his eyes skyward with a patient, long-suffering breath. “Don’t let that cloud your judgment. You’re sure we can get through?”
“Yes. With my help, you’re golden. So long as you’re quiet. Be mice.”
Marc grunted. “Your analogies need work. Turning the volume down. We’re about two minutes from the end of the university. Will contact you after.”
He put the netlink back into his jacket pocket. Then, with an awkward maneuver that looked as though he were groping himself, he reached in under his jacket, unclipped the strap on the holster, and withdrew his blaster.
“Let’s go.”
Either the university had closed, or all of its students and staff had decided to stay home tonight. They met no one on their way down, nor in any of the halls they passed, though all of the main lights were on. A light in an office made them duck and tiptoe up to it, but, if anyone worked inside, the tilted blinds in the window prevented them from seeing out.
Empty, Karin decided. She couldn’t imagine going to work here, alone, with Shadows about. Unless the place was staffed with ex-Black Ops crews extremely dedicated to their work—not impossible, but definitely doubtful since the office looked like it was built for support staff and, given the circumstances, any retired serviceman had probably found themselves redrafted to fight the current invasion.
That had happened last week, she’d learned. It also explained why the streets were so empty. With an estimated half of the population turned into Lost and a good number of them either currently in or redrafted into the service… and she imagined the clinics and hospitals were busy, too.
The sick had to go somewhere.
A wave of dizziness came over her at the end of the hallway, and she grabbed at the wall for support. For a few seconds, her heart pounded like a rock in her head. Prickles of feeling tingled through her brain and down her face. Static blotted out her vision.
Marc put a hand on her shoulder, fingers squeezing.
A second later, his entire arm went rigid. Without a word, he pulled her from the wall and funneled her into a small, windowless room, one arm strong across her shoulders. As her vision came back, she caught glimpses of a storage closet, with shelves full of books—actual, honest-to-saints, paper books—and more than a few pieces of antique-looking electrical equipment. Several mops and buckets stood at the end under a vent.
Everything went dark as Marc closed the door. His hand re-found her shoulder in the dark, and his breath blew across her face as he leaned in closer.
“Shh. Patrol.”
She swallowed hard, and her jaw tensed. Marc fumbled with the door, and something clicked—a lock? She froze, eyes wide and unfocused as he went still beside her, his slow breath tickling across her forehead.
Not long after, footsteps came up the hall.
There were multiple sets, with the prolonged, heavy tread of boots. In the quietness of the hall, she could make out the sound of their treads in minute detail. Other things jangled and clicked as they walked. Uniforms and equipment?
They paused down the hall, and a door creaked open. A few seconds later, it clicked shut again. The footsteps resumed.
They were coming closer.
Karin closed her eyes, willing them to go away. Breaths shallow and as quiet as she could make them, she checked every part of her body for movement, trying to ignore the clash of sedative and stimulant that made her brain so dizzy. Dry, stale air caught in her throat, and she decided that she hated books. If the dust in this room made her cough…
Marc found her left arm and gripped hard. His breath brushed across her nose. He was still, too, quiet, listening.
Then the soldiers’ footsteps drew even with the door. Her eyes had adjusted enough to see the line of light at the bottom edge of the panel. A shadow passed over it.
The door rattled in its frame as the soldier outside tried its knob. Then it stopped.
Voices murmured outside, too quiet for her to hear their words.
The soldiers moved on.
Marc relaxed as they heard another door—the same one at the end of the hall that they’d been going to—open and shut, and the footsteps grew fainter.
He squeezed her arm again and, after another few seconds, worked the lock open.
“Come on. Let’s find a different route.”
Chapter Five
“What happened to us being golden?”
Marc held the netlink to his ear—more a habit than a necessity. Even with the volume turned low, she could still hear the defensiveness in Cookie’s tone.
“I have eyes under the university, not inside it! I never said I had them inside! As far as I know, the routes are still clear.”
Marc glanced up at her, his expression flat. When he spoke, it was with great patience. “No, they’re not. Those two patrolmen you didn’t see just went down our B Route, so unless you can find me another connection—”
“I’ve got one.” Soo-jin, this time, open
ing her link into the comms group. “Verina’s got eyes on her, so I’m moving her to a dummy location. Jaxx says his area is still in the clear. Where are you?”
