Approaching Oblivion (Jezebel's Ladder Book 4) (16 page)

“Aren’t
you afraid of bumping into Nadia? She’s hunting snakes around the Hollow while
it’s still too cold for them to move.”

The
idea of Tasering the other woman to test the new tools flitted briefly through
her mind. “Not at all. In fact, I welcome any constructive encounter we might
have.”

The
weather outside was still a bit brisk, but the residual chill gave her an
excuse to run all the way to the computer lab with the equipment she needed.
After tinkering for a while, Yuki successfully tested the jerry-rigged Taser on
low power. Building up enough for a full zap would take another twelve hours.

She
managed to get the paint from the second gadget to shoot a couple meters out,
but the force used every gram of paint and propellant. A light shade of café au
lait now splattered the wall of the lab. “Sorry, Sojiro, it’s for a good
cause.” She’d try to use as few of the color cartridges as possible.

That
night, Park fixed her shrimp tempura, complete with shaved onions, carrots, and
broccoli. Lou called it a “full court press” when he smelled the food frying.

“What
do you mean?” she asked while Park was away borrowing something from Sojiro.

Lou
smiled. “Come on, Yuki. He wants to give you every reason to say yes to his
proposal. He never cooks, and he was humming tonight.”

“Before
I can answer him, there’s some girl stuff I need to talk to Yvette about
tomorrow.” Maybe she could force Snowflake or the robots into solving a few
mysteries.

Wednesday morning, Yuki
kissed the sleeping Park on the cheek and crept from their room. She stopped
only to pick up the picnic basket with her specialized gear and a few snacks.
However, she was so nervous about the upcoming meeting that she skipped
breakfast to reach the chapel ahead of Yvette. A little warmer in the habitat,
there were signs of renewed life on this trip—rabbits, new grass shoots, and
even a line of bumblebees crawling out of a crack in the barn rafters. She
would have to tell Herk to smoke the insects out and move the hive somewhere
safer. They didn’t want to harm the valuable creatures because they pollinated
almost everything in the habitat. She even recalled a warning Einstein gave
about protecting honeybees.

A
large tarp across the front door of the barn held the heat in and kept out the
breeze. She admired the stacks of food alternating with Sojiro’s marvelous
paintings, all badges of what they had managed to accomplish since arriving in
Sanctuary
.
Yuki particularly enjoyed the rendition of Winged Victory with her face. A
glance at her wristwatch told her that Yvette could arrive at any moment. The
technician withdrew the pieces of her makeshift detector and weapon from the
picnic basket, snapping them together in a few seconds.

There
was almost no chance that any robot had snuck in here, but she activated the
pulse to make certain. The face of the chronometer turned emerald green,
meaning she had company. In response to her signal, a soft whirring sounded
above her head. She’d find the little sneak and capture it. Hands shaking, Yuki
fired the paint apparatus. She was so nervous or the connections were so loose
that all of the barrels fired upward at once.
Oops
. She worried about
how she would explain the loss of so much paint to Sojiro. This fear
transformed into panic as she saw polka dots of every hue dancing in the air
above her. She dropped the paint gun and sprinted for the exit.

She
stopped counting at four pyramid outlines hovering above her. There were
probably twice that many bumping angrily around the room. Turbines revved to
chase her. No sooner did she reach the hard-packed dirt outside than the canvas
cover billowed outward like a sail. She slapped the red button on her badge as
she ran for her life. “Help! Yvette was right.” Her badge bleeped, disconnected
from the habitat network.

Between
one step and the next, a couple floating objects lifted her centimeters off the
ground. “The hand must not be seen,” a mechanical voice buzzed at her elbow.
Other objects smashed against her, lifting her higher still.

“I’m
doing this to save Mercy. You like Mercy.” Her good arm was pinned between
floating pyramids. The robot’s surface felt like the antigravity dominoes that
lined the saucer.

Snowflake’s
reasonable voice explained, “The twisted one should save her if he remembers
the hypothalamus.”

The
formation flew her headfirst toward a rocky outcropping.

“You
can’t kill me,” she wailed.

“Appropriate
injuries will explain your memory loss,” buzzed the mechanical voice.

The
robots tried to drop her, but she clamped the magnet onto one and wouldn’t let
go. Her weight was too much for one robot to lift, but it dragged her over the
loose shale at speeds high enough to hurt. Her metal fishing line was long gone.
Still she wrestled with the invisible creature, while repeating the word,
“Hypothalamus.”

