A Dragon at the Gate (The New Aeneid Cycle Book 3) (35 page)

The patient grimaced again. “I’m good for it! How long?”

Jack unsealed one end of the canister and slid the needle in through the rubber cap to draw a dose of silvery liquid. “Not long. This shit works quick. Just a bit more pain, and that wound’ll seal right up, good as new.” He finished filling the syringe, and then nodded to someone out of frame.

Caitlin’s breath caught as Felix entered the room, moving to the patient. The angle hid his face, but there was no mistaking him. He began to fasten restraints around the patient’s wrists. “For your own protection,” Felix said. “Sorry.”

The patient nearly pulled away, but acquiesced. “You ain’t gonna do me wrong, are ya, Hiatt?”

“It’ll be fine,” said Jack. “You want fast healing, you’ll get it. But it’s a shock to the system. You’re lucky to get the opportunity! This shit’s new!”

Felix finished securing the straps and turned to leave. Caitlin’s heart jolted as she caught sight of his face before he vanished out of the frame: a mask of anguish. His jaw quivered with what looked like barely contained rage in a way she’d never seen before.

“Hiatt?” called the patient. “Where you goin’, man?”

Jack brought the needle to the patient’s left shoulder. “Brace up; this is gonna sting.” The needle pierced the skin. The patient grimaced as Jack pushed the plunger down. When the entire dose of silver liquid had finally slid into the man’s body, Jack pulled the needle out and walked out of the frame without a word. Off screen, the door closed with a clang and a click.

The patient’s eyes darted between his shoulder and the observation window before his entire body jerked at once. “Ohhh, gawd this hurts! Fucking—” His jaw clamped down mid-curse. He stared again at the wound, which now had begun to shimmer silver in its depths and around the edges. The camera zoomed closer, and Caitlin saw the liquid rebuilding the flesh before her eyes. The patient’s struggling eased, and, soon after, the wound closed. He began to breathe again.

“Well, hey!” he cried. “That’s fuckin’ sleek! Pain’s even starting to—” At once he flung his head back and screamed: a nightmare wail that nearly pierced Caitlin’s eardrums. Silver cracks appeared along the newly healed arm in a blood vessel pattern, and then split open. The silver flowed from the splits, spreading, shimmering, almost bubbling, as the piteous bloke thrashed and screamed. The silver continued to spread. Unable to turn away, Caitlin watched his arm deflate and dissolve into a pool that covered the chair.

The effect then spread into his chest, aborting his screams as heart and lungs liquefied, deflated, and transmuted into the same silver liquid that Jack had injected in the doomed man’s arm less than a minute before. It was as if the liquid ate his body to make more of itself. The more it devoured, the faster it spread until, finally, there was nothing left of the man.

No, she realized, not nothing. His clothes, his piercings, and his artificial arm all remained. The camera withdrew. The liquid spilled over the sides of the chair, pooling on the floor. Jack had made it happen, and Felix had helped.

Caitlin’s stomach twisted, wrenched, and dove upward. She barely turned from the screen before vomiting everything she had onto the floor.

When her stomach unclenched, she gasped and looked up at the screen again. The entire silvery mass crept along the floor of its own accord, circling the chair like a hunting shark before the video ended. Caitlin belatedly wiped her mouth and tried to swallow away the taste of it all as Jade set a hand on her shoulder.

“Told ya,” Jack said from where he sat, tied to the operating table. “Gruesome, awesome shit.”

Caitlin pulled from Jade’s hand, crossed over to Jack, and decked him across the face so hard she wondered if she’d broken her hand. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” She slugged him in the gut, and he tried to kick her away—a feeble attempt in his captured state—which she easily dodged. “
What the bloody fuck is wrong with you?
” She seized the first object she could find and smashed it across his face, his chest, his kicking legs, anything she could make contact with, until she lost track of herself or how many times she’d swung.

At some point, Jade pulled her back. Blood and already swelling bruises bloomed on Jack’s face. A couple of new rips graced his shirt. He cowered back on the table as far as he could with both wrists still bound onto the edge. Caitlin lifted her hand to see the object that she’d used to beat him with: a weighty, steel rib spreader. It slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor.

