The Plague Forge [ARC] (52 page)

But perhaps more damning than that was the fact that Prumble could breathe. That he hadn’t become a Popsicle inside that bathroom. That his custom environment suit they’d gone through all that bloody trouble to procure was now only fit to propel a small yacht. Newcastle was kept cold, airless, so that mold and microbes and rust would not pose a problem.

“So where the hell am I?” he muttered.

At least the exit was near enough to reach. It could have been ten meters above his head on the opposite side, forever unavailable to a man of his generous girth. Instead he only had to deal with the indignity of foisting himself through the horizontal portal.
First things first,
he thought, and yanked the handle. It didn’t budge. Fear rose like bile in his throat at the prospect that this whole damn climber was indeed a coffin. Then he pulled it the other direction and the handle turned smoothly. Terror receded. He did a little jig.

When the door swung open—turning out and down as if he were emerging from a giant oven—Prumble saw part of a darkened, vaguely circular room of which he appeared to be very near the center. The space was turned on its side, of course. His stomach seemed to love to point that fact out. But in this case that little detail mattered little. The room was a climber hub, he assumed; a cylindrical space roughly equal in depth and width. The direction of gravity mattered little as a result. Walls, floor, ceiling, all looked basically identical, and one such surface was just a few meters below him.

He pointed at it. “I dub you Sir Floor. World, start making sense.”

And it did. A bit. It had an up and a down, at least.

Small point lights illuminated the perimeter, creating little pockets of white in the otherwise dark room. A few spoke hallways radiated outward, with similar sparse lighting. Terminal panels inset in the walls beside these glowed with text and iconic graphics that probably indicated Very Important Things. Lots of green there, at least. He took that as a good sign and shifted his focus to the more immediate concern: What the hell now?

Find a friendly face. Find a gun. Find a bag of crisps. Any of the above.

Somewhere someone laughed. The sound echoed slightly through the large empty room. Another voice followed with a hoot. Prumble stained his ears and, just at the edge of perception, heard conversation.

“That’s a start,” he said under his breath, and shambled down from the climber as quietly as his hulking form would allow. He paused long enough to shake some feeling back into his swollen feet, then walked toward the voices.

His foot caught on something and he nearly fell. Glancing down, he saw the floor or wall or whatever had a shallow channel running off in two directions, with what looked like ladder rungs bolted within. His brain drew a picture of floating workers, foisting themselves along the guides with expert—

Stop that
. He snapped his eyelids shut and shook his head. When he opened them again, he focused on the simple task of traversing Sir Floor, everything else be damned.

The voices grew louder. Prumble moved over to what seemed to be a temporary barricade—thick square sections of the floor that had rotated up on heavy hinges to block off a portion of the room for some reason. He sidled along the partial wall until he came to the corner, a good five meters still from the perimeter of the room. Leaning out slowly until he could see with one eye, Prumble noted two Jacobite guards seated on the floor about five meters away. They were facing each other. Between them lay the telltale signs of discarded Preservall packaging. Both men were chewing at their rations now, conversation apparently on hold.

On the floor next to one of them lay a compact assault rifle. If the other was armed, Prumble couldn’t see the weapon.

He leaned back, weighed his options. Clearly they weren’t expecting trouble. They’d been left here, as backup perhaps in case a need did arise elsewhere. Good.

Prumble turned the corner and walked casually to the men. With each step he expected them to turn, to stand and challenge him. With each step that this did not occur, a smile grew on his face.

One finally turned when Prumble was just a step away. The man’s cheeks looked like they held a week’s worth of food. He tried to say something but only cracker crumbs fell out. Prumble kicked him in the mouth. Bits of beige cracker and perhaps a few teeth exploded outward, propelled by a muffled cry of agony.

The other guard sat frozen, eyes wide with abject disbelief. He was staring at Prumble as if the Lord himself had appeared. Prumble slugged him twice with one meaty fist. First punch bloodied the nose, second one broke it. A low whimper gurgled up from somewhere deep in the poor bastard’s gut as his brain finally caught up with what was happening. He tried to stand but Prumble kicked his legs out from under him, sending him down hard on his back. Another kick to the abdomen left the Jake a sniveling, writhing mass. Years as a bouncer in Christchurch’s shittiest clubs still paying dividends, Prumble knelt beside the bloke, held him down by the shoulder, and hammered his thorax three times with his right fist.

