The Dark Imbalance (36 page)

“That’s as may be,” she said. “But I have a gut feeling that this was no accident.”

She forced herself to hurry, ignoring the pain in her hip every time her left leg took a loping stride. Section gold-one lay midway between the officers’ decks and the warren, in the middle of the ship’s main inhabited nacelle. It wasn’t far from the bridge, but it seemed to take forever.

“You don’t think it might have been Vri?” Haid asked.

She was trying not to think at all, so she didn’t answer him.

Pressure-doors had come down around sections gold-one and gold-two. Roche and Haid sealed their suits and keyed in the appropriate overrides. The heavy door before them slid aside, setting free a cloud of smoke.

Roche stepped cautiously through it. The walls bulged inward in places, reminding her that this area was close to the ship’s main life-support vats. For a moment, she wondered if the attack might have been directed there, and not directly at Kajic.

But then they rounded a corner and found what remained of the four rooms that had contained his body and the equipment required to support it.

The external door was off its hinges. The walls were blackened and twisted. Roche passed through the outer chambers, crunching over piles of twisted wreckage to the control room. Nothing had survived intact. The window over the main console had shattered into a million pieces. Through the hole in the wall where it had once hung, Roche saw the smashed air-conditioning units, the melted fiber-optic cables, the cracked tank...

The tank itself was empty of anything but ash. Its organic contents had either boiled or burned away. “Look at this,” said Haid from behind her. She turned mutely.

He was at the entrance to the rooms, holding up a section of the outer door. One gloved finger traced the smooth, curved edge of the fragment.

“It’s been cut through,” he said.

Roche had seen enough. Not trusting her voice, she called Maii by epsense.

she replied bluntly.

She felt the Surin girl’s grief immediately but didn’t indulge it.

is
Cane still with you?>

she said.

“It wasn’t him,” said Haid, overhearing their thoughts. “Someone had to cut through the door while Uri’s defenses were down, when the cable was severed.”

Roche asked Maii.

Roche shook her head in frustration. Then, like an energy bolt, realization hit her.

“Alta!” she exclaimed.

“What? That’s not possible,” said Haid. “She doesn’t know the ship well enough.”

“Who else
could
it be?” snapped Roche, said Maii.

“We’re on our way,” said Roche, turning to run back the way she had come. “Can you find out for sure if it
was
her?”

said Maii.

“Don’t be gentle.” Roche turned grief and apprehension into powerful nervous impulses that sent the suit hurrying through the ship. “Tell Cane!”

said Maii.

Roche urged her suit faster, even though at fall stretch she knew they wouldn’t arrive in time. “Just be careful!”

A wave of secondhand mental force rolled through Roche. wait
!>

A terrifying flash of fear caught Roche in mid-step, making her stumble. The suit fell heavily as a second explosion tore through the ship. This time it was much closer. The floor bucked as she landed on it, sending her flying into the air. For a giddy moment she was in free-fall; then she hit a wall with a solid crunch and skidded to a halt.

Her vision grayed for a moment.

“Ameidio... ?”

A silver-gray figure loomed out of the suddenly billowing smoke, hand extended. Haid helped her upright. “That came from up ahead,” he said.

“This can’t be happening!” She was moving even as she spoke.

Blast doors had come down across the entrance to the bridge. Roche keyed an override and stepped back as a wave of oily, black smoke exploded out of the entrance.

The reave was silent. She had said nothing at all since that last, terrible thought. As Roche stepped cautiously into the slowly fading smoke, all she could think of was the fear she had felt in the girl’s mind.

The air around them, as measured by the suit’s sensors, was hot—much too hot to sustain life, even if the oxygen in the room hadn’t been consumed by the fire. The crew stations were half- melted and spattered with fire-retardant foam. The walls had buckled, the main screen imploded.

“Pressure-mine,” said Haid dully. “The same used on Kajic, but not as effective in an open space.”

“Effective enough,” Roche muttered numbly.

Haid stared helplessly at the blackened wreckage.

“Help me look,” Roche said, refusing to give up hope.

“Morgan, they couldn’t have survived...”

