Earthcore, p.56
Earthcore, page 56
Veronica jumped as a silverbug hit the floor next to her, bounced into her leg. She scooted away, but it wasn’t trying to get her. She looked up to the ceiling to see how many of them remained.
The ceiling … all the silverbugs were gone.
For the first time, she could see the curved walls.
Her grief flowed into fury.
Veronica Reeves smiled.
9:56 a.m.
O’Doyle helped Connell drag Bertha across the platinum silt, deeper into the bubble room’s shadow.
“But she came down from the surface,” O’Doyle said, just loud enough to be heard over the river’s constant sounds. “And she’s worked for you. She’s got to be here to help us.”
Connell’s brain felt like mud. Thoughts slow, plodding. Maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly, but his IQ hadn’t dropped sharply since this all started — Kayla Meyers was not there to help.
“I never told her where this place was,” he said, still pulling, dragging, fighting against the agony in his back and knee. “That means she hacked our systems or she turned an EarthCore employee. If she’s here, she’s working for someone else. The Russians or the South Africans, maybe.”
“She armed?”
Connell huffed. “She’s a killer — she’s always armed.”
A killer … something Connell knew firsthand. Maybe this was some kind of karmic payback. The assassin he’d hired to murder his wife’s killer, standing in the way of escape.
Two grown men, but both were so drained it was all they could do to haul Lybrand across the silt to the room’s edge, as far away from the river as they could get without searching for a way that led further into the ancient ship.
O’Doyle fell to his ass next to Lybrand. She didn’t move. He leaned over her, gloved hands gently caressing her face through the thin mask.
Connell had probably known what his plan was the moment he laid eyes on Kayla. Now, watching O’Doyle worry over Lybrand, that plan solidified. It was what had to be done.
O’Doyle looked up.
“If she’s armed, then we have to run,” O’Doyle said. “This ship goes on forever, we can hide somewhere inside.”
Deeper into this strange ship, where rocktopi might be, where silverbugs might be. No, not when the way out was so close.
“If you run, she’ll hunt you,” Connell said. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, he just knew.
Barbara Yakely didn’t know how to contact Kayla. Kayla wore a KoolSuit and carried a Marco unit, two things that were only available in the EarthCore camp. Connell hoped he was wrong, that through some fluke of the fates Kayla had found the alternate way in and that she was there to help, but he also knew that was a naive fantasy.
She was there to kill anyone she saw, either hired to do so, or so that she could sell this location to another company.
If Kayla Meyers saw O’Doyle and Lybrand, Connell knew damn well she would kill them both.
He couldn’t let that happen.
Once upon a time, Connell had been in love. Losing that love had destroyed his life. Now he had a chance, one last chance, to save two people perhaps as in love as he’d once been with Cori. O’Doyle and Lybrand might make a future together. And what future did Connell have to look forward to? Endless work. An empty apartment. Nightmares of the evening his entire world had crumbled into nothing.
And, there was that long-ago sin to atone for.
Connell had no illusions — he had pissed his own life away.
If here, at the end, he could do something good with it, wasn’t that worth dying for?
“Turn Lybrand on her side,” he said. “I need that Polo unit on her neck.”
O’Doyle was just as tired, just as hurt, his mind probably just as muddy. It took him a second to understand. When he did, his sleepy eyes widened. He shook his head.
“No way,” he said. “There’s two of us, Connell. We can take her. Don’t do this.”
Honorable words that rang hollow. O’Doyle wanted to fight, but he knew full well he was in no shape to do so.
“You don’t know Kayla,” Connell said. “Hurry up before she comes in here. Roll Lybrand over.”
O’Doyle did.
Connell unfastened his glove, slid it off. The heat hit his skin in an instant, like he’d dipped his hand in scalding water. He felt at the back of Lybrand’s neck for the seal to her hood. He opened it slightly, reached inside, felt for the little dot of her Polo sounder. He pried the bit of plastic off like it was a scab. He put it in a pocket of his webbing, pulled the glove back on and sealed it up.
Then Connell held out his hand, palm up, to the scarred, sagging man before him.
“Your turn,” he said.
O’Doyle stared at the hand.
Connell instantly understood what O’Doyle saw — not the yellow glove, but rather the cut on the palm beneath it.
The same cut that had let their blood mix together.
“We can set a trap,” O’Doyle said. “Something. Anything.”
