by James Axler
Sashaying around her cage, she hooded her eyes and coyly asked, “Mr. Hat kiss Shirley?”
Chapter Ten
Though Doc’s legs were long, the man in the balaclava was just out of reach of a front snap kick. And because only the top half of his head was sticking up through the cockpit hatch opening, the chance of a one-kick, knockout blow was highly unlikely. A glancing strike or a miss would get him shot in the stomach.
“I want you to come toward me slowly as I back down these stairs,” the boss man said, his bluesteel, semiauto blaster braced in gloved hands. “Then I want you both to follow me down the gangway. The second the middle of your chest doesn’t stay in my sights is the second I squeeze off a round. The second I can’t see the palms of your hands is the second I fire.”
“He already told us we were dead,” Mildred said.
“Perhaps it was simply a figure of speech, my dear.”
“Shut up and move.”
Since being time-trawled to Deathlands, Doc had seen more 9 mm through-and-throughs than he’d had hot dinners. He immediately understood the man’s reluctance to open fire on them in the tight quarters of the cockpit. High velocity rounds passing through one or both would damage the control panel or conceivably blow out the front of the canopy. As much as the man in black wanted to execute them on the spot, he couldn’t do it. The risk of decommissioning the aircraft was too great.
When Doc didn’t move a muscle in response to the command, the boss man’s eyes narrowed behind the holes in his knit mask, and Doc knew his reasoning was on the money.
“Goddammit, move!”
In the second that followed, Doc made two assumptions. First, that the boss man hadn’t realized he’d figured out the situation. Second, that even when pressed, the man in black would hesitate to fire because he still had other options—such as retreating to the deck alone and calling for help—and they didn’t. They were trapped in the cockpit.
Doc took a quick breath and broad jumped the intervening gap, coming down with the soles of both boots on the man’s shoulders, hitting him with his full body weight. The blaster didn’t discharge on impact, perhaps because fearing a catastrophic accident the boss man had left the safety engaged. Doc felt solid resistance beneath his feet, then it just melted away. The man in black slid helplessly backward, down the gangway, and Doc dropped through the hatch opening after him. The fall was about twelve feet, but broken by hitting the edges of the steps on the descent. They landed in a heap at the bottom of the gangway, with the old man on top. The handblaster flew from the man’s fingers and skidded across the floor, bouncing off the bottom rim of a quinoa barrel.
Mildred rushed down the gangway and jumped past him as he gripped the boss man from behind, seizing his chin with his right hand, holding him across the chest with his left arm. The man kicked wildly, his boots thumping the deck, and he thrashed his arms, trying to slip out of the death hold.
“Where’s his gun?” Mildred asked.
Doc was too preoccupied to answer. The noise the man was making was sure to attract unwanted attention. It had to stop. He gave the man’s chin a hard, sudden twist, left to right. Full power. The neck made a crisp, snapping sound as it broke, and the head smoothly rotated another ninety degrees, until the face pointed backward, over his right shoulder. When Doc let go of the head, it lolled to one side. He immediately pushed the warm corpse away and stood up.
“Sir, are you okay? Do you need our help?”
The inquiry came from outside the cargo hold’s door. A male voice.
More black suits, Doc thought. And very polite ones, at that. Apparently the prospect of something going wrong in the hangar was so remote they felt a formal invitation was required.
Doc looked at Mildred in exasperation. Things were about to go downhill for them in a hurry. He scooped up the handblaster and cracked back the slide, confirming the chamber held a live round. Mildred held a finger to her lips and shook her head. She was right. Gunshots had to be avoided unless they had no other choice. Sending up an alarm at this point would all but eliminate any hope they had to rescue their companions.
“Sir?”
Mildred grabbed the crowbar from the top of a longblaster crate. Keeping out of sight of the doorway, she crossed the deck and put her back to the aircraft’s wall a few feet from the opening.
Boots crunched on the thick frost.
When the enforcers stepped into the hold, they had their truncheons in hand, but their blasters were holstered.
Doc rose from behind a barrel and aimed the captured blaster at them, moving the sights from one to the other, and back again. He was ready to fire if need be, but the primary goal was to provide a distraction. For a split second, the black suits just stared at him, stunned, arms at their sides.
Mildred brought the curved end of the crowbar crashing down on top of the skull of the man nearest her, a blow that was in no way softened by the balaclava he wore. The bar made a wet crunching sound as it caved in the bone; his eyes instantly rolled back in his head so only the whites showed. Bright blood squirted out of both nostrils as he slumped to the deck.
The other black suit spun toward her and reached for his sidearm, opening his mouth to shout for help. Before he could cry out, Mildred thrust the straight end of the crowbar with both hands like a lance, jamming the steel shaft between his teeth, and ramming the wedge tip into the back of his throat. Impaled, no doubt choking on his own broken teeth, he clutched at the bar, unleashing a high-pitched, but soft scream through his nose.
Doc rushed forward, discarding the blaster for the loose end of a length of cargo tether line. He slipped the rope under the man’s chin, and using his knees for leverage, pulled back with all his strength.
The man’s shrill squealing stopped as the pressure across his throat cut off the air supply.
