Severance (35 page)

Her vision finally returning to normal, she dropped down to
the floor of the cavity and looked around. Spotting her pistol and terminal,
she scooped them up, then looked outside.

“Do you know who I just shot?” Bruce asked.

“I do! How’d that feel?”

“Like nothing. Really disappointing.” He shook his head. “If
shooting your boss doesn’t feel awesome, then what else is there to believe in?”

“A question for the philosophers, buddy.” She poked her head
out of the hatch and looked around. The far side of the cavity opened out onto
a hallway, running uphill in both directions. They were now in the core, the
part of the ship that would actually detach. It looked like the engineering
deck, but she hadn’t been up here in years.

Bruce picked up the fuse torch and smacked it against the
wall a couple of times. “Yeah! Escape to Destruction! Let’s go mess something
else up.” He spun around in a circle. “Where are we?”

“The engineering deck, but…”

“Great! The engineering deck! Let’s go find the reactor and
kick
it
!”

“Bruce,” she said soothingly, not sure how much of this was
an act. “I think our luck is sufficiently pushed.”

A strangled gasp from down the hall punctuated that thought,
Stein turning to watch a wide–eyed naval engineer staring back at her. A pair
of shots from Bruce thudded into the wall beside him, which sent him scurrying
down the cross–hall he had come from. “No!” she yelled, reaching out of the
hatch to grab Bruce’s arm as he set out to chase after him. “Let’s go!”

He stopped, glaring at her. “I could have got him,” he said,
allowing her to pull him back inside the cavity. Once in, he reached back
outside and slammed the hatch shut behind him.

“I know,” she said. “Come on.”

They bounced across the cavity and out the far side,
shutting the hatch on that side as well, hand–tightening down a couple of the fasteners.
“You are like my least favorite person right now, you know that?” Bruce said as
they ran back the way they had come. “No, Bruce, don’t shoot the guy. Don’t
kick the reactor.
Thanks a lot, mom.”

They rounded a corner, Stein pulling to a halt in front of
one of the elevators. “Well, because you’ve been such a good boy, I’ll let you
use the elevator on the way out,” she said, jabbing the button. Bruce stopped,
grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her away. “Hey!” she yelled.

“They’ll be able to stop us in there,” he said, dragging her
towards the stairwell. “Trap us,” he added, giving her a push down the first
flight of stairs. She squawked in protest, but floated down the drop elegantly
enough in the low–gravity. “Besides, this way is more fun,” he said, leaping
down the flight himself.

Hurling themselves down the stairs became progressively more
reckless as they went, and they soon found themselves descending more or less
normally, at which point Bruce’s interest in the elevator rose again. There was
another problem with that, she realized a few floors later. They were almost
directly above the fortified barriers right now — any elevator down to street
level would deposit them in the middle of a group of amused security officers.

They were forced to slow to a tip–toe when they reached the
fourth floor. These stairs extended all the way to the four street levels,
emptying out to locked doors, emergency exits normally inaccessible to the
public. The doors were locked and closed when they had come up this way, but if
alarm bells were ever going to ring, this would be the time. And indeed, by the
time they reached the second floor and started prying off the loosely fastened
grate covering the pressurization duct, voices could be heard not far above
them.

They quickly moved inside the ductwork, Stein gently closing
the grate behind her once inside. As quietly as they could, they set out
through the substantially–sized ducts, necessary for pressurizing the
stairwells in case of fire. More footsteps and shouting from behind them,
though thankfully no one saying, “They’re in the ducts!”

Stein let Bruce take the lead, as he led her downhill, taking
an obviously different route than the one they had arrived from. To Stein’s
sense of direction, they were heading away from the barricaded doors they
wanted to head to. “You did have an escape plan for this, right?” she asked his
ass, bobbing and weaving in front of her as the big man crawled away.

“Oh, yeah,” Bruce replied from somewhere ahead of his ass. “Actually,
that reminds me.” He stopped, provoking an unseemly collision and fumbled around
in his webbing. “E?” he eventually said into his terminal. “It’s Horatio Q.
Pseudonym. We’re on our way out, probably around the Africa–1 area. We could
use some big distractions if you’ve got any handy.”

