Messiah (24 page)

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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Messiah
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Nickolai prepared to jump from his perch before the machine started rolling through the building, but the gantry stopped short of the structure. Whatever was happening, the machine was not out of control. He looked up, but there didn’t seem to be any obvious control cabin—it was probably automated ...
“Nickolai!”
He looked down and saw Kugara. He didn’t realize how tense he had been until he saw her, and some deep part of his psyche relaxed its grip. As this point, death didn’t concern him so much as did facing it without her.
Nickolai jumped to the ground between the gantry’s legs as Kugara emerged from the smoke-filled building. As she approached him, he saw that the scientists followed her. Between them, they carried a pale, wounded Flynn.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Bastard was shot,” Kugara said. “What’s your better hand?”
“Right—”
“Grab his right leg, then.”
She had been leading, carrying both Flynn’s ankles. Nickolai reached down and took Flynn’s leg in his left hand, keeping the gamma laser in his right. “I can carry both,” he said.
Kugara looked at him, and then at Flynn’s foot dwarfed by Nickolai’s grip. “Forgot how big your hands are. Here, don’t drop him, he’s driving.”
Nickolai took a grip around both Flynn’s ankles, tucking them against his hip. He glanced back and saw the two scientists holding Flynn’s shoulders. Flynn looked unconscious. His torso was stripped naked, and the contents of some first-aid kit had been sprayed on his abdomen, and the spray bandage was already turning rust-colored at the edges.
He’s driving?
A black comm unit sat on his chest, one end of a rat’s nest of cables plugged into it. Another cable snaked from the tangle to go around Flynn’s neck.
She couldn’t mean—
The gantry started moving.
“Come on,” Kugara told him, running ahead to the forward moving part of the gantry and unslinging a laser carbine.
Progress was nerve-rackingly slow, the gantry never moved faster than a walking pace—a walking pace for someone with a stride considerably shorter than Nickolai’s. He felt as if he strode through molasses.
At least the guards had decided that they had enough. No one came after them while they walked underneath the lumbering gantry.
After what seemed to be an eternity, the gantry came to a stop and Kugara looked back at him and said, “We’re here.”
They walked up next to her and saw that the gantry had crunched to a stop about fifteen meters shy of crushing a small outbuilding. The single door on the structure had a sign reading,
“Maintenance Access. Authorized Personnel Only.”
“That’s our way down.”
“How do you—”
As if in response to Nickolai’s half-spoken question, the door popped open with a pneumatic hiss.
“Move it,” Kugara said, running across the open space to the cover of the door. Nickolai followed, slowly, so that the scientists could keep up. The back of his neck practically burned with how exposed he was. He watched Kugara swing her carbine from inside the doorway providing covering fire that was only visible as infrared trails of superheated air. They didn’t take any return fire.
Nickolai crouched through the doorway, and a second later he heard the door hiss shut behind them. They were in a large storeroom, filled with tools and spare parts piled on shelves lining the walls. A cylindrical elevator shaft dominated the far end of the room. As he watched, the elevator dinged, and the doors slid open.
Nickolai leveled the gamma laser at it, but the elevator was empty. He glanced back around at Flynn, who was still semiconscious and groaning.
Next to him, Kugara said, “His Tetsami alter ego is still wired into the network here.” She reached out and touched Nickolai’s chest. He looked down at her as she said, “Carbine’s drained. I need to raid your arsenal.” She pulled one of the other gamma lasers from his improvised bandolier. “Let’s get moving.” She gestured to the elevator.
 
The elevator took them down four sublevels and let them out into another storeroom. They put down Flynn, and Nickolai handed Dörner and Brody the last two lasers he carried.
Dörner looked up at him and said, “Why are you giving me this?”
“Because you probably can’t handle the recoil of this,” he said, taking out one of the slugthrowers.
He joined Kugara by the door to the storeroom. It opened a crack, and Nickolai could see out on to a subway platform crowded with people, about half heavily armed. He counted at least fifty in his line of sight.
“So what’s the plan now?” he asked.
Before Kugara could answer, an electronic voice echoed across the platform.
“I’m in control here, so nobody fucking move!”
There was a metallic screech from out of their line of sight from the storeroom. He could hear someone out there groaning in pain. The echoing PA system said,
“That was so not a good idea. Get the hell away from those controls.”
“What the hell?” Kugara whispered.
Inside the room, a speaker above them said,
“Okay, chicky. You and the tiger better clear them out.”
“Tetsami?” Kugara whispered.
“Christ in a sidecar, who do you think? Move it, you think this is easy for me?”
Nickolai cast a glance back at Flynn as Kugara pushed her way through the door. She yelled to the mass of people, “Okay, everyone, toss weapons on the ground and move yourself out the nearest exit. Now!”
Nickolai followed and found himself on a long wide platform in a massive arched chamber. A maglev train sat on one of two sets of tracks, the front end smoking slightly with the smell of overheated ceramics. The driver was backing away from the controls as if they had just bit him.
Nickolai stood behind Kugara and growled.
Over the PA, Tetsami called out like the voice of God.
“You heard her. Drop the guns and move it. You do not want to piss off her friend.”
The mass of people moved toward the exits, away from him and Kugara. Only about half tossed weapons down, but Nickolai didn’t much care about the others as long as they didn’t choose to level their weapons in their direction.
In less than a minute the platform was empty, and he heard doors sliding shut, sealing them off.
Next to them, the train stood on the track, doors open.
Kugara turned to him and said, “Get Flynn.”
 
