The Darwin Elevator (38 page)

“He wasn’t in his room,” Zane said. “We’re still looking.”

With sudden certainty Neil knew they wouldn’t find the man, at least in any condition to operate the climbers. The saboteur had probably run straight to the poor bastard’s room after fleeing from Neil.

Smart
.

“Keep at it,” Neil said. He decided to keep his deeper fears from Zane. Dealing with stressful situations wasn’t his brother’s strong suit.

Neil switched to the private frequency again. “Rally at L-Four J-Two,” he said.

“We’re here already,” one leader replied. He was shouting over a loud hiss.

“What’s that noise?” Neil asked.

“Steam!” the man replied. “They’re cutting through the damn airlock!”

Neil forced his legs to move faster. The very fact they they’d brought a water torch meant Alex had anticipated being locked out. There would be no simple stalemate.

“Dig in there,” Neil said. “I’m almost to you.”

He could only hope Alex hadn’t anticipated an armed resistance.

Team three joined up with Neil just before he reached level four. He let them take the lead and grunted back the fire in his thigh muscles as he ran to keep up.

He heard sporadic gunfire before the junction came into view.

Steam roiled in the air, pouring down from “above,” where the junction corridor led up to the central docking bay. Neil could only see a few meters into the cloud. The constant hiss from a cutting torch, high above them in the spoke, drowned out even the warning Klaxon.

“Report,” he said to the first commando they reached.

The woman was pressed against the wall, using a support truss for modest cover. “They’re through the airlock door. Surprised to see us, I’ll tell you that.”

“How many?”

“Twenty,” she said. “Thirty. Hard to say. We got off a few shots before they pinned us here. Brought some serious weaponry.”

Thirty men. Neil’s four teams had four members each. Almost two-to-one odds. “If they’re through the door, why are they still cutting?”

Someone lost in the steam ahead answered. “They’re working on a side door, halfway down the spoke.”

Another team arrived, their presence feeding Neil’s confidence. “Warthen’s going after the climber controls,” Neil said to all of them. “They mean to destroy our ability to leave the station, and we can’t let that happen.”

He saw nodding faces in the roiling steam.

“They’re sitting ducks in that tunnel,” someone said. “Smooth walls, weak gravity.”

The station’s rotation provided Earth-normal pull here at the outer rim, which decreased the farther one traveled up the spoke to the central bay. Neil hadn’t considered that this might make the enemy’s movements slow and awkward. A small advantage, but he’d take it.

“Concentrate fire,” Neil said. “Everyone together.”

“We can’t see anything in this steam,” the woman said.

“Fire blind,” Neil shot back. “It’s a narrow tunnel—you’re bound to hit
something
. One burst from each of you ought to show them we’re serious.”

“Each team take a corner,” one of the leaders said.

They fanned out and began to fade into the swirling vapor. Neil felt naked without some kind of weapon in hand, despite the fact that he’d only held a gun a few times in his life. Swallowing, he took a few tentative steps into the cloud, moving just fast enough to keep the back of the last commando in view.

“On three,” he heard someone say. “One … two …”

The shooting began. Muzzle flashes lit ghostly figures within the steam cloud, as all sixteen fighters leaned in and fired upward into the access shaft, like revolutionaries celebrating a coup.

Cries of surprise and pain came from above.

A body drifted down the vertical corridor, falling faster as the mock gravity took hold. It hit the ground with a thud, and two more followed seconds later.

One of them lost their gun in the fall. It skittered over the tiles and tumbled to a stop near Neil.

The tone of the cutting torch changed, then stopped.

“Get back!” Neil shouted just as the mists cleared.

Alex Warthen’s troops answered the attack with a relentless barrage. Bullets hammered against the floor of the hall for what felt like a minute. The special munitions gave off no sparks but left hundreds of small pockmarks in the floor.

Neil heard bullets ricochet in every direction, clattering across the tiles as they lost momentum.

He saw one of his men take a round in the calf. A splatter of blood like spilled paint on the floor. Two of his squad mates pulled him out of the line of fire, ignoring his anguished cries.

