It was five minutes later when they finally came across the source of the blood trail they’d been following. A turian lay facedown on the floor in the middle of a medium-sized room, bleeding profusely from a wound to his leg. Anderson recognized him as one of the mercs who had fled the recent battle. Approaching carefully, he knelt down beside the motionless figure to check for a pulse but found nothing.
There was only one other exit from the room, another sealed security door off to one side.
“You think his buddy’s inside there?” Dah asked, using her assault rifle to point to the closed portal.
“I doubt it,” Anderson replied. “He probably knew we’d be following the blood trail. I bet he ditched this guy at one of those other branches farther back. Probably waited for us to go by then made a mad dash back to the exit.”
“I hope Shay and Lee are on their toes,” Dah muttered.
“They can handle him,” Anderson assured her. “I’m more interested in what’s behind this door.”
“Probably leads to the primary research lab,” O’Reilly guessed. “Maybe we’ll finally get some answers in there.”
They rolled the dead merc out of the way; there was no sense taking the chance of someone tripping over his body if there was another firefight waiting for them beyond the door. Then, on Anderson’s command, the corporal set to work overriding the security lockdown while the lieutenant and Chief Dah took position for another flash-and-clear operation.
Dah was the first one through this time, and once again there was nobody on the other side. Nobody alive, anyway.
“Sweet mother of mercy,” she gasped.
Anderson stepped into the room and felt his stomach lurch at the gruesome spectacle before him. O’Reilly had been correct; they were standing in an enormous lab dominated by a massive central server. The only way in or out was the door they had just come through, and like the rest of the base every piece of equipment in the room had been blasted beyond all hope of repair.
But none of that was what had evoked their reactions. At least thirty corpses were strewn about the room, most piled along the walls on either side of the entrance. Their uniforms marked them as Alliance personnel; the guards and researchers killed throughout the other sections of the facility. The mystery of where all the bodies had gone was solved, though Anderson still couldn’t figure out why they’d all been dragged to this single location.
“Check for survivors, sir?” Dah asked, her voice not holding out much hope.
“Wait,” Anderson said, holding up his hand to freeze his team in place. “Nobody move a muscle.”
“Oh my God,” O’Reilly whispered, just now recognizing what Anderson had already seen.
The entire room was wired with explosives. Not simple proximity mines, but countless ten-kilo detonation charges placed strategically around the lab. For Lieutenant Anderson, all the pieces suddenly fell into place.
There were enough explosives here to vaporize everything inside the room, including the bodies. That was why they’d been so carefully collected here. There’d be no way to positively ID the remains, meaning whoever betrayed Sidon would be presumed dead with all the others. They could assume a new identity and live off the profits of their crime with no chance of repercussions.
A soft electronic beep made Anderson realize that finding the traitor was the least of their problems.
“Timer!” O’Reilly hissed, his voice raw with fear and nervous energy.
A second later it beeped again, and the lieutenant knew the dying merc had lured them into a trap. The detonation sequence was counting down and their fate—survival or death—would very likely be determined by the next order he gave.
In the split second between beeps his mind analyzed and evaluated the situation. The size of the blast from the explosives would be enormous, more than enough to destabilize the entire underground complex. It would probably cause a cave-in, collapsing the huge natural chamber back by the elevator. Even if they were far enough away to survive the blast, they’d run out of air long before rescue workers would ever find them.
O’Reilly was a tech expert; there was a chance he could disarm the trigger before it went off. If they had enough time to find it. And if there wasn’t a backup. And if it was a manufacturer he was familiar with. And if there weren’t any built-in fail-safes to prevent manual overrides.
Too many ifs. Disarming it wasn’t an option, which meant the only thing left for them to do was…
“RUN!”
Responding to his order, all three of them wheeled around and sprinted back down the halls the way they had come.
“Shay, Lee,” Anderson shouted into his radio. “Get to the elevator. Now!”
“Aye-aye, sir!” one of them shouted back.
“Wait for us as long as possible, but if I give you the order, you go without us. Is that understood?”
There was silence on the other end of the radio—the only sounds were the clomping boots and heavy breathing of the three Alliance soldiers sprinting down the hall.
“Private! Do you hear me? If I say go, you damn well go whether we’re there or not!”
He was rewarded with a reluctant, “Understood, sir.”
They were racing through the halls as fast as they could run, slipping and skidding around corners in a desperate attempt to beat out the timer that could go off at any moment. There wasn’t time to check for enemy ambushes; they just had to hope they didn’t run into one.
Rounding the corner into the room where Anderson had earlier ordered Shay and Lee to wait for them, their luck finally ran out. Gunnery Chief Dah was in the lead, her long legs allowing her to eat up extra ground with every stride, and she had pulled a few meters ahead of her two male companions. She ran full speed into the room…and right into a spray of gunfire.
The lone surviving merc, a batarian, was waiting for them. He must have stumbled into the room after Shay and Lee had pulled back to the elevator on Anderson’s command. Since then he’d been waiting patiently, just hoping for a chance to extract some form of petty revenge.