When Mildred jerked out the crowbar, blood mixed with pieces of teeth poured from the man’s mouth, splattering the deck at her feet.
Doc held the ligature tight. At first he had difficulty controlling the frantic kicking and jerking, but it got easier and easier, and then the movement finally stopped. When he let the body slip from his grasp, he was gasping for air himself.
Staring at the dead men sprawled on the deck, Doc said, “This is hardly an ideal outcome. It trebles the chance that someone will come looking and realize what has happened, which means we may have a welcoming committee waiting for us here when we return with the others.”
“But we still have the freedom to operate,” Mildred said. “That’s the most important thing. And we don’t have to bring the others back here. It would be better to find the mat-trans, and use that to get away. Much quicker, more secure and more direct. Coming back to this hangar is a last resort if the mat-trans is out of reach. Come on, we can hide the bodies to buy ourselves more time.”
“Before we do that, I suggest we exchange clothes with them,” Doc said. “I think the color black will blend in belowdecks much better than this garish canary yellow.”
“Good idea,” Mildred said. “That way, our carrying weapons won’t draw as much attention. We can wear their balaclavas, too.”
As they stripped off the men’s clothing, it was obvious how they managed to stay warm in the hangar in just their coveralls—each of them wore a set of densely woven long underwear. In the throes of death they had all soiled themselves, so confiscating the undergarments was not an option.
When Doc pulled on the borrowed jumpsuit, it seemed a bit short in the legs and accordingly tight in the crotch. Not tight enough to impede movement, though. He and Mildred appropriated the gun belts, handblasters and truncheons.
“Perhaps we can find some empty barrels for the corpses,” Doc said.
“Even if there were some empties, there’s no room in here to stack them,” Mildred said. “The hold is already full. Em
ptying three barrels won’t work, either. We’d have to do something with all the quinoa.”
“Cockpit, then,” Doc said. “Not in the seats, but on the deck where no one from outside can see them.”
“Sounds good to me,” Mildred said.
Having dealt with the hassle of moving fresh corpses into awkward places many times before, they acted quickly and decisively, without discussion. After Mildred tied the first man’s wrists together, she ran the line up to the cockpit deck where Doc was waiting. Neither of them wanted to push the bodies from behind, given the sad state of their long johns. Working in unison from above, they hauled on the rope, yarding the body up the gangplank steps. They stretched the first two corpses across the rows of seats to get them out of the way until they had the third on the upper deck. After that, they pulled them all down below the level of the canopy, piling them on the narrow walkway between hatch and control console.
That done, they descended to the hold and used their discarded yellow coveralls to wipe up the spilled blood.
“How much time do you think we have?” Doc asked.
“Maybe an hour, tops.”
Doc sighed. “Not good. We do not know where the others are. This redoubt is immense. If a general alarm goes up before we find them, that goal could become impossible.”
“We’ll do it systematically,” Mildred stated. “Identify and check the most likely places first. If they’re under heavy guard, and there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t be, there’s going to be a firefight to free them. And more firefights between us and escape. We need to load up with as many weapons and as much ammo as we can carry.”
“Lugging multiple weapons and high explosives through the redoubt will certainly raise questions,” Doc said.
Mildred had already cracked the lid off a crate of C-4. Pushing aside the excelsior packing, she smiled and said, “Problem solved.”
Inside the box, along with clear plastic, separate bags of blasting caps and timers, were black nylon backpacks for transporting the explosive material. Inside a crate of assault rifles they found a duffel bag made of the same ballistic fabric.
“Very thoughtful,” Doc said as he lifted out a mint M-16.
“Let’s leave the rifles behind,” Mildred told him. “Remember those narrow corridors and all the tight turns in between? What we’re looking for is cyclic rate, not barrel length or accuracy at a distance. Mixing calibers is a mistake in this situation, too. We need weapons with high rates of fire chambered for ammo that’s interchangeable with the handguns. That means 9 mm. Plus, if we only take SMGs, we can carry more of them and more loaded mags.”
“Your logic is impeccable,” Doc said, replacing the assault rifle in its cradle and closing the crate’s lid.
Doc took the crowbar and began opening crates. Mildred started sorting out the necessities of the mission. In addition to the three 15-shot pistols belonging to the men in black, she laid out four Heckler & Koch MP-5 SD 3 submachine guns with stick mags. She counted out twenty extra, loaded 30-round mags from a separate crate, then slipped weapons and ammo into the duffel bag.
Doc tried to lift it by the strap with one hand, then decided two were required. “It must weigh close to sixty pounds,” he said.
“Can you run carrying it?” Mildred asked.
He slipped an arm through the strap and swung the load around to this back. The strap cut into his chest, and the deadweight felt low and off-balance. It was bound to slide around if he ran, and it would bounce against his bones.
“Yes, I can manage, but hopefully I will not have to run far. It is going to be hard on the knees and lower back.”
“You’ll only have to carry it one way,” Mildred reminded him. “We’ll divvy up the weapons and ammo after we find the others.”
He watched as Mildred loaded ten one-pound blocks of C-4, and blasting caps and timers into the small backpack. She added a handful of frag grens and dug into a small crate for a dozen loaded pistol mags. When she was done, she shouldered the pack and tested the weight. “I’m good to go,” she said.
