The Plague Forge [ARC] (44 page)

Skadz wheeled on him, an awkward move in the press of double gravity. “Bloody hell, mate. Thanks for the downer.”

“Take it easy, Skadz,” Sam said. “He’s right. They don’t have to do anything but wait us out.”

Skadz grumbled something, then nodded at Vaughn in a silent apology.

After what felt like an eternity, the blanket of weight began to lift. An easing back to normal weight, then further still until they were floating about like balloons. Floating meant stopped, Sam knew. She glanced at Kelly. She and Skadz both were looking up at the ceiling, waiting to see if their direction would change again, back toward Earth.

The climber car reverberated as something clanged against the airlock door.

“Fuck,” Kelly said. “I’ve no idea where they brought us, but we’re docking. Get ready, just like we talked about.”

Skadz pushed off for the door, while Kelly tugged herself along the wall to a position on the opposite side. Sam moved near the back, taking a position behind the couch with Vaughn and the other prisoner, Martin. There’d been considerable debate about how to use the prisoners. Skadz had advocated lining them up in front of the door in a situation like this, forcing Grillo’s people to have to shoot some of their own just to get inside. Sam had been emphatically against this, though, and not just because of her feelings for Vaughn. She also knew what Grillo was capable of; she didn’t think he’d have a second thought about giving the kill order.

So the prisoners would be used only when the situation called for it. Traded for a resupply of air, or more likely water, given the climber’s dry state. Sam wasn’t sure what she would do if the time came to trade Vaughn away for a damn drink. She wasn’t sure what he would do, either.

A hiss of pressure equalization from the door killed her line of thought. Sam hunkered down as best she could in the lack of gravity and checked her weapon. Mentally she recounted their supplies. Six bullets in her gun, five in Skadz’s. Kelly had twelve, and of a different caliber or else she would have divvied them up. A dire situation by any measure, so they’d all agreed on the tactic required should a shooting scenario come up: Let them get close, drop the front line, and scavenge.

It all comes back to being a scavenger,
Sam thought.

Another thought came to her, like the first flash of lightning on a night about to turn stormy.
Scavengers. Could the Builders be looking for that trait? Is that what this has all been about? To find out if our species can dawdle on by picking at the remains of our cities?

She grimaced.
So what if we can?
She couldn’t imagine how that would matter to a bunch of aliens who could travel the cosmos, gift space elevators seemingly at will, and engineer pandemic diseases as well as magical fucking force fields that defend against them. What the hell would they gain by finding out if a species could rummage through its own garbage?

The hatch opened and intensely bright light flooded the cabin of the climber car. A crumpled white umbilical tube surrounded the perimeter of the door, leading straight off, though to where Sam couldn’t see from her position. She watched as Kelly stole a glance, leaning out and then whipping back into position. She repeated the motion a few times, careful to time her looks at random intervals. After four looks she turned and whispered. “The tube leads out of a cargo bay, and there’s a spotlight at the end. Can’t see anything else.”

“There’s no rush,” Skadz said. “Sit tight; let’s wait and see what they do.”

“What if they toss some tear gas in here?” Sam asked.

“That would change the equation.”

Kelly turned back toward the door, using a handle on the wall to keep herself from floating into view of anyone outside. “I say we shoot out that light. We’re blind otherwise.”

“Agreed,” Sam said.

Skadz shook his head. “Bad idea. Not until we know who we’re dealing with. They could be friend—”

A whirring sound cut him off. It sounded like an electric desk fan, and Sam braced herself. Fans moved air, and air was something they couldn’t afford to lose or have contaminated.

Seconds later an object floated up to the open climber door. It propelled itself on a half-dozen small fans mounted off a central truss, aimed in each direction to give it a full range of movement. In addition there were two glass domes, one on top and one on the bottom, with glowing red cameras mounted inside. They swiveled, taking in the scene within the compartment, and almost immediately they focused on the package beside Sam.

“Drone!” she shouted.

