Aaron Conners - Tex Murphy 02 (30 page)

Apparently, Eva knew exactly what to do with the Winter Chip and finished installing it within minutes.

“All right. It’s ready to go.”

I kept my eyes on the hostages. “So…what happens now?”

Eva glanced at her watch. “We get the hell out of here. There’s no telling how long it will take the chip to crash the system, but I’m planning on it being sooner than later.”

On cue, an alarm began to blare. I scanned the room quickly and saw lights flashing on most of the consoles. Eva was looking around frantically. Seeming to make a decision, she moved toward a corner of the room, where a tall filing cabinet stood. I backed away in the same direction, still keeping my tasc gun trained on the now-terrified group.

Glancing back and forth between the hostages and Eva, I saw her pull out the drawers to form a set of stairs. Standing on top of the cabinet, she could easily reach the ceiling, which I now noticed consisted of acoustic fiberboard tiles, laid into a grid of metal supports.

Eva pushed on one of the tiles,moved it aside, and then pulled herself up and out of sight. I backed up to the file cabinet and briefly wondered why we hadn’t gone out the door. As I started climbing up the drawers, one of the men got to his feet. I aimed and fired, knocking him down. Reaching the top of the cabinet, I set the gun on the fiberboard and pulled myself up, kicking the cabinet over in the process. At the same instant, I realized why Eva hadn’t taken the obvious escape route. I heard the door open, and several sets of boots scrambled into the room. The hostages began to yell.

I picked up the tasc gun and spotted Eva some distance ahead, carefully moving along a catwalk. The crawl space was about five feet tall and stretched out for hundreds of yards, maybe miles, in every direction. I crouched and ran as fast as I could manage. The bedlam below faded away.

I was about twenty feet behind Eva when a hail of bullets ricocheted past me. Over my shoulder, I caught sight of several guards in hot pursuit. I couldn’t look at them for long.

The catwalk was perilously narrow, and one false step would send me down through a ceiling tile, into God only knew what. There could’ve been just about anything below us, from an ocean to a desert. Eva and I were now moving at a recklessly dangerous pace.

To make matters worse, a wall loomed directly in front of us. Eva reached an

intersection on the catwalk and turned right.

We continued at break-neck speed, zigzagging left and right along the narrow walkway.

We were quickly approaching another wall. Behind us, the gunshots echoed

sporadically. When I turned to check our pursuers, it was clear they were gaining on us.

As I looked back to Eva, I saw her reach the wall, then drop out of sight, followed an instant later by a loud clang. I reached the spot where she had vanished and saw that she’d jumped down onto a metal-grate landing. I lowered myself just as a slug put a dimple into the wall right above my head.

Now on the landing, I saw that we’d arrived at an access point to the elevator shaft. Eva was leaning into the opening, craning her neck up, then down. She looked back at me. “I can’t tell if the elevator is above us or below. We’ll have to risk it and hope it doesn’t catch us in a bad spot.”

She backed into the opening and began to climb down. I waited a moment, then

followed. The ladder rungs were built into the wall. As I climbed carefully down, I looked around and saw that there were no old-fashioned elevator cables in the shaft.

Instead, each of the four corners had tracks constructed into them. The elevator was probably run electrically. And with the ladder imbedded in the wall, I was willing to bet that there would be no appreciable space between the walls of the shaft and the exterior of the elevator. If we weren’t close to an access window when the elevator passed us, we’d have no choice but to go with it. Suddenly paranoid, I began looking up, then down, like a spectator at a tennis match.

We continued our descent for several minutes, passing access windows about every thirty rungs. Above us, the voices of our pursuers were now audible. Once they reached the access window, we’d be dead. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. And I’d be the first to go.

Then I heard the elevator. It was above us. Eva seemed to have heard it, too, and glanced up sharply. “Hurry!”

We moved even faster than before. A gunshot went off, and a bullet went pinging down the shaft. A security guard was leaning through the access window, cradling a rifle. I tried to pull my head in between my shoulder blades like a turtle, but it wouldn’t retract.

Below me, Eva had reached an access window and was crawling in. Another shot rang out. One of my feet reached the access window. A bullet ricocheted off a ladder rung just above my hand. A scream suddenly erupted and echoed down the shaft. As Eva helped pull me through the opening, a spray like red rain passed by, followed closely by the top half of a bloody corpse and a rifle. A split second later, the elevator flashed past.