They replaced the lids on the crates they’d opened but didn’t nail them down—the logic being, if they did return they might have to get back into them in a hurry.
As they pulled on the appropriated balaclavas, Doc said, “These masks are all well and good, and the color of the coveralls will certainly protect us from casual inquiry, but what if we are stopped by our fellow enforcers?”
“We say we’re just following orders. We don’t have to understand the reason for them. We’re doing what we were told to do. If we can’t talk our way out of it, we use the truncheons first. Drop the bastards cold. Don’t pull your gun unless things are going down in flames. Don’t shoot unless there is no other choice.”
Loaded with weapons and ammo, they hopped down from the hovertruck and set off down the hangar’s central aisle, heading back the way they had come. The enforcers and workers busy loading the aircraft paid them no mind. Everyone was focused on their assigned tasks.
When Mildred and Doc stopped in front of the elevator doors, the up button was already lit, a car was ascending. They waited in the freezing cold in silence. As the elevator doors parted, Doc’s fingers tightened on the truncheon in his hand, poised to strike. The sole passenger, a man in an orange coldsuit with faceplate, looked him straight in the eye, then stepped past without acknowledgment. He didn’t seem to notice the heavy duffel, either.
Doc and Mildred entered the car at once.
Well out of truncheon range, the man in orange stopped and turned, glancing down curiously at the high cuffs on Doc’s coveralls and his exposed, bony white shins.
Then the elevator doors closed.
Chapter Eleven
As Ryan was rolled into an elevator, the phrase “throwing their poop” kept replaying in his head. He couldn’t imagine his companions resorting to something like that, nor could he visualize a situation where it might be the least bit helpful. If the female whitecoat wasn’t talking about something Krysty, J.B., Jak and Ricky had done, then what the nuking hell was she talking about? And who were they going to inject with his infected blood?
He considered not waiting to find out, making his play right there, but then thought better of it. Even though he was feeling stronger by the minute, he hadn’t had the chance to test his full weight on his legs. For all he knew they could still be wobbly, in which case the attempt would never get off the ground. Moving quickly in the biohazard suit was another problem; he hadn’t tried that, either.
If the men in black had been closer, he might have tried going for one of their blasters anyway, but they were both standing behind him and unless that changed, he couldn’t see a way to take a blaster and turn it on his captors without first being subdued, either beaten down or shot.
When Lima pressed a button on the console, the elevator made a loud clunking sound, then the bottom dropped out. With a whir, it plummeted at a dizzying speed. When Ryan looked up, the LED readout above the doors was scrolling down floor numbers in a blur, from double digits to single digits. They dropped so quickly that he didn’t catch any of them. When the car jolted to a stop, the level of their destination wasn’t indicated by a number, but by a pair of letters: VX.
They exited in order: the female pushing him in the chair, Lima on the left, the two armed enforcers behind. The corridor ahead was grim and dim, and it was noticeably colder. There were patches of white on the floor, either frost or uncompacted ice.
When they passed through a bulkhead door, it got a lot lighter. The bluish glow was coming from the left side of the hall. As Ryan was rolled toward the source, he saw the row of benches. The inside of the hood was roomy enough that he could turn his head without moving the hood and still see out the side of the visor. The benches faced a long window in the wall.
Lima paused to loo
k, and the woman pushing Ryan followed suit.
On the other side of the window, and some distance away, a huge, disk-shaped structure stuck out of a sheer cliff of glacier. It looked almost black against the pale blue of the ice, but where the klieg lights hit it directly it was more of a slate gray. The intricate scaffolding on and around it was the only scale Ryan had for comparison. It looked like ladders for ants. But there were no ants; nothing moved in or on the thing.
“I still can’t believe we’re just leaving it, just walking away,” Echo said, her voice suddenly trembling with emotion. “There’s so much more to learn. My family devoted a century to studying it and uncovering its secrets. There’s easily another century of important discoveries waiting for us, discoveries that could radically change the future of humankind. Good grief, the physics of the star drive alone...”
“We are at the mercy of well-meaning but shortsighted imbeciles,” Lima said. “The current leaders have decided science must take a backseat to other concerns. We have no choice but to do as they say. Our lives are in their hands. Try to think of it this way—that alien craft has been caught in the ice, preserved virtually intact for one hundred fifty thousand years. It will still be there, as we left it, when our species finds the time and allocates the funding to return. We may not see the Ark’s star drive unraveled, but if we stay true to our scientific principles despite the challenges ahead, perhaps our children’s children will.”
“Take the long view? That is a much more comforting way to look at it, Doctor. Our turn with the Ark is simply over. That doesn’t mean the task is abandoned forever.” She hesitated before she added, “It is still so sad, don’t you think, to look through the glass and see no one working?”
“Yes, indeed,” Lima said. “Sad.”
As the wheelchair rolled onward, Ryan took a last look through the window. It was impossible to imagine how, if that giant thing actually once flew, it had managed to get buried so deep in the ice. He pushed the question from his mind. He had more pressing things to consider.
