Insidious (9 page)

“Yes, ma’am.” The man bowed and walked out.

Her family had fled the crushing power of the Chinese bloc shortly before it seized control of Japan. Despite the lack of open war, many in power there had not escaped execution. Only Aldriena and her father had made it out alive. At the time, she was seven years old.

Her father later remarried. Aldriena grew up in Brazil, taken half a Brazilian name, and even spoke Portuguese. In fact, she thought sadly, her Japanese was worse than her English was. But she had a part of Japan in her face and in her heart.

She knew the man in her quarters was only doing his job, but she couldn’t shake the hatred her father had instilled for the Chinese bloc. The current political climate suited her bias since Chinese remained the enemy of both her ancestral homeland and her adopted one. She told herself she had softened somewhat. Her father would have throttled the man if he’d seen him touch her.

A broadcast link message interrupted her inner turmoil.

This is the United Nations Space Force. We are conducting a surprise inspection of this facility. Report to your personal quarters immediately and remain there or face possible severe injury or death.

“
Merda
!” Aldriena spat. The message repeated itself.

Aldriena tried to get the Cascavel to reconnect but its authorization had timed out. She used another of the one-time codes. She hadn’t planned to push her luck, but something was obviously up and she wanted to know what.

She picked up enough in a couple of seconds to know that the space force was preparing to board Thermopylae in numbers. This wasn’t a perfunctory visit of a couple of officials from the corporate pocket. Several police cruisers had somehow surprised the base and were dispatching military forces into the deep space enclave.

Aldriena knew that Bentra kept a small army of Circle Fours on the base. Then there was Red. Did the UNSF know about the special ones? Aldriena didn’t think so. Black Core had gone to great lengths to make sure they didn’t leak it, and of course, Bentra, Gauss, VG, and the others didn’t want anyone Earthside to have any clue. Still, if Black Core had managed to find out the secret, could the space force have learned of it?

Her gear went back on in record time. She wasted a few more valuable seconds thinking things through. What would the UNSF have brought to neutralize the Circle Fours? Other robots, of course.

If she was going to run for it, she needed to do it now. Once citizens got to their quarters, she’d be too conspicuous. She hurried out into the main room where she saw her servant standing uncertainly. She pulled out C4B and enjoyed the moment of terror on his face.

“I’m out of here,” she said through her mask and ran for the door. It flicked open just in time to emit her into the corridor outside. She saw a couple of citizens scampering for their own quarters. Aldriena’s Cascavel flipped up an escape route for her to follow. She broke into a sprint and followed the green-lit route.

She ran past several doors and then darted to her left, going through some kind of physician’s waiting room. A reception wall robot called after her as she bolted past. She raced through a back hall with routine evaluation equipment and then into a surgical prep area.

The Cascavel directed her through another door and into a large white room with a clear observation wall on one side. A large medical scanner or repair machine dominated one wall.

Startled by Aldriena’s sudden entrance, a nude woman jumped off an examination table next to the scanner. She made no move to cover herself but took a step or two backward. She had long black hair like Aldriena.

“What are you doing here?” Aldriena asked.

“Who are
you
?” the woman demanded.

“Why aren’t you going back to your quarters?”

“I can hardly go back naked, can I?”

“Well, where is your—” Aldriena aborted the conversation.

What the hell do I care what this woman is doing? I have to get off the base.

A loud
boom
came from beyond the other door. The woman whimpered and fell back into a corner next to the medical scanner.

Aldriena took a deep breath. She steeled herself and readied C4B so it could communicate with her Cascavel. She deactivated the safety and prepared the weapon’s software. She knew she wouldn’t miss. C4B had a ten-degree arc of fire. Pulling the trigger kept it armed, but it wouldn’t shoot until aligned on a logged target. All she had to do was yank back the trigger and wave the business end in the direction of the enemy.

She turned off the automatic door request through her link so she could step up to the portal without it opening. She preferred to sling doors open the old-fashioned way in these situations. Aldriena yanked the door open and stepped forward with C4B ready in her hand.

She saw the UNSF war robot, a four-legged walking machine studded with sensors and god knew what else. It stood to the height of her shoulder filling the narrow hallway. She recognized two large-caliber weapon ports on the sides of its wide flat head, which brought the danger of her position into shocking clarity. Those were not for capturing anything; they were lethal weapons. If she’d had another second to think, she might have fled at that point, but she’d already committed herself to a course of action.

Aldriena logged her target with her Cascavel with a quick thought. She pointed C4B at the monstrous robot with the trigger back. She watched the fire light cycle red to green in the course of one adrenaline-laced breath, and then she whipped back through the door.

The robot exploded through the portal a second later, sundering the door into three ragged panels that flew inward, shedding the faux wood coating in confetti-sized chunks. Aldriena tried for another shot, but a silvery tentacle whipped out faster than her eye could follow and snatched C4B out of her hands. The tentacle retracted back under the robot’s head, still clutching C4B. The killing machine froze in front of her.

But it didn’t kill. The thing turned and walked through the transparent wall, crumpling the thick plastic as if it were a clear food wrapper. The naked woman screamed from a corner somewhere. Aldriena swore, as much at the machine’s invulnerability as the theft of her weapon.

She peeked down the corridor through the ruined door. There didn’t appear to be any more robots coming now.

Ironically, even though the corridor was clear, it was easier to get back toward her courier through the opening in the wall created by the path of the invading robot.

Aldriena felt bold enough after the close encounter to do just that.

