Out of the corner of her eye she saw some movement.
Evi dove through the window, seeking cover behind the concrete planter. She hit ground on top of a pile of black lacquer slats as bullets tore through plastic foliage. Before she could get oriented, the firing ceased, punctuated by a solid thump and the rustling of fake foliage. The smell of fresh canine blood filled the air.
She cautiously got up and looked around.
Laying face-first in a fake palm was an Afghani merc missing most of the back of his skull. Walking into the building behind him was Huaras clutching the other commandeered Mitsubishi.
She looked at the one-eared rabbit and asked, “Where’d he come from?”
Huaras gestured at the rank of elevators lining the wall to the right of the lobby. “Got here, just. Think maybe he check on why other two dogs no longer talk on radio. No?”
“Think he got word to the other dogs?”
“No way we know. Think not.”
Nohar followed Huaras into the lobby. “Where from here?”
Evi walked over to the desk. “We stay here for a few minutes. Cover the elevators, both of you.”
On the desk were two dead security guards. She rolled the bodies off the desk as she moved behind it. The guards never even had time to draw their weapons.
“Price,” she asked over her mike. “Where’re the aliens being kept?”
“Sublevel three.”
She looked over the vid displays set into the desk. Many showed snow. She kept hitting keys, changing cameras, until she got a picture showing Afghanis on it. “Sublevel three,” the camera said, “maint corridor five.”
It was a war. The camera was aimed down the length of a concrete corridor, toward a steel vaultlike door. Trapped in front of the door were easily a dozen humans, security guards and scientists, wielding handguns. The humans were using crates and overturned lab carts as cover. Three of them were on the ground and looked dead.
Pinning the defenders down were six or seven Afghani canines. The dogs had ripped a fire door from somewhere and were bracing against it as they swept wave after wave of machine-gun fire past the humans.
As she watched, a human wearing a lab coat jerked backward and sprayed blood on the vault door from a wound that sprouted in his chest.
“Price, I’m looking at a camera pointed down maintenance corridor five straight at an airlock-looking door.”
“That’s them,” came the response over her earpiece. “Fitzgerald wanted them in their own environment, 2.25 atmosphere—”
“All I want is another way in, Price.”
“Blocked?”
“Yes, damn it, it’s blocked!”
“Let me think—”
“We don’t have time—”
“Isham,” Nohar yelled back at her. “One of the elevators is moving!”
“If it’s a dog, shoot it.” She looked at that end of the lobby as Nohar and Huaras leaned up against the wall on either side of the moving elevator. The elevator was coming from the sublevels. “Price,” she yelled.
“I don’t have the floorplan memorized. Give me a minute.”
Evi looked up and the elevator was on sublevel two. She looked down at the monitor and saw that another human had fallen, as well as one canine. She began switching cameras at random, looking for another way down there.
“The methane jet,” Price said over the radio.
“What?”
“There’s this massive flame-jet set up in the center of the alien habitat. All the works for it are a level below—”
“How do we get there?”
“Same as the air lock you’re looking at, but a floor below.”
She punched up a camera and looked at a view labeled. “Sublevel four, maint corridor five.” It was the twin of the one where the battle raged, but empty of people, canine or human. If they could get there before the Afghanis plowed through the humans—
The elevator dinged.
She ducked behind the desk and covered the doors with her Mitsubishi. The elevator doors slid open reluctantly. Nohar and Huaras were leveling their weapons when Evi could see inside the elevator.
It wasn’t carrying a dog.
Erin Hofstadter bolted out of the elevator. Huaras and Nohar both hesitated as the round German economist ran past them. He didn’t seem to see either of them as he headed straight for the doors.
Evi leveled the Mitsubishi and yelled. “FREEZE!”
She could feel her finger tighten on the trigger even as Hofstadter stopped moving. It took a great effort of self-control not to shoot her old boss.
Hofstadter turned around, “Isham?”
“Grab him, Nohar.”
Hofstadter started to back away from the advancing tiger. “What the hell is this, Isham?”
She couldn’t help grinning. “It’s poetic justice.”
“You work for the Feds.” He was turning red. From exertion or anger, Evi couldn’t tell. “What’re you doing with a gang of moreau terror—”
Nohar put a massive tawny hand on Hofstadter’s shoulder. The economist gasped when it happened. It looked as if he tried to shrink away from the contact, but the tiger kept a solid grip on him.
Evi walked around the desk. Fear, that was the overriding smell that floated off her old boss. He was sweating, and the white shirt he wore was drenched. From him, she could smell traces of bile and ammonia. With all the anger that was swelling in her, all she could think to say was, “Any nonhuman with a gun is a terrorist to you.”
The fear got worse, and Hofstadter’s face was purpling, “You’ve turned.”
She took her right hand off of her weapon and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. His soft flesh crushed under her hand, and he was thrown against the tiger, spitting blood.
“How dare you!” She yelled at him. “You turned against your government, and then you turned against your own conspiracy.”
