Haywire (19 page)

Shaking his head, Alex said, “You need to do what I asked, Lieutenant. The information you and your people get out of those witnesses might end up being what breaks this thing, so I need you up there to make it happen. I also need you to send some officers out to Dr. Campbell’s. It’s possible whoever is behind this might have gone there, and we need to know if they did. Don’t worry about me – I’m armed and armored. You do your job, and I’ll do mine. Now go.”

Neither man looked pleased to do as they were told, but after several looks and sighs, Beddor and Ritchie made their way back the way they’d come. Over his shoulder Ritchie said, “If I don’t hear from you in ten minutes, Agent, I’m coming down there, and I’ll be bringing every person I’ve got with me. Forget that twenty minutes crap.”

Alex would never have said it out loud, but the police officer’s words made him feel better. He knew he was being reckless in going alone into a potentially deadly situation. But, in the back of his mind he saw Alicia running scared and hurt. Wanting to save her from that drove him harder than he would admit even to himself.

“
Understood, Lieutenant. Good luck.”

“
You too,” Ritchie said as he rounded the corner and disappeared.

Alex stepped forward until he was in the middle of the lift, and then turned about. “What are you doing, you dummy?” he asked the emptiness.

“
I’m wondering the same thing,” Isabel replied.

Alex wanted desperately to laugh, but the tight knot in his gut wouldn’t let him.

“
And for the record,” Isabel continued, “I agree with Lieutenant Ritchie. You shouldn’t be going down there alone. Once the doors close, we will lose contact. It’s your decision though. Just press the ‘Down’ button in front of you. And please, be safe.”

He nearly laughed at the computer’s sentimentality as he pressed the button. His stomach lurched as the elevator dropped into the moon. To fill the time Alex reached to his right hip and unclasped the strip of material that held his pulsed-energy gun in its holster. The small readout showed a full charge in the battery clip. He then made sure it was set to an output level low enough to render targets unconscious, and not dead. Now armed and ready, he backed away from the doors and waited for them to open.

Thirty seconds later, as the wall before him parted, a dusty, poorly lit entry room appeared. On the floor was a set of tracks that led to the right. There were too many footprints to know exactly how many people had been there. Further out, other tracks heading left. The air smelled of old books and rotting cloth, and beneath it was a scent he couldn’t recognize but that churned his stomach. From the scuff marks on the floor, going down the right hallway seemed like the proper flow of events.

A low level hum he more felt than heard sat like a heavy blanket over everything. Other than that, all was silence. He thought of the tombs he used to read about when he was a kid, his head filled with dreams of hacking his way through equatorial jungles in search of lost cities.

As the footprints led further away from the elevator, the strange scent became stronger and more foul, like sewage and decay. He slowed his walking and put his left shoulder against the wall to make himself as small and off-center a target as possible. Ahead of him the footprints turned into a room on the left. When he was near the open doorway he stopped and concentrated on his hearing, but there was nothing other than his beating heart. He gave himself a five count before rushing around the doorway with his gun out in front of him.

Inside the room was a scene of carnage unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. Half a dozen bodies were laid out on the floor, all of them sliced open and sitting in pools of blood, some cut entirely in half. Organs were spilled onto the dusty floor like a slaughterhouse, and the smell of piss and shit clogged the air so thick he could almost see it. His stomach flip-flopped violently, but he swallowed and held his gorge in check. Barely.

Beyond the bodies, piles of dust sat along a wall that held multiple columns of stacked canisters. Most of them were still in their racks, but the column to the far right was ripped open, and one of the containers was missing.

Knowing he needed to document everything as well as he could, Alex pulled out a small recorder. He ran its lens over the room while dictating his thoughts and observations.

“
There are six dead bodies, all of them dressed in delivery uniforms. Some of them are wearing holsters, and there are several guns on the floor, along with… are those whips? Yeah, metal whips. Most likely electric. There are scorch marks on the walls indicating shots were fired. What a goddamn mess.”

Once every face was photographed and prints were scanned, he turned and exited the room. He followed the boot prints that led back the way he’d come, and then deeper into the dim corridor. As he walked, his recorder beeped, and in the view window he saw it had picked up traces of blood on the floor. He took samples before moving on. Again he put his back to the wall and walked with slow, deliberate steps. Twenty meters past the elevator, a large open door on his left. Silence continued to reign. He peered around the doorway, but no movement caught his eye, so he raised his gun and crept in.

At the far end of the room was a large device, but what it had been built for was completely beyond him. On the left of it was what looked like a bed or slab, while on the right he saw a bank of monitors, some glowing controls, and a cavity that had been left open. Inside it was a canister like the ones in the previous room. The overhead lights flickered and dimmed, so he pulled out a flashlight and played its bright beam across the device to see what might be hiding in the shadows.

Nothing.

The text on the display monitors might as well have been written in a foreign language for all he could read it. A few lights still blinked, but he had no idea what they meant or did, so he left them alone. After running the camera over everything he stepped back and considered the situation.

“
Okay, what do we have?” he said, making sure his recorder was hearing him. “We have a mother and son, two regular people. We also have a group of criminals and what Joseph Beddor thinks might have been a Titan. Then we have a hidden elevator shaft, and deep beneath the ice we have a secret laboratory presumably put here by Dr. Groesbeck. There’s a struggle, people are killed, and then someone who’s wounded comes here. So… why? What were those guys in the delivery uniforms looking for? Maybe some old piece of Titan tech? And did they hope Alicia would be able to help them find it? Did she maybe know about this place? Who else was brought here, and what happened to them? Where are Alicia and her son now? And, if Beddor’s right and he actually saw a Titan, was the Titan with them all along, or had it been down here all this time?”