It had its chance to kill me and it didn’t. I was probably stupid to try to blind it with my weapon. The robot isn’t here to capture people, but to take care of the Circle Fours.

She ran through the ruined plastic wall and picked up a new course fetched by her Cascavel. She knew at any moment a team of UNSF marines could appear and wrap her up in a tangler grenade or knock her out with a rubber bullet. She ran through a twisty section with more medical examination rooms and doctor’s offices before joining up with a main hall that ran a gentle curving course along the perimeter of the base. It was a risk. Each grand corridor, as they were called, could get you somewhere quickly. She figured that the UNSF invaders would lock down the grand corridors first.

Aldriena sprinted down the section avoiding the occasional citizen who hadn’t found their quarters yet. She ran long and hard enough to start losing her wind breathing through the annoying plastic mask. Then she arrived at the branch off for
Silvado
’s bay. She left the grand corridor and started climbing up toward the runway on the inner ring surface.

A person in blue trim identical to Aldriena’s, hurtled around a corner, and collided with her. Aldriena hooked her arm under the stranger’s and rolled the person over the side of her hip in a smooth judo throw.

“Ugh. Where’s the space force troops?” the person transmitted from their back, staring up at Aldriena.

“Get to your quarters before you get shot,” Aldriena growled and resumed her flight.

Her hopes rose as she neared the dock where
Silvado
waited to whisk her to safety. She loped into the reception area and selected the outgoing passageway to the final lock umbilicus. The lock room felt cold. Or maybe it was her imagination, mindful of the unforgiving emptiness that lay beyond the thick triangular windows.

She approached the umbilical doors, but they didn’t open. She sent an explicit open command through her link, as she looked to either side, half-hoping to see a manual opening mechanism. Her link request returned. It said the passage was forbidden to all but UNSF personnel.

“Son of a bitch.”

The UNSF must have already broken into Thermopylae’s system and locked the runway down. Either that or someone on the station had started to coordinate their attack.

Aldriena looked through the human-sized windows at her ship sitting outside in the vacuum. If the damn robot hadn’t grabbed C4B, she would fire it into the windows and crack them. If the little entrance lock was in danger of depressurizing, it would unlock all the doors to any adjacent area that had pressure, so that anyone inside could escape. Provided the lock hadn’t been completely evacuated of air. In that case, she would have killed herself spectacularly, but now that she didn’t have her weapon, she supposed it didn’t matter.

She looked around the room and found the pressure sensor opening. It was a round hole about a half-centimeter in diameter. It was well above her head. Then she saw another across the room.

An idea struck her. She ran back the way she had come. She swore as she ran into the door, forgetting she’d turned off the auto-open broadcast signal from her link. Once through the door, she snatched up a flimsy chair from the atrium and brought it back. She slammed the chair up next to the wall and stood on it so she could face the sensor.

Gotta get the timing just right …

Aldriena slipped her mask off and let it drop to the floor. She leaned forward to cover the hole with her mouth. Then she accessed emergency services through her link and selected the atmosphere leak alert for the room. At the same time, she sucked hard on the wall sensor. She couldn’t help the other sensor being there, but maybe the emergency protocols would fire if the sensors disagreed. Either one could be malfunctioning.

I’ve probably never looked so stupid
.

The lights turned red in the entrance lock. A synthetic voice came through her link and her ears simultaneously.

Evacuate this area. Depressurization warning. Evacuate this area immediately.

Aldriena leaped down and accessed the lock portal to her courier. The door opened and she stepped through. In the walkway, she could hear the sounds of foam being sprayed across the lock windows outside. She’d seen the procedures trigger before. In the event of a hull breach, the station would take immediate action to repair itself with a quick-hardening foam that sprayed on to seal any holes.

Laughter bubbled out of her at the immense relief.
Nice safety feature. One of the advantages of being an operative in this culture. These people would rather be really safe than pin down a spy or two.

She knew she was a good kisser, but this had to be a record result. Now if she could get out of here, maybe she could share the story with a friend someday. An empty pang resonated in her soul, dispelling the amusement of a second before. She’d need some friends first. She left the troubled thought behind in the entrance tube. No time for self-pity yet.

Aldriena slammed into her pilot couch and energized the control system. Her takeoff module blinked red in her mind, the controls faded out, inactive. Her courier took cues from Thermopylae’s docking computers, and the goddamn
artilheiros
had probably locked down the control tower.

She gave the courier an override code from one of her fast buffers and disengaged the docking umbilicals. Her data tables flashed red in warning as she brought the plane straightforward, cutting across the runway. Up ahead, she saw the ninety-degree drop-off of the edge of the ring. Since her “down” pointed straight into the curved runway, it looked like a cliff.

She gunned the close maneuvering jets and sent the craft speeding toward the edge. She denied the impulse to engage her main drive and blow a hole through the station behind her, because she knew there were innocents back there as well as the boira,
artilheiros
, interpols … she knew ten more names for the police in four languages.

And she’d never let them stop her before.

Her courier flung itself over the edge and plummeted out into the star-sprinkled void. Her weight left her so that she felt only the gentle push of the seat at her back as her smaller jets pushed the craft farther from the station. Aldriena couldn’t resist peeking back to get a real eyeshot of the station receding behind her, even though she could have viewed it through her link from any of half a dozen cameras on the ship.

So far so good. She didn’t see anything near the station. Whatever UNSF police vessels were out there, they were still docked with the station. She hoped the space force was happy with the chunk they had already bitten off. Maybe they wouldn’t need such a little morsel as the
Silvado
for dessert.