Roche ignored him, using the powerful limbs of the suit to sweep debris aside. The explosion had blown piles into corners or burned the tougher fixtures where they stood. Haid stepped over to her as she attempted to wrench a large sheet away from where it had stuck to the wall.

“I just want to make sure,” she said distractedly. “She might have been taken hostage—or Cane got her out in time—or—”

She fell silent with a large piece of wreckage raised in one hand, staring at what she’d uncovered—at the evidence that dashed her last, desperate hope.

Haid stepped up beside her. “Is that...
her
?”

“Yes.” The face and head of the body was scorched down to the bone where it showed above the neck of the blackened suit, but there could be no doubt. The body was so small, curled in a fetal position with one arm outstretched.

Blackness rose up in Roche like bile. She thought she could smell burning, even though she knew that was impossible through the suit. Her gaze fixed upon the open hand of Maii’s outstretched arm, as if it were reaching for help.

An overwhelming guilt washed over Roche for not having been there...

“She’s going to pay for this,” Roche whispered.

“Maybe Cane’s here too—” Haid began.

“I don’t care.” Roche heard her own voice as though listening to another person from a great distance. “I just want Alta Ansourian.”

“Morgan...” Haid’s hand had come to rest on her shoulder.

“We have to find her,” said Roche without looking up, resisting his efforts to turn her away from the sight of Maii’s body.

“But how? With Uri down and the bridge wrecked we’ve no way of tracing her.”

She looked up and faced him. “The suit beacons.”

“You think she might be wearing one?”

“If she’s using Dato mines, why not a suit as well?”

The shoulders of his own suit jerked. “It’s possible, I guess.”

She clenched her left fist so tight, she imagined the ceramic finger joints buckling. “I don’t have any implants,” she said, keeping her anger in check. “So I can’t operate my suit properly. You’ll have to do it for me.”

He slaved her instruments to his and searched for beacons anywhere in the ship. There was one, and it was moving toward the scutter docks.

“She could be trying to escape,” said Haid.

Roche nodded. “But we can catch her if we hurry.” She reached for a weapon, and realized only then that she was unarmed. Haid was in a similar position.

He raised his arms in a helpless gesture. “I wasn’t anticipating combat within the ship,” he explained.

“And we don’t have time to go to the armory,” Roche said. “We’ll just have to manage without.”

“Maybe we should split up,” Haid suggested. ‘Tackle her from two directions at once—”

“No,” Roche said. “We stay together. But we won’t use the suit intercoms; otherwise she’ll be able to hear us. Just stick to the suit speakers.”

Haid nodded in agreement.

“What about Cane?” he said, the audio system of his suit clearly audible through hers. “Do you think he’s dead also?”

“Not a chance,” said Roche. Turning her back completely on Maii’s body, she stepped past Haid.

“Morgan?” he called after her. “What happens when we find her?”

“She dies,” she said, leading the way from the bridge. “Beyond that, I don’t really care.”

* * *

The internal transit tubes were inactive, killed along with Kajic, so they were forced to run again. The light brown corridors seemed too bright as they headed in a different direction this time, down through connecting corridors and access tubes toward the ship’s fat central drive section. There the scutters and other smaller support vehicles were docked or stored between outings.

Halfway there, a growing suspicion about what the woman had in mind became a certainty as the first of a new wave of explosions rocked the ship.

“What the hell is she doing?” Haid gasped. The data available through his instruments confirmed that at least one of the five remaining scutters had been damaged.

Roche watched—beyond horror, beyond surprise—as a chain of detonations ripped the docks to pieces. “This didn’t just happen overnight,” she said. “Those mines must have been placed and armed in advance.”

“We gave her the freedom to roam anywhere in the ship,” Haid said. “We let her do whatever she wanted. I didn’t
suspect
—”

“You had no reason to,” Roche said. “How could we have known she’d do something like this?”

The explosions continued, damaging more of the scutters. Roche couldn’t tell how many craft had been crippled or destroyed, but she knew the docks were ruined. The chain reaction would have left the place a raging inferno. If Alta herself hadn’t got out in time, she wouldn’t last a minute.

