The Exodus Towers (62 page)

Jenny stared at him, her face a sudden mask. She blinked, as if hearing his command a second time and still not believing it. The other operators were still, too. Even the nurse froze his work at Russell’s order.

“Relax, we’re not going to go all kamikaze on Darwin. We’re going to survive.”

“Sir,” Jenny said, “it’ll take at least an hour to clear everyone from the slice bulkheads. Eight hours to have the station prepped for null gravity, minimum.”

Russell shot her a glare that cut off the argument. “How long does it take if you throw every goddamn safety reg out the window? If you wanted, say, to save all our lives.”

She swallowed, gave him a terrified nod, and began to enter the instructions. “I need your code to authorize it,” she said after a time.

“ ‘Sex machine.’ ”

Jenny looked at him, an eyebrow arched.

“Yes, my code is ‘sex machine.’ Keep staring at me like that, love, and I’ll prove it.”

Jenny glanced down at her screen and tapped in the code. Warning lights began to spin. Klaxons wailed.

From the hallway outside came the sound of emergency bulkhead doors closing. More noises came from under the floor, inside the walls and ceiling. Water pipes sealing themselves, Russell guessed.

“Warning,”
a pre-recorded voice said over the station intercom.
“This station is about to experience null gravity. Stow nonsecured objects immediately. All noncritical personnel …”

“Everybody better hang on to something,” Jenny said. “Killing spin in five, four, three …”

“You,” Russell said to nasal-boy. “Count off the minutes till those climbers get here.”

He nodded, his face white as a bedsheet. “Uh. Nine minutes.”

“Jenny?”

She’d finished her countdown. “We’ll clear the cord in … eight,” she said. As her words came out the sensation of gravity began to fade.

A mug on the desk next to Russell began to drift upward, as if he were levitating it with his mind. Scissors from the nurse’s first aid kit began to float out of their compartment, followed by a stack of bandages that splayed out like a deck of cards.

Across the room, random items began to rise toward the ceiling as if ascending to heaven. Then the station lurched. The walls creaked, and in the same instant there came a chorus of surprised gasps from those in the room, the hall outside. Russell gripped the arms of his chair. Though brief and gentle, the pulse of acceleration still sent every floating item hurling across the room. Flotsam smacked into people’s heads and rattled against the wall to Russell’s left. A framed picture on the wall shattered when someone’s forgotten headset smacked into it, shards of glass expanding into a cloud around the frame.

“Everyone cover yourselves,” Jenny said, sounding on the verge of tears. “Reverse thrust coming.”

Russell cringed. “Can you cancel that?”

“What? Don’t stop?”

The plan formed in Russell’s mind like a Darwin thunderstorm. He felt it before he could see it. “Cancel it. How much fuel do we have?”

Jenny glanced at her screen. She tapped a few icons. “Retro-burn canceled; station is adrift.”

“Good. How much fuel?”

“Very little. A typical station reposition, if there is such a thing, requires only six brief thrusts. Detach, stop. Reposition, stop. Attach, stop. Of course, I’ve only done this in simulation, but the reserves allow for maybe seven or eight reposition maneuvers.”

Russell tried to think of alternatives, knowing there were none. Grillo had pulled off an incredible coup, if the station
reports were accurate. Alex Warthen conveniently left on the last climber before the attack. Russell was alone. He’d lost Darwin willingly, fooled himself into thinking he could get it back. He’d alienated himself from the Orbital Council with such success that Alex Warthen had needed to sit him down like a delinquent schoolboy, for which Russell rewarded him with a reinstatement of sorts.

All he needed to become the true reincarnation of Neil Platz was a bullet between his own eyes. His kingdom had shrunk to this tin can, one marvelous whore in his bedroom, and stubborn delusions of revenge against Tania Sharma.

“Russell?” Jenny asked. “What do we do? Where can we go?”

Vary the pattern
.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” he said, and glanced at the girl.

She stared at him, a mixture of hope and fear in her wide eyes. Everyone stared at him.

“Save the fuel; we’re going to need it,” he said. “We go to Brazil. To the colony, and trust in the kindness and mercy of Tania Sharma and Zane Platz.”

Cappagh, Ireland

Date imprecise

T
HE DOME RATTLED
as if the very planet below it had cracked open.

Fist-sized chunks of earth from the lip of the pinnacle broke away and fell. Skyler’s foot slipped in the ascender and he kicked hard to keep his toes within the loop.

Vanessa’s scream below turned into battle cry, followed by the rhythmic hammer of gunfire. Her weapon chattered in short bursts. Once, twice, then a third time, each a split second apart.

Ana screamed, her voice a mix of terror and warning.

There came another sound, a new thing that Skyler couldn’t comprehend. Below, a swarm of distinct thrumming objects could be heard, emitting an almost electrical hiss, each at its own frequency.

Skyler fought the urge to look down, because the creature in front of him held his gaze with an absolute promise of death in its bloodshot eyes. Tangled strands of greasy gray hair hung across the subhuman’s twisted face. Its nostrils flared. Its cracked and blistered lips were slightly parted, revealing a filthy mess of gritted teeth. Soiled clothing still clung to the creature’s muscle-corded body. Scrapes and scabs littered its arms.

Its hands and feet were in a perfect row across the front lip of the alien object upon which it perched. Twenty cracked and jagged nails, the middle portion coated black, in an uneven line like some kind of saw blade.

