Ancestor (10 page)

GUNTHER JONES SAT back and read his words. Not bad, if he did say so himself. Take a bite out of that, Stephenie Meyer. How hard could it be? Some handsome bloodsuckers, some romance, a little forbidden fruit that turns into hot sex, and boom—vampire novel.

The wee hours of the morning were usually his most creative. Tucked
away in the security control room, no one bothered him, particularly at 3:00
A.M
. Not that he didn’t do his job … there just wasn’t much job to do. Other than making sure Jian didn’t try to off herself, he ran through all scheduled procedures and checked that the alarm systems were online. If anything came up that required eyeballs, he woke Brady or Andy or Colding, depending on who was on call.

Closed-circuit cameras blanketed the facility’s interior, giving him a view of every possible angle. After almost two years here, he was adept at keeping the monitors in his peripheral vision—if something out there moved, he’d see it. Nothing ever did. That meant Gunther Jones basically got paid damn good money to sit and write for hours on end.

He’d completed two novels in the
Hot Dusk
series already:
Hot Dusk
and
Hot Evening
. As soon as he finished his current book,
Hot Midnight
, he’d have a kick-ass trilogy to push on agents.

The computer beeped, indicating an alert. Gunther reduced his novel (making sure to save it first, he wasn’t about to lose those amazing words), revealing a flashing alert message:

He called up the maintenance screen, hit the
re-link
button, then waited to see the link reconnect like it always did. Colding didn’t like losing that signal, although it happened from time to time for some interstellar communications reason they didn’t really understand. A new message appeared:

Huh. He’d never seen that before. He repeated the step and waited.

“Colding’s going to be pissed.” Gunther called up the diagnostics program and let it run.

He stared at the screen. Hardware failure? That had never happened before. There was only one thing left to do in the repair protocol—send out some eyeballs. He turned to the vid-phone and punched Brady’s room.

BRADY GIOVANNI DIDN’T mind the cold, but that didn’t mean he was stupid about it. He had been one of those kids who always listened to his mother. Growing up in Saskatoon, listening to your mother meant dressing warm.

When on call, dressing warm meant wearing his thermal long johns and socks to bed, cutting down his response time. After Gunther’s call woke him, it took Brady only seconds to pull on the black Genada parka with matching snow pants, military-grade cold-weather gloves, a scarf and the thing that Andy “The Asshole” Crosthwaite teased him about to no end—a wool hat knitted by none other than Brady’s mother. The hat fit perfectly over his big head and the headset/mic combo in his ear.

He punched in his access code at the front interior airlock door. It opened and he stepped into the chamber. He closed the door and waited five seconds while the pressure equalized. A beep from the door let him know the cycle had finished.

“Gun, this is Brady, exiting now.”

“Roger that,” Gunther’s voice said in his ear.

Beretta in hand, Brady opened the heavy latch to the outside door and stepped out into the cold night air. The compound’s lights lit up the grounds. From the door, he could see the back of the satellite dish. Nothing moving. He double-timed it across the snow, the icy wind pulling at him as he ran. It could blow all it wanted, because Brady was prepared. Maybe a little more than just
prepared
, as proven by the sweat that already trickled down his armpits despite the subzero temperatures.

He kept a sharp watch as he cut a wide circle around the satellite dish. Nothing really happened at the isolated facility. Even something as trivial as this hardware failure brought welcome excitement, gave him a chance to practice good soldiering.

The fifteen-foot-wide satellite array pointed out to the stars, away from Brady. His circle brought him around to the front, where he could see the receiver held up by metal arms that pointed in and up from the concave
dish. As he moved, he steadily swept his vision from left to right, then right to left.

Gunther’s voice piped into his headset. “You there yet?”

“I’m twenty feet away and you know that,” Brady said. “You’re watching on infrared, aren’t you?”

Gunther’s laugh sounded tinny through the small headset. “Yeah, I love this thing. Never get to use it. Nothing moving out there but you, big fella.”

Brady came around the front of the satellite dish. Seeing no movement, he closed in until he could examine the receiver. He stared at the gadget for a full three seconds, not really believing what he saw.

Baffin Island wasn’t boring anymore.

THE VID-PHONE AGAIN let out its shrill digital blare. Colding groaned and rolled over and looked at the phone—3:22
A.M
. Jian again? Jesus, couldn’t a guy just get some fucking sleep around here? Colding clicked the
connect
button.

“What’s up, Gun?”

“We have a situation,” Gunther said in a rush. “The satellite array has been damaged.”

Colding instantly came fully awake. “Define
damaged.”

“Let me patch in Brady,” Gunther said. “Brady, Colding’s on, tell him what you see.”

Gunther’s face stayed on the screen, but Brady’s girlish voice came from the speakers. “Someone whacked the fuck out of the satellite array. The dish is fine, but the receiver-transmitter unit has been smashed up pretty bad. Looks like marks from an axe.”

An axe. There were twelve fire axes spread through the small facility’s interior. Whoever sabotaged the satellite dish had come from inside the building.

“Gunther,” Colding said, “activate all the apartment cameras and give me a head count, right now.”

“No problem, boss.” Gunther’s eyes looked away from the screen, back to another unseen monitor.

“Let’s see … Jian is awake and in the bioinformatics lab, typing away. Rhumkorrf is in his bed, looks asleep. Andy disconnected his room camera, but I can hear him snoring over the vid-phone. Hoel is buried in her blankets. Brady is at the dish, I’m here, you’re there, and … hey … Tim’s not in his room.”

