Grillo stopped a half-dozen meters short of the bowl-shaped depression in the middle of the long floor. He motioned and Skyler was marched to stand beside him, a few meters between them for safety. The bindings at Skyler’s wrists were cut, bringing a sudden rush of blood to his numb hands. He immediately began to massage feeling back into his fingers.
Two more guards—no, workers, Skyler decided—carried one of the rucksacks up and set it on the ground. At Grillo’s nonverbal order they pulled the bag open to reveal the object within.
A cube nestled within the folds of the cloth bag, blue-white light rippling along inset geometric grooves in its sides. Like all the other objects, one side had a difference—a feature, not an imperfection—to indicate “this way up.” In the case of the cube, a channel was etched along the length of one side.
“Leave us,” Grillo said, to no one in particular. Alex Warthen opened his mouth to object but stopped at Grillo’s raised hand. “It’s all right. This one won’t try anything with all of his friends held captive.”
“He fled Gateway Station while his crew was—”
“He can’t flee now, though, can he?” Grillo let a few seconds of silence follow. “There is nowhere to go. He’ll have to look into their dead eyes this time and know he brought it upon them.”
Alex seemed on the verge of speaking again. He changed his mind, cast one doubtful glance at Skyler, and clambered back up the ladder. Larsen followed, and Skyler and Grillo were alone.
Oddly, Skyler felt more unease alone with the deranged man than when his guards had been present. He steadied himself, then turned to face the slumlord.
“What happens when it is inserted?” Grillo asked.
“The ship has an orgasm,” Skyler said. “Lower your gun. I wasn’t joking.”
“Skip the salty language then and explain, quickly.”
Orgasm, salty? Maybe he really has bought into all this Jacobite nonsense. “There’s a lot of light, and warmth, and if you want my opinion the ship’s response is vaguely akin to ecstasy.” Never mind that the pulse of light will knock you straight across the room if you’re standing too close. A good orgasm would, too, but Skyler guessed Grillo had never experienced such a thing. He seemed like the type of man who had to wear surgical gloves just to take a piss.
“All right then. Proceed.” He kept his gun trained on Skyler now, aim steady.
“Ladder’s up!” a voice shouted from the far end of the room. “No sign of them.”
“Remain vigilant,” Grillo called back. “Shoot on sight.”
“Understood.”
Skyler glanced back. The spherical lobby chamber was fifty meters away. Inside, Sam, Tania, and Vanessa would be sitting in a line now, between the two lower doors. A human shield. Hands bound, mouths taped
He’d failed to count how many guards were with them. Six or so, he thought, plus the two who’d left to check on the other prisoners. If Skadz or Ana tried to approach that room they’d be gunned down instantly.
Best to hurry, Skyler decided. Get everyone’s attention on the relic, wait for that flash of light, then act. Hopefully the others would get the hint. He’d need to shout something, just to be sure.
“Now, Skyler,” Grillo said.
Skyler nodded, shifted his focus to the relic on the ground before him. The blue-white light rolled through the fine grooves with a liquid pace, inviting scrutiny, demanding it. Skyler forced himself to blink and break the spell, then deliberately blurred his vision as he knelt and lifted the cube.
He struggled under the weight of it. The strain brought fresh pain from his shins and knees. Even his chin bloomed with renewed heat as his grimace stretched the skin there. But it all felt distant now, as if he were just an observer to it now, studying the injuries from the other side of that sheet of fallen ice brought on by the news of Kelly’s death. The cold thirst for revenge numbed his mind better than any painkiller ever had.
Skyler crossed the distance to the socket indent on the floor and knelt. He heard Grillo gasp as the indent sucked inward as if the floor were made of nothing more than plastic wrap. The area grew, forming a pitch-black half-dome almost three meters deep and wide in the floor.
“This was easier in zero-g,” Skyler said, shimmying his legs over the edge of the enlarged bowl.
“No talking. Finish it.” To hammer home the point he pressed his gun to the back of Skyler’s head.
Skyler perched himself on the edge and lifted the cube object out over the middle of the depression. The weight of the relic melted away, yet simultaneously it seemed to tug against Skyler’s grip, pulled downward into its designated slot.