“Sorry, Cait. You do that much longer and he wouldn’t be able to answer questions,” Jade told her. Her sympathetic smile faded as she turned to Jack. “And you: Keep answering questions or you’ll have both of us to deal with on that front, because you absolutely fucking deserved that.”

Jack spat blood and gave the tiniest nod.

“How many times?” Caitlin whispered.

“How many times what?”

“How many people did you do that to?” she yelled.

“With that result, not many. The shit didn’t do that stuff at all at first. Used to just heal, and hardly that. When your boy came knocking, that’s what he said it was: medical tests. Needed live trials. He said it might get messy, have some nasty side effects, and was I good with that?”

“And you said yes,” Jade finished.

Jack shrugged. “I could have any leftover parts I wanted if something went wrong, on top of what he’d be paying me. People I treat here don’t make the world a better place, ya know. But like I said, it wasn’t like that at first. One time it worked damn near perfect. Healed everything up nice, just a bit of silver goop to mop up. I figured that’d be the end of it. Then Hiatt came back, said we weren’t done.

“That time it healed the wound, then kept going. Made new flesh until the guy had a blob the size of a grapefruit on his leg. I cut that off pretty easy, bandaged it up, he went on his way. Happy customer. Next guy wasn’t so lucky. Gut wound. Stuff sealed him up alright, then ate half his stomach before it ran outta juice or whatever. Did a few more after that. Ate the whole body. Vid you just saw is the first time it kept moving after. Like it was looking for another meal. I kept a pair of lab rats in the room each time—Felix’s instructions. It oozed over to ‘em, covered the cage, covered the rats, and then left ‘em alone. It’s got a taste for humans.”

“And—” Caitlin swallowed, the taste of bile still fresh. “—the people you tested it on, did Felix bring them here or did you . . . get them?”

“Bit of a mix, depending. Couple-a times he just dropped off the serum and came back to get the data later.”

Caitlin drifted away, finding herself staring through the observation window of the test room. The floor looked recently cleaned. The door stood ajar.

“Where’d it come from?” she heard Jade ask.

“He didn’t say.” Something heavy smacked into something soft; Jack shouted and groaned. “He didn’t! Why would he? And I didn’t wanna know.”

“Guess,” Jade said.

Caitlin pushed open the chamber door further. A rubber seal covered the bottom of the door. She kneeled for a closer look.

“Somewhere big, that’s all I know,” Jack said. “Shit like that doesn’t get thrown together in some basement. But no corp markings on any of the canisters or the diagnostics he brought, and Hiatt paid cash.”

The door seal had seen better days. She ran her fingertips over it. The rubber was hard and cracked. “How’d you keep it from getting out the door?” she asked. “Or clean it up?”

“Mop and bucket.”

Caitlin stood, arms folded, awaiting more. “What
else
?” Despite his injuries, Jack only smirked.

Jade patted him on the knee. “Jack. Puddin’. We’ve been over this. You want to get out of this alive, you shouldn’t hold back when my friend asks a question.” She scooped the rib spreader off the floor and held it out for Caitlin.

Caitlin hesitated, but then returned to take the implement from Jade.

“You’re not gonna kill me,” he told her.

Jade chuckled—a cruel sound. “Say that enough and you might believe it, bub.”

“You’re not going to see Felix again, Jack.” Caitlin tightened her grip on the spreader, feeling her jaw clench at the same time. “Would you like to know how I know?” She slammed the spreader across the edge of the gurney. “Because he’s dead! Shot, right in front of me, because of all this bloody mess!” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “And
I
don’t know whose fault that is. I don’t know who messed with his brain to make him do this! Was it them, Jack? Was it
you
?” She smashed the spreader across his shoulder, unable to stop herself, shouting again. “I don’t bloody know! And
I
don’t know that I won’t kill you for it, so what makes
you
so bloody certain?
Now answer the sodding question!
”

THE ELEVATOR DOORS CLOSED
and seemed to vanish before Michael’s eyes. In reality, the screens built into the doors’ surface had simply come to life, replacing the previous bronze-colored mirror with a vivid display of a woodland scene bursting with dark green pines, brilliant wildflowers of orange and blue, and a frothing river where a pair of elk drank. And the doors merely completed the scene already formed around them by screens in the walls and ceiling. Only the wood floor, hand railings, and button display beside the door marred the illusion. Well, Michael corrected, that and the utter absence of the feeling he got amid real vegetation. It was hard to believe they were still in the middle of a research campus on the outskirts of the city of Gibson.

