The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

  If only she could do something. If it weren’t for that damn gun.

  “Scott Fitzgerald,” she heard the creature say.

  It crossed her mind that it was about to go through that whole speech again for the professor.

  Not even close.

  “You help in locating our four others. For that you are thanked. Your purpose for the Race and the Octal is served. We allow Dimitri to deal with you as he sees fit.”

  She got a ten minute speech. Fitzgerald got barely ten seconds. She supposed that it was poetic justice. She’d been duped; Fitzgerald apparently, had sold everyone out.

  Fitzgerald backed away from the pit. He opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. He began to shake his head violently.

  “No!” was what finally came out. “Not after all—” He broke off choking on his own words. Evi turned toward him and began to realize what must be going through Fitzgerald’s head. His life’s work had led up to this point, and he’d just been dismissed as so much extra baggage.

  He might have wanted what the aliens were offering her.

  If she could, she’d trade places. Alien larvae or not, she thought she could take Dimitri in a fair fight.

  Fitzgerald was backed all the way to the cone. “I will not let you do this to me.” Then he surprised the hell out of Evi by jumping Dimitri. The doctor was still in the air as Dimitri turned the Mitsubishi around to empty half a clip into his chest. Fitzgerald jerked and fell face-first onto the smooth concrete floor with a dull wet thud.

  The bubbling around the perimeter of the chamber increased in volume.

  Evi was primed for action. The second that Dimitri turned the gun away from her and began firing, she jumped. She was much faster than Fitzgerald, faster than Dimitri. She got behind him and lowered her arms over his head, to pull the chain on her handcuffs across his neck.

  Dimitri was trained. He saw her arms lowering and in the split-second he had, he raised the Mitsubishi up to his neck. Her arms met the hard resistance of the submachine gun’s short barrel, and the impact sent a shuddering flame of agony down her left arm. Dimitri’s right elbow slammed into her abdomen, awakening deep bruises left there by Sukiota’s interrogation.

  She slammed him face-first into the concrete cone. She felt an explosion in her left wrist; the cuffs were becoming burning brands.

  Dimitri jerked against her, rotating. He was now turning to face her, and the gun had come loose. She was no longer clamping on the vulnerable portion of his windpipe; her hands were feeling the back of his head.

  They were too close together, leaning by the side of the cone. Dimitri was pushing against her with his knee, trying to clear a space to point the gun at her.

  She glanced up at the jet of burning methane shooting out the top of the cone. He glanced up there, too.

  “No,” he said.

  Evi clamped her forearms tight on either side of Dimitri’s neck, under the jawline, her hands entangled in his hair. The effort of tightening the muscles flamed up her arm and blurred her vision. She wanted to scream or pass out. She let herself scream.

  She put everything she had into the lift and the swing, all the rage, all the pain, all the strength she could squeeze out of her genetically engineered muscles. She could almost hear the bicep in her left arm tear as Dimitri’s hundred kilos left the ground. As her forearm brushed the lower edge of the methane flame, every nerve in her shoulder was flayed open and ignited as her shoulder redislocated.

  When Dimitri’s chin caught on the lip of the gas nozzle, she couldn’t hear his screams over her own.

  She hung on to the back of his neck, arms on either side of the concrete cone, as Dimitri’s face was forced into the fire. His arms flailed widely on the other side of the cone, clawing at her arms. He stared at her through the blue-green flame, and she stared into his eyes as his face reddened, blackened, melted . . .

  Evi closed her eyes.

  Dimitri stopped struggling.

  It took her five minutes or longer to disengage herself from the body. She had to slowly pull her arms over Dimitri’s head, and that hurt, especially because the insides of both forearms were badly burned. The only reason she didn’t burn herself worse when disengaging herself was because, when she pulled on the back of Dimitri’s head, it nodded forward and plugged the hole. That put the flame out.

  Once she got the handcuff chain over the back of Dimitri’s skull, she slid off of the cone and landed on her ass next to Fitzgerald’s corpse. Dimitri fell off of the cone in the opposite direction.