The glow began to build, starting from the grooves along the object’s surface and then spreading like spilled laser light into the bowl. The center of the receptacle bulged outward, reaching and taking on the same shape as the object.
Skyler pulled his feet out of the pit and lifted his arm across his face, ready to shield his eyes.
Object and floor met. In that instant a blue-white flare seemed to come from everywhere at once. He pressed his arm over his eyes. Felt the heat of the energy release on his skin, the pressure pushing him backward like an expanding bubble of force.
Someone cried out in alarm. A yelp that was instantly cut off.
Skyler felt his feet slip. A centimeter skid, then more. Then he was falling sideways.
The entire room rolled.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The Key Ship
2.APR.2285
Tania clamped her eyelids down when the eruption of blue light began. It flooded through the key-room portal like a searchlight. Soon even through shut eyes the world seemed as bright as a summer day.
She coiled in anticipation of the pressure wave that would follow, and hoped the guards would be thrown off balance.
The wave came, like an inflating balloon of pressure building at her back. And then, abruptly, it vanished. The light blinked out as well, plunging the room into darkness.
Tania opened her eyes and registered the faint glow the room emitted. Anyone who hadn’t shut their eyes would be all but blind for a few seconds. She glanced back and saw that the high portal that led into the key room had vanished.
An initial confused chorus of puzzlement welled up from the guards. A few urged calm. She heard something else, too. A sound like stone gliding against stone.
Tania knelt and pitched forward, knowing what was about to happen. She could only hope Vanessa understood, too, and that Sam would take the hint.
The gray bands lurched into sudden motion, turning and rolling at once this time. Confused shouts burst out from the guards as their feet were swept out from under them by the thin, flat rings. Arms bound as they were, Tania could only roll with the motion as one band slid under her like a spatula.
The men were falling sideways, backward, pitching atop one another into a tangle of limbs at the basin of the room.
The bands stopped as quickly as they’d started, and once again light filled the room. Yellow light.
Prumble’s heart had dropped through his stomach when the door ahead irised closed.
He’d been seconds from sending Vaughn in as a distraction, when the light from that space had winked out, leaving him staring at a dark end to a featureless tunnel. Sam and the others cut off from view. Skyler, likely somewhere beyond, hopefully alive, a distant unknown.
Prumble had acted without thinking. He’d rushed forward, past Vaughn, leaving Skadz and Tim hissing his name in a mixture of surprise and warning. They hadn’t seen the door vanish, the route to their friends disappear.
He’d rushed, howling and full of blind anger, to the tunnel end, intent to slam into the wall with the butt of his gun and every gram of his weight.
Intent to, but the wall pulsed open when he still had a half step to go.
Beyond he saw writhing bodies. Armed men and prisoners alike, struggling back to their feet after some kind of massive and total upheaval of the spherical space.
Prumble did not break stride. He couldn’t have, and didn’t want to. He kept going, full steam, straight into the crowd, and slammed the stock of his gun straight into the face of the first Jacobite he reached.
When the room settled, Tania rocked onto her back, pulled her knees to her chest, and swung her arms under and around herself to get her hands in front of her.
A guard began to rise in the same instant, and she kicked her legs back down hard, catching him on the shoulder and sending him sprawling on top of the others still struggling to get up.
Somewhere, someone was howling. A battle cry.
She rolled to her stomach, pushed up to a coiled crouch, and found herself staring into Vanessa’s eyes. The immune had indeed acted. She’d managed to get her arms in front of herself, too. Her hands came up and gripped the tape at Tania’s mouth, tearing it away in one brutal motion.
Tania ignored the sting across her lips and performed the same favor for the other woman. “Hands,” she said, trying frantically to rip the duct tape away from Vanessa’s wrists.
“No time,” Vanessa said. “Duck!”
