Outlander 05 - Parallax Red

by James Axler

  He choked out a pained curse, and the remote dropped from suddenly nerve-dead fingers. He swung his cane like a cudgel at her faceplate, but she checked the blow with a forearm. Her knee flashed up, pounding into Sindri's chest and driving him backward against the railing.

  Bracing himself against the rail, he delivered both feet into Brigid's midriff. She staggered, hit the top rail, teetered for a second, then plunged over it. It wasn't really a fall. She twisted her body and managed to alight on her feet in a crouch, catching herself on her hands. She immediately bounced upright.

  Keeping one eye on the swerving, circling molecular destabilizer, Kane snatched up his and Grant's blasters. Sindri bellowed, "Go ahead and shoot me, you smug bastard! But the power buildup of Thor's Hammer cannot be stopped by bullets. Whether I'm dead or alive, it will still cast a thunderbolt to the programmed target."

  Kane believed him. He pushed the blasters into Brigid's hands and sprang for the madly wheeling MD. Throwing all of his body weight against its bulk, he steered it toward the control consoles beneath the platform. The machine was very heavy, and it wasn't until Grant joined him that it was pushed in the right direction.

  The molecular destabilizer trundled forward, snapping sparks and glowing with an eerie aura. Grasping the rail, Sindri leaned over and half screamed, " Don't , you idiots! You don't know what you're doing!"

  "The hell I don't!" Kane shouted in response. "I'm making up more shit as I go along."

  He aimed the harp at the rolling MD and played the strings with fast, violent strokes. The dorsal surface of the machine shuddered, acquiring dents and bulges. A seam popped, spilling out a rainbow-colored nimbus. The concentric storage rings shattered in a cascade of spark-shot vapor.

  The harp shivered violently in Kane's hands, the building vibrations stinging his fingers, shooting up his arms into his neck. His vision blurred, but he saw a hairline crack suddenly cross in his helmet's faceplate. Swiftly he hurled the instrument at the console, making sure it landed right beneath it. Gauges on the panels erupted in sprays of glass shards. He turned to run.

  Sindri shrieked, "You maniac! You son of a"

  Whatever else he had to say dissolved in a prolonged, screeching rumble that penetrated their helmets. Coruscating light, like a miniature sun going nova, burst up behind them. As Brigid, Grant and Kane sprinted for the ramp, the deck lurched under their feet. They stumbled but didn't fall.

  A great, cyclonic wind seemed to gust in front of them, trying to swat them back. They fought against it, bending double, nearly dropping to all fours. When they reached the top of the ramp, Kane glanced back.

  Through the flares of light mushrooming up from the dynamos, he saw a ragged, ten-foot-long gash ripped in the blister cupping the GRASER cannon. Enclosed and compressed by the armaglass shielding, the destructive fury unleashed by the overloading dynamos had nowhere to go but up. Like a strip of carpet, a long section of the platform's flooring tore loose from the framework, the alloy fluttering like cloth.

  Legs flailing, Sindri clung to a handrail with both hands, his body in a straining vertical posture as he struggled desperately against the relentless drag of de-pressurization. Splinters of glass and metal scraps swirled around him, trapped by the suction created by the breach in the hull.

  Kane would have preferred to wait and watch Sindri be sucked into the vacuum of the void, but he couldn't do so without risking the same fate. He and his companions half rolled and half fell down the ramp. They didn't discuss tactics but simply ran, following the same route that had brought them there.

  They were aware of the great groaning shudders that racked the bulkheads around them and jounced the deck beneath their sprinting feet. None of them voiced the dread all of them sharedthat the sudden and violent decompression would trigger a chain reaction throughout the rattletrap space station, causing either a total power shutdown or making Parallax Red simply fall apart, ejecting them all into space.

  By the time they scrambled up the ladder and onto the tier holding the mat-trans unit, the latter hadn't happened, and lights still glowed in the promenade, though they flickered frequently.

  They didn't dare slow their pace, dashing flat out and side by side up the corridor. When they entered the control room, Kane paused to catch his breath by the big VGA monitor screen. It still displayed an exterior view of Parallax Red .

  A white billowing cloud of frozen, escaped atmosphere hung above one of the station's spokes, very near to the axis. Reflected sunlight glittered from pieces of metal wreckage floating around it. To his disappointment, the range was too great to tell if a small body floated among the debris.

  "Let's go!" Grant demanded breathlessly.

  Kane joined his companions at the jump chamber. Brigid entered the Cerberus unit's destination lock on the keypad, adding the encrypted ID number that informed the redoubt's autosequencing program who was making the transport.

