Hellhole Inferno (11 page)

The maintenance woman was adept, hardworking, and reliable. When Laderna met her in the small, rented hotel room, the woman was furtive and nervous. She brought images of the full floor plan of the institute, blueprints of ventilation systems, electrical grids, even a time chart of security personnel. “I brought you everything I could get hold of. It took a great deal of searching. Not easy,” the woman said, as if hinting at something—more pay, no doubt—which Laderna studiously ignored. She saw a list of patient designations, but without names. She could crunch the information, though, and extract specifics. Since she already suspected where Haveeda Duchenet was being held, she could approach the answer from multiple directions.

“And how do I get inside in the first place?” Laderna asked.

The maintenance woman was sweating. “That'll be harder. Every employee is coded into the security system, allowed inside only during designated shifts. A palm-print scanner verifies my identity before I can get through the door, and I won't be allowed to slip a second person into the facility. There are weight sensors to verify it.”

Laderna assessed the maintenance woman, confirmed that they were nearly the same size; the woman's brown uniform would fit her well enough. “I have a way around that,” she said.

After Laderna had killed the woman, donned her clothing, and gathered up her severed hand, she was ready to go.

After midnight, Laderna used the woman's cold palm print to pass through the identity scanner at the Cove Institute's rear entrance. Once she launched her operation, speed would be vital. She had no interest in covering her tracks or being subtle—she
wanted
Michella Duchenet to know that her sister had been a very specific target. She needed to work her way through the facility with all possible speed, dispatch Haveeda, and then disappear. For Ishop.

Wearing the facility's uniform, Laderna arrived at the central guard station, where she stunned the guard and disabled the surveillance system. She had memorized the floor plan, the blueprints of the systems, and had crunched through the patient IDs; she was convinced she knew where the Diadem's sister had been held all these years. It was probably a tiny, pampered apartment in the facility, someplace where Haveeda could cause no trouble. Laderna planned to put an end to her as quickly as possible. She moved on to her target.

In her plan, she had timed every movement, and had very little room for error or delay. She would depend on speed, brashness, and accuracy; she would do it alone.

This time, she used the guard's severed hand to get through heavier security, sliding aside a thick metal door to a windowless section. Yes, Haveeda must be in here. Laderna needed to hurry, finish her task, and be away. Afterward, she already knew how she would disappear.

Inside the high-security section, she found herself in a small entrance foyer, with cubicles containing lab equipment, cleansuits, and protective magnifying goggles. At this late hour, no one was around—the maintenance woman's schedules had been accurate. Inside, she expected to find one or more confinement cells for patients of the sanitarium, luxurious rooms for the highest-priority, wealthy but disturbed guests. One of them was the Diadem's sister.

She passed through a second doorway and heard a strange silence, an electronic barrier that dissolved when she touched an identity scanner. Inside, additional doors each had a control panel. Her pulse quickened as she went to the first one. The data image on the screen provided the patient's name and brief personal history, but this was not the name she wanted. She kept moving from door to door until she found Haveeda Duchenet.

This door had a simple manual mechanism that locked from the outside. Laderna had expected something more complex and secure; if Haveeda became violent she could probably have broken through the simple lock. Considering all the other precautions, Laderna found it a curious lapse.

She pulled the door open to feel a blast of cold vapor, as if Haveeda's room was highly refrigerated. Inside, she saw no distraught patient, no sleeping woman on a hospital bed, no well-appointed apartment … merely a sealed tank in the center of the room. Fascinated, she stepped over to it.

With growing confusion, Laderna wiped sparkling frost from a curved observation panel, and to her surprise she saw a woman lying inside, preserved and frozen. Her eyes were open, staring straight up. It was the Diadem's sister.

She had expected to find Haveeda held as a prisoner, but not
this!
It was shocking, but nevertheless she had a job to do, an important accomplishment to impress Ishop. The problem was, how could she kill a person in suspended animation? Cutting off the medical monitors and life-preservation systems … not as dramatic an end as she had hoped for, but the result was what really mattered.

