by Greg Cox
She wished she could be sure that the friendly Takagi had been kept in the dark about Seven's imprisonment and obvious abuse, but knew that she had to assume the worst. If nothing else, Takagi's arrival meant that she was now even more outnumbered than before. “How long has he been a captive here?” she asked Kaur, looking anxiously at her supervisor's slumped figure.
“A day at most,” Kaur insisted soothingly. “In fact, we suspect he stowed away on the very same jet that brought you to India.”
“He must have done so,” the other scientist said, revealing an upper-crust British accent. “How else could he have gotten from New York to Delhi in so short a time?”
Guess you've never heard of the Blue Smoke Express, Roberta thought. After all she had seen at Chrysalis, it came as a comfort to recall that she and Seven still had a technological edge over all these assembled mad geniuses. “New York?” she asked innocently.
“Nothing you need to worry about,” Kaur answered, deflecting her query. “What's important is that our uninvited visitor has clearly gone to great lengths to penetrate our security.” She took Roberta gently by the arm and attempted to guide the younger woman toward the exit to the storeroom. “I know that what you've seen appears quite barbaric and upsetting, but you must understand that it is also absolutely necessary. There are forces in the world that would readily undo everything we've accomplished, and, more importantly, everything we hope to achieve, so we have no choice but to defend ourselves against spies and saboteurs like this man.” She looked back at Seven, more in sorrow than in anger, before returning her attention to Roberta. “To surpass nature, Veronica, one must sometimes be as ruthless as nature. This is a cogent truth that you will come to understand as you become more familiar with our work.”
Roberta was appalled to see both Takagi and the English scientist nodding in agreement. “I don't know,” she said, feigning uncertainty while resisting Kaur's efforts to ease her out of the room. I need to play this scene carefully, she realized, striving to strike the perfect balance between conscience and complicity: protest too little about Kaur's draconian methods and the shrewd director might get suspicious, object too much and I might end up in the cage with Seven. “You can't just turn him over to the authorities, I guess,” Roberta equivocated in what she prayed was a convincing manner, “but what's going to happen to him in the long run?”
Kaur did not answer the question directly. “Don't worry,” she told Roberta. “Our guest is bound to cooperate with us eventually. One way or another.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE PERSONAL QUARTERS CHRYSALIS HAD PROVIDED FOR ROBERTA were cozy enough. Peach-colored walls brightened the room, while fresh flower blossoms, no doubt garnered from some well-lit subterranean garden, floated in a porcelain dish upon the bedstand, which looked hand-carved from rich brown teak. The very comfortable bed had been neatly made in her absence, suggesting that the project employed maids as well as Nobel Prize-winning geneticists. In short, it was a nice place to visit, but Roberta wasn't planning on staying much longer.
Having been dropped off by Takagi only minutes before, at the conclusion of her somewhat overly eventful tour of Chrysalis, she planned to sneak back and rescue Seven as soon as the coast was clear. With any luck, Kaur and her bodyguards would have moved on as well, improving Roberta's odds of a successful raid. That was a fairly big if, she realized, but, hey, she had to do something. No way am I leaving Gary in that cage one minute longer than necessary.
Pacing restlessly across the sheets of the queen-size bed, Isis squawked impatiently at Roberta, who guessed that the cat was just as anxious as she was to spring Seven from his hellish-looking confinement. “Yes, yes, I hear you, Isis,” Roberta declaimed for the benefit of anyone who was listening. After what went on in Rome, she wouldn't put it past Chrysalis to have bugged her quarters again. “I know you want Mommy to play with you right now, but Mommy wants to take a shower first.”
The southern wall of the combined bedroom and living area was entirely covered by a large glass mirror. The reflective surface served to make the compact room appear more spacious, but Roberta suspected that the mirror might also provide a one-way window through she could be covertly observed by security-conscious guards. She had been careful the night before not to do anything at all suspicious in view of the mirror, confining her failed attempts to contact Seven to the ( she hoped!) privacy of the shower stall, while also discreetly calling the glass-covered wall to Isis's attention (“Don't you look pretty, kitty!”) so that the cat would not alert the bad guys by, say, turning into an excessively slinky-looking biped when she thought no one was looking.
