Skyler focused on Kantro’s ship, now approaching the pad. He could see the pilot through the cockpit window. Even as Skyler watched, the pilot hefted a pistol in one hand and fired toward the back of the cockpit. The craft tilted to one side and started to drift.
Subhumans advanced into the crowded cockpit, the pilot shooting frantically, each gunshot lighting up the creatures’ furious faces.
Just meters away from clipping a nearby building, the craft tilted back violently, overcompensating. It moved back in the other direction too fast, and this time its wing sliced through the corner of a scaffolding adjacent to the Elevator tower. Sparks and debris showered down.
Guards on the landing pad began to break formation, diving for cover or running for shelter.
Somewhere behind him, Skyler heard the sound of hydraulic motors followed by the deep hollow sound of a warning alarm. A missile battery, mounted on Nightcliff’s wall, preparing to fire.
“Shit!” he hissed. Nightcliff would rather have flaming debris rain down on the cargo yard than let the erratic ship damage the climber tower, or worse, the cord itself.
The engine sound ramped suddenly to a high-pitched whine and the aircraft tilted forward, then back.
Skyler caught another glimpse of the cockpit, and saw no one at the helm now. He opened the barrack door and stepped out into the mud to get a better view. The uniform could wait.
The aircraft began to spin and loose altitude. Just five meters above the asphalt now. It lurched hard to the right and the engine noise dropped to nothing.
Skyler knew then that the vehicle would crash, on the south side of the yard. It if landed on its belly the damage might not be catastrophic, but those inside would be shaken up pretty badly.
He took a few steps toward the scene, then paused. He glanced north and saw the old Platz mansion over the rooftops. The sight of it trapped him between two choices: rush to help the people on board the craft, exposing himself in the process, or use the crash as a diversion to continue his mission.
Kantro might be a friend, but Skyler didn’t relish the idea of fighting a bunch of subhumans on the side of Nightcliff’s goons. Sooner or later someone would realize he didn’t belong in the yard, and he’d be apprehended. Mission over.
“The Aura is everything,” Prumble’s voice echoed in his head. “You did what you had to do.”
The erratic vehicle tilted again and its starboard wing slapped into the ground. It fell like a stone the rest of the way, smashing into the paved surface with the torturous sound of metal scraping on stone.
People began to rush out the doors of nearby buildings. The squad of guards emerged from their cover as the doomed aircraft slid across the ground and collided with a low building south of the yard. It came to a rest there, half-embedded into the structure. A cloud of dust and debris filled the air around it.
The rear cargo hatch was open. There were people inside, lots of them, tightly packed and ragged. They swarmed down the open ramp and into the yard. Some galloped on all fours.
Skyler ran north, the sounds of shouting, screams, and gunfire at his back. He wanted no part of it, and besides, it was ten times the diversion he needed.
That an aircraft had limped in from the Clear and made it all the way to Nightcliff’s yard uninvited was one thing. That it had done so with a cargo bay full of subhumans was sheer insanity. Kantro, or the pilot, must have waited until the last minute before radioing in for help; otherwise Nightcliff would have shot them down well before they reached the fortress.
“Not my problem,” Skyler said to himself as he ran. He set his sights on the mansion and pumped his legs, his pains forgotten in the rush of adrenaline. A figure emerged from a building in front of him. A plump woman, in a soiled nurse’s gown. Skyler shouldered his way past her and she toppled to the ground in a surprised yelp.
She shouted for him to stop. Shouted for help.
Skyler turned to yell something over his shoulder and saw a subhuman racing toward her. The once-human creature tackled the poor woman and they disappeared into the doorway she’d emerged from. A cry of surprise, then pain, came from within.
Another subhuman had followed the first. It set its gaze on Skyler and began to gallop toward him. A scrawny thing, with a face so calm, so serene, that Skyler almost tripped.
Resolute to conserve his bullets, Skyler faced forward and ran as hard as he could. The mansion came into full view. He threw himself onto a feeble chain-link fence that surrounded it and climbed.