She noticed a small access port on the side of the tank, as well as a pair of insulated gloves. She reached for the gloves, sure she could accomplish enough damage if she wrecked the life-support and monitoring systems. This was not a mission for subtlety; in order to make Ishop's necessary point, others needed to
know
what had happened to Haveeda.

Just as she reached inside the cryo-tank, she heard a noise behind her. Three guards burst into the room and tackled Laderna, slamming her to the floor.

 

14

While the walumps intrigued Enva Tazaar, anthropologists had apparently grown bored with them. The native creatures were enigmas, but at the end of the day, not all that interesting. Enva found it amusing that the creatures were so preoccupied with themselves, unaware of and uninterested in the tumultuous events out in the galaxy. It made them seem either enlightened or oblivious.

On a day off from her clerical job, she took her easel and watercolor paint supplies she had purchased in town. A tribe of twenty walumps had built mud huts on the edge of the paved landing zone. Three nights previous, they had erected huts right in the middle of the pavement, but the administrator's office—on Enva's recommendation—dispatched dozers to knock them down and clear the area. Some dozer drivers yelled at the walumps, who paid no attention as their huts were destroyed. They simply rebuilt them the next night in the same place, and they were plowed down again the following day.…

Enva dabbled with her watercolors to capture the walumps. The creatures shuffled in slow circles near their huts, but she couldn't discern any particular interactions. Enva painted them, capturing their noble innocence, their primitivism. It was a good day.

Enva had always fancied herself an artist. As the daughter of Lord Azio Tazaar, she'd had everything she could want, creating exotic aerogel sculptures. She liked the design and the curves, and played coy when critics asked her what the sculptures meant. Because of the power of her noble family, her aerogel sculptures had sold for high prices, and many lesser nobles showed their support for Lord Orsini by purchasing his daughter's art.

When Enva Tazaar took over the family fortunes and expanded Orsini wealth and influence, she'd donated one of the aerogel sculptures to the Sonjeera palace, part of her campaign of trying to convince old Michella that she, Enva, would be a better successor than the evil Black Lord.

She had lost that gamble, though. Lost everything. And the fact that Enva now felt content to relax and paint, with no political purpose in mind, worried her. She didn't want to disappear into obscurity. If she wasn't careful, she might put her ambitions aside, make excuses for one delay or another.

She needed to move further in her career in the administrator's office, making herself not just excellent, but indispensable. For days, Karlo Reming had been agitated and intense, and she'd not seen him like this since she started to work as a meek functionary. The administrator had been conducting many private meetings and had asked her and Maruni Li to keep a tally of the space traffic to Tehila with a paranoid attention to detail. He took a particular interest in scheduling the normally lackluster crews that manned the two stringline terminus rings in orbit—one connected to the iperion route to the Hellhole hub, and the second, embargoed one, that went back to Sonjeera.

Enva's instincts told her something was afoot. Working in the administrator's office, she interacted with dozens of bureaucrats, some wearing business attire, others in paramilitary uniforms that weren't quite the same as those of the General's Deep Zone Defense Forces.

The Candela refugees were crowded into communal prefab dwellings, but they caused little trouble despite cramped living conditions. She thought those people were still in shock from their ordeal. They had few amenities, but other habitation complexes were under construction, so they knew their circumstances would improve. Original Tehila colonists, though, seemed unhappy about having to provide for all these unexpected new settlers.

In studying the space traffic patterns as she was instructed, Enva had noted an interesting new arrival. A trade ship flying in from the Hellhole hub carrying supplies and colonization equipment earmarked for the Candela refugees—and the pilot and copilot were listed as Ian Walfor and Tanja Hu. They asked for no special treatment, but Enva recognized their names. She assumed Reming would want to know that two former planetary administrators had come to Tehila, where they could be of great help organizing and caring for the refugees. But for some reason the pair had chosen to arrive without fanfare. Very odd. Maybe Hu and Walfor wanted to keep a low profile. Perhaps it had something to do with Administrator Reming's plans, whatever they were.

