Frost Station Alpha 1-6: The Complete Series (25 page)

They walked side by side down the corridor, the broad suits almost making them knock each other into walls. It was clunky and awkward, but Makkon liked the idea of going into battle with her again.

“What were you going to say?” Tamryn asked as they stepped inside the lift. “Before I grabbed the gun.”

“Oh. That I enjoyed kissing you very much and that we should find a way to do it again, perhaps without soldiers looking on.” He decided not to mention that the time they had spent in her room kept coming to his mind at inappropriate moments, and that he would enjoy doing
more
than kissing too.

The sound of her soft sigh came through the comm clearly. “That’s not a good idea.”

Makkon couldn’t have expected her to say anything else, but the rejection stung, nonetheless. No, he decided. It wasn’t a rejection, just an acknowledgment that she couldn’t see a future where it would ever be acceptable for them to be together.
He
could think of all manner of scenarios, including one that involved his people putting that faster-than-light technology to use on a colony ship to another system, but they would all involve her abandoning her duty and leaving her family, perhaps forever. With his stomach upset from more than the whiffs of gas he’d inhaled, he knew he couldn’t ask her to do any of those things.

Chapter 17

As the lift descended toward the level Makkon had selected, the one directly above the level where the scientists had cordoned themselves off, Tamryn considered the options offered to her by the suit’s HUD and controls. He intended to stop the scientists from gassing the station, and he surely wanted to stop them from whatever else they had planned to take back control. She could not allow that.

He had seen her grab the rifle in the armory. She didn’t think he had noticed her stuffing flex cuffs and a couple of grenades into the exterior sling. He had still been donning his suit then. Judging by the way he had struggled with that, he had never used combat armor before. He probably didn’t know that there were differences between their suits, that hers had more applications and options because it had been modified for an officer’s use. It had more power too.

She could raise the statistics for all of the soldiers on the station who were wearing suits, including him, and she could take over control of his suit at any time. Those overrides were there so commanders could walk injured or unconscious men out of battle if they couldn’t do it themselves. As long as gas filled the corridors, Makkon couldn’t simply remove his suit, though she worried that with his superhuman strength, he might be able to fight the mechanized power. She could also activate the meds built into the suit, a collection that ranged from adrenaline-based concoctions to give an injured man the wherewithal to finish a mission to painkillers to keep him from noticing those injuries.

If there had been a pure sedative, she would have already tried to inject him with it. There were enough painkillers that they might affect his reaction time, but she had no idea if he had a normal metabolism or if it might be faster or enhanced somehow. Hadn’t he said something about certain drugs not working effectively on his people? On her display, his heart rate was at the low end of normal currently, and his blood pressure was normal. None of the vital statistics gave her any clues. Tamryn didn’t want to randomly try things, not when they might not work. She would only get one chance before he realized what she was up to and turned from ally to enemy again. At that point, she had no delusions about the armor protecting her from him. It hadn’t protected the rest of her men or any of the pirates on that ship.

Makkon stepped out as soon as the doors opened on Sub-Level Four. Two men lay sprawled in the corridor, as if they had been racing for the lift but hadn’t made it before the gas overcame them. The brawny bare arms suggested they were Makkon’s men rather than pirates. The back of one’s head looked like it belonged to the engineer. Dornic was his name.

Makkon crouched next to him and turned him over. He frowned down at his gloved hand. The metal barrier would make it impossible to test for a pulse.

“Can I take the gloves off without exposing myself to the gas?” he asked.

“No. Your air would still flow, but it would break the containment and let gas into your suit. Also...” Tamryn checked a reading. “It’s still coming out of the vents. A scientific suit might have been able to analyze it, but the combat armor is just designed to help us kill things and stay alive while we do it.”

“Understood.” Makkon laid his hand on Dornic’s chest.

Tamryn didn’t know whether to hope his men were dead or not. If the gas was designed to kill, it would take out Gruzinsky too.