He dropped down the other side and landed looking backward, directly into the face of the scrawny subhuman. The creature slapped into the fence, gripping it with white-knuckled hands, and that same, eerily serene expression on its face.
It whispered something. A woman, past middle age, he guessed, from the wisps of gray in her tangled hair. He glanced down and saw that she wore the tattered remnants of an environment suit.
Recently afflicted, then. One of Kantro’s crew. He looked at her face more closely, trying to remember her.
She tilted her head to one side and whispered again, louder. “Play with me.”
“Not today. A bit busy.”
“Play with me,” she rasped, and shook the fence. Her eyes darted up.
She began to climb.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Below Darwin, Australia
11.FEB.2283
The Platz family mansion, once an ultramodern architectural wonder of sharp angles and brilliant white walls, looked near collapse.
Scraps of plywood covered every window. Black mold seeped up the walls from a forest of choking weeds. The front door, two slabs of thick wood four meters tall and at least as wide, were held closed by a thick rusty chain wrapped in a figure eight around the wrought-iron handles. A padlock the size of Skyler’s hand said visitors were not welcome.
Running full speed, the sound of a rattling fence behind him, Skyler angled his run to the right of the massive door. A shabby piece of plywood loomed in front of him, covering a space where a floor-to-ceiling window had once framed the entrance. Or so he hoped.
He jumped and went shoulder first into the wall of thin wood. An elbow shielding his face, Skyler crashed through the feeble barricade in a shower of splinters and fragments. A marble floor inside the foyer greeted him, cold and unyielding as he landed on his back.
Skyler’s head rocked backward and cracked against the dusty stone surface. He grimaced and rolled, bringing his gun to the ready from a prone position. He aimed at the gap he’d created, and counted. The alien-created disease drove the infected to chase human prey with relentless zeal. The creature should, he thought, leap through the hole in about five seconds.
He counted to five. Then ten. Twenty.
Nothing save for dust and the distant sound of a terrible melee came through.
Skyler pursed his lips and drew himself up on one knee. Maybe the sub couldn’t scale the fence after all. Experience told him otherwise, but—like it or not—things were changing. Old expectations couldn’t be trusted anymore.
He took a chance and swung his rifle around the huge entry room. Marble, everywhere he looked. A series of pillars lined the walls, impressionistic takes on the classic Roman style, all square and angular.
Piles of labeled boxes and filing cabinets filled the corners of the space. Skyler vaguely recalled Neil’s words from their meeting, something about the mansion being relegated to long-term storage. From the chained door to the thick coat of dust on every flat surface, Skyler guessed no one had been in here in months, maybe years.
A stairway opposite the double doors led halfway to a second floor, before splitting into two stairways that went east and west.
Upstairs didn’t matter. Platz said the covert entrance to the Elevator silo was in the basement, but no more. Judging by the opulent house, Skyler imagined a vast wine cellar concealing the way in. He pictured twisting a gargoyle statue to reveal the secret entrance behind a faux wall of vintage bottles. The vision brought a laugh to his lips. “How very supervillain of you, Platz,” he muttered.
At least thirty seconds passed with no sign of the subhuman. Maybe she’d found someone else to “play” with. Maybe the surprised guards in Nightcliff’s yard had managed to quell the bizarre attack. Whatever the case, time was wasting.
Skyler backed into an inner room, waiting until the last second to aim his rifle away from the hole he’d made on entry. The stale air reeked of mildew. Shards of wood crunched under his boots.
He crept through a grand dining room. Chairs lay in disarray around a table ten meters in length. A chandelier had fallen on the polished wood surface at some point and toppled off to one side. Skyler stepped around it and continued into a kitchen beyond.
Big enough to service a large restaurant, the kitchen had four rows of counters. Commercial-grade stoves, ranges, and sinks ran the length of each. Or parts did, at least. Much of the equipment had long ago been removed, in part or in whole. Missing faucet heads, a stove with no door or control panel. The scavenger in Skyler noted these on instinct. What was missing, what was useful.
He went to the far wall, fixated on the idea of a wine cellar. But a search of the kitchen turned up nothing. He looked through a walk-in freezer, a pantry ten times the size of his quarters at the hangar, and lastly a small and simple dining room where he assumed the staff used to take their meals.
