He looked down and saw the briefs were still dripping water down his legs, and felt a sudden chill as the cool lab air hit his skin. He took tentative steps to the table, and an image of a stumbling newborn giraffe flashed across his mind. In spite of his aching body, he smiled.
“Hey doc,” he called as he grabbed his shirt. His congested voice sounded like he was just getting over a chest cold. “I’m out.”
As he pulled the shirt over his head, his neuretics signaled a successful reboot and came back online. He queried them for elapsed time, and page after page of data returned, too fast for him to keep up. He sent a stop command, realizing he had a whole new system to learn. He remembered his upgrade from Level Three to Four mil rets and the days it took going through all the new capabilities. He knew he’d be in for a steep learning curve.
The data showed twenty-one hours, thirteen minutes since he entered the capsule. He pulled off the wet briefs and got dressed, then socks. His boots were under the table. He started to reach for them when he saw something out of place in the corner of his vision. He stood back up and looked over the table, but didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. He turned his head slightly, hoping his peripheral vision would pick it out again. There.
He picked up the water bottle. Behind it was a round red mark, in stark contrast to the spotless white lab table. He peered closer. Blood?
The hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up, and his neuretics threat assessment algorithms kicked in automatically. Passive scans searched the room without orders from him, all returning negative. The room was empty.
He set the water bottle back down, a few inches further from the blood drop than it was before, and again something caught his peripheral vision. On the floor, to his right, another drop. A few feet past that, another. And another. Leading to a large storage locker mounted to the bulkhead next to a computer workstation.
He glanced back under the table. His gear bag, with all of his extra clothing, personal belongings, and perhaps most importantly his weapons, was missing.
Now the hair on his arms stood up. Something was definitely wrong. His passive scans showed nothing amiss, but the blood and missing gear told him differently.
He walked slowly over to the locker in sock feet, trying to get used to the disorientation and different musculature. His head moved as if on a swivel, and he felt all of his old combat techniques come back to him. He reached the locker and sent a low-level active scan into it, but the heavy steel construction blocked most of it. A small corner of his mind noted the vastly increased power and detail of the Level Seven active-scanning package, even on the exterior of the locker, but his attention was focused in front of him.
The locker was approximately nine feet tall, six feet wide, and two feet deep, with two wide doors on the front, each with a small handle. It had a slot for a scan pad, but the slot was empty. By design or otherwise, he wasn’t sure. Either way, the door wasn’t locked, and the blood trail stopped right in front of it.
With one last passive scan of his surroundings, he reached out and turned a handle, stepping quickly off to one side.
The door slowly swung open with a metallic squeak, and he sent the same low-level active scan inside. Empty. Shelves, bottles, cases, nothing more.
He peered around the edge of the door. At the bottom of the locker, under the lowest shelf, was a crumpled pile of light blue fabric. The same shade of blue Knowles was wearing when he met her the day before. And it was stained with blood.
His neuretics howled a protest in his mind as they detected a threat just outside the main door.
Chapter 6
Gabriel padded softly over to the only door to the lab, scanning left and right for anything resembling a weapon. Nothing. The lab was bare. He flattened himself against the wall next to the door and reached out with a passive scan.
Two bodies were in the corridor outside the lab, and both were armed. Judging by the power signature and the heavy EM leakage, the weapons were cheaply made Chinese knockoffs of M-74 pulse rifles. Neither was stealth shielded, and neither broadcasted any type of signal via neuretics or other means. They were quiet, but not invisible. And with the types of rifles they carried, Gabriel ruled out the possibility of friendlies.
His neuretics linked into Cielo’s security system. It was secure, but his new Level Seven had no issues burning through the NAF firewall. The security system showed no breach or alert; the station was operating as normal. Then who the hell were these guys?
His Mindseye showed the ghostly passive scan image of a body stepping close to the door and reaching out, while the other stayed a step behind, rifle at the ready. Gabriel didn’t dare go active to pin down their armament or equipment; if they had the most rudimentary of neuretics, he’d announce his presence like a lighthouse beacon on a dark night.
The door slid open, and Gabriel watched as the blocky barrel of an M-74 copy poked into the room followed by a man in black combat gear and half helmet. The rifle barrel pointed to the man’s left, away from Gabriel. Perfect.
The gunman stepped into the room just feet away from Gabriel, and allowed the second man to enter. The second rifle only made it inches into the room when Gabriel reached out and grabbed it from under the barrel.
The pulse rifle was followed by the startled face of a man looking down at the weapon being pulled away from him. Before the man had a chance to react, Gabriel slammed the barrel upwards into the man’s face, then yanked down on it again, hard.
Blood spurted from the man’s shattered nose and upper lip as he stumbled into the room. Gabriel threw the rifle to one side, and smashed the heel of his other hand into the man’s chin. The intruder’s eyes rolled up in his head and he dropped to the floor.
In the split second the engagement had taken, the first man in the room still hadn’t fully turned to face the fight. Gabriel took full advantage of the man’s hesitancy and lunged forward. He detected a neuretics transmission coming from the gunman, and his own neuretic combat algorithms reached out to jam it. A distant part of his mind again was impressed with his new software upgrade.