Hofstadter was on his knees, sputtering. The left side of his face was discolored and swelling and it looked as though he might have a broken cheekbone. She could smell urine. Hofstadter spat up blood. “So you’re—” He gasped and clutched his chest. “Kill me, too?”
“I should—” She leaned in and realized that Hofstadter did not look good.
“Time, it is short, yes?” Huaras said from behind her.
No time for personal business. “Hofstadter, look at me.”
He turned. His eyes were bloodshot, and he had trouble breathing. He still clutched his chest.
“Are the aliens still in the habitat, Hofstadter?”
He started laughing. It started as a giggle and moved up the scale to a desperate grasping wheeze.
Then he started choking, doubling over as he clutched his chest. He collapsed at Nohar’s feet. Evi dropped her gun and turned him over. Hofstadter stared up at her with an expression somewhere between a smile and a pained grimace. He sucked in a shuddering breath and whispered, “Ten minutes and no aliens.”
Evi stopped as she was unbuttoning his collar. “There’s a methane—”
“Yes.” Hofstadter wheezed and closed his eyes.
Evi looked up at Nohar. “I hate explosives.”
Chapter 20
“Not good, we leave, yes?” asked Huaras.
“Damn,” Evi said. “Drag him out of here. Wait back at the vans.”
They picked up Hofstadter, who had lost consciousness. As they left, Nohar looked back over his shoulder. “Isham?”
“Move!” she yelled back at them. She headed for the elevators.
Hofstadter said they had ten minutes. She was confident she could disarm any explosive that Hofstadter could have rigged. The problem was getting there and finding it.
“Price,” she called over the mike as she waited for an elevator to reach her. “Give me the a
ccess codes for the sublevels.”
Price gave her two sets of six numbers, one for the elevator and one for the air lock on sublevel four. “I don’t know if they’ll work. They’re my codes and I—”
“They’d better work, Price.”
An elevator dinged into place. The door slid aside, stopped as the lights in the lobby flickered, and resumed opening the rest of the way. “Price, before I drop out of radio contact, where would you hide a bomb around that methane jet?”
“What?”
The doors started closing.
“Never mind,” she said as she slipped inside the elevator. The voice of the elevator was repeating the phrase, “. . . stairs in case of fire. Elevators should only be used by emergency personnel . . .”
The voice pickup was dead, so she keyed in her destination manually, along with the six-digit security code. The elevator descended.
She passed the third sublevel and the lights flickered again and went out. Emergency lights came on. Apparently the fire in the administration building, probably Hofstadter’s work, had finally nuked the power grid for the complex.
If Hofstadter had been right, she had all of eight minutes left.
She wedged her fingers between the doors to the elevator and pushed them apart. Her left shoulder felt it, even under the anesthetic. With the door open, she could hear gunfire on the third sublevel. The lower halves of the elevator doors leading to that sublevel were riddled with bullet holes.
She kneeled and tried to separate what she could see of the doors for the fourth sublevel. They came apart reluctantly. The ceiling of the fourth sublevel only cleared the floor of her elevator by a meter. She rolled out.
Emergency lights cast a stark white light on the bare concrete corridor. To her right the corridor shot a straight twenty meters to an airlock door. Above the airlock a red light was flashing some kind of warning.
She looked to the left. Ten meters away she saw a canine coming out of the door to the fire stairs.
Evi rolled back to take cover in the shaft. She grabbed one of the elevator doors and swung inside. The bottom of the elevator brushed her hair. She didn’t hear any shooting. The dog might not have seen her.
She hugged the wall of the shaft, one hand holding on to the door for dear life, her left hand clutching the Mitsubishi. Her feet were half-hanging off of the girder that ran across the shaft, level with the corridor’s floor. She looked down the shaft behind her and saw three more sublevels before it ended in a flat slab of concrete.
She was breathing hard and beginning to sweat. Her pulse throbbed in her neck, and the copper taste of panic soured her mouth.
This dog could be point for a recon team, looking for another way in to the aliens. There could be as many as five of them if her original estimate was correct.
The smell began to drift toward her. She could distinguish two separate canines before she heard the fire door swing shut.
Six minutes left.
She could hear a dog talking on the radio, in Arabic. “. . . similar air lock design, no defenders. We’re going to—”
Her eavesdropping was interrupted by the abrupt return of power. The elevator began to descend.
She began crouching as she lost clearance. Her footing began to slip.
With a meter and a half left, she bolted. She leaped back into the corridor, turning to swing the Mitsubishi with her bad arm. She sprayed the corridor and prayed that she hit something.
The silenced Mitsubishi made a sound like someone jackhammering mud. Both dogs were taken by surprise. She managed to get one in the abdomen. Then she landed on her ass, and as she slid on the concrete floor, her remaining shots hit the ground at the other’s feet. One canine folded, collapsing in a heap, while the other took cover behind a large pipe that ran floor to ceiling. That one crouched and snapped off a burst.
She still slid across the floor. As the dog shot at her, she felt something like a sledgehammer hit her left arm. The impact tore the gun from her hand and rolled her over. She came to rest by the wall opposite the elevator in a slick of her own blood.