Back in the main dining area, Skyler took the first hallway leading out of it. Other than the occasional hint of light sneaking past a boarded-up window, the only illumination came from his gun-mounted bulb.
The hall had once featured a plush carpet. Now the fabric sluiced away under his boots like dead skin. Rectangular patches on the walls marked where paintings once hung.
Skyler tapped each light switch he passed. None worked. For the best, he thought. The lack of power had probably led to the home’s abandoned state, and that suited him.
Each door he passed opened to reveal simple bedrooms, and one small recreational area with bookshelves and even a chessboard, game frozen in mid-play.
At the end of the hall, he came to a door different from the others. Thick and sturdy, with a large metal handle and a key card panel on the wall beside it.
Skyler tried the handle and found it to be broken. Deliberately, from the scuff marks. The door pushed open with ease and he stepped inside.
Stairs led below. Skyler sighed with relief and trotted down them two at a time. At the bottom he found another door, just like the previous, also forced open long ago.
Inside he found an office. A wide space, one side lined with cubicles, the other with a collaborative area—couches facing a large bank of panel screens that went from floor to ceiling. Every screen had been shattered, left to rot. In his mind Skyler could see them bright and alive with news from the world’s financial markets, or the faces of distant Platz employees delivering to Neil news of high-profile mergers.
A massive circular door dominated the far wall. A safe, suitable for any bank vault. Scorch marks stretched out from the main tumbler, and an electronic pad on the wall beside hung by frayed wires.
Despite the damage, the vault door was closed tight. Skyler stared at it for a long moment. He racked his mind to recall Neil’s words. He’d used the word secret in describing the entrance. No, Skyler thought, it was “hidden.” A giant vault door did not equate to hidden.
From above, a faint sound reached his ears. A light scrape, gone as quick as it had arrived. He stood very still and listened.
Dozens of times in the past he’d found himself in places like this. Pitch black and deathly quiet. Danger lurking ahead or behind. He’d never deliberately scoured through such a place alone, though. The lack of Samantha’s presence only furthered his unease.
Total silence followed. A phantom noise, perhaps. Imagination and fatigue, conspiring against him.
Moving to the center of the room, Skyler turned in place, scanning the area with his light. It felt right that the hidden entrance would be here. Over and over his attention returned to the massive safe door. A voice inside him said that was the point of it. The barrier was so large and tempting that any interloper would get tunnel vision the moment they saw it.
Skyler put it to his back and looked at the rest of the room.
The door through which he’d entered. Nothing interesting about it.
The cubicles. Maybe they could be concealing some small access passage? His gut said no.
Last choice, the bank of destroyed video screens. It looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to each one. An odd thing to do in a world where such devices were always needed, especially in orbit.
Their arrangement was odd, he realized. Two-wide, running floor to ceiling. Almost like a—
Door.
Eyes locked on the monitors, Skyler swung his legs over the couch between him and the wall and stood in front of the devices. They were mounted flush to the wall. He stepped to one side and looked at them from the side, running a finger along the edge of one screen. He could just detect a ridge there. A sliver of space just before the point where the monitor connected to the wall.
I’ll be damned, he thought. The monitors must have been smashed to dissuade anyone from taking them off. A clever trick, he had to admit.
He searched for a button, or lever … anything that might open the panel. He ran his hand along the bottoms of every table and desk, tried tapping the buttons on each monitor attached to the wall. Nothing worked.
“Fuck it,” he said aloud. No time for caution and decorum. Platz could hire a crew to come back here later and fix things.
He set his rifle on a desk near the entrance, pointing its light at the bank of screens. Then he swung the bag Prumble had given him onto the floor and removed one brick of plastic explosive.
Blasting caps inserted, Skyler selected a detonator. With no more fiber cable, he couldn’t use the switch, so a timed charge would have to do. He went with a twenty-second fuse, mentally planning his route. Up the stairs, through the hall, under the big table in the dining room in case any chunks of the ceiling were knocked loose.