Sighing in frustration over too many questions and not nearly enough answers, Alex took pictures of the chamber and the device, poked around to make sure he didn’t miss anything, and then walked back to the elevator. There were a couple other rooms off the entranceway, but the dust on the floor in front of them wasn’t disturbed. The camera flashed a few more times, and then he reentered the elevator. The ride up felt like an eternity.

Once he was out of the elevator he activated his comm and said, “Isabel, get the Assistant Director’s office on the horn ASAP and upload my recorder data to him. Not only is this a missing persons case, but now we can add murder and possible theft of illegal technology to the mix.”

“
Right away, Alex,” Isabel replied. “I’m glad you’re back.”

“
Thanks. I also need you to contact the traffic controls for both the spaceports on the moon. They need to be shut down immediately. Whoever was down there is probably trying to get away as we speak, and if we want to have a hope in hell of stopping them we need to close off their access to transportation quickly.”

Alex didn’t wait for his A.I. assistant to respond before he started making his way back to the upper levels. He trusted her to do the tasks he’d given her promptly and efficiently.

“
Alex, I’ve sent all the data we have to Assistant Director Anderson. His office is on the line waiting for you.”

He pressed a button to call the freight elevator. “Good. Once I’m done with the AD, get Mr. Robert Campbell on the line. I don’t know what I’m going to tell him, but he’s Shawn’s father. I’ve got to tell him something.”

Alex lapsed into silence, mentally chewing all the different things he could say, and not liking the taste of any of them. “Remember when I said we needed more action around here, Isabel?”

“
Yes.”

“
I take it back.”

The Alliance Security Agency headquarters wasn’t a secret facility. The large domed building sat on the surface of Luna as bold as brass. Beneath it, buried in the regolith, was a collection of offices and meeting rooms, all well documented and unclassified. But, at the end of corridor G-12 was a door not mentioned on any blueprint, and leading down from it was an elevator few knew existed. At the bottom of it, teams of silent people worked with the focus of arc welders at computer station after computer station. There were no outbursts here, no wasted motions. Order was maintained at all times and at all costs.

When an intensely working data analyst lifted his head and called for his superior, Lieutenant Zaki moved with haste.

“
What do you have?”

“
Sir, Fenrir has detected a hit on code sequence India-Oscar-Niner.”

Zaki’s mind rifled through all the codes his department used on a regular basis and came up blank. He then dug deeper, every neuron firing as he worked through lesser used and older codes. When he finally got a hit, his brain lurched – Titans.

“
Pull up the log,” he said as he leaned over his subordinate.

On the computer display was a comm channel report from an Alliance Agent to his Assistant Director on Minerva Terminus, Jupiter’s primary orbital station. The report concerned a recently opened investigation at the Groesbeck Museum. An encrypted file was attached to the transmission.

“
Open that file.”

The staffer launched a decryption program that laid the file bare in nanoseconds. Zaki’s eyes roamed across the exposed text and pictures rapidly, every pixel sending a jolt down his back. By the time he finished, his heart raced and a layer of sweat chilled his forehead.

“
Very good,” he said, straightening up quickly. “I’ll track this from here. Forward it to my terminal and reroute all future hits there.”

“
Sir, yes, Sir,” the staffer replied as he hit a series of keys.

Lieutenant Zaki turned and walked back to his station. He had calls to make to offices that were well above his pay grade. His pulse hit harder with every step he took.

“
Oy, ya right cocker, keep it togetha!” Captain Millie Finnegan shouted at the control panel in front of her.

The freighter’s old engines and creaky hull shook Shawn so violently he thought his very atoms would break free and fly away. It was the most brutal takeoff he’d ever experienced in his life, and considering how often he’d flown that was saying something.

Ahead of him, in the pilot’s seat of the
Bonny Lad
, sat Captain Finnegan, her cloud of bushy red hair spreading like a fire around her chair’s headrest. She cursed – or he assumed the strange words were curses from her tone – as she flipped switches and strained against her control stick. Shawn had never seen so many flashing lights and readouts before.

He turned his head and looked at Artemis sitting a meter away on his left, then to his mother on the right. They were the only people on the bridge beside the captain; the rest of her crew were at their stations.

The Titan was having a hard time of it. Her armor, from what little he could see of it around the collar of her borrowed spacesuit, pulsed as it struggled against both the shaking and her infection. Sweat beaded along her brow and upper lip. Her hold on her condition was fragile, and he hoped she could hold out a little longer. If the captain saw it, the questions that followed wouldn’t be pleasant.

“
We’re nearly gone,” Finnegan shouted over her shoulder. “Give me another minute and we’ll be right as rain.”

The
Bonny Lad
continued to shake as the freighter rocketed away from Callisto, and Shawn wondered if there was a rivet or screw left in it that wasn’t loose and rattling around. At any moment it would burst apart at the seams and send them flying into the dark. But, true to the captain’s words, the chaos soon ended. The weightlessness of space was nearly as shocking as the violence that went before it.

Finnegan reached to her left and flipped a series of switches. “Right, that should do ‘er up. The Minerva Terminus is dead in our sights, and it looks like the queue to get through the Hygeia conduit’s a quick ‘un. We should make good time. Yer all free to unstrap and knock about if ya like, though try not to biff any switches, yeah?”

Shawn reached down and pressed the button that released his seat harness. He heard his mother do the same to his right. Artemis, though, didn’t move. Instinctively he moved to get up and float over to help her. Before he could move a centimeter, her eyes opened and she glanced at him. The look on her face was pained and desperate, but she shook her head.

“
No, don’t. Even with this suit on you know it’s not…”