He brought his right hand up close to his face and opened it, keeping it cupped around the thin strip of serrated metal he’d grabbed from the workbench when Scott had taken him down. He could recall only vague snatches of what he had told Albright under the influence of whatever drugs they had pumped into his body, but he was fairly certain he had gone into detail about the Repository, elaborating on the few details he’d already given them.
Mitchell twisted around on his narrow cot until he lay facing the door. If he didn’t escape, he would die – and soon.
Mitchell unfolded himself slowly, grimacing with pain while keeping his fist tight around the blade.
Do it now
.
He kneeled by the door, pressing one temple against its cool metal, as if momentarily resting h head there. He used one end of the blade like a screwdriver, slowly working out one of the screws securing a thin metal plate to the door frame.
His palm started bleeding where it clutched the serrated length of the blade. He put the strip down and clenched his bleeding hand for several seconds, swearing under his breath until the worst of the pain had passed.
He started working again. It was funny how things turned out, because the locks were cheap and shoddy crap, the result of some budget-cutting exercise. Fortunately for him.
He took a fresh grip on the blade and started working at the screws once more. After fifteen or twenty minutes of labour, he had removed four of them, but the plate wrapped its way around to the other side of the door frame, where it was presumably held in place by more screws.
Mitchell dropped the blade and took a grip on the loosened plate with the fingertips of both hands and started to pull, grunting with the effort. The metal was thin and malleable but even so it took a considerable effort to bend the plate back aside and expose the delicate electronics beneath. He fell back and massaged his injured hand for a minute, before pulling himself up close to the task once more.
He studied the exposed electronics with a practised eye, then, working carefully, used the tip of the blade to tease a single wire loose, the thumping of his heartbeat increasing to a roar between his ears. He meanwhile took extreme care not to touch any of the circuitry connected to the alarm system.
The door clicked loudly, and swung inwards. Mitchell let out his breath in a rush. He hadn’t even realized he was holding it in. He stepped out into the corridor and listened carefully, but there was no sound of anyone approaching. He began to walk, slowly at first, then more quickly, the tiles cold and hard under his bare feet. His injured hand throbbed against his side, the blade held in the other.
Halfway along the corridor, he came to the stairwell leading down to the garage. At the bottom he found a door with a security keypad, where he tapped in a standard override code, then watched with relief as it clicked open.
Mitchell continued down the rest of the stairwell below, noticing the lights were on and the van had been lowered to the ground. A tool bag had been dropped next to one wheel, and the door on the driver’s side stood open. He stopped and listened for a moment, but heard and saw no one. Even so, he ducked down to take a look under the vehicle, in case someone was standing on the far side. Seeing nothing but the other side of the garage, he quickly heaved himself up and climbed inside the van, pulling the door shut.
He barely had time to think any further, when the door was suddenly ripped from his grasp. He heard a muttered curse, in the same instant that a fist struck him on the side of the head. Mitchell raised a hand to try and defend himself, moving with the same inexplicable speed as before. Bright pain flared through his body, leaving him helpless, but out of the corner of his eye he saw that his assailant was Albright’s assistant.
Scott dragged him roughly out of the seat, and Mitchell landed hard on the garage’s ccrete floor. His assailant leaned down and took hold of Mitchell’s head, apparently preparing to smash his skull against the concrete.
It was a sign of how badly the cryogenic process had affected his thought processes that he only now remembered the hacksaw blade still gripped in one hand. He drew it straight across the bridge of Scott’s nose, then watched as the other man screamed and leaped back, his hands clasped to his face.
Mitchell managed to stagger upright and then over to a workbench. Taking hold of a heavy wrench, he gasped as Scott wrapped one arm around his neck from behind. Mitchell swung the wrench wildly around behind him, hearing a wet thud as it buried itself in the side of Scott’s head.
It was Scott’s turn to stagger, collapsing against one side of the van. Mitchell leaned over him, his breath rasping, and struck him a second, then a third time. He was lost in a black fury, and blood and hair spattered across the grey concrete before he finally let go of the wrench. He wiped one trembling hand across his mouth, then forced himself to look away from the devastation that was the remains of Scott’s face.
He headed over to the garage doors and pushed them open, still gasping hoarsely. Brilliant sunlight spilled across the concrete as he gazed out at the same buildings and the airstrip he’d viewed from his cell. The Rockies stood blue and hazy on the horizon beyond the airstrip. He’d never seen anything more beautiful.
The anger had felt good, even cleansing. Mitchell worked at regaining some semblance of calm, all too aware of how lucky he was that nobody had yet noticed his escape from the cell and sounded the alarm.
He stepped back to the van, and rummaged around in the rear until he found a set of overalls. He pulled them on quickly. They were baggy and loose, but a lot better than the paper blues he’d been wearing before.
Mitchell got back in the cabin and touched the dashboard, listening with satisfaction as the van’s engine vibrated with latent power. He tapped a softly glowing panel and the wheel unfolded from its slot, the vehicle reconfiguring itself slightly in order to accommodate his smaller frame. He took a grip on the wheel and steered it, slowly, on to the narrow road that ran beyond the garage.
The other Mitchell, the one who’d been kept under sedation ever since he’d been brought back from Site 17, was still locked away in another facility near Omaha. And the only one who could possibly have got him out of there, he realized at last, was himself.
But first he was going to need some help.
Flathead Lake, Montana, 29 January 2235
By the time late afternoon of the next day rolled in, there was still no sign of Dan returning. Missoula wasn’t much more than a couple of hour’s drive away, and the spring floods had abated, leaving the roads clear. When e way began to darken, Jeff had already started to assume the worst.