The creature grunted at him. Skyler saw white knuckles
on those toes, and the black-covered fingers curled almost imperceptibly as they tightened against the alien object. He saw a slight coiling motion of the body and the lowering of hips, and he did the only thing he could think do to.

He ducked. The subhuman pounced.

Skyler’s chin hit the edge of the rocky pinnacle, sending a jolt of pain up through his jaw and into his skull. He tasted blood.

The creature aimed where Skyler’s eyes had been. Instead of colliding with Skyler full in the face, it found air and landed with just its knees on the pinnacle. Its abdomen slammed into the top of Skyler’s head and, for a split second, he thought it would go over and fall to a quick death. Instead, a hand somehow found Skyler’s chin and it clamped down like a vise. Black fingernails dug into his cheek, stinging as if electrically charged, as the weight of the creature went beyond the lip of the pinnacle. The legs went up and over. The other hand found Skyler’s shirt and gripped desperately as the subhuman’s entire body flipped around.

Skyler grunted with the sudden addition of weight. Just above his waist, the ascender’s tension lock gave a little squeak with the extra strain and the rope that ran through it slipped a few centimeters. He tugged the rope near the grapple on pure instinct, a mistake in hindsight. Both of their bodies now pulled on the grapple. The foot he had in the ascender buckled. He yanked his head viciously to the right in an effort to dislodge the fingers that still clawed at his cheek. Pain seared his flesh as the nails were wrenched away by the motion and the creature’s hand, now free, fumbled for new purchase as the subhuman swung from the hand that held a fistful of Skyler’s shirt. A heartbeat later the free hand clasped onto his leg behind the knee, twisting him awkwardly, one foot still clinging to the ascender for dear life.

The creature roared.

Skyler looked down, arms on fire as he struggled to hold the rope.

In that instant he saw something below that defied explanation.
Something so far out of his experience that his mind practically refused to register it.

The red and blue surfaces that had filled the craters on the dome’s floor were rising up in amorphous blobs that were somehow solid and as ephemeral as mist simultaneously. Some, those of red hue, had already completely vacated their former holes in the ground and were tearing around the dome’s floor with astonishing speed. They
flowed
from one position to the next, surfaces stretched forward in almost smoky tendrils as if they were somehow incompatible with the atmosphere in the dome, and so they couldn’t simply move through the air but had to somehow filter through it. Their movements generated the quasi-electrical hum Skyler had heard, and when they came close to one another the noises built rapidly and then discharged as if they repelled one another.

The subhuman still roared, and Skyler’s mind snapped back into focus. He saw bared teeth, head and neck coiled back, then snapping forward to bite at his thigh. Skyler reacted on pure instinct and thrust his knee up as the teeth bore down.

His knee met the creature’s jaw with a sickening crunch that Skyler felt as much as heard. The sub’s jawbone cracked. Its eyes rolled back in abject pain.

Only when Skyler’s hands suddenly slipped on the rope did he realize his mistake. The leg he’d thrust to block the attack had been the one in the ascender. Without a foothold, his already burning hands and arms had to support all of his combined weight. Weight he hadn’t the strength to bear.

Nor, it turned out, did the grappling hook. He heard it pull free and scrape across the pedestal before he registered the fact that he was falling.

Skyler cried out, held the rope out of sheer survival instinct, as they fell away from the spire toward the humming red forms below and the rattle of Vanessa’s weapon.

Melville Station

4.DEC.2284

T
HE HULKING FORM
of Platz Station appeared on proximity radar a day earlier, approaching in an orbit equal to what its altitude had been above Darwin.

All attempts at contact failed, though Tim never stopped trying. With a full day to prepare, Tania took the precaution to move all nonessential staff down to Belém, or up to Space-Ag 1. If the incoming station showed signs of altering course, turning itself into a giant battering ram, they’d have plenty of time to evacuate the remaining people.

A larger concern was if the goal was to ram the thin cord of the Elevator itself. The facility was too big and moving too slow to sever the cable like a knife, assuming such an action was even possible. But no one knew what would happen if it simply crashed into the alien cord. The mass of an entire space station pushing against the cable might fold it in half, pull it loose of its anchors, or send reverberations along the entire length that would wreak havoc on everything from Black Level down to the climber port in Belém.

Just in case, Tania had all stations on standing alert to detach and clear. Technically, none of them actually touched the cord.
Attached
was simply the term used when they were positioned with their center ring around the thread. Attaching or detaching required the retraction of special movable bulkheads aligned in a slice along one edge of the station. For most this meant that a gap five meters in width would be created, then closed again once the facility was centered on the Elevator.

Platz Station, like all others, could do this. A key design feature that allowed the stations to be manufactured and assembled in a central location, then moved into place as a whole. Even rearranged later.

Tania sat in front of a widescreen monitor and watched the facility grow ever larger. A half-consumed avocado lay on a dish beside her, along with a cup of water. She sipped the cool liquid and set it back down, her eyes never leaving the screen, even when she wiped sweat from her brow.

“You can hit the showers if you want,” Tim said behind her. “I’ll monitor this.”

Tania turned and smirked at him. She’d come straight from her sparring session, part of the training regimen Karl insisted she begin if she intended to make any more forays outside of Camp Exodus. Her instructor, one of Karl’s old “cleaning crew,” taught in the Krav Maga style and had no problem pushing her to the limit.