The force of the bullets picked Dah off her feet and sent her crashing to the ground in a heap. Her forward momentum caused her body to somersault across the floor until she stopped, crumpled and motionless in the corner.
Anderson was the second one into the room; he charged in with his weapon already firing. Normally, running straight at a stationary enemy with a loaded assault rifle was pure suicide, but the merc had foolishly kept his attention on Dah as she’d tumbled and fell—he wasn’t even looking in Anderson’s direction. By the time he tried to spin around and fire back at his charging foe the lieutenant was virtually on top of him; so close that even while running he was able to aim accurately enough to blow a hole in the batarian’s chest.
O’Reilly arrived a split second later, coming to a stop when he saw Dah lying in a rapidly spreading pool of blood.
“Go!” Anderson shouted at him. “Get to the elevator.”
O’Reilly gave a curt nod and took off, leaving Anderson to check on their fallen comrade.
The lieutenant dropped to one knee and rolled her over, then nearly jumped back in surprise when her eyes flickered open.
“Stupid bastard aimed too low,” she said through gritted teeth. “Took me in the leg.”
Anderson glanced down and saw that it was true. A few stray bullets had penetrated the kinetic barriers protecting her torso only to ricochet off the heavy plates of her body armor, inflicting no damage beyond small dents and discolorations. But her right leg, where the armor was thinner and the highest concentration of fire had drained the shields, had been reduced to pulp and hamburger.
“You ever have a piggyback, Chief?” Anderson asked her, tossing his weapons to the ground and rapidly stripping off his own body armor.
“I was never a piggyback kind of girl, sir,” she replied, snapping off her belt and discarding every piece of equipment that wasn’t strapped on.
“Nothing to it,”
he explained, reaching down to help her into a sitting position. She still had her body armor on, but they’d already wasted too much time. “All you gotta do is hold on.”
He did his best to help her wrap her arms around his neck and shoulders, then stood up, momentarily staggering under the large woman’s weight. He reached back to help support her weight, clutching her thighs and buttocks while her arms locked around his collar in fiercely strong grip.
“Giddy-up,” she grunted, doing her best to hide the agony the movement was inflicting on her mangled limb.
Anderson took a few unsteady steps, struggling to find a way to move as quickly as possible while balancing the awkward load. By the time they emerged from the passage into the large stalactite-filled cavern he had found an awkward but effective cadence somewhere between a gallop and a trot. And then the timer detonated.
From the main laboratory in the heart of the research base an enormous ball of heat, fire, and force burst loose, laying waste as it swept through the complex. Doors were warped and ripped off hinges, floors buckled, walls melted.
Far away in the natural cavern the effects of the explosion were felt in three distinct stages. First, the ground seemed to heave under Anderson’s feet, sending him tumbling to the ground. Dah screamed as her leg slammed against the floor, but her voice was drowned out by the second phase of the explosion—a deafening boom that echoed throughout the cavern and drowned out every other sound. The final phase was a wall of hot air propelled by the blast spilling out from the passage to roll over them, pinning them to the ground, burning their lungs and leaving them gasping for air.
Anderson struggled to breathe, and for a second he nearly blacked out. He fought to maintain consciousness as the invisible hand squeezing his chest and pinning him to the ground slowly released its pressure while the super-heated air expelled by the blast dispersed itself throughout the cavern.
They weren’t out of danger yet. The force of the blast had rocked the cavern. The strings of artificial lights ripped loose, swaying wildly and casting bizarre, crazy shadows throughout the room. And though his ears were still ringing, he could plainly hear the loud, sharp cracks of stress fractures appearing in the walls and ceiling as the cavern began to collapse.
“O’Reilly!” he shouted into his radio, hoping the three men in the elevator could still hear him. “This place is caving in! Get to the surface! Now!”
“What about you and Dah?” The reply was barely audible inside Anderson’s helmet, though from the tone it was clear the corporal was shouting.
“Send the elevator back down after you get to the top,” he snapped. “Now move! That’s an order!”
Not waiting for a reply, Anderson scrambled over to check on Gunnery Chief Dah. She had passed out; the pain in her leg too much to bear on top of the physical trauma of the explosion’s aftershocks. Summoning what was left of his strength, the lieutenant managed to stand up, slinging her over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.
He began a desperate, staggering race to freedom as the chamber disintegrated around them. Stalactites plunged down like enormous jagged limestone spears, the fragile hold they had maintained on the ceiling for thousands of years finally failing. Huge cracks were spreading through the floor, walls, and roof, causing great chunks of rock to shear off and tumble to the floor where they exploded into dust and rubble on impact.
Anderson did his best to block it all out. There was nothing he could do but keep moving and pray they weren’t crushed from above, so he forced his mind to focus solely on placing one foot in front of the other. He wasn’t sure he was going to make it. The swinging strings of lights caused a strobelike effect that made it difficult to keep his balance on the uneven ground. He was bruised and beaten from the concussion of the blast. Exhaustion and fatigue were setting in. The muscles in his thighs and calves were burning.
