8


“Not bad, Hal. You got the principal plus one,” Grady said as we moved into a new area and hunkered down to see which way the RSG and the crazies moved. There were a lot of both despite the sun illuminating the surface of Dreadmax with a harsh white light.
“We need to get to a pickup site,” I said.
“I have the ship coming back around. Once we confirm you have the principal, we have clearance to pick you up. I told you this would be an easy mission,” Grady said.
I noticed Elise and the doctor were watching him carefully. She kept her mouth shut, almost like this was too good to be true.
The girl had good instincts.
I shook my head. “It’s too hot for an LZ here. They have heavy machine guns on vehicles, and I saw at least one crate of surface-to-air rockets in their stronghold.”
There was also a theory I wanted to test.
“Dammit, Hal. We’re done. This mission is over. You have the principal and his daughter. The dropship can withstand small arms fire, you know that. You don’t have to make up some story about rockets.”
“I saw the rockets,” Elise said. “Before he came, they used to shoot them off like fireworks. They’re a bunch of psychopaths.”
Grady clenched his teeth and hobbled to the edge of our hiding place to look for threats.
“The plan they gave during the briefing designated a shuttle bay for deployment and pickup,” I said. “That’s where we’re going. Their spec ops team can get help from Soldier security if they need to.”
“I should’ve known better. Nothing is ever easy with you,” Grady said. “That’s five kilometers from here. On a good day, any place other than here, that wouldn’t be too bad, even with this scratch on my leg. But we’re on the clock here, in case you forgot. And there’s a lot of bad guys roaming the streets.”
“You got that part right,” I said.
“What did you do to piss them off?” Grady asked.
“Well, for starters, I stole their prize doctor, who seems so valuable, even if they don’t really know who he is. I also killed a bunch of them.” I paused to let that sink in. “I’ll take point, you can act as the rearguard if you can keep up. I don’t know about the doctor, but the kid is fast.”
“I’m not a kid,” Elise declared.
“She’s not a kid,” her father agreed a half second later.
I ignored them both and so did Grady.
“Mission Control isn’t going to like this,” he commented. “I doubt my decision to help you has earned me any points. Briggs and his bosses about shit kittens when you jumped early.”
“Good. Serves them right. They should have let me plan this operation. What have you done to get the innocents evacuated?”
“I was told it’s handled,” he said with a shrug.
“You’re such a dick. You know that’s bullshit.”
“They’re sending a maintenance team to repair whatever is failing, give them more time to sort out the consequences of Dreadmax going offline with innocents on board.”
His claim was almost believable. If I had to rescue a large number of people from this place, the first thing I’d do was buy some time. So maybe my old friend wasn’t totally full of crap. But there was something he wasn’t telling me. The guy looked guilty.
“Time to go,” I said. “The Hastings family knows the drill. My way or no way.”
“Not going to work, Hal. We need to secure this area for an immediate pick-up. Mission control is very adamant about this point.”
“Elise, grab your old man and let’s go,” I said.
“Okay.” She pulled her father to his feet and urged him into a fast walk.
I covered them. Grady brought up the rear, but we hadn’t been heading away from the current landing zone for ten seconds when the dropship came around, hovered, and opened fire.
“Stay with me!” I grabbed Elise and the doctor, changing course and running for cover.
“What are they shooting at?” Hastings asked.
“Don’t worry about it.” I pushed my principals deeper into an alternate path that was going to require a lot of elevated walkway crossings and climbing over debris.
Grady caught up to us. “I told you we have to follow orders. Of course they’re going to shoot if they think we’ve gone rogue!”
Pivoting on my heels, I punched him on the side of his helmet, staggering him without causing real damage.
“Fuck, Hal! You’re such a pain in my ass. Let’s go back and get on that ship!”
From somewhere above us, a trio of rockets fired into the Dreadmax sky, missing their target and exploding several seconds later on the interior of the environment shield.
“I told you they have surface-to-air rockets,” I said, pulling him close for some private words. “That strafing run looked like more than warning shots. I understand they might shoot at me, but it looked like you were in their crosshairs too.”
“Don’t be a paranoid jerkoff. That’s always been your problem.”
I ducked out of our hiding spot, looking for RSG thugs, crazy-ass cannibals, and Union gunships. It looked clear, but I knew that wouldn’t last.