The man stared up vaguely at the ceiling, limp, trying to breathe in sharp little motions and probably realizing somewhere in the fog of pain he lay in that breathing wasn’t something he’d ever do again.

Prumble whipped his focus back to the first man, while simultaneously reaching for the sleek rifle that still lay forgotten on the ground. He leaned over the guard, and ignored the horrid mush of blood and cracker being forcibly coughed from the wreck of the bloke’s mouth. The man stopped his sputtering when he felt the cold metal of the rifle’s business end press up under his chin. His tear-filled eyes searched, found Prumble’s, and froze at the deadly gaze they found there.

“Take me,” Prumble said, “to my friends.”

Tim swallowed hard.

The alien ship, all six kilometers of it, suddenly beginning to rotate was one thing. To see Midway Station attached to it like a barnacle frayed the last of his nerves.

Tania was not alone in there now. Her oxygen reserves would be uncomfortably low, too. A decision had to be made.

He could wait. Wait for the backup ERV and the strength of a couple more people to enter with him. It would only be—he glanced at the timer—four hours.

“No,” he said. His voice sounded feeble, a squeak. Tania would be so impressed.

He cleared his throat and tried again. “No,” he said. “No.” Conviction now. “No.” There. Force, drive.

Tim pulsed his thrusters and headed for the emergency docking ring on Midway Station.

“Which friends?” the guard sputtered. He coughed, and groaned with pain for the effort. Cracker crumbs stained red with blood sprayed out in a cone on the floor in front of him.

Prumble gripped the man’s shirt and hauled him to his feet. “You know who I mean.”

Nose broken, the man had to speak and breathe through his mouth, forcing him to talk in short, nasally bursts. “There’s two groups. Some went inside the … ship. The rest are still here.”

“Where’s here?”

“Midway. Midway Station.”

He knew of it from an occasional spec-list request and the odd glimpse of a Platz Station map, but nothing more. “The group still here: How many guards?”

“Uh,” the man said, “six.”

Prumble frowned. “I’m going to start breaking fingers in a second here, mate. How many?”

“Two … two.”

“That’s better. Which way?”

The man gestured off to his left, and started to turn.

“Sorry, friend. You’re a liability now.” Prumble raised the compact rifle.

The guard began to whimper and slid down to his knees.

“I’m not going to shoot you, mate. I just can’t have you shouting a warning. This way.” Prumble guided him to the vacant climber and, after a few more threats of bodily harm, stuffed the man inside the shitter-coffin and tied the door closed, securing it with a length of cable ripped from behind a nearby access panel.

The spoke hallway leading away from Midway’s cargo bay hid mostly in shadow, and this suited Prumble just fine. Halfway to the far end he began to wonder if he’d made a mistake leaving the guard alive. He thought not. The door was well secured and besides, the poor sod was in a living hell now, as Prumble well knew.

At the end of the hall he paused long enough for his breaths to come at a normal rate, and the steady drum of adrenaline at his temples to recede. Then he stood and listened.

The outer ring led off in each direction, to his left and right, each bending backward in the current setup instead of up as they would under normal circumstances. His brain desperately wanted to make the carpeted side the “floor” instead of the outermost wall and it took an effort of will to keep his bearings.

He waited for a long moment, the only sounds coming from hidden fans and plumbing behind the thin walls. Ventilation ducts were everywhere.

Voices to his left.

Prumble moved instantly in that direction, keeping close to the wall, his stolen gun pointed at the floor a few meters ahead. The passage was lit by one long, contiguous LED strip along the curved wall to Prumble’s left, normally the ceiling. The band of light zigzagged from top to bottom in a pattern that didn’t help his mixed-up internal compass at all.

Worse, the surface upon which he walked normally served as a wall, and had been designed as such. Half of it was removable ventilation plates, forcing him to keep to one side. And every three meters or so he had to step over a raised support truss.