It hit Connell — there, of all places — just how much he’d tuned out since his wife’s death. The only relationship he had was with his boss. He’d been around O’Doyle for a few scant hours, but they had fought side by side, fought for each other, saved each other’s lives.
This man was a friend. A true friend. Connell’s best friend.
“You don’t know her, Patrick. She’s as dangerous as you are. If you want Lybrand to live, this is the only way.”
The look in O’Doyle’s eyes. Desolation. The knowledge that he couldn’t do the one thing he’d been born to do. He nodded, stripped off a glove. He bent his head, opened the seal of his hood and pried the little dot free.
He offered it up.
“I won’t forget this,” he said.
Connell took the dot. He put it in the webbing pocket with Lybrand’s, careful to make sure both bits of plastic were safely in there before he closed it.
He knelt, started scooping platinum dust on Lybrand, hurriedly covering her legs, hips and chest. O’Doyle did the same to himself, scooping armfuls on top of his suit’s yellow fabric.
Connell took a step back. In seconds, the shadows combined with millions of dollars’ worth of platinum to make the pair look like lumps of silt. If Kayla’s headlamp panned this way, she’d see them instantly, but out of the corner of her eye she probably wouldn’t notice a thing.
Especially if she was distracted.
Connell turned to walk away.
“Wait,” O’Doyle said.
The big man held out his sheathed knife.
“If you get a chance, you stick her,” he said. “In the belly. You keep sticking her until she stops moving. Got it?”
Connell nodded. He took the sheath, stuck it into the webbing belt at the small of his back.
So many dead — this was his one chance to help two people live.
At least someone might make it out.
He walked to the edge of the ship.
10:02 a.m.
On the Marco/Polo unit’s controls, three names stopped flickering, suddenly glowed steady and strong:
BERTHA LYBRAND
PATRICK O’DOYLE
CONNELL KIRKLAND
Kayla looked up and saw Connell standing at the edge of the ship canyon, where the river flowed out of it — a mere fifty yards away.
“Connell!”
It was almost over. She didn’t have to fake her smile.
Kayla stuffed the Marco unit into her belt, leaving both hands free. The Galil hung at an angle across her chest and stomach.
She walked toward him.
“Oh my God, I’m so happy to finally find you. Are you all right?”
He reached out his right hand, grabbed the edge of the ship, took a half step closer to it.
“Stop right there,” he said.
She did.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m here to rescue you. Where are the others?”
Tension in his body. His hand gripped the ship’s hull, ready to pull him behind the edge, out of her line of sight.
“And how did you know we needed rescuing? How did you know where we were?”
That look on his face … she should have known he was too smart to not know why she was there.
Oh well — as long as he died, it didn’t really matter.
Kayla snapped-grabbed for the Galil. Connell ducked behind the ship hull. Kayla fired anyway, a quick burst, but he was already gone and the bullets clanged off platinum.
She sprinted after him and entered the ship canyon’s steamy shadows.
10:03 a.m.
It would be easy.
Just follow the instructions etched into the cathedral ceiling. Even for the self-destruction of their entire race, the Old Rocktopi relied on simple pictures.
And that made sense.
She didn’t know much about rocktopi communication, but she knew that of her own species. Without some central cultural reference, such as television or radio, human languages fractured, split and mutated into countless regional dialects. In just decades, a language could change so much that people who spoke the original tongue might not understand the new form.
How much could a language change over the course of eleven thousand years?
It was funny to think that this race — a race that had once traveled among the stars and had the power to move mountains — now communicated at a level equal to that of primitive humans. She wondered if the same fate lay in store for her own race. Perhaps in the end, the very end, mankind would be left with nothing more than crude pictures.
The instructions: an engraving of the control panel, step-by-step pictures showing what buttons to press, what knobs to turn. Simplicity itself.
That same concept explained the Picture Cavern. The carvings there were instructional, filled with the one message rocktopi understood all too well: If it comes from the surface, kill it.
Like they had killed her father.
Now it was their turn to die.
Veronica took a deep breath. She double-checked the first instruction, then pressed a yellow square.
10:04 a.m.
Patrick lay still.
The woman Connell feared so much came around the corner, rifle in hand, the river on her right, the room in which Patrick and Bertha hid on her left.
Kayla Meyers. Farm Girl.
