The detonator beeped at her as she hit the ground and blacked out.
• • •
The first thing she became aware of was the pain. It felt as if someone were squeezing her arm, and every squeeze sent a wave of fire across her shoulder.
It took a second to realize that someone was squeezing her arm. Her eyes shot open. The first thing she saw was the peeper. She tried to reach for her automatic. Her right arm didn’t move.
There were three canines on her. One held down her right arm, one her legs, and one seemed to be doing first aid on her wounded arm. The peeper was leaning against the piping, holding the detonator.
“Evi Isham,” he said. “Finally.”
She looked with alarm at the dog who was tending her arm.
“Don’t worry, Sharif is an excellent combat medic.”
The dog jabbed something into the wound. Fire exploded inside her arm, burning out the inside of her skull. Her back arched, and when the pain receded, she could feel the ache of stressed muscles from her neck all the way down her spine.
The peeper gave her a lopsided smile. “I thought you’d like to experience the full effect of that wound.” The peeper pulled the collar of his khaki shirt away to reveal a puckered red scar in his neck, under the adam’s apple. “Like I did.”
The world had finally fallen in on her.
“Ironic,” the peeper said as he hefted the detonator. “You probably saved my life. I doubt the Race’s little beasties could patch me up after an explosion. It’s one of the ways you kill them.”
Sharif silently ripped what felt like a meter of barbed wire out of her arm. She turned to look at him tossing aside a few dozen strands of carbon fiber from her jumpsuit.
“What are you going to do with me?” She asked. She was ashamed of how weak her voice sounded.
“If it was up to me,” he said, looking down at her and his smile disappearing, “I’d cut out your eyes and toss you naked into the Bronx.”
Sharif finally finished his job. Evi felt the pressure of an airhypo injecting something into her arm. Then Sharif wrapped her arm in a dressing.
The peeper went on. “Unfortunately, for both of us, the Race has an interest in you, beyond the retrieval of their—” He hesitated and said the last word with distaste, “people.”
Sharif backed off of her arm and the peeper told her, “Get up.”
The canines retreated, letting her stand. The world felt oddly disjointed, as if she were watching events from a distance. She wondered if it was an effect of the pain, or hitting her head, or what they’d doped her with. They’d shot her up with something, and it wasn’t painkiller. The fire in her arm was a razor-sharp sensation, while the rest of the world seemed fuzzy and indistinct.
“Who are you?” The words came out in slow motion, as if they had to fight her tongue to get out. “NLF?”
“Move first. We’ve outstayed our welcome.”
He prodded her and she started walking. She walked through air that felt like molasses, and she couldn’t bring herself to resist the peeper’s commands.
The three dogs escorted her out the air lock and down the corridor, the peeper in the lead. The power had died, and they walked under the periodic spotlights of the emergency lights. The peeper kept talking, his voice a small rattle in a gray-cotton silence. “Dimitri’s what they call me. NLF was Hioko’s little boondoggle, before his brain had an argument with a bullet . . .”
When they reached the fire stairs, she had a brief fear that she had forgotten how to climb them. She stopped short, confused, as the peeper’s, Dimitri’s, voice faded in her awareness. Someone pushed her from behind and she had to struggle to move. It took an inordinate amount of concentration, and Dimitri’s voice kept fading in and out of her awareness.
“. . . never trusted the Race, smart move though it killed him . . .”
“. . . don’t kill you is because what the Race’ll do instead . . .”
“. . . need folks like you. What they give is almost worth it . . .”
Somehow she made it to the ground level. She was briefly curious about how long she’d been in the bowels of the UABT complex, but her time sense had left her. All she knew was that it was still dark outside, and the cargo hauler was gone.
Where was her backup? Gurgueia, Huaras, Nohar, and Fernando with his video camera who was supposed to document the aliens and the conspiracy. She remembered that she’d told the jaguar to follow wherever the aliens went; she must be following the truck.
The administration building still burned. The roar of the fires seemed to heighten in volume in time to her pulse. For some reason she couldn’t focus on the fire; her eyes kept darting after random motions, following smoke around in circles.
Someone prodded her, and she realized she had stopped moving. Dimitri’s voice faded into her awareness. “. . . not get distracted. Once you’re in the van, your attention can wander all you want.”
She nodded. It made a lot of sense at the time.
Once she settled into the seat in the van, she allowed her gaze to drift again. It took too much effort to focus her attention on any one thing. She cradled her arm and looked out the windshield. Dimitri talked on in the background, but she couldn’t keep a grip on what he said. As she faced the windshield, the van shook. That was briefly of interest, since no one had started the engine.
Glass fell from the windows of the main building, looking like black ice. Blue-green fire rolled out from the lobby, upward. It struck Evi that something had ignited all the methane that had been pumping out of that jet. She turned her head to the rear window, where, in the distance, she saw red and blue flashing lights. Police, she thought. NYPD or Agency impersonators? She didn’t know, or care.
Dimitri climbed over her and into the driver’s seat. She followed him with her eyes and her gaze rested on the back of his neck as he turned on the van and slammed on the accelerator.