The thought arose that if Gruzinsky died, there wouldn’t be anyone alive who had witnessed her kissing the enemy and who could report on that fact later. She quashed the notion, hating herself for even having it.

“They’re breathing,” Makkon said, “but shallowly. And they’re deeply unconscious. I can’t rouse them.”

“This would be a good time to find the pirates and round them up,” Tamryn said, though she doubted he would go for it. Unlike Brax, he clearly saw the scientists as more of a threat. And he was surely right. She had long since figured out that he wasn’t dumb. That was why she had to be careful in picking her moment. Just because he liked kissing her didn’t mean he wouldn’t shoot her if she threatened him. Sadly, she acknowledged that they were similar kinds of people, both dedicated to their duty. And if what he had told her about his people starving was true, he had even more reason than she to make sure he adhered to his duty.

“I’d like to round
everybody
up,” Makkon said after a long pause. He stood up, not looking at her. “But that’ll be hard to do alone. I should take these men back to the armory, see if I can get them into suits too.” He rapped a knuckle against his chest plate.

“I doubt they’d fit into any of the units that were left on the racks.” Tamryn could understand Makkon wanting his allies back, but for her and the station, it would be better if he didn’t get them. “And they’re already knocked out. Who knows how long it would be before they woke up? Better to take care of the pirates first. I’ll help.”

“Hm.” Makkon regarded her thoughtfully, and she worried he could guess her every thought. “The scientists are more of a threat right now.” He waved at the air around them, even though the gas wasn’t anything that they could see.

“Do you have a plan for stopping them?” Tamryn couldn’t imagine that he intended to knock down a door and leap inside to confront thirty scientists by himself, especially if he didn’t intend to shoot them. And he had better not be intending that. She trusted that he still wanted hostages.

“If I cut a big enough hole in the floor, the gas may take care of my plan for me.” Makkon tapped the big laser lance he had plucked out of the armory.

Tamryn suspected the scientists would have a contingency to deal with a gas leak, since it was their own concoction, but she said nothing. With all of Makkon’s people knocked out, this was her chance to take back the station. If she could deal with
him
somehow. She was sympathetic to the Glacians’ plight, but it was her duty to reclaim the station if she could.

Makkon found a short, dead-end corridor that he seemed to like and slung the thermite lance off his back. Tamryn didn’t know if he’d had an opportunity to consult a map, perhaps back when he had been poking around on her tablet, or if he was simply going to guess and hope no major conduits, pipes, or structural supports blocked their way. She would laugh if he managed to knock out the lights.

He ignited the lance and set to work burning a hole in the floor. Tamryn quietly watched him work, though her mind was anything but quiet. If he made it through, that would be the time to attack, the moment when he was busy facing off with the scientists. She didn’t know if they would hear him cutting through the floor and be there, waiting with rifles, but she assumed they had armed themselves by now, with some kind of weapon at least. The idea of attacking him—turning on him, it felt like—made her break out in a sweat, both because it was dangerous and because it would feel almost like a betrayal now. Even if she had tried to kill him multiple times, and he couldn’t be surprised by it, that had been before they had kissed. Before that, none of their shared moments had been real, but she would be lying to herself if she didn’t admit that the kiss had been real. If she succeeded, she hoped she could come up with a way to let him walk away with his life. Fleet never would, not after he and his team had killed so many, but maybe—

“We’re almost through the top layer,” Makkon said.

We. As if this was a team effort. As if she wanted to break into the scientists’ level and help him recapture them.

“I judged about five feet between levels when we were roaming through the maintenance shafts and up and down ladders,” he added.

Roaming. As if he hadn’t been chasing her, and she hadn’t been fleeing for her life.

“Sounds right,” she said, so he wouldn’t wonder why she had gone quiet.

Makkon broke through the top layer, set the lance aside, and removed the smoking circle he had cut, the gloves on the suit offering him protection. She eyed the lance, aware that it could make a useful weapon, perhaps even better than a rifle at close range. But she waited. He wasn’t that distracted.