Patrick knew her from his service days. She was the real deal, would put a bullet in you as soon as look at you. He had an urge to rise up, move quietly through the shadow toward her, put her down — but he knew he’d never reach her.
Kayla crept forward, stepping carefully through wet platinum sludge. She couldn’t stop herself from looking up, craning her head left and right.
If she looked into the room …
She continued along the riverbank.
Her movements: steady, strong, graceful. Kayla moved like a big cat. But she also looked afraid, overwhelmed by the strangeness that surrounded her.
She moved past the room, out of sight.
Connell had a brief head start, but with his knee, how long until she caught him?
Patrick counted to ten. He shook Lybrand. Her eyes fluttered open.
“Baby, if you got anything left, we need it now,” he said. “We got one chance to get out of here.”
The skin of her forearms and hands almost glowed red. Swollen, covered in blisters. Her lips were cracked and dry. A crusty film caked her eyelids.
“Go without me,” she said. “Please. Survive.”
He shook his head, brushed platinum dust off them both.
“If you don’t make it, I don’t make it,” he said. “You want me to live? Then you have to help.”
Patrick pulled her to her feet. She could barely stand.
One last sprint, a three-mile hump, and he could save her. He lifted her in a fireman’s carry. Every atom of him wanted to stop, to quit, to sleep.
Just a few more miles.
He carried her out of the bubble room. He glanced left, upstream — Connell and the woman both were already lost in the mist.
Patrick gritted his teeth, stepped through ankle-deep silt and exited the ship canyon. He carried his love to the tunnel entrance.
Lungs already burning, muscles already begging, he started up the Linus Highway’s steep slope.
10:05 a.m.
The mist-filled ship rose up on either side, towering above … so many rooms, hundreds of them, all the wrong shape. Everything about this place was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Kayla caught a glimpse of Connell up ahead in the mist. Limping. Hurt, or faking? Trying to lure her in?
She raised the Galil, squeezed off a burst. As she brought the gun down, her right foot slid in the deep mud. A ripping pain in her left ankle. She hopped on her right foot, trying to slow her momentum, but she slipped — she fell to her side, splashing in the river’s shallows.
Kayla scrambled to her feet, kept moving. The left ankle, twisted. Maybe a light sprain. Not enough to stop her from chasing him.
Or, should she just leave?
Leave this fucked-up place behind forever?
No. If she did that, she was saying good-bye to her dream, right when she was so close to getting it.
Kayla kept moving down the riverbank, moving as fast as she could.
10:06 a.m.
Bullets whined off metal somewhere ahead. How close had they come to hitting him, to ripping through skin and muscle and bone?
He was going to die here, miles underground. Kayla was going to shoot him in the back.
Keep running, as long as you can, lead her away from Patrick …
Connell fought through the fire in his knee, the spear point in his back. A fast hobble more than a sprint, each step sheer agony that pierced the last of his adrenaline rush.
Up ahead, the river bent to the right.
He knew where he was: not far from the orb room … not far from Veronica.
If he went that way, Kayla would follow, he’d lead her right to Veronica.
Shit, shit, shit, SHIT!
Had to find a place to hide.
It hit him: he couldn’t hide from her, not with the Polo unit on his neck.
Dammit dammit, why hadn’t he taken that off before? He could have tossed all three little dots aside, kept running, maybe that would throw her off.
He scanned the rooms on his left. Just ahead, an oval one that looked like a corridor, leading deeper into the ship’s darkness. Get out of sight for a moment, get that Polo unit off, then maybe he could keep moving while she tracked it down, circle back somehow …
A bap-bap-bap of Kayla’s rifle: heat exploding through his right thigh.
He screamed, stumbled, hands clutching at his leg.
Connell landed hard, instantly scrambled to hands and knees. He crawled through the silt and dust toward the shadowy corridor.
10:08 a.m.
A second set of gunshots echoed through the ship canyon, fading away into the river’s roar.
This set sounded closer than the first.
Connell, Lybrand and O’Doyle didn’t have any bullets left, so who the fuck was doing the shooting?
Maybe rescuers. Maybe soldiers.
They would come down here, take control of the ship. They’d keep it a secret, keep everyone out.
And … they would keep the rocktopi alive.
Her father’s butchers. Alive.
Veronica was almost finished with the instructions. Just one last button to push, a blue one with a spot of red in the middle.