I probably wouldn’t have reacted on my own. I felt Eva’s hands on my back, and then I was falling helplessly through the air. A moment later, I hit the top of the elevator, and then Eva landed on me painfully. I laid there, more stunned than hurt, as Eva rolled over and onto her knees. Above me, gunshots rang out, but the distance between us and the guards was increasing rapidly.

We continued to descend for probably twenty seconds, and the elevator slowed and stopped alongside another access window. Eva motioned for me to follow her into the opening. “C’mon.”

“Where we going?”

She flashed her grim smile. “All the way to the bottom. Voorman’s freighter should still be in the cargo bay. And if the life-support systems don’t shut down in the next few minutes, we might still make it out of here.”

“So why are we climbing out of here?”

Eva looked at me indulgently. “Because going up at this point would be a bad thing.”

Following Eva’s lead, I crawled into the opening. We waited breathlessly until the elevator moved. It was going down. As we jumped back on, the elevator shuddered slightly, and the lights dimmed, then brightened. I wondered how much longer we had before the Winter Chip’s work was done. Every breath felt precious. Eva leaned toward me. “We’re almost there. Get ready.”

I wasn’t certain what getting ready entailed, so I tightened up and gritted my teeth. The elevator came to an abrupt halt, knocking us off-balance. Eva rolled over toward the ladder. An access window was about four feet above us. “Hurry!”

Eva scrambled up the ladder and into the window. I was just a beat behind her. As I dragged myself out of the shaft, I heard the elevator lurch. I’d just pulled my legs in behind me when the opening was sealed off momentarily by the passing elevator. We waited for a few seconds and listened to the elevator ascend. Eva nudged me, and I lowered myself into the shaft and onto the ladder.

I went down the ladder as fast as I could, figuring that Eva would let me know when I should stop. As it turned out, the elevator had taken us most of the way, and we only had to climb down about another hundred feet before we reached the bottom. I was just about to jump off the ladder and onto the floor of the shaft when Eva shouted to me.

“Stay on the ladder! The floor’s hot! Go into the lowest opening.”

I did as she told me, and seconds later I was back in a crawl space like the one we’d been in up above. As I waited for Eva, an alarm started to blare. When she caught up to me, she gave me an amazingly calm look, and then darted down the catwalk.

Eva seemed to know exactly where to go. I followed her along the narrow walkway for several minutes until she came to a sudden halt. Getting down on her knees, she pried up one of the ceiling tiles and peeked beneath it. Apparently satisfied, she lifted the tile and set it to one side, then nimbly swung down into the hole and dropped. Not wanting to seem apprehensive, I followed her lead without my usual preliminary inspection.

Fortunately, the drop was only about ten feet, and I suddenly found myself in the midst of a women’s lavatory. I’d heard rumors about “the other rest room,” talk of luxurious daybeds and sparkling clean facilities, not to mention the strange compliment of dispensers. Even now, seeing it with my own eyes, I’d never dreamed it’d be so much nicer than ours. Of course, Eva had no reason to be awestruck. She moved quickly to the door and opened it. As she did, the lights flickered, then went out.

We left the restroom and stepped into a dark hallway. Some kind of emergency lighting had come on, giving the passage an eerie, greenish glow. Eva turned, and we bolted down the hallway. When we reached a door on the left side, she opened it. Then she led the way down an almost pitch-black stairwell. The still-blaring alarm echoed over the concrete. My lungs burned, and I realized that the air was growing warmer and thinner.

It felt as though the circulation function of the life-support system had quit working.

I was planting like a dog by the time we exited the stairwell. Following Eva, I stepped through a door and entered the cavernous cargo bay. The air here felt like a cool ocean breeze. The cargo bay was as dark as the stairwell had been, but there were searchlights constantly scanning the area. I traced the searchlights to a dimly lit tower that rose about forty feet above the floor. With the darkness, the alarm, and the wildly circling spotlights, the scene resembled the pre-tip-off extravaganza at a Bull’s game. I could clearly hear several voices as they echoed around the chamber. It didn’t sound like there was a lot of security in the cargo bay, but there was certainly enough to make me uncomfortable.

Eva pulled me close and whispered fiercely in my ear. “Where is Voorman’s ship?”