Roche found it difficult to muster any sympathy for the woman—especially given that Vri had been down there, too.

But the transponder kept moving. Roche tried to think one step ahead of the woman. No matter how hard they ran, the suits were identical; they would never catch her by dogging her heels. They had to try to cut her off.

The docks were in an outer layer of the drive section. The next obvious place to hit was two levels down.

“She’s headed for the drive chamber,” Roche said. “She’s probably going to try and blow that, too.”

“Can she do that?” asked Haid.

“She obviously thinks she can, otherwise she wouldn’t be heading there.” Roche considered her options while trying to maintain a steady pace, but the sheer size of the
Ana Vereine—
previously an asset—was now proving to be a disadvantage. “I doubt we’ll arrive in time to stop her,” she said, “so there’s no point trying. But somehow I don’t think she’s going to be willing to blow herself up along with the ship.”

“She’ll be looking to escape,” said Haid.

“And fast.”

“But how? She’s blown up all the EVA—” He stopped, realizing the only real option that Alta had. “The Hum ship!”

“It’s the only possibility I can think of.”

“You think she’s a clone warrior?”

“Maybe not,” Roche said, “but certainly on their side. It’s the only explanation I can think of for why she’s doing this.”

“So she’ll rig the drive to blow, then jump ship?”

“That would be the simplest solution.”

“Then she’s going to need access to the hull.”

“Exactly,” Roche said. “See if you can pull up any plans on airlocks close to the central drive chamber.”

Within seconds, Haid had the plans before them, via their suit’s displays.

“Which do you think she’ll go for?” Roche asked, studying the map.

“There’s one likely candidate, and a couple of close seconds.”

“Take us to the most likely, and we’ll just have to wait for her there.”

“Listen, Morgan,” said Haid, “I know you want to keep us together, but wouldn’t it make sense to split up now? If we risk all on one airlock, and she picks another, that puts us in a bad situation. After all, we’ve only got one shot at this.”

Roche pondered this. As much as she didn’t want to let Haid out of her sight right now, his suggestion
did
make sense. If Alta had worked out how to locate them via her own suit, they could end up walking into a trap.

“Okay,” she relented. “Ameidio, you take a secondary airlock and I’ll wait for her at the main one.” Haid was about to protest. “I have just as much chance against her as you, Ameidio. And besides,” she added, “I’d like to be the one that takes her down.”

“Okay, Morgan,” he said. “But just take care, all right?”

She nodded. “Keep an eye on my beacon so you know where I am, but
don’t
communicate unless you have to. The less she knows about us, the better.”

“Okay. And if all goes well, I’ll meet you out on the hull.”

At the next intersection, he turned left while Roche kept going. She watched the dot of his suit angle away from hers with a feeling of apprehension. The pain in her side was a constant ache punctuated by spikes of agony. A rumble of distressed machinery came to her through her feet rather than her eardrums. She ignored everything, and concentrated instead on the task ahead.

Each stride was like the tick of a clock, taking her ever closer to some unknown fate. She hurried through the
Ana Vereine’s
extensive warren, through tunnels she hadn’t visited since first occupying the ship. It was here that Cane, Haid, and Maii had hidden while Kajic left Sciacca’s World and the Hutton-Luu System with the intention of handing Roche and the Box over to his superiors in the Ethnarch’s Military Presidium.

On the tracking screen, Alta had reached the main drive chamber. Within minutes, a siren began to sound.

“That’ll be the drives,” Roche mumbled to herself. The lack of response from either Maii or the Box only intensified her sense of isolation and the ever-growing emptiness inside her.

She had hoped it would take the woman longer, but a warning through her suit only confirmed her worst suspicions: the drives were going to overload in about fifty minutes. She didn’t know exactly what Alta had done, but it had to be something slow-acting, something she had prepared in advance. Had she freed the antimatter reserve, they would already be dead. But whatever it was, it was unlikely it could be stopped. It could take them hours just to figure out what she had done, let alone begin reversing whatever process Alta had set in motion....