The rifle swung in his direction, and he blocked it with his right forearm. When the barrel cracked and bent around his arm, the gunman’s eyes went wide. Gabriel’s left hand chopped at the man’s throat just above the collar of his combat armor. The shattered rifle clattered to the floor as the man grabbed his neck and fell to his knees.
Gabriel kicked the wrecked gun away and it skittered across the hard floor. He bent over and stared into the man’s wide eyes. His neuretics were still blocking the weak transmission the man continued to try to send.
“Who are you?” Gabriel asked in a low tone. “Where’s the doctor?”
The man gasped for air, alternately sucking in air and trying to wheeze out words.
“Don’t…know…who…you’re…talking…about…”
Gabriel grabbed the man’s collar and pressed his knuckles into his throat. The man’s eyes bulged.
“Who sent you? What is your target?” Gabriel growled.
The man grabbed at Gabriel’s wrist, trying to pull his hand away from his throat.
“Gabriel…target…” he gasped.
“Who…” Gabriel’s neuretics picked up an inbound transmission, sent to the gunman. He saw a bloom of red static appear in his Mindseye, and the man’s eyes rolled back in his head. His head lolled to one side and Gabriel released his collar. He was still detecting life signs; the man was unconscious. He ran a check on the transmission.
Data wipe.
The gunman’s neuretics had been remotely erased. How deeply, Gabriel had no idea, but he’d seen the same during the Canary Islands battle. Several of the prisoners of war they had taken unexpectedly passed out, then woke with no memory at all of the operation.
The wipe was troublesome, as now he’d have to figure out on his own who was behind the attack, but the wipe also gave him a key piece of information. His neuretics traced the transmission to a lo
cation within Cielo itself. He now had a target.
He turned away from the gunman’s limp body and stepped over to the second attacker, who was face down on the floor. Blood pooled around his head from a smashed nose and lip, but like the first one, he was out cold — only this one was by Gabriel’s hand. He sent a tracer worm transmission into the man’s neuretics and found the same thing: he’d been wiped remotely.
He rubbed his right arm where the other rifle had smashed into it. His skin had been cut by the plastic and metal barrel and dripped blood, but he felt little pain. The enhanced muscles underneath his skin absorbed the blow and prevented bone damage, and apparently whatever Knowles had injected into him prevented the bulk of the pain from reaching his nervous system. Interesting. He crouched and wiped his hand off on the fallen gunman’s sleeve. The pulse rifle Gabriel used against him lay against the bulkhead wall near the doorway. He reached over and picked it up, palming the trigger pad to arm it. Shit. Neuretics code locked. He was an unarmed target on an unfamiliar space station, still recovering from a full day under sedation.
A neuretics threat alert buzzed in his head. Another warm body was on its way down the corridor. He stood and squeezed the disabled pulse rifle in frustration, and an icon popped up in Mindseye.
OVERRIDE COMPLETE
The pulse rifle clicked and he felt a tingle in his hand, signaling the weapon was armed and ready to fire. A feral grin creased his face. Thanks doc, wherever you are.
He glanced down at his sock feet, then looked across the room toward his boots. No time, he thought. And maybe quieter without them. He pressed the stock of the rifle into his shoulder, raised the barrel, and stepped to the doorway.
Chapter 7
Cielo’s corridors were relatively narrow, and their smooth walls afforded no cover whatsoever, as Gabriel remembered from his arrival the day before. The only exceptions were the elevator bays. Around Cielo’s 4,750-foot circumference were eight elevators that led “up” into the central docking hub, and each of those took up half of the corridor’s twelve foot width. The vertical steel tubes offered a natural defilade every 600 feet or so along the sloping hall, and Gabriel knew the opposing force would use them for cover.
His neuretics pulled a schematic of the station from Cielo’s security system and projected it into his Mindesye, then plotted the position of the most recent threat. He pushed the image off to one side, not wanting a full HUD at this point, and sent out a more powerful passive scan.
The flashing icon was behind the closest elevator bay, as Gabriel himself would have been, and in the direction of the transmission origin. He quickly popped his head through the doorway. Without the steel walls and bulkheads in his line of sight, his neuretics were able to “see” into the corridor. His passive scan pinned down the likely transmission source as a small room about halfway around the torus, on the same side of the hallway as the lab. He had nearly 2,000 feet to go, past three elevator bays, and at least one hostile in his way, most likely more.
He pulled his head back into the lab, lowering the pulse rifle, and glanced down at the unconscious gunman slumped against the bulkhead. His modern plate-on-fabric combat armor appeared to be NAF-issued, but the weapon most certainly was not. The boots didn’t match the armor, the armor bore no insignia, rank, or name, and his unkempt hair stuck out from under the ill-fitting half helmet. The helmet was a combat-rated generic model used by dozens of third-world armies with rudimentary electronics and communications, no HUD visor or face shield, and no direct neuretics link. He was a walking contradiction, or in his case, a sleeping one. Who the hell are these guys?