Colding stood up. “Not in his room? Where is he? Do an infrared body count of the whole building.”

Gunther’s droopy eyes narrowed in concentration. “Um … infrared confirms all visuals. Everyone accounted for except for Brady and Tim. And I just checked the access and egress logs. No one has coded in or out for the past two hours.”

“But I just went out,” Brady said. “Walked right out the front.”

“Not showing up,” Gunther said. “Someone shut off the tracking. And it looks like the hallway cameras are fixed on a loop. I … I can’t tell how long it’s been since they’ve shown live video.”

Colding started pulling on his clothes. “Call up access to the admin log. Whose code turned off those systems?”

“Uh …” Colding heard Gunther’s fingers tapping away. “I’m looking.”

“Move it, Gun! You’re supposed to know how to do this shit!”

“I know, I know! Hold on … here it is. Access code was 6969.”

Tim’s code. But why? Why would Tim do such a thing after all this time? Why … unless …

“Brady,” Colding said, “I want Tim found. He’s sabotaging us.”

“Yes sir.”

“And keep your eyes open. He’s got that axe at least, if not other weapons.”

“Yes sir,” Brady said. “Should I take him out?”

“No, for fuck’s sake, don’t kill anybody,” Colding said, shocked at how quickly Brady considered lethal force against a friend. But Brady was thinking like a soldier. Colding needed to think like that as well. If Tim really had taken a payoff from another biotech company, or far worse, he was working with Longworth’s special threats biotech task force, there was no telling what the guy might do.

“Protect yourself,” Colding said. “But do whatever you can to avoid
shooting
him, okay?”

“Yes sir,” Brady said, his voice crawling up another pitch in the excitement.

“Gunther,” Colding said, “get Andy up and tell him to guard the rear airlock. If Tim’s outside, I don’t want him getting back in. And get the internal cameras working.”

“Fuck, man, I don’t know how to do that.”

“You told me you’d studied up on the system, goddamit!”

“I know, I know! My bad, but I can’t fix it now. You want me to go outside and search as well?”

Colding punched his leg in frustration. Gunther was too busy writing his fucking vampire romance novels to do the homework that was expected of him. Colding’s own fault, really, for taking Gunther’s word for it instead of riding shotgun. “Just stay in the control room and get it fixed.”

“Yes sir.” Gunther’s face disappeared from the screen.

Colding jammed his feet into his boots, then reached into his nightstand, pulled out his Beretta and popped out the magazine—full. He made sure the safety was on before he shrugged on his parka. He quietly opened his door and cautiously checked the hallway. Seeing no movement, he headed for the main airlock.

THE ADMIN SCREEN listed five errors.

Jian’s fingers danced across the keyboard, calling up menu after menu, or trying to—most of them were blocked. Her access code had been erased. She had to move fast. Whoever was doing this wanted to wipe out the research. Something had taken out the satellite uplink, so she couldn’t even do an emergency data-dump to Genada headquarters in Manitoba. On top of that, the hacker had already erased the off-site backup drive.
Erased it
. The only remaining active data set was in the main drive, located right under her desk in the bioinformatics lab. Jian had caught the attack on that drive, intercepted it in midstream and countered it. If she had been sleeping they would have lost everything the God Machine had produced since Bobby Valentine brought the latest samples.

And that would have been disaster indeed … because it was
finally
working.

She split her focus between wiping out the last vestiges of the rampaging computer programs and watching the God Machine’s readout. She would handle the other problems as soon as she could. Fixing the cameras would be a snap, but she didn’t know what was causing the hangar temperature to drop. Someone had manually shut off the radiant heaters, but why?

The God Machine interrupted her thoughts with a cheerful chime that sounded horribly out of place considering the current situation. Jian looked at the upper-middle-left screen, the one that showed the new announcement.

Ninety-five percent. She had done it. Whatever it took, she had to protect this data set.

HE HUNG IN that space between conscious and unconscious. Bits and pieces came back … a sound, his name, the shitty taste in his mouth. Andy Crosthwaite just wanted to stay asleep.

But that rotten cocksucker Gunther would just
not
shut the fuck up.

“Andy, come on, wake up!”

The only light in the room came from the vid-phone, which was damn near blinding to Andy’s squinting, sleepy eyes. The phone’s screen showed that dickhead Gunther looking like he needed a bathroom pit stop pronto before he dropped the Hershey squirts in his pants.

“Gun, don’t you have a fag novel to write, or something?”

“Andy, I’m not kidding, get your ass up now.”

“Fuck off.”

“Get
up!
Tim’s sabotaging the place, you need to guard the back door!”

Andy reached out and put the vid-phone facedown. Then he put his spare pillow on top of it. It didn’t drown Gunther out completely, but Andy was a very sound sleeper and it would be enough.

“ANDY, YOU SHITHEAD, wake up!”

The feed from Andy’s vid-phone had gone black. Gunther started to scream again, louder this time, when motion on another monitor caught his eye.

The hangar.

“Brady! Brady, come in!”

“Easy, Gun! This headset is
inside
my ear, okay?”

“Right, sorry.” Gunther continued in a calm voice. “Infrared shows the
cows in their stalls in the hangar, but there is a person moving by the vehicles.”

“Just one? You’re sure?”

Gunther looked again. The black-and-white monitor showed heat in white, cooler colors in gray shading to black. Aside from the cows and the mystery heat source, he saw only Brady, moving from the satellite dish toward the hangar’s front door. “Confirmed, just one target. Gotta be Tim.”