  The room filled with the sound of hissing, flameless methane.

  She sat down, clutching her arms to her stomach, breathing heavily. She wanted to throw up, but her stomach was empty.

  She sat there for a long time it seemed, only aware of the pain in both her arms. She forced herself to look up. The Race were still there, unmoving, bubbling, pulsing, unaffected by the little drama that had played out before them.

  “You freakish bastards. You just don’t give a shit do you?”

  The leader, the one at the head of the spiral ramp, spoke in its underwater monotone, “Personal native arguments do not concern the Octal. We appreciate now that you step in and embrace Mother.”

  Evi got to her feet, clutching her stomach with both arms. Her laugh broke from her in racking silent spasms. “Fuck you.”

  She backed away from the pit and the hissing gas jet. “You’ll have to kill me first.” She was grinning, and that scared her. She was losing it, and it was a bad time to lose it.

  “The Race does not kill. Lesser species kill.”

  She had backed to the cart at the entrance. There seemed to be a shuffling movement along the ramp. The bubbling was deepening in intensity and increasing in volume. Both her arms were burning, the wound on her left arm had burst open and she was bleeding all over the place, and she couldn’t help laughing. “Bullshit.”

  “Evi Isham, you embrace Mother for your own good. You are wounded. You die without Mother’s aid.”

  She looked down at her arm. That was a hell of a lot of blood. There was a clear trail from her all the way back to the hissing cone. She clamped her right hand over the wound to stop the bleeding.

  The bubbling was reaching a crescendo and the leader continued. “We leave you here to decide as we handle infrastructure problems.”

  One creature, the one nearest the bottom of the spiral ramp, descended toward her, the cart, and the exit.

  Evi looked at the creature, then to the cone back in the center of the room. Flameless methane still hissed into the room.

  No wonder these things were acting nervous. Fire was one of the things Dimitri said could hurt the Race. This whole room was about to become a bomb.

  She turned to look at the robot golf cart. Electricity was another . . .

  She raised her foot and kicked the cowling off the rear of the cart. The plastic cracked off, revealing the inductor housing and the lead wires. She bent over it and grabbed an insulated wire in each hand, even though it hurt like hell. She pulled the wires away from the engine, which sat under the cart, and something out of her sight gave.

  She fell on her ass with about a meter of wire in each hand. Even though the pain in her arms whited out her vision, she managed to keep the red wire from touching the blue one. She managed to croak out, “Stop moving. I think there’s more than enough juice in this to liquefy you.”

  When she opened her eyes, the creature had stopped short of the end of the ramp. She got to her feet, hands shaking. More blood was streaming down her arm, and now she couldn’t put any pressure on it. Her left hand had stopped hurting, even though she thought her wrist was broken. Felt like it had fallen asleep.

  Slowly she turned toward the other end of the room. Yes, she had enough play in the wires to cover the end of the ramp from where she stood. If aliens started bailing from
the ramp in other parts of the room, they could make it out the other side of the cart, but it didn’t look as if they were built for jumping. “Wrong answer,” she told the head alien. “Try again.”

  “You bleed to death without Mother—”

  “You have a one-track mind. Get the picture. I’m taking your worthless asses with me.”

  The room, not just the leader who’d been addressing her, but the entire room, became silent. The bubbling quieted. Tentacles stopped waving. Undulation ceased.

  The only sound was the hissing gas from the methane jet.

  “This makes no sense. Such an ending when other options—”

  “You’ve been fucking with this planet for so long that you don’t understand revenge?” She couldn’t believe she was grinning at the thing. She was feeling light-headed and giddy. Her entire left arm was asleep now.

  There was a thudding plop and Evi turned around. One of the Race had jumped from the ramp. It wasn’t going to be much more of a standoff. They were going to rush the exit now.

  The ground shook under her feet. “What?”

  She looked back down the tube of the corridor, and she thought she could hear a crash or an explosion back in that direction.