The dropped weapon lay near Neil. He reached for it, his fingers just brushing the black metal when more shots rang out from above. Warthen’s men had an opening and they were seizing it.

Neil yanked the weapon toward himself as he sulked away from the danger zone.

Somewhere above, mixed with the constant bark of firing weapons, he heard the sound of metal striking metal. Repeated, powerful blows, as if someone were taking a crowbar to a computer.

He realized that might not be far from the truth. They were in the climber room, smashing it to pieces.

Bullets fell from the vertical shaft like rain. And then, as suddenly as they’d started, the gunfire stopped.

Neil’s ad hoc commandos were shell-shocked. Two appeared to be wounded. He decided to take the initiative and stepped forward, into the open area below the spoke corridor.

He saw men climbing up, toward the cargo bay airlock at the top. Others waited there, looking down, guns at the ready. They were holding fire to let their comrades retreat from the control room.

Neil raised his gun and pulled the trigger. The snub rifle barked and spat. It slapped into his shoulder with vicious strength and almost vibrated out if his grip. His shots sprayed wildly up the side of the shaft, toward the top and across the men climbing. The arc crossed the men waiting at the top, forcing them to push away for cover. A slow and clumsy movement in zero-G, where they were.

The gun fell silent, out of ammo. Neil thought he might have hit one of them in the back before they were pulled out of the shaft.

But the damage was done. He could see hazy smoke spilling out of the backup climber control room, halfway up the shaft.

Warthen’s men, peering down from the cargo bay, recovered from Neil’s barrage and lifted their weapons. Neil stepped back, feeling suddenly calm. He let them shoot. Waited it out.

When the bullets stopped, he knew they’d retreated.

Minutes passed in silence. Neil’s men eventually organized again and risked the climb up to the cargo bay, but he waited in the hall. He knew they would find it empty.

By now Alex and his men would be zipping along the Elevator cord toward Gateway Station, just fifty kilometers below.

All things considered, Neil counted the skirmish a draw. Alex failed to get into the station proper and did not achieve his desired “inspection.” Plus he had no presence on Platz Station at all now, which meant Neil could move forward without those watchful eyes.

But the climber controls were gone. They would have to rely on other stations to guide their traffic in and out. Stations controlled by Warthen’s guards. A huge problem, by any estimation, but even as Neil helped drag bodies from the bullet-ridden hallway, backup plans formed in his mind.

Chapter Thirty

Darwin, Australia

8.FEB.2283

On the horizon west of Darwin, lightning danced through deep purple clouds, creating pockets of bright violet over a calm sea.

Russell Blackfield counted the seconds until rolling thunder washed over the city. He stood naked in the warm wet-season breeze, on a balcony high above Nightcliff’s western wall. A hotel, once, for the thousands of people who came from all over the world to gawk at the alien device.

A whore lay on the bed in the room behind him, sleeping already. He’d worn her out, given her more than she bargained for. He took a deep breath and stretched. Russell never felt like sleeping after sex. In fact, what he needed was a good run.

He returned to the room and collected his clothing, careful not to disturb the sleeping woman.

“Whore” was unkind, he decided. She’d been genuinely willing, and asked for nothing in return. Not overtly, anyway. They all wanted the same thing—status, and ultimately a trip up the ladder to a better life.

Russell paused after pulling on his pants, and sat on the bed next to her. She lay on her side, back to him.

The thought came out of nowhere, a thought that had never crossed his mind before.
Perhaps I should take a wife
.

Word had come yesterday, from Sofia Windon herself. He had been elected to the Orbital Council, a post that would allow him free access to any station. He would even be assigned quarters in Gateway, for extended stays. He was an Orbital now, even if his job remained here in Nightcliff.

On top of all that, Neil Platz had resigned. Convenient, that.

Yes, a wife. For the first time in his life, he could legitimately offer life in orbit as a perk for being with him.

He traced a finger along the curve of the woman’s back. She had a well-toned body. Thin as a rail, like most Darwinians, but good proportions on the whole. He ran his finger over the arch of her buttocks and down her hip. Would she make a good wife?