“Ellen?” Stein asked when he shut the call off. “Aren’t you
resourceful?”

“One of my many traits,” Bruce confirmed, setting into
motion again. “Resourceful, irresponsible, gassy, reckless, recklessly gassy…”

Stein sniffed the air. “
Oh, come on.
”

“What?” Bruce stopped, this time Stein managing to halt
herself in time. Bruce sniffed the air ahead of her. “I swear that wasn’t me.”

“
Oh, come on.
”

“I’m being totally serious. But I think it means we’re
close.” Bruce set out again, Stein reluctantly following. The smell got
stronger as they went, Stein finally realizing where Bruce was leading her:
into the meat farms.

Bruce stopped again, fidgeting around with something in his
webbing. He finally found what he was looking for and rolled onto his back.
Shimmying forward a bit more, Stein could see a diffuser directly above him, a
faint light trickling down into the ducting. Bruce pressed a tool against the edge
of the diffuser and began cutting into the thin metal with the plasma blade.
The diffuser itself was far too small for them to pass through, so he spent the
next few minutes expanding it. Finished, he pounded his fist a couple of times
into the middle of the diffuser, punching his way through the floor above. “Oops.
That one was me,” he said.

“What one was you?” she asked, smelling the answer a moment
later. “
Oh, come on.
”

Bruce clambered up out of the hole he had made, then reached
down to help Stein through. On her feet again, Stein looked at the meat trees around
her, suddenly remembering that she hadn’t seen Mr. Beefy in almost a week. He
was just a cute little guy compared to these monsters, who generated the bulk
of the ship’s protein. Up close, an orchard full of meat trees was decidedly
not very cute.

“What now?” she asked Bruce, who had wandered down another
row of the orchard.

“Basically, we run for it,” he said. “Hoping of course that
they don’t know where we are.”

This did not turn out to be the case, as they discovered a
moment later when the door on the far side of the farm opened up, three
security officers streaming in, not asking questions. A flurry of shots just
missed Stein as she hurled herself to the floor in a hail of exploding meat,
shards of awful confetti raining to the floor around her. A tremendous thump on
the far side of the room, Bruce presumably using his stockpile of grenades.
Collecting herself, Stein crawled to the end of a row of planters and peeked
around a corner. Looking at the door through a tangle of meat trees, she thrust
her own pistol out in front of her and crept forward. A helmeted head appeared
behind a bench of meat seedlings, and she shot at it, missing, but causing the
head to duck back down. A grenade sailed through the air and landed on the far
side of the bench, exploding with a thud.

On the far side of the room, a burst of gunfire. She saw a
female security officer standing, pistol blazing, presumably firing at Bruce.
As Stein raised her own pistol to fire, a roar from the far corner as an
enormous wad of meat charged forward, Bruce taking cover behind it as he ran.
The security officer fired wildly, charged particles thumping into the meat
uselessly. A fraction of a second later, an awful collision, Bruce, officer,
and meat crashing to the floor in a heap. Some more thuds. Stein ran over, her
pistol ready, only to see Bruce straddling the now unconscious officer. He
looked up at Stein and smiled. “Did you see that?”

“I did.”

“Can you believe there’s people out there who don’t love
this stuff?” He kissed the bruised meat fruit, then tossed it to the ground. He
stood up. “So…I think they know where we are.”

“So it would seem. Hiding’s probably out,” she agreed.

“Then let’s do the opposite of that.” Bruce stepped over the
unconscious security officers to the door of the farm. Peering out cautiously,
a huge smile spread across his face. “Oh, yes!” he shouted, stepping outside.
Stein trailed him out the door to see a security van parked nearby, Bruce
already climbing into the front seat. She joined him on the other side of the
van.

“Do you know how to use one of these things?” she asked,
getting in.

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m a faster learner.” Bruce pushed and twisted the
control stick, sending the van around in a clumsy circle. “Where are we, again?”

“Uh, that’s Africa that way,” Stein said, pointing at the
street that they had just lurched past. As she was pointing, she caught a
glimpse of a group of security officers scrambling down an escalator. Behind
them, shots rang out. “We’re also heading south, incidentally.”