A drunken silverbug stumbled into her leg. She kicked it aside.
As near as she could tell, the orb would descend anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour. Maybe a little more. When it reached the proper depth, it would detonate, blow this place to bits.
“You don’t get to live,” she said.
She reached for the red-blue button, stopped just before pressing it.
If it only took forty-five minutes … was that enough time to reach the surface?
A chill rippled through her. In her hatred and anguish, she hadn’t thought about the most-important part of her plan — getting out alive.
A gleam of metal at the river’s edge caught her eye. There, two silverbugs, water beading up and dripping from their smooth shells.
Smooth, flawless shells.
Veronica didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. Where had they come from? Had they swum here? Had they—
She flinched at the metallic sound of spring-loaded metal: a gleaming, curved blade jutted out from each of the silverbugs.
Blades pointed right at her.
The machines stood between her and the river.
She hadn’t seen another way out of the room.
10:10 a.m.
Alone.
No light.
His nose, clogged shut. Angus had to suck in air in big, fast gulps when he sneered his lips away from the ball, then feel those lips flap when his breath shot out again. The ball forced his mouth open so far the mask wasn’t properly aligned — some breaths came in cool and normal, some so hot they seared his lungs.
His hand … his hand.
Wrist still tied behind his back. The ruined fingers, mostly numb but still enough bubbling misery to remind him over and over and over again of what she’d done to him, one knuckle at a time.
That cunt. If he got out of here, he’d kill her, slice her into pieces and make her hurt so bad for so long oh yes he would he—
A sound. Something other than his breathing.
Was it a click? Silverbugs coming for him. On his stomach, unable to move, barely able to breathe.
Wait … a light?
The rocktopi, flowing toward him, coming with those knives to slice him, to hack him …
No, the light bounced … a mining helmet.
Oh no ohnoohno, that woman, coming back for him like she’d said she would.
Angus started to scream. He couldn’t stop it. He screamed for help, prayed for a miracle, for someone other than that woman to come, anyone but her.
The light came closer, filled the tunnel.
Not the robots.
Or the monsters.
Or that evil bitch.
Lybrand over his shoulders, lungs heaving, legs wobbling, Patrick O’Doyle stopped and smiled down at Angus.
“Hello, coward. I was hoping I’d run into you again.”
The ceiling … all the silverbugs were gone.
For the first time, she could see the curved walls.
Her grief flowed into fury.
Veronica Reeves smiled.
9:56 a.m.
O’Doyle helped Connell drag Bertha across the platinum silt, deeper into the bubble room’s shadow.
“But she came down from the surface,” O’Doyle said, just loud enough to be heard over the river’s constant sounds. “And she’s worked for you. She’s got to be here to help us.”
Connell’s brain felt like mud. Thoughts slow, plodding. Maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly, but his IQ hadn’t dropped sharply since this all started — Kayla Meyers was not there to help.
“I never told her where this place was,” he said, still pulling, dragging, fighting against the agony in his back and knee. “That means she hacked our systems or she turned an EarthCore employee. If she’s here, she’s working for someone else. The Russians or the South Africans, maybe.”
“She armed?”
Connell huffed. “She’s a killer — she’s always armed.”
A killer … something Connell knew firsthand. Maybe this was some kind of karmic payback. The assassin he’d hired to murder his wife’s killer, standing in the way of escape.
Two grown men, but both were so drained it was all they could do to haul Lybrand across the silt to the room’s edge, as far away from the river as they could get without searching for a way that led further into the ancient ship.
O’Doyle fell to his ass next to Lybrand. She didn’t move. He leaned over her, gloved hands gently caressing her face through the thin mask.
Connell had probably known what his plan was the moment he laid eyes on Kayla. Now, watching O’Doyle worry over Lybrand, that plan solidified. It was what had to be done.
O’Doyle looked up.
“If she’s armed, then we have to run,” O’Doyle said. “This ship goes on forever, we can hide somewhere inside.”
Deeper into this strange ship, where rocktopi might be, where silverbugs might be. No, not when the way out was so close.
“If you run, she’ll hunt you,” Connell said. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, he just knew.
Barbara Yakely didn’t know how to contact Kayla. Kayla wore a KoolSuit and carried a Marco unit, two things that were only available in the EarthCore camp. Connell hoped he was wrong, that through some fluke of the fates Kayla had found the alternate way in and that she was there to help, but he also knew that was a naive fantasy.