As the van rocketed forward, she recorded a brief amazement at the fresh red scar under the edge of his close-cropped hair. It was obviously the exit wound from the bullet she’d placed in his neck less than seventy-two hours ago. Nothing healed that fast.
The van hit a bump and her head rolled aside. There were four Afghanis in back here with her. She wondered what these shaggy dogs thought about her. She was responsible for the death of a lot of their fellows. This breed of moreau was the least “human.” The Afghani dogs were pack oriented and had little concept of individuality. They were so well engineered for combat that they couldn’t adapt to any other environment. No room in their psyches for personal vendettas. They took orders, killed people, and usually died violently.
As the van shot through the gate and a space that used to hold a parked limousine, she closed her eyes and wondered if she should try to force her thinking into a more coherent pattern.
Chapter 21
The ride in the van was a long sequence of disjointed imagery. Evi tried to force her mind on one track of thinking. The effort had the edge of desperation, and she embraced it. The feeling of desperation helped to fight the sense of apathy that enveloped her like quicksand.
If she closed her eyes and concentrated, to the exclusion of the outside world, she could think straight.
The first coherent thought she had was that there was no way she could escape this situation while she was drugged. But the fact that she could force herself to think coherently meant the effects of the drug were waning. Her metabolism tended to race such things through her body. If she got lucky, Dimitri wouldn’t know that.
One consolation about her capture. It looked as if they assumed she was still working solo, or with Frey’s people. They didn’t seem to be aware of the moreaus; that was good. If Gurgueia followed her orders, they would track the cargo van to its destination. With Fernando, they’d complete some of the mission, getting some record of the aliens’ existen
ce on video.
Only surveillance footage of aliens being transported from point A to point B wouldn’t be as effective as their original idea of broadcasting straight from the alien habitat itself. However, it might still shake something loose.
Unfortunately, for her that was all moot now. She had hoped the plan would nullify the reasons everyone wanted her, dead or otherwise. With a public broadcast, Hofstadter couldn’t keep his secrets by killing her, the Agency couldn’t save itself embarrassment by disappearing her, and, if they’d done it right, Nyogi would have other problems than kidnapping her.
Now, it seemed, Nyogi wanted something from her, beyond getting their people back. From what she remembered of Dimitri’s speech, whatever that was, it wasn’t pleasant.
The van came to a stop and she opened her eyes. The world became disjointed again, but it was easier for her to concentrate. The van had parked in a huge elevator, easily the size of Diana’s entire loft. There was the whir of distant motors, and the ceiling was receding above her. She found herself focusing on a concrete beam in the ceiling above that must have had a cross section larger than the van’s.
She forced her gaze down, into the van. The only residents were herself and Dimitri. Dimitri was covering her with an unsilenced Mitsubishi.
Where were the Afghanis?
Dimitri seemed to notice her looking. “The canines aren’t allowed where you’re going. Few creatures are, other than the Race themselves.”
“Race?” She managed to slur.
“What they call themselves.”
She found that, with a considerable effort, she could keep her gaze locked on the peeper. “Why,” she forced herself to say, “you work for . . .” It took too much effort, she let the question trail off.
“Why’d a human turn on his whole planet?” Dimitri smiled. “Why’d a nonhuman work for a bunch of humans?”
That sliced through the fog. “I never had a choice.” Her voice actually sounded coherent that time.
“We all have choices, Isham,” Dimitri said. “Sometimes we make the wrong ones to save our asses.”
The elevator came to a halt, and Dimitri pressed a button on the dash that opened the rear door.
It wasn’t until the door opened that she realized that the air conditioning in the van had been going full blast. Heat slammed into the van in a wet, rancid blast. She turned to look out the rear doors and saw a massive room beyond. The room was a warehouse. She could see crates, robot forklifts, and cargo haulers in a massive loading dock, everything in the room disturbingly normal.
The normalcy was disturbing because the construction of the room itself was alien. The entire warehouse area was a squashed sphere, ovoid in cross section. The ovoid was maybe a hundred meters in diameter and easily twenty meters tall at its highest point. Cones projected from the walls at regular intervals, shooting blue-green jets of fire that added to the ranks of red lights that were sunk into smooth depressions in the ceiling.
This dwarfed anything she’d seen in Cleveland.
A small robot golf cart rolled up to the back of the van. Dimitri gestured with the gun. “Get in the cart.”
Dimitri stood back in the air-conditioned van and watched her from behind his submachine gun. The heat started her sweating and made her dizzy. By the time she had dragged herself to the cart, she wanted to pass out.
It had to be forty degrees down here, she thought. It felt as if she were buried under a burning compost heap.
She closed her eyes when she collapsed in the back of the cart. She could hear Dimitri walk up to her. This was the time to make a break for it, she thought. She opened her eyes and saw Dimitri standing in front of the cart as it started moving. He faced her, never lowering the barrel of the gun. She tried to sit up, and the wave of disorientation she felt when her head moved told her that at the speed she was operating, Dimitri would put three shots in her chest before she got halfway to her feet.
