The Valkyrie Project (27 page)

"Okay, so you'll cover the hall and I'll take out the guys on the stairs?"

"On three."

Ana flippe
d to the other side of the doorframe to give herself a cleaner path to the top of the stairs.

"One."

She took a quick glance, and drew a few shots from one of the men standing on the stairs. She spotted the top of his head. If she could hit him before she got to the stairs, the other two further down would be at a severe disadvantage.

"Two."

Ana tucked the storage drive in her against her hip, ready to protect it with her armor-covered body.

"Three."

Rani leaned out, firing down the hall as Ana sprang through the door and fired a quick three-shot burst just as the man at the top of the stairs began to rise up for another peek. The two men down the hall ducked back into the rooms they were using for cover. Rani managed to place a couple bullets at the entry to the rooms across the hall from each other, leaving just the two men on the stairs. Ana hoped they were dumb enough to think that the third man had just let his head get too far up, but in reality, they must have known that the third man's sudden topple and the accompanying fountain of blood meant she was coming for them.

Ana
sent a torrent of bullets down the stairs, and didn't take the time to assess the surprise or fear in the faces of the two remaining men as she followed her cover fire. Ana hurdled the body whose head lay on a pillow of blood and forced her way past the other two men as they stumbled backward, trying to figure out if they had enough life left in them to take a shot at her.

Rani caught up to her at the bottom of the stairs. Ana conti
nued sprinting, the soft sponge of real wood cushioning the impact of her long, strong strides. The man who had been tending bar cowered behind it, peeking out during the momentary lapse in gunfire only to decide he needed to continue hiding.

Ana heard Rani's gun fire several times behind her, followed by the contrasting crack of another weapon and then a sting in her calf muscle. Something wrapped its way around her lower leg like an electric eel, shocking her muscles and numbing her nerves. Ana stumbled and fell to one knee, the storage drive dropping from her hand as she thrust
it out to break her fall. Rani's gun sounded and Ana looked back to see her partner running sideways toward her so the veteran Valkyrie could put up more suppressive fire.

Rani grabbed Ana under her arm, hauled her up,
put up a few more shots, and kept going for the exit without slowing down. A few more of the odd electric bolts angled toward them, but the aim from the men coming down the stairs missed the pair of Valkyries. They hopped the bodies of the men Ana had taken down to reach the first floor, but Rani and Ana pushed through the door and out of sight.

The storage drive
—the information they'd come for in the first place—lay in the middle of the bar room. With Ana limping and two shooters pursuing, Ana comforted herself that perhaps the Continuum would think she left it on purpose as a small gift, something to build their trust in her as a triple agent.

--

When Ana and Marisol had infiltrated Lukas Huang's Evil Lair, she had convinced herself that a two-person strike team fit the mission scenario despite the fact that the two Valkyries might have to cover literally three square kilometers of area within the fortress. As she and Etienne swirled down into the parking garage next to a factory that was the Continuum's next target, she couldn't help but question the decision to send only the pair of them in to take down the entire operation inside.

She tried to process whether the Continuum already knew the outcome of the mission, but got lost in the loops of their changing the future versus playing out predestined events. Her thoughts corkscrewed up like the spiral that funneled them to a parking space one level below the ground floor. They followed an ant trail line of workers under the dry crust through a cool tunnel outlined in durostone.

The prearranged security access allowed Ana and Etienne to duck out through one of several blue metal doors which siphoned off workers into various side routes and work areas before they made it to the main factory floor.

They wore blue jumpsuits that match
ed the security doors and, by virtue of their one-piece styling, made it hard for the female employees to get in and out of the bathroom in any reasonable amount of time. Ana was surprised by the number of female employees walking beside them through the tunnel. She wondered if they even got bathroom breaks. The Greater States tended toward lax enforcement of laws intended to protect lower-class minimum-wage workers.

Ana and Etienne
wore bandanas to hold their hair back and further blend in as worker drones in the colony. In theory, they would keep long hair out of the myriad of chemical processes and electrical and mechanical components.

The side corridor
they shuffled into from the main thoroughfare branched off at various points itself into smaller corridors that formed a square—albeit a fairly disjointed one—around the perimeter of the facility. All in all, a kilometer of cold durostone ground to cover before they would arrive at the door that was essentially a mirror image of where they'd started at.

Ana pulled what looked like a
stick of carrot from her lunch box and stuck it to the wall, pressing a tiny button on the flat top of the cylinder. Outside the context of pale blue duroplast box with pink and yellow flowers adorning the lid, the explosive resembled the sort of alkaline batteries used until the middle of the last century.

Sixteen charges, four for each side of the building, placed as close as they could get to
a hundred meters apart based on calculations done on the schematic they'd been provided. Sticking and setting the charges only took Ana about thirty seconds apiece. It was the branching routes and doubling back to make their way down a different corridor that made the task annoyingly time-consuming. They'd entered during the post-lunch back-to-work shuffle, and needed to finish by the time the end-of-work bell kicked off the mass exodus.

Etienne stood watch while Ana placed the charges
, her head swiveling back and forth like a security camera while her fierce clear blue eyes darted around more like an animal anticipating an attack. The corridors off of the corridors for their part remained eerily devoid of people. Nevertheless, the two of them bantered as they went so as to seem more casual if they encountered anyone. And as she'd imagined in the pool—before being assaulted by the raven reaper Natalya—Ana got in her question about the mind-controller.

