Insidious (27 page)

“I was hoping you might say that.”

***

The next morning, Chris awakened with the lethargy of a troubled night of sleep. Cinmei wasn’t in the room. He stared at himself in the wall mirrors of his personal quarters. He lay entwined in the maroon bedsheet. Sleep had disheveled his blond hair, but it was so short it didn’t look too bad. He looked older now. No gray hairs, but the lines of his face cut deeper.

Is this how Chris Adrastus dies? he asked himself. Slaughtered by an alien in a reckless attempt to escape Synchronicity?

He dressed in light pants and a white shirt and then layered his gear over the top. He wondered if this were the last day he’d have to wear it. He’d about become used to the bulky armor-like garments. They made him feel protected, like a thick set of winter boots.

He walked out into the main room. Cinmei sat on the couch wearing a small set of gear except for the helmet, which rested on the glass table before her. The suit was black with gray webbing similar to his with the blue trim of a low ranking individual.

“Gear for you? How did you get it?”

“Made doctor appointment,” Cinmei said. She grabbed her helmet and stood up.

“How many of your people are coming?”

“No room for anyone else,” she said. “We can only fool the security this much. Red may know. He has killed,” she said. She put her helmet on. Chris thought he could tell it was she inside the gear from the graceful movements, but he told himself that was only because he’d seen her don it.

“I remember!” Chris said. He slipped his helmet on.

They left the quarters and marched down the outside hall past rows of doors to other living accommodations. Chris thought he could tell Cinmei wasn’t used to the gear. She had the same awkward gait he’d had his first day or two on the station. It took awhile to get used to the extra bulk of the suits, even though they were fairly light.

Will someone notice? It doesn’t matter. Just paranoid.

Chris felt danger gnawing at his gut. When he’d been competing for Alec Vineaux’s attention, he had fed off the uncertainty and what he’d thought of as “danger.” Now he felt cowed, vulnerable. He didn’t thrive on the action anymore. At least not today.

He followed Cinmei into larger concourses where more people moved about heading to incarnate meetings or duties. The traffic wasn’t heavy, because more than half of work and a third of social activity took place in a virtual format. No one pointed out Cinmei or yelled at him to stop. He relaxed a notch.

Advertisements flickered on the walls. His link fed them into his visual cortex from outside agencies and painted them onto the large flat surfaces. The ads were tailored to him personally—other people saw different ads based on their known proclivities and past purchasing history.

“Jacobson disposable wardrobe. For the serious traveler. They’ll think you brought your clothes all the way from Earth!” a stranger urged him from an ad on his left.

Chris winced. If the advertising software suspected he was headed to the spaceport, would Captain know too?

They filtered into the main entrance of the port. Almost no one else seemed to be going into the departure area. Chris wanted to ask how big a flight they were on. He didn’t want to attract any attention, and since Cinmei supposedly didn’t have a link, he didn’t dare try to transmit a message. His link hadn’t picked up any signal that she had one, which didn’t surprise him. She couldn’t emit the public link broadcast protocols and go unnoticed.

They walked up to a collection of doors divided by rails like racehorse chutes. Cinmei selected one and they walked inside. Chris recognized the room as one of the small check-in areas he had been in after getting off the VG shuttle. He looked at the checker bot built into the wall expectantly, but it didn’t move.

“Wait here,” Cinmei said.

“Hey, wait! How big is this flight, anyway? How come no one else is here?”

“Technicians only,” she said. “Not for passengers. Cargo flight.”

“Really? Oh.”

Chris had been envisioning a fancy spaceplane like his flight out from Earth. Yet another uncertainty. He didn’t even know what the plane looked like, or what it would be like inside. A cargo flight sounded much less pleasing than the luxury flight he’d arrived on, but he anticipated leaving nonetheless.

“Wait,” Cinmei repeated. “Time must be right; we pretend to be someone else.” She walked ahead out of the room.

Chris stood nervously waiting for Cinmei to reappear. Time seemed to slow to an agonizing crawl while he fought a combination of impatience and dread. He shifted around aimlessly staring at the barren room. The advertisements hadn’t followed them here. The robotic inspector remained lifeless at the counter. He had an odd fear that it would return to life and sound an alarm in a shrill voice.

“We get on now.”

Chris jumped. He spun around. Of course, it was only Cinmei. He hadn’t heard her return. He slumped.

“Relax. It go like plan,” she said, tugging on his arm. He stepped toward her. She lifted his hand and placed a silvery metal object into his armored palm. Chris looked at the device. It was a smooth cylinder with two needles protruding from the front. It had a firing stud and a safety switch on top.

“Stunner?” he guessed.

“Taser,” she said. “For emergency. I take care of pilots.”

“The computer flies the shuttle, not the pilots,” Chris pointed out.

“Pilots control computer,” she said. “They give me the authorization to …” Cinmei hesitated, looking for a word. “Navigate.”

“But they’re not our people?”

Cinmei walked ahead and didn’t answer. Chris wondered what Cinmei was going to do to get the pilots to help. Bribery? Torture? Was there another way? Maybe mind control, he thought. After all, Captain had managed to manipulate minds. Could Cinmei’s people have mastered that technology?