The adrenaline rush he’d felt at the beginning of the mission was gone: his body simply had nothing left to give. He moved slower and slower, the unconscious woman draped over his shoulders feeling as heavy as the massive slabs of rock raining down around them.
When the elevator finally came into view he wasn’t surprised to see O’Reilly, Shay, and Lee still waiting for him. Seeing their commander staggering along like the living dead, all three of them rushed out to help. Anderson was too exhausted to object. He simply let Dah slide from his shoulders into the grasp of the two privates, one taking her under the shoulders and the other under her hips.
With the burden removed he lost his balance and nearly fell over, but O’Reilly was there to catch him. Leaning on the corporal for support, he managed to take the last twenty steps into the elevator before collapsing in the corner.
The doors slammed shut and the car began the long journey up to the top. The ride was far from smooth: the elevator moved in fits and starts as the gears screeched and squealed. Nobody said anything, as if they were afraid mentioning their precarious position might make it worse. Anderson simply lay where he had fallen, panting and wheezing as he tried to catch his breath.
By the time they reached the top and spilled out into the safety of the surface he had recovered enough to speak.
“I told you not to wait for us,” he chastised his team as they made their way back to the Hastings, the privates still carrying Dah’s unconscious body between them. “I should bust each of you down a full rank for disobeying orders!” He paused to let the statement sink in. “That, or recommend you all for medals.”
FOUR
First Lieutenant Kahlee Sanders was smart: she was one of the Alliance’s top computer and systems technicians. She was attractive: other soldiers at the base were always trying to pick her up when she wasn’t on duty. She was young: at twenty-six, she could expect at least another half century of healthy, productive years ahead of her. And she knew she was on the verge of making the biggest mistake of her life.
She glanced warily around the bar, sipping nervously at her drink as she pressed herself deeper into her small corner, trying not to draw attention. Average in both height and build, Kahlee’s only really distinguishing feature was her shoulder-length blond hair—a genetically recessive trait, natural blonds were nearly extinct. But her hair was a dirty blond, with streaks edging toward shades of brown…and there were still plenty of humans who dyed their hair blond anyway. She didn’t normally stand out in a crowd. That made it easy for her to escape notice here—the Black Hole was packed.
Most of the crowd was human. Not surprising, considering the bar was an upscale establishment within walking distance of the spaceports on Elysium, the Alliance’s oldest and largest colony in the Skyllian Verge. But at least a third of the patrons were made up of other species. Batarians were the most predominant; she could see their narrow heads bobbing on their sinewy necks among the crowd. They had oversized nostrils and large, triangular noses that were almost flat against the face, the tip pointing straight down to their thin lips and pointy chin. Their faces were covered with hair so short and fine it looked like the soft velvet of a horse’s nose, though the hair grew longer and thicker around the mouth. A flat stripe of ridged cartilage ran along the tops of their skulls and down the backs of their necks.
But the most unique characteristic of the species was undoubtedly the fact that they possessed two distinct sets of eyes. One pair was set wide in prominent bony sockets protruding from the corners of their face, giving their skulls a noticeable diamond shape. The second set of eyes was smaller and closer together, set higher on the face, just beneath the middle of the forehead. Batarians had a habit of looking at you with all four orbs simultaneously, making it difficult for a binocular species to know which pair to focus on during conversation. The inability to maintain eye contact was disconcerting for most other species, and the batarians always tried to exploit this advantage in situations involving bargaining and negotiations.
Like the Alliance, the batarian government was actively settling the Verge, trying to establish a foothold in a regio
n ripe for expansion. But the Black Hole currently played host to a number of other aliens as well. She saw several turians among the crowd, their features largely obscured by the hard, tattooed carapaces of flesh and bone that covered their heads and faces like fierce pagan masks. She noticed the quick, darting eyes of a small cluster of salarians across the room. A pair of massive krogan loomed in the shadows near the door, like prehistoric dinosaurs standing on their hind legs, guarding the entrance. A few rotund volus waddled about the room. And a single asari server, ethereal and beautiful, glided effortlessly through the crowd, moving from table to table while balancing a full tray of drinks.
Kahlee had come here alone, but it seemed as if everyone else in the bar had arrived in a group. They were leaning on the bar, or huddled around the high tables, or milling about on the dance floor, or pressed up against the walls. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, laughing and chatting with friends, coworkers, or business associates. Kahlee was amazed they could even hear one another. The constant din from fifty simultaneous conversations rose up to the ceiling and crashed down over her like a wave. She tried to escape it by squeezing herself even farther back into her own little corner.
When she’d first arrived she had thought the presence of the crowd would be comforting. Maybe she could lose herself in the faceless mass of people. But the drinks at the Black Hole were as potent as their reputation, and even though she was only halfway through her second glass, her senses were already slightly dulled. Now there was too much noise, too much motion. She couldn’t keep a fix on what was happening around her. Nobody here had any reason to be suspicious of the young woman standing alone in the corner, but she found herself constantly scanning the room to see if anyone was watching her.