17

Catching up to Elise and her father wasn’t as easy as I had assumed it would be. I understood she was quick but thought of the doctor as a lumbering mass of indecision. She was too small to push him far, and if he resisted, I’d find them having a father-daughter argument while bullets flew over their heads.

Grady’s final stand rose to a crescendo not long after I began navigating the maze of trenches and tunnels in this area. It still intrigued me that, from space, the surface of Dreadmax looked almost smooth, like a thick ring of armor plating that was almost a complete sphere except for the spine running down the middle that everything rotated on.

Most of the power core was located in the spine, what some people called the tower. Personally, I thought that the first term was more accurate, but it didn’t matter. Anything that was truly important to a ring station was stored near the center.

“Can you help me out, X?” I asked.

The Reaper AI affixed to my nerve-ware didn’t respond immediately, which could mean several things, most of them bad. Had I finally overloaded the micro hardware?

X-37 spoke with a slight glitch in his voice. “One moment. I was considering the ramifications of a total power core failure and what that meant to residents of Dreadmax.”

Ice shot down my spine. Nerve-ware AIs were not supposed to be able to read a person’s mind. We’d had this discussion before. I understood this was coincidence, but it never gave me a warm fuzzy feeling when it happened. I decided to give X-37 a taste of his own medicine. The silent treatment wasn’t that difficult when I was running hard enough to put myself in deep oxygen debt.

“Be mindful of your environment. You’re moving faster than normal and your heart rate is ten percent higher than it has been since you fell,” X-37 said. “Continue on the path of least resistance. I believe Elise will be in flight mode, not much different from a wounded animal. She’ll go as fast as she can and take routes that are easy for her less athletic father to manage. However, the schematics show a junction with too many options, where she will likely wait for you or at least hesitate.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. “You mean an intersection?”

“Not precisely,” X said. “The junction is three-dimensional. She will have to choose from fourteen horizontal trenches, ascending stairs, or descending stairs.”

Not far ahead, I saw one of the large observation towers looming above us. It was a handy landmark. “I seriously doubt she’ll go below decks.”

“That is unfortunate. The observation towers are like trees, reaching high enough to observe and manage a large portion of the top deck but also reaching down to access the spine. My estimation is that very few of the people on Dreadmax understand this.”

“Don’t care.” I really didn’t. Why would I?

“Your biometrics tell a different story.”

“You and I both know Dreadmax is done. Am I pissed off about thousands of innocents going down with it? Sure, X. I’m a cold-blooded assassin, not a heartless jerk-off.” Not long ago, I’d been watching kids play on an intricately fabricated jungle gym. Mothers and fathers had worked nearby. Bug was right, the shipbuilders were good people.

I didn’t want them to die like this.

X-37 interpreted my silence correctly and tried to put me at ease. “I’m sure the thousands of relatively innocent human beings on Dreadmax will survive. Your friend Bug in the surveillance tower mentioned Climbdown Day. This suggests they have a plan to survive the collapse of the environment shield. And you witnessed the engineers attempting to fix a starship.”

“Do you honestly think either of those plans will work?” Why did my AI have to mention the kid?

“It is unlikely either plan will succeed,” my AI said. “But you don’t care.”

“You got that right, X.”

“Deception detected.” X-37 had the best poker voice I’d ever heard. How could I compete with that? I was hard, but he was a machine.

Images of Dreadmax collapsing upon itself and then exploding into drifting chunks of metal ran a loop in my head that I mostly ignored after the first annoying manifestation of guilt.

None of this was my fault.

“I’ve completed my analysis of the schematics for this area,” X-37 said. “It only looks like a maze from your current vantage point. Unfortunately, I can’t put the entire map in your HUD.”

I adjusted my pace and searched for Elise. The tower loomed above us, the largest vertical structure I’d encountered on Dreadmax. It was probably thirty meters in diameter at the roughly hexagonal base. Four of the sides were out of proportion to the others and hosted bay doors almost as large as those at the RSG stronghold.

This place was made for moving heavy equipment. Everything on Dreadmax was big, like the designers had pretended they were giants.

“X, you said there were stairs. Is there a lift?”

“Yes. There is a lift with a one-thousand-ton capacity, but it can move heavier loads if the gravity generators are turned off, of course. This is how most of the construction was done. However, I do not believe the lift is functioning and would serve no purpose to our current mission if it did.”

“A simple yes or no would have been fine.”

X-37 beeped so quietly I doubted it was meant for me to hear. The digital little jerk needed an update. “The question seemed out of place. Please refine your inquires in the future. Stop being a dick.”

“Whatever. Shut up while I search for Elise.”

“You’ll recall I was speaking of the map,” X-37 said. “The layout of this area is important. Given the number of connected maintenance trenches and other access ways, there is a high probability you are being enveloped by the rogue spec ops team trying to kill you.”

“I’m pretty sure we’re the rogues and they’re the Union-sanctioned strike team.”

“Admitting that they are right and we are wrong interferes with my functioning,” X-37 said, almost accusingly.

Whoa! Hold on there! “That’s not what I said. Just factor in that the Union is bad and your life will be a lot easier.”

“I am an artificial intelligence. A bundle of programs, essentially. Look at it from my perspective.”

“Okay, X,” I said as I spotted Elise crouching near one of the large bay doors with her father. She looked determined but uncertain. Her father tried repeatedly to drink from a water bottle that was empty.

Pulling back to conceal myself, I took a cleansing breath and lowered my heart rate. “I’ll make it simple for you. We’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys, and your job is to keep me alive. Maybe two or three other people as well.”