They walked into a deserted lock corridor toward the shuttle. Chris approached eagerly and they stepped through into the spaceplane.

The interior suffered from a dearth of light, slowing Chris’s first analysis. As his eyes adjusted, he realized the flight deck held about half the number of seats of his arrival flight. He saw drab plastic canvas seats. Was the interior dingy or just dark? Everything on his arrival flight had been new and shiny. He remembered the sparkle of the VG tags. Nothing sparkled in this place. A thin gray carpet covered the floors.

The individual seating stations sat on barren metal platforms that rotated to accommodate the acceleration of the shuttle. Each passenger had their own storage area, although this shuttle had only two storage compartments for each seat.

A figure suited in a bulky set of black gear entered the passenger module from the far side. The person threw his helmet aside revealing his face. The man had brown hair with gray on the sides. Drops of sweat streaked his fat cheeks. The man glanced at Chris and Cinmei but his gaze didn’t linger.

They walked closer to the man as he struggled with his gear. Chris saw the man wore the lowest ranking blue. His cheeks were flushed red, and he breathed heavily while yanking off his shoulder coverings.

“You can take your gear off now,” the man said testily. He bent down to pull off his own shin pieces.

Cinmei pointed her taser at the back of the man’s neck and activated it. Chris heard a sharp crack. The man grunted and jerked forward as his muscles convulsed. His knees hit the deck followed by his face, propping his body up in a ludicrous position. Cinmei kicked him over sideways causing him to flop limply across the floor onto his back.

She took off her helmet and looked at Chris.

“Leave rest on,” she said. “Just in case. Maybe good protection.”

Chris nodded. He understood her point. The thick suit might stop several types of nonlethal weapons, like their tasers.

“What about his link? If he wakes up and sends out a message …”

“Link dead now,” Cinmei said. She pointed at her taser.

Chris realized that the weapon must be more sophisticated than he had estimated. If it neutralized links, then that covered his first worry. Then he had another thought.

“But if we zap the pilot’s link, the shuttle might—”

Cinmei put up her armored hand. “Know. Have link to take over.”

“But the pilot’s link must have a series of one-time codes used to communicate with …” his voice trailed off as Cinmei shook her head.

“Know,” she said again. “We have codes, too. Only need password to make navi … navigation changes.”

Chris sighed. He was only along for the ride. Apparently, Cinmei and her people were quite competent. He might as well shut up.

Cinmei shuffled quickly to the other door. It opened to reveal a short corridor that seemed to run the spine of the cargo shuttle. The white passageway had an ugly beige floor. The bottom edge of the space had square corners but the ceiling had smoothed out edges, making Chris think the passage must lie immediately under the top surface of the shuttle. She headed toward the front of the vessel with Chris close behind her.

Cinmei paused at the end of the corridor. Chris accessed the shuttle map through his link. He could clearly see that they stood at the entrance to the vessel cockpit.

“Your entrance is not authorized,” a soft voice told him through his link as he centered it on the cockpit.

Chris saw the control space beyond the door was only four by six meters. He saw a picture of the interior showing a large acceleration couch and two banks of manual controls that he assumed were only for emergencies.

The door opened. A man in a jumpsuit uniform of blue and white lounged in the acceleration couch he’d seen on the diagram. The room had the banks of equipment shown by the link, augmented by a few potted plants. The man looked more slender than his comrade looked but had the same graying hair. He didn’t gaze at the newcomers, but simply stared into space. Most likely, he focused on his PV.

“So, what’s up?” asked the man. Chris detected an accent in the voice. Maybe German or Austrian, he thought.

Cinmei pointed her taser at his chest and let him have it. The pilot yelped and went limp. After a split second, a rivulet of blood ran down the man’s chin. Chris winced. The pilot had bitten his own lip or tongue.

“Help carry,” Cinmei entreated.

Chris nodded. He took the man’s upper arms and pulled him from the couch. Cinmei helped to pull the body into firefighters’ carry position on Chris’s back. A single drop of blood splattered onto the floor, marring the dull beige floor with an oasis of crimson.

Cinmei led Chris down the hall and into a room of storage lockers. The ceiling was rounded and low overhead and lit by glow panels nestled between dark grilled vents. Four or five white chairs were around a table that folded out of the wall. Cinmei pulled a chair out into the center of the room, so Chris dropped the pilot into it.

Cinmei opened up a locker. Chris saw some duffel bags inside. Cinmei shuffled things around in the locker and produced some slender yellow rope.

“Tie up,” she told Chris, tossing him some rope. Then she hurried out.

Chris had just managed to get the pilot seated when she returned dragging the other man. He helped her sit him down on another white plastic chair.

Chris tied them up, securing their hands behind the chairs. Then he tied their ankles to the legs of the chairs. He pulled the cords as tight as he dared. He remembered hearing something about serious consequences of tying someone up so tightly that their limbs did not get enough blood. When he was done, he wasn’t sure the bonds would hold forever, but he figured it would take at least a couple of hours to escape from them.