Marc looked around, taking a brief stock of the hallway. “In HNU somewhere. The office says ‘Records and Transcripts.’”
A series of clicks sounded over the line. “Got you. Okay. Give me a minute.”
Karin hugged her arms across her chest and hunched, stamping her feet to ward off the cold, shaky feeling rolling through her. The tingling had started in her legs again, a kind of pins and needles that felt like rain falling on the inside of her skin. Light spilled out from the office down the hall. They hadn’t moved much, working on the assumption that a recently-patrolled area would probably not be checked again for a while, but the closeness of those two soldiers made her uneasy.
Just how the hell were they supposed to get through this? Marc was good, but he wasn’t some Black Ops miracle worker. As far as she’d gleaned, his tenure in the military had wound up only a little longer than average. Fallon training might have given him an edge, but what the hell did that matter now?
He watched her pace out of the corner of his eye, turning to keep her in sight as she wandered close to the office on the other side of the hall. A loose darkness clouded the inside of the windows, but its shades had been pulled back to allow her to peer in. The dormant base of a holoscreen sat on one side of the desk. Books, files, and pages of looseleaf lay scattered across the rest of the space. Just what was it with these people and their paper-products? Maybe Nomiki’s hardcopy notebook hadn’t been that odd.
“Okay,” Soo-jin said. “Got it. You’ll want to head for janitorial. There’s a hatchway that connects between the boiler room and an access tunnel into the eighteenth floor. After that, you can…”
A small clunk drove her attention away from Soo-jin’s voice. Karin looked up the hall with a frown, searching for the source. It had been quiet, like an automatic air duct clicking open, or maybe something in the plumbing.
Probably nothing. The city was full of weird sounds, and Arcin-17 doubly so.
She let out a slow breath, trying to dispel the sudden spike of tension that gripped her—but then caught movement.
Visible through the windows of the office, a sphere the size of a baseball floated its way up the adjacent hallway toward them.
“Marc,” she hissed, backing away. “Marc, look.”
Startled, he turned to follow her line of sight. His eyes widened. “Run. Go, go, go, go, go!”
He grabbed her arm and hauled her back toward the door. Her shoes slapped against the floor as she stumbled the first steps, Marc’s support the only thing keeping her from falling, and a flash of pain made her hands tense into fists. Breath gasped through her throat as she fought to even herself out.
A whirring noise sounded from behind her. She gave a wild glance back, and Marc hauled her forward as the action made her trip again. The sphere had turned the corner. She could almost feel it behind her, like it were something alive, coming for her.
The spot between her shoulder blades tingled, as if someone were staring at her. A low crackling sound built up.
Marc shoved her to the side as a bolt of energy shot through the spot she’d been. Electricity exploded as it hit the wall ahead of them, and she flinched as it arced away from impact. Crackles of energy sparked a meter in each direction and left a dark, scorched spot on the wall.
Sol’s burned child. It’s going to kill us.
Adrenaline pumping into her blood, she raced, pounding every last bit of energy down into her legs.
The sound of crackling came from behind them again.
They slammed through the doors just ahead of the second shot, ducking into a flailing roll as it blew past. This time, she got a good look at the ball of energy as it smashed into the stairs just ahead. Electricity wrapped around the railing, buzzing like a split transformer. Its splash crackled several centimeters down the spokes of the metal railing, and a burning, ozone smell rose in the air.
Marc pushed away from her and leapt up. The door’s hinges and hydraulics squealed and hissed as he muscled it closed. Beyond, the vision of the sphere, electricity powering up around its body as it floated inexorably, relentlessly closer, was replaced by a closing wooden panel.
It shut with a click.
She stared at the wood paneling. “Can it get through?”
“It got into the university, didn’t it?” He backed away, attention on the door, then turned to her. “We have to go.”
She took his offered hand. Adrenaline made her legs feel shaky and watery, but she forced them to work. Soon, the air filled with the sound of their footsteps racing down the stairs.
“So, is anyone going to tell us what the fuck that was?”
Soo-jin’s voice came from Marc’s pocket. He didn’t bother to take it out, instead giving the door a glance back. Karin thought she could see a light on the other side that hadn’t been there. Just how did it open doors? There was no chance it had already been there, not unless the soldiers had dropped it. HNU security—or, for that matter, Arcin-17 security—wasn’t that intense. But it had come from a different direction than the soldiers.