“We’re going to talk about this,” I said to Grady, then pointed to Elise, who seemed like the only person on this team with her head right.
We moved out. After several quick and dangerous crossings of metal walkways, I found what I was looking for.
“This is a stairway to below decks. Do you think this is a good idea?” Grady asked, still red-faced from our argument and running on an injured leg.
The doctor and his daughter went pale and watched us wide-eyed. I saw her trying to formulate words but cut her off.
“This is the peak time for crazies above decks. The sun is going down again and they’ll be up looking for dinner. According to the schematics, there are long, straight tubes where they run heavy equipment on rails. Since they probably don’t have any trains working, it should be the quickest, safest way for us to get to the pickup location,” I explained.
“If we’re gonna do this, then let’s get to it,” Grady said, leaning against the wall and aiming his HDK back the way we came. “I’m right behind you.”
We hadn’t gone very far in the five-meter-tall tube, when Elise came up to my side. “I don’t like it down here.”
“Me neither. It stinks.” What I didn’t mention was the evidence of crazies. This passage was one of their superhighways, apparently. The rails were raised slightly, leaving a depression on both sides of the support beams. I saw little shanties and tents made from various materials. They looked vacant, but there was no way to tell for certain, and I didn’t have time to clear them out.
Every hundred meters along what was essentially an industrial-strength subway tunnel, there were side doors. I saw ventilation shafts and drainage grates. It was still hard for me to wrap my head around the possibility of flooding or the occasional venting of steam. I knew what it was—coolants from the titanic power plants on the lowest decks.
Whenever I found one of the steam-spouting pipes, I also found serious rust and degradation of the structural integrity.
Doctor Hastings saw what I was looking at during one of our rest breaks. “The venting of moisture isn’t just from the cooling tubes. It’s part of the agricultural and oxygen production areas. The hydroponics level causes this, I think. It’s probably very humid on that level and I doubt they’re doing quality control checks.”
“That’s at least four levels down from here,” I said.
“You really do know the schematics of this place,” he said.
“I need to go topside to make sure this is taking us where I think it is.”
“You’re not leaving us down here,” Elise said.
“I agree with the girl for once,” Grady added.
There wasn’t much use arguing, so I climbed the ladder, did my security scan of the rooftop the access hatch opened onto, and stepped out. The others hurried after me and breathed deeply as though the air was better out here.
Maybe it was a little bit better. But probably not.
“Oh shit!” Elise squeaked.
I looked up in time to see a rocket streaking over Dreadmax. The dropship Grady and I had come on banked hard to avoid being struck. Two other rockets launched from different positions.
“A bunch of gang members can’t take down a union dropship,” Grady said. “It just doesn’t happen like that.”
My gut tightened and I felt sick.
Two rockets missed, but the third clipped one of the short wing-like structures that held one of the turbines used for landing. The dropship twisted, fought against the gravity generators of the Dreadmax, and faltered as the turbines screamed.
There were four turbines. Pilots claimed they could land with two, which I never believed. Of course, landing and flying were actually two separate maneuvers.
The dropship started a slow spin, canted too far to one side, then flipped over and broke apart as it went down. Another rocket struck it, exploding the main fuselage.
Bodies were flung out of the wreckage. Some plummeted toward the station while others spiraled toward the void. I waited for them to hit the environment shield and come down.
Beside me, the doctor spoke somberly. “I imagine they’ll die either way, but the shield has become more and more porous. Some of the areas that are supposed to have a protected environment are very hazardous.”
“You’re not an expert on Dreadmax,” Grady said, frustrated. “Stick to what you know.”
I watched as the bodies went past where the environment shield should be. “Shouldn’t this atmosphere bubble be venting if there is a hole?”
“If your friend would let me explain —” Hastings started.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Grady said, heading for the ladder to the subway. “My team knew how to eject from a crashing ship. I want to get this over with so I can look for survivors.”
“Did you see anyone ejecting?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, choosing instead to push ahead at a faster pace.
I was more than a little annoyed with the guy. There was a reason I was on point and he was the rearguard. All I needed him to do was make sure the doctor and his daughter didn’t fall behind or wander off course. Now he was just being moody, stumbling down the ladder-like spiral staircase without paying attention like he should.
“Elise, you’re going to have to bring up the rear while I catch up with Grady. Can you handle it?”
“Sure, Cain. As long as my father listens to me,” she said.