I squinted my eyes and tried to get my bearings. I’d only been here once, and I hadn’t been in a particularly observant frame of mind. After a minute of scanning and trying to catch sight of things when the searchlights hit them, I decided that our freighter was parked at least a hundred yards away, somewhere between ten and eleven o’clock from our relative position. The guard tower was about a hundred and fifty yards away and at the two o’clock position.

I pointed out the freighter to Eva. She waited for the searchlight to illuminate the ship, and nodded. Then she again put her mouth to my ear. “Can you fly it?”

I wasn’t sure, but I figured I could wing it. “You bet.”

Eva nodded. “I want you to get inside it and fire it up. Do you see that door?”

She pointed across the cargo bay to one of the exit doors for aircraft, and I nodded.

“I’m going to try to get that open. When you start up the freighter, that should get everyone’s attention and hopefully give me a chance to get into the control booth. The door is hydraulic and isn’t connected to the network, so I should be able to access it, even if the computer system’s down. Once it starts to open, they won’t be able to close it for at least thirty seconds. Hopefully, that’ll give you enough time to squeeze through.”

“What about you? I’m not just gonna leave you here.”

Eva smiled indulgently. “The important thing is that one of us gets out of here. Percival and some of the others undoubtedly have their own private escape pods and are probably already clear of the Moon Child. Someone has to notify the authorities and have the cult leaders picked up. And you know where to find the evidence that will put them away.”

I must’ve looked confused. Eva’s smile changed from indulgent to sympathetic. “I’ll try to make it back to the freighter, but you can only give me twenty seconds after the door opens. No more.” Her smiled disappeared. “After that, our window of opportunity will disappear. Literally. Once the cargo-bay door is open, fly the ship through it and into the vacuum tunnel. There’s another door at the end of the tunnel that will open as soon as the door behind you seals.”

Eva waited for me to acknowledge that I understood, then headed off toward the searchlights. I watched her for a moment, wondering if I’d ever see her again, and then began to make my way across the bay. The room was not unlike a speeder lot, with hundreds of vehicles and other pieces of machinery neatly arranged. Keeping my head low, I moved from one hiding place to another, careful to freeze whenever the searchlights seemed to be close.

It took about five minutes to reach the freighter. I waited for the searchlights to flash across the ship before opening the hatch on the underbelly. Scrambling inside, I climbed into the cockpit. Then I strapped myself into the driver’s seat and surveyed the instrumentation. It didn’t look too difficult to manage.

The windows in the cockpit wrapped around, and I could see both the escape door and the guard tower. Taking a deep breath, I turned on the pilot console and fired up the engines. Moments later, like a scene from an alien abduction movie, the cockpit was suddenly bathed in bright white light. The security personnel seemed to have noticed me and had focused the searchlights on the freighter. I glanced at the bay door, but it wasn’t opening. Looking toward the tower, I saw several dark shapes running straight for me.

I checked to make sure I was ready to lift off, then looked back toward the hydraulic door. It wasn’t moving. For the first time, it occured to me that Eva might not get to the control booth. Maybe she’d been discovered and killed. What if the door never opened?

I’d locked the hatch behind me, but the security guards would be able to blast their way in eventually. And even if they didn’t, the Moon Child’s life-support system would fail sooner or later, and being in the freighter would only prolong my fate.

Several light bursts flashed in the corner of my eye. Shots were being fired in the guard tower. I strained to see, but could make out nothing. Then everything went dark.

Someone had shut down the searchlights. A starry pattern floated in the darkness as my eyes slowly adjusted.

Beyond the stars, a vertical stripe of faint light appeared, then slowly widened. I squinted my eyes, trying to make out what was happening. After several seconds, I realized the cargo-bay door was opening.

Under the hull of the freighter, someone started banging on the hatch door, sending a metallic clanging through the ship. My eyes were now accustomed to the darkness, and I scanned the area between the freighter and the guard tower for signs of Eva. Then I began to count silently. Thousand-one, thousand two, thousand three…the cargo-bay was opening from right to left. When it was fully open, the doorway would be about thirty feet high and fifty feet wide. Thousand ten, thousand eleven, thousand twelve…the freighter was probably twelve feet high and twenty feet across. Thousand twenty, thousand twenty-one, thousand twenty-two…cursing under my breath, I shoved the freighter into gear and lifted off.