Slipping out to rescue Seven, however, was going to take a little more effort. Stepping into the adjacent bathroom, Roberta moved rapidly from the sink to the shower, turning on all of the hot-water spigots as far as they would go, while casually singing to herself to allay suspicion. She kept the bathroom door wide open, and periodically tossed extra items of clothing into the living room to make it appear that she was undressing. She got halfway through the chorus of “ Crocodile Rock” before, as planned, the steaming torrents fogged up every mirror in the place, including the big one between her and the exit.
Leaving the shower running, Roberta took advantage of the mirror's “accidental” obscurement by snatching Isis up off the bed and darting for the door. She quickly slipped into the hall outside, grateful that nobody at Chrysalis had been paranoid enough to lock her in her quarters. She looked up and down the corridor, but saw no indication that her departure had been observed by anyone who might raise a fuss.
Ready or not, here we come! Clutching Isis to her chest, Roberta marched swiftly down the hall. Having taken care to memorize the route between her quarters and the smelly menagerie where Seven was being held captive, she now retraced her steps as hurriedly as she could without looking too out-of-place or alarming.
Okay, she thought, reviewing her plan as it hastily came together in her mind. Get to the storeroom, zap the guards, and 'port us all back to the Big Apple to consider our next move. She had already logged Chrysalis's geographical coordinates into her servo's memory, so they could always take the Blue Smoke Express back to the complex whenever they felt like it. We've learned enough for this go-round, she decided. Time to get the heck out of here.
The corridors of Chrysalis were fairly busy this afternoon, and Roberta passed several groups of technicians and lab workers going about their business as she traversed the intricate warren of tunnels, catwalks, and elevators. She feigned a confident and casual manner, as though she belonged here as much as anyone else, which seemed to work well enough; her unfamiliar face elicited a few curious glances, but nobody looked inclined to raise an alarm, an indication, perhaps, of how much faith the average worker had in Chrysalis's tight security and assiduously maintained anonymity. Guess they all just assume that I wouldn't be here unless I was invited, she surmised. Which was more or less the case.
The cat in her arms made her a bit more conspicuous than she would have liked, but Roberta knew that Seven would never forgive her if she left Isis back with the luggage, even though the cat's glittering collar held a microscopic homing device. Besides, as much she hated to admit it, the demanding feline came in useful occasionally. Considering the circumstances, namely that she was on her own, deep in enemy territory, attempting to outwit a score of scientific geniuses and their hired army, Roberta figured she could use all the help she could get.
But that didn't mean she had to like it.
“It's no good,” Williams pronounced. “He's out cold.” Damn! Sarina Kaur regarded Gary Seven's limp corpus with an acute sense of frustration. She had come so close to extracting their prisoner's seemingly extraterrestrial secrets, only to be interrupted by that idiotic American and her cat. Now Seven appeared to have dropped into a comatose state that left him incapable of answering all the questions she was aching to ask him. Dr. Neary had better be a damn fine scientist, Kaur thought irritably, after
all the trouble she's c aused.
“Can't you revive him?” she asked.
“Hah!” Williams snorted bitterly. He crouched on the floor outside Seven's cage, flashing the beam of a penlight into the prisoner's unresponsive eyes, whose lids he lifted sequentially. He then checked Seven's pulse one more time before letting go of the insensate captive's wrist, leaving it to dangle lifelessly from its shackles. “After a double dose of that blasted neurotransmitter, I wouldn't be surprised if his gray matter's completely fried.” He rose to his feet, wiping his hands of any responsibility for the prisoner's dire condition. “Looks to me like we've got a vegetable to dispose of.”