The maglev smoothly accelerated and slid into a tunnel aimed deep at the heart of the Diderot Mountains. Flynn took up one of the passenger benches, the bandage on his gut now mostly dark with blood. Kugara and Dörner had found a first-aid kit by the driver’s compartment and were trying to improve on the wound’s dressing.
Nickolai wrinkled his nose because Flynn had already started smelling of death.
Kugara reached to peel away the old bandage, and Flynn grabbed her hand. “No time,” Flynn groaned.
“Lay back,” she said, “we’re on the way to the mountain. We need to stop the bleeding.”
He shook his head. “No time. Gram did what she could, but we’re cut off from the network.” With a shaking hand, he reached up and pulled the socket out of the base of his skull. “We’re out of range of where this thing works.”
“The train,” Dörner said, “it’s still moving?”
“Autonomous.” He pulled himself into a near sitting position to lean against the window. “We only have five minutes.”
“Five minutes for what?” Nickolai asked.
Flynn looked up at him and smiled, his teeth glistening red from his own blood. “Your stop.”
 
Flynn had them carry him to the controls at the front of the train. Nickolai listened as Flynn told them, haltingly, that Tetsami had managed to penetrate far enough to see that Bleek Munitions’ HQ in the mountains was very aware of the attack on their facility, and they had been ramping up their security since it started. And unlike the facility they had just left, the security in the mountain consisted of a unit of PSDC military.
There was no way through at the end of the line.
However, the train flew through caverns only slightly modified from the lava tubes that Tetsami remembered. While in Bleek’s network, she had been able to pull a full map of the known tunnels, and there were several places where the tunnels intersected with the subway.
Flynn sat at the controls, doing something to override the computers piloting the train. Then he leaned against the wall and whispered to himself. Nickolai barely heard the words, “Ten. Nine. Eight ...”
At three, Flynn pulled the emergency stop and the train screeched to a halt. “We’re here,” he said.
“Okay,” Kugara said, “Nickolai, get his feet.”
“No,” Flynn said, shrugging away from Kugara’s reach.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” she said.
“I’m too injured,” he said. “I’ll slow you down, and bouncing me around isn’t going to help what life I got left. Without me, you’ll have half a chance.”
Kugara shook her head as Nickolai gently pulled her away from Flynn.
Flynn said, “Look, wherever you’re going, I’m not making it there like this. At least, driving this thing, I can make you harder to follow.”
Whatever Nickolai’s faith might believe of Flynn, or the transgressions his people had made, Flynn had been a worthy ally. He had the soul of a warrior. Nickolai placed his right hand gently against Flynn’s bandaged wound and breathed in the scent of blood. He whispered, “May the spirit of Saint Rajasthan join you in your final battle.”
The blessing felt blasphemous spoken in the tongue of the Fallen, but Flynn deserved to hear it. Flynn looked up at them and said, “Go on, move it!”
 
When Flynn was alone on the train, he shut the doors and started it moving again.
“Just you and me, Gram.”
He heard a sniff and looked next to him and saw Tetsami’s effigy standing there right where the tiger had been. Her cheeks were wet, and she was semitranslucent, as if she was leaving the land of the living before him.
“Don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying,” she said, his own burning eyes making her a liar.
“We had a hell of a ride.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Ever wanted to see how fast something like this can go?”
He reached up and started turning off parts of the train’s navigation system. Turning off collision avoidance sensors, and the computer that held the train under a safely controllable speed.
The velocity sensor started cranking upward, and the tunnel lights began shooting by impossibly fast, becoming a blurred streak in the windscreen.
The frictionless maglev only gave a slight pressure of acceleration as it climbed toward double the velocity it was rated for. The only sound it made was air ripping by outside, muffled through the train’s skin.
“I always thought I’d die on this hellhole,” she said.
“If I could, Gram, I would have sent you off with the others.”
The velocity peaked, hovering around eight hundred klicks an hour. At this rate, in thirty seconds the train should slam into the station like a bullet. Fast enough that he probably wouldn’t even be aware of the collision.
“If Adam came now,” Tetsami said, “I think I’d say yes.”
“Gram?”
“My last resurrection went pretty well,” she said, “and I don’t want you to di—”
A violent rhythmic thudding interrupted her, as the train suddenly started trying to shake itself apart.
“What the hell?” Flynn shouted at the console. It was vibrating too hard to make out clearly, but the velocity meter was racing backward. The accelerator was on full, but the train was still slowing down.
“Damn it, they figured out some way to slow us down.”
It took a second for him to realize what had happened. The HQ always had, as a last resort, the ability to shut down the track. If they nuked the magnets holding this beast up, the train would stop—but at the speed it was going, it would stop catastrophically, probably taking out a good part of the tunnel with it.
Instead, someone had the bright idea of shutting off every
other
magnet in the track. Not enough to have the train fatally kiss the ground, but enough to slow it down violently.
“Shit!” Flynn called out, the train forcing his voice into a vibrato and trying to shake his intestines out the wound in his belly. The velocity dropped under a hundred klicks an hour, and the shaking got worse, and now it sounded as if a massive hammer was trying to pound the underside of the train apart.
Now only every third magnet is powered
, Flynn thought, holding on to the bench with a death grip. His heart pounded, as the fear gripped him. They had dropped far below the speed of instant death. At seventy-five klicks an hour, there was a good chance that he’d live through a collision at least long enough to feel it.

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