“Gotcha.”

“We want to head north.”

“All right, then,” Bruce said, hurling the van into another
sloppy turn. They rocketed down a side street, Bruce fumbling with his terminal
as he drove. “E? It’s Horatio again,” he shouted into it. “Slight change of
plans. We’re now in a security van. It’s awesome, so don’t shoot it.” He
dropped the terminal in his lap, swerving slightly. A block ahead, another
security van turned into the street and accelerated at them.

“Shoot,” Bruce said, knuckles white on the steering wheel.

Stein nodded. “Dammit!”

“No, I meant you should shoot. Shoot at them.” He gave her
several encouraging nods. She swallowed, then leaned out the side of the van,
steadying the pistol against the frame. Taking a deep breath, she began
repeatedly pulling the trigger, sending a woefully inaccurate series of shots
in a direction that could just barely be considered forward. Not in any
actual danger from this, the other van nevertheless swerved violently, bashing
into both sides of the street. Before she could line up to take another shot,
she was hurled back into the van as Bruce pulled another hard right. “Going
north now, boss,” Bruce said.

“Superb,” Stein replied. She leaned out the window and
looked behind them. The other security van had entered into the street on their
tail and adopted her strategy of spraying crazily inaccurate gunfire across the
road. She squeezed back a few shots of her own, no more accurate.

“There’s another van behind us, E,” she heard Bruce say. “That
one’s okay to shoot.” Another violent swerve pulled Stein back inside the van.
Stein faced forward and watched Africa Street approaching. Getting the hang of
Bruce’s driving technique, she braced herself. They turned onto Africa, the
blockade visible five blocks ahead. She looked back, watching the other
security van careen into the street behind them.

“Got it,” Ellen’s voice, tinny over the terminal speaker. “Stay
right.”

“Your right or my right?” Bruce yelled.

“My right!”

“So, my left?”

“Rrr…correct!”

“Ahhh! You were going to say right!” Bruce cackled.

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?” Stein shouted. “NOW? NOW? OF
ALL TIMES?”

The van swerved in a direction, although facing backwards,
Stein had no way of telling if it was the right one, or, for that matter, the
correct one. A sharp crack, and a gaping hole appeared in the front of the
tailing security van. It lurched and drifted to the left — its left — smacking
heavily into the wall, grinding to a halt.

“Get in here,” Bruce yelled, yanking her back into the van.
She turned around, seeing the blockade only a block ahead, muzzle flashes
blazing. Bruce accelerated with his head down, peeking over the dash with one
eye. “Also, hang on.” She dropped the pistol to the floor and braced herself
against the dashboard.

A thousand hammer blows of pain, all over every part of her
body. No, not spread evenly. More hammers on the right side. And not all
hammers. At least one axe. Blood in her mouth, cotton in her ears. She opened
her eyes. She didn’t know they had been closed. Feet. Not her feet. Too big for
that. Bruce’s? Yes, but from a funny angle.

She realized she was on the floor of the van. She turned her
head, which made the hammer blows a bit worse. There was Bruce, swinging the
control stick around, blood on his forehead. His mouth was moving, but she
couldn’t hear what he was saying. It looked like “Whooo.” No, wait. It sounded
like “Whooo,” too. So, she could still hear. That was nice. Someone needed to
do something about those hammer blows, though.

“Oh, man,” Bruce said, as he twisted the control stick. He had
a big grin on his face. That made Stein happy. “They were right to not let just
anyone drive these things,” he said. He looked down at Stein. “Laura? Oh, shit.
Laura? Oh, fuck. I’m sorry. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. Hang on.”

Data modulo 2 insertion in sanctuary will cause base
pairs to align with great forthrightness. Success!

Harold’s eyes ached, dry and itchy from lack of blinking, as
if they didn’t want to turn their backs on the insanity he was making them read.
A cookbook on illegal genetic manipulation techniques was open on the screen in
front of him, part of a big text file of forbidden knowledge he had stumbled
upon in his school days. He wasn’t the only one; getting your first copy of
this nonsense was a rite of passage, something the science nerds passed around
for fun.