Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (26 page)

She finished her
work on the security systems, suppressing all the alarms. Then she
found the file Renee had been trying to unlock and wiped it from
the network drive and the backup systems. She knew what it was,
courtesy of the Kempf creature: the names and a wealth of personal
information on the humans who knew the true identity of the
harvesters and were considered their human servants. Kempf had told
her the list was kept as a form of insurance, with updated copies
kept by every harvester: should any of the humans on the list
decide to turn, they had more than enough information to hunt them
down. Sheldon must have seen her name when he opened it after
finding it on Kempf’s laptop, which Ellen hadn’t known would be in
the lab. His fate had already been sealed, for he had been Ellen’s
gift to the harvesters after the one she had released had been
killed in the base, but he had surprised them all.
Now
, she thought,
no one would ever know what was in the
file
.

She looked at
Renee’s chair again, a sob escaping her lips as her mind replayed
the sight of the older woman being flung backward by the muffled
gunshots.
I’m so sorry,
Renee
, she thought bitterly,
but I didn’t have any choice. Please forgive
me
.

What made Ellen feel even worse was
that Renee would take the blame for everything that was about to
happen. Ellen had spoofed the systems and deleted the copies of the
secret harvester file under Renee’s login, and any accounting of
the network’s activity would only show her hand at work. After
finishing what she still had to do, Ellen would return to the
command center, put Renee’s body back in the chair, and sound the
alarm just after the video showed Ellen killing her brilliant
friend, whom the others would believe was the true
traitor.

Biting back the hot bile that seared
the back of her throat, Ellen dashed out of the command center and
down the tunnel that led to the antenna silo and the harvester’s
cell.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

Jack paced in his room like a caged
animal, fueled by anger and a sense of helplessness that he hadn’t
known since he had been told of his wife’s death while he was still
bedridden in Afghanistan.

Alexander, perched on the bed,
watched Jack with alert green eyes, but remained quiet in the
atmosphere charged by his human’s mood. Ironically, Koshka had
chosen to accompany the big cat back to Jack’s room, and Jack had
taken perverse pleasure in the fact that the sleek feline had
temporarily shunned Naomi.

Naomi
, Jack fumed. “Why can’t
you
see?
” he
suddenly shouted, startling both cats. Renee had made the
connection with Ellen almost instantly. Naomi was so brilliant, but
blinded by loyalty to her people, not believing any of them were
capable of such treachery. Jack knew better: he had seen it before
in Afghanistan. He had no idea what Ellen’s motives were, but he
had no doubt she was dirty.

Looking over the pathetic collection
of things he had left from his former life, he saw the photo frame
that Sheldon had given him. The thought that a woman, a fellow
human, must have given Sheldon up to the enemy nauseated him. What
made it worse was that it was probably the same person who had
released the harvester that had almost killed Naomi. That this
collaborator was here, being treated like a hero by the others,
brought on a tide of black rage.

You can stay here
like a child who’s been put in time-out
,
Jack berated himself,
or you can go out
and try to open their eyes to what’s going on
.

“Fuckin’-A,” he snarled as he
stormed out of the apartment, the two cats trailing after him
before the door closed.

Taking long, angry strides down the
tunnel to the blast lock that was the gateway to the main junction,
Jack tried to rein in his anger enough to confront Naomi with as
much logic as he could muster. The last thing he wanted was to get
into a heated shouting match, but if that’s what it took, then
that’s what he’d do. He wanted some answers from Ellen, and he was
going to get them. Tan might be a problem, but Jack was ready for
him. He hoped.

He swiped his badge on the panel of
Blast Lock #2, and was surprised that the thick door began to open
before he had entered his code or done the retinal scan. Frowning,
he called to the camera and microphone mounted on the ceiling,
“Renee?” Nothing. “Is anybody at the security station?”

Again, nothing.

That shouldn’t
be
, Jack thought. With a growing sense of
dread, he ran the rest of the way to the main tunnel junction,
encountering no one but half a dozen cats. He headed toward the
command dome entrance, and was again surprised when the blast door
opened just with the swipe of his badge, the retinal scanner
nothing more than a shiny hunk of inert metal embedded in the
wall.

Ignoring the living quarters on the
first level, Jack vaulted up the spiral staircase to the command
center above.

It was empty.

“Shit,” Jack breathed. He knew there
should always be at least one person on watch. Always. And he knew
Renee had tonight’s shift. He carefully made his way among the
cubicles, then he checked out the conference room.
Empty.

He was just about to check the other
door next to the conference room when he heard a voice behind
him.

“Turn around, Jack.
Slowly”

It was Naomi.

He turned around, holding his hands
away from his body. She held a .44 magnum revolver pointed at his
chest. She looked at him with a devastated expression, her eyes
welling with tears.

“How long have you been here?” Naomi
asked him in a wavering voice as she moved carefully toward the
security workstation where Renee should have been. “And what have
you done with Renee?”

“I got here just before you did,”
Jack told her, exasperated. “You must have heard me running up the
stairs. I came looking for Renee, and for you. Something’s wrong,
and I think Ellen’s at the heart of it.”

“We know Ellen, Jack,” Naomi told
him. “We’ve known her for years. We–”

“For God’s sake,
Naomi,” Jack shouted, “
think!
She’s the only link that ties everything
together, from the time the last harvester escaped, to Sheldon’s
death, and to whatever’s going on now. Did you notice that the
security systems are screwed up? I was able to open the blast doors
just with my badge!”

“What?” she asked, the blood
draining from her face. “That couldn’t happen,
unless...”