She was there to kill anyone she saw, either hired to do so, or so that she could sell this location to another company.
If Kayla Meyers saw O’Doyle and Lybrand, Connell knew damn well she would kill them both.
He couldn’t let that happen.
Once upon a time, Connell had been in love. Losing that love had destroyed his life. Now he had a chance, one last chance, to save two people perhaps as in love as he’d once been with Cori. O’Doyle and Lybrand might make a future together. And what future did Connell have to look forward to? Endless work. An empty apartment. Nightmares of the evening his entire world had crumbled into nothing.
And, there was that long-ago sin to atone for.
Connell had no illusions — he had pissed his own life away.
If here, at the end, he could do something good with it, wasn’t that worth dying for?
“Turn Lybrand on her side,” he said. “I need that Polo unit on her neck.”
O’Doyle was just as tired, just as hurt, his mind probably just as muddy. It took him a second to understand. When he did, his sleepy eyes widened. He shook his head.
“No way,” he said. “There’s two of us, Connell. We can take her. Don’t do this.”
Honorable words that rang hollow. O’Doyle wanted to fight, but he knew full well he was in no shape to do so.
“You don’t know Kayla,” Connell said. “Hurry up before she comes in here. Roll Lybrand over.”
O’Doyle did.
Connell unfastened his glove, slid it off. The heat hit his skin in an instant, like he’d dipped his hand in scalding water. He felt at the back of Lybrand’s neck for the seal to her hood. He opened it slightly, reached inside, felt for the little dot of her Polo sounder. He pried the bit of plastic off like it was a scab. He put it in a pocket of his webbing, pulled the glove back on and sealed it up.
Then Connell held out his hand, palm up, to the scarred, sagging man before him.
“Your turn,” he said.
O’Doyle stared at the hand.
Connell instantly understood what O’Doyle saw — not the yellow glove, but rather the cut on the palm beneath it.
The same cut that had let their blood mix together.
“We can set a trap,” O’Doyle said. “Something. Anything.”
It hit Connell — there, of all places — just how much he’d tuned out since his wife’s death. The only relationship he had was with his boss. He’d been around O’Doyle for a few scant hours, but they had fought side by side, fought for each other, saved each other’s lives.
This man was a friend. A true friend. Connell’s best friend.
“You don’t know her, Patrick. She’s as dangerous as you are. If you want Lybrand to live, this is the only way.”
The look in O’Doyle’s eyes. Desolation. The knowledge that he couldn’t do the one thing he’d been born to do. He nodded, stripped off a glove. He bent his head, opened the seal of his hood and pried the little dot free.
He offered it up.
“I won’t forget this,” he said.
Connell took the dot. He put it in the webbing pocket with Lybrand’s, careful to make sure both bits of plastic were safely in there before he closed it.
He knelt, started scooping platinum dust on Lybrand, hurriedly covering her legs, hips and chest. O’Doyle did the same to himself, scooping armfuls on top of his suit’s yellow fabric.
Connell took a step back. In seconds, the shadows combined with millions of dollars’ worth of platinum to make the pair look like lumps of silt. If Kayla’s headlamp panned this way, she’d see them instantly, but out of the corner of her eye she probably wouldn’t notice a thing.
Especially if she was distracted.
Connell turned to walk away.
“Wait,” O’Doyle said.
The big man held out his sheathed knife.
“If you get a chance, you stick her,” he said. “In the belly. You keep sticking her until she stops moving. Got it?”
Connell nodded. He took the sheath, stuck it into the webbing belt at the small of his back.
So many dead — this was his one chance to help two people live.
At least someone might make it out.
He walked to the edge of the ship.
10:02 a.m.
On the Marco/Polo unit’s controls, three names stopped flickering, suddenly glowed steady and strong:
BERTHA LYBRAND
PATRICK O’DOYLE
CONNELL KIRKLAND
Kayla looked up and saw Connell standing at the edge of the ship canyon, where the river flowed out of it — a mere fifty yards away.
“Connell!”
It was almost over. She didn’t have to fake her smile.
Kayla stuffed the Marco unit into her belt, leaving both hands free. The Galil hung at an angle across her chest and stomach.
She walked toward him.
“Oh my God, I’m so happy to finally find you. Are you all right?”