He rechecked his data. It was 163 feet to the first elevator bay, and his first obstacle. He debated sending an active scan to fully plot his route, but again dismissed it as being too risky. Wait. The security system. He pulled up the station’s security program and went through the system packages visually in Mindseye, like flipping the pages of a book. He stopped at a folder marked AV and requested access. The sentry algorithm only gave token resistance before his neuretics breezed through.
He found the video monitoring systems for the corridor and began searching. Within seconds, an image seen from above of a man in combat armor crouching behind the gray steel elevator bay popped up. Gabriel flipped through more vids and found two more hostiles, both taking cover behind the elevator bay closest to the transmission origin. No other vids picked up anyone in the corridor; it was completely empty. Again he wondered about the identity of the attackers, as the security system showed no elevated threat levels anywhere on the station. Yet there they were, and the station seemed devoid of any other personnel. According to Cielo’s standard operating manifest, dozens of researchers should be on duty at any given hour, not to mention the regular comings and goings of Navy personnel. Something was seriously wrong with the entire situation, but Gabriel put that thought off for now. He had a more immediate threat — three armed hostiles in his way.
He was about to step into the corridor when a thought hit him. With three hostiles along the shortest route to his target, the longer route may be undefended, and it was a circle after all. He enlarged the station schematic, then frowned as he scanned the data.
According to the station plans, Cielo had four heavy carbotanium blast doors along its circumference that sealed off a quarter of the corridor in case of atmospheric breach or accidental release of materials from one of the research labs. The security schematic showed the one to Gabriel’s left, or in the direction of the long route around the station, was closed. He sent a signal to the system to check the door’s status, and it showed hard-locked, meaning manually dogged, apparently from the other side, according to the readout.
They were leading him.
The station was empty, only one route was available to him, and it led through armed gunmen. It was most certainly a trap, but why? Gabriel looked back at the locker on the far side of the lab, where the bloody shirt lay. If someone wanted him dead, the easiest way would have been to do it while he was under sedation, fast asleep in a pool of goo in a sealed container. Something else was going on here.
A memory nagged at him: the assault on the pirate hideout on the asteroid a few weeks back. He and his team had rooted out and captured or killed a dozen pirates by going door-to-door through the makeshift surface station the pirates had built using leftover or stolen prefab units tied down to the dusty asteroid with steel cables. And now here Gabriel was, about to embark on an eerily similar door-to-door mission with a singular target, only this time, he was alone.
His thoughts were interrupted by his threat assessment pinging him. The security system video feed image, still projected into a small corner of his Mindseye like a holovid picture-in-picture, showed the nearest gunman edging around the elevator bay, and the other two starting to move as well.
He took one last look at his boots under the table and sighed. Bringing the rifle back up to his shoulder, he turned and stepped into the corridor.
The limpet mine was unexpected.
Chapter 8
After the fact, Gabriel would come to realize that what saved him from the explosion was not his upgraded neuretics, or his augmented body, but his natural reactions — and his memory of the asteroid mission. His memories, as he thought later on, while painful, had saved his life.
As he stepped into the corridor, a flicker of memory from that mission flickered. He and his team, in microgravity, made their way between two of the prefab units. Gilly was point man, and Gabriel was a few dozen yards behind, with the gap growing. Gilly’s quick pace stirred up dust into a cloud that hung in the airless environment. They were maintaining comm silence, so Gabriel had no way to tell Gilly to slow his movement. He wanted to push forward, grab the young seaman by his shoulder, but his own heavy boots and reverse retro thrusters, designed to keep the team grounded in less than .02G, slowed him.
He was about to send a point-to-point neuretics burst when he saw a lump on the side of the prefab Gilly was passin
g. It was most certainly out of place; the color was whiter and the area was cleaner than the rest of the dirty, graying prefab unit. And Gilly didn’t see it.
Silence secondary at this point, Gabriel toggled the comm and shouted, but it was too late. The IED attached to the prefab detonated, probably a proximity sensor Gabriel later reported. Shrapnel tore into Gilly, throwing his body heavily into the prefab on the opposite side of the crude path the team walked. Gilly bounced off the plastic wall and skipped along the surface of the asteroid.
Gabriel yelled into the comm. “Active sensors, spread out! Rush all units, go!”
He switched off his retros and shoved off the surface. He angled his body forward and engaged the thrusters again, this time reversing them. They pushed him forward a few feet above the surface towards Gilly. He knew before he arrived the nineteen year old was gone. When he grabbed his drifting body, he saw Gilly’s face through his helmet visor locked in anguish. His skin was puckered with blisters from the decompression, and the blood that leaked from his mouth, nose, and eyes had frozen into dark stains.
The limpet mine on the wall of the corridor was thin, barely an inch in depth, and was all but unnoticeable. However, the color was a slightly darker shade of industrial gray than the corridor, and the overhead light strip cast the barest of shadows underneath its raised bump. But the corner of his eye caught it, just a split second before it detonated.
He turned his upper body away from the mine, taking his right hand off the pulse rifle and shielding his face with his forearm while he twisted towards the opposite wall and dropped to one knee. The mine was head-height, and he was counting on it being directional, like what had killed Gilly. If it was a wide-dispersal Claymore type, he didn’t have a chance.
Gabriel: Zero Point (Evan Gabriel Trilogy) Page 4