The elevator dinged and its doors closed.
The wound was a burning pressure in her bicep. Most of it hid under the effects of the painkillers that already doped her arm. But she knew it was a bad hit, because she couldn’t move her arm anymore.
The canine was getting out from behind the pipe he was using for cover. He pointed the Mitsubishi at her as he crept over to his partner. She supposed she looked dead.
He turned to look at his downed comrade.
Evi used that break in the dog’s attention to draw the Smith and Wesson from her shoulder holster and pump three shots. Two hit the canine in the face. The dog hit the ground before the cannon shot echoes died.
Five minutes.
She didn’t have time to look at her arm. She got to her feet and ran for the airlock door. She had to holster her automatic to operate the keypad. “The code better work. Price.” Price didn’t hear her; the few tons of concrete above her had killed her radio.
After she entered the code, it took the computer an inordinate time to respond. After a short eternity, the door slid aside, revealing a square chamber beyond, with a smaller door on the opposite wall. Red lights flashed at her from the corners of the air lock. She stepped inside and the door started sliding shut.
It stopped when the power died again.
“Shit,” she whispered.
Next to the opposite door was a glass-covered recess. Beyond lie glass was a red lever. The writing on the glass said “emergency release.” She punched in the glass and pulled the lever.
The door cracked open, filling the air with a high-pitched whistling. Wind razored by her, trying to scour her skin with windblown sand. She had to hang on to the lever to remain upright as the door continued to slide away. She closed her eyes and turned away.
The air that blew by her, trying to force her down, was hot and moist. It would have been saunalike if not for the smells that seared her nose. Bile, ammonia, sulfur, brimstone, lava. Molten smells, diseased smells.
She hung on to that lever for thirty seconds as the pressure equalized between the two environments. When she could face into the chamber beyond, she had only three minutes to find Hofstadter’s bomb.
The chamber beyond the air lock was cylindrical. The ceiling sloped upward into an irregular concrete cone. At the apex of the cone was a roughly circular hole about two meters in diameter, beyond which shone red-green light. A massive network of pipes snaked upward in the center of the room, terminating in a flared nozzle that stopped about a meter short of the hole in the top of the cone. The methane jet.
No fire shot out the top of the nozzle though. Instead, Evi heard a steady low hiss. The wind from the pressure equalizing must have blown it out. The nozzle was now pumping methane into the room.
Where did he stick it?
When she didn’t see it immediately, she had a fear that Hofstadter had planted it on the floor below, where the pipes seemed to originate. She told herself that if she didn’t find it in sixty seconds, she’d run and take cover in the stairwell.
When she circled the base of the pipes, she saw it. A small brick of plastic explosive and a small electronic timer/detonator. The timer said that Hofstadter had overestimated the amount of time they had.
The display had already rolled over to under a minute. She had forty-eight seconds to turn the thing off. She ran up to the pipe and instantly realized that Hofstadter was taller than she was. The bomb was out of her reach.
She could see it clearly, nestled between a thin pipe that seemed to be part of the ignition system and one of the big gas pipes. She grabbed the smaller pipe and pulled herself up to within reach.
It was a standard timing element. An idiot-proof detonator mass-produced for the defense department. Nothing exotic, but she had expec
ted as much from Hofstadter. If Hofstadter had been an operative and not an economist, she wouldn’t be down here risking this.
The trigger didn’t even have a motion sensor. The extent of its booby-trapping capability was the ability to send a triggering spark into the explosive block if the wires were pulled out prematurely.
The little timer window rolled over into the thirties.
She tried to find footing, but her feet kept slipping on the base of the pipes. Damn it, all she had to do was hit the reset button on the thing. It wasn’t brain surgery. All she needed was to get her hand free.
The timer hit twenty-nine.
She looked down at her wounded left arm. The jumpsuit was wet with her blood from the shoulder down. She tried to move it.
The painkillers lost their effectiveness. Not only her shoulder burned, but there was a white-hot poker twisting in her bicep. Sweat stung her eyes, but she saw her arm move. She raised her shaking arm as lightning flashes of pain shot up her arm to settle into her gut. Every pulse of her heart ground a branding iron into her upper arm.
It seemed to take much longer than twenty seconds to raise her arm to the bomb. However, when her hand reached it, the timer still had nine seconds to go.
She blinked the sweat from her eyes and saw that Hofstadter had broken off the reset button.
“You BASTARD!”
Six seconds. Evi wrapped her hand around the detonator and hoped that Hofstadter’s primitive method of protecting his device meant that he wasn’t technically adept.
Five seconds. She knew she was going to die. She could taste it in her mouth, feel it breathing on the back of her neck.
Four seconds. “If this doesn’t work, at least I’m the one who did it.”
Evi ripped the detonator from the block of explosive. When she did so, her grip slipped and she fell backward. Even as she was in the air, she knew that it had worked.
To booby-trap the detonator the operator had to crack the case and wire a jumper inside. Hofstadter didn’t have the time or the technical inclination to attempt that.