He reached out his right hand, grabbed the edge of the ship, took a half step closer to it.
“Stop right there,” he said.
She did.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m here to rescue you. Where are the others?”
Tension in his body. His hand gripped the ship’s hull, ready to pull him behind the edge, out of her line of sight.
“And how did you know we needed rescuing? How did you know where we were?”
That look on his face … she should have known he was too smart to not know why she was there.
Oh well — as long as he died, it didn’t really matter.
Kayla snapped-grabbed for the Galil. Connell ducked behind the ship hull. Kayla fired anyway, a quick burst, but he was already gone and the bullets clanged off platinum.
She sprinted after him and entered the ship canyon’s steamy shadows.
10:03 a.m.
It would be easy.
Just follow the instructions etched into the cathedral ceiling. Even for the self-destruction of their entire race, the Old Rocktopi relied on simple pictures.
And that made sense.
She didn’t know much about rocktopi communication, but she knew that of her own species. Without some central cultural reference, such as television or radio, human languages fractured, split and mutated into countless regional dialects. In just decades, a language could change so much that people who spoke the original tongue might not understand the new form.
How much could a language change over the course of eleven thousand years?
It was funny to think that this race — a race that had once traveled among the stars and had the power to move mountains — now communicated at a level equal to that of primitive humans. She wondered if the same fate lay in store for her own race. Perhaps in the end, the very end, mankind would be left with nothing more than crude pictures.
The instructions: an engraving of the control panel, step-by-step pictures showing what buttons to press, what knobs to turn. Simplicity itself.
That same concept explained the Picture Cavern. The carvings there were instructional, filled with the one message rocktopi understood all too well: If it comes from the surface, kill it.
Like they had killed her father.
Now it was their turn to die.
Veronica took a deep breath. She double-checked the first instruction, then pressed a yellow square.
10:04 a.m.
Patrick lay still.
The woman Connell feared so much came around the corner, rifle in hand, the river on her right, the room in which Patrick and Bertha hid on her left.
Kayla Meyers. Farm Girl.
Patrick knew her from his service days. She was the real deal, would put a bullet in you as soon as look at you. He had an urge to rise up, move quietly through the shadow toward her, put her down — but he knew he’d never reach her.
Kayla crept forward, stepping carefully through wet platinum sludge. She couldn’t stop herself from looking up, craning her head left and right.
If she looked into the room …
She continued along the riverbank.
Her movements: steady, strong, graceful. Kayla moved like a big cat. But she also looked afraid, overwhelmed by the strangeness that surrounded her.
She moved past the room, out of sight.
Connell had a brief head start, but with his knee, how long until she caught him?
Patrick counted to ten. He shook Lybrand. Her eyes fluttered open.
“Baby, if you got anything left, we need it now,” he said. “We got one chance to get out of here.”
The skin of her forearms and hands almost glowed red. Swollen, covered in blisters. Her lips were cracked and dry. A crusty film caked her eyelids.
“Go without me,” she said. “Please. Survive.”
He shook his head, brushed platinum dust off them both.
“If you don’t make it, I don’t make it,” he said. “You want me to live? Then you have to help.”
Patrick pulled her to her feet. She could barely stand.
One last sprint, a three-mile hump, and he could save her. He lifted her in a fireman’s carry. Every atom of him wanted to stop, to quit, to sleep.
Just a few more miles.
He carried her out of the bubble room. He glanced left, upstream — Connell and the woman both were already lost in the mist.
Patrick gritted his teeth, stepped through ankle-deep silt and exited the ship canyon. He carried his love to the tunnel entrance.
Lungs already burning, muscles already begging, he started up the Linus Highway’s steep slope.
10:05 a.m.
The mist-filled ship rose up on either side, towering above … so many rooms, hundreds of them, all the wrong shape. Everything about this place was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Kayla caught a glimpse of Connell up ahead in the mist. Limping. Hurt, or faking? Trying to lure her in?
She raised the Galil, squeezed off a burst. As she brought the gun down, her right foot slid in the deep mud. A ripping pain in her left ankle. She hopped on her right foot, trying to slow her momentum, but she slipped — she fell to her side, splashing in the river’s shallows.
Kayla scrambled to her feet, kept moving. The left ankle, twisted. Maybe a light sprain. Not enough to stop her from chasing him.
Or, should she just leave?