With dawning
horror, she looked at Renee’s computer and the command interfaces
for the security systems. They had been taken off-line. Leaning
down, still keeping the gun pointed at Jack, she quickly brought up
the internal surveillance systems and video feeds. Everything
looked normal in the tunnels and the antenna silo where the
harvester was being kept.
That’s the most
important thing
, she thought, her mind
trying to come to grips with whatever was happening. “Why would
Renee do this...”

“It wasn’t Renee, dammit!” Jack
insisted. “She–”

He snapped his mouth shut as he
heard it, a muffled cry from somewhere behind him. Forgetting about
the gun Naomi still had trained on him, he quickly moved toward the
sound, which was coming from the utility room.

Without stopping
to think, he kicked the door next to the lock, slamming his heel
against the metal surface. Fortunately, neither the door nor the
door frame were terribly sturdy, and on the third kick the frame
gave way with a loud
crack
and the door slammed inward.

Jack plunged into the small room to
find Renee on the floor, her arms curled over her chest as she
cried in pain.

“Renee,” he breathed. “Jesus, what
happened to you?”

“Ell...en,” she rasped.
“Bitch...shot me.”

“Oh, my god,” Naomi whispered as she
knelt down next to the older woman. Gently but firmly moving
Renee’s arms aside, Naomi pulled up her sweater to examine the
wounds, shocked to see that there wasn’t any blood.

Instead, she saw the dark lining of
a bulletproof vest. She found where the slugs had hit, penetrating
about halfway through the armor. With Jack’s help, she quickly got
the armor off.

“Ahhh,” Renee cried.

“You probably have a couple of
bruised or broken ribs,” Naomi told her as she and Jack helped
Renee up and back out into the command center, carefully settling
her into her chair.

“I think I figured that part out,
girlfriend,” Renee rasped. “Jesus, that hurts.”

“What happened?” Jack asked
urgently.

Renee shook her head. “I was just
standing my watch when Ellen showed up and shot me point blank with
a silenced pistol. She didn’t say a damn thing before she pulled
the trigger.” She looked at Jack. “I got the creeps about her after
that little revelation you led us to, and decided it was time to
try out that fancy body armor that Gregg bought for all of us that
I used to turn my nose up at. Just in case.” She grimaced as
another wave of pain shot through her chest, and she gritted her
teeth.

“Do you believe now?” Jack asked
Naomi.

She nodded. “Yes, but what is she
doing?”

“I don’t know,” Renee growled, “but
you’d better sound the alarm.”

“Right,” Naomi said. Moving to the
security station, she lifted the plastic cover from the big red
alarm button and slammed her hand down on it.

Nothing happened.

“Shit,” Naomi cursed. She hit the
button again. Still nothing.

“Move aside,” Renee told her. Jack
pushed her forward to the console, and Renee began to type at the
keyboard, trying to unravel what Ellen had done. “God,” she
whispered, “she must have been planning this for
months.”

“Why do you say that?” Naomi asked,
glancing worriedly at Jack.

“Because what she did here you don’t
just sit down and do...” Renee paused as she continued to backtrack
through the changes Ellen had made to the security systems. “Oh,
no,” she muttered. “Goddamn it.”

“What?” Jack asked.

“She password coded all the security
access routines,” Renee said, her voice edged with frustration and
a rising sense of anger at Ellen’s betrayal. “She even locked out
the communications system. Dammit!”

“But you have the master passwords
to the system!” Naomi said.

“So does she,” Renee told her grimly
as her fingers continued to fly over the keyboard. “Whatever she
plans to do, there’s nothing we can do here without rebooting all
the servers...Oh, shit.” Turning up to face the others, she said,
“She also deleted the file we’ve been trying to break into. She
wiped all the copies. I can’t retrieve them.”

She looked at Jack, and he was
shocked to see her angry expression transform into a satisfied
smirk. “But I’ll bet she didn’t get the original.”

“What,” Jack said, astonished, “did
you put the smart card back in that goofy photo frame that’s in my
room? Without deleting all the files?”

With a wink, she nodded at him. “Why
should I delete the files? There wasn’t any reason to.”

“Let’s go,” Naomi said, putting a
hand on his shoulder. As he turned to face her, she added, “And I’m
sorry, Jack. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he told her,
gently brushing his hand against her face. “Come on.”

“Where to?”

“We’ve got to bang on some doors and
wake people up,” he said, turning and heading for the
stairs.

Naomi put a hand on his arm and
stopped him. “Jack, it’s the mid-shift, and there’s no one
downstairs. I’m the only one who lives in the command dome, except
Gregg and a few of the other topsiders when they need to sleep
over. Everybody else is in the apartments near the missile
silos.”

Jack’s hopes sank. “We can’t run all
the way there to get help and still hope to catch
Ellen.”

“You think she’s gone to get the
harvester, don’t you?” she asked.

“Nothing else
makes sense. What else is here that would be worth killing
Renee?”
And probably
others
, he didn’t add.

As they turned to go, Renee said,
“Hey, kid, you might need this.”

Jack took the .44 magnum pistol she
held out to him.

Then he followed Naomi out of the
command dome and they cautiously headed down the tunnel that led to
where the harvester was held.

***

At that moment, Ellen was standing
before the prison that contained the creature they had known as
Sansone. It had assumed that shape again, and stood, nude, facing
Ellen behind the cell wall.

Behind Ellen, the three guards were
sprawled on the floor, unconscious. She had lured one of them
outside on the pretext of helping her with the malfunctioning
retinal scanner, then stunned him with a shock baton.