Skadz swung the butt of his weapon down toward the thing. Its fans ramped to full power in a millisecond and on a burst of speed it avoided his attack neatly. The cameras had not swiveled toward him, so it must have sensed the impending strike with some kind of proximity detector. He swung again, to the same result, and with each motion to avoid attack the little automaton moved farther into the cabin. The two cameras jumped from one angle to the next, taking in everything. One stopped on Samantha’s face for a half second, and she did the only thing she could think to do and extended her middle finger at it.

Then Vaughn was next to her. He’d taken his jacket off and simply floated over to the thing and gently lay the garment over the top of it. Only when one of the cameras became occluded did the robot try to lurch away, fans screaming, but Vaughn pulled the sleeves of the jacket together at the bottom and held on tight. He pushed off toward a corner of the cabin and managed to wedge the bundle between himself and the spot where the walls joined. The robot squirmed inside his coat like a trapped cat.

Sam turned back to the door and her eyes narrowed. A welcome rush of adrenaline coursed through her. Whoever was out there knew much about the contents of the climber, including that Vaughn wasn’t exactly a cowering captive. But she thought perhaps it hadn’t seen Kelly.

“How about we talk,” a voice called from somewhere outside.

In the darkness Sam couldn’t see Kelly very well, but she looked at her anyway. Their eyes met, communicating the same thing:
That is Grillo’s voice
. “Skadz, kill that fucking light,” Sam said. “Ours, too.”

Beside the door, Skadz aligned himself and then leaned out, gun aimed. He fired once, a deafening single clap that made Sam jump despite herself. The light went out as he pulled himself back out of view.

“Suit yourselves,” Grillo said. He did a good job of sounding bored.

With sudden, nauseating motion the climber lurched. Sam felt the meager contents of her stomach churn as her mental perception of up and down changed almost instantly. Suddenly the door of the climber was down, and she was falling toward Skadz. She managed to reach out and grab one of the couch’s support legs, which were bolted to the movable base. She slipped her feet in to rest against another and found she could stand like that.

The bundle containing the alien object slid down what was now a wall, bumped against something, and went tumbling into the air.

“Catch it!” Sam said.

Kelly reached but missed, and their prize fell down the umbilical tube. Sam realized then with cold certainty that the tube hadn’t moved away when the climber lurched into motion. They’d moved together.
The whole station is being moved
.

A shape on the periphery of her vision dashed the thought as the captive Martin fell past her. Or maybe he’d jumped. Either way, Sam watched their last true bargaining chip plummet through the door and into darkness. She glanced back and up. Vaughn had managed to stay wedged into the corner, his back against the couch on the opposite side of hers. His face was strained from having to support his own weight and the still-struggling camera drone.

“Just drop it,” she said. She doubted the little propulsion fans on the thing could actually support its weight in gravity, and anyway it had seen everything.

Vaughn took her advice and practically threw the thing toward the door, along with his jacket. The whole package fell like a stone, and a few seconds later she heard someone, probably Martin, grunt as the little robot crashed on top of him at the bottom of the umbilical.

“That was Grillo talking, wasn’t it?” Skadz asked.

“Yeah,” Kelly said.

“Fuck. He picked a bloody convenient time to be in orbit.”

She nodded. “Options?”

“I say we go now,” Skadz said, “guns blazing. We’re sitting ducks in here, and just giving them time to plan. Plus they’ve got the object and our one real captive now.”

“I agree. Let’s go.”

“Hold on,” Sam said. She fixed her gaze on Kelly. “I don’t think the drone camera saw you. Skadz distracted it when it came in, and it never looked your way after that.”

“So? He’ll know I’m with you.”

“But he doesn’t know you’re
with
us. So when we go out, turn on us, say you planned the whole thing. We wanted to flee on foot, you suggested orbit where you know he’d be.”

“To what end?”

“He must want us alive, or he would have just left the climber sitting outside for a few days. So you present us, take credit for bringing us in, and when he’s mulling that over you pull the same move you did in the vault.”

Kelly bit in her lower lip, thinking it through.

“It might work,” Skadz said. “Sounds plausible. Too plausible, if you ask me. Sorry, Kelly, I don’t know you too well.”

“Plausibility is why it might work,” Sam said. “And there’s no time for another plan. Let’s go.”

Reluctantly, Kelly nodded.