As a woman who had created many schemes herself, Enva could see telltale signs of what Reming was doing, though she didn't understand his goal. She decided that some information was best kept to herself. She had no particular loyalty to the Tehila administrator. In fact, in her overall scheme, she intended to supplant him as soon as possible. And Hu and Walfor might provide a good opening for her to present herself to General Adolphus on Hellhole. That could be her first step in emerging from exile.

She finished her watercolor painting and signed it “Enva,” then paused to weigh the risks, wondering if she dared put her actual surname there. But it wasn't time for that yet. Instead, she left her last name off. For now.

All afternoon as she painted the walumps, she had watched shuttles rising up to orbit. At first, she hadn't paid much attention to how many were loaded with uniformed men. She was familiar with the spaceport schedule, and now realized that at least three times as many outbound ships had departed as usual—and no returning craft had landed. She saw no downboxes arriving from inbound commercial ships. What was going on up there in orbit?

She packed up her watercolors, sealed them in her case, folded the easel, and covered her painting of the walumps and their strange huts. It was good work, but not her best.

Abruptly, she realized something was happening, though the creatures didn't react. Enva looked around, her brow furrowed. She saw vehicles racing across the paved landing fields. They were loaded with armed men and women, and they swarmed toward the barracks where the General's DZ Defense Force soldiers were typically quartered. Several privately owned ships were on the ground. More trucks rolled around the perimeter, securing the spaceport.

Enva stood with her painting gear, watching. Just a bystander. The uniformed men and women looked at her as they drove by, as if assessing whether she was a threat.

Then she received an urgent summons from the administrator's office on her private comm. All employees, without exception, were to come to the mansion immediately. “No one is excused.”

Enva stashed her art supplies before making her way over there. As she raced up the mansion steps, she saw wide eyes and frightened expressions among her coworkers. They were confused and frantic. Men and women in security uniforms locked offices and stood guard. Others took custody of a yelling and indignant man.

“What's going on?” Enva asked.

A female office worker rushed by, too harried to pause to give an answer. But Enva reminded herself of who she really was and used a crisp commanding tone to demand a reply. The woman stopped and turned. “There's been a purge! Administrator Reming has taken over, severing ties with the General's loyalists!”

In disbelief, Enva pressed for more information, but the woman said impatiently, “All employees are required to check in at the administrator's office and have their IDs verified. You'll get your answers there.” She ran off.

Enva hurried to Reming's primary office. She tried to imagine what kind of coup had occurred, what the man could be thinking. She heard snippets of conversation, but none of it made sense. A guard scanned her ID, checked her name off a list, and frowned at her. “Administrator Reming has been waiting for you. There's much work to do—he needs competent people to help.” He ushered her inside the main office.

Reming looked up when Enva entered. His face was florid, the bags under his eyes seemed lifted now. He was excited. “Ms. Lien! There's so much chaos right now. I need your help organizing things.” He grinned. “I have good news for all of Tehila.”

Maybe not everyone would consider it good news, she thought. “I heard something about a purge, but I don't understand.”

“After today, we return to the good graces of the Constellation. We're no longer at war or under threat. I've torn Tehila free from the General's rebellion. We never wanted any part of it, and now we're safe from retaliation. We don't have to live in fear anymore.”

In the office, Enva recognized the people with whom Reming had engaged in his surreptitious scheming. One reported, “All DZDF soldiers have been confined to barracks. We've rounded up the known Adolphus supporters and locked them up.”

Another said, “The Sonjeera stringline terminus is ours and secure, Administrator.”

A transmitted report blared over the speaker in the office. “Hellhole stringline is also secure. One casualty, an Adolphus supporter who tried to blow the terminus and kill us all. We stopped her.”