“I don’t see how this can be that complicated for the rest of our escape,” muttered Dr. Hastings. “Maybe I should bring up the rear of our column. Is that a dangerous thing? I don’t want to risk my daughter again.”
“Elise knows what she’s doing. She’s got better instincts than you do. She’ll bring up the rear. Grady and I will go ahead to have a look.” I hurried down a stairwell enclosed by metal grating and found Grady looking grim. “What’s wrong?”
“Do the crazies ever have weapons?” he asked.
I edged ahead of him and scanned the tunnel with my infrared eye. Grady knew what I was doing. He had a list of my full specs. He also knew some of the other gifts the Reaper Corps gave me before throwing me in prison.
A cluster of crazies worked their way down the temporary dwellings alongside the tracks in the subway. They grunted and cursed in a bastardized language I couldn’t understand but weren’t as loud and reckless as those I’d seen above decks hunting for people to eat.
These were a different class, and they were armed with crude firearms. One had a tactical shotgun with the barrel and stock sawed-off and wrapped in some kind of tape. Another had a pipe that was basically a zip gun, something I’d seen on a smaller scale in various prisons. It wasn’t accurate and it would probably explode the first time he used it, but it would launch a slug that would punch through walls if the charge was powerful enough.
I counted seven of these new enemies. “They look like hunters, might be the warrior caste of the crazies. We should let them pass.”
“Agreed,” Grady said, “but we are really running out of time. I’m not sure what will happen when we make it to the landing bay.”
I wanted to interrogate him about the fiasco with the dropship and demand a good reason why they fired on us, because while I wanted to believe they were merely trying to stop us from going a certain direction, I wouldn’t doubt a more sinister motive.
The motley crew of warriors took their sweet time but eventually passed. I motioned for Elise and her father to follow me and for Grady to bring up the rear.
“No flashlights. No noise.”
They nodded agreement.
I moved farther ahead than normal, hoping to detect problems before they happened. There were more and more tents and haphazard lean-tos underneath and beside the rails of the subway, impossible to clear as well as I wanted to.
We were almost to the next surface hatch when I heard Elise shout at her father.
“Get back from him!”
I turned and saw one of the underground warriors stand up from a pile of blankets. It looked like there was another person or two in there and I didn’t want to know what he’d been doing.
All that mattered was that the desperate-looking man had a hatchet in one hand and a shotgun in the other.
I aimed as the humanlike warrior pointed his shotgun and screamed a battle cry.
He fired and rushed forward with the hatchet at the same time I pulled the trigger. From further back, Grady also fired, striking the barbaric warrior in the knees. My rounds impacted the chest twice and then the head once.
The result was a crazy death dance.
Rushing forward, I paid attention to every possible opening to make sure it wasn’t another threat. There were still tents on the edges of the tunnel, but also distant walkways in ventilation openings. Everything looked like a possible point of attack now.
The man we’d shot was human, but so bent over and unkempt that he looked like an animal—who carried a shotgun and a hatchet to his final battle.
I realized Elise was crying and swearing profusely at her father. When I turned, I saw he’d been shot in the chest.
“Grady, hold security while I do first aid.”
Elise tried to help but only got in the way. I shoved her aside as I ripped off the top half of the doctor’s jumpsuit and applied pressure bandages.
“I can help!” Elise screamed, clawing at my arm.
“Calm down, he’s lost a lot of blood but has a decent chance of surviving. There’s nothing more you can do.”
“There is!” She lowered the volume but not the intensity of her words. “Tell him, Father. Tell him what I can do to save you.”
Gently but firmly moving Elise back, I squatted over my patient. “Yeah, Doc. Tell me what she can do.”
Silence. I could feel Grady trying to listen from where he was providing overwatch.
“I’m a Reaper, Doc. I have ways of making you talk.”
He swallowed. Tears ran down his face and his voice was barely audible. “I used technology from the Lex project to cure Elise when she was a very sick little girl. There were never any side effects, so I assumed the treatment hadn’t worked on her.”
“It worked, Father. You know it did. I can transfuse my blood to you so you don’t die.”
“Let’s just hold off on the highly experimental, dangerous-as-fuck field medicine. If he’s really going to die, I’ll give you a crack at him.”
All the color left Doctor Hasting’s face and I realized he was as afraid of his daughter’s blood as he was of his own death.