“Your move!” Grillo shouted. “No rush, we’ve got plenty of time.”

Kelly frowned. “We’re coming out. I’ve disarmed them.”

“Is that Sister Josephine?”

“It is, Father.” She rolled her eyes at the title. “Can you kill the gravity?”

Within seconds the press of acceleration faded and weightlessness returned. Sam tucked her pistol into the back of her pants and floated over to the door next to Skadz.

“You’d better be right,” he said under his breath. “That he wants us alive, I mean.”

“Who wouldn’t want us alive? We’re so much fun to be around.”

Sam went first, bracing herself in the door and pushing off gently to float down the white tube that had been attached to the climber. Without the blinding spotlight she could see the tube ended at a normal hallway about twenty meters away. That hall in turn continued much farther, ending at a T intersection a good hundred meters distant. There were people down there, waiting. Four or five, at least.

She glanced back and saw Skadz was right behind her. Kelly had pushed out, too, and floated a meter back from him, her gun trained vaguely toward his back.

“Keep your hands visible,” Grillo called out.

Sam turned back as they crossed the threshold of the umbilical and into the hallway. A series of red ladder rungs lined the wall on her right, and she recalled a similar layout in Gateway’s cargo bay exit, though this tunnel was narrower, and bare metal instead of painted. A door drifted by on her left, with signage next to it:

MIDWAY STATION—AUX. CLIMBER CONTROL

She’d never spent much time studying the various space stations and their places along the cord, but she remembered Midway simply because it sat alone at the very center of the cord, with nothing on either side of it for thousands of kilometers. Sam recalled something about it being the smallest station, an outpost really, serving merely as an emergency stopover for climbers on their way to points much farther above or below.

But they hadn’t traveled nearly far enough to reach it. Sam pondered this as she floated toward Grillo and a handful of tough-looking Jacobites.

Grillo eyed her with casual interest, like a surgeon analyzing a patient. He’d ditched his usual business suit for a uniform of sorts. Black shoes, khaki pants, and a black sweater open at the neck to reveal a white turtleneck beneath. Almost priestly. Almost.

He must have moved Midway Station down, near Gateway. But why? There wouldn’t have been time to do it simply to capture her climber. They would have had to start moving it days ago.

Of course,
she thought.
Kip. He told Grillo everything. Grillo had been planning this all along. Not our presence, but moving the object over to the Key Ship. And we brought the fucking thing right to him.

The thugs at the end of the hallway pushed back to give her a wide berth as she reached the wall. Sam stopped herself with her hands and feet, and used a rung on the wall to move aside so Skadz could land. For the moment she decided to avoid Grillo’s gaze, which she felt hot on her like the glaring spotlight before.

Instead she scanned the faces of the men with him. Jacobites, she assumed, but they wore none of the usual garb. These men were dressed instead like Gateway Security. Sam flicked her gaze across each, sizing up their weaponry and anything else useful she could glean. The problem with zero gravity, though, was getting the measure of a man. How he stood, what kind of confidence wafted off his posture.

Two of them, she realized suddenly, she knew. Alex Warthen himself, along with his right-hand man, whose name she’d forgotten. They’d interrogated her after Skyler fled Gateway what seemed like a lifetime ago. Platz and council allies once, then Blackfield’s, and now Grillo’s. Some people never change, though neither man looked terribly happy to be here.

One of the others looked familiar, too. Had she stalked him in the halls of Gateway? Perhaps stolen from his quarters while he slept? That had been a favorite game of Kelly’s. Swap two guards’ shoes around, or steal the caps from their flashlights and earpieces. But no, Sam knew where she’d seen this one.

Hightower. Bonaparte.

Weck was his actual name, if she recalled, and she’d floored him with a kick, starting the brawl that ended the lives of Angus and Takai. The brawl that sent Skyler fleeing the station. And all because Sam had drank a bit too much. He was staring at her, his head tilted to one side, brow furrowed. Sam looked down. He recognized her, of course, but she didn’t want him to see the wrath in her own eyes. Her gaze found his weapon, a snub rifle like Roddy had carried. What had she said? Something about an electric shock … No, a toxin.