“Mission directive updated.”

“And also find me some Starbrand cigars,” I said looking for a place to move.

Stun grenades rained down all around me, filling the area with smoke and noise. Three squads of spec ops soldiers burst from as many maintenance trenches. Bullets and tracer rounds cut through the smoke as I dropped low and ran to the cover of the ramp. The edges were thick enough to keep heavy equipment from sliding off. I’d never been so safe.

Too bad I couldn’t stay. Callus’ team rushed me, confident I couldn’t see them.

They should’ve known better.

To my enhanced vision, they looked like red silhouettes running through near total blackness. My right eye saw the smoke, my left eye saw variations of heat and cold, and the Reaper nerve-ware helped my brain interpret the sensory input as one image.

“Time to go,” I said, ducking around a corner without standing from my crouching position. Duck-walking felt about as good as lighting my quadriceps on fire, but it was better than being shot in the face.

I’d trained for this in a previous lifetime. This far into a mission, everything hurt.

X-37 didn’t comment.

At the first gap in their suppressive fire, I ran at the nearest squad, adjusted my course, and found a man-sized hatch near one of the roll-up bay doors. It was closed, probably locked, but the frame around it was excessively thick—brutish architecture that must’ve been popular when this section of the deck was constructed.

“Why don’t they have infrared optics in their helmets?”

“Unknown,” X-37 said.

Elise screamed angrily. Gunfire followed. “Get back, dickface! I see you creeping!”

The sound of her pistol ceased abruptly and she screamed without the shit-talking attitude.

Her father yelled, “What kind of Union solider are you? Why would you do that?”

I’d seen some tough women fight and that was what she sounded like, minus her juvenile battle cries.

Moving toward the infrared silhouettes behind the sounds, I found the doctor stumbling through the smoke, searching the area in front of him with his hands.

“Hastings,” I said, grabbing him and pulling him toward another access door to the tower. “Shut up and do what I say.”

“My daughter’s in trouble. We have to find her. Where have you been?”

“Of course she’s in trouble. Now shut the fuck up and stay hidden until I come back for you.”

“He threw her into a… into a gap. The… lift is down or something. She’s probably dead.”

“She’s not dead. I heard her. Now keep your mouth shut or you’ll both be dead.”

“Yes, of course. I heard her. She needs me, Cain. I hate this entire situation.”

“Save it.”

He said something else, but I was already gone.

* * *

I moved along the wall, disappointed the distraction smoke was clearing and suspecting I might have been played. Callus was probably securing his primary objective before focusing all of his attention on me.

Or throwing her down a hole like the doctor said.

The smoke thinned, and I realized that Elise had moved into the tower before being attacked. The main level of this structure was similar to a hangar, but instead of moving ships into the void, it had been designed to take heavy equipment into the guts of the station. I didn’t think the big stuff could be raised. The tower served a different purpose than the base or the sub-deck access points.

There were four platforms, one of which had been lowered long before we arrived if the streaks of polluted grease were an indicator.

I moved carefully, keeping to the last swirls of smoke. Callus was looking into the hole, chest heaving from recent effort. A second later, he pivoted on the balls of his feet and resumed his search.

Steam settled as the smoke from the distraction devices finally dissipated. I moved cautiously forward, worried that my adversary and his squads of elite commandos would return. I knew they were searching for me, but their efforts had been complicated by their primary mission objective.

I wondered if all of them hated me as much as Callus did.

Electricity pulsed through my cybernetics, interfering with my vision and cutting me off from X-37 completely. Damn inconvenient right now. My natural eye adjusted the darkness at the bottom of the elevator shaft while the glitch corrected itself. The platform had locked halfway between levels. Three meters below me was a body.

"Elise, can you hear me?” I asked.

No response.

I did a quick circuit of my immediate area. Gunfire broke out around the corner of the tower where spec ops squads engaged an usually strong contingent of Red Skull Gangsters.

"I don't care who you are, soldier boy. He took something from Slab and we want him," a voice shouted.

I climbed down the wall of the industrial-sized lift. Elise groaned, turning onto one side as I approached. The deck below her head was slick with blood. When I checked her, it was hard to find the wound in her hair.

"Elise, you have to talk to me. I need to know if you can go on," I said.

"What are you doing here?” she asked groggily.

"Getting myself killed," I muttered as I looked up at the edge of the hole we were in.

"You're not really answering my question." She squirmed and pushed herself into a sitting position, then struggled to her feet. “What I meant is, why are you helping us if you know you're going to die?"

That was a pretty good question I didn't have an answer for.

"What's the matter, Reaper got your tongue?" she asked.

"Ha ha, very funny. Someone put me on this mission thinking they could order me to kill you.”

“Is that what you think?” Her tone radiated disbelief and sarcasm.

“That’s what I was trained for.” My job had always been to kill the target even if it cost my own life. Looking back, I wasn’t sure how I ever thought joining the Reaper Corps was a good idea.

“Then why did they send that other man?” she asked. “Why are they trying so hard to kill you?”

“Those are good questions,” X-37 agreed. “You haven’t received an order to execute the girl or her father, which would indicate your assumption is incorrect.”

“I think someone sent you to help us.” Her tone softened. “Like a guardian angel.”

“Unlikely,” I said. X-37 seconded the conclusion in my ear.

“Whatever. You’re so smart,” she said with renewed attitude. “Tell me why the Union would send someone like you, who is so hard to kill? They can’t all be bad. There has to be someone among them working to do the right thing.”

“You really are just a kid.” I regretted the words the moment they left my mouth.

She turned away, crossing her arms and refusing to even curse at me.

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