They
bounced off the weather vane of the barn, but it still couldn’t dislodge her.
After an impact with the ground, they skittered into chicken wire, which
snapped but slowed them enough that the next impact stopped them cold. When the
white cleared from her vision, she had trouble breathing, but the foul smell
and feathers told her they were in a chicken coop.

Fortunately,
the clear pyramid seemed just as damaged as she did. The whirring had changed
to the whine of an off-kilter saw blade. With her on top, the robot wasn’t
going anywhere. As the cold weariness tugged at her, she worried that she might
die before help arrived. Drawing her belt knife, she started writing a message
in the dust.

Before
she finished what she was convinced would be her final words, she saw a thin
probe extend from the point of the pyramid toward her forehead.

Shit, no
, Yuki thought. It
would not fry her and get away. As the robot made contact with her, she shoved
her prosthetic up the air intake at the bottom of the pyramid. She convulsed
from the electrode at the same instant that the revolving blades turned into
shrapnel.

****

Pain
bit her feet, but Yuki didn’t release her grip. Smoke and liquid crystal oozed
around her left arm. Afraid of acid, she attempted to pull her arm free, and a
large gem rolled from the hole instead.

She
didn’t know what she was doing on the ground, only that this glass box in her
arms was important. When she twisted to look around, her midsection screamed in
agony.
How the hell did so many shards skewer my left side?

The
air shimmered over her as pieces of the weird device were sucked up and
disappeared. It didn’t worry her until she saw her dagger float up a few centimeters
and vanish. On the ground, she saw the scratched message under her dagger begin
to smooth out like a Zen garden. The dust made her cough. Shouting for help,
she clung to the bloody shell and rolled her body over to protect a few of the
words. Moving only caused her vision to go white.

Nadia
was the first to arrive, layered with a month of dirt and discontent. “Damn
you, ungrateful bitch. I put a lot of work into that battery, and you destroyed
it in less than two days.”

“Battery?” Yuki seemed confused until she noticed that the mysterious wind was gone. “The
ghosts are afraid of you. God sent you to save me.”

The
power engineer narrowed her eyes. “Fool. I could let you bleed out and walk
back into my old life. No one would ever know. This is my land. You don’t even
have a badge. I could bury you here, and they would never find you.”

“Don’t
bury,” Yuki gasped. “Take the shell to the others. Read the words. I saved a
few.”

“This
is new Magi tech. Where did you find it?”

“I
woke up with it. Important words: invisible zero, and Toby hypothalamus.”

“Bah,
you’re delirious,” Nadia grunted. “You are bleeding everywhere on my coop. I
will call the doctor to clean up this mess.”

Yuki
grabbed her rival’s ankle with her good arm. “Please,” she said with a cough.
“Don’t leave me. I don’t mind dying, but the ghosts will eat what’s left if
you’re not here. You can have everything back when I’m gone. Stay.”

As
Nadia stared at her and the underside of the pyramid that Yuki hugged, her hate
appeared to waver. Over her badge, she broadcast, “Doc, Yuki looks like she
fell down the mountain. She took out the top of the barn and my coop on the way
down. She has abrasions, rock fragments imbedded in her side, and a head
wound.”

The
Russian woman made her own sweater into a pillow for Yuki and started cutting
clothing away from the wounds with her snake-killing blade.

Herk
arrived at a run, and the nurse wasn’t far behind. “Put down the knife,” he
ordered.

“Shut
up. See this.” Nadia kicked the almost empty, graffiti-covered, armor shell
with her foot. “She discovered something on the mountain someone did not want
her to find, and she almost died bringing it back.”

Yuki
could finally let go. She had beaten the ghosts.

****

Seeing
the extensive damage, Yvette realized that Yuki wouldn’t survive without her
help. No one injury was fatal in itself, but there were so many. First, she
collected blood from Park, who was the best match for Yuki’s type. When that
wasn’t enough, she borrowed some of the blood Mercy had donated for the Caesarian
section. Eventually, both she and Toby had to assist as Auckland performed
surgery. Because the only room large enough to hold all the equipment and
personnel was the Olympus storage room, the nurse had to concentrate on one
instrument at a time to avoid her own internal screams.

