Star Road (19 page)

Like it’s fading.

Without having to be told, Annie moved to the right of the entrance doors of the main building while he swung to the left, signaling the others—Nahara and Rodriguez—to hang back.

Simultaneously, he and Annie nodded and stepped forward to trigger the automatic doors.

Jordan wasn’t surprised when they didn’t open.

Annie cast a quick glance at him.

“Power’s out.”

To Nahara: “Doesn’t the terminal have auxiliary power?”

“Only for the essentials—computers and communications.”

“I would think getting in and out of the building might be considered essential,” Jordan said. He didn’t like belaboring the obvious. But this didn’t bode well.

Thinking:
What the hell happened here?

Stepping over to the manual door, he pushed the metal bar to open it, but it, too, didn’t budge.

Locked from the inside?

No choice, then.

He waved Annie away from the door. Then he gave the Plexi in the door a quick blast with his pulse pistol.

It shattered, spreading a wide, white spiderweb across the surface. Jordan stepped up to it and kicked it in. Shards of Plexi rained like spilled diamonds onto the floor.

~ * ~

As soon as they were inside, something to his left caught Jordan’s attention.

Something on the floor.

A body.

Human.

He pointed it out to Annie, who nodded.

Performing a 360-degree sweep, they approached the body. Jordan wondered if Annie might be shocked by what she saw. But he’d seen enough death as a grunt fighting the Northwest Uprising.

You grew ... kind of used to it.

Kind of.

Definitely a man—or what had
been
a man.

His face was a tangled mess of ripped flesh. His throat had been torn away in one large chunk, exposing the glistening white knobs of his spine. His eyes so
wide.

And empty.

Staring sightlessly up at the ceiling. Is that where what killed him had come from?

“Jeezus—not good,” Annie said, shaking her head.

“We know one thing.”

“And that is?”

“We’re not dealing with a human killer.”

He looked down at the scanner.

The only life signs were from the small SRV party.

Good,
he thought.

Annie nodded.

“Okay. Station control’s this way. Up a level,” Nahara said, signaling them over to the nonmoving escalator.

Still scanning their perimeter, Jordan led the way up the steps with Nahara and Rodriguez close behind. Annie brought up the rear. Heads pivoting like searchlights.

Then, just as they reached the top, Jordan heard a noise.

A low growl.

He looked at the scanner.

We’ve got company.

He dropped to one knee, pistol extended, gripped firmly in both hands.

Then, down the corridor—so dark—something moved.

And then—incredibly fast—it charged, and then launched itself at him.

He pulled the trigger.

~ * ~

Annie yelled when she heard the first shot. She started up the stairs, pushing past Nahara and Rodriguez to get to Jordan.

“Jordan!”

Only one shot.

Jordan usually didn’t have to fire twice.

But what if he missed, and... ?

She heard an enraged howl—unearthly, a sound that made her stomach tighten.

It filled the air, echoing in the empty corridor.

Then the stench of singed flesh and hair filled her nostrils before she reached the top of the stairs. Nahara and Rodriguez froze on the dead escalator—and she saw what had happened.

Jordan was getting to his feet, slowly. Then he walked over to his kill.

He turned from side to side, looking in both directions at the upper floor.

Checking for more visitors.

“Why didn’t your scanner pick up that life form?”

“It did. But not soon enough. Something’s wrong here. Some kind of interference.”

She looked at the dead thing on the ground.

“So what have we got here?”

“This?” Jordan gave a quick glance down at the dead creature but didn’t lower his guard for an instant. “Not good.”

The creature had to be at least four meters long, stretched out. A long snout... the wide anteater-like mouth lined with pointed fangs, fangs that could easily tear out a person’s throat. Or remove a head. Or an arm.

One nasty beast,
she thought.

And it reeked. The fur, smoking from the pulse blast, gave off a horrible stench of musk, fecal matter, and singed skin and fur.

Jordan’s pulse pistol had ripped away the creature’s right flank, exposing thick rib bones. The thick, matted pelt was marked with wide brown and black stripes. It was heavily muscled, especially the torso. Whatever it had for internal organs was spilled onto the polished floor, glistening, purple in the dim light that came through the high station windows.

“I’m not familiar with this,” Annie said.

“I am.” Jordan was still scanning the area with a cautious eye. “It’s a warrow.”

“Never heard of ’em.”

“You don’t want to. They don’t—uhh—do well in zoos. Thing is”—he turned to Annie and lowered his voice—”far as I know, they’re indigenous to only one planet... in the Janus System.”

“We’re a long way from Janus.”

Jordan nodded. “No kidding.”

“So what the hell’s it doing here?” Nahara asked, suddenly coming back to life.

Neither of them answered.

Annie kept looking around the upper-level area, peering into the deepest shadows in the places farthest from the windows. The silence was unnerving.

“Thing is,” Jordan finally said, “warrows always hunt in packs, like wolves, years ago on Earth. And they—” He caught himself.

Annie turned to him. Eyebrows raised.

“And?”

“Just stay frosty,” Jordan said. “These things are clever stalkers, and like I said, they generally hunt in packs.”

“How many in a pack?”