Leave this fucked-up place behind forever?
No. If she did that, she was saying good-bye to her dream, right when she was so close to getting it.
Kayla kept moving down the riverbank, moving as fast as she could.
10:06 a.m.
Bullets whined off metal somewhere ahead. How close had they come to hitting him, to ripping through skin and muscle and bone?
He was going to die here, miles underground. Kayla was going to shoot him in the back.
Keep running, as long as you can, lead her away from Patrick …
Connell fought through the fire in his knee, the spear point in his back. A fast hobble more than a sprint, each step sheer agony that pierced the last of his adrenaline rush.
Up ahead, the river bent to the right.
He knew where he was: not far from the orb room … not far from Veronica.
If he went that way, Kayla would follow, he’d lead her right to Veronica.
Shit, shit, shit, SHIT!
Had to find a place to hide.
It hit him: he couldn’t hide from her, not with the Polo unit on his neck.
Dammit dammit, why hadn’t he taken that off before? He could have tossed all three little dots aside, kept running, maybe that would throw her off.
He scanned the rooms on his left. Just ahead, an oval one that looked like a corridor, leading deeper into the ship’s darkness. Get out of sight for a moment, get that Polo unit off, then maybe he could keep moving while she tracked it down, circle back somehow …
A bap-bap-bap of Kayla’s rifle: heat exploding through his right thigh.
He screamed, stumbled, hands clutching at his leg.
Connell landed hard, instantly scrambled to hands and knees. He crawled through the silt and dust toward the shadowy corridor.
10:08 a.m.
A second set of gunshots echoed through the ship canyon, fading away into the river’s roar.
This set sounded closer than the first.
Connell, Lybrand and O’Doyle didn’t have any bullets left, so who the fuck was doing the shooting?
Maybe rescuers. Maybe soldiers.
They would come down here, take control of the ship. They’d keep it a secret, keep everyone out.
And … they would keep the rocktopi alive.
Her father’s butchers. Alive.
Veronica was almost finished with the instructions. Just one last button to push, a blue one with a spot of red in the middle.
A drunken silverbug stumbled into her leg. She kicked it aside.
As near as she could tell, the orb would descend anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour. Maybe a little more. When it reached the proper depth, it would detonate, blow this place to bits.
“You don’t get to live,” she said.
She reached for the red-blue button, stopped just before pressing it.
If it only took forty-five minutes … was that enough time to reach the surface?
A chill rippled through her. In her hatred and anguish, she hadn’t thought about the most-important part of her plan — getting out alive.
A gleam of metal at the river’s edge caught her eye. There, two silverbugs, water beading up and dripping from their smooth shells.
Smooth, flawless shells.
Veronica didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. Where had they come from? Had they swum here? Had they—
She flinched at the metallic sound of spring-loaded metal: a gleaming, curved blade jutted out from each of the silverbugs.
Blades pointed right at her.
The machines stood between her and the river.
She hadn’t seen another way out of the room.
10:10 a.m.
Alone.
No light.
His nose, clogged shut. Angus had to suck in air in big, fast gulps when he sneered his lips away from the ball, then feel those lips flap when his breath shot out again. The ball forced his mouth open so far the mask wasn’t properly aligned — some breaths came in cool and normal, some so hot they seared his lungs.
His hand … his hand.
Wrist still tied behind his back. The ruined fingers, mostly numb but still enough bubbling misery to remind him over and over and over again of what she’d done to him, one knuckle at a time.
That cunt. If he got out of here, he’d kill her, slice her into pieces and make her hurt so bad for so long oh yes he would he—
A sound. Something other than his breathing.
Was it a click? Silverbugs coming for him. On his stomach, unable to move, barely able to breathe.
Wait … a light?
The rocktopi, flowing toward him, coming with those knives to slice him, to hack him …
No, the light bounced … a mining helmet.
Oh no ohnoohno, that woman, coming back for him like she’d said she would.
Angus started to scream. He couldn’t stop it. He screamed for help, prayed for a miracle, for someone other than that woman to come, anyone but her.
The light came closer, filled the tunnel.
Not the robots.
Or the monsters.
Or that evil bitch.
Lybrand over his shoulders, lungs heaving, legs wobbling, Patrick O’Doyle stopped and smiled down at Angus.
“Hello, coward. I was hoping I’d run into you again.”