Tania did, diving sideways in the same motion into the torso of a guard who’d come to one knee beside them. The guard grunted, fell away. Tania rolled and looked back in time to see Vanessa, hands bound, block the swing of one of the uniformed men, the one called Larsen. His swing was meant for Tania and would have knocked her senseless had Vanessa not warned her. The other woman whipped her hands back up to slug him in the jaw, then she dropped her fists to the neck of his shirt and grasped, pulling him down toward her. In the same motion she thrust a knee upward into his groin. Larsen groaned, face contorted. Vanessa didn’t stop. The immune dropped her knee and coiled her leg into a full-blown kick. She let go of the man’s shirt as her foot connected with his abdomen. The kick lifted him off his feet and sent him toppling backward into the confused tangle of bodies behind.
Others had entered the room. A huge man in a leather overcoat and a Nightcliff guard who seemed to be fighting his own people. She saw a third person bolt in from the entryway, just a shadow, but the dreadlocks gave Skadz away. She’d heard enough stories from Skyler to know the man instantly. He held a pistol, smoke curling from the barrel, and raced through the chaos of the room to the side opposite her. In two quick steps he was up the curved surface and vaulting himself into the thick of the melee with an almost acrobatic grace, shooting as he flew.
Tania lurched to her feet, driven by a sudden flood of newfound hope. The whip-crack sound of Skadz’s gun echoed strangely within the sphere, replaced instantly by a bright ringing and the labored sounds of her own breath. She whirled, saw a guard rise before her with a snub rifle in hand. Tania swung her bound hands at the weapon and knocked it free.
The guard reacted with a quickness that surprised her. He pulled a knife from a sheath at his calf and swiped it at her face. Tania recoiled, felt the whoosh of wind as the blade missed. He jabbed next, sending her back a step on the steeply curved wall. Her foot slipped and she fell back onto her elbows, her bound hands over her chest as if clasped in prayer.
The guard grinned and managed to raise his blade before a pair of thin arms enveloped him from behind. Tania recognized the blue jumpsuit before she saw Tim’s long, usually kind face over the surprised guard’s shoulder. That kindness hid now beneath a mixture of desperation and rage.
Confused, angered, the guard shifted his blade and sliced wildly across Tim’s forearm, producing a dark red gash across the blue sleeve. Tim didn’t scream, didn’t make any noise at all. He just tightened his grip and stared into Tania’s eyes as both he and the guard began to topple forward toward her.
She did the only thing she could think to do. She reached up, grabbed the falling guard’s wrists, and twisted.
The man groaned as his body collapsed onto hers. She felt a sudden warmth at her breast as blood began to ooze from around the buried blade.
With a force of will she tore her gaze away from the dying guard’s eyes and sought Tim’s instead.
Somehow he managed a smile.
Skyler thrust himself up into a ready stance, fists up, ignoring the searing heat of torn skin at his chin, and the deep new ache that had exploded in his gut when Grillo’s first kick had landed. Tears welled in his eyes, blurring his view.
He shook his head violently. Grillo stood before him. Half turned in profile. Knees slightly bent. Hands low and coiled. He shifted his weight rapidly from foot to foot, ready for anything.
Skyler spat blood and moved in, his head swimming from pain and the constant upheaval the Builder’s ship kept putting them through. He managed to keep his fists in front of him but felt none of the lightness Grillo seemed to be enjoying.
Gritting his teeth, Skyler stepped in and threw a left jab that Grillo sidestepped easily. Skyler followed with his right, putting everything he had into the haymaker blow, anticipating where Grillo’s head would be as he returned from his sidestep to counterattack. But Grillo didn’t return. He didn’t answer Skyler’s left jab at all.
Instead he’d kept moving, ducking low and sliding past Skyler altogether.
Skyler whirled to find the slippery bastard, stepping back at the same time to stand where Grillo had been. He felt the fist against his cheek before he saw it. And then another, rocking his head in the other direction. Skyler sputtered as a third blow took him in the stomach, filling his entire gut with a heat unlike any pain he’d known before.
And he knew he’d lost.
“Put the fucking yellow key in,” Grillo rasped.
Skyler blinked. He heard the sounds of fighting, desperate and violent, from the other room. It killed him not to be able to see. Not to know who lived and who’d fallen. He’d heard the distant, abstracted sounds of people falling in panic even through the closed wall when the key room had rolled. There’d been no chance to find out what happened. Grillo had been on him from the instant the cylinder stopped, relentless and stunningly adept in combat.