The waver in Nahara’s voice made Annie tense even more.

“How many do you think they need?” Jordan said.

We need to get out of here,
Annie thought.

“Okay. Warrows. Maybe ... maybe more of them. All right. So let’s get to the damn pod bay,” Rodriguez said, “so I can get my message, and we can get the hell out of here.”

Annie nodded. Not a bad plan. Check the ion deflectors fast.

Then split.

~ * ~

They moved as a group down the long corridor, their footsteps echoing loudly, Annie still in the rear. Gun at the ready.

She said, so Jordan could hear, “I’d like to find out what happened here. The Authority will want—”

But then she and the others drew up short when, ahead, they saw something that confirmed her worst fears.

A dozen or more human corpses littered the floor and were draped over chairs and desks in awkward, unnatural poses.

Throats and stomachs torn open. Organs spilled across the floor. Blood splattered in wide swatches on the floor and walls.

Not fully dry ... Jesus, this slaughter didn’t happen all that long ago.

“Well,” she said, “now we know why no one was here to greet us.”

~ * ~

19

THE BODIES

Nahara took a breath, his
paranoia now replaced with something more primal.

The whole scene was surreal as he looked around station control. The auxiliary power had kicked on, so all the computer stations and monitors were up and running. No power anywhere else, though.

But there were no people left alive.

The room—a charnel house.

Jordan walked around, ultimately counting more than thirty corpses, including the ones on the second floor. It was hard to get an exact count because they’d been ripped apart, and so many body parts were scattered all around.

Some bodies were still draped across their desks and chairs where they had died. Others—and parts of others—were sprawled across the floor, sticky with drying, clotted blood. The filtered air still rich with the stench of excrement and death.

“Looks like this just happened. Maybe within the last hour or two,” Rodriguez said.

Nahara remembered. Rodriguez. Scientist. Exo-biologist.

Knows things about alien creatures. That could be good.

“You have the computer passwords?” Scott asked Nahara.

He nodded.

In a goddamned daze.

He started rattling off the sequence of passwords that would bring the station’s screens to life, the visuals floating in the air, ready to reveal secrets.

~ * ~

“Okay,” Annie said.

With a few flicks of her hand, she moved one screen to the side and brought up others. The images from a series of monitors floated before her.

“Right,” Jordan said, coming closer. “Let’s check the monitors and security cams. See what the hell happened here.”

“Isn’t it
obvious
?” Rodriguez’s voice was pitched so high.

Is he freaking out?

“They didn’t just break in here and start killing,” Jordan said.

Annie looked back to her gunner. “What do you mean?”

“I mean”—Jordan paused and, gun raised, looked all around—”someone set these animals loose in the station.”

Annie looked at each of them in turn. Then she focused to Rodriguez.

“We have to report this... get a pod out,” Annie said. “Doc, when you—”

“I just want to get my message and get the hell out of here,” he said.

“You can. And you’ll send word back to the WC Authority. Got it?”

Rodriguez nodded.

~ * ~

With the captain’s attention on Rodriguez, Nahara moved over to one of the computer bays and sat down. A screen popped up in front of him.

Only then did he see what was resting on the terminal bay.

A severed hand.

Nahara gagged and, using a file folder from the desk, pushed it away. It left a thin smear of blood on the display. With a quick touch of a few keys, a display screen was projected in front of him.

From where the others stood, they couldn’t see his screen as he waited for the computer to run through its initial boot.

He entered his authority password and called up the security files. After they finished scrolling onto the screen, he entered a single command:

Purge.

If there was going to be an investigation into what happened here—and he had no doubt there would be—he’d make sure no compromising files remained.

The computer screen ran down through the files before it flashed a message:

REQUESTED FILES PURGED.

But then ... someone was walking toward him.

Scott.

His fingers flew across the screen, hurrying now as he called up the backup files and then entered another
purge
command.

The last of the files disappeared from the screen as the captain came up to the desk, leaning over his shoulder to look at the screen.

“Anything?”

Nahara grunted and shook his head.

“Picked clean. Security vids are gone here, too. Transport and incoming logs deleted. Inter-office memos—kaput. Everything.”

Scott gave him a hard look.

An unasked question on her face?

“My guess? Whoever released those creatures into the station had enough savvy to come up here, get computer access, and wipe the security files clean.”

Scott nodded. Then: “Maybe. But where’d they get the passwords?”

Nahara squirmed in his seat. He didn’t like this dance. He wanted to keep his lies to a minimum so he could keep track of them.

“True. Could be they had someone ... ?”

He left his thought hanging so she could complete it herself. She stared blankly at the computer screen and then said, “On the inside? But why?”

“Why what?”

“Why kill so many people in cold blood? On some backwater station. Revenge?”

“Or for fun?”

“Warped idea of fun.”

“Could have been Runners?” Nahara said.

“I don’t get it.” Scott took a breath.

“We’re not going to find out until the WC investigates,” Nahara said. “And by then, hopefully we’ll be long gone.” He hoped that would end it.

And it did.

For now.

Scott left him at his terminal and walked over to the others. Nahara took the time to finish deleting the rest of the deep backup files. Closing every door. He never should have suggested this was the work of Runners.