Beside him stood Marette and David Taylor, who had gotten them this far into New Eden’s facility. With luck, he’d be able to get them all the way.

“And now we see if Yoshi’s access still works,” Taylor said. Yoshi and he had reportedly doubled their security credentials over each other’s to allow them each use of the other’s access. Taylor pushed his thumb against the button for the fifth floor and held it there while the thumbprint scanner did its thing. The button blinked green a moment later, and Taylor let out a breath of relief.

With that hurdle surmounted, Michael’s thoughts shifted. “Any traces of the syr yet on that scanner?”

“Alyshur says the readings do not show a concentrated trace source that would indicate the syr remains on Earth in its original state,” Marette answered. “The syr may have activated at some point in the distant past, in which case it may not be recoverable at all. At its heart it is only a catalyst for change, designed to be reconstituted in time after its use once the process is complete. Yet no elder would have been on Earth to manage the reconstitution, and so the chance might now be lost. Yet it is too early to be certain of anything.”

“How much longer until you’re sure?”

“We do not know.”

Taylor glanced back at both of them but said nothing. Moments later, the elevator chimed, the doors blanked and slid open onto a red-and-gray carpeted foyer. The foyer formed a T-intersection in which a security desk sat—an empty security desk, Michael noted. It was late, but it seemed odd that the desk be unstaffed. Perhaps the guard was on rounds?

“Come on,” Taylor said.

No sooner had they exited the elevator than a guard appeared from the right corridor. Taylor gave the guard a startled glance while Michael sized him up as best he could without seeming concerned: the guard was shorter than Michael and at least ten years older, with thinning dark hair. A 9mm auto-pistol and a taser rod adorned his belt. Taylor led them away from him down the left hall.

“Hold up, folks. I have to sign you in and see your creds.”

Taylor stopped. They all turned. “Uh, hi Sam,” Taylor said. “Sorry, in a hurry.”

“Oh, Mr. Taylor. I didn’t think you were cleared for the server floor,” Sam said. He held out an e-pad, to which Taylor, after a breath, pressed his thumb. Something appeared on the pad which seemed to satisfy Sam, who then flipped it around and offered it to Marette.

“Uh, they’re with me,” Taylor said. “I mean, obviously they’re with me, I mean, but they’re guests. With me.”

Sam took the pad back and tapped the screen. “Guests still need clearance in the system, Mr. Taylor. I’m not seeing anything . . . ”

“We are a last-minute invite,” Marette said, glancing at Taylor. “Perhaps it is not yet fully approved?”

Taylor nodded. “We’re in kind of a hurry, here, Sam. You know how these authorizations go.”

Sam sighed, and Michael caught what seemed to be a once-over in his direction. The guard was sizing him up now. “Authorizations don’t take all that long, Mr. Taylor. And I can’t let these two pass without them.”

Marette lifted one hand, fingers spread, palm facing the guard in a placating gesture. “Sam,” she began, “there are exceptions for everything, are there not? We are in a hurry, and with Mr. Taylor, who clearly has his own authorizations.”

Sam blinked and swallowed. He raised a hand near his head as if to rub his temple before letting it fall again. “Rules are rules, miss.”

“And rules are important. But would it not be easier to let us pass, for now, and save the argument? Avoid the conflict?” Marette lifted her hand higher. Michael caught a glimpse of luminous green at the corners of her eyes. “Please.”

Serenity descended across Sam’s face. He let the e-pad fall to his side. Taylor glanced aside to Marette, and then Michael. The glow in Marette’s eyes intensified, until at last, through a fog, Sam nodded. “Alright. Just this once. Now, um, get going.”

Michael wasted no time, taking Taylor by the elbow and leading him down the hall. Marette lingered a few moments with Sam before catching up with them.

“What the hell just happened?” Taylor whispered.

Michael shook his head. “Don’t ask. Count your blessings and lead on.”

Michael let go of Taylor’s arm and let him go ahead, while he fell into step beside Marette. Her eyes had returned to normal. Clearly Alyshur had done something, yet making the guard let them go couldn’t have been just a matter of calming him into a rational decision.

“I thought Alyshur said you couldn’t do that,” he whispered to her. “
Make
people do things they don’t want to?”