  They stepped into the mat-trans chamber, Grant slamming the door behind them. AH of them were gratified when the ceiling and floor disks immediately exuded a glow.

  As the mist curled up around their feet, Brigid asked quietly, "Do you think he survived?"

  Leaning against the wall, Kane released his breath in a sigh of mingled relief and satisfaction. "Not a hope in hell, Baptiste. Not a hope in hell."

  Epilogue

  Brigid took a breath and raised her arms above her head, arching her back to work out the kinks in her shoulder muscles. She tried to keep her mind empty, visualizing nothing but what she had witnessed over the past few days.

  They had arrived safely back in the Cerberus redoubt late in the afternoon of the day before. Lakesh had been almost pathetically happy to see them. Domi had tried to kiss Grant even before he had taken off his helmet. Brigid had been grateful that Rouch wasn't a part of the welcoming committee.

  Kane and Grant related a very terse, undetailed overview of the events on Parallax Red and Mars. Lakesh seemed shaken by what they told him, even a little awed. "You three may have saved two worlds from destruction. How does that make you feel?"

  Kane had frowned, then said dourly, "I haven't really thought about it." Then he left the control complex for his quarters.

  As usual, Lakesh put the responsibility for a full report in Brigid's hands, inasmuch as her eidetic memory left little room for misinterpretation. She had been inputting all the events into the main database for the better part of the past two hours.

  As she stretched, Lakesh shuffled into the control center, throwing her a smile as he came and stood be-side her terminal. The smile fled his lips as he scanned the words glowing on the screen.

  Brigid peered up at him over the rims of her eyeglasses. "Something wrong with the report?"

  Lakesh shook his head. "Aspects of the contents disturb me. How likely is it that when Sindri probed your unconscious minds, he learned the Cerberus destination code and the ED number?"

  She shrugged. "He wasn't interested in information of a technical nature. Besides, he's floating frozen and dead on the dark side of the Moon. And even if he were alive, the ID encoding is encrypted."

  Lakesh nodded, as if he agreed with her, but did so reluctantly. "Withal, judging by what you said about him, he was a remarkable man. A genius who never arrived"

  "He was a warped little man with ambitions to challenge God," she broke in, more harshly than she intended. "He won't be missed."

  Lakesh patted her shoulder. "Perhaps not. But as friend Kane can attest, hate is often as strong a bond as love."

  "I didn't hate him," Brigid protested. "Despite what he did to me, to all of us."

  "As you said, he bobs for eternity in the infinite cold of space." Lakesh shivered as if the notion gave him a sudden chill.

  Suddenly lights flashed and needles wavered on the consoles. Beyond the anteroom, a humming tone vibrated from the gateway chamber.

  She leaped from her chair, and both she and Lakesh gaped at it in astonishment Bright flashes, like strokes of hea
t lightning, flared on the other side of the brown-tinted armaglass walls. The low-pitched drone climbed to a hurricane wail, then dropped down to silence.

  In a stunned whisper, Lakesh stammered, "Somebody jumped here...to Cerberus !"

  Eyes wide and wild, he swung around toward the Mercator-relief map, then spun toward a desk, hands fumbling to activate an intercom. Leaning over it, Lakesh shouted stridently, "Armed security detail to the control center! Stat !"

  Within half a minute, the big, vaulted room milled with people wielding blasters. Kane was among the first to arrive, hefting his Sin Eater. Rouch was right behind him, shouldering an SA80 subgun. Kane pretended not to notice the slit-eyed stare of suspicion Bri-gid directed toward him.

  Auerbach, Farrell and Cotta fanned out around the jump chamber, blasters held at hip level. Kane and Grant cautiously approached the armaglass door from opposite directions. They took up positions on either side of it, exchanged curt nods and Grant heaved up on the handle.

  As the door swung open on its counterbalanced hinges, the two men darted inside, Kane going low, Grant going high.

  They froze motionless inside the chamber door staring silently at the floor. Anxiously Lakesh snapped, "What is it? Who is it?"

  In a flat, unemotional tone, Kane called, "Baptiste, you need to see this."

  She warily approached the mat-trans unit, pushing between Grant and Kane. Soberly Grant said to her, "A little gift."

  "Or a little message," said Kane grimly.

  "Both," Brigid declared.

  The last wispy scraps of white vapor dissolved like early-morning mist. A polished black walking stick lay at an angle on the hexagonal floor disks. The silver knob and ferrule gleamed with a mocking light.