A new sound caught his ear. A metallic thud, like a heavy door closing. The voices, closer now, responded.

“Who’s there? Identify yourself!”

Prumble pressed himself against the wall and froze. The thud had sounded even farther away than the voices, and he knew he’d made no noise at all. They were responding to the door. Maybe Skadz or Sam had escaped. Maybe they were closing in from the other side.

Time to act, he decided.

He moved forward at a jog, drawing confidence from the rifle in his hands.

Two guards came into view, creeping in the opposite direction, guns sweeping the hall before them. One, clad in Jacobite garb, carried a Sonton pistol like he knew how to use it. The other, a Gateway regular, had a weapon exactly like the one Prumble had picked up from the cargo bay floor.

They heard him before he could close sufficient distance to get an effective shot. The guards whirled in unison and raised their weapons.

Prumble did the same, dodging right at the same time. His finger squeezed on the trigger even as they fired.

Something smacked into his foot. A bullet, his mind concluded as he fell. He realized the truth before he hit the ground. He’d tripped, caught his foot on a blue placard stenciled with a stick-figure man and the word
RESTROOM
next to it. It would have been wall signage had the station been in its normal configuration.

The sign probably saved his life. Bullets sailed over his head. Prumble hit the floor awkwardly and, relying on the theory that neither guard would put a second bullet in his back, went limp, sliding to a stop. The gun clattered away.

His theory proved accurate. Neither man fired again. One of them even barked a nervous laugh after a brief, shocked silence.

“Where the hell did he come from?” one of them said.

“Beats me,” the other replied. “What do we do?”

“What do you mean?”

“We can’t just leave the body lying there.”

Prumble fought to keep his breathing even and slow. After the run, the burst of adrenaline, this proved near impossible. If they came closer …

“Search him at least. Check for a pulse,” the first said.

Shit
. He weighed his options even as he heard footsteps coming toward him. Mind racing, he decided to try for time and perhaps a bit of distance. He let out a long, feeble groan.

From the sound of it, the approaching guard almost fell himself in surprise. He scampered back a step or two. “Don’t move!” he shouted.

Prumble hadn’t moved, and didn’t now. Instead he groaned again.

“What the heck do we do?” the nearer guard said. “There’s no medic around.”

“Shoot him again.”

Prumble tensed.

“You fucking shoot him!”

“You’ve got the darts. Knock him out for a while until Grillo—”

A sudden clang reverberated down the hallway, loud and deep. Prumble flinched on reflex, felt nothing. Something heavy hit the floor.

He rolled and came to a knee in one motion.

Ahead of him, one of the guards lay prone on the floor. The one near Prumble was whirling to face a third man. This one wore a blue jumpsuit and wide, terrified eyes. In his hands was a red fire extinguisher.

The guard raised his pistol.

The newcomer threw his fire extinguisher as the gun went off.

Prumble surged forward, saw a bright spark as a bullet hit the metal cylinder and ricocheted harmlessly away. The guard managed to fire again, but he was also trying to lean away from the meter-long red tube sailing toward his face, wrenching his aim. Prumble went low, aiming his shoulder at the man’s thighs, and at the moment of impact, he swept his arms forward and up and heaved.

Another clang followed by a muffled yelp as the fire extinguisher took the bewildered guard full in the face. Prumble lifted him, adding to the momentum and sending the body in a heels-over-head flip.

The guard cried out as he landed.

Prumble kept moving straight ahead, diving for his own gun, which lay two meters away at the base of the wall. He grabbed it, spun about, and saw the overturned guard extending his pistol in a desperate blind-fire move. Prumble ignored the two booming shots and took his time. When he fired, a single red dot appeared on the guard’s forehead. Blood sprayed along the floor and wall behind the man as he slumped, dead.

Lowering his weapon, Prumble leaned back against the wall and turned to look at the newcomer. “Nice timing,” he said.

“You shot him,” the man stammered.

“Uh huh. And you threw a bloody fire extinguisher at him.”

The man looked down at his own hands as if he’d never seen them before. “I … I guess I did.”