"It came as a side effect of traveling back and forth," Etienne said. She didn't say traveling back and forth to where, but Ana had a pretty good idea. "The
albinism as well as the thought-shaping ability. Some are stronger than others, obviously, able to hold up to the mental breakdowns that tend to come with frequent travel." And couldn't help but think of Jrue and Alando Piscina. Had they both already "traveled"? Were they mentally weaker than the man who she’d let get away? "They've come up with some modifications that reduce the effects and extend the amount of time before the side effects get really bad."

Modifications? Etienne had no idea how close Ana had come to those modifications.

Half of the charges had been set when they came to the dead end. Ana had seen it coming, and presumed Etienne had as well. She'd hoped it was a trick dead end with a ladder to offer them a way up through a duct and over to the other side. She had memorized the route, though, and knew the only opening was the way they'd come.

"Did we take the wrong turn back there?" Ana asked as Etienne pulled the schematic from inside the front of her jumpsuit. They'd both memorized the route, and Ana knew they'd gone the right way according to the diagram that Etienne held.

"Shit," Etienne muttered. "They must have changed it."

"Changed what?"

Etienne looked up, panic flashed in her eyes. "The building. They must have altered it after we got the blueprint."

"So, we go back and around the other way
—"

"And hope that nothing else has changed."

"Yes, or we try to find a way through over here. We've only passed a few other hallways."

"Assuming that one of them goes through."

Ana hated always having to be the optimist. She preferred assessing reality with logic, but if Etienne brought up a negative counter to everything she said, then she'd have to continue being the positive one.

"We have to backtrack anyway," she said
. "Let's just see if anything looks promising along the way."

They both knew the plan allowed very little time for rat maze games, but arguing while they were halfway around the building would only reduce the time available to find a solution. So they turned and hustled back the way they'd come and then back down the various offshoots that the schematic indicated might go through. Not that they trusted the print-out any further than they could throw it, which, even crumpled into the ball of paper that Ana wanted to make of it, was not far.

As they returned from the third dead-end corridor—each one further back toward the entrance—Ana thought perhaps they should have followed Etienne's pessimistic plan and started over from the other end.

The
fetid stench that accompanied her
self-
loathing thought might not have been a
self-
imposed hallucination, but just a waft of her armpits as the chemical composition of her nervous sweat ran together with the output from the quickened pace of their search. A more complete analysis of her neuroses was halted by the echo of boots coming down the hall.

Etienne froze and held a hand out in case Ana hadn't heard. But Ana had already slung her small company-issue backpack off one shoulder and put
her free hand inside where it closed around the handle of a slimline Needler.

A
rming herself before she even knew who was coming might have been a bit presumptive, but Etienne did the same thing a moment later. Better safe than dead.

"
…couldn't have just disappeared. There's only two ways in, and they haven't come out the other side or Jacob and Jarvis would have been on the comms."

While Ana believed that she could take Jacob and Jarvis before they could get on their com
ms, the important part of the statement was that they were indeed looking for the two women who'd sauntered in and disappeared for an unusually long time. Lost new hires they were not.

The men, presumably two of them like their friends coming in the other way, were still around a bend where the current hallway adjusted for some unseen bit of architecture behind the walls. Between that bend and Ana and Etienne was an open entry to what was probably another dead end. It was also the only possible place where they would have any sort of cover. Etienne knew it too, as any good agent would, and started jogging toward it, careful to be light on her feet. While the security guards, or whoever they were, walked and talked without any sort of attempt at stealth, Ana and Etienne could be much quieter and still be loud enough to give themselves away.

Etienne pressed her back against the wall closer to the direction from which the guards would come. Ana folded in beside her, both their guns up at a ninety-degree angle perpendicular to the ground.

"Go!" hissed Etienne, pointing with her off hand down the corridor in which they'd taken refuge.

"Go where?" Ana replied. But she knew perfectly well where her partner wanted her to go. She stalled because the odds were slim that this particular passage would be the one that would lead them to the other half of the building.

"Down there. You have the charges. Go down there and get through and get them set. I'll take these bozos and follow you. If it doesn't go through, then we'll head back together and try another one."

"Why don't we both take the guards and go back to the entrance. We can go in from the other side."

"They'll have someone watching the door. We can't go back that way now."

Ana did not like the prospect of leaving Etienne to get captured while walking into a confrontation with two security guards herself, but other options made themselves scarce.

With a nod as her only acknowledgement, Ana took off down the hall. She didn't get far before she heard shots fired. The tiny needle guns were quiet
, but not silent. Several percussive pops echoed down the hall in concert with the bass line of much heavier-caliber weapons. The sound died without an encore and gave no clue as to who had won the firefight. Ana just kept running. If Etienne was down, then Ana would be lucky to get out alive. If Etienne did as she’d said and dropped the guards, then she might be able to catch Ana since she didn't have to set charges along the way.

Since she didn't know the outcome, Ana just ran. She kept somewhat accurate track of her location in relation to where she'd placed the last charge before the dead end, and wasted no time in setting the charges once she passed that point plus one hundred meters. And the hallway stretched past that point and further.

She sprinted, but not full out for fear that she would run into the duo known as Jarvis and Jacob.