  She turned back to the alien that had jumped the ramp. It wasn’t moving toward the exit. It had turned grayish and was pulsing quietly.

  The leader spoke again. “We reconsider our offer. Put down the wires and we discuss other options.”

  The leader sounded weak and was turning gray, too. In fact, all the creatures near the top of the chamber were becoming grayish. As she watched, a dull gray pulsing cone with five tentacles collapsed into itself and rolled off the edge of the ramp, hitting the edge below, pushing aside two grayish fellows.

  Damn, Evi thought, this might look like home to these guys, but I bet, back home, their volcanic vents don’t go out.

  The room was filling with methane and they were asphyxiating. A wave of dizziness hit her. I could use some oxygen myself.

  That started a silent laugh that degenerated into a gasping wheeze.

  She thought she could smell smoke under the sulfur-ammonia smells now. She wondered if she really heard gunfire in the background or if it was just wishful thinking.

  “We give you what you want,” said the lead creature. The pseudo-humanoid form it wore seemed to be melting into a gray slime. “Name a wish, it is yours.”

  “I want my life back, I want my country back, most of all—” She paused to catch her breath. “I want to see you dead.”

  “Isham.” Where the hell did that voice come from?

  “Isham.” The voice came again as the alien spokesman slipped off its perch and slammed into the ramp below. She looked around the room and at first saw only collapsing aliens. Then she saw Dimitri’s corpse move.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Apparently Dimitri could still hear, because a blackened skull turned toward her. Empty sockets looked for her as Dimitri’s hands groped about him. “Kill you.” It came out as a moan.

  There was no way that this man could still be alive. His face was burnt off. Despite that, he was on his hands and knees groping around.

  Dimitri’s right hand brushed the Mitsubishi.

  Evi looked from the gun to the methane jet to a few dozen gray asphyxiated aliens, dropped the wires, and ran.

  She was twenty meters down the hall before the thought struck her that if Mother’s larva were bonded to all of Dimitri’s cells, then she needed total immolation to kill him, not just burning his face. Thirty meters down the tube and she was sure she could hear gunfire ahead of her. Forty meters down the tube and she heard gunfire from behind her.

  She felt her feet leave the ground as a pressure wave blew by her. A flaming hand slammed her into the ceiling. Her last coherent thought was how much she hated explosives.

  Chapter 23

  Evi woke up in a hospital. They kept her drugged and at the fringes of consciousness for days. By the time she was conscious enough to take full stock of her surroundings, she had been there for at least a week.

  The place was an Agency hole. Evi could tell. Her room was private, windowless, and—when she managed to get out of bed once—locked. No comm. Her only contact with other people were with the doctors and nurses, none of whom talked to her.

  Go from the frying pan to the fire, Evi thought. Where do you go from the fire?

  No answers.

  She had started off in bad shape, but they gave her a lot of time to recover. One thing about an Agency hospital, they knew more about her engineered metabolism than any civilian medics—even though they pretended not to know English.

  Or Spanish . . .

  Or Arabic . . .

  Or any other language she came up with.

  At least it gave her a chance to think. And those thoughts brought a whole raft of mixed feelings. On the one hand, she’d been willing to give her life to see those aliens go down, and somehow she’d managed to see that happen and live through it. On the other hand, it was the Agency who’d done it, and that was uncomfortably familiar—not to mention that she was a de facto traitor.

  She was also their prisoner.

  Evi wondered why they even bothered with fixing her up if they were going to just disappear her.

  The more she thought about it over her days of recuperation, the more she wondered about the Agency showing up. It was so convenient, even if it had saved her life. Evi had the uncomfortable feeling that she’d been used, again.

  When the bones had knitted together, and she’d become ambulatory, she had a visitor who confirmed some of her worst suspicions.

  Evi was in the midst of a hundred push-ups—she knew if she tried anything medically objectionable, the silent doctors would come in and stop her. She’d long ago determined that even the bathroom was under constant surveillance—when the door opened. Instead of a doctor or nurse, the door let in Sukiota.