He had packed only those items he considered essential into a light backpack he normally used for making short treks. Anything else, he abandoned in the cabin’s bedroom. He passed Dan’s wand over the contents of the backpack several times, listening carefully with satisfaction to the device’s monotone beep every time it fried another locator chip. After that he pulled on his hiking boots and stepped outside to stare across the lake, which was spread out below him like a great dark mirror, bringing back unpleasant memories of Site 17. The sun had finally slipped below the horizon, staining the upper slopes of the mountains across the valley a fiery red. It occurred to him that this might be the last time he would ever set eyes on Flathead Lake.
Whatever might happen next, he wanted to fix this memory in his mind.
Jeff listened to the sound of birds calling to each other across the waters and wondered what he should do next. Besides the crude car-jacker gear Dan had left him with, he had a spare pack of contacts he hadn’t yet registered. He could get by with those for a while, but Dan was right in one regard: they’d never be enough to get him past Array security.
He realized, with a start, that the lights of a car were now moving along a highway running parallel to the far shore of the lake. He watched for a few moments, then activated his UP for maybe the hundredth time, to see if Dan had left any kind of message.
Bright lines of text floated before him, suspended in the night air. There was a message all right, but it wasn’t from Dan. It was, he realized with a shock, from Mitchell Stone.
Jeff swallowed hard. He hadn’t seen or heard from him since Mitchell had been medevaced back to Tau Ceti, disappearing into the ASI’s maw as mysteriously as he’d reappeared in that chamber of pits.
He opened the message and read it:
Need to speak with you and any other members of TC sci-eval teams urgently. Am in North Dakota. Where are you?
Indecision flooded over Jeff. Mitchell Stone had been . . . if not exactly a friend, at least someone who had sided so strongly with the sci-eval teams that he’d run the risk of court martial. But he was also part of ASI Security, the same people Dan was sure were trying to kill them. So who to trust?
Jeff hesitated a few moments more, then made a decision.
Near Flathead Lake in Montana
, he sent back. Then added,
I’m here with Dan Rush
.
He waited, but an immediate reply clearly wasn’t forthcoming.
He glanced back down at the lake below, and saw the car had now taken the turn-off from the highway and on to the narrow road that circled the lake, coming his way. Maybe, just maybe, this was Dan.
Jeff tried to follow the progress of the car’s lights as it appeared and disappeared between the tree trunks crowding the slo of the hill beneath him. He could just make out parts of the sharply winding road that switched back and forth up the steep incline towards his cabin. He watched with mounting tension as the headlights approached the nearest switch back turn.
Hope finally gave way to a desperate paranoia. After all this time, the chances were good that this was anyone but Dan.
Jeff pointed his index finger towards the car, thumb cocked, and quickly drew a circle in the air with the moving car roughly at its centre. His contacts responded by projecting a bright pastel circle against the dark outline of the mountain slope, moving along with the headlights despite the intervening trees, while retrieving whatever public information might be available about the vehicle’s occupant or its registration. Nothing came back, but he hadn’t really expected it to.
The best thing to do was not to take any chances, so he hurried back inside the cabin and grabbed hold of the backpack. He could always hide out somewhere nearby until he saw who got out of the car. He hoisted the rucksack over his shoulders, remembering to pick up the car-jacker chip only at the last moment.
The fireplace still glowed fitfully in one corner. He’d added wood to it in just the last hour. If there was anyone inside that car looking to hurt him, they weren’t going to have too hard a time figuring out he’d only just departed. There wasn’t much he could do about that, so he quickly pulled on his gloves and ordered the cabin to turn its lights off, before stepping back out into the frigid evening air.
Jeff jogged along the gravel path fronting the cabin until he reached a flight of steps leading towards the summit of the hill. After ascending the first few dozen steps, he stopped and looked back in time to see the vehicle pull into the driveway.
As two figures got out of the car, Jeff felt a tension at the base of his spine. He reached out again, drawing a circle with them both at its centre. This time he enlarged a single frame of the two men at maximum magnification, until he could see their faces more clearly.
It took a second for his contacts to process the data, and he studied the faces of the two men, who were now approaching his cabin. He recognized neither. One had sandy hair that flew about his forehead when the wind caught it, while his taller companion, thin as a rake, clutched a lightweight suit jacket around his shoulders. Neither of them was dressed for the freezing weather.
Jeff’s teeth chattered, not entirely from the cold. He watched them confer for a moment, before they stepped up to the door of his cabin. The shorter one held in one hand what might be a weapon of some kind.
Jeff continued watching as they stepped inside, light flooding on to the gravel a moment later. With a sudden terrible lurch, he remembered that the contacts containing the stolen database were still hidden in the tool shed behind the cabin.
He gripped the wooden hand railing running alongside the steps, and swore quietly.
How
could he have been so stupid?
He saw the cabin door swing open once more. After a moment, the bright beam of a torch flicked first across the driveway, then up towards the path on which he stood watching.
Suddenly galvanized, Jeff hurried further up the steps, taking them two or three at a time. After ascending a short way, he came to another trail encircling the summit of the hill. He jogged along this second path until he found another clear view down through the trees, to where he could see a tiny wharf jutting out into the waters of the lake, where some of the local residents kept their boats moored.
He pulled himself up and over the low wooden railing, whose purpose was to keep summer hikers from tumbling down the hillside, and started to make his way down the steep slope, navigating between dense clumps of pine and fir. He could make out the dark masses of granite outcrops to either side, while far below him lay a relatively smooth grassy slope extending most of the way down to the shoreline. Assuming he didn’t take a tumble, he could make it to the wharf in about ten minutes, or fifteen at the outside.