There were some conduits and thick beams running beneath the floor, but they were off to the side of his hole. By luck or research, he’d picked a spot that was fairly empty, with nothing but insulation padding the open space. He ripped that out and tossed it aside, then quietly lowered himself to the ceiling of the level below. He braced his boots on support beams, then pulled the lance down and set to work again.

A bleep of light showed up on one of the displays in Tamryn’s helmet. She stared at it in surprise for a moment before the significance fully registered.

She adjusted the comm, so that she had a private line with Makkon, and they weren’t transmitting system-wide. “Another suit just came online.”

He paused and looked up at her, only his head and shoulders visible above the floor. “You mean someone else climbed into some combat armor? Should that be possible? The gas has been flowing for ten, fifteen minutes now. My people were knocked out.”

“Two more suits just came online, same location as the first. They’re up in the armory where we got ours.” Tamryn shrugged. “Maybe someone else figured out a temporary way to avoid the gas and thought of the suits.”

“Can we speak to them?”

“Yes. I made us a private line, but the default is to transmit system wide.” Tamryn crouched down as much as the unwieldy armor would allow and looked at his face, wondering if he was expecting anyone else to join them. “Do you
want
to talk to them?”

“I... don’t think my people would have thought of your combat armor as an option to shut out the gas.”

“I don’t think our civilians would have, either. There are hazmat suits in the labs that would have been more natural for them to select.”

“Hazmat?” Makkon asked slowly, perhaps not familiar with the term. “Hazardous materials?”

“Yes.” Tamryn wondered if she should have given him that information, especially if he had been hoping his leak would send gas flowing below to knock out the scientists. “They’re mostly working with animals that they made from genetic material gathered from the ice down there, but there’s always the possibility that they’ll bring back something dangerous from the planet.”

“All right.” Makkon brought the lance to life again with a flare of orange light. “Can you monitor the conversations the people in those other suits have?”

“Already doing it, but nobody’s talking yet. They may have the comms off and simply be speaking loudly enough to each other to be heard through the helmets. If they’re pirates, they may not know
how
to turn on the comms.”

“What if they’re your people?” Makkon had his head bent as he worked, so she couldn’t see his face.

“My people? The soldiers?” She thought of Cox and Powell, who had presumably been better off than Gruzinsky and able to walk out of the lounge with the scientists. That would only account for two people in suits, unless someone else had been hiding on the station and had joined them. “My people would know how to use the comms.”

“And they’d know that they could be monitored, right? And that there are two other suits out there?”

“That’s true. I’m going to guess pirates got to the armory, though, and also thought of the suits as an option for avoiding the gas.” Though she didn’t know how they would have survived those long minutes exposed to the gas to get to the armory. Nor did she know how they would have known where the armory was. Unless someone on that team was familiar with the station.

She shook her head. She was going to give herself a headache with all of this rampant speculation. Makkon was more of a concern than three people in suits on another level, at least for now. With his head down and most of his body in that hole in the floor, she wondered how effectively he could dodge laser fire. It would take a sustained blast or a more powerful weapon to breach the armor, and he could leap out and get at her before she could finish him off. Besides, as she’d already admitted, she no longer wanted to “finish him off.”

“About to break through,” he said, oblivious to her thoughts.

Well, no, he probably wasn’t oblivious. As many times as she’d tried to kill him, he was probably very aware of the fact that she was standing above him and armed. He might even wonder if the kiss had been real or if it had been part of another ruse. As if she was that good of an actor. Without the influence of that drug, she never could have gotten down on her knees in front of him. Even now she felt embarrassed and almost scandalized by her brazenness. Of course, there was a part of her that imagined some future in which she could do it again, not as enemies, but as lovers.

Makkon turned off the lance and set it on the floor next to her. She forced her wandering thoughts back to the moment.