  She wanted to ask why she was still alive.

  Evi stopped her push-ups, stood up with the help of a crutch, and said to Sukiota, “Someone had to have gotten to me within five minutes, or I would have bled to death.”

  Sukiota shook her head. She was dressed in an anonymous androgynous suit; the only sign of authority was a ramcard clipped to her lapel. “We got to you in less than thirty seconds, if you’re counting from that explosion.”

  Evi shook her head, somewhat gratified to have someone here respond to her. She’d half expected Sukiota to pull the same mute act that the doctors did. “Now what? Am I under arrest? Now that I’m almost healed, am I about to disappear down some Agency hole?”

  Sukiota smiled. “Actually, I’m here to thank you.”

  “What?”

  Sukiota’s smile was surreal, as if Evi was looking into a distorted mirror. Physically they were so much alike. Evi didn’t like the fact that Sukiota’s smile looked so much like her own. “You gave my operation a chance to crack Nyogi. I’ve been trying to get approval to take them down since I started investigating the Afghanis.”

  Evi shook her head. She didn’t like the way Sukiota’s talk was drifting. “Last time you were throwing words like ‘traitor’ at me.”

  Sukiota’s smile never wavered. She took an opaque evidence bag from her pocket and began to toss it from hand to hand. “I suppose so. If it weren’t for certain expediencies on my part, the Agency would have considered you part and parcel of that extra-Agency conspiracy. The Domestic Crisis Think Tank you called it. We finished mopping it up weeks ago.”

  Evi realized that she had been here a long time.

  “Everybody?”

  “We’re checking the records, but I believe we have all but one accounted for. Of the people you fingered, Frey, Gabriel, and Davidson are on slabs, Fitzgerald is so much carbon, Hofstadter was dumped at a critical care unit in upper Manhattan in the l
ate stages of a stroke and is vegetating two floors below us . . .”

  “Price?”

  “He’s the unaccounted one.”

  Sukiota was still smiling, and it was getting on Evi’s nerves. “Did you set me up?”

  Sukiota tossed the white evidence bag up, following it with her eyes. “I was pissed with you.” She caught the bag and tossed it to her other hand. “But I needed you. You served your purpose.”

  “That whole scene in the subway—”

  Sukiota shrugged and caught the bag.

  “You bastards set me up!”

  “You didn’t do anything that you weren’t about to do anyway. I saw a good chance you’d go straight to our target—”

  “Damn it,” Evi yelled. “You knew about Nyogi all along. You could have stormed the place any time you wanted too.”

  “You know better than that, Isham. The Feds give the Agency major latitude in domestic covert ops, but Nyogi is a major corporation with major congressional and Executive support. I couldn’t get approval to go in.”

  “But you went in.”

  “After you.”

  “What?”

  Sukiota laughed. “I told you I carried out certain expediencies on your behalf. Before we let you escape, I resurrected your Agency file.”

  Evi just stared.

  “Different rules apply to hot pursuit, especially when an active duty agent is involved.”

  “You used me as an excuse?”

  Sukiota nodded. “And after we did that, we couldn’t very well let you die. That would have been embarrassing.”

  All of a sudden she had just come full circle. She was right back where she had started, an Agency creature. And, again, as always, she had no choice in the matter.

  Evi sighed. It might have been fatigue, but she felt that she had used up all of her anger. Her emotions were one vast plain of resignation. “What about the aliens?” she asked.

  “I’d say that’s on a need to know basis, but that’d be a fraud. Rest assured, the Feds are sifting through the UABT complex, the buildings at Columbia, and underneath the Nyogi tower. We’ve captured a number of aliens—” Sukiota seemed uncomfortable with the word—“and enough people and agencies are involved this time that no one is going to bottle this up.” Sukiota shook her head. “Everyone from the Biological Regulatory Commission and NASA to Defense Intel and the Department of the Interior . . . The Agency handed the alien problem off to everyone else. We’ve got other problems.”