The cart rolled through the cavernous warehouse. The lack of right angles or straight lines in the room made it hard for her to judge distance. Holes collected in the walls in irregular groups of eight. She couldn’t tell if the openings were small and close by or huge and impossibly far.
They passed through one of the holes long before she expected to. Suddenly she was slipping through a nearly cylindrical concrete tube that was of a much more manageable scale. It could have been a storm sewer if it weren’t for the red lights sunk into the ceiling in organically smooth pits. The concrete walls were polished to a sheen that reflected light like wet marble.
They traveled through miles of sameness. The concrete tubes had branches that resembled the inside of a stone giant’s circulatory system, and the ovoid openings that broke into the sides of the tube resembled ulcers. Most of the doors showed only darkness beyond, but behind at least one she saw a pulsing white amoebic form.
The farther they went, the hotter it became.
The cart pulled to a stop when the tube emptied into another squashed spheroid. This room was much smaller than the warehouse, twenty meters across. It was big enough for the cart to pull in and circle halfway around the perimeter, around a hole in the center of the floor.
She noticed eight corridors that slipped out of the room at regular intervals in the walls. Still in a drugged fog, she couldn’t pick the one the cart had come from.
“End of the line,” Dimitri said. “Everybody out.”
As he spoke, there was a sucking sound, and a blast of cool air came from the center of the room. She looked in that direction and saw a metal lid opening in the room’s central pit. It reminded her of a trapdoor spider. Light came from underneath it, a more reasonable white light.
“That’s where you’re going.”
She looked at him. He was sweating profusely. It might be possible . . .
She stood, and the wave of vertigo made her reconsider. She climbed out of the cart, trying to be careful of her footing, and slowly walked across the too-smooth floor toward the blessedly cool pit.
When she reached the edge, she looked down. It was a steeply angled tube that quickly slipped out of her sight. It was clear she was intended to slide down it.
Dimitri waved his gun. “Go.”
She quietly told herself that, if Dimitri and company wanted her dead, they would have killed her long before now. Then she stepped into the hole, protecting her arm with her body.
Her slide down the chute was much faster than she’d expected. The vertigo returned with a vengeance, heightened by the fact that the tube was smooth and uniformly white, giving her eyes no landmarks to lock on.
The dizziness was so intense that she didn’t realize she’d passed out.
• • •
Evi opened her eyes and found herself looking at a bearded man in his early fifties. She recognized him from the surveillance footage from the peeper’s, Dimitri’s, Long-Eighties. He was the professor type, Fitzgerald, the xenobiologist.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
The quickness with which she grabbed his lapel told her she’d been out long enough for the drug to work its way out of her system. “All right?” she yelled at him. “What do you think? After you, and Frey, and everyone else screwed me over?” She pushed him away, hard, and sat up. No waves of vertigo hit her this time; for that she was grateful.
She got off the bunk she had come to on, and looked around. Fitzgerald backed toward a regular flat wall. Two bunk beds sat opposite each other in the rectangular room, and the lighting came from recessed fluorescent tubes. An air conditioner thrummed low in the background, and cool breezes flowed from vents high in the walls.
She stood in a room normal-looking enough for her to briefly think that her travel through that alien environment had been a drug-induced hallucination. It hadn’t been. She could still smell the taint of sulfur and burning methane that filtered through the o
verworked air conditioner.
If she had any other doubt, the fact that the only entrance to the room was a circular hole on the far wall between the bunks showed that what she’d seen was more than a hallucination. The drug might have played with her sense of scale, but what she had seen of the alien habitat must’ve covered several acres at least.
Fitzgerald took a tentative step forward. “Miss Isham?”
“WHAT?” She advanced on him, feeling three days’ worth of adrenaline course through her blood. “What, by the name of all that’s holy, what could you possibly have to say to me?”
Fitzgerald sputtered, “But—”
“Are you going to tell me how sorry you are? You folks didn’t mean to keep me in the dark. You didn’t mean to make me a traitor!” She pushed him to the wall with her good hand. “Or are you going to apologize for being the one to hand your own conspiracy back to the damn aliens. You were the one, weren’t you?
“How about Gabriel? How did you feel about him trying to blow me away?”
“He’s dead,” Fitzgerald said in a hoarse whisper.
“What?” She realized that she had wrapped her right hand around the professor’s throat. It dawned on her that she could have killed the man. She backed away and began deep-breathing exercises. “Who’s dead?”
“Everyone,” Fitzgerald croaked. “Gabriel, Davidson, Frey. Hofstadter tried to blame it all on you—”
She thought back over what had happened to her.
“How did Davidson and Gabriel die?”
“Their car crashed on the Southeast side of Manhattan.”
The aircar, she thought, the one that had chased her into Greenwich Village. “I’m sorry I jumped on you.”
He shook his head. “Did you kill Frey?”
“No!” She could still smell Frey’s blood, still feel the panic she’d felt then, when she first began to realize the scope of what had happened.
“Gabe and Davidson—”