Standing
for so long during the surgery had cost Auckland dearly. He collapsed on a
crate near the patient. “I’m going to fall asleep with my scrubs on if we don’t
talk to the planners soon. One of you should give the briefing, and I’ll just
nod.”

Yvette
entered the command room but left the door to the storage area open so the
doctors could hear.

Zeiss
decided to record the findings so the others in the crew could hear the facts
without all the witnesses repeating themselves. Red pulled up a date and time
stamp on the overhead bubble. When people gathered, she started the recording,
listing the date, time, and those present. Cutting to the heart of the matter,
Red asked the nurse, “Are we going to need to kick Mercy out of the freezer?”

“Not
yet. Physically, Yuki should be stable as long as there’s no infection.
Mentally, it’s another story.” Yvette took a moment to gather her resolve.
“There are burns on her forehead and mild swelling in her brain. The Magi
device has a pseudo pod that matches the pattern of the burns. Nadia can attest
that Yuki has developed a fear of the Magi, and I don’t blame her. At the time
of the attack, she was on her way to meet with me. In her call for help, she
said I was right about something. We’re hoping she’ll recover enough to tell us
what. Herk is searching the mountainside for signs of the attack site or her
badge. No word so far.”

“What
the hell was that thing we found with her?” Red asked.

“Nobody
knows, including Yuki,” the nurse replied.

“The
armor is translucent, like our windows in Olympus,” Nadia interrupted. “When I
found the shell, it was clear and had a slight energy residue. Now it is dead.”

“It
changed states when the power faded,” Zeiss guessed. “How did it die?”

“We
need to analyze further, which is difficult without all the pieces,” Nadia
explained. “Something erased most of the evidence before I arrived. It even
pulled the fragments of the material out of her wounds. The one piece of glass
we recovered was stuck in the wood of her prosthetic. When I first looked
inside the shell, I saw energy trace moiré patterns consistent with one of my
nanobatteries detonating. I’m guessing the bitch was tough enough to get in the
last word.”

“Sounds
like you respect her a little now,” Red noted.

“We
Russians don’t always get along, but when someone invades our homeland, we pull
together to make them pay. She took these injuries for our whole team.”

“What
was she fighting and why?” the commander demanded.

Yvette
said, “Yuki has no coherent memories of the Oblivion system or even receiving
her new prosthetic.”

“Traumatic
amnesia?” asked Zeiss.

“That,
or the Magi gave her electroshock to erase something.”

Red
rolled her eyes at the paranoia.

“Does
she remember me?” asked Park, horrified.

“It
would serve you right to learn what it is like for someone to just forget you
one day, too,” Nadia grumbled.

Yvette
put a hand on Park’s shoulder. “She asked for you earlier, but there’s been a
side effect from infusing her with Mercy’s blood. Yuki was the only woman on
the team without Collective Unconscious. She’s been resistant to the talent so
far.”

“I
thought that was because my own talent was so weak,” Park said.

“Being
a spy, Mori chose someone with certain antigens to prevent casual infection. He
didn’t want her sharing information with our team accidentally,” Yvette said
carefully. “Forcing the talent into her by transfusion may have temporarily
caused as much confusion as the head trauma. She’s raving with paranoia, and I
didn’t want you to see her like that. We had to sedate her.”

“The
paranoia may not all be baseless,” Nadia said. “Yuki wrote an important message
to make certain we would get it. I even had Herk take a picture. I carried the
shell to the cart while we lifted Yuki. When I ran back to shut the coop,
something had wiped the letters clean.”

Red
sighed. “It’s called wind, people. No conspiracy there. I’ll just pull up
Herk’s photos of the scene.” Chicken tracks, and tiny stones covered every
square centimeter of the yard except the space beside Yuki’s body. Here, the
image on the screen was blocked by a close-up of Herk’s thumb. Red laughed
nervously. “He used to make that mistake all the time.”

“Not
for years,” Zeiss said. “The last time he did that was for a group photo of his
bachelor party.”

Red
changed directories and pulled up the picture her husband had mentioned. The
thumb positioning was identical. “Coincidence.”

“Getting
rid of loose ends so the lab rats won’t suspect,” Yvette countered.

“What
did it say?” asked Zeiss calmly.

Nadia
shrugged. “Her writing was so smeared, I couldn’t tell, but she told me the
important ones: invisible zero, and Toby hypothalamus.”