“That doesn't make any sense,” Kaur protested, overlooking the Englishman's increasingly insubordinate attitude. “The serum has never produced that sort of effect before.” Then again, she reflected, no one had ever resisted the drug for so long, let alone required a second injection. Had the strain of resisting the serum's compulsion indeed caused irreparable neurological harm, or had Seven's apparent surrender eventually triggered some manner of deep-rooted mental block? It was possible, she speculated, that the intruder's prolonged unconsciousness was a last-ditch defense mechanism against the most intense and overpowering of interrogations. Such a precaution was theoretically possible; in fact, Kaur had once looked into the feasibility of hypnotically installing similar blocks in the minds of the key Chrysalis personnel, before rejecting the technique as unreliable given the current limits of psychological conditioning. But perhaps Mr. Seven knows a few tricks modern practitioners do not?
“Well, it may not make sense,” Williams said, “but one thing's for sure: You're not getting anything out of this poor sod anytime soon.” He yawned loudly, while massaging the sore muscles at the back of his neck. “Frankly, Madame Director, we're wasting our time here, and I, for one, could use a break.”
Sadly, Kaur conceded that Williams had a point. She herself had many other pressing duties to attend to, while the enigmatic Mr. Seven was undeniably dead to the world, at least for the present. Perhaps we can try reviving him again later, she considered, after his mind and body have had the opportunity to recover from their mutual ordeal.
“Very well,” she informed Williams. “You're dismissed for now.” She turned her attention to the guard in charge of the storeroom. “Bhajan, please keep a close eye on the prisoner. Summon me immediately if there is any change in his condition.”
“Yes, Director,” the burly Sikh agreed. Williams wasted no time exiting the storeroom-cum-jailhouse, but Kaur lingered a few moments more, reluctant to leave the captive behind while so many of his secrets remained unplumbed. Her personal bodyguards waited patiently as she toyed absently with the penshaped instrument she had confiscated from Seven earlier. Was there alien technology employed in its construction? It occurred to her that, should Gary Seven never recover from his current vegetative state, this small artifact might prove to be the only tangible evidence of his unearthly origins, that and whatever knowledge might be gleaned from his DNA and eventual postmortem.
She inspected the instrument more closely, impressed by the persuasive simplicity of its camouflage; the device certainly looked like just an ordinary writing utensil. Keeping the point of the weapon carefully aimed away from her, she tinkered with its controls, which appeared to be activated by twisting the outer casing of the pen to various gradations. Suddenly, she discovered that it could be twisted in more than one direction as well, resulting in a gentle click followed by a far more audible electronic beep.
Hmm, she thought, intrigued. What have we here?
By her own reckoning, Roberta was two-thirds of the way back to the animal storeroom when the servo in her pocket beeped for her attention. Hey! she thought jubilantly, her spirits lifted immeasurably by the unexpected sound of the servo's hail. Seven must have sprung himself from behind bars. She suddenly felt foolish for having underestimated him after all these years. Guess he was just playing possum after all.
Isis climbed onto Roberta's shoulder, freeing the young woman's hands. Glancing around quickly to make sure no one was watching, Roberta retrieved the servo from her pocket and activated its reply function. “Hello, Seven? Boy, am I glad to hear from you!” The situation was obviously far too urgent to waste time with silly code names. “Isis and I are en route to your last known location. Please advise.”
An unnervingly long silence followed, broken finally by the last voice Roberta expected. “Dr. Neary?” asked the Indian-accented tones of Dr. Sarina Kaur. “Is that you?” A cold, sardonic amusement, lacking any trace of warmth or good will, crept into the scientist's voice. “What an extremely . . . revelatory . . . development. I look forward to meeting with you again, Dr. Neary, and as soon as possible.”
Roberta could feel the blood rushing from her face to her toes. Uhoh. She switched off the servo with record-breaking speed, but the damage had already been done. The jig is up, she realized with a gulp. The time for complicated cover stories and clever dissembling was over; nothing left now but the running and the shooting and the gratuitous violence. She set her servo on tranquilize, as Isis leaped from Roberta's shoulder onto the floor. Let's just hope that Chrysalis hasn't genetically improved its guards' marksmanship.