She met Marc’s gaze, and he shook his head at the question on her face.
“No, I’ve never seen anything like that. Closest is hover-drones, but even they… Well, they are pretty obvious.”
“Come on guys, you’re killing me here,” Soo-jin said. “What the hell happened?”
This time, Marc pulled the netlink out of his pocket. “Can you guys run a search? We just got attacked by a floating metal sphere that shoots electricity.”
“Seriously?” Cookie said.
Soo-jin’s tone was much more professional. Above the sound of their racing footsteps and the rising rate of their breaths, they heard a couple of clicks.
“Military?”
“No idea, but I’ll assume yes.”
“It was mechanical,” Karin added. “I heard machinery inside.”
“Mechanical flying things. That’s definitely Soo-jin’s area,” Cookie said.
“It’ll take me a few minutes to dig the data, if I can find it. Cookie’s helping,” she said. “You guys—”
“We’re running. Don’t worry. Any bead on where the two soldiers we encountered went?”
“No.”
“Okay. Stay on the line. Be quiet if you hear quiet.”
Marc thumbed the volume lower on the netlink, returned it to his pocket, and switched his blaster into his left hand. With a backward glance at her, he moved ahead, veering to the wall and aiming across the stairs as they came to the next landing.
From above, they heard the distinct crackle of the sphere’s discharge. The doors rattled.
Following his lead, she switched to the wall-side railing, making an effort to quiet her steps and breathing. The two soldiers had gone down this way, and, by the amount of noise they’d just made, there was a good chance they were doubling back to check it out. A coil of tension tightened through her stomach as the stairwell turned quiet. A hum of electricity and whirring machinery came from above.
Marc signaled for her to wait at the following landing. He quietly moved down the next flight of stairs, peered over the railing, then came back up. He used the cuff of his sleeve to cover his hand as he opened a small wooden door on the right-hand side of the landing, then waved her through.
“I think it’s heat-sensing,” he whispered as she went by. “If we can just get out of its range, then…”
He trailed off as another sound came from the stairwell, this time from below. Boots tramped up, accompanied by the clack and jingle of equipment. Without another word, he and Karin ducked inside. The door shut with a click, then clicked again as he threw the lock.
They inched forward in the dark. Karin cussed as her shin bumped into something hard and metal on the ground.
Marc cleared his throat. “Karin, can you—”
“On it.�
� Light flared to life on her palm, and she dimmed it almost immediately, blinking away the sudden brilliance. Its mercurial, quicksilver glow reflected off the shelving and pipes that crowded both sides of the long room and stretched to another door at the end. It stood ajar.
Jaxx’s work, she’d bet.
She stepped over the defunct cleaning robot she’d bumped into and moved inward. Marc followed close to her back. They had almost reached the other end when a small concussion rocked through the air. The hiss and crackle that followed rang muffled and distant, but dust shook free from the ceiling, filtering down into Karin’s light and making her squint.
Behind them came the sound of alarmed voices. Boots pounded up the stairwell.
She doused her light as they heard the soldiers race past. Something brushed against their door.
To their surprise, more shouts came back. And the distinct sound of crackling electricity.
Blaster-shots cracked. A staccato of red and orange light played on the bottom edge of the door as the soldiers yelled.
“Guess they’re not on the same team,” Marc murmured into her ear. “Come on. We’re close.”
Together, they felt their way toward the end of the room. The fighting intensified behind them, but the not-quite-closed door at the end of the room gave them enough light to see their target.
They shut it behind them when they left.
Chapter Six
“I’m not getting any info on the sphere,” Soo-jin said. “Or—more accurately—I’m getting too much. Don’t hold up hope that I can sort through all this in time.”
“Keep on it, anyway. Cookie, you got an ear on Jaxx?”
Marc held the netlink between them, his blaster still in his left hand. They’d left both the sphere and the soldiers behind and put several twists and corridors between them. In another minute, they’d hook back up with their B Route and, hopefully, Jaxx.
As if on cue, the netlink crackled. “Yeah, I’m here.”
“We still clear?” Marc asked.
“Cops have been by twice. I’ll tell you if they come again.”