Russell tried to imagine himself wed to this woman. Sleeping with her every night.

What was her damn name?

True, she had pleased him this evening, and a few times previously. How long could that last?

She’d been so willing. So utterly boring.

He wanted someone who would be shocked at his bedroom demands. Someone with rounder, softer curves. Someone he could corrupt.

Someone with a name worth remembering.

His thoughts drifted to Tania Sharma.

All in good time
. Russell stood and finished dressing.

In the main yard, he splashed through puddles left by the storm that now faded into the eastern sky. He picked a barracks at random and burst through the door without knocking.

A soldier, who had been sitting in a creaky wooden chair by the door, leapt to his feet. His surprise turned into a salute when he realized who had entered.

Russell felt pleased the guard had not been asleep, but hid this.

“Get everyone up,” he said. “We’re going for a run.”

“Yessa!” the guard said. No more than a boy.

“I’ll be out front. You have thirty seconds.” He enjoyed the youngster’s reaction, all slack jaw and clumsy stammer. Russell spun on his heel and walked back outside to the sound of shouted orders and frantic men rolling out of their bunks.

Sixty seconds later, the guards were standing in a rough line, two deep, in front of him. While a few had managed to get into uniform, most were still in their undershirts and shorts. He let the tardiness go.

“I feel like a jog,” Russell said. “How about you?”

They shouted their agreement in perfect unison.

“Good. Once around the wall, I think,” Russell said. He turned left, toward the main gate, and began to run. Behind him he heard the satisfying sound of eighty feet landing in unison with his.

He kept the pace brisk, took a sharp turn just before the huge gate, climbed the stairwell there to the top of the wall. A route he did often, often with a random platoon trailing behind. They knew the drill.

The wall made a rough circle around the base of the Elevator, except when following the coastline, with a total circumference of just over five kilometers. It stood more than fifteen meters high, with steeply sloped sides, and only a fraction of it had guardrails to protect one from falling.

For most of it, including the entire stretch along the ocean, there was only flat, weathered concrete, slick with sea spray. One misstep would result in an unfortunate meeting with asphalt to the east or south, or craggy shallow rocks to the north or west.

Few actually fell. Hell, the last one even survived, if Russell remembered right. About as useful now as a horse with two legs, but he survived. A run in and of itself was a mind-numbing activity. Add a little risk, though, and you had something.

The group started to spread out by the time they reached the one-kilometer marker. Only a small portion of the guards could keep up with Russell, and by the end he knew that it would be him and perhaps one or two others.

Russell thought it was a good way to find candidates for his elite guard. And of course, the men knew that he would often reward those who finished next to him with a willing woman.

Good motivator, that.

And good for the woman, too, as far as Russell was concerned—practice makes perfect.

At the midpoint on the north wall, by the old jetty, he heard a voice calling for him. He assumed it was one of the guards behind him, pleading to slow the pace, and ignored it. But on a second call he realized the voice came from below. Russell looked down and left and saw someone waving both arms.

“What the hell do you want? I’m running!” he shouted at the dark figure.

“Gateway is on the comm; they say it’s urgent,” the man yelled back.

“Did you tell them I’m running?”

The man stammered.

“That was a joke,” Russell shouted. “Be right there.”

Russell took the call in his office.

“This is Blackfield,” he said into the microphone.

From the other end came a jostling sound. He heard muffled voices in the background.

“Russell, hello.”

Alex Warthen. He sounded tired.

“What can I do for you? There’s been no sign of that scavenger, Skyler what’s-his-name, if that’s why you’re calling.”

“There’s a situation developing up here, and I need your help.”

Russell grinned.
One day, and already I’m indispensable
. “You sound like shit.”

“Took a bullet,” Alex replied, “in the shoulder. Collarbone is all cracked to hell.”

“Shit,” Russell said, leaning forward. “You’ve got my attention. What happened?”

Alex recounted the story of the failed raid on Platz Station. “He was ready for us. With well-armed fighters. Luckily my sleeper agent aboard his station had the sense to act before Platz could divide my men. We would have failed completely without her help.”