She took a deep breath, pausing to let the adrenaline kick in, then took off down the corridor at top speed. Isis sped along beside her, her paws barely touching the polished tile floor. With luck, Roberta prayed, they could still spring Gary Seven before Kaur could call in reinforcements, assuming they got to the storeroom first. “C'mon, c'mon,” she urged herself on, running so hard that she could hear her heart pounding in her chest. Alert eyes scanned the corridors and doorways ahead, looking out for trouble. She knew she'd just hit the top of Chrysalis's Most Wanted list.
Startled lab workers gasped in surprise as the unidentified blond woman, accompanied by a speeding black cat, came sprinting down the hallways. “Coming through!” she hollered, forcing clumps of shocked Chrysalis technicians to scatter out of her way.
So far, so good, Roberta thought. At the moment, the inhabitants of the top-secret lab were too confused and off-balance to even try to detain her, but these were just the civilians; trained security forces were undoubtedly on their way. By now, someone had surely found the empty shower back at her cozy underground hotel room, just as Kaur must have guessed where she and Isis would almost certainly be heading.
Hang on, Seven, she thought desperately. She counted down doorways and detours as she rushed by them in a blur. We're almost there.
No such luck. Just as she approached a metal stairway she remembered from before, two teams of guards converged from opposite directions, blocking her way to the stairs. “Halt!” the lead guard called out, flaunting an automatic pistol. Four additional guards displayed gray steel batons that reminded Roberta uncomfortably of cattle prods. “You are ordered to surrender to our custody immediately.”
“Sorry, no can do,” she muttered, targeting the gun-wielding guard with her servo even as she struggled to keep her own forward momentum from carrying her straight into the guards' midst. An electronic hum resonated across the gap between Roberta and her adversary, and the lead guard's belligerent stance relaxed dramatically. His stern, forbidding scowl gave way to a goofy grin and a dreamy expression as the muzzle of his firearm drooped toward the floor. His baffled cohorts looked on in puzzlement as their senior officer let go of his pistol, then stretched out on the floor for a nap. Loud snores replaced the harsh commands the guard had emitted only seconds before.
Roberta, on the other hand, did not pause to inspect the effects of her tranquilizer beam on the hired soldier. She was too busy reversing direction and taking off back the way she had come. Isis was way ahead of her, leading Roberta on an improvised detour through the bowels of Chrysalis. Boots pounded on tile behind her as the rest of the security team resumed its pursuit. “Stop! Surrender at once!” they shouted, in at least three different languages and dialects.
T
hey might as well have been speaking in Martian for all that Roberta intended to obey their commands. The race to rescue Seven had turned into a chase, with herself the primary quarry. Shades of Berlin, she thought, remembering the tumultuous and exhausting mission that had first launched her and Seven on the investigation that had eventually led her to this hidden stronghold, deep beneath the surface of the Indian desert. How come I always end up running from guntoting goons?
Keeping her head low, she spotted a small cluster of scientists milling about in an airy underground atrium, complete with a spewing marble fountain sculpted in the shape of a dolphin leaping above chiseled waves. Many of the white-jacketed workers appeared to be enjoying a lateafternoon cigarette, safely distant from the volatile chemicals back in their respective labs.
“Over there!” Roberta hollered to Isis, before plunging into the throng of stunned researchers. She barreled through the crowd at top speed, hoping to discourage her irate pursuers from opening fire, but her plan backfired when the onrushing guards called out to the civilians surrounding Roberta. “Stop her!” their angry voices demanded. “Don't let her get away!”
A few brave scientists grabbed on to Roberta, hoping to hold her long enough for the security team to catch up with the apparent fugitive. “Hey, watch the hands!” Roberta objected indignantly.
Luckily for her, a couple of overeager lab jockeys were hardly a match for her hard-earned martial-arts expertise. She flipped one over her shoulder onto his back, while jabbing her elbow into another guy's sizable gut. For a second, she thought she was free and clear, and started to race ahead once more, only to discover that yet another techie, more determined and/ or foolhardy than the rest, had what felt like a death grip on her hair. She winced, her eyes watering, as he pulled mercilessly on her roots, until Isis doubled back and bit the clinging creep in the ankle. “Ow!